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At 10:34 AM 12/16/97 -0500, you wrote:
>It would be great to have references or articles handy that refute these!
Yes, it would, but that's part of what makes them "Big Lies"--the way they
are cited relentlessly as "self-evident truths," with no need to provide
underlying evidence (much less balance). You will probably notice, if you
look carefully, that these are usually cited *with* anecdotal evidence--one
person or a small handful of people saying this or that, with their
statements used as "evidence" of a much larger statement--one that could be
(but will not be) evaluated more carefully. [Also a Big Lie that takes
seconds to say can take a book or several to rebut--which is going to get on
the nightly broadcast from the mind-control machine?]
That makes it quite difficult to even find what support people have for
reaching these conclusions, much less for countering it. You can't disagree
with anecdotes any more than you can with people saying "I feel lousy today."
For example, when you see a person on food stamps buy something at the store
that you consider to be wasteful or extravagant, the logical thing to do is,
before drawing any conclusions, note what proportion of foodstamp recipients
this person represents and what portion of their purchases the "wasteful"
ones represent.
But, if a Big Lie has been relentlessly drummed into your brain (say,
"People on welfare are just lazy good for nothings who sponge off honest
working people who have to buy beans so the bums can buy steaks") you go
quickly from a few data to a foregone conclusion. ("Leaping to conclusions
is all the exercise some people get.")
That's the *purpose* of a Big Lie--it's not to invent facts (too easily
debunked) but to create a context that helps determine which facts are
considered (the ones that support the lie) and which are discarded. It's
far more effective to control how you will think about a given set of facts
than it is to try and feed you nothing but the facts that support what I
want you to think.
Further, as I think about it, one thread I see in Big Lies is that the
statements are usually judgements rather than facts themselves; that means
it's essentially impossible to "refute" them in the usual sense of that
word. Since we can both look at the same set of "facts" and draw totally
opposite conclusions, how can you "refute" a judgement?
Hitler and everyone else in Germany had the same set of facts available; but
Hitler and Goebbels (who closely studied American advertising) created and
propagated a Big Lie to explain those facts ("It's the Jews' fault"). For
those who bought the Lie, that made all the facts that supported the thesis
seem especially significant and all the facts that opposed it false (and
further *evidence* of the Jews' perfidy!)
As has been noted on this list and elsewhere before, humans tend not to use
facts to decide things; we tend to decide things and select the facts that
lend credence to our decisions.
That's why Big Lies are so important to this list. Living "voluntarily" in
any manner (simply, sustainably, whatever) means, if it means anything,
taking control of your own thoughts back from those who want to control them
for you. Once that is done, you can decide how you want to live.
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