One of the people I’ve really grown to admire, just based upon her willingness to have conversations with persona non grata types on her podcast, is Trish wood.
On last weeks show, she had on another writer I’ve been meaning to check out after I heard him on “Tucker Today”, a couple of weeks ago, a funny interesting fellow by the name of Chris Bray.
As always, they attempted to muddle through some of the details, trying to make sense of a World apparently gone mad, trying to find the sanity buried beneath all the dismembered logic piles, casualties of the culture wars.
At some point they started to talk about Orange man, and agreed that, while he was, perhaps not the most polished character, it’s difficult to conclude (for an impartial observer) he had a fair “at bat” while occupying the white house.
Back before the World turned up the now wildly apparent crazy to 11, I attempted to try and make some sense of this. I personally had been quite friendly with, dare I even say liked, by many friends and Family who thought that even saying something as simple as “I don’t have to be a Trump ‘fan boy’ to suggest I think that he’s talking about some real and substantial issues...” to be scoffed at as if starting to sprout a tiny little head from the neck, and that was early on. As the time progressed, and the media got more and more frantic and hysterical. Especially after he won, at which point we’re also told the teeny little head started to sprout its own teenie little clan outfit.
Yessir, those were some interesting times. Trying to have a conversation with people about anything other than your favourite TV show or sport (and some of those too..) immediately became about constantly trying to talk them down from the ledge that they were perched upon, clinging to any remnant of sanity they still held back, ready to spring off into the abyss, potentially to never come back if you didn’t immediately agree that everything Orange Man said was racist, homophobic, sexist, ableist, so on and so forth, and therefore any discussion of the issue themselves became impossible, because the issues had become inextricably linked to the bad man, and once the Russia narrative came along, the outbursts said to their predecessors: hold my beer..
Again as a person who was trying to discuss issues, it was actually a little amusing to see how the narrative quickly changed from “Trump is far too stupid to ever really understand anything, potentially incompetent even…”, morphing right in front of everyones eyes into a Russian agent, sent in by the Kremlin, supported by armies of Russian and Macedonian troll farms, not because that was a business model for clicks, but because the Russians wanted to “..destroy our democracy…”. And most of the people who had already gone quite mad, unable to think straight, completely changed tact, and pointing it out would inevitably serve to further enrage and infuriate them.
Let me tell you, from the position of someone who wasn’t caught up in all the almost totally manufactured crisis that happened week after week, I became a little disillusioned, not with Trump, but with people who had spoken down to me as if it were justified to never actually hear what was being said, or as if it were righteous to repeat stories that were, often on the face of them, just completely absurd, or “social justice” related, every single one of them in relation to some issue that Trump was attempting to raise, whether it were borders, taxes, red tape, jobs, infrastructure, medical reform, on and on, and in almost every single instance, the media would present some story, to which various DNC and even RNC politicians would react in a completely over the top way, and with all manner of nutty commentaries, which the media would then repeat yet again while sometimes losing the ability to hold back their emotions. It all seemed so very obvious to me, and while I know it often triggered my friends and Family, I would tell them so.
It wouldn’t usually go very well.
In an attempt to try and reason with people who seemed beyond reason, on facebook I presented a short piece of writing to try and make sense of the things that I was seeing.
If you’ll indulge me, this is how it went, cleaned up and polished a little:
Jan 1st, 2018
Why it matters
Recently I had a doozy of a fight with my Wife.
Coincidentally, there's a massive fight happening in the World, or to be specific, in the World of ideas.
Neither of these kinds of squabbles is new. My Wife and I have disagreements about things all the time, and I don't consider this to be unusual. It’s through disagreements that functional couples come to make decisions as a team, and the couples who are able to do this with common goals in mind, often have the best chances of weathering the various storms “Life” can throw at us. It’s when we stop being reasonable and start acting with emotional outbursts that things can tend to degrade.
