Health Responsibility Movement is fantastic, hopefully it sticks.
Corbett is definitely one of the truther voices I trust most: as you say, logically consistent with a high intellectual integrity, but also consistent in his tone and emotions, without falling for the sensationalism and grandstanding that many others do. He put me in my place more than a few times during my Qtard phase.
Also, thankyou for slogging through Steiner so we don't have to! He is hard work, I know I should take the time to sit down and read more of him, although audiobooks on long car rides make the slog a bit more appealing. I find the Ahriman/Lucifer archetypes a very helpful framework for understanding how our world is governed.
Yes! I was going to say that about Corbett too, that he was never bombastic or hysterical. He keeps that even tone that's so matter of fact, even when he's saying things that are obviously true but no one else is saying!
Glad you like Health Responsibility Movement. With freedom, it sounds like we're trying to get away with something. Really it's the opposite.
I too am a lover of the calm, cool and collected. That's what I liked about Malone as opposed the Dr. Breggins. Boy was I wrong on that one, as you proved beyond the shadow of a doubt.
There is a lot of talk of energy credit systems organised from centralised government which lots of people I know are using their energy to resist, because they don't want to be controlled by them (in the London we have the ULEZ , low emission zone, coming in). I agree resisting leads to persisting.
And I think our movement needs to include not just responsibility for our own health but also responsibility for our energy use and impact on the environment and other species, instead of just fighting for the freedom to continue to abuse other animals, pollute and ransack the world.
Health and impact on mother earth responsibility movement
Yes and... responsibility for producing, as a community, most of what we consume. I think that necessitates regenerative agriculture that centers on animal husbandry, as a way that restores the soil and grasslands while treating animals humanely. I know we disagree about that and Jack, another reader I respect, agrees with you.
Decentralization, however, means that we can each try out our methods and see what happens. We don't need to agree. We can each take responsibility in our own way.
Yes being decentralised we don't have to be in the same community. We are in communities who align with our core values taking responsibility for ourselves, no more debating and disagreeing or trying to get consensus.
What a great article you posted on this, Jo! Thanks for the shout-out. And I was going to say, lots of fellow insomniacs on this thread, I see you and kitten seeking answers both reading at 1:45 Pacific time, unless you're both in Australia.
Great post, Tereza. I confess to being late to Corbett as well, and find myself having a very similar appraisal of his contributions as you have. (My forward thinking sister has been aware of him for many years!) He is a valuable voice indeed. Perhaps I say that because he aligns with my many comments about the importance of removing 'hero' worship, aka 'hopium'. The elevation of the hero is the creation of the victim.
Yes! The opposite of 'hope' is personal responsibility. Fantastic observation! There is the possibility of confusion between what in yoga is called 'ishvara-pranidhana', loosely translated as 'trust in God', where that means more accurately, imo, taking responsibility to align yourself with God rather than the self-delusional 'hope' that God will be the deus ex machina that arrives as the ultimate just-in-time 'hero'. JC directed us to look within, ie, take personal responsibility for becoming your own hero as an expression of God. A strong version of 'ishvara-pranidhana.'
And Corbett also agrees with my observation that to fight this war is to lose the war, because that action is in fact the reaction-energy that the cabal require to remain alive. Simply disengage and create parallel systems! Understand that the 'central' bank is an artifice only recently constructed and totally unnecessary. (Tereza, did you read Jane Jacob's brilliant book "Cities and Wealth of Nations:f Principles of Economic Life"? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85401.Cities_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations.)
Are we able to recognise that 'partisan' political systems are inherently self-corrupting and will at best have short-term (quasi)efficacy?
"Money" is not required for a society to function (despite Jacob's great argument about how 'city money' was crucial in having created the wealthy cities and that central currencies will impoverish cities!)
Do we have the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist?!
Your citation from Steiner, and your experiences that have confirmed his words are also confirmed by my own similar experiences. I've had many astounding 'alignments' or 'coming togethers' of information and/or so-called knowledge and/or ostensible/unstable truths that have created spontaneous and totally acausal/synchronistic or intuitive appreciations of deeper understanding. I've had so many 'ahas' about so many ironclad solid truths crumbling into dust that now everything is, as Gautama Buddha astutely observed, impermanent.
(Side note: Cosmos Agent Roger 23 comments in this discussion that 'change is also a possibility' and so is not absolute because the choice to remain unchanged is extant. In my not too distant past I may have agreed with him in the following way: 'Most people would rather die than change. To really change means that something held true will die, otherwise it isn't *real* change. And instead of allowing a truth to die, many (most?) humans choose to die. Fascinating.' Does that mean that change was 'just' a possibility? Nope. I now appreciate that the choice of remaining rigid and unchanging itself invariably precipitates change. I understand at a more visceral level the common Taoist (and other writers) observation that flexibility is aligned with the energy of being alive, rigidity the energy of being aligned with death. Both lead to transformation, and are therefore 'structures' of impermanence.)
You have pointed us towards many resources here, Tereza. Thank you. I'll do my best to get through them quickly.
Thanks for such a thoughtful response, Guy, and the Jacob's reference, which I haven't read. Maybe my distinction between hope and hopium goes back to my episode on Spiritual Optimism and Political Radicalism. There's one of the sutras that says something about skillful nonchalance. It's a fine line I'm trying to convey, but I think you get what I mean.
Yes from reading your journey, I can certainly see why you'd relate to Steiner's message. Sometimes it's so uncanny that things fall into my lap, I can't kid myself that it's accidental.
Regarding the Matt Ehret article, which made many great points, he also wrote this, which is so far off the mark that it’s completely cringeworthy, “Mussolini and Hitler…in their effort to dominate the world…”
Their efforts to rule the world?
It’s astounding that someone could make such a statement in this day and age especially when virtually the whole article is otherwise spot on.
How does that sort of thing happen? Mussonlini and Hitler were most probably hirelings, but I doubt either had any intention of taking over the world. Taking over the world was preached by Marxists for decades before those two showed up, and Marx was another hireling and a pathetic moron like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, all US presidents, and all the rest.
Sure the “Nazis” were “fascist,” which by my definition is cooperation between large corporations and the state, and therefore evil, but so was and is Communism, which is just another form of fascism but under a slightly different pretext. This should come as no surprise since it’s pretty obvious that those with world controlling intentions are the international bankers and their partners in crime, the financial “elite.” The title of the book, “Web of Debt,” pretty much says it all. The other mega problem is that the conjuring of what we use as money is in the hands of a tightly knot claque of criminals.
The other thing that irritate me about the article is their seeming softness on the criminal, FDR, and their almost complete silence on the Communist movement, having mentioned it only once. “By the end of 1945, the Truman Doctrine and Anglo-American “special relationship” replaced FDR’s anti-colonial vision while an anti-communist...” FDR was anti-colonial and anti- Commie? That’s news to me. In fact, FDR’s policies led to the de facto colonization of both Germany and Japan, “colonization” being just a euphemism for enslavement which is also what the productive classes in the US have been forever.
Something tells me that Ehret and Chung are part of the problem, and I won’t be reading them in the future.
You may be right, Geoff. Some months ago I posted this episode: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/we-need-to-agree-to-agree. In it, I wrote: "But even in the rarefied corner of a half dozen journalists who are getting it right, they don’t agree with each other. For instance, Matt Ehret and Robert Malone agree on 911, Covid, Ukraine and Trump, but Matt is a Hamilton fan and Robert a Jeffersonian, and never the twain shall meet. Aaron Mate and Matt Taibbi do brilliant work on Ukraine but still say Putin is a villain who should have pursued other options. However, neither have said what other options he had. And Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand, with whom I agree about nearly everything, are vegan/vegetarians, which aligns with the Great Reset against the food sovereignty of communities and for lab-produced meat."
You might be interested in that one because it's the first where I question the offnarr of WWII. I end by positing that we need to agree on a purpose and a process for discerning truth from lies. I write: "In my opinion, this will not end until the agenda of The Great Reset becomes obvious to everyone because of its consequences. My hope and belief is that those consequences will be reversible but not until they’re exposed. So we might as well be planning among ourselves since we’re not going to change anyone’s mind. ... I suspect the world will have changed in the next two years so the disease is evident; the lightning strike will illuminate the problem so it’s seen by everyone. And we need to be ready with a plan for interconnected, sovereign community governments."
Agree with all and would like to emphasize that the "Putin is bad" canard is a good sign that we're dealing with clueless.
As for discerning truth from lies, that comes from experince if it comes at all, and like you, I have realized that we're not likely to change anyone's mind.
Ideally we "... need to be ready with a plan for interconnected, sovereign community governments," but I think it's an evolutionary process and like planting a garden, all we can do is prepare the soil, plant seeds, and ensure that there's enough of what's needed for the plants, then sit back, be patient, and deal with the results as we see fit.
Supporting one another on excellent sites like yours seems very worthwhile as well.
FDR's 'new deal' was a defacto communist state pre-emptive 'action' to disrupt the rise of the rising popularity of communism in the wake of 'capitalism's' failure during the 30s.
There are some arguments that the building of the Hoover dam and the like were effectively government subsidy to the rise of the industrial plant in the east: government funded and supplied cheap electricity. Interesting argument.
Agreed except I'd substitute populism instead of communism. The populist statements at the time, which I know from researching the Grange that was instrumental to the movement, was that they weren't an 'agrarian' movement. That was a group that wanted redistribution of the land. They stated that they had no problem with capitalists and 'middle-men', they just had no use for them. So it was an economic system where the farmers built their own mills, granaries and transportation systems, along with ways of getting their products directly to consumers.
I will want to do more research on this to find the nuance you suggest. Unfortunately I am looking elsewhere at the time so... For now, though, I'll tentatively stay with 'communism' because if my memory serves me the communist party was becoming highly populated with registrants. Populism was there, for sure. The perceived threat that motived FDR to avoid a communist takeover was to become the communist enemy with the New Deal and create work from the state.
I see my contribution to resisting the biggest, most limiting threat of control on our freedom that we face; the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty still on course for May 2024 has been to research and write about no virus, no contagion. No need for any vaccine, digital id, mask, lockdown, social distancing, murder by midazolam nor fake pandemic ever, ever again. Corbett is still talking about 'severely overestimated case numbers' for diseases that don't exist cause by non-existent viruses.
Of course unelected officials at the WHO shouldn't have any control over us but we could easily get rid of them if we understood that disease is not communicable.
Yes I just read your new piece on that, nice job! My feeling is that much of the damage that's been done hasn't yet manifested from the 'vaccine'/ bioweapons. We're in for a ride that may not stop until it crashes. Until then, I don't see any kind of mainstream resistance rising up but maybe I'm wrong.
Rather than hope, it seems like you're saying that history and experience lead you to think that humanity is moving in a less violent and more communicative direction. That would be choosing research over delusion.
But yes, what matters is reality over what I want to happen.
If things change, I will change how I feel.
Too much hope I think would make people ignore negative facts, much like positive facts are ignored by the black pilled who live in anti hope, despair?
As I say on the back cover of my book, my working hypothesis is that people are inherently good and when they behave badly, systems are to blame. And my core dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else--in the past, present or future.
So I don't know that I agree people were more violent in the past. The Dawn of Everything indicates that wasn't true in anthropology, outside the genocidal Judeo-Christian colonial capitalist system. The capacity for inflicting violence with no risk of retaliation, I think, has taken warfare to a degree never seen before in history, not including the everyday violence of a monetary system that enslaves everyone.
'Black-pilled', as I've seen it, was developed by Malone to discredit the Breggins and others who identify what we're experiencing as a global depopulation agenda. I don't even like red and blue-pilled, personally, because I think the Matrix had it backwards--reality is better than we dare imagine it, our illusion is that it's negative. But we have to be willing to see the illusion in its full gory, without fear. Anyhow, that's my suspicion.
I remember reading a pretty cool point about the red and blue pills of the matrix years ago.
The point was that if you didn't take both, you didn't know the whole story.
Some people who are red pilled cannot understand why others are blue pilled and think as if they're better than those people. But if you walked in their shoes it would make sense and one could see that changing conditions would wake them up too, as we're all on the same path. No better and no worse than them. This was a hard pill to swallow for me, as I felt like I was special for figuring it out. Nope, the conditions and experiences I had opened me up to it sooner than them.
This connects to the past violence, which yes, was caused by systems that excused inhumane things. These days there's still inhumanity, as we have seen with the COVID debacle, but even with this upside down legal system, at least people are less supportive of violence as a solution.
The worst times could very well have been the inquisition. Perhaps, people still fear that kind of power happening again, as I've seen on the left and right dramas.
Humanity is still a child in learning how to live in bigger civilisations. We make mistakes, but as long as we remember to not repeat the past AND see the echoes of the past, we will learn how to move forwards, slow but steady.
Oh I love that, Rob! May I quote you? I think that's exactly the point I was trying to make. Purple-pilled! I love your humility in questioning your own specialness for seeing through it.
I agree that it's meaningful that we publicly disapprove of slavery, for instance. It wouldn't have been a global given that it was bad just one century ago.
Sure, you can quote me. I didn't feel this way in the past. I was stuck in my awake bubble, ah the irony!
Also huge thanks earlier for saying that I'm choosing research over delusion.
Sometimes I fear getting sucked up into false hope, like I did in the past. I know I'm trying to be objective and my partner is an amazing woman that helps me see the bright side to this chaos.
Viewing ourselves as something special strikes me as infantile ideation and I agree with you. It is positvely nauseating to watch so many people prancing about as if they deserve special treatment "just because."
I certainly can believe that WWII could have been avoided after seeing that this current special Military Operation of Russia also could have been avoided had Ukraine de-nazified, stopped bombing there own people, kick the western biolabs out of their country and not seek Nato entry. Not unreasonable requests imo. But Ukraine would have to stand up to America or not have let them take over in the 1st place. The leaders of our country who are controlled by the central banksters, are cruel sick people who wish to spread their illness to everyone else. I have watched this situation with Ukraine unfold very closely and like you said Tereza the people who control our country will stop at nothing. They no no boundaries and the crazier it sounds the more likely they will do it. That's why its so hard for people to believe and apparently no one has seen the "mean girls" movie. I have not read Mr Corbett. I only heard of him mentioned by someone recently and it was not in a favorable light.
I'll reply here so it goes to Goeff too. Thank you for sending me that Matt Ehret video, with such specific instructions on where to start to get the context and where he mentions Corbett. It's interesting that the context was Catherine Austin Fitts. I stopped listening to the Great Game, as it was called, because I can't stand Matt's co-host. He's bombastic and uses insults and ridicule to make his arguments, and doesn't bring the best out in Matt, I've felt. So it's interesting that he's an investment banker and hedge fund manager, and dismisses Fitts for her lack of credentials.
I'm working on another post on Corbett, which I've already recorded. I'll put the rest of the response into the Substack because I think it speaks to larger issues of centralization vs. decentralization and changing the system vs. leaving the system. Thanks again for this food for thought!
Yes, I understand completely, but what I like about V Guerrilla is he lets Matt talk, a lot, as opposed to some other hosts. That particular video was so long, but was probably one of the best informational videos about Africa I have heard about until last night, when I read the chapter swept away by the currency. Oh My! that was a sad chapter, but Americas should face this. So my theory is Americans know there is some shenanigans and the swop is uneven, but they have no idea of the details you provided in that chapter. I thought we were exporting a better life to these countries. I am embarrassed! I do think if Americans had an inkling as maybe they do now (seeing how they are deposable) they would do the deep dive to find out the truth. So my political wake up call was the 2020 election when I saw all the evidence of cheating and the courts not even hearing any grievances. And simultaneously the vaccines hit. I cut the TV Cable and started following election and Covid everything on the internet to find the truth. Which also led to a greater understanding in Philosophy, politics, religion, economics and weather control. And I'm just getting started! I look forward to your next post Tereza about Mr. Corbett. As always thank you.
I love Matt Ehret but you already know that, right? He's doing great work on the multipolar reality. I also have been reading the unlimited hangout you posted on Ukraine. Very interesting and disheartening, except that it's a trial run in a war zone so can they not get away with it anywhere else? Here's hoping.
I think this may resonate with many here and also reminds us that we're dealing with age old issues.
"Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. "
- Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784)
Now, I'm outta here for now. the chickens are squaking and the weeds are growing!
James is spot on and has been for years. I think that is partly because of where he lives , he has an 'outside looking in' view of the world. You wont go wrong listening to him.
That's a good point and many ex-pats seem to be able to take the wider view. Glenn in Brazil, for instance, Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar. I'll always reserve my right to 'trust in Allah but tie my journalist-credibility camel' as I paraphrase from Matt Taibbi when Russell Brand asked him what venues he trusted. But James has a lot of veracity and integrity points in my book, where I'd have to consider whether I'm mistaken if I found we disagreed. Here's my post on Matt with that quote ;-) https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jokers-on-the-left-clowns-to-the right.
I firmly believe in sarcasm and humor and the not so obvious benefits. I like your optimism and observations. Also like the fact that you are a critical thinker. Keep on doing what you do.
intentional psycho manic manipulation was also going on jerking people from fear to hope (back & forth) wearing them down and making them more pliable, compliant to the scam programs. (not an excuse)
responsibility, by definition, is personal, different for everyone based on their individual situation. part of this is an intentional disregard for the individual.
Yes and if you have different communities taking responsibility in different ways, you have real life experimental data to compare control groups to different outcomes. That's EXACTLY what they're trying to prevent.
And yesterday in Corbett's report, he posted a nice short interview on 'statist' versus 'voluntaryist' and the invocation of the value of 'autodidacticism' A gentle and interesting discussion of the problem of how to 'move' statists to 'anarchists'. The humour and gentleness here confirms the depth of Corbett's wisdom.
The Palestinians and Israelis have been volleying ammo back and forth last night or night before last. Also Pakistan just had a military issue of sorts around the same time with an indicated comment about India/Pakistan feud. How can Vickey be everywhere at once? But seriously They are trying their hardest. Yes, the 2 people I love the most!: You and Matt/Cynthia and Co. ! Its a funny thing: consolidation is easier to control, but then you have the divide and concur. PS: Greeced lightening was A great chapter. I want to read it again before I move ahead because I think we are headed there sooner than later. Yikes
Oh what an honor to be put in their company! I hadn't heard about Palestine and Israel, I'll look it up. And I'm glad you enjoyed Greeced Lightning. It was another synchronicity when Steiner talked about the same thing, "Often a single phenomenon expresses something that throws light on decades, illuminating like a flash of lightning what is really happening."
Yes I think that lightning strike is coming and I'm glad that you'll have finished the book by then and will have a plan at the ready ;-)
One of the good things about the covid fiasco-fraud is that people are beginning to ask questions and to understnad that "authorities" may not be what we wish they should be. This is the first time I've ever read of anyone mentioning Pat Buchanan's book and I would like to add that he has (Had? I have not checked) a fine website wiht many excellent articles on WW2. Same goes for Paul Craig Roberts.
Here's a quote and a link to a short article that I consider a classic on this subject.
“… this entire myth, so prevalent then and even now about Hitler, and about the Japanese, is a tissue of fallacies from beginning to end. Every plank in this nightmare evidence is either completely untrue or not entirely the truth.
If people should learn this intellectual fraud about Hitler's Germany, then they will begin to ask questions, and searching questions…”
Murray Rothbard, Revisionism for Our Time
Mr. Rothbard was an American historian of the very highest caliber.
Here are a couple of quotes from some excellent books.
I suppose it began with a sense… that what the average child is taught about major historical events is a pack of lies.
-Gerard Menuchin, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil p12 (2016)
Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth. Lying, as we all know, does not take place only in war-time. Man, it has been said, is not "a veridical animal," but his habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish.
- Arthur Ponsonby, MP, Falsehood in War Time (1929)
Another excellent book that exposes and explains the lies, with perception, sensitivity and nuance is Douglas Reed's. "The Controversy of ZIon."
As for the Unz site, it is full of excellent stuff, but I've come to believe that it's a limited hangout. It harps incessantly on a lot of unnecessarily divisive garbage as well. That said, Unz has an archive site full of old newsmagazine article and books which is a true gold mine of information.
So many great quotes, Geoff! I've been encountering the same names but I'm especially pleased you quoted Ponsonby. I use him in this one that, imo, didn't get the attention it deserved since Jankowitz had such a short reign: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/nina-jankowicz-the-warbling-warmonger. And I think I agree on Unz, although I haven't read outside of particular authors. But several of the other titles make me skeptical.
Tereza, that piece was excellent as well. I also have used the Alice in Wonderland quote, and here are a few more of my favorites.
[During the war]words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.
Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.
- Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Chap X, ~400 BC
… that there is not in Lexicography, a more fraudulent Word [than republic].
-From John Adams to Samuel Adams, Sr., 18 October 1790
I've noticed that most people avoid sarcasm and although I don't understand why, I respect it. I also highly enjoy the old (ancient) satirists, although if I lived back then and exposed to them, I'd probably feel as you do!
The war on hope is a communist tactic to demoralize people.
Hope in the proper sense can only be related to the true and living God. Anything else falls short.
The mundane version of hope is more nuanced. The enlightened Atheist shares with the Christian the belief that it is better to not have hope in people, much less in their promises.
What is it okay to hope for in this life, in this world? The always present possibility of change.
"But change is a fact, not a possibility. Everything changes all the time."
Not so. Change is also a possibility. When people make a mistake, they have to correct that, but that change is often prevented by pride.
A rational hope is that some people will change when they are bored of getting always the same pain. At some point, the self preservation instinct overrides pride.
This is only one example.
The law in general allows for rational hope to change. Conciliation is often a possibility, sometimes it is good to start with the qualified hope that change will happen.
It's always a bad practice to get drunk on hope, no matter how reasonable it is in a given situation. But used correctly, at the time it is useful, rational, well measured hope helps our thoughts to advance.
The pessimistic bias shows up because it is really true that most of the time there is no rational hope available for the situation at hand. Then, we jump to conclusions. Then, we demoralize ourselves preemptively.
That's worse than hopium, that's hoptanyl overdose.
That's what the communists want. Self-demoralization, which boils down to inducing confused thinking.
Common practice of the communists: they recommend Dante's Inferno, and not the other two parts. It's always incomplete works. Always emphasizing one part of the art, and throwing the whole work to the curb. That's the general case of the war against hope.
It's similar to refusing to consider the human body as a whole in medicine. The communists will destroy and Scientist that attempts to study the totality.
Also, the victim mentality is based on hiding a large chunk of reality. It's another part of the programs of demoralization and self-demoralization. Lose hope in reality, you are a victim, and if you try anything then you are proving our point. There is only one way to overcome victim mentality, which is through the cultivation of hope that creates action.
I insist: for this world, for dealing with flawed humans, only rational hope is okay, and only in counted occasions.
By my definition of the other side, a war against hope would be a war for honesty. When you say hope is good, you're saying that delusion is good as long as it's a good delusion. But unless you secretly believe that reality is bad, why do you need to believe in a delusion? If there's meaning and purpose in life, it exists whether we believe in it or not.
I've never had much appreciation of hope or maybe it's because I was never susceptible to despair. I'm not at all into fantasy or delusion either. For people like me it's all about persistence; just driving on.
I have a low tolerance for BS as well although I'm pretty much full of it! My wife and I were just talking about it; she's similar that way. : )
We are changing topics here. If I'm not mistaken, you are leading me to talk about about faith, not hope.
My belief is that for human beings it is utterly impossible to live without faith. That is, believing something is true without having seen the truth of the object of the belief.
Many people say they don't have beliefs, they have facts. Pretty soon after that they say something like "absolute truths don't exist, and we cannot be completely sure of anything, but this argument of mine is as close as we can get to truth." They have faith, because they have intellect, because they are humans.
Faith can be a delusion. We can believe wrong things. In fact, it is often the case that people keep believing wrong things after studying a topic. (Is this fact a true belief without evidence or a true belief with evidence?)
Delusion also happens in reverse: here is a true fact of reality T. People believe T is true, without knowing the evidence for T. People have faith in T. Then they study and they become deluded, and believe T is false, because of their false study. They have a deluded faith now, because they belief T is false, but the premise is that T is true.
For example, let T be "the human animal is omnivorous." It is true. People believe it, with or without evidence. Then they begin to study false notions and conclude that it is immoral for humans to eat this or that, and, therefore, it must be that humans are not capable of digesting this or that, do humans are not omnivorous. They are now deluded.
Common phrases one hears from these deluded faithful people: "eating meat is a habit, a cultural custom, it is not natural" or "cooking vegetables is wrong, it makes them worse food because then they are more difficult to digest and have less nutrition. The only valid natural diet for the human animal is ripe tropical fruit, which is naturally low in fat, which is the single cause of cancer."
More generally, the way of thinking of individual causality is delusional most of the time. And the entire building of modern natural science is based on this faith. Which simplifies the marketing process, but has almost nothing to do with gaining true knowledge about the world.
Sometimes people in science fight over two contradictory delusions, which is hilarious.
So true faith is objective. The truth or reality of the object of belief is independent of the belief of the human who believes. We probably agree on that, except you will call it knowledge and not faith.
Hope is good because it helps people to develop virtue, that is, to change.
Faith is a virtue and it benefits from having hope. A false hope diminishes faith, and any other virtue.
Teaching is a work of love, which is the final purpose of virtue, in my worldview. When someone is developing a vice because of a false hope, that will affect her true faith, and she runs the risk of rejecting a true fact.
So, for example, if my true faith in the fact that "people prefer not to be robbed or killed" is diminished by the false hope that "the courts of law will protect people," then, you, Tereza, my teaching me that my hope in that case is delusional, you would be helping me to preserve my faith, and in this example your teaching would be a work of love that satisfies your need for meaning and purpose in life.
Or so I believe.
Where am I wrong?
Do the zen brothers and sisters have a true faith in not having faith and not having hope, or being able to get rid of both if they happen to have them?
You're right, Roger, that I was certainly conscious that I was talking about hope and faith together but then my thoughts went to how charity fit in, so I didn't put it in that context.
By my definition, dogma is whatever you refuse to raise to question. We all have dogma. What I say is that you need to own your dogma and name it, as the liberation theologians do with their preferential option for the poor. My only dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else. When I disagree with anyone, it's because they've kicked my dogma. And I'm often kicking theirs on the basis of mine, but no other basis.
To say that faith is good without defining what that faith is, is like saying truth is true and using that to justify your definition of truth without naming it. If your faith includes that the Bible is true, then my articles like https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-devil-and-naomi-wolf and https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops will argue that your faith is in a God that enslaves some and protects empires. It's a faith in the superiority of some over others, which is a faith that's justified violence. Is that faith good if faith is a generic good?
To make a joke, sometimes the God of the bible speaks like a bad NYC psychiatrist who is always blaming her patients for their issues.
In that analysis, you say the Christian God of the Holy Bible "enslaves some and protects empires" but you are forgetting the Magnificat, where Mary says to Elizabeth that God puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble. (Marxists hate this idea, in my experience; Former Marxists hate that idea even more)
Buddhism teaches, if I'm not mistaken, that this world is a delusion. That pain comes from attachment to mutable things that have no real essence, and that pain is also a delusion. And that this is eternal because of reincarnation, but the liberation from all this is achieved by the extinction of the self, through the practice of the eight noble actions (I'm trying to remember) which include correct speech, correct action, correct thoughts and five more I don't remember.
I don't know if the Buddhist Monks believe in all those teachings, or dogmas (not pejorative "dogma", but normal "dogma" here.)
But I think that faith is delusional (I mean no offense, really.) This world is obviously real. Injustice is real. The possibility of making justice is also real. We always are allowed to choose to live in peace, and we can stop cooperating with our enemies any time we choose.
My opinion is that it I am better off enjoying the gift of faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is the Messiah that Yaweh, the only true God, the creator of everything and the almighty, promised he would send, to free the people of God and all the rest, once and forever. That's an statement of faith. It's not perfect but it's what I have.
I understand that most people strongly dislike this. Everyone has her own reasons. Trauma, ideologies, desires, preferences, etc.
But we started talking about hope, and I distinguished between eternal hope, and mundane hope. The hope for this life in this world has to be, in my view, commensurate with our limitations. If we only believe in our own strength, our power is greater than if we don't believe in our strength and we depend on others for everything, and yet the same power is still insufficient. So, we search alliances with other people, and this is tricky because it is dangerous and easy to believe others too much, and demand from them more that they are able to give.
But all the good things humanity has achieved depend directly on this gamble of confidence in social cooperation, which is is under attack right now. This is difficult to see because it is an abstract phenomenon, that is, social cooperation is immaterial, but real, and it has been damaged, because in this war all the foundations, so to speak, of the West, have been attacked with mortar fire from propagandists. (mixing too many metaphors, sorry)
My thesis is that it is never necessary for people to be of one mind, or of one belief, or faith, to peacefully cooperate and achieve a good economic outcome. (The Nieztscheans hate my guts right now, "why are you so venal bro?") We only need to be realistic about our conditions and act accordingly.
Therefore, anarchism.
I don't believe in equality in the abstract, and I will give a speech. Equality between two persons is always in relation to a third thing or condition. For example, you and I are unequal in age, but we are both equal with respect to the fact that we both write in English. Some people seem to think that all humans should be equal in everything. That is impossible and it breaks the principle of social cooperation.
Some people are superior to others with respect to something, in my opinion. For instance, you have good taste in home decoration, and I know next to nothing about home decoration. you are superior than me in that regard. But I am probably superior in that I probably know more verses and poems of the Spanish 1500s and 1600s than you. That is not natural, but circumstantial. You could learn the language and memorize more verses that I know of in about two weeks, because I don't that many.
For example, this is part of a monologue from a 17th century play, "La vida es sueño", recited by a man who has been a prisoner all his life, since the cradle:
"Nace el bruto y con la piel
que dibujan manchas bellas,
apenas signo es de estrellas
gracias al docto pincel,
cuando atrevida y cruel
la humana necesidad
le enseña a tener crueldad,
monstruo de su laberinto.
¿Y yo, con mejor instinto,
tengo menos libertad?"
(I don't have a translation handy, bummer; a brief summary: the prisoner compares himself with a savage man, and seeing he is better asks to the Heavens why he has less freedom.)
So, there is no equality between people in general, in this life. Yet, death makes all of us equal to each other.
Some are superior to others, due to their merit, or due to corruption. Superior people are at risk of being attacked by others all the time, regardless of what they do or don't do. It is not desirable to be superior about anything when one is surrounded by vicious people.
Learning is the great equalizer. Whatever virtue is there in equality, it is to be achieved through learning, which happens between the ears of the individual.
Paradoxically, it is impossible to learn everything. And so, inequality can only be reduced, and not eliminated completely. I think is is also part of reality and take it as a good.
Roger, when you write, "I understand that most people strongly dislike this. Everyone has her own reasons. Trauma, ideologies, desires, preferences, etc." you're not including my reason: I reject a God who favors some people over others as an immoral God and therefore a logical impossibility. It's not personal trauma or desire.
What I mean by superiority is morally superior. I hold that we're all born with the equal potential to choose good or bad actions. If that's true, then any choices we make are because of our circumstances. If you, the soul of Roger, was dropped into the body of Pol Pot at birth, you would have done the same. Ditto for Hitler. Ditto for boomers. Ditto for zoomers.
If there is benevolent design, aka God, then each of us has been dropped into the life circumstances we're best able to bring meaning out of. So I wouldn't have made better choices in anyone else's circumstances, but I might have made worse. There's never a reason for pride or shame because, as the Course says, I am as God created me. Which is to say perfect.
That's a good explanation. Thank you. I understand your way of thinking about this much better now.
I disagree about that reasoning regarding everyone being beholden to their circumstances. I think we have reached the main difference, between Christian and the Non-christian way of thinking about ethics and ontology.
The radicality of free will in the Christian mindset forces people to try to become better, to gain virtue. This is due to the syncretism between the original Christianity and Stoicism and that little touch of Epicureanism that is present in some Christian ideas.
The non-christian mindset tends to deny change at some point. Because change is painful, and a burden to people. "You behave bad you have to change." "But I like to behave badly, I don't want to change."
It is also the idea that humans are merely a prolongation of the earth, just like all other animals. As such, there are many things we do that are bad for others, bad for this spaceship that gives sustains all of us. And this leads some people to contempt for humanity. The idea that humans should not exist or should have never existed. Not your case, clearly.
But all animals do "bad things". For example, I heard once a person explaining that bulls in the African Savana use their horns and their front feet to dig holes in the ground before the rain season comes, then those holes fill up with water, and then mud. Many animals benefit from that accumulation of water, although the bulls do that mainly for themselves. Positive externalities are natural!
