There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be. – Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire, 1968)
Section 1: It’s Blue
(Conjecture) 8
You might think you could walk away from a cult such as Jonestown or Waco. Such cults resemble the small ancient civilizations where kings claimed to be divine. In big civilizations, individuals support themselves by getting jobs, and everything important in their lives, including their loved ones, becomes part of the civilization. Civilization is the only security you know. You could submit and find a purpose within the lawful order. Can you walk away? Perhaps you agree with the Roman lawyer Cicero, who thought laws made life better.
“The good life is impossible without a good state; and there is no greater blessing than a well-ordered state.” (Laws 5.7)
Modern societies have centralized institutions to design and enforce rules. We might assume that modern people are more restricted than our forager ancestors, though this rumor could be wrong. The image of unrestricted primal people could be purely fictitious since all societies have rules. However, there is a difference between early tribal societies and civilized societies, and this difference came about as culture went through economic, technological, and social changes.
The Roman poet Ovid wrote about a golden age when everyone gathered wild food, living in harmony with the land, without government.
“Punishment and fear of penalties existed not.” (Metamorphoses 1.91)
The Mediterranean, where Ovid lived, had agriculture for thousands of years before Ovid’s time. Any memory of our forager past had been long forgotten. Instead, the story comes from the common opinion that life was better in the past. This myth is still popular in modern times. The movie “Dances with Wolves” (1990) portrays natives living in an Eden unspoiled by civilization. No one knows if this golden age ever existed. This chapter is not about the golden age. Let us examine why law lovers impose law on us and how we lost paradise.
Thomas Hobbes claimed the government was necessary to bring order. Living during a political conflict when politicians were making people kill each other, Hobbes thought such periods of misery were a return to a state of Nature.
“Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.” (Leviathan XIII)
Hobbes wrote this in 1651 when protestants did not want the Pope to get all the cash. Protestants wanted to use the cash to build colonies where enslaved people would do all the work. Only an advanced civilization creates these conditions. Law lovers ignore the influence of civilized conditions, blame our Nature, and put everyone in a totalitarian prison. They mistrust people and refuse to accept that people could build a stable society without Big Brother controlling them. Unfortunately, the mistrustful have gotten their way and imposed governments on us.
Civilization was forced on us; I never signed a social contract, and I want the option to say no. I am going to counter the myth that laws are good by inventing Myths where laws are bad. We will start with the fourth concept, which personifies any step leading to change. Due to this change, the perspective of the West contains multiple dualisms and contrasts. The West has a star with six points, made by combining a triangle pointing up for fire, with a triangle pointing down for water. This union unites the body with the mind and the mother with the father. This combination forms a son, Dionysus. The sacred name of Dionysus EUO stands for spring, summer, and fall. This seasonal child reincarnates each year. In our temple, Dionysus personifies the joy we get following emotions.
Seeking something outside emotion can lead us to invent a modified version of the dying god myth. In Christianity, Jesus came to Earth and then died to save you from original sin and bring about eternal life in heaven.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)
Dionysus is also a religious ecstasy similar to the experience of described by the Ancient Egyptian philosopher Plotinus.
“For these are the states one should be in regarding something which is beautiful: astonishment, and sweet shock, and longing, and erotic thrill, and pleasurable excitement.” (Ennead 1.6.4)
Plotinus loved intellectual wonderment and a more controlled way of life. The other person of the fourth concept is more orderly than the younger Dionysus, occupies a position of authority, gives orders, and enforces obedience. Dionysus and Zeus are the same person at different stages in life. You might start willing to take risks and go on adventures. Eventually, you might become wiser, more cautious, and less flexible.
A Common myth in multiple cultures worldwide is a Thunder Character who kills monsters. This character is a father who strikes down the sinful to sustain the tribal laws. Notice how the Roman name Jupiter combines the sounds Deus and Piter, the ancient words for sky and father. The Greek name Zeus might also be derived from Deus. The letters of the seasons backward spell the sacred name YOUE, similar to the Roman name Jove. In our clockwise calendar, these letters would appear counterclockwise. This counterclockwise Thunder perspective of destruction personifies the west wind of the autumn.
