Jim Marrs was absolutely right. Ref to his great book on the Fourth Reich
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by Dr. Joseph Mercola
November 29, 2021
from Technocracy Website
Spanish version
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
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A psychological condition of society known as “mass formation” is a condition for totalitarianism. Under mass formation, a population willingly sacrifices their freedom
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The central condition for mass formation to occur is a lack of societal bonding. In other words, social isolation on a mass scale, which is precisely what the lockdowns were all about. But even before the ‘pandemic’, social isolation was at a historical high
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The second condition is that a majority of people must experience life as meaningless and purposeless. The third condition is widespread free-floating anxiety and free-floating discontent. This refers to discontent and anxiety that have no apparent or distinct causes
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The fourth condition is free-floating frustration and aggression, which tends to naturally follow the previous three. Here, again, the frustration and aggression have no discernible cause
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Once these four conditions are widespread, mass formation can occur, which allows for totalitarianism to rise and thrive. A key strategy to break mass formation and prevent totalitarianism is for dissenters to join together as one large group, thereby giving fence-sitters who are not yet fully hypnotized an alternative to going along with the totalitarians. Another is to loudly speak out against the totalitarian regime, as this is how atrocities are limited
In 1938, Technocracy defined itself as
“The Science of Social Engineering”.
This professor of clinical psychology in Belgium
has revealed the four key elements of “mass formation”
that cause people to disconnect from reality.
The Great Panic of 2020-2022
shows that all four have been realized
with predictable outcomes.
Patrick M. Wood – TN Editor
In the video far below, Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, reviews the societal conditions under which a population ends up willingly sacrificing their freedom.
Desmet, who also has a master’s degree in statistics, discovered peculiar anomalies in statistical analyses done during the COVID ‘pandemic’, which made him realize our global society is starting to enter a “mass formation” state, a type of “collective hypnosis” required for the rise of a totalitarian regime.
In this Aubrey Marcus podcast interview, Desmet reviews the step-by-step formula that results in this collective hypnosis, and how this formula has been deployed on the global population over the past two years.
Needless to say, he warns us about continuing down this path, and provides solutions that we can take, both on an individual and collective basis, to prevent the loss of freedom that will surely follow if we do nothing.
Nonsensical Modeling
Around the end of February 2020, Desmet started looking at case fatality rates and other statistics, quickly realizing that there was something seriously wrong with the models presented to the public and used as justification for shutting down “nonessential” businesses and telling everyone to stay at home.
The models were greatly exaggerating the threat of SARS-CoV-2, and by the end of May 2020, this was “proven beyond doubt.”
For example,
the Imperial College in London predicted that if Sweden did not lock down, 80,000 people would be dead by the end of May 2020.
Well, Sweden opted not to lock down, and by the end of May only 6,000 people had died with a diagnosis of COVID-19.
Strangest of all, Desmet says, was that everyone kept saying the coronavirus countermeasures were based on mathematical models and science, yet,
“when it was proven beyond doubt that the initial models were completely wrong, the measures continued, as if nothing was wrong and the models were right.”
Clearly, then, modeling and science were not foundational or even part of the equation at all.
This, Desmet says,
“was a strong sign that there was something going on at the psychological level that was really powerful.”
Another tipoff that something was really wrong was the fact that none of our political leaders were taking into account the collateral damage of their countermeasures.
There was no cost-benefit/risk-reward analysis for any of the countermeasures…
The World Health Organization (WHO) did warn that the measures might result in excess deaths from starvation.
Yet at no time did we ever see a mathematical model that took into account both sides of the coin – the death toll from the virus, and the collateral damage of the countermeasures.
And without such an analysis, we could not assess whether the countermeasures might be more harmful than the virus…
Anytime you consider a public health measure, a cost-benefit analysis is essential. You cannot make a sensible decision without it.
Yet here, such basics were ignored as if the collateral damage was inconsequential…
The Four Base Conditions for ‘Mass Formation’
What psychological dynamics and processes might be responsible for this apparent blindness?
After a couple of months, Desmet finally realized what was going on.
Society was (and still is) under the spell of a mass hypnosis, a psychological process known as “mass formation” that arises in society when specific conditions are met.
The central condition is a lack of societal bonding.
In other words, social isolation on a mass scale, which is precisely what the lockdowns were all about.
We were all told that any contact with others, including members of our own family, could be a death sentence…
I’ve heard of people who for over a year have not met with a single person, remaining locked in their homes the entire time, for fear of contagion. But social isolation was a widespread problem even before the ‘pandemic’.
Marcus cites a survey, which found 25% of respondents didn’t have a single close friend.
What’s more, the loneliest age group were young adults, not seniors, as typically suspected.
So, even before the ‘pandemic’, Western societies were suffering from a lack of community, which is a key condition for “mass formation” syndrome to emerge in the first place.
The second condition is that a majority of people must experience life as meaningless and purposeless.
Desmet cites research showing that half of all adults feel their jobs are completely meaningless, providing no value to either themselves or others.
In another poll, done in 2012, 63% of respondents said they were “sleepwalking” through their workdays, putting no passion into their work whatsoever.
So, condition No. 2 for mass formation hypnosis was also fulfilled, even before the ‘pandemic’ hit.
The third condition is widespread free-floating anxiety and free-floating discontent.
Free-floating anxiety refers to anxiety that has no apparent or distinct cause.
If you’re in the jungle and find yourself chased by a lion, your fear and anxiety have a natural, easily-identified cause – the lion.
However, when you are socially disconnected and feel your life has no meaning, then a free-floating anxiety can emerge that is not connected to a mental or physical representation of a specific threat.
Judging by the popularity of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, condition No. 3 was also fulfilled long before the ‘pandemic’.
The fourth condition is free-floating frustration and aggression, which tends to naturally follow the previous three.
Here, again, the frustration and aggression have no discernible cause.
When Conditions Are Met, Mass Formation Emerges
When these four conditions are fulfilled by a large enough portion of society, they are ripe for mass formation hypnosis…
All that’s needed now is a story in which the source or cause of the anxiety is identified and spelled out, while simultaneously providing a strategy for addressing and neutralizing that cause.
By accepting and participating in whatever that strategy is, people with free-floating anxiety feel equipped, finally, with the means to control their anxiety and avoid panic.
They feel like they’re in charge again.
Interestingly, when this happens, people also suddenly feel reconnected with others, because they’ve all identified the same nemesis. So, they’re joined together in a heroic struggle against the mental representation of their anxiety.
This new-found solidarity also gives their lives new meaning and purpose.
Together, this connection, while based on a false premise, acts to strengthen the psychological disconnect from reality.
It explains why so many have bought into a clearly illogical narrative, and why they are willing to participate in the prescribed strategy,
“even if it’s utterly absurd,” Desmet says.
“The reason they buy into the narrative is because it leads to this new social bond,” he explains.
Science, logic and correctness have nothing to do with it.
“Through the process of mass formation, they switch from the very painful condition of social isolation to the opposite state of maximal connectedness that exists in a crowd or a mass.
That in and of itself leads up to a sort of mental intoxication, which is the real reason people stick to the narrative, why people are willing to go along with the narrative, even, as we said, it is utterly wrong, and even if they lose everything that is important to them, personally.”
These losses can include their mental and physical health, their homes, livelihoods and material well-being.
None of it matters when you’re under the hypnotic spell of mass formation…
And this, Desmet says, is one of the most problematic aspects of this psychological phenomenon.
Masses of people become self-destructive through their myopic focus.
19th Century Mass Formation
Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist renowned for his study of crowds once said:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them.
Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
Le Bon’s book, “The Crowd – A Study of the Popular Mind,” takes a deep-dive into the characteristics of human crowds and how, when gathered in groups, people tend to relinquish conscious deliberation in favor of unconscious crowd action.
He warned that if society didn’t take heed and ward of social isolation and the anti-religious idea that life has no purpose, we would end up in a state where mass formation would become the norm.
These psychologically damaged people would take over, which is precisely what happened.
A key example is the Nazi regime.
Desmet points out that while we typically think of dictatorships arising from the use of brute force and fear, the Nazi regime – and the leadership we’re faced with right now – came into power on the back of this deep psychological phenomenon known as mass formation.
People WILLINGLY participated in the Nazi atrocities because of the psychological state society was in, the mass formation phenomenon, not because they feared their leader.
Key Difference Between ‘Dictatorship’ and ‘Totalitarianism’
So, it’s important to realize that classical dictatorships and totalitarianism arise from different causes.
As a general rule,
in a classic dictatorship, the dictator becomes milder and less aggressive once dissident voices, his opposition, are silenced.
Once he has seized complete power, he doesn’t need to be aggressive anymore and can resort to other means to maintain control.
In a totalitarian state, the exact opposite occurs.
This is crucial for us to understand, because,
in a totalitarian society, once the opposition is silenced, that’s when the state commits its greatest and cruelest atrocities…
An example of this is,
Stalin‘s purification scheme in the 1930s, which led to the death of about 80 million people in a single decade.
The mid-30s is also when the Nazi regime began its insane cleansing, which resulted in the Holocaust.
Both occurred after the vocal opposition had been quenched.
We’re now at another watershed moment in history, where the opposition to the ‘pandemic’ madness is being silenced.
If we want humanity to survive and not succumb to global totalitarianism, we must keep speaking against it, because when we stop, THAT’S when the real atrocities will begin.
In other words, we ain’t seen nothing yet…
The worst is still to come – if we fall silent.
Here’s another important point.
Totalitarians don’t stop committing atrocities once the opposition is vanquished. It merely expands to new groups.
Desmet recounts how Stalin switched from one scapegoat to the next, as he kept running out of groups to blame and had them killed off.
Eventually, he ended up murdering half of his Communist Party members, even though most had done nothing wrong and were loyal to him.
That’s something to ponder in our present situation.
Right now, “anti-vaxxers” are the opposition the totalitarian regime seeks to destroy.
Once there are no more “anti-vaxxers,” say, theoretically, that everyone in the world got the shot, the opposition to be done away with would become some other group.
So, if you’re “vaccinated” and up on all your boosters right now and are cheering on the crusade against those who don’t want the shot, know that it’s only a matter of time before it’s your turn to be victimized over something…
The Tragic End that Awaits All Mass Formation Societies
The fate of those who succumb to mass formation and embrace totalitarianism is particularly tragic, in a sense, because of another curious thing that occurs.
People under its spell often end up agreeing that they deserve to die and willingly go to their death. This, Desmet says, is what happened with many of Stalin’s party members who were given death sentences for no apparent reason.
As noted by Marcus, this is basically menticide, the killing of the mind…
The psychological process of menticide so degrades the mental faculties that rational thinking is no longer possible, making you profoundly gullible. In this state, you’ll buy into any narrative without critical thinking.
Mass formation also always ends up creating more of the conditions that allowed it to emerge in the first place.
So,
in the end, people who are under mass formation hypnosis will feel greater social isolation than ever before, less meaning and purpose in life, and more free-floating anxiety and free-floating aggression than before.
Mass formation also erases individuality.
The group becomes all-important and the individual inconsequential.
Hence being told you, your parents or children deserve or need to die for the betterment of society is acceptable and agreeable.
“Everyone becomes equally stupid, essentially,” Desmet says.
“It doesn’t matter how smart or intelligent they were before. They lose all capacity for critical thinking, they lose all individual characteristics.”
Applied to today, this is shockingly relevant.
It helps explain how and why parents are willing to line up their children for an experimental injection that can disable or kill them.
“Totalitarianism is a monster that ALWAYS devours its own children,” Desmet says…
Mass Formation in Action
Another important point is that, typically,
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only 30% of people in a totalitarian society are actually under the hypnotic spell of mass formation. It seems greater, but they’re actually in a minority.
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However, there’s typically another 40% that simply go along with the program, even though they’re unconvinced. They don’t want to stick out by going against the prevailing current.
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The remaining 30% are not hypnotized and want to wake the others up.
The so-called Asch experiments clearly demonstrated that,
very few people, only 25%, are willing to go against the crowd, no matter how absurd and obviously wrong the crowd’s opinion is.
Two-thirds of people are willing to go along with “idiocracy“…
Time and again, mass formation events and experiments show us there are three groups of people:
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those who become spellbound and actually believe that the wrong answer is the right one
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those who know the answer is wrong, but dare not tell the truth so they agree with what they know to be false
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those who know the answer is wrong and say so…
How to Break Mass Formation
All of this points to what the answer is.
According to Desmet,
what dissidents need to do is firstly join together to form one large group.
This gives the largest, 40% group – the fence-sitters who only go along with the program because they’re afraid of being ostracized – an alternative social bonding platform.
Most of them are likely to join the dissident anti-totalitarian group rather than follow the totalitarian mindset that they don’t fully agree with.
At that point, the mass formation is done…
The totalitarian state is finished because the neutral fence-sitters, which allowed for mass formation to take root and grow, are now no longer participating in that process.
And without mass formation, a totalitarian takeover cannot succeed.
Secondly, we must continue to speak out – LOUDLY…
Speaking out can help minimize the number of people who get hypnotized.
It can also wake some up who already are under the mass formation spell.
According to Desmet, speaking out has also been shown to limit the atrocities committed.
“In my opinion, it is not an option to stop speaking,” he says.
“It’s the most important thing we can do.”
It’s not easy…
As discussed by Marcus and Desmet,
the totalitarian regime has the benefit of being able to control the narrative through a centralized media…
Not surprisingly, mass media is a key tool for the successful creation of mass formation.
A third action item is creating parallel structures.
The power of this strategy was demonstrated by Vaclav Havel, a political dissident who eventually became the president of Czechoslovakia.
A parallel structure is any kind of business, organization, technology, movement or creative pursuit that fits within a totalitarian society while being morally outside of it.
Once enough parallel structures are created, a parallel culture is born that functions as a sanctuary of sanity within the totalitarian world.
Havel explains this strategy in his book, “The Power of the Powerless.”
As noted by Desmet, totalitarianism will always self-destruct in the end.
The psychological underpinnings are so self-destructive that the system falls apart.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is a totalitarian system can survive for long periods of time before petering out, and there tend to be few survivors at the end…
That said, Desmet believes this new global totalitarianism is more unstable than regional dictator-led totalitarian systems, so it may self-destruct faster.
So,
the key is to survive outside the totalitarian system while we wait for it to self-destruct…
However, we must still dissent in word and deed, in order to limit the atrocities and mitigate the damage.
Ultimately, as in medicine,
preventing totalitarianism is far easier than trying to break free later.
To do that, we need to prevent the four root causes of mass formation in society:
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social isolation
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purposelessness
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free-floating discontent/anxiety
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free-floating frustration/aggression…
This will be the task of those who remain once this global totalitarianism experiment fails and falls.
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Sources and References
by Allan Stevo
November 14, 2020
from LewRockwell Website
You might think that wearing a mask and social distancing is about your health, but you are wrong:
It is about conditioning and control to drive the world into Technocracy and Scientific Dictatorship.
The real issue is, will you comply or not?
The Question I’ve Wanted to Answer for Twenty Years is Suddenly So Clear to Me
Shortly after the turn of this century, I found myself standing in one of the halls of political power in former Czechoslovakia, after hearing the umpteenth horror story from communism, and saying to myself,
“I wish I could live through a little bit of communism to see how normal people allowed it to all happen.”
You see, I just couldn’t believe how this stable and prosperous interwar democracy could find itself in the throes of Stalinist communism and its psychological turmoil.
It was shortly after World War II though, in 1948, that the communists came to power and there was a lot of “new normal” to deal with after the horrors of war.
Akin to our current era, there was even a period of Czechoslovak communism called “normalizacia” or normalization.
What was this thing called normalization?
It was the “second wave” of Stalinism led by the old guard, a return after the liberalization of the 1968 Prague Spring to the most oppressive communism, a “new normal.”
Normalization lasted from the fall of 1968 until November 17, 1989, when a peaceful revolution was set into place in former Czechoslovakia.
The Normalities of Life Under Communism
From the surveillance state, to the uranium mines for political prisoners, along with other horrific impacts for thinking the wrong thing:
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no college for your kids
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no permission to pursue your desired career path
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no permission to travel (unless you were really awful, hard to repress, and they wanted to get rid of you),
…to the total control of almost all aspects of life for all people, political prisoner or not, to the total domination of media and culture for the political ends of government, in which there was even well-funded and encouraged official culture and unofficial culture.
If you stayed obedient, you were mostly treated okay compared to the others.
If you got close to the most powerful, you were treated better.
Within a few years, no one in society – from the highest echelon down – was living all that well.
As time went on, the difference between west and east grew more stark.
Virtually everything was chintzy in the east.
How could a people put up with it?
How could anyone treat this as ‘normal’?
The stories I heard from so many seemingly normal and logical people in my many lengthy visits to post communist countries was,
“It was all so normal” and “We never realized anything was wrong with it.”
Plenty will also speak openly about the abnormality of it all.
To this day, in the post-communist lands, large percentages of the population, who are more comfortable being obedient to authority than figuring out how to add value in the world around them, lament the shift from communism.
Some people such as that have not made the shift to the logical and generous environment of capitalism very well.
They miss the warm paternalistic embrace of being a lackey in communist society.
As I write this, on Friday, November 13, 2020, seven months into our free trial of corona communism, on the 241st day of lockdown in this most heavily locked down American city in which I hang my hat, I’m beginning to see the many similarities that made it all so possible for the people of Czechoslovakia to see it as all so ‘normal’…
Compliance Is at The Heart of Totalitarianism
I stood with a European two weeks ago as he intimated to me the descent of the world into a state of compliance at all cost, and he related those details from his corner of the world since World War II, imbued with the memories of his forefathers.
Totalitarianism is compliance.
Compliance brings totalitarianism.
Whether it be more like fascism or communism matters little, widespread individual compliance inevitably leads a society to a bad place.
Lack of compliance is generally protective to the individual in the early days of totalitarianism as the non-compliant are not worth the trouble.
How Does Your Compliance Benefit You or Anyone Else?
The benefit of compliance to the individual in the present era of corona communism is unclear and unquestioned.
The insistence to comply is the primary definition of what is taking place today. There is no rigorous reason to it. There is no prevailing logic to it. There is certainly no genuine public debate.
Many governments and cultures in a self-perpetuating loop of fear that has been stoked and re-stoked have shifted toward this totalitarian demand toward compliance at all cost.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo even admits to happily riding the tide rather than leading.
The Empire State Fear-Monger Criticizes his Work
Cuomo, seemingly the biggest reactionary of all state governors instead of leading, tries to claim cynically that he rides the wave of fear, while blaming others for the fear-mongering behavior that he engages in that so feeds that fear.
On a Tuesday, October 6, 2020 (h/t Robert Wenzel) conference call, trying to make peace with Orthodox Jewish leaders who he later “stabbed in the back,” by their account, Cuomo calls his government’s corona response an over-reaction:
“I’m a hundred percent frank and candid.
This is not a highly nuanced, sophisticated response. This is a fear-driven response, you know. This is not a policy being written by a scalpel; this is a policy being cut by a hatchet. It’s just very blunt.
I didn’t propose this, you know; it was proposed by the Mayor [Bill de Blasio] in the City. I’m trying to sharpen it and make it better. But it’s out of fear.
People see the numbers going up – ‘Close everything! Close everything!’ It’s not the best way to do it, but it is a fear-driven response. The virus scares people.
Hopefully, we get the numbers down in the zip codes, the anxiety comes down, and then we can have a smarter, more-tailored approach.
Your point is right: why close every school? Why don’t you test the schools and close the ones that have a problem? I know, but, first, I don’t know that we have the resources to do that now.
But I can tell you honestly, the fear is too high to do anything other than,
‘Let’s do everything we can to get the infection rate down now, close the doors, close the windows.’
That’s where we are.”
This is The Predictable Outcome of Leaving Technocrats in Charge
Can anyone be surprised when a member of the technocratic class approaches a perfectly healthy human and instead of choosing the humbling “If it any broke then don’t try to fix it” approach, attempts the “Let’s do everything we can” approach?
This is their “professional deformation” as the Slovaks like to say about technocrats and a handful of other professionals, who have a hard time separating themselves from their career.
This over-reaction, which we euphemistically call “overkill,” a term that can both literally and appropriately be applied to Cuomo’s lethal corona response, is exactly what is to be expected of the technocratic class.
This is why a sane person places no trust in them.
They think they are miracle-workers, and they treat the state they serve as god-like.
