Saturday, March 25, 2023

A Post Pandemic Parable: The Boy Who Cried Wolf & The Crowd Who Played His Game

There is always something powerful about half-truths. 

A half truth is not only highly persuasive, it can also be morally corrosive as it brings out the lying tendency in our human nature.

The boy who cried wolf is the most accurate description of our gullible and dangerous participation in the fear-mongering chatter of the Covid-19 pandemic. Especially during 2020-2021. 

The wolf turned out to be an old fox

Fortunately, after a year of going through the saga of mostly non-fatal infections and controversial vaccines of different brands, the world woke up to the false narratives of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. 

Setting aside the mysterious origins of the Covid-19 pandemic (whether it was a bat transmission, accidental lab leak or a synthesized virus to create a global crisis), the biggest half- truth that many of us participated in was the lie that the Covid-19 virus was so fatal that it justified the lockdown of all social and economic activities for 2-3 years.

The hungry "wolf" turned out to be just an ageing fox whose dance of death has caused more mental & economic damage than physical harm. Just look at the push-back from those mass protests in Germany, France, Australia and Canada in 2021-2022.

For countries like China that had the strictest lockdowns, the lies about the danger of Covid-19 infections were finally exposed when the Chinese saw thousands of maskless spectators from all over the world cheering and having a great time at the World Cup games in November-December 2022.

Why was it a half-truth?

It was half-true because the virus was actually infectious (4 out 10 people were infected in most cases) and can actually worsen the health of people with pre-existing health issues or comorbidities

In an era of fact-checks and 10 second surfing per post, half-truths can be promoted to the detriment of our mental and physical health. 

At the individual and communal level, half-truths encourage the human tendency to lie in order to satisfy a psychological or economic need. (In behavioural science, this is known as cognitive biases of the brain).

It is also extremely comforting to share with a group of people the same fear and anxiety (band wagon bias). As if sharing your fears make it less fearful. In fact, the opposite is usually the case: for weak-minded people, sharing a communal fear frequently (availability bias) makes it even more fearful.

(For example, one of our neighbors recently found a python curled up under his car engine bonnet. Imagine the communal fear if this shocking incident & photos of the snake was shared repeatedly among the house wives. The passive mind often plays tricks on our fight-or-flight instincts). 

In the case of governments, pharmaceutical companies and other big corporations, the pandemic and the policy responses have given them much greater control over their citizens' lives, their revenues and profits.

The next big lie?

If we dont call out the lie of the boy (i.e. the collusion of governments, big pharma, tech platforms and the WHO) today, we would not be able to deal with the next big lie tomorrow. 

But this time, it may be even more persuasive because quite a number of us, who have not woken up to the half-lie, will be primed to participate in the World Economic Forum's agenda of deception (also known as the Great Reset).

So be warned, my fellow world citizens. 

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

What to do about the deception

The posture of our minds and hearts determines our perspective. So if we are committed to living and staying in a life based on truth, there is no way we can compromise to live in half-truths and half-lies. The most powerful deceptions are the ones with some grain of truth in them. 

Like the traveler with one foot on the platform and the other on the train. Either he goes onto the train or stays where he stands. There is no two ways about it.

Thus, the three things we need to do to avoid falling into the narrative of half-truths and half-lies:

(1) Be aware of your own cognitive biases when reading news and the narratives that the media is conveying through their juxtaposition of actual facts and unsupported opinions.  

(2) Be quick and alert to call out those friends/social media writers who repeat half-truths and total falsehoods. 

Dont worry about causing offense when making your point. These people are either intellectually naive or their minds are so programmed that their consciences are immune to truth-checks (as opposed to the discredited fact checking engines).

(3) Take three steps ahead of the liars's next move. Once we are aware of the agenda of control by the deep state and their corporate and institutional supporters, then we can checkmate their next big deception by positioning ourselves ahead of their next move. 

Three steps ahead can be strategic or tactical.  For myself, as a Christian, it means (a) listening to God's prompting, (b) confirming what I discern with the voice of the anointed prophets and (c) watching the evolution of world events objectively to see whether the prophetic messages line up with them. 







Saturday, March 18, 2023

The New Myth of Sisyphus: What The Young Generation of Workers Face Today

 What I have noticed in my decades of work-life as a team leader is that there are 3 self-limiting challenges facing today's young generation of professionals (between 20-40 years old):

(1) Intellectual courage: though not lacking in courage to aspire and fulfill their dreams, I notice the young people of today are not sufficiently intellectually courageous enough to take a contrarian stance from the herd mentality. This is especially valid in the area of politics and global issues (eg the ready acceptance of narratives like climate change, pandemic origins, the bad-guy versus good-guy reporting of the Russian-Ukraine war).

(2) Power of influence: they underestimate their ability to influence and impact their clients/audience/supply chain partners (posting in social media like Instagram and Tik Tok may have the opposite effect of spurring a focused, coherent world view in an era of diverse views and political correctness).

(3) Perspective: their passion/energy levels are admirable but they are not inquisitive enough to form a more relevant, more meaningful and more truthful perspective of the world they wish to influence constructively. (their typical response to this is that everyone's values are subjective. But before they come to that conclusion, have they done enough researching or is the response a matter of convenience?)

As a consequence of a much more dynamic and asymetrically changing world in the millennium, these three mental obstacles are being tested severely, and young professionals are pressured to make the right decisions fast. 

To some extent, I empathise with their dilemma because in my generation and my parents' generation, we had a more stable, more favourable economic and social environment for patient learning and gradual forming of a world perspective/value system from which we can work out our vocation in life.

Instead, today's generation has to contend with a corporatised, politically biased news media (controlled by big tech companies) and social media that promotes instant distractions and 24/7 entertainment. 

As for the intellectually inquisitive, the answers to modern history's most tragic events (WW2, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, genocide, wars, corruption, the meaning of evil) are clinically diluted into superficial terms (eg concepts packaged into "ism") that divert young minds from exploring further the truth of the matter. 

The "big issues" which the powerful governments and organisations have promoted are climate change, diversity and ESG as if moral and spiritual issues are not the root problem of human society.

The New Myth of Sisyphus

Among the parables I can think of, the most accurate one to describe the dilemma of today's young generation is the myth of Sisyphus.

At the end of the day, their barriers to the truth (deeper insights into human nature and the world) is self-inflicted. And this means young workers have to climb a steeper, more frustrating learning curve while at the same time pushing up the stone of world challenges (work-related) that pressurises them to give up critical thinking.

At the intellectual breaking point, they may finally submit their assigned decision-making process to Artificial Intelligence to solve their moral and professional dilemmas (eg ChatGPT, robots, blockchain, CBDCs). 

In other words, this means outsourcing value judgement decisions to powerful tools that are only programmed to analyse processes, not social and political outcomes of a complex world.

 


                        



“The Younger Generation’s Altered View of the Concept of Führer”

Two days after Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave a radio talk on February 1, 1933 at 5:30 pm.  Bonhoef...