Category Archives: science

Rationality of faith

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So, what I really wanted to accomplish with the last series of articles is to point out how religion really isn’t as silly as atheists like to portray it, and that it actually contains a great deal of sophisticated rational thought, combined with a quite reasonable amount of faith, which essentially amounts to trusting the credible witnesses and, very often, your own experience.

What I will now do is show how science isn’t nearly as rational and reliable as some see it, and also requires quite a large bit of faith.

You see, in late 1992 I was studying physics at the University of Zagreb, and I was having a very troubling spiritual crisis. I had very strong reasons to believe in the existence of things that other physicists were clueless of. I knew about the NDE testimonies, but that wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was that I actually had significant spiritual powers, of the kind where someone felt pain, I focused on the painful spot and the pain would go away, at least temporarily. I could see the pranic shadow around the astral bodies of animals that died, with something between physical and inner sight, and I could actually spiritually communicate with the souls of those animals. I actually saw a human do astral projection and he confirmed that I followed his astral body with my eyes despite him deliberately “jumping around” in order to try to confuse me. I was speaking out people’s thoughts all my life, and everybody who had those experiences had them only with me. Essentially, I had as much reason to believe in the reality of those things as people usually have in their physical senses, and yet my problem was the interpretation. It’s true, but how can it be true? There must be some kind of physics behind it, some deeper law of nature that encompasses both ordinary physics and this stuff. That’s why I chose to study physics, because I hoped I will eventually discover some explanation. I did have two models that explained it all, but I didn’t have enough support for either.

According to one model, the physical Universe is the fundamental reality, but physics hasn’t yet discovered its most fundamental level. Somewhere beneath the standard model and its quarks and leptons there must be a deeper layer which might explain everything, both physics and the weird shit that I could do and see. I could, for instance, see that a photon can be intellectually broken down into more fundamental elements, into “alpha” and “beta”, where “alpha” is the vector consisting of direction and lightspeed, and “beta” is a scalar descriptor of wavelength. If there are more such “fundamentals”, and they can be combined in weird ways, who knows what shit is possible, and maybe somewhere in there I could find some satisfying explanation for my experience. But according to this model, the Universe is the “hardware”, and spirituality, including God, is “software”.

According to the other model, the reality experienced by the NDE witnesses is the actual reality – and they say that God is the basis of all reality, that everything is actually made of His light. In this explanation this physical reality is merely a persistent illusion, some kind of software that is run on the spiritual hardware, and spiritual experiences are merely glimpses of the other, non-material realities that are also simultaneously run on that same hardware, without there actually being any reason for things to make sense in a physical way because the “mechanics” of it all are quite arbitrary. This was before most people had any thought about virtual reality, and the computer I had at the time was a 80386 with 4MB of RAM, but I was a programmer and I thought in those terms. The concept of different virtual universes with consistent laws that existed within different pieces of computer software was quite ordinary to me, because I could actually write some of that.

Both models provided an equally good explanation for everything I experienced, and I couldn’t dismiss either of them based on evidence alone. However, the people who had too much faith in the materialistic paradigm were getting on my nerves, because they obviously didn’t know as much about the weird part of the world as I did, and consequently there was nothing to disturb their faith. They didn’t live lives where “how did you know?” or “that’s exactly what I was thinking right now” happened daily. They weren’t the ones who were trying to figure out a deeper layer of physics which explains how mind transcends a corporeal shell, and how this keeps working after death. Basically, I saw them as idiots who either don’t see or deny half of reality and are therefore happy with their half-assed explanations of the world.

At one point, during a lecture (I think it was mathematical analysis but it might have also been a linear algebra practicum, I no longer remember correctly) it clicked. I don’t know what happened but something in the inner workings of my mind made a decision that the second model is the real one. The physical universe is merely a specific case of software, and all its laws are as arbitrary as those within a video game. Studying them will not reveal anything really fundamental about reality, because reality is not contained within those laws, those laws are contained within a higher reality, reality which I had no hope of understanding by any means known to me.

