Zero Nets, after Net Zero.
In many ways, I am dismissive of people classed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ on the internet these days, not because they make preposterous claims. In fact, they’ve been right on nearly everything in the past two or three years, from Epstein to Covid, and after watching The Northman, probably Nicole Kidman and the evils of Hollywood as well.
I mean, the character Nicole Kidman is such a perfect inversion of the divine mother Mary, that the symbolism cannot be a coincidence. The mother of our hero was unwilling (a concubine), impure (a former prostitute), unloving, callous, and she rejects her son’s sacrifice and protection. The perfect mirror image of the loving, pure and willing mother of Jesus, Mary. Can we even remotely entertain the idea that Hollywood is not deliberately trying to destroy our culture?
I believe that there are terribly motivated people in this world who are out to kill us all. I think you’re naïve if you don’t believe that. Especially when they say so, out loud.
The question much discussed on podcasts these days, is what motivates these psychopaths? The answers given make sense, money, power control, delusion, and ego. Yes, certainly these all play a part. But as Jordan Peterson often points out, Psychopaths always make up between 1 and 5% of any given population. They are a constant. Like gravity.
The question we face now is how to live in a society, where there is a risk of psychopaths using technological advancements to seize control of our networks and political hierarchies? How can we stop them from using the powerful innovations of the free market against us, to make us a permanently vulnerable underclass?
The answer, for me, is for us to look at the philosophical deviations that led us here. To return to where we went wrong, in principle. And from that point, identify a course correction. Both philosophy and religion need to be revived and refined in this way, as time moves on. In the same way, a ship that has been at sea for many years, takes on the magnetism of the earth and the cargo it has carried. From time to time, you need to take the ship on a full swing and recalibrate your bearings. Note your deviations, and precisely adjust corrective magnets to compensate for the traits acquired over time.
My problem with conspiracy theories on the internet these days, therefore, is that they don’t go far enough. They under-estimate the problem. And that is because the problem lies partly with us.
When we still cling to notions that we can fix the system, or punish a few former leaders, we only legitimise the entire enterprise the more. The cycle will continue until the end of time if we are unable to take responsibility for our own part in the evils of the world today.
When we ask to be delivered from evil and not into temptation, what should we fear being tempted by? Giving up sugar for lent is easy, my friends. Why don’t we try giving up dependence on the state, its agents, and our corporate employers for 40 days each year?
I’ve recently tried to understand the concept of original sin, from a non-autistic post-modern viewpoint. Like most people of my generation, I have rejected it out of hand for my entire life. ‘What supposedly benevolent God would attach Sin to every innocent child on Earth?’
The mid-witted question answers itself only too easily. Except, that it doesn’t really. The literalist mindset has produced the wonders of civilisation in the 21st Century, but it has also led us to the terrifyingly corrupt and dangerous world we now inhabit. A world where the general population is complicit in the destruction of future generations, sacrificing the young for the old and applauding the destruction of the freedoms that founded our society.
We live now in a country where British people who’ve spent two years arguing for mandatory masking and vaccination are now railing for ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘bodily autonomy’ when it comes to taxpayer-funded abortion in the USA. We live in a world where people speak entirely in euphemisms, in order to legitimise the violation of property rights, freedom of thought and freedom of movement. A world where the government can lock people in their own homes, but agents of the state can roam freely and murder women on the streets of London after curfew. A world where taxpayer money is used to fly the flags of foreign nations on our government buildings, pay for gender-selective abortions and create artificial shortages of food and energy, without the consent of the governed.
And all of this is supported, by the ‘majority’. At least, so we are told.
I’ve always thought of Britain as a communistic country. I rather think we’re more of a National Socialist nation now than we’ve ever been. Corporations reflexively bent over backwards to adhere to the (continuously contradictory) local, devolved, national and WHO guidance over Covid. Where were the free-thinking entrepreneurs, defending free markets? Aren’t they supposedly all corrupt and able to bend the ear of the powerful?
Watching business leaders submit to authority so comprehensively was as astounding as it was revealing. The state is a corporation that has a monopoly on violence. They are exempt from the rules most of us live by. That is the nature and purpose of power. Their business model is to franchise out that right to preferred partners, called corporations. The legal entities that are the true agents of enforcement in most of our lives.