At their hands, we will be led to totalitarianism, provided that they continue to encounter a compliant population.
The Formula our Technocratic Class has Borrowed from The Totalitarians of The Last Century
Though this can be elaborated on quite a bit after two decades of interviewing people and trying to make sense of communism, below is the formula that brought totalitarianism to vast portions of the globe and that is now being used in the United States (and the world):
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Find a stressful situation.
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Stoke fear.
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Implement a new normal.
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It will quickly perpetuate itself as useful idiots, useful innocents, confidence men, and many others collaborate in a self-fulfilling spiral.
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Once a threshold has been breached, Frankenstein’s monster turns on Dr. Frankenstein and runs rampant for some decades hence.
This predictable equation is what I have, in disbelief, never imagined could be implemented on a society without watching it first hand.
I just could never imagine such drastic, measurable, toxic, self-sabotaging, and total change over such nonsense in under a year. I’m watching it first hand in my American homeland.
So many more died from the lockdown than from Covid, and the immeasurable horrors of the response to Covid beyond that will long be felt in society, even if we return to the old normal today.
I’m also watching this strange attitude get exported to vast portions of the globe, though I can’t travel to those places, so I remain skeptical about the veracity of the scattered reports.
Just like the “free” media of post-communist former Czechoslovakia, a great number of stories in many foreign newspapers are merely plagiaristic local translations or of New York Times stories or similar coverage.
52 Weeks In Slovakia
Having studied this topic of totalitarianism obsessively for the past two decades, I am most grateful for the knowledge I have that prepares me for this moment.
For those in doubt, just have a glance at the last decade of my writing in the website 52 Weeks in Slovakia, (www.52insk.com) which was started as a response to the awful coverage of the American media and also the Western-influenced Slovak media on domestic coverage of Slovakia.
The website is a slow, decade-long awakening.
In time, I learned a few details about those who successfully avoid the totalitarian.
The Individual Solution to Avoiding Totalitarianism
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You can’t change anyone but yourself.
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That means you can’t change society. Society may follow your lead, but you can’t guarantee that any action you take may change another. Even the most extreme regimes have learned this.
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This may be sad to some, but this can also be liberating, for the good news is that you need only focus on yourself and those entrusted to you (who you also can’t change, but who you can lead and be a model for).
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You can,
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choose to be compliant with your own will
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choose to be compliant with your Creator’s will
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choose to be compliant with the most trendy, base trends of pop culture
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choose to be compliant with the most twisted sycophants and sociopaths of media and culture
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choose to be compliant with the most perverse laws and orders of government…
That choice is 100% yours. The easy choice is to make no choice, no decision, no commitment, but unless you are as spineless as they come, if you make that easy choice, boy will you hate yourself and where you end up.
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Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. You are the sum of the five people you most associate with. Who you associate with (for now) remains your choice.
Choose wisely, because plenty of people are working hard day-and-night in the nexuses of power: in DC, Arlington, Langley, big cities, state capitals, Silicon Valley, and many other places around the world to deny you that most basic freedom of association.
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“What if there is uncomfortable pushback?” you may ask. Well, I’m sorry, that’s life and you need to choose your place in life. As Stephen Baskerville writes “He who is afraid to anger or offend is not yet a man.”
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The choice then is this one, and this one alone. Will you be compliant or not…?
Will You Be Compliant or Not?
Because,
if you will wear the face mask, then you will take the vaccine.
If you will wear the face mask, you will believe the election results.
If you will wear the face mask, you will accept the lockdown.
If you will wear the face mask, you will let your mother die alone.
If you will wear the face mask, you will let your son be buried with no funeral.
If you will wear the face mask, when historians one day call it necessary and normal, you will agree.
If you will wear the face mask, then 2020 will be tolerable to you, and you will learn to adapt to the worst in humanity, rather than to demand the best.
When you wear the face mask, you tell the world that you are someone who will not identify his boundaries, communicate his boundaries, or defend his boundaries.
You are instead someone with flexible boundaries, waiting for the right confidence man to walk all over you…
How Totalitarian Regimes Engulfed Half the World
How did totalitarian regimes engulf half the world in the Century of the Great State (1917-2016)…?
That’s simple.
By getting its people to “wear” lots of different “face masks”…
What choices are you making at this moment in order to spread greater liberty in the world?
If you don’t have clear answers, you’re probably part of the mass marching us toward normalizacia.
The ‘new normal’…
by Bruno Waterfield
September 17, 2022
from Spiked-Online Website
His defense of freedom
flies in the face of
all that is woke and regressive today.
Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something.
For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language.
He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully, about the threat it posed to our freedom.
He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning.
That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.
And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today.
Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more…!
Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time
The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell.
Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state.
They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.
Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations.
They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom.
These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell.
As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England‘:
‘All the culture that is most truly native centers round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’
Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR.
But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too.
He was concerned about the Sovietization of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties.
He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanized intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR.
And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.
Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general.
They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power.
They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviors and attitudes.
This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it,
‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.
Edmond O’Brien as Winston Smith
and Jan Sterling as Julia,
 in an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
03 June 1955
In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy.
It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.
Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy.
He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped.
He was not part of the clerisy’s world.
He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such.
On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.
Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing.
He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927.
And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinized left.
The hostility was mutual…
Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travelers continue to display towards Orwell today.
The importance of words
Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning.
Just think, for example, of the way in which,
our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government,
…a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia – 1938).
Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality.
Orwell would not have been surprised by this development.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview.
Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality.
‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual.
‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation.
As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:
‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.
And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’
As Orwell wrote elsewhere,
‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course.
From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’
This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times‘ 1619 Project to statue-toppling.
History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.
But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control.
Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak.
Newspeak is more than mere censorship.
It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible.
It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thought-crime’).
As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:
‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought.
In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller…
Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated.
In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police.
There is little of that in our societies today:
people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.
However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thought-crime.
And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing.
Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realized in an openly dictatorial manner.
No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.
The intellectual turn against freedom
But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish.
As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realization of their worldview.
Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organization, English PEN.
Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton‘s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticize Soviet Russia or wartime censorship.
Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.
‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.
Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of,
‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’.
The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.
An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is,
‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.
These are insights which have stood the test of time.
Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus.
They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.
And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged.
This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age.
Free speech does not support privilege…!
We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC.
But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.
Orwell’s legacy
Orwell is everywhere today.
He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture.
But his value and importance to us lies in his defense of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.
mmm
His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.
Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry.
Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language‘ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’.
He said:
‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate.
It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’
Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:
‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope.
He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively.
He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men.
That is why he is a figure for us.’
Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself.
As he put it in The Prevention of Literature,
‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’.
That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself.
He sets an example and a challenge to us all.
Temple of Set Reading List: Category 14
Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Magic
Reprinted from: “The Crystal Tablet of Set” (c) Temple of Set 1989 CE Weirdbase file version
by TS permission by Michael A. Aquino, Ipsissimus VI* Temple of Set
This is a very potent, controversial, and dangerous area of magic, whose implications are rarely examined, understood, or appreciated by the profane [which is just as well]. Much of the data concerning it derives from Nazi Germany, whose character as a state based upon magical rather than conventional principles goes a long way towards explaining the “peculiar” fascination which that episode continues to exert on students of history and political science. Many of the techniques pioneered or perfected by the Nazis continue to be used/abused – generally in a superficial and ignorant fashion – by every country of the world in one guise or another.
The magician who can recognize and identify these techniques and the principles behind them can thus control or avoid their influence as desired. 14A. “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” by Wilhelm Reich. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1970. (TS-3)
MA: “The controversial Reich examined both the Nazi and the communist elements of Germany, found them wanting, and was roundly denounced by them in return. This book exposes their use of mass movements and mob psychology as a sexual substitute, and their repression of ‘innocent’ sex as a deliberate political technique [compare #14E]. This manipulation of expression and repression is applied to other social phenomena as well – such as certain organized religious bodies. A lucid and hard-hitting study.
A biographical profile of Reich is presented in #6N, Appendix 75 – ‘The Frankenstein Legacy’.” 14B. “The Occult and the Third Reich” by Jean-Michel Angebert. NY: Macmillan, 1974. (TS-3) (OT-3)
MA: “This book contains sections on the Grail (both Christian and pagan), traditions concerning Atlantis and ancient initiatory societies, the theories of Nietzsche and Wagner, Nazi mysticism, and the Catharist tradition. Well footnoted.
The almost fantastic subject material tends to make the author’s objectivity suspect, but on close examination his argument is grounded in responsible research. On the other hand Otto Rahn, the young German mystic whose theories are advanced in this book did not hold the alleged high rank in the SS, nor commit suicide because of politico/mystical reasons. He was an Unterscharfuehrer (sergeant) who killed himself after being expelled from the SS because of his sexual preferences.” 14C. “The Grail Legend” by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970. (TS-4) (OT-1)
MA: “Another book for the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology [see also #19K], this impressive study treats all major historical versions of the Grail legend, identifies their common features, and evaluates their significance.
The definitive work on the Grail. See also #6N, Appendix 36 – In Quest of the Unholy Grail.” 14D. “The Spear of Destiny” by Trevor Ravenscroft. NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973. (TS-3) (OT-3)
MA: “The chief merit of this book lies in its profile of the metaphysical and occult-society concepts and movements that influenced pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany. Read critically but thoughtfully. Since it is heavily footnoted to Theosophical Society (Blavatsky) and Anthrosophical Society (Steiner) sources, this book cannot be considered factually reliable.” 14E. “1984” by George Orwell. NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1949. (TS-3)
MA: “Orwell’s classic portrait of a ‘negative utopia’, with many features adapted from Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – but also a satire of socialist trends in postwar Britain.
Many features of Orwell’s imaginary society may be increasingly applied to actual ones today. The shape of things to come?” 14F. “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943. (TS-5) (OT-3)
MA: “Everyone knows that this is ‘the most evil book ever written’, but few have taken the time to actually read it, hence cannot really explain why. Further complicating the situation is Hitler’s interspersion of political philosophy (interesting) with emotional tirades (not so interesting). Look for the discussions concerning the selection of leaders, control of the masses, and the justification for human social organization. You may be surprised at what you discover.