So, basically, since I didn’t need physics to make a living since I was in the process of making a career as a programmer, and I didn’t have any hope of figuring out the deeper layer of reality on this course, I abandoned my study, and, having no better ideas, I got piss drunk. Other than a bad hangover, this didn’t do anything for me, so I started thinking about how I might find answers, and since I didn’t take religion very seriously because of its total non-overlap with my understanding of spirituality and reality in general, I simply read everything and counted on eventually getting lucky enough to find some clue. I found a book of upanishads and they gave me a whole new spectrum of ideas, and so I combined what I learned there about yoga with what I already knew from my practice of autogenic training and more-less involuntary applications of spiritual sight and influence and started experimenting. Obviously, it worked.

So, essentially, what I want to say is that materialistic people misunderstand the concept of “faith”, at least in my meaning of the word. Faith doesn’t mean that you accept things without evidence, it means choosing one valid interpretation of the evidence over the other, and seeing where it takes you. You never actually go against the evidence, but evidence is not a universal datum valid for all people indiscriminately. We all have our inner algorithm for weighing evidence and arranging it into a sensible, working universe in which we function. Materialism might be a viable explanation for someone who was more willing to dismiss inconvenient facts than I was, and therefore I was sufficiently troubled with the stuff I couldn’t dismiss that I couldn’t find the materialistic explanations satisfying. Does that mean that I stopped using my intellect? Not exactly; in fact, I think I used it more. Faith does not consist of suspension of critical and evidence-based thinking. Faith consists of choosing one interpretation of evidence over another, and testing this interpretation to see where it leads, until it is either confirmed or disproved.

Leave verifying to smart people

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The worst thing you can do to a stupid person is tell them they should not take things on faith, but that they should personally verify things, because that’s what science and independent thinking are all about.

