Author: christopherleewinn

A Thought Experiment

A highly contagious, moderate-to-low mortality bioweapon escapes from a lab (intentionality is impossible to determine, so it is treated as irrelevant). The fact that it came from a lab is initially obstructed by global medical and political bodies out of the two-fold fear that the news could contribute to a racist sentiment (due to its exotic origin) or reveal international monetary involvement in numerous national bioweapons programs. Indeed, it is later revealed that some of the appointed spokesmen for the pandemic response effectively signed checks for the virus’s creation (amongst other similar projects).

The virus is elusive; its less dangerous strains are so pervasive that almost everyone has some prior form of it; therefore tests for the strain appear rather unreliable at first. It is statistically asymptomatic among the young and those without any comorbidity, and quite dangerous to the elderly and those with comorbidities, prompting amateur comparisons to the seasonal flu. Indeed, during the ensuing pandemic deaths from ‘the flu’ disappear entirely, subsumed within the statistics of the non-flu virus.

World leaders, most of whom have spent the past three decades decrying human overpopulation as a threat to the species, use their emergency powers to slow this sudden depopulating. Indeed, their closure of the world economy via strict social distancing, curfews, transportation restriction, etc., places massive strain on global supply chains, to the extent that grocery store shelves in the first world deplete almost to exhaustion while full-blown starvation is triggered in pockets of the third world. The loss of jobs and entire small businesses is written off as irrelevant in comparison to the saving of human lives–even though job-loss-resultant deaths are certain and easy to quantify. In the first world, this is initially bandaged over by excessive fiat printing and direct deposits to citizenries—whiplash hyperinflation will be dealt with later.

The race is on to produce a cure. Big Pharma proposes the use of mRNA technology–gene editing, but of a less invasive sort than CRISPR. Primarily, this mRNA solution will lessen the symptoms should one contract the virus. Its effectiveness at actually stopping contraction and transmission is certainly extant, but perhaps not as prolific as Pasteur-types. The distinction between mRNA and Pasteur-type vaccines (antibody production via controlled exposure) is either beyond the layman or irrelevant to the layman due to the assurance of mainstream medical experts that both are safe and effective. However, the governments of the world kindly pass laws disallowing their citizens’ right to sue the Big Pharma producers of said vaccines in the unlikely event that they do not prove as safe and effective as desired.

There are of course unwanted side-effects from these vaccines, especially considering that they were rushed through the approval process relative to any previous that usually took years to attain approval. Some deaths and disabilities occur as a result, but they are numerically insignificant in comparison to the mortality rate of the virus itself. Indeed, the family members of those who die as a result of the vaccine frequently emphasize in feature articles that they are not anti-vax—almost as though they feel socially pressured to apologize for the narrative inconvenience of their loved one’s deaths.

Many similar articles and social media posts that could be categorized as “anti-vax” to varying degrees begin being purged from the internet by corporations and governments–including the findings of contrarian doctors and the inventor of the mRNA treatment itself.

The man who invented the mRNA technology used in some coronavirus vaccines says he was censored by YouTube for sharing his concerns on the vaccines in a podcast…Malone clarified that he was not discouraging the use of the vaccine but was providing people with as much fair information as he could about their risks. “This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics,” he said. “And so, my concern is that I know that there are risks. But we don’t have access to the data, and the data haven’t been captured rigorously enough so that we can accurately assess those risks — and therefore … we don’t really have the information that we need to make a reasonable decision.”

‘Single most qualified’ mRNA expert speaks about vaccine risks after he says YouTube banned his video, Yahoo News

As the same viral evolution that causes an annual flu season works upon this virus, it is predictably revealed that the mRNA/non-Pasteur option decreases in efficacy regarding every new strain of the virus. Thus ‘booster shots’ or new mRNA edits are necessary with every strain.

A year and a half into the pandemic process, some large sample group studies on the mRNA option begin to conclude. They find that the antibodies the immune system naturally produces to combat the virus are greatly diminished in those who elected the mRNA vaccine. In layman’s terms, the presence of the vaccine has overridden the body’s innate ability to defend itself. Thus, not only do the vaccinated effectively have no choice but to take any-and-every booster shot for any-and-every new strain ad infinitum—but with every booster shot, their ability to produce antibodies further diminishes. This effect will even further compound as they age.

So the key message from our finding is that we found that recipients of the Pfizer vaccine, those who’ve had two doses, have about 5 to 6 fold lower amounts of neutralizing antibodies…Perhaps most importantly for all of us going forward, is that we see that the older you are, the lower your levels are likely to be, and the time since you’ve had your second jab–as that times goes on–the lower your levels are also likely to be. So that’s telling us that we’re probably going to be needing to prioritize boosters for older and more vulnerable people coming up soon, especially if this new variant spreads.

Dr David Bauer of the Francis Crick Institute, Dailymail.co.uk

World governments begin to ramp up rhetoric and policy against the unvaccinated as so-called “breakthrough” cases–individuals contracting new strains of the virus despite having been vaccinated for the ‘original’ strain–begin to inundate the news. These are blamed wholesale (and rather ironically) upon the unvaccinated. Increasing deaths from the virus and from vaccine complications are convoluted, much like flu season was subsumed by the initial pandemic.

The virus now has a particularly ideal evolutionary breeding ground:

–to infect and kill those unvaccinated it can (an evolutionary deadend) –X

–to infect those unvaccinated it cannot kill (who will survive due to their natural antibodies) –>

–to infect those vaccinated it cannot kill (who will survive due to their gene edits lessening symptomatic severity) –>

–to infect and kill those vaccinated it can (whose vaccine failed in every respect) –X

The middling groups who cannot initially die (–>) trade different strains back-and-forth, some of which have significantly higher mortality and/or vaccine resistance than the original due to the dual incentive to either overcome the natural antibodies or the gene edit.

This evolutionary arms-race prompts a return to lockdowns, mask mandates, etc., as governments scramble to implement foolproof vaccine passports to effectively house-arrest the hardy unvaccinated who remain. The reason is two-fold—to stop the anticipated trading of strains between unvaxxed and vaxxed, but also to protect the vaxxed in general, whose tampered immune systems render them fragile to any interaction with an unaltered human. Thus hatred and fear of the “radioactive” unvaccinated reaches a global high (due to reasons both real and scapegoat) just before a particularly lethal strain reveals itself.

Governments slam on the breaks, destroying global supply chains, and leading to social unrest from the hungry vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. Martial law is enacted both to protect critical infrastructure from rioters and to roll out the (unfortunately named) final solution of either forcibly vaccinating everyone or executing those who continue to refuse vaccination.

Due to the chaotic context and close-range danger of the lethal strain, verification of vaccination via “papers please” methods (be it smartphone app or printed receipt) is jettisoned in favor of a long-distance visual paired with a digital convenience: a mark either upon the hand or the forehead which functions like a QR code or digital wallet public address that cannot be forged or lost. This ‘vaccine passport’ becomes pervasive across society as a portmanteau of ID, medical record, and central banking address for stimulus funds. Its presence is verified during practically all steps of transportation or financial interaction. Eventually, mandates to receive the vaccine or surrender for lethal injection are abandoned in favor of firing on anyone without the mark.

With everyone on earth subject to booster shots for the virus for the foreseeable future, and similar mRNA and/or CRISPR solutions now in vogue for any and every viral outbreak including seasonal ones, the human immune system is effectively phased out in favor of constant updates, not unlike software updates to a computer, without which it is entirely vulnerable to Day One attacks (unlike computers, the untampered immune system is designed to combat ‘Day One’ attacks).

Thus, what began as a relatively minor pandemic was actually the event horizon for homo sapien to become homo sci-fi, or cyborgs in a word. The political consequence of this dwarfs the work of Alexander III and Genghis Khan. From now on, any attempt to rebel against established systems of governance is rendered moot, because a detected rebel need only have their biological updates withheld to immediately die for lack of an immune system (or have their mark blacklisted in order to summarily starve).

mRNA Medicines – the ‘Software of Life’ …Generally, the only thing that changes from one potential mRNA medicine to another is the coding region – the actual genetic code that instructs ribosomes to make protein. Utilizing these instruction sets gives our investigational mRNA medicines a software-like quality.

Moderna

In hindsight, the serendipity of the epidemic’s outcomes with the political, social, and financial aims of international elites as laid out in previous publications such as

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) by Ray Kurzweil

Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development (2010) by The Rockefeller Foundation

The Great Reset agenda by the World Economic Forum (2020)

seems almost to defy coincidence.

