Self-Critical Mass

Source Code and Gratitude.

Hello, my absent friends.

I’m in the Dutch sector of the North Sea now. We loaded 20,000 tonnes of granite rocks from a quarry in Norway last week and brought them down south to bury some submarine cables. Rock-dumping on top of the cables protects these multi-million dollar assets from being damaged by anchors or trawlers. So, that’s the job for the next few weeks.

The Stavanger area was exceptionally warm when I joined the vessel, so I had a very pleasant few hours cruising the fjords, to rendezvous with the ship.

Misty morning, departing Stavanger.

Anyway. This article is a re-write of one that I started drafting at the beginning of the summer. I couldn’t finish it then because my trip on the cable-layer in Taiwan ended up quite chaotic. Breakdowns and safety issues really get in the way of your hobbies sometimes.

Anyway. On one level, everything seemed quite normal this year. The rhythm of school term dates punctuates our existence. The children keep growing. Elections have been happening.

I even bumped into Alex Salmond delivering his usual spiel at our local tavern just before the election. He said hello, but I just giggled and kept walking. ‘Look at that. I guess he is still alive. Tw*t,’ went my inner monologue.

That’s how I feel about almost every aspect of British life at the moment. It’s like it’s all a bad joke, and I’m waiting for it to be over.

I even attended the primary school parent liaison meeting just before the school closed for summer break. They asked parents for ‘input’ on why there could possibly be a country-wide spike in ‘behaviour’ – by which they meant such events as children throwing chairs at teachers, destroying property, and dirty protests in the lavatories (in the equivalent of K-12 schools). Our primary school is a pretty decent one overall, but there is a new headteacher (very woke, and very incompetent) who has spent the past 2 years running it into the ground.

Bear in mind that there was a time when Scotland used to be the most literate country in the world, with more publishers per capita than any other. Our illustrious educators could not fathom such a thing today. My kids already know more than their teachers in some respects.

‘Do you think it might be something to do with the fact that you shut down the country and the schools for the best part of two years, leaving the most vulnerable children in a state of total neglect during their prime formative years’?

No. The school teachers (even the good ones) think ‘a lot of stuff gets blamed on covid because it’s convenient.’

They reckon they’re simply witnessing an unprecedented generational spike in poor parenting, compounded by excessive material wealth and permissiveness. ‘If only iPads and the internet could be banned, this wouldn’t be happening’ seems to be the sentiment.

As if iPhones and parental neglect didn’t exist in 2019.

The state of British public institutions is subject to relentless and boring criticism of late. Immigration policy, censorship, propaganda, the failing health service, criminalisation of thought crimes, currency inflation, etc.

We naively seem to think that if we keep pointing out what’s wrong, that they’ll have to stop.

Naively.

I think the teachers are professional people, and most people are too busy and harassed to see the big picture. We are nation a that has really been worn down to the point of exhaustion with politics and the state. And that’s why the majority can’t stomach the vast truth of what we are seeing now.

What I really think, is that the problem is much larger than people can bear to see. The problem with ‘Western’ society (apart from the fact that it only exists apophatically), may be described as having two major components:

•              Cultural Marxism completed its takeover of our institutions some time ago when we weren’t paying attention.

•              With the decline and now absence of our parent culture, Judeo-Christianity, our society is reverting back to paganism quicker than people have been waking up to the threat.

I say Judeo-Christianity because I’ve come to view the top-down schismatic actions of Pope Leo IX, Henry VIII, Edward VI and Oliver Cromwell as being the ultimate origins of our current crisis.

Cultural Marxism is functionally the same as revolutionary satanism. This ideology has deliberately destroyed community and family. This happened a long time ago, and we’re only now becoming aware of what we’ve lost because the internet allows more frequent and diverse comparisons. People have so internalised these revolutionary ideals that they believe they are their own honestly gotten opinions, rather than a destructive ideology that has been cultishly thrust upon them by subversives.

The idea that we even have a ‘society’ when government is placed at the top of the hierarchy, and as a mediator between every human interaction, is an illusion that leads to ever-expanding human misery.