This is an incredible load of bullshit, because science is not at all about verifying everything yourself. Science is about organizing human knowledge in such a way that everything you deal with in the sphere of science has been verified by multiple people, and most people only verify one or two things personally, while having faith that the rest of the scientific community has been doing their job with the same diligence in the sphere of their personal competence. Essentially, a particle physicist can only verify statistical data obtained from an accelerator, he doesn’t verify that the Earth is round or that there’s a black hole in the center of the galaxy. A geologist only verifies things regarding tectonic plates and their movements, and the nature of the minerals recovered by deep drilling, he doesn’t verify things in the sphere of influence of meteorology. You only specialize in that one thing, and the rest you take on faith. So, basically, if you organize a system in such a way that in every sphere of scientific interest you have multiple scientists peer-reviewing and fact-checking each other, you create what is known in cryptography as the web of trust. You don’t need to personally verify everybody’s PGP key. What you need to do is personally verify PGP keys of the people you personally know. The groups of people overlap, and if you have people A, B and C, and if A can verify B, and B can verify C, A can trust C without being able to personally verify. There’s also the criterion of results, which is probably the most important thing of all because that’s the main difference between hard science and a circlejerk. The criterion of results is when you can produce technology based on your science. It’s when you can use what you know about photography, lithography, chemistry and quantum physics and produce a microprocessor. The fact that it works proves that you know what you’re talking about; without that, it could all be bullshit. One religious fanatic told me, more than a decade ago, that science is unreliable, it’s never the complete truth and certainty (that he, presumably, gets from some bronze age scripture). I told him that science and technology indeed contain a certain degree of unreliability, but I put it this way: you have a screen in front of you, that reliably produces the same picture refreshed some 60 times per second. This picture is not garbled. There might be a dead pixel somewhere on the screen. There might be a difference in backlight illumination in the corners. The computer itself performs millions operations every second in order to display the picture. It is able to connect to the network, get data, process it, display it in client software, you then read it, understand it, reply to it and send it back through the server, and I download it on my side and see the exact same message that you sent. Not a single bit was corrupted, despite all of the supposed unreliability of it all. You don’t see people complaining on forums that they can’t understand the text because it’s garbled, because those computers, they make mistakes every now and then. Actually, it’s all incredibly reliable, it’s so reliable you have air traffic control which uses radars and computers to reliably detect position and speed of multiple aircraft simultaneously, they use the data to predict future and issue specific orders to pilots, and this happens all over the world every day, and every other decade you have an accident due to an air traffic control error. This stuff is so reliable you can use it to make bricks. Yes, there’s some possibility for error, there’s an innate degree of unreliability in there, but you need to understand what it is. My computer is so reliable it works for years on end without any issues, and if there’s an issue, it’s not with the computer, it’s with some program that’s not the greatest, or with the operating system which can be configured to just reboot in order to install updates while I’m in the middle of something. The unreliability is not of the degree where you can’t tell what the red color is supposed to be or where you can’t read the letters because they came out garbled, and the random pixels are just flaring up on the screen like white noise on the old analogue TV sets when the reception is bad. The unreliability is that you don’t always have good base station coverage for your GSM phones, the unreliability is that you sometimes have no mobile data connection because you’re in a canyon and there are no base stations nearby. The unreliability is that out of thousands of planes that fly every day, every year you’ll have several bad accidents. It’s not that it sometimes works and sometimes not. It almost always works perfectly. I’d trust air traffic control more than I’d trust my eyesight, and that’s not because I have poor eyesight or because I’m a gullible person, it’s because they are so incredibly good at what they do, and because they are tested all the time and they reliably deliver the goods. They are not tested by me, but they are, and I believe it all because I’m not a fucking idiot, like those people who would say that the Earth is flat and that you’d believe that too if you actually tested it like they do, and it never crossed their small shallow minds to just go from northern to southern hemisphere and look at the night sky, because the constellations are different, which is an absolute proof that you’re on a sphere. So be wary of those who tell you to go verify things for yourself, because they are usually either stupid or evil or both. Testing things yourself is something that’s so sensitive to sample bias, ignorance and manipulation it’s usually the worst thing you can do. Your best option is actually the PGP system, the web of trust. You need to figure out who is it that reliably knows something, and if you want to learn something, learn it from a person in a web of trust, because that person has been peer reviewed. Maybe you can’t verify him because he’s above your pay grade, but there are people on and above his pay grade who can and do verify him, and if he tells you how something works, this information is of better quality than anything you could come up with using your senses and “common sense”, because let’s face it, if common sense of most people was worth a damn, it wouldn’t take us most of history to figure out formulas for inertia and gravity and to figure that light can be broken into separate wavelength components, and it was mostly done by one guy, because common sense of everyone else wasn’t worth shit.

There are certain things one can and should personally test. I personally test cameras and lenses and see how they behave, because I’m a photographer and I can. I know what to look for when I test them and I know how the equipment works well enough that I can figure out the way lens designers set up the spherical aberration by the way the out-of-focus areas look. That’s because photography is within my sphere of competence and I know what I’m doing. I can also find flaws in other people’s reasoning, because that, too, is within my area of expertise: I’m actually very good at thinking. There are many things I can personally verify, but even more important is that I know the difference between what I can check an what I can trust. I can trust that people at Intel know a thing or two about quantum physics, because if they didn’t, their shit would fail much before the 14nm level of integration and I wouldn’t be able to overclock my CPU to 4.6 GHz. I can trust that people at NASA know calculus and that the Newtonian physics work, because without them we wouldn’t have the communication satellites. I can trust that the Earth is round because if it were flat I’d see the Magellanic Clouds and the Southern Cross from Europe, which I don’t.

What I can’t trust is that people are smart enough to use that mythical “common sense” in order to verify complicated things personally. For instance, it’s quite easy to figure out that there are communication satellites in the sky, which basically proves the entire modern physics if you’re a competent enough thinker to do the necessary reasoning. You buy a satellite dish, point it at a random part of the sky, see what you get on your TV. Then point the dish at the satellite, good reception. Voila, proof that you have a radio transmitter in the sky at a very precise location. Now, think about how it can be there, who put it there and how, and how can one transmit images from a station on Earth, relay them through a satellite in the sky, so that you can pick the signal up and amplify it, and then reproduce it on your TV. But if you don’t know how a TV converts radio waves into RGB pixel intensities and how PAL encoding works, fuck off with that “I’m not a sheep, I’ll verify things” shit. You’re a stupid sheep alright, go back to eating your grass and bleat. Leave verifying to people with functioning brains, and you stick to blind following because that’s actually the safest thing for you to do, because finding someone smarter and following him is the only way for you not to fuck up everything.

Acceptability of evidence

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Who decides what is considered to be evidence?

It’s a serious questions, because one of the common forms of demagogic trickery consists of confusing this issue, and so the opposing side implicitly assumes it has the right to arbitrarily accept or refuse the offered evidence. So basically I say that trees are living organisms, and the guy I’m talking to says “I dispute that”, and then what, I have to prove that trees are living organisms, or do I simply get to say “you are an idiot”? I actually prefer the latter option, because it is almost impossible to prove anything within the context of a discussion. You can only refer to research and evidence that has already been produced in a more formal setup, experimentally, and if someone refuses to accept that, you have a serious problem if you want to proceed with any kind of a discussion, because if you allow the opponent to control acceptance of evidence, he in fact gets to control who wins, because victory is defined by having the prevailing evidence on your side, and if someone decides what is accepted as evidence, he can rig the game.

For instance, I’ve seen extensive IQ studies based on statistical evidence proving racial differences, and it is all dismissed out of hand with the statement that “this has been refuted”. No, it wasn’t refuted, it was confirmed again and again and again, and it is being summarily dismissed by the leftists because it doesn’t agree with their beliefs and so “it must be wrong”, because racism or because Nazism. So if I allow my opponent to simply dismiss enormous body of work that is offered as evidence, and then proceed to say that my claims are unsubstantiated because there is no evidence for them, can the discussion really be continued? There really isn’t anything to talk about because it’s like dismissing spaceflight as evidence because someone says that nothing NASA publishes can be trusted. If you can’t rely on scientific research as evidence, what can you rely on, in a debate? You can’t really demonstrate any significant physics in a debate, except that water is wet and glass is breakable by smashing a glass of water on the floor. This very much limits the possibility of a debate between very different philosophies and worldviews, because admission of evidence is the point where the debate is decided in advance. Another problem is when your opponent cites a bullshit study you’ve never heard of, which for instance “proves” that there’s no gravity and that the impression of gravity on Earth is created because it keeps accelerating upwards at a rate of 9.81 m/s2. First he dismisses NASA as evidence, and then he offers this bullshit study as the truth, and when you dismiss it, the result is a false impression of equal fanaticism and stubbornness on both sides. The real truth is, you’re talking to an idiot, and if that truth isn’t openly acknowledged, you’re fucked by merely participating in a debate.

And now we come to the more important issue. In your personal life, who decides what is evidence, and what is acceptable? Is it you, or is it dictated to you? Are you free to make a personal judgment about acceptability of evidence?

