- The 'Shills' -
(The Grand Distractors)
A technique that is usually employed in the more successful con games is the use of a 'shill' - a decoy. Someone or some activity whose purpose is to distract the victim's attention away from what the bunco artist is actually doing to him.
The Great Swindle makes use of such shills in its operation, too. However, in the case of the Great Swindle, these shills are not people or diversionary activities.
Rather, they are modes of fallacious thinking which distract our attention away from, and blind us to, the true REALITIES of life.
We call these shills the Grand Distractors, because, in the total spectrum of life, they serve the ends of the Great Swindle, and, so, they deserve as grandiose a title as does the Great Swindle itself.
There are a number of these Grand Distractors and they do, indeed, occupy and distract our attention away from the true FACTS about life and our own nature as living beings. They accomplish their function by pretending to contain those true "facts" about "reality" themselves, which they do not.
They are deceivers; shills; decoys.
But, as with all swindles, so long as these Grand Distractors are at work, and so long as we are taken in by them, the Great Swindle will continue being worked successfully right before our very eyes, without us even being aware of what is actually happening.
These shills, these Grand Distractors, all have two basic qualities about them by which they are able to fulfill their deceptive roles.
Firstly, they clothe themselves with an aura of respectability in that they purport to be expressions of the 'common wisdom' as to "truth".
These modes of thought dress themselves up and present themselves as "reality". They try very hard to appear to our minds as accurate views of the way things "really" are. Only by appealing to us in this way can they win our attention and thereby accomplish their function of misdirecting us. After all, who amongst us does not wish to be realistic in his views of life?
The second basic quality of these Grand Distractors, the one by which they do their damage most directly, is that the "realities" they represent and express are false.
They are the antithesis of the REALISTIC views they pretend to be.
They may very well express the 'common' wisdom of people in general, but they are a far cry from expressing TRUE or accurate wisdom. The 'common' wisdom, as with 'common' sense, may be that held by people in general, but 'common' sense is not necessarily good sense, and, neither is the 'common' wisdom necessarily the same thing as TRUE wisdom.
The Grand Distractors hold a "true" view of "reality" only to the extent that we accept them as doing so. They are "realistic" only because we, as individuals and as a society, BELIEVE they are, and therefore act upon the supposed "realities" they represent.
If we didn't BELIEVE and act upon the supposed "realities" the Grand Distractors expound, they wouldn't be REAL at all. They would evaporate as the fallacies they truly are.
(In short, the Grand Distractors are the major manifestations of the Erroneous "knowing" aspect of IGNORANCE in the Great Swindle. Although there are many such distractors in life by which Erroneous "knowing" rears its ugly head, we shall focus here only on those distractors which play a major, direct role in the successful operation of the Great Swindle - the Grand Distractors).