Keep in mind that this book was written not as a historical memoir, but rather as a propaganda device to lend an image of philosophical substance and coherence to the still-fledgling and somewhat [due to Hitler’s incarceration in prison at the time of MK’s writing] disorganized Nazi Party. A far more revealing ‘Hitler Memoir’ is #14K.” 14G. “Hitler: Legend, Myth, & Reality” by Werner Maser. NY: Harper & Row, 1971. (TS-3)
MA: “As time passes, biographical profiles of Hitler become increasingly more objective. This is probably the most useful one currently in print, which Colin Wilson calls ‘the most important document on Hitler so far published’. It is noteworthy for its focus on the man rather than on the political official [for the political official see #14H]. If you are going to take a look at Hitler’s own writings and statements (#14F/K/L), read this first for perspective.” 14H. “The War Path” (NY: Viking, 1978) and Hitler’s War (2 volumes) (NY: Viking, 1977) by David Irving. (TS-4)
MA: “1933-39 (WP) and 1939-45 (HW) through Hitler’s eyes. An impressive work of research that will show you peacetime Nazi Germany and World War II as you’ve never seen them before. Sound scholarship, objective evaluation.” 14I. “The Bormann Brotherhood” by William Stevenson. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. (TS-3)
MA: “Around VI-VII the pursuit of underground Nazi- survivalist organizations was all the rage, and there was a flurry of Bormannism, ODESSA films/novels, etc. This little book was sort of overwhelmed in the general stampede, but it didn’t deserve to be. A cold, clear, fact-packed study of the post-World War II survival of the original Nazi hierarchy.” 14J. “Three Faces of Fascism” by Ernst Nolte. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963. (TS-4)
MA: “This is a political science text analyzing 20th- century fascist movements in France, Germany, and Italy. The observations concerning the metapolitical implications of the philosophy are among the most profound yet voiced.
The analysis of the failure of the French movement is as instructive as that of the successes of the German and Italian movements. It is interesting to contrast Nolte’s assessment of fascism with Hitler’s [as set forth in #14F].” 14K. “Hitler’s Secret Conversations 1941-1944” by H.R. Trevor-Roper (Ed.). NY: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953 [simultaneously published in England as “Hitler’s Table Talk” by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London]. (TS-5) (OT-3)
MA: “Martin Bormann was sufficiently fascinated by Adolf Hitler’s private conversational comments on various topics that he persuaded Hitler to allow them to be stenographically recorded. After 1945 the transcriptions were found among Bormann’s private papers and were ultimately compiled and published by Professor Trevor-Roper (who also edited and published the final entries of Dr. Goebbels’ diaries). Hitler’s conversations cover an astonishingly broad spectrum of topics – organized religion, metaphysics, dogmatism, Voltaire, origins of the human race, aesthetics, Egyptian & Greek culture, Hoerbiger’s cosmology, genius, philosophy of law, superstition, mental diseases, etc. An impressive look into the mind of an individual whom the postwar world has been conditioned to dismiss as a crude, criminal, and unintrospective thug. Read, then judge for yourself.” 14L.
“The Voice of Destruction” by Hermann Rauschning. NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940. (TS-5) (OT-3)
MA: “Rauschning was a regional party leader (Gauleiter) of the early Nazi Party who was a confidant of Hitler’s during 1932-34. At first so impressed with the F~hrer’s private statements that he took extensive and immediate notes, he later took fright and bolted to Paris. In 1937-38 he wrote a theoretical condemnation of Nazism entitled The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (NY: Alliance Book Corporation, 1939).
It seemed so alarmist that few took it seriously – until World War II broke out. Then Rauschning was able to publish these transcripts and analyses of Hitler’s conversations. Topics include: Aristocracy, Antichrist, barbarism, ethics of war, a new social order, the Human Solstice, Black & White Magic, and the mystical elements in Obersalzburg. Most of the material for Nazi occultism quoted and alluded to in #4B came from this book. It was generally regarded as so “weird” as to be spurious until after the war, when the #14K material came to light and substantiated it.” 14M. “Hitler’s Secret Sciences” by Nigel Pennick. Suffolk: Neville Spearman, 1981. (TS-4) (OT-1)
MA: “The esoteric section of the German Nazi SS was not the Sicherheitsdienst [as alleged in #6L] but the Deutsche Ahnenerbe (German Ancestral Heritage Organization). Most histories of the SS concern themselves with the better-known organizations and activities of the Black Order, mentioning the Ahnenerbe only in passing.
This is one of the first books to discuss it in any detail. Again there is a lot of #14B/C/D material, but it is all relevant and coherently organized. This is a concise (177 pages), fact-packed book bolstered by a strong bibliography of rare and unusual publications and periodicals. If you are seriously interested in the Ahnenerbe, and are fluent in highly-technical German, see Kater, Michael H., “Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS 1935-1945: ein Betrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches” (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974). [The complete archaeological, magical, and administrative records of the Ahnenerbe are contained on microfilm rolls #120-211, Microcopy T-580 (10-135-4) in the National Archives Building of the United States, Washington, D.C.
These papers have never been sorted, indexed, and annotated in detail, but the Order of the Trapezoid has compiled a working index with brief annotations pending a more thorough study. Initiates of the Order who may be traveling to Washington and wish to examine that microfilm are invited to contact the Temple office for a copy of the index.] [See also #5H.]” 14N. “The Passing of the Great Race” by Madison Grant. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916. (TS-5)
MA: “You can still find #14F in print, because it’s a good whipping-boy for sanctimonous finger-waggling. It is less easy to find the books from ‘our side’ that argued along similar lines.
This is [was!] one of the more famous, and you may still uncover an occasional copy in the back room of a used-book store or in the darkest corners of obscure libraries. Grant was not exactly a nonentity or lunatic-fringe fanatic. He was Chairman of the New York Zoological Society, Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, and a Councilor of the American Geographical Society. In this book [by a prominent publisher] he argues a forceful case for a European race history that would have done credit to Hitler and Rosenberg. The most interesting aspect of this book is that only a very few years ago it was accepted as a respectable contender in the academic/scientific community. After World War II it was, in Orwell’s terms, guilty of Crimethink and thus condemned to be an Unperson.
There is a lesson to be learned here concerning the durability and invulnerability of ‘established scientific fact’ when it becomes politically or socially inconvenient. I hereby suggest that you make up your own mind as to whether the book is convincing. After all, I wouldn’t want to get in trouble for even appearing to endorse it.” 14O. “Race and Race History and Other Essays” by Alfred Rosenberg (Robert Pois, Ed.). NY: Harper & Row (Harper Torchback #TB-1820), 1974. (TS-5)
MA: “Extracts from the major race-history writings of the Nazis’ ‘official philosopher’ – with a finger-waggling introduction, of course. It is O.K. for this book to be in print; it has the appropriate editorial condemnation. [See also #14S.]” 14P. “Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power” by Robert Strausz-Hupe. NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942. (TS-4)
MA: “The study of international relations on the basis of power politics is academically known as political realism (Realpolitik), and before reading #14P you might want to flip through the bible of this school, Hans Morgenthau’s “Politics Among Nations”, for a general familiarity with its principles.
In 1926 and 1928 Oswald Spengler published his powerful indictment of contemporary Western civilization, “The Decline of the West”, and this made a great impression on a German General named Karl Haushofer. Haushofer became a professor who gained increasing fame in Germany as the master-theoretician of ‘Geopolitics’, being a part-political, part-geographic, and part-mystical rationale for aggressive state expansionism. Haushofer was considered by many to be the evil genius behind Hitler’s ‘blood and soil’ and ‘living- space’ programs.
He wrote no single, coherent text of his philosophy. This book was commissioned in order to explain Geopolitics to a still- uncomprehending U.S. diplomatic community, and it does a good job. Geopolitical thinking was out of favor in the West until reintroduced by Henry Kissinger (a Morgenthau enthusiast), but it has always been the lynchpin of Eastern (Soviet/Chinese) foreign policy. Strausz-Hupe summarizes: ‘World policy evolves towards several continental systems, and technology accentuates the strategic importance of large, contiguous areas.
Thus the era of overseas empires and free world trade closes. If this reasoning is pushed to its absolute conclusion, the national state is also a thing of the past, and the future belongs to the giant state. Many nations will be locked in a few vast compartments. But in each of these one people, controlling a strategic area, will be master of the others.'” 14Q. “Wewelsburg 1933 bis 1945: SS Kult- und Terrorstaette” by Prof. Dr. Karl Hueser. Paderborn: Verlag Bonifatius Druckerei, 1982 (German language edition only). (TS-5) (OT-5)
MA: “The definitive documentary study of the role of the Wewelsburg Castle in the mythological and Black Magical practices of the SS.
This is a historical, not an ‘occult’ publication; in the first few paragraphs it easily discounts the fanciful, ignorant accounts of the Wewelsburg such as appear in #14B/D/N/R, etc. Here is bedrock: bewildering to some, but a Gate to the Order of the Trapezoid.” 14R. “Hitler: The Occult Messiah” by Gerald Suster. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. (TS-3)
MA: “This is a short (200-page) hardcover book which brings together most if not all of the occult speculations concerning Nazi Germany, with a reasonable degree of footnoting.
Hence it is included here as a good introductory survey of the field. Extensive quotations from Crowley and an ‘AEon of Horus’ theme throughout the text expose the author’s Thelemite bias.” 14S. “The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology” by Robert Cecil. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1972. (TS-4) (OT-3)
MA: “The best biography and critical analysis concerning Alfred Rosenberg, ‘official philosopher’ of the Nazi movement. Much of the material otherwise in existence concerning Rosenberg is suppressed by the Soviet Union, while previous Western biographies and editions of his memoirs were crudely edited to portray him as more of a monster than a human being, much less a philosopher. Nevertheless Cecil is no apologist for Rosenberg, bringing out his weaknesses as well as his strengths.
This book also describes the ideological background and climate of Nazi Germany as a whole, and summarizes the main arguments of Rosenberg’s “Myth of the Twentieth Century”. [A 1982 English translation by Vivian Bird of Rosenberg’s “The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of our Age” is available from Noontide Press, 1822-1/2 Newport Blvd. #183, Costa Mesa, CA 92627, USA.][See also #14O.]” 14T. “Metapolitics from the Romantics to Hitler” by Peter Viereck. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941. (TS-4) (OT-1)
MA: “This is quite simply the definitive history and analysis of the Germanic mystical and magical tradition as it has been applied to society and politics.