How do you decide that your wife loves you? Do you say it can’t be determined because there’s no scientific backing for the claim? Do you dismiss your emotions as evidence because someone says they are not reliable? Or do you trust your own judgment and make up your own mind? How do you approach the question of God’s existence if you feel that God is present in your life and you feel that there is compelling evidence for accepting that He exists? If you cannot communicate this evidence to others, does it stop being evidence to you, personally? Is it a requirement that others must accept it, or it isn’t evidence? I don’t think so. It’s a complex thing, and what is evidence for a person, doesn’t necessarily need to be admissible to a court, or to science, but it doesn’t necessarily cease to be valid. For instance, there isn’t a reliable way for someone outside my room to tell whether I’m writing this text on my desktop computer or a laptop. When I connect to the CMS, it only sees the IP address of my router, with no identification of the internal IP address on the LAN which could indicate which machine was used to make the connection. The text would be the same in both cases. Anyone inspecting the CMS database wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. You won’t be able to tell the difference. But I know which machine I used, I know I’m typing it into the desktop machine. I cannot reliably prove it to you, but I know it’s the truth – only I know the truth. The courts cannot know it, science cannot know it, but I know it. Is it less true because it isn’t scientific or communicable? If I write on this keyboard do I write less reliably because you cannot reliably know that I do? If I drink coffee from a cup, did I drink it less because there are no witnesses and you cannot know that I did? If I experienced God, directly and without any doubt on my side, is it less true because you cannot confirm it? But if that is the cornerstone of my personal understanding of reality, and it is not admissible as evidence in a debate, if others will not accept it and I cannot deny it, if my personal experience is incommunicably wider than others’, of what use is a debate? I can write my narrative, and it can be compelling or not to others. I can actually use spiritual powers to create spiritual experiences in others, but what it does is just create one more person that believes me, and one more person you will call crazy or deluded. So what it all comes down to is faith. You choose to believe certain things, and you accept evidence that supports your belief, and dismiss evidence that refutes your belief. Until you change your internal reasoning for acceptability of evidence, there’s nothing anyone can do to convince you. Long ago, I decided that it doesn’t matter. I will do my thing based on what I believe, and you will do your thing based on what you believe, and each choice will have consequences.

Leftist approach to reason and evidence

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It’s interesting how some people, usually on the left political and intellectual spectrum, recommend that we all disregard our prejudice and make up our minds based on reason and evidence, and yet, when people do just that, and based on reason and evidence come up with conclusions different from theirs, they go absolutely fucking nuts.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. If you say that I should reject prejudice, I will do exactly that. I will reject the prejudice that people are equal and see the evidence. I will look into the statistics, I will look at the results, and I will make up my mind. If I don’t come to the same conclusion as you doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong. Maybe it’s you who are not following your advice. Maybe it’s you who are prejudiced, only your prejudice is that of equality.

If you say that people should reject religious dogma and make up your own mind about the existence of God based on the available evidence, and I do exactly that and conclude that God indeed exists, and that religions are just a primitive way of dealing with that truth in an inept and clumsy way, similar to the ways in which cavemen dealt with subdural hematoma. They actually invented trepanation, removal of a part of the skull in order to let the brain expand and relieve intracranial pressure, and it was widely ridiculed in medical circles until quite recently the modern neurosurgeons discovered that craniotomy is the best way of dealing with that exact problem. So yeah, the cavemen were the stupid dumbasses who bored holes in people’s skulls to let the evil spirits out, except that the modern doctors also bore holes in people’s skulls in order to… what? So yeah, we follow the evidence. But I will also make up my own mind on what I consider to be evidence. If I’m to make up my own mind, I’ll be damned if I’ll allow someone else to dictate what I’m to do with this freedom. I will see for myself. So, if God exists, are there people who can attest to that? There are. Are they credible? Yes. Are there multiple testimonies that can be correlated? Yes. Do I have personal experiences that confirm that God exists? I do. So well, there you have it. I followed the evidence, I approached those things rationally, and I made up my own mind.

The fact that my mind didn’t turn out into a replica of yours should not surprise you, since you profess your support for “multiculturalism” and accepting differences. But that isn’t really the case, isn’t it? It’s only a pose. You only accept different opinions if they are the same as yours. You only say we should follow the evidence and reason and reject prejudice because you think you can order people around and dictate what the prejudice are, what the evidence is and what is the reasonable conclusion. Essentially, you have a playbook you want to impose on everyone, and the story about freedom and reason and evidence is just a collection of nice words that are supposed to cloud one’s judgement and blind him to the ugliness of what’s actually going on.

About science, verifiability and equality

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Generally speaking, science is the best tool ever devised by mankind for the purpose of finding out the facts about the world. It provides us with the most accurate and verified information of all the sources of knowledge that we possess. It is more accurate than religion, it is more accurate than journalism, and it is much more reliable than politics. If you want to know something about the world, ask a scientist. Don’t ask a religious person or a politician.

