So, despite my procrastination, I'm going to get in here and do this, because it is the most important part of Exodus that has the biggest parallels with our own time. It's part 3 of the Exodus , here for you. God taking the slack out of his people.
The Fear Files
27 October 2023
Faith and Truth, Part III
24 October 2023
Faith and Truth, Part II
Tonight, we're going to talk about Exodus again. Because it's instructive, and we might ought to pay attention to what has been laid before us as a lesson for thousands of years. "Faith, truth, and proof"
A quick lead in that is not related to Exodus, but which is common to the human condition and is remarkable throughout this entire argument. Milton, in "Paradise Lost" pointed out something remarkable that you should include in your perceptions: The basis of the sin of Lucifer before the Fall was his assumption that he knew EVERYTHING that was worth knowing. Look upon your politicians and your leaders and judge them according to that.
Assess your own ego and put it against that. But let's get back to Exodus in light of that.22 October 2023
Faith and Truth
There is so much truth that we can take from Exodus, if we can just put down our modern sensibilities and consult that ancient wisdom that lies deep within each of us. Among the most important lessons that we can derive is the repeated bludgeoning of the ineffective tactic of trying to provide "proof" of God to those who are neither willing nor prepared to receive God. It's a great fucking story, that runs a few different levels.
First level: Moses himself. Moses by virtue of this faith, has been chosen by God to free His chosen people. He is God's Instrument in this particular situation. (henceforth "Moses" will be referred to as "Mo", in deference to my mortarmen. IFYKYK) Lotta back and forth in this. Mo doesn't think he's worthy. Mo doesn't want the responsibility. Mo has doubts. One can understand. It's a heavy, heavy burden, and one that takes a special kind of madness to take up and do the Thing appropriately.
talks about this.04 July 2022
Standing Out
Not too long ago, various biologists were studying zebras out in the wild. The problem they kept confronting in their observation of individual zebras was discerning a given subject as it milled about with the herd. Someone came up with the idea to mark his subject with a simple blot of paint so that he could keep track of the subject.
To their horror, the lions cut that individual from the herd and ate it almost immediately. Thus, it was surmised, the safety of the individual within a zebra herd was in blending in with the rest of the zebras. Those who stand distinct will be identified as individuals and consumed.
When I first heard of this study, it struck me in a very significant way. Most who know me will attest to the fact that I've walked the earth these many years with a large paint blot on me for any apex predator to see. When I was a young lieutenant, I tried like mad to wash it off. By the time I was twenty-seven, I realized that it was a pointless exercise and that I must find a way to make due, malformed though I might be.
It's a weird dichotomy for me, and it's something that I've chased around in my head for decades. Mistrusting groups of people while being a Marine. Working for a government that I mistrust. An old friend wrote to me the other day that, "Your paranoia of anything new and the world writ large is scary to me. Not because of the things that cause it; because of what your nightmares must look like." (I responded with, "My nightmare is Solzhenitsyn's description of what happened to his country.")
If nothing else, these suspicions have allowed me to think critically in ways that are probably far from standard and I think it has been useful in those instances where I can avoid cynicism at all costs. What follows, therefore, is a realistic view of the healthy interaction between an individual and the group, the mob, the masses, "culture"; how "duty" and "patriotism" jibe with "individual sovereignty" and "free will"; and finally, how the difficult path which is separate from that of the herd justifies our suffering and allows us to transcend it.
Standing Out
Any explanation that seeks to explain the way things are now without looking from whence we came leaves out the conditions under which this entire reality is operating. Hobbes, Locke, Nozick, et al recognized this, but most obviate the requirement to consider this stage of history in the context of a "state of nature". I will spare the 10,000 words that the worthies referenced above used to explain how we derive "natural rights" because that isn't germane to my argument.
Sometime between 550,000 and 750,000 years ago, homo sapiens became distinct from our nearest ancestors. What's never really talked about is how a species of "featherless bipeds" with very unimpressive physical defenses survived and reproduced with enough success to take over the world. The obvious answer is that we grouped together into tribes and adopted habits and techniques unique to the most successful of those nascent groups. Perhaps the largest factor that reinforced this was the fact that, unlike female apes, human females were very selective in whom they mated with. Also, while this is supposition, I think the beta-version of the human race had a heightened ability to communicate or at least empathize at least a subconscious level that gave them an advantage over other predators. Thus, humans strived, suffered, overcame, and thrived in groups that conformed to very strict patterns of behavior. An individual who would deviate from those patterns was either quickly killed off or similarly excluded from the group and died alone because his deviation could result in the decimation of the entire tribe. Kierkegaard brushed up against this when he said:
"Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there."
