Of Deceit..

They've all told you lies..

They kept you in the dark because of their fear that the particular light you were shining might illuminate their darkness too. They stopped you from making choices because of their own discomfort and cognitive dissonance. They told you it's all for your own good, when really it just suited them. They made you feel like a freak when the individuality you expressed freaked them out, because of their faulty perception of how it might reflect on them. They hid the truth from you purely for their own convenience. They lied.

You spent ages summoning up the words to express things, ideas buried so deep that were so very important to you, being so careful to take the time to find words which might appeal to their frames of reference. All they did was laugh at you, or dismiss you, or simply make you wrong. They trod all over your sensibilities with their size ten boots and never looked back, leaving you to seethe silently with no recourse. They said they support you, but only ever did it on their terms. They said that they'd always listen. They lied.

They told you that if you do all your work, study hard and behave well that you can go on to get any job you like, that you won't have to struggle as they have. They said that the future will be better, that you would be better off than they were when they were young, but they didn't tell you that the whole game is rigged. They didn't tell you how debt will enslave you, how the government will screw you over, how the media will propagandise you. They taught you to believe in falsehoods. They lied.

They espoused loyalty and dedication to the corporation, told you you can go far if you work hard, but really they were just reading from a script because they were told to by the boss. They gave you just enough encouragement and praise to keep you from questioning your worth, so that your little cog in their machine kept turning. They promised you promotion, knowing that the figures just didn't add up and in full awareness of the downturn to come. They told you your job was safe. They lied.

They wrapped you up in a blanket of affection, swept you off your feet and promised you the Earth. They made you feel like nothing could touch you, high up on the pedestal they built for you. They said it would be forever, that nothing could break you apart. They fostered your dependence and manufactured your consent, whilst whispering of love and dedication, but all too soon they revealed their true colours. They used you up, then cast you aside the moment you tried to express your individuality, bruising and abusing you with their bullying. They told you it was love. They lied.

They said they'd always have your back, through thick and thin, amigos to the end. They propped up your bullshit with theirs as you enabled each other, in a mutual dance of slow self-defeatism. They pretended it was all good to your face, then casually cussed you down behind closed doors. You accepted the idiotic arrangement of fools because you couldn't find the strength to break out alone, but the moment you began to rise to grace they turned against you without a second thought. They told you you'd never make it alone. They lied.

All those lies..

The deception of a lifetime flows like crude oil across the ocean of your experience, polluting and choking everything with its chemical blackness. So easy to dismiss the significance of this array of disappointment back into the mists of time, pretend it doesn't really impact on who you are in the here and now. Disillusionment does that, but at the expense of true awareness. Awareness that is essential if you are to turn the accumulated colourlessness of the past into the bright multi-coloured brilliance of the future that you know you deserve.

At some point, too, you realise that blame must be taken out of the equation. You have to get to a position where you can forgive the lies and try to accept the reasons behind them. It seems impossible to start with, but eventually it gets easier to understand why they deceived you, or at least to accept that they just weren't capable of honesty. Point is, you absolutely have to expose every lie you've ever swallowed, understanding the nature of each deception, in order to avoid falling through the same cracks in reality as those who misled you.

Lies beget lies, but truth - in all its humbling, grounding, powerful, glorious light - will always shine through even the most tangled web, if only we can bare the exposure.

Copyright ©2018 Richard C. Greenlow. All rights reserved.

The Stupidity Of Deception

Yesterday the US envoy to the UN, Nikki Haley (read Hatey) said of the decision to pull out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, "the body is hypocritical and self-serving and makes a mockery of human rights". This comes on the very same day that a recording of children crying out for their parents from the inside of cages at the Mexican border was released, Trump vehemently defending the policy of enforced separation with his 'national security' narrative. Hmm.. Hypocrisy .. a mockery of human rights .. can they really be that transparent?

Whether we're dealing with the deception of the individual in everyday life, or within the propaganda machine of a government, the thing with the lies people tell to try to hide their own faults is it's almost inevitable they will give themselves away through classic projection. The cornered animal, refusing to face the consequences of its actions to the last, will project its flaws onto those who they feel under attack from. The pot calling the kettle black, if you will. In their rush to defend their position they often are the very last to realise they have revealed themselves for what they are.

The level of sophistication involved in the fairy tales we hear from characters like Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Benjamin Netanyahu and all those others preceding them is, frankly, laughable. They ooze the slime of falsehood from every pore. They betray their shaky narratives within single sentences on a regular basis. They assert their deceptions in bold type, only to belie themselves in the very next breath. Watching the current US administration now is eerily reminiscent of the footage of 'comical Ali' from the first Gulf War, as Trump tweets how well his policies are going whilst the facts on the ground simultaneously show us the opposite truth, whilst Netanyahu is doing a fine impression of Tony Blair in the run up to the Iraq War, with his powerpoint presentations of the 'threat from Iran' which turns out to be decade-old intelligence. These people don't learn from history, such is their exceptionally tiny world view. They don't even possess the wit, charm or intelligence to use rhetoric.

Of course the US wants out of the UNHRC. Human rights are an inconvenience to an administration that wants to cull all protest, monitor all mass communication, further control the media, deport anyone who isn't basically a member of the gammonati and pursue it's self-serving agenda in the guise of 'America first'. Haley showed just how shaky the US position is becoming last month, when following the dreadful Israeli killings of unarmed Palestinian protesters, she simply walked out of the UN Security Council meeting just as the Palestinian envoy was about to speak. It is obvious why. There is only so much defending of the indefensible you can do.

Sadly, there are still an awful lot of people in the general population who choose to believe the lies they are told. Maybe it fits in with their own narrative, or sits comfortably with them because they tell themselves the same lie. Some people start to smell a rat but decide they don't have the time and won't make the effort to delve beyond the surface. Some would rather avoid the inevitable conflict, whether it comes in the form of an argument with somebody or a challenging of their internal dialogue. But it is always a choice. It is harder to challenge deception than to just swallow it hook, line and sinker, but in the long run you do yourself a major disservice by accepting falsehoods or allowing yourself to be lied to with impunity. You effectively enable your own manipulation, and that constitutes a diminishing of your power of control over your own mind.

There exists examples though of a much darker, more insipid, downright clever kind of deception, most often associated with psychopaths. Never to be confused with psychotics, who can commit so-called 'evil' acts through no fault of their own due to their detachment from reality, the psychopath who chooses to lie and deceive will manipulate people and situations systematically, methodically and intelligently, sometimes in a planned fashion for years at a time, to whatever ends they have designed. These individuals can be found anywhere in life, but there is a growing bank of evidence to suggest that psychopaths, or at least those with psychopathic traits, are often to be found in positions of power in the world of finance, business, media and government. It is not that much of a stretch to see that this makes sense. Top politicians, bankers, media barons and company directors routinely have to make decisions that enrich the elite and dump on everyone else whilst telling the public they are doing the opposite.

We have to hope that the basic, low-level morons who constitute a good deal of current world leaders are not eventually replaced by far more sophisticated agents of catastrophe. As it stands, we can safely say that those in power at present vary from the easily condemnable to fertile grounds for satire. If the lessons of history teach us anything about mass deception it is that it only takes one psychopath, planning and orchestrating at the right time and in the right place, to engineer the subjugation, slavery and death of millions. If we begin at the individual level, refusing to tolerate liars and calling them out whenever we find them, we stand the best chance of avoiding the very worst of outcomes for ourselves and every else.

The truth will out .. but sometimes it needs help.

Copyright ©2018 Richard C. Greenlow. All rights reserved.