The renowned sociologist W.G. Runciman, who died in late 2020, was the sort of figure who liked grand explanations. No one has been grander in our time, except perhaps Perry Anderson. Runciman wrote a massive ‘Treatise on Social Theory’ over many years. It was a sketch of the evolution of human societies in terms of how they operate in three fundamental areas: 1) economic or productive, 2) political or coercive and 3) persuasive or ideological.
One of the questions he asked himself was why the Greek polis (i.e., city state, e.g. Athens, Sparta, Corinth etc.) had died. His answer was that it had failed to tick the three boxes. It had failed to understand the importance of controlling resources and generating profits. It had failed to maintain its militia and failed to pay its mercenaries. And, above all, it failed to convince its people that they had any good reason to accept their subordination within the polis. There was, he said, “no ideology of subordination”.
His argument was that every civilisation needs an ideology of subordination. There will be an ideology of subordination, whether we like it or not. And so — and this is my argument rather than his — we have an interest in making sure that our ideology of subordination is a good one.
What is an ideology of subordination? It is a set of beliefs that persuade the masses to defer to what we now call the elites. In short, it is what we believe in order to accept our lot. In his book Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist — not that reluctant, obviously — Runciman commented that there was no set of values in Athens or Sparta to explain to the slaves or poor why they should defer to their rulers. Aristotle in the Politics testified overwhelmingly to the failure of the rulers to “persuade those whom they designated as kakoi” that their rule was justified. Plato in the Republic allowed a poor man to declare that “the rich are only rich because the poor aren’t brave enough to have a go at them”. This sounds a bit like modern Britain.
Cities could of course be successful if they ticked all three of the boxes Runciman identified. Runciman instances Rome and Venice: Rome, which extended citizenship to foreigners and slaves, which established something like a cash nexus, and which had a remarkable imperial-military cult based on the Temple of Jupiter; and Venice, which learnt how to extract wealth from its colonies, which used its naval power in service of control of commerce, and which magnified its own cult by building a shrine on the site of St. Mark’s bones and decorating it with Roman statuary.
What about our ideology of subordination? As everyone has come to know, Michel Houellebecq achieved notoriety for a novel, Submission, which sketched a vision of France operating under Islamic hegemony. This is one candidate for a modern ideology of subordination. The other major candidate is the corporate communist-capitalist one of China, the WEF, the WHO, the IPCC, the EU, London and Washington D.C. There are, perhaps, two other candidates. One is distinctively out of favour, though it is probably the only one which can save us. It is Christianity. And the fourth is a completely empty fantasy. It is built out of the decorative but insubstantial words of our civilisation: democracy, liberalism, freedom.
On May 1st Tulsi Gabbard spoke to Joe Rogan. She reflected on the rise of Islamism, and offered a simple analysis:
…their goal being to influence populations around the world towards this Islamist ideology. They want to govern the world under Islamic rule, under sharia law… And so this ideological war that’s being waged is being waged by one side, and there’s not a counter-narrative, there’s not a counter-war being waged on the other side to defeat it — with the superior ideology of freedom!
This seems to be the hopeful consensus of our time. That we, in the West — in the world created by the European empires in America, Australia, perhaps India and parts of Africa — can use the grand language of liberty to defeat our enemies. But there is an obvious problem with this.
The problem is, as usual, that we can understand this hypocritically or idealistically. Hypocrisy means we will use this language, and not believe it, and hope other people believe it. Idealism means that we will use this language and believe it.
The problem is that it fails both as hypocrisy and as idealism.
Hypocritically, an ideology of liberty is just a fig leaf for the communist-capitalist protocols of the institutions I have already listed. Liberty will avail us of nothing if its meaning is adjusted, twisted, reverse-engineered to mean something else. We will be forced to be free in a way even Rousseau could not have imagined. We will talk of freedom, but not be free.
Idealistically, an ideology of liberty is empty. It has no content. It offers us no reason to accept subordination. It ends in psychoanalysis and antidepressants. For a time, we believed in ‘meritocracy’. But as Michael Young, Ferdinand Mount, David Goodhart and many others have shown, it is extremely socially disruptive: it can only work within a grander ideology of subordination. Nigel Farage’s ‘British values’ are simply not going to hold anything together for more than a generation — a generation probably already gone.
