6 ms·

“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He tak

by ttt0 5y ago

“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.” ― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

willis936 5y ago
A fun hypothetical, but how smart do you think the average Q anon believer is? Reality isn’t as nice on the ears as the fantasy of a poet is.
- pitay 5y ago
  Q anon believers are at most are a tiny proportion of who is described by that. Judging an entire population by the worst few of them that you can think of, is questionable. Also, you don't really know the distribution of where these 'believers' came from.
- ttt0 5y ago
  For sure, the world is much more complicated and the inability to read between the lines and not taking everything at face value certainly isn't limited to "educated people". But there is a lot of truth to this quote nonetheless. For what it's worth, all of those wacky theories about Q-anon or even flat earth don't beat the fact that people somehow managed to subvert and obscure the fundamental truth about nature that's shared between every living being, reproduction, and made educated people believe that biological sex is simply irrelevant or not even a valid concept. Covid's another thing, I get that there are wacky theories about that too, but there are many pretentious, insufferable people who are acting like they're better than everyone else, because they blindly believe any propaganda about it that's pushed by the "official sources".
  - willis936 5y ago
    You’re sending me a lot of red flags, so I’m hesitant to engage, but I feel the need to point out that defending the rights of the individual is not motivated by some desire to defer to authority on how one should orient themselves sexually. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The quote has no truth. It’s a fantasy used as anti-intellectual propaganda. Anyone can say a clever platitude.
    - ttt0 5y ago
      I haven't said anything about the motivations behind it. It's probably just a feeling that you're doing something good. But that's basically what I'm talking about, the biological sex is obscured with words like "orientation" or "identity", despite that the premise of this entire theory at least used to be that sex, gender and orientation are separate things. You can't change your biological sex, it's immutable. If you were born as a man, you won't be able to bear a child. It's supposedly defending individual rights with what is a plain deception. I cannot even imagine any example that would top that in terms of what wacky theories people could believe. I'm sure that criticizing Q-anon is a red flag too for some people.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        >You can't change your biological sex, it's immutable. I assume you mean nobody can presently create fully functional organs for someone that wasn't born with them. I don't know who disputes this. But when you make such a declaration, it sounds (to some) like you are denying biological reality yourself; claiming that there is no such thing as intersex, that chromosomes are always in alignment with physical characteristics, and so on. There are complex processes necessary for the emergence of typical characteristics, and just because it's strongly bimodal doesn't mean that's 100%. Anyone educated knows it isn't, completely apart from politics. If one agrees that such things are well-known for a long time and not controversial, and that there appear to be gender related differences in the brain, then it's not reasonable to declare that "an X brain in a Y body" is impossible or delusional. You can't know, and it's particularly antisocial to go around telling people stuff about themselves when you can't possibly have rational grounds for it.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Today, or when Q first showed up? I happened to have a front row seat to the first few Q threads and it began as a highly intellectual set of puzzles with the community providing a lot of the weird coincidences that make for an interesting conspiracy theory. One might say that the average Q believer in the first few months was a poet. Didn't remain that way of course. Edit: And come to think of it, that kind of intellectual soft flex is actually exactly the kind of thing the Lewis quote refers to, just presented in a different venue. It's my understanding Daesh recruitment propaganda has a similar tone.
- zouhair 5y ago
  I know of Doctors who believe homeopathy or acupuncture works.

by ttt0 5y ago

willis936 5y ago

A fun hypothetical, but how smart do you think the average Q anon believer is? Reality isn’t as nice on the ears as the fantasy of a poet is.

pitay 5y ago
Q anon believers are at most are a tiny proportion of who is described by that. Judging an entire population by the worst few of them that you can think of, is questionable. Also, you don't really know the distribution of where these 'believers' came from.
ttt0 5y ago
For sure, the world is much more complicated and the inability to read between the lines and not taking everything at face value certainly isn't limited to "educated people". But there is a lot of truth to this quote nonetheless. For what it's worth, all of those wacky theories about Q-anon or even flat earth don't beat the fact that people somehow managed to subvert and obscure the fundamental truth about nature that's shared between every living being, reproduction, and made educated people believe that biological sex is simply irrelevant or not even a valid concept. Covid's another thing, I get that there are wacky theories about that too, but there are many pretentious, insufferable people who are acting like they're better than everyone else, because they blindly believe any propaganda about it that's pushed by the "official sources".
- willis936 5y ago
  You’re sending me a lot of red flags, so I’m hesitant to engage, but I feel the need to point out that defending the rights of the individual is not motivated by some desire to defer to authority on how one should orient themselves sexually. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The quote has no truth. It’s a fantasy used as anti-intellectual propaganda. Anyone can say a clever platitude.
  - ttt0 5y ago
    I haven't said anything about the motivations behind it. It's probably just a feeling that you're doing something good. But that's basically what I'm talking about, the biological sex is obscured with words like "orientation" or "identity", despite that the premise of this entire theory at least used to be that sex, gender and orientation are separate things. You can't change your biological sex, it's immutable. If you were born as a man, you won't be able to bear a child. It's supposedly defending individual rights with what is a plain deception. I cannot even imagine any example that would top that in terms of what wacky theories people could believe. I'm sure that criticizing Q-anon is a red flag too for some people.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      >You can't change your biological sex, it's immutable. I assume you mean nobody can presently create fully functional organs for someone that wasn't born with them. I don't know who disputes this. But when you make such a declaration, it sounds (to some) like you are denying biological reality yourself; claiming that there is no such thing as intersex, that chromosomes are always in alignment with physical characteristics, and so on. There are complex processes necessary for the emergence of typical characteristics, and just because it's strongly bimodal doesn't mean that's 100%. Anyone educated knows it isn't, completely apart from politics. If one agrees that such things are well-known for a long time and not controversial, and that there appear to be gender related differences in the brain, then it's not reasonable to declare that "an X brain in a Y body" is impossible or delusional. You can't know, and it's particularly antisocial to go around telling people stuff about themselves when you can't possibly have rational grounds for it.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Today, or when Q first showed up? I happened to have a front row seat to the first few Q threads and it began as a highly intellectual set of puzzles with the community providing a lot of the weird coincidences that make for an interesting conspiracy theory. One might say that the average Q believer in the first few months was a poet. Didn't remain that way of course. Edit: And come to think of it, that kind of intellectual soft flex is actually exactly the kind of thing the Lewis quote refers to, just presented in a different venue. It's my understanding Daesh recruitment propaganda has a similar tone.
zouhair 5y ago
I know of Doctors who believe homeopathy or acupuncture works.