“He who knows the highest cause simply, which is God, is simply called wise.”
Why is there so little wisdom in our complex world? This is the subject of this post, which examines where we are and where we might be going.
Our moment is a pivot in history.
The legacy of the 20th century is coded in images, music and text - whose power to govern the actual is exhausted.
The hand of history is slipping off the shoulders of our leaders.
It is now around their neck.
This is the story of the god that failed.
That god is man, and in his several guises brought three religions of mankind to replace the divine with self-worship.
The last of these is Liberalism, whose survival beyond the others was declared a victory.
As we can now see, dying last is no vindication. How did this fever dream shape the chaos we inhabit, and where do we go next?
THREE STAGES OF LIBERALISM
From Rights Inalienable to F*** YOU DAD!
Liberalism went through three stages.
Rugged individualism (18th, 19th centuries)
Welfare state liberalism (Turn of the 20th century)
Esoteric liberalism (1960s)
The liberalism we have now is pure fantasy.
The Liberal idea began with the rights of the individual and their liberty to act as their conscience directed them. It was individualist.
The welfare state liberalism which succeeded it was an attempt to extend these rights and liberties to the dispossessed. It was collectivist.
Then came the personal as political. The counter culture of the 1960s was a revolt against the parent generations and the parent liberalisms it had upheld.
It was the liberalism of F*** YOU, Dad!
It was esoteric - deeply personal. This is what we have today - a liberalism of taking liberties that hates the Father.
It is the creed of the brat. “I shall not serve”1, he says, demanding everything.
RELIGIONS OF MANKIND
Liberalism is a religion of mankind. Its purpose is to replace God and belief in Him with belief in Man, in his reason.
Yet Liberalism has not made men rational. It has made men women.
What it liberates is not the individual but his, her, xir desires.
Partnered with consumerism, which sells products to match them, it produces an ersatz “reality” to inhabit.
Why was this so successful? The appeal to the deeply personal is powerful.
If you have an esoteric system it is always me-time.
This is the reason so many men are children today, and also why hysteria has replaced reason as an argument.
It is also why treason is the policy of Liberal governments.
The belief that liberating men’s desires from restraint would make them perfect has driven the world insane.
THE CODEX LIBERALIS
What do liberals believe in but themselves?
The words they inscribe are instructions to humanity on how they ought to live.
When these instructions are applied, chaos is the result. Chaos - and evil.
Why does this happen? The rule set of laws and imperatives and the rights that are attributed as a result are attempts to command obedience from reality.
Reality is not a dog to be trained with a ringing bell.
The power of this appeal lies in vanity. It is vanity to presume to teach the world how it ought to be, but it is folly to believe things can be made so by saying.
Saying things are so is dispraised, deplatformed and sanctioned.
Saying how things ought to be, or speaking as if this “ought” is actually how things are, is valorised. This is “stunning and brave”.
The Codex Liberalis is my name for the tomes of superstition which govern the policing of reality.
That Liberalism has made reality a controversy is the point. What is it for, if it forbids the actual in favour of fantasy?
THE LOSS OF GOD
We inhabit a myth of the twentieth century. That is, the myth that man can remake himself and the world without God.
The three religions of mankind have all resolved into barbarism. State worship and man-worship have demonstrated their legacies. Beware of making the same mistake again.
You must ask what the next system is for, not what it is against. It is not enough to be against.
What is ideology for? Where does it come from?
It is an attempt to account for the absurd condition of life in a godless context.
This context has been made out of words, to make the ideologies seem necessary.
WHAT IS REALITY
God is the ultimate reality. If you do not believe this, you believe in nothing. There is a need for a structure, for some purpose, for a sense that I am greater than myself.
This can be supplied by membership.
For the state level politician, membership is offered in cabinet positions, then in the leadership club, and finally they may ascend to the exalted pantheon of the NGOs.
This is the career path of the career politician. Some prefer to disport themselves in the mire of patronage for its own sake, others use the riches and power this confers to ascend to the Olympian company of Liberal Heaven: the sinecures of international bureaucracy.
For the subject of Liberal consumerism. membership is equally afforded by the tantalising promise of the company of titans.
It can be bought. You can wear the shoes of the athlete, eat the food of the cognoscenti. You can buy drugs and surgeries to transition into a new self, one which is the pinnacle of the fusion of erotic desire and consumer transcendentalism.
Of course, this is a fool’s bargain. Drinking the lion’s blood only confers the belief in gaining its strength. Consumerism is fetishism - a superstitious practice which has made the disordered exaggeration of satisfaction into a promise of liberation from the confines of the self.
It is a trap.
MASS CULTURE AS CARGO CULT
These are substitutes for satisfaction. The more they are pursued as means to magnify, the more they dissipate the self.
The politics-member must align with the host. The consumer seeks to incorporate itself in the brand. Desire leads to this solution of the self in the substance of nothingness. This is ambition, this is liberation.
This is success.
Our culture is a cargo cult. At first glance it is mimesis without an ultimate product.