All three of the great subjects the Daily Sceptic has made its own are elements of a modern secular ideology of subordination. The hope of our secular elites is that they can transcend the eclipse of Christianity by persuading us that we have good reason to value their domination. They do this by issuing grim warnings about what will happen to ‘the planet’ if we do not obey, by trying out new powers in crises such as COVID-19, and by allowing the old habit of liberty to be commandeered by useful administrators and protesters who demonstrate that the entire system is conspicuously and inquisitorially caring of the marginalised by proscribing anyone who does not accept the protocols of inclusion.
It should be obvious that we in the 20th Century made the mistake of taking our civilisation for granted. We believed that Christianity and Empire had delivered us into a relatively beneficent and prosperous modernity, and we supposed that we could dismantle Empire and dismantle Christianity without losing that beneficent and prosperous modernity. This, in retrospect, looks like a mistake. We are now aware that our political system is controlled by a new ideology of subordination, built out of desperate secular attempts to command our allegiance by claiming scientific and moral authority. This is the explanation of wokery, climate change, and even immigration — immigration being the means by which we recruit foreigners into our system not only for work but also in the hope that they, like the foreigners who became Roman, will feel loyalty to the Western state. This, obviously, is frequently not the case. And even if it were the case, in miniature, and for a time, it is happening within a system which is now not free but heavily ideologically coercive. And I, for one, cannot see why immigrants will see reason to respect a system which is now being designed to demoralise its own original people.
It is Christianity, in its truth, and Christian civilisation, in its conflict — see Hume, or Acton, or, indeed, any good historian — that generated the order into which we have been born. Christianity was always ambiguous as an ideology of subordination. It professes no simple submission. It asks for theology, in a way that Islam does not. When discovered in hypocrisy, it weakens itself more than any other system of belief. But it is for these very reasons that it is the most beautiful justification for subordination ever adopted by humans.
If the English fully lose the habit of organising their imagination and institutions around faith in Christ, then there is no alternative but to accept a stronger and inferior ideology of subordination. For the moment, the candidates appear to be the Islamic one, and the Chinese one. Perhaps there is hope in the vivid and various civilisations of Japan, India and even Europe, but it is hard to see how they can offer the requisite simplicity required by a modern system of subordination.
I intend this argument to be grim. Whether we like it or not, we must have an ideology of subordination. In the last five or so years we have been witnessing increasingly desperate secular attempts to supply us with one.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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What happened to the piece on Posie Parker in Belfast?!!
Wasn’t she controversial?
Common sense I would say! Women are women, no one else can be. Female with 2 XX chromosomes and a cervix!
Thats what the article on here wrote about her, that she was ‘controversial’. How does not wanting men to use your safe spaces, or compete in your sports or groom children be classified as ‘controversial’?
I see that the Daily Sceptic article about Posie Parker and the ‘Let Women Speak’ event in Belfast on Sunday afternoon has disappeared, and Toby Young’s tweet about it has been deleted, which is just as well as it very much misrepresented the event. I hope lessons will be learned at the Daily Sceptic, to check the accuracy of articles before publishing them, rather than after.
In contrast, most (if not all) the comments below the article indicated that Daily Sceptic readers didn’t believe it, they were quite rightly sceptical!
Here is a comment I started to write before the article disappeared, and finished writing after it disappeared, and therefore never got posted, so, as I went to the trouble of writing it, here it is here:
Whether it’s the fault of the Daily Mail or the Daily Sceptic, this is a very distorted article. It looks like it was mainly written before the event, with the expectation that there would be “chaos” and trouble. I was at the event this afternoon in Belfast and there was no “chaos”, no trouble. It was all very relaxed, orderly and peaceful, and very well policed by the PSNI, who had no difficulty whatsoever in their efforts to “keep the peace” and the two sets of protesters apart. The presence of the police alone ensured it was all peaceful, and the police simply kept an eye on things. A BBC News article states that the police said there were no arrests.
The Daily Sceptic article states:
“Parker addressed crowds at the Let Women Speak event on Sunday afternoon. Her supporters and LGBTQ counter protesters squared up, requiring more than 50 police officers to keep the two groups apart.”
Nobody “squared up” to anybody. The ‘Let Women Speak’ protestors totally ignored the ‘Trans Rights’ counter protest, and the PSNI were there to ensure that no ‘Trans Rights’ protestors approached too near to the ‘Let Women Speak’ crowd. But I was able to casually walk from the ‘Let Women Speak’ crowd to the ‘Trans Rights’ crowd, and back again. That’s how relaxed it was.
The ‘Trans Rights’ activists played loud music to try to drown out the ‘Let Women Speak’ speakers, and partially succeeded, which is no victory for the ‘Trans Rights’ activist, as it portrays them as an anti free speech group trying to silence women.
But there was never even a hint of any violence or trouble. As the crowds dispersed, almost simultaneously, there were a lot of happy, smiling faces, and I’d say that both sets of protestors enjoyed their respective protests.
Great comment and very handy for the rest of us that you were there and able to give your firsthand account of what actually happened. I also wondered where the article went this morning as I only got a chance to glance at it before going to bed. Do you remember the gist of Toby’s Tweet? Anyway, thanks for describing the true state of play with the event. Sounds like the usual distorted garbage we can expect from the DM. Perhaps another outlet with more integrity covered it elsewhere.
Thanks Mogwai. Toby’s tweet was very similar to the Daily Sceptic article which was very short and mainly quoted from this Daily Mail article without any criticism of it, which is surprising as the Daily Mail article is clearly very anti Posie Parker and anti Graham Linehan (which several Daily Sceptic readers immediately commented on):
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11978799/Womens-rights-campaigner-Posie-Parker-addresses-crowd-Belfast-despite-counter-trans-rally.html
In a tweet yesterday, the writer of the Daily Mail article, “Elizabeth Haigh (she/her)”, claimed that “Graham Linehan today tweeted about killing LGBT activists and was there”, which is a total misrepresentation and (possibly deliberate) misunderstanding of a sarcastic tweet, and Graham Linehan – who was back on Twitter last night, within about 24 hours – is now threatening legal action against Elizabeth Haigh.
https://twitter.com/ElizabethHaighx/status/1647655240550825984
Both the Daily Sceptic article and Toby’s tweet gave the impression that there was “chaos” at the protests, when the opposite was true.
“Elizabeth Haigh (she/her)” has acknowledged, sufficiently to avoid legal action, that the tweet which got “Gary Linehan” (accuracy is clearly not her strong point) briefly suspended from Twitter was a joke.
https://twitter.com/Glinner/status/1647959697507360770
Thanks, GKIG! It’s really good to have some on the scene coverage that provides an undistorted view of what actually happened.
Very very strange.
Here was what I posted: https://youtu.be/S8e83KoJb00
A link to a very recent interview with Posie.
Many thanks for your report.
“Every Phone in the U.K. Will Get an Emergency Alert Next Weekend – And This Is What It’s Going To Say” –
Now well in my 60’s, I cannot think of one occasion in my life where a ‘potentially life threatening’ situation would have been averted by an Emergency Alert. What is it that’s big enough, and dangerous enough to require this, I wonder..?
I wish the government would just {six letter verb beginning with B] {three letter adverb beginning with O} and stop trying to keep everyone safe. It’s not their {infinitive beginning with an F} job to keep everyone safe. Their job is to make sure the economy works, to make sure that the food supply is there, to provide education (not programming), make sure the roads and rail are usable and affordable; etc etc etc and to protect the country against invaders and anyone who would do us harm. This government mission creep is not wanted or appreciated. As you say, Neil, I’ve never once needed a government alarm in my life. I’m an old geezer too and I’m still here despite the government’s best efforts to kill me off with a totally unnecessary medical procedure and flirting with nuclear war in Ukraine. They need to remember that it is taxpayer money that pays for all this nonsense and no one, NO ONE, voted for this {infinitive beginning with an F} stupid idea. I wonder how many crashes or near crashes there will be on the motorways or secret phones found or important conversations interrupted. Does anyone know the cost of this deluded system? It’s not an emergency alarm signal, it’s the biggest example of a virtue-signalling signal!
The first half of your comment Aethelred sets out the business of genuine government working for its people. Unfortunately for us the uniparty government in this country now obey the dictates of new overlords and we, the plebs, are expected to do as we are told. Those running this country now are the Davos Deviants.
Sadly, as I have posted many times – our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
I know, HP, and that’s why many of us here in Dorset are actively challenging councils and alerting others to things like 5G and 15 MN cities etc. Going local is the way to push back. If we all did it, THEY wouldn’t be able to get their plans out. We’re not having it. MPs as you know are bloody useless. They parrot away their scripts and seem either totally corrupted or unable to think for themselves and often a mixture of both. It’s clearly pointless trying to petition parliament or your local MP. It has to be a grassroots movement. UK Citizen.org has some really useful info and there’s lots else besides. We will prevail!
Tip o’ the hat Aethelred.
Record temperature recorded half way down a jet aircraft exhaust
slight cold in two year old – we must stay indoors
government about to lose election -please stay at home
gentle wind on the east coast has been named “Slightly breezy Jamshid”
you can complete the list.
Wheezy breathing occurs in a 98 year old! We must lockdown to protect him!
Love it👍
A & E Departments will be closed next Monday while their new tik-tok videos are filmed. Please avoid.
Right on, HP!
Even if they ping one of these alerts over a couple of weeks after this one I will still ignore it. Actually ’emergency alerts’ will remain permanently in the off position on my mobi anyway.
“I cannot think of one occasion in my life where a ‘potentially life threatening’ situation would have been averted by an Emergency Alert.”
Me neither. So my conclusion re ’emergency alerts’ – CGAF!
I’m thinking of getting rid of the shiny black rectangle. It would be difficult but I am trying to imagine a life without it and it would probably be better!
…maybe young people will buy their parents smart phones so they can receive the alerts? Lots of people buy into this sort of crap……I know lots of older friends whose kids have bought them ‘Alexa’ and assorted gadgets that they think they need….….then they’ll be set for CBDC’s and any number of ‘health apps’ etc…..
My guess that it’s to ‘normalise’ things like this..ready for the next scamdemic …..
I was at my brother’s last weekend. His youngest daughter spouted from I don’t know where:
“Alexa” tell me a joke.”
Oh no, not another one FFS.
Some years ago we got a telephone message from the environment agency telling us of a potential flood risk and to move ourselves and animals to higher ground – my husband is still waiting for the follow up call telling him he can return to lower ground…
Good one…LOL!!
😀😀😀
Wow, how incredibly kind and thoughtful of the government; I can’t wait to get a text along the lines of
“Urgent! you have illegally exited 15minute zone X58. Return immediately.”
Very helpful. Thank you big brother.
Well if you read a couple of the articles I posted earlier you will recognise that you might just be on the money with that comment.
“‘Quite Ambitious’ Electric Vehicle Strategy Expected To Be Released in Australia This Week” From the people who brought you, “You go to work, you come home, plug your car into the solar panel overnight, and you’re all ready to go the following day.”. I think that might have been the deputy Prime Minister though…
“G7 Vows More Effort on Renewables but Sets No Coal Phaseout Deadline”
“This week, we will mostly be printing more money to give to our friends.”
..I’m not sure what is happening in the world quite frankly. The G7, are a bit like the ‘jabbers’..refusing to see anything other than what they are doing…even though they are wrong on an epic scale…
”In the midst of an unprecedented energy crisis, it’s important to come up with measures to tackle climate change and promote energy security at the same time,”
Japanese industry minister Yasutoshi Nishimura told a news conference.”
Except there isn’t an unprecedented energy crisis, other than the one they are actually making for themselves….and forcing on us!?
Since @2020 The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations as a whole now contribute more towards global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than the G7 industrialised nations do, in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP).
The G7 nations account for about 10 per cent of the world’s population, whereas just India and China, together make up about 35 per cent.
https://theprint.in/economy/led-by-china-india-the-5-brics-nations-now-contribute-more-to-world-gdp-than-industrialised-g7/1490881/
The developing countries will grow, while ‘the West’ stagnates due to this stupidity…I think we are heading towards the New Western Dark Ages!!
“Top Scientists Warn ‘Next Pandemic Is Coming and We’re Not Ready’” –
Au Contraire. I’m totally ready to ignore it, like we should have done with the last one.
Fool me once, etc…
In other news, “Small Boy Warns Wolf is Coming And We’re Not Ready”
Or rather some important sounding men with gloomy dispositions, three letter prefixes before their names, and skin in the game cast their runes in bid to keep the population scared witless and their own reputations relevant. We’re totally ready for this as we knew they wouldn’t stop but we all know the game better now. Arcturus is one of brightest stars in the night sky and that’s it!
Double seconded.
“How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilised Conservatives”
I know this is in the USA, but can anyone detail a ‘right’ that Transgender people DON’T have compared to other citizens..?
A lot if not much of the pro-Trans push is actually homophobia: afraid to be gay. Take for example girly gay guys shunned by normal gay guys so they put on a dress and wig as an excuse for being dateless wonders. Others and their promoters afraid to be gay so they say they are Trans instead. It is just another form of “gay conversion therapy”.
Fresh from Igor’s ‘stack; excess deaths up in the UK and Germany again. Now why would excess deaths in the UK be so high at this time of year?? Genuine question. Can it be more than one thing causing it? It’s mid-April for Pete’s sake!
”Vaccine advocates say, “It is definitely not the vaccine,” without offering viable alternatives. The health authorities refuse to investigate the situation as if they do not want the answers to be known. Without extensive autopsies, pathology research, and individual-level statistical exploration, we cannot know the exact mechanism that caused 21% more than normal deaths among Brits in the week ending on Mar 31, 2023, and that caused 11% more than normal deaths among Germans around the same time.
People are dying. We are groping in the dark. The health authorities and the press, complicit in the Covid vaccination campaign, insist that we must “move on from the pandemic” and forget the continuing unabated excess deaths.”
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/excess-deaths-back-with-a-vengeance
I’m reluctant to disappear down the 5G rollout rabbit hole but I did see a Dr Tess Lawrie post – have so far resisted watching.
Nothing would really surprise me nowadays. If the Spanish Flu was possibly occasioned by global growth of wireless broadcasts, followed by respiratory outbreaks following rollouts of radar, TV, 3G, 4G.
Could it be reasonably mooted that the whole coronavirus scamdemic is an elaborate cover for known, ‘terrain’ effects of 5G? Herx effects among others.
It should definitely be considered if only to show that it is “safe”.. But surely the weak link in all of these is electrical supply – once that is too expensive and unreliable doesn’t the whole infrastructure fall apart?
It is due to Nail Gel (last week’s excuse) and poor air quality (this week’s excuse).
Wir kommen gut voran; “German Pathology”, by JC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEE5OfiVS7o about 17 minutes.
“Budweiser Releases New Pro-America Advert With Iconic Mascot in Wake of Anheuser-Busch Mulvaney Controversy”
“TOO LATE! she cried!”
You’ve shown your true colours, the mask slipped and what was seen underneath will never be forgotten!
You dumped on your most loyal vast majority of customers and it won’t be forgiven!
I’m not sure they ‘dumped’ on their loyal followers. They continued to dispense the same amber nectar, but more metaphorically.
Bud Light = Amber Nectar.
That’s the first time I’ve come across that accolade for gnat’s piss.
“British Library offering emotional support to staff for workplace trauma,”
Yes, during the 1st and 2nd world wars, librarians where clamoring to leave library’s for a quieter less traumatic career in the trenches and on the front lines sooner than face all that psychological and mental atrocity they experienced down between the romantic fiction rows! The famous 5 isle was a particularly abomination!
Lol, yes I expect nowadays a young librarian would be required to seek counselling should they inadvertently read an original version of The Twits, sans trigger warning. I’m fully expecting the numbers of people experiencing PTSD as a direct result of reading from the children’s section to increase exponentially going forward. Will UK mental health services be able to cope??😵🤓
What UK mental health services?? Anything offered under that banner is worse than useless as it is impersonal & offered after such a damned long wait that it is of less use than a sticking plaster for a broken leg.
What you are questioning the doling out of chemical coshes and saying that the solution is not to fill humans with partially tested chemical concoctions?
Absolutely!
An excellent interview with Jerm Warfare and Denis Rancourt…updated interview about all cause deaths….and deaths and the JibJab…..
I know we all know this stuff, but it’s just astounding that this is out there, and they still want to jab babies!!
I also noticed it still says on the UKGov website that you are more likely to catch Covid if you haven’t been vaxxilated….yet their own data says the opposite….!?🤡
https://jermwarfare.com/conversations/denis-rancourt-vaccines
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-planning-is-still-occurring-in-plain-sight/
An excellent article from Dr Tess Lawrie and the dangers of the WHO. The horrendous Panic Preparedness Treaty and the amendments to the International Health Regulations illustrate how close to slavery we are approaching.
There is a link to a petition demanding a vote in the UK Parliament on the amendments to the IHR 2005.
PLEASE, PLEASE add your signature.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/dr-michael-yeadon-most-important-single-message-ive-ever-written/5792100
A heartfelt plea from Dr Mike Yeadon.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/policing-the-elites-technocracy-how-do-we-resist-this-effectively/5815949
A hefty run-down on the coming transhumanism. I doubt even many on here appreciate how dangerous our predicament.
A long read but worth it.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-mad-rush-for-ventilators-in-the-covid-killing-fields-part-1/
The C1984 killing fields indeed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-65296931
Apologies, BBC etc.
1400 acres of the Yorkshire Dales are going to be filled with trees to prevent flooding. I wasn’t aware these lands were prone to much flooding. Some birds have not lived there for over 500 years. Yes, and they might decide they don’t want to go back.
I wonder if the soon to be homeless sheep will get a say in the matter.