As we grow up, age and mature, we come to think that there are some that we can count on to call it straight.  We can count on umpires to be neutral arbitrators of the strike zone.  We thought we could rely on the Supreme Court to judge all laws, all ideas, all thoughts, all regulations, and all speech according to the U.S. Constitution.  We thought scientists would pursue the truth.

I don’t think we were being Pollyannaish, nor looking for rainbows, not ever acting as if we live in Mayberry.  But at a certain age, we came to expect and appreciate certain political bodies, certain government agencies, and specific non-profits to judge all and everything according to the Constitution and rule of law.  Even if we did not agree with them on a specific matter; we knew where they were coming from.  We thought they would always be pure in their motivation.  We thought they came at us straight and true.

But not anymore.  Over the last 5 years, and especially the last 18 months it has become clear that many of these people are just dirty political fronts.  They’re not noble, they’re not non-partisan, and they’re not nice… at all.  These groups that we had held in high esteem because we felt that they would always call it straight, regardless of the politics, have let America down.  They have destroyed Americans’ sense of fair play and neutrality. 

They are just as corrupt and bias as the politicians of whom we never trusted.  But we thought these guys would keep Washington, D.C on the straight road, out of the Mao ditch and Stalin embankment.  They failed, and thus our nation’s capital is now failing.  It is as if no one in DC goes by the U.S. Constitution anymore.  They openly ignore the written laws. They allow things they know are unconstitutional. Once they were held in high regard, maybe not revered, but they certainly had been grudgingly respected.  Not anymore.

The Military

The leadership of the United States military has become a huge disappointment, and are now probably acting outside the Constitution.  We had always been taught, and it always seemed, that the military leadership stayed out of politics.  They did not engage in partisan issues.  They remain under the Commander-In-Chief according to the Constitution.  But it has become very obvious from the first day President Trump was sworn in that  they worked behind the scenes to destroy him.  General Milley is much more interested in being “woke” to BLM and Antifa, than winning wars.  Milley himself apologized and said he was wrong when he condemned the BLM/Antifa attempted burning of the oldest church in Washington DC.

It appears leadership in the military would rather get the applause of the Washington Post and New York Times than the regard of their own men and women in uniform.  The military doesn’t guard our southern border from invasion, but then thinks it’s totally cool to allow themselves to be used to move illegal immigrants throughout the heartland in America General Milley, rather than reading books on 1619, might want to read books on the fall of the Roman Empire and maybe see if he thinks there’s a rational nexus of that time period to today.

ACLU

We had always thought the American Civil Liberties Union was liberal… but pure.  We had always believed they were on the Left side of the spectrum, but noble in their pursuits.  Not anymore.  It has become painfully clear that the ACLU is just another appendage of the Progressive Deep State.  All of the pure and noble values that the ACLU had pushed since 1945, after WW II, they are now ignoring.  The ACLU sits back quietly as books are banished; they do not speak up as publishers of conservative content are banned from social media and not a peep from them as journalists and members of the press are surveiled, spied on, and shadowed.  Charles Schultz (of Peanuts) is canceled, and the ACLU says nothing.  To Kill A Mockingbird is taken out of our schools, and the ACLU is mute.  Conservatives are shouted off of the stage in our universities and the ACLU looks away.  American citizens are being forced to take an experimental vaccine, and the ACLU is silent. 

Now the ACLU says the Second Amendment is… wait for this… racist.  The ACLU has not said one word as 1/6 trespassers are sitting in solitary confinement in DC jails for half a year.

Intelligence Agencies 

From the FBI, to the CIA, to the NSA, our intelligence agencies are no longer neutral.  They no longer adhere to the Constitution and federal law.  They are used by the Progressive Deep State to punish the political adversaries of the Deep State.  They operate outside the law and outside the Constitution.  From them spying on candidate Trump in 2015, to undermining President Trump for 4 years, our intelligence agencies are operating outside the Constitution.  Entrapment is illegal.  More and more the leadership looks like something out of 1930s Germany, 1950s Soviet Union, or China today.  They wiretap President Trump, they spy on Tucker Carlson, and the entrap General Flynn.  They send a dozen heavily armed men in the middle of the night to arrest Roger Stone.  FBI agents actually “took a knee” in allegiance to the BLM during last summer’s violent riots.  Today, our intelligence agencies make Joe McCarthy look like a civil libertarian.  They are dangerously corrupt, and this is extremely scary.

