Quote of the Day – April 16 2012

“Is”, “is.” “is” — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don’t know what anything “is”; I only know how it seems to me at this moment”
― Robert Anton Wilson

So much of what I’ve been thinking and writing about of late seems to come down to this quote. We human beings love to generalize and then stop. If we can peg something down and describe it then we think we have a handle on it.  “Pumpkin Pie is good”,  “Violence is bad”, “Roberta is smart” Once we have these descriptive maps, we tend to fit our reality around them. Even the worst pumpkin pie will taste bette than Brussel Sprouts if we have in our mapping of reality that one is good and the other is bad. Violence done to defend oneself or one’s loved one is looked on critically because everyone knows that ‘Violence is bad’. When applied to  highly relativistic areas like politics, this classification becomes even more fraught. Words that we use to describe our countries or our points of view can come back to bite us in the ass in a big way. Right now in the United States, the government tells us that ‘Iran is bad’, ‘Iran is warmongering’ etc. It is justifying a possible war using much the same language that it used the last time to justify the last war. You remember the second gulf war? The one where we were told that Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling nuclear missiles and so we should get them before they get us? Only later on, it turned out that that wasn’t quite true. Once the rhetoric was stripped away, there was no proof of nuclear weapons in Iraq.

Now we are being told similar things about Iran. What’s worse is that many believe it without question. After all our elected officials are reliable. Aren’t they?

Blessings, G

Click on image to see full-size

Fractal Soup (Unicursal Hexagram) by G A Rosenberg

5 thoughts on “Quote of the Day – April 16 2012”

  1. Agree wholeheartedly with your posted words – question authority! Love Fractal Soup – what’s the medium / process for this? Thank you for stopping by art rat cafe.

    1. I use photoshop CS5 and play around quite a bit with various filters and stock photography When I do certain pictures such as my tarot series ( I have completed images for around 30 of the cards) I have a clear idea of what I want the final picture to look like),other times the picture lets me know as i go along….Thanks for the comment

  2. A study was done recently proving that many people, even when presented with the actual facts will still believe the lie they were told first. Possibly because the teller of the lie used “is.” Question everything. Every politician is a liar:-)

    1. I often wonder why people feel so threatened when they find that something is not as they believed. For me that happens in small and large ways every day, reality is always so much bigger than we know it to be….
      Thanks Lori, I think you may have given me tonight’s topic for the blog 🙂

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