Like Jews, the World War II Generation talked almost exclusively about how they “SUFFERED.” I used to hear endless tales about how they were REAL MEN because they peeled potatoes and, God knows how often I heard this exciting fact, “The Sarge made me make my bed so tight he could bounce a quarter off of it.”
I was told about the shots they had to take. The few who had actually heard an enemy shot fired told me only they knew what life was like.
They told me that REAL MEN like them could do anything they wanted to do.
It took me a long to realize an amazing correlation. The ones who talked the most about World War II were the ones who had done the least since. I found out after he died that Professor Carlton Coon parachuted behind enemy lines as a spy.
Yes, there is a point to all this bitching. You may not notice the distortions in our thinking that came from this “suffering” crap, but I had my nose shoved into it like a puppy in house training, so before I pass away, I need to tell you what it taught me.
And the one big lesson it took me decades to realize was that output does NOT equal input. Above all, it is NOT true that “Talk is cheap.” The words “Talk is cheap” were precious to those who had accomplished nothing since 1945.
Most of the observations I make are terribly obvious once you think of them. For example, a guy who talks endlessly fifty years later about what he did as a teenager before 1945 is almost always someone who did not make it in the communications-based world he came back to after 1945.
They endlessly quote the fact that Benjamin Franklin would be taking his wheelbarrow to his printing house at dawn every morning. Franklin stated flatly in his autobiography that that was a publicity stunt. “It is important,” he said, “that one be SEEN working hard.”
His point was exactly the opposite of what the Greatest Generation made of it. But they hadn’t read the book because it was “just talk.”
I was raised on the idea that production equaled Hard Work. And now that I have the time to think things out, I realize that this led me to the disastrous idea that what I SAID was incidental, because it wasn’t HARD.
It is painful to realize what I could have done had I realized some basics. The world is not changed by what YOU feel. Effort does not equal results. Lord this seems so obvious now that I say it I wonder whether I should say it.
It is true that if you can’t do anything else, you can get paid for doing what others don’t want to do. There are jobs programming and lifting things and getting dirty, though they are becoming fewer all the time. Those are the jobs that guys who feel the height of their life experience was making tight beds could get.
I want to try to make this sound more profound, and not just reveal how obviously naïve I was most of my life.
But sometimes the best thing an old man who is trying to wow you with his wisdom can do is tell you plainly about the times that he was just plain stupid.
#1 by Dave on 12/05/2009 - 11:23 am
When you get to what is real the world looks very different.
Most people are not involved in politics. They don’t know that politics is a collection of subcultures of people who all know each other.
I have been around these people enough to come to understand them. I have yet to find one who is in the business of fundamentally making sense. Somehow, they are not wired along the trajectory of fundamentally making sense.
Fundamentally making sense is not what they do. Instead, and this is what so few of us understand, what they all share in common is an incredible work ethic.
There is no such thing as a lazy successful politician. They don’t exist.
But they don’t make fundamental sense either. This is true even when the interests they represent seem to be very logical.
This is a worldwide phenomenon and a plague.
This is also why Robert Whitaker’s advice to always ask why, why do people say things, is right on.
Why do people do what they do? Why do people say what they do?
Take the time to geniunely assess it. There is a lot of power in doing that.
#2 by Lord Nelson on 12/05/2009 - 9:07 pm
Very interesting. It makes me think that maybe we all underestimate the real potential we have reading and writing on BUGS. And of course, the huge cyber world outside.
Spread the word!
#3 by AFKANNow on 12/06/2009 - 12:49 am
This is a post of seminal importance, and should be printed out and pasted to the door of your refrigerator.
In an earlier post I mentioned how shocked I was by Derren Brown’s special for Britain’s Channel 4, “The Heist.”
I have spent a lot of the time since then trying to unlearn the semiotic equivalent of Wordism, and seeing Wordism itself as simply a tool for manipulating you, whether you like it or not.
Both are most effective when applied together, when you have little resistance to the combination.
I have argued mass color television is the most important social control tool in history, far surpassing any educational system, or formal system of governance.