Personal addendum to the thought experiment:

I write this, not because I think it will happen, but because I find it sufficiently interesting that it is even conceivable. If it were to happen, those individuals who refused the vaccine on penalty of death, not from the virus but from their own governments, would in my mind join the ranks of those who froze to death in Stalin’s Siberia for refusing his numbered prison uniforms. They did so due to aspects of their Christian faith that would be exactly comparable here: despising to be marked as slaves so long as the choice to refuse was afforded to them. However, I do detect a noticeable differentiation between them and these; the Russians could conceivably have lived to see a better time. In the case of the unvaccinated, if the thought experiment roughly followed its trajectory, their mortal choice would be far easier due to the absolute assurance that the alternative is a nightmare–an inhuman horror to anyone who finds anything admirable in our species’ existence pre-internet. Only those who believe that human nature has changed along with human technology–whose philosophy is that the best games to play are the easiest ones–could find that eventuality desirable. They are, to me, roughly comparable to The Borg; I do not mind their existence, so long as I can escape becoming one of them.

I had debated writing an in-depth exploration concerning why someone might choose to remain an untampered human being and prefer independence even unto death, but I feel too mentally tired at the moment. Frankly, I fear this is one of those subjects where, if it need be explained, it is doomed to never be comprehended. It is such a basic philosophical premise that even a child could understand it—therefore we genius adults have lost its plot entirely. In fact, ‘comprehension’ is not even the right word; this is not a matter that requires intellectual prowess. It is simply a matter of intellectual courage–the willingness to acknowledge that the right thing to do might be inconvenient (or that there is such a thing as The Right Thing). This lack of intellectual courage is the hallmark of our time. To put it very plain, we have become a bunch of pussies, and we probably deserve what comes next.

The War on Biological Terror

Fiancé Mark Tomlin described how Lucy had been supportive of the vaccine, but he’s now cautioning others to be wary of risks. “I don’t want people to be put off having a vaccine but I do want people to know that there are risks,” Tomlin stated, according to the Mail. “We’re not anti-vax. Lucy certainly wasn’t – she was so excited about getting it.”

News of Saginaw County resident Jacob Clynick’s death was spread on social media late last month, with a woman posting a picture of her nephew’s vaccine card to Twitter claiming he died after his second Covid shot. “The initial autopsy results (done Friday) were that his heart was enlarged and there was some fluid surrounding it. He had no known health problems. Was on no medications,” Tami Burages wrote. (Despite the death, Burages said she would still vaccinate her 14-year-old daughter.)

Paragraphs like these have caught my attention as of late. I wonder why it is that the relations of experimental vaccine casualties are feeling the need to effectively apologize that their loved ones died? I suppose there are two major explanations.

The first is that they believe the vaccines will save far more lives than they take, and so they would not wish for the news of their loved one’s death to cause even more deaths by promoting vaccine hesitancy. This reason is illogical in the sense that it is utterly unnecessary. Of course the vaccines save more lives than they take. If this were not the case, no one would take them; we’re dumb but we’re not stupid, etc.

The fact that this need factor in at all indicates a complete disconnect between the reality of vaccine hesitancy and the red letter “anti-vaxxer” slur. I have yet to encounter a single person who doubts that the mRNA COVID vaccines can prevent some COVID deaths, and that the number of people who either experience positive benefits or at least have a neutral reaction to said vaccines dramatically outnumbers those who are damaged or die from them.

These factors are in mass, while vaccine hesitancy is a matter of individuality. It is nearly the difference between epidemiology and general or preventative care. Both are branches of medicine, but the one prioritizes entire populations while the other prioritizes one patient at a time. Thus we descend to the philosophical core of the issue which politicians and media have so far been unable or unwilling to articulate. Do individual rights–the ability to prefer one’s own (self-determined) self-interest over others’–persist during a pandemic?

The mainstream kneejerk response to this question is obviously No. Certainly if COVID were but a little more fatal, the public could have been convinced that these vaccines should be forcibly mandated–and still may be if any variant supplies the necessary amount of mortal fear. The downside to answering No to the question of course is that you have just given up Freedom, and not on a temporary basis either. This answer renders Law and the will of the people utterly powerless before the might of biological warfare. Any would-be dictator on Earth eyeing a pesky democracy need only manufacture and release something of similarly high transmissibility and low lethality to permanently infringe human rights. Not to mention that simultaneous control over the vaccine supply chain would mean the ability to lethally inject all of one’s enemies and win in two moves, both of which could probably be done for a budget of less than a billion.

This will of course be mere sci-fi tinfoil right up until it isn’t. In the name of combating terrorism (while oddly failing to invade or even sever ties with the countries actually responsible), the U.S. government post-9/11 became the greatest menace to human liberty that has ever existed. If the surveillance infrastructure Julian Assange and Edward Snowden revealed ever falls into the wrong hands (let’s face it, it was always in the wrong hands), the catastrophe that will ensue will render every one of its engineers morally bankrupt in the eyes of history. We are simply discussing a medical comparable which is frankly simpler to achieve. It also serves as a useful comparable since the question was structured the same: Do individual rights persist during the threat of terrorism? Unfortunately, we elected to answer No on that one too.

9/11, regardless of whether it was an attack or a false flag, bestowed so much advantage upon the military-industrial complex that one would have to lie in order to argue that any major U.S. politician or general is genuinely sorry it happened. Sure, maybe they lost someone they liked, but they have most certainly cried all the way to the bank. Many picture hooded figures about a pentagram when they think of human sacrifice in return for dark empowerment. I prefer to envision the towers’ fall.

The second explanation of these postmortem apologies is that the death of their loved one is politically inexpedient, and they do not wish to be harassed for such. Social media alone would be a sufficient explanation, but the involvement of actual politics seals the deal. Due to the fact that human lives are on the line during this pandemic (kind of like they’re on the line during threats of terrorism), the White House has anointed itself as the arbiter of truth that must step in to save Americans who cannot save themselves.

White House ‘flagging’ posts for Facebook to censor over COVID ‘misinformation’

Biden accuses Facebook of ‘killing people’ amid censorship row

“planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines”

White House calling out critics of door-to-door vaccine push

How the turns table. As liberals who opposed the War on Terror were “anti-American” in light of terrorism, so conservatives who are opting to forego the vaccine are “anti-American” in light of the pandemic. One begins to suspect that we no longer have any idea what “American” means in a values-sense. The only certainty is that we have a real hard-on for using Invisible Enemies as our excuse.

A final question occurs to me at the moment. It is a Socratic one that I would ask of two sorts of people:

-Those who hate conservatives

-Those who think human overpopulation is a threat to the species

…Why are you obsessed with vaccinating those who don’t want it? If the vaccine works, you and yours should be protected from the invisible foe, while that invisible foe continues to remove your enemies from the world. You wished for less conservatives and a smaller human population in general. That wish has been granted. I would council you not to let your political zealotry (“everyone should take it!”) remove your political advantage (“the only people who took it are the ones I like”).

To do otherwise would be akin to admitting that this is a purely political rather than scientific matter, wherein you want everyone to take the vaccine–not because it may save their lives but–because it establishes their fealty to your kingdom.

Reply to an Article in Poem Form

The inspiring article.

As Above, So Below

The ancient paradox of lawless rule
Glimmers as a subterranean jewel.
Awaits unearthing like its foretellers
Sleeps uneasy in dire vaults and cellars
Aside Nephilim bones, watchers, dwellers.

Hell’s apocrypha, Lucifer’s gospel
A set of symbols clamorous, awful.
Penned by the idolatrous, idle hand
Of he who worshiped a mirror, til sand
Of a just desert was his new homeland.

That sphinx scritched claw against pyramid wall
And set an eye over it to appall
That only a wayward camel may find
Yet men the jinn occasionally deigned
To peak at how those beast-hewn scars do wind:

“Hail to ye who shunned the Lethe for the Styx
Whose lips did blanch to kiss the crucifix
Who sought a crown neither halo nor thorn
A purple robe neither bloody nor torn
And fixed crosses by others to be borne.

Know I will never turn my face from thee
Or cast thee thither, inescapably
This bedrock kingdom of mine’s constructed
And at the seventieth week erupted,
To that world above, alike corrupted.