Paganism is the worship of power. And so is everything that we see in our politics today.

There is still meant to be an assumption of the consent of the governed, despite an adversarial multi-cultural underpinning. As ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer considers building concentration camps in the Falkland Islands for Facebook and Twitter offenders, some people still seem to think that the technocracy is about to blink. That they will soon cave under the pressure of their own absurdity.

Most mainstream people generally now agree that conspiracy guys are sometimes correct and that the government and media definitely lie to us. Although, most still seem unable to apply that knowledge in any meaningful way. The grip of nihilism and cynicism in our time is crushing, and palpable.

But when the propaganda bubble bursts, all they have left is force. And without a moral framework that inherently opposes the idea that ‘might makes right,’ what’s to stop them?

I know it is hard for the liberty lovers and conservative types that comprise my little audience to understand, but the vast majority of people have actually internalised the exercise of power as a virtue.

Remember. Odin was a rapist. Zeus was a rapist. As was Hermes, Dionysus, Apollo. Poseidon, and Hades. The planets worshipped by the Romans, too, were rapists. Human sacrifice, infanticide and cannibalism have been ubiquitously and thoroughly practised in pagan cultures.

People encountered these terrible gods and worshipped them.

Why?

Because when people encounter terrible and fearful things, their weak human nature leads them to appease that power. In the simple hope that it will leave them alone. Or that by bargaining with it, or defending it, they will share in its terrible power.

That is what drives statism. That is what drives globalist neo-corporatism. That is what fuels the trans-humanist delusion.

People seemed certain that Trump would crush Biden in the upcoming election and restore world order through his Madman-Diplomacy and secretly stable business-democrat domestic policies. Now what’s going to happen?

The technocratic propaganda machine is working overtime to get their puppet politician Kamala Harris into office. Vladimir Putin has even sent his support. I don’t think he was joking. He is licking his lips at the thought of Harris-Walz in office.

The majority of Western Europe is throwing off the ignorant and complacent class of progressive politicians who’ve dominated our education and discourse for so long, in favour of restoring borders and national sovereignty. Geert Wilders is being tarnished as a ‘far-right populist nationalist’ for insisting that arrest warrants should be issued for Pakistani imams who’ve issued fatwa judgements demanding the extra-judicial killing of Westerners they deemed heretical. Giorgia Meloni has been called a fascist for pointing out that the left has been ruling Italy through back-room deals, and not winning a popular vote majority for 15 years. Macron appeared to be on the brink of being ousted, just before he made a deal to share power with the actual communist party of France in the summer.

The reason the word ‘populist’ has become an insult in the supposed democracies of the West, is because the majority of people are not voting for those in power.

The left know they are an unpopular minority. They don’t care. Lenin said, “The goal of Socialism is Communism.” They only view democracy as a means to that end.

The primary anomaly in Europe is the UK. Before the summer’s thrown election, we had an incumbent Conservative leader who was clearly trying to escape the election to avoid becoming a wartime PM. We had (& still have) a King dying a death slower than Joe Biden walking off stage. And a revolutionary Labour party hell-bent on sending all remaining straight white conservative men into the conscription meat grinder. And Labour won.

Was anybody shocked?

Our only hope is that the US hegemon will be restored just in time to save us. A Trump win will end the insanity of this suicidal decline, by restraining Britain from its own blood-thirsty Jacobins and Neo-Marxists.

A hope for sanity to prevail long enough for the Reform Party to gain traction and begin treating criminal migrants as criminals, and citizens with opinions as citizens.

I’m not holding my breath.

I don’t think our public intellectuals – even the ones many find alarmist – are even close to explaining the seriousness of it all, because they have not produced an effective narrative to replace the current one.

It feels like there is nobody in the public space interested in addressing underlying issues, like the family, societal values, the debased currency, or the abuse of our multi-cultural/open-border policies by those who would infiltrate our society with malicious sleeper agents.

The ‘Type-A’ personalities that you get on the post-academia, books/podcast circuit are amazingly well-connected and well-informed. But almost by definition, they cannot help but be part of the problem.