As individuals, we also have our own thoughts and ideas, that help us develop a mindset that enables, encourages or entices us to achieve goals both big and small; Goals of immediate necessity and goals to aim for in the future. One big factor that keeps us from thinking rationally about those objectives, is determined by how well we can develop our own ability to engage in “deferred gratification”. This is beneficially a skill many adults develop that enables us to choose wisely instead of emotionally and irrationally, helping us to decide which goals or objectives should get preferential treatment. This is how we budget, save, and create contingency plans, always wary of the idea that we cannot simply have everything we want, right when we want it, at potentially the expense of our future selves. It’s our best and most reliable navigation tool to help get us to a destination of our choosing.
Without this metaphorical telescope through which to examine and navigate the World, we become subject to the whims of those around us like so many tiny boats in the sea of Life, the motion of which drifts us along, shifting with the stronger tides of that which we find ourselves surrounded by. In this way, having opinions and ideas act as makeshift rudders in the sea of Life, helping us steer a course while within the often choppy waters of society.
It’s worth bringing up, not to address the way we think about the day to day events within our personal and social lives, but also as a means to navigate the shifting ripples of the sea, the things we don't talk about. We often don’t consider the tides as if they don't affect us or our little ships, so we seem to think, but what we tend to not recognize from our bow it changes in the water does affect the Sea itself.
It is that aspect of our lives we tend to take for granted, assuming the people we elect to be our leaders and the people we elevate to positions of authority have our best interests in mind when they make decisions about how best to sail the waters from their much more influential wake creating barges. That being the case, in todays hyper connected World it should not surprise anyone there's an overwhelming conformity and complacency in the eyes of average people who tend to act as passive actors when it comes to World events, history, politics and philosophy, and while these are things that can shift “current” events, most sailors are quite often wrapped up in maintaining their own voyages to be bothered with paying more than passing attention.
So again, none of this is news to anyone, but have you ever stopped to think about the fact that these intellectuals, professionals, most of the media and entertainment industry, and of course academia, are also taken in by individuation? Also piloting their own ships, with their own goals, hopes and aspirations? I would hazard to say the vast majority of people who fit into this group constitute mostly well meaning people, including my Wife. And simply because they may be going with the tides, that doesn't make them right, even though they may 'feel' like they are. In most cases there can be multiple points of view, but the ones that are the easiest to find consensus or current on does not necessarily make them the right answers to tough questions. In other words “Democracy” shouldn't be considered as an interchangeable word with “going with the flow”, or “getting caught up in the undertow”, but it certainly seems like lately, that's exactly what's happening.
Don't get me wrong, I love and respect my Wife and her opinion, but when it comes to a lot of the things we fight about, she has thoughts about various situations or events that we may talk about in the course of daily conversation, and while they may 'feel' like they're her own, it's not necessarily true that she's as uncorrupted in her thought process as she might think she is. In fact, she feels like her ideas are morally relevant, and therefore it makes her a good person to profess why her opinion is valid, and this is a fairly common condition. Again, I think this is true of most people you meet. But the reality is, ideas that sound innocent and altruistic are not always without their own corrupt underpinnings, and they are themselves immersed in a World that has become increasingly more like a reinforcement mechanism to keep boats from drifting afloat, and instead keeping them all like little “ducks in a row”. That is to say, following in the wake of the barges and not trying to maintain your own course.
Trying a slightly different metaphor, let’s that it was decided by the barge Captains that individuals should even be allowed to have their own boats, and instead they would be relegated as passengers within the hull of the barge, as passengers, held against their will. Deep in the heart of the ship, instead of finding the ocean breeze and working hard to catch the wind in our sails, we find ourselves in an echo chamber that can only be broken out of by approaching the cabin door, and constantly picking away at the lock with the expertise of a master locksmith to try and snatch one of the lifeboats, perhaps to once again steer your own ship.
Of course this isn’t some pleasure craft. The large ships have many passengers, and crew. Now envision that behind many locked doors is a crew member who’s been subject to cabin Life and conditioning, so all enveloping they don't even seem to know they're being held de facto hostage by walls that act as a reinforcement mechanism to keep them enclosed in one barge of ideas, and they would most likely fight you tooth and nail to keep you from even trying to pull them out through the door, even if your intention was a rescue mission.
This is a good way to think about the domain of so-called “experts”.