A person who believes: there is no change, there can be no change, life is painful and no one should go through this; this person would hate the bulls too because they "hurt" the earth to expand life. And they would end up hating every life form, because all hurt the earth, all benefit each other, all expand life, and thus suffering. This is absurd for a Christian. And probably for many non-christians too. Because it is not for us to decide. We are not the creator. Our role in all this is different.
The occult, the hermetic stuff, the gnosticism and the equivalents of that in the East, all aim to frozen man and all life in place. To separate man from life, and his moral duties toward the Creator, which include repentance and change. Even the best of the East, the ones that don't hate life, don't have this radical idea of free will, as far as I know. This way of thinking seems to be of the West, and from there it has moved to all the world.
And I am aware that many bad things are present in Western culture and have also gone to other places and harmed people and everything else. But the idea of making things right seems to me to depend on radical Christian free will.
As for moral superiority, that is always a posteriori. Judge a practice for its consequences not for its intentions. That which works better is probably ends up manifesting better the idea of Good.
For me, Christianity stands in opposition to victim mentality. Christianity is Radical Liberation. Some philosophies and some religions clearly promote victim mentality, and some under the appearance of opposing it. This happens even inside supposedly Christian groups, which can be very abusive, specially when money is involved.
This is why I like economics, even though it is so boring. the disputes between religions and non-religions about what is it to be done now can be resolved by learning what works and what does not work. Communism does not work economically. Fascism either. Those groups that promote better living conditions materially and spiritually have to accept the harsh teachings of economics: not anything goes.
The other disputes (one or three, zero or infinite, this form of prayer or this other one) are not about the here and now. Economics cannot say anything about that. If anything, metaphysical beliefs corrupt economic analyses, and that affects the living conditions in the end. People don't learn! They don't change. They are not allowed to change.
That is one of the greatest pains of human life, to not allow people to change anything about themselves, because that will hurt the bottom line of the business.
Hope is an opiate for the masses. It is meant to disorient and blunt personal agency.
Hope is flailing about in the 21st Century with apologetic and weak people who have been down so long and sadly have accepted that condition as part of their natural situation and believe it can only be altered through some divine, magical intervention as noted circa 2008 with the post-modern political pablum platitudinal company man Obama and then through the Orange Man carnival barker.
Two different brands of the same drug.
As an aside the Audacity of Hope™ (Obama's book) is an oxymoron on the face of it, according to the Greeks. There's no "audacity" in hope. It is the stuff of denial and cowardice - two other escapees from Pandora's box.
So to go back to the opposite of hope as responsibility, I think it's important to be talking about the policies that we'd want in our own economic commonwealths. I agree that there's no audacity in hope. But until we have a system that allows us to take responsibility, I don't know that I'd go as far as denial and cowardice.
Libertarianism, Green jobs, "real Democracy", REAL American Values, Election Reform, Financial Reform, Tax Reform, Monetary Reform, Reform Reform.
Resignation, Depression, Human Nature, Hope, Spirituality, Smoke Pot, Smoke your Left Foot. Resign, Quit, Move, Cry, Give Up, Become Reactionary, Sing the Blues.
It's like watchin' a Pinball Tournament.
Without ideology - A way to see the world, a perspective, a beginning and an end that makes rational sense, a way to discriminate - you've got jack.
Positivity-Self-Improvement-Buying Green-"If only the Constitution were enforced"- Regulated capitalism- Re-naming all the streets- Getting money out of politics- Ballot access- Making water flow uphill towards money.
Without partisanship, and a consciousness as to why you maintain that loyalty, you don't have squat.
There are no such things as Taxpayers, Americans, Members of the Middle-Class, Liberals, Conservatives, White People, Independents, or etc.
OR, those things exist only to the same extent as there are Hoosiers, NASCAR Fans, or those who have completed a Weight Watchers course.
All people are not the same.
There are people who work to live and are dominated by that work.
And, there are people who live by the work of others and dominate those who work for them.
Everything else stems from this.
If you don't know which side you are on, you don't have squat.
Think about political discussion (and politics is always a "discussion"). Think about it in either the narrow terms of the political websites you see or in the larger sense of politics in America, as a whole. What is the basis, the most fundamental basis for debate? What is the common language of that "debate"?
You can fill in the gory details of the problem: on the one hand, anything goes; on the other hand anything is acceptable and must be accepted (in the name of tolerance). Opinions are personal, categories are arbitrary and foggy, and the only basis for commonality is a very loose and changing list of policy statements that could just as easily be their opposites. It is not just mysticism and pop-theories that are at issue. There is a century worth of slogans, assumptions, "facts" which are "well known" or "commonly known." Even simple logic is not required.
Yes, class perspective is the key to it but the political chaos extends so far that even that is tough to put your finger on in a practical way.
Materialism, "cold" pursuit of the "truth" for practical reasons, basic class partisanship, a method for determining what is correct and accurate and what is not, agreement on these methods and the history from which these are derived - these are the most rudimentary tools of a political movement.
Otherwise, everything just spins like water in a toilet bowl just to be dumped into the sewer and get piped into the Idea Treatment Plant only to go through the same cycle once again.
It ain't "philosophy."
It's a common language and method very rigorously adhered to at a hundred different levels of sophistication but fundamentally starting with the soldiers' quote in John Reed:
"If you aren't for one class, you are for the other."
"Left market anarchist" sounds like another fungible phrase and/or an oxymoron.
I'm aware that dialectical materialism and in general even a stab at discussing leftist thinking in the US is fraught with such cultural conditioning and historical ignorance it's difficult to even get the plane off the ground.
This is not by accident.
I will say that there is a substantial portion of "the health freedom movement" which has a deep strain of reactionary right-wing elements throughout.
Once you unpack the language and ideologies of many of these individuals you come to a place that has dangerous historical precedents.
He writes comments like a demoralized boomer or worse, a demoralizing gen-x.
You only look 65, by the way. Just kidding.
I turned 39 about a month ago. My hair is getting all gray, lol, like my father at that age. I probably won't lose it because my father had his hair until he died at 79.
Boomers are difficult to deal with sometimes. Many millennials have boomer parents, not gen-x parents. The zoomers are so weird because the gen-exers are... well... you know the gen-exers, they saw the disintegration of the USSR and they are socialdemocrats or shameful conservatives that are so afraid of being called far-right. Gen-x people have not been able to prevent any of the disasters since then. The zoomers play with the far-right and communism because their parents are so helpless and demoralized.
My generation is sanwiched between two generations of unrealistic bad thinkers. The millennials with all our OCDs and ADHD will save the West eventually (after the collapse). We will also have to find a way to reverse the sterilization of the zoomers. We may need to create artificial wombs. I hope no one puts MSWindows in those machines.
I'm happy to know you are not demoralized. You often comment in a tone that I cannot understand well.
The labels from the generations in the comment to Tereza are to be understood in a semi-serious tone, like most of my comments.
In particular, if you happen to be a boomer and have been insulted because of that in the past, I think that is a bad thing to do. My sincere opinion is that boomers still have time to make things better, and I think their place is in the community that fights against globalism.
If you are a from the following generation, you really have no remedy. No, just kidding. Those guys can also bring something useful to help with the global mess we are in.
My fellow millennials tend have suffered a lot in since the crisis of 2008. As we become older, we begin to see what needs to be done. That is good.
The younger ones do a lot of good in my opinion. They stimulate the older generations to get on their feet and fight.
Don't you agree that the successive campaigns of psychological operations and other attacks from the elites over the last 40 years have done a lot of harm to people? If so, isn't it a good idea that we all try to learn what is happening and do something about it?
Agree with your assessment on the harms done to people by not just the psyops but moreso the very real material attacks on us all.
Your astute comment on that is one of the rudimentary truths that illustrate all of these notions about "personal choice" or "individual responsibility" are absurd constructs that ignore a constellation of real life circumstances as well as historical realities.
Worse, these tropes about "personal choice" etc, provide cover what is being DONE TO people who have next to no possibilities of any meaningful choices due to what you describe.
Also agree on doing something about it which I do just about every day of the week.
Health Responsibility Movement is fantastic, hopefully it sticks.
Corbett is definitely one of the truther voices I trust most: as you say, logically consistent with a high intellectual integrity, but also consistent in his tone and emotions, without falling for the sensationalism and grandstanding that many others do. He put me in my place more than a few times during my Qtard phase.
Also, thankyou for slogging through Steiner so we don't have to! He is hard work, I know I should take the time to sit down and read more of him, although audiobooks on long car rides make the slog a bit more appealing. I find the Ahriman/Lucifer archetypes a very helpful framework for understanding how our world is governed.
Yes! I was going to say that about Corbett too, that he was never bombastic or hysterical. He keeps that even tone that's so matter of fact, even when he's saying things that are obviously true but no one else is saying!
Glad you like Health Responsibility Movement. With freedom, it sounds like we're trying to get away with something. Really it's the opposite.
I too am a lover of the calm, cool and collected. That's what I liked about Malone as opposed the Dr. Breggins. Boy was I wrong on that one, as you proved beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Yes, me too! *Sigh*
Hiya, yes health responsibility!
There is a lot of talk of energy credit systems organised from centralised government which lots of people I know are using their energy to resist, because they don't want to be controlled by them (in the London we have the ULEZ , low emission zone, coming in). I agree resisting leads to persisting.
And I think our movement needs to include not just responsibility for our own health but also responsibility for our energy use and impact on the environment and other species, instead of just fighting for the freedom to continue to abuse other animals, pollute and ransack the world.
Health and impact on mother earth responsibility movement
🙏🏽
Yes and... responsibility for producing, as a community, most of what we consume. I think that necessitates regenerative agriculture that centers on animal husbandry, as a way that restores the soil and grasslands while treating animals humanely. I know we disagree about that and Jack, another reader I respect, agrees with you.
Decentralization, however, means that we can each try out our methods and see what happens. We don't need to agree. We can each take responsibility in our own way.
Yes being decentralised we don't have to be in the same community. We are in communities who align with our core values taking responsibility for ourselves, no more debating and disagreeing or trying to get consensus.
What a great article you posted on this, Jo! Thanks for the shout-out. And I was going to say, lots of fellow insomniacs on this thread, I see you and kitten seeking answers both reading at 1:45 Pacific time, unless you're both in Australia.
Thank you so much Tereza and you're very welcome.
Teehee I don't know about kitten but I'm in the UK, not an insomniac! I sleep well until the cat wakes me at 5.30 xxx
Responsibility? Decentralization? Maintaining our equanimity in the face of "disasters" and hysterics everywhere? What? Where am I?
TC, you are brilliant. How could anyone disagree with what you're saying?
"... instead of just fighting for the freedom to continue to abuse other animals, pollute and ransack the world."
This is a great point. I could elaborate, but not necessary here.
Thank you.
Please feel free to elaborate on my stack!
I just popped over there and must say that your invitation is tempting. Fine list of topics there!
Bless you and yours!
Thank you so much. See you in the winter if not before!
🙏🏽😺
Thank you. I'd love to do that, but this is a very busy season for me., so I'll be pretty scarce until next winter.
Great post, Tereza. I confess to being late to Corbett as well, and find myself having a very similar appraisal of his contributions as you have. (My forward thinking sister has been aware of him for many years!) He is a valuable voice indeed. Perhaps I say that because he aligns with my many comments about the importance of removing 'hero' worship, aka 'hopium'. The elevation of the hero is the creation of the victim.
Yes! The opposite of 'hope' is personal responsibility. Fantastic observation! There is the possibility of confusion between what in yoga is called 'ishvara-pranidhana', loosely translated as 'trust in God', where that means more accurately, imo, taking responsibility to align yourself with God rather than the self-delusional 'hope' that God will be the deus ex machina that arrives as the ultimate just-in-time 'hero'. JC directed us to look within, ie, take personal responsibility for becoming your own hero as an expression of God. A strong version of 'ishvara-pranidhana.'
And Corbett also agrees with my observation that to fight this war is to lose the war, because that action is in fact the reaction-energy that the cabal require to remain alive. Simply disengage and create parallel systems! Understand that the 'central' bank is an artifice only recently constructed and totally unnecessary. (Tereza, did you read Jane Jacob's brilliant book "Cities and Wealth of Nations:f Principles of Economic Life"? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85401.Cities_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations.)
Are we able to recognise that 'partisan' political systems are inherently self-corrupting and will at best have short-term (quasi)efficacy?
"Money" is not required for a society to function (despite Jacob's great argument about how 'city money' was crucial in having created the wealthy cities and that central currencies will impoverish cities!)
Do we have the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist?!
Your citation from Steiner, and your experiences that have confirmed his words are also confirmed by my own similar experiences. I've had many astounding 'alignments' or 'coming togethers' of information and/or so-called knowledge and/or ostensible/unstable truths that have created spontaneous and totally acausal/synchronistic or intuitive appreciations of deeper understanding. I've had so many 'ahas' about so many ironclad solid truths crumbling into dust that now everything is, as Gautama Buddha astutely observed, impermanent.
(Side note: Cosmos Agent Roger 23 comments in this discussion that 'change is also a possibility' and so is not absolute because the choice to remain unchanged is extant. In my not too distant past I may have agreed with him in the following way: 'Most people would rather die than change. To really change means that something held true will die, otherwise it isn't *real* change. And instead of allowing a truth to die, many (most?) humans choose to die. Fascinating.' Does that mean that change was 'just' a possibility? Nope. I now appreciate that the choice of remaining rigid and unchanging itself invariably precipitates change. I understand at a more visceral level the common Taoist (and other writers) observation that flexibility is aligned with the energy of being alive, rigidity the energy of being aligned with death. Both lead to transformation, and are therefore 'structures' of impermanence.)
You have pointed us towards many resources here, Tereza. Thank you. I'll do my best to get through them quickly.
Thanks for such a thoughtful response, Guy, and the Jacob's reference, which I haven't read. Maybe my distinction between hope and hopium goes back to my episode on Spiritual Optimism and Political Radicalism. There's one of the sutras that says something about skillful nonchalance. It's a fine line I'm trying to convey, but I think you get what I mean.
Yes from reading your journey, I can certainly see why you'd relate to Steiner's message. Sometimes it's so uncanny that things fall into my lap, I can't kid myself that it's accidental.
"Sometimes it's so uncanny that things fall into my lap, I can't kid myself that it's accidental."
Amazing, isn't it? So much is so fascinating that any tendency to panic and join in the herd hysterics is simply overwhelmed.
Regarding the Matt Ehret article, which made many great points, he also wrote this, which is so far off the mark that it’s completely cringeworthy, “Mussolini and Hitler…in their effort to dominate the world…”
Their efforts to rule the world?
It’s astounding that someone could make such a statement in this day and age especially when virtually the whole article is otherwise spot on.
How does that sort of thing happen? Mussonlini and Hitler were most probably hirelings, but I doubt either had any intention of taking over the world. Taking over the world was preached by Marxists for decades before those two showed up, and Marx was another hireling and a pathetic moron like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, all US presidents, and all the rest.
Sure the “Nazis” were “fascist,” which by my definition is cooperation between large corporations and the state, and therefore evil, but so was and is Communism, which is just another form of fascism but under a slightly different pretext. This should come as no surprise since it’s pretty obvious that those with world controlling intentions are the international bankers and their partners in crime, the financial “elite.” The title of the book, “Web of Debt,” pretty much says it all. The other mega problem is that the conjuring of what we use as money is in the hands of a tightly knot claque of criminals.
The other thing that irritate me about the article is their seeming softness on the criminal, FDR, and their almost complete silence on the Communist movement, having mentioned it only once. “By the end of 1945, the Truman Doctrine and Anglo-American “special relationship” replaced FDR’s anti-colonial vision while an anti-communist...” FDR was anti-colonial and anti- Commie? That’s news to me. In fact, FDR’s policies led to the de facto colonization of both Germany and Japan, “colonization” being just a euphemism for enslavement which is also what the productive classes in the US have been forever.
Something tells me that Ehret and Chung are part of the problem, and I won’t be reading them in the future.
You may be right, Geoff. Some months ago I posted this episode: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/we-need-to-agree-to-agree. In it, I wrote: "But even in the rarefied corner of a half dozen journalists who are getting it right, they don’t agree with each other. For instance, Matt Ehret and Robert Malone agree on 911, Covid, Ukraine and Trump, but Matt is a Hamilton fan and Robert a Jeffersonian, and never the twain shall meet. Aaron Mate and Matt Taibbi do brilliant work on Ukraine but still say Putin is a villain who should have pursued other options. However, neither have said what other options he had. And Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand, with whom I agree about nearly everything, are vegan/vegetarians, which aligns with the Great Reset against the food sovereignty of communities and for lab-produced meat."
You might be interested in that one because it's the first where I question the offnarr of WWII. I end by positing that we need to agree on a purpose and a process for discerning truth from lies. I write: "In my opinion, this will not end until the agenda of The Great Reset becomes obvious to everyone because of its consequences. My hope and belief is that those consequences will be reversible but not until they’re exposed. So we might as well be planning among ourselves since we’re not going to change anyone’s mind. ... I suspect the world will have changed in the next two years so the disease is evident; the lightning strike will illuminate the problem so it’s seen by everyone. And we need to be ready with a plan for interconnected, sovereign community governments."
ps My episode on populism quotes from Web of Debt on how FDR was a toothless substitute for William Jennings Bryan's economic plan. FDR just kicked the can of debt down the road: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/thomas-frank-misses-the-point-on populism.
All I can say is, "durn yer good!"
Agree with all and would like to emphasize that the "Putin is bad" canard is a good sign that we're dealing with clueless.
As for discerning truth from lies, that comes from experince if it comes at all, and like you, I have realized that we're not likely to change anyone's mind.
Ideally we "... need to be ready with a plan for interconnected, sovereign community governments," but I think it's an evolutionary process and like planting a garden, all we can do is prepare the soil, plant seeds, and ensure that there's enough of what's needed for the plants, then sit back, be patient, and deal with the results as we see fit.
Supporting one another on excellent sites like yours seems very worthwhile as well.
Nice work!
FDR's 'new deal' was a defacto communist state pre-emptive 'action' to disrupt the rise of the rising popularity of communism in the wake of 'capitalism's' failure during the 30s.
There are some arguments that the building of the Hoover dam and the like were effectively government subsidy to the rise of the industrial plant in the east: government funded and supplied cheap electricity. Interesting argument.
Agreed except I'd substitute populism instead of communism. The populist statements at the time, which I know from researching the Grange that was instrumental to the movement, was that they weren't an 'agrarian' movement. That was a group that wanted redistribution of the land. They stated that they had no problem with capitalists and 'middle-men', they just had no use for them. So it was an economic system where the farmers built their own mills, granaries and transportation systems, along with ways of getting their products directly to consumers.
Interesting about the Hoover dam. Not surprising.
I will want to do more research on this to find the nuance you suggest. Unfortunately I am looking elsewhere at the time so... For now, though, I'll tentatively stay with 'communism' because if my memory serves me the communist party was becoming highly populated with registrants. Populism was there, for sure. The perceived threat that motived FDR to avoid a communist takeover was to become the communist enemy with the New Deal and create work from the state.
"... take personal responsibility for becoming your own hero ..."
There's that word again. Imagine taking responsibility. What is this world coming to? : )
" Simply disengage and create parallel systems! Understand that the 'central' bank is an artifice only recently constructed and totally unnecessary."
Amen to both and the rest of your comment.
Thanks
Nice to meet you Geoff. You're welcome.
I see my contribution to resisting the biggest, most limiting threat of control on our freedom that we face; the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty still on course for May 2024 has been to research and write about no virus, no contagion. No need for any vaccine, digital id, mask, lockdown, social distancing, murder by midazolam nor fake pandemic ever, ever again. Corbett is still talking about 'severely overestimated case numbers' for diseases that don't exist cause by non-existent viruses.
Of course unelected officials at the WHO shouldn't have any control over us but we could easily get rid of them if we understood that disease is not communicable.
Yes I just read your new piece on that, nice job! My feeling is that much of the damage that's been done hasn't yet manifested from the 'vaccine'/ bioweapons. We're in for a ride that may not stop until it crashes. Until then, I don't see any kind of mainstream resistance rising up but maybe I'm wrong.
I have hope in humanity. We are less violent, more communicating, than in the past.
The issue is that those who hold hope over our heads, while profiting on not fixing issues are the ones who clog the channels.
But people are learning that too as mass media followings are at an all time low.
Same with politics, 50+% are independent, which means it's the minority that play team sports.
That's why they had to have a seminar at the WEF about how to gain back trust.
Haha, once you're at that point, you went too far.
Rather than hope, it seems like you're saying that history and experience lead you to think that humanity is moving in a less violent and more communicative direction. That would be choosing research over delusion.
Good point!
The hope I have is that this direction continues.
But yes, what matters is reality over what I want to happen.
If things change, I will change how I feel.
Too much hope I think would make people ignore negative facts, much like positive facts are ignored by the black pilled who live in anti hope, despair?
As I say on the back cover of my book, my working hypothesis is that people are inherently good and when they behave badly, systems are to blame. And my core dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else--in the past, present or future.
So I don't know that I agree people were more violent in the past. The Dawn of Everything indicates that wasn't true in anthropology, outside the genocidal Judeo-Christian colonial capitalist system. The capacity for inflicting violence with no risk of retaliation, I think, has taken warfare to a degree never seen before in history, not including the everyday violence of a monetary system that enslaves everyone.
'Black-pilled', as I've seen it, was developed by Malone to discredit the Breggins and others who identify what we're experiencing as a global depopulation agenda. I don't even like red and blue-pilled, personally, because I think the Matrix had it backwards--reality is better than we dare imagine it, our illusion is that it's negative. But we have to be willing to see the illusion in its full gory, without fear. Anyhow, that's my suspicion.
I remember reading a pretty cool point about the red and blue pills of the matrix years ago.
The point was that if you didn't take both, you didn't know the whole story.
Some people who are red pilled cannot understand why others are blue pilled and think as if they're better than those people. But if you walked in their shoes it would make sense and one could see that changing conditions would wake them up too, as we're all on the same path. No better and no worse than them. This was a hard pill to swallow for me, as I felt like I was special for figuring it out. Nope, the conditions and experiences I had opened me up to it sooner than them.
This connects to the past violence, which yes, was caused by systems that excused inhumane things. These days there's still inhumanity, as we have seen with the COVID debacle, but even with this upside down legal system, at least people are less supportive of violence as a solution.
The worst times could very well have been the inquisition. Perhaps, people still fear that kind of power happening again, as I've seen on the left and right dramas.
Humanity is still a child in learning how to live in bigger civilisations. We make mistakes, but as long as we remember to not repeat the past AND see the echoes of the past, we will learn how to move forwards, slow but steady.
Oh I love that, Rob! May I quote you? I think that's exactly the point I was trying to make. Purple-pilled! I love your humility in questioning your own specialness for seeing through it.
I agree that it's meaningful that we publicly disapprove of slavery, for instance. It wouldn't have been a global given that it was bad just one century ago.
Sure, you can quote me. I didn't feel this way in the past. I was stuck in my awake bubble, ah the irony!
Also huge thanks earlier for saying that I'm choosing research over delusion.
Sometimes I fear getting sucked up into false hope, like I did in the past. I know I'm trying to be objective and my partner is an amazing woman that helps me see the bright side to this chaos.
Viewing ourselves as something special strikes me as infantile ideation and I agree with you. It is positvely nauseating to watch so many people prancing about as if they deserve special treatment "just because."
I certainly can believe that WWII could have been avoided after seeing that this current special Military Operation of Russia also could have been avoided had Ukraine de-nazified, stopped bombing there own people, kick the western biolabs out of their country and not seek Nato entry. Not unreasonable requests imo. But Ukraine would have to stand up to America or not have let them take over in the 1st place. The leaders of our country who are controlled by the central banksters, are cruel sick people who wish to spread their illness to everyone else. I have watched this situation with Ukraine unfold very closely and like you said Tereza the people who control our country will stop at nothing. They no no boundaries and the crazier it sounds the more likely they will do it. That's why its so hard for people to believe and apparently no one has seen the "mean girls" movie. I have not read Mr Corbett. I only heard of him mentioned by someone recently and it was not in a favorable light.
I'll reply here so it goes to Goeff too. Thank you for sending me that Matt Ehret video, with such specific instructions on where to start to get the context and where he mentions Corbett. It's interesting that the context was Catherine Austin Fitts. I stopped listening to the Great Game, as it was called, because I can't stand Matt's co-host. He's bombastic and uses insults and ridicule to make his arguments, and doesn't bring the best out in Matt, I've felt. So it's interesting that he's an investment banker and hedge fund manager, and dismisses Fitts for her lack of credentials.
I'm working on another post on Corbett, which I've already recorded. I'll put the rest of the response into the Substack because I think it speaks to larger issues of centralization vs. decentralization and changing the system vs. leaving the system. Thanks again for this food for thought!
Yes, I understand completely, but what I like about V Guerrilla is he lets Matt talk, a lot, as opposed to some other hosts. That particular video was so long, but was probably one of the best informational videos about Africa I have heard about until last night, when I read the chapter swept away by the currency. Oh My! that was a sad chapter, but Americas should face this. So my theory is Americans know there is some shenanigans and the swop is uneven, but they have no idea of the details you provided in that chapter. I thought we were exporting a better life to these countries. I am embarrassed! I do think if Americans had an inkling as maybe they do now (seeing how they are deposable) they would do the deep dive to find out the truth. So my political wake up call was the 2020 election when I saw all the evidence of cheating and the courts not even hearing any grievances. And simultaneously the vaccines hit. I cut the TV Cable and started following election and Covid everything on the internet to find the truth. Which also led to a greater understanding in Philosophy, politics, religion, economics and weather control. And I'm just getting started! I look forward to your next post Tereza about Mr. Corbett. As always thank you.
Excellent comment, particularly about the central bankers.
I'm curious to know what the objection was to Corbett...
I'll see if I can find the Rogue news show and put the link in a comment.
https://rumble.com/v2lvmx6-the-multipolar-reality-on-rogue-news-ukraine-us-taiwan-china-new-world-reor.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
This was a great show, long but worth it, but start at 1:10 to get background and then they mention him at 1:23 to the end
I love Matt Ehret but you already know that, right? He's doing great work on the multipolar reality. I also have been reading the unlimited hangout you posted on Ukraine. Very interesting and disheartening, except that it's a trial run in a war zone so can they not get away with it anywhere else? Here's hoping.
I think this may resonate with many here and also reminds us that we're dealing with age old issues.
"Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. "
- Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784)
Now, I'm outta here for now. the chickens are squaking and the weeds are growing!
Bless all of you!
I guess it didn't resonate with many! Oh, well! ; )
James is spot on and has been for years. I think that is partly because of where he lives , he has an 'outside looking in' view of the world. You wont go wrong listening to him.
That's a good point and many ex-pats seem to be able to take the wider view. Glenn in Brazil, for instance, Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar. I'll always reserve my right to 'trust in Allah but tie my journalist-credibility camel' as I paraphrase from Matt Taibbi when Russell Brand asked him what venues he trusted. But James has a lot of veracity and integrity points in my book, where I'd have to consider whether I'm mistaken if I found we disagreed. Here's my post on Matt with that quote ;-) https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jokers-on-the-left-clowns-to-the right.
I firmly believe in sarcasm and humor and the not so obvious benefits. I like your optimism and observations. Also like the fact that you are a critical thinker. Keep on doing what you do.
really like “health responsibility”…
intentional psycho manic manipulation was also going on jerking people from fear to hope (back & forth) wearing them down and making them more pliable, compliant to the scam programs. (not an excuse)
responsibility, by definition, is personal, different for everyone based on their individual situation. part of this is an intentional disregard for the individual.
Yes and if you have different communities taking responsibility in different ways, you have real life experimental data to compare control groups to different outcomes. That's EXACTLY what they're trying to prevent.
And yesterday in Corbett's report, he posted a nice short interview on 'statist' versus 'voluntaryist' and the invocation of the value of 'autodidacticism' A gentle and interesting discussion of the problem of how to 'move' statists to 'anarchists'. The humour and gentleness here confirms the depth of Corbett's wisdom.
https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/james-corbett-discusses-human-freedom
He mentions an lovely 'poetical' essay called 'I, Pencil' by Leonard E. Read.
https://genius.com/Leonard-e-read-i-pencil-annotated
Thanks Guy, I had that bookmarked to listen to. I'll look forward to it and the essay!
The Palestinians and Israelis have been volleying ammo back and forth last night or night before last. Also Pakistan just had a military issue of sorts around the same time with an indicated comment about India/Pakistan feud. How can Vickey be everywhere at once? But seriously They are trying their hardest. Yes, the 2 people I love the most!: You and Matt/Cynthia and Co. ! Its a funny thing: consolidation is easier to control, but then you have the divide and concur. PS: Greeced lightening was A great chapter. I want to read it again before I move ahead because I think we are headed there sooner than later. Yikes
Oh what an honor to be put in their company! I hadn't heard about Palestine and Israel, I'll look it up. And I'm glad you enjoyed Greeced Lightning. It was another synchronicity when Steiner talked about the same thing, "Often a single phenomenon expresses something that throws light on decades, illuminating like a flash of lightning what is really happening."
Yes I think that lightning strike is coming and I'm glad that you'll have finished the book by then and will have a plan at the ready ;-)
Lol, I wish I thought I had a fool proof plan, but then I would be a fool.
OMG!!!
Brilliant!
One of the good things about the covid fiasco-fraud is that people are beginning to ask questions and to understnad that "authorities" may not be what we wish they should be. This is the first time I've ever read of anyone mentioning Pat Buchanan's book and I would like to add that he has (Had? I have not checked) a fine website wiht many excellent articles on WW2. Same goes for Paul Craig Roberts.
Here's a quote and a link to a short article that I consider a classic on this subject.
“… this entire myth, so prevalent then and even now about Hitler, and about the Japanese, is a tissue of fallacies from beginning to end. Every plank in this nightmare evidence is either completely untrue or not entirely the truth.
If people should learn this intellectual fraud about Hitler's Germany, then they will begin to ask questions, and searching questions…”
Murray Rothbard, Revisionism for Our Time
Mr. Rothbard was an American historian of the very highest caliber.
http://mises.org/daily/2592
Here are a couple of quotes from some excellent books.
I suppose it began with a sense… that what the average child is taught about major historical events is a pack of lies.
-Gerard Menuchin, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil p12 (2016)
Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth. Lying, as we all know, does not take place only in war-time. Man, it has been said, is not "a veridical animal," but his habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish.
- Arthur Ponsonby, MP, Falsehood in War Time (1929)
http://www.vlib.us/wwi/resources/archives/texts/t050824i/ponsonby.pdf
Another excellent book that exposes and explains the lies, with perception, sensitivity and nuance is Douglas Reed's. "The Controversy of ZIon."
As for the Unz site, it is full of excellent stuff, but I've come to believe that it's a limited hangout. It harps incessantly on a lot of unnecessarily divisive garbage as well. That said, Unz has an archive site full of old newsmagazine article and books which is a true gold mine of information.
So many great quotes, Geoff! I've been encountering the same names but I'm especially pleased you quoted Ponsonby. I use him in this one that, imo, didn't get the attention it deserved since Jankowitz had such a short reign: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/nina-jankowicz-the-warbling-warmonger. And I think I agree on Unz, although I haven't read outside of particular authors. But several of the other titles make me skeptical.
Tereza, that piece was excellent as well. I also have used the Alice in Wonderland quote, and here are a few more of my favorites.
[During the war]words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.
Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.
- Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Chap X, ~400 BC
… that there is not in Lexicography, a more fraudulent Word [than republic].
-From John Adams to Samuel Adams, Sr., 18 October 1790
New York Oct. 18. 1790
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-1081
“Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.”
- John Adams, letter to J. H. Tiffany, Mar. 31, 1819.
Perfect! I'll need to find a way to use these too!
You must be the only other person in the world who's even heard about Ponsonby, and what's the chance that we both have quoted him? Fascinating.
Yes, it's his 10 principles of war propaganda I quote:
1. We don't want war, we are only defending ourselves
2. The other guy is the sole responsible for this war
3. Our adversary's leader is evil and looks evil
4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interests
5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes
6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons
7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big
8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause
9. Our cause is sacred
10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.
#10 Should be, We don't do propaganda; only the other guy does. We only tell the truth and if you doubt it you're a traitor.
"A traitor is everyone who does not agree with me" (King George III).
Yes, health responsibility movement it is. Responsibility to vaccinate or not to, yes.
I've been aware of Corbett for awhile but don't actually like his delivery. Maybe I'll give him another go.