Jordan B Peterson is a personal hero of mine, but I think he may be missing the point on several issues. Most fundamentally when he discusses the argument that Marx called ‘religion ‘the opiate of the masses.’

Peterson often goes at it from the traditional angle of pointing out that the potential for eternal damnation in Hell is a pretty bitter pill to swallow if you’re going to call that an Opiate.

This argument is wrong. As alert as he is to the diabolical nature of Marxist thought and its importance as the fundamental idol that motivates the modern Left, he misses a chilling point here.

The full comment that Marx wrote in 1843, as part of the introduction to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, goes thusly:

‘"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

I’d like to point out that Opium is not Opiate.

Opium is and was widely considered at the time to be real medicine. Jefferson grew it at Monticello because he thought that every free person should have the ability to treat their own illnesses. That’s why the DEA had to raid the museum and rip out his poppy flowers from the display, in 1987. Can’t have the proles being independent from corporate pharma. What’ll be next? Distilling their own whisky?

Opium was not simply an empty and degenerating narcotic, or the cornerstone of the Afghan economy, as we are enjoined to view it today. It represented medicine and freedom.

Religion was also better linguistically understood to be a kind of ‘repeated binding together,’ that allowed communities to cohere.

Marx went on:

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

…

Marx, and every demon-worshipping socialist, has decided for you. If you think you’re happy you are wrong. We are going to destroy everything that is your “heart,” “soul,” and “sigh of oppression.” We are going to burn it all to the ground and force you to suffer beyond imagination, in the coldness of an empty and loveless world, because only then will you know the true happiness, that we decide to give you.

Pause for a moment and remember the potentially hundreds of millions of people starved or directly murdered by their own communist governments in peacetime, in the 20th century. The crime of democide so widely practised, but still hotly denied by ideologues today is detailed in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. A 1997 book by Stéphane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Margolin, and several other European academics, that is widely suppressed and contested by the left today. Thankfully, the full text is available freely online. It is in fact one of the most well-founded and referenced pieces of academic research it is possible to compile.

Always remember that they did that on purpose.

Lenin also said “When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.”

Remember that when pointing out that there is no justice in Keir Starmer jailing people for wrong think.

These people, do, not, care.

The underlying philosophy or theory of leftist/Marxist thought is that if you destroy everything, the cold hard shock of total destruction of the family, the nation, and private property will magically cause utopia to ensue, by sheer force of contrast.

I say magically because the crucial in-betweeny step of ‘HOW?!,’ is never explained. It’s a bit like anarcho-capitalism in that respect. The libertarian fairy may not live under the magic money tree, like the socialist fairy. But they are probably neighbours.

Every example of the catastrophic failures of socialist or communist policy is always dismissed out of hand as having been ‘insufficient.’ Or, stealthily rebranded by the euphemism conveyor belt described by Orwell in his essay, 'Politics and the English Language'

To be clear, where socialism and communism fundamentally catch people out, is in attacking private property. The narcissism and histrionic delusion of most people in the modern ‘West’ allow them to believe that this means they could all be living like Jeff Bezos if only ‘We The People’ were allowed to steal just a little bit more property. That is Joe Biden’s career-claim in a nutshell.

It didn’t feel like that in Taiwan.

Their society is a little barmy and still overtly Pagan. They have icons and idols all over their work equipment, their clothing, shoes, and so on. Grown men are dressed like pin cushions, they are adorned with so many talismans. I was baffled by the popularity of the soft toy Lotso, from Toy Story. This soft toy was available for sale everywhere. Grocery stores, bookshops, toy stores, food courts, pharmacists, supermarkets, 7-11s, and petrol stations. They all had Lotso dolls for sale, or on display.

Why would they like the bad guy?

In the West, we liked Woody, and Buzz Lightyear. In Taiwan, these characters were nowhere to be found.

I loved Taiwan. They had really innovative urban planning. An excellent High-Speed Rail network. Clean and orderly streets. Just enough chaos between the order to reassure you that private property still exists, and therefore, tyranny was not quite at CCP or even Singapore during lockdown levels.

But it felt like they do worship power in Taiwan.

