There’s something profoundly disheartening about the politics of our countries right now. The deep madness, I’m afraid, is British imperial thinking that has been taken over by the United States. My country, the United States, is unrecognisable now compared to even 20 or 30 years ago. I’m not sure – to tell you the truth – who runs the country; I do not believe it is the President of the United States right now. We are run by generals, by our security establishment. The public is privy to nothing. The lies that are told about foreign policy are daily and pervasive by a mainstream media that I can barely listen to or read any more. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the main television outlets are 100% repeating government propaganda by the day, and it’s almost impossible to break through.
What is this about? Well, as you’ve heard, it’s about a madness of the United States to keep US hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense, because their modus operandi is to make war. And they are cheerled by Britain, which is unfortunately, in my adult life, increasingly pathetic in being a cheerleader for the United States, for US hegemony, and for war. Whatever the United States says, Britain will say it 10 times more enthusiastically. The UK leadership could not love the war in Ukraine more. It’s the Great Second Crimean War for the British media and for the British political leadership.
– Professor Jeffrey Sachs in a 5 July 2023 speech to SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth). Hat tip to Alexander Mercouris
Introduction
I watch on in growing hope as establishment figures from the highest levels of society slowly morph into “conspiracy theorists”. Of course they would not call themselves that, but those invested in and thus loyal to establishment (aka ‘mainstream’) narratives would not hesitate to label them so. RFK Jr., US presidential hopeful, currently doing surprisingly well in the polls, strikes me as an honourable man on a journey quite similar to the one Professor Sachs is walking. Both are men with open minds, a clear positive that, nowadays, will quickly get you labelled “conspiracy theorist”. And that the knives are now clearly out for Biden tells us The West knows Biden cannot win. With no one viable to replace Biden, and with RFK Jr. playing the independent-media circuit with aplomb, Kennedy may well be the next President of the United States.
In times of historical decadence, it seems, dark ambitions kept hidden – because not quite ready for prime time, because still held somewhat in check by institutions established to that end – are suddenly forced into the open by a combination of hubris, ignorance, and event-driven desperation. Conspiring is but one facet of this revelatory process, incompetence another. How to precisely weigh the relative importance of each – and other factors – is beyond my pay grade, though I do hope to appeal to your hearts by drawing attention to interconnections between the bleeding obvious but wilfully ignored, the not-so obvious, and the mysterious.
In that vein, this article is a counterbalance to my previous musing.
A blitzkrieg recap of recent times
The seven most amazing events of my life:
1. Because of a virus, the constitution is suspended and an emergency regime of curfews and general psychological terror is established.
2. Anyone who questions this state of affairs is no longer a citizen, but a “Schwurbler” [transl. someone who talks rubbish, used synonymously with “conspiracy theorist”], or even a Nazi.
3. The suddenly omnipresent slogan "New Normal" is accepted uncritically, almost fervently. A return to the Old Normal – one hears and reads everywhere – will never happen. (How do they all know this with such certainty?)
4. A leaden silence settles over the country. Those who think the new situation is wrong better keep their mouths shut, otherwise their social status will immediately drop to that of doggie doo-doo. People talk behind closed doors and meet conspiratorially.
5. When a vaccine is rolled out, there is no general sigh of relief; instead we get the next mass hysteria. Those who, upon sober reflection, decide not to take the jab are mobbed in public, have to fear for their jobs and become social lepers.
6. And then, just like that, the whole thing is over. Compulsory masking, compulsory vaccination, compulsory testing are but a distant memory, a disturbing dream receding into the shadows.
7. Did anything even happen? Was there something? Everyone is acting as if nothing happened. Now there’s a war, and in the media disaster always travels alone. As if triggered by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, suddenly there is no more reporting of infection rates in the newspapers, and no one wants to be reminded of Corona.
The Old Normal indeed returned.
’Twas a mere trifle of billions of euros spent? Sure looks like it.