No other political analysis of Nazi Germany compares with it, and an understanding of the Nazi phenomenon is impossible without it. Major sections deal with Romanticism, life-worship, Kultur, dynamism, Wagner, Chamberlain, Fichte, Hegel, Rosenberg, and Hitler.” 14U. “For Freedom Destined: Mysteries of Man’s Evolution in the Mythology of Wagner’s “Ring” Operas and “Parsifal”” by Franz E. Winkler. Garden City, NY: Waldorf Press, 1974. (TS-4) (OT-1)
MA: “The definitive study of the magical and philosophical aspects of the “Ring” and “Parsifal” operas. From the book: ‘When we think of the origin of man, we insist illogically on confusing the history of his purely biological being with the history of his spirit; the latter defies any attempt at investigation by methods we now call scientific.
Darwin and his followers deal with the emergent evolution of visible man, while on the other hand religion and mythology deal with the evolution of his invisible soul. In his cycle of the “Ring” and “Parsifal”, Wagner uses the magic power of music, words, and scenery to open man’s heart to the history of the hidden essence of his own self, and to the changing forces that are active behind the sensory phenomena of man and Earth.'” 14V. “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. NY: Harper & Row, 1951. (TS-3) (OT- 3)
MA: “Hoffer’s thoughtful study of the mind of the fanatic and of the various media through which such a mind attempts to fulfill itself – religious, political, or social.
It is particularly instructive to compare Hoffer’s theses with the experiences of Hitler, Himmler, and Rosenberg as treated elsewhere in this reading-list category. The book’s strong point is Hoffer’s famed common-sense, but this same feature is also its weak point, because it is obvious that Hoffer is not aware of [or does not understand] the principles discussed, for example, in #14T.” 14W. “Astrology and the Third Reich” by Ellic Howe. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1984. (TS-3) (OT-3)
MA: “A historical study of astrological beliefs in Western Europe since 1700, with special emphasis on German astrology during 1919-1930 and in Nazi Germany.
A revised and expanded edition of Howe’s earlier “Urania’s Children”, this book also presents and critiques basic astrological theory and explores the Lesser Magical use of astrology as a psychological warfare device during World War II. Howe, in addition to being the author of #10F and a contributor to #4E, served in Britain’s Political Warfare Executive during World War II.” 14X. “The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany 1890-1935” by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1985. (TS-3) (OT-3)
MA: “This new and very scholarly book fills a crucial need in the study of 20th-century Germanic occultism, namely a detailed and non-sensationalistic account of Guido von List’s Armanenschaft, Joerg Lanz von Liebenfels’ Order of New Templars, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff’s Thule Gesellschaft. Also profiled is SS-Oberfuehrer Karl Wiligut, occult counselor to Heinrich Himmler and architect of such projects as the Wewelsburg restoration and the SS-Totenkopf ring. This book is a revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis at Oxford.”
by Charles Hugh Smith
September 06, 2016
from CharlesHughSmith Website
The truth is we have more in common with people of different ethnicities and religions than we can possibly know in a totalitarian system drenched in the divisive propaganda of identity politics.
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Identity politics are the core of every totalitarian state.
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Identity politics were the beating heart of Nazism, and the core strategy of the USSR’s liquidation of kulaks and other groups identified as enemies of the state.
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Identity politics eliminate the potential for class consciousness that crosses ethnic and religious boundaries.Â
As noted yesterday in ‘Our Impoverished, Pathological Society,’Â
“race is not a significant determinant of social polarization in today’s America. It is class that really matters.”
Identity politics divide and fragment the debt-serf class into ethnic and religious silos that are propagandized into viewing each other as enemies rather than colleagues.Â
The core of identity politics is if you fail to vote the party line, you are a traitor to your race/religion.
The appeal to ethnic/religious identity as the sole definition of political selfhood is the perfect tool for manipulating the masses – and this is why the only possible output of identity politics is totalitarianism.
In the U.S. both political parties deploy identity politics, but the Democrats in particular depend on the,
“if you don’t vote the Democratic ticket, you’re a traitor to your race”,
…line of propaganda.
The goal of both parties is of course identical:
to fragment the bottom 90% who actually share common cause into ethnic, religious and secular silos that cannot possibly threaten the power elite’s hold on the nation’s wealth and power.
If you fall for identity politics, then you’re complicit in an oppressive, parasitic system that aggregates most of the wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.
This chart shows that the bottom 99% received essentially zero income gains since 2009, but even those in the top 1% who earn their living have treaded water compared to the top 1/10th of 1%Â that own most of the nation’s capital and have used it to buy political power.
95% of Income Gains Since 2009 went to the Top 1%:
Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez put out an update to his estimates of income inequality, and the headline figure has everybody outraged: 95% of income gains since 2009 have accrued to the top 1%.
The favorite tool of fascists and totalitarian states is identity politics, for obvious reasons:
Appealing to ethnic and religious identities fires up our built-in engines of identity and our propensity for “us vs. them” divisions.
The truth is we have more in common with people of different ethnicities and religions than we can possibly know in a totalitarian system drenched in the divisive propaganda of identity politics.
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by Patrick Wood
March 07, 2017
from Technocracy Website
Zbigniew Brzezinski (National Security Advisor),
President Jimmy Carter and
Cyrus Vance (Secretary of State)
For some reason, a few recent articles have surfaced that resurrect a 1973 report of the Trilateral Commission titled, The Crisis Of Democracy.
Antony Sutton and I co-authored Trilaterals Over Washington, Volume I in 1979, fully exposing the plans of this elite group that was formed in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The Crisis of Democracy, by Trilaterals,
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Michel Crozier (Europe)
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Samuel Huntington (US)
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Joni Watanuki (Japan),
…was one of the very first authoritative reports issued by the Trilateral Commission.
If you have a mind and the time to read this 168 page tome, it can be seen here. Suffice it to say that Sutton and I did read every word in 1977 and referenced it several times in our subsequent books. Here are two excerpts.
With reference to the Trilateral takeover of the Carter Administration:
The significance of this lock on the legislative process is brought into focus when we examine the political ideology of Trilateralism as expressed by Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki in The Crisis of Democracy.
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The democratic political system no longer has any purpose
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The concepts of equality and individualism give problems to authority
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The media is not sufficiently subservient to the elite
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Democracy has to be ‘balanced’ (i.e., restricted)
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The authority and power of the central government must be increased.
Weighing these totalitarian ideas which form the political philosophy of the Commission against congressional membership… (p. 22)
On the appointment of eighteen Trilaterals to the Carter cabinet and Administration:
The Crisis in Democracy is devoted to the theme that the American system needs to be discarded and totalitarianism central authority substituted.
Why was there no public outcry? Simply because media reporting was superficial and stifled.
While the majority people today are wringing their hands over activities of the left or right (take your pick, depending on your orientation), virtually none of these realize that this was thoroughly exposed almost forty years ago!
Although Sutton and I sold over 75,000 volumes of Trilaterals Over Washington, spoke and lectured extensively and appeared on hundreds of radio programs, America did not listen, much less act on it.
Nevertheless, because America was duly warned in time to take action, its destruction is now on its own head.
This applies to both the political left and right:
you have both been suckered into thinking you must fight the “other” side.
This has always been a false narrative and the Trilateral Commission has taken full advantage of it, having escaped any responsibility for bringing American to its knees.
If I were not an American, it would be tempting to say, “Good riddance”. But alas, I cannot: my own children and grandchildren are at stake.
The clear and present danger today (Technocracy, brought to us by members of the Commission) is far greater than the 1970s, and the window of opportunity is virtually closed.
In the meantime, we must NOT succumb to apathy, fatalism or suppression, but rather we must sternly warn everyone who has an ear to listen…
by André Marques
December 09, 2022
from Mises Website
The Federal Reserve (FED) is sowing the seeds for its central bank digital currency (CBDC).
It may seem that the purpose of a CBDC is to facilitate transactions and enhance economic activity, but CBDCs are mainly about more government control over individuals.
If a CBDC were implemented, the central bank would have access to all transactions in addition to being capable of freezing accounts.
It may seem dystopian – something that only totalitarian governments would do – but there have been recent cases of asset freezing in Canada and Brazil.
Moreover, a CBDC would give the government the power to determine how much a person can spend, establish expiration dates for deposits, and even penalize people who saved money.
The war on cash is also a reason why governments want to implement CBDCs.
The end of cash would mean less privacy for individuals and would allow central banks to maintain a monetary policy of negative interest rates with greater ease (since individuals would be unable to withdraw money commercial banks to avoid losses).
Once the CBDC arrives, instead of a deposit being a commercial bank’s liability, a deposit would be the central bank’s liability.
In 2020, China launched a digital yuan pilot program.
As mentioned by Seeking Alpha, China wants to implement a CBDC because,
“this would give [the government] a remarkable amount of information about what consumers are spending their money on.”
The government could easily track digital payments with a CBDC.
Bloomberg noted in an article published when the digital yuan pilot program was launched that the digital currency,
“offers China’s authorities a degree of control never possible with cash.”
A CBDC could allow the Chinese government to monitor mobile app purchases (which accounted for about 16 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2020) more closely.
Bloomberg describes how much control a CBDC could give Chinese authorities:
The PBOC [People’s Bank of China] has also indicated that it could put limits on the sizes of some transactions, or even require an appointment to make large ones.
Some observers wonder whether payments could be linked to the emerging social-credit system, wherein citizens with exemplary behavior are “whitelisted” for privileges, while those with criminal and other infractions find themselves left out.
(Details on China’s social credit system can be found here.)
The Chinese government is waging war on cash. And they are not alone.
In 2017, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a document offering suggestions to governments – even in the face of strong public opposition – on how to move toward a cashless society.
Governments and central bankers claim that the shift to a cashless society will help prevent crime and increase convenience for ordinary people. But the real motivation behind the war on cash is more government control over the individual.
And the US is getting ready to establish its own CBDC (or something similar). The first step was taken in August, when the Fed announced FedNow.
FedNow will be an instant payment system and is scheduled to be launched between May and July 2023.
FedNow is practically identical to Brazil’s PIX.
PIX was implemented by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) in November 2020.
It is a convenient instant payment system (using mobile devices) without user fees, and a reputation as being safe to use.