Supreme Court

Either the Supreme Court members are cowards, or they’re compromised or corrupt.  That is the only way to explain how the Supreme Court could have turned its back on election fraud and felonies before the November 2020 election, after the election, before the inauguration, and still today. They is no way of explaining what the Supreme Court is not doing, is not ruling, is not “being” the Supreme Court without using the words… cowards, corrupt, or compromised.  With all of the forensic audits going on in “Purple States’ that are showing election fraud did occur, and President Trump most likely won, the Supreme Court will eventually need to make “The Decision” regarding Election 2020.    The very real problem here is that about half of America no longer trusts and respects the Supreme Court.

CDC

Trust the Science.  Trust the Science.  Trust the Science.  No more, no more, no more.  It has become painfully clear that the CDC is no longer a purely medical institution, no longer above the fray, and no longer “just” scientists and doctors.  Apparently, some within the Center for Disease Control appear to either be woefully incompetent or corrupt bureaucrats that we can no longer trust,  no longer take at their words.  The corruption and/or incompetence of the CDC is on national display.  And now the CDC is “requesting” moms and dads who have been fully vaccinated, to now wear masks inside their own home around their own children!  Because of all of this, half of America is not listening anymore.  The CDC still refuses to say the China virus came from a military lab in Wuhan, China.  Why?

These 5 entities have shockingly let us down. We cannot give them a blank check of acquiescence anymore.   This is a pivotal and volatile time.  If we did not trust politicians, we thought we could trust them.  But no more, unfortunately. 

When cement columns and steel girders crumble; buildings go down.  When the Constitution is no longer followed by our leadership, the Democratic Republic goes down.  And now it begins to get dangerous and wobbly.  Citizens begin to take matters in their own hands.  Read your history books about other once-democratic countries; it happens again, and again, and again

It’s on these institutions to regain the trust of half of the American people.  It is on them.  And it needs to be very very soon

If you read about the fall of the Roman Empire, you find a lack of principle and a LOT of palace intrigue.

All the fighting about Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York illustrates that well.

The leftists know they have won the political war, and they’re winning the cultural war. America is being delivered not just to some horrific hybrid of National Socialist/fascist Germany, Soviet Russia, Cuba, North Korea and Maoist as well as post-Maoist China; it is also changing as a culture, becoming a place where people wear masks and stand ready to do anything else the government or its media tell us to do. That includes even what to FEEL: when to be afraid, and when to be less afraid.

The people in control of our government and culture do not need Mario Cuomo. They know his policies will be implemented, forever, by whomever sits in his chair. But the media-sanctioned scandals over his evidently declining rule make for good theater. The media must have something to report. It still makes its money off companies whose allegiance now resides more with Communist-fascist China than with paying customers. It all makes perfect sense.

Once you understand that the Democratic Communists understand that it’s all over — that they have won — then you will be able to explain their behavior. Joe Biden acts as if there’s never going to be another challenge to any of his edicts. Obama didn’t quite act that way; but Joe Biden does. Obama enjoyed (inexplicably, to me) a personal popularity that Joe Biden will never have; yet Biden acts with more freedom than an FDR or a Ronald Reagan at the peak of their popularity and influence.

The point is: When you have won the battle for the culture and the government, it no longer matters who’s in charge. Because the people in charge know there will be no challenge to their authority.

Andrew Cuomo is at the whim of the powers that be, just like the rest of us. Lockdowns will be restored and scaled back at the whim of the dictators. As the governor of my own state says about the next impending lockdown, “I’m monitoring the situation closely.” All this means is: “I don’t feel like locking things down right this minute. In an hour, or a day, or a week, I might. It depends on my personal, political and financial prospects. I do what I feel like.”

Even most patriots and Republicans do not grasp, I fear, the magnitude of the real danger we’re in. It’s far worse than Democrats having stolen the election; and the Supreme Court (about to be stacked with Communists) refusing to do anything about it. The real danger is that tyrants are in charge, they know they have won, and they know the population is dominated by sheep who cannot and will not challenge them — even on masks and vaccines.

