Today I did some research on the current state of some places in the USA I've been to. Through sites like YouTube you are still able to view many videos of "eyewitness accounts"—people with cameras showing what they see. Likewise, there are the popular big news companies with more "traditional" media type videos. The job of the analyst (you as you watch YouTube) critically) is to piece together what is going on broadly from these various sources.

Movies, TV shows, and other relatively high budget productions can be called more tightly controlled than some dude with a phone uploading some video. A blog like this one is much less "polished" or "refined" than some book through a big publisher.

These different forms of media have different uses. A higher budget, more refined document may be useful for seeing some systematic plan spelled out. It can be "tighter" in that special provisions may be made to answer possible objections, address shortcomings, and so forth.

On the other hand, a blog post like what I'm doing here doesn't try to be "comprehensive". Its value is in how quickly it is written—"one-session writing" ¹ It is similar to a "vlog" where someone flips on a webcam and starts talking, but it is in text. ²

The dangers of repeating "talking points"

When we repeat some "fact" given by experts, we often carry with what we are saying an affirmation of some big theoretical framework. For instance, we can talk about "mental health"—looking at things like depression or anxiety.

There are some "primitives" I think we can agree on here; some days, we may wake up and feel a particular way. Talking to others about our experiences, we will find that these things we experience are not unique to us as individuals, but common to many humans. Getting to know people better, we can find how the day-to-day choices we make impact how we think, feel, etc.

Now, if someone I generally trust tells me about their experiences, I believe what they say in their reporting. But this does not mean I buy into establishment psychological research, their shifting categories, and their definitions of various conditions.

Earnest research into many of the sciences of this era will show you just how rocky of a foundation much of the language we throw around today is.

Case study: ADHD

Growing up, many friends around me were diagnosed with ADD or ADHD—Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder. Thankfully, I never had to take any medications, get diagnosed, or do anything personally with this, but I know many people who did. People in their mid 20s to early 30s (millennials) in many parts of the USA likely have very similar experiences.

Here are some experiential claims:

• sometimes it is hard to focus on things
• lots of what you are asked to do in school is boring (especially now with online classes for many)
• being able to move around, go outside, etc. often makes me feel better

AD(H)D diagnoses were made to bend kids to accept public school. Medications and stuff can make people more compliant, and thus more prepared to "succeed" in a given social framework.

Now, if you "have a conversation with someone about ADHD", you have to come up with a shared understanding of ADHD to get anywhere. For instance, if both parties agree that there is indeed some disorder affecting tons of kids, then the conversation moves to how to solve this particular problem. What training methods can be employed to make people accept such-and-such thing (e.g. standardized tests) that they have a natural revulsion towards?

Conversely, you may have two people talking that don't really "believe in ADHD" in the sense that they think that the foundations of much of psychology are from literal mad scientists trying to treat humans like "guinea pigs" to usher in some utopia/dystopia... Then, discussion of ADHD may be more along the lines of how some establishment mongers came up with a label for a particular "inefficiency" wherein humans refused or were unable to act like the cogs in a machine they were told to be. ADHD between these people is not discussed so much as a "fact of reality", but instead as a concept that arose for particular purposes one might regard as negligent at best and nefarious at worst.

Use timeless language

One way to avoid getting caught up in the latest models/fictions of how the world works is to avoid theory-laden speech. What are things that are self-evident to us which require no explanation?

In some domain particular to the times, you'll of course have to use jargon—talking about cars will require using certain terms that would be innapropriate for talking about horses. However, even here, we are still at the point of having names for identifiable things, e.g. parts from different manufacturers. For most people, how a car works is just "magic". So while you may have names for new things, the basic way in which you talk about the interactions of those things can still be "timeless".

Reading the Times

Just as personality test type online quiz things remain popular, I remember classmates coming up with collections of the various "mental health issues" they had.

We now have a pretty extensive catalog of terms—with "official" definitions as well as colloquial usages—to describe particular patterns of thinking and behavior modern people attest as they contend with the violence of the modern world. ³

We should not slander other people or call them liars—each individual can report on their own experiences. However, to impose a particular model/language to talk about how the world must work is a kind of modern "Inquisition" (in the sense of forcing religion).

COVID-19 and Language

In "police society", we are strongly-suggested to describe our experience in terms of particular things we are told about. For instance, you are asked to operate your business, to meet with other people, and so on and so forth in recognition of how a cadre of scientific "clergy" tells you how the world is.

Headlines everywhere will refer to this thing that we all are assumed to be there. We have diagrams, explanations, videos, etc. all explaining how this stuff works and why such-and-such is reasonable.

Philosophy 101 is... well, you start with some presuppositions about how the world works, you can then deduce what follows.

So if you were an power-hungry world manipulator, the thing you would do to control a bunch of people is to undermine their presuppositions about what is true. If you can get them to accept a handful of axioms as "self-evident" then a great many things logically follow.

Here are some things most people I know take for granted,

• Evolution of mankind from some non-human ancestor
• The great expanse of the universe, of which the earth is but a "pale blue dot"
• Social progress in the form of greater social liberty and provisions for a basic standard of living

From these three points, you can put forward pretty much everything in Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World.

Believing that human nature is maleable and that people can be made better underlies the transhumanist movement. The idea is that humans can be engineered like machines, so why not use whatever means are available to us to engineer greater human prosperity?

Affirming the smallness of the earth itself doesn't seem to me to be so problematic as Scientism and the importance cosmology within this framework. Most of us are not aspiring astronauts; the workings of billions of dollars, space shuttles, and all of this isn't directly our business. Not working in these areas, I will not speak on the specifics.

What we must affirm though is that a handful of narratives such as the threat of nuclear weapons, the "space race", and the need for international cooperation in various technologically related projects form much of the mythos of our present era. Generally, you can also look into:

• Imaging/simulation technology; what is it possible to present to the public and how this does(n't) map to reality
• Hollywood and esoteric/occult connections
• Intelligence agencies and their role in large-scale world events

As we have embarked on "conspiracy theory" thinking here, I just want to point out that,

• Saying you don't know about something isn't the same as calling such-and-such parties liars; many things we simply don't know as individuals and must accept based on expert testimony
• This is not an attack on news broadly—indeed this post opens by describing the importance of eyewitness accounts and the experiences of individuals. Rather, I'm advocating not naively accepting narratives from large media companies, assuming the people that direct their operations have your best interests in mind
• Epistemololgically (how we know what we know), you can see how shaky much of what we're told is. This is not like trying out a new weight lifting training routine and finding out you can lift more; we're going off unverifiable reports from parties we have reasons to be wary of

Concluding thoughts

YouTube, the New York Times, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. all have their problems, but that does not make these sources "bad" or "fake news". Rather, when trying to find out what is going on broadly, a good idea is to consider what sources are and what they are not. Simply outsourcing your thinking about the outside world to a major corporation the Bernie bros would aptly critcize ⁴

In this way, I think that the idea of "fact checking" with Google, Facebook, etc. is mega-cringe because it will likely be a lot of flagging of various trigger words and the cnesorship of materials that don't follow a particular establishment narrative. Many blindly buy into this idea because they think that they have access to The Truth (TM) and that others get wrapped up on wrong-think, so it is necessary to control the wrong-think through multi-million dollar corporations.