Public life has become disorienting. Most people, by and large, previously expected to hear the truth, or some semblance of it, in daily life. We would generally expect this from each other, but also from public media and authorities such as governments or international agencies set up ostensibly for our benefit. Society cannot function in a coherent and stable way without it, as so much in our lives requires us to place trust in others.
To navigate the complexity of existence, we generally look for guidance to certain trusted sources, freeing up time to sift the more questionable ones. Some claim they always knew everything was fake, but they are wrong, as it wasn’t (and still isn’t). There were always liars, and campaigns to mislead, and propaganda to drive us to love or to hate, but there was a core within society that had certain accepted norms and standards that should theoretically be followed. A sort of anchor. Truth is indestructible but the anchor cable connecting us to it, ensuring its influence, has been cut. Society is being set adrift.
This really broke in the past four or five years. We were already in trouble, but now public discourse is broken. Perhaps it broke when governments openly employed behavioural psychology to lie to their people on a scale we had not previously seen. They combined to make their peoples do things they rationally would not; accept bans on family funerals, cover their faces in public, or accept police brutality and the isolation and abandonment of the elderly. The media, health professionals, politicians and celebrities all participated in this lie and its intent. Virtually all our major institutions. And these lies are continuing, and expanding, and have become the norm.
We are now reaping the harvest of untruth. The media can openly deny what they said or printed just months earlier about a new presidential candidate or the efficacy of a mandated vaccine. A whole political party can change its narrative almost overnight about fundamental characteristics of its leader. People paid as “fact-checkers” twist reality to invent new facts and hide reality, untroubled by the transparency of their deceit. Giant software companies curate information, filtering out truths that run contrary to the pronouncements of conflicted international organisations. Power has displaced integrity.
Internationally, we are pummelled by agencies such as the UN, the World Bank, the G20 and the World Health Organisation to give up our basic rights and hand our new masters our wealth in response to threats that can unequivocally be shown to be false. Paid-off former leaders, grasping legitimacy through the legacy of greater minds, reinforce mass falsehoods for the benefit of their friends. Once something a free media would have exposed, these falsehoods feed narratives in which the same media is openly complicit.
The frightening part is not the lies, which are a normal aspect of humanity, but the lack of interest in the truth. Lies can stand for a time in the presence of a people and institutions that value truth, but they will eventually fail as they are exposed. When truth loses its value, when it is no longer even a vague guide for politics or journalism, then recovery may not occur. We are in an incredibly dangerous time, because lies are not just tolerated but are now the default at the national and international level, and the fourth estate has embraced the darkness.
History has witnessed this before, but on a lesser scale. In Germany, a way of running society built entirely on the acceptance of lies led to the wholesale massacre of millions, from individuals whose disabilities were considered a burden on the majority, to people of specific sexual orientation, to entire ethnic groups. It was ordinary people like us who served to facilitate, and implement, this slaughter. A barrage of lies disoriented them, allowing them to be separated from their consciences or appreciation of goodness. As Hannah Arendt noted: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
And further:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
But this passivity of the ‘people’ is not necessarily inevitable, or applicable to society as a whole. We are all capable of implementing tyranny, but this does not remove our capacity to insist on equality (or, to use its analogy in this context, freedom).
The regime of lies from which Arendt fled was halted through an invasion of foreign armies. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s regime faltered with his death. But we are now in a place where the all-devouring dictator is a coalition of interests broad enough to be resilient to the death of any of its members. It has no physical borders to be invaded. Although feudalism has long been the greed-driven default of society, we are now in uncharted territory, facing a devouring confluence of interests on a global scale with no obvious counter. They anoint national leaders from New Zealand to North America to the EU, and control what we then hear and read about them. No white knight or armed coalition is going to ride to our rescue as we cower in a bunker or simply keep our heads down, keep our thoughts to ourselves, eat what we are fed and try to fit in.
It is only us who can actually make a stand. Otherwise, we – humanity – simply lose. But taking a stand is in the capability of all of us. We could first recognise where we are. We could then take hard decisions and risk being outcasts by supporting people we ourselves assess as telling the truth, and absolutely refuse support to those who are not. We will make ourselves really unpopular by doing so, as unpopular as those who protected neighbours rather than report them, or refused to raise the arm or the little red book. They were vilified, derided, and described by the media as vermin.
We could make a stand in workplaces, in conversations with friends and family, and it may be the last conversations they will accept. And we can do it through the way we vote, which may mean breaking with all we had once claimed to be indisputable. All that we thought we stood for, and that our chosen media had confirmed for us. And we will have no personal reward at the end – this does not collect likes and followers. As Arendt also said: “Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.”
