Everything You Know Is Wrong

graphics/animation morton_h, the blogger, sound & text ChaosNavigator

A RADIO PARADIGM PRODUCTION:

Sound and video artwork on Michael Ellner's 'poem':

Link to video on YouTube
Update: Reedited alternative version 2016

Essay on the poem: Everything You Know Is Wrong
by Chaos Navigator

Extended version for download (pdf)
Dansk version herThe protagonist is a simple variation of The Hero's Journey in which the hero is the awakening minority of humanity, declaring that the trust in our current major institutions of our time is misguided, an abominable suicidal anathema that must be vanquished. 

There is civilizational struggle between the narrative of the antagonist (the voices of humanity's obedience having internalized their master's voice unwittingly) - and the protagonist's dissatisfied melancholic quest (the awakened part of humanity), a dark melancholy and outrage that comes from the fact that the prisoners in 'Plato's Cave' keep on trusting in their own enslavement (a fact, projection notwithstanding as it's a subordinate point of irrelevance in terms of truth-value).

The protagonist laments the fact that his words fall on deaf ears, sometimes words in tone resort to ironic mockery that comes from perplexed indignation as he points out the absurdity and the contradictions which the prisoners cannot see, while they blindly follow the path to unwitting destruction, not knowing that they are controlled by the normalization of unacknowledged collective pathology, not to mention masters of perception management (deep politics and directed history) defining much of their reality. Hence the protagonist's sardonic or/and earnest amazement in the repeated grotesque implication; 'You trust them'. But to no avail,apparently - which is perhaps the tragic part of the moral of the story.

'Positive' associative examples of such narratives are: Gandalf breaking Saruman's spell on King Theoden, Morpheus extracting Neo from 'The Matrix', Truman deconditioning himself from 'The Truman Show', the two prisoners in 'The Island' finding out that they are indeed prisoners, etc.

Group think, stockholm syndrome, cognitive dissonance, imitation, the lemming effect, the eradication of individuality, subversive and grotesque implications of internalization, educational cognitive damage, obedience, collectivism, mass hypnosis, mind control, perception management, Plato's cave, The Emperor's New Clothes, useful idiots, etc. are all implications in the narrative.
See also the quotations below.

The poem finishes with a sudden catharsis ('Everything you know is wrong!), followed by soundbits of 2 protagonists, Chaplin inciting the possibility of deconditioning oneself from the suppression ('You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men!), and Krishnamurti's call for perception leading into a possibly spiritual world.

The Adagio is somewhat symbolizing the vanquishing of the darkness, perhaps a romantic longing (adagio by Alessandro Marcelli performed by Severino Gazzeloni)

Just a likely approximative interpretation, words never suffice...

 
EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG!

Everything is backwards.
We now live in a world where everything is upside-down

Doctors destroy health, but claim they protect it
And diseased people protect doctors anytime doctors are exposed as diseased...
You trust them...

Psychiatrists destroy the mind, but claim they sanitize it
And insane sheople sanitize psychiatrists anytime psychiatrists are exposed as insane...
You trust them...

Courts destroy justice, but claim they legitimize it
And unjust people legitimize courts anytime courts are exposed as unjust...
You trust them...

Universities destroy knowledge, but claim they preserve it
And ignorant people preserve universities anytime universities are exposed as ignorant
You trust them...

The mainstream media destroy information, but claim they propagate it
And disinformed people propagatemainstream media anytime mainstream media are exposed as disinformers...
You trust them...

Scientists destroy truth, but claim they seek it
And untruthful people seek science anytime scientists are exposed as untruthful...
You trust them...

Banks destroy the economy, but claim they enrich it
And impoverished people enrich banks anytime banks are exposed as impoverishers
You trust them...

Governments destroy freedom, but claim they defend it
And imprisoned people defend governments anytime governments are exposed as imprisoners...
You trust them...

Religions destroy spirituality, but claim they save it
And unspiritual people save religions anytime religions are exposed as unspiritual...
You trust them...

And now when we see it...we can undo it!
 

______________________

The prisoner returns to the cave, to inform the other prisoners of his findings.
They do not believe him and threaten to kill him if he tries to set them free.
- on Plato's Cave and Socrates

 
Quotations:
We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.
- Guy de Maupassant

'The mass psychology of accepting information indiscriminately, of giving prompt mass obedience to imposed limitations of personal liberty, without due understanding of the underlying reasons, and the consequent blind following of leaders, will only come to an end through the intelligent fostering of individual recognition of selfhood and the assertions of the individual as he seeks to express his own ideas.'
- Alice Bailey


'The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.'
– Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
- Krishnamurti


Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.
- Howard Zinn

'All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.'
– Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

We live now in an era where normal values have been displaced. The good is called bad, the bad - good.
- Anna Politkovskaya.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
- Bertrand Russell

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.'
- Yeats

'The powers that be not only try to control events, but they try to control our memory and understanding of these events, which is part of controlling the events themselves.'
- Michael Parenti.

'The struggle of freedom against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.'
- Milan Kundera.

'We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line.'
- David Icke

'The individual no more knows the point of life, of existence. He no longer knows why he is living, what he is supposed to do, where he is going, let alone who he is. He is in fact completely lost.'
- A.H. Almaas

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts
- Richard Feynman

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education
- Bertrand Russell

Education is a system of imposed ignorance
- Noam Chomsky

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education
- Einstein

Strange as it seems, one meets independent thinking today only in the few people who have not been to school much
-Rudolf Steiner

'Puzzlement and doubt are, however, already crimes in the totalitarian state. The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.'
– Joost A. M. Meerloo: The Rape of The Mind.