The stakes were high indeed in those days. But over time, men who had new ideas did emerge to the benefit of their tribe. Think on it for a second, those geniuses had a tightrope to walk, didn't they? They had to learn the various behavior patterns that had benefitted their tribe for generations. They had to prove their worth in executing those patterns competently. They had to conceive of a "better way" and then have both the competence and reputation to articulate their "new ideas" to the rest of the tribe sufficiently to convince their mates to diverge from the "old ways" of doing things. Only then would their new ideas be tested at quite a risk to their tribe, people whom they loved and were devoted to. Any failure potentially meant the abrupt end of everything and everyone they knew. I think this adequately describes the reason why such geniuses are seen to be a bit crazy and are easily and casually disregarded even now. More so, this completely describes the anxiety that Kierkegaard described above.
Now, rather than trace all of the advances made by men such as these, let's just think for a moment about what all this means. What began as collections of very small tribes of people have resulted in 8+ billion people across the globe. There was error and there was blood but we somehow managed to get to the year 2022. I would submit that all of this was made possible by the continued selection across time of those who were not simply complacent to go along with the tribe. Thinking critically within a given pattern of behavior is in our DNA. The circumstances are not anywhere close to being as dire as they were in the beginning, but the propensity to expand outside of established norms is deep within our genes and within our psyche. Each of us is the sum of the men and women who were willing to risk everything to find a better answer to the problems encountered through all of the suffering and striving for hundreds of thousands of years. Placed in this light, it is clear that we have a duty to our ancestors and our families today to fulfill all of the requirements that they surmounted to advance us to this point.
It is in this that we can answer the dichotomy posed above between being a member of the herd while yet standing out from the herd. There remains risk involved and it is not easy. For most, the call to conform and "stay in one's lane" is the obvious and least strenuous choice. As Fredrich Nietzsche once said:
“A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: “They have a propensity for laziness.” To others, it seems that he should have said: “They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.” In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful.”
So the pay off for not risking the disapproval of society, for accepting conventional wisdom without taking the time and effort to analyze it, is safety. The lions can't see you against the backdrop of the rest of the herd.
What would then justify standing out from the crowd? What is it that dwells within each of us to step out of line? Why face Kierkegaard's "anxiety" if we don't have to?
Well, you're going to suffer either way. You will feel pain whether you walk their line or not. Reality is structured in that manner and there's no arguing or bargaining your way around it.
But you do have a choice as to how you will face that pain, that suffering. The legacy of our anscestors is choice in what we believe and how we embody that belief in how we act. It is thus our responsibility to make use of that legacy to learn about the world around us, to understand what our limitations are, to dare to step beyond those limitations when it is appropriate and necessary for us to do so. Philosophers for time out of mind have done so and attached adjectives like "meaningful", "satisfaction", "proper", or "complete" to describe life as a result of having done so.
I find those descriptions to be somehow incomplete. Nietzsche up there threw out "laziness" and "fearful" in describing those who refused to accept the burden of originality. I tend to agree, and I've come to the conclusion that such negative connotations reflect an unwillingness to look within oneself and realize the potential that is inside of us. The realization of that potential by constant learning, improvement, and reflection that is then embodied in our interaction with the world is what we owe to that legacy that was freely given to us by dint of simply existing in our current form.
We learn with the tribe as we grow older. We understand its ways, what keeps it thriving and why. Then it becomes our lot to look within us, to see the potential there, to make up our own minds, and to choose to step out and lead it. The failure and the repetition is necessary for us to realize the full value of what is inside us. That potential doesn't belong simply to us though. It is on loan from our ancestors. It is the birthright of our children and their children. It belongs to the tribe.
Stand out.
01 March 2022
The Best I Got Left
The Best I Got Left.
1 March 2022
Unclean
It was 2002. I was a 32 yr old Captain. The President wanted to go to war. I wanted to go to war. The media went on a tear like we're seeing right now. "You're with us or with THEM!" We said. We said it constantly, we heard it without end, and we never questioned the authorities on whose behalf we were to fight.