Dionysus and Jove both represent doors between the known and the unknown. This may be the point where the younger becomes the older. The blue points of the Morning Star stand for either destruction of the self to become Nirvana or the destruction of Nirvana to become a person. This blue door sits in the middle of two triangles. One triangle is spring, birth, and the element west. The other triangle is fall, death, and the west wind. The duality of the fourth perspective portrays unique ways of moving through life. How you choose a step determines how the next step will be. A complete life from birth to death happens with each step when you build your life at the moment called EVOI. You can use the word to announce yourselves as part of the world.
Section 2: The Worst Mistake
(Conjecture) 10
A person can think the world contains evil without wishing to end their life. Instead, a civilized person may assume there is a way to fix the world. The engineer Buckminster Fuller optimistically says people can solve any problem, and Buckministrer wrote about building a utopia in the book “Critical Path.” Progressives want to make the world what they believe it should be. These engineers try to control the world instead of letting Nature grow on its own.
Cultural and technological change is not new. Ever since the end of the last ice age, homo sapiens have made ecological changes when their activity spread plants and bugs. Though people intentionally brought some plants, others followed us, and this new ecosystem depends on us. The spread of our ancestors also coincided with the extinction of megafauna around the globe (Diamond, 1997 ch. 1).
Modern civilization has made more changes, which have become ecological disasters. Let us say you want to make a river more navigable, so you clear the vegetation near the river. This led to more erosion. You then need to solve the erosion problem. In the Southern United Starts, the vine Kudzu was introduced to help stabilize the erosion. Conditions in America differed from the Kudzu’s native Asian habitat; the plants covered entire farms and smothered native trees. Millions of dollars are spent trying to control the spread (Blaustein, 2001). Notice how a small change ignites massive damage, and then, to fix the problem, people add more changes. These new changes have the potential to produce more problems.
In the early twentieth century, progressive forest managers tried to increase the number of deer by eliminating predators. The deer population increased and ate so much vegetation that the environment became unsuitable for deer. The deer then disappeared from large areas in the United States. Aldo Leopold realized the deer needed the predators and wrote a story called “Thinking Like a Mountain.” Leopold also understood creatures adapted to ecological conditions by forming a network that easily gets disturbed by bad management. Though Nature constantly changes, civilized progress makes too many changes. Forest has been cut clear, biodiversity reduced, and the fertility of the land disrupted. The Earth suffered more disruption 65 million years ago when a large asteroid hit the planet, but civilization has just started, and civilization could one day spawn a bigger mass extinction.
Before agriculture, people gathered food directly from Nature. Most foragers lived in small groups, never settling in one place for long. The land had time to recover (R. Kelly, 2013 ch. 4). Foragers did change the land; Aboriginal Australians would burn grassland to make the environment more suitable for the kinds of animals people would eat (G. Kelly, 1999). These changes are small compared to the huge scars on the Earth made by modern farm machines. The scholar Jared Diamond called agriculture “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Farming made starvation a real threat when our ancestors depended on crops that occasionally failed.
Agriculture creates temporary periods of plenty, allowing people to settle in one place. Meanwhile, large communities made farming necessary. These large settlements can pollute and overuse the nearby land until people can no longer live off the land the way foragers did. Sometimes, farmers leave a field fallow to allow it to regain fertility. Unfortunately, sustainability can break down, and farmers eventually need more land to support their wasteful way of life. Agriculture spread like a disease all over the world. Farming was an early form of artificial technology. All forms of technology change the world and risk upsetting a stable ecosystem. As more changes upset the environment further, more changes seem necessary. People contribute to civilized progress by thinking of ways to fix the world. Clearly, progress is not always an improvement, and people are not fixing the world if history is a comedy of error performed when people try to fix past disasters.