But you can't just pull off a stunt like that and pretend everything is normal again. History judges mercilessly. Slowly, but mercilessly.
I, for one, will never forget what happened and what an extremely ugly side society put on display. And I will share what I know. In books and films and wherever I can. My bet: this affair will be dealt with.
Maybe not for decades.
But it will happen.
Because the critical mass of those who had to watch on aghast as the world around them went mad is large enough. I notice it every day and everywhere I go.
– German text shared anonymously on Telegram
The WEF / WHO / Davos Crowd bet the farm on their desired utopian/dystopian vector set in motion with covid lockdowns. Part of that was of course continuation of preceding shenanigans, doings that include sufficient control of midwit ‘leaders’ – the Build Back Better Brigade – placed in positions of ‘authority’ across the Western world by this malicious grouping of deranged, wannabe Global Rulers.
Despite their best efforts, their plans fray and unravel all around us.
About a year and a half ago, The West’s specially selected ‘leaders’ (narcissistic, ambitious, controllable, not very bright) have managerially, obediently doubled down on that bet, this time giddy with the belief that Russia is weak, corrupt, a paper tiger, a gas station masquerading as a country. This particular exciting venture is the neocons’ Grand Obsession, or more accurately that especially visceral gaggle of ideologues among them who Hate Russia! so blindly, they seem ready to destroy humanity in pursuit of their grubby Eurasian dreams.
Despite their best efforts, their plans fray and unravel all around us.
Their panic is now plain to see if you but look.
What now characterises The West as a result of all this is the ideologically fanatical leading the vain, ambitious and shallow on ugly missions of destruction, with the bought-and-paid-for Western media acting as stenographers amplifying the ever deepening madness that has the West in its grip. Currently, most of the West’s peoples are some combination of too busy, too tired, too cynical or too paralysed by their angsty Stockholm Syndromes to respond with robust, meaningful protest. And of course there’s the vast institutional inertia grinding on and on and on.
And yet the fact that Professor Sachs, among several others, has noticed and is speaking out, and also that there are multiple grassroots and professional fightbacks underway in the UK and US, as indeed across the world, is part of the evidence I draw on when arguing that the cultural soils beneath the now-panicked clown show propagated so garishly by Western media outlets are – though still mostly out of sight – now richly fertile, ready to birth new forms of governance in the West.
Meanwhile, we find ourselves confronted with a tragic mess of epochal proportions, utterly devoid of charm, grace or glory. I will never be able to convey how disgusted I am by what I am witnessing. After earnest and repeated promises to do “whatever it takes”, The West slammed NATO’s doors in Ukraine’s face at the recent Vilnius summit. They may enter those hallowed halls after they beat Russia. But if they can beat Russia, why would they so desperately want NATO membership?
The West ‘wants’ (needs) a way out, but the only way out appears to be the blunt correction of abject defeat. It will try to stealthily shift the narrative away from Ukraine to The Next Scary Monster, or it will escalate yet again; perhaps today’s the attack on the Kerch bridge was that escalation. My gut and intuition tell me, however, that if they do indeed risk escalation, they will be thwarted by an adult response from Russia/China that stop events boiling over into WWIII.
Ultimately though, the quality of The West’s madness is so tawdry, so malign, so devoid of decency and compassion, it is simply beyond comprehension. The non-Western world watches on, incredulous, trying to keep as far from our crazed insanity as it can, and assiduously gets on with the business of setting up alternative international systems in which one day – I hope – a healed West will participate.
The evil that men do
What The West has primarily squandered is its authority. Grown spiritually bankrupt, materialistic, pompous and narcissistic, The West has come to confuse raw power for authority. Blinded by its hubristic error, it has seduced itself into catastrophic overreach and destroyed yet another nation. It is also destroying itself. Its power, no longer rooted in true authority, is simply the repeated application of brute force, which is now visibly waning brute force.
