This article is a great summary of what happened in the past 50 years that led to the nihilistic, confusing “woke” world of today, where men can be women, and there is no such thing as truth anymore. Approved and rammed-down-our-throats new definitions of words and approved narratives decide what is true and what isn’t.
The author, James Richards, observes correctly that:
Today, many politicians can’t even agree upon what a man is or what a woman is. That would have been inconceivable until just a few years ago. Any such debate would have been a skit on Saturday Night Live as a topic so ridiculous it would never occur in real life. But today, those debates exist.
This undermining of core values that once created stability for people in Western Democracies didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident either. It is a strategy of war and was actively deployed by the Soviet Union and is actively deployed by China.
I recently read one of the most fascinating political articles ever that addresses this question. It’s a 39-year-old interview with a Soviet KGB defector to the United States named Yuri Bezmenov.
In it, he describes the psychological and propaganda techniques the KGB used (and that Chinese Communists still use today) to undermine the U.S. from within.
I found his analysis highly accurate and highly credible. He explains how controlling the meaning of words and controlling narratives can be used to undermine the beliefs that citizens have in their own society. From there, it’s all downhill for that society.
He’s not alone in his views. His analysis and prognosis are in line with George Orwell’s, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four; Aldous Huxley’s, author of Brave New World; and many others’.
Another angle of our cultural downfall was explained some 50 years ago by Joseph Schumpter:
One of the most prescient commentators on the decline of capitalist and democratic societies was Joseph Schumpeter. In his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), he predicted that capitalism would fail and be overtaken by socialism. His reason has nothing to do with a Marxian revolution. He thought that was nonsense.
Instead, capitalism would be a victim of its own success. We would become so wealthy as a society we would take prosperity for granted and forget where the wealth came from. At that point, we would move to socialism (without revolution) on the view that we could afford it.
He said the process would take 50 years. That turned out to be a highly accurate prediction.
I couldn’t agree more. My wife and I often use the term “1st world problems” when we refer to the current gender, virus and climate problems. People are clearly too rich to get worked up about and willingly finance projects that kill our wealth.
The current cost-of-living crisis is just the start. It might be more than just a crisis, though. A crisis is meant to end after some time, a few lessons learned, and an even better life follows.
I am concerned the cost-of-leaving crisis is the beginning of a long decline because governments and deep state bureaucracies are borrowing and spending money for woke vanity projects like there is no tomorrow.
Not only does everything get more expensive, but everything takes longer, and the quality of goods and services worsens. The free-market competition that ensured a great price-to-quality ratio over decades is meddled with by ESG scores, DEI policies, oligarchies and more and more deep-state central-planning production.
The current breakdown in the electric vehicle and bus markets is a prime example: Billions are wasted because central-planning eco-policies eliminate the self-regulating free markets.
All this decline started back in the sixties with this philosophical school called social constructionism or post-modernism.
Their main idea is that words do not have objective meanings. Words mean what those in power say they mean. Words are used to construct narratives, basically stories that define reality. The “truth” of the narrative is irrelevant. What matters is the power of the narrative to influence perception and behavior.
So those in power define words, construct narratives and control perceptions. This is the real purpose of taking over universities, foundations, media and corporations. You get to control the narrative.
The Covid plan-demic showed us how very well this all works. Climate alarmism shows us how well this all works. Of course, censorship and propaganda are part of it as well.
The practical implications of controlling the narrative are all around us: climate alarmism, pandemic, DEI, ESG, BLM, insurrection and more.
This redefinition of words and reconstruction of culture were implemented at the elementary and secondary school levels. The program was to eliminate critical thinking, SATs and merit-based admissions. One imperative was to stop teaching history.
What’s left is an ideologically brainwashed generation (or two) […]
So, who will save us and how?
Sadly, the only alternative offered in the articles is Trump. While the author correctly observes that Trump is “vulgar and narcissistic”, he sort of excuses this by stating that Biden and Obama ars as narcissistic, just less vulgar and more polished.
But he believes in the Orange Man:
But the real reason Trump is so hated is because he stands in the way of everything described above.
He is, so to speak, not with the program of the progressives and neo-Marxists. That’s why they will stop at nothing — including criminal prosecutions, dismantling his business empire and personal attacks — to stop his current advance toward the White House.
That might be true, but even if Trump succeeds in the coming elections, is one man enough to stop and turn around 50 years of brainwashing? And, just a little uncomfortable reminder, Trump already tried and failed. Why do people think he has a chance? To his credit, Richards is very realistic about the mammoth task at hand.
If Trump wins the White House in November 2024, as seems likely, it’ll still take 20 or 30 years to reverse the educational and intellectual damage that’s been done. After all, these ideologies began their “long march through the institutions” in the 1960s.
Today they control the media, entertainment, government bureaucracies, education — all the major institutions that govern American life. The battleground is everywhere, but primarily in elementary schools and homes.
I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but it really is a culture war. And remember, politics (and markets) is downstream from culture.
We need a paradigm shift
Because politics is downstream from culture, politics can’t take us out of this crisis of the West. Only people can because it is the beliefs and behaviours of people that form cultures.
For example, at the height of religion in a society (any religion), the religious dogma and laws are considered the truth for most people living in such a society.
The churches dictate what God wants, write it down, and recreate it in their religious rituals. However, this is just another version of the above, where the people in power create the meaning of words and control the narrative.
Religion is not an antidote to social constructionism. It is governed by it.
However, from the Age of Enlightenment onwards, many people weren’t happy with a God-based religious narrative anymore and thought realism and science is a better deal. Over the past 200 years, all religions worldwide have lost their power over the narrative in most societies.
I can’t see us going back to the old religious-based societies. We have to go forward, not backwards.
More importantly, the people have to take charge of their truth and the narratives of their lives. We must replace top-down, linear, and authoritative leadership models with new paradigm leadership by competent, unauthoritarian networks. This is not new; some indigenous tribes still operate like that.
But this requires a society built on love and not on power. Power always corrupts. A society built on love is only possible if individuals rediscover, each on their own, the spiritual love for their true selves. Our egoic, non-spiritual self is based on all the narratives we have heard since day one.
That’s why most people have a national character. Most Germans, Americans, Brits and so on have very similar characters because they grew up with the same dominant narratives controlled by the people in power. That character is not our true self.
Most people also have a very similar social group character. Working-class males in Australia, for example, are very much alike. The same is true for British aristocrats.
Further, people have a family character shared by the other family members they grew up with. There is more, but you get the point.
This begs the question, how much of your character, what you call “yourself”,“ was not formed by the dominant narratives of your life?
Everyone who moves into a different culture and lives there for at least two years will often wake up to this. It becomes very obvious how much we are a social product rather than an individual.
The conditioning goes down to fundamental beliefs about what is right and wrong, good and bad. And people die for these beliefs, thinking they are their own, when in fact, they are cultural.
The post-modernists are correct. Culture and narrative shape people and their truths.
Therefore, changing culture or politics doesn’t help us find our true selves and truth. No matter our culture, we are still its product based on the dominant narratives. How about stepping out of it completely and discovering who we really are? Is there a self-independent of all these characters ’ shaping forces?
To do so, we first must fully wake up to our ego character and understand the fakeness of it all.
Then, we have to believe - until it is confirmed to us - that we are not this fake character. This is a different spirituality from a doctrinal, belief-in-a-God-that-will-fix-the-world-based religious spirituality. The latter might work for some people, and I am happy for them. But I needed something different, and many others do, too.
Finding our true selves is such a different path. It is not based on faith but on the scientific method.
We start with a hypothesis - that there is a true self beyond this ego structure - and start searching for it. The scientific world has certain methods to prove or disprove hypotheses. In this case, different wise people developed several methods millennia ago. There are the Buddhist, Zen, and countless Yoga methods based on Hinduism, just to name a few.
They are all different methods to prove the same fact for ourselves: That we are not this egoic false structure we think we are but something much more profound beyond it. Which method to use depends on our characters, interests, cause and effect, karma and other factors.
Personally, I played around with a number of methods until one really stuck: Non-dual spirituality as taught by Nisargadtta Maharaj. This method is very logical, which suits me well. It works by elimination. It identifies everything that is egoic and false as “not me” and discards it as unreal.
Eventually, when all egoic elements are discarded, all that is left is my true self. So goes the theory.
It is a paradoxical method. It uses our own dualistically structured mind to dissolve itself, similar to using a thorn to pick a thorn out of our skin. Or a wooden stick to stir a fire, and the stick gets consumed by it as well.
It is quite simple, really.
Our mind - and the mind-based ego - always works in a subject-object relationship. Whatever we see, hear, do and experience - our whole life - is governed by a subject (“I”) observing an object (“the world”). That’s why our mind is dualistic. There is nothing wrong about it. It is just how nature developed it, a law of nature.
That our minds work dualistically is not the problem. The problem is that we totally identify only with one part of the pair - the “I” - and therefore create an ego or “I” identity when, in reality, both the I - subject and the world - object are observable from an awareness beyond the “I”.
In a nutshell, instead of seeing everything exclusively from the “I” perspective, seeing what is happening to “me” and all the good and bad implications for “me” that go with it, we move our awareness to a higher plane and watch our “I” as part of the play, not the centre of it.
Our ego structure can be seen and observed. So how can it be us? Who sees it? That’s the paradoxical trick used.
Therefore, the method is: Whatever you can point to is an object - a tree, your body, your liver, your thoughts, your beliefs, your mind etc. - therefore, it can’t be you.
Is it not important to you to know whether you are a mere body, or something else? Or, maybe nothing at all? Don’t you see that all your problems are your body’s problems -- food, clothing, shelter, family, friends, name, fame, security, survival -- all these lose their meaning the moment you realise that you may not be a mere body.
Q: Then what am I?
M: It is enough to know what you are not. You need not know what you are. For as long as knowledge means description in terms of what is already known, perceptual, or conceptual, there can be no such thing as self-knowledge, for what you are cannot be described, except as total negation. All you can say is: ‘I am not this, I am not that’. You cannot meaningfully say ‘this is what I am’. It just makes no sense. What you can point out as 'this' or 'that' cannot be yourself.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
That’s why Nisargadatta endlessly repeats these seemingly strange observations: You are not your body; you are not your mind. From there, the logical conclusion is reached that you were never born and never die - only bodies do.
Ultimately, you can never see or observe your true self because that would create a new higher duality. Who sees the true self? A truer self behind? And who sees that? An endless circle that leads to nowhere.
As you can never see your own eyes without using a mirror, you can never see your true self.
You can only be yourself, seeing your subject-object dualistic relationship appear and disappear. But you will never “know” yourself because all “knowing” is also based on duality - the knower and the known.
With the method in place, you chip away at the false ego structure. As a result, you get less and less identified with it and see it increasingly as an object you watch from your true self. And with disidentification, the ego-self slowly loses all power over us.
Eventually, we experience a state where the seer (ego) and the seen (world) melt into a very simple but extremely familiar state of non-dualistic “seeing”. Just “seeing”.
That’s when we arrive in reality beyond the illusionary nature of our dualistic minds. And we know it by being it. That’s when we can drop the hypothesis because we have proven it to ourselves. That’s when we know our “true self” and what truth is.
The same process has to happen for cultures to escape the nihilistic, soul-destroying belief that all there is is narratives dominated by the people in power.
The falseness is easily recognisable in the contradictory nature of both nihilism and religion. Truth never contradicts itself. Nihilism and religion do all the time.
People create culture, and leadership and politics are downstream from that. How can many ego-based, greedy people ever develop a just and fair culture and politics?
When we reach a critical mass of people who know themselves as the source of awareness and love, we can start dreaming of societies with a network-like leadership structure based on love and competence.
This current crisis has a chance to wake people up to that.
Ironically, postmodern ideology paves the way. The understanding that everything is constructed in our minds using words and narratives is true. Of course, the story doesn’t end there, but it does for these nihilistic philosophers. But there is no happy life to be had like this. There is no meaning and love in this.
The sufferings of such a bleak, powerless, and meaningless life will motivate people to search for their true selves, which are not governed by mind-based control and power. Because deep inside, they know they are more than just words and narratives.
So millions, if not billions, will start searching and will find it.
The fifth column of Communism has infested every tier of government from top to bottom. Including the armed forces, education system, sport, retail and any other industry you care to name. They have embraced capitalism and have become those we call "Globalists" and now use our own capitalist system against us. In order to achieve their goal of eliminating ownership of private property and the class system. I bet the Indigenous, LGBT and other activist folk have not worked that one out yet. They are only First Nations till these ideological sock puppets gain full control and then they will have it all taken off them...again.
I have looked at the formative power of language as part of "national" character. Thus national character traits are a function of the language as well as the physical situation. This controls the effective or permissible narrative, as you detail, and corresponds to the Orwellian corruption of vocabulary during our lifetimes.
I have various preferences which might even be described as prejudice for various national groups. For instance, Americans as individuals can be quite charming, but the nation itself is dangerous.
My wife has an Anthroposophical background and believes that our souls incarnate where they need to be, which would correspond to your Maharaj formulation in which you seek to find that essence.