No, I don't mean a Master mechanic, chef, or heart surgeon. It's true that if you want to go to the right person for a specific need, you want the one with the experience and the track record, and probably the most specialized individual if you can get them, but even when it comes to that scenario they themselves can be operating with bad information when relying on consensus for direction, but this is often more due to misguided influence than bad intentions. Indeed this is one of the largest mass cases of Stockholm syndrome to ever exist. The strange part is it remains unclear who is the kidnapper, and who is the kidnapped.
I'm going to try and explain how the conversations we have with everyday people(including my Wife, who I'm only calling 'ordinary' for convenience, she's anything but ordinary... I love you Babe!), have become hyper emotive, even 'triggered', provoking knee jerk reactions from this group of well meaning do-gooders in all things political and social, hyper energized and accelerated by the election of Donald Trump. In fact the conversations themselves are not new, but they've come to the fore in an unsuspecting and jarring package, namely the orange skinned cocksman and uber successful Real Estate mogul turned television celebrity, previously thought of as the first person that springs to mind when envisioning grandeur and self importance. Previous to this new and confusing time, the kind of conversations I'm referring to have been had for several decades, and they've been discussed ad-nauseam over dinner tables and at water coolers, in coffee shops, and wherever else people tend to congregate and trade banter over how the World is and how we think it should be.
I'm talking about literally all manner of conversation, which up until recently was not part of the discussion when it came to sports or music or general entertainment interests where most people can find common ground, but now even these conversations seem to have become about something other than the topics at hand. They have themselves been hijacked by ideological forces that wish to change us into something we will never be, with the reasoning given we need to stop being something we never were. And when I say 'we' I mean Western Civilization, as a whole, but more specifically this paradigm, and this generation, and this zeitgeist. We have been accused of being sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, bigoted, and now transphobic. Forgive me if I sound like all of the above by rejecting this nonsense outright like like some kind of caveman, but in all honestly, before it was annoying, and now it's becoming openly aggressive, dismissive, and petulant.
Yep. I said that. If you feel the urge you may dismiss me as a simpleton who just doesn't see things as deeply as you do, but I have in fact thought about this a tremendous amount, so much so that I make it the heart of most conversations I engage in with others to see if they also understand why they may say something I believe to be evidence of institutionalized and formulated opinions not of their own design, and rife with groupthink. I do have my reasons which I would like to share with you, should you be so kind as to open your mind a little.
I promise you can nitpick this apart after I'm done and go on with life as usual, and if you like you can tell me why I'm wrong, but please, if you wish to do so, don't misrepresent what I've said, and make your reasoning personal. So many conversations get hijacked by ego, whataboutism, and moral relativism, and the meaning lost. Often purposely and deliberately as both a tactic to achieve points instead of rebut actual arguments, and more often as a lazy form of thinking which I see as being nurtured by it's own dialectic in some weird paradox where the idea feeds on itself so you never have to challenge your own beliefs, possibly damaging your rudder leaving your ship adrift. We all seek stability for clarities sake, and because it's easer to defer to authority rather than challenge it, this paradoxical thinking is sanctioned by society. When we fail to hear the other side, that's when conversation breaks down and the chance to find a greater understanding through proper debate is squandered.
Back to my main point. While all the vitriol and public admonishment of late is generally circling around the words and deeds of one Man, the contemptuous Trump, it's my opinion this is all in fact stemming from the ideological battle between the Judeo-Christian ethic that gave rise to enlightenment and eventually Capitalism, being firmly juxtaposed against the current push towards the idea of Marxism/Communism, however, it wasn't nearly so visible before this catalystic super ego of a character came along and made it all glaringly obvious. Make no mistake, we are at the point now where one axiom or the other is trying to take the upper hand, and the winner gets to steer the ship in the direction they choose, regardless of the perils that may lay ahead for everyone on board.
And it matters. More than anything else, it matters which ideas we are going to use as a guiding light for the future of humanity, and of course this is very solipsistic, but I believe this time in World history will change everything about the future of Humanity in such a way that if it's not recognized and given the gravity and reverence it deserves we may just be setting ourselves up for a future none of us want, and we being led towards that end by people who should know better. Maybe they even do, they being a specific handful of actors who stand to benefit and won't have to bear the consequences the rest of us do, and that's up for debate. There's a lot of reasons to believe that may just be the case, whether it's premeditated or simply easily rationalized, but I digress. This is about changing course for those of us who will be the most affected before it's too late. For me, this is about protecting my children's ability, and yours, to live a life of meaning.
I believe this 'battle'-the one that is for the most part obfuscated and misdirected by the powers that be, intentionally or otherwise, is given justification and moral authority and perpetuated by the general public and a grand conglomeration of established institutions for reasons that are part ignorance or intellectual laziness, part necessity, part blind obedience to the status quo, and part ideological belief systems-is the one base conversation that actually matters. To decode the heart of the matter we have to know civics, and understand why the clear and necessary participation of ordinary people has to come back to an understanding of the ideas that gave birth to our open and free society, or we will undoubtedly be led blindly down the road that will lead to atrophy and deterioration. Eventually this World we know and cherish for the freedoms it has granted us, and still has the potential to show us so much more if we don't take it for granted, will die. I believe what will emerge in the absence is not the Utopia some believe their actions are advocating for, but the same failing society we have seen over and over agin, with the same mental disease both emotionally and physically that has happened wherever and whenever we forget to be diligent about what makes society at the individual, societal, and abstract level work.
Stepping back a bit, I know that when I put together Marxism/Communism, some people may push back against the grouping, but in practise these are only slightly different ideas. The former being the way we perceive things, people, production and distribution of goods and necessities in society and institute policy eventually leading to the latter, which is effectively the full implementation of these ideas whole cloth to run society, and thereby dictate what people can and cannot do. You may say this already exists in society, and for most people, this is the argument, but it lacks perspective. Our political orientation doesn't just dictate the way people are allowed and expected to behave at penalty of punishment for lack of conformity. The way our resources and laws are dictated and distributed has real effects on the outcomes. The implementation of Socialism vs Capitalism is the argument. The fact that some people appear to be the benefactors of more of those resources than others is a consequence of the inequality that exists in nature, it is NOT due to one philosophy being innately more corrupt than the other. It is, in my opinion, due to Humans being corruptible. The difference between the two philosophies is that one believes the system is the problem, the other recognizes that the system can be corrupted, and it is up to individual actors to govern themselves for things to work. You could say that one set of ideas believes itself to be the parent of unruly children that need to be controlled, while the other leans more heavily on the notion that you must learn to control yourself, and only with competent citizens can society continue to improve in a way that serves that largest number of people.
I recognize that to the average person these ideas may be foreign, with the only real exposure they get coming from people on television, who in most cases do not present the facts as they are. They too are little boats in a big Sea trying to navigate, although some boats may be larger and have more bells and whistles and larger engines due to several hands being able to operate and navigate their ship. What's never discussed in the mainstream, and therefore rarely part of the conversations had by the average people on the street, is how this changes the unfolding of events for all. It's always presented as individuals being affected, because that's the way average people have learned to think about things:
How does it affect me? How does it make me feel?
They don't tend to ask:
What are the extenuating circumstances, and why should it matter?
The dominant theme that operates society currently is one based on identity politics. This is in accordance with Marxism on a fundamental level, and the number one reason why it's always been wrong.
The base idea of Marxism is one that could be most basically understood as this:
Some people have things, and this ownership gives them some sort of authority through this ownership that leads them to be de facto in charge, which makes them inherently powerful, and by extension they are corrupted.
Conversely some people do not have things, and are not in charge, but they should be considered as important as anyone else, and the way their thoughts and feelings need to be regarded is as equally valid to the have's.
Now this is obviously on some level true, but is it the fundamental truth that underlies Western society?
What’s the alternative proposition? Is that given the same amount of consideration when talking to the average person on the street?
I defy you to talk to someone who does not at least recognize that this basic concept infects everything in our World. You see it in the movies, television, Politics, and most profoundly on the “news”. This proliferation of power dynamic recognition and employment when analyzing almost any issue has had a profound effect on the state of our World, and with the advent of the internet and more specifically social media, has been used by both sides of the established political parties as a tool to push a narrative that is what I believe to be the most fundamental question of our times, and right now it needs to be either faced by people who understand the full ramifications, or it will envelope our lives completely, and we WILL ALL be subject to the consequences if we change the base level operational system of society, from what it was, individual “rights”, starting with the right to property, especially property of self, to where the “left”, aims to take us.
