Much has been lost or perverted in the mad dash for progress these past two centuries. Modernity is like an over-eager adolescent rushing toward a compelling spectacle, tripping over himself in his haste, falling to the ground and smashing his face on the pavement. The enthusiasm itself is not problematic, but its expression reveals a lack of refinement in character, a lack of solemnity, self-control and good sense. Even the loveliest sentiments can hurl us into catastrophe if we lack the capacity to enfold them within a mature worldview. Not understanding this is how we find ourselves, today, adrift in a sea of half-truths and grossly distorted notions of what is good.
Some of this bumbling is natural and expected, a normal consequence of great change and the introduction of fresh possibilities and expanded horizons, but even more of it has a nefarious character that bespeaks deliberate manipulation, the intentional subversion of the good in service to either a deranged ideology or the unenlightened self-interest of power-hungry mediocrities. An unholy alliance between the manipulated and their manipulators, useful idiots and their puppet masters, has done an incalculable amount of damage to the spirit of our time.
For every advantage we have gained we have lost as much or more. For every new device or procedure which makes our lives a bit easier and more colorful we lose yet more gratitude and respect for the things which matter most. With each new cresting wave of sensationalism and the celebration of a new flavor of debauchery we become less familiar with the truly beautiful, and think wholesome passion evermore quaint and outdated, a mere relic of a bygone and backward era. Increasingly we scorn that which would make us sound and happy while celebrating and glorifying the crass and vulgar habits which are slowly turning us all into half-mad, exhausted, neurotic weaklings who can find life tolerable only when heavily medicated.
This condition is not natural. It is not normal. It certainly isn't inevitable, though many have been brainwashed into believing all sorts of misery and malaise are inescapable and incurable. That many torturous bodily and mental states have become commonplace is plain, but commonality and normality are not the same, and what is common is not therefore inevitable. To be normal is to attain to a basic standard, it is not to be merely average. There have been many attempts to conflate the two, driving benchmarks for health and wellness ever-lower with each passing decade.
That most people are in a sorry condition does not mean that they must be. These problems are largely born of an ignorance which is actively encouraged and enshrined in our culture. Right the erroneous beliefs and we are already in a position to extricate ourselves from the worst of our suffering, though it will take prolonged effort and determination to fully transcend it. What are some of these pernicious beliefs?
Consider the increasingly bold hostility towards the family that is endemic in Western countries. It is considered odd to live with any relatives past early adulthood and even shameful or pathetic to live with one's parents. The notion that it's best for a child's development that they have a mother and a father, who can model what a healthy male-female dynamic looks like, is met with venomous contempt by acolytes of the pseudo-religious secular ideologies which have hijacked our culture. There is growing suspicion that homeschooling is dangerous, the narrative being that it can be used to indoctrinate children, yet very little is heard about the mass brainwashing which occurs in our public schools, before which even a fundamentalist religious upbringing is beginning to look level-headed and sane.
Having children has been painted as one of the most catastrophic and unfortunate things that can befall us. Every conceivable discomfort, expense, or difficulty that can come with starting a family is consecrated and emphasized with ruthless persistence in articles, news coverage, movies and television. We're told how expensive they are, how they ruin our sleep, how pregnancy and birth mutilate the mother's body, how much of a mess they make, how stressful it is to deal with their tantrums and helplessness, how they're always getting us sick, even that they're "bad for the environment." One gets the impression that infertility is to be envied! That there are very real difficulties raising children cannot be denied, but the lopsidedness of the coverage is grossly misleading. Nothing on this Earth can bring greater happiness, wisdom and fulfillment than raising children well. We rarely, if ever, hear about that.
There is yet more. Our very perception of reality has been branded as woefully inadequate, as lacking the epistemic rigor that only an authoritative institution may now possess. To have an opinion on anything that wasn't given to us by an authority is practically scandalous. What our senses tell us can scarcely be trusted, yet statistics presented by experts, no matter how suspect the data collection and analysis proves to be, are not to be questioned by commoners. If we switch to a plant-based diet and watch our muscles wither away, see our hair begin to fall out, notice dark circles appear under our eyes, and develop generalized anxiety for the first time in our lives we may rest assured that we're living a healthy lifestyle; the experts recommend it, after all. If you take to eating mostly high quality meat, dairy and eggs and notice that you gain muscle easily, your skin and hair improve, your energy is the highest it has ever been, and your mind is keen and poised, you must cease immediately. The manifest reality of your improved condition is no argument against the pronouncements of a hallowed, scientific institution, no matter how vibrantly and wondrously healthy you seem. Likewise, if atmospheric scientists publish a peer-reviewed paper which suggests the sky is in fact red, you would be a fool and a dimwit to insist on calling it blue. That this is barely even parody anymore ought to disturb us all.
