THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

This is a Whitakerism.

That is, this is in no way a new point, but a very careful look into an old one.

In everyday conversation, you always look at what a person says a bit cynically. You know what he wants out of the way his story comes out. Some guy's stories will always end up showing that the speaker is a Real Man.

Some will go along to show that the person telling it is irresistible to the opposite sex, and so forth. We know t hat, we use that every day.

But when it comes to our world view, we forget a basic point like this. When we take it into account, it becomes a Whitakerism.

When a society stagnates, all information says what, by a staggering coincident, it HAS to say. Every test on busing shows that there is an improvement for blacks and whites remain the same.

Since everybody knows what has happened in schools since integration got started, you cannot sell a test result that says everybody is doing stunningly better. On the other hand, you cannot publish a test result that says what Senator Jenner of Indians said in the 1950s, "Integration is like mixing sugar with sh... It ruins the sugar and it doesn't help the sh.."

So all the published tests shows that having all those screaming black kids in with them doesn't hurt white performance - teachers are instructed to make the white kids get used to the high decibel level - but the whole program requires that somebody benefit from it, so the blacks always are reported as benefiting.

The rest of the examples of this kind of fact production are so obvious we don't even mention them. Profiling blacks works wonderfully in reducing crime for the same reason any profiling does: It works.

In fact, everything we read today is a Just So Story that always comes out the way it should. We know why, but only Whitaker PURSUES this fact, only Bob STATES it in actual conversations.

Only a Mantra Thinker THINKS about it.

Everybody else wants to ignore how trite our Truths are and talk about The Latest News.

But anyone who is serious is going to listen to any information with this reality in mind. If you are questioning somebody you have to be aware every minute of WHAT he wants to be true. You have to be on alert for WHY it wants it to be true.

And if he is too consistent, your radar had better be on.

That's when we're serious about a crime or Intelligence information. Or for that matter, a person's real preference in automobiles height but.

But when it comes to determining the world's future, we trade the latest news and never even consider the perfectly wonderful consistency of the information that is manufactured for us.

ANY information that is too consistent is unsatisfactory to an adult of normal intelligence.

If I am interrogating somebody and his answers too consistently say exactly what he WANTS it to say, I DO NOT BELIEVE HIM, simply because it is apart of a pattern I have seen before in hundreds of earlier liars.

The whole Out of Africa bit seems to be collapsing, but I didn't believe it when it was popular. It was too consistent. It was too loudly announced.\\

I had exactly the same doubts about how every climatic problem was being traced to Global Warming.

But being right about such things is no good if I cannot get you into the HABIT of seeing in public discussion exactly the same thing you naturally watch for in any personal talk you have.

Don't just say you KNOW the story of the Emperor's Clothes.

Get Whitaker on them. Stop going into neutral on common sense when it comes to Mommy Professor issues.