It is authority alone which is the true and unique power of law. Compulsion is only an expedient to which one takes recourse in order to remedy a lack of authority. Where there is authority […], there compulsion is superfluous.
– Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot, 1972 (2019), pp77-79.
Where there is authority, there compulsion is superfluous.
And yet perhaps The West’s malfunction is not evil, perhaps it is something duller, less romantic than that. It is a very human madness of vain pride whose roots clutch deep into decades, centuries of entitlement and privilege, drawing on dynastic belief systems spawned in the slow heat of too much power, too little corrective feedback, too little wisdom.
The “evil spirits” which deprive man of his freedom are not at all beings of the so-called “hierarchies of evil” or “fallen hierarchies”. Neither Satan, nor Belial, nor Lucifer, nor Mephistopheles has ever deprived anyone of his freedom. Temptation is their only weapon and this presupposes the freedom of he who is tempted. […]
[P]erverse human tendencies can deprive us of our freedom and enslave us. Worse still, they can avail themselves of our imagination and inventive faculties and lead us to creations which can become the scourge of mankind. […]
Resist the devil, and the devil will be your friend. A devil is not an atheist; he does not doubt God. The faith which he lacks is faith in man.
– Ibid, pp61-63.
Resist The West, and it will crush you without mercy. Its vanity demands total obedience, the total subjugation of your free will to its demands.
This is the pivotal question: What, in all this noise, has become of our faith in ourselves? How persuaded are we by the unceasing waves of dogwhistle messaging informing us we suck; we are vermin; useless eaters; greedy, porn-addicted breeders procreating too much, but producing nothing of value? How deeply have we internalised this cruel siren song?
Should we go under? Should we allow ourselves to be culled like Marvel’s Thanos wanted? What are your thoughts on this oddly titillating moral conundrum?
In my previous post, I presented that part of me that forever vacillates, forever ‘progresses’ from one seemingly solid analysis to another. Like all such traits, such vacillation is boon and bane.
We need faith and skepticism both. The former without the latter leads to fanaticism and machine-like obedience. The latter without the former leads to Hamlet-like inaction and erodes our courage.
My own faith, my knowing, is that humanity is here for a reason, and is on the cusp of rediscovering this truth. We are not pointless. But because free will is sacred and we are trusted with it, we are free to go wildly astray. Astray, our adventures teach us much – though very slowly at the collective level –, and one means of their teaching is great suffering. Sadly – cries the ego – it is a rinse-and-repeat process.
Note, however, that it is “great suffering”, not “great pleasure”! Something in us yearns for nobler lives, something more fitting to our destiny. As the saying goes, “Respect existence or expect resistance!” We resist because something noble in us must resist. We resist because we perceive something profoundly dysfunctional in tyranny. Of course it is never all of humanity resisting as one, but enough of us do resist, and ever more fiercely as times grow ever darker. Human nobility is a flame that can never be fully extinguished. We will always find a way to fight back.
What we need to understand, is what we are fighting for.
The dilemma of dilemmas
Apparently, it costs $20 to $30 to recycle one solar panel, but $1 to $2 to leave it in a landfill to rot. This factoid is a numerical reflection of the image that heads this article. The reason we ‘value’ the latter over the former method for dealing with old solar panels is because we measure value with numbers. In other words, we appreciate value in too coarse, too cumbersome a way at the cultural level.
A science rooted solely in intelligence seems to tend to destructive technologies. Rooted also in wisdom, it would tend to the constructive. Consequently, one could argue (as I do) that some kind of return to God, to the primacy of consciousness, to the ineffable, is required to afford a shift of emphasis, a shift in the cultural value systems that direct our science, economics and politics. In my analysis, in my intuition, it is precisely this quality of shift that characterises the evolution underway in the cultural soils just beneath our collective perception.
My argument is that this is but one manifestation of that old dilemma, quantity versus quality. It is a very specific dilemma that is not easy to resolve. Or, better perhaps, is a dilemma we should not try to resolve. Part of the Western way seems to me to be a dialectical need to tease out dilemmas in order to choose one side at the expense of the other, as if compelled by an unseen urge to put one half of reality to shame while idolising the other.
