{"id":17689,"date":"2011-06-27T16:02:54","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T23:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/?p=17689"},"modified":"2015-06-27T16:10:14","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T23:10:14","slug":"the-good-the-bad-and-the-half-asleep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/the-good-the-bad-and-the-half-asleep\/","title":{"rendered":"The Good, the Bad and the Half-Asleep"},"content":{"rendered":"

Strike-The-Root.com<\/a> | It was Aristotle who observed there are two kinds of ignorance: when you\u2019re ignorant and know it, and when you\u2019re ignorant and don\u2019t know it. The second kind of ignorance is the dangerous kind, because people who are ignorant and don\u2019t know it usually think they\u2019re smarter and more knowledgeable than everyone else (as Rousseau wrote: “One is misled not by what he does not know but by what he believes he knows”).<\/p>\n

This ignorant-and-don\u2019t-know-it is what makes the afflicted so dangerous. It\u2019s as if they\u2019re using arrogance to cover up stupidity.<\/p>\n

Someone not knowing they\u2019re ignorant is a fugue state \u2013 the person is in a deluded, half-asleep state but unaware of it. Many people know they\u2019re not totally awake, because to be totally \u201cawake\u201d you\u2019d have to know everything, to know what theologians call the Mind of God. For humans that is of course impossible.<\/p>\n

People who understand their limitations and ignorance can be considered humble in the true sense of the word: not debasing yourself, just understanding how limited you are and how easy it is to make mistakes, which is inherent in being human.<\/p>\n

The Greeks defined humility as Sophrosyne: “Know thyself,” and “Nothing in excess.” The more one \u201cknows thyself\u201d the less susceptible to propaganda he\u2019ll be, and believing in Pure Good and Pure Evil always leads to excesses, because it invariably leads to dehumanizing \u201cthe Evil\u201d as subhuman or nonhuman monsters.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, people who are ignorant and don\u2019t know it, and instead think they know what they are talking about (and what they are doing) can be considered arrogant, or afflicted with what the Greeks called Hubris, and the Bible, Pride.<\/p>\n

These days, the term for Hubris or Biblical Pride is \u201cnarcissistic grandiosity.\u201d It\u2019s only been noticed in the last century that people with this affliction split things into \u201call-good\u201d and \u201call-bad,\u201d into pure good and pure evil.<\/p>\n

I have met some of these people and the havoc they wreak is astonishing. All have certain traits in common. The main one is, \u201cIt\u2019s always someone else\u2019s fault, never mine.\u201d Another is that they never notice the trouble they cause.<\/p>\n

When you get groups of people together they always, under stress (say, an attack such as 9-11), regress to narcissistic infants. They, or their tribe, or their nation, is all-good, and those they define as their opponents or enemies are all-bad. And there the problems start.<\/p>\n

Since no one, or no tribe or nation, is all-good, or perfect, whatever flaws they have are projected onto their opponents. The word for this is \u201cscapegoating,\u201d which comes from a practice by the ancient Hebrews in which they projected their sins onto a goat and then drove it into the wilderness, believing their sins would disappear.<\/p>\n

An example not so long ago is when the perpetually confused George Bush referred to the Evil Ones who attacked us \u201cfor our goodness.\u201d Then the \u201cEvil Ones\u201d returned the favor by calling the United States \u201cthe Great Satan.\u201d<\/p>\n

In politics everything is either good or evil, with no shades of grey (just as in politics people are never murdered \u2013 they are collateral damage, obstacles to be removed). When the belief in either-good-or-evil is wedded to the force and fraud inherent in politics, along with the infantile narcissism and simplistic thinking inherent in the Mob, it is no wonder politics has slaughtered more people than everything else in the world put together.<\/p>\n

As deluded as an individual can be, groups \u2013 tribes, Mass Man, the Mob, whatever name you call them \u2013 are truly the problem. Read Entire Article<\/a><\/p>\n

By Bob Wallace<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Strike-The-Root.com | It was Aristotle who observed there are two kinds of ignorance: when you\u2019re ignorant and know it, and when you\u2019re ignorant and don\u2019t know it. The second kind of ignorance is the dangerous kind, because people who are ignorant and don\u2019t know it usually think they\u2019re smarter and more knowledgeable than everyone else […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[327,176,930,931],"class_list":["post-17689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-belief","tag-groups","tag-ignorance","tag-scapegoating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}