We Rule You, If We Can Fool You

Agnotology: the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, part 2 of a 3 part series

“WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF IGNORANCE, and it is important to understand how this came to be and why. Our goal here is to explore how ignorance is produced or maintained in diverse settings, through mechanisms such as deliberate or inadvertent neglect, secrecy and suppression, document destruction, unquestioned tradition, and myriad forms of inherent (or avoidable) culturopolitical selectivity. Agnotology is the study of ignorance making, the lost and forgotten”.
from the Preface of Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance
by Robert N Proctor and Londa Shiebinger¹

As a person of profound ignorance, I have long had a deep interest in this subject. I find the word Agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, to be extraordinarily evocative. Imagine my joy at finding a book devoted to it.

According to the authors, my ignorance can take various forms.

Native Ignorance

It can be native or primitive. In this form it is seen as something in need of correction. It is a void that only knowledge can fill. It is something that must be overcome, a kind of deficit due to the inexperience of youth or inadequate education.

For a curious person, a sense of awe can inspire a lifelong battle with their own recognised ignorance. Socrates taught that to be wise is to realise how little one knows. Conversely, philosophers Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes saw a time, in the near future, when all would be known. Who thinks that now? For every question answered and vestige of ignorance erased, more questions rise up to mock our hubris.

Our personal battle to banish ignorance is further complicated by active agents in our society who seek to induce confusion into our cultural experience. They disguise it as knowledge and tell us how clever we are in our conformity. Yet, what we think we know may not be true.

A false knowledge can make our personal striving more complex. It may even have the purpose of creating doubt. A shared understanding of basic notions of how the world works was once the bedrock of our culture. I am sure some old concepts were better discarded but do we know what we’ve thrown out and what’s taken its place?

In recent years, “The Long March Through the Institutions”² and its related identity politics have made knowledge contingent.

Only a coloured person, a woman, gay, queer or transgender person can offer an authentic perspective of their world. Though they appear to live in the same one as me, their experience of it is quite different.

As an unfashionable, white heterosexual male I must merely acknowledge their truth and try not to get in the way. This can be quite hard because it’s linked to a relatively recent and rapidly expanding concept known as decolonisation. This concept casts me as the cause of their problems.³

Which brings us to the next agnotological form.

Ignorance as lost realm or selective choice

”This second variant recognizes that ignorance, like knowledge, has a political geography, prompting us to ask: Who knows not? And why not? Where is there ignorance and why? Like knowledge or wealth or poverty, ignorance has a face, a house, and a price: it is encouraged here and discouraged there from ten thousand accidents (and deliberations) of social fortune”.
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In this form, the authors discuss a number of fascinating aspects of ignorance. For example, our precise dilation on an object automatically excludes other potential foci. Knowledge is hidden from us simply due to our habit of attending to the world. A hunter or an artist will have a vastly different experience of the same landscape.

From another perspective, our location in relation to knowledge may advantage or disadvantage us. The unfortunate inhabitants of Hiroshima, left with no sense of what was coming, were turned “into a shadow on the asphalt?” Who didn’t turn up for work at the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001?

It can be difficult to tell where attempts have been clearly made to destroy knowledge or promote ignorance. We can imagine a mix of purposeful and inadvertent neglect. These boundaries may not always be clear.

The 1910 Flexner Report⁴ comes to mind which revolutionised modern medicine by favouring allopathic remedies and discarding homoeopathy. This has resulted in a culturally induced medical amnesia. Were John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie aiming to bring in a new golden age of health and prosperity or merely trying to make some money? Might their vision have even stretched to today?

Which brings us to the third form which will be the focus of the rest of this article.

Ignorance as a strategic ploy or active construct

“The focus here is on ignorance—or doubt or uncertainty—as something that is made, maintained, and manipulated by means of certain arts and sciences. The idea is one that easily lends itself to paranoia: namely, that certain people don't want you to know certain things, or will actively work to organize doubt or uncertainty or misinformation to help maintain (your) ignorance”.
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The book gives numerous examples where knowledge is fiercely guarded in order to protect the interests of a privileged few: military intelligence, trade secrets, research and development, legal matters, concealment of criminal behaviour.

Written in 2008. the authors went into considerable detail in discussing attempts by the tobacco industry to conceal the true impact of their product on public health.

Did You Know That In the 1950s More Doctors Smoked Camel Than Any Other Cigarette?

Brown and Williamson, makers of Kool and Lucky Strike cigarettes stated:

Here we had a large company seeking to induce ignorance into western society so my father would continue to smoke. Growing medical evidence acted as a warning to tobacco smokers that this ignorance would kill them. Big Tobacco’s solution was to call on ignorance’s ally DOUBT.

