This is the final excerpt from the no-longer-to-be-held-secret book that I've been reading the past days.
Every society is based on lies. Our society of today is based upon on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, single-lie society absorbed the single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, uncontradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.
The man in our multi-lie society absorbs a chaos of conflicting lies and is reminded daily by his friends and neighbors that his beliefs are not universally held, that his values are personal and arbitrary and his desires often ill-aimed. We must realize that to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method of driving him insane.
When I first read this paragraph I was totally amazed. Just a couple of lines and suddenly so many pieces come together. Society is based on lies. Democracy? Or rather hereditary democracy where members of rich and powerful families get elected again and again with the blessing of the hallucinating morons? Justice? Well if you have money you don't only get private banking, you also get private justice. Moral Values and Common Good? Ha, if and when they do not affect shareholder value in a negative way.
I have come to agree with what Luke Rhinehart says above in his infamous-to-some book The Dice Man. Today's society is a big "WTF is going on man???" Most people try desperately to make sense out of this massively self-contradicting mess and only get frustrated, disappointed and even depressed or insane. They need something to believe in, but what could that be?
On the other hand are some that fully understand that nowadays money and power are the only ideals, that moral values do not exist but are a necessary evil for dealing with the press and presenting a decent face. They are the "clever" ones...
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