Governments all across the Western world have also worked assiduosly to normalize their image and role as a parental figure who must be obeyed. No longer is the government a public servant which exists to do the will of the people and improve their lives, it is now increasingly portrayed as lord and sovereign over the people, dictating what they can and cannot do, telling them what is true and what is false, what is good and what is bad. Increasingly trivial aspects of our lives are intruded upon by government bureaucracy. A lemonade stand set up by children was recently taken down for lacking the requisite permit. We are given curfews and told we must wear masks everywhere we go, that we must inject ourselves with whatever pharmaceutical companies rush through testing in the midst of an irrational panic, that to own property we must continually pay the government for the privilege of keeping it, and that to drive a car we must waste hours of our time, pay a fee every year and endure the sour temper of government clerks.
Imagine, for a moment, that you bought a phone and paid in full. Suppose you then received an email every year thereafter which demanded you pay the company that sold it a fee of 10% the initial cost, or they would come and take it away from you and file criminal charges. Suppose this was all legal. Would you then claim that you "owned" the phone? No? Then why do you think you "own" a house you cannot keep without paying property taxes? Because you can sell it and transfer the fees to someone else? So what? We do not own something we are compelled to pay for in perpetuity on pain of imprisonment. The notions of ownership and private property have been diluted and cheapened severely. Most people seem quite oblivious. It has become increasingly uncommon to actually own or possess even music, media or television series that we have paid for. They exist in a company's server which we access through a continually-renewed subscription, which could be disabled at any point. We trend blithely into a future where we have to continually pay for more and more mundane things that we ought to pay for once and own for a lifetime, further eroding what little sovereignty and self-sufficiency the average citizen has.
Sexuality is almost always presented and discussed in a churlish and adolescent fashion, glorifying and obsessing over the mechanical and bodily aspects while mocking the emotional and spiritual ones. To require a handful of bizarre "kinks" and rubberized power tools to get off, to master the art of rapidly seducing bar-hopping drunkards, to become a callous mercenary who can sleep with half a hundred people and develop no fond feelings for any of them, to avoid pregnancy at all costs or terminate it if should occur; this is what is seen as a well-developed and mature sexuality.
Food, likewise, is approached in a manner befitting a self-loathing glutton. Maximally stimulating, synthetically flavored, highly processed garbage is preferred to that which actually nourishes. As with sex variety and crude intensity are accorded the highest status, while that which would actually make us healthy, strong, beautiful and mentally sound is seen as boring or flavorless. A deranged palette prefers artfully flavored poison to real sustenance. Most every healthy, instinctual, primal need and desire has been perverted in this fashion.
There is far more that could be discussed, such as the worrying trends towards centralization in every facet of society, the eradication of privacy, the power of social media to inveigle and manipulate the masses into all sorts of catastrophic idiocy, and so on. But what we've considered will suffice for now. Is there a common thread to these trends? I believe so.
A healthy family is a resilient, decentralized unit of support through all of life's vicissitudes. Whether financial, social, intellectual or spiritual crises befall one, a strong family will be there and give what aid it can, in a heartfelt and authentic fashion. Those who have devoted families have far less need of a bloated and meddling government. The hard-hearted bureaucrats and agents of the state are a monstrously cold, ineffective and inhuman substitute. It is thus in the interest of those who wish to expand the powers of the state—and bring the citizenry into a state of hopeless dependency upon it—to erode confidence in and reverence for the family.
Having children invests us powerfully in the future of our society beyond the time of our own death. It expands our concern from merely personal fulfillment and happiness to one that encompasses multiple generations. We are compelled to think of the long-term consequences of the policies and actions that are undertaken in the present. Suddenly all of the miraculous promises made by unctuous politicians—free college, free health care, free money!—may begin to reveal themselves for the long cons that they are (given the catalyst of some modest critical thinking). The more the state takes from the citizenry, the less power the citizens possess to influence society and culture as they see fit. The more the government goes into debt to deliver on these fantastical promises, the more heavily future generations are burdened.
