This is a super-special series of five episodes, all sans-guests and covering some vital topic for all of our lives.
The first in the series of five was the super-prescient 2019 New Year Special. Released over a year before the covid tyranny it was entitled “Is FS + Tech Ushering In Orwellian Tyranny Rather Than Freeing The People?” Well that one has dated well and I think the answer to that question is a clear Yes given that the BigTech giants increasingly act as public censors, best buddies of the Deep State, with the modern equivalent of Nazi book burning, Big FS firms and Fintechs such as Mastercard, Paypal, Patreon deplatform, unperson people and collude to block (or in case of Paypal, take) their income in the name of holding people to their political/moral/ethical standards
In January 2020 we were experiencing a relaxing lull and the New Year Special was focused on the much closer to home decade of Fintech.
January 2021 after near-global House Arrest had been created as A Thing was the second in the series and moved on from the technological road to serfdom to serfdom itself. It was a clear start of what one might call in the simplest of terms the outbreak of a war on the people entitled: “The Elite’s Governance & Cultural Revolutions – Key Insights from Spengler, Nietzsche, Lasch”.
Briefly Spengler’s the Decline of the West written a century ago saw civilisations as organic forms rising and falling. Without a doubt the centuries long rise of Europe and European ways has utterly changed the whole world. In the same way the decline – in absolute or relative terms – will be the major factor over the coming century and certainly has been in 2022 not least re an insane and incompetent US government shooting themselves in the foot and provoking a damaging to them dedollarisation.
In the 19thC Friedrich Nietzsche accurately foresaw that the Decline of Christianity would inevitably unravel European society with problematic consequences.
Finally in this episode I covered an under-rated and not so widely-known 20thC thinker American Christopher Lasch who wrote on many topics but I focus on two of his books in which he outlined problematic major cultural trends in America – the rise of emotionalism and elitism – which so dominate current discourse on all matters. On elitism I could equally have referred to Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Annointed, also coming true in spades right now.
The third in the series was the special episode LFP200 which reverted to focusing on tech and dived into the true and little understood nature of technology per se. “The Philosophy of Technology & Technique & their Existential Impact on People, Society and Civilisation w/Oswald Spengler & Jacques Ellul”.
Briefly to recap. Technology is not – as commonly portrayed value-neutral – you know the ‘a knife can kill but in the hands of a surgeon it can cure’ angle. First technology, by its very nature, always ends up putting greater power in the hands of a few who inevitably throughout history have, until eventually somewhat restrained by society, used it for personal gain and greed and power over their fellow man. Secondly technology has always moved power away from local communities to more distant folk – globalism is simply the reductio ad absurdum of this process. Thirdly technology and its parent, technique, condition man to being, to existing, in a particularly diminished way. Put simply the more man is surrounded by technology and technique the more robotic he ends up behaving, being, thinking and feeling and the less (poetically put) he can be fully human and live in a world of values other than rational efficiency.
Technique and technology thus naturally lead us into a world well described by Max Weber as a polar night of icy darkness, an icy cage of disenchantment, bureaucratisation and control, a world ripe to be plucked by tyrants (aka the cultural and governance revolution of the elite which we are witnessing now). This archetypal motif was well portrayed in Star Wars I where the rule by bureaucrats was perfectly set-up to be controlled by Palpatine.
The fourth in the special series about the crises of 21stC life and society was 2022’s “How The World Is Governed – An Exploration Of The Nature Of Globalism, The Ne Plus Ultra Issue Of Our Time”. This dived into the long-planned origins of globalism and its nature. Agenda 21 (in its current version Agenda 2030) and climate change as The Thing were all agreed by the UN and the Club of Rome respectively way back in the 1990s.
As per not just Spengler but also as per the first historiographer Ibn Khaldun who wrote in 1377 in his Muqaddimah successful societies need an Assabiyah a group feeling, a centripetal principle. What happens when this assabiyah, when the centripetal force that binds societies disappears? Well there’s an answer for that. Top-down tyranny.
The top-down governance of globalism is embedded and exemplified by the so-called Global Public Private Partnership – in which of course the public get no say whatsoever. Policy flows down a five-layer organogram from policy creators (BIS/WEF/CFR et al) through policy distributors (IMF, World Bank, WHO, Global MegaCos et al) through governments (labelled as policy enforcers) through policy propagandists (corporate, state media, social media) to you, me and Joe Sixpack at the neofeudualised bottom. Scholarship candidates may spot that this breaks roughly every governance around the world.
At some deep archetypal level those at the reigns of power seem possessed by Freud’s death drive – misanthropy, millenarian fantasies of doom and gloom, of man as a scourge to Gaia and elite desires of population reduction and actualities of aggressive population replacement, the Kalergi plan to make it easier to rule the roost, and a total lack of anything like a commensurate increase in infrastructure (minor matters like houses, hospitals, doctors, houses, roads, reservoirs et al) ensure most everyone will assume their newly defined neofedual place on the bottom rung of the two tier Hunger Games model.
The fifth in the series (from which this essay is the overview) was by far the most positive and points to the decline of the old systema and the rise of a new system 2023 New Year Special: Fleeing Plato’s Cave, Escaping the Matrix in Search of Love, Light and Healing
It covered five areas:
1. Metapolitical Awakening
2. Psychological Awakening
3. The Wasteland and the Grail
4. Existential Awakening
5. A Magical New World
Summing up the first, the metapolitical challenge in one practical question, this would be how best to avoid living in countries that are pressing on the whole way right to the very end of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom that he correctly foresaw (and was effectively canceled by his profession for) in 1944.
It is worth recalling that Churchill – who was almost a lone voice in the wind in warning of the terrible dangers approaching in the 1930s, who created the phrase and concept of the Iron Curtain across Europe – used his first election broadcast in 1945 to talk of the dangers of central planning, and raised the idea that it would, in the end, require the powers of a Gestapo to put the ideal of a planned society into practice.
Attlee mocked that idea and promised that nanny would indeed look after everyone from cradle to grave and duly got voted in. Well fast forward not that long – all this has happened within the lifetime of my parents – and nanny is smothering its charges, injecting them with dangerous substances, poisoning their minds with endless gaslighting (in passing is it just me that has noticed the current religion and diet respectively are DIE and SAD (diversity/inclusion/equity and the standard american diet), presenting as lifestyle choices what until very recently was seen as a mental illness, overseeing rising crime and filling the house with newcomers all of whom will suffer when the lights go out. I could go on but lets save us all. Pick your own favourite symptoms for nanny having spent far too long at the ouija board and ending up possessed by demons.
As so often nature produces an antidote next to a poison. If the first four episodes in this series were about the Great Reset which would have been unthinkable pre mobile and personal computer technologies (House Arrest almost everyone in the 1970s and the country would have ground to a halt within a week) then this 5th episode is about the Great Awakening.
This phrase has been used to denote many levels of awakening in my terms metapolitical, psychological or existential/spiritual.
Alexander Dugin’s publishers joined the the Great Awakening vs the Great Reset bandwagon by using it for the title of a very short 2021 work by the Russian scourge of Western liberalism/modernity/hyper-individualism with the collective something to be actively destroyed and where nothing is sacred.
I think on the sacred point Dugin perhaps misses out the sacred nature of consumption to all too many, malls are the new cathedrals of the culture, a place of worship to be ever-returned too as one never actually reaches the apotheosis of owning it all. And in terms of worship, in passing, I was much taken this year by orthodox icon carver Jonathan Pageau’s comment on his symbolic world YouTube channel that it is impossible not to worship. To worship is to orientate oneself towards something and we all orientate ourselves towards something whether it be sex, drugs and rock n roll or as our guests on the show towards creating ex nihilo extraordinary firms.
A sentence from an amazon review lays out Dugin’s thesis simply and it is one that is of great relevance to the arising multipolar world – it seems to summarise the growth in power of civilisation States – China, Russia and Saudi for example all have a clear idea of what they are and what they stand for. The reviewers sentence:
“History is, he says, at one of its major turning points, where humanity must now choose between a ‘Great Reset’, a nightmare post-humanist world as advocated by the Western liberal elite or else a ‘Great Awakening’ where the peoples of the world who want to preserve their culture, traditions and humanity, will take back power from them.”