Why do people believe the official narrative, even when it is obvious nonsense?

By believing the news/government, people have something to go on, something to call ‘facts’. By not believing, they are left with nothing, except their minuscule, subjective point of view from which to reason about what to do and make sense of the world, which is terrifying. Consequently, most people choose to believe, no matter what.

Every policy that makes mortgages more accessible also increases the money supply (via credit), and this newly created money is injected directly into the property market, chasing housing, thus driving house prices further up as it devalues wages, therefore a further loss of affordability.

It is no longer enough to assert what is ‘true’ to succeed in litigation; truth is still only an act of faith, a belief taken for granted, subject to social disagreement. The only way to defend yourself or assert rights in the ’post-truth-world’ is to show that someone else’s claim does not make sense. Sense is the ultimate standard of judgment.

If ethics is a subset of morality, and morality is the distinction between right and wrong intentions, a standard that our judgment is subject to, then to deny the objectivity of this distinction would imply the denial of a standard, thus rendering the distinction meaningless/void. Our choice is not subject to a standard if that standard is subject to our choice, or else contradiction. The contradiction arises already in the use of normative terms with respect to subjective preferences.

The objective standard of morality is rationality itself, because morality cannot be non-sense, therefore morality is a subset of rationality. Non-contradiction is the totality of the moral law. https://substack.com/@michaelkowalik/note/c-172057567

Investors hold globally about 2 trillion USD in Bitcoin. The total volume of USD cash is 2.5 trillion. If Bitcoin could be freely used to pay for goods and services (currently it cannot, with minuscule exceptions), it would crash the USD and other dominant currencies by creating an instant inflation shock by near-doubling the volume of ‘cash’ in circulation.

Undercover cops or allied propaganda assets do not really ‘go to jail’.

New consicousness cannot be built because the act of building is already internal to consciousness, and only expresses that existing consciousness. Any built system could not be reflexively consistent with the consciousness that built it. There is no beginning or end for consicousness because time is internal to it, and the ‘beings’ that arise in time are not themselves consciousness but its active expressions. Expressions of consciousness may recognise one another, but cannot create one another.

Morality (the distinction between right and wrong intentions) cannot be contradictory/nonsensical, or it would be meaningless, therefore not morality, not normative. Since one cannot be an agent without the distinction between right and wrong intentions, every agent is committed to logically consistent morality. Therefore, one can either cease to be an agent, renunciate agency, and thus no longer be of concern to the moral law, like any object (with no moral status), or be an agent and thus be subject to the moral law.

If one values being an agent, which is a commitment intrinsic to action (to reliably realise our intentions) then one is committed to the moral law, which must be logically consistent. https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO

Making sense on a systemic level is difficult, inaccessible to most people, because humans have not evolved for making sense on a systemic level. They only need enough sense to eat and avoid being eaten, have sex, and kick ball; everything else is Dreamtime.

‘Empirical evidence’ entails a degree of objectivity only insofar as it is limited to what we sense directly; the involuntary impressions that we cannot deny having experienced. Nevertheless, nobody ever perceives in terms of rudimentary sensory data (which is infinitely complex, therefore already a theoretical abstraction) but always in terms of conventional categories of objects and properties, which are vague terms of a basic language with no objectively ‘correct’ definitions. These categories are continuously negotiated according to subjective preferences and cognitive capacities. Modern scientists misrepresent their imagination and confabulation of experience as empirical evidence; they cannot distinguish between theory and perception because they are conditioned not to perceive but to hallucinate theory as perception.

It is not necessary to have linguistically precise definitions of words in order to conduct precise logical evaluation. Words in a sentence or argument are definitive symbols that are logically related to other symbols. For example, we take recurrent words to be the same logical variable throughout an argument, and this allows us to detect contradictions. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/the-meaning-of-words

By ‘truth’ people typicall mean whatever they take for granted, an auxiliary premise they apply to every possible argument, but they also mean that this ‘taking for granted’ ought to apply to everyone else, for everyone else, and this normative extension of the concept does not follow from anything. Moreover, it allows contradictions if this ‘standard’ were applied universally, therefore it must be rejected as a standard, because it results in contradictory truths, therefore no truth. Sense, on the other hand, can be precisely, symbolically defined, based on non-contradiction. This property is universally verifiable and applies to simple, isolated systems, such as a single sentence in a natural language, and to complex systems, such as denoscriptions of causality, ethics, physics. Instances of sense made at the simple level may not be consistent with other instances of sense and thus do not make sense as a complex system. In practice, we continuously evaluate instances of sense and their logical interaction with other instances of sense, and the biggest, most comprehensive system that makes sense is given the name ‘reality’, although people make logical errors, and many cannot even correctly identify simple contradictions, so disagreements abound. A perfectly consistent system is not possible because the concept of Self, which is a pivotal term the system, itself defined in terms of that system, is logically incomplete and therefore continuously augmented in time to maintain tentative consistency, which destabilises any conceptual system. As such, what we take for ‘reality’ is always marginally inconsistent (Russell’s paradox), never as definitive or definitionally fixed as people believe, and all we have is pockets of sense/consistency by means of which consciousness sustains itself as a Self among other selves. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/what-is-sense

When an empty set is contained in another set, that other set is not empty. This is how we can think about non-sense, meaninglessness.

If all banks make more loans uniformly, their costs don’t go up, because their mutual liabilities cancel out (on average). If one bank goes out of sink with the cartel, it suffers greater costs because it has more liabilities it cannot offset with retail deposits from other banks, and so it must pay interest in hard currency.

A rare instance of good economic reasoning.

‘Artificial Intelligence’ demonstrates that many professional, educational and creative tasks can be performed without intelligence.

Truth is the prison of the common mind.

The default state of ‘society’ is that of narrative and ideological hypnosis. There is no possibility of overcoming this hypnotic state without logically rejecting the concept of ‘truth’, any truth, the very possibility of truth. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/what-is-truth-like

Self-substitution implies contradiction.

A simple example I use to demonstrate that circular logic of the form x=f(x) implies contradiction is the liar sentence: “This sentence is false”. If “this sentence” is meant to refer to the entire sentence, then substitution for the phrase “this sentence” with the whole sentence is possible. Try to substitute until no further substitution is possible and see the result. The same happens even if you would use “this sentence is true”. The contradiction lies not in the choice of the predicate (true/false) but in the signified sentence implying both something and nothing, subject and no subject.

In the post truth world (the de facto doctrine of modern power), the affect of staging an event is not impeded by the appearance of it being staged. It is amplified by its obviousness as a noscripted performance. Every pivotal story must now contain glaring inconsistencies because, counterintuitively, only the inconsistencies and sloppy acting make the theatre feel like reality, but you can never be sure where the show ends and reality begins, making your experience hyper-real and creating a layer of psychological dependency on the noscriptwriters. It is a show that people cannot look away from, which mediates power over reality itself.

One cannot effectively negotiate with the ruling power without projecting power over meaning and thus forcing the hand of the noscriptwriters to change the noscript.

Only someone with an agenda would agree to do “peer review” for free, more than once.

The primary function of education in Economics is to protect the wealth of the rich.