Even the idea of a two party system has been interpreted to mean that somehow the small guy is being left out of the conversation or excluded, but I now believe, having watched what happened with the Election of a so called Republican in Trump, the quintessential embodiment of Capitalism with all it's flaws is still holding all it's promise, and the idea that it is exclusionary is clearly a false notion given the uplifting of people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to represent the newest version of the Democratic party, and yet underneath it all the conversation about what matters has been far too watered down, and become about identity politics, revealing itself as the very argument I'm addressing now.
I promise, I can tie this altogether.
*************************************
So there’s been quite a bit of revision to the above as I pumped it out fairly quickly at the time, but I think what the post discussed, or at least my intentions were to try and point out, that orange man was the embodiment of “Capitalism”, even with all its warts.
That is what the “left” saw Trump as representative of, and was attacking, not because the man was so bad, but because all the things he was talking about, and embodying through his various successes, and pointing at the various things that were and still are accelerating in such a way that it threatens the very stability of Western society. Things like drug and crime proliferation, porous borders, and the breakdown of laws that used to be well understood to be created to uphold the social contract that Western society built, that stemmed from this very simple idea:
Justice is blind.
And that all Men are created equal.
Which I think it’s safe to say has now revealed itself after the events of the last few years to have been accurate, and was a large part of the reason so many in the media and on the “left” were collectively losing their minds.
It’s the same reason they’re losing their minds today over people like Elon Musk and his recent Twitter shenanigans, and people like Jordan Peterson who are defending the ideas of Western civilization as if they’re not so horrible that we must upend all of society and rearrange, or reimagine it, or build it back better as most of the talking heads from the WEF/UN/WHO are telling us we must, and that we only have “10 years to save the Planet”, which shockingly coincides with agenda 2030’s timeline.
This is of course not meant to be a monolithic observation, meaning something that can’t be changed due it’s sheer size, but more of a way to think about how society tends to operate as a whole. To think about the underlying themes that guide our collective actions, which are diverse and complex, but perhaps when things become too overwhelming, most of us choose the path of least resistance, and sail our ships into the calm waters so we don’t have to face adversity in the current moment, but doers that mean it will always be the path of least resistance? It will always be the “safer” route? Does the competency of the sailer matter? If they always take the calmer seas, are they necessarily prepared for the storm that may be lurking ahead?
The way we think about things, and ourselves, and possibilities, isn’t something that people normally recognize about their own behaviours, and yet it is one of the ways that most people, who are largely too busy to think that deeply about many things, allow themselves to operate for the convenience of the current moment. We pick our battles and mind our own ships. But there is a larger sea out there that we all occupy, and perhaps it’s the direction that determines the weather ahead, and the competency of the crew.
Perhaps that’s why the “left”, or this current iteration of the left, which seems to be hopelessly intertwined with unheard of establishment power dynamics as most people seem to be in a state of shock, is acting this way. The amount of projection that was heaped upon Trump was simply mind blowing to a person who wasn’t wrapped up in all the hyperbolic panic. But what if the panic was being driven, because the agenda was already on the table, and it was being managed by powerful forces who already had these goals in mind, because they so obviously did. The groundwork for agenda 2030 was laid in Rio in 1992, the place that brought us the original framework entitled “agenda 21”, and simply stating that true fact is enough to get someone labelled a “far right extremist” these days. Why? Because the establishment Ideological position is literally at the far left end of the spectrum, so much so that it is changing the very laws that underlie Western society, namely who has the right to tell someone what their “rights” are, as it was laid out in the greatest thing that the West ever birthed, which again, was not perfect, but it started out with the phrase:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..”
Here’s the link to the original post if you wish to fact check my sincerity: https://www.facebook.com/andrew.corner.5/posts/pfbid0vqYqCADzyhicJHsZuBDtKpzeM2F5NSnU17wLDCcHvNpXGdc8snqXLaBiB3U6VnMhl?notif_id=1663082404089777¬if_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif