Dialoguing with a pupil

What it can look like

The video of this post is here.

My previous post was about a pupil’s work, which has led to a dialogue in recent days at the Avalon forum. I decided to make my reply this morning into this Substack post. I wrote:

Hi Serg:

This may be due to a lack of clarity on my part. I don’t mean “sneaky” in the sense of sneaking into the other camp, but “sneaky” in the sense of sneaking past a person’s ego defenses, by which people defend their in-group status. Pals have called my work “in my face,” which I won’t argue against. There are a few reasons for that, and one is chasing away people who are not ready to give up their in-group conceits. In my early days of engaging the public on my writings (largely as they stand today, since about 2000-2001), pals would bring people to me, and I watched a few blow gaskets on this section, for instance. They were defending their American delusions. I quickly learned that people who defended their delusions and in-group status were not awake, and they would defend their delusions in the most irrational ways. There really is no way to honestly invalidate that section. Those gasket-blowers did not have the integrity or sentience to deal with my work. Few do.

In the series of posts that I am in the middle of, I repeatedly state that the lessons that I learned had multiple levels that it took many years to learn. As I look back, it began when I was 12 when our family changed its diet from processed food to whole food, to save my father’s health, which resulted in a health miracle. I soon learned that nobody wanted to hear it, even when they knew that their diets were killing them. But I kept on with my idealism, naively asking questions that everybody laughed at, but they were the most important questions that could be asked.

In my early days of media studies, long after I knew that the media shamelessly lied, I began studying Lies of Our Times, Unreliable Sources, and the like, and I soon realized that nobody wanted to hear it. They were happy with their beliefs, no matter how delusional they were. They were the sleeping masses, I was surrounded by them, and I knew that they would be no help for what I was groping towards.

It was also when I began to articulate what I found troubling about Dennis Lee’s approach, although it would be more than another decade before I was able to put it into an intelligible framework: Dennis was appealing to the primary population management ideologies. People adhere to them for egocentric and survival reasons, and they comprise the easily exploitable herd. Dennis was trying to bait them into saving themselves, but they didn’t really want to be saved. I watched them file to their deaths, even eagerly, rather than question their beliefs. I saw this in every direction that I looked, and the awake were very few and far between.

It was also in those days that I read Ralph McGehee’s book, and I recognized his awakening process, which was similar to mine. Those were long, slow processes that took many years. Dennis had a similar awakening process. They were early examples of what I called disillusioned idealists. They were overgrown Boy and Girls Scouts who chased their ideals, to eventually realize that they had been sold Big Lies. I often liken it to pulling aside that curtain in the Emerald City and realizing that it was all a sham.

I slowly came to realize that not only were they really the only people that I could reach with my work, but they were the only people who could help with what I have in mind.

I realized that the people that I seek had to already care and have their awakening, and awakenings only happened through experience. Nobody can truly awaken by reading work such as mine.

Dennis admitted that he was trying to sneak past people’s ego mechanisms, and I realized that the crowd that Dennis drew would give him a standing ovation one day, and cheer the next as he was crucified. So, Dennis began appealing to nationalism, organized religion, and capitalism (business opportunities), but they are all in-group ideologies that appeal to people’s egos, and they are what the elite use to manage the herd. I realized that the herd is easily stampeded this way and that, even over the cliff, and I knew that they were useless for what I had in mind.

Again, these were lessons that took more than 30 years to learn and articulate. Many people came to me after 9/11, as people began awakening to the fact that something was wrong with the picture they were presented. The JFK hit and COVID were also events that woke up many people.

Awakening is the first step, and I have done what I can to reduce the learning curve for the people that I seek. This could be a very long post, but I’ll stop here. The word at issue here is “sneaky.” :) I am not going to sneak past the global elite, either. They watch me to this day. They will see this coming. I am going to turn this into a Substack post.

So I did. Such exchanges give me an opportunity to clarify my work, and give pupils such as Serg the opportunity to hone his chops. It is discussions like that which will lead to the formation of what I call the “choir.”