Just because humans do not like “being told” - Alcyonenews

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Posted March 7, 2025

Just because humans do not like “being told”

In the 1970s, Super-Journalist Patrick Watson landed an enormous $10M ($100M in 2025 $) grant to study Democracy. He assembled a panel of consultants to tell him how to do it. Upon discovering that none of them knew the scope of Democracy, Patrick trekked to Cambridge to talk to the wise man Sir Moses Finlay. The response was: “What brought about democracy in the first place? This is the $64,000 question! It is still very hard to see how anybody got the idea.”

One would expect Patrick to rub his hands with pleasure and lead his hounds to sniff the answer out. Instead, he let sleeping dogs lie. He plowed headlong into a study of Democratia without knowing its raison d’ être. They treated the genesis of democratia as being a miracle, akin to the famous Bethlehem birth. I suspect the professed stupidity being fake. Shoes were invented because people do not like walking barefoot on brambles. This is the cause effect syndrome, the core of Western Civilization. Well?

Democratia was invented because humans do not like “to be told”. Like cats, we are curious and anxious to learn, but hate being told. We are made that way, that is all. To avert being told, the Greeks opted to govern themselves and under the scheme they called Democratia. And a darn good answer to the dilemma this was.

We are born pre-programmed to cry and use it immediately after birth to protest oxygen and to command food and sanitation. Soon we learn words and use them to “talk back” to those who “tell us”. They tell us to surrender for our own good, but with this we disagree, as is evidenced by so many caught with our fingers in the cookie jar.

The worse things come soon afer birth, that of being delivered to the clergy and the “teachers”. They tell us to praise God and curse the Devil. This to transition us into a niche in the social beehive. Among other things, we are told to absorb the words of the drill-sergeant who will teach us how to use guns to “kill enemies” for medals to decorate our chests.

Chaps like Oscar Wilde and Henry David Thoreau appreciate the innate human aversion to obedience. The problem with that is that by the time those people reach us, our parents, clergy, and school-teachers have done virtually irreparable damage to our minds. They have imprinted into our minds the “merits” of obedience. And like Solon (not to be confused with King Solomon) said: “Un-learning the rubbish swept into our mind is a formidable obstacle to learning”.

That God needs the allure of Heaven and the help of the Devil to make us obey, gauges his fear of the free mind.

The war against disobedience is unending. This simply because aversion to obedience is innate. We all (well, almost “all”) are born with the rebel instinct. Hence, no matter how many people become “broken-in” to servitude, more are born with intact their natural resentment to obedience. Bertrand Russell observed this phenomenon and encapsulated it in his famous quote: “Men are born, ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education”. He was a brilliant bloke.

I know of no better reasoning for the conception of Democratia than the innate human dislike of domination. The story of Adam and Eve is a story of disobedience. No sooner were they were given possession of Paradise than they decided to do their own thing. This elicited the original notice-to-vacate.

It is a dilemma: we either govern ourselves or be “governed” by others. We invented Democratia to avert the latter and it worked for awhile. But the Bullies shifted the game away from the green field of reason to the arena. And drove us into the Silent Majority coral. They tell us what to do and we take it all lying down, making pilgrimages and asking for mercy.

Nowadays we “are told” ad nauseam to demean ourselves and surrender to bullies, lest they feel hurt if we do not. We are told whom to obey, whom to love and whom to hate... Whom to curse and whom to praise, whom to apologize to for no cause for if there was cause we would not need to “be told”. Many feel the “freedom of speech” is the noise of an empty drum, too dangerous to cater to.

Recently, a Canadian Senator was kicked out of the Senate. For what? For, in effect, uttering the adage “every cloud has a silver lining” which was embedded into Western Civilization a couple of millennia ago (Ouden kakon amiges kalou). Another person was made a Senator for making religious headgear a “regulation” item of the RCMP uniform, a most revered Canadian Institution. This, at the crucial time Quebec is trying to shake off the relics of Duplessis style theocratia threatening Canadian Unity.

People don’t want to be told whom to hate and whom to love. The Dark Ages happened because those in the pulpit told people to hate the Devil and love God. People are still scared to assert publically that the Dark Ages were the work of God and the Devil. The world may survive Trump. But we cannot survive what caused Trump.

The Black Ages are at the gates.