Thursday, 23 May 2019
Herding cats? - individual evaluation and agency is the only proper opposition to totalitarianism
If Romantic Christians want to oppose totalitarianism, there is a temptation to 'organise', to create an oppositional 'army' (an 'army of liberation'); but - even if it were possible, which it is not - that would essentially be the Boromir Strategy - Hey lads, let's use the One Ring to fight Sauron!
Because the core problem is The System, and organisation involves creating a Sub-System with The System - using System features such as money, laws, media etc - then attempting to use this Sub-System to destroy The System.
It never works because it can't work.
This was brought to mind on this day when UK people are having an election for MEPs, i.e. members of the European Parliament - and there is a chance to register a vote in favour of Brexit. A Brexit 'party' (a Sub-System of The System) has been created, plus a couple of other Brexit possibilities. So this is a protest election, therefore a chance for each individual vote to be 'make a difference', perhaps?
But to make a political party, to support a party, to join an election, to vote is to participate in The System; is to become complicit - and to become a part of the controlled-opposition (spiritually to join oneself with Emmanuel Goldstein, who is The System's manufactured-fake enemy). To vote is the Boromir Strategy...
If not, then what? If I suggest that organising, voting, participating-in The System is actually making-things-worse - then what should people do instead?
('Instead', since whatever we have-been doing is clearly ineffective.)
Instead, we should beach of us become really and truly self-motivated self-evaluators, agents who thinf for our-selves, from our freedom - who believe not what we are told but what we know from personal experience understood by direct intuition, who think not as we are told but as what arises from-with; be individuals whose behaviours can neither be predicted nor manipulated en-masse.
We should behave like cats; and cats cannot be herded.
Thirty-plus years ago - government Health Service policy broke ineffectually over the barrier of General Practitioners - Family Physicians - because each was an independent agent, and spiritually each was stubbornly independent (for better and for worse - but independent).
I worked in the NHS bureaucracy for a couple of years, and the government officials often complained that that trying to control General Practice by changing policies and rules was like herding cats - their exact words - in other words it could not be done, because GPs were not predictable in their behaviour; under the same policy, each was likely to go off in his own direction, without regard for the group.
It did not much matter what you did to one GP, because most of the others regarded themselves as living in a different world. In practice, The System either had specifically to control each GP as ?50,000 separate units; or else there would not be much control.
That was then, this is now> Now there is a massive system of detailed (patient by patient) online surveillance and monitoring, a single imposed-contract for all, and the work and payments is broken up into multiple separate (monitored) units; and GPs are increasingly organised in increasingly-large groups. The GP is de facto (when not in practice) an employee of The System.
British GPs are no longer cats but instead sheep - or, increasingly, archetypal-movie-lemmings; who were, in reality, being herded off cliffs by unseen Disney technicians...
(An exact analogy for Western Man with respect to the Global Establishment.)
And what applies to GPs in microcosm applies to Western Man. This is what it is to live under a totalitarian system - no longer to be an agent, not to have one's own unique motivation, to be monitored and manipulated in large, impersonal units, by bureaucratic systems of rules, incentives and punishments.
We need to become cats, cease being lemmings.

