Why calls for boycotts and sanctions are a symptom of failing to understand that "things are much worse than that".

There are people, online especially but also IRL, whose response to the evil nature of the ruling classes is avoidance. 

It's the puritanical impulse (common to all religions, and found in all denominations); that ranks "sins" and makes a Big thing about publicly and socially avoiding those regarded as worst; on the assumption that this will make people and society overall better...

But given that all Men are sinners; the puritan impulse has its dark side.

Which is (to summarize) that of allowing or even encouraging the multitude of sins and evils Not singled-out for enforced surveillance and exclusion.

Thus a high status puritan (whether religious, or nowadays non- or anti-religious) may be mild-mannered and modest in dress, and strictly avoid alcohol and fornication...

And also be extremely spiteful, resentful and cruel. 

In practice; the avoidance of one or a few special sins, allows space and oxygen for the non-special sins to grow unchecked.  

This is a close analogy to the idea that it is an effective strategy for those who oppose (for instance) "leftism" to operate by avoidance and exclusion of (supposedly) exemplary wrongness. 

Such is the call for "activism". 

This stuff may have begun back in the 1950s, when such people often asserted "I don't have a television", which of itself is perfectly fine; but it was said in a way that implied those who do have a television are morally corrupted. 

When I was a teen, another version of this was people who would "boycott" some particular organization, because it "had ties" to some particular nation, that was supposed to be particularly evil - South Africa was the favourite example... 

And this, at a time, when China's "cultural revolution" was underway! But China wasn't what the right kind of people were talking about, while South Africa was.  

Nowadays there are people whose response to any currently highlighted instance of the evil-strategy of Western institutions is to assert that people "just" need to stop consuming their output. 

This amounts to picking one example (or ten, or a hundred) from among thousands or millions of equivalent evil institutions or persons; focusing on the supposedly special evil of that one...

And then assuming that if we stop consuming the product of that one we shall ourselves become better people and create a pressure for general improvement. 

Such an attitude is evidence of a gross failure to understand that "things are much worse than that"; we are way, way beyond any state at which singling out persons or institutions or nations for special disdain can be anything other than a personal idiosyncrasy. 

As such - as a personal idiosyncrasy - such disengagement and boycotting may well be significant and important. 

I certainly have particular entities - people, places, institutions etc. - that I avoid like the plague; often because they make me viscerally disgusted. 

It seems like obvious sense that we each should go-with such intuitive aversions; but let's not delude ourselves that this "makes a difference" in any systematic way

But the step from this to - for example - launching some kind of campaign to boycott or block some particular entity; is evidence of dangerously naïve ignorance concerning the actual state of our civilization - which is far more systemically and strategically evil than such people realize.

The vast volume of socio-political commentary that focuses on criticizing the absurdities and evils of the self-styled "left" political personalities and parties, is another such failure - because the leftism being critiqued pervades all major personalities and political parties. 

Similarly; when commentators focus on the supposedly special value-corruptions of a particular nation (Canada, New Zealand, UK, France...) this is another instance of dangerous incomprehension; because the real problem is qualitative, not quantitative. 

The problem lies with the entirety of Western civilization, and all its parties, and all its institutions, and all of its leadership class...

And their commonly assumed and shared and enforced atheism, materialism, hedonic-despair - and pervasive and long-term self-loathing and suicidality. 

If you don't grasp this; then you are part of the problem, enmeshed in and supportive of the strategic evils of The System - and have no grounds for self-congratulation. 

And if you do grasp the situation - that things are much worse than implied by assumptions of specific and encapsulated evil; then you will know that picking-out particular people or institutions, parties or nations for special and systemic exclusion - and assuming such "action" will "make a difference"; is not just futile, but dangerously delusional. 

Fight, Fight, Fight is only a variant of "If only everybody would just be Nice"

Things are much worse than most people think! That is clear from the "If only" conversations and writings that seem to have plagued the world for hundreds of years at least. 

So many people though history have pointed out that "If only" people would just be nice, kind, reasonable, sensible, or whatever - "then" how much better this world would be...  

Yes indeed; but the Whole Point is that People are not thus, and show no signs of significant improvement in their natures.

A variant of this are the appeals for people to Fight this, that or the other. "If only" a few people would awaken to their own power, band together, organize, vote, Fight - "then" we could win. "Such exhortations are always, whether explicitly or implicitly, about "us" and what "we" could do if only we would Fight.  

Yes indeed; but the Whole Point is that (here and now, in "real" life) people don't and won't fight.

Or, at least, they will fight only when they are compelled by the government, get paid, or attain high status for fighting. Although some people will fight without reward; from their pleasure in destruction, bullying, and infliction of pain.  

And therefore (because their motivations are bad) people will only in practice fight on the side of evil - because, in terms of spiritual virtue: motivations are what matter.  

What's more, even if people could be well-motivated to fight on the side of God and Good; who exactly would they fight? 

The answer is that those who fought for Good would need to fight those on the side of evil. 

But things are much worse that most people think; and those on the side of evil are not a handful of Dark Lords and elite lieutenants, the elimination of whom would win the spiritual war; but instead those on the side of evil is... Almost Everybody. 

If you really (rather than merely rhetorically) were to fight, fight, Fight; then your would nearly-always start by fighting your family and friends, moving on to neighbours and colleagues, very soon including almost-everybody... those involved in almost-every social system: those responsible for food, water, energy, building and repair, trade and transport, retail etc. - as well as police and the military.  

The evil that rules this world, controls all these, and the other (politics, media, law, education, health,. arts, science...), social systems - so all-of-them is exactly who and what you would need to Fight. 

And even supposing you were able to inflict significant damage on Them; by destroying The System; you would certainly cause the sooner (rather than later) collapse of Western Civilization*. 

Things are much worse than most people think; and even if people and this world were utterly different from what they actually are - the dewy-eyed optimism of those who exhort us to Fight reveals their naïve ignorance of how bad things actually are, how pervasive and (in its various, or specific manifestations) overwhelmingly popular is the agenda of evil. 

Realistically; there is no basis for optimism: that is, there is no basis for believing that the world can or will become significantly better than it is now. 

But for a Christian this is not a counsel of despair, because Heaven is not of this world, and Jesus Christ's promises are of resurrection for those who follow Him - real Christianity is not a programme of socio-political reform. 

In other words: the cure for despair is not optimism but hope; not group belief in a high probability of amelioration or improvement but the personal certainty of salvation. 

*Of course, the underlying motivations of the fight-fight-fight brigade are often (apparently) selfish or in service to evil. Some are using this rhetoric to "make a buck", to build a business, build a cult around themselves, support the "party"; others are paid shills or state-employed agents provocateurs. Others are just LARPing as tough guys. But some are, no doubt, sincere but misguided - and they are the focus of the post.  

Assuming bad intentions

*

The Western ruling elites could be basically decent, well-meaning people who want good things but - through lack of knowledge, personal greed and other types of selfishness, short-sightedness etc. - end-up doing (and trying to do) mostly evil things...

OR

They could be basically evil people whose strategic goal is to destroy good things wherever and whenever they have the opportunity - but who are somewhat restrained from doing so with maximum long-term efficiency by defects such as laziness, cowardice, spite and short-termist comfort-seeking; plus being hampered and confused by that fact that they are not wholly evil and residual good elements will sometimes divert the motivations and sabotage the plans of the primary evil components.

*

We are agreed, therefore, that the secular Left politically correct leadership of all Western nations and all major institutions have done and are doing great evil, and are planning and propagandizing to do more great evils; and will not listen to anyone who points-out the facts, but rather the opposite: they will ignore, sideline, lie about, exclude, suppress-by-whatever means the truth - will violate common sense and call it sophistication, and will outlaw anybody learning from their own personal experience...

This we know.

But people retain considerable uncertainty about the basic set-up leading to this situation.

*

The mainstream secular Right continually try to explain the bad things of modern life by a kind of Marxist analysis which purports to demonstrate that although most people are damaged by policy X, the political leadership will benefit from it - and this is (it is argued) why they are doing it.

For instance it is common sense and personal experience to know for sure that mass immigration will lead to the destruction of any society sooner or later; and the fact that the secular Leftist elites aggressively promote this policy is obvious; but the usual explanations focus upon ways in which the elite leadership will benefit (personally and in the short term) from this policy (cheap labour, cheap servants, getting elected etc).

But this type of analysis and explanation assumes that the key opinion formers are basically good people, who want good things, but who have been corrupted by short term selfishness into pursuing policies which are harmful to more people and over the longer term...

(It is also to assume the primacy of Marxist analysis: the primacy of economic motivation. A double error.)