🙏🏽
I get a kick out the sarcasm in his delivery although I really do not like videos in general so I rarely listen to him or anyone else.
I squirm at his sarcasm, we're all different. Yes, I tend to read rather than watch too
I think sarcasm can be a cheap shot. It hasn't bothered me with James because it's not all he's delivering, but I may change my mind.
I love that you allow yourself to change your mind. 🙏🏽
I've noticed that most people avoid sarcasm and although I don't understand why, I respect it. I also highly enjoy the old (ancient) satirists, although if I lived back then and exposed to them, I'd probably feel as you do!
I had another go with JC, still don't like him! Hey hoo
Hope is good.
The war on hope is a communist tactic to demoralize people.
Hope in the proper sense can only be related to the true and living God. Anything else falls short.
The mundane version of hope is more nuanced. The enlightened Atheist shares with the Christian the belief that it is better to not have hope in people, much less in their promises.
What is it okay to hope for in this life, in this world? The always present possibility of change.
"But change is a fact, not a possibility. Everything changes all the time."
Not so. Change is also a possibility. When people make a mistake, they have to correct that, but that change is often prevented by pride.
A rational hope is that some people will change when they are bored of getting always the same pain. At some point, the self preservation instinct overrides pride.
This is only one example.
The law in general allows for rational hope to change. Conciliation is often a possibility, sometimes it is good to start with the qualified hope that change will happen.
It's always a bad practice to get drunk on hope, no matter how reasonable it is in a given situation. But used correctly, at the time it is useful, rational, well measured hope helps our thoughts to advance.
The pessimistic bias shows up because it is really true that most of the time there is no rational hope available for the situation at hand. Then, we jump to conclusions. Then, we demoralize ourselves preemptively.
That's worse than hopium, that's hoptanyl overdose.
That's what the communists want. Self-demoralization, which boils down to inducing confused thinking.
Common practice of the communists: they recommend Dante's Inferno, and not the other two parts. It's always incomplete works. Always emphasizing one part of the art, and throwing the whole work to the curb. That's the general case of the war against hope.
It's similar to refusing to consider the human body as a whole in medicine. The communists will destroy and Scientist that attempts to study the totality.
Also, the victim mentality is based on hiding a large chunk of reality. It's another part of the programs of demoralization and self-demoralization. Lose hope in reality, you are a victim, and if you try anything then you are proving our point. There is only one way to overcome victim mentality, which is through the cultivation of hope that creates action.
I insist: for this world, for dealing with flawed humans, only rational hope is okay, and only in counted occasions.
For everything else, Mastercard.
By my definition of the other side, a war against hope would be a war for honesty. When you say hope is good, you're saying that delusion is good as long as it's a good delusion. But unless you secretly believe that reality is bad, why do you need to believe in a delusion? If there's meaning and purpose in life, it exists whether we believe in it or not.
I've never had much appreciation of hope or maybe it's because I was never susceptible to despair. I'm not at all into fantasy or delusion either. For people like me it's all about persistence; just driving on.
I have a low tolerance for BS as well although I'm pretty much full of it! My wife and I were just talking about it; she's similar that way. : )
That looks a lot like a straw man fallacy.
We are changing topics here. If I'm not mistaken, you are leading me to talk about about faith, not hope.
My belief is that for human beings it is utterly impossible to live without faith. That is, believing something is true without having seen the truth of the object of the belief.
Many people say they don't have beliefs, they have facts. Pretty soon after that they say something like "absolute truths don't exist, and we cannot be completely sure of anything, but this argument of mine is as close as we can get to truth." They have faith, because they have intellect, because they are humans.
Faith can be a delusion. We can believe wrong things. In fact, it is often the case that people keep believing wrong things after studying a topic. (Is this fact a true belief without evidence or a true belief with evidence?)
Delusion also happens in reverse: here is a true fact of reality T. People believe T is true, without knowing the evidence for T. People have faith in T. Then they study and they become deluded, and believe T is false, because of their false study. They have a deluded faith now, because they belief T is false, but the premise is that T is true.
For example, let T be "the human animal is omnivorous." It is true. People believe it, with or without evidence. Then they begin to study false notions and conclude that it is immoral for humans to eat this or that, and, therefore, it must be that humans are not capable of digesting this or that, do humans are not omnivorous. They are now deluded.
Common phrases one hears from these deluded faithful people: "eating meat is a habit, a cultural custom, it is not natural" or "cooking vegetables is wrong, it makes them worse food because then they are more difficult to digest and have less nutrition. The only valid natural diet for the human animal is ripe tropical fruit, which is naturally low in fat, which is the single cause of cancer."
More generally, the way of thinking of individual causality is delusional most of the time. And the entire building of modern natural science is based on this faith. Which simplifies the marketing process, but has almost nothing to do with gaining true knowledge about the world.
Sometimes people in science fight over two contradictory delusions, which is hilarious.
So true faith is objective. The truth or reality of the object of belief is independent of the belief of the human who believes. We probably agree on that, except you will call it knowledge and not faith.
Hope is good because it helps people to develop virtue, that is, to change.
Faith is a virtue and it benefits from having hope. A false hope diminishes faith, and any other virtue.
Teaching is a work of love, which is the final purpose of virtue, in my worldview. When someone is developing a vice because of a false hope, that will affect her true faith, and she runs the risk of rejecting a true fact.
So, for example, if my true faith in the fact that "people prefer not to be robbed or killed" is diminished by the false hope that "the courts of law will protect people," then, you, Tereza, my teaching me that my hope in that case is delusional, you would be helping me to preserve my faith, and in this example your teaching would be a work of love that satisfies your need for meaning and purpose in life.
Or so I believe.
Where am I wrong?
Do the zen brothers and sisters have a true faith in not having faith and not having hope, or being able to get rid of both if they happen to have them?
You're right, Roger, that I was certainly conscious that I was talking about hope and faith together but then my thoughts went to how charity fit in, so I didn't put it in that context.
By my definition, dogma is whatever you refuse to raise to question. We all have dogma. What I say is that you need to own your dogma and name it, as the liberation theologians do with their preferential option for the poor. My only dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else. When I disagree with anyone, it's because they've kicked my dogma. And I'm often kicking theirs on the basis of mine, but no other basis.
To say that faith is good without defining what that faith is, is like saying truth is true and using that to justify your definition of truth without naming it. If your faith includes that the Bible is true, then my articles like https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-devil-and-naomi-wolf and https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops will argue that your faith is in a God that enslaves some and protects empires. It's a faith in the superiority of some over others, which is a faith that's justified violence. Is that faith good if faith is a generic good?
To make a joke, sometimes the God of the bible speaks like a bad NYC psychiatrist who is always blaming her patients for their issues.
In that analysis, you say the Christian God of the Holy Bible "enslaves some and protects empires" but you are forgetting the Magnificat, where Mary says to Elizabeth that God puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble. (Marxists hate this idea, in my experience; Former Marxists hate that idea even more)
Buddhism teaches, if I'm not mistaken, that this world is a delusion. That pain comes from attachment to mutable things that have no real essence, and that pain is also a delusion. And that this is eternal because of reincarnation, but the liberation from all this is achieved by the extinction of the self, through the practice of the eight noble actions (I'm trying to remember) which include correct speech, correct action, correct thoughts and five more I don't remember.
I don't know if the Buddhist Monks believe in all those teachings, or dogmas (not pejorative "dogma", but normal "dogma" here.)
But I think that faith is delusional (I mean no offense, really.) This world is obviously real. Injustice is real. The possibility of making justice is also real. We always are allowed to choose to live in peace, and we can stop cooperating with our enemies any time we choose.
My opinion is that it I am better off enjoying the gift of faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is the Messiah that Yaweh, the only true God, the creator of everything and the almighty, promised he would send, to free the people of God and all the rest, once and forever. That's an statement of faith. It's not perfect but it's what I have.
I understand that most people strongly dislike this. Everyone has her own reasons. Trauma, ideologies, desires, preferences, etc.
But we started talking about hope, and I distinguished between eternal hope, and mundane hope. The hope for this life in this world has to be, in my view, commensurate with our limitations. If we only believe in our own strength, our power is greater than if we don't believe in our strength and we depend on others for everything, and yet the same power is still insufficient. So, we search alliances with other people, and this is tricky because it is dangerous and easy to believe others too much, and demand from them more that they are able to give.
But all the good things humanity has achieved depend directly on this gamble of confidence in social cooperation, which is is under attack right now. This is difficult to see because it is an abstract phenomenon, that is, social cooperation is immaterial, but real, and it has been damaged, because in this war all the foundations, so to speak, of the West, have been attacked with mortar fire from propagandists. (mixing too many metaphors, sorry)
My thesis is that it is never necessary for people to be of one mind, or of one belief, or faith, to peacefully cooperate and achieve a good economic outcome. (The Nieztscheans hate my guts right now, "why are you so venal bro?") We only need to be realistic about our conditions and act accordingly.
Therefore, anarchism.
I don't believe in equality in the abstract, and I will give a speech. Equality between two persons is always in relation to a third thing or condition. For example, you and I are unequal in age, but we are both equal with respect to the fact that we both write in English. Some people seem to think that all humans should be equal in everything. That is impossible and it breaks the principle of social cooperation.
Some people are superior to others with respect to something, in my opinion. For instance, you have good taste in home decoration, and I know next to nothing about home decoration. you are superior than me in that regard. But I am probably superior in that I probably know more verses and poems of the Spanish 1500s and 1600s than you. That is not natural, but circumstantial. You could learn the language and memorize more verses that I know of in about two weeks, because I don't that many.
For example, this is part of a monologue from a 17th century play, "La vida es sueño", recited by a man who has been a prisoner all his life, since the cradle:
"Nace el bruto y con la piel
que dibujan manchas bellas,
apenas signo es de estrellas
gracias al docto pincel,
cuando atrevida y cruel
la humana necesidad
le enseña a tener crueldad,
monstruo de su laberinto.
¿Y yo, con mejor instinto,
tengo menos libertad?"
(I don't have a translation handy, bummer; a brief summary: the prisoner compares himself with a savage man, and seeing he is better asks to the Heavens why he has less freedom.)
So, there is no equality between people in general, in this life. Yet, death makes all of us equal to each other.
Some are superior to others, due to their merit, or due to corruption. Superior people are at risk of being attacked by others all the time, regardless of what they do or don't do. It is not desirable to be superior about anything when one is surrounded by vicious people.
Learning is the great equalizer. Whatever virtue is there in equality, it is to be achieved through learning, which happens between the ears of the individual.
Paradoxically, it is impossible to learn everything. And so, inequality can only be reduced, and not eliminated completely. I think is is also part of reality and take it as a good.
Roger, when you write, "I understand that most people strongly dislike this. Everyone has her own reasons. Trauma, ideologies, desires, preferences, etc." you're not including my reason: I reject a God who favors some people over others as an immoral God and therefore a logical impossibility. It's not personal trauma or desire.
