Prager Insights

 

I pride myself on thinking for myself, that I am an original thinker, and believing that I have long loved and listened to be the Good Spirits, so I have my own source to truth, knowledge, love and wisdom, independent of those like Peterson, Levin, Hoffer and Prager, who have indirectly, strongly influenced my thinking and awareness of reality and the human condition.

 

Still Dennis Prager likely has influenced me more than the others, after Eric Hoffer. Prager comes up with gems of wisdom that I had never thought of, but are crucial to filling in the blanks in one’s coherent effort to build a web of belief that captures how the world works and is.

 

Here is an example. I am taking notes on a Prager article, published on 11/15/22, likely at Townhall. I took notes on the article, the arts that interested me, and will comment on them.

 

Prager: ‘In a recent Fireside Chat—my weekly podcast for Prager U . . . a young man is his 20s asked how he was supposed to figure out who is telling the truth and who isn’t. . . . Giving the opposing positions one encounters on almost every issue, how is one supposed to figure out which position is right, and which one may not only be wrong, but a lie?

 

In addition to the obvious suggestions—such as finding individuals and institutions whom you trust, studying both sides of the issues, learning as much as possible and using common sense—I offered what may be the single most important indicator of who is more likely to be lying.

 

It is not a perfect indicator of who is telling the truth—there is no perfect indicator—but it comes close.

 

With rare exceptions, the party that calls for censorship is lying. People who tell the truth can deal with dissent and different opinions. In fact, truth-tellers welcome debate.”

 

My response: Those that call for censorship are the liars. Liars are totalitarian and want to make dissent, truth-speaking and independent thought and speech outlawed by the state. Note that groupist, groupthink, fanaticism, ideological quest for purity and conformity in thought and action, that all are part of a politicized, interlocking set of hierarchies ruled by the state.

 

Where there is liberty, individualism, small government, capitalism, pure free speech and private, self-realized, self-educated, independent-minded supercitizens, it is impossible there to censor free speech, so there the truth will out all the time, all over quickly and widely, to the benefit of all, whether they immediately realize it or not. Prager’s insight here was most helpful to me: if one claims to speak the truth, and yet censors oppositional voices, one is not only a state thug, one is a liar that seeks to shove that Big Lie down the throats of all opposing thinkers.

 

Prager: “If this theory is correct—and I cannot imagine a valid argument against it—it means that in virtually every instance of a Left-right difference, the Left is lying.”

 

My response: Prager, having studies Leftism for 50 years, is an absolute expert, and he and Rush Limbaugh have done Americans great service in warning us about these cultural Marxists and their vicious plans to transform America. What he seems to be saying about Leftists lying all the time, though true, is also instructive if we replace the word Leftism with any abstraction or ism that is elevated as the new secular religion to follow, a false, worldly, satanic religion that all individuals, most easily capitulating, are forced by threats of violence and being group-swarmed, howling mobs of true-believers, to join and believe in with all their heart and souls.

 

Then the Big Lie, or web of lies, pushed by the Left or whatever mass-movement juggernaut currently plaguing a people, is a network of believed falsehoods adored by its zombie adherents, a web of deceits that all the world must accept and be infected by, through holy war if necessary, for their own good.

 

Prager: “There is no important area of left-right difference in which the Left—not liberals; the Left—does not call for shutting down dissent . . . Truth is a liberal value, and it is a conservative value. It has never been a left-wing value. From Vladimir Lenin and the Communist Part to the contemporary university, the Left has always suppressed dissent.

 

And for good reason. If dissent is allow, the Left loses power.

 

And the Left knows it . . .  which side is lying: the one that censors and suppresses dissent. The Left.”

 

My response: Great points.