The Empire of Lies
In this post I will examine the social and political condition we inhabit. A strange combination of fantasy and force, which replaces reality with alibis, it is a total system of contagious aversion to the world as it is.
This is the empire of lies. A topsy-turvy world, where the product always contradicts the packaging. As we shall see, it seeks to banish reality from every dimension it dominates, from the personal to the political at state level - and beyond.
We inhabit the slow motion collapse of this refuge from disenchantment, which cannot survive contact with reality.
Contents
Rootless Cosmic Polities - The Ruling Ideology as Fantasy
The Ghost in the Machine - Something is Rotten
Refugees from Reality - Political Asylum Seekers
Popular Mechanics - How Hearts Move Minds
The Word Made Flesh - Self Hypnosis as Enlightenment
Para-participation - Rituals of Significance
Desperate Times - Attachment and Detachment
Once More With Feeling - The Fool’s Bargain of Fantasy
Rootless Cosmic Polities
I have investigated many themes to do with government and the international bureaucracy which wishes to supplant its sovereignty.
There is a common thread to the World Economic Forum, the neoconservatives, the techno-futurists and their transgender posthuman bedfellows. That thread is the projection of personal fantasy into the world, assuming political and legal power - including coercion, humiliation - and force.
It was my good fortune to be contacted by Prof. Mikko Paunio, who indicated with precision the degree to which leading environmental and global governance figures were animated by bizarre fantasies.
The founder of the Club of Rome, Maurice Strong, shares with John Kerry a messianic self belief. These beliefs, as in Strong’s case, are infused with New Age fantasies. Klaus Schwab has his “Magic Mountain” at Davos, and his acolyte Yuval Noah Harari peddles some of the most fantastical science fiction in the public domain.
These people believe in themselves and nothing much else. A fervent conviction that their fantasies are a manifesto for human emancipation, they look to technology for the means of realising their make-belief. These people are grandiose. Their manifesto is a delusion combined with the power to destroy. Ultimately, they hate anything that is not themselves.
This equally applies to the transgender cult, as it does to those “Liberal interventionists” whose unshakeable dogma justifies the destruction of disagreement. It matches the complete detachment from reality we see in the packaging of the war against Russia. The economic sanctions have devastated European economies. No one talks about the fact that forever war drives mass migration.
In every regard, the ruling ideology is a contradiction of the real. These lies they tell about diversity, about equality, about the planet and the people on it are fact-like products for the fashion conscious.
What unites the factions of today is the fusion of personal desire and political power. This factor, always present, shows how far the time is out of joint. It is the fact it is so extreme that it requires the total exclusion of contradiction.
Refugees from Reality
Contradiction is prohibited by law and custom. Hate speech is simply disagreement based on experience, for example. Under lockdown, contradiction was conspiracy. With the West at war in Ukraine, contradiction is now Russian propaganda. The slur of Russian propaganda is marshalled against any emergent reality which threatens to embarrass the management. A spectre is raised to spook the population when their attention is menaced by the facts.
Russian propaganda has been cited as an influence on Brexit, on the 2016 US Presidential election, on Hunter Biden’s laptop, on the person and policies of Donald Trump. The Russians have reportedly blown up their own pipeline and sent a spy whale to Norway. According to Fairyland News, Vladimir Putin is the most powerful man in the world. This despite him being reported as dying of leprosy, Parkinson’s disease, cancer as well as being already dead.
Information which closely corresponds to reality is filtered out of the fairytale. This is the reason you can lose your job because of spicy memes, and it also explains why our political class is committed to the war policy of escalation.
Reality is offensive to these people. It is you who will face consequences for trifling actions, whilst their large scale devastation and plunder goes unpunished.
To the managerial class in the Empire of Lies, politics is a belief system. These beliefs are replacements for reality. The beliefs have no connection to one another, but are presented as a vision of harmony. If you seek their monument, look around your local city.