A year after its launch, PIX already had 112 million people registered, or just over half of the Brazilian population.
Of course, frauds and scams do occur over PIX, but most are social engineering scams (see here, here, and here) and are not system flaws; that is, they are scams that exploit the public’s lack of knowledge of PIX technology.
Bear in mind that PIX is not the Brazilian CBDC. It is just a payment system…
However, the BCB has access to transactions made through PIX; therefore, PIX can be considered the seed of the Brazilian CBDC. It is already an invasion of the privacy of Brazilians. And FedNow is set to follow suit.
Additionally, the New York FED has recently launched a twelve-week pilot program with several commercial banks to test the feasibility of a CBDC in the US.
The program will use digital tokens to represent bank deposits. Institutions involved in the program will make simulated transactions to test the system.
According to Reuters,
“the pilot [program] will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.”
Banks involved in the pilot program include,
BNY Mellon, Citi, HSBC, Mastercard, PNC Bank, TD Bank, Truist, US Bank, and Wells Fargo…
The global financial messaging service provider SWIFT is also participating to,
“support interoperability across the international financial ecosystem.”
(This video details the pilot program and how the US CBDC would work.)
The IMF is also thinking of a way to connect different CBDCs under a single system.
In other words, the IMF plans to create a PIX/FedNow for CBDCs around the globe:
Things could change as money becomes tokenized; that is, accessible to anyone with the right private key and transferable to anyone with access to the same network.
Examples of tokenized money include so-called stablecoins, such as USD Coin, and central bank digital currency.
The reception of Brazil’s PIX shows that FedNow will likely be widely adopted due to its convenience.
However, this positive economic and technological element should not overshadow the increased control instant payment systems will give to central banks.
The BCB has access to all transactions made by Brazilians through PIX, and this would only get worse should a CBDC be implemented.
With a CBDC, it would be easier for the government to carry out expansionary monetary policies (which cause misallocations of resources and business cycles) and exert greater control over citizens’ finances.
by Patrick Henningsen
Special Issue Vol 15 No 6
Dec 2021
from NewDawn Website
If the last two years taught us anything, it’s that humanity is now at its most critical inflection point.
We stand at the precipice of a major turning in western civilization – the culmination of a millennium of human development, seminal events, knowledge, and culture.
It is undeniable, yet not at all clear, the direction we are headed, or what the future holds, and who will be around to see it come to fruition. We are not seers or prophets and cannot peer into the future, but we can read the signposts of the past and present.
We have a wealth of shared experience and a vast living memory – a collective consciousness updated and added to every day. If we search humanity’s archive, we find answers to many of these questions.
Those answers have always been available, gleaned from understanding ourselves, our journey as a family, and the human race.
French novelist Alphonse Karr famously coined the saying, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” or, the more things change, the more they are the same.
Yes, we have been here before.
Let’s step back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries – a time of upheavals and period of great turbulence on many human fronts – politically, spiritually, and technologically.
The western world was in the midst of an existential crisis as secularization brought with it two disruptive forces to the traditional order of knowledge and influence: the rise of the intellectual and mass media.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the world finds itself in a very similar impasse approximately a century later, with many of the same conditions present today, only on a much more pervasive level.
The parallels between then and now are astonishing.
This should not be viewed as ‘history repeating itself’ but rather as a more intense interlude of what had already come to pass – only this time events are unfolding at much greater speed, propelled by advances in communication technology on a global scale inconceivable to previous generations.
Such changes were equally profound in 1900, as were the transformations that took place across society.
As the 20th century approached, theology was supplanted by evolutionary science.
An ascendant Darwinian authority presided over existential questions like,
“Who are we?” and “What is man’s purpose?”…
Undoubtedly, this was a tumultuous time, intellectually and spiritually, with acrimony leading to heated exchanges between clergy and scientists, even leading to violent confrontations.
But, with its newfound status, it was inevitable the secular power of Darwinian science would colonize the political and social sciences before giving rise to the sordid science of curative breeding known as eugenics.
Recent history leaves no doubt that if left unrestrained by morals and ethics, wanton destruction and incredible suffering are wrought in the name of science and progress.
These forces of modernity materialize in today’s advances in genetic engineering that have brought us back to that point once again:
humanity faces the dilemma of resisting game-changing advances of technology and innovation or surrendering to it and prostrating at the altar of science and progress.
We are an entire century into a fully secularized society in the West.
Today’s tech gurus, vaccinologists, and public health officials now occupy positions of prestige and command the reverence once reserved for pontiffs, philosophers, and poet laureates.
The divine mysteries have given way to the ‘divine’ algorithm, and timeless sublime prose to the transience of the latest epidemiological model – from Gandhi to Gates, Whitman to Whitty, in just a few generations.
How else could a man like Dr Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old career gatekeeper for the transnational pharmaceutical cartel, still occupy the US government’s highest-paid job, and recently voted People Magazine‘s “sexiest man alive”?
Albert Camus once said,
“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
Indeed, if not for the wave of mass hysteria and fear that swept over the world in February 2020, few would even know of Dr Fauci, let alone revere him as a demigod.
On one level, we may be deluded into believing that today’s gaudy exhibitionists are mere frivolities of pure media spectacle, but behind the facade of political celebrity is an unforgiving ideology called technocracy.
You will often hear the trope that,
“more people have been killed over religion than anything else.”
If only it were true.
The 20th century serves as a potent reminder of the misleading nature of that statement, for no other century witnessed the sheer brutality and crimes against humanity on an industrial scale perpetrated in the name of various despotic interpretations of some variant of social Darwinism or political science, reaching levels of totalitarianism never seen before in human history.
There are too many examples:
WWI, WWII, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to name only a few…
In almost every instance, the preservation of secular dogma took precedence over the lives and souls of humans who were unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire of ‘progress’.
Fascism, socialism, communism, neoliberal capitalism – each would justify collateral damage as a means to achieving the goal of transformation or the formulation of a new order.
In the 21st century, the forces that inherited the mantle of power – the dynastic families and special interests – are preparing the next act in this worldly saga.
The Grand Narrative
So often it’s been said that in war, history is written by the victors, who impose what is known as the ‘living memory’ of a nation or people, chronicling a shared experience, generally of collective sacrifice undertaken for the greater good, and paying tribute to the martyrs along the way.
These become the narratives that post-war orders and worldviews are built upon, a central pillar around which the reorganization of society and economies occurs.
Without marshalling the “narrative,” a ruling establishment cannot lead and steer society in its direction of choice.
What happens in the absence of a bona fide world war? Can elites still construct an equally compelling living memory which the people can rally around?
Grand narrative management is precisely what Klaus Schwab‘s World Economic Forum (WEF) has been attempting from the onset of the global ‘pandemic’ crisis.
In 2021, the WEF announced its “Great Narrative” initiative, although evidence for this project can be traced much further back through a number of their documents and website presentations.
People distrust self-appointed elites
who are planning the future of society…
This internet ‘meme’ – of the ‘real’ Klaus Schwab – circulated on social media.
To create the requisite living memory, Schwab and the WEF replaced the usual military war piece with the new war on microbes.
“The ‘pandemic’ has revealed the acute need to focus on the future and long-term health of our societies,” said the globalist luminary.
While the rhetoric sounds innocuous, everything we’ve witnessed over the last 24 months proves beyond any doubt that their hyper-centralized ‘public health’ planning has little to do with the health of the individual and more about how the individual can be more effectively managed to serve the collective, that in turn is to be administered by the new technocracy.
The WEF is merely the latest avatar for this elitist ideology,
whose primary goal is always to meet the ruling oligarchy’s financial and consolidation goals and objectives…
This was true 100 years ago as it is today.
Just as with the global financial crash in 2008, when elites privatized their profits and socialized their losses through gargantuan government bailouts, so too will elites seek to consolidate their baronial individual asset wealth portfolios and privileged asset classes while demanding infinite self-sacrifice for everyone else… all for the greater good, of course…
It is also about managing expectations, as the WEF states:
“The Great Narrative Meeting [in November 2021] is a linchpin of the Great Narrative initiative, a collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.”
You might be asking:
what is their endgame…?
Put simply,
every new world order needs a financial reset, and in the WEF’s Great Reset, the plan is to intentionally overinflate and collapse the current fiat money system, reimagined and replaced by a new globalized economic system backed by a new superficial asset class under the guise of the “financialization of nature.”
That plan gained a significant foothold in October 2021 when the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange announced the creation of a new asset class that will effectively monetize the natural world as well as the processes underpinning all life.
All in the name of “sustainability”…
The lifeblood of this system will be a new Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which will be fully programmable, meaning that the currency issuer can stipulate how the digital money is spent.
This is the highest form of social engineering conceivable and can become the payment mechanism for Universal Basic Income, allowing the government issuer power over what you are allowed to purchase.
It could limit your transactions to green spending and ‘carbon-neutral’ activities. It’s also a system designed to eliminate upward mobility unless you gain promotion through the political economy.
It could lead to the ultimate victory of the technocracy.
However, its Achilles heel might be that,
it seeks to remake the world in such a short space of time, presumably so these masters of the universe can marvel at their ‘remarkable achievements’ in this lifetime – the ultimate act of hubris by these self-anointed stewards of the planet.
Oswald Spengler
When the technocracy movement first emerged in the early 20th century, contemporary thinkers raised the alarm that pseudo-intellectualism and the mechanized worldview augured an eventual collapse of western civilization.
The timeframe wasn’t clear, only that it was inevitable.
In his historical literary work, The Decline of the West (1928), Oswald Spengler described the event horizon that eventually consumes all major cultures, and which generally have a limited lifespan of roughly one thousand years.
He examined eight major civilizations as examples:
the Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indian, Greco-Roman, Mayan-Aztec, Arabian, and European-Western.
He envisioned the West being consumed by its intellectual vortex:
Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery, the media, that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama.
The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.
Now realize what is at stake…
The unconstrained vision of Davos elites may become the final revolution within a larger civilizational cycle.
The Covid-19 pseudo-‘pandemic‘ would be one of the catalyzing events in this process, followed by global cyber-war, and then finally ending in something more outrageous like a nuclear conflagration before ushering in a New World Order.
Such a protracted multi-phased upheaval would mark the end of the main features of modern western civilization:
the post-Westphalian nation-state, the era of enlightenment and rational thought, self-governing democracy and republican forms of government…
The world would move into what Zbigniew Brzezinski called a Technetronic Era.