Gadgets invented by engineers only sell under the right economic conditions. For instance, the Industrial Revolution created a demand for steam engine production. Thousands of years earlier, the ancient Greek Hero of Alexandria knew how to build a steam engine, though there was no economic demand for steam engines at the time. Economic changes also brought about political and social changes, helping progress spread even more. New methods will develop until civilization becomes such a massive machine that it will quickly require new resources. Businesses developed new methods to take over more resources. Progressive civilization did not become a reliable part of a stable ecosystem. It became what Daniel Quinn called “the taker culture.”
“The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man … The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world.” (Ishmael 145)
This taker culture pollutes the land with toxic waste, which the environment cannot reprocess into a healthier material. For example, civilization damaged the Aral Sea until the area around the sea became a tiny fraction of the former ecosystem (Whish-Wilson, 2002). The area became a health hazard when the land became toxic waste. These problems happen anywhere civilization makes the wrong changes.
The takers destroy entire races of people, though a few individuals get assimilated into civilization. Civilization destroyed the environment we once had, and when we lost contact with the land, we forgot how to live as part of the land. People now depend on civilization, living in plastic houses and eating plastic food. Civilization resembles an addictive drug that makes us dependent on it. Ambitious people find a purpose in this taker culture by supporting colonization and expansion. Cecil Rhodes exploited Africa for the advancement of English culture.
“I would annex the planets if I could;” (Stead, 1902)
The rate of change has accelerated in the past 400 years. We live in an age of advancing technology. The computer used to write this book is already outdated; it was considered a great technological marvel a few years ago. It can not do what the new computers do, and parts are getting harder to find, so it will need to be replaced soon. Merely upgrading contributes to progress. We blindly contribute without realizing the results of our actions. We are all machines programmed to do what the system wants.
Section 3: The Flood
(Conjecture) 10 e1
Stories of a Thunder God fighting a giant snake appear worldwide. More than a representation of good fighting evil, this war represents all struggles, challenges, and conflicts. The Serpent personifies the primordial, and the Thunderbird personifies the current challenger. In the modern world, the Thunderbird stands for progress, which tries to control the world, and for us, the struggle is the conflict between the civilized and the uncivilized. Native Americans included both the Thunderbird and the Earth in their stories because people needed both stories. Modern civilized cultures let the Thunder perspective dominate, forgetting the ways of Earth and craving a powerful concept to help them control the world.
The movie “Clash of the Titans” (1981) portrays the Greek thunder god as good. Let us try a different interpretation of Zeus, where Zeus is the villain. In Greek mythology, Zeus overthrew the father Cronus, starting civilization.
When Saturn had been banished into night and all the world was ruled by Jove supreme, the Silver Age, though not so good as gold but still surpassing yellow brass, prevailed. (Metamorphoses 1.113)
Early forms of farming started the process leading to civilization; therefore, Saturn, the personification of agriculture, planted the seeds of Saturn’s destruction. Our ancestors became civilized and lost Nature. If we equate the Golden Age with the Garden of Eden, Zeus was the Satan who tricked us out of Eden.
Rather than directly destroying themselves, progressives destroy the environment, and by doing so, people also destroy themselves. We are part of the environment. Once the continuity of Nature gets upset, things go wrong. Using progress to fix a situation caused by progress seems like a poor plan to me. Faith in progress allows Zeus to rape more of the world. The system spreads as a parasite on the world’s ecosystem, and progress will continue killing more of the world, leaving extreme ecological devastation on a poisoned planet. We must stop the purifier from making the world sterile. We must gain immunity.
A new continuity will eventually establish itself in a few thousand years; however, if we destroy ourselves, Nature will return without us. Hopefully, people will learn civilization is wrong and reject it. The Roman poet Virgil mentions the return of the age of Saturn (Eclogue 4:6). Would a return to an agricultural way of life be better than living in an industrialized city? At least farmers get to work close to the Earth. Our bodies were not made to sit in cubicles all day long.