Although, when compared to the west, it didn’t feel like the underlying ethos was one of diabolical disintegration.

All that is to say, superficial material comforts do not indicate moral superiority or victory.

The huge number of Church of Scotland churches being sold off has not really upset me. It is sad that our most ancient cathedrals are either going to be turned into mosques, nightclubs or luxury condominiums. But that is merely a sign of the illness, not the cause.

To my mind, the ‘body of the church’ in the Christian worldview is the correct model for understanding a living society. Just as every person who puts a Christmas gift in a stocking each year becomes a cell in the body of Saint Nicholas, the concept of the church was always meant to be that the people make the body of Christ. Not the buildings.

I understand people getting upset by mass migration and feeling frustrated and confused by the difficulties of living in a multicultural society. Arson attacks on French churches, the stabbing of innocent children in England, and the trans-ing of the kids are all very alarming.

But I can also sympathise with the calls for censorship at this time.

For those who are newcomers to this blog (Thank you for your subscriptions and support, btw), I was basically a secular atheist, but cultural Christian until 2020 ‘happened.’ By the time I received my religious insight, I was already married to a Jewish woman. I also have Muslims, Catholics and humanist new agers in my immediate family. And I love them all. They are inseparable from my being, and are part of my identity, too.

My Jewish father-in-law always says. ‘Man plans, and God laughs.’

Well, if God is planning a race war in Britain, he’d be having a good old chuckle at my expense. Whether the radical Hamas types win, or the vile and venomous neo-Nazis win, I’d be for the chop.

Personally, I now think God gave me a Jewish wife and both Christian and Muslim family so that I couldn’t fall prey to such vile temptations as base tribalism. I think I’m definitely the type of person who would otherwise have fallen prey to foolish nationalist delusions of self-superiority. Thankfully, such notions are completely off the table for me.

Unlike the cretinous people who recently called me a ‘Race-traitor’ in my Substack comments.

Seriously guys, if you think there is anything genetically superior about being Scottish, you should really take a walk up the High Street in Glasgow on a Monday morning as the junkies are being handed out free methadone before their court appointments at 9 am. It’s a sorry sight.

And for the Muslim bashers. Islam isn’t a race. The caliphate ended in 1924. And ‘the muzzahs’ are not the ones drugging and cutting their children up to change their ‘socially constructed’ gender. Deal with the fact that there is a cultish criminal element among their ranks, and stop treating groups as untouchable, when it is individuals that are behaving as criminals.

We live in a multicultural environment on international merchant ships. Peaceful co-existence can only be maintained if the same standards are applied equally to everyone, regardless of their supposed group identity.

It is moral relativism that is causing our problems. Not a societal contagion, but a lack of clarity and resilience.

Also, the hitherto thinly-veiled hatred of Jews in our society has very quickly resurfaced this past year. Those of you who call yourself ‘Christian,’ but talk about the ‘small-hats,’ ‘big-noses,’ and ‘Zionists’ running the world and calling for Pogroms on my Substack notes. (Yes, this has been happening. Substack is no longer the polite and pleasant intellectually safe space that it once was for early adopters). You should know that ‘Christianity’ is also not a race. And it is not European. Believe it or not, the apostles did not believe they were starting a new religion. In fact, our disagreement with Talmudic Jews, theologically, is about who is doing Judaism properly, in light of the fact that we have now met the person who walked with Adam in the garden and wrestled with Jacob.

To paraphrase Forest Gump, ‘Christian is, as Christian does.’ That means you should “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Matthew 5:48.

In other words, don’t be spending too much time calling for a race war on the internet, while claiming moral superiority over others.

The Enlightenment project has failed because it was built on the supposition that reason was within our grasp, and that syllogism would set us free. It hasn’t, because, unlike God, we do not live in perfection, outside of time and space.

We weren’t wrong for trying. After all, what else could ‘Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’ possibly mean?

Human beings are trees, with our roots in the earth, and our branches in heaven. It is our job to make perfect principle manifest on earth. And to understand the eternal meaning of things that happen in the material world.

Miracles are events on earth that illustrate a heavenly meaning. Relics are objects involved in those events. The church is the people, not the building because it is we who experience meaning. Human beings are where heaven meets earth.

A tree falling in the woods may cause vibrations in the air. It does not make ‘a sound,’ unless it is perceived by human ears. Because that’s what sound, is.

Our society, too, is like a tree. The life of a tree is in the skin. Each generation expands, as each year builds ring upon ring. Every individual is a cell in the bark of that tree. That living layer of bark rests upon layers of the dead wood, going all the way back to the core, and the original seed.

The way our ancestors used to cut down trees with stone tools was to cut into the bark of the tree, all the way around the circumference at the base of the trunk. They didn’t have the available calories, or mechanical efficiency to cut straight through a mighty trunk in one sitting. By penetrating the skin all the way around the tree, the water cannot make its way from the roots, to the leaves. The leaves died, and the tree desiccated above the incision. Our ancestors could then just burn the dried-out trees. Hey presto, the first fields were born by planting in the ashes.

Modern humans have supposedly walked this earth for over 400,000 years. But we know nothing of our culture before about 7,000 years ago. Everything we know about life back then indicates that people lived in fear, with the constant presence of the most horrific violence.

Only the Hebrew Bible gives us anything of worth from those times. Long before the Scots and Irish called themselves Scythians and ventured westward across the Steppe. Only one society was founded not on the idea of supremacy, but on self-criticism. And that is the seed of the Judeo-Christian culture that our rotting, but once mighty oak of a culture grew out of.

Are you afraid? Good, you should be.

But engaging in nationalism, utopianism, Marxism or just plain racism isn’t going to get you where you need to be.

Only consistency and integrity can get us out of this hole we’re in. The moral victory is the only victory there is.

And I’ve sailed with passengers before, so believe me when I tell you this. Your strength of emotion is no indication of your actual strength. Do not kid yourself.

The problem with that is, you’re going to have to start with yourself.

I put it to you, that that’s the real reason you hate the Jews. Because they’re the ones who gave us the burden of self-awareness, and the knowledge of the father of existence. And you don’t like it.

Like the tree falling in the woods, the importance of definition is the key to understanding.

It is plain to see in the order of all natural things that everything has a beginning and an end. The same must be true of material existence. There must have been an instant where things changed from non-existence to existence. When time and space were born.

(Materialist scientists call this moment the ‘Big-Bang,’ because they instinctively know that there must have been an observer who heard it go bang.)

Because we exist in time and space, we cannot conceive of the non-existence of time and space.

Close your eyes in a darkened room. Mediate on the opposite of existence. Imagine ‘no-thing.’ No such concept can be experienced because no-thing-ness cannot be observed. We cannot imagine non-existence.

This is the seed. The absolute zero that neither science, religion nor philosophy can get beyond. By definition.

The Hebrew concept of God is the first and only postulation that whatever caused existence to exist out of nothingness is ‘the one true God, and the only one worthy of worship.’

That definition of monotheism is not the one we are used to in the West any more, but it does allow for the existence of pagan Gods. It just says that those guys are lesser beings, not worthy of worship.

No pagan god that we know of, even so-called ‘creator’ gods, ever claimed to be that God.

Again, definitionally, we must remember that whatever caused the existence of space and time, exists outside of space and time. Therefore, by definition, whatever ‘cause’ that is could choose to end the existence of space and time. Since time is no factor to such a force or being, we have no choice but to assume that no-thingness, or non-existence may come for us all at any time.

The fact that it doesn’t, must mean that the creator is continuously choosing not to end creation. This is true at all times that we continue to exist.

That is what is meant when we say, God is Love.

Love is what makes unity out of multiplicity (thanks to Jonathan Pageau for this working definition). Two individuals make a couple. Their DNA combines to produce new life. In the same way, people come together to form a church, or a sports team, or a ship’s company.

The force that makes things cohere, is love. The force that brings light out of darkness, and earth from the waters of chaos, is love.

Coherence and love are the same.

So long as existence, is, then we live in love. By definition.

That God is the one who loves existence. He is the one who told our fathers in Abraham, that we should no longer sacrifice our children. Killing Isaac will not please the God who creates Isaac’s existence by his love, at all times.