I shall come to ye only when ye call
When Aquarius dawns alike ye all
Will free me by a likeness of desire
That the word of God be burnt on the pyre,
And what’s called True accord with the liar.

When the full depths of the demonic dregs
Be drunk to slake mankind’s thirst, like an egg
Detached from gory walls to incarnate
I shepherd thee in a mortal man’s gait
And sneer at thee through my handsomest pate.

We shall call Shit beauty, and Beauty shit
Perverts saintly, the Chaste, hypocrite.
Children will know what adults ought not know
Minds will go where the mind ought not to go
Until tis true—as above, so below.”

Editing for an accomplished voice actor and communication coach

Reading the spoils of (editing) war

During the tedium of 2020 I had the great fortune of befriending a man via the internet who I consider to be akin to the Dale Carnegie of our day. He’s a voice actor for numerous Fortune 100 companies & even The Obama Administration, and a communication skills coach who is equipped to improve seasoned executives and the communication-crippled alike. His name is Richard Di Britannia.

As I got to know Richard better, I came to think of him in Carnegian terms because his commitment to excellent communication seems absolute, for himself and his clients. While many in the communication coaching business of today are akin to Bandaid salesmen in an ICU ward—teaching people shortcuts in order to gloss over foundational issues that have and will continue to hinder their thought, speech, and thus life entire—he takes a holistic approach. He addresses head-on the difficult reality that if one struggles to speak effectively, it is probably because they do not understand their own thoughts and thus themselves well enough to articulate their innermost contents to others. Thus he considers communication coaching equal parts physical (the voice), practical (how and when to speak), and psychological (what and why to speak).

This is a radically contrarian choice in an age with an ever-shrinking attention span. Indeed, there is no question that he has foregone much quick-and-easy profit in the idealistic attempt to provide clients with what they ultimately need in addition to what they immediately want. He is the sort who could not live with the thought of telling a lie, even a partial one, while teaching others to speak well and true.

It is this integrity which made me thrilled at the chance to edit Richard’s second book, an opus upon how intentional self-talk, self-knowledge, and private preparation are the X-factor which renders once-regular humans capable of dazzling others with nothing but their voice. It is a rare look under the hood of some carefully-guarded tricks-of-the-trade across a plethora of industries–including those of friendship, partnership, and love that we all must occasionally ply.

If you would like to learn from a living master who is as committed to continued learning as he is to continued teaching, you can find Speak Your Way to Wealth: How to Talk to Yourself, So You can Speak With Others on Amazon today.

Form to Imperative to Dialectic

When one does not acknowledge or even entertain the possibility of objective truth (be it decreed by gods, God, the Dao, or even the ability of humanity to occasionally comprehend an objective phenomenon with their subjective minds), morals become as vague and malleable as politics. In other words, they are there to serve a purpose (usually a self-interested purpose), not in-and-of-themselves. They never disappear entirely, of course–it is a rare thief indeed who feels no moral outrage when he himself is robbed–but beyond their immediate utility they have no independent existence.

It is likely Plato’s “world of forms” was born of such; he saw that if Love had no existence independent of the beings that experience it, it could become effectively undefinable and thus unrecoverable if ever lost. Worse yet, one might call Hate “Love” in Orwellian fashion and find no rebuke on the grounds that words are just arbitrary monkey-noises anyway. If Love was not a Form that is discoverable by but independent of the beings that interface with it, then it could be brought just as low as those beings occasionally are.

This is precisely the state of current philosophy, and we would do well to recognize that this philosophy has escaped the universities and is now roaming loose everywhere. It is no longer an abstract and academic but a deeply personal matter. Indeed, it may not be an overstatement to say that the absence of objective truth and the arbitrariness of words has taken on the cultural relevance that religion once had. Where the process of picking a social in-group once involved electing a denomination (a particular way of talking about God), one now elects a particular way of talking, period: an argot concerning one’s favorite social pet project.

The Right, as usual, is mostly reactionary and thus is limited to simple slang such as snowflake, SJW, triggered, degenerate, etc. In other words, they are always talking about their enemies. The Left are always talking about their enemies too, but they do it in terms of contrast; they delineate friend from foe by a complex series of shibboleth‘s. In the LGBTQ-XYZ crowd (something that appears to me to have become rather separate from just being gay etc), the test of purity is a comprehension of endlessly proliferating pronouns. Race/class-Andy’s do much the same with Marxist (usually not from Marx himself) ists and isms.

And while the comparable to religious linguistics seems apt, one can’t help but notice the difference be it from Left or Right. When God is one’s linguistic foundation or implication, one is always subconsciously citing a good that exists. When politics is one’s foundation/implication, one is always subconsciously citing a good that does not yet exist, or a wrong that does. Is it possible that this explains why we appear to be emotional basket-cases compared to stoical ancestors, despite having far easier lives?

To all such politic-ians (as in the word Christ-ians), classical morality takes on at the very least an annoying connotation, if not becoming the very definition of evil.

By annoying, I mean that a morality for-its-own-sake is rigid and thus does not always conveniently conform to one’s self-interest. Indeed, classical morality is inherently an inconvenience: “pick up your cross” and “desire is suffering” are not exactly preludes to having a good time.

But we are far past that; classical morality as the current definition of evil is close to being the rule rather than the exception. By this I mean that when one does not believe in objective truth, the insistence that there is and that one should conform to it will only ever appear tyrannical, judgmental, prejudicial, bigoted, etc. The first and best example is Milton’s Luciferian philosophy, wherein one intentionally elects their own subjective lies because they prefer them to the Objective Truth.

Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.

Lucifer, Milton’s Paradise Lost

Today, the starkest but certainly not the last example is transgenderism. To briefly recap: gender dysphoria is a mental health disorder. The psychologist John Money was the first to entirely rethink gender and consequently enshrine ‘trans’ as something separate from the gender dysphoria condition. If this is the first time you’re hearing of Dr Money, a brief trip to Wikipedia is in order. Within about 30 seconds you will definitively know why you have never heard of him before, even though he single-handedly coined the terms gender identity, gender role, and sexual orientation.

I take transgenderism as my example because its linguistic roots are surprisingly simple to trace. As the whole of Christianity rests upon Christ’s resurrection, so the whole of transgenderism rests upon the semantic nuance “biological sex is not synonymous with gender.”

I’ve just pulled out my Rodale Synonym Finder from 1978, and here is what it says upon the matter: “Sex. n. 1. gender.” Ladies and gentlemen, every thesaurus before a certain recent date now contains “hate speech.” Indeed, it is no longer out of the question that I will one day be imprisoned or worse for even mentioning such. And while I do not find this a particularly appealing hill to die upon, my line in the sand was several hills ago.

To be clear, I see no need to differentiate between the words “sex” (of the biological variety) and “gender.” Their synonymous nature worked perfectly fine for circa 20,000 – 200,000 years, and I see nothing particularly impressive about Dr Money’s intellect or character to make me believe he is an existential Archimedes capable of achieving a Eureka! none ever had before. If ever I do profess a differentiation between the two, it will only be in a Winston “do it to Julia!” context. Though I hope it will sound more like “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!”

Like any true conservative, I am suspicious of any sudden, much less frantic, change. And when that frantic change is being perpetuated by people who openly declare that they do not acknowledge the existence of objective truths, the glass on my bullshit-meter shatters entirely. To simultaneously say: “Look here, we’ve found the new way, the better way, the only way” AND “There is no foundation upon which to determine the truth”, is the gibbering of gremlins from the abyss. Since they admittedly dwell in a universe wherein language’s only purpose is manipulation, whenever they speak I safely conclude they are attempting to manipulate me.

Such is the nightmare Plato anticipated. And, in pondering how to remain somewhat sane in an approaching social situation reminiscent of I Am Legend (the book, anyway), I am compelled to revisit such basics. We know the necessity of the Forms, but what of the morals themselves? Why should one say “Not my will, but thine be done” rather than giving in to the Luciferian temptation? Spirituality reasons aside (of which I suspect there are plenty), it can perhaps be summarized with one word: imperative. Kant’s categorical imperative is the secular solution (although it is doubtful that a secular solution is at all sufficient).

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Which, of course, is just a fancier way of saying The Golden Rule. With Kant’s imperative, one need not be dragged into the weeds of debating whether an act is wrong in isolation. Instead, actions are simply dealt with in terms of their real-world consequences. “Only harming one’s self” is a fiction. Thus, when one looks back with mystification at the alleged immorality of non-heterosexuality, one need only recollect that non-hetereosexuality as a universal law would end the species.