There were never enough studies. The science was always uncertain. Experts could be found to refute real science. All of this was used to buttress business sales of “5.7 trillion cigarettes per annum, enough to circle the Earth some 13,000 times” which was reported as late as 2008.

The most tragic effects of smoking didn’t show up for 20 to 30 years so animal testing could always be pointed to as inadequate proof of anything. Much like the Hardie’s asbestos saga or the current refusal to investigate post-vax Covid deaths, the role of doubt was to delay any clear determination.

In the meantime, these drug pushers expanded into new markets where health regulations were more lax, such as Indonesia. 63% of men and 5% women of that country’s 275 million people are now smokers. Many are children.

There is a sense in which many of us in the test are being treated like tobacco addicts.
Though opium might be a closer analogical fit. We are being induced to accept lies on a scale much larger than anyone in my circle can recall. And where we think we see these lies for what they are, nudge units encourage us to doubt our own minds.

Need we wonder why mental illness is booming? Do you need your derangement affirmed? Call Sydney University’s Mind and Brain Centre for a speedy endorsement.

The specials tonight are roast lion and grilled zebra

Are you ready to savour laboratory produced meat? You haven’t heard of it? If you have, did you know it may be approved next month for subsequent introduction to our supermarkets? No, then your ignorance is on full display. Predictably, this story has been largely concealed. You’ll know all about it once the deals are done and even be given a cameo role in this drama as a customer.

Here is the result of a Google search in the last week and one using DuckDuckGo.

Google searches are often more complete but just as often skewed (do a comparison between these search engines for Remdesivir). Yet, they do like to keep the cognoscenti informed so here it linked to local articles in Business Insider and the Australian Financial Review.

The DuckDuckGo search gave us Kate Mason’s wonderful work⁵ but no local media such as the Sydney Morning Herald and News publications which suggests they did not cover it.

Was the fact we may soon be eating some variation of lion or zebra not newsworthy?

Was this collaboration between Bill Gates, Sergei Brin, Twiggy Forrest, Blackbird Ventures, Main Sequence, the CSIRO. FFAIR, the Good Food Institute, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the world’s largest agritech businesses, renewable energy companies, governments and many others who see a dollar in these ventures not worth a note in our media.

The pap story is of a little local operation called Vow, run by a former chef and biochemistry grad who fell over $79 million dollars and now plans to replace thousands of years of meat eating with something he cooked up recently in a laboratory. What could go wrong? Am I mad or is something going on?

This tale should have pushed King Charles’ cancer to page 3. Its implications for the way we live, for farming, land management and for our health are unimaginably large but this is just ONE story.

Lab meat is part of a much bigger one. I don’t want to bore you with what you already know but maybe you could talk to people in your network about what is coming if they fail to join us in this fight. The lab meat farce is built on the fraud that its true purpose is fighting climate change.

This so-called crisis is already seeing massive struggles between farmers and governments in Europe which will soon be copied here, one can only hope. In turn, this false narrative is linked to animal and human emissions (see link to story below about methane reducing medication for cows), the notion of over-population and the need for sacrifice (again I say, look up Kate’s work).

All this sacrifice will be yours and mine. It will not affect the very wealthy. In order to compel our sacrifice, the Australian Federal Government is looking to introduce us to two initiatives in the near future: Central Bank Digital Currency and a Digital ID. The ID will be used to control your access to currency. It will also determine your access OR NOT to everything, what you are allowed to know, where you can go and what you can do.

Community groups of concern that gather to discuss where these projects are leading are labelled extremist and right wing mad. This is a key part of the role academics like Josh Roose perform as discussed in the previous article. These attacks on decent people with questions is supposed to justify the implementation of Orwellian information controls that our governments are planning.

This coincides with their extravagant efforts to brush aside the idea that they are up to something. To express curiosity or concern with regard to any of these issues listed below is to indicate to others you have joined a cult. Former friends, family and new found enemies (often the same people) are thus entitled to say the most dreadful things about you.

Despite the discouragement, these matters have caught my eye: ESG, 5G, electromagnetic radiation, 24 hour surveillance, smart cities, smart parking, permanent pandemics, the pandemic treaty, Planetary Health, perpetual wars, geoengineering, cloud seeding, carbon credits, natural asset classes, CSIRO, central bank digital currency, climate change, vaccinations, digital ids, wealth disparity, excess death rates, dropping birth rates, lockdowns, masking, fiscal space, artificial intelligence, transgenderism, queer theory, grooming, the rapid rise of autism, immigration, food adulteration, attacks on farmers, lab meat, house prices and homelessness, phoney fact checkers, Trusted News Initiative, social media censors, Bank of International Settlements, World Economic Forum, World Health Organisation, United Nations and their Sustainable Development Goals, GAVI, CEPI, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Jane Halton and what the hell our politicians are up to.