*

This is certainly not self-evident. Indeed common sense and personal experience suggests that the opposite is likely - that people are naturally very reluctant indeed to do anything which benefits them personally and in the short term when it obviously leads to the destruction of their society - including the world in which they will themselves live during old age and their friends, family and own children will have to live-in.

What this economic analysis is actually assuming is that the ruling elites are basically decent in the motivations, wanting the same things as everyone else, but seduced into the pursuit of selfish and short-termist behaviours about a few specific bad things like mass immigration, simply because they have been corrupted by power.

*

This does not make common sense.

On the one hand, the economic (secular Right) analysis assumes that the ruling elites are essentially good-motivated people who have been corrupted by power into long-termist (strategic) pursuit of their own short-termist selfishness

(for example mass immigration is being promoted now because will lead to cheap labour and electoral dominance in 5, 10 or 20 years)

- and yet, on the other hand, somehow, the predictable long-term massively destructive consequences to themselves and their friends and families of sustained mass immigration do not affect their policies.

*

The standard secular Right explanation for the wicked policies of the elites therefore assumes that the ruling Western elite are long-termist about achieving benefits but ignore inevitable long term harm; that they think strategically about economics, but about nothing else.

In a nutshell: the mainstream secular Right argue that the  dominant Leftist elites are strategically short-termist - which is an oxymoron.

This analysis does not make plain sense - of course it can be tortured into a semblance of sense by the addition of complex qualifiers; but that amounts to the same as saying it does not make sense. 

*

The actually-existing Western ruling elites are not like normal people. 

Therefore we should not judge them as if they were like normal people.

Especially we should not assume that they are motivated like normal people.

In particular we should not assume that their motivations are 'basically good'.

*

Some significant and dominant proportion of the Western ruling elites are basically evil in the sense of strategically seeking the destruction of good and good things, wherever and whenever they are found.

If they see a good marriage, or a happy family, an innocent child, or a beautiful building, or encounter a man of honesty and integrity - then their response is to hate it and want to deface it or destroy that goodness: break-up that marriage, pop-the-bubble of that family and rub their noses in filth, tattoo that child, demolish and replace that building, and corrupt that man of integrity into acts that violate his conscience.

If they encounter an argument which proves conclusively that their policies will certainly be widely destructive of good things and promoting of lies, ugliness and vice; they will inwardly nod, think 'thank you', and proceed with even greater determination having heard confirmation that this is a valid plan which will achieve its objectives.

*

The Western ruling elites will and do pursue evil policies even when they know that these policies will surely harm themselves, their families, and be destructive of everything they value and indeed love.

In fact it is not a case of 'even when' they know the policies will be destructive of good, it is 'because' the policies are destructive of good: that is what evil means.

*

And it you ask how it is possible for a person to be active in pursuit of evil, then I advise you to read the Old Testament (or Tolkien) for numerous examples.

Such people are not so much to be regarded as the ultimate origin of their own evil, but in the grip of evil; consenting to and embracing evil by an act of will which feeds upon itself.

But don't ever expect acknowledgment of truth from evil. It is characteristic and intrinsic of evil to lie.

*

People ask which is most likely "cock-up or conspiracy?" - incompetence or active planning?

Un-ask the question, these are not the options. Things are much worse than that.

The options are basically good people accidentally doing harm or purposive evil deliberately destroying good.

And it makes a big difference which is true; because if you treat purposive evil as if it was accidental harm, you will not stop it, but make matters worse.

When the destruction of good is actively (albeit covertly) being sought via policy; then starvation, disease and violence are seen as a feature, not a bug.

*

The centre has not moved Left - there is no centre

It is about three years since I started blogging the ideas that found their way into my mini-book about the mass media, Addicted to Distraction -

http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk

Since then I have been doing my best not to take notice of the mass media - but to be honest I have not done very well. It is extremely difficult to avoid the most harmful and significant onslaughts of propaganda - since they come at you from all sides, including other people's opinions and questions.

It seems clear that human beings are 'built' so as to 'take sides' on any question, and this - combined with modern Man's lack of any religious centre - is what makes us so easy to manipulate by selective and distorted reporting.


But although everything I see is consistent with the world being run by demons whose goal is the destruction - preferably by inversion - of all that is good; the single most striking thing is that the populations of The West (of Europe and the Anglosphere) seem not to care that they are continually lied-to and manipulated.

Actually, it is far worse than not caring. Although strategic and purposive evil emanates from the leadership elite, not from the population at large; there is a groundswell of active, mass, popular collusion in the process - and it is this which makes the adverse trend literally irresistible (without some mass, powerful religious and spiritual revival).

What seems evident is that there is (for whatever combination of reasons) no centre to modern public life - that is, no point around which oscillation occurs.


I do not mean that the centre has 'moved left' - that was an early phase - things now are much worse than that.

I mean that there isn't any centre at all.

That is not to say that 'anything goes' - because at any moment discourse is heavily constrained - but that there is no cohesive point around-which things are organised. The centre has a location only for the duration of an utterance - then reappears somewhere (unpredictably) elsewhere.


Most of what happens in the mass media is irrelevant and insignificant - but the big news stories are relevant and significant, and these are where the lack of centre shows-up; because there is no position from which to resist the concerted efforts of coordinated elite opinion to shape attitudes and opinions.

So the forces of evil always win - overall and on the whole.

After each major saturation news coverage, there is a permanent and almost universal degradation of public opinion that is not recovered.


The reason that people are not noticing what is happening is precisely that there is no centre and that they themselves have no centre - individuals with no centre do not posses a point of view from which change may be detected and measured.

This is also why the mass of men leads lives of quiet desperation without knowing it. The paradox of modernity is that of people assert that they have good lives in a good society which is engaged in moral progression - but have no hope for anything.

People have a public mask that says one kind of thing, and an invisible shadow that continually plots and schemes for personal and societal extinction. The mask is a fake, and the shadow knows it.

(And when Man has no religion there is nothing else but masks and shadows - it is masks and shadows all the way down.) 


And people are so deeply disgusted at themselves that - from their anti-religious stance, with no other alternatives - annihilation is the best option.

Hence, people actively welcome being lied to, manipulated, whipped-up into fake frenzies of adulation and indignation, crushed down into passive terror and despair. This is what the people want, and this is what the media delivers - and the masses don't just lap it up, but seek it out and pipe it into their minds at high pressure 24/7. They feel that this is no worse than they deserve.

Schadenfreude is the only thriving business in the modern soul - where the only solid reality is the sneering satisfaction of the shadow-self triumphing at the incremental come-uppance of that smug, gullible idiot which is the respectable public persona.

Magic, and the missing causes of the way the world works

Something that I become more aware of with the passing years, is that there are very significant causal factors which are left-out of the usual explanations for things such as the economy, civil society, even the survival of nations. Such that I am aware that "we", including myself, do not really understand things half so well as we suppose. There must be a lot more going-on than is realized. 

I really have no idea how the economy continues to provide so much stuff for so many people. I can see pretty exactly where my own income has come from and goes, but I cannot remotely do the same for others. The numbers don't add up. 

I can only assume that there are hidden subsidies all over the place - but how this is kept going I don't see. 

(The high level of escalating subsidy - which goes to the lowest classes, as well as to the richest - can't all be derived from resource extractions from people like myself - there aren't enough of us. And we don't generate many real and useful resources anyway.)

So, while I am sure that the British economy will collapse at some point, it has continued far longer than seemed possible during the birdemic stoppages. Hardly anybody seems to be doing anything true, or beautiful, or even useful - most people are actively engaged in destruction - and yet...

While the EU is destined to collapse, this has been the case for at least 15 years - and it is still there, and still causing mischief and mayhem on a massive scale (and still unconditionally supported by the UK ruling class).  

The situations, as I currently see it, is that human beings are very actively engaged in their strategic own annihilation by almost every means conceivable - including the most fundamental one of almost ceasing to reproduce; but also, recently, by trying to start pointless wars with stronger opponents.

Eventually this must and shall have the massively destructive effect that humans desire.

But meanwhile things continue; which I infer means that some-thing, or rather some-beings, some-where must be working against this - or else the destruction would have long since happened. 

(I do not believe that this is only a matter of buffering destructive change. That would not suffice. There must be actual opposition to the destruction - there must, in other words, be some positively creative activity. 

But it really does not seem that positive creative activity is coming from human beings. 

In other words, something "magical" - which means something unconsidered by our explanatory models, something outwith our materialist explanations, something working by spiritual not physical means, is at work... 

And that magical spiritual "something" is not coming from the human beings - more exactly only very few human beings seem to be involved - and these not-human powers for good are slipping under the radar.   