We were wrong. Not because we fought, but because we forgot to question the answers that were given to us. Many of us have looked back and were not surprised at the lies, now plainly exposed, that were fed to us. We knew in our hearts that the justification was a little sketchy. It didn't matter, back then. We wanted to fight.
We were wrong. I was wrong.
My mistakes make up the majority of the fund of knowledge that I offer to those who are young. In the case of mass corporate media driving madness toward war, don't listen to them. That was our failure. That was my failure. Good men died because of me.
We failed in the first act, that of independent thought. Largely because of that lack, our efforts were doomed from that very point forward. Lies are nothing but attempts to misshape the world around us into something other than reality. Reality inevitably snaps back and shows us to be fools. Anything built upon that lie falls without foundation.
Well, twenty years have passed and the exact same people who drummed up the war then are at it again now. They are, again, trying to misshape the world into something other than reality. Anything that is based upon that will fall just as utterly. Good men will die as a result.
Don't lie to yourself, and don't let somebody convince you of following them when they are busy misshaping the world. Ask the questions. Question the answers. Keep questioning until your heart is satisfied. Anything less than that is failure.
I'm rather past the halfway point of the four-score that I hope to be allotted. I pray that the Lord will allow me to atone by destroying an enemy worthy of a good death, but I'm old enough to know that He rarely goes in for that sort of plain symmetry, nor do I fear that I am worthy of such an opportunity at redemption.
What is left, then, is to teach. To observe and instruct about reality as it is, not as I wish it were. That is truth. It's about the best that I have left.
Don't let my mistake, all those years ago, be forgotten.
Learn from it.
02 October 2021
Legislation vs. Morality
My mother had a few bromides that have stuck with me over the years. "Don't poop where you sleep" was a good one. "Keep your pecker out of the payroll" is one that has kept me out of trouble for the better part of 35 years.
But she used to repeat, watching the news of the day, that "You can't legislate morality." I've been working that out since I was 18, and on it's face, it's completely bullshit, since Moses' Ten Commandments and the Hammurabi code are both results of the steady and continual watching of goal-oriented behavior long enough to extract and embody those things which were most important to a burgeoning society.
Thus is morality, and thus is it embodied in law.
But I get what Ma was trying to express. We've watched it get worse and worse over the past 35 years. What she meant, and what we've seen, are laws that contradict morality.
Morality is simply the rank ordering of patterns of behavior that are most important to us. Think about it. What is the best thing you could be?
Maybe that thing would be someone who voluntarily accepted to be denied by his friends, betrayed by his church, and tortured to death by his state, in order to wash the burden of sin from mankind. Something like that, I reckon. I can't conceive of anything more heroic. Hit me up in the comments if you can perceive anything more awesome than that.
So, that's the highest, as nearly as I can determine.
Here recently, anyone who would try to act in such a manner would be branded as a "white supremacist" (regardless of race. See: Larry Elder.) He would be branded as a "domestic terror risk".
I think what Ma meant when she said "you can't legislate morality" was that it is very important for us not to confuse God with the government.
God loves you.
Your government looks upon you as chattel.
God expects you to sacrifice appropriately to become a better person and strive to transcend the suffering that is endemic to living on this mortal coil.
Your government expects you to consume as you are instructed, be smart enough to pull levers and push buttons upon command and no smarter. To readily and cheerfully act in a manner that benefits them personally.
We can see a diversion between the two ideals. The government is not your God. It is comprised of barely competent office holders who have no consideration for your lot in life and are actively hostile toward you if your interests conflict with theirs. We'll never fix that. It's baked in. We have to realize this fact and simply go on our way...
Our way to becoming worthy of Christ's sacrifice, on a path to transcend the pain of existence through forthright thought and action.
When choosing who may represent us, I recommend looking for those who might defend us from those wearying bureaucrats described above. We should demand that those who represent us have the chief quality of wanting us to be free of restriction, able to achieve our goals, and unfettered in our natural rights.
In that manner, we may realize a government that once again is more concerned with the freedom of its citizens, while disregarding the temptation to force us into a chosen manner of behavior.
That is the way. To demand more of ourselves and expect more of those who wish to speak on our behalf.
Unclean
13 July 2021
Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part V
…The years went by. The decades went by. In spite of the Iron Curtain, views on what
was happening in the West, what people were thinking about, kept coming through
to us [in the USSR’s Gulags], mainly thanks to the BBC’s Russian broadcasts,
although they were vigorously jammed.