I have noted that you can not NOT watch television, which has become uniquitous; even in fast food restaurants, there is a screen with every sound perfectly pitched to gain your attention, and pictures that work with them to control your attention, your Consciousness.
I knew, intellectually, how advertising worked.
I did not know how powerful the science of manipulation had become, acting with the precision of a laser beam to push aside your conscious mind.
I have had moments – here’s where I tie this in to Bob’s masterful admission – where I have felt something almost like schizophrenia overtaking me, as I have battled to avoid the omnipresent wall of controlled media from controlling my attention, and THEN “shaping” my opinions.
This jarring discontinuity – between the world we are told exists, and the world we see with our own senses, IF we have the power to listen to them – is almost beyond belief.
Most people are literally sleepwalking, and are passively acting our scripts given to them by third parties.
My GOD, but the parasite has so much control over the host, and that is why I go to such lengths to keep the System Media out of the monastery.
Look at Bob’s example – men whose only moment of (nominally Adult) Masculine Individuation was when another man beat the Hell out of him, and quickly took over his Persona.
Note that nothing in their lives since has been so validating.
I’ve run into a hundred guys who speak quietly of “their experience in the ‘Nam,” and, upon further discussion, describe their experiences as snipers with numerous “thousand yard kills’ to their credit.
Think there’s a little bit of compensation there?
I asked the ones who seemed to have the most credibility – they could name places and events that really happened – to show me their DD-214.
Not one could.
They ALL claimed to have “lost it,” or “it’s at my mom’s back in Wacka Wacka.”
They have been gelded to such a degree that they are trapped in the ONE Moment of Glory; real or imagined, it’s the best they can do.
To a one, they are “Incompetent Males.”
And, to a one, they compensate by recreating lives of massive fiction.
They are all actively sleepwalking; the only way they could be validated as Real Men would be on the basis of their “Service” to the Country.
They were nobody who mattered before they went in the Service (IF they went in the Service), and they regressed back to being nobody afterwards.
Perfect proof of this are the old men wesring the damn VFW hats, with all of the little damn bric-a-brac on their clothes, and suddenly it damn hit me:
THIS IS THE FACADE THEY AGGRESSIVELY PROJECT TO STOP ANYONE FROM LOOKING AT WHO THEY REALLY ARE, AND WHAT THEY HAVE REALLY DONE WITH THEIR LIVES.
They can not face who they truly are, and they don’t want us to face it, either.
They claim to have experienced great pain, and undergone great sacrifice, as if, somehow, this made them morally superior to us, and Real Men, to boot.
Look at their production since their alleged time in the service.
This is ALL compensation for their inability to match their Real World Performance with the Fantasy World Performance they were sold by the mass media cartel.
“Effort Does Not equal Results” is only so obvious now because The System wants to keep us busy at doing work that will not challenge the status quo in any way.
I’ve been looking more closely at “Progressivism,” National Socialism’s evil twin, and the entire impulse of all of their activities was to mold a New Man, taking off the rough edges, ridding the State of the burden of the Outliers, and turning us into easily manipulated cattle, just smart enough to work the machines, and not smart enough to ask serious Foundational Questions.
The core of Progressivism, I think, particularly as it worked out through the Frankfurt School, was the geld the male, turning Men into males, whose only point of validation was their service to the State.
Remember, the schools of Education were sold to the politicians by the industrialists, both of whom wanted compliant workers, useful tools.
Indeed, the school of Education were called “Normal Schools,” as their purpose was to manufacture a citizenry shaped to meet “The New Normal.”
Reread that last paragraph, and realize the enormous waste of dollars, and human potential, the public school system is.
This Is Not By Accident.
Remember the point made by Orwell in 1984:
“Freedom is the right to say two plus two equals four.”
We’ve lost a lot of that, both externally, with political correctness, and internally, through deliberately dumbing down the citizenry.
God, but the fight to get back to Better offers such
challenges“opportunities.”#4 by jo3w on 06/14/2013 - 9:49 pm
If I live to be 150, l’ll tell you how stupid I was when I was 90.