You can’t unsee truth, you can merely deny it.
Posted by uncajake on March 16, 2008
I believe that man has something of a truth-detector hard-wired into his makeup. I don’t mean that we cannot be hoodwinked or fooled, but once we see the truth, it makes us somehow uneasy with accepting contrary ideas.
Unfortunately, I also believe that this mechanism can be turned off by consistently denying the truth we see. The question becomes one of why would we want to deny the truth? That is a good question. Like a 5 year old who has broken a vase, and who blames it on the dog in order to escape punishment, we deny the truth when it is in our perceived self-interest to do so.
Notice that I said ‘perceived self-interest’. What we perceive as being best for us, may only be best in the short term, or at the very least cost us the least amount. In life the least costly short-term solution can often be the most costly long-term solution. I have often heard that someone has, “Sacrificed his future on the altar of the immediate.”
In a very real sense, our government has been guilty of this fallacious acting. Our social security is going bankrupt because we kept using the money for some ‘immediate’ need. I don’t mean to say that the need wasn’t real, but the money for it should not have come from social security funds. It has never been the government’s job to bail citizens out of problems, read the Constitution, it just isn’t in there.
We need to start making some hard choices NOW, or we will find ourselves living in the street wondering how we got there.
curmudgeonslair said
Mostly what I see is that Americans want to be taken care of by our government. We want the government to provide security even at the cost of a few freedoms now. Little to these folks know, security is an illusion. Russia and Nazi Germany arrested and killed people in the name of security and it turned out to be a serious threat to their own people’s security. We need to return to the philosophy of responsibility and self-reliance.
uncajake said
It’s not just security,it’s the whole ‘nanny-state’ mentality. People in this country, instead of getting busy and making a better life for themselves are sitting back chirping like baby birds waiting for the government to shovel food into their mouths. It is sickening.