Truth

HEGE Series

Rabbit-Hole 01

• Humanity

  • Culture

    • Games
    • Food
    • Art
    • Music
    • Hollywood
    • Adam Curtis
    • American Adam
    • Modernism
    • Materialism

      • Christmas
  • Ethnicity

    • African
    • Asian
    • Celtic-British
    • First Peoples
    • Franco-Roman
    • Grecian-Balkan
    • Semitic
    • Slavic
    • Spanish-Latino
    • Teutonic

      • Exulanten (Exiles)
  • Racism
  • Human Body

    • Pinocchio
    • Addiction
    • Desire
    • Identity
  • Language

    • Reason
  • Personality
  • Relationship

    • Divinity
    • Creation
    • Sexuality
    • Marriage
    • Family
    • Community

      • Intentional Community
      • The Bruderhof
  • Spirituality

    • Oral Tradition
    • Philosophy
    • Psychology
    • Heterodoxy

      • Catholicism

        • Secularism
      • Protestantism
    • Orthodoxy

      • Christian Apologetics

        • Gnosticism
        • Western Esotericism
      • Iconography
      • Monasticism
      • Truth
      • Love
      • Beauty
      • Challenges
      • Lazar Puhalo

Truth is essential to humanity and life, because only the truth is real. It's no wonder then that a lot of fuss is made over it.

See — Pinocchio

The World Is Mad — Archbishop Averky (1906-†1976)
The time will come when people will behave like madmen, and to him who does not, they will say: you behave like a madman because you're not like us.
 
Fool-for-Christ
Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.
— 1 Corinthians 3:18-19

I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me (John 14:6).
Brethren, these words were not merely spoken, but were soaked with blood, confirmed by the Resurrection, instilled by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the faithful, and proven again and again by the Church through ages and ages. Of all the treasures on earth, men love life the most—and they love life more than they do truth, even though there is no life without truth. Thus, the highest good is life, but truth is the foundation of life. He who loves life, must also love truth. But where is the way to truth? Our Lord says: I am the Way. He did not say: “I am a way,” so that none would think there is another way to truth besides the Lord Jesus. And He is not only the Way, but also the Truth and the Life, so that none would think that there is some other truth and some other life besides the Lord Jesus. For this He was born as a man, to show men the way; for this He was crucified, to mark the way by His blood. No man cometh unto the Father, but by Me. This addresses those who deceive themselves by thinking that they can know God and acquire the Kingdom of God without the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord entirely cut off this false hope and desperate self-deception by these words. The apostle who heard and wrote these words in the Gospel, expressed them in his Epistle in this way: Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father (I John 2:23).
— Bishop Nikolai Velimirović, Prologue from Ohrid Sep 20, Homily: On the only Way, Truth and Life

It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World | Wikipedia
— The quintessential spiritual parable of America and the West — “every man for himself” in the proverbial fools’ chase after money (gold)

Drunk on Foolish Pleasures: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Ancient Greek comedy | Wikipeda — Fools are what make “comedy” in the classical sense, to be pitied not emulated

See — Psychology, American Foundations, Love of Money, Totalitarianism, The Beast

The Hatter and the March Hare are referred to as “both mad” by the Cheshire Cat, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

See — HEGE Series on Main Page

Reality or Deception (Illusion, Delusion)?

The Truman Show | Wikipedia - Trailer
— Truman Burbank, “Chosen out of six unwanted pregnancies to be the first child legally adopted by a Corporation”
“True Man”: the one who comes to understand the true corporate controlled condition of modern man and choses to forsake it all for Real Life

Quiz Show (film) | Wikipedia — Trailer

Twilight Zone: The Movie | Wikipedia — Trailer

Simulacron-3 (Counterfeit World) | Wikipedia — 1964 science fiction novel
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) | Wikipedia — Trailer YouTube based on Simulacron-3
The Thirteenth Floor | Wikipedia — Trailer loosely based on Simulacron-3

The Matrix (franchise) | Wikipedia
  — Trailers: Matrix 1999, Reloaded 2003, Revolutions 2003, Resurrections 2021

The Matrix Tried To Warn You — @Moon-Real | YouTube

Fallacy (Error)

In the Information Age, it's imperative to train ourselves to think like lawyers building court cases. We must learn the basics of logical fallacies so as not to fall prey to them. How many today know the difference between raising the question and begging the question, especially when their arguments mainly consist of ad hominem attacks on those they oppose? If we cannot concede to “point taken” or that we simply don't know, then we are not reasoned beings. And if our evidence is unreasonable and will not stand up in court, then we must accede lest we be thrown out of court and lose our conviction, or worse, maintain it on the false basis of claims to “conspiracy theory”, “truthiness”, or “alternative facts” and become guilty of slandering our neighbor.

Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies !
Thou shalt not suffer cognitive biases !

Fact or Fiction?

It's always been hard enough to separate fact from fiction, but in this day and age of deception, illusion, and delusion (and now AI Deepfakes), I'm not sure it's possible any more, especially when most today seem to have forgotten their 3rd grade lessons for distinguishing between the two. On top of that, we're bombarded daily by Propaganda. As Alex Carey has noted, Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet. Politifact.com and Snopes.com can help, but most of us make decisions based on our emotions, not facts, and often fail to distinguish between what isn't factual but merely opinion or an impression, what's only possibility or probability, circumstantial, anecdotal, or conjectural.

It's true that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. But a lot of the people are fooled a lot of the time, and typically refuse to listen or follow the few who historically aren't fooled and who exhibit good judgement. The court of public opinion is just that — opinion, not fact, or necessarily good judgement. It's nothing but mass mentality, or herd mentality that's easily manipulated into political “constituency”, or mob, by those who know how — who have means, motive, and opportunity

See — Criminal investigation

Wikipedia

Sometime before June 29, 2022 it was discovered that —
Someone Slipped Hundreds of Fake Articles About Things That Never Happened Onto Wikipedia.
Apparently, Chinese and Russian language versions of Wikipedia suffer from this the most, but the English version is not immune either.

History of Wikipedia • What Wikipedia is not • No original research • Accuracy dispute • Verifiability • Criticism of Wikipedia • Do not create hoaxes • List of hoaxes on Wikipedia • Reliability of Wikipedia • Wikipedia is not reliable • Conflict of interest editing

Wikipedia Review | Wikipedia
The Wikipedia Review]
Wikipediocracy | Wikipedia

Wikipediocracy
Our Mission: We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with its structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense that issues forth from one of the world’s most frequently visited websites, the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit....
[E]ven after 20 years of existence [Jan 24th, 2022], it’s still too easy for Wikipedia to be manipulated by clever and/or tenacious bad actors, even when those bad actors aren’t particularly well-versed on the rules, or even particularly skilled at lying.