Etymologically, a dilemma is a choice between two accepted assumptions or propositions. Positing such between “quality” and “quantity” is usefully illustrative, precisely because one should not want to shame the one and idolise the other. But isn’t this precisely what the West has done these last few centuries?
Quality is ineffable, unmeasurable. Quantity is its ‘opposite’; we love to grade everything, set endless milestones and benchmarks, we worship precision, admire suspension bridges and internal combustion engines, respect the hard fact of money in the bank and solid trade surpluses, etc. But feelings about these things? Subjective impressions about what it all might mean?
“Commit it then to the flames”!
If a thing cannot be measured, if it contains “nothing but sophistry and illusion”, it is a thing to be banished from our attention. This 18th century call to action from David Hume is surely emblematic of how the West has treated reality for about three centuries. This approach has produced engineering marvels and astonishing increases in material wealth, but also much to lament. There is plainly more to reality than that which can be precisely measured. Dignity springs to mind, as do love, honour, friendship, trust, wisdom, to name but a few. None of these could be thought of as unimportant. None can be measured.
We are therefore faced with what I’m provocatively calling the dilemma of dilemmas, by which I mean a cultural inflection point in which the consequences of having idolised quantity for too long, and of having no cultural means, or wisdom, for taking quality effectively into account, are coming home to roost. We have paired reality into a bewitching array of dilemmas, a process whose advantages – precision, clarity, predictability, certainty – have somehow morphed into a soul-smothering quagmire whose ugliest poster child is Ukraine, closely followed by the bureaucratic nannying and paranoid fear mongering of lockdowns, compulsory vaccination and medical tyranny.
Our digital future of 0s and 1s is upon us!
Back to faith, back to reality
How backward and inappropriate this concluding subheading must seem to most. What sort of charlatan, what manner of snake-oil salesman would dare headline a phrase that equates faith with reality!? But I go further still. I dare to advocate a re-embracing of superstition. There be gold in them thar hills, the gold of encoded wisdom.
Wisdom cannot be purchased or stolen. You earn the Holy Grail; you cannot win it by chance. Nor can you, by logical extension, earn it and then gift it to others unearned. Accepting this is so, accepting further that wisdom resists measurement and definition, if we do want to make our culture alert to the value of earning and appreciating wisdom, if we do want to draw attention to wisdom as a most noble quality, generally and across time, we are consequently tasked with encoding the many pathways to wisdom in our initiatory and preparatory customs, habits, rituals and, yes, even superstitions. I suspect this set of solutions to the problem of preserving wisdom across time is broadly familiar to all cultures.
This is not to say superstition and its friends should usurp rationality or the scientific method, rather that it be newly understood, welcomed even, as a valued partner in establishing the many interweaving processes of social governance.
But our centuries-long focus on quantity has sped us up into a white-noise frenzy of perpetual economic growth, 24/7 entertainment and narcissistic abandon. We are cynical, exhausted, emptied. Slowing down to taste the gentle pleasures of mindfulness, the calm solidity of patience, and more importantly to enjoy them, will be challenging, to say the least. I note, however, that Robert Kennedy’s campaign has wisdom and love as foundational elements. I note too that Charles Eisenstein is one of Kennedy’s campaign advisors. All that I write here is thus finding its way into the mainstream via powerful channels. Seeing as the meat and potatoes of this article are more than a little Eisensteinian, and seeing too that this perspective is, one way or the other, as old as time, I hope you can begin to feel the inevitability of wisdom’s return.
Unbalance wants to correct, disease to ease. Mysteriously, reality always finds the right vehicles for effecting needed correction. I believe Robert Kennedy is one of the more prominent, though there are tens of thousands of less known advocates of what needs to be done. It is my firm conviction that we cannot be stopped.
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