Tag Archives: psychology

Is Real-World Activism Part of our Spiritual Journey?

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By Richard Enos

Source: Collective Evolution

We are living through a time that is shaking us down to our foundations. This ‘Pandemic’ has led to actions being taken by our governments that seem to completely disregard the rights of citizens and the rule of law. And there is mounting evidence that the severe measures being employed have not had any positive impact on our collective health and safety, and in fact are only serving an agenda to strengthen the grip of control enjoyed by the ruling class.

I don’t begrudge people who still believe that all we have to do to return to some form of normalcy is continue obeying protocols, but support for that idea is dwindling, as more people start to wonder if compliance is really the answer or if it is actually the problem itself. Questions surrounding these measures are being asked everywhere we turn: Why are small businesses being shut down, while multinational corporations that pose just as much ‘risk’ are able to open? Why are children being forced to wear masks and distance within schools when the science and statistics indicate that such measures are unnecessary and even harmful? Why are our governments trying to convince us that the Covid vaccine will solve the problem, while telling us that we will still have to wear masks after receiving it?

A Spiritual Battle

It is healthy to question things that don’t make sense to us, and we deserve answers. We have every right to defy commands we feel are unjustified–especially when our government oversteps and ignores the very laws it is supposed to uphold. And rather than heeding the growing discontent, and giving even the faintest impression that they are trying to ‘serve the public,’ the government is pushing back on our defiance like never before.

Let there be no doubt: we are in the midst of a spiritual battle.

But have courage. I believe that everything that is happening around us, as nefarious as it may be at some level, is being guided by a higher intelligence. And that higher intelligence has brought forth a situation that gives us an opportunity to begin to take charge of what is happening on the planet.

At this moment in history humanity is emerging from a state of adolescence and moving into adulthood, where we are starting to take responsibility, individually and collectively, for the condition the world is in. It is when a critical mass of people adopt this mindset that we will be able to turn this ship around, and get out from under the thumb of the ‘father figure’ of our adolescence, the current self-serving ruling class.

Confronting Our Fear

Indeed, one of the major stumbling blocks many of us face in standing up against what is going on is overcoming our fear of authority. Most of us first experienced a fear of authority at the hands of our parents, and as Edward Snowden explains in the short clip below, the ruling class has created a system that continues to stoke this fear and force our compliance from the time we enter school until we die.

As individuals, it is certainly worthwhile to ask ourselves if any trust we still have in our authority figures is justified, or if our compliance is just fear-based programming. Do we feel afraid to stand out or speak out, are we worried that we will be shamed by family, shunned by friends, unable to fit in at work or school? To truly act as free individuals we need to become still and grounded when we ask these questions, so that we can hear the quiet but reassuring voice of our higher self, reminding us of who we really want to be and what we want to do. This is the only authority you really need to follow.

Now certainly I don’t presume to tell anyone what ‘right action’ is for them. In fact it is no longer a time for you to blindly follow anyone, as I illustrated in my documentary ‘The Leaderless Movement.’ So we shouldn’t be guilted or shamed into defiance any more than we should be guilted or shamed into compliance. It’s time for each of us to find our center. From there, you do whatever feels right to you. That might very well mean doing nothing at the moment. But if you happen to notice, when you get into a state of stillness, that your inner voice has been gently coaxing you to stand up for your principles and be active in the world, then you owe it to yourself (and the rest of humanity, I might add) to overcome whatever fear you might have and follow through.

What is Real-World Activism?

When we think of real-world activism the first thing that often comes to mind is our right to assemble and protest. Some may dismiss this out of hand because it evokes unpleasant images of fighting and violence. But that is not an inherent quality of standing up for our personal rights and freedoms. The vast majority of gatherings and demonstrations in Canada and around the world regarding pandemic measures have been peaceful, and that’s the only way they are going to be effective. Certainly the time for pitchforks and streetside guillotines has long passed us by. If we decide that our only objective is to tear down the ruling class and subject them to bloody retribution then we are just perpetuating the division that the ruling class has used this whole time to keep their small elite group running the show.

Real-world activism does not actually require you to stand against anything. Of course many of us are angry about what we see going on in the world and we don’t like it. And that is a healthy thing. Our anger awakens us out of complacency and into action. But once we are activated, it’s important to move on to the next emotional stage, which is a firm resolve to stand for something, like the basic principles of personal freedom and human dignity that we all share. This opens us up to our connection with each other and fuels our desire to improve not only our own lives but those of our fellow human beings as well. This eventually leads us to looking at the way the entire planet is being governed and wondering why we are continuing to give our consent to it.

And of course real-world activism is not limited to participating in demonstrations and protests. It could simply be the way we conduct ourselves in our daily lives when we deal with those in some position of authority. Usually it is something that affects us personally that spark us to action. In my case, I remember the day clearly, when I read that my grade 1 son would be required to wear a mask in school. That is the day I jumped out of my chair and put the time and effort into researching the matter and then contacting those involved. This eventually led to a string of frustrating and uncomfortable conversations with people of authority from a principal to a director of education, documented in my article ‘How I Obtained a Conscientious Exemption From Mask-wearing at School for my Child.’ Early on, I had a sense that the whole exercise was not only done for my son, as I had decided after losing trust in the system that I was not willing put him through a single day at school; I also felt I wanted to learn how to stand up for my rights so that I could help others who were in the same situation.

Effective activism always has a spiritual component. It requires us to look at ourselves in the mirror and do the inner work that builds self-responsibility and changes the way we show up in the world. It requires us to look at the world with more discernment and a devotion to truth. We have long been divided by deception, but the singularity of truth unites us, and the sharing of truth empowers us and sets us free.

The Takeaway

What is unprecedented about the events that we are living through right now is that we are all personally affected one way or another. Nobody has been left untouched, and that makes it more difficult for people to continue sitting this one out. We are all being called to some form of engagement, and it’s likely that things in the world will keep getting worse until enough of us are involved. And this is why I believe that higher intelligence is orchestrating this. For when we reach a critical mass and the behemoth that I call the ruling class finally falls, we will have learned how to take responsibility for the condition of the world, we will be more educated in the deceptive ways of power, and we will have begun to connect to each other and unite at a deep level. This will put us in a position where we will already have the tools to start creating a world that serves us all.

Defeating The Global Elite’s Coup D’état: The Great Reset

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Worldwide, international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), governments and the corporate media, acting as agents of the global elite, continue their efforts to preoccupy the human population with measures supposedly being taken to address the non-existent virus labelled SARS-CoV-2.

For just two of the most recent of the ever-lengthening list of documents and videos demonstrating non-existence of the virus, see ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’ and ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’.

Unfortunately, this lie is succeeding in distracting the vast bulk of the human population from the ongoing elite coup to take complete control – politically, economically, socially, spiritually and even physically – of the human population under the guise of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’. See ‘The Great Reset’ and ‘Now is the time for a “great reset”’.

Hence, the elite coup – which includes implementation of the technological measures necessary to facilitate the fourth industrial revolution as well as the agenda of the transhumanists – now rapidly gathers pace, at enormous cost to the human population and our prospects for survival.

In brief, this coup has many facets notably including the deployment of 5G to enable comprehensive surveillance, digital ID (possibly implanted in your brain: see ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” Is Being Re-Engineered by the Elite’s Coup’) linked to your bank account and health records, a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life, the digitization of money, robotization of the workforce and the military as well as, in the words of Dr Joseph Mercola, the complete transformation ‘of government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing – even how we interact with our fellow human beings. The globalist technocracy is using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, override opposition, accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the public against our will.’ See ‘Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?’

But for a more detailed summary of the essential details of this coup, see ‘Corrupt Science and Elite Power: Your Techno-Slavery is Now Imminent’. For a summary of the enormous and increasing costs, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’. And for the evidence of the coup’s adverse impact on human survival prospects, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

However, while the bulk of the human population remains unaware of what is being planned for us, or naively believes the sanitised version of events presented by elite agents – such as the World Health Organization, governments, official medical spokespeople and the corporate media – enough people are concerned about the serious threats to humanity’s future or, at least, about the very damaging impacts of the lockdowns and other measures such as the ‘gene-altering injectables’ being marketed as ‘vaccinations’, that resistance to this elite coup is also gathering pace. And while this is an encouraging sign, the resistance being conducted so far falls well short of what is necessary given the imminence, multifaceted nature and enormity of the threats.

