Does anyone vaguely recall those remote, almost legendary, days of 2020-22? The birdemic and the peck campaign...
(And in the midst of it all, the lying, resentment, and spite of the "MLB" antiracism debacle of later summer 2020, and its permanent sequelae in law and regulations and social practices).
If you really try, can you remember how most people (and all institutions) behaved? What they said - and what they willingly, and with pleasurable anticipation, approved and anticipated?
I do. It isn't a subject I think about much; but it is an era that permanently affected my evaluation of people and organizations - especially "Christian" churches.
It was a time when true-colours were revealed - starkly exposed. The metaphorical gloves were off to reveal the iron fist inside the velvet. Proudly wearing the cloth or paper masks (and displaying selfies of it!), so many people un-masked their real natures.
It's not so much that I dwell-upon their embrace of the agenda of evil and their reluctance to think, reason, learn - their cowardice and the short-termist hedonism that governed them...
But that - in terms of my system of mental evaluation, 2020-21 established the categories within-which I "place" entities - in terms of their motivations, their aspirations, ultimately the side they have taken in the spiritual war.
These are the categories from-which I continue to make inferences.
And this is why I have zero optimism - that is no expectation of things positively improving - emanating from any of the people, institutions, or systems of the public discourse, or the Establishment system.
And this is why I am saddened and disappointed to observe so many people who are optimistic about the way things are going. So many who imagine that the West (the world?) has bottomed-out, and begun a rise to better times; or done a U-turn and begun to retreat from the strategy of self-annihilation...
But spiritually nothing has changed for the better: there has been no large scale repentance - therefore nothing substantive has been learned.
Therefore (since change is inevitable) we should infer that those who chose the side of evil in 2020-22 have since come to endorse the assumptions of that side more deeply and thoroughly (whatever their self-identification may be).
I regard this-worldly-optimists as not merely deluded, but as having been seduced from good (if they ever supported it), and made choice of the wrong side.