Picture Source: Book Cover of Andy Lock and Tom Strong: Social Constructionism
CJ Hopkins is one of the most switched-on authors I know. He doesn’t get distracted by all the side shows and limited hang-outs and also keeps his ego in check.
Most importantly, he doesn’t want to be a leader. He is a true dissident, while important Substack writers and several alternative news people and platform owners like Dr. Malone, Viligant Fox, Shasha Latipova, Michael Schellenberg, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and many more are all either not smart enough to see the big picture, too blinded and unaware of their unconscious agendas and belief systems, or infected by egoic ambitions and big dreams to be part of a solution.
But there are no good solutions for all of us. Someone always pays if others improve their lives. Such is the law of nature. Life feeds on life. And all politics - left, right, middle - is a big circus “signifying fucking nothing” but one group of people striving for power over another group of people.
All of this is distracting entertainment for our minds. As long we are addicted to this story-based mental stimulation, there is no way out for us.
And no grassroots movement or new ideology will solve this. It is an individual quest each of us has to complete “to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery” because “only ourselves can free our minds.” (Thank you, Bob Marley, for these eternal lyrics)
But I am jumping the gun here. Let’s unroll the stories of our current expected misery:
This is from the above Substack:
The thing is, most of us are so laser-focused on the trees that we cannot see the forest. But our adversaries see the forest. They see the forest like fucking eagles. They own the fucking forest and everything in it. While we hop like squirrels from tree to tree, distracted from distraction by distraction, from limited hangout by limited hangout, they are building a big fucking fence around it and deploying the Forest-Ranger Sturmabteilung.
That’s why I love CJ Hopkins. The man can write. The man can make a point.
I’m reminded of that infamous Karl Rove quote. He was referring to the USA, of course, but it was GloboCap (i.e., the Corporatocracy) that he was really speaking for whether he knew it or not …
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore … we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [The New York Times Magazine]
If we do not want to end up “studying that reality,” the global, pathologized-totalitarian reality that is being subtly and not so subtly implemented simultaneously in countries throughout the world, at some point we had better come up with some actual answers to those questions above.
However, Hopkins is missing the spiritual connection and theory that only non-dual spirituality can provide about the nature of all our experiences. That is the only reason I write this article. To point people to the fact, that these “new realities” created by those in power, are all illusionary and - spiritually speaking - unreal. They are just words we show interest in and believe in. If we stop doing that, these new realities will just disappear by themselves
The supranational, globally-hegemonic, post-ideological system of power that runs our world — whatever you need to call it — has answers to those questions. It has a story. It is a story about a beneficent global empire governed by authoritative scientific experts who are trying to save the world from Whatever and protect everyone from “disinformation” and “harmful” speech, ideas, and so on. Like every good story, it has an antagonist. Us. We are the official enemy. Right, Left, libertarian, anarchist, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist … it does not make one iota of difference. There is only the Empire, and those who oppose it. The Empire does not give a shit why. It is conducting a global “Clear-and-Hold” operation, wiping out internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity. It could not care less what you think you believe in. All it wants is mindless obedience and rote repetition of its propaganda. That’s how totalitarianism works.
And there I go with my story again. If anyone has a different story that makes sense of the last seven years — and arguably the last 30 years — honestly, I would love to hear it. My story fills me with fear and loathing, but the only other coherent story I’m hearing at the moment is the Empire’s story, and I think we all know how that one ends.
In the comments section of the article, Hopkins explained more about the Empire’s story. I think it is a brilliant analysis of what is going on and pointing it out makes us all aware of it. And therein lies the immense value of it. Awareness alone is sufficient to heal everything.
Some readers seem to be a bit unclear about the nature of the "story" I referred to in the piece. It's about the history of the post-Cold War period, the early 1990s up to now. I presented an extremely condensed version of it at a conference in London in April. Here it is again ...
"In order to understand what happened to the Left (i.e., how it became the New Normal Left), you have to understand the history of global capitalism over the last 30 years or so. Actually, you have to go back a bit farther, back to the early 20th Century, when the Great Ideological Game was still afoot. Back then, capitalism, having overthrown the aristocracies, was on the march, transforming the world into one big marketplace. It was challenged by two opposing ideologies, fascism and communism. They fought it out. Long story short, capitalism won.
Global capitalism (“GloboCap”) was born. It’s one big global-capitalist world now. It has been since the early 1990s. GloboCap has no external adversaries, so it has nothing to do but Clear and Hold, i.e., wipe out pockets of internal resistance and implement ideological uniformity. Which is what it has been doing for the last 30 years, first, in the former Soviet bloc, then, in “The Global War on Terror,” and finally, in our so-called “Western democracies,” as we have just experienced up close and personal during the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal, and are continuing to experience, albeit somewhat less dramatically.
In other words, GloboCap is going totalitarian. That is what the New Normal is. It is not your granddad’s totalitarianism. It is a new, global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. It displays a number of familiar features — suspension of constitutional rights, official propaganda, goon squads, censorship, ubiquitous symbols of ideological conformity, gratuitous restrictions of freedom of movement and other aspects of everyday life, hatred and persecution of official “Untermenschen,” segregation, criminalization of dissent, mob violence, book burning, show trials, etc. — but there won’t be anyone goose-stepping around in jackboots shrieking about “the master race.” It’s not that kind of totalitarianism.
To understand it (which it would behoove us to do), we need to understand global-capitalist ideology, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. Global capitalism has no ideology … or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you have no ideological adversaries, you don’t need an ideology. You’re basically God. “Reality” is whatever you say it is, and whoever disagrees is a “science denier,” or a “conspiracy theorist,” or a “malinformationist,” or some other type of deluded “extremist.”
Yes, they say it is “reality” but it is only a mental dogma that enough people take seriously and believe in. This “new reality”, deliberately created through totalitarian propaganda and lies, becomes only real if people believe and act on it.
And it has no spiritual reality at all, of course. It is a 100% mind game and when enough people see it like that and understand it like that, they will stop reacting to it.
Reacting goes both ways. We react when we believe it and implement it (the compliant cohort). And we react when we fight and resist it (the non-compliant cohort).
Both cohorts keep it alive - that’s what most resistant fighters, including JC Hopkins, don’t seem to understand. Their fear gets the better of them. They think they have to fight it to stop it. But what we resist, persists. We don’t need to fight it. We don’t need to find solutions. All we need to do is see it for what it is. Mental clouds.
Pointing that out to others will prevent it. Awareness alone will end it. Hopkins is fantastic in pointing out all the mechanisms and tactics at play. But he doesn’t think this is sufficient.
But it will be. If enough people understand it, this artificial creation of reality will lose all its power because people will lose interest either way and stop playing along with it.
That’s why this so-called crisis is so brilliant for the awakening of humans. Ten years ago, most people were not aware that events were created through dominant deliberate stories. And they weren’t aware how either.
Most thought, that events a real for a valid, good reason. Now, most people know that they are played by the people in control of the narratives. With that knowledge, the whole system will collapse like a house of cards.
Back in the seventy, we had this anti-war slogan: “Imagine there is a war and no-one attends?”
More and more people, who see through all of this, will stop to “attend” anything put on them by any authority. They will stop to self-censor, too.
Sometimes, authorities will enforce compliance - and smart people will pretend they go along with it until authorities run out of resources. And then go back to non-compliance. They can’t police and enforce authority on a global scale. It is impossible. Hence the emphasis on psychological warfare, nudging, propaganda which they hope will lead to “mental slavery” and “self-censorship” and “automatic compliance”.
But all these methods are only mental, not physical. When properly understood, they have no power over us,
You don’t need to argue ideology with anyone, because you have no ideological opponents. Society is divided into two fundamental groups, (a) “normal people,” who accept “reality,” and (b) the “deviants” and “extremists,” who do not. Your political and ideological opponents are pathologized, preemptively delegitimized. After all, who would argue against “reality” except liars and the clinically insane?
Yes, of course, there is intramural political and ideological conflict within the confines of so-called “normality,” just as there is intramural competition between global corporations, but challenging the ideological system itself is impossible, because there is no ground outside it from which to mount an attack.
I don’t think we need an opposing ideology, an outside ground, to nullify a constructed false “reality”. Just pointing out the inherent falseness and fakeness of it, will stop people believing in it. And if people stop believing in it, if enough people simply ignore it, it will fall away by itself.
Further, all ideologies are false anyway. Isn’t that what happened historically? One ideology replaced another and replaced another. Did the plight of all people get better simultaneously? Or does one ideology just favour one cohort, while another favours another cohort? Is there an ideology that serves all people on this planet in the same way?
Fuck all ideologies, I say. Who needs them? Let’s just live our little lives with love, courage, dignity, and compassion and focus on our immediate, real environment and stop worrying and stop trying to solve unreal artificially constructed problems of this world.
No ideology will ever make everyone happy. Only ourselves can make us happy and we don’t need any ideology for it. We need to understand who we really are. That’s the only path to true lasting happiness. It is a spiritual quest. If that is understood, all else will be seen as moving deckchairs around.
This is probably the hardest thing for most of us to come to terms with. There is no ideological territory outside global capitalism. There is no “outside.” There are no external adversaries. There are only insurgencies, and counterinsurgency ops.
The rest is intramural competition."
This is only true if we base ourselves on our ever-changing, fickle minds and bodies. Which is the dominant materialistic-scientific story and this story is coming to an end because it is based on greed and power and will destroy itself.
Two readers responded with their own stories:
These are true stories of hope, no doubt and will - if given enough time - come true. Only to be replaced by totalitarian stories again. And so it goes - round and round - endlessly.
Hopkins claims above, that “There is no ideological territory outside global capitalism. There is no “outside.” There are no external adversaries.”
That might be true for a while - but given enough time it will change again. Nothing ever stays stagnant. But we don’t have decades or maybe even centuries to wait it out. We don’t want to suffer under such a system until it runs out.
I prefer another story - a story to end our dependencies on stories altogether:
I have a story that builds on the previous stories to transcend them all.
There will come a time when a critical mass of people recognize and transcend all stories - good or bad - as unreal. This, of course, is only possible, if we know the only "real" thing there ever was from within ourselves: Our true nature.
People who realize their true nature are free from any story. Stories only have power when we give attention to and believe in them. Power itself is just another spiritually unreal conceptual story that is believed.
This shift in consciousness is only possible if we see our body-minds as conceptual stories and disidentify ourselves from their limitations. After all, all our problems need a body-mind to be effective. Without a body-mind, where are the problems? No death, no pain, no existential angst - all of it needs a body-mind.
Most people think you are crazy if you deny that you are your body-mind. But why care what most people think? Our recent past has once again shown us, that what most people think is extremely stupid and harmful.
Thinking that we are this body-mind is the first piece of materialistic propaganda we are exposed to. From day one, we are told that we are this body-mind, it is given a name and a fragile, vulnerable ego develops. That’s why the whole world believes it. It is not an absolute truth. It is just another story we believe.
Thankfully, there were always wise men, the most critical thinkers we can imagine, who questioned everything. They also were true and brilliant scientists. They experimented with radical new hypothesises, for example, "What if I assume, for a while, that I am not my body-mind" and see how that works out.
And it worked out quite well for them. They all got enlightened and radiated divine presence. They tried to pass on the great news but most people are still too brainwashed to take them seriously and people don’t suffer enough, yet. They behave like frogs that slowly boil to death because they are too lethargic to jump out of the water.
But those who can suffer, who can feel the sharp pain of separation from the whole - these people will be compelled to find new ways. These people will be motivated and energized to look outside of the box.
The new normal global capitalistic-materialistic world order will be so dominant, that no other story-based ideological idea can displace it for a long time. I agree with Hopkins on that.
They will try total control over our body-minds. They will try to manipulate everything about our body-minds - what we want, what we fear, what we think, what we shouldn't think and eventually, even if we should live or die.
They do not even have to arrest or kill us. They will have the nudging psychology so refined, that we will do that for them ourselves.
We will willingly walk into a "state-sponsored friendly and caring assisted-dying clinic in our friendly neighbourhood" when some AI algorithm has decided that our body-minds crossed the "usefulness threshold". And our neighbours will stand in their neat little courtyard gardens and praise us as "heroes" for freeing the planet from the burden of our body-minds.
Make no mistake. This is a mental-spiritual war. Those who know their true selves will be able to resist this highly sophisticated brainwash. Those who believe they are a body-mind will be very vulnerable to these attacks on our psyche and mental belief systems.
However, increased suffering will evoke the search for remedies and will raise awareness and energy levels. If there are no solutions left in the materialistic-mental realm, people will rediscover their spiritual realm.
And I am not talking about going to church and praying. This might work for a few simple-minded true believers (“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”)
The materialistic-scientific powers to be have turned most of us into educated, scientific, intellectual mental nutcases that have lost the connection to their hearts, incapable of true thoughtless surrender to a God.
But other spiritual systems and practices - like Buddhism and Non-Dual-Spirituality - were developed to cater for the modern human. These techniques can help us to discover our true selves. As soon we know ourselves, we will be very resilient against these attacks on our minds and souls.
But as long we think of ourselves as body-minds, we are doomed, of course - totalitarian system or not. This is not new.
But there is a good chance that the mounting overwhelming pressure of this new normal totalitarian capitalistic-materialistic world order will drive people out of their body-minds into the hands of spirit.
And the spiritual seeds, sown over millennia, will suddenly sprout and explode with life, like the desert after the long-awaited rainfall.
That's my story. It is still a story because that’s how body-minds communicate. But it is a story that aims to end all stories and that dies itself at the end. It is like the wooden stick that stirs the fire and burns down itself.
In the end, if we see them as what they are, all stories are just noise put into random mental patterns with ever-changing meanings that create no lasting truth ever.
Only stories that make us question all stories are good stories. All other stories keep us in the prison of your minds.
Excellent article. One aspect our overlords to be didn’t think through with their Covid lockdowns is how many people, thanks to government enforced solitude, would begin to awaken to the true nature of reality; my time in solitude is what awakened my dormant spirituality. Really is funny that their totalitarian nature is what will end up being their downfall,
Brilliant article. Hard hitting truth encapsulated in a few pages. The delusions that we (the unenlightened) cherish in the outer/lower mind are the cause of all our temporary joys as well as our temporary sufferrings.
On a more historical note, CJ Hopkins' analysis amd comments helped me make sense of Fukuyama's 'the end of history' - no external adversaries for global capitalism. But, as you point out, nothing stays the same for long and soon another adversary will arise, and then another....