Civilization attacks the world outside when it destroys a forest. It attacks Nature inside us when it changes us. A civilized environment will give people unnatural stress, and the civilized person might think more progress will solve the problem. Building their cage, the domesticated become their own oppressors. These people pride themselves on having risen above their foraging ancestors. Leaving the old world of freedom to enter the new world of regulated behavior, the change from savage to civilized happens in a baptism, which washes the old self away, and a new person is born.
“Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5)
The clean pass through the mystical door in this ritual of life, death, and rebirth. Whatever made them take these steps must have been unnatural since an earthling in Nature was born right the first time. Beat a wild animal enough; it will deny its own will. Once domesticated, reward it when it obeys, and civilization rewards those working within the system, putting themselves deeper into it. As natural desires remain unsatisfied in civilization, civilized people tell you those desires are evil, turning minds away from Nature and towards the false reward of civilization. The domesticated fight instincts, perverting the mind to fit a perverted system, and their progress begins by training themselves to fit new ways.
Though conformity to civilized ways makes life seem less troubled, the trouble comes from the system claiming relief. Those wanting a civilized lifestyle do not see the source of the problem. Instead, the civilized mistake domestication for maturity and disapprove of anyone who does not develop. The peer pressure to change requires everyone to get reborn into civilization. In some form or another, all civilized people detach from Nature. Domestication kills our natural selves, and those parts would have helped them to live a happy life.
The Story of a great flood appears in multiple cultures, where the waters of death purify the world when the old ways get washed away until the new ways take over.
“And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly;” (2 Peter 2:5)
Modern people live in the age of this flood; civilization surrounds us and makes us part of it.
“For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:13)
A baptized Christian has purified the old world out of their bodies and now lives in a new world. Christian Fundamentalism makes salvation the primary goal at the expense of other values. Believers in this civilized cult assume the baptized have become better than Nature, calling themselves “the perfect” or “the chosen.” The civilized give their children over to become domesticated. Strange values like this develop when those trapped in civilization see no other choice and only know how to exist within the system.
We will remain civilization’s most utilized technology until progress replaces us. Machines are already becoming the primary producers. Someday, machines will become the primary consumers as well as the primary managers, and we will no longer be a necessary part of the economic equation. People will look back at the progressives of the past and say, “They did it to us.”
Even though modern Civilization invents technology that moves us farther from Nature, which causes all kinds of evil in the world, and everyone in civilization contributes to the problem, most people would rather do good than evil. In some movies, the guy in charge is portrayed as the source of most evil. In other movies, the villain’s followers are also portrayed as evil. In reality, no one is innocent, and no one is guilty. Through a series of unnatural events and one mistake after another, we need no philosophical influence to misguide us. The seeds of progress were planted over 44,000 years ago when our ancestors began using signs.
“The picture of change in human society that emerges from this recent research throws new light on that aspect of the Transition that has been called the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ and the ‘Creative Explosion’ – that time when recognizably modern skeletons, behavior and art seem to have appeared in western Europe as a ‘package deal’.” (Lewis-Williams, 2002 ch. 3)
Modern homo sapiens used more symbols than earlier people. This behavior must have seemed unusual to the other people. The craziness let us create illusions to follow, and this door made progress possible. This new ability has made us successful. Modern homo sapiens now dominate the world, and all other forms of people went extinct. I wonder what the first Thunder Dreamer saw. Did the dreamer see the Circle, the Tree, the Door, and the Power? These concepts have been around since the oldest written records. The ancient Mesopotamians called Jupiter Nibiru in the Mul.Apin tablets (Column 1, Line 38), and the tables called Nibiru “a place for crossing.” On the other side is a domesticated mind that forces itself to trust the illusions of progress. It is an automatic correction feature inside your head.
Section 4: Pompous Jargon
(Conjecture) 11
Back in the sixties, the hippies thought everything they were doing was right. Then, in the seventies, we found out that everything the hippies did was wrong. More recently, we have kids who talk about identity, and they get angry if you ask them to define the word identity. Every generation thinks past generations were wrong. Grandchildren don’t care about the concerns of their grandparents, and the kids have a long list of new obsessions. In colleges, advocates will exploit youthful enthusiasm by preaching all kinds of political and religious nonsense to turn the kids into weapons. Just don’t burn all the books because your generation is outraged over something people did two hundred years ago. Someone from the next generation might want to read those books.