That is because the process is one of annihilation. It turns something into nothing. It promises more and delivers less. It is a faustian pact whose rewards are ephemeral, as the material conditions of life are universally degraded - even for those on top. They retreat to exclaves of privilege, to mountaintops and to islands of self indulgence.
These are sanatoriums for the sick, who imagine themselves the teachers of mankind.
Life is banalised when saturated with desires. The reflex of satisfaction is weakened with every repetition.
BE THE DEATH OF ME
Heroin, which is the ultimate satisfaction in the fool’s bargain hunt, is a case in point.
It make the user feel heroic in the act of displacing their soul.
As with every addiction, the use of heroin reduces the world and all its promises to a mockery of itself. Only I can give you this feeling, whispers the demon.
It is always the same feeling. Gambling, sex, food, money, power, drugs - the means breed indifference to the end.
Unlimited desire, total hedonic utility, is a mechanism of self annihilation celebrated in the hermetic glory of a neurochemical apocalypse.
The fireworks burst in the brain, the pulse quickens, but races to a walking pace when ecstasy becomes a habit.
Then there is nothing left, for the demon has told you “I am all there is”. When you put down the needle there is nothing but a hole in reality.
That hole is you.
EXCAVATION NATION
Making absences is the work of present day technique. There is so much information, but what does it do?
Mass media is a supermarket stocked with food-like products. It satisfies an urge promoted by itself. To be filled, but it does not nourish.
What kind of food promotes hunger?
The Liberal idea is now an act of rebellion against the parent of reality.
Our Liberal system expressly seeks to replace God with technology, with better management solutions being the utopia towards which it rows over the sea of blood, never to arrive.
It is a superstitious cult, one of annihilation and of death. It makes the noblest promises to deliver the vilest products. Judge it, and what comes next, by what it does - and not what it says.
BEWARE OF TOMORROW
The world of the West is experiencing a series of earthquakes. Some will ignore the tremors altogether, others will point to the trembling furniture and seek to resituate the pictures on the walls.
The next movement of resistance will be against the magnitude of this disaster.
It is feeling, not facts, which attaches men to myths. It feels too bad to ditch attachments so strong, even when the attachment is to suicide.
The moral, diplomatic, economic and ideological basis of the Western idea is dissolving and this cannot be stopped. The earthquakes are the shocks of creeping disenchantment. The islanders are realising that the cargo will never arrive, no matter how fervently they believe in it.
Populism and censorship, the destruction of nations, the lies asserted as fact - none of this can be contained by the educational pharmakon.
THE MEDICINE THAT SICKENS
For a hundred years this empire has managed its populations with a medicine that is also a poison.
It is the sorcery of saying so. Education in schools and in universities is alike to “public information”: it is a tool used as a form of therapy, intended to correct impressions gained from contact with unmediated reality.
Efforts against “misinformation” are a form of mass therapy. The public are patients, sickened by sunlight. They must be brought back into the shade, managed like mushrooms into membership.
Here is a guide to “Propaganda as Therapy” what I wrote last year.
Therapy seldom pronounces a cure. It is concerned with the prevention of remission. The goal of therapy is to replace the dependence of the subject on one habit with that on another - on therapy itself.
Thanks to education, most people are unaware the Soviet Union did most to win the Second World War. That Communism killed over a hundred million. That Europe was conquered militarily by the US and the Soviets.
That the Council on Foreign Relations was set up to manage “democracy” through the production of public opinion. Through “education”. There are many cases. The first is that education does not “enclever” people.
Here is a guide to the manufacture of “reality” by the Council on Foreign Relations
Education can inform, but its purpose as an instrument of political power is to make submission identical with wisdom, and to valorise the persecution of the prudent.
Education is therapy. To be educated is to be armed with a word hoard, an avalanche of alibis to exculpate the guilty. It is a form of consumerism.
Credentials are commodities which confer a sense of self magnification - to the self. This is esoteric - deeply personal and internal.
The use of the credentials in public signals membership of an elite. An elite which writes and teaches from the Codex Liberalis. This too is largely imaginary, as most credentialed people will never author and only repeat the totems of status.
Education offers membership, but this membership is not real. It is, in this sense, induction into a cult.
Membership confers the power of preaching, of reaching out, of calling out. Of signalling the self to others as a better example of humanity. It dignifies despising. It creates Pharisees.
The best question to ask of therapy is also the best to ask of “progress”. The question is: “into what”?
Therapeutic education guides us into what? Into the disbelief of the senses, into an aversion for reality, into the Skinnerian maze of false choices and sensory condition.
Into a trap.
I have written a guide to the end of the Liberal idea here. Covid, war, corruption, and why the Liberal elite are appalled by reality
END TIMES
All’s well that ends, as the saying now goes.
What ends when the symbols shatter? The myths of the Liberal West are exposed by their own legacy: only the spectre remains at the feast.
It is hard to let go what you have learned to love. Yet let go you must, as it does not love you back.
The loss of God is the reason for the atrocity exhibition of the 20th century. Its old ideas as new ideas still enchant the populations and politicians of the West.
Enchantment is a song which survives as long as people sing it. So much is out of tune that a melody cannot be made of discord. Remember, the Greek chorus narrated the tragedies, the follies of hubris and hamartia.