But forgiveness will also make us unpopular, even hated, by many who thought we were allies.
Or, we can buy into the fallacies, blank our minds, accept that the past never happened and lie on the pillow of deceit the media are providing for us. We can accept the assessment of liars and follow their lead over that of our own eyes and ears. ‘Truth’ can become subject to convenience and to what our friends and colleagues would prefer. We can all participate in the farce, embrace the comfort of blank self-deceit, and pretend to live life as we always have. One day, we will find how deep is the hole we have dug for ourselves and our children.
In politics, in public health, in international relations and in history, the best times were always when truth was valued above all, however imperfectly applied. What the media, governments and the empty husks who now direct them are offering is something quite different. Let us hope enough are repulsed by it to take the risks that are necessary. Don’t stay safe. Get to a place that is quite the opposite. Light overcomes darkness but it also makes it very hard to hide. A very dark future can be avoided, but not by keeping it hidden.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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A great read. I feel that the accelerating discombobulation of society is entirely intentional. What is happening in the US government and media at the moment, in particular, places us firmly in terra incognita, as you note.
The elites no longer care that we see them; either they have discombobulated themselves, or they have grown cavalier, knowing that final victory is so close.
CBDC,s means game over ( Computer Says “NO” followed by Walliams
breathy cough) !
Years ago I read “The Book of Merlin” by T.H. White and one particular observation has haunted me ever since:
“We find that at present the human race is divided into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become ‘politicians’; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off under the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated.”
I am not filled with optimism that ‘the proles’ will be our salvation, as Orwell predicted/hoped in ‘1984’.
Thank you for this post.
Sadly I agree with T. H. White and your final para.
Ditto
Fantastic comment. Thank you
Bleak future ahead if true. Unless the wise “ones” can change the current direction of travel. We must never give up hope, truth will prevail, lies will always (eventually) fail.
What the hell is this, please? Do you think if you wear a mask while you cook you’ll be alright? Personally, being quite the badass cook, I’ve yet to meet a pan I’ve been afraid of..
”There’s a lot of chatter out there right now about “Teflon flu,” an illness you can develop from using pans coated with polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). With that, it’s only natural to wonder what you can do to lower your risk of getting this illness.
If you have pans coated with PTFE at home, Teflon flu is a real risk, according to the National Capital Poison Center. But given that some foods cook better on a non-stick surface, there’s no reason to toss your Teflon pans based on this fear alone.
Teflon flu can cause a range of symptoms, including fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle aches, and dry cough. Basically, it can make you feel like you have the flu, but it’s caused by your cookware.”
https://www.foodandwine.com/teflon-flu-8685022
Off-T
So, Russia is to be the testing ground for CBDC ‘s in the West.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/07/30/putin-calls-for-full-scale-implementation-of-digital-ruble/
Here we go ……..
‘What is truth’ (Pontius Pilate).
‘The truth will set you free’ (Jesus of Nazareth).
A notice seen in a bar in a hotel in Skegness by the authoress Madeleine Bunting: Your body is not a temple but an amusement park.(The body as a temple for the Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth, was a concept urged on his converts by the Apostle Paul).
Churchill said a ‘bodyguard of lies’ was necessary to conceal the preparation for D-Day.
The word ‘truth’ appears 224 times in the Bible. The situation the author describes has been encountered before. ‘And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter’. (Isaiah lix.14).
Strange omissions in the article. There are no specific names of individuals, but generalisations like “our masters”. Who are those masters? Could we have names please. The same with agencies like WHO, the UN, the World Bank and the G20. But who actually controls those agencies? There is indeed reference to countries like Germany and Russia, but in the past tense. Why China, the Present and Clear Danger is not mentioned? China is openly challenging not just America, but by leading the axis of evil with Russia, N Korea and Iran, the whole of the West and its values. And yet, and yet, nowhere China is mentioned in what appears to be a truth-seeking essay. Strange to say the least.
I tune out whenever I read, “This is just like Hitler!”
Trust you are then tuning out the stuff being written about Trump? On the other hand, the phenomena of Hitler (and Stalin) is relevant to how even the most advanced societies go wrong, especially given that it is recent (ie, within living memory). The real issue is whether Hitler’s tactics of using pseudoscience to support authoritarian control by an elite of “believers” are, or will be, used? Similar tactics have been used throughout history to achieve dominance, so it’s quite justified for people to be seriously concerned about today’s situation. I’m appalled by the possibility of neo-feudalism.
Check my post above
What have you got against China? As far as I am concerned, China is doing an amazing job of picking itself up after its catastrophic period under Mao Zedong. It may be flooding western markets with cheap products but it is also leading the world in many fields. One does not have to agree with the leadership of Xi Jinping but he is taking care of his 1.4 billion people quite well.