Social activists go around claiming that some groups of people have unfair systemic advantages. The modern age is loaded with tyrants who started their careers using this activist story. Politicians don’t care about the truth when they want to pretend to be saviors. So they claim that certain people are the problem. Perhaps some of the evil they talk about is imaginary, and they invented stories that satisfy this imagination.
Marxism failed when the Berlin Wall came down. The prediction of a communist utopia turned out to be false. You would think that after the world learned about all the deaths and suffering under communism, common sense would never build such governments again. Yet idiocy lived on in the confused minds of academics, and they are bringing it back. An arrogant tradition developed in cultural studies departments where teachers try to control what words mean. While they complain about capitalism and Western culture, these professors tend to believe European philosophers whose writing imitates the obscure style of Theodor Adorno.
“Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry.” (Adorno, 1944)
Such academic writing resembles a third grader who was caught lying and is making up excuses. The Positivists preferred to make sure an idea was true before claiming it was true. But for Adorno, verifiable facts are too restrictive to deconstruct society. Using complicated jargon eliminates the restriction. Politicians use jargon to persuade while avoiding the truth. Art critics use jargon to make nothing seem necessary. Philosophy students use jargon to look smart. You could even let the jargon do your thinking. Jargon sounds persuasive, yet an argument without facts has the same value as astrology. Dr. Jordan Peterson calls these social critics postmodernists; however, they are not all postmodernists. Unfortunately, these intellectuals refuse to name themselves, and they claim any name others give them is an attack, yet they have no problem making up insulting names for everyone else.
Marx thought that workers around the world would rise against their oppressors (Marx, 1848). By the middle of the twentieth century, radicals were having trouble explaining why the revolution never happened. Rather than admitting communism is wrong, the philosopher Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard, 1979). I do not know anyone who doubts all metanarratives. Most people subscribe to at least one of the big stories. I like the way the founders of the United States told us that all people have inalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Such ideas became the essence of the American dream. Though this Dream has been successful, socialist academics try hard to portray the Dream as something to be embarrassed about because it benefits selfish rich people.
Eurotrash philosophers have a really sneaky way of thinking about freedom. They think picking options you want is false freedom because they think true freedom is when you choose what they say you need because you don’t know what you want. But they know. Europeans use the word “ideology” when they complain about what people think or do, and Louis Althusser thought the ideology of freedom helps the rulers dominate the workers.
“Blackmailing them with freedom so as to keep them in harness,” (Althusser, 2005 pt. 7)
We invent a bunch of excuses instead of taking responsibility for our choices, and our idea of essence is one of those excuses. In other words, we blame Nature. The philosopher Sartre called this blame bad faith (Sartre, 1948). Sartre wants us to define ourselves as free from the burden of an essence. What Sartre calls bad faith sounds like good faith to me since our biological essence wants to make choices. Without motivation, we would have no reason to make choices. We would be free from the desire to be free. People with political agendas call people subjects when making up stories about what the subjects should do. Their fictional subjects do not have biological needs and would fit a government where people are not allowed choices. In a government with that much control, individuals become irrelevant. We are living objects with biological needs, so do not choose freedom from your biology; choose freedom to be your biology.
You might think thoughts are free when people can say what they want, but what you intend to say means nothing to a manipulative person who claims to know the sociology of your words. A pedophile named Foucault tried to undermine modern culture by claiming that our thoughts enforce power structures, and knowledge is what the structures support.
“We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” (Discipline and Punish, 1977).
This pervert claimed knowledge prevents the individual from having control over thought. Fortunately, practical people, engineers, and inventors see the potential we get from knowledge. We could discover something new that was not in the original picture. People also have more than one picture to choose from. We modify plans to suit our needs and pick whatever features seem to work for any situation. Sharing helpful information allows more people to make improvements, and to share facts, engineers need to communicate correct information clearly. Engineers, scientists, and mathematicians do not write in the sneaky postmodernist style.
