THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

How can something called "the basics" be so difficult? You have learned a skill which the rest of us need to develop, but it will take a lot of time and effort for us to be hit with this way of thinking until we get it. Most of us have been conditioned by television and the media to absorb information uncritically.

Comment by Al Parker

ME:

To a great extent, your last sentence answers the question posed in the first one.

Absorbing opinions uncritically has been what all of mankind before the white race normally did. That is an easy pattern to impose and a hard one to break.

We broke the pattern and went for the simple answers, but there is nothing EASY about that.

Simple is not easy.

It is not difficult to say that "Walter Cronkite said so and so" or "The Great God Kufu speaking through the High Priest" said so and so. It is EASY to try to find the final truth in quotes from the Old Testament.

When Newton noticed that things fall, he deduced a whole theory of the universe from that. The concept is simple, but when you go into it, your whole blackboard fills up with calculus equations. That is NOT easy.

Once you have decided not to compromise with reality, the world becomes very difficult to deal with. You can no longer say, "Well, Father X or Reverend Y or Justice Z must be compared with the words of ...." You don't even have to wake up to talk that crap.

But reality is a tough customer. You can't quit with a quote from Father Ignatius. You can't rest until you get the ANSWER. The one that WORKS. The one that couldn't care less whether it sounds good or not.

Simple becomes very, very hard. If you realize its importance AND you have a conscience and empathy, it becomes downright cruel.

But the only alternative is to be a herd beast.

It's not Contradiction, It's a PATTERN

When you see the world as I do, you sit in amazement at how callous people are. Many years ago someone pointed out to me, "Bob, the thing about you is that things other people don't even notice jump our at you." The problem is that this talent for having reality jump out at you has an uncomfortable side effect. Something just jumped out at me, but I am absolutely alone in hearing what was REALLY said.

Years ago there was a televised debate about whether an AIDS-infected child should be allowed to go to public school. The American Medical Association had a representative there to argue in favor of the AIDS children being in the general population. In the course of the discussion, the moderator asked the AMA rep, "Is the AMA saying categorically that no other child can possibly get AIDS from this child?"

The AMA rep replied that the AMA could not say THAT. I sat waiting for the parent's rep to jump on that.

It was ignored.

The AMA rep was saying that the probability of one of these parents' children getting a fatal disease was low enough for the AMA to demand that the child be admitted, but NOT low enough so that the AMA could put something serious, its REPUTATION, on the line. As I say, the parents' rep didn't even NOTICE that!

So when I saw the program on reducing the probability of crime mentioned below, where the program repeated the Politically Correct line that there is no correlation between race and crime, I was not at all surprised. The AMA was simply stating publicly and openly that the danger to the children was not high enough for them to fail to endorse the politically correct position. Sure, one of the kids MIGHT die, but that was not a critical matter, like the AMA's reputation.

After a while, I got used to this sort of thing. But here lies a pitfall for those in this seminar.

You see, there's more here than just the particular callous hypocrisy I see in each case.

After a while, I develop RULES about these hypocrisies.

To give another example, Enron's mantra in its advertisements was "Ask WHY." The ad would end with an echoing voice saying, Why, why, why, why, why... And, of course, the reason thousands of people lost their jobs and their life savings was precisely because they never asked ENRON "Why?"

Here is the problem:

When you first learn this way of thinking, you get all wrapped up in these contradictions, these ironies that jump out at you. You are so concentrated on the absurdity of the AMA talking about its professional ethics and using its ethics to violate real ethics that you don't see the forest for the trees. I sit here waiting for people who notice that Enron advertised "Why?" when it was destroying its investors because they didn't ask "Why?" to TAKE THE NEXT STEP.

While a few people are slowly beginning to notice the obvious ironies, I am still sitting here all by myself, waiting for them to GET it. I keep forgetting that it took ME decades to GET it.

The fact is that you are not here until you come to the realization that OF COURSE a person who destroying medical ethics is going to do so in the name of Medical Ethics. The company that does not let people ask "Why?" is GOING to be the one that says, "Ask WHY?" Those who are for real, ongoing genocide are OF COURSE those that are official anti-racists.

I love it when people begin to wake up. But when they express amazement for the tenth time that they have discovered that nobody could hate like the Love Generation and nobody chickened out in real life faster than The Greatest Generation, I begin to realize what my high school football coach meant when he would shout, "Feel around you, Whitaker, maybe you're still in bed!"

There comes a time when one must wake up and smell the coffee. The first time this coincidence is a contradiction. The tenth time it becomes a RULE:

When someone starts preaching, watch for this RULE.

1) Anti-racist or HATE means they are pushing genocide

2) Flower power means screaming attacks on opponents

3) When the AMA starts preaching Ethics that are Politically Correct, they are attacking ethics

4) When the greatest generation preaches about fighting for liberty, it is the generation that gave freedom away

5) When Enron talks about why, why, why, why, it is keeping anyone from asking why.

How many hints do we need?

By the way, this applies to me, too.

WATCH ME when I get off the basics I am preaching about.