So things continue much longer that our knowledge and understanding suggest that they could or should. 

Yet, instead of noticing this, being grateful, and acknowledging and supporting these non-human beings for protecting us from our own malign motivations - the lesson most people draw is that we can and should continue our strategic destructiveness, on the basis that it is not really destructive. 

For so long as the society does not actually collapse into rampant/ endemic violence, disease, famine, chaos - for so long the mass of people (especially, but not only, the rulers) can and will continue to claim that this means their nihilism and spitefulness are "good for" the economy, peace, security, decency...

And even when chaos supervenes, it seems that the collapse will be blamed upon those scattered and weak human beings who still try to do good; who recognize and endorse truth, beauty and virtue. 

Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that we share our nations with a multitude of other - not human - beings; animals, plants; and spirits of many kinds including (but not only) the dead, angels, and the "elemental" beings that modern Man regards as non-living.

Some of these "magical" spirits are apparently doing their best to sustain that which human beings are doing their worst to destroy. 

The God-aligned and Good among these non-physical, magical, spirit beings are, I presume, the missing cause that explains (could we but understand their activities) why things are not already much worse than they actually are. 

Choose your religion - or else religion will choose you

It is interesting that, at root, so many groups of people - whether that be in religion or in politics, actually offer explicitly what they are able to give. It is a kind of basic honesty, that seems to bind even the worst people and groups.

I have commented on this in religion - it is surprising how little most religions offer their adherents. Christianity offers far more than any other major religion (as Pascal noted - the only coherent reason for not wanting to be a Christian is that you think it is untrue - otherwise it offers far more than any rival religion or ideology), and even within Christianity some denominations offer more than others.

This is surprising in the sense that I would have supposed that there would be a lying bidding-war between religions, each striving (or pretending) to offer a more wonderful life or afterlife than the rivals.

Somehow this doesn't happen.


For example, modern liberal Christianity might be supposed to be offering its adherents more than some traditional types - in the sense that there is no Hell, and no strict rules about sex, fasting, attending Church etc.

But in fact liberal Christianity offers its adherents nothing at all - no miracles, no answered prayers. no healings, no experiences of contact with the divine, no afterlife, no resurrection of the body...

The advertised fate of a liberal Christian is that same as that of any other secular modern person - a purely subjective 'god' and extinction at the point of death.


Something similar applies to politics. The secular Left parties are, of course, fundamentally dishonest - but they are strangely honest about what they offer and what they do not offer.

They offer a focus (ie. lots of talk, lots of bureaucracies, lots of taxes) on themes such as equality, diversity, inclusiveness and so on. By means of affirmative action - preferences according to sex, sexuality, race, religion, ideology - the Left indeed offer a bit of the actuality.

But interestingly Leftist parties do not offer greater economic efficiency and growth, better science and more breakthroughs, an impartial legal system, greater military power, civil peace and public good behaviour, control of borders... or any of the things that the Right offers.


Of course the Left does make an occasional, sporadic (and dishonest) claim to fix anything and everything - but over time, day by day, in terms of strategy and propaganda the Left hardly mentions such things, avoids the subject, changes the subject. It is very obvious indeed that the Left is not going to do any of these things, and the Left don't make any serious or sustained effort even to pretend that they will.

Why don't they just say they will deliver on such matters? Why don't they pretend they will do everything? Perhaps because they are averse to these other 'goods' - certainly they are uninterested by them, don't like the subjects to be discussed... but then, that itself seems to suggest that they do not want to be put into a position of lying about them.

It is as if even these habitual and fundamental liars are constrained by some basic truth: if and when the Left has ruined a society by imposing equality, destroying Christianity, wrecking the economy, subverting marriage, breaking-up families, and encouraging unrestricted mass immigration... or whatever - then they can at least claim that they were merely doing what they said they would do!

This explicitness is odd, on the face of it; because the Left do lie about many, many things, for years and decades, and they get away with lies because the Left is the mass media, and modern populations are addicted to the mass media. But there are some things that they don't lie about...


The same basic and overall honesty applies to the more Right Wing Left parties (all mainstream modern politics is extremely Leftist, by world historical standards, so it does not make sense to call mainstream conservative, republican, libertarian type secular groups 'Right' wing parties, they are merely slight less Left wing than their rivals: the only truly Right wing parties are religious parties that want to run society on religious line, i.e. ultimately according to religious priorities and evaluations) - and it also applies to idealistic secular Right wing theorists, self-proclaimed reactionaries, for instance.

I refer to these groups as basing their appeal on Common Sense: they are characterized by common sense policies on economics, the law, immigration - their claims are that they will make things more efficient, more effective, make their nations more secure and powerful, make their societies more peaceful, favour their own native people and races rather than other people and races etc.

The problem is this mainstream or idealistic secular Right wing politics is so deadly dull, boring, pedestrian, prosaic, small minded, selfish. In a word sensible! 


It really is. This is not an illusion. Secular 'Right' politics presents its vision of Life very lucidly (and honestly) as an ideology that drains away everything except... functionality. It offers a future of highly efficient nothing.

(Does this explain why people have a horror of sensible people and parties? That if the secular Right got what it wants, if we really were sensible in a secular world, people would mean nothing, life would mean nothing, Men would be just so many cogs in an abstract machine. In our personal lives, among those we love, we do not want people to be sensible about us.)


Mainstream (secular) Rightism offers more of what we have already had - especially a generation or two ago, when things were far more sensible than now - increasingly prosperous, powerful, rational, fair etc. social systems whose aim is... increasingly prosperity, power, rationality, justice etc.

The secular Right offers a nightmare of means but no ends. The vacuum of ends is indeed proclaimed as a virtue, as freedom, as individuality - there isn't even an attempt to claim that there is any point to the secular Right vision - its utter pointlessness is proclaimed as a benefit.

The West has been more sensible than any other society in the history of the world. We have had sensibility, and we have been made plausible offers of even-more sensibility - and we have rejected it: decisively.


So modern life is divided between these options - Common Sense versus Leftism - and Leftism has won. The public have decided that they prefer lying and nonsensical but very-slightly idealistic, very-slightly and very-vague Utopian Leftist dreams over the sensible, value-free, dead, dull functional efficiency offered by the Right - because even a glimmer of idealism is preferable to deadly, dull, functional efficiency; any values (however feeble) are preferable to no values.

There is no way out of this unless or until a truly Right party emerges (i.e. a religious party) which offers more than the Left to feed the ineradicable religious hunger in Men's souls. Eventually this will emerge - one religion or another will displace the Left, because the religions have so much more to offer - and in a broad brush sense, each probably religion delivers what it offers.


We will easily see this when it happens, there will be no doubt or uncertainty about what is happening, it will be an extraordinary shock - because the whole tone and content of public discourse will change utterly.

There will be a vision presented, and the vision of any religion is qualitatively different from any vision presented by modern politics. The concentration of discourse - the mass of what people talk and wrote and read about - will move to the divine, to the divine plan, and to the afterlife.

Suddenly the concerns of modern mainstream Western politics will seem pathetically dull, shallow, trivial when compared with the scale and scope of a religious perspective.



And this could happen very quickly indeed, in just a few weeks a religious fever could - and indeed will - sweep through the West.

It will happen quickly because there is nothing to stop it happening, no resistance to it happening, because the alternatives are so utterly feeble.

The devastation this will undoubtedly cause to the normal running of society will, quite suddenly, seem unimportant - people will be filled with, pumped-with, motivation and they will find it intoxicating and overwhelming - they will realize that the secular society is pointless.

When they glimpse a vision of purpose, and this vision begins to spread, they will embrace it, they will be fuelled by it, swept-up in it - they will want more of it whatever the cost - and the cost will surely be immense; but that will not stop it happening, because the idea will be that any cost is worth it.


The stability of the modern secular West is extremely feeble, requires continual vast and expanding expenditure of bribes and propaganda. The West is indeed 'metastable' - which means there is a much more stable configuration into which it could move at any point - and that configuration is religion.

All the main Western political and social trends are draining away stability, all the satisfactions of modern life are ephemeral, there is less and less motivation because there is less and less reason to be motivated.

The modern secular 'religion' (ideology) is that each of us is alone, life has no meaning, and when we die we are annihilated. Really, it is not difficult to offer more than that! Any religion offers more. Any religion could displace the West.


The question will be which religion, or religion, suddenly emerges - which will be the one or ones that suddenly sweep an particular Western nation or region or ethnic group - what will be on offer that suddenly makes secular politics - whether of the Left or secular Right -  seem trivial, shallow, pointless - which religion galvanizes people with a sudden motivation so strong that all the substitutes of the past two hundred years will be discarded with hardly a glance back at them,


I am not asking for speculation on which specific religion, or which various religions, will suddenly emerge and within weeks sweep aside two centuries of triumphant secularism - because in a metastable state nobody knows.