Foucault implies that everyone is part of power relationships. However, no one knows which systems of power influence which words. Power might not even have any influence on words. Nonetheless, hard Leftists pretend to know. They think harmful words stem from cultures with inequality, and they equate capitalism with a wide variety of bad cultures, such as colonialism. Even medical science gets accused of being fascist. Dave Holmes called medical science “outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative” (Holmes, 2006). This impressive, educated vocabulary equates asking for evidence with oppression. Real medical experts consider the risk of any treatment, and real scientists value rigorous experimentation. In the humanities departments, speculation without rigorous experimentation allows resentful academics to combine ideas into a complicated nonsense machine that thinks of new ways to make enemies, and they encourage this intellectual dishonesty by giving each other awards and academic titles.
Thinking the past was made of people doing bad, social activists think the future will consist of their side doing good. Though without rigorous experimentation, they have no idea if anything they do is making the world better, so their social advice is about as reliable as medical advice from a hypochondriac. These hypochondriacs hate Western values so much that they invent grievances against normal people. Do we need universities teaching resentment to cultivate conflict in society?
In the twentieth century, universities in the United States imported Marxists from Europe and made them professors. Now, the Humanities departments are full of Leftist teachers and no conservatives. These colleges should answer questions as to why they hire so many people who preach the same ideology that killed millions of people. They will prefer not to answer because Communism thrives in secrecy and dies when it is exposed. And, since Communists ignore millions of deaths committed by Marxism, remind your teachers of all the deaths. Keep reminding them and their students. Never let them forget.
Section 5: Baphomet
(Speculation) 9
Oberlin College let its students pester a bakery (Hartocollis, 2019). Here, we find rage against a traditional family, who resembles characters in a Hallmark movie. In schools all across the United States, the humanities departments teach students to accuse normal people of committing unacceptable sociological customs. Exactly who died and made the humanities teachers boss? They appointed themselves because they wanted the students to be weapons against society. I used the word “normal.”I’ve had teachers tell me that there is no normal, even though they dislike anything normal.
Going beyond the original Marxist ideas of economic class conflict, the humanities departments talk about how power structures support bad customs, and students are told that traditional values support these power structures. But, if most people in capitalist countries recognize the equal rights of everyone, are these people bad? Students will see bad people if they are trained to see oppression in every relationship. Their jargon confirms itself by asking how Badness is present instead of asking if it is present.
Fortunately, most students do not fall for newspeak and its imaginary enemies. Some students go to college to learn practical skills. Marxists do not teach practical skills. They have an alternate way of thinking, which they feel is better because they think they understand history.
“This critical philosophy implies above all historical criticism. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins and shows therefore that they are subject to history in every -respect…” (Lukacs, p. 47)
They do not think you understand history.
“… From a very early stage, the ideological history of the bourgeoisie was nothing but a desperate resistance to every insight into the true nature of the society it had created.” (Lukacs, p. 66)
Communists do not want you contributing to the conversation because they think your arguments defend privilege, while they see their own arguments as virtuous. Such claims are easy to make when people do not check if what they say is true. After Lukacs and other communists claimed to know more than you, communists let millions die of starvation, and they ignored research that would have shown better agricultural practices (Kean, 2017). This pretentious art of ignoring reality while redefining reality was inspired by a confused writer named Hegel.
“To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect.” (Hegel, Philosophy of History 13)
To do the rational part, claim that something people say is not what they mean by inventing fake history. Then, act like an intellectual authority on new consciousness by using words that don’t describe anything, such as dialectics, becoming, and actuality. Then, reinterpret logic and truth without using facts or making clear statements. Don’t forget to describe what your ideas will become by using religious words, such as absolute. Though Hegel wrote a bunch of absolute nonsense, one idea rules them all.
“The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.” (Hegel, Philosophy of History 41).