A remarkable four years

Some of us have had a remarkable four years. We lost jobs, family members and friends.  Some friends, like two of my acquaintance, dropped dead without a wave. Others seemed quite unwell despite making the “safe and effective” choice.

Longstanding friendships were broken by the unwelcome suggestion that something strange was going on. Seems it was impolite to suggest so. That is another one of the remarkable achievements of the nudgers.

We made new friends who had spent years down rabbit holes and who told us remarkable things. Some were immigrants from eastern Europe. Others were religious and helped us to rediscover a spiritual element in our lives. Please don’t tell Noah Harari.

Conversely, we found international organisations seeking to reshape our world using implausible stories that challenged the integrity of their track record. When we saw our own politicians and bureaucrats working as their agents, our ignorance of the true role of government evaporated.

The effect of this new understanding has only widened the gap between us and those who have not had our experience.  Good luck to you if you have come through the Covid-19 without mishap but you were indeed lucky. 

For us, the world is irrevocably changed.  We have to research, review and discuss what we have found.  Our experience demands that we not turn away as others might do. We do not want to be fooled again.

Yet, attempts to distract us continue and past examples are ignored at our peril. The Australian government departments of Health and Home Affairs became vital agents of Facebook / Meta in censoring public opinion that challenged mainstream Covid-19 rhetoric. This was a prize exhibit of Government and business collusion uncovered by Senator Antic of South Australia.

There have been many lies told to us over the past few years but few greater than those used to misrepresent the role of social media. Until late 2022, Twitter was a savage censor of stories that challenged the official Covid-19 narrative. Facebook’s shift occurred around April 2023. Its censorship protocols prior to that time made Twitter’s efforts appear lazy.

Neither of these platforms offered the opportunity to challenge or question an undoubtedly dangerous medical experiment. To suggest the “vaccines” were anything other than “safe and effective” often resulted in service termination. No explanation was ever offered by censors.

Use of the word Ivermectin was another quick road to censure and social media oblivion. The professional promoters of Big Pharma’s vision and the amateurs who did their work for free had things all their own way on these big platforms for a very long time.

How many did this practice kill?

This censorship carried on through the critical period of injecting and then ended without explanation. Whatever the reasons for this move to the current more relaxed policy, Big Pharma’s needs had been fully served by the time it ended.

The bleating you have heard more recently from celebrities like Sam Harris and mainstream journalists, especially with regard to Twitter, flows from the fact they now face challenge in earning their blood money.

It was once a founding principle of liberal states that:
“[O]mniscience can be dangerous, and some things should be kept private. Rights to privacy are essentially a form of sanctioned ignorance: liberal governments are (supposed to be) barred from knowing everything; inquisitors must have warrants. Juries are also supposed to be kept ignorant since knowledge can be a form of bias.”.
p9 Agnotology: the Making and Unmaking of Ignorance

That principle was trashed during the Covid plandemic and there is no reason for us to expect anything other than some excellent trashing of our rights in the immediate future unless we do something about it. The International Health Regulations and the Pandemic Treaty with the World Health Organisation come to mind (see Exit the WHO).

The governments of the west are desperately seeking to obtain that omniscience as they embrace the latest technology for this purpose. The caution that people like George Orwell and Neil Postman urged in relation to technological overreach has long been set aside.

Our masters see this as a race between finalising the trap and the rest of us waking up.

From hereon, the real battleground is trust. Our job is to keep speaking out. Eventually, those of our colleagues who have condemned us will surely join what is clearly their cause too. Failure is not an option.

Who do you trust? We can ask no more important question.

We will discuss this issue of trust in part 3 of this series.

Read Part One: What Is Wrong With Men?

1. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance
by Robert N Proctor and Londa Shiebinger

2. Antonio Gramschi: The Godfather of Cultural Marxism

3. See Gender and Decolonisation
See Sex and Decolonisation
See Race and Decolonisation
See Disability and Decolonisaton
See Fat Shaming and Decolonisation
See the Environment and Decolonisation
See Children and Decolonisation
See Science and Decolonisation
See Health and Decolonisation
Also see James Lindsay on the Violence of Decolonisation

4. The Flexner Report

5. Farmers under globally. Why? Kate Mason
Lab created “Quail enter Australian Food market - Kate Mason

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