THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THE ART OF IGNORANCE | 2004-07-06

There is an art to ignorance.

No society before white civilization ever admitted ignorance. If they needed an explanation, somebody made up one. There were various ways of doing this. Some societies would have Wise Old Men come up with "the stars were put there by Googumbus in his pursuit of Cululi." Others would have a shaman take some crazy weed so he could get "Out There" and come back with Revelations.

Odin, the Father-God of the Germans and Scandinavians, was the first god to admit he didn't know. He hung on the World Tree and lost one eye, not for capitalized Truth, not for Wisdom, but just so he could know a few more facts.

When Christianity came along, it dragged the Old Testament with it from Middle Eastern civilization, so all the facts about everything were right there. There was no ignorance.

This idea that every preacher knows True Science is an alien idea, a throwback. The word "modern" is a throwback, too. It says that we now KNOW because we are modern. Political Correctness is a throwback. It says we KNOW because what we say is proper. The 60s hippies were throwbacks when they tried to learn the truth by going "Out There" with LSD. The New Agers are a throwback when they sit on their butts and find Truth inside their own skulls.

Albert Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to refute Heisenberg's quantum theory, not because it wasn't true, but because it didn't FIT. Einstein said, "God does not play dice with the universe." Now there's some real scientific objectivism in action!

You can only learn what you do not think you already know. That is why every other society stagnates, but the West has kept advancing. You have to clean out the crap first, you have to learn ignorance, and then you can advance into the empty areas.

As the Old Testament was pushed slowly and painfully out of the way, we began to learn ignorance again, slowly, painfully. A lot of people got burned alive for denying the Old Testament told us all we needed to know about the earth being the center of the universe and so forth.

We are the first society that, not only do we just flat out not know, but that we are going to find out.

But what do you do BEFORE you find out? How do you make decisions when there is so much you just don't know? What do you do when there is no university professor and no screaming preacher and no Wise Man or Pope dressed up in the right outfit or a Talmud or a Koran to tell you all the Final Truths you need to know?

What do you do when you don't know all the facts yet but you still have to make decisions?

That is the art of ignorance.

LATENT AND "DUHH!" | 2006-06-05

I admitted my admiration of the "latent homosexual" tactic that liberals use to silence all oppositiont to Gay Lib.

The beauty of this tactic is that you can't argue with it.

If someone is a "latent" homosexual" it means he doesn't KNOW he is a homosexual. By definition, he is hte last person on earth who can defend himself from the chrage.

You can't argue that you aren't a LATENT anything.

Another neat and similar gambit is hte "DUHH!" tactic. This is a product of the inbred intellectual hothouse antis live in. The anti simply says "DUHH!" or, in the standard anti language, which is synonymous iwth "DUHH!" they say, "I don't understand what you are talking about."

Now if you are a New York City provincial or any other kind of provincial who thinks that his is the Only Truly Sophisticated World, anyone you don't understand is a rube. In fact, anybody who doesn't repeat what you are used to hearing is, by definition, a rube.

And, like "latent," there is no way to answer this argument.

How can you argue with someone about whether THEY understand what you are talking about? If you accept the assumption that if they don't understand, then YOU are doing something wrong, it all falls into place.

You cannot argue that you are not a "latent" anything. You cannot argue that someone else understands what you are saying, no matter how simple it is.

Which means antis never have to absorb new ideas.

People who are comfortable with new ideas don't develop tactics like that.

HISTORY: HISTORY IS AN INSTITUTION | nationalsalvation.net

Old London Bridge was finished about 1200 AD and stood until the early nineteenth century. To pay its cost, it was lined with shops and living spaces, eight on the bridge. These were destroyed a century before the Old Bridge, the one the song says is falling down, was taken down completely.

In an earlier history I read the writer made fun of those who postulate that a "real" bridge across the Thames existed before the Romans, inspired by the Greeks who were inspired by the Egyptians, built it. Fords, being natural, yes - even some tenuous wooded walkway across the Thames at some points which the hairy barbarians might have tossed up before running back into the woods.

But a BRIDGE?

Fiddle-faddle!

Everybody knew where BUILDING occurred. All the Historical, Earliest Buildings were right out there in the desert where we could find them. I wrote an article lately about how convenient it is that all the historical stuff happens to be right there where they can be easily found.

The latest book about London Bridge was written after a discovery a couple of miles downriver from the Old London Bridge.