Such a state is a collective mind with no restrictions. Hegel showed both communists and fascists how to think about setting up a government that will define reality for us. In this reality, anything the state does not want is said not to exist. Even our biology will get called an untruth when it does not fit the narrative. The government is given priority, and governments will oppress people when they do not value people. Marxists don’t only imagine social institutions where the collective has priority over how people value themselves, they create nations where populations are treated as if people don’t have value.
“Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers. Publish their names. Seize all their grain from them.” (Lenin, 1918)
Lenin did not just kill a few hundred; Millions were accused of having privilege and then murdered. How much privilege did those people have? Very little, and the state came to take their last handful of food. Millions are murdered every time Marxists get control. The death camps in North Korea and Soviet Russia happened when useful idiots, such as professors and their students, ignored what their ideology would do. Universities are being run by delusional gulag deniers who do not see their side as the bad guys.
Progressive movements might start with some good ideas. Civil rights leaders wanted everyone to have equal rights under the law. People like rights. A few of my teachers were excellent and provoked fascinating ways of thinking. When security targets a black person, and white people are not targeted, the structuralist point of view can provide insight into racial issues that are worth considering. However, black people did not require an academic hypothesis to see stuff they already knew. Hypotheses can exaggerate real situations, especially when they are invented by people who want to force other people to obey. Now, agitators have shifted to outrage over thought. Any argument they cannot use as a tool for control is forbidden. Only ideas that support the revolution are allowed. Meanwhile, student tuition keeps increasing while the universities hire more administrators to enforce the new grievances invented by the outraged (Randall, 2019).
A clue to understanding the progressive mindset can be found in the way Hegel understood Zeus.
“Zeus, therefore, who is represented as having put a limit to the devouring agency of Time, and stayed this transiency by having established something inherently and independently durable” (Hegel, Philosophy of History 92)
To counter the old devouring time, Zeus established a new world order. No one gave Zeus the right to impose civilization on us. Aiming for progressive goals makes people think they have the right.
A business person said that my cynicism makes people uncomfortable. This person wanted to feel the acceptance business managers get at the Rotary Club. They think good intentions would lead to a better world. We rarely meet someone who does evil just to do evil. Even a business manager who cuts down a forest and disturbs the environment assumes their job will produce a greater good. Plato thought people desire good and only do evil because of ignorance.
“And do you think that those who believe that bad things benefit them know that they are bad?” (Meno 77d)
Good intentions created the evil called civilization, and the great expectations began when people tried to be more than our biology. The ancient Roman Lawyer Cicero thought God gave us abilities that make us more like the Gods than animals.
“Again, the same moral excellence resides in man and in God, and in no other species besides. And moral excellence is nothing other than the completion and perfection of nature.” (Laws 1.25)
The idea of cultivating moral excellence to create a better world has been developing for centuries. Even Jesus talks about the coming of a new kingdom.
“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)
This brings up the image of a new, better kingdom on Earth that people can join by following Jesus. Augustine claims God created people to join the City of God. Thomas More wrote a book where Utopia is achieved through cultural change (More, 1516). Is achieving a utopia the purpose of the mind? Before you answer that question, what do you think progress is? To what god did you sell your soul?
To the fanatical, progress equals the mystic law. One level includes learning about progress, a higher one includes spreading progress, and an even higher one makes you progress itself. The progressives must become the bearers of their law, striving to become the ideal, becoming the guide who leads people to the law. The idol of this mystic law is called Baphomet. In reality, no cosmic mind guides us to progress, though advanced technology will someday make a great mind happen. Engineers will build that mind. Socialists will not build it, though socialists will try to use it to control us.
Section 6: The Cult
10
Most people are not aware of how unhinged progressive thought has gone. I think the truth is out there, and you can look for it, but anyone who tries to create truth could end up creating lies. Communists redefine justice, so it equals communism. They redefine good so it equals communism. They redefine truth so it equals communism. The most extreme of extremists think their side brings truth into the world.