Also this process will not necessarily be good, may well leave things much, much worse than they have been. May be - in terms of health, happiness, comfort, convenience, pain and misery - an absolute disaster.


The religion that wins in some places, or in most places, may be a very bad one, by Christian standards.

But that will not stop it happening. Unworldly, non-rational mystique, magic, and religious idealism are utterly irresistible to alienated, nihilistic secular politics. Religion will spread like wild-fire, perhaps like fiend-fire - but the only remotely effective resistance to Hell-fire will be Heavenly Fire.


There is a message for each and every Western person:

Choose your religion, or else religion will choose you. 

It's important to recognize how very bad things actually are - civilizationally

A recurrent source of disagreement I have with nearly everybody, and going back to about 2008; is that I am acutely aware that our civilization is in a really, really bad way - much, much worse than almost almost-anybody is prepared even to entertain as a possibility. 

This seems to me very obvious! And also that the problems are as deep as such problems can be - problems of false fundamental assumptions concerning reality, and problems that the strongest human motivations in this life are disordered...

The problem of habitual and compulsive dishonesty (including, most damagingly, with oneself), and the problem of being unable or unwilling to learn from repeated experiences. 

...To mention only some of the fundamental problems. 

I suppose one reason that this conviction of mine is hardly shared, is that people evaluate civilization first in terms of how they personally are feeling, here-and-now - and if they are feeling OK or happy, they infer that nothing can be seriously wrong. 

Or that people evaluate civilization in terms of sheer abstract survival and continuity. SO that as long as things haven't actually collapsed, or can - at least - be imaged as rebounding or self-correcting (even over multigenerational timescales) then nothing can be seriously wrong. 

And under this is the truth that matters of civilization aren't our concern, really. Civilizations are not as product of human will and planning - and neither is their continuation. They are a kind of unavoidable backdrop and essential sustenance - and (evidently) a colossal influence in spiritual aspirations, beliefs,  perceptions - and yet these matters cannot be positively influenced in an overall or top-down fashion (although they can be negatively affected). 

In the end, spiritually speaking; we are individual persons and agents - no matter how much we try to elude this; and our primary social concern is with loving relationships - which are the only like that "society" has to the great dramas of spiritual learning and salvation. 

Therefore I am not-at-all saying that we ought to recognize how very bad things actually are because this might help us to make them better! 

What I am saying here; is that - unless we recognize how bad things actually are - then we Will Not Actually pursue the real business of our lives - i.e. the great dramas of spiritual learning and salvation.  

While some may argue that we don't need to acknowledge the evil nature of the Big Picture in order our-selves to be good; this seems decisively to be refuted by experience. Unless people feel themselves spiritually detached from our civilization in a profound metaphysical and motivational way; then for so long they will be aligned with the agenda of evil - and at a deep level of affiliation that subverts surface declarations and practices.   

In other words: observation of what happens when not; brings me to the conviction that we need (yes need) to sense, know, acknowledge, take-account of; just how very bad things really are civilizationally - if we our-selves are to be able to become clear about this mortal life - and make Christian personal discernments and choices. 

To be free to choose to follow Jesus, and to learn from our actual lives; entails that we know the nature of our spiritual situation in this world.  

Anything less just doesn't cut it. 

***

NOTE ADDED: I would like to emphasize that the fullest recognition of how very bad things are; is, or can be, in its effect a great and immediate liberation. 

By it we are freed from futile engagement with that utterly vast, and impossibly complicated, web of distortions and manipulations that is the realm of public discourse. 

Positively: we become true agents; with both authority and need to stand on our own evaluations.

And thereby we become primarily responsible for understanding our place in this world, and deciding our desired destination beyond it. 

What are those who call for 'action, not words' really asking?

Dissident Christian websites, are usually inhabited by pseudonymous identities (or writing as 'anonymous'), who pour scorn on useless talk, and call instead for 'action', for doing something: organizing, confronting the problem etc. 

And with the implicit, when not explicit, assertion that those who 'just' try to understand, discuss or engage in spiritual activity (and don't fantasize about organizing militia) are not real men; are shirking responsibility; are (because they 'must be') lazy, cowardly, quietistic, pacifistic, self-pitying, miserable, terminally despairing... 

What is going on here? 

First, I always notice the absurdity of those who urge real, physical and manly action (danger, risk?) while sheltering behind pseudonyms. 

Second, some of these pseudonyms will surely be agents, provocateurs, Establishment snoops, trolls - and the like. 

But what of those who are serious - who sincerely desire to embark on well-directed and direct action in pursuit of Christian goals? 

What exactly are they asking-for, when they demand to be told what to do.   

My impression is that many are craving a well-motivated and strong group which they can join. 

Or, perhaps they believe that there already-is such a group, a particular church - for instance, and are seeking for it, or recruiting for it?

Or they may be asking that somebody (i.e. somebody-else - not the asker himself) get-on-with the task of forming and organizing some such group (i.e. the kind of group the asker feels that he would like to join); so that the asker can then join it, and join-in with its work. 

In sum - a lot of people (understandably!) want a tough gang that they can join, who will provide guidance of what-to-do, and strong backup for doing it. 

An understandable desire  - and one we have surely all felt at some time!

So why are such 'calls' so-often heard, for so many years - and yet, and yet... It never happens!

There are many reasons why it never happens, or else it would have happened. 

But the main reason is that things are much worse than those who demand action realize. 

Our society is much-more profoundly corrupted and demotivated than believed by those who believe that things can be turned-around merely by some sarcastic or scornful online cheerleader who is trying to discover a suitable gang he can to join. Much worse than one who vaguely hopes that (acting in response to his pseudonymous scorn) that somebody-else, somewhere, will be stimulated to form such a gang. 

In essence all the powerful 'gangs' are already-corrupted.

That is the powerful gangs are overall (and usually explicitly in several respects) anti-Christian, pro-leftist, and operate in accordance with the agenda of totalitarian materialism. 

In sum: the big, strong and thriving gangs are on the side of Satan and against God. 

What about organizing a bigger, stronger and more deeply-motivated gang in service to Jesus, to fight totalitarianism, leftism, and other forms of evil - and instead to impose Good? 

The first and deepest problem is finding enough and suitable personnel: enough who are properly-motivated, strongly-motivated, tough... 

Such people must also be willing to accept here-and-now significant disadvantage and harm - in pursuit of long-term good.

Ultimately what is needed is sufficient people who will be motivated to suffer (for sure), and (maybe) die, for that Good which they strive to bring-about. 

And that is exactly what cannot be found. 

To my mind; a pseudonymous commenter or blogger asking for 'action' has - by sheltering behind a pseudonym - probably already shown himself personally unwilling to take risk or suffer disadvantage; in pursuit of long-term goals -- no matter how sincere his inner desire for a better world. 

Therefore, the high prevalence and affected-tough attitudes of 'pseudonymous chicken-hawks' illustrates one important reason why it has (apparently) not been possible to recruit enough sufficiently-motivated people to form a new and strong movement against the left/ materialist/ totalitarians - and in favour of a Christian society. 

But there is usually more than one reason why some-thing good and desirable has-not-happened; and a further reason is that - here-and-now, as society is presently structured - organizations of sufficient size to be strong are bureaucracies. 

Bureaucracies are intrinsically leftist-tending, materialist in the procedures - and therefore have a continual tendency to become short-termist and expedient (hence weak).

Also, to recruit and sustain themselves and grow - and here-and-now organization must do-so in an environment in which personnel management, employment, workplace, accounting, loans and penalties... and a multitude of other constraints have built-in pro-Leftist and anti-Christian rules and laws. 

(This is probably a major reason why the largest and most potentially-powerful churches, have by-now all been tamed and conformed to the anti-Christian core agenda items - the Litmus Tests. Of course; many people are self-blinded to this reality; but that does not stop it from being reality.)

Thus, any strong organization will be bureaucratic, and any bureaucratic organization itself will be (to a significant and increasing degree) de facto leftist in its workings...

And to the extent it is Not conforming to the left-agenda; the organization will be diminished in its power to propagate and impose its views.   

A double-bind. 

In practice, therefore, either we are willing to start taking action on our own, in a situation where this will mean we suffer immediate disadvantage and increased risk, and without back-up...

Or else we will continue to wait - hoping to find a suitable and ready-made group that doesn't exist.

Or, waiting for 'somebody-else' to create such a group in a societal situation aggressively designed to prevent any such group arising and retaining significant power or influence. 