Lockdowns, indemnified injections, the proxy war to collapse Russia - these did not break - but tested the core of the chorus.
The West cannot afford to follow Israel into the abyss.
Israel is pursuing a strategy of Armageddon. Here is a guide to that.
Defeat in Ukraine, disgrace over lawfare, the displacement of diplomacy with mic-drop photo opportunities and the soaring debt cannot be lullabied into the background because the background is the cacophony of chaos. Israel, Ukraine, and Afghanistan before it are projects of international suicide. They are wars of attrition against domestic populations, as well as projects of mass slaughter.
The global policeman is a crook. His business is crime. These are committed against entire peoples, including his own. The labelling of the politics of national suicide as progress, as the defence of democracy, is itself a crime.
If you would like to know more about our culture of crime, I did a three part series on it. Part one is here:
It is as if. It is all “as if”. As if a senile old man is in charge of all this, and not a vicious cabal including the Nuland-Kagan family, whose family business is the deaths of others. As Irving Kristol pointed out2, the reason these people require a strong US military is to defend Israel from the consequences of its own actions.
To speak of the national interest these days is an act of sedition.
What has led us into these pipe dreams, played by rat-enchanting pipers?
It is a grand strategy of moral inversion, fuelled by the belief that things can be made real by saying so. This is the instrument of desire over the divine. It replaces the divine with the diabolical, and calls it sacred.
The result is universal disorder.
Which way, Western Man?
What comes next is a choice between accelerated fantasy or a return to reality. The 21st century is growing older. What will it become? A spoiled child, or a sinner returned? The grave offence is written in our history, its verdict is the mess we inhabit. The mad cult of the self is the axis of a broken wheel, yet the road is still a road.
Instead of being taken for a ride, we must learn to walk again. The moment we inhabit is the infancy of the future of mankind. There is the abyss, and there is the light. Where is the memory of the century behind us? Dove sta’ memoria?
Mankind has a higher spiritual purpose and it is not to be found in the fanaticism of fantasy, in reasons for treason.
The West is not dying, it is sick. It is in the grip of a receding fever which it long mistook for rude health. It can turn again to the mirror, or turn its face back to God.
The lesson of the 20th century is that man cannot teach himself into a better world.
His efforts to do so have resulted in a society of substitutes, a morality of vice, a permanent pax humana that makes a desert and calls it peace.
The complexity of the current system renders overall direction impossible. This is the late stage entropy of massification. Babel is tumbling anew, as historical memory folds into the swipe of a screen.
What is remarkable now is that reality is so controversial that it is itself becoming an urgent distraction from the virtual.
The legacy of ten decades vexed to nightmare is not a dream but a state of decay. The wounds it has produced cannot be nursed with lullabies. Night terrors stalk the day, the would-be king has murdered sleep. Distraction is hard to maintain with reality intruding everywhere.
It is good to live with the want of such comfort, because it makes men want what what is real again.
The political moment is the diplomatic moment is the spiritual moment. The crisis comes because of rebellion.
Tomorrow belongs to the men who can live without these consolation prizes.
The god of man has failed again, and failed better. This is a crisis which can only be solved by Christ, and the meaning which flows from a return to the ultimate reality.
This means that a moment is upon us for a new politics.
Rooted in reality, in the natural order, and the recognition of the true higher purpose of mankind. There is a better life than a bargain hunt. There is more to life than you. The Liberal fantasy has resolved into universal barbarism.
Mankind deserves better. Come home, Western Man. It is not God that left you in this mess.
It is not God who abandoned you.
“Non serviam” - “I shall not serve” - was said by Milton in Paradise Lost to be the slogan of Satan, emblazoned on his shield, as he led the rebellion against heaven.
Senator George McGovern was the a candidate for the US Presidential election in 1972. In September 1972, founding neoconservative Nathan Glazer wrote
“[McGovern’s] general position in favor of the reduction of American military power and commitments abroad seriously raises the question of whether under a McGovern administration American aid would in a crisis actually be available to Israel.”
The following year, Irving Kristol wrote in a journal of the American-Jewish Congress,
“Senator McGovern is very sincere when he says that he will try to cut the military budget by 30%. And this is to drive a knife in the heart of Israel… Jews don’t like big
military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States…
American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we
don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military
budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”
I cannot find the source, cited as a 1973 edition of Congress Weekly. Kristol himself repeats this idea in a lecture from 1980 here, however.
Both Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer did remarkable work which bears little relation to the fanatical drivel written by Kristol’s son William, who founded the neoconservative Project for a New American Century with bloated obscenity Robert Kagan.
I will write more on Irving Kristol and his fascinating concept of “educational therapy” soon.
>The next movement of resistance will be against the magnitude of this disaster.
Correct, and an excellent prediction. But before we get to the bargaining stage we'll have to get through this God-damned election cycle first, and the attendant disappointment and economic misery afterward.
You have reminded me of something me grandmother used to say 50 years ago.
'saying, don't make it so...'
A lesson burned in my brain. I need to repeat it more often.