“For the process of truth to begin, something must happen.” (Badiou, 2002)
Alain Badiou talks about the activities of activists who are activating new ways of thinking. The new thought is supported by faithful subjects who think the revolution is love and opposing the revolution is hate. The truly dedicated revolutionaries are oblivious to any truth not connected with their politics and see any alternative idea as a conspiracy against them. Badiou had faith in the revolution and supported the Khmer Rouge (Badiou, 1979), whose faithfulness to the revolution murdered over a million people (Locard, 2005). Even after all those murders, faithful subjects will still think the revolution will be done right the next time, and they insist that true Marxism has not happened yet. Progressives want to manage the world, and they drive with their eyes closed.
Leftists have conferences where they get together and complement each other. Angela Davis is a celebrity at the commie con. Their superstar went to communist countries to be with tyrants who murdered people (Young, 2019). It is really sad to see schools teach children to admire Angel Davis as a hero. Other communist supporters of murders, such as Che Guevara and Audre Lorde, are given endless compliments by today’s media.
Our culture disapproves of displaying Nazi symbolism. Leftist symbols should also be disapproved of because communists murdered more people than the Nazis. Instead, Marxist symbols are shown with glee, and Hollywood movies portray Leftists as good. Most large bookstores have books that praise communists even though communist terrorists such as the Weather Underground would kidnap people, torture people, and murder people. I am not saying that we should censor the leftists. I recommend reading their literature; however, I do not like how both government and private businesses spend billions of dollars paying for their bad advice. Perhaps if more people understood how Marxism is corrupting our culture, we would stop feeding them money.
Have you ever read a book by an Eastern European conservative from the early twentieth century? Probably not, even though a golden age of conservative thinking happened in Eastern Europe during the early twentieth century. Conservatives were not invited to join American universities; the Soviets sent them to gulags, and their work was destroyed.
A similar erasure of conservative ideas is happening in the black community. I noticed that MSNBC had a list of the best black writers who are supposed to represent the voices of black people. Most of these writers are Marxists. Such lists are common in leftist media and do not include black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell. They left out the name of the greatest black writer who ever lived. So, what do you get if you admire one of those activists? You get spitefulness from nerotic losers. What do you get if you admire Thomas Sowell? A lifetime of wisdom from a great philosopher. However, most black kids are never told about Thomas Sowell.
I wanted to use the Nazi swastika as a symbol for the West Wind, lawful evil, and any authoritarian government. I then realized that people would not understand a book full of swastikas, so most of the Nazi symbols were removed from this book. Now, the temple uses a hazard symbol for the West Wind; that might work better.
We all know that the right sometimes produces tyrants. The left also produces tyrants (Costello, 2020). Sometimes, people agree with socialist causes and are unaware that they support political agendas with bad consequences. All civilizations have economic and political practices that allow tyrants to prosper. I kept the swastika on Baphomet to represent the potential for all civilizations to become evil.
A few centuries ago, ignorant doctors would try to cure patients by bloodletting, which would make them sicker (Greenstone, 2010). Natural immunity would have been a better cure. People did not need modern political parties in small tribes where people cared for each other. People have natural social instincts that work. Therefore, most modern laws are unnecessary, and we could live without a civilization caging us in. Obviously, you would have difficulty maintaining a lawless autonomous zone in the middle of a big city. So I recommend you build your lawless tribes someplace private.
In the TV series Star Trek (1989), the Borg is a technological civilization where the collective has completely assimilated individuals. The Borg are fiction; they are also warming. We need to limit how much civilization we give ourselves. Some progress is good, and in modern times, people solve problems our ancestors could not. The hammer symbolizes Jupiter. It gets used for breaking or building. Whenever you build anything, you destroy something. Check to see what you destroy. The door into rebirth needs life into life. Never progress to permanent destruction, and don’t let change become your cage. We have the tools to change the world, but we also need the wisdom to know when not to use these tools. We do not need to abandon all technology. Perhaps we will travel the stars while remembering to protect the Sacred Grove.
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