In sum; those who want to join an already-existing tough gang on the side of Good before taking any action themselves, are disappointed to find they don't exist. 

And those who want somebody else to organize such a gang for them to join, are likely to be waiting a long time...   

This means if we want action to be taken, we our-selves must take action essentially alone - without back-up, with our particular gifts and disadvantages, and from the exact situation in which we find-ourselves here-and-now. 

Because each who acts positively will be acting alone in an unique situation, there can be no generic good advice about 'what to do'. So - don't ask for it!

And because he is working essentially alone and with no back-up; anyone who is genuinely engaged in serious 'material' action to change modern society positively would be stupid to reveal his plans publicly! 

And here we come to another crux: the material versus the spiritual. 

Those who ask for action mean 'action in the material realm' - and they do not regard spiritual action as real. They regard spiritual activity as just an excuse for sheltering and hiding; for doing-nothing. 

However, given the realities; spiritual action must be primary, must come first, must be done before any realistic change that material action can possibly succeed. 

This is because personal action must genuinely be positive, must truly favour the Christian goals; and this means that Christian action absolutely-must be properly-motivated. 

Wrongly-motivated action will work against Good, and for evil - no matter what that action may be. 

Furthermore, well-motivated individual action must be strongly motivated, because otherwise it will rapidly fail due to the adverse worldly incentives; and this motivation must be 'from-within' because it cannot depend on institutional or social support. 

This world has-been structured so that we (as individuals) must be prepared to suffer and risk in the short-term, in order to have even a chance of betterment in the long-term.   

This means strong faith; which means a faith which looks beyond this material mortal world...

Which means spiritual strength must come first - or else no action will be taken, or the individual's good-intentions will fold and collapse at the first significant obstacle.

In sum: if you are Christian and want action, don't wait for other people to prepare your ground: do it yourself; working from your own unique nature and situation. 

But don't talk about it!

And don't forget that effective material activity for Good comes-from, and is fuelled-by, spiritual strength - deriving-from strong love-for and faith-in God, and with loving motivations dominated by our living hope of resurrection. 

 

Charlton's Third Law - there is no single 'key', you are held back by two things - lack of religion *and* spirituality

People who are seriously trapped in a bad situation are always held by at least two errors. If it was just one error, that would not be much of a problem - sooner or later you would stumble on the key you needed to escape.

Of course, according to my first law, things must get worse before they get better. Otherwise things already would be better. It is usually obvious what needs to be done to make things better, but it is not done because doing the right thing nearly always makes things worse at first.

But even allowing for this, if you are in a bad situation there will be two things (minimum) holding you back. If you merely fix one of these two things, then you will not experience any significant improvement - both have to be fixed to make a difference.

Indeed, if two things need fixing but you fix only one of them, then it may be a bad thing overall; this is the kind of situation which leads to people (and institutions) doubling-down on their errors - trying harder and harder to implement a strategy which has not worked, shows no sign of working and never can work.

So, for the typical modern lost soul, religion and spirituality are both needed - and if you are religious but not spiritual, or spiritual but not religious then - overall and in the long-run - these don't work and have no prospect of working.

Of course, there is the matter of what 'working' is - and it is possible to define this in a circular fashion. But for someone that is stuck, it is unconvincing to be told that if you do this one thing then you will realise that this one thing is the only thing that matters. Someone who is stuck needs to feel that they can escape to a better place, a better life, a better way of being - if they are to do something which will, in the short term, make things worse.

But in general, people need a new religion - that is a new set of assumptions, a new framework, new practises and the rest. And they also need a new spirituality - a new way of thinking, a new mode of consciousness, a new way of experiencing the same things.

People who are religious without spirituality find that they just have a different set of theories ('beliefs') but inside they are still the same old miserable person they always were; people that are spirituality without being religious find that they are just doing psychotherapy - they may feel better, but this is just a matter of temporary and meaningless feelings.

So people need to become religious and spiritual at the same time for things to work - yet that is not easy - people are linear in thought and behaviour - they can only think about or do one thing at a time.

They need to move both feet, but have to move one foot or the other first - and whichever foot they move it will not take them to where they want to be.

Furthermore, it seems that human institutions are the same. Some institutions are religions and some are spiritual - they put one above the other in practice, and in practice whatever is put first tends to take over, and become the only thing.

When there is a conflict, solution is usually via setting priorities; and most religions have religious priorities - that it is more important how you behave rather than how you think - and pretty soon that becomes the whole thing. Then there is the legalism, Phariseeism, which Jesus warned against and into which so many religions have degenerated so quickly.

And the people who are spiritual find they want to behave differently than the religion - they want to do something the religion forbids, or not do something the religion insists upon - so they 'solve' the conflict by dumping the religion - and trying to think and feel spiritually without a religious frame. And they find that then the feelings are merely feelings - purpose and meaning have disappeared with the religion.

There have only very seldom been situations, or even individuals, who are both religious and spiritual - but that is our destiny, the only thing that is really worth striving for - because either alone is at best inadequate and more often a situation which is subverted to evil.

So there is no single key - what is needed to launch your life is more like those two separate and different keys, on opposite sides of the room, which must be turned simultaneously, that I have seen in movies as necessary for launching some kind of ultimate weapon.

Religion and spirituality are the two keys, each is distinct; and we need to turn them both at the same time - even though the locks are separated by a significant distance.

Either we need to stretch our arm span wider then ever before, or get help from someone else.

Signs of the effectiveness of an ideology or religion: thriving institution, life-changing, gratifying, or strengthening

What I look for in evaluating the 'success' or 'effectiveness' of an 'ideology' or religion or any kind of spiritual activity; is that it is strengthening. 

All the rest of the indices are pretty useless as of 2023; although they may well have been valid at various points in the past. 

A thriving institution is nowadays, nearly-always, merely a measure of its approval rating with the global totalitarian regime, since The System sustains only what advances its agenda of evil - and will otherwise keep an institution small and weak (in material terms), when it does not assimilate or destroy it. 

Therefore indices such as expansion, growth of numbers, profits, new building, approval ratings or viewings, increased influence, greater status (prizes, awards, prestige...); such things mean little more than that one is an insider-to-evil. 

That something is measurably life-changing is of somewhat more relevance; but only when the induced change is for the good. 

There are plenty of life-changing events, artifacts etc that are merely increasing conformity to the agenda, or corrupting people into greater acceptance and approval of sin. 

It is much easier to make people worse than to make them better. For instance it is easy (given enough resources) to increase peoples' fear, resentment or despair; but very difficult indeed to improve their lovingness, courage, and transcendental hope. 

Much the same applies to some-thing that improves happiness, gratification, satisfaction, motivation. 

This is again somewhat closer to where we want to be; yet in the world as it is now, most things that make people feel better and more energetic are bad-things that will lead then to a much worse situation. 

Such is clearly the case for the 'liberations' and 'rights' of the sexual revolution: short term people feel better, have more fun - but long-term: nihilism. Or any modern political movement that engages peoples and sets them to work. At first there is a sense of community, belonging, a mission... But pretty soon 'activists' become among the very worst of people; characterized by shame, guilt, self-hatred, self-destructiveness... 

Desirous of escape, insensibility, death, and their own (plus general) destruction. 

The most valid - although still incomplete - benefit seems to me to be strengthening in the cause of Good. The strength can be most readily seen negatively, in terms of Not being enlisted into the agendas of totalitarian evil - of passing the Litmus Tests for example. 

Conversely, the utter uselessness of most institutions, churches, religious systems, spiritual disciplines (such as meditation) etc. can now be clearly seen by the fact that the organizations and their adherents fail the Litmus Tests en masse; that they always go-along-with whatever current evil-policy is being pushed; they always believe what the Establishment currently most want them to believe; they are self-blinded-against, uninterested by, and in-denial-of whatever is truly important and most-threatening in the world (preferring instead to focus on imaginary threats and Total Lies). 

It is harder to discern, and measure, positive strengthening in others - without a direct (and loving) personal relationship; but it is necessary to have such strength in order to pursue Good, and to live by one's destiny, in a world endemically evil. 

Such strengthening is what we should seek for ourselves.

Because to be useful here-and-now, as-things-are; it seems to me that our choices of affiliation, religion, spiritual practice - whatever - need not only to be abstractly (and overall) correct by our best evaluations...

But - if our beliefs are to be of real use, they must also be personally (and, if this is possible, institutionally) strengthening. 

Without positive strength, however right our religion, we shall be lost - if indeed it has not already happened. 

Keeping children safe? - Oh yeah, sure...

I need not bother to provide evidence of how little the Establishment cares about the safety of children in the UK. 

All their favourite strategic policies tormented, harmed and killed children on a truly colossal scale; and then condoned and concealed this - directly, and indirectly. 

So when there is legislation that purports to be motivated by concern for the "safety of children", we should immediately know that this is a lie - and the motivation is certainly quite other.

And know too that the real motivation is certain to be evil - or else it would not systematically, and by saturation and coordination, have been lied-about.

(And also, we know with certainty it is evil because, everything that our Western leadership class is pursuing seriously over the long-term - is strategically and intentionally evil; and I mean Every Single Thing.)  

It seems that the access to media is already more explicitly and aggressively restricted in the UK than any other Western nation - especially after geopolitical events in early 2020, and then again from early 2022. 

A lot of stuff that can be read online from the US, Commonwealth and Europe; has been blocked in the UK for the past three-to-five years.

You didn't realise? 

Well that is significant - one way or the other.    

Q: What kind of stuff is blocked? 

A; Stuff critical of the major programs of UK Establishment policy, of course!

Those Litmus Test issues I linked early. 

So far this past week I have noticed several blog posts blocked by a message stating that the problem with content is child safety - when actually the content is related to some kind of analysis of (privileged and powerful) social and ethnic groups. 

Would-be readers are sometimes asked to provide "age verification" (i.e. to create an account and explicitly identify themselves), in order to read this anti-Establishment material.  

Well, I expected nothing else - the West is now, after all, a fully-totalitarian society, just closing a few remaining loopholes of un-restricted discourse.

And They are only interested in doing things to Us; and not-at-all in what We want; and it has been like this for many years.

As always, the truly vital thing is is that we:

1.Recognize the situation.

2. Recognize it for what it is - i.e. They are lying in order to harm us - physically, but mainly spiritually.

3. Recognize the net-evil strategic motivations of our leadership class - whether institutional, national, and global leadership. 

4. Realize that therefore the worst spiritual harm comes from Our consenting to the validity of Their imposed world-view and motivations; and from consenting to Their authority to control Our world-view and motivations. 

5. Be confident that They cannot spiritually harm Us... unless we invite Them into our hearts. 

But that is exactly what So Many people do in excusing Them as having naïve good intentions, or being merely selfish and greedy, or being merely stupid and ignorant and short-sighted. 

Things are much worse than that. 

In truth; Our leaders do bad things to Us, for bad reasons. 

What we need to do is be clear and explicit in our own minds as to what is going on and why; and then to reject it as evil*!

Too many people jump to advocating effective organized opposition... Not that this ever actually-happens! - but that does not stop people calling for it, automatically; like a speak-your-weight machine. 

But opposition as such is futile and indeed counter-productive, especially when opposition is itself motivated by some strategically net-evil programme, inevitably rooted in the hedonic materialism of all public discourse. 

Corrective and good social action may or may not be possible in practice; but whether possible or not, good action cannot possibly happen without a prior and sustained inner act of discernment, responsibility and courage. 

While of course we should strive not to cooperate or support evil; organized opposition will be futile or counter-productive unless genuinely motivated at every level; because to evil does not lead to good, unless there is motivation to good.  

And at the bottom line, as this process expands and envelops, we should recall that, in net-effect; mass/social media do vastly more harm than good.

All restrictions on mass media will almost-inevitably make it less popular overall, less engaging, less addictive**.

So that, by pursuing short-term expediency, evil is (to a significant extent) thwarting its own long term success.  

After all; to be denied some particular external inputs, and to be thrown-back upon our own personal experiences, evaluations, personal contacts, and individual reasoning - is probably just what we most need. 

In our civilization and nation; things probably need to get worse before they can get better - but they will get better only if we first understand enough of what is going-on.  

*That is what is required of Christians for salvation - it is indeed, all that is required of us, in a negative sense. Of course, the reality is that to move on to resurrected eternal Heavenly life, we must commit eternally to live only by love - and the rejecting of evil is really just a means to that end.

** This also applies to the "AI"-slop that is flooding mass and social media. Since this (as with all aspects of "AI") is backed by subsidies and amplified by corrupt boosting into displacing appealing content; such a trend can only diminish the long-term influence, impact and appeal of mass and social media. 

Explaining some Charlton catch-phrases

*

1. Things need to get worse before they can get better

2. People are not-even-trying

3. Humans are simple, dichotomous creatures

4. Repentance must come first

These refer mainly to social and political matters - and especially to plans and schemes for reform.

*

1. Things need to get worse before they can get better, because otherwise they already would be better.

This means that things can get better only via getting worse - and that is the reason why it has not already been done.

What stops people doing what needs to be done, is that improvement can come only in the long run while problems arrive immediately.

What needs to be done causes problems for sure whereas its benefits are more remote and conjectural.

*

2. It certainly will not happen when people are not even trying to make it happen.

Good things don't happen by accident.

They don't necessarily happen when people are trying to make them happen - but they certainly don't happen unless people are trying to make them happen.

If the mass of people are mostly trying to do one thing, it is unlikely that they will consistently achieve another, quite different, thing.

If you want to achieve something, then that is what you should aim to achieve.

*

3. Humans are simple, dichotomous creatures. This means that in practice, policies can only be simple, dichotomous.

This means that complex solutions are always wrong.

And effective solutions are always crude.

(And until there is a simple and crude solution, there cannot be an effective solution.)

Therefore, there are always significant disadvantages to any effective solution.

Therefore you need to decide what is most important. You may get this; but only at a cost.

*

4. Repentance must come first.

Politics and management is only serious when it begins with repentance: with a confession of what they did wrong and a resolve to avoid this fault in future.

Our society is only serious about the things it openly repents (which is why we are in so much trouble, i.e. because of the choice of things we repent).

When things are going down, nothing effective will be done about it until there is a clear repentance and repudiation of that which led to the decline.

*

In public policy, therefore, You cannot do good by stealth.

You must shout from the rooftops, and repeatedly, what was done wrong, that the wrong has been repented, what are the new priorities. Then shout the crude and simple solution, including the inevitable and expected costs and nature of opposition. And then do it.

The inevitable costs must be borne, the inevitable opposition must be overcome.

The process is not sophisticated nor nuanced - it is crude and conflictual - and it will be vilified by the intellectual elite.

*

To which I would add:


5. Inertia means that things get worse slower than you fear; but also that adverse trends are harder to reverse than you hope.

*

Just how bad are things? And why are they SO bad? And what must we do about it?

*
I regard things as very bad indeed. I recognise that this view is not generally accepted - most people would say that things are bad but not much worse than usual. But I regard that attitude as the final straw in clinching just how bad things really are.

What sets us apart from earlier societies is moral inversion; that the bad things are openly promoted as good by politicians, government agencies, the legal and educational systems and in the mass media.

Naturally this confuses people - since in the past people have usually been bad despite official exhortations to do good. In earlier times the officials were usually hypocrites, but paid lavish lip service to the importance of being and doing good - now they urge and reward and coerce people to do be bad, and attack good - while reversing the labels.

*

What do I personally regard as the strongest evidence of things being extremely bad, in my country of England?

The high and rising addiction to the mass media, that people will not believe their own experience and knowledge but instead believe the mass media. The grossest example is the ignorance and denial and total lack of interest in truly massive, rapid and multi-faceted demographic transformation.

http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/

The collapse into sub-replacement fertility among the most intelligent, best educated and wealthiest people - the taboo against noticing this, discussing it, doing anything about it. 

That inverted and pathological sexuality are propagandised, and defended by draconian regulations, laws, and managed-mobs. Two landmark examples are the Jimmy Savile affair- where the most widely promoted moral exemplar of recent decades was revealed to be a monster of depravity; and the still unfolding revelations of industrial scale paedophilia in Rotheram, Oxfordshire etc.

Related to the last - that the British establishment does not just tolerate, but vigorously-protects systematic racism, violence, torture, mutilation, slavery and disciplinary-homicide when it occurs among recent migrants and immigrants.

http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk/

The fact that a majority of young, and a large minority of older, people practise and proudly-display escalating levels of permanent self-mutilation in terms of tattoos, piercings and the like.

In the public area of communications, people are dishonest nearly all the time. This applies not just to politicians and bureaucrats, advertising and the mass media; but equally to schools, colleges, science, medicine, law, the police, the military, and of course the mainstream churches. Every statement is hyped, spun, selective, distorted, designed to mislead and seeded with outright lies. The very discourse of our time, thus our capacity for reason, is rotten - and ineffective.

*

That is a short list of a few of the things which most strike me and come to mind.

But how can this happen? How can all this be going on with either ineffectual resistance or tacit approval of the mass of the population?

There are many answers, and many factors contributing; but the deepest answer and underpinning reason is the lack of religion in the UK.

At a profound level, the mass of British people deny - correctly - any absolute legitimacy for themselves and their convictions; and therefore collude in an agenda of multi-pronged self-destruction.

People try but cannot convince themselves of the validity of any secular rationale for modern peace, prosperity and comfort - and in this they are absolutely accurate. Our unprecedented material well-being and amusements - based on the inherited gifts of past geniuses - does not justify anything; certainly selfish abundance does not justify the kind of tough, long-termist, explicitly discriminatory policies required to safeguard and sustain a complex civilisation.

*

Bad things will go on happening, and will go on getting worse and more urgent, and will continue to be ignored, misinterpreted and forgotten; unless or until there is a mass religious revival - which would almost certainly require the emergence and intervention of some leader of goodness, genius and great good fortune.

Because these deep problems are a consequence of a national state of nihilistic demotivation which is both severe and widespread; religious revival, which should of course be a Christian revival, is the one and only and absolutely necessary basis for doing anything which is net-constructive.

(If we try to solve the major problems without religion, we will surely, one way or another or in many ways, end-up using the (un-repented) 'Boromir Strategy' of using the One Ring to fight Sauron. We will - like the secular Right - try to defeat the evil of Leftism and try to make a better world by fostering hatred, greed and pride - in other words, the weapons of The Enemy.)

*

Of course, such pragmatic criteria are not a reason for becoming Christian - the only and sufficient reason to become a Christian is that it is true: objectively true and really real.

(If another, non-Christian religion was the subject of a Great Awakening, then realistically this would simply be a different form of societal demise - a different route to what would amount to the same destination: i.e. the collapse and replacement of Britain by something else.)

*

In sum, the more bad things happen with the approval of the ruling elites and the badder they get, the more tempting it is to try and stop these bad things by arguing and organising against them - but that is a counter-productive waste of time.

In sum, as things stand, the United Kingdom does not deserve to survive, knows it does not deserve to survive,and that is why it is allowing and encouraging its own demise.

The answer is that we must deserve to survive; by having a higher goal, and being motivated by serving that higher goal: Christianity.

*

The only strategic stance - at the general, socio-political level - which is not fundamentally a waste of time or counter-productive is Christian evangelism; to try and promote, in whatever way we can best think of, a religious revival.

I have not the slightest flicker of optimism that this is actually happening - but it could happen, so there is ample room for hope.

Start here and now and with yourself.

*

Why are most mass media populated Only by people I dislike and despise: and nobody-at-all with whom I wish to empathize?

For me, much of the mass media output is ruined and made intolerable because populated entirely by dislikeable characters. 

Indeed "dislikeable" is putting it mildly! Most media dramatis personae (whether in TV, movies, songs, plays or novels) are people I regard as actively loathsome individuals!

I used to theorize this on the basis that it was part of the strategy of corruption; for instance that heroes were - over the past decades - replaced by anti-heroes, and virtuous exemplars were replaced by "victims". This is surely correct - so far as it goes...

But I now think the proximate reason may be simpler: 

That the authors of TV, movies, songs, plays and novels are writing about what they know - and they know evil from the inside and by-experience; and know almost nothing of heroism, virtue of Goodness. 

The authors and artists themselves typically lack such virtues to begin with; and to make matters worse have strategically affiliated themselves firmly to the devil's agenda.

I mean, they authors have embraced the anti-God, anti-creation, anti-Good agenda that is pursued by "the global establishment", top-down; and via all possible means...

From direct coercive power (laws and regulations), through subsidy and awards; to multi-pronged ideological propaganda that naturally (and very importantly) includes "the arts". 

Furthermore, the mass media world they have chosen to inhabit and in which they participate is pervasively corrupt: the world of movies and television, directors and actors, publishers and marketing, patrons and "arts administrators", reviews and critics, musicians and production...   

In conclusion; there are (by my judgement) no virtuous characters in the great bulk of mass media, simply because those who produce the mass media are themselves deficient in virtue and live-out their lives among some of the most corrupt and value-inverted human beings the world has ever known. 

And, what is worse, authors depend on the good opinion of these corrupted persons; insofar as the authors desire money, fame and high status. 

With authors being as-they-are and working in the environment they actually do; it is to-be-expected that the modern mass media is replete with actively-evil protagonists (liars, cheats, selfish hedonists, psychopaths); while the truly virtuous are depicted unconvincingly - or most-often not-at-all. 

And when there is any attempt to depict genuine virtue; because authors personally know nothing of such matters; these characters inevitably will be pathetic, miserable, simple-minded, deluded - but inevitably victims. 

It's not that authors are merely representative of the corruptions of this era - things are much worse than that! It is that authors are among the avant garde of evil: they personally are active advocates of, not merely going-along-with, the agenda of evil; and that authors inhabit a social-world of like-minded persons - the society of those who have chosen, professionally, to join the primary servants and implementers of the demonic strategy. 

"Boomers" are just as bad as their worst critics say; but the following generations are even-worse

I'm afraid I regard the bulk of the "anti-Boomer" genre as strictly delusional; not because I disagree with all the nasty things they say about the post-1945 generation* - indeed in this respect, I don't think most anti-Boomers go anything like far enough, because they focus on physical-material flaws, whereas it is the spiritual sins of the Boomers that are most serious. 

Where I totally disagree with the genre is the inbuilt assumption - sometimes implicit, often explicit - that the later generations are superior to Boomers; including that later generations have learned from Boomer excesses and errors. 

This seems so utterly mistaken and truth-inverted that I must regard it as delusional. The fact is that that, generationally, things have Very Obviously gotten worse and worse; although not in exactly the same ways that Boomers went so wrong. 

Because leftist-materialism is an oppositional ideology, it contains many contradictory and incoherent strands. So, while Boomers were keen on divorce and "heterosexual" promiscuity then feminism; later generations are much keener on other sexual sins and lies. Whereas Boomers were mad for socialism/ communism, later generations are keen on Climate Change and Diversity... Boomers are selfish and cling to life, but later generations are more prone to suicide and despair. 

And so on. 

But - changing the theme of evil is not a move-towards Good!

If later generations really were better than the Boomers, then we would be seeing a pendulum-swing back towards sanity - whereas we are seeing the opposite: the pendulum swings further-and-further away-from common sense and basic decency. 

I think the problem arises from the great sin of our era, which is resentment. While it is fine and factually-correct to hate Boomers and get angry at what they/we have done as a generation; once resentment enters-in, then we are into the realms of the master sin of Christianity: which is Pride. 

Delusional Anti-Boomerism is a form of Pride, which is why it feeds-upon-itself, is so insatiable, and so corrupting to those who hold it. 

Resentment doesn't just oppose, it assumes self-superiority; such that every criticism of Boomers becomes an implied self-aggrandizement. The worse the Boomers are painted - the better (tacitly suggested) seem later generations. 

In other words, resentment-driven Anti-Boomerism becomes just another Poor-Me/ Evil-You leftist victimology; unless contained within a realistic understanding that the worst legacy of the Boomers was the corruption of later generations. Which means that later generations need to accept that they are even-worse than the worst they can say about Boomers.  

+++++

*"Boomers" (an American term, never used in Britain until recently) are presumably those born up to about 1970, on the biological basis of the length of a generation being the average date of childbirth. For most of history (among demographers); "one generation" used conventionally to be 25 years (with, therefore, four generations per century) - on the basis that about half the surviving children were born to the average woman before that age, half afterwards. More recent generations in The West/ developed world are therefore more than 30 years, since currently the average date of first child is greater than 30 years.   

Is Everything a Total Fake?

It is an interesting and significant fact, that major-controlling institutions in our totalitarian Western society often tolerate - and indeed fund and publicise - books, TV, movies, and social commentary; the arguments of which categorically assert that Everything in public discourse is a Fake - and, in the most uncompromising versions - always has been a Fake, through history.

The expounded idea is that official and mass media narratives are (in general) pure illusion, based on nothing at all; an eggshell of false narrative enclosing a void of real life content. 

At the most extreme level, the "Everything a Fake" people seem to be saying that "nothing ever happened" - at least nothing that was said officially to have happened. They are suggesting that public discourse has always been pure illusion.  

With individual exceptions - this is not generally true, especially not as we go further back into eras in which the mass media and state propaganda systems were smaller and less effective.

I feel confident that "Everything has always been a Fake" is not true, from the big changes in increasing fakery that I have experienced through my lifespan, and by the obvious acceleration of such trends through the 1990s and into the 21st century. 

If Fakery has got so much worse in living memory, then clearly things were less faked in the past. 

Also, we know that Total Fakery isn't the norm from the huge efforts that The System invests to make things happen. 

This would not be the case if it was normal and expected to manufacture significant fakes from zilch. Important fakes aren't built on nothing, for the obvious reason that then they would be less effective. 

We all know that lies mixed with facts are much more convincing than complete fabrications. 

 

When fakery incorporates real aspects of actual events; fakes are far more difficult to disentangle and thereby disprove outright - hence far more convincing to the credulous and inattentive majority. 

What (in general) happened in the past was that underlying events were essentially real (albeit much more often contrived by the authorities than realized at the time); but the truth of reality was exaggerated, or twisted by fakery, in order to manipulate public opinion. 

The incremental trend (especially over the past several generations) was both for fakery to become more dominant; and for the underlying real events to become more top-down contrived. 

For instance, the 2020 Birdemic was very nearly a Total Fake; in that it was invented, planned, and implemented top-down - and some "evidential" aspects were Total Fakes (e.g. things that had not happen were theatrically staged and filmed). 

But as a total phenomenon; the Birdemic incorporated many real world actions and events - and the consequences of pseudo-therapeutic interventions (e.g. extra deaths caused by supposedly anti-Birdemic medico-social changes) - into its pre-determined narrative. 

Eventually; there resulted a hyper-complex and deliberately-confused mass of many inventions, illusions and lies - built-upon and mixed-with a few factual realities. 

Consequently; we know for sure that the official narratives are all false and deliberately misleading; but it can never be known what actually happened minus the Fakery. 

The lesson is that although some small things are indeed a Total Fake, most important lies will interweave real facts and events. 

Which does not, of course, mean that there is "some truth" in (for instance) the Birdemic, the CO2 Climate narrative, or the current top-down imposition of AI; because events and facts are not truth. 

We must learn to distinguish between facts and truth: facts only have meaning when interpreted by theory. 

Thus, when theory is false and dishonest, then "real facts" can only serve to sustain a false and dishonest understanding. 

In sum: all the major strategies of the global totalitarians are fundamentally and intentionally false - despite their not being total fakes; and despite whatever correct facts and real events are woven into them.

Total Fakery is not the real problem - which is why people are encouraged (officially!) to entertain the idea of Total Fakes at such length, and in such detail. 

It is intentional untruthfulness in service to evil intent, that is the real problem.         

 

The saddest thing of the past 25 years - the unthinking, unrepented, almost universal drift Leftward of once-decent people and institutions into a whirlpool of the inversion of Good

*
The title says it. Over the past 25 years or so, I have watched appalled as almost every person and institution that previously I respected and admired, or even loved, has gone over to the dark side. This has been a terribly sad thing.

It is not that these people and groups have nothing good in them - of course they do. But it is a matter of balance - what once did more good then harm, had the heart in the right place; now does more harm than good, and the heart is fixed upon lies.

The people and institutions have succumbed to the inversion of Good: they have substantially relabelled virtue as wicked and vice as the-new-good; they have become habitually dishonest, systematically exaggerating their positives and deliberately concealing their negatives; they pronounce ugliness to be beautiful, and give awards to the hideous and soul-destroying anti-aestheic worlds they make.    

People who were once sensible and decent, organizations that were once working for sensible and decent goals, have thus by increments capitulated to the prevalent secular, Leftist evils; ideas that are superficially merely wrong or nonsensical or 'a matter of opinion' but which - once adopted - reveal themselves to be malignant cancers, actively and pervasively and terminally-destructive of Goodness in its manifestations.

*

It is like (and perhaps not just 'like') demonic possession: once fine churches, colleges, hospitals, schools, charities, professions like medicine and law... now spewing slight variations on the same corrosive stuff about diversity, social justice, global warming, inclusiveness...

If you want a clear example of great goodness turned to the service of evil, take a look at the web pages of The Salvation Army: http://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/ - it is all there, all the hype, the weasel words - the fingerprints of a modern Leftist bureaucracy corrupted by state subsidies and indistinguishable from the propaganda of government offices. [See note below.]

In fact take a look at the web pages of any and all large and powerful organizations and you will nearly-always see exactly the same underlying purpose at work.

*

And this has most often happened without any observable crisis, and without much in the way of objection - no visible or audible protest beyond a few private grumbles.

And - having been very thoroughly corrupted - there is no perceptible awareness among persons or organization that they have, in fact, changed sides - that they are no longer even trying to do what once they were trying to do; but are now dominated by the slogans and pseudo-goals of a political correctness which is almost wholly dishonest and destructive.

And without such awareness, there seems no prospect of repentance.

*

All this is terribly sad to me - a population, including many friends and ex-mentors, that has slid insensibly into very thorough, very comprehensive wickedness.

The main explanation is - I think - weakness; the weakness that comes from lack of roots - and the lack of roots from a lack of faith in anything real, objective, solid. In this respect the adherents of 'liberal' religion are indistinguishable from the prevalent agnosticism, atheism and New Age spirituality - all have drifted down the same slippery slope at the same rate and ended up in the same place of corruption, and flaccid, spiteful, aimless destruction of the Good.

So, the sadness is that so much which I thought strong was not strong; so much that I thought brave was not brave, so much that I thought principled was not principled. 

*

These are not men and women who have been broken by the system, crushed by overwhelming forces; rather, they are men and women who drifted feebly into corruption by incremental steps; because they were simply floating, bobbing-along like a buoy broken from its anchor, in an increasingly wicked world - floating, especially, in that sea of lies, sensation and despair that is the mass media.

The mass media has carried almost everybody and every organization into this deeply sad state of hollow horribleness, which is in fact a maelstrom, a whirlpool downward - so that there is an acceleration, and more powerful suction, as time goes by.

And - even worse - even among those who are not in that state, almost all people and institutions that remain on the side of net-Good are perceptibly drifting towards that whirlpool: it is a matter of 'not yet' rather than of them holding firm.

*

This situation provides near certain grounds for pessimism: for believing that things will get worse; but it is not, after all, grounds for despair.

This passage from the Gospel of John (Chapter 10: 26-30) explains why: it is a source of immediate consolation, and solid grounds for ultimate hope. Jesus is speaking:

Ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand. I and my Father are one.

*

No matter what kind of world we live in, no matter if everyone around us has fallen; if we hear and follow our Lord then his hand is about us - and nothing on earth can pluck us from his hand. 

We are ultimately safe. We have hope based on that certainty. 

And that certainty is what motivates, en-courages and enables us to fight back; to look about us at what may be done, and do what we personally can, in what manner we personally can, to save some others. 

*


Added: I used always to be referencing Nihilism by Eugene Rose (later Father Seraphim Rose) - but I still regard this small book as the best and deepest description of the scope and nature of that modern malaise which I call secular Leftism (or political correctness).

http://www.oodegr.co/english/filosofia/nihilism_root_modern_age.htm#V.

Inter alia he explains why the above mass apostasy from The Good has happened, even/ especially among erstwhile kindly, decent folk:

Nihilism has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any "front" on which it may be fought; and those who think they are fighting it are most often using its own weapons, which they in effect turn against themselves...

Nihilism is but one side of [the modern] Revolution. Violence and negation are, to be sure, a preliminary work; but this work is only part of a much larger plan whose end promises to be, not something better, but something incomparably worse than the age of Nihilism. If in our own times there are signs that the era of violence and negation is passing, this is by no means because Nihilism is being "overcome" or "outgrown," but because its work is all but completed and its usefulness is at an end. The Revolution, perhaps, begins to move out of its malevolent phase and into a more "benevolent" one--not because it has changed its will or its direction, but because it is nearing the attainment of the ultimate goal which it has never ceased to pursue; fat with its success, it can prepare to relax in the enjoyment of this goal...

Nihilism is, most profoundly, a spiritual disorder, and it can be overcome only by spiritual means; and there has been no attempt whatever in the contemporary world to apply such means.

The Nihilist disease is apparently to be left to "develop" to its very end; the goal of the Revolution, originally the hallucination of a few fevered minds, has now become the goal of humanity itself. Men have become weary; the Kingdom of God is too distant, the Orthodox Christian way is too narrow and arduous. The Revolution has captured the "spirit of the age," and to go against this powerful current is more than modern men can do, for it requires precisely the two things most thoroughly annihilated by Nihilism: Truth and faith.

*

Note: Since I browsed the Salvation Army website yesterday, I have been 'spammed' with advertising from them, asking for money, situated on numerous of the web pages I have looked at - presumably via a cookie. This kind of high pressure marketing pretty much says it all that needs to be said about what has become of the Salvation Army.