We give them their power. We are complicit in our own demise. That is what we cannot wake up to, as a society.
We did this and we did it long ago. Some of us are only now beginning to realise the horrific scale of the lies that underpin our society. The reality is that the ones we love, are also vampires and zombies. Confused centurions, too comfortable or convinced to step out of the rank and file.
We are legends. Minorities, held in shameful judgement by the mob. Like the book, not the vaccine propaganda film.
Does the line between good and evil run through the heart of every man? Is there no hope for us? The dark side of the Yin and Yang symbol is blacker than the darkest night. It describes an element within us all. Original sin.
I believe that Sin is ‘Exemptionism’.
That is, the human propensity to allow an evil to go unchallenged, because of the identity category of the group or person committing the act of evil.
E.g., It’s not theft, its taxation because my government is doing it. It’s not a war crime, it’s a pre-emptive strike because our side are the good guys. It’s not the use of taxpayer money to disproportionately kill female babies who are unborn, it’s the NHS being culturally sensitive to the needs of immigrants with different norms and supporting feminism. Etc.
Allow me to put my surveyors’ hat on and perform a little ‘Root Cause Analysis’.
Libertarianism and free-market economics go hand in hand with Christian culture for many reasons. The former seems to be a natural outgrowth of the latter. The ideas of consent, the sovereignty of the individual and of creative destruction are foundational to both ideas and cultures. Perhaps the fourth cornerstone these cultures share is original sin.
I cannot be the only one who sees the connection between the idea of original sin, and the idea of opportunity cost? Adam Smith probably wrote about this, long before Dostoyevsky? Please let me know if you have a reference because I tried to read The Wealth of Nations, but I just gave up and went for Hazlitt instead.
Original sin now makes sense to me because I have observed the role of opportunity-cost in ethical decisions made by myself, and by everyone around me.
I believe that those of us who stood up to vaccine pressures, and mask mandates have done a real service to the people around us who were too weak or mentally enslaved to defend themselves. I believe every compromise made for comfort, peer pressure or career was a quiet act of evil in the form of societal negligence.
Yes, inflation, corporations and fixed salaries are weapons used to buy compliance. But somehow, you have to take the hit and stand up for freedom. Otherwise, there is nothing on earth they cannot take from you.
No heart or mind can be fully conscious of the full implications of every decision or action we take. The ripples we send out into the world, with every action, have an effect on others. Both now and in the future. Here, and far away. For good, and for evil. Every maskless face communicates an absence of fear and a message of hope to the world, whether they thank you for it or not.
The idea of being a categorically ‘good’ person is a laughable one. It seems to be an inescapable feature of the human organism to gain status at the cost of others. Or to shame, humiliate or embarrass others at some point in our lives. To belittle the suffering of others, in order to continue the path toward our own survival and progress?
Could human beings have come to survive and propagate in such numbers, without the supposedly sinful tendencies toward selfishness, greed, and in-group preference?
Original sin may not be a burden put upon us by a manipulative and exploitive hierarchical church. It may be a profound and mystical observation, based on billions of iterations of human lives, recognising that we have a nature that inescapably will produce negative or sinful outcomes. Not a cruel condemnation of the infant, but a recognition that we are the descendants of many fallible ancestors. Beneficiaries of forebears, with many aggregating deficiencies as well as virtues. Weak as well as strong.
We may not be responsible for the sins of our forefathers, but we exist in part because of them.
I now accept that the concept of original sin might be a useful one. It may be there to remind us that we are always complicit in the evil in the world. Being conscious of this fact should give us pause for a second thought. Even if we have no way of knowing what thing we support is evil, we should always be mindful of our limitations.
Many people in the post-World War 2 era were brought up to fear or to hate certainty. The hippies and their cultural children see certainty itself as a sin, or at least a red flag. But the disposal of such an idea as original sin means we need to replace it with something better. Or articulate it better in rational terms.
