"As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.
You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. What is truth? Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.
Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
"Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. The never ending alarms, the never ending phrases, the never ending hanging out of flags, now in triumph, now in mourning—it all produces apathy.
There is so much lethargy in the German people, and so much immorality, and above all so much stupidity. I must make notes even now, I must, no matter how dangerous it is. That is my professional courage."
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933-41 A Diary of the Nazi Years
Stocks were digesting their gains today from the latest leg of their bubble this week.
Gold and silver gave up some of their recent gains as well.
Next Tuesday the 26th there will be an option expiration on the Comex.
People seem to be fleeing their confusion, and the burden of thought, into indifference and contempt for others.
It is a reaction to hysteria, and a loss of grounding in reality. Even if much of the fear is from phantoms based in obsessive greed and selfishness.
Madness. And it serves none but itself.
May God have mercy on us.
Have a pleasant weekend.