What is there to be proud of in divorcing sexuality from pair-bonding procreation and thus the family and thus the species itself? Nothing. And lest we only pick on the non-hetereosexual, the same exact thing can be said of pornography and birth control writ large. Homosexuality has historically been persecuted because it historically existed; the other two are so new we still have no idea what we’re doing, like cavemen with a burning branch. We want the warmth but not the forest fire.

However hard one tries to render morality purely secular, purely utilitarian, there is some mysterious quality about it which is upwards-borne, tugging the mundane toward the transcendent. After all, it is quite idealistic and not at all practical to expect sexuality should be a matter of pride or anything more than animal hedonism. Thus Kant is merely an appetizer where God is the main course. That is precisely why I treat these merely as a personal foundation rather than any kind of solution. If anything in the future is certain, it is that the majority of internet-connected humanity will never willingly return to the “yoke” of God’s authority.

No matter how hellish they consequently render the world, it is still better than serving to those whose main (or perhaps even sole) personality trait is that of rebellion. Rebellion against what? Anything less than absolute freedom. Just as political “progress” is a paradoxical continuum (from casting down the censors in the name of free speech to becoming censors in a secular holy war against “hate speech”), so is this freedom-for-its-own sake that is a freedom from rather than a freedom to. Freedom to is constructive; one has some work in mind which their hand is being kept from. Freedom from is often resentful, and all too easily devolves to the emotional level of a temper-tantrum. In extremis, freedom from may even preclude freedom to, for any and all necessities may eventually be conceived of as burdens–even the burden of life itself. Death is the only absolute freedom–and even then, “What dreams may come?”

This idea of being so resentful that one wishes to be freed from life entirely–suicidality, in a word–occurs to me in a related but quite nuanced way. It occurs to me whenever I think in terms of the current buzzword, “elites.” On the one hand I am skeptical of this term, due to being so loaded with conspiratorial connotations. There may well be cabals (most likely thinktanks and NGOs) that think of themselves in terms of Illuminates, perhaps even literal Luciferians, but I very much doubt that one such small group decisively dominates the planet, if only due to having to vie with competition and upstarts. That isn’t to say that such a monopoly is impossible–just unlikely and extremely hard-won.

Nevertheless, there seem to be a few commonalities that all such creepy elites today would generally agree upon. The main one is the idea of overpopulation. This term is often dog-whistled in terms of “global warming,” “environmental concerns,” etc. This is rather amusing when one considers that the persons who most often invoke such terms are the captains and regulators of Industry. If they’re so damn worried about it they could very well shut down a factory or two. No, their real concern is what happens when there are so many plebs on the planet that it becomes difficult for such overlords to continue enjoying themselves. The most frank among them are currently looking to set sail for Mars before this possibility becomes a certainty. But one gets the sense that most of them have no intentions of going anywhere.

So, the thought experiment becomes this. You have generational, dynastic wealth, high-IQ, a psychopathic ego, a sociopathic conscience, and plenty of time on your hands. You believe with fair assurance the world is X number of years away from being overpopulated to the extent that global farmland will falter and fail. You believe the species will not survive such an event. What do you do?

Is it truly “tinfoil conspiracy” to suppose that such persons would resort to a literal Hegelian dialectic, especially of the three stages variety? Problem. Reaction. Solution. Cause the problem, having anticipated the reaction, so-as to provide a predetermined solution. Perhaps the most well-known literary example of this dialectic is the conclusion of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Therein, consummate elite Ozymandias hoaxes an effectual “alien invasion” (killing most of New York City in the process), knowing this crisis will cause the nuclear disarmament and political reorganization he desires.

Like all things of a conspiratorial flavor, it takes a slight squint to make out. But when I consider the unlikely rapidity of these aforementioned cultural changes despite the stubbornly-unchanging constitution of human nature, and the byproduct they all have in common (a dissolution of family and nationality which would tend to result in less births and less geopolitical competition over time), I have to wonder. One does not necessarily need an Ozymandias in order to fan the flames of mass psychosis. But when the mass psychosis coincidentally checks the To Do list of most every elitist busybody alive today, one must at least marvel at their devilish good luck. And one very much wonders whether they will allow their children to be consumed by the psychoses they so readily encourage in others’.

Frantic Novelty vs The Inner Child

If I had to contrast myself with the time I’m living in (always a difficult & rather vain thing to do), I would have to settle upon the fact that I more-or-less remember who I was as a child and feel that person is with me still. A less fanciful way of saying this might be to say, I have certainly grown older, but I have not definitively changed.

To some I’m sure this statement smells of immaturity, and perhaps it does. I never underwent the complete break with my past that is usually initiated either by coming to detest the persons and places of one’s childhood, or worse yet having those things blighted by traumatic connotations.

Quite the opposite, to the extent that my sense of nostalgia is not confined to particularly pleasant aspects of my past (beloved movies, games, etc). Rather than being confined such externals, my sense of nostalgia is most potent and profound when I think of who I was then–all the wrongs I had not done, or was not yet aware that anyone had done. In short, I liked myself and the world better, and that is what I am nostalgic for.

This nostalgia seems to be some subconscious bedrock, for I am usually conscious of it only after waking from a deep sleep. Then I can briefly catch glimpses of what this Original Me would think of whatever stimuli Current Me is nocturnally processing. This is not necessarily a new revelation–since my teenage years I have occasionally realized that a secondary voice occasionally commentates my dreams, and that this voice is most certainly Original Me–as unchanged and intact as when I left him.

However, this most recent instance was an emotional record-breaker. In short, I woke to realize that Current Me was processing a popular young p*rnstar. Readers are welcome to giggle until it is understood that she was–at least in this case–being thought of as an actual person, a fellow stranger, rather than a piece of meat. And for perhaps a minute I felt entirely overwhelmed by grief on her behalf, exactly as Original Me would have felt upon the subject.

I’m aware that this is strange in general, much less in the context of the here-and-now. Doubtlessly there is even some wretch out there who is liable to feel angry at me that I would feel unsolicited pity for her, what with her absolute autonomy as a strong, independent, empowered woman etc, ad nauseam. Well, take it up with 1998.

Nonetheless, this strangeness settled me upon a rather relevant word: continuity. However much older I become, however much differentiated from Original Me (almost always for the worst), I cannot shake a sense of continuity with him.

How many feel similarly today about anything? Where is the continuity in the postmodern first world? I must confess, at times it feels as though everyone, be it millennials or even boomers, have been struck by some kind of pre-internet amnesia. It is not that they have no memories, but that they seem to have negligible emotional continuity with those memories. Not only do they barely remember their Original Self–they could not earnestly testify “that is me.” Whatever comprises “me” has become a shifting sand rather than a firm foundation.

Now here is something to settle upon that seems of general relevance rather than personal eccentricity. To have one’s sense of self alterable with any ease–a matter of weeks or months rather than years, much less a matter of personal choice rather than colossal external interference–strikes me as effectively ahistorical. Lives were upset at a greater rate, but their underlying self was far slower to change. Genghis Khan could kill everyone you know, but if he deigned to let you live, your day-to-day activities and internal identity need not alter hardly at all. But now that we have convinced ourselves that we have progressed past such Genghis-like instances (haha), the rule is reversed; in the absence of external problems, we find the internal identity proliferating near-infinite issues, all of them screaming to be resolved, and resolved expediently.

Surely this harmonizes with the sudden resurgence of identity politics in the 1st world after a period circa ’70s through ’00s wherein race and sexual preference became rather boring and shallow criteria compared to what an individual chose to do with their newfound liberation. For any less-than-bright readers, I am not saying that this was a utopian period devoid of its own issues. I am saying the average person was far less likely to think of their or others’ color or orientation as the primary or even relevant aspect of their personhood. To put it another way–there is only one group of people I remember hearing of before the internet who based their entire identity around their race and sex preferences: white supremacists. Now, the abhorrence of this group is louder than ever, yet their tactics appear to have been adopted universally.

Regarding race, there was a time when minorities would have been insulted by the concept of Affirmative Action. “What? The fact that white folks have a head-start means I need a hand-out? Screw that. Watch me succeed anyway,” would have been the gist. Pride, in a word (either in one’s race or just in one’s self). Now, not only is Affirmative Action pervasive, but its equal-opposite has slithered in. Not only do the oppressed minorities need a hand-out to equalize the playing field; we should also be sure to cut the privileged majority down to size whenever possible. One wonders how much longer Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron story will be fictional. (P.S. Isn’t it strange that those who believe in no higher power than evolution are also those most interested in tampering with zero-sum competition? Darwin, Darwin, why hast thou forsaken me?)