These immoral fables can only survive if protected from reality. The function of hate speech laws and the knowledge that speaking truth to power will end your career are two means by which the bubble is preserved. An extreme, remote and comfortable parallel world is entertained by people who have no contact with the world outside their narrow Overton window.
Every captured institution is a sanatorium - a place of safety for the differently saned. Your schools, colleges, workplaces, social media platforms and public services are political asylums, staffed with refugees from reality.
The Ghost and the Machine
That these narratives are widely accepted shows the degree to which the notional and virtual has replaced the actual. With mere words - magic spells - reality can be banished from the room, leaving the narratives of fairyland in comfortable and safe detachment. The factions of fantasy are free to entertain their imaginary friends without intrusion.
Mesmerising media has made a desert of our discourse, its messaging a shimmering mirage on the lone and level sands.
It is like the ghost at the opening of Hamlet. It is a sign that the phantom has entered the world of the flesh, and it is not a mere subject.
When something is rotten in the state, the ghost is King.
Popular Mechanics
Individual extremism has pushed this factor to the exclusion of any and all reality which contradicts the convinced. This condition affects Regime critics as much as loyalists.
The missionaries of me time care for nothing but their own message. They are living memes, a slogan with an image, braced for impact and thrive on replication. Haunted by the ghost, they look for signs beyond the obvious.
When the symbols shatter something breaks inside us. The process of disenchantment is a shock to the world within and without. To suffer the loss of God, the belief in government and the goodwill of the familiar faces of fame is devastating.
The significance of celebrity in mass media culture is a fetish of friendship. These imaginary friends are real to many people, who treat the characters in soap operas like close confidants. To break this spell is traumatising. Politicians are celebrities, and most people cherish some famous champion or other.
The same goes for political disenchantment. To realise your institutions are rotten is like an old lady hearing her favourite daytime television host is a pederast.
Both are disenchanted by the intrusion of an ugly reality upon a cherished image. The sentimental value is ruined. What is destroyed is a fantasy, a picture in the mind infused with feelings and values and not a little consolation.
This is the risk of falling in love with a phantom. It is the reason we resist the interruption of the real, because it means the surrender of something we love. Something inside ourselves, which we have summoned to enchant us.
This power is used in propaganda. Edward Bernays, being Sigmund Freud’s nephew, was notable for his interest in appealing to unconscious motivation. He wished to capture the heart and the mind. He was a magician in both senses. A trickster, performing sleight-of-mind, he sought to summon the demons of desire.
The Word Made Flesh
To incorporate the motifs of mass media is to embody the ideology. Professional activism and para-participation are of a piece with the internalisation of the fantasy of power. Correctly understood, the use of personal fantasy as a political praxis disempowers and divides the many at the convenience of the few.
This is a condition which applies equally to dissident doomsayers as to regime loyalists. The poles of apocalypse and nihilism are the limits of the self expressed externally. To speak with absolute certainty about an inescapable damnation is not an explanation of the world, but of the speaker.
These designs have their appeal. They divide the world into the wise - you - and the foolish - everyone else. You are awake, they sleep. Yet you inhabit a nightmare, and they do not.
To base your self upon desire, imagination, fantasy is to suffocate. Bernays helped to batch process populations into sealed individual units, connected by consumer aspiration. War is a product like any other, and it has been sold very well. Doom as enlightenment is a thriving brand.
How does this work? The appeal beyond reason speaks to the forces sense cannot control. Death, survival, hate. Brilliance, selflessness, heroism. The grandest of narratives have mythic power to inspire and electrify. They galvanise people against the corrosion of prudence, and flatter without merit. These are the lies of animation.
The matter of blank lives.
Para-Participation
The group membership made possible by social media is a development of the public spectacles Bernays used to arrange. They afford the appearance of belonging to a significant cause. They recast the momentary and the banal as episodes in a cinematic struggle for justice.
All these narratives are heroic, and all are in agreement with the narrative of political power. They are the product of propaganda, and they are all lies.