On a more personal level, however, things are quite a bit different, because on a personal level, you can’t really verify science, and you don’t actually see it first-hand. You hear about science from the politicians and the journalists, or even worse, from the religious people, and what science survives this unreliable conduit is no longer science. It’s an interpretation of science that serves someone’s agenda, and to you personally, it’s served in form of a religion, which I call “scientism”. Scientism is the religion of science. It preaches salvation by science, and divides the world into scientific and falsehood. If there’s a scientific opinion about something, it’s a sacred dogma. If scientists agree on something, it’s to be viewed with the same worshipful reverence with which the Catholics view a council of the Church. If someone says a 97% of scientists agree on something, you don’t verify. You obediently comply and you don’t ask questions lest you be called one of those names that end all discussion and harm your chances of ever finding or keeping a job.

The problem is, the world isn’t neatly separated into science and falsehood. It’s separated into the part that is known to us and within our ability to process in any way, and the part that is completely beyond our grasp. The part that is within our ability to process is very small, and it is further divided into the part that the science has ways of dealing with, and the part that it can’t process because it’s incompatible with the scientific method. That’s why we have so much knowledge about chemistry and so little about human psyche; what we do know about human spirit is only the part that can be subjected to scientific analysis, and the psychologists like to believe that this part is much larger than my personal experience can attest.

There is also a big difference between science as a method, practitioners of scientific method, the scientific community, and the impression the general population gets about what it’s all about. What the general population thinks about science is basically what the newspapers and other media report. Think about it what you will, but I am less than pleased with my prospects of finding out any kind of objective truth with this method.

One of my problems with the so called “social media” is that it gives a platform to vocal but stupid people, who often know very little about what’s going on in the world, but they tend to have a huge following. Recently some ignorant musician went on a campaign to inform people that the Earth is really flat. There’s actually quite a following of conspiracy theorists who claim that NASA is all about computer-generated forgeries and that it’s actually impossible to go into orbit let alone to Moon and Mars, because the Earth is flat.

And that’s my main problem with the movie “Martian”. Regardless of how interesting and well made it is, it works with an implicit faulty assumption that we live in the same civilization that went to the Moon in the sixties and early seventies. We don’t. That then was a civilization ruled by white men who did what they thought was right and didn’t care much about anyone else. The result was that they stretched technology to the limits and did what people today would generally consider impossible, but not because it’s really impossible, but because they are stupid people whose arrogance and self-importance was inflated by the social media culture which conditioned them to believe that they are important and that they matter. Which they are not, and they don’t.

They are uneducated, because the education system in the West, and especially in America, under-emphasises hard science disciplines and a direct experimental approach, with the end-result of students getting degrees while thinking that it’s all just dogma whose purpose is to fill short term memory in order to pass the tests. On the other hand, what is over-emphasised is self-importance, self-confidence and rhetorical skills whose purpose isn’t to find out and defend the truth, but to win arguments for any side. Essentially, they are taught conceit and demagoguery, and that’s what we can see online – vain, stupid, conceited, argumentative people who post “selfies”, use the platform of social media to talk endlessly about their unimportant experiences and shallow thoughts, and never concede that they are wrong about anything.

As a result, this raises the noise floor so much, you can no longer reliably differentiate between the spikes of authentic signal and various social media propagandistic campaigns, with the end-result of nobody taking the serious stuff seriously, because we are repeatedly brainwashed with claims that everything is equally important and everybody matters. As a result, the civilization portrayed in the “Martian” doesn’t exist. It existed when Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev led the space programmes of their respective nations. It existed when important people were taken seriously, and stupid people didn’t have a platform from which to shout their worthless drivel, and as a result of them not having a voice, they couldn’t say stupid things and raise the overall civilizational noise floor.