Compared to the 20th century, this would more resemble a centralized command and control economy and a highly automated society. In terms of individual rights, it would look like a neo-feudal dark age.
This cycle was discussed by American writers William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book The Fourth Turning (1997), which illustrated how the development of Anglo-American society is a feature of a much larger centuries-old cycle.
Or, as Italian commentator Federico Dezzani describes it,
“like a snake biting its own tail over the span of a century, Anglo-American societies are born, grow, mature and die, only to rise again and begin a new cycle.”
The Noble Lie
In the end, it all comes back to Malthus – Malthusianism – which is ultimately the ideological standard hoisted by the likes of,
Schwab, Bill Gates, Stanley Johnson, Prince Charles, and globalist outfits like the Trilateral Commission…
These elites believe that the people must bear the brunt of this epic existential predicament of an overcrowded planet in a state of terminal decline due to man and his industrial exploits, which is said to be driving anthropogenic global warming to the point where Earth will be uninhabitable.
To save humanity from itself, we must be forced to accept that there are too many of us, so we play their globalist game of musical chairs. We know what they mean, but they won’t state their intentions openly, not yet anyway.
Only it’s not true…
In Plato‘s Republic, in the dialogue of the myth of the metals (social castes), Socrates explains that to maintain order and social continuity, the ruling class must act under the aegis of “the noble lie.”
This is based on the belief that from time to time,
the ruling class must feed the general populace an ennobling fiction to maintain order and continuity.
The noble lie is noble because it benefits the soul of the person who believes it.
From an elite’s perspective, this is done for their own good and that they might feel better about their station in life.
If you think about our living memory, or what happened in the West over the last half-century, it’s been a continuum of such lies, although hardly noble:
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the assassination of JFK
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the Gulf of Tonkin incident
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Saddam’s WMDs
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19 Arab hijackers on 9/11
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spreading freedom and democracy in Afghanistan
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overpopulation
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climate chaos
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Trump-Russian collusion
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Covid-19
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the Great Reset,
…and soon it will be the coming war on China…
Each epic yarn spun with the help of a 24/7 mainstream and social media barrage of propaganda and misinformation.
By brainwashing the population incessantly, the establishment creates the illusion of a ‘bottom-up consensus’, so much so that the people believe they’ve collectively arrived at a grassroots consensus.
Drifting out noble lies in the 21st century has become a pretty efficient process with the consensus enforced by digital dragnet: dare oppose any noble lie deployed by the globalist caste for your own good to ‘reimagine’ and reorganize socio-economic systems, and you’re treated the same as a blasphemer in medieval times:
Silenced, excommunicated, banished from view, and no longer permitted to speak in the public commons…
Deplatformed, depersoned, cancelled…
At the same time, however, a very real great awakening is also taking hold with a rising level of political and conscious awareness much broader and wide-ranging than anything before in human history.
This is a consequence of the same global panopticon wielded against the people by the elites.
Such awareness is the prerequisite to ultimate liberation, or as philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff once said,
“If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison.
If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”
Which brings us back to the philosophical and existential question:
Why are we here?
What is the purpose of humans on this planet?
Darwinian genetic science says we are here to promulgate our genes and advance the species.
On a fundamental level, this is what makes us human.
But the new green technocracy says this is no longer possible, and we must embrace a higher truth – a new altruism imbued in the Great Reset doctrine.
The irony is that collectively speaking, humanity might not survive this new ’empty planet’ initiative.
Elite technocrats will contend that only a planned society modeled after Huxley’s vision of a technocracy organized by functional castes and selective breeding in vitro can save the planet from the alleged existential menace of human consumption and climate change.
Whose compelling future is this?
Is this not the ‘scientific dictatorship’ that H.G. Wells foresaw, with a global government run by an elite committee of scientists and technocrats who hold the reins of power over every aspect of life and dictate how society is organized and run minute to minute?
This is unconstrained totalitarianism.
Under such a system, the individual will have no agency, no conscience, and eventually no soul.
The last 250 years have been an extraordinary progression from monarchies to democratic nations, in which the state eventually assumed a god-like status.
It set the stage for what is heading towards us now:
the advent of globalist transhumanism and a one-world unified state.
Far from being its crowning victory, this crescendo of technocracy and the perversion of ‘progress’ exposes how materialism and the scientific priesthood cannot satisfactorily answer the fundamental questions we’ve asked since time immemorial, those eternal questions and divine mysteries pursued by,
monks, sages, and sannyasi…
The forces of modernity cannot resolve this predicament, so people are left searching for something more grounded – where through the natural world they may also know the supernatural.
Once again, people reach for religion and spirituality to find meaning and purpose, including (and not surprising as one may think) the younger generation.
We should be under no illusion about the challenges lying before us. But even beyond an awareness of what you face, you need to have a vision of a world you wish to live in.
Elites have always been adept at occupying the minds of the people with propaganda, and the latest war or catastrophe, so we never settle long enough to formulate our vision of a compelling future.
Instead, our vision is mired,
in a never-ending procession of reactive emotions, leaving us vulnerable to the power of suggestion… and a ‘compelling future’ is instead continually served up to us by our rulers.
They create the problem (a noble lie) that elicits our reaction before they present us with a solution to which there is usually no alternative.
Make no mistake:
the great and the good in Davos are busy designing your ‘compelling future’, and if no other counter-narrative is offered, they will decide your future for you.
It’s that simple…
Qui tacet consentit.
Translated: your silence is your consent.
There is still much work to be done, but the work is never done. Throughout time, this has always been the case.
The more things change, the more they are the same…
Footnotes
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Albert Camus (1963), quote from “Carnets: 1935-1942”
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Wall Street’s New Asset Class Will Put Natural World ‘Up for Sale’ – childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wall-street-new-york-stock-exchange-natural-asset-company
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Federico Dezzani – Covid – The Destruction of Institutions and Beyond
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What is a Noble Lie? – kenyonreview.org/2007/02/what-is-a-noble-lie/
by C.J. Hopkins
2020-2021
from ConsentFactory Website
October 13, 2020
Photo (original):
Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha
One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is mass conformity to a psychotic official narrative.
Not a regular official narrative, like the “Cold War” or the “War on Terror” narratives.
A totally delusional official narrative that has little or no connection to reality and that is contradicted by a preponderance of facts…
Nazism and Stalinism are the classic examples, but the phenomenon is better observed in cults and other sub-cultural societal groups.
Numerous examples will spring to mind:
the Manson family, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Church of Scientology, Heavens Gate, etc., each with its own psychotic official narrative:
Helter Skelter, Christian Communism, Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy, and so on…
Looking in from the dominant culture (or back through time in the case of the Nazis), the delusional nature of these official narratives is glaringly obvious to most rational people.
What many people fail to understand is that to those who fall prey to them (whether individual cult members or entire totalitarian societies) such narratives do not register as psychotic.
On the contrary, they feel entirely “normal”…
Everything in their social “reality” reifies and reaffirms the narrative, and anything that challenges or contradicts it is perceived as an existential threat.
These narratives are invariably paranoid, portraying the cult as threatened or persecuted by an evil enemy or antagonistic force which only unquestioning conformity to the cult’s ideology can save its members from.
It makes little difference whether this antagonist is mainstream culture, body thetans, counter-revolutionaries, Jews, or a virus.
The point is not the identity of the enemy.
The point is the atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria the official narrative generates, which keeps the cult members (or the society) compliant.
In addition to being paranoid, these narratives are often internally inconsistent, illogical, and… well, just completely ridiculous…
This does not weaken them, as one might suspect.
Actually, it increases their power, as it forces their adherents to attempt to reconcile their inconsistency and irrationality, and in many cases utter absurdity, in order to remain in good standing with the cult…
Such reconciliation is of course impossible, and causes the cult members’ minds to short circuit and abandon any semblance of critical thinking, which is precisely what the cult leader wants.
Moreover, cult leaders will often radically change these narratives for no apparent reason, forcing their cult members to abruptly forswear (and often even denounce as “heresy”) the beliefs they had previously been forced to profess, and behave as if they had never believed them, which causes their minds to further short circuit, until they eventually give up even trying to think rationally, and just mindlessly parrot whatever nonsensical gibberish the cult leader fills their heads with.
Also, the cult leader’s nonsensical gibberish is not as nonsensical as it may seem at first.
Most of us, upon encountering such gibberish, assume that the cult leader is trying to communicate, and that something is very wrong with his brain.
The cult leader isn’t trying to communicate.
He is trying to disorient and control the listener’s mind.
Listen to Charlie Manson “rapping.”
Not just to what he says, but how he says it…
Note how he sprinkles bits of truth into his stream of free-associated nonsense, and his repetitive use of thought-terminating clichés, described by Robert J. Lifton as follows:
“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché.
The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.
They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism – A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, 1961
If all this sounds familiar, good.
Because the same techniques that most cult leaders use to control the minds of the members of their cults are used by totalitarian systems to control the minds of entire societies:
Milieu Control, Loaded Language, Sacred Science, Demand for Purity, and other standard mind-control techniques.
It can happen to pretty much any society, just as anyone can fall prey to a cult, given the right set of circumstances.
It is happening to most of our societies right now.
An official narrative is being implemented.
A totalitarian official narrative.
A totally psychotic official narrative, no less delusional than that of the Nazis, or the Manson family, or any other cult.
Most people cannot see that it is happening, for the simple reason that it is happening to them.
They are literally unable to recognize it…
The human mind is extremely resilient and inventive when it is pushed past its limits. Ask anyone who has struggled with psychosis or has taken too much LSD. We do not recognize when we are going insane.
When reality falls apart completely, the mind will create a delusional narrative, which appears just as “real” as our normal reality, because even a delusion is better than the stark raving terror of utter chaos.
This is what totalitarians and cult leaders count on, and exploit to implant their narratives in our minds, and why actual initiation rituals (as opposed to purely symbolic rituals) begin by attacking the subject’s mind with,
terror, pain, physical exhaustion, psychedelic drugs, or some other means of obliterating the subject’s perception of reality…
Once that is achieved, and the subject’s mind starts desperately trying to construct a new narrative to make sense out of the cognitive chaos and psychological trauma it is undergoing, it is relatively easy to “guide” that process and implant whatever narrative you want, assuming you have done your homework.