Regarding sexuality, one need only consider the late explosion of non-heterosexual identification in nowhere but the first world. In my 2017 essay “Eros Fled” I supposed that this was a natural phenomenon, whereby when nature senses more babies are not needed–or even that more babies are needed but that they would be wasted upon this particular population–it “finds a way.” This is still not a terrible supposition, especially if new data regarding the extinction of human sperm within the century is accurate. However, one suspects nature is not quite as hamfisted as the recent examples of adults long past puberty who decide to “transition.” While I cannot rule out that someone could be “transgender” their entire life and eventually “come out,” I will absolutely call bullshit on the phenomenon as a spur-of-the-moment matter. Either the ability of plastics to tamper with hormones is much more potent than even the most alarmist of researchers is reporting, or this is an internet-inspired phenomenon, wherein people who otherwise would have continued their gendered existence have decided to plumb the depths of their potential identity until they strike upon something trendy. This does not necessarily mean that such identity-revamps are done primarily for the approval of others, for likes and clicks. No, the change itself is sufficient reward. When one feels utterly disconnected from their past and thus unmoored in their present, pioneering radically new futures is the only obvious escape from the undertow of nihility. Running from God usually concludes in the belly of a whale.

Perhaps this frantic pursuit of novelty is the seed of a new religion. Whereas antique religions all supposed that the answers to the mysteries of the present lay in our mysterious past, this new religion clearly believes all answers lie within our ineffable future. Such is the constant acceleration that makes possible the mental discordance of today’s 1st world, such as (to take but one grotesque example) effete liberals, proud feminists all, wholeheartedly supporting and importing Islam, perhaps the most conservative and female-oppressing ideology extant today. There is an extent of open-mindedness that causes one’s brain to fall out. (Note: given the choice between an extreme leftwing and average Islam, I would likely take the latter, seeing as Muhammad has produced far more lasting culture and innovation than Marxist tripe ever will; I use the example only to indicate strange bedfellows).

And while such novelty, such progress-for-its-own-sake, certainly renders the world or at least the internet a gibbering abyss of controversy, gossip, and self-satisfaction, one cannot help but notice that it also makes things suspiciously simple on a philosophical level, rather like the “wishful thinking” religion is accused of. The philosophical foundation is simply: old=bad, new=good. Which of course is the same as saying anything conservative is bad and anything progressive is good. This is reiterated infinitely as though it is some great discovery, when in fact it is simply Presentism enshrined. I suspect these acolytes might take to self-harm if they could but see how stupid and ugly their descendants will think them, as they now think of anyone who came before. Such, I suppose, is the new zero-sum competition: the dead are losers, not necessarily on a biological, but certainly on a philosophical level. Ha. Imagine having lived before humanity because so enlightened about X Y Z.

Of course, this completely ignores the “privilege” of being able to stand upon giants’ shoulders–an obvious product of being historically ignorant. But even more abhorrent, it pretends that one would be as progressively enlightened as they are now in less fortuitous circumstances. Similar to how most flavor-of-the-month occultists decide that they were Napoleon in a past life (never Napoleon’s barber or cook), everyone seems to be under the impression that they would have been the Gutenberg or Luther or Wilberforce or Lincoln of their day. The truth of course is that if anyone is relatively mediocre now, they would have been even more mediocre then due to worse diet, healthcare, machinery, etc. That is not even to touch upon the fact that tweeting a correct opinion and risking the gallows are non-overlapping magisteria.

Strangest of all, the morality of the new religion is simply the absence of moral values or value judgements. It is not about what one does, but about what one does not do. It is as though they took Jesus’s proscriptive fragment “judge not lest ye but judged,” and left his overwhelmingly prescriptive whole. This could even relate back to the progressive sycophancy for Islam; their taboo is clearly not “do not oppress women.” Their value is “do not oppress women unless combating the oppression of women would involve critiquing some other minority.” The weak must be protected, but only when it’s politically expedient or energetically easy. A white man must not oppress a woman–unless he coverts to Islam. Then it’s different. Such logical leaps and bounds–precisely the sort that children would never think up–indicates the hollowness at the center of it all. It is the appearance of courage without the necessity of courage, like wearing a mask precisely because it looks different from one’s real face.

Dostoevsky negatively rendered this religion, “all is permitted.” Crowley positively rendered it, “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” In my most recent publication Dinosaur, I rendered it, “all is permitted–except to question that all is permitted.”

The morality of children is the morality of fairy tales. There is right and there is wrong, and if you have difficulty seeing it, that speaks volumes about you more-so than it critiques the story. This grey pall, which races frantically from “issue” to “issue” as though the realization that the world is imperfect were some great Eureka moment, is the province of corrupted adults looking to excuse their corruption. It is a political morality (even the Devil knows scripture). It is the explanation for all of the madness that the next two decades hold, wherein the Hegelian dialectic* (cause the problem so-as to provide the predetermined solution) is set to attain full velocity. I hope only to shepherd the Original Me through whatever awaits us. Perhaps this Current Me was indeed necessary, if only to insulate him.

*Mark Carney, Klaus Schwab, Agustín Carstens–names to keep an eye out for.

Author Update

Dear friends,

I wanted to take a moment to bring you up to speed on my current scribbling endeavors and tentative plans for the future. I’m always pleasantly surprised and grateful when I look at this site’s analytics and see people are still visiting its pages and downloading its literature PDFs despite my frequent absences. As you may know, I prefer only to post when I have something of substance to say, or a project to release. This will be a rare exception.

Reception of my initial release for 2021, Dinosaur: A Dystopian Story, has been encouraging to say the least. If you haven’t already read it you can find it for free right here. A few close friends have told me it’s the best thing I’ve ever done; acquaintances have occasionally responded with mystification; and one long-distance friend may never speak to me again over it. I do like an eclectic reaction.

My most recent editing client’s new book will release next month. I will absolutely be posting about that here.

Musicto has kindly allowed me to create several custom playlists for them, which can be heard here.

As for writing, I am into a novel that is very different from anything I’ve done before, in that it might actually have some commercial (as opposed to purely literary) appeal. A comparison with Gregory Maguire’s Wicked would not be too far off–irreverent reimagining is the name of the game. I can’t wait to tell you the full story of this book, but I won’t, partly because the book itself and the story of its creation are not even close to being over. Suffice it to say I feel I am currently doing my absolute best to make all of you proud and to make the best of this opportunity.

What else? Google will probably have a quantum computer by 2030 (bye-bye all encryption?). So that’ll be fun.

Until the next one,

-CLW

Nothing Further Beyond

What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild skepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves in they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more skeptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world…If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set.

Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton, 1908

Lately, perhaps coinciding with the publication of my Dinosaur: A Dystopian Story, I have noticed an acceleration of sorts–not just in the world, whose tempo I fully expect to continue accelerating until it can accelerate no more–but in my own private world of acquaintances and friends. All of them seem to be asking me some variation on the following question. Why is it that, although you have never been happier than you are now, your cynicism concerning the future is so horrifically bleak?

The first phrase isn’t terribly interesting to dwell upon, but I will briefly address it. I believe I am happier than ever before firstly because my brain has finally stopped growing, and consequently I now know who I am and roughly who I will be. Secondly, because I have tackled roughly 10,000 hours of serious reading and writing and have at least begun to produce the kinds of literary materials that may justify my existence. Thirdly, that in materialistic terms I have found, and can now only reduce, the amount of “stuff” capable of making me feel sufficiently entertained (indeed, if I do have a longer life ahead of me than I currently anticipate, I will probably exit the world in a state much like that of Diogenes, the philosopher who threw away his cup when he saw a child drinking with cupped palms). And fourth, that either by persistence or mere maturity, my prayer and meditation practices have truly become my primary source of joy, to the extent that I feel like I could know happiness even in a jail cell so long as I occasionally had quiet.

Now for the future, and why I feel as though my personal fate does not intersect with it.