What I’m saying here, is that ordinary people should be aware that they are not special. They are not important. Their opinions aren’t important, aren’t smart, aren’t well informed and, being aware of that, they should shut the fuck up and not drown out the voices of the few who actually have something important and relevant to say. The fact that everybody has a voice and a platform only served to reveal how stupid, unimportant and uneducated most people are, and why censorship and restricted access to public speaking platforms were such a great thing, that brought us to the Moon, gave us nuclear energy and produced all the great things of modern technology.

What social media gave us are the stupid conspiracy theorists who don’t know jack shit about how science and technology actually work, but who possess worthless degrees given to them by an education system that teaches people that truth doesn’t matter, that the facts don’t matter, but that presentation is everything.

As a result, we live in a civilization in which facts don’t matter, the truth doesn’t matter, and the media-created thoughtspace contains only presentation, propaganda, opinions and nonsense, and people like myself, who genuinely cut through that bullshit in search for truth and the facts are seen as some crazy right-wing kooks who say things that are completely out of touch with the stuff “everybody knows is true”.

Well, what you “know” is true is that 97% of scientists support the man-made global warming interpretation. That’s what the politicians tell you. That’s what the media tells you. But when someone actually bothered to ask the scientists, they said something quite different.

I once watched a Youtube movie called “Zeitgeist” that intends to reveal all the “bullshit” of religion, by uncovering all the “lies” Christianity, for instance, has been telling us. For instance, it states that Jesus is a myth, that stories about virgin birth are abundant in the Mediterranean circle of religions. I saw this movie because it was widely spread by “skeptics” and conspiracy theorists. Guess what, I actually bothered to be skeptical enough of the movie’s claims as to verify them, and found them to be complete and utter drivel. For instance, Krishna is quoted as an example of someone born of a virgin. Only he was his mother’s eighth child. This is something I noticed immediately because unlike the author of the movie, I actually know something. I proceeded to verify other similar claims, and they all fell apart, nothing even remotely makes sense when you look at the actual content of some belief, not the one-sentence presentation made by a liar and a conman. So, it appears that the self-proclaimed skeptics are the most gullible people you can ever meet. They will believe literally anything, as long as it isn’t the “official story”, and the cause of all this is that stupid, irrelevant, common people have been lead to believe that they are special, that they should question things and not simply accept them, and that narrative is everything and the facts are relative.

And when you have stupid people who are skeptical of what the smart people tell them, you get a doomed society.

Common people believe that we are all the same, that they are equal to the smart people, because they were never required to actually test this belief. If they were, their opinion of themselves as God’s special snowflakes would suddenly wane. At one point in life I was surrounded with average people who didn’t think I’m special because I looked like them, only more scrawny, I talked to them about the common banalities, but they heard that I’m supposed to be some Mensa-IQ guy so they got some IQ tests and offered that we solve them together, to see how we compare. I will never forget their faces when they saw with what ease I solved the test while they got stuck at the simplest questions, and not only did I do my test flawlessly, I simultaneously helped them with theirs. They felt humiliated, probably for the first time in their lives, and not because I laughed at them or made fun of them – on the contrary, I was as polite and forthcoming as always. It’s because for the first time in their lives they saw that not all men are equal, not because somebody told them, but because they were forced to confront the evidence in their living experience.

When people are told all the time that we are all equal, that IQ doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter, that there is no more than 1% of difference between people, that all souls were made the same by God, they tend to believe that – “those scientists, they’re not really smarter, they are just deceiving us, but we know better”. I personally experienced many situations where I was faced with someone who knew much more about something than I did, and I couldn’t delude myself into thinking that we are equals; I was the stupid one, and if I wanted to overcome that I had to learn. I truly wish everyone had the same experience, and then this entire political correctness multicultural egalitarian bullshit would go away. There’s nothing more harmful to a civilization than belief that we are all the same and that everyone’s opinions and lives matter the same.

They don’t. Narrative is not all that matters. When some people succeed where others fail, it’s not due to discrimination, it’s because some people are better than others, and they are worth more. If you think you’re anyone’s equal, take an IQ test against a 1-percentile.