And this is why so many people – people who are able to easily recognize totalitarianism in cults and foreign countries – cannot perceive the totalitarianism that is taking shape now, right in front of their faces (or, rather, right inside their minds).
Nor can they perceive the delusional nature of the official “Covid-19” narrative, no more than those in Nazi Germany were able to perceive how completely delusional their official “master race” narrative was.
Such people are neither ignorant nor stupid.
They have been successfully initiated into a cult, which is essentially what totalitarianism is, albeit on a societal scale…
Their initiation into the Covidian Cult began in January (2020), when the medical authorities and corporate media turned on The Fear with projections of hundreds of millions of deaths and fake photos of people dropping dead in the streets.
The psychological conditioning has continued for months.
The global masses have been subjected to a constant stream of propaganda, manufactured hysteria, wild speculation, conflicting directives, exaggerations, lies, and tawdry theatrical effects.
Emergency field hospitals and morgues.
The singing-dancing NHS staff.
Death trucks.
Overflowing ICUs.
Dead Covid babies.
Manipulated statistics.
Goon squads.
…and all the rest of it.
Eight months later, here we are. The Head of the Health Emergencies Program at the WHO has basically confirmed an IFR of 0.14%, approximately the same as the seasonal flu.
And here are the latest survival rate estimates from the Center for Disease Control:
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Age 0-19… 99.997%
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Age 20-49… 99.98%
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Age 50-69… 99.5%
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Age 70+… 94.6%
The “science” argument is officially over…
An increasing number of doctors and medical experts are breaking ranks and explaining how the current mass hysteria over “cases” (which now includes perfectly healthy people) is essentially meaningless propaganda, for example, in this segment on ARD, one of the big mainstream German TV channels.
And then there is the existence of Sweden, and other countries which are not playing ball with the official Covid-19 narrative, which makes a mockery of the ongoing hysteria.
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I’m not going to go on debunking the narrative.
The point is, the facts are all available. Not from “conspiracy theorist” websites. From mainstream outlets and medical experts. From the Center for Fucking Disease Control.
Which does not matter in the least, not to the members of the Covidian Cult. Facts do not matter to totalitarians and cult members. What matters is loyalty to the cult or the party.
Which means we have a serious problem, those of us to whom facts still matter, and who have been trying to use them to convince the Covidian cultists that they are wrong about the virus… for going on eight months at this point.
While it is crucial to continue reporting the facts and sharing them with as many people as possible – which is becoming increasingly difficult due to the censorship of alternative and social media – it is important to accept what we are up against.
What we are up against is not a misunderstanding or a rational argument over scientific facts. It is a fanatical ideological movement. A global totalitarian movement… the first of its kind in human history.
It isn’t national totalitarianism, because we’re living in a global capitalist empire, which isn’t ruled by nation-states, but rather, by supranational entities and the global capitalist system itself.
And thus, the cult/culture paradigm has been inverted. Instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it.
I wish I could be more optimistic, and maybe offer some sort of plan of action, but the only historical parallel I can think of is how Christianity “converted” the pagan world… which doesn’t really bode so well for us.
While you’re sitting at home during the “second wave” lockdowns, you might want to brush up on that history…
April 21, 2021
Photo:
Cheri Scudder-Thomas
Back in October of 2020, I wrote an essay called The Covidian Cult (above Part 1), in which I described the so-called “New Normal” as a global totalitarian ideological movement. Developments over the last six months have borne out the accuracy of that analogy.
A full year after the initial roll-out of the utterly horrifying and completely fictional photos of people dropping dead in the streets, the projected 3.4% death rate, and all the rest of the official propaganda, despite the absence of any actual scientific evidence of an apocalyptic plague (and the abundance of evidence to the contrary),
millions of people continue to behave like members of an enormous death cult, walking around in public with medical-looking masks, robotically repeating vacuous platitudes, torturing children, the elderly, the disabled, demanding that everyone submit to being injected with dangerous experimental “vaccines,” and just generally acting delusional and psychotic…
How did we ever get to this point… to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult,
“instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it?”
To understand this, one needs to understand how cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal scale.
There is a wealth of research and knowledge on this subject (I mentioned Robert J. Lifton in my earlier above essay), but, to keep things simple, I’ll just use Margaret Singer‘s “Six Conditions of Mind Control” from her 1995 book, Cults in Our Midst, as a lens to view the Covidian Cult through.
Six Conditions of Mind Control
The italics are Singer. The commentary is mine:
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Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time.
Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group.
Looking back, it is easy to see how people were conditioned, step by step, to accept the “New Normal” ideology.They were bombarded with terrifying propaganda, locked down, stripped of their civil rights, forced to wear medical-looking masks in public, to act out absurd “social-distancing” rituals, submit to constant “testing,” and all the rest of it.
Anyone not complying with this behavioral-change program or challenging the veracity and rationality of the new ideology was demonized as a “conspiracy theorist,” a “Covid denier,” an “anti-vaxxer,” in essence, an enemy of the cult, like a “suppressive person” in the Church of Scientology.
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Control the person’s social and/or physical environment; especially control the person’s time.
For over a year now, the “New Normal” authorities have controlled the social/physical environment, and how New Normals spend their time, with lockdowns, social-distancing rituals, closure of “non-essential” businesses, omnipresent propaganda, isolation of the elderly, travel restrictions, mandatory mask-rules, protest bans, and now the segregation of the “Unvaccinated.”Basically, society has been transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an enormous hospital from which there is no escape.
You’ve seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their “normal” lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields.
What you’re looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.
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Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.
What kind of person could feel more powerless than an obedient New Normal sitting at home, obsessively logging the “Covid death” count, sharing photos of his medical-looking mask and post-“vaccination” bandage on Facebook, as he waits for permission from the authorities to go outdoors, visit his family, kiss his lover, or shake hands with a colleague?The fact that in the Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a state approaching infancy.
This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated.
Thus the mantra-like repetition of the “New Normal” platitude “Trust the Science!” by people who, if you try to show them the science, melt down completely and start jabbering aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.
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Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person’s former social identity.
The point here is the transformation of the formerly basically rational person into an entirely different cult-approved person, in our case, an obedient “New Normal” person.Singer gets into this in greater detail, but her discussion applies mostly to subcultural cults, not to large-scale totalitarian movements. For our purposes, we can fold this into Condition 5.
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Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group’s ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors.
Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group’s beliefs, and compliance are rewarded, while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection.
If one expresses a question, they are made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning.
OK, I’m going to tell you a little story. It’s a story about a personal experience, which I’m pretty sure you’ve also experienced. It’s a story about a certain New Normal who has been harassing me for several months.I’ll call him Brian Parks, because, well, that’s his name, and I no longer feel any compunction about sharing it.
Brian is a former friend/colleague from the theater world who has gone full “New Normal” and is absolutely furious that I have not.
So outraged is Brian that I have not joined the cult that he has been going around on the Internet referring to me as a “conspiracy theorist” and suggesting that I’ve had some kind of nervous breakdown and require immediate psychiatric treatment because I do not believe the official “New Normal” narrative.
Now, this would not be a very big deal, except that Brian is impugning my character and attempting to damage my reputation on the Facebook pages of other theater colleagues, which Brian feels entitled to do, given that I am a “Covid denier,” a “conspiracy theorist,” and an “anti-vaxxer,” or whatever, and given the fact that he has the power of the state, the media, etc., on his side.
This is how it works in cults, and in larger totalitarian societies…
It isn’t usually the Gestapo that comes for you. It’s usually your friends and colleagues.
What Brian is doing is working that system of rewards and punishments to enforce his ideology, because he knows that most of my other colleagues in the theater world have also gone full “New Normal,” or at least are looking the other way and staying silent while it is being implemented.
This tactic, obviously, has backfired on Brian, primarily because I do not give a fuck what any New Normals think of me, whether they work in the theater world or anywhere else, but I am in a rather privileged position, because I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in the theater, and would rather stick my hand in a blender than submit my novels to corporate publishers for review by “sensitivity readers,” so there isn’t much to threaten me with.
That, and I have no children to support, or administrations to answer to (unlike, for example, Mark Crispin Miller, who is currently being persecuted by the “New Normal” administration at NYU).
The point is, this kind of ideological conditioning is happening everywhere, every day, on the job, among friends, even among families.
The pressure to conform is intense, because nothing is more threatening to devoted cultists, or members of totalitarian ideological movements, than those who challenge their fundamental beliefs, confront them with facts, or otherwise demonstrate that their “reality” isn’t reality at all, but, rather, a delusional, paranoid fiction.
The key difference between how this works in cults and totalitarian ideological movements is that, usually, a cult is a subcultural group, and thus non-cult-members have the power of the ideology of the dominant society to draw on when resisting the mind-control tactics of the cult, and attempting to deprogram its members… whereas, in our case, this balance of power is inverted.
Totalitarian ideological movements have the power of governments, the media, the police, the culture industry, academia, and the compliant masses on their side.
And, thus, they do not need to persuade anyone.
They have the power to dictate “reality.” Only cults operating in total isolation, like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in Guyana, enjoy this level of control over their members.
This pressure to conform, this ideological conditioning, must be fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences, both publicly and in our private lives, or the “New Normal” will certainly become our “reality.”
Despite the fact that we “Covid deniers” are currently outnumbered by the Covidian cultists, we need to behave as if we are not, and hold to reality, facts, and real science, and treat the New Normals as exactly what they are, members of a new totalitarian movement, delusional cultists run amok. If we do not, we will get to Singer’s Condition 6…
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Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order.
The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing.
We’re not there yet, but that is where we’re headed… global pathologized totalitarianism. So, please, speak up. Call things what they are. Confront the Brians in your life.Despite the fact that they tell themselves that they’re trying to help you “come to your senses” or “see the truth,” or “trust the Science,” they are not.
They are cultists, desperately trying to get you to conform to their paranoid beliefs, pressuring you, manipulating you, bullying you, threatening you.
Do not engage them on their terms, or let them goad you into accepting their premises. (Once they’ve sucked you into their narrative, they’ve won.)
Expose them, confront them with their tactics and their motives.
You will probably not change their minds in the least, but your example might help other New Normals whose faith is slipping to begin to recognize what has been done to their minds and break with the cult.