On Honest Deception

So two people (!) found my noticing that SoA is what the orange fuckup could do to be supportive.
 
Truth is neither supportive nor in opposition to any given side. It simply is, indifferent to the nature of the problems.
 
If you have a problem with the truth, then you start to create issues for yourself. Not for others — for yourself.
 
One of the things that I have long done as Dyssonance — indeed, some could say that my rep was based on it — is to bring as much truth to bear as possible.
 
Facts don’t give a shit if someone argues with them. They still remain facts. Right now, in this climate, Honesty and Truth are more important than ever. More important, in fact, than any ideology.
 
More important than party or who you like or who you don’t like, and one of the reasons for this is that all sides are so willing to abandon truth in favor of the same thing that put this creature into power in the first place.
 
Lies.
 
Part of the Potency of Structural Power is the ability to use various forms of deceit to manipulate people — to prey on their gullibility and their ignorance, to provide them with Misinformation and Disinformation.
 
When you can do so using Stigma, and from a position of Privilege, you gain incredible capacity to deceive and destroy those you oppose.
 
So it is tempting to do it. For everyone else.
 
There are reasons that when I put together The Structure that the social powers are Avarice, Apathy, Deceit, Privilege, and Stigma.
 
They are what is currently in operation right now. They are the tools of Oppression; the Master’s Tools, and if you pick them up, you become a servant thereby.
 
You can subvert them — but, well, most people overestimate their capacity for subversion. Partially because they don’t understand how it works, and mostly because they don’t actually have the capacity to subvert it being outside the structure that enables it.
 
let me explain that last bit for you, real quick, using me as an example.
 
I am pretty good at subversion. Not because I try to be, and not because I actively choose to do so, but because I’ve learned that my ability to drift between different sets of expectations (those insulations and granted privileges I get as a result of the presumptions of others) is something I cannot cntrol, but that I can use, if I understand it well enough.
 
But, that is only as useful as the amount of “in” that I have in that given moment. I cannot subvert a company right now because I am not working for a company. I cannot subvert government because I am not involved with them. I cannot challenge the capacities of different people unless I am close to them.
 
This is why I never talk about the extremist groups I am a part of online in any detail. They are nasty, nasty places, but they give me access to how those people think — and it is very rare that I see a chance to subvert something about them because I purposefully keep my profile low and almost invisible.
 
Covert and subvert are not the same thing, and a lot of people synonymize the two of them.
 
So I rarely have the opportunity to do so — and subversion requires you to wait for that opportunity if you cannot make one. But as I have done this, I have seen many, many, many people come in and try to subvert things. And each and every time, they get busted and meet the fate of all spies.
 
In the last 60 days, I have seen forty of them come and go. I was there a long time before them and will be there long after the next 40 happen.
 
That’s what I mean about not realizing how good they are or bad they are.
 
And the outcome of their actions has been to empower those people who have, to a man (and occasional woman) to do more of the same kind of nasty, immoral, unethical behavior.
 
There is, btw, a reason that I use those terms. Immoral. Amoral. Unethical. Incompetent. Gullible. Dishonorable.
 
These are the terms they use among themselves. These are the words that they use when they don’t think anyone is watching — when they are in their safe spaces.
 
These are what they use as peer pressure and conformist concepts. n much the same way that a politician picked the invention of a Trans woman to create his little corner of woman hate, they claim ownership of these terms and ideas, since they do not see us as having the capacity for such.
 
That makes them our in. That makes those things our tools to subvert, and the reason we can is that they do not see us as having the capability of lifting them.
 
And they *really* hate it when we do.
 
Plus, of course, they speak volumes.
 
In any case, those are much more effective tools than trying to be dishonest — to simply spout something you heard fro someone somewhere.
 
Despite a lot of folks thinking that the other side is inherently dishonest (which I admit my post to now has not discouraged), the truth is tht the common individua on the other side is honest.
 
If you ask them why they “rag on women” or “rag on mexicans” so much, they will honestly tell you, up front.
 
They will often use a lot of offensive language in the process, and too often folks get caught up on the language that offends, and not the stuff around it.
 
It allows you to see the honesty they present. Once they are honest, you can begin to dig into the most dangerous and powerful word of the language.
 
Why.
 
Digging into their reasons is key, because if you can dig down deep enough, you can find the personal source, and once you have that, you begin shifting their honest deceptiveness towards truthful opposition.
 
“Honest deception” is not a concept people can readily grasp, lol.
 
You see, Honesty is not truthfulness. Truth is singular. Honesty is that thing where we all have our own variations of it. “We all have truths” is really “we are all honest here, this is what we believe and think” while truth is “welp, here’s a fact, make of it what you will.”

A person can honestly believe that there is no human right to a basic standard of living for everyone. They can honestly believe that being gay will kill you or that being Trans is a choice and a mental illness.

When they tell you that, they are being honest.  The Why of it is that they usually don’t understand the natue of their idea, they don’t remember where they learned it or who taught it to them — these are not things you retain memory of or for, and you don’t really have a care, because they are often part of something larger — the propriety of Men being strong protectors and Women being supportive nurturers, in this case.

Prosperity Gospel teaches that your wealth is a direct result of how sinful you are. They honestly believe what they are told, even while the people who preach it are actually doing the opposite, and despite the fact that Jesus was, you know, a penniless vagrant.
So they are being honest and they are being deceptive at the same time — they are, at that moment, tools themselves of those who they follow.  The usual metaphor here is like sheep under a shepherd.
I hate that metaphor. Sheep don’t have the capacity to change their behavior.
People do.
A better one is like Commune Leaders — charismatic, powerful people who use their power over others.  In this case, however, that power is money. Because make no mistake, the wealthiest folks have had all the things they need. Most of them might not understand how Structural inequality works, but they don’t need to — they are the beneficiaries of it. They just need to know how to keep themselves there, which is a lot easier than changing things.
So you get folks like the Cato Institute, Prosperity Preachers, Populist folks who have a net worth of over a million dollars, talking heads that are paid for being the mouthpieces of folks who benefit.

You get deregulation, which enables the consolidation of industries and puts them in fewer hands — you get large corporate powers under the control of boards that share the same 5000 people over and over again. Because this makes it harder to resist them, and makes it easier for them to control what can be seen and heard.

You get people who take over school boards and push through things like teach only white history and we don’t need music or ceramics or anything but the basics. You get charter schools for the masses that teach you how to be a good employee, and never bother with teaching you how to live a good life because that’s what you learn from your prosperity preacher and your libertarian politics.
It is all one thing.
From Disney to Donuts, Superman to Survivor, your own personal jesus is waiting for you to embrace the role that lies before you, and you can do so honestly and think you are being truthful because you do not know better and think how they must feel when someone who has been to school and learned the larger things looks at them and says to them that they are not being truthful.
They don’t know what truth is. They have been told that truth is a changing thing, we all have truths, are mine the same as yours?
There is the challenge, the thing that it falls to us on the Left to avoid.
They hate knowledge which challenges them — hate, an intense dislike, the spark that triggers Aggression and frustration and Insecurity and Envy and is, without question, hate.
These are people who use the meaning of a word as the equivalent to the concept the word is meant to describe.  These are the people who will say that “debate” doesn’t require good faith because the dictionary doesn’t list that.
Literally.
This is the nasty.
This is the honest deception of the immoral and the unethical and the incompetent and the gullible.
They literally don’t know any other way to be.
So I have to think, however full of myself it makes me, that it is incumbent on us to show them, and drag them, kicking and screaming, into a more truthful place, and hope their children and grandchildren are not as honestly deceptive.