As a result, Homo sapiens rushes headlong to the cliff-edges of both tyranny and extinction.

So who is resisting, how are they doing so and what else must be done to defeat this coup?

The Resistance So Far: Individual Scholars and Groups

Of course a substantial number of individuals and groups have made the effort to investigate and analyse what is happening ‘beneath the surface’ of this coup and these efforts have resulted in a multitude of documents and videos such as these, for example:

This interview of Catherine Austin Fitts for the film ‘Planet Lockdown’.

This video ‘“The New Normal” New documentary exploring the origin and purpose behind the covid narrative’.

This latest video by Professor Michel Chossudovsky: ‘The 2021 Worldwide Corona Crisis’. Or you can read his article ‘The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”’.

And this article by Dr Joseph Mercola which explains the network of organizations centrally involved in ‘The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth’.

The Resistance So Far: Health Professionals

Many health professionals and others have been consistently exposing the lies that underpin the official narrative being promulgated by the (badly misnamed) World Health Organization, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, national governments and the corporate media. One outcome of this effort to educate people was the formation of the World Freedom Alliance, which you can join.

Another initiative, undertaken by the 1,500 members of United Health Professionals, was to issue an initial ALERT on 26 August 2020, titled ‘STOP to: terror, madness, manipulation, dictatorship, lies and the biggest health scam of the 21th century’. They urged an immediate halt ‘to all crazy and disproportionate measures that have been taken since the beginning to fight SARS-CoV-2 (lockdown, blocking the economy and education, social distancing, wearing of masks for all, etc.) because they are totally unjustified, are not based on any scientific evidence and violate the basic principles of evidence-based medicine.’ Subsequent alerts of a similar nature have followed.

Other initiatives, among many, have included this recent video by 33 doctors warning against getting the experimental vaccines. Watch ‘33 doctors around the world issue dire warning, to not get the covid vaccine’.

Leo Hohmann simply reminds us that Dr. Tal Zaks, the chief medical officer at Moderna, admitted in 2017 that ‘We are actually hacking the software of life’ thus ‘totally debunking the establishment media’s lie that mRNA vaccines don’t alter your genetic code’ when that, of course, is the actual purpose of messenger RNA vaccines. See ‘Moderna’s top scientist: “We are actually hacking the software of life”’.

Other authors make a point of highlighting the high death rate among those vaccinated, even on official sites which clearly understate the extent of the problem. See, for example, ‘460 Dead 243,612 Reported Injuries from COVID19 Vaccines Reported in the U.K.’ and ‘COVID Vaccine Injury Reports Grow in Number, But Trends Remain Consistent’.

An earlier report noted that the US was forced to change official guidelines in response to the enormous vaccine injury rate. See ‘CDC Issues New Guidelines, Launches Probe After 1000s Negatively-Affected Following COVID-19 Vaccination’.

And Denmark, Iceland and Norway have simply halted administration of the vaccine ‘after reports of blood clots among some people who had received the inoculation’. See ‘COVID: Several European countries halt use of AstraZeneca vaccine’.

If the above doesn’t have you questioning the elite-driven narrative, check out this website with its multitude of videos challenging elite dogma in relation to the ‘virus’: ‘Questioning Covid’.

Of course, you will find very little of the above in the corporate media, with its huge advertising revenue from the major pharmaceutical corporations giving them no incentive to risk losing this income by telling the truth.

The Resistance So Far: Legal

Another series of initiatives is the ongoing efforts to challenge the legal basis of the lockdowns and other official policies supposedly in response to the virus. Watch, for example, Dr. Reiner Fuellmich outline the basis of one legal challenge in ‘“Crimes Against Humanity”: The German Corona Investigation. “The PCR Pandemic”’ and see these two documents submitted to governments in Australia by the Concerned Lawyers Network: ‘Re: Notice of Liability & Potential Claims, 6 November 2020’ and ‘Re: Notice of Liability & Potential Claims, 11 December 2020’.

One challenge has been posed by scholars and a judge drawing attention to the ways in which forced mask-wearing and forced vaccines violate The Nuremberg Code, 1947. See, for example, Judge Anna Von Reitz’s ‘A Plague of Liars’ and Makia Freeman’s ‘Do Mandatory Masks and Vaccines Break the 10 Points of the Nuremberg Code?’

Two of the legal challenges under way in the United States are those being conducted by New Mexico Attorney Ana Garner against declaration of the public health emergency and mandatory administration of the unapproved experimental injectables. Watch ‘It’s Here: First Court Case Against Mandatory Vaccination – Attorney Interview’.

Of course, there are other legal challenges taking place in various countries but, again, you won’t hear much about them in the corporate media.

The Resistance So Far: Police and Military

Police and military personnel around the world have also taken a stand in defence of human freedoms won long ago but now under siege once again.

For example, police in Spain formed Policías Por La Libertad (‘Police for Freedom’) and this is now spreading around the world, including to Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States, for example.

The mission of this international movement is to re-humanise our societies, bringing back trust and unity between the security forces and the people. The peaceful marches, events, campaigns and content created by Police For Freedom aim to educate people about their human rights, civil liberties, constitutional rights as well as the ethical code of conduct for the police and security forces.

We are colleagues from different occupations who want to continue to carry out our work based on our personal and professional ethics, without being influenced by fears, deceptive narratives, immoral rules or differences of opinion.

The Association of French Reserve Army Officers issued their extensive and damning report ‘Investigative Report on the Covid-19 Pandemic and its Relationship to SARS-CoV-2 and other Factors’ in May 2020. Its conclusion noted that ‘The management of the health “crisis” seems to be a pretext for a totalitarian global takeover’ and includes the ‘intention to impose a global cryptocurrency, a vaccine with nano-chips and a subcutaneous electronic chip’ with ‘5G installations, both terrestrial and aerial (Elon Musk’s satellites in low-Earth orbit)… clearly part of this “total war” project.’

Of course, plenty of military personnel are simply resisting vaccination personally, given the long history of abuse of service personnel with experimental ‘vaccinations’. At one US base, ‘as little as 30 percent of personnel are accepting the vaccine’. See ‘A THIRD of all military personnel are refusing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine with alarmed commanders aiming to make the shot mandatory “as soon as possible”’.

The Resistance So Far: ‘Ordinary’ People

Resistance to one or other features of the coup by individuals, communities, businesses and religious organizations, despite being largely ignored or denigrated by the corporate media, has been considerable with plenty of demonstrations, street theatre and other nonviolent actions documented all over the world. For just one article outlining some of the resistance in Europe last year, see this summary: ‘Anti-Lockdown Protests All Across Europe’.

But perusal of the progressive media will quickly reveal some of the many initiatives undertaken by activists and others who have no trouble ‘seeing through’ the fog of lies and misinformation with which certain international agencies, governments, tame medical personnel and the corporate media are deluging us. For example, you can watch ‘10,000 Protesters In Vienna March Against Coronavirus Restrictions’.

More recently, this resistance has gathered pace considerably, including among the small business community. For example, in mid-January restaurant-owners in Italy, other parts of Europe, Mexico and elsewhere opened their doors in defiance of lockdown measures reminding people that collective civil disobedience of any magnitude is extraordinarily difficult to stop. See ‘“I Am Open”: 50,000 Italian Restaurant Owners Plan to Ignore Lockdown’.

And, more broadly, hundreds of Polish businesses reopened in January as well. See ‘Lockdown Rebellion: Highlanders in Poland’s “Winter Capital” to Reopen Hundreds of Businesses’. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/01/14/lockdown-rebellion-highlanders-polands-winter-capital-reopen-hundreds-businesses/

Such is the resistance taking place across Europe, that some prominent commentators have been led to ask ‘Is a Revolutionary Movement Developing in Europe? Rejecting the Lockdown and the Mask’.

Are you reading about any of this in the corporate media?

What Can We Do to Halt ‘The Great Reset’ and Defend Ourselves against the Elite Coup?