It is a bridge. It is a HUGE bridge. It is dated to 1500 BC. The writer explains that was during the high Bronze Age, when there was lots of trade. But he still sticks to the thesis that there was nothing in the area of today's LONDON at that time.

"They" would have found it, you see, just like "They" would have found that bridge.

And that is the cement, the cement of pure faith that holds together the entire accepted history on which Political Correctness, Modern History, Modern Thought, and Modern Archeology, is built.

History is not an area of study any more. History is an institution. You become a historian by being ordained by other historians. They don't lay on hands but they still wear the robes. I keep repeating that one religious institution has more in common with other institutions than it does with the doctrine it claims to represent.

A conversation between Jesus and Buddha would have been entirely different from one between those representing Christianity and Buddhism today. These are institutions saying "Why can't we get along?" Not two men with their own rigid concepts of what is true.

It is hard to imagine two more opposite approaches than two men debating real truth and two institutions with vast resources to preserve trying to go along and get along.

But no one NOTICES this difference!

Each faith gets along with what it has, the remains of a vanished book called The Sayings of Our Lord written when some of those who saw Jesus were still alive, a set of Gospels each of which was written to be the ONLY Gospel, selected by a committee, and endless proven forgeries.

Behind all that is Christ.

Buddhists have the same sort of thing, shreds, institutions which are gone today.

The big difference is that Christianity, and I suppose Buddhism, can look to the Spirit of the Founder. But history just plods right on, ignoring the fact that it is an institution.

So what do historians DO? They dig among the shreds, just as religious institutions do, but, unlike religious institutions, they don't ADMIT it.

It has often been remarked that Westerners are great at developing everything from Public Libraries and References of detailed information to the storage of literature.

At the same, any student of our actual history is puzzled by how, with our genius at storing and referencing knowledge, the same basic errors go on generation after generation. The classic example is how Galen's Ancient Theory of Humors, which has no basis in fact at all, remained the basis of medicine and medical study right into the nineteenth century.

The answer is that an institution was built on it, an institution called The Medical Profession called the Medical Profession. To be an academic in that field, you had to be able to explain all things in Galen's terms and in Galen's Latin.

What the Medical Institution wanted was Latin and accumulated selected facts. Like any institution, it had no room for someone who was trying to invent the whole field again.

Who succeeded in Medicine when doctors killed as may as they cured? Those whose interest was not in cures, but in having Educated Doctors. If you could write in the right terms and in the right language, no one stopped to consider how many patients died or were cured.

A field of study steadily advances in KNOWLEDGE. But as it institutionalizes, everyone must FIT into the institution. It may or may not be that a major topic of debate at Universities in the Renaissance was how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, but there is no reason why it should not have been.

If you could use the accumulated doctrine and the correct language to discuss that point, you could easily have gotten a doctorate out of it before Occam came along.

What institutions routinely lost is not KNOWLEDGE but PERSPECTIVE. All the knowledge in the world means nothing if look at the world the wrong way.

But who can qualify for an INSTITUTION and make a correction in that Institution's PERSPECTIVE?

BUGS demands a lot of knowledge. But in the new age, knowledge is handled by machines. Only perspective is now the exclusive talent of human beings.

Google is about knowledge.

Bob's Underground Seminar is about perspective.

YOUR CONSPIRACY | 2007-11-08

I am still trying to figure out what the opposite of "paranoid" is.

I love the feeling I get when I read the comments that people are conspiring behind my back to do me GOOD. I read things about how Bob's writings need to be put into a format, or this needs to be done with them. Not, "Bob, why don't you do this?" but "Why don't WE do this?"

Then there is BoardAd, who just flat DOES it.

This is, honestly, as good as it GETS. After a lifetime of plugging alone or with one or two indispensable people – I dedicated my first two books to my wife – it is a relief to see the baton being carried. And, of course, unlike the heroic Dr. Pierce, and heroic is the least I can say about him, I will not feel that my way of thinking will die with me.

No other compliment can be as satisfying as this one. Being told how smart you are in a lifetime of abuse is balm to the soul, but when people discuss how to extend what you devoted your life to, when they DO it, as BoardAd has – it makes my heart swell.

What I feel is the opposite of paranoia. Since it is a good thing, we naturally don't have a name for it. That shows how rare, and therefore how precious, it is.