is our ruinous nightmare.
This can be seen through a game, from the conspiracism thread:
KF, 86: >> . . . there is a silly little mental game we can consider.
[The Crooked Yardstick Effect:]
Step one, define that a certain crooked yardstick, S, is the standard of straight, accurate and upright.
Once that is done, no stick I that is genuinely so can ever conform to S: I != S. So on the S-standard I will always be rejected.
This seems silly, until it is in place on an ideologically tainted matter, ask, how can we move from S to the incommensurable I. Only, by interposing a plumbline P that you are willing to accept is naturally upright and straight. But, if you are committed to S, you may well refuse to acknowledge P.
So, if we can be led to set up a false standard S, it can be self-sustaining in the teeth of all corrections, until something catastrophic forces a change.
Resemblance to too much of political (and so also military and ideological) history is NOT coincidental.
It even reflects a lot of exchanges in and around this blog on ID and related themes.
Sadly, including the case that infers that those who reject the establishment of atheism in a lab coat as the somehow standard definition of Science, its methods and conclusions are deluded and childish, to be taken in charge by their betters, the bright ones.>>
In short, we should never under-estimate the ruinously blinding power of a dominant, warped paradigm. If an adept propagandist can get falsity entrenched as the standard of truth or correctness, that will become self-reinforcing. This also implies the value of naturally evident or self-evident plumb line test cases as a means of breaking false narratives and their agendas. Unsurprisingly, self-evident truth is at a steep discount in our day and “scientific consensus” and the like have been put up on a pedestal as substitutes for plumb line truth.
We even have the establishment of one’s opinion as a substitute for truth:
Let’s add:
This then readily explains the commonly seen problem of resistance to needed change even in the teeth of warning-signs that we are heading over a cliff:
A related perspective can be seen through the lens of the seven mountains of influence, culture agenda model:
Resemblance to trends already in progress for our civilisation is NOT coincidental:
For those of us who are Christian, all of this then brings to the table the force of a modification of Francis Schaeffer’s “taking the roof off” model of reformation (think of the seven mountains as pillars supporting a temple roof in the 7M model above):