Understanding the many elements of what is taking place and, therefore, what is necessary to address it effectively, is the first step to responding powerfully.

Important points in this understanding include two I have made above: The global elite is driving what is happening and, using the ‘virus’ (for which there is no documented scientific proof in existence) as a ‘cover story’, is conducting a coup to take complete control of our lives.

But there is a third, and deeper, point that it is vital to understand: This coup has only proceeded this far because existing parenting, educational and religious practices indoctrinate and terrorize children into a lifetime of submissive obedience. Hence, the bulk of the human population is too (unconsciously) frightened to even question the elite-driven narrative, let alone seek out and analyze the evidence for themselves and then act powerfully in response. For detailed explanations, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So if we are to succeed in defeating this elite coup, we must be strategically thoughtful in how we approach it.

This is why it is important to point out that entreaties to key international organizations and governments, as well as legal challenges, must ultimately fail. The global elite operates without official constraint, well beyond the ‘rule of law’ and has long controlled all key international organizations as well as governments and legal systems (and the medical and pharmaceutical industries, for that matter) so that they serve elite interests. Therefore, initiatives directed at these elite agents will inevitably come to nought, as history has repeatedly demonstrated. See, for example, ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

So while I acknowledge the sincerity and genuine effort being put into such activities as lobbying politicians and legal challenges, for example, unless sufficient people are willing to take action that fundamentally undermines the power that enables the global elite to implement its agenda, humanity faces a dark future. It is for this reason that, once again, I outline below the measures that are necessary for us to succeed.

Hence, if you would like to be part of the campaign to defeat the elite coup, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve this outcome, and other aspects of this campaign, starting here: Coup Strategic Aims.

Anita McKone has presented a simpler version, with explanations and examples of actions you can take, here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’. Her song, of the same title, can be heard here: ‘We are Human, We are Free’.

If you wish to focus on resisting the deployment of 5G – the central pillar that will enable so many of the technological measures of the coup to be implemented while causing enormous other harm in the process – scroll down ‘Campaign Strategic Aims’.

To undertake action that is strategically-focused, it will be useful if more people understand the principles and practice of nonviolent action, which can be taught by some nonviolence educators around the world. See, for example, ‘Nonviolent Action/Strategy Workshops in Australia’.

If you wish to campaign to avert one or more of the four most immediate paths to human extinction, you can see a list of strategic goals for doing so here: Campaign Strategic Aims.

If you wish to nurture children to be better equipped to understand what is happening and far more able to critique it and act powerfully, see ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you wish to reduce your vulnerability to elite control, consider joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

  1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
  2. I will not travel by plane
  3. I will not travel by car
  4. I will not eat meat and fish
  5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
  7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
  8. I will not buy rainforest timber
  9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
  12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Under cover of a non-existent virus and pandemic, the global elite is now implementing a coup that has been carefully planned and prepared over several decades: It is the logical culmination of a millennia-long process of consolidation and expansion of elite control, at the expense of humanity and the biosphere. I have briefly outlined this history in ‘Why Activists Fail’.

If you question the sanity of the global elite for doing this, you are right to do so. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

The fundamental aim of this elite coup, readily discernible by reading their documentation over the past 50 years, is to substantially reduce the human population and keep those still alive, subject to permanent surveillance as well as mind and behavioural control, as ‘techno-slaves’.

If you wish to resist this fate for humanity, you are welcome to join us.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Post-Pandemic Landscapes: Behavior Modification as the New Consensus Reality

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

The ‘Covid Event’ gave the unreal world its great coup over the place of the real. This perception intervention gave the final stimulus necessary to tip the twenty-first century into an awaiting technologically manipulated reality. A new landscape is emerging where, for the first time, the human mind is finding itself out-of-place within its own territory. What are now being termed the emerging ‘post-pandemic’ landscapes are likely to be hazardous territory for our mental, emotional, and physical states. The human condition is under modification.

New forms of power are on the rise, embedded within structures of health security, that are re-imagining our social lives, living and workspaces, and our physical and digital movements. Until now, the spider’s web of social control mainly operated below the waterline in a space where an almost intangible world existed beyond governance or accountability.  Now the Kraken awakes and is unashamedly coming to the surface. The beast of behavior modification is spreading its tentacles through our most established social and cultural institutions without shame – all in the name of health security (the new nom de plume of social management).  These institutions include the media, city life, the office, and – perhaps most of all – the online-digital world. The modification of these spaces is set to further desensitize, anesthetize, and dehumanize us. It is as if the collective human mind is being groomed and prepared for a new consensus reality of ‘normalized dissonance.’

The post-pandemic landscape is merging physical pandemics with its own viral digital epidemics that are infecting the human psyche. The Italian philosopher Franco Berardi has noted that our ‘electronic mediascape’ is putting ‘the sensitive organism in a state of permanent electrocution.’[1] The social body is being deliberately targeted by strategies that cause anxiety, fragmentation, exhaustion, confusion, polarization, and fear. We can see this through national and local lockdowns; social distancing; anti-social interaction; social ostracization; loss of economic independence, and more. In early July, Prof Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society (the UK’s national academy of science) stated publicly that face masks should be worn in all public spaces (as they already are in many places in Europe and worldwide). Not wearing a face covering, he added, ‘should be regarded as “anti-social” in the same way as drink driving or failing to wear a seatbelt.’[2] This is nothing short of encouraging a regime of public shaming. The human condition is being subjected to a new rhythm of the modern power-machine that is breaking down our social alliances.

The established conditions that created a sense of social reality are being dissolved and replaced with processes aimed at managing the masses through forms of separation and quantification. That is, the techniques necessary to begin the formation of a technologized humanity. These processes seek to reduce human life, and its environment, to something measurable and predicable – a life ordained by algorithms. These imposed changes are creating a disequilibrium in the human psyche – a fragmentation of the human self. Furthermore, they are seeking to break down our trusted social relations.

There is something insidious creeping up into the global collective that is attempting to create a world of sleepwalkers, plied with fear-pills, updated with vaccines, programmed with nonsense, and dismissive of alternative thinking. As a conscious, biological organism we are being prepared to mimic the automation of the machine. Humanity is mentally sleeping and slipping into the void where a new form of the ‘social collective’ awaits us.

Techniques are being devised and employed to produce normalized and standardized behavior in order to create a socially managed populace. The collective human mind is being adapted and adopted into an infrastructure of control that operates largely through modes of digital connectivity. I refer to this rising mechanism of social engineering as the modern power-machine (MPM) that exerts control over human expression and autonomy of behavior. To enact this, a consortium of institutions have been selected to structure contemporary societies toward specific functions that give the promise of security and human well-being whilst developing increased social dependency. This is the post-pandemic landscape now rapidly arising and to which all future generations shall be born into.

Childhood’s End

Luciano Floridi, a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, believes that human civilization is shifting into a phase of ‘hyperhistory.’ A hyperhistorical society that is dependent upon integrative technologies, says Floridi, could also become human-independent – that is, not needing us. Life on this planet is being developed into an infrastructure that favors machinic intelligence and artificial organisms, thus de-territorializing the human experience. Our urban environments may soon be more conducive to artificial life than biological ones. No one is yet ready for the mutation at hand. We are being programmed to take on a new position in the world that will erode the possibility of human transcendence; a world where the ‘flesh robot’ will eventually become the reality consensus.

We are witnessing an unprecedented migration of humanity from its physical space to the digital-sphere – an environment of surveillance and technocratic social management. The incoming generations will recognize no fundamental difference between the digital-sphere and the physical world as this mergence will form the reality they are born into. To the new generations, the digital-physical-sphere will be their only reality for they will have been born without the offline-online distinction. In the words of Luciano Floridi, they were born onlife. This is now their reality, and it is ‘onlife.’ The world that many of us recognized as being human will never be the same again. With the ‘onlife’ mode, a new era of history begins. Childhood comes to an end when they stop being a child and become a user. It is then that they inhabit whole new realities – realities they may believe to be ‘user-generated’ when in fact the reverse is more the case.