What I mean by superiority is morally superior. I hold that we're all born with the equal potential to choose good or bad actions. If that's true, then any choices we make are because of our circumstances. If you, the soul of Roger, was dropped into the body of Pol Pot at birth, you would have done the same. Ditto for Hitler. Ditto for boomers. Ditto for zoomers.
If there is benevolent design, aka God, then each of us has been dropped into the life circumstances we're best able to bring meaning out of. So I wouldn't have made better choices in anyone else's circumstances, but I might have made worse. There's never a reason for pride or shame because, as the Course says, I am as God created me. Which is to say perfect.
That's a good explanation. Thank you. I understand your way of thinking about this much better now.
I disagree about that reasoning regarding everyone being beholden to their circumstances. I think we have reached the main difference, between Christian and the Non-christian way of thinking about ethics and ontology.
The radicality of free will in the Christian mindset forces people to try to become better, to gain virtue. This is due to the syncretism between the original Christianity and Stoicism and that little touch of Epicureanism that is present in some Christian ideas.
The non-christian mindset tends to deny change at some point. Because change is painful, and a burden to people. "You behave bad you have to change." "But I like to behave badly, I don't want to change."
It is also the idea that humans are merely a prolongation of the earth, just like all other animals. As such, there are many things we do that are bad for others, bad for this spaceship that gives sustains all of us. And this leads some people to contempt for humanity. The idea that humans should not exist or should have never existed. Not your case, clearly.
But all animals do "bad things". For example, I heard once a person explaining that bulls in the African Savana use their horns and their front feet to dig holes in the ground before the rain season comes, then those holes fill up with water, and then mud. Many animals benefit from that accumulation of water, although the bulls do that mainly for themselves. Positive externalities are natural!
A person who believes: there is no change, there can be no change, life is painful and no one should go through this; this person would hate the bulls too because they "hurt" the earth to expand life. And they would end up hating every life form, because all hurt the earth, all benefit each other, all expand life, and thus suffering. This is absurd for a Christian. And probably for many non-christians too. Because it is not for us to decide. We are not the creator. Our role in all this is different.
The occult, the hermetic stuff, the gnosticism and the equivalents of that in the East, all aim to frozen man and all life in place. To separate man from life, and his moral duties toward the Creator, which include repentance and change. Even the best of the East, the ones that don't hate life, don't have this radical idea of free will, as far as I know. This way of thinking seems to be of the West, and from there it has moved to all the world.
And I am aware that many bad things are present in Western culture and have also gone to other places and harmed people and everything else. But the idea of making things right seems to me to depend on radical Christian free will.
As for moral superiority, that is always a posteriori. Judge a practice for its consequences not for its intentions. That which works better is probably ends up manifesting better the idea of Good.
For me, Christianity stands in opposition to victim mentality. Christianity is Radical Liberation. Some philosophies and some religions clearly promote victim mentality, and some under the appearance of opposing it. This happens even inside supposedly Christian groups, which can be very abusive, specially when money is involved.
This is why I like economics, even though it is so boring. the disputes between religions and non-religions about what is it to be done now can be resolved by learning what works and what does not work. Communism does not work economically. Fascism either. Those groups that promote better living conditions materially and spiritually have to accept the harsh teachings of economics: not anything goes.
The other disputes (one or three, zero or infinite, this form of prayer or this other one) are not about the here and now. Economics cannot say anything about that. If anything, metaphysical beliefs corrupt economic analyses, and that affects the living conditions in the end. People don't learn! They don't change. They are not allowed to change.
That is one of the greatest pains of human life, to not allow people to change anything about themselves, because that will hurt the bottom line of the business.
[I wasn't plannig on writing so much; sorry!]
Hope is an opiate for the masses. It is meant to disorient and blunt personal agency.
Hope is flailing about in the 21st Century with apologetic and weak people who have been down so long and sadly have accepted that condition as part of their natural situation and believe it can only be altered through some divine, magical intervention as noted circa 2008 with the post-modern political pablum platitudinal company man Obama and then through the Orange Man carnival barker.
Two different brands of the same drug.
As an aside the Audacity of Hope™ (Obama's book) is an oxymoron on the face of it, according to the Greeks. There's no "audacity" in hope. It is the stuff of denial and cowardice - two other escapees from Pandora's box.
So to go back to the opposite of hope as responsibility, I think it's important to be talking about the policies that we'd want in our own economic commonwealths. I agree that there's no audacity in hope. But until we have a system that allows us to take responsibility, I don't know that I'd go as far as denial and cowardice.
Without ideology, you've got jack.
Libertarianism, Green jobs, "real Democracy", REAL American Values, Election Reform, Financial Reform, Tax Reform, Monetary Reform, Reform Reform.
Resignation, Depression, Human Nature, Hope, Spirituality, Smoke Pot, Smoke your Left Foot. Resign, Quit, Move, Cry, Give Up, Become Reactionary, Sing the Blues.
It's like watchin' a Pinball Tournament.
Without ideology - A way to see the world, a perspective, a beginning and an end that makes rational sense, a way to discriminate - you've got jack.
Positivity-Self-Improvement-Buying Green-"If only the Constitution were enforced"- Regulated capitalism- Re-naming all the streets- Getting money out of politics- Ballot access- Making water flow uphill towards money.
Without partisanship, and a consciousness as to why you maintain that loyalty, you don't have squat.
There are no such things as Taxpayers, Americans, Members of the Middle-Class, Liberals, Conservatives, White People, Independents, or etc.
OR, those things exist only to the same extent as there are Hoosiers, NASCAR Fans, or those who have completed a Weight Watchers course.
All people are not the same.
There are people who work to live and are dominated by that work.
And, there are people who live by the work of others and dominate those who work for them.
Everything else stems from this.
If you don't know which side you are on, you don't have squat.
Think about political discussion (and politics is always a "discussion"). Think about it in either the narrow terms of the political websites you see or in the larger sense of politics in America, as a whole. What is the basis, the most fundamental basis for debate? What is the common language of that "debate"?
You can fill in the gory details of the problem: on the one hand, anything goes; on the other hand anything is acceptable and must be accepted (in the name of tolerance). Opinions are personal, categories are arbitrary and foggy, and the only basis for commonality is a very loose and changing list of policy statements that could just as easily be their opposites. It is not just mysticism and pop-theories that are at issue. There is a century worth of slogans, assumptions, "facts" which are "well known" or "commonly known." Even simple logic is not required.
Yes, class perspective is the key to it but the political chaos extends so far that even that is tough to put your finger on in a practical way.
Materialism, "cold" pursuit of the "truth" for practical reasons, basic class partisanship, a method for determining what is correct and accurate and what is not, agreement on these methods and the history from which these are derived - these are the most rudimentary tools of a political movement.
Otherwise, everything just spins like water in a toilet bowl just to be dumped into the sewer and get piped into the Idea Treatment Plant only to go through the same cycle once again.
It ain't "philosophy."
It's a common language and method very rigorously adhered to at a hundred different levels of sophistication but fundamentally starting with the soldiers' quote in John Reed:
"If you aren't for one class, you are for the other."
I agree on ideology. I don't know if you've seen this one of mine: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/ideology-is-everything.
And this one talks about my one dogma and the four beliefs and five principles that follow from it: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/socio-spirituality-and-small-scale.
Have you read the site of Rad Geek?
https://radgeek.com/
He is a left market anarchist.
Your reflection here remind me of some of his writings.
By the way, are you aware that materialism is also a worldview and an ideology?
Haven't seen it.
"Left market anarchist" sounds like another fungible phrase and/or an oxymoron.
I'm aware that dialectical materialism and in general even a stab at discussing leftist thinking in the US is fraught with such cultural conditioning and historical ignorance it's difficult to even get the plane off the ground.
This is not by accident.
I will say that there is a substantial portion of "the health freedom movement" which has a deep strain of reactionary right-wing elements throughout.
Once you unpack the language and ideologies of many of these individuals you come to a place that has dangerous historical precedents.
There is a book title "Markest, Not Capitalism" by Gary Chartier & Charles Johnson (Rad Geek.)
https://marketsnotcapitalism.com/
This is the most "Marxist" side of the modern libertarian corner of the intellectual world.
They emphasize egalitarian arguments and class struggle.
Great comment.
Thanks!
Are you older than 50?
Were you a socialist at some point?
Answer the second question first, as Groucho wrote in his treatise on the art of politics, Duck Soup.
Haha, I have never called myself a socialist. Why do you ask?
And I just turned 66--ancient and ageless. Another 600 yrs and I'll reach my demonic birthday.
LOL. Nice to know, but I was asking Allen.
He writes comments like a demoralized boomer or worse, a demoralizing gen-x.
You only look 65, by the way. Just kidding.
I turned 39 about a month ago. My hair is getting all gray, lol, like my father at that age. I probably won't lose it because my father had his hair until he died at 79.
Boomers are difficult to deal with sometimes. Many millennials have boomer parents, not gen-x parents. The zoomers are so weird because the gen-exers are... well... you know the gen-exers, they saw the disintegration of the USSR and they are socialdemocrats or shameful conservatives that are so afraid of being called far-right. Gen-x people have not been able to prevent any of the disasters since then. The zoomers play with the far-right and communism because their parents are so helpless and demoralized.
My generation is sanwiched between two generations of unrealistic bad thinkers. The millennials with all our OCDs and ADHD will save the West eventually (after the collapse). We will also have to find a way to reverse the sterilization of the zoomers. We may need to create artificial wombs. I hope no one puts MSWindows in those machines.
Not demoralized at all.
Your misinterpretation of that is illustrative of your lack of grounding.
Your use of the various labels applied to "generations" is of no value.
Hi Allen.
I'm happy to know you are not demoralized. You often comment in a tone that I cannot understand well.
The labels from the generations in the comment to Tereza are to be understood in a semi-serious tone, like most of my comments.
In particular, if you happen to be a boomer and have been insulted because of that in the past, I think that is a bad thing to do. My sincere opinion is that boomers still have time to make things better, and I think their place is in the community that fights against globalism.
If you are a from the following generation, you really have no remedy. No, just kidding. Those guys can also bring something useful to help with the global mess we are in.
My fellow millennials tend have suffered a lot in since the crisis of 2008. As we become older, we begin to see what needs to be done. That is good.
The younger ones do a lot of good in my opinion. They stimulate the older generations to get on their feet and fight.
Don't you agree that the successive campaigns of psychological operations and other attacks from the elites over the last 40 years have done a lot of harm to people? If so, isn't it a good idea that we all try to learn what is happening and do something about it?
Cheers!
See my above comment on ideology to Tereza.
Agree with your assessment on the harms done to people by not just the psyops but moreso the very real material attacks on us all.
Your astute comment on that is one of the rudimentary truths that illustrate all of these notions about "personal choice" or "individual responsibility" are absurd constructs that ignore a constellation of real life circumstances as well as historical realities.
Worse, these tropes about "personal choice" etc, provide cover what is being DONE TO people who have next to no possibilities of any meaningful choices due to what you describe.
Also agree on doing something about it which I do just about every day of the week.
All the best.