Evil is, by definition, irrational and weak. But when the good guys, when the previously proud and the strong, succumb to the bad guys, and do the bidding of the bad guys (however resentfully) — well, then it’s all over. Because confident, arrogant bad guys are the last thing you want. Yet look at them. They know they have won … because we have let them.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

Paraphrase from Ephesians 2:2

It is not difficult to imagine that we have entered one more dark history of humanity on a long string of dark histories.  I want to say that others have suffered much worse, and they have.  We can think of those in the path of Genghis Khan; the early Christians under Rome; medieval Europeans under siege by Vikings, Huns, or Charlemagne; almost anyone in France in the late eighteenth century; Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; those living in between Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s; Chinese under Mao; Vietnamese under napalm; Arabs under drones.

But I think I am on safe ground to consider that never before in the recorded history of humanity has the entire population of the world been under siege simultaneously and placed in a medical experiment, forced to face the risk of early death regardless of the path chosen.  All of humanity; one-hundred percent.  More than seven billion people.

Ephesians 6: 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

These sons of disobedience, are they merely ghosts?  Or do they walk among us, flesh and blood?  Certainly, as the Apostle Paul writes, they are in the heavenly places, but he also writes that they are world forces.  We find this reality elsewhere:

1 Peter 5: 8(b) Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

The Apostle Peter doesn’t say he is floating, coming only in a dream to fill our heads with evil thoughts.  He prowls, like a lion; he devours – a physical act.

Jesus furthers this idea that they walk among us, on the surface quite religious and devout.  He says to the Pharisees:

John 8: 44 You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Those to whom Jesus is speaking are the sons of disobedience; the sons of their father, the devil.  They want to do the devil’s work.  We see them on television daily; they fill every major outlet.  Their father was a murderer from the beginning, and they want to do his work.  We also have come to see them in positions of church leadership, bowing in obedience to the sons of disobedience, speaking lies as their father does.  They are doing their father’s work and teaching others that they also must do their father’s work.

One of the paths I have taken at this blog is a significant examination of the many false histories we have been taught, the lies used to justify action, the way evil was described as virtuous.  When I began that journey, I was already somewhat skeptical of the narrative; as I worked through that journey, I have come to conclude that everything being described to us about meaningful events in our history is a lie.

The sons of disobedience always lie, because their father always lies.  It is in their nature because it is their father’s nature.  Every major event in my lifetime (and for centuries before this) has been based on a lie or explained away by a lie.

For this reason, I didn’t believe for a minute that we faced a plague of medieval proportions (see my earliest thoughts here, here, and here – all from March 2020).  I didn’t need to have a complete answer of the truth; just that I knew what we were being told was a lie.

Revelation 9: 11 They have as king over them, the angel of the abyss; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon [destruction], and in the Greek he has the name Apollyon [destroyer].

Their king brings only destruction.  And the sons want to do his work; they want to please him and actively strive to do so.  Lying and destruction comes as easily to them as breathing does to me and you.

The Apostle Paul knows that many Christians will be deceived and follow the destroyer, becoming sons of disobedience themselves:

2 Corinthians 11: 3 But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

13 For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. 14 No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 15 Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds.

There are several important factors I consider regarding which church to attend, and it is a question I – like many of us, I suppose – have had to face in the last year.  I am coming to the conclusion that the highest factor on the list might be how that church dealt with the nonsense of the last eighteen months.  Closing last Easter…I still can’t believe how willingly this was done.

Revelation 2: 9 ‘I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich), and the blasphemy by those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. 10 Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison, so that you will be tested, and you will have tribulation for ten days. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.

Is Satan himself physically going to cast believers into prison, or will he act through his sons of disobedience?  The faithful will suffer tribulation, it is a tribulation from which there is no escape – we will be made to physically suffer whether we obey the lies of Satan or we don’t:

1 John 5: 9 We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.

The world lies in his power; but we have a means to resist:

Ephesians 2: 13 Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.

Stand firm.  Remember that no matter which path you take, you face the risk of physical death: follow in the path of these sons of disobedience, and you will have poison pumped into your arm; do not follow in their path, and they may shut you out of society.

But this is only the physical death.

Conclusion

In the face of this, how should we then live?

Ephesians 2: 14 Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; 16 in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

1 Peter 5: 6 Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, 7 casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.

James 4: 7 Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Reprinted with permission from Bionic Mosquito.

Just seven weeks into his presidency, Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. Among the largest spending bills in history, it was passed without the vote of a single Republican.

The plan sent direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, extended a $300 per week unemployment insurance boost until Sept. 6 and expanded the child tax credit for a year. It also put $350 billion into state, local and tribal relief.