Connectivity and access will be part of the regime of the new power-machine. And the rights of access are going to be a matter of consensus health security (as addressed in New Dawn 180/181).  To be a part of the power-machine will mean opting-in to its sanctioned, and on-surveillance, connections. Soon, opting out will be made an almost impossible alternative. Connecting into the power-machine will become the new cartography of the ‘human reality.’ Living ‘manually’ will become one of the last few remaining sites of resistance as human life becomes regulated-by-automation.

The City as Machine Cradle

Modern living, especially within dense urban metropolises, as well as within poverty-stricken neighborhoods, severely affects the human psychological condition, as well as affecting the nervous system. Journalist Naomi Klein has noted how a form of ‘Pandemic Shock Doctrine’ is emerging where city metropolises are forming suspicious partnerships with large tech conglomerates to re-design city living. Klein has stated that the quarantine lockdowns were not so much to save lives ‘but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.’[3] One tech CEO that Klein interviewed commented that: ‘There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology…Humans are biohazards, machines are not.’[4] Several local city governments are in negotiations with large private tech companies to create a ‘seamless integration’ between city government, education, health, and policing operations. Further, the individual home will become a smart-enclosed hub for the urban dweller. All this, and more, as a ‘frontline pandemic response.’

Online learning, the home office, telehealth, and online commerce are all now a part of an emerging investment landscape to convert existing physical-digital infrastructures to cloud-based ones that will be incorporated into the arriving fully-completed 5G network. All in the name of providing citizens with a securitized ‘virus free’ landscape. Erich Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google/Alphabet and now chair of the Defense Innovation Board that advises the Department of Defense on military A.I., announced publicly with a straight face:

‘The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon.’[5]

Schmidt has now been hired to head up the task force commissioned to reimagine New York’s post-Covid reality. And he won’t be alone. High-tech is now jumping to get into partnerships with local governments in order to bring a safer, more ‘securitized’ landscape into civil society – all for ‘our’ benefit.

The business office landscape is also under re-organization to further regulate and isolate the social interactions of working colleagues. It can be said that a new form of business behavior modification is in the works. In a recent business analysis published in Bloomberg by Jeff Green and Michelle F. Davis, they suggested that:

The pre-Covid workplace, with its shared desks and common areas designed for “creative collisions,” is getting a makeover for the social distancing era. So far, what employers have come up with is a mash-up of airport security style entrance protocols and surveillance combined with precautions already seen at grocery stores, like sneeze guards and partitions.[6]

The authors of the report also foresee that the newly returned office worker will likely be encased in a makeshift cubicle made of plexiglass sheets. A new mode of anti-interaction is clearly in the works.

Hundreds of major companies, at least, are planning what they call ‘employee re-orientation programs’ and have already hired ‘thermal scanners’ to monitor employees for fevers, according to the article’s sources. The authors also noted that there has been a spike in job postings for ‘tracers,’ who would track down the contacts of anyone who tests positive for the covid-19 virus. In short, companies are now looking for a range of solutions to keep people away from one another throughout the working day. IBM, for example, is looking into using existing sensors or finding new technology to detect when people are too close together or ‘trending’ in that direction. Another report from the UK[7] noted how companies were looking into developing their own specialist employee smartphone apps that would operate elevators hands-free. The language employers are using includes creating ‘safe bubbles’ around employees and monitoring so that these ‘safe bubbles’ do not overlap. How would they manage such monitoring?

Various companies, the UK report goes on to say, are looking to teach artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the video cameras that are monitoring the employees. Dr Mahesh Saptharishi, Motorola Solutions’ chief technology officer (based in Boston) explained that AI algorithms can offer feedback about ‘pinch points’ where people are too close together. Instead of employers (read ‘humans’) having to spend time (read ‘waste time’) watching the actual video, they can ‘ask’ the AI how well social distancing is being observed overall, and where problem points are.[8] So that’s the issue solved then. We’ll just rely on AI algorithms to tell us how to ‘social distance’ in our non-interacting bubbles and we can modify our behavior accordingly. Job done!

What this also signifies is that in order to be able to modify our behavior, machine intelligence will need to gather ever greater datasets about us. That is, ‘smart cities’ and ‘secure offices’ equals increased surveillance which equals expanded datasets. The ‘Black Iron Prison’ that Philip K. Dick saw coming is now hitting us squarely in the form of surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance Capitalism

Professor Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the widely acclaimed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has said that digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. With the rapid rise of data collection for commercial gain, Zuboff says that: ‘The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information.’[9] People are reduced to being less than products because they are rendered into being a mere ‘input’ for the creation of the real product which is the data. Predictions about peoples’ futures are sold to the highest bidder so that these futures can be profited from or altered to favor better commercial gains. Zuboff considers surveillance capitalism to be, at its core, parasitic and self-referential – a parasite that feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.

Human experience is considered free to be taken as raw material and it is this that becomes the product of value. From this material, organizations decide to intervene in our lives to shape and modify human behavior in order to favor the outcomes that are most desirable for commercial gains. Behavioral modification is now in the hands of private capital – and undertaken with the minimal amount of external oversight. At its most basic, humans have been reduced to ‘batteries’ that produce datasets for algorithms and machine learning to process. What is most worrying is that, by and large, the general populations are ignorant of what is going on quite literally beneath their fingertips. As Zuboff notes, people unknowingly end up funding their own forms of domination.

Through its operations of technocratic ‘normalization’ and the deliberate breaking up of social alliances, the power-machine age is manufacturing a new standardization of the human body and mind. With the encroachment of socially managed interventions, people are made vulnerable to the increased destabilizing of the human self. The human sense of ‘self’ and identity has become a fragile thing; it is analyzed, scrutinized, and criticized through social media; it is modified through surveillance capitalism; and it is increasingly being rendered by AI facial recognition systems such as Clearview. As these post-pandemic landscapes become increasingly rolled out in more social environments, we are likely to see, as a consequence, an ever-greater fragmentation of the human self.

The Fragmented Self

It is no exaggeration to say that humanity is entering a period of existential crisis that has perhaps not been last witnessed since the Middle Ages. Only this time, we don’t have our religious institutions to offer us salvation. The responsibility is upon our shoulders of finding salvation through becoming fully human in the face of dehumanizing forces. At present, we are being bombarded with such contradictory information that many people are unable to find coherence or to make a whole picture out of the shards. That is, the human mind is finding it increasingly difficult to see the patterns and to connect the dots. Many people will also now be experiencing forms of cognitive dissonance. One definition of this state is: ‘Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.’[10]

The result of this is that the mind desperately wishes to reduce this discomfort and restore balance by seeking – or being provided with – a coherent picture, or closure. The danger here is that this ‘closure’ or ‘coherent picture’ may be provided by an external source, institution, or body (a structure of orthodox ‘authority’) and many people will jump onto it as a way of gaining closure, and thus comfort. When, in truth, we need to find this coherence and closure within ourselves, through our own resources. With the increasing breakdown of social relations and an interactive human environment, people’s consciousness is being further pushed into compartmentalization where events are seen as random rather than interrelated and meaningful. This lack of meaningfulness will be compensated for by the rise of virtual attractions as the digital-sphere increasingly becomes the ‘safe and secure’ home that people turn to. Critical thought, perceptive observation, and intuitive knowing will be under the onslaught of nullifying behavior modification.

As we are now seeing in the public space, self-identity (race, sexuality, etc) is becoming a target of division, further creating doubt, anxiety, and social polarization. Psychologically, people are being pushed to acquiesce, submit, and accept the measures that are being implemented as the ‘new normal’ post-pandemic landscapes. And the more we submit, the more we become vulnerable to further submission and disempowerment. Bureaucratic regimes and administrative structures will creep further into our living, work, and leisure lives until a form of what French philosopher Michel Foucault calls disciplinary power will dominate over the human condition. New forms of social discipline and collective obedience are fostering an artificial and engineered state of perception. We are right in the middle of a time of intense ‘enforced socialization,’ or what Edward Snowden recently referred to as an ‘architecture of oppression.’ For some, the only response to this overwhelming ‘architecture of oppression’ will be to find their comfort zones – such as sitting in their chairs at home with their ‘surrogates’ roaming the digital-physical landscape on their part.[11] Or, as the 2008 computer-animated sci-fi film Wall-E depicted, growing lazy and obese while robots cater to all their needs, while indulging in infantile entertainments. We can only hope this shall never be the case.

