GASLIGHTENMENT
The False Consciousness of Progress
I am writing a book on the liberal democratic system, which I argue was intentionally created to replace our civilisation following the First World War.
In this post I will try to explain why, being neither liberal nor democratic, this system requires its subject populations to believe in things that are not real, and to disbelieve in things which are.
If we look at the liberal ideology, we shall see strong similarities with another 20th century religion of man - Bolshevism.
Both belief systems are anti-reality, and seek to recast humanity in their own image. Both accuse their critics of a type of “false consciousness”.
Today we ask why the liberal anti-reality cult seeks to illuminate men by gaslight, showing the irrational roots of a movement which amounts to a large scale act of vengeance on what is there, in the service of what is not.
We live in an age of “Gaslightenment” - in which we are instructed and rewarded to disbelieve in the actual, in the service of the virtual.
Naturally, this is rather diabolical.
Main points:
Introduction - power, desire, progress towards annihilation
Our system is not “liberal”
Meaning minus God, a culture of subtraction
Isaiah Berlin and his importance in the liberal idea
Why our system is “despotic” by Berlin’s definition
The liberal democratic system is a substitute for our civilisation
This system has no use for humanity
There are a lot of ideas in here. TS Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Isaiah Berlin and that.
There are menes too. xDDDD
NOTHING BUT POWER
When God is subtracted from the meaning of life what remains is the will to power.
It was not only Nietzsche who talked about this, but Liberal rationalists such as Bertrand Russell.
In his 1938 book, Power, Russell says the “Lust for power1” is unique to humans and found in us all.
The idea that human life is a contest for power - in the home, in society, over the minds of men - drives the 20th century religions of permanent progress.
Bolshevism and Liberalism are concerned with “empowerment”. The traits they share are obvious, but obscured. This is due to the power of the progressive ideology, which has captured the State, and goes by the name of “liberal democracy”.
This is the reason nothing is as it is described, and why the function of mass communication is to gaslight you into doubting the evidence of your own eyes.
Power is expressed in two main forms - the desires of the powerful and the powerless. These are combined in the sale of the retreat from reality. The business elite which rules us benefits enormously from the recasting of personal power as the enactment of desire. To become concerned mainly or only with satisfaction, with the false promise of transcendence presented in the advertised fantasies of consumerism, is to be neutralised.
Having no spiritual, political, moral foundation, the consumer is led by desire, erotic and not, into a world of tantalising fantasy. The pinnacle of this process at the present time is the notion you may purchase a new you through becoming “trans”. This industry promises a further pipe dream: to transcend humanity completely, permanently, through the means of technology.
This is the salvation of “technianity” - the religion of technological progress, which is superseding the cult of social progressivism.
It is to this annihilation that all the rights-based movements, all the critical-theoretical destruction of norms, are leading. To the zero point of the human story, a full stop at the end of a life sentence.
Today I will try to explain how and why the dominant ideology uses mass deception to secure its power. The Liberal idea which shapes our world is not a rational explanation of the world, but an alternative to reality.
It is an act of vengeance on all that is.
LIBERALISM IS NOT LIBERAL
I do not think the “liberal democratic” system liberal or democratic. It is the crown of trans-sanity: a thing named as something that it is not.
The system which governs us is the despotism described by Isaiah Berlin.
Sir Isaiah Berlin2, the greatest and in my view most intelligent champion of the liberal idea, defended liberalism because it was “plural” in its values and not singular.
He said the singular state was a despotism3, a “rule of elites” - self appointed experts - which was no better than a dictatorship.
Not all despots are wicked, nor are they all engaged in an argument with reality. Ours are.
THE LIBERAL SUPERIORITY COMPLEX
Isaiah Berlin was perhaps the greatest champion of liberal pluralism ever to have lived. This is the liberal idea at its best, which claims its superiority because it accepts as valid different values.
It was this idea of tolerance that led liberals to claim they were better.
Pluralism accepts the fact that men differ in their ways of seeing - and therefore the fact of basic difference itself. That things are not the same as one another.
This seems banal until you realise that our system rejects the idea of basic difference, is constantly promoting substitutes for food, fiction for fact, and saying the meaning and matter these counterfeits supply is identical to that found in the genuine article.
Liberals today have retained their sense of superiority whilst discarding the reason for this belief.
That is the reason for liberal chauvinism, which is the automatic and invincible presumption on the part of the “liberal” that he or she is right, and that everyone who disagrees with whatever the liberals say is not only wrong but also stupid.
This is the reason you, your rights, and everything you value is despised by the contemporary “liberal”.
THE MERIT OF THE LIBERAL CHAMPION
Isaiah Berlin’s writings have enormous merit, because they do not merely showcase his opinions but also demonstrate their origins. To read him is to understand liberal culture, which is important because it is in fact different from what many self-described liberals believe today.
ROMANTICISM AND THE LIBERAL IDEA
Berlin also explains why this may be the case, as the roots of the liberal idea reach far beyond rationalism4. He admitted the secular belief in Man was a result of Romanticism - an irrational movement which magnified men’s feelings to displace wisdom. It was a form of impassioned vanity, projecting the self into the world with such force as to obscure the difference between the interior and exterior reality.
What I am on about here is that your leaders, their political system, and the Good and Kind People who subscribe to its values are not guided by Reason or Liberty or any other fine slogan. This is about power, and it is inspired by fantasies whose relation to reality is now entirely hostile.
MATTHEW ARNOLD AND CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT CHRIST
Not every counterfeit is presented with a threat. Some promise enlightenment - like the “sweetness and light” of Matthew Arnold.
Yet the result, as TS Eliot pointed out, is to present different things as if they are in effect the same.
Arnold’s intention5 was to make religion viable in an age of unbelief by equating it alternately with literature and morality, and by suggesting that it was part of a wider whole called “culture.” This had the effect of reducing different things to each other or, in Eliot’s signature phrase, of trying to make things “substitute” for one another.
THE MACHINERY OF FAKES
This is not just about the Church, nor even just about culture. It is a question bigger than the survival of our civilisation, against which is staked the industry of progress
The business of “progress” is to present counterfeits as superior substitutes for everything in our reality.
At the root of this process is the annihilation of difference.
This gives rise to the notion of equality, which nullifies everyone equally. It permits the idea that people and their religious and all their other beliefs, everything they do and make and eat and hope for, are fungible. It says that all things can be replaced like parts in a machine and the results will be the same - or even better.
This is a machine which works best when all its parts are fake.
GASLIGHTING BY DESIGN
The reason the mass media is gaslighting us all is not because it is ruled by a secret cabal of cackling villains who conspire in ritual gatherings to do evil.
It is also because the process we inhabit is intended to replace our civilisation with a new world. One of new values, new meaning, a new idea of humanity and of course with a new religion. This is the mission of “liberal democracy”, whose global ambitions see it labelled “globalism”.
NEW AND IMPROVED
Novelty sells well. “New and improved” is a staple of advertising because it is effective in selling product. Improvement is linked in the public mind with novelty. This itself is intentional, and of course, pernicious.
Practically every novelty sickens. The new religion, the new food, the new injections, the new borderless forever war industry, the new idea of freedom and democracy which means criminalising anyone sufficiently sane to object to the institutional madness. The new art is ugly, the new comedy humourless.
A CULTURE OF SUBTRACTION
What is the effect of the new and improved substitutes? It can be summarised as subtraction.
Religion minus God, virtue minus the Good, ethics minus morality, food minus nutrition, information minus meaning, art minus beauty, architecture minus identity, politics minus change.
Whilst people remember what was, they will never accept these substitutes. This is the purpose of coordinated messaging: to place a new picture of reality in the mind of the public.
Out with the old, in with the new. The extinction of historical memory is not only about replacing world history with cartoonish myths, it is the extinction of the real, the triumph of the will to power a world of pure fantasy in its place.
THE MEANING OF MEANING
Meaning is neither exclusive to the self nor the sole property of some external human agency. It is supplied by belief and supported by reason in its correspondence to reality. This correspondence is called the truth.
The creation of a parallel to reality, in which false things become true as a function of power, is typical of utopian systems.
To present a fantasy world as a functional alternative is convenient to the ruling elite, and it permits the ruled to enjoy the consolation prizes it offers. Almost all the “rights-based” arguments are simply arguments against reality6, for example, attaching a virtual virtue to the retransmission of the signals of the system.
It is not whether we will believe in some story or other, but in which. If you believe in something, your story is being dissolved by the enlightened prophets of nothing. Empty vessels, dead souls - like the homosexual atheist and anti-Christian Yuval Noah Harari seek to project their inner void into everyone7.
Religious faith is a gift, not a delusion - a deposit, not a decree. Ultimately in the Catholic faith it is an explanation of the nature of reality ordained and created by God.
This is briefly what is called the natural order: God, then Men, the world visible and invisible and so on. Order and disorder also function as an explanation of sin as much as they reflect the temporal and spiritual arrangement proper to sanity in spirit, mind and body.
Whether you accept it or not, the Catholic faith has an explanation of reality on which our civilisation is based, and without it there would be no “Western civilisation” to replace.
THE TALE OF OUR TIMES
Yet we are told a different tale today, replacing the sign of everything by the signification of nothing.
The story of our lives is one of annihilation, presented as liberation, as the pinnacle of virtue and wisdom.
It is attempting to cancel our culture and transform our institutions in its own image. In this total effort it seeks to leave nothing behind.
LIBERAL CHAUVINISM
What distinguishes the “liberals” of today from those who deserved the name is their unearned sense of superiority. There is no means by which the claims of anti-reality can be tested, and this is why the “liberal” chauvinist cannot recognise criticism of his belief system as valid.
It is a critique which now sees liberal-globalism compared to the late Soviet Union, sharing elements such as hypernormalisation and the use of the legal system to intimidate, humiliate and criminalise dissidents.
BERLIN, BOLSHEVISM AND THE FOOL’S BARGAIN
Isaiah Berlin’s first attempt at writing, at the age of 12, was a story about the extremes of “Bolshevicks”.
Subtract the slogans, the propaganda, the personalities and you are left with a state-powered act of criminal vengeance on the entire population.
It brutalises even those it favours - perhaps those especially, as it is the fanatics who have been totally consumed.
The reward for pulling the wool over your own eyes and denouncing sight as treason is to profit personally at the expense of everything else of value.
That our values are annihilated helps this process seem less of a fool’s bargain.
The fool’s bargain, of course, is the Devil’s bargain.
TWO RELIGIONS OF MAN
Isaiah Berlin’s first attempt at writing is based on his witness of Bolshevik terror.
“At the age of seven, during the February Revolution in Petrograd in 1917,while out walking [Berlin] watched a policeman loyal to the tsar, white-faced with terror, being dragged off to his death by a lynch mob.”
Five years later he wrote his short story, titled afterwards as “The Purpose Justifies the Ways”. It is a moral tale about the total moral corruption common to all Utopian fanatics. Believing they are creating paradise, hell is unleashed on everyone and everything in their way.
In his last essay Berlin admitted the influences which had shaped his love of pluralism - the liberalism of the recognition and respect for the difference of opinion.
This is now extinct, but the instincts which inspired it are not.
My political pluralism is a product of reading Vico and Herder, and of understanding the roots of Romanticism, which in its violent, pathological form went too far for human toleration.
Vico was a Catholic, his New Science a theory of history as the seasons of culture. Herder was not, but his attempts to synthesis feeling and reason are an extension of the Romantic impulse which Berlin says informed the secular religion of man we know as Liberalism.
This system is not the plural toleration of ideas celebrated by Berlin. It has become fanatical, it is not pluralist but in Berlin’s term - “monist”.
We inhabit the despotism Berlin denounced, not the liberalism he defended.
A TRANS-SANE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Our system is entirely trans-sane. It identifies itself as something it is not, and seeks to materialise its base desires in the mutilation of the mind and body politic.
C.S. Lewis’ novel8, compressed in the meme above, said
A sinister technocratic organization is gaining power throughout Europe with a plan to "recondition" society, and it is up to [the hero] to squelch this threat by applying age-old wisdom to a new universe dominated by science.
What is replacing Western civilisation is neither liberal, democratic nor even civilised.
It is a business model for elite rule administered by financial and media managers, whose worship of technology is explained by the fact it promises their salvation and not ours.
It has no use for humanity.
This is the reason I think the “liberal” system more extreme than that of the Bolsheviks, whose “permanent revolution” has been rebranded as progressive reform.
I hope to make this argument more fully in the book I am writing, but I promised some more on the mythology of liberal democracy and so here we are.
Russell is talking about the same thing as the other famous moustache man of Germanic letters. I think he uses “lust” and not “will” to mean the same thing as Nietzsche. Personal power, being the capability of enacting your desires, is an essential theme of the narrative of liberation which animates the “Liberal” ideology.
Berlin was a Russian Jew, and his family fled Bolshevism to settle in England. Berlin, as you will see, was horrified by Bolshevism and his first story was about the abuse of law and order by a fanatical state convinced it was creating paradise on earth.
It is extremely unlikely Berlin would approve of the utopians of our time, the masters and managers of the so-called “liberal democracies” who are doing much the same - with “liberal” methods.
“The enemy of pluralism is monism -- the ancient belief that there is a single harmony of truths into which everything, if it is genuine, in the end must fit.
The consequence of this belief is that those who know should command those who do not.
Those who know the answers to some of the great problems of mankind must be obeyed, for they alone know how society should be organized, how individual lives should be lived, how culture should be developed.
This is the old Platonic belief in the philosopher-kings, who were entitled to give orders to others. There have always been thinkers who hold that if only scientists, or scientifically trained persons, could be put in charge of things, the world would be vastly improved. To this I have to say that no better excuse, or even reason, has ever been propounded for unlimited despotism on the part of an elite which robs the majority of its essential liberties.” Isaiah Berlin, from My Intellectual Path, reproduced here.
I do not agree that there are a plurality of values whose claim on the truth is equal, but I do not agree that you should be criminalised and have your life destroyed for saying so.
Our system makes criminals of critics. It is not liberal, and nor does it defend the truth. A case could be made for a despotism in defence of the true, but in practice men are flawed and likely to abuse it.
This is roughly what I believe about state governance and reality. I am not a liberal but I do not support the imprisonment of people whose view of the world, though I may see it as irrefutably mistaken, disagrees with mine.
That said, this is of course a criminal system and its abuse of justice ends when the criminals in power are held to account.
Aside from the restoration of justice, there is in reality no equality of opinion, most of it being little to do with thought, facts or even reason at all. From the point of view of liberal power, public opinion is the social contagion of useful stupidity.
Berlin said this in his last essay. If you want to start reading him, you could do a lot worse than begin with “The First and the Last”, a feature published in 1998 which presented Berlin’s childhood short story and final essay side by side.
Matthew Arnold was a pioneer of the idea of continuing Christianity absent Christ, which is what some say animates the liberal utopian idea. This means the belief you can swap poetry or music for God, and the culture you treasured will continue to flourish. Instead of poetry, Taylor Swift and televised sports. As you can see, Eliot’s point about things being different, and producing different results, is obvious.
It is therefore extremely controversial, as is the noticing of difference generally.
Racism, sexism and so on - just objections to the statement of basic difference. These concepts are 20th century inventions. “Antisemitism”, “transphobia” - the noticing of negative group behaviours. The grievance industry monetises the denial of reality, and is a career move in itself for those who have no other talent.
I have had to review Harari’s latest attempt on the life of our civilisation, and have discovered this Jewish homosexualist likes to “meditate” for two hours a day.
This is a practice which identifies superior consciousness with mental, emotional, and spiritual absence in the midst of life. It is the enlightenment of annihilation, practised in silence but always preached as a demonstration of intellectual vanity.
Harari called Christ “fake news”. The news he brings is neither novel nor good, being Pygmalion reimagined. In this retelling, Harari does not wish for a woman, who is useless to him, but to make an image of himself into which he may transition. People like this see humanity as a curse, a condition in need of a cure, life a sort of sickness.
The attack on facticity is always led by people who have nothing good to say about anything.
So how does it end? It surely cannot go on. It is becoming increasingly absurd as their utopian ideas slam into reality and do not survive. The herd need to dig ever deeper to maintain their illusions about gender, diversity and the weather.
And we also know the wider world comprehensively rejects Western Liberalism. Not just the Muslims, but the Far East and India too. Only a tiny number believe these things.
Exactly right.
The audio-visual *symbol*, i.e. the word "liberal", was stolen by the Left (anti-liberals by *definition*) in the early 20th century at the same time it stole "progressive".
But *concepts* cannot be stolen. Or rather, the attempt will always lead to contradiction, which in turn must be hidden from the hoi polloi People by all the various methods we see today by the Democrats.
Thank you, Frank. You are an amazing thinker and writer. I would edit you, here and there, but that I decline to be specific I hope you take as the compliment I mean it to be. You are as substantive as anyone I have ever read.