Good people wear a mask
Obesity is beautiful
Erotomania is normal
Ukraine is going to win
Kids are bad for the planet
Trans rights are human rights
Cultural enrichment
Love is love
Every narrative of fantasy, from climate doom to the covid fiasco, is identified with the good and the great. To ally with these symbols, to internalise and project them as identical with your identity, is to participate in a spectacle of heroic struggle - against the people who do not.
Desperate Times
This technique divides societies into antagonistic factions. It dehumanises those best fit to resist the process of mental colonisation. Mental discipline produces an immune response to this contagion. This was punished with licensed hatred in the case of vaccine resistance, leading to worldwide prejudice against the prudent.
It is no coincidence that the most vocal of supporters for any of these fairy tales are visibly broken people. A need for approval, an absence of love, and a sense of abandonment in a morally neutral marketplace are the results of estrangement.
The term erotomania may loosely apply here, as it describes people - typically women - who are convinced without evidence that someone of a higher status loves them.
There is no love for the common people in the parasite class. The cost of division was certainly counted in every case - war, injections, mass immigration, the privileging of sexual identities. This cost did not come to nothing, because the cost is not counted from your point of view. To those doing the counting, it is a benefit.
Once More With Feeling
Meaning has seeped out of the lives of the lost. Everything but sex talk is off limits. There is nothing to say, but plenty to scream about.
The thymos of the digital age reduces to the desperate need to be noticed. To be noticed in the right place, with the right people, displaying the right message is the goal of the dead souls.
The vanity of these acts is in their blind futility. To the media-crazed, their isolation in fantasy makes them invincible. They stand in front of traffic, and glue themselves to roads.
Confident that the unenlightened will preserve and free them, their act is an expression of their own giddying self belief. I am significant. I am right.
It is the voices in their head versus those outside.
Their energies are directed into state sponsored social causes. For example, the EU routinely funds NGOs to lobby itself, including those promoting extreme agendas. The activist class do not notice, because their focus is within themselves, not without.
Cult-like behaviour is as prevalent in political as in social factions. The circular economy model of Finland is intended to be exported as a template for all the other nations of the empire of lies. As Prof. Mikko Paunio showed here, it is a fantasy project whose international adoption would cripple industrial society.
Everybody should have the opportunity not to own things.
SITRA is a Finnish fund with close ties to the World Economic Forum.
In 2016, SITRA, which is subordinate to the Finnish Parliament, delivered a fabricated report on Finland’s circular economy miracle and created the current circular economy concept for the World Economic Forum, which is harmful to the environment, to human health and the economy.
Paunio has documented the mismatch between this circular fantasy and reality, whose complete failure has had no effect on the promotion of this model economy.
I have witnessed the bankruptcy of Finland’s circular economy and green waste policy in the 21st century…
All that remains of Finland’s circular economy are smoking ruins. However, it will has to be faked because of the binding but unenforceable utopian circular economy legislation inspired by Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.
This circularity, also present in the close relationship between Western governments and non-government bureaucracies, mirrors the function of manufactured fantasy at the personal level. It is a closed system, opposed to all outside the loop. These ingroups of fantasy are self sustaining, and they are found at every extreme.
This phenomenon demonstrates the complexity of the media patterned personality. If you are socialised by fairytale memes, your idea of yourself is realised through a prism of unreality which makes you feel more significant. At the same time it is neutralising you, as everything for which you campaign is already present on some technocrat’s agenda.
What is more, you are summoned into the self by the fool’s bargain of fantasy.
The reason these causes are popular is because they are popularised. The hunger for popularity fuels their contagious transmission. In a populace bereft, the consolation of belonging to a group of imaginary friends is not the pitiable succour of the lost, but a valiant effort for racial, sexual, climate, international justice.
It is the echo of those who are never at peace, because they are at war with reality. There will be no negotiated settlement, only escalation.
One day they will look around and see they are alone.
In the next part I will examine the impact of reality on the Empire of Lies - panic, madness and the unmaking of belief.
The Empire of Lies
As usual, top shelf (restacked)
Deep examination of the mental state of the manufactured reality.