If people will no longer accept that they are flawed, imperfect and always incorrect as an axiomatic article of faith, then we must find an equivalent way to understand the same idea. And in a hurry, before every statue is torn down and every notion of sovereignty deleted from our legal system and culture.
I believe the development of religions, particularly the revelatory religions of the Abrahamic tradition, was a critical technological development. Produced by aggregate experimentation and refinement. Built over centuries of pragmatic trial and error. A decentralised open-source code for programming the human mind, for proper action in the world.
I feel that religion is empirically derived, and is a useful creation because as a seafarer, I am a watcher. Immersed in the physical, I make my living by reading the signs of the world. I know which way the wind will blow soon, because I know the seagulls will go to sleep aerodynamically facing where the wind will be, later on, to avoid shifting in the night. I feel the tension in my mooring ropes and prepare my gangway. I hoist flags, and watch them closely, as their actions speak volumes. I listen to stories closely, as every sailor has a unique tale. Each one packed with clues for my own future, or directions worth passing on to others.
Religion dances like a flag in the wind. Political force lurks beneath the surface as an uncharted danger. The zombie-like superficial chatter of our fellow citizens’ bubbles, surges, and swirls past us, like a strong simmering current. Every family must now brace themselves like Jonah, or Noah.
We are both cursed and blessed like these men of legend.
We sense our burden, prepare the ark, and pray that God will not drown us and our dreams, along with the others that have rejected the truth.
The storm will come. Those who survive will father nations. The cycle will repeat unless we can transmit the lessons learned to our descendants.
As we ready the ark for our families, we must choose what provisions to bring, and what to leave behind.
Original sin is on board for the ride as far as I’m concerned. An important contributing factor in our root cause analysis is our neglect of the idea that we are all sinners, to a man.
We have rejected the idea that there ARE NO EXEMPTIONS to this rule. And because that idea has been absent from our psyche and our culture for so long, we think that we can behave any way we like, and still be classed as ‘good’. We allow groups of people to be completely exempt from the normal rules of morality and call themselves our betters.
For me, I think the fatal flaw of British society has been an over-focus of our Christian culture on the sacrifice of the individual. The highest ideals of Saint George, Saint Andrew and Saint Patrick combine on our flags and fly from the highest and grandest places in our nation. The ideal citizen is the one who humbly sacrifices himself to rid the world of dragons and snakes. As fishermen, knights and missionaries, shepherds, and escapees of slavery, we toil humbly toward a better state of being. To bring heaven on earth into being. Having faith that our suffering will manifest over the aggregation of lives spent in these tasks.
Our country is so beautiful, verdant, and cultivated. Our buildings are so expressive of loving labour, design, repair, and stewardship. Our ancestors so integrated into our place names, infrastructure, ports, and communities. Our country can often feel like heaven on earth.
So much so, that as I travel up and down this country in the wake of Covid, it is easy to forgive the people of Lowestoft, Hartlepool, Humberside, Angus, Fife, Edinburgh, London and so many other Britannic versions of Eden for forgetting that there is a snake in the garden.
I believe the sacrifices of our people in World War I and two led us to two major errors:
· Believing that our nation is categorically a force for good, even when it acts badly
· Over-valuing our role of self-sacrifice to the nation. In so doing, we have forgotten the major element of the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus – the idea of voluntaryism or consent.
Root Cause Logic:
- The adoption of rationalism is commanded by a Christianity that trusts that God is truth and observing reality cannot be a heretical act.
- Our subsequent technological successes and insights allow us to believe that we are God-like.
- We no longer believe in magic, or powers beyond our own prowess.
- No longer believing in magical power, leads to a purely metaphorical belief in Christianity, and a general psychological acceptance that, yeah, Jesus might have been a cool guy, but none of that was real.
- Resurrection cannot happen for you or me, or maybe resuscitation or a coma can, so the central story of Christian values is just silly.
- We forget that the reason Jesus was magical in the stories was to illustrate that he could have avoided his martyrdom easily
- We then forget half of the value of Christianity, which teaches us that voluntary consent is a miraculously high virtue in itself. One that ennobles and makes self-sacrifice echo for all eternity.
- We eventually live in a world where because we ‘look god-like’, we assume we know enough, or know everything.
- Our metaphysics becomes entirely mechanical and without spirit. Our elites are now programmers, not guides.
- Some among us soon believe themselves to be in an exempt class, with nothing of greater power above them. No judge, no higher value, no greater knowledge.
- Many of us caught in the zeitgeist gaze into the smartphones and tablet computers and imagine that we too are powerful. Our comfort becomes a sign of our virtue. Our narcissism, our cage. We worship Jobs, Gates, Zuckerbergs, and politicians, instead of universal principles and virtues. We look at these purveyors of pleasure as miracle workers and ignore the miracles that have guided us for generations before.
- In our technologically sated, ego-satisfied zombie state, we grant our drug dealers space in our minds as a special class of people. Thereby granting authority in all things, to those who are only good at one thing.
- We all propagated the societal deficiencies that allowed the descent into narcissistic madness our society now faces. The idea is that human beings of a select class can order nature or enforce unnatural selection.
- The society that allows exemptions to exist in moral categories, is the one which provides the habitat for sociopaths and/or technocrats to thrive and exploit.
- Socialists, National Socialists, Communists, Democrats and Statists of every modern stripe reject the magic of Christ. They also reject the idea of sovereign consent of the individual.
- Consent is no longer a foundational principle in our hearts, and so it is eroded from our society.
- National debt, conscription, income tax, state-funded abortion, mandated medical procedures, destruction of the family, lockdowns, all result from the abandonment of the idea that there are no special classes. We are all imperfect.
How do we face this?
I believe it is too late and too urgent to hope for a return to the mystical intuitions of Christianity. Our people are too cynical to believe in restraint from the expediencies of the awesome power of the modern state. And too narcissistic to take responsibility for legitimising such evils as the national debt that funds every other scheme that corrupts and imprisons us.
We need a vision.
Our vision must consider the fact that people must be treated with forgiveness and respect, even though they oppose, hate, and fear our highest values. Our vision must not require the belief systems of our enemy to change.
Imagine a world where no agency or group could hijack the product of your labour without your consent? Imagine a world where changing the defence or healthcare policy supported by your ‘tax’ contribution, was as easy as changing your mobile phone provider? Imagine a world where there is no social contract, without an actual contract.
We are so nearly there.
Technological advances of our times are so great, and they threaten the idea of freedom so completely, that many predict the grip of the state will be more total than even our worst dystopian nightmares can fathom. Biometrics, neural inks, AI, network surveillance and censorship are so all-encompassing that there is no corner left in our world for competition to the state to gain a foothold.
The same technology is there for us all to use against this dystopian reality.
I believe the danger is coming at us so hard and fast right now because our enemies recognise that the idea of networked communications technology fundamentally releases people from having any need for state coercion.
The shadow rulers and warmongers of centuries past are finally living in a world where kids with laptops can run rings around the most financially powerful entities in earth’s history.
The stakes are high, and they know it.
They will ultimately fail, and we must make them fail as soon and as thoroughly as practicable. The way we will achieve that is by speaking only the truth, immersing ourselves in reality, and remembering the lessons of our ancestors.
The tower of babble must collapse because it reaches too high.
In the same way, a small trawler may appear to be weaker than an ultra-large container ship. However, the smaller vessel can ride over the waves in a storm, whereas the larger ship buckles under much greater stress. Decentralised command will always outperform centralised command. Nature requires competition.
Religion is a technology, as much as a supertanker, or the internet. Our job is to pay attention and use each tool in its proper way.
We must batten down our hatches, mend our nets and chart our course, safe in the knowledge that our ancestors have been through far worse storms, with much less at their disposal. We must look at the world around us and know faithfully that we will triumph as individuals encouraging each other to do good deeds, and not as serfs, dependent on the safety net promises of the technocrats.
We must not believe in Net-Zero or Zero-Covid. When politicians promise us anything, we must resist. We are our brother’s keeper. Discipline is required to resist the state and the supra-national technocrats. Every little act of self-reliance or charity will be one of the thousand cuts that bleed this monster to death. Start with yourself. Build from there. And have faith.