Observations About the World, Part Thirty-Eight

Photograph of the Atlas globe

Opinions, Do They Matter?
Monday – July 13, 2026

I have often had the pleasure or displeasure, depending on your perspective, to have to deal with the opinions of other people, and what this has taught me is that most people are stupid, ignorant, and perfectly duped and controlled. Ask yourself this: why is it that so many people tend to believe what some random person on the internet or in a news article says? Should it not be the case that most people should act with some kind of circumspect around information, read "Navigating the Informational Landscape", that they are not yet too familiar with? But no, most people will believe information if they know very little about it, and this carries to the extent where it becomes easier to lie to people, rather than to convince them of the truth. If anything was a great material argument against democracy, this fact should be.

    Yes, it may come across as ironic then, that I should state "facts" in such a normative way and without evidence. Well, to that I can only assert this: either you read whatever it now is that I have to write and you believe it, without hesitation and without question; or you read what I have written and you remain circumspect. Whichever way you choose to proceed is all up to you; it is your responsibility to act with prudence when you do something: it is not the writers' responsibility to make sure that you are informed, because only you may do that. Yes, some people will argue that the writer is responsible to make sure that everything that has been stated under their name and under their pen is accurate, but this is simply not true, nor is it possible; the fact is that you, the reader, has to act with prudent circumspection, and if you choose not to, then you are liable to your own stupidity and to your own laziness.

    Indeed, life is hard and when it comes to reading, life is no less hard. You must approach everything with care and with doubt in your mind, and yes that would include this very sentence. I will say this though: there is a difference between lies and manipulation and weakness on your part, because after all in the former case we are dealing with an untruth or a very creative stretch of the imagination, and in the former case we are dealing with a lack of proper discipline. Do you lack discipline? Well, you probably do lack discipline, but even when it comes to lies and manipulation, your lack of proper discipline does play a role: if you were aware enough to possess proper knowledge, then you would be almost invulnerable to the manipulations of the serpent, and this would make you really certain about the world. Yes, many people will then say that it is not good to be "too certain" about the world, but what these people do not seem to consider is why it should be a good idea to be uncertain about the world? Yes, uncertainty can bring a certain amount of circumspection and weariness about the world that can enable you to gain access to uncomfortable truths, but it is just as true to say that uncertainty can act to lead you astray, to lead you down blind alleys. So no, there is actually very little reason to be uncertain about the world, and the more certain you can be about the world the better you will be because of it; there is very little to gain, materially or not, from being neurotic all the time, but neuroticism is essentially what many of these people ask of you, read "Politicians". Besides, it seems that everything here in the modern world is almost neurotic, and this is perhaps the case in particular with profane sciences; really, it seems that profane scientists are perfectly unable to ever make up their mind about even the simplest things. Yes, the obvious counter to that assertion would be that this thing called "open discourse" creates room for "experimentation" and elaboration, and that it can enable ideas to interchange substances with other ideas, really that the tree of material knowledge can become enabled to grow in this manner, and while this may be true in a material sense it is just as true that "open discourse" just as often multiplies the uncertainty and the neuroticism, which means that uncertainty is allowed to infect everyone and fester around for much longer than it actually deserves to. Granted, the world is uncertain, especially the material world, but this is not reason enough to attempt to generalize this sentiment, and then go on to dismiss and even bully everyone else, because you refuse to know. Yes, you do not have to know, but you simply do not get to tell other people that they cannot know; also, there is surely a difference between demanding that other people should not know and suggesting to other people that they may not now, but this difference is often so subtle that it becomes completely redundant to attempt to hold on to this distinction. What is the truth then? Is the truth a mathematical certainty between the lower and the upper bound? Is the truth just a matter of mechanistic prognostication?

    Really, if other people's opinions should matter, then they should carry a fairly large amount of certainly, but if other people's opinions only serve to infest your mind with more neurosis, then you are better off without them; and yes this is more often than not what other people's opinions do to you: they infect every aspect of your mental process until all that is left is the ruins of the new dawn and a decomposing mind, read "What is Mental Illness?". It is at least true that if you do rest your shoulders on the opinions of others that you are allowed to blame them, and this may be just as well... But really, if you should blame the people that you claim to trust your entire mind with, then do you really have anyone else to blame but yourself? You see, you may not protect yourself from reality, from the wrath of God, from the vengeance of deceit. Reality is reality whether or not you like it, read "Why Not Utopia?". Of course, what the revolutionary elite has been able to do is to socialize, if you will, the costs of this vast and enormous lie, read "The Big Lie", but socialized or not, lying has consequences and in the end even them (the revolutionary elite) will not be able to escape from the consequences. In the end, what matters more, or what should matter more, than opinions is the truth, and if other people's opinions have no hope of corresponding, even in the slightest, with reality, they simply do not matter and you should not allow yourself to be affected by them.

Reginald Drax (AKA, M. C. Dutt) – July 13, 2026.