Humanity has entered unprecedented times. Such times demand an unprecedented response. It appears that we are now being asked to ‘step up’ to accept our responsibility for our human becoming, and so to become fully human. By doing nothing, we are allowing our behavior to be modified and our self-identities to be splintered. In these post-pandemic landscapes, the choices we make will be choices that, like never before, determine our future as a human species. I suggest it is time now for declaring our unity as an empowered fully human species – by not accepting the push of the power-machine into distanced and disempowered individuals.

What “Normal” Are We Returning To? The Depression Nobody Dares Acknowledge

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Perhaps we need an honest national dialog about declining expectations, rising inequality, social depression and the failure of the status quo.

Even as the chirpy happy-talk of a return to normal floods the airwaves, what nobody dares acknowledge is that “normal” for a rising number of Americans is the social depression of downward mobility and social defeat.

Downward mobility is not a new trend–it’s simply accelerating. As this RAND Corporation report documents, ( Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018) $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

Time magazine’s article on the report is remarkably direct: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% — And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure.

“The $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn’t inevitable; it was a choice–a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people.”

I’ve been digging into downward mobility and social depression for years: Are You Really Middle Class?

The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the top 5%–if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as a baseline.

The downward mobility isn’t just financial–it’s a decline in political power, control of one’s work and ownership of income-producing assets. This article reminds us of what the middle class once represented: What Middle Class? How bourgeois America is getting recast as a proletariat.

This reappraisal of the American Dream is also triggering a reappraisal of the middle class in the decades of widespread prosperity: The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?

Downward mobility excels in creating and distributing what I term social defeat: In my lexicon, social defeat is the spectrum of anxiety, insecurity, chronic stress, fear and powerlessness that accompanies declining financial security and social status.

Downward mobility and social defeat lead to social depression. Here are the conditions that characterize social depression:

1. High expectations of endlessly rising prosperity instilled as a birthright no longer align with economy reality.

2. Part-time and unemployed people are marginalized, not just financially but socially.

3. Widening income/wealth disparity as those in the top 10% pull away from the bottom 90%.

4. A systemic decline in social/economic mobility as it becomes increasingly difficult to move from dependence on the state or one’s parents to financial independence.

5. A widening disconnect between higher education and employment: a college/university degree no longer guarantees a stable, good-paying job.

6. A failure in the Status Quo institutions and mainstream media to recognize social depression as a reality.

7. A systemic failure of imagination within state and private-sector institutions on how to address social depression issues.

8. The abandonment of middle class aspirations: young people no longer aspire to (or cannot afford) consumerist status symbols such as luxury autos or conventional homeownership.

9. A generational abandonment of marriage, families and independent households as these are no longer affordable to those with part-time or unstable employment.

10. A loss of hope in the young generations as a result of the above conditions.

The rising tide of collective anger arising from social depression is visible in many places: road rage, violent street clashes between groups seething for a fight, the destruction of friendships for holding “incorrect” ideological views, and so on.

A coarsening of the entire social order is increasingly visible: The Age of Rudeness.

Depressive thoughts (and the emotions they generate) tend to be self-reinforcing, and this is why it’s so difficult to break out of depression once in its grip.

One part of the healing process is to expose the sources of anger that we are repressing. As psychiatrist Karen Horney explained in her 1950 masterwork, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization, anger at ourselves sometimes arises from our failure to live up to the many “shoulds” we’ve internalized, and the idealized track we’ve laid out for ourselves and our lives.

The article The American Dream Is Killing Us does a good job of explaining how our failure to obtain the expected rewards of “doing all the right things” (getting a college degree, working hard, etc.) breeds resentment and despair.

Since we did the “right things,” the system “should” deliver the financial rewards and security we expected. This systemic failure to deliver the promised rewards is eroding the social contract and social cohesion. Fewer and fewer people have a stake in the system.

We are increasingly angry at the system, but we reserve some anger for ourselves, because the mass-media trumpets how well the economy is doing and how some people are doing extremely well. Naturally, we wonder, why them and not us? The failure is thus internalized.

One response to this sense that the system no longer works as advertised is to seek the relative comfort of echo chambers–places we can go to hear confirmation that this systemic stagnation is the opposing ideological camp’s fault.

Part of the American Exceptionalism we hear so much about is a can-do optimism: set your mind to it and everything is possible.

The failure to prosper as anticipated is generating a range of negative emotions that are “un-American”: complaining that you didn’t get a high-paying secure job despite having a college degree (or advanced degree) sounds like sour-grapes: the message is you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t get the right diploma, etc.

It can’t be the system that’s failed, right? I discuss this in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform: the top 10% who are benefiting mightily dominate politics and the media, and their assumption is: the system is working great for me, so it must be working great for everyone. This implicit narrative carries an implicit accusation that any failure is the fault of the individual, not the system.

The inability to express our despair and anger generates depression. Some people will redouble their efforts, others will seek to lay the blame on “the other” (some external group) and others will give up. What few people will do is look at the sources of systemic injustice and inequality.

Perhaps we need an honest national dialog about declining expectations, rising inequality and the failure of the status quo that avoids polarization and the internalization trap (i.e. it’s your own fault you’re not well-off).

We need to value honesty above fake happy-talk. Once we can speak honestly, there will be a foundation for optimism.

How Conspiracy Theorizing May Soon Get You Labelled a ‘Domestic Terrorist’

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Cass Sunstein

By Matthew Ehret

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

If you are starting to feel like forces controlling the governments of the west are out to get you, then it is likely that you are either a paranoid nut job, or a stubborn realist.

Either way, it means that you have some major problems on your hands.

If you don’t happen to find yourself among the tinfoil hat-wearing strata of conspiracy theorists waiting in a bunker for aliens to either strike down or save society from the shape shifting lizard people, but are rather contemplating how, in the 1960s, a shadow government took control of society over the dead bodies of many assassinated patriots, then certain conclusions tend to arise.

Three Elementary Realizations for Thinking People

The first conclusion you would likely arrive at is that the United States government was just put through the first coup in over 58 years (yes, what happened in 1963 was a coup). Although it is becoming a bit prohibitive to speak such words aloud in polite society, Nancy Pelosi’s official biographer Molly Ball, recently penned a scandalous Time Magazine article entitled ‘The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Elections’ which admitted to this conspiracy saying:

“Even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream- a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” (Lest you think that this was a subversion of democracy, Ball informs us that “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”)

Another conclusion you might come to is that many of the political figures whom you believed were serving those who elected them into office, actually serve the interests of a clique of technocrats and billionaires lusting over the deconstruction of western civilization under something called “a Great Reset”. Where this was brushed off as an unfounded conspiracy theory not long ago, even Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister (and neo-Nazi supporting Rhodes Scholar) Chrystia Freeland decided to become a Trustee of the World Economic Forum just weeks ago. In this role, Freeland joins fellow Oxford technocrat Mark Carney in their mutual endeavor to be a part of the new movement to decarbonize civilization and make feudalism cool again.

Lastly, you might notice that your having arrived at these conclusions is itself increasingly becoming a form of thought-crime punishable in a variety of distasteful ways elaborated by a series of unprecedented new emergency regulations that propose extending the definition of “terrorism”. Those implicated under the new definition will be those broad swaths of citizens of western nations who don’t agree with the operating beliefs of the ruling oligarchy.

Already a 60 day review of the U.S. military is underway to purge the armed forces of all such “thought criminals” while McCarthyite legislation has been drafted to cleanse all government jobs of “conspiracy theorists”.

Another startling announcement from the National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin that domestic terrorists include: “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority [and] perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”

While not yet fully codified into law (though it will be if not nipped in the bud soon), you can be sure that things are certainly moving fast as, before our very eyes, the right to free speech is being torn to shreds by means of censorship across social media and the internet, cancelling all opinions deemed unacceptable to the ruling class.

The Conspiracy to Subvert Conspiracy Theorizing

This should not come as a surprise, as Biden’s new addition to the Department of Homeland Security is a bizarre figure named Cass Sunstein who famously described exactly what this was going to look like in his infamous 2008 report ‘Conspiracy Theories’ (co-authored with Harvard Law School’s Adrien Vermeule). In this under-appreciated study, the duo foresaw the greatest threat to the ruling elite took the form of “conspiracy theorizing” within the American population using as examples of this delusion: the idea that the government had anything to do with the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, or the planning and execution of 9-11.

Just to be clear, conspiracy literally means ‘two or more people acting together in accord with an agreed upon idea and intention’.

The fact that Vermeule has made a legal career arguing that laws should be interpreted not by the “intentions” of lawgivers, but rather according to cost-benefit analysis gives us a useful insight into the deranged mind of a technocrat and the delusional reasoning that denies the very thing which has shaped literally ALL of human history.

In their “scholarly” essay, the authors wrote “the existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be.” After establishing his case for the threat of conspiracies, Sunstein says that “the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups”.

Not one to simply draw criticisms, the pro-active Sunstein laid out five possible strategies which the social engineers managing the population could deploy to defuse this growing threat saying:

“(1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counter speech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counter speech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help”.

(I’ll let you think about which of these prescriptions were put into action over the ensuing 12 years.)

Cass Sunstein was particularly sensitive to this danger largely because: 1) he was a part of a very ugly conspiracy himself and 2) he is a world-renowned behaviorist.

The Problem of Reality for Behaviorists

As an economic behaviorist and lawyer arguing that all “human rights” should be extended to animals (blurring the line separating human dynamics from the law of the jungle as any fascist must), Sunstein has spent decades trying to model human behavior with computer simulations in an effort to “scientifically manage” such behavior.

As outlined in his book Nudge (co-authored with Nobel Prize winning behaviorist Richard Thaler), Sunstein “discovered” that people tend to organize their behavioral patterns around certain fundamental drives, such as the pursuit of pleasure, avoidance of pain, and certain Darwinian drives for sex, popularity, desire for conformity, desire for novelty, and greed.

One of the key principles of economic behaviorism which is seen repeated in such popular manuals as Freakonomics, Nudge, Predictably Irrational, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Animal Spirits, is that humans are both biologically determined due to their Darwinian impulses, but, unlike other animals, have the fatal flaw of being fundamentally irrational at their core. Since humans are fundamentally irrational, says the behaviorist, it is requisite that an enlightened elite impose “order” upon society while maintaining the illusion of freedom of choice from below. This is the underlying assumption of Karl Popper’s Open Society doctrine, which was fed to Popper’s protégé George Soros and which animates Soros’ General Theory of Reflexivity and his Oxford-based Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).

This was at the heart of Obama’s science Czar John Holdren’s call for world government in his 1977 Ecoscience (co-written with his mentor Paul Ehrlich) where the young misanthrope envisioned a future utopic world governed by a scientifically managed master-class saying:

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime- sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable”.

The caveat: If Darwinian impulses mixed with irrational “animal spirits” were truly all that animated those systems which behaviorists wish to map and manipulate (aka: “nudge” with rewards, punishments), then a scientific priesthood would indeed be a viable and perhaps necessary way to organize the world.

Fortunately, reality is a bit more elegant and dignified than behaviorists wish to admit.

Why Computer Modellers Hate Metaphysics

On a closer inspection of history, we find countless instances where people shape their individual and group behavior around sets of ideas that transcend controllable material impulses. When this happens, those individuals or groups tend to resist adapting to environments created for them. This incredible phenomenon is witnessed empirically in the form of the American Revolution, Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings, Civil Rights movements, and even some bold manifestations of anti-lockdown protests now underway around the world.

Among the most troublesome of those variables which upset computer models are: “Conscience”, “Truth”, “Intentions”, “Soul”, “Honor”, “God”, “Justice”, “Patriotism”, “Dignity”, and “Freedom”.

Whenever individuals shape their identities around these very real, though immaterial (aka: “metaphysical”) principles, they cannot be “nudged” towards pre-determined decisions that defy reason and morality. Adherence to these principles also tends to afford thinking people an important additional edge of creative insight necessary to cut through false explanatory narratives that attempt to hide lies behind the appearance of truth (aka: sophistry).

As witnessed on multiple occasions throughout history, such individuals who value the health of their souls over the intimidating (and extremely malleable) force of popular opinion, will often decide to sacrifice personal comfort and even their lives in order to defend those values which their minds and consciences deem important.

These rare, but invaluable outliers will often resist policies that threaten to undo their freedoms or undermine the basis of their society’s capacity to produce food, and energy for their children and grandchildren. What is worse, is that their example is often extremely contagious causing other members of the sheep class to believe that they too are human and endowed with unalienable rights which should be defended.

The Intentions Ordering World History

Perhaps, most “destructive” of all is that these outlier people tend to look for abstract things like “causes” in historical dynamics shaping the context of their present age, as well as their current geopolitical environment.

Whenever this type of thinking is done, carefully crafted narratives fed to the masses by an enlightened elite will often fail in their powers to persuade, since seekers after truth soon come to realize that IDEAS and intentions (aka: conspiracies) shape our past, present and future. When the dominating intentions shaping society’s trajectory is in conformity with Natural Law, humanity tends to improve, freedoms increase, culture matures and evil loses its hold. Inversely, when the intentions animating history are out of conformity with Natural Law, the opposite happens as societies lose their moral and material fitness to survive and slip ever more quickly into dark ages.

While sitting in a jail in Birmingham Alabama in 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described this reality eloquently when he said:

“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust… One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”

From Plato’s organization of his Academy and efforts to shape a Philosopher King to beat the forces of the Persian Empire, to Cicero’s efforts to save the Roman Republic, to Augustine’s battles to save the soul of Christianity all the way to our present age, conspiracies for the good and counter-conspiracies for evil have shaped history. If one were to begin an investigation into history without an understanding that ideas and intentions caused the trajectory of history, as is the standard practice among history professors dominant in todays world, then one would become incapable of understanding anything essential about one’s own reality.

It is irrelevant that behaviorists and other fascists wish their victims to believe that history just happens simply because random short-sighted impulses kinetically drive events on a timeline- the truth of my claim exists for any serious truth seeker to discover it for themselves.

Back to our Present Sad State of Affairs

Now we all know that Sunstein spent the following years working as Obama’s Regulatory Czar alongside an army of fellow behaviorists who took control of all levers of policy making as outlined by Time Magazine’s April 13, 2009 article ‘How Obama is Using the Science of Change’. As the fabric of western civilization, and traditional values of family, gender, and even macro economic concepts like “development” were degraded during this period, the military industrial complex had a field day as Sunstein’s wife Samantha Power worked closely with Susan Rice in the promotion of “humanitarian bombings” of small nations under Soros’ Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

After the Great Reset Agenda was announced in June 2020, Sunstein was recruited to head the propaganda wing of the World Health Organization known as the WHO Technical Advisory Group where his skills in mass behavior modification was put to use in order to counteract the dangerous spread of conspiracy theories that persuaded large chunks of the world population that COVID-19 was part of a larger conspiracy to undermine national sovereignty and impose world government.

The head of WHO described Sunstein’s mandate in the following terms:

“In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries are using a range of tools to influence behavior: Information campaigns are one tool, but so are laws, regulations, guidelines and even fines…That’s why behavioral science is so important.”

Today, hundreds of Obama-era behaviorists have streamed back into influential positions of government under the new “scientifically managed”, evidence-based governance coming back to life under Biden promising to undo the dark days of President Trump.

Ideologues who have been on record calling for world government, the elimination of the sick and elderly (see Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emmanuel’s Why I Hope to Die At 75), and population control are streaming back into positions of influence. If you think that anything they have done to return to power is unlawful, or antithetical to the principles of the Constitution, then these technocrats want you to know that you are a delusional conspiracy theorist and as such, represent a potential threat to yourself and the society of which you are but a part.

If you question World Health Organization narratives on COVID-19, or doubt the use of vaccines produced by organizations like Astra Zeneca due to their ties to eugenics organizations then you are a delusional conspiracy theorist.

If you doubt that global warming is caused by carbon dioxide or that implementing the Paris Climate accords may cause more damage to humanity than climate change ever could, then you must be a conspiracy theorist.

If you believe that the U.S. government just went through a regime change coordinated by something called “the deep state”, then you run the risk of being labelled a delusional threat to “the general welfare” deserving of the sort of treatment dolled out to any typical terrorist.

It appears that the many comforts we have taken for granted over the past 50-year drunken stupor called “globalization” are quickly coming to an end, and thankfully not one but two opposing intentions for what the new operating system will be are actively vying for control. This clash was witnessed in stark terms during the January 2021 Davos Summit, where Xi Jinping and Putin’s call for a new system of win-win cooperation, multipolarity and long-term development offset the unipolar zero-sum ideologues of the west seeking to undo the foundations of industrial civilization.

Either way you look at it, conspiracies for good and for evil do exist now, as they have from time immemorial. The only question is which intention do you want to devote your life towards?

Be Your Own Revolution

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

I made the mistake of involving myself in a sectarian Twitter spat when I was halfway through my morning coffee today and I instantly felt like an idiot.

People from the Left Twitter faction I’d offended rushed in to push back against the offense I’d caused them, and within minutes I felt it: the all-too familiar sensation of inspiration and creativity draining away from my body. Tension, coldness and defensiveness where previously there was playfulness and the crackling sensation of an exciting new day in which anything was possible.

If you’re active online, you’ve probably experienced this too. The days when you’re involved in sectarian bickering are the days when you are at your least creative, your least inspired, and your least effective at fighting against the machine. At best the drama gives your ego a tickle (as social media platforms are designed to do), after which you feel a bit yuck. The longer you engage in it, the lower the probability that you will produce something creative and inspired that day.

As a general rule, you may find that it works best to reject cliques and factions altogether. When you “belong” to any group you feel compelled to defend it, and to move with it wherever it goes even if that’s not where you feel like the energy is. You get invested in wanting the collective to move in a certain direction, and you get frustrated when it just wants to focus on silly nonsense and sectarian feuds.

So my advice to you here, which you of course can take or leave, is to just blast off on your own and fight your own revolution in your own way.

The unfortunate fact is that our society is insane, and its madness pervades literally every political faction to varying degrees. Marrying yourself to any group means marrying its madness. Instead, focus on becoming more sane, and then act based on that sanity.

Just blast off. Don’t wait for your comrades. Don’t try to pull them along with you before they are ready. Just blast forward into your own revolution, burning brightly and scorching the machine with your own light. If you shine brightly enough, the others may follow when they are ready.

One of the most frustrating things is seeing where we need to move and not being able to get the collective to come with you. You’re like, “It’s there! Let’s move!”, and they just want to bicker and ego spar. Just blast off into health yourself, and trust that the others will follow if and when they are able.

Be your own revolution. You have all the media access you need to help wake the world up with the power of your own inspired action. Reject cliques, factions and sectarianism, and have the courage to stand on your own two feet attacking the machine with your own unique abilities.

This doesn’t mean you can’t organize and work collectively; you absolutely can. If you see people doing something you want to uplift, uplift it. But when you’re done, don’t stay and become a member of the club. Move on and retain your self-sovereignty. If you’re doing something that people want to help uplift and amplify, let them do so. When they don’t want to anymore, let them go. Don’t try to manipulate them into staying.

You are free to collaborate with anyone on any issue at any time. You don’t actually need to be a member of the Blah Blah Whateverist Club to do this. And when nothing is happening that you want to collaborate with others on, you can attack the machine on your own, using your own unique set of tools based on your own inspiration. You are not owned or bound.

All these debates we’re seeing lately over who should be let into and kept out of the Revolution Club, how the Revolution Club should act, who should lead the Revolution Club etc are based on the assumption that there has to be a Revolution Club in the first place, and there just doesn’t. Organize and collaborate on a case-by-case, issue-by-issue basis while remaining sovereign.

Have the compassion to prioritize the needs of the collective and the courage to stand as an individual. Trying to impose your will on exactly how the collective revolution should and should not be moving is a doomed endeavor, because you cannot control the collective, you can only control yourself. So be your own revolution and attack the machine wherever you detect a weak point in its armor.

I’ve avoided all cliques and factions like the plague, and I’ve been far more effective in this fight than I would have been if I’d chosen to glom onto some faction and uphold all its -ists and -isms. It would have killed my ability to move with agility in whatever way is demanded by each present moment, because I would have been binding myself to the movements of a group that isn’t seeing what I’m seeing and can’t move the way I move.

This is just what’s worked for me, and of course your mileage may vary. But if you’re like me and you don’t see the various groups, organizations and factions getting us to where we need to go, consider stepping out of the vehicle, standing on your own two feet, and waging your own revolution.

A TAOIST MASTER EXPLAINS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RELIGION AND INDIVIDUAL SPIRITUAL CULTIVATION

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

“The modern world needs true spiritual guidance and development.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

A spiritual war is upon us and the individual is challenged to maintain integrity in a sea of greed, egotism, terror and fear. With no clear path toward spiritual evolution, so many of us floundering and losing ourselves to addiction, despair and self-destruction.

When in the past ordinary religions might have served to offer a pathway toward spiritual awakening based upon the experiences of their ancient sages, today, the best they seem to offer is communal support. Far too often, though, modern religions are mired in greed, scandal, pedophilia and outright terrorism. Religions are failing to provide the help one needs to spiritually thrive in this insane world.

In a reading from the book 8,000 Years of Wisdom, Taoist Master Hua-Ching Ni talks about the state of religions today:

“Spirit can hardly be found in noisy, crowded churches and temples. Even where the teachings of the past sages have been established they have been spoiled by the insensitive trend of the times.

The spirit of the world’s religions died long ago and left most temples and churches merely empty shells.

These places continue as superficial social conventions and can only supply their devotees with shallow activities, psychological games of shadow playing, and hypnosis, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with spiritual reality.

This is the faith of today’s world, and most of their achievements are not the true answer.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

What then, is spiritual reality? And what does it look like in a world governed by fear, distracted by materialism, and kept in conflict by egotism? It’s really quite straightforward, says Master Ni, who refers to it as the “plain, simple truth of your life,’ which is best understood as the profoundly important concept of inner peace.

“The first spiritual goal of Taoism is the restoration and realization of one’s own well-balanced being, and then one’s spiritual evolution.

The highest goal of life is to combine oneself with the spiritual energy of the universe. There is one way to eliminate all wonder, bewilderment and confusion and that is to have inner peace.

The primary method or principle for personal cultivation is to keep peace within oneself and maintain normalcy in one’s environment; thus you can dwell with the spiritual energy and the spiritual energy dwells within you.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

Comparing the teachings of ordinary religions to true personal spiritual cultivation, Master Ni notes that undeveloped human beings follow and devote themselves to belief systems, deities and spiritual figureheads. In contrast, individuals seeking genuine spiritual evolution understand these systems for what they are: illusions and traps.

“People mistake religious emotionalism and hypnosis for spiritual reality.

Often in history religious emotion has been exalted as truth itself. This gave birth to all kinds of religious prejudice and persecution. Religious mobs have carried out the mischief caused by the hot-blooded in the forceful image of a spiritual sovereign. This has not the slightest connection with spiritual reality. It is the manifestation of the impure, heavy, bloody energy of undeveloped human beings before having completed their spiritual evolution.

Many people are fooled by their own ignorance or that of others. And in their ignorance they fool others too. People like this have no hope of reaching the spiritual realm. They will have no chance to touch the real spiritual life. So, before you commit yourself to any religion, you should develop the mental ability to discern what is religious emotion and what is the spiritual truth. One is the right way to follow, and the other is only a psychological pitfall and trap. This is very important for a seeker of truth on the spiritual path.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

Generating this type of spiritual emotionalism has become a profitable art form. Take note of the costumes worn by Catholic Cardinals and deference to the Pope in his symbolic Mitre hat. Islamic fundamentalists and ISIS do the same when they emote fear and terror by parading captives in front of religious soldiers clad in all black robes with faces covered, armed with rifles and sabres. Using symbolic imagery as tools of dominance and control, as Master Ni points out, has absolutely nothing to do with true spiritual reality.

What would the world look like if individuals first placed their own spiritual development ahead of their desire to change the world in accordance with their beliefs about spirituality and feelings of religious emotionalism? What if individuals were instead offered a plan of genuine spiritual cultivation, a path that led to actual inner peace?

“The spiritual process itself is a process of the evolution of the human spirit.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

Generation Numb: How Losing My Phone Exposed Me to the Pain of My Peers

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This terrible void of which everyone stays pleasantly unobservant is the unofficial sickness of Gen Z.

By Ben Scheer

Source: ScheerPost

I hadn’t planned to give up my smartphone. After all, I was starting my sophomore year of college and I had not met a single adult who lives without one and definitely no other 19-year-old. If you haven’t noticed, it is part of the culture. A few weeks into the semester, I forgot my phone (a Google Pixel 2, for all you phone nerds) in the backseat of an Uber on my way back from shopping off campus. This would lead to an opening to consider a break from the phone and everything that comes with it.

I remember feeling frustrated at myself for being so absentminded and immediately rushed to track it down, anxiously calling the driver from a friend’s phone. While I listened to the open ringing on the line I began to think about this one technology’s central role in my life.

That gateway to other worlds.

Over the next few days I continued to hope my phone would come back to me and also thought further into its role in my relationships. I felt how hindering it was in communicating with the people I love.

How it had required me to be always ready to pluck it from my pocket, pull my focus and as a result, never be truly present. I saw in that reflection the possibility for healthier relationships, less dependent on constant digital connection.

More free, less reliant.

Sure, there were a thousand things that would be made more challenging and tedious, but it would be worth it if I could be more present for my own life.

Days later, after I had given up hope of seeing it again, I used a friend’s phone to call my dad to tell him.

“I will get you another one, what kind do you want?” was the first thing he said.

“Actually I think I’m good,” I responded, to his surprise. “I can write you and my mom by email. If we want to talk, I can call you from my computer.”

Quickly, I started to feel the change. My mood and habits became clearer; I felt happier, more grounded, less looming anxiety, feeling more alone and with myself, more conscious of my space and those in it.

Being alone led to more opportunities for reflection and boredom. I felt calmer, and my walking and pace of day actually slowed down. It is hard to describe how it changed the patterns in my brain but I could feel it readjusting, as it does if you spend a week in the woods or on a beach. One thing I felt was that my days were longer and more connected from one moment to the next.

I also became more aware of the moods and feelings of others around me and was suddenly terrified to see how dependent my peers were on all their screens, and, looking back just a bit, how consumed I, too, had been.

Something else bubbled up from my unconscious: My expectations of college differed from what I was seeing. Between talking to older relatives and seeing college life on TV and in the movies, I was expecting a . . . BIT MORE JOY! Young souls, free minds, positive energy, community. I was seeking some bright spark in the people around me, yet all too often what I saw was dull, void, distractible, unthinking, unfeeling people enveloped in the world of their screens instead of being in community and conversing with the people around them.

Yes, that is harsh. It is also what I see.

So much lost human potential.

I want something or someone to blame, but maybe what I should really be blaming is myself for expecting something else. The truth is, though, I feel right in blaming the phones.

It has been over a year since I gave up my smartphone, but I remember vividly when looking at my phone for hours a day seemed normal to me. I was content to stare at the screen for hours, doing the same thing: Watching mildly entertaining videos or mashing game buttons, swiping on Tinder, scrolling on IG, surfing memes and YouTube videos. In many ways, it’s a drug too good to give up, seemingly a harmless drug, but no. We have opened Pandora’s box of marvels and there is no way to close it now.

We are continually wanting what we do not yet have, an innate motivation amplified and rerouted by capitalism’s hyperdrive marketing engines. A good fix for this constant yearning, or any discomfort is to drown it out with distractions. Feeling an uncontrollable emotion? Existential itch? Low-grade anxiety? No problem: Try scrolling on the social of your choice for a bit, trust me, it takes the edge off.

Trauma or poverty, pain or loneliness, all manner of worry, we have a cure! Or at least the emotional response can be staved off long enough for you to find the next thing to click.

This terrible void of which  everyone stays pleasantly unobservant is a part of me as well, the unofficial sickness of my generation. (COVID-19 will be the official one, memorialized in our virtual yearbooks.) This hole, this pit, that is created from not knowing one’s self, not trusting one’s self, or not allowing feelings. So distracted that these insecurities that we act on every day are a mystery. That you cannot see how fundamentally OK everything actually is because you have music constantly in your ear and a fear that, in silence, your own thoughts would be too scary. The sickening thought that your true feelings for someone were no more than an act of comfort-seeking desperation and that “love” is a lifesaver from yourself.

I can’t blame anyone though. The distractions surround us, they surround the people we are with. The collective unfeeling is so great, so vast, it cracked me open, actually made me cry often once I allowed myself to experience it. I felt like I was losing my footing in the world in which I had grown up. Disconnected from my past and unsure of where we were going.

(Side note: If you haven’t yet watched The Social Dilemma, go do that, it’s worth it.)

Walking into a small college class to see no one looking at each other or chatting, the blank vacant stares. The soft glow. It felt … confusing? Why were so many interesting young people ignoring one another? What was a classroom like before these tools were available and allowed everywhere? Why were the screens so celebrated?

Then my confusion grew, and from it rage and pain. These emotions danced together, fueled me and crushed me. I saw, for the first time, the real power that the phones held. Yes, a power we had given them, but a power nonetheless. The power to keep people who were 500 miles apart tethered to one another, or keep people sitting right next to each other brutally apart.

Who can I blame? It is just the world I have been born into, and the technology- and profit-driven changes are coming faster every year. We live in the future with brain equivalents in our pockets and a web that contains all of our collective knowledge but reveals the worst of what we are and so little of the love we contain and of which we are capable.

Is the internet a good idea? Are phones good for humans? These are not questions we have answered or even barely thought to ask in the mainstream of our culture. Of course they are, what else could they be? Progress! Faster communication! More knowledge! More speed! More fun! We will all be more efficient and entertained, and from that we will live better lives.

NO! Stop, slow down. Please. These gadgets, these everywhere-anytime screens, are ruining the minds of the people who have been mesmerized since they were only little children.

To clarify: not ruining, in that people are made stupid (although it definitely does not help develop our attention span), but rather ruining our emotional capacity and spiritual selves. And these limits fetter us as we are already so strained by the pain we are able to see through our little windows; we don’t have a moment to feel, to feel our own pain, or that of our friends.

Or, for that matter, the pain of the world, or the impact of our constant consumption, or where all this STUFF comes from and where it ends up, or the pain of our history and centuries of exploitation of other humans and nature from which all this wealth originally was derived.

Being human is objectively great. We can use language and words to describe how we feel. We can feel the sun on our face and take in the taste of a thousand foods, dance to every song. Feel great pain and great happiness. Yet, all the time I see this discomfort, unrest and fear in my most distracted friends. It is coming from the disconnection from what they are feeling, a disconnection from being.

This is the worst theft of modern-day, first-world life: the theft of being present.

The phones and distractions and speed create this disconnection from the simple fact that you are actually OK, better then OK — you are alive and can feel and that is a gift to cherish.

Worse than the days of sadness are the days of not feeling anything. Some people are depressed not because anything is wrong but because they are numb to their feelings, too distracted and avoidant to feel them; avoidant, and scared of what might happen if they let themselves feel.

Try this: Really study those you love, let their face become new to you, again, and become fascinated in the way they move. Feel the wonder of being with another human.

After more than a year without a smartphone, I am more hopeful than I was in those first few months. Not to say that everything is all right, far from it. Here in the United States our technology has allowed for multiple realities to coexist alongside one another and I don’t see a clear path out of that problem. Distraction and narrow self-interest prevent us from seeing and grappling with the apocalyptic future climate change can bring in a much shorter time frame than even most globally aware people are willing to accept.

However, I do know that change is a constant and I am healed by looking past my own lifetime and by all the simple beauties of life and living. In the end, these technologies do NOT define us. We can work together to change how we coexist.

 

Postscript: For those who are interested in also letting go of your smartphone, I would recommend downgrading to a flip-phone or phone of a similar level. I now walk around the world with a thick, red brick through which I can communicate with my work and family in case of emergencies.