And the more we learned, the more the state of your world perplexed us.
Human nature is full of riddles
and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the
search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, over
simplified explanations. One of these
riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of
slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to
rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who
soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lost the taste for freedom,
lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to
crave slavery? Or again: why is it
that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have
been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul
which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the
real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of
information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a
kind of voluntary self-deception? [Emphasis added]
This is precisely what we have
found to be the correlation between the spiritual development of the East and
that of the West. And, alas, the process
of your development is five, if not ten times swifter than ours. This is what almost robs mankind of any hope
of avoiding a global catastrophe. For
years we refused to believe this, thinking that the information which reached
us was inadequate. A few years ago I
spoke of this with considerable alarm, in my Nobel lecture.
And yet, until I came to the
West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the
extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world
situation, the extreme degree to which the West had already become a world without
a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it,
a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom.
There is a German proverb which
runs “Mut verloren—alles verloren”: “When courage is lost, all is lost”. There is another Latin one, according to
which the loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction. But what happens to a society in which both
these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of reason—intersect? This is the picture which I found the West
presents today.
Of course there is a perfectly
simple explanation for this process. It
is not the superficial one, so fashionable in our day, that man himself is
irreproachable and everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society, but
a purely human one. Once, it was
proclaimed and accepted that above man there was no supreme being, but instead
that man was the crowning glory of the universe and the measure of all things,
and that man’s needs, desires, and indeed his weaknesses were taken to be the
supreme imperatives of the universe.
Consequently, the only good in the world—the only thing that needed to
be done—was that which satisfied our feelings.
It was several centuries ago in Europe that this philosophy was born; at
the time, its materialistic excesses were explained away by the previous
excesses of Catholicism. But in the
course of several centuries this philosophy inexorably flooded the entire Western
world, and gave it confidence for its colonial conquests, for the seizure of
African and Asian slaves. And all this
side by side with the outward manifestations of Christianity and the flowering
of personal freedom. By the beginning of
the twentieth century this philosophy seemed to have reached the height of
civilization and reason. And your
country, Britain, which had always been the core, the very the pearl, of the Western
world, gave expression with particular brilliance of this philosophy in both
its good and its bad aspects.
In 1914, at the beginning of our
ill-fated twentieth century, a storm broke over this civilization, a storm the
size and range of which no one at that time could grasp. For four years Europe destroyed herself as
never before, and in 1917 a crevasse opened up on the very edge of Europe, a
yawning gap enticing the world into an abyss.
The causes for this crevasse are
not hard to find: it was the logical result of doctrines that been bandied
about in Europe of ages and had enjoyed considerable success. But this crevasse has something cosmic about
it, too, in its unplumbed, unsuspected depths, in its unimaginable capacity for
growing wider and wider and swallowing up more and more people.
Forty years earlier Dostoevsky
had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims. At the time it seemed an improbable
figure. Let me ask the British press to
acquaint its readers with the impartial three-page report of the Russian
statistician Professor Ivan Kurganov. It
was published in the West twelve years ago, but, as is so often the case with
matters of social significance, we only notice things that are not
contradictory to our own feelings. From
Professor Kurganov’s analysis, we learn that if Dostoevsky erred, he erred on
the side of understatement. From 1917 to
1959 socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!
When there is a geological
upheaval, continents do not topple into the sea immediately. The first thing that happens is that the
fatal initial crevasse must appear someplace.
For a variety of reasons it so happened that this crevasse first opened
up in Russia, but it might just as well have been anywhere else. And Russia, which people considered a
backward country, had to leap forward a whole century to overtake all the other
countries in the world. We endured
inhuman experiences which the Western world—and this includes Britain—has no
real conception of and is frightened even to think about.
It is with a strange feeling
that those of us who come from the Soviet Union look upon the West today. It is as though we were neither neighbors on
the same planet nor contemporaries. And yet we contemplate the West from what will be your
future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating
itself today. And what we see is always
the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children;
the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors
scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for
the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary
extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them;
the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments;
societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion
leading to political upheaval. What
will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory
we can easily predict what these events will be. [Emphasis Added]
Please go back and read that last paragraph aloud to
yourself. Solzhenitsyn said those words
to us 45 years ago.
Pray. Think,
people. Speak the truth. Your freedom is your gift and your burden. To earn it, you must carry it and hold it
with the utmost care.
12 July 2021
Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part IV
Day four of selected passages from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West, from
his speech to the AFL-CIO in D.C. on 30 June 1975. In ’75, for those too young to remember, the
U.S. Government was trying to avoid Nuclear War with the USSR by pandering and détente. Ford was not a strong voice for freedom. Here’s what Alexandr thought of that
diplomatic approach. Again, note how
this lines up with current events and how we’re dealing with China currently:
You have to understand the
nature of Communism, all of Lenin’s teachings, are that anyone who doesn’t take
what’s lying in front of him is considered a fool. If you can take it, do so. If you can attack, strike. But if there’s a wall, then retreat. [No
shit, that’s a direct fucking quote.] The Communist leaders respect only firmness
and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them. Your people are now saying—and this is
the last quotation Iam going to give you from the statements of your leaders—'Power,
without any attempt at conciliation, will lead to a world conflict.’ But I would say that power with continual acquiescence
is not power at all.
Look around. Check’s
come due. Pay attention.
10 July 2021
Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part III
More from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West speech of 30 June 1975 in
D.C., to the AFL-CIO. He describes the
context of the Communist system. Most
Americans aren’t tracking this information.
Not much of it has been taught in schools. Note that the Soviet tyranny was several of
orders of magnitude larger than that of Nazi Germany, and China is several
orders of magnitude larger than the USSR.
With that in mind, as you read, note the parallels between the nascent
Soviets and what is happening around us in Canada, Europe, and the US right
now. I lost count.
For decades on end, throughout
the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1940’s, and 1950’s, the Soviet Press kept
writing ‘Western Capitalism, your end is near.
We will destroy you.’
But it was as if the capitalists
had not heard, could not understand, could not believe this.
Nikita Khrushchev came here and
said, ‘We will bury you!’ They [the capitalists] didn’t believe that
either. They took it as a joke.
Now, of course, they [the Soviets]
have become more clever in our country.
Today they don’t say ‘We are going to bury you,’ now they say, ‘Détente!’.
Nothing has changed in Communist
ideology. The goals are the same as they
were, but instead of the artless Khrushchev, who couldn’t hold his tongue, now
they say, ‘Détente.’
In order to make this clear, I
will take the liberty of presenting a short historic survey—the history of
these relations which in different periods have been called, ‘trade,’ ‘stabilization
of the situation,’ ‘recognition of realities,’ and now ‘détente.’ These relations have at least a forty year
history.
Let me remind you with what
kind of system relations began [the Soviet System].
The system was installed by an armed uprising.
It dispersed the Constituent
Assembly.
It capitulated to Germany—the common
enemy.
It introduced punishment and
execution without trial through the Cheka [Secret Police].
It crushed workers’ strikes.
It plundered the countryside to
such and unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened
it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible manner.
It smashed the Church.
It reduced twenty provinces of
our country to utter famine.
This was in 1921, the infamous
Volga famine. It was a typical Communist technique: to struggle for power
without thinking of the fact that the productivity is collapsing, that the
fields are not being sown, that the factories stand idle, that the country is
sinking into poverty and famine—but when poverty and hunger do come, then turn
to the humanitarian world for help. We
see this in North Vietnam today, Portugal is on the same path. And the same thing happened in Russia in
1921. When the three-year civil war,
started by the Communists—and ‘civil war’ was a slogan of the Communists, civil
war was Lenin’s purpose; read Lenin, this was his aim and his slogan—when they
had ruined Russia by civil war, then they asked America, ‘America, feed our
hungry.’ And indeed, generous and magnanimous America did feed our hungry…
…This was a system which was the
first—long before Hitler—to employ false announcements of registration, that is
to say: ‘Such and such persons must appear to register.’ People would comply
and then they were taken away to be killed.
For technical reasons we didn’t have gas chambers in those days. We used barges. A hundred or a thousand persons were put into
a barge and then it was sunk…
…This was a system which
exterminated all other parties. And let
me make it clear to you that it not only disbanded each party, but destroyed
its members. All members of every non-Communist
party were exterminated.
This was a system which carried
out genocide of the peasantry. Fifteen
million peasants were shipped off to their deaths.
This was a system which introduced
serfdom, the so-called passport system.
This was a system which, in time
of peace, artificially created a famine, causing six million persons to die in
the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. They
died on the very threshold of Europe. And Europe didn’t even notice it. The world didn’t even notice it. Six million persons!