'To governments that control with fear, the truth is the enemy of the state. Propaganda, censorship, and mass mind control produce homogenized thinking conforming to the will of the Controllers.'
- Tarra Light: Angel of Auschwitz: A Spiritual Memoir of Forgiveness & Healing

'All the power and policy of man cannot continue a system long after its truth has ceased to be acknowledged, or an establishment long after it has ceased to contribute to utility. It is equally vain, as to expect to preserve a tree, whose roots are cut away. It may look as green and flourishing as before for a short time, but its sentence is passed, its principle of life is gone, and death is already within it.'
- Anna Letitia Barbauld

'Anyone who shirks the labors, sacrifices, and dangers that his people must undergo is a coward. But no less a coward and traitor is the man who betrays the principles of thought to material interests, who, for example, is willing to let the holders of power decide how much is two times two. To sacrifice intellectual integrity, love of truth, the laws and methods of thought to any other interest, even that of the fatherland, is treason. When in the battle of interests and slogans the truth, like the individual, is in danger of being devalued, disfigured, and trampled under foot, our one duty is to resist and to save the truth--or rather, the striving for truth--for that is our highest article of faith.'
- Hermann Hesse: Reflections

'There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.'
- Jacob Bronowski.

'We are living in a demented world. . . Everywhere there are doubts as to the solidity of our social structure, vague fears of the imminent future, a feeling that our civilization is on the way to ruin. They are not merely the shapeless anxieties which beset us in the small hours of the night when the flame of life burns low. They are considered expectations founded on observation and judgment of an overwhelming multitude of facts. How to avoid the recognition that almost all things which once seemed sacred and immutable have now become unsettled, truth and humanity, justice and reason? We see forms of government no longer capable of functioning, production systems on the verge of collapse, social forces gone wild with power. The roaring engine of this tremendous time seems to be heading for a breakdown. But immediately the antithesis forces itself on our minds. Never has there been a time when men were so clearly conscious of their commanding duty to co-operate in the task of preserving and improving the world's well being and human civilization.'
- Dutch historian Johan Huizinga: In The Shadow of Tomorrow

'If there is no free conversation human aggression accumulates. A man who listens only to his radio or is caught by the hypnotism of the movies must discharge his aggression somewhere else. But the civilizing sublimation of conversation does not reach him, so he cannot get rid of his aggression.

People have learned to be silent listeners. Dictatorship asks only for silent citizens. If man cannot redeem himself of his everyday tensions through words, the archaic primitive demands within him grow more and more awake. The world falls prey to his accumulated obsessions, and in the end collective madness breaks through. Let us talk now, so that we do not become mad animals!'
- Joost A. M. Meerloo: Conversation and Communication

‘Work that produces unnecessary consumer junk or weapons of war is wrong and wasteful. Work that is built upon false needs of unbecoming appetites is wrong and wasteful. Work that deceives or manipulates, that exploits or degrades is wrong and wasteful. Work that wounds the environment or makes the world ugly is wrong and wasteful. There is no way to redeem such work by enriching it or restructuring it, by specializing it or nationalizing it, by making it ‘small’ or decentralized or democratic.’
- Theodore Roszak

'The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.'
- Hunter S. Thompson: Kingdom of Fear

'Wisdom is so important that it might be said that mankind is composed solely of the Wise...Not only is it true that humanity consists solely of the wise, but also, in the most fundamental sense, only the wise exist'
- Almaas

Happy slaves are the bitterest enemies of freedom
- Marie Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves
- Harriet Tubman

'The ultimate tyranny in a society is not control by martial law. It is control by the psychological manipulation of consciousness, through which reality is defined so that those who exist within it do not even realize that they are in prison. They do not even realize that there is something outside of where they exist.'
- 'Bringers of the Dawn'

'There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method

of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship
without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration
camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their
liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they
will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or
brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And
this seems to be the final revolution.'
- Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961

You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be `unplugged`.

And many are so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to
defend it '
- Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), The Matrix

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful

executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To
make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to
ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

‘But there is a price for telling the truth. Professional journalists committed to truth in media are invariably penalized by their corporate employers. They are pressured into accepting media disinformation as routine, as part of the job. They are encouraged to skim the surface or to convey half truths. This system rewards mediocrity. Lying brings fame, funding and career advancement. Those who refuse to abide by the standards of the mainstream media are fired, blacklisted and their prospects extinguished. Journalists who have the courage to say the truth find themselves marginalized and excluded, and therefore often driven into poverty. Indeed, a considerable number of journalists who contribute to Global Research find themselves in this predicament’
- Global Research

'They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because

they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and
were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening'
- George Orwell, 1984

It is easier to mislead many men than one.
- Herodotus.

'We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented'
- The Truman Show

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
- Goethe

A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well packaged web of lies has been sold to the masses over generations the truth will seem utterly preposterous, and its speaker a raving lunatic.”
- Donald James Wheal

'Life is a smoke-filled room full of blind slaves - thinking they are free but none can really see.
They die in blissful ignorance while they fade, at worst they see the truth when it's too late.
The foresighted are attacked for pointing out the prison, and killed when pointing out an exit.
While most die in their sleep that they call 'life', the foresighted die while looking for the exit.
Such life is a room full of smoke - a gas chamber full of poisonous soma 
Most die in their sleep while others die looking for the exit.
Trying to escape from a hell that the sleepers in their dreams call... 'paradise'.

'Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your
religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of
your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have
been handed down for many generations. But after observation and
analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is
conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and
live up to it.'
-Buddha