Maintaining a sense of balance in a world of lies and insanity
How is one to be in the Age of Consequences?
This is my rave.
Yesterday, I felt too physically and mentally-drained to do the news so I started putting my random thoughts together before I was overtaken by fatigue.
I am completing this fresh this morning, starting from where i left off.
I stumbled upon this discussion with James Corbett discussing a 500-year- old tract called, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie.As best I can ascertain it is a favourite among libertarians and certainly does not appear on Amazon!
Tyrants HATE This 500 Year Old Trick for Ending Tyranny
A couple of quotes should give an idea:
“It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”
And…
“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”
I am sure that in the 16th Century,La Boétie knew what tyranny and the King’s army looked like from where I am sitting it seems naive to to think that merely freeing the mind is enough to free oneself from tyranny – it seems to be an assertion that comes from people who have no conception what the Gestapo, the KGB or Stasi looked like. It is true that once a sizeable section of population ceases to consent to be ruled over there is nothing the ruling elite can do. But that can take many years.
The conversation moved seemlessly on to photographic ID’s and whether I should renew my driving licence, although I have not driven a car for some time or apply for a passport although I am never going to travel again.
This arose from a situation where a friend could not become a co-signatory on a bank account because they could not provide photographic proof of identity (which is something, not being fully involved with public life, that has come across very suddenly. I remember when presenting a bill in your name was sufficient. One day it all very easy-going in the traditional NZ way and the next I have to use voice identification to establish my identity).
Well, I am damned if I am going to going to go to the expense and possibly the requirement of new glasses just to get a photo ID for the bank!
If I had mentioned this to liberal friends I can hear the response; “Don’t be ridiculous. There is an alternative way to get an ID which you can apply for.”
If I was to suggest that the government was honest and introduce a national identity card (which would be very old hat compared with what they have in mind with us the same people would scream that this goes against human rights..
It might not occur to my friends that sizeable part of the population might have neither passport nor drivers license so when they go to the bank they find themselves locked out because they don’t have the right form of identification.
Allegedly, this is all designed to stop money laundering. I doubt very much that someone who is laundering money has not worked out a way of faking a passport or driving license. In addition, they are already using voice identification (“my voice confirms my identity”) and once they introduce facial recognition they will be able to work out your identification in milliseconds.
I don’t know what the official position is but it took me a few seccnds to find this company advertising facial recognition technology which to me implies it is available commercially
That brings me to the next point. An ability to passively accept the imposition of a fairly minor bit of tyranny to me is a strong predictor that when push comes-to-shove they might just acquiesce when it comes to taking the vaccine “or else”. Many of the people I know who are on the right side of this blithely say they will NEVER accept the vaccine.
Such people are used to living in a nice liberal bubble where nothing bad happens and despite everything they read still feel that nothing bad can happen. They have no concept of what a rude knock at the door at odd hours is like. They are used to life of plenty, of convenience and are thus unprepared for what may be coming
Some of my friends overseas are starting to get an inkling.
A friend from Canada reported to me yesterday that after attending a Freedom rally had the local police tried to serve her with an $800 fine so she barricaded her drive.
I have no idea how it went from there.
Keeping a balance between Wisdom and Compassion
It has been a morning of looking things in a new way. I came across the following quote from a British social thinker, Theodore Dalrymple.
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple
I have no idea who Theodore Dalrymple is and it seems pretty right-wing but I have to recognise that there is a lot of commonsense and truth contained in the quote above.
In Buddhism is talked about the need to balance equanimity (or may I see the ability to see things as they are) with compassion,
Too much of one and you seem like an unfeeling, right-wing bastard; too much of the other and you literally lose your mind as daily headlines from what used to be the Left will attest.
I am all in favour of all groups of society making their contribution and that means the rich paying taxes so that those left behind can be given some help. I don’t think that people should be put on the scrapheap by an elite that takes more and more (and more) for itself. However, I also have to recognise what two generations of people living on welfare has done for the recipients. It has taken away any sense of self-worth which comes from sacrifice and hard work, something that people of my parent’s generation knew very well.
I know of people living on the pittance thrown at them by what the Right calls the ‘nanny state’ so that they have become flabby and self-indulgent and encouraged never to grow up. Political correctness has indeed led to the development of an underclass that survives through crime and do not think they owe anything to anyone. I know this because once I was myself in danger of becoming part of the first group (not the second).
In an era when everything is falling apart and society is being pulled into a state of mass psychosis I think the only answer can come from spiritual self-development. Simply put, it is time to get right with God and to recognise that there is a Higher Principle that transcends the perceived interests of the individual. This quote from Helen Keller says it all really.
The majority of voices out there will tell you the opposite – not to take responsibility for yourself, that the State is there to ‘protect’ you from malign influences such as critical and discriminating thought so it takes a lot of guts to go against an influence that I would definitely say is demonic.
We need to be kept safe from ‘Wrong Thought’
Climate is the new Covid
The “public health policies” allegedly in place to fight Covid19 are being rebranded as “saving the planet”.
Last time I looked this emminetnly-sensible tweet had not been deleted and was certainly visible to me!
The revolution is eating its own children
What follows are just a fee examples I have come across that indicate that already the Revolution is eating its own children.
Planned Parenthood Head Says Abortion Provider Is ‘Canceling’ Founder Margaret Sanger
After years of pro-life criticism, Planned Parenthood’s president and chief executive officer, Alexis McGill Johnson, now says the abortion provider is “reckoning” with the legacy of its founder, Margaret Sanger, and they are looking to “cancel” the early abortion and birth control advocate over her connections to “white supremacist groups and eugenics.”
God gets the last laugh: Atheist Richard Dawkins sent to woke purgatory for questioning progressive dogma
Old school gay rights activists under fire from furious transgender activists for daring to set up a charity that excludes them
Obsessed not so much with their side of the argument as with who might agree with it and how, British gender warriors have launched into all-out war against a gay group that looked to validate the most unforgivable of crimes – they sought and won recognition as a charity, but without including trans people.
Oh, my Lord. The wailing! The gnashing of teeth! The flouncing! The sheer horror at the very idea was hilarious, if it wasn’t so absurd. The Pink News led from the front with a mouth-foaming attack against the “transphobic hate group”. Really?
***
In the midst of all this this is what goes for “news” in New Zealand
So, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and their dotard who is haunting the White House want to make a life that is safe for themselves in which we all will drive an electric car, presumably self-driving that will only take you to a pre-programmed destination, presumably to eat your hamburger made from lab-produced pseudo-meat.
Meanwhile,the planet burns.
In the meantime, we are supposed to ignore the fact that the green electric cars will likely be powered from energy produced from coal. Either that, or the whole fleet will grind to a halt because there is insufficient wind or solar energy to power them.
We are supposed to ignore (or be ignorant of) the dirty oil that goes into manufacturing these wonders (12 gallons of oil for every tire) or are powered by lithium batteries derived from slave child labour in the Congo.
Two things come to mind: an old Soviet-era joke about a train trapped in a snow drift in which the punchline is Leonid Brezhnev saying:
“Pull down the blinds and let’s pretend we’re moving”
The other came from a Russian friend many years ago:
“Optimism is the absence of realism”
Rather than fall into the insanity that is possessing much of the world I would rather risk being called a pessimist and maintain my sense of realism.
I would like to meet my Maker with all my mental faculties intact.
If I had a slogan it would be, “long live commonsense!
One thought on “Maintaining a sense of balance in a world of lies and insanity”
Thanks for the effort you have put into this.