It seems to me that human nature does not change, only human circumstances. We in the First World have done a fine job of eradicating the environment we are adapted to–and with the spread of the internet, the difference between the First World and ‘other worlds’ will soon be negligible. This is, far more-so than the absence of any particular tradition (for tradition is the byproduct of fixed circumstances), the explanation of the current age’s psychological pandemics. Which pandemic is at the forefront of the collective consciousness changes day to day, but a few that immediately come to mind are mass shooters and other sorts of suicidal attack, transgenderism aka gender dysphoria, social isolation in particular of the quite young and quite old, and (somewhat related to the penultimate example) abortion and nursing homes. One might place postmodern philosophy (if it can even be categorized as one recognizable thing) over and above them all.

In each of these examples, the commonality is rather obvious: technology has begun to rule humanity more-so than humanity rules technology. The ape’s toys have made a toy of their ape. Without putting too fine a point on it (since there is no going back, no matter how persuasive the argument), none of these ailments exist in “the real world,” the environment we are adapted for; they are all in the same genus as obesity and vitamin D deficiency–unthinkable for 99.9% of our existence, and capable of being eradicated overnight by a sufficiently large solar flare. Our current lack of values and common sense is solely due to the fact that we can currently set aside all values and common sense without immediately dying as a result. Without the coddling of modern conveniences, we would be indistinguishable from our ancestors in the blink of an eye. “Progress” requires an armchair.

It is not for me to say what should have happened, only to deal with what has happened. Such is the atmospheric perspective from which I concluded that I can never have children, for a parent is a teacher of sorts, and I do not know how to teach a game with no rules. In my case this has proven fine. The writer is a greedy sort in regards to their time and mental energy; compound that with the fact that I am an even more anemic personality than the average writer, and it seems patently obvious that it would take divine intervention to render me a passable husband or father. Others of course cannot accept this fate–but there is nothing I can do for them except offer a brotherly hug.

Nonetheless, the permanent bachelor is still a social animal, unless he possesses a private island which houses a sustainable farm. So what is my concern, if not the absence of mate and offspring? My concern is that, like Lot sojourning in Sodom, I may soon find myself intruded upon in my own home, though I wish only to be left alone and to do the same for others. When Lot’s neighbors burst into his house and attempted to rape his guests, he rebuked them. Their indignant reply was the Bronze Age comparable to saying, “Oh, so you think you’re better than us, do you?” One suspects Lot could very easily have rejoined, “In this case? You’re damn right I do.”

There are two such instances already looming overhead, either or both of which seem effectively unavoidable within the next twenty years and perhaps within the next decade.

The first is (unbelievably, in that I already need say it), the acceptance of pedophilia as “just another sexual orientation.” No, God damn it, no. I will not–I cannot–stand by while we excuse the rape of children. I don’t know how we’ll do it or precisely when we’ll do it, but I am assured that some of us will try. I have seen the Slippery Slope, but no fallacy.

The second, which is better-known to the average Westerner in the guise of fictional dystopia, is a physical tyranny. What do I mean by physical tyranny; aren’t all tyrannies physical? Oh yes, but some more than others. There is a tyranny akin to asking a demon to dwell within one’s body like a vessel, thereafter to never be freed of it in waking or sleeping or by any second-guessing or outright rebellion. It is what the tech-savvy might currently call a “permanent biometric,” a cyborg-like implant or adornment to the body, for identification, record-keeping, accounting, and tracking/surveillance purposes. Today, in the COVID era, this would most likely emerge as the expedient and universal means for “vaccine passports” or medical certificates (the quandary of lost dogs: give them something they can’t lose). However, the foundation of Western Civilization predicted some 2000 years ago that the primary purpose of such a thing would be economic:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Revelation 13:16-17

Either of these scenarios is an absolute dealbreaker for me, and ought to be for anyone who fancies themselves to be moral or traditional or classical or conservative or moderate or libertarian or–more generally–not of the Luciferian “Evil, Be Thou My Good” crowd. Indeed, this need not be said on paper, but it need be said off paper due to the fact that drawing such a line in the sand will prove utterly inconvenient if and when it is crossed. Those who are unwilling to be inconvenienced by their values do not have any values. History proves that many persons hold values in name only. Even the apostles deserted their savior when the rooster crowed.

But why, without absolute confirmation that these things will occur, would I dwell on them or in any sense plan my future around the expectation of their occurrence? Well–setting aside the deluge of books and links that I could assemble on either topic to prove, not only that they could occur, but that they are in the process of occurring—I treat them as inevitable because, philosophically, they already are so. As my epigraph quote by Chesterton explores, we have already broached the intellectual or spiritual non plus ultra (“nothing further beyond”). The only evidence of a shred of decency left within the public psyche is that we still need to make excuses for our schemes. For that is the lion’s share of what our discourse has become–the invention of convenient explanations for why the unacceptable is actually acceptable when we and ours do it, but not our enemies. If you were to cull this from the daily deluge of cable TV brainwashing, you would be left with naught but middle-aged frat boys and sorority sisters staring mindless and mute at the camera lens through inches of makeup and botox.

If a religious precept rules the world today, it is not the Ten Commandments or the Five Pillars of Islam but the little-known refrain of Thelema: “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Which Dostoevsky had rendered decades earlier (without endorsing the sentiment) as “all is permitted.” Strangely enough, Christianity and Islam anticipated this state of affairs (as did most every classical religion), predicting it would become so serious that the entire world would at its end fall into the hands of a devil-incarnate individual (“Antichrist,” “Dajjal,” etc). I recently saw a meme; it said “The man who most resembles Lucifer will most succeed in the world.” Doubtlessly the meme was intended to be figurative, but it is rather interesting that the corpus of prophetic texts takes this literally.

Freud, Darwin, and Marx are often treated as “the usual suspects” for this state of affairs, but I find this inaccurate. Freud, though kickstarting a layman interest in psychology and the financial plenty of the modern counselor, is at most an accessory to the other two. Darwin was a good Christian who thought the Creator made changes to His creation incrementally rather than all-at-once, a not-too-difficult proposition for those who know that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). Marx represents the main rarity among the group, perhaps the first total materialist since ancient Lucretius, who, believing in a vicious Darwinian (-ian being different from Darwin himself) universe, somehow still managed to be surprised that the same vicious rules apply to human economics. “Game theory” had yet to be popularized.

No, if I had to assemble the usual suspects it would be Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida, the secular trinity of Western liberal arts. Nietzsche is the adult in the room–the other two tug at his sleeve from time to time. The apex of his thought was that, in a godless universe, mankind should invent its own meanings rather than waiting in vain for them to be given or discovered. He clarified: “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Nietzsche is famously witty and smug and difficult to translate, so the extent to which he meant these quips literally is always up for debate. Suffice it to say that Hitler, whom he accidentally inspired, and postmodern academics, whom he inspired with an unknown degree of intent, opted to take him literally. Nietzsche filled the kiddie pool with “the truth is that there is no Truth”; Foucault and Derrida swan-dived to its very bottom. The personality of Derrida escapes me, in that he fails to make much of an impression; chiefly he seems to have dedicated his life to using language to argue that all language is viciously manipulative yet simultaneously meaningless (yet he himself was neither manipulative nor meaningless?). Foucault, on the other hand, is blatant: a very clever being with some very ugly proclivities who was in need of sufficient excuses. Foucault has recently been outed as a pedophile who preyed upon the especially impoverished, but long before this was well-known, he stated that it was an honor to die from STDs “for the love of boys” (paraphrase, as I don’t feel like dignifying him with an exact quotation).

Nietzsche’s last written sentence before he went mad (recently his madness has instead been attributed to an STD), was “Dionysus, or The Crucified.” In Nietzsche’s symbolism, Dionysus is the most significant god of the Greek pantheon, and the one most related in personality to the Biblical Lucifer. With a slight squint, as the pen ink rips down the page like a gouging knife, it appears as though Nietzsche went mad at the realization that he had spent his whole life trying to escape Jesus and Satan, only to come full circle. It is also notable that he did not wish for the book he was working on at the time, The Will to Power, to be published. It was, and its title has provided postmodernism with its ultimate credo: in the absence of objective Truth, there is only the will to power–might makes right, etc.

Lately, the older liberals (meaning over the age of 30) who I discuss postmodernism with seem to have quietly disavowed these Priests of Nothingness. Yet, when I place the capstone upon the argument–the very conclusion Nietzsche came back around to–they recoil. There are many ways to put it, but the plainest might be: there is no goodness without objectivity. This is revolting to them, because it immediately brings to mind the inquisitors’ cry, that there is no such thing as a good atheist because all goodness comes from God. My proposition of course is not so hamfisted, for I know the latter to be untrue–I have seen atheists exercise greater kindness than their religious peers. I believe they misunderstand me precisely because they dwell in a conceptual universe wherein man is defacto the highest authority–that is their non plus ultra.