In what way is China openly challenging America? Surely USA is militarily challenging China, for example, stationing US soldiers on islands in the Taiwan Strait, including an island a mile off China’s south-east coast, not to mention the US Navy patrolling in the South China Sea. Are there Chinese soldiers stationed one mile off USA? Is the Chinese Navy patrolling off the US coast?
And Russia, North Korea and Iran are an axis of evil, challenging the West and its values?
One does not necessarily have to agree with the political leaders or politics of any of these countries but are they a threat to the West or are they, alternatively, not only continually threatened but also sanctioned by the West?
And as for the values of the West, is the article not clearly pointing out that the western world is governed by liars, that there is no truth in anything the West portrays, that the values we should have and thought we had have long since disappeared down a rabbit hole?
In the days of the Cold War, any criticism of a communist country by the West was countered with the statement, “You are interfering in the internal affairs of our country”.
I have come to the conclusion that this is a fair statement and we should desist from imposing our values, whatever they may be, on other countries. Let other countries and their people get on with their lives while we get on with ours.
As for the question who our true ‘Masters’ are, you could start by looking up names like Bilderberger and Rockefeller, for example, in https://expose-news.com/. I do not believe there is one sinister figure manipulating the world, I believe there is a whole lot of individuals delighting in playing God. I believe earlier generations of these creatures used to be tolerated but more or less ignored, whereas now our wonderful western politicians just bow down to anyone they consider superior to themselves – and thus spend a lot of time bowing down.
Ivor Cummins with a succinct round up of the position we find ourselves in .
https://thefatemperor.com/global-dystopia-strategies-and-synergies-all-explained-simply/
Thanks Freddy
Powerful stuff. If we are to speak up and tell the truth we must watch our tone carefully otherwise we compromise our message. St Paul says we are to ‘tell the truth in love’. Equally important is to be a member of the Free Speech Union. You never know when you might need it to have your back.
Seconded
Yes but is what Bergson called the elan vitae. We know that we are surrounded by a miasma of filth and yet we can’t respond. If the mythos of the civilisation loses its juice then it is very hard to put it back. It can be done but it requires advanced minds that are also the ability to fight in an increasingly predatory environment. Most masters tend to hide themselves away. We have been taught in recent decades that the idea of nationhood is essentially a corporate structure, a facilitation of colonialism. There is some truth to this but there is a deeper truth that was buried. The spirit of the true nation belongs to the archangeloi. These spirits are two levels above human consciousness. There is a level of development in human understanding where a person embodies the spirit of the nation – they have direct contact with the archangel. You cannot speed up the process of intiation but it is good to dwell on the archangel of your country.
In England you will find that a very attractive woman has very few suitors. This is because most men consider her to be out of their league and so they don’t want to look like an inadequate prat rejected by a goddess. This is the problem. Complete lack of self-esteem I see it everywhere. You should be the man who approaches that woman and then not only will you win her but you will impress with your courage and gusto your timid peers.
A time is coming where a man’s word will be his currency. Will you even remember what it is like to speak in such times. They have robbed your speech of its potency. No point in hoping for television cliches to fall off your tongue in the style of a young footballer. We think that we are a war-like nation but when was the last time you faced a fierce and determined and rational enemy? If such an enemy appeared tomorrow they would have our guts for garters before we sorted ourselves out. Although I do have faith that once we sorted ourselves out we could be a formidable enemy.
Farage on GB News tonight … He has never aligned with Tommy Robinson ( he could & should have left it there ) but he continued to say “& I never will” SO now we know !!!!….
More substance and truth to Tommy than Nigel
Don’t obsess about the crap in the media. It is the worst thing you can do because you only have so many minutes in your life. You can imagine your enemy devising schemes to suck at those minutes away. See it that way and you will move towards the most productive path.
It isn’t just the blatant lies; it’s the deliberate gas-lighting and the fact that every so-called “conspiracy theory” about their plans is confirmed as correct about 6 months later.
They are not bothering to try and hide their plans: that is part of the process. Telling us what is planned to cause alarm and some limited resistance …..limited because “waking up the brainwashed sheep is virtually impossible …… to justify the imposition of more control mechanisms.
I hope, the next time they declare a plandemic and attempt to re-run the lockdowns, far more people will refuse to comply.
But I’m not confident.
I don’t think they’ll do it again until they have all the surveillance/control mechanisms in place.
What side should one resolve to be on ?
Truth, not lies ? Fact not fiction ?.Moral not immoral ? Good not bad ?
A task that remains outstanding is the maintenance of the distinction between intelligence and probability