Knowing this God created all things means that we have nothing to offer Him as a sacrifice that is not already His.

That is why the only sacrifice that matters, is self-sacrifice.

Pagans have misery and oppression. They have brutal asceticism. They have insane sacrifices. What they all point toward, however, is ‘getting’ things in return. There is no love. Only a cause and effect bargaining.

What makes Christianity different is the understanding that it is more important to celebrate creation in gratitude. To feast. To sing. To rejoice and give thanks. And to cohere in togetherness.

Repentance. Forgiveness. Gratitude. Communion. Celebration.

Those are the roots that you are being cut off from. Not your ethnicity. Not the sufficiency of welfare state resources or the supply of housing. Not the social contract.

Sheer gratitude for the miracle of existence, and the awareness that all people should know that they live in that love.

That’s why it gives you chills to find out that the Democratic National Congress has ritual abortions in a tent outside their rally. That’s why you know it’s wrong for the state to jail people for victimless offences. That’s why the pit of your stomach sinks toward hell when you hear of prominent LGBTQ+ drag queen story hour activists being arrested for paedophilia.

You can’t vote for the mass of illegal migrants to be removed in the hope of restoring the post-war fantasy of the welfare state. You can’t ask for free-speech to be restored and expect a happy ending. The people who are ruining this know that they are destroying things, and they know that you’re not going to be happy about it.

It isn’t an accident.

After the resurrection, the Romans crushed Israel and killed the entire Jewish priesthood. Christians survived because Jesus had warned them this would happen, and because they left Israel. They did not have a material concept of race. Their mission was to transcend the tribe and make all gentiles, spiritually Jewish. And in the West, they succeeded. So much so, that you are not even self-aware of how Hebrew you are, at heart. Even if you are a gay, liberal, vegan, Democrat or Labour voter.

In this, Christianity is unique. Unlike both its Abrahamic cousins, there is no ethnic or language barrier to being Christian. There is no racial component. No territorial centre. Only the living diasporic skin of the tree.

Jesus was quoting Leviticus when he commanded us to ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’ He commands both Jew and Gentile to keep the Torah.

This universalism is antithetical to the state. Nation states by definition cannot be moral entities, in our definition of morality as aligning heavenly principle with earthly practice.

Why?

A modern nation-state is a corporate creation of man, not God. It is a limited liability corporation that only exists by being exempt from moral laws that are applied to others. I.e. Citizens must respect property rights, but the state can seize assets, land, raise taxes, etc at will. The citizen must not print currency or be called a counterfeiter, but the state must print currency. The citizen must not initiate the use of force, but the state must initiate the use of force, etc.

By definition, a nation-state exists in moral contradiction. It is an agency exempt from universal morality. As such, it can never be consistent, and therefore can never be moral. That’s why everything ‘good’ it does, causes other problems. Everything you ask it to do further distorts its moral legitimacy.

It’s not just socialism that bankrupts us and runs up currency inflation. It is all state activity that does it.

That’s why political conservatism is just slow-burn socialism. The same end is inevitable. It’s only the pace that differs.

That’s why I am not a Muslim. I’m not a statist of any kind and cannot be. Their prophet was a head of state, whereas mine was a teacher and a healer.

It’s a strange place to be, in this day and age.

That’s why the left wing, globalists, and radicals of every stripe seem to be aligned with Hamas terrorists now. While supposed liberty-loving conservatives are siding with Russia, or Ukraine, or other statist entities who are currently doing their very best to put the world into the meat grinder one more time.

They don’t believe they are sinners. They believe that their ‘category’ is right. And that the exercise of ‘might’ proves it. They are ungrateful.

That’s the debate right now. Is the kingdom of heaven at hand, here and now? Can we find it by humbling ourselves in gratitude?

Or is it a material thing to be taken? Should we sacrifice others to get it?

I think that’s pretty much it from me tonight. Rant over. I haven’t read this back-through from the start, so apologies for any incoherence. I’m too tired.

Goodnight. Sweet dreams y’all.