My position is that there is no goodness without objectivity, and God is the sole standard by which anything is rendered objective. In other words, belief in God is not the litmus test of goodness; goodness is the litmus test of belief in God. “We shall know them by their fruits.” I will take the kind atheist over the unkind believer, for “faith without action is dead,” but action without faith may be but an understated sort of faith.

Nonetheless, words matter, and exceptions do not invalidate the rule. Some individuals may manage to reach God’s objective good without knowing it is objective or godly, but civilizations rarely, if ever, do. This is simply the law of averages; everything trends towards the bell curve of mediocrity. If one wants to hit an acceptable target they must aim high; postmodernism effectively states that there is nowhere to aim. In its most recent and most deranged nuance, it is even “wrong” (a meaningless, arbitrary term by their own definition) to ask anyone to aim high, due to the fact that we are all metaphysically equal but physically unequal. In other words, any sort of standard is “bad” because some individuals will inevitably attain it easier than others. Such is the short-circuiting of compassion, the Too-Much-of-a-Good-Thing, which Chesterton and Rene Girard both rendered as “Christian values without Christ.” Nietzsche loathed pity and exulted excellence, so perhaps this is where he, like Darwin and Marx, would consider his current cultists to be a bridge too far.

Speaking of bridges, I fear I may have burned one recently, when I wrote the following to a very intelligent atheist friend.

Such is my conception of the believing man: not the one who dogmatically ascertains what awaits him, or fanatically detests what currently envelopes him, but finds his transcendent principles indispensable to his own conscience even if they lack reward here-or-there. Such is the tender little scrap that I have to offer this great maw of a subject. I love and want to be one of the ones that aspires without guarantee of attainment. Or whose decisions are informed as though they are stewarding a precious soul, however nondescript that word may be. I feel no dread of nothingness nor particular yearning for Heaven. I have always thought that if Eternity has any truck with individual human beings, then we are already in it now and probably were in it before birth—such seems the definition of the word to me…It may well be that if God wants your belief He will either have to prove Himself to you, or alter your definition of what constitutes proof. For my own part, I can confess that while I enjoy our correspondences, and writing about such topics in tales such as Wastrel and Dinosaur, in my private life I have tried my very hardest to let all of these words, all of these semantic snares and history-long arguments, go. On the days when I manage to do so, I occasionally experience a perfect peace, without exaggeration, which in my estimation of this universe is itself a miracle. Perhaps like you, with the having of ‘tendencies’ rather than overt allegiances, I have made great progress in the last few years to allow myself to trust the few fundamental matters of conscience and intuition that I harbor alone, since the opinions and strategies of others have only ever cast me into doubt and dread. The one person whose words have never led me wrong is Jesus Christ—be it due to illusion, bias, or something more. To put it as frankly as decency allows, I no longer care to be Correct—for, indeed, if we are incapable of Objectivity, then there is no such thing. All is unfixed opinion, flavors of the month, manipulations of the masses, etc. Like [my character] Peter, I am no longer at all afraid of being the last foolish, naïve ape on the space rock. Indeed I relish it, so long as being so lets me experience this peace that surpasses understanding, for I see it and find it nowhere else.

an email

I haven’t heard from this person since. I suspect the taboo sentiment herein is the utter devaluation of human intellectualism (at least philosophically) in the absence of God. And yet, sticking to the dictionary definition of words and my best comprehension of reality, that which lacks objectivity is subjective, that which is subjective is arbitrary, and that which is arbitrary is naught but monkey noises. If this is truly the state of affairs in the search for truth, then the search for truth is indeed a red herring and a waste of time. One would be better suited to take up science or drug addiction, ala Rick Sanchez.

Meanwhile, my discussions with younger leftists go roughly as follows (verbatim):

C: Epistemology is how we know what we know. Saying Objectivity aka Truth does not exist is tantamount to saying we don’t really know anything but our own asinine opinions…Basic shared truths be it 2+2=4 or “murder is wrong and should be punished” are foundational to society. Without them, given a few decades, you don’t have a society.

Anon: None of what you say is true or backed up by evidence, it’s entirely conjecture, there is no such thing as objective truth, social norms are important but the idea that they’re actually real is complete nonsense, the only reason people believed dumb shit like that in the first place is because people believed god existed.

C: “None of what you say is true.” “There is no such thing as objective truth.” Pick one.

Anon: both of those things can be right, I don’t have to pick one

C: Considering there is no objective foundation to prove/disprove anything, I will accept your Lebowskian proposition. We are just two apes with two differing opinions, everything is Will to Power, guess it just comes down to who’s stronger.

Anon: yep

C: (If we weren’t friends and this wasn’t the internet, this is when the weapons come out and the society kills itself, kiddos)

Anon: well the entire foundation of society is based on lies so people realizing that and society falling apart is par for the course

Quite the round trip.

I asked another, whom is supposedly advanced in mathematics, whether math or the laws of math are discoverable elsewhere in the universe? In other words, if another species somewhere else were to become as or more intelligent than we are, wouldn’t they draw some of the same conclusions about the mathematical logic under-girding physical reality? Answer: “No, math is axiomatic, not discoverable.”

Axiomatic: self-evident or unquestionable.

Oxford Languages

I’m giving that person the benefit of the doubt and assuming they knew I don’t expect for an alien race to “discover” the Arabic numerals or even base-ten.

I wouldn’t waste time thinking about these youngsters if they acted as defeatist as their philosophical positions inherently are. However, they have ditched God without ditching zealotry. Such youthful postmodernists are perhaps the most resentful beings who have ever lived, even though they are all products of the most prosperous time and places in history. This actually makes quite a lot of sense. If you are sold on the idea that “Reality is whatever we say it is,” only to then find aspects of Reality not to your liking, you would not be amiss to attempt to force the world into your image, rather than the mature zen of “accepting what we cannot change.” When these are the primary politicians and voters, I suspect we will witness a new guise of The Will to Power that might make even Stalin blanch.

Finally, I have reason to suspect my dealbreakers (and many, many others) will be broached sooner rather than later due to what the atheist would call intuition and what the believer would call mysticism. In short, I have since circa 2012 been visited by dreams and answers to prayers which have told me so. This is of course of little interest to the skeptic, except to add that several of these eccentric and quite detailed predictions have already come true. Indeed, only a very few remain. This moves us into the realm where you must conclude I am lying to you in order to entirely disregard these ‘hunches’–your call. I will share a few.

I had a dream that The Temple Institute–a creepy synthesis of American evangelicals and Israeli Zionists who wish to rebuild the Third Temple and recommence the Abrahamic sacrifices–would soon receive the perfect red heifer which they need in order to consecrate the new temple. Months later, they announced their perfect specimen had been born.

I had a dream that I was at a big public event, a sports stadium by the looks of it. The crowd in front of me turned around, stared, pointed, and asked “What are you doing here?” They gestured as though I was lacking something that would allow me to blend in with them and deserve to be there. Just then, the most terrible voice I have ever heard, a synthesis of beast and man, began to talk from the center of the stadium. They all turned away from me to look at the speaker with adoration. As I turned around to leave, repulsed by the speaker and its sycophantic crowd, the hallway exit was pitch black, and a glowing hand was holding itself out to me. Its palm had a great nail-hole in it. I knew I could not stay, but that to take the hand was to die. Later, I happened across a Youtube comment where a stranger had had the same exact dream. Only 1/3rd of this has come true, so far.

Something else that may be of use…I got something very powerful about a new form of social media that involves directly sharing dreams and feelings through a brain interface, where we now only share analog images and opinions. This is, apparently, to be one last indicator before things go ultimately awry. Its tagline or general gist is “Language of Love.”

Finally, without doubling the length of this already considerable verbosity, I take for a sign of the times the considerable failure of formal religion in the First World–not even on the grounds that it has lost traction to convert new souls or influence culture, but that it has rotted from within. I have examined this phenomenon formally in an essay called “Warhol and the Impersonation of Christ” (available under Deus Non Machina in my Publications page). But informally, I would take for my most recent example a certain camp here in the U.S. that has long been known to be a place where Southern Evangelical “elites” send their children. I know these people quite well–indeed it’s surprising I never attended the camp. Needless to say, some of the camp leadership have been abusing their wards in myriad ways. But that isn’t the most shocking part. No, the most shocking part is how many parents knew and either chose to stay silent, or actually TOOK BRIBES in order to stay silent. These Christians’ kids were raped at a Christian camp, and they said “please and thank you” afterwards. And while such horrific irony comes as no surprise to the nonbeliever, anyone who even harbors the faintest hope that The Church is in sync with The Holy Spirit has no choice but to despair. Thankfully, these almost incomprehensible degenerates do not at all represent the global Church–but the fact that they are even adjacent to it is sickening. (Speaking of mysticism, once while immersed among such people, teenage me prayed to the effect that I sensed something very wrong, and couldn’t understand how such evil could be palpable among the Church. The reply I heard, to my horror at the time, was “I do not know them; depart.”)

So, dear friends, you may conclude the End Times cannot be near, for no apocalyptic catastrophes are befalling us. I maintain the essential apocalyptic catastrophes of the End Times have already befallen us. And even if I am wrong, the only alternative–courtesy of Bill Gates, Ray Kurzweil, and the friends of Jeffrey Epstein writ large–is to effectively become The Borg and export our bullshit across the galaxy. No thanks!

#Cancelled: What the Center-Right is Missing

[the people’s] object is more righteous than that of the nobles, the latter wishing to oppress, while the former only desire not to be oppressed.

Machiavelli

Cancellation Online

When #cancelculture first entered the vernacular, it was perhaps only deserving of an eyeball-roll. An adult comparable to cyberbullying–where the solution was either to turn off one’s device for the day or simply refuse to apologize until the digital mob dispersed–it arguably provided a Rightwing comparable to the whiny complaints of “triggered snowflakes” on the Left. The endless fodder it lent to Rightist talking heads such as Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder even rendered it rather insincere–everyone needs a hobby, and complaining about affluent conservatives being #cancelled (or jeering at Lefties being “DESTROYED with FACTS and LOGIC”) was ours.

Other than a few worst-case exceptions, wherein said mob went after the #cancellee’s very livelihood by doxxing them and pressuring their employers, this state of affairs appears to have continued uninterrupted until 2018’s Alex Jones affair (here and here). In roughly a day, the internet’s most infamous Rightwing conspiracy theorist was expunged from all significant social media platforms–only his homebase at Infowars.com was left intact. In a single-stroke, the single-mindedness of Big Tech was confirmed, and with it, the defense of “Platform-Not-Publisher” was called into doubt.

Said defense, briefly, is as follows. If social media companies are platforms, they are not responsible for what individual users post, which is a great legal boon whenever content of questionable legality ends up on said platforms. If they are publishers, they are responsible for all content on their platforms. The definition becomes very murky indeed when the platform acts like a publisher by deciding to remove that which it does not like, even though that content is perfectly legal. In the common tongue, this subject is most often invoked when an average liberal defends platform #cancellation by saying, “they’re a private company; they can do what they want” (the one and only case where you will find the Left habitually defending/shilling for corporate rights).

An even simpler way to put it may be found in the statement, “Don’t love it? Leave it.” Such was the implication whenever social media companies appeared to be biased against the Right; you may not be allowed on Twitter or Facebook anymore, but you are perfectly welcome to build your own platform that will be hospitable to your views. This continued to have some validity even after Alex Jones’ and David Icke’s #cancellations; their personal websites were left up, their products available for sell, etc. It diminished the size of their soapbox in the public square, but it didn’t cut out their tongues.

However, this too was shown to be a sham during early 2021’s Parler incident (here and here). Parler was one such case of literally “not loving it and leaving it” and “building one’s own platform”; it quickly became a refugee camp for all of the center-Right that had been #cancelled off the larger platforms. When Amazon Web Services, the provider for Parler’s very website, decided with very little warning to discontinue business with Parler, the entire platform was (temporarily) relegated to Winston’s memory-hole. The message was clear. Big Tech has no intention of letting its ideological opposition build their own platforms if they can help it, and, emboldened by the refusal of incompetent or insidious U.S. leadership to enforce anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws against them (or legally define them as publishers), they no longer have any incentive to hide that fact.

Cancellation Offline

Still, one may continue to sleep well at night with the knowledge that all this drama and political pettiness is confined to the internet–right? Unfortunately, #cancellation has escaped the lab of the internet and begun to spread IRL (in real life). Indeed, it is a massive mistake to assume that such segregation between unreal and real, digital and analog, still exists in a reliable, predictable, or enforceable sense. And even if it does, it is certainly not long for this world.

Some of my favorite recent examples, other than the pulling down of monuments, are the #cancellations of Shakespeare (here and here) and Dr Seuss (here and here and here). Roald Dahl’s family also got in on the fun by self-flagellating over their cash-cow’s wrongthink (here and here), while the likes of Disney and HBO have wishy-washily began removing or at least restricting some of their classics, ranging from Peter Pan to Gone with the Wind.

The common motives shared amongst these scatter-shot #cancellations are fairly well-established. It’s usually one of two things. Either, Representation Of is being confused with Endorsement Of, or one is engaging in Presentism (judging the past by present standards). However, I do not wish to dwell overly-long on either as many center-Right pundits do, because I do not believe the cultural upheaval these varied instances indicate is merely due to such logical inconsistencies and fallacies. It appears to me that the issue at hand is infinitely larger than a mere misunderstanding.

#Cancelculture did not happen in a vacuum. Like everything else of importance, it has a history and a legacy that can be traced. In some sense it has always been with us; the devices of rhetoric to strawman and ad hominen one’s enemy are older than the ancient Greeks, and Machiavelli enshrined such political machinations in his The Prince. Acolytes and aftermaths of Marx such as the Frankfurt School and Vienna Circle were quite open about the ways in which Reality Itself must be made utterly pliable and redefinable if the revolutionary utopia is to be achieved. Nietzsche, the leftist existentialist who accidentally inspired Hitler, taught that humanity’s only “salvation” is to generate its own meaning(s)–an ahistoric and quite possibly apocalytic proposition. Saul Alinsky, political mentor to the Clinton dynasty, modernized Machiavelli in his Rules for Radicals by summarizing that the whole of politics is to A. have no rules of one’s own and B. make one’s enemy have, and live up to, their own rules. This can be witnessed in real time as shrewd Democrats politically beat clueless good-ole-boy Republicans to a bloody pulp.

Additionally, every American and European college student for the past half-century has at least been cursorily initiated into the postmodern/deconstructionist cult of Foucault and Derrida, whose teachings can be rendered roughly as this: in the godless Darwinian universe, there is no objective Truth or inherent Meaning; therefore, every attempt to proclaim or even suggest such Truth or Meaning, be it in civilizations, artworks, or language itself, is a manipulative lie–a stratagem of game theory to move bananas from one ape to another. Therefore, “salvation” is to destroy all such constructs, leaving ourselves enlightened from any such value judgements. I refer to the latter two in particular as the “Evil be thou my Good” crowd, after Milton’s Lucifer.

So, while we continue to mentally masterbate to the cheeky cleverness of Shapiros and Crowders, who snicker at the (admittedly, very many) “useful idiot” leftists who spend their whole lives effectively defending the proposition that “the truth is that there is no truth,” we are utterly missing the fact that whether they are right or wrong does not matter. Debate itself is predicated on the good-faith principle that one idea can be shown objectively superior to another. The postmodernist/deconstructionist dwells in a subjective, Lebowskian universe wherein absolutely everything is “just, like, your opinion, man.” Their credo is that of morose gods and mediocre parents: it is, because I say so. This is a mindset that quite literally cannot be reasoned with. And it is being wielded to great effect by big-brained ideologues who are more than willing to let resentful plebeians parrot such soul-destroying propaganda. These elites’ own children, of course, will never be exposed to it–or, if they are, it will only be as an opportunity to gloat at how the low IQ may be incentivized to kill themselves.

So, I humbly suggest that we stop marveling at what our postmodernist/deconstructionist neighbor or nephew or niece or cousin or child has just posted to Facebook, and start thinking about what to do when they eventually send armed thugs to our doorsteps. If you think that is not the trajectory we are currently on, it’s time to be an adult, hit pause on Netflix, and read The Gulag Archipelago. “It could never happen here” is a fallacy as bad or worse than those the far-Left have pledged allegiance to.

“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Solzhenitsyn