This weekend, a bipartisan group of senators crafted a $1 trillion measure to repair and expand the nation’s roads, bridges, ports, airports and broadband. Last week, this trillion-dollar infrastructure plan got a green light from 17 Republican senators, including Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Boasted Biden: “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal is the largest infrastructure bill in a century. It will grow the economy, create good-paying jobs, and set America on a path to win the future.”

Up next is a $3.5 trillion measure to remake America, which is also to be enacted without GOP support via a process called “reconciliation,” which enables the Senate to pass measures with a simple majority.

This $3.5 trillion measure would expand social and environmental programs, extend the reach of education and health care, tax the rich and take on the challenge of the century — climate change.

Among programs funded are universal prekindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds, two years of free community college, clean energy mandates for utilities and lower prescription drug prices. Medicare benefits would be expanded and amnesty extended to millions of illegal migrants.

All that is needed for its enactment into law is a Democrat majority in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House, the votes of the 50 Democratic senators and the signature of Biden.

After effecting passage of his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, if Biden gets the $1 trillion infrastructure proposal and the $3.5 trillion package, he will have enlarged federal spending by $6 trillion.

This would constitute the greatest leap forward toward socialism of any American president, with Biden’s only rivals being previous record-holders Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s’ New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s.

If Biden succeeds in getting it all, this would not only be a quantum leap toward European-style socialism. It would cross a divide for America, from which history teaches us there is no return.

“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” said Sen. Everett Dirksen in the 1960s, when he was leading a badly outmanned Republican minority in the Senate after the Barry Goldwater defeat.

Today, we talk not about billions but about trillions, and that $6 trillion in spending Biden is reaching for translates into more than six thousand billion dollars.

As of today, however, neither the infrastructure bill nor the $3.5 trillion omnibus bill is a done deal, with the former looking more probable than the latter. But if both are passed, they would create new records and new realities for the U.S. government.

The federal debt would exceed the U.S. economy for the first time since World War II. The deficits for this year and last, roughly $3 trillion in each year, already exceed any past deficits since World War II

Passage of the $3.5 trillion omnibus bill would constitute a quantum leap in the number of Americans dependent on the federal government for the necessities of life.

It would increase America’s ratio of tax consumers to taxpayers.

It would be tantamount to an admission of belief that the real engine of economic growth in America, the truly indispensable provider upon whom an ever-expanding share of the population of the nation depend for food, rent, health care, education and cash income, is the government of the United States, not the American free market system.

As for the Republican Party, the conservative party of lower taxes, balanced budgets and free market solutions to social problems, the fiscal debate will be over in a way it has never been before.

Passage of that $3.5 trillion omnibus bill would represent the triumph of Great Society liberalism over Reaganite conservatism.

In his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan declared that government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.

In his State of the Union address in 1996, President Bill Clinton seemed to concede the triumph of Reaganism over liberalism and socialism:

“We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means.

“The era of big government is over.”

In 2021, Biden and his party are saying: Clinton was wrong to concede Reaganism its victory. When there is a big crisis in the country, FDR was right: Big government is the solution.

If the terrain looks unfamiliar, that is because we are crossing a new continental divide. We are entering Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez country.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

All the available evidence says that about half of Americans are now “fully vaccinated”. In plain English, this means that about half of Americans have (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) elected to obtain an experimental treatment for a virus that has less than a 1 percent chance of killing them. They’re doing so under pressure from their government, not because their government claims they will die without the vaccination, but because “you owe this to your fellow man.”

This so-called vaccination is NOT about health. It’s about obedience, power and control. But it’s deeper than that. It’s also about the idea of self-sacrifice. All but explicitly (and sometimes even explicitly) the tyrants from Biden on down are saying, “This vaccination will help you. You know that because we say so — WE are the only source of science and facts you need. But even if it doesn’t help you — even if taking the vaccine hurts you, in some way — then it’s even more noble. Why? Because you’re being told to do this for your fellow man. THAT’S what makes it virtuous. And THAT’S what also makes it mandatory.”

Those, by the way, are the premises and arguments of National Socialism; and Communism; and of every totalitarian mentality ever known in human history.

A lot of Americans sense this — and a few even explicitly understand it. When you give in and submit to the “vaccine”, you’re surrendering not just to your one-party government, but also to the idea that you are your brother’s keeper. Your government wants you to believe that you are your brother’s keeper, and that self-preservation and self-interest are evil and wrong. Why? Because government officials really believe that? Try to find people who act LESS like their brother’s keepers than elite billionaires and corrupt Party members in the Imperial City, and you’ll really have found something rare indeed. No, they don’t believe we are all each other’s keepers. But they want YOU to believe it. Because if YOU believe it, then you can be compelled to do anything they wish and command.

And look how it’s working, at least so far. Flawlessly. Without even having to fire a shot (at least yet).

Remember: Everybody is being told to self-sacrifice. Everyone is being told that it’s precisely because something does NOT make sense (even on its own terms), and precisely because something is NOT in your interest, that you should do it. That’s what masks were about, that’s what lockdowns were about, and that’s what “the jab” is about.

Once you persuade a majority of people of the claim that their own lives are not important, and that only the well-being of the collective matters, then it’s all over. You have them under your control.

The vaccine is a first significant and important litmus test on the road to serfdom. So far, about half the country is up for self-sacrifice, and the other half is not so sure … even dead-set against it. Hence the divide among the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. THIS is what tyrants in government, the corporate culture and media cannot stand. It’s making them crazy. That’s why the vaccine passports and other horrors yet to come are on the rise, at present.

Guard your body, your mind and your liberty very, very carefully. You’re about to find out just how precious those attributes are.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Mark Twain, once a celebrated American Author, now cast into the Memory Hole as the author of “racist” Huckleberry Finn, opposed American hegemony and warned Americans, usually a useless and unprofitable task, that Washington’s lust for conquest would destroy the American republic. He wrote that Washington’s “trampling upon the helpless abroad” would teach Americans, “by a natural process, to endure with apathy the same treatment at home.” Americans who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties would live to suffer the same fate.

The problem with Americans is that they only learn of their peril when it is too late to do anything about it. America, like Humpty Dumpty, has fallen off the wall, and it will take more than all the king’s men to put America back together again.

Indeed, it would take massive violence against those multitudes whose propagandistic lies have destroyed the belief of so many Americans in their country. The widespread teachings in taxpayer-financed American public schools and universities, and in racial sensitivity training in American corporations and US military present the picture of the white American as the greatest threat our country faces. Seldom do those cast as the villain win.

Today it is a lie to call America “the United States.” The country is the Disunited States. The blue states are one people. The red states another. The blue states politically assassinated the President elected by the red states. The blue states are now trying to imprison the former president and 535 of his supporters who rallied for him on January 6. Trump supporters are called “insurrectionists” and “domestic extremists.” The Biden idiot in the Oval Office calls this “Unifying the country.”

Yes, unified like the one ring would unify the world under Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.

But the country is not unified. 66% of Republicans in the US South and about half of West Coast Democrats want to secede from the Disunited States. https://www.rt.com/usa/529285-republicans-southern-us-secede/

Blue state democrats regard white Americans as “systemic racists” whose DNA compels them to be “white supremacists” and oppressors of “people of color” by which they mean blacks and not Asians, who are also “racists” because they outperform blacks. To stop Asians from taking on the basis of merit admission places that Harvard University wants reserved for blacks and Jews, Harvard imposes racial quotas against Asians just as National Socialist Germany limited Jews. Where Hispanics fit is undecided by blue state Democrats because some of them are almost white and others are mainly Indian. The Democrats’ Identity Politics is encountering the same problem National Socialist Germany had in deciding what blood percentage makes who what.

This is America today. There is no longer an American Nation. A nation requires homogeneity. No such thing exists in America, not ideologically, culturally, or racially. America is a Tower of Babel. It is nothing else. When Russia, China, and Iran call the cards, who is going to answer? The demonized white people? The oppressed “peoples of color?” The oppressed homosexuals and people of infinite genders? The oppressed Hispanics? The oppressed feminists?

In my days as a Wall Street Journal editor, I reviewed a book by a historian who said the sack of Rome by barbarians occurred because the Roman citizens feared the terrors of the barbarians less than they feared the terrors of their own government and opened the gates of the city to the barbarians.

With all its talk of domestic terrorists, this seems what Washington fears. Patriots see Washington as the enemy and are now the danger that Washington faces.

New York Democrats have confiscated Rudy Giuliani’s law license because he defended President Trump and presented signed affidavits of electoral fraud in the 2020 election. New York Democrats are framing Donald Trump by building a false case against Trump’s business manager, which will be dropped when Trump’s business manager turns false witness against Trump. 535 Trump supporters are rotting in jail despite habeas corpus awaiting their frame ups for being “Trump insurrectionists” and entering Congress under the tutelage of FBI agents pretending to be “insurrectionists.”

What real American can support a government this corrupt?

If the moronic zionist neoconservatives who populate the illegitimate Biden Regime get us into a war with Russia or China or even Iran, we are done for.

The American people are so insouciant that they have no idea of the collapse that is staring them in the face.

My generation is the last generation capable of producing political and business leaders capable of understanding that if there are only material interests of interest groups and ideological interests, there is no national or public interest.

Over the course of my lifetime I have watched the slow destruction of my country. I could describe in it detail year by year, but I won’t. The young are not aware of it. They are born into the moral, political, and legal depravity, and to them it is normal. It is all they know. They are confident that they are more attuned to reality than an old fogey like me. The young, never having experienced the past, have no idea of what has been lost.

Assertive in their ignorance, they march on into destruction, and the country goes with them.

Paul Craig Roberts

People are often surprised when I suggest that one of our therapeutic goals will be to help them think, i.e., trusting their senses, and integrating reality into abstract conclusions. Rational thought is necessary to intelligently answer big questions like, “Should I get married?” Or, “Should I quit my job?” It also helps ensure a happy day-to-day life. People often say, “He should get help!” Or, “She’s in denial.” He or she simply needs to think. Choosing not to think sets the stage for “needing help,” denial and more serious psychological problems.

People sometimes tell me that they’re uncomfortable thinking about personal matters. Denial is a good example. Life goes on around us whether or not we choose to think about it, and actions indeed have consequences — even if we’re not paying attention. Thinking grants us the power to control what happens to us. People who are perpetual victims of “circumstance”, “bad luck” or whatever, are guilty of one central offense: Failing to think.

Of course, thinking doesn’t guarantee accuracy, but mistakes can be corrected with even more thinking. Life is a work in progress. Refusing to think can turn existence into one continuous mistake, putting us squarely in the path of chance events. And whining about “having a bad day” won’t make a bit of difference.

No wonder the world is filled with anxiety disorder, depression, low self-esteem! We blame the economy, hormones, brain chemistry, or whatever “disorder” happens to be the latest vapid topic on Oprah. But nobody ever stops to say, “Y’know, maybe there’s not enough thinking going on.” Ironically, arriving at such a conclusion presupposes that thinking did, in fact, take place.

In the middle of a discussion such as this, people sometimes say to me, “Just because you think doesn’t mean you’re being rational.” Of course that’s true. Mental activity assumes that there is an objective reality and that this reality can be discovered through the use of reason. If your reasoning rests on arbitrary assumptions, unfounded generalizations, fact-dropping or fantasy, then you’re not truly thinking. So yes, in that sense, thinking doesn’t always lead to rational conclusions.

That’s why psychotherapy and other intellectual pursuits sometimes seem to be a waste of time. If our mental activity breaks with actual facts, then the computer-age proverb, “Garbage in, garbage out” applies. But the possibility of error doesn’t lessen the value of thinking. In fact, it demonstrates how important it is to achieve a solid interaction between the mind and reality, and then form conclusions within that framework.

The laws of logic and reason (aka, common sense) must be applied to daily life, not just to abstract subjects. This point was made perfectly by educator Maria Montessori: “The greatest sign of success for a teacher … is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” Unfortunately, we all know that nowadays this is not the outcome for many students or schools.

Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to self-responsibility because they think of it as having to “suck it up.” But it’s a lot more powerful than that. It requires the active use of your mind. It requires being thoughtful and tuned in, and it’s the cornerstone of empathy and compassion. Thinking does not mean having to be right, but it does mean using logic and facts to figure out what “right” is. The resulting self-confidence and mental health is well worth the effort.

Psychotherapy is a form of thinking specifically relating to personal decisions and emotions. Thinking, in the rational sense (i.e., integrating your perceptions into objective reality) is the common theme that runs through it all. You can change your life by paying attention to what’s around you and then acting accordingly. See facts for what they are, and then form conclusions based on them. Will you be right all the time? Of course not. But rational thought and reflection, based on objective data from your senses, can lead to independence and genuine self-respect.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach