Is there no other way beyond traditional belief systems that require you to accept falsehoods as if they were true, and leftism run amok that requires you to accept falsehoods as if they were true?
Thank you for your response. I don’t disagree with anything you said. I was a Christian but now find myself looking elsewhere for the answers we all seek. I know wokeness is bullshit, and as you say materialism stops at where metaphysics begin. I guess you could say I’m on my own journey right now and not sure where it’s going, but at least I know a couple stops I won’t be making.
I just decided to leave Christianity as my belief system a few weeks ago so I’m not sure where to begin other than reading Homer and going forward from there. I like philosophy but literature I think provides us metaphysical understanding and insights too.
I’m sad I missed this exchange. Looks like one of you got banned. I was interested in your comments re: Christianity. I grew up a believer, but left the Church as a teen. I know my morality comes from Christian values. I’m okay with that.
It’s not that I don’t believe Christianity has truth or goodness in it
It does
I just find myself unable to accede to the Nicene creed or the Bible as divinely inspired, so once I acknowledged that, I knew it was time to move on (this is just my own experience)
I left christianity (had i ever arrived?) In my teens and explored some mystical options since. I have noticed in the last decade at least that oftentimes the people who are willing to stand up for their understandings courageously profess to be Christians (Ed Dowd for instance). Not enough to create a road to Damascus experience in me but I am taking note - strong faith can accompany exceptional moral courage in some people and i dont think that is a bad thing in these troubled times.
The best piece that I have read so far on how a collective madness has power
"Truth is a weak commitment signal. Anyone can embrace truth. Only the truly “enlightened”, and normatively aggressive, can make falsity—especially about testable reality—work as a signal.
Genuine expertise deals in complex truths. But that is not the sort of truth at stake here. Genuine expertise is a costly signal in all the wrong ways: it does not scale up.
Your signal has to scale up in ways that work for midwits—especially midwit managers—and lay folk. Falsity can do that just fine. Even better, disconnection from reality makes it so much easier for marker beliefs and linguistic signals to be regularly and conveniently updated.
This is how we end up with some women have penises.
The more you have to not notice (the denial of biology, the travails of de-transitioners, the sterilising of minors)—especially to make the required affirmations (mandated pronouns, here we come)—the stronger is your adherence signal and the more invested in leverage-and-status strategies you become. This extends to arguing how wrong, how transphobic, it is to notice wrongly."
Helen, you have outlined brilliantly and succinctly the nature of this 'mass psychosis', with the slight omission of the 'social contagion’ among girls’ aspect the heaviest true victims of this social-horror-phenomenon and that has particular resonance with the negation of the value parental experience and wisdom, as the most propitious social protector against predatorial ideologues, which, of course, is now legally being done, as you do highlight so clearly here.
The religion analogy is in fact not an exactly analogy, it is instead more of mutation, a combination or sort of tri-synthesis of the Durkheimian and Eladian conception of religion as the interplay between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’. But in a world where the Sacred is no longer noticed or sought, but negated and denied. The profane being the hum drum mundane life of every day, the sacred that vision of the super-mundane, that which inspires humanity to seek to create and innovate to transcendent toward beatific visions of what could be, inspiration of the beautiful and terrible dreams of the human imagination. This is combined with Baudrillard's key idea, initially often and intended to be used in discussing postmodernism in the arts, though now seemingly ubiquitous in every field of human activity, business, the arts, science, education the family – Baudrillardian tentacles creep everywhere: "simulation" and "the hyperreal." The hyperreal is "more real than real": something fake and artificial comes to be more definitive of the real, which is exactly what you lay out brilliantly in this essay.
No wonder Wachowski sisters were such devotees. The true subtext of The gnostic transhumanist allegory of the “Matrix” trilogy culminates was the merging of Neo with machine mind, in a messianic act of self-sacrifice, fulfilling prophecy as saviour of both Man and Machine (AI) in order the save the world for both and preserve the balance of mutual interdependence. (Scary shit).
Thus, the ideology itself functions precisely to circumvent what had previously underpinned the psyche and logos of western civilisation, rooting itself the functional and evolutionary sex roles of biological reality, in the Judaeo-Christian mythos substrate is grounded in the mythos Adam and Eve. Spare rib indeed, but not feminist imposition by a Patriarchal tyrant, mere reality, the acceptance of which our survival and flourishing was perceived to rest.
The necessary acceptance of our human condition is precise what Genesis represent to us, that we must first accept our fallen state as our own responsibility (whether that seems fair or not it is existential test all human must face) an unassailable truth, and the first true step on the path redemption and adult maturity of living with the REAL. This is the initiation of every tribe, before we may begin the process of spiritual maturation and from there pursue question the emergent questions which lead to transcendent wisdom. Of what it means to be a Man and a Woman, of what it means to seek the Sacred in life. And it this that the blank-statists seek to erase and replace with their insanity of identitarian fantasy and tyranny of affirmation.
That is why the activist ideology seek through every avenue of influence to plug itself into children, for children experience the transformative beauty of imagination in a way which adults, whose psyches are tempered by decades of reality checks, simple cannot, because of the existential cost it would wrought, an adult allow themselves to be deluded by it and must live in REALITY – at least, not till now. The number of parents now indoctrinating, and schools as well, long with MSM and the Medical profession and supporting cooperate industries, one might speculate will be 20 years before this religious possession of a generation can be re-grounded in something more real and truly religious, for we have lost sight of that which should be most Sacred:
To quote Morpheus’ well-known lines: “For the longest time I wouldn’t believe it. And then I saw the field with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be intravenously fed to the living, and standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realise the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. A computer-generated dream world”. Built by those who seek erase reality and make God in their own image. For those who only recognise power dynamics as the sole arbiter of political reality, and who will pursue this ideological goal of protecting the sacred trans victim at any cost, wilful blindness to ‘not- noticing’ incvenient truth or the loss of the Scared and Truly Holy. As you say “The Transcult is a reminder of how much horror faith in a transformative future can generate: a reminder written on children’s mutilated and sterilised bodies.” The Matrix, indeed, seemingly made real., in search the narcissistic illusion of individual freedom which is in truth no freedom at all. To quote St Justin Popovic, where perhaps true could be found.
“In truth there is only one freedom - the holy freedom of Christ, whereby He freed us from sin, from evil, from the devil. It binds us to God. All other freedoms are illusory, false, that is to say, they are all, in fact, slavery.
Very briefly. It isn’t really bonkers, they didn’t just now happen. They were always there. This is just the rise of it, and after a time it will fade, as surely as they will remain a tiny minority. Their wish is to recruit, and that will fail too.
How many people that were effectively progressives in their youth, later on decided that a bit of order in the world is ok?
Unfortunately I don't see the youth of today recovering from this... They have been fed lies from their big brother telescreens from the moment their parents worked out the convenience of the pacifier effect of the 'cell' phones
Well, progressivism wasn’t a thing when I was young. I believed Ronald Reagan would start WW3, believed with my peers that the Vietnam war was feeding young men to the military-industrial complex and considered myself liberal. I passed on a great tech-writing job because I’d have been working for a weapons system contractor. Growing up, taking on responsibilities changes everything. I still hate war. Still despise the m-i complex. But I’m a constitutional conservative
That means just about any dickhead can see the light.
Progressivism is just the current word for revolution, change, atheism. Pull down the current order with reductionist and nihilistic views due to being young or ignorant or envious and replacing it with chaos then nothing, then the new orde (which looks unremarkable like the old one)r- Orwell covered this for the tyrants, in his handbook " Animal Farm"
Oh, I don’t know about that. I recently got into that because some idiot claimed “rule by science fiction” was happening. Writing, no matter how good, isn’t prophesy, and I’m about as far from progressive as one person can possibly be. And yet, I favor revolution. Only there would be people in power and new rules of the game after said revolution, which with progressives would not likely agree.
Maybe we need involuntary leaders? What person in their right mind would want to take on the burden of the masses - hoards craving to pass off responsibility to someone or something else to exonerate themselves from blame?
Involuntary leaders. How, I wonder, does that mind work?
No one is exonerated. If a government is needed, and it is, then how should it work?
In place we have a well-crafted representative republic whose representatives have chosen to buy and sell our representation. Once that is stopped, and just try to imagine that staggering concept, the people might actually make the decisions.
Marxists were tiny minority in Russia, but managed to take it over through ruthless coordination. The activist core of the “woke” is pretty small, but the wider group of believer is 8-15 percent of the adult population, disproportionately young and likely about the same proportion as Christians were in Rome when they began their march through the institutions.
We are living through a creedal passion period. Bonkers beliefs are to be expected. The concern would be if ten years from now there is still a lot of this. So, you should keep up your efforts to help folks recover. Then we will have a resistant population for the next 30 years until the next one of these comes along.
A great summary of why post-modern belief systems are no replacement for religion. They have not had time to undergo a sort of ideological Darwinism and therefore have not had a chance to be killed off by nature due to being the unfit belief systems that they are.
"all the streams of thought that create “wokery”—flow from Hegel and his pouring of the spiritual into the social."
Kinda a little off topic from the main point of another brilliant essay. But far from being an expert on Hegel, my feeling is this movement (Hume - Kant - Hegel - Marx) from the spiritual into the social was the consequence of loss of faith in God that started in the Enlightenment. An attempt to replace the diminishing authority of God with the authority of Reason. But the values in which they reasoned from were Christian. I am not sure that wokery can be overcome without a serious revaluation of Christian values.
"demand to control how others speak and think of them—pioneered by the Jewish lobby"
Jews -- who probably number fewer than trans people worldwide -- were genocided by 20th century right (fascist) and left (communist) wing dictatorships. So yes, perfectly fair to try to change the narrative and dispel millenia-old conspiracy theories.
The comment in the text is about the activists, the Jewish lobby, not Jews in general. Moreover, contesting negative stereotypes is fine. Trying to destroy careers and livelihoods through hyperbolic sensitivity is not. Remembering that the activists have an interest in making Jews feel as unsafe as possible, so they will donate to the lobby groups.
I'm new here, I thought this was a great piece until I hit this paragraph:
"The Transcult takes a demand to control how others speak and think of them—pioneered by the Jewish lobby and expanded by feminism—to an extreme not previously seen."
I won't speak for Lorenzo (who wrote the piece), and of course I can't make people read anything either of us writes.
However, I will make two observations.
First, this piece is one of a series. When Lorenzo first started writing for it, this Substack had about two hundred subscribers. It now has well over three thousand. There is a lot of hinterland. I will probably have to re-publish the entire series starting again at zero for new subscribers, but of course that will set the whole process running again, leading to similar comments from new subscribers.
Secondly, the most casual acquaintance with the internet will disclose that I personally have had a very nasty run-in with the Jewish lobby, one that led to cancel culture in all its familiar forms, including attempts to get me sacked and disbarred.
Relatedly, my first encounter with what is now called "debanking" was in 2014 (when I was a parliamentary staffer), and came via representations made to my MP boss by BDS advocates: their pro-Israel opponents were trying to get their bank accounts shut down, depriving them of the ability to receive donations.
As I told these individuals at the time, I don't support BDS, because I don't think boycotting entire countries is reasonable (or moral, for that matter). However, BDS advocates--like the rest of us--have both freedom of speech and the duty to engage in debate. So do their opponents. The way to defeat one's opponents is with arguments, not by shutting down their bank accounts or seeking to get them sacked or disbarred.
Even Bari Weiss--a commendable individual in many respects who was treated shamefully by the New York Times--started out as a university undergraduate trying to get pro-Palestinian academics sacked.
The tactics of cancel culture are always deplorable, but the notion that they were "pioneered" by the Jewish lobby is, as history, just pure nonsense. Such tactics (ostracism, shaming, exile) have existed throughout human history (as someone who has written novels about the Roman empire ought to know). "Blame the Jews" is always a huge red flag.
And feminism? Really? This is even more absurd, and deeply ironic since self-described radical feminists were first to recognize and fight the trans cult, and are still in the forefront of the fight today:
Ostracism, shunning, shaming: these may well pre-date our emergence as a species (that is Homo erectus may have engaged in such). There is certainly reason to think Homo sapiens have used such tactics for our entire history as a species.
The modern activist version of whispering and letter campaigns, systematic moral hyperbole, attempting to destroy careers, intimidatory moral shaming, organised by activist networks based on specific non-profits has been operationally pioneered by the Jewish lobby.
You can argue that Christians did similar things against homosexuals (true). But the activist-organisational basis was pioneered by the Jewish lobby. If you want to see this in operation, look at the public response to “The Hand That Signed The Paper”. Such activism managed to block US publication of the book and extended to trying to block Helen having a career as a lawyer in a different country.
Israel actually employs teams of ppl to scour internet in order to react too. Which is also similar to TRAS. If you haven’t said the ‘wrong’ thing in a post about Palestinians you won’t know what ppl are referring to.
Ostracism, shunning, shaming: as you rightly point out, almost as old as time and certainly as old as some of the other utterly deplorable aspects of the human psyche. To take an active interest in history as Lorenzo does is to be utterly ashamed of our performance. So the question is not; who is doing it but who is not doing it, and how can we get more of that? As a planet we are on a very low level of evolution and need somehow, to climb out of this hole. There seems to be an inexhaustible well of bad actors who we certainly need to be aware of. As well as the Bad Jews there are the Bad Prussians (substack.Prussia Gate) and that is to hardly leave our familiar ground. Bad CCP. Etcetera. We hardly need to grade them, they are just very low level, power hungry, and ultimately stupid people. It is extremely important to shine a light on their actions without becoming enmeshed by their negativity and fighting among ourselves.
If you criticise men, it’s feminism. If you criticise women, it’s misogyny. Feminist activism has absolutely pushed both forced association and attempts to control how one speaks about women.
Such is the complete emotional capture so many people, like you, suffer.
I used to suffer it too.
But it is possible to accept and understand that no group---no group at all---is a sacred caste that is incapable of doing wrong. And that acknowledging that---that all people are wholly human, in good and in bad---does not make you AN ANTI-SEMITE!!!@@!!!@@!!!
Ironically, I'm the one acknowledging that. I'm the one who is NOT blaming two specific groups ("the Jewish lobby" and "feminism") as being responsible for cancel culture. I'm the one saying it is a general human tactic used for thousands of years, and that these two specific groups (or any other specific group) should not be blamed for it.
Yes. You are emotionally resistant to the very normal observation that certain groups do, at certain times, use tactics that they are, in fact, responsible for. It's not possible to converse with you when emotion blockades something you'd ordinarily be able to discuss, and certainly about groups you didn't have an emotional "makes u bad person to criticize the X" attachment to.
LOL! The claim was NOT that "certain groups do, at certain times, use tactics that they are, in fact, responsible for", the claim was that "the Jewish lobby" PIONEERED "a demand to control how others speak and think of them", and that this was then "expanded by feminism".
This is completely ahistorical nonsense. Pretty much every group in history, in any sort of interation with other groups, tried to "control how others speak and think of them". Of course they did! Who wouldn't?
For the record I am not Jewish and I am not female, so my putative "emotional resistance" has no obvious origin. It's also a pretty sad tactic for you to pull, and reeks of projection.
No, this is a modern pattern you are projecting backwards. It is not, for example, the same as imposing some form of intellectual conformity. The Inquisition is not cancel culture.
The claim that they pioneered the activist techniques since more broadly mobilised as cancel culture is not the same as saying they are responsible for cancel culture. Especially as cancel culture is now very much adversely affecting Jews (including the standing of Jewish students in universities) and gender-critical feminists.
Thankyou for making this topic more relevant for me regarding the problem at hand ( sigh). I have been thinking about the woke and the trans as one of many diversionary strategies being employed to take attention away from the sun virus poisoning.
Reading this has made it more clear to me that the trans- agenda is as toxic a threat to humanity due to it's ability to control much more than the slow death from pharmaceutical poisoning.
I wonder if the reality deniers will be able to deny hunger, or pain and suffering from being poisoned? Reality deniers and brownshirts do love their money and their conveniences....
What I think is a real diversion is the MFM and anti- Marxists attempting to provide ' the evidence' that will wake people up.
I'll now put this down to the remarkable benifits of what you call 'not noticing' that attempting to wake these people up doesn't work!😁🚫
"Well-written histories of the Great Terror or the Cultural Revolution — or of the final years of the Roman republic, say for example — have the strange effect of becoming incredibly boring. The 94th bonfire of humanity, appearing on page 678, resembles the previous 93 bonfires. The grim machine of political purges makes brutal depravity tedious. Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z run the Committee to Kill Wrongthinkers; then, and you always see this coming, Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z are declared to be wrongthinkers, and are tossed on their own bonfire. The managerial tier is always consumed by its own instrument. Purge culture is the center of a politics of repression, the inevitable dynamic of a system that has degenerated to the stage of an unprincipled grasping for status and position. Someone was denounced yesterday; someone is being denounced today; someone will be denounced tomorrow.
Just a reminder that Lorenzo is in Australia so asleep while everyone else is awake--he will be around to make comments in due course.
The next essay is explicitly on the Transcult as riffing off Feminism.
Is there no other way beyond traditional belief systems that require you to accept falsehoods as if they were true, and leftism run amok that requires you to accept falsehoods as if they were true?
Thank you for your response. I don’t disagree with anything you said. I was a Christian but now find myself looking elsewhere for the answers we all seek. I know wokeness is bullshit, and as you say materialism stops at where metaphysics begin. I guess you could say I’m on my own journey right now and not sure where it’s going, but at least I know a couple stops I won’t be making.
I just decided to leave Christianity as my belief system a few weeks ago so I’m not sure where to begin other than reading Homer and going forward from there. I like philosophy but literature I think provides us metaphysical understanding and insights too.
Strange indeed, but also wonderful and intriguing.
I’m sad I missed this exchange. Looks like one of you got banned. I was interested in your comments re: Christianity. I grew up a believer, but left the Church as a teen. I know my morality comes from Christian values. I’m okay with that.
And I have to say
It’s not that I don’t believe Christianity has truth or goodness in it
It does
I just find myself unable to accede to the Nicene creed or the Bible as divinely inspired, so once I acknowledged that, I knew it was time to move on (this is just my own experience)
I left christianity (had i ever arrived?) In my teens and explored some mystical options since. I have noticed in the last decade at least that oftentimes the people who are willing to stand up for their understandings courageously profess to be Christians (Ed Dowd for instance). Not enough to create a road to Damascus experience in me but I am taking note - strong faith can accompany exceptional moral courage in some people and i dont think that is a bad thing in these troubled times.
Great point
This is a very good and succinct summary of the issue, thank you.
The best piece that I have read so far on how a collective madness has power
"Truth is a weak commitment signal. Anyone can embrace truth. Only the truly “enlightened”, and normatively aggressive, can make falsity—especially about testable reality—work as a signal.
Genuine expertise deals in complex truths. But that is not the sort of truth at stake here. Genuine expertise is a costly signal in all the wrong ways: it does not scale up.
Your signal has to scale up in ways that work for midwits—especially midwit managers—and lay folk. Falsity can do that just fine. Even better, disconnection from reality makes it so much easier for marker beliefs and linguistic signals to be regularly and conveniently updated.
This is how we end up with some women have penises.
The more you have to not notice (the denial of biology, the travails of de-transitioners, the sterilising of minors)—especially to make the required affirmations (mandated pronouns, here we come)—the stronger is your adherence signal and the more invested in leverage-and-status strategies you become. This extends to arguing how wrong, how transphobic, it is to notice wrongly."
"... they use your vocabulary, but not your dictionary." That's a keeper.
Helen, you have outlined brilliantly and succinctly the nature of this 'mass psychosis', with the slight omission of the 'social contagion’ among girls’ aspect the heaviest true victims of this social-horror-phenomenon and that has particular resonance with the negation of the value parental experience and wisdom, as the most propitious social protector against predatorial ideologues, which, of course, is now legally being done, as you do highlight so clearly here.
The religion analogy is in fact not an exactly analogy, it is instead more of mutation, a combination or sort of tri-synthesis of the Durkheimian and Eladian conception of religion as the interplay between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’. But in a world where the Sacred is no longer noticed or sought, but negated and denied. The profane being the hum drum mundane life of every day, the sacred that vision of the super-mundane, that which inspires humanity to seek to create and innovate to transcendent toward beatific visions of what could be, inspiration of the beautiful and terrible dreams of the human imagination. This is combined with Baudrillard's key idea, initially often and intended to be used in discussing postmodernism in the arts, though now seemingly ubiquitous in every field of human activity, business, the arts, science, education the family – Baudrillardian tentacles creep everywhere: "simulation" and "the hyperreal." The hyperreal is "more real than real": something fake and artificial comes to be more definitive of the real, which is exactly what you lay out brilliantly in this essay.
No wonder Wachowski sisters were such devotees. The true subtext of The gnostic transhumanist allegory of the “Matrix” trilogy culminates was the merging of Neo with machine mind, in a messianic act of self-sacrifice, fulfilling prophecy as saviour of both Man and Machine (AI) in order the save the world for both and preserve the balance of mutual interdependence. (Scary shit).
Thus, the ideology itself functions precisely to circumvent what had previously underpinned the psyche and logos of western civilisation, rooting itself the functional and evolutionary sex roles of biological reality, in the Judaeo-Christian mythos substrate is grounded in the mythos Adam and Eve. Spare rib indeed, but not feminist imposition by a Patriarchal tyrant, mere reality, the acceptance of which our survival and flourishing was perceived to rest.
The necessary acceptance of our human condition is precise what Genesis represent to us, that we must first accept our fallen state as our own responsibility (whether that seems fair or not it is existential test all human must face) an unassailable truth, and the first true step on the path redemption and adult maturity of living with the REAL. This is the initiation of every tribe, before we may begin the process of spiritual maturation and from there pursue question the emergent questions which lead to transcendent wisdom. Of what it means to be a Man and a Woman, of what it means to seek the Sacred in life. And it this that the blank-statists seek to erase and replace with their insanity of identitarian fantasy and tyranny of affirmation.
That is why the activist ideology seek through every avenue of influence to plug itself into children, for children experience the transformative beauty of imagination in a way which adults, whose psyches are tempered by decades of reality checks, simple cannot, because of the existential cost it would wrought, an adult allow themselves to be deluded by it and must live in REALITY – at least, not till now. The number of parents now indoctrinating, and schools as well, long with MSM and the Medical profession and supporting cooperate industries, one might speculate will be 20 years before this religious possession of a generation can be re-grounded in something more real and truly religious, for we have lost sight of that which should be most Sacred:
To quote Morpheus’ well-known lines: “For the longest time I wouldn’t believe it. And then I saw the field with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be intravenously fed to the living, and standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realise the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. A computer-generated dream world”. Built by those who seek erase reality and make God in their own image. For those who only recognise power dynamics as the sole arbiter of political reality, and who will pursue this ideological goal of protecting the sacred trans victim at any cost, wilful blindness to ‘not- noticing’ incvenient truth or the loss of the Scared and Truly Holy. As you say “The Transcult is a reminder of how much horror faith in a transformative future can generate: a reminder written on children’s mutilated and sterilised bodies.” The Matrix, indeed, seemingly made real., in search the narcissistic illusion of individual freedom which is in truth no freedom at all. To quote St Justin Popovic, where perhaps true could be found.
“In truth there is only one freedom - the holy freedom of Christ, whereby He freed us from sin, from evil, from the devil. It binds us to God. All other freedoms are illusory, false, that is to say, they are all, in fact, slavery.
Very briefly. It isn’t really bonkers, they didn’t just now happen. They were always there. This is just the rise of it, and after a time it will fade, as surely as they will remain a tiny minority. Their wish is to recruit, and that will fail too.
Power? I don’t think so.
Nice one.
How many people that were effectively progressives in their youth, later on decided that a bit of order in the world is ok?
Unfortunately I don't see the youth of today recovering from this... They have been fed lies from their big brother telescreens from the moment their parents worked out the convenience of the pacifier effect of the 'cell' phones
Well, progressivism wasn’t a thing when I was young. I believed Ronald Reagan would start WW3, believed with my peers that the Vietnam war was feeding young men to the military-industrial complex and considered myself liberal. I passed on a great tech-writing job because I’d have been working for a weapons system contractor. Growing up, taking on responsibilities changes everything. I still hate war. Still despise the m-i complex. But I’m a constitutional conservative
That means just about any dickhead can see the light.
Progressivism is just the current word for revolution, change, atheism. Pull down the current order with reductionist and nihilistic views due to being young or ignorant or envious and replacing it with chaos then nothing, then the new orde (which looks unremarkable like the old one)r- Orwell covered this for the tyrants, in his handbook " Animal Farm"
Oh, I don’t know about that. I recently got into that because some idiot claimed “rule by science fiction” was happening. Writing, no matter how good, isn’t prophesy, and I’m about as far from progressive as one person can possibly be. And yet, I favor revolution. Only there would be people in power and new rules of the game after said revolution, which with progressives would not likely agree.
Maybe we need involuntary leaders? What person in their right mind would want to take on the burden of the masses - hoards craving to pass off responsibility to someone or something else to exonerate themselves from blame?
Devil’s advocate, perhaps?
Involuntary leaders. How, I wonder, does that mind work?
No one is exonerated. If a government is needed, and it is, then how should it work?
In place we have a well-crafted representative republic whose representatives have chosen to buy and sell our representation. Once that is stopped, and just try to imagine that staggering concept, the people might actually make the decisions.
The Tree of Liberty might flourish anew.
Marxists were tiny minority in Russia, but managed to take it over through ruthless coordination. The activist core of the “woke” is pretty small, but the wider group of believer is 8-15 percent of the adult population, disproportionately young and likely about the same proportion as Christians were in Rome when they began their march through the institutions.
We are living through a creedal passion period. Bonkers beliefs are to be expected. The concern would be if ten years from now there is still a lot of this. So, you should keep up your efforts to help folks recover. Then we will have a resistant population for the next 30 years until the next one of these comes along.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
A great summary of why post-modern belief systems are no replacement for religion. They have not had time to undergo a sort of ideological Darwinism and therefore have not had a chance to be killed off by nature due to being the unfit belief systems that they are.
"all the streams of thought that create “wokery”—flow from Hegel and his pouring of the spiritual into the social."
Kinda a little off topic from the main point of another brilliant essay. But far from being an expert on Hegel, my feeling is this movement (Hume - Kant - Hegel - Marx) from the spiritual into the social was the consequence of loss of faith in God that started in the Enlightenment. An attempt to replace the diminishing authority of God with the authority of Reason. But the values in which they reasoned from were Christian. I am not sure that wokery can be overcome without a serious revaluation of Christian values.
"demand to control how others speak and think of them—pioneered by the Jewish lobby"
Jews -- who probably number fewer than trans people worldwide -- were genocided by 20th century right (fascist) and left (communist) wing dictatorships. So yes, perfectly fair to try to change the narrative and dispel millenia-old conspiracy theories.
The same screeching mindset tho in my experience
The comment in the text is about the activists, the Jewish lobby, not Jews in general. Moreover, contesting negative stereotypes is fine. Trying to destroy careers and livelihoods through hyperbolic sensitivity is not. Remembering that the activists have an interest in making Jews feel as unsafe as possible, so they will donate to the lobby groups.
“Remembering that the activists have an interest in making Jews feel as unsafe as possible, so they will donate to the lobby groups.”
Ding ding ding! See also: ACLU hyper partisan accusations of trans genocide
I'm new here, I thought this was a great piece until I hit this paragraph:
"The Transcult takes a demand to control how others speak and think of them—pioneered by the Jewish lobby and expanded by feminism—to an extreme not previously seen."
That stopped me cold. I did not continue.
I won't speak for Lorenzo (who wrote the piece), and of course I can't make people read anything either of us writes.
However, I will make two observations.
First, this piece is one of a series. When Lorenzo first started writing for it, this Substack had about two hundred subscribers. It now has well over three thousand. There is a lot of hinterland. I will probably have to re-publish the entire series starting again at zero for new subscribers, but of course that will set the whole process running again, leading to similar comments from new subscribers.
Secondly, the most casual acquaintance with the internet will disclose that I personally have had a very nasty run-in with the Jewish lobby, one that led to cancel culture in all its familiar forms, including attempts to get me sacked and disbarred.
Relatedly, my first encounter with what is now called "debanking" was in 2014 (when I was a parliamentary staffer), and came via representations made to my MP boss by BDS advocates: their pro-Israel opponents were trying to get their bank accounts shut down, depriving them of the ability to receive donations.
As I told these individuals at the time, I don't support BDS, because I don't think boycotting entire countries is reasonable (or moral, for that matter). However, BDS advocates--like the rest of us--have both freedom of speech and the duty to engage in debate. So do their opponents. The way to defeat one's opponents is with arguments, not by shutting down their bank accounts or seeking to get them sacked or disbarred.
Even Bari Weiss--a commendable individual in many respects who was treated shamefully by the New York Times--started out as a university undergraduate trying to get pro-Palestinian academics sacked.
This behaviour is of long standing, and has only recently (in publications like Sapir Journal) been called into serious question by many of its erstwhile practitioners: https://sapirjournal.org/cancellation/2022/10/jews-and-cancel-culture/
The tactics of cancel culture are always deplorable, but the notion that they were "pioneered" by the Jewish lobby is, as history, just pure nonsense. Such tactics (ostracism, shaming, exile) have existed throughout human history (as someone who has written novels about the Roman empire ought to know). "Blame the Jews" is always a huge red flag.
And feminism? Really? This is even more absurd, and deeply ironic since self-described radical feminists were first to recognize and fight the trans cult, and are still in the forefront of the fight today:
https://womensdeclaration.com/en/
https://womensliberationfront.org
See the websites linked above.
Ostracism, shunning, shaming: these may well pre-date our emergence as a species (that is Homo erectus may have engaged in such). There is certainly reason to think Homo sapiens have used such tactics for our entire history as a species.
The modern activist version of whispering and letter campaigns, systematic moral hyperbole, attempting to destroy careers, intimidatory moral shaming, organised by activist networks based on specific non-profits has been operationally pioneered by the Jewish lobby.
You can argue that Christians did similar things against homosexuals (true). But the activist-organisational basis was pioneered by the Jewish lobby. If you want to see this in operation, look at the public response to “The Hand That Signed The Paper”. Such activism managed to block US publication of the book and extended to trying to block Helen having a career as a lawyer in a different country.
Israel actually employs teams of ppl to scour internet in order to react too. Which is also similar to TRAS. If you haven’t said the ‘wrong’ thing in a post about Palestinians you won’t know what ppl are referring to.
Ostracism, shunning, shaming: as you rightly point out, almost as old as time and certainly as old as some of the other utterly deplorable aspects of the human psyche. To take an active interest in history as Lorenzo does is to be utterly ashamed of our performance. So the question is not; who is doing it but who is not doing it, and how can we get more of that? As a planet we are on a very low level of evolution and need somehow, to climb out of this hole. There seems to be an inexhaustible well of bad actors who we certainly need to be aware of. As well as the Bad Jews there are the Bad Prussians (substack.Prussia Gate) and that is to hardly leave our familiar ground. Bad CCP. Etcetera. We hardly need to grade them, they are just very low level, power hungry, and ultimately stupid people. It is extremely important to shine a light on their actions without becoming enmeshed by their negativity and fighting among ourselves.
If you criticise men, it’s feminism. If you criticise women, it’s misogyny. Feminist activism has absolutely pushed both forced association and attempts to control how one speaks about women.
Such is the complete emotional capture so many people, like you, suffer.
I used to suffer it too.
But it is possible to accept and understand that no group---no group at all---is a sacred caste that is incapable of doing wrong. And that acknowledging that---that all people are wholly human, in good and in bad---does not make you AN ANTI-SEMITE!!!@@!!!@@!!!
Ironically, I'm the one acknowledging that. I'm the one who is NOT blaming two specific groups ("the Jewish lobby" and "feminism") as being responsible for cancel culture. I'm the one saying it is a general human tactic used for thousands of years, and that these two specific groups (or any other specific group) should not be blamed for it.
Yes. You are emotionally resistant to the very normal observation that certain groups do, at certain times, use tactics that they are, in fact, responsible for. It's not possible to converse with you when emotion blockades something you'd ordinarily be able to discuss, and certainly about groups you didn't have an emotional "makes u bad person to criticize the X" attachment to.
LOL! The claim was NOT that "certain groups do, at certain times, use tactics that they are, in fact, responsible for", the claim was that "the Jewish lobby" PIONEERED "a demand to control how others speak and think of them", and that this was then "expanded by feminism".
This is completely ahistorical nonsense. Pretty much every group in history, in any sort of interation with other groups, tried to "control how others speak and think of them". Of course they did! Who wouldn't?
For the record I am not Jewish and I am not female, so my putative "emotional resistance" has no obvious origin. It's also a pretty sad tactic for you to pull, and reeks of projection.
No, this is a modern pattern you are projecting backwards. It is not, for example, the same as imposing some form of intellectual conformity. The Inquisition is not cancel culture.
The claim that they pioneered the activist techniques since more broadly mobilised as cancel culture is not the same as saying they are responsible for cancel culture. Especially as cancel culture is now very much adversely affecting Jews (including the standing of Jewish students in universities) and gender-critical feminists.
Because you belong to THAT belief system maybe?
Thankyou for making this topic more relevant for me regarding the problem at hand ( sigh). I have been thinking about the woke and the trans as one of many diversionary strategies being employed to take attention away from the sun virus poisoning.
Reading this has made it more clear to me that the trans- agenda is as toxic a threat to humanity due to it's ability to control much more than the slow death from pharmaceutical poisoning.
I wonder if the reality deniers will be able to deny hunger, or pain and suffering from being poisoned? Reality deniers and brownshirts do love their money and their conveniences....
What I think is a real diversion is the MFM and anti- Marxists attempting to provide ' the evidence' that will wake people up.
I'll now put this down to the remarkable benifits of what you call 'not noticing' that attempting to wake these people up doesn't work!😁🚫
This top shelf!
If interested here is my take on the dogmatic view of the same cult
https://frederickrsmith.substack.com/p/dogmatic-secular-sexual-humanism
https://luctalks.substack.com/p/absolute-progressivism
https://neociceroniantimes.substack.com/p/the-normalisation-of-liminality
https://tolma.substack.com/p/culture-barbarism
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/we-rise-as-one-to-passionately-denounce
"Well-written histories of the Great Terror or the Cultural Revolution — or of the final years of the Roman republic, say for example — have the strange effect of becoming incredibly boring. The 94th bonfire of humanity, appearing on page 678, resembles the previous 93 bonfires. The grim machine of political purges makes brutal depravity tedious. Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z run the Committee to Kill Wrongthinkers; then, and you always see this coming, Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z are declared to be wrongthinkers, and are tossed on their own bonfire. The managerial tier is always consumed by its own instrument. Purge culture is the center of a politics of repression, the inevitable dynamic of a system that has degenerated to the stage of an unprincipled grasping for status and position. Someone was denounced yesterday; someone is being denounced today; someone will be denounced tomorrow.
https://eejjbair.medium.com/nietzsches-great-regret-3b1bfdce2325
Excellent. Thank you Lorenzo. Clear and enlightening, as ever.