This is another older post I ran across, but well worth the time. It can be a big shock to the normies when they come to the realization that all is not as they have been told. Jonathan Revusky writes about his own moment of awakening and how he now views the world through a new frame of reference.
There is an event that I recall from a book that I read a long time ago that, I think, illustrates the concept quite nicely. It’s a rather obscure book, probably out of print now, entitled “Checkmate in Prague”. The author was a chess grandmaster named Ludek Pachman. I read the book back in my teens when I was a fanatical chess player. It’s partly a memoir of the author’s chess career but is mostly a political memoir of his time in Czechoslovakia under communist rule and it culminates in his defection to the West some time in the early 1970’s.
The event I have in mind goes like this: Ludek’s housekeeper is going off to the market to buy some food. As she is going out, Ludek tells her that he would prefer that she not buy pork. You see, Ludek had read some sort of popular science article that warned of how unhealthy it was to eat pork. He was concerned that he was eating too much pork and would prefer for her to buy beef or chicken instead.
His housekeeper, surely not a very educated woman, responded: “Oh, that is all nonsense, Mr. Pachman. They are telling us that pork is unhealthy because, at the moment, there is a severe shortage of pork and they don’t want people to notice.”
Ludek took this as an example of the kinds of misguided notions that uneducated people engage in. (I don’t believe he used the term “conspiracy theory”.) For Ludek, it was completely unthinkable that scientists would write an article like that saying that pork was unhealthy if there was not some real evidence that it was.
Well, some months after this, Ludek was reading some popular science article and the article was extolling the health benefits of pork. Now, apparently, pork was by far the healthiest meat, much better for you than beef or chicken. It struck Ludek as rather odd that the scientific consensus on this could change so quickly. Ludek looked into the question and discovered that, now there was a huge oversupply of pork. It seems that the authorities had overreacted to the previous shortage and now there was more pork than anybody knew what to do with. Thus, the authorities were desperately trying to increase the demand for pork by putting out articles telling everybody how healthy it was.
Many readers might chuckle at the above story, not think that it is very consequential. After all, when you think of the various abuses committed in communist regimes, a few porkies about pork surely do not rank very high. Nonetheless, this incident really did shock poor Ludek, and was, as I recall, one of the key events that caused him to turn against the communist regime and, ultimately, to defect to the West. He just really disliked living in such a corrupt, mendacious society, in which everything was a lie.