Thus disincentivizing people from starting families, from having and loving children, is immensely helpful for those trying to push through policies which are attractive to self-obsessed, myopic people who vote for their perceived short-term benefit. This could take the form of allowing environmental contamination to continue unabated to keep prices down, the massive inflation of the money supply, the gratuitous waste of taxpayer funds on yet another state-initiated attempt to remedy a problem (which only succeeds in making it worse), or military aggression in foreign countries. Such policies are almost always destructive, though the righteous indignation of the small-minded is expertly channeled and weaponized against any who resist them. Having children that we love incentivizes us to carefully consider the bigger picture.
Sowing distrust in our ability to perceive the reality around us, outsourcing answers to "experts" on any question of real importance, is plainly conducive to the effectiveness of any and all propaganda the combined might of governments and global conglomerates deign to unleash on the public. That the corporations we work for and buy from have also begun to adopt the paternalistic, overlord approach to dealing with their employees and customers is clear. Power is being siphoned away from localities and individuals directly into the faceless, increasingly unaccountable departments of government and mega-corporations, which are suspiciously well-aligned in their ideological pronouncements.
The corrosion of property rights and the explosive growth of pseudo-ownership is a continuation of this trend. Are you more or less likely to challenge whatever narrative has attained to prominence if the government or a small handful of companies have the power to legally repossess or entirely remove access to many of the things you've bought, which you use and depend upon daily? If the unholy alliance between major coroporations and governments in the West continues apace there will be little difference between where we're headed and the tightly constrained internet and commerce of communist China. The complete digitization of a currency which can be easily tracked—and turned on or off at the whim of authorities—would be the crowning achievement of such a system. That this restructuring of finanace, or something akin to it, is under development the world over cannot be denied by any informed person. It may eventually be tied to a social credit score, which would essentially be a measure of how reliably and thoroughly you follow the dictates of the state. This is turn would determine what freedoms a person is allowed to enjoy and their rank in the social heirarchy.
Reducing sexuality to a crass and soulless enjoyment of bodily pleasure, bound up with petty egoism, makes it far less likely that we will form any truly loving and profound connections with our parnters. When we become atomized and pleasure-seeking we are far easier to control and direct from without. When we cannot form deep connections with others or intuit higher truths we become spiritually weak. There is nothing we would fight and die for, nothing which truly motivates us except our own sense of self-preservation and the fleeting thrill of base amusements. The spiritually weak are easily conquered, no matter how much material wealth or social clout they may possess.
Similarly, eating mildly toxic, nutrient-poor foods from cradle to grave enfeebles and destabilizes us. Many of the bodily and psychological disturbances we naively assume are normal and inevitable have their roots in the abysmal state of the food supply. Those who are prone to anxiety or depression, who have a low tolerance for stressful situations, who fear conflict or lack the energy to think critically or to live creatively are, of course, far easier to control than the vigorous, intelligent, courageous and unflappable.
The commonality in everything discussed is this: It makes it considerably easier for powerful institutions—whether public or private sector, national or international—to extract more resources from and exert more control over the citizenry; to cajole, rob and command us as they see fit. The changes have been slow enough, at least until recently, that the vast majority of people were oblivious. That everything here listed has accelerated radically in the past year and a half is, I would hope, obvious to almost anyone. It reeks, in fact, of a kind of desperation to browbeat the public into submission with a relentless salvo of misinformation, censorship, hyprocrisy, demoralization and fear-mongering.
Does this strike you as paranoid or overstated? I contend that it is not. That all of these trends dovetail so seamlessly in furthering this agenda suggests no small measure of deliberate manipulation. For it to be wholly organic strains credulity, as the opportunities presented in the past year for tyrannical encroachment were all seized with terrific haste and zeal, on pretexts that were flimsy at the time and are practically immaterial in hindsight. The irrational reluctance to roll back any of them, despite their patent ineffectiveness and a deluge of collateral damage, also speaks volumes.
The modern world has many wondrous aspects, and in some ways life as a human being has never been better. Yet it is also infested with all manner of decadent and delusional beliefs, immoderate and baneful obsessions, an unearned sense of moral and intellectual superiority to all who came before us, and has spawned the most subversive and pervasive forms of totalitarian control yet devised. If the tone here seems harsh it is only because these trends are casually dismissed as unproblematic when they assuredly are not. I wish to impress upon you the importance of identifying them, so that we may move in a more enlightened direction. We have the ability to see through the deceptions, to rebuke the vulgarity and short-sightedness which has been foisted upon us. The world is in dire need of luminaries who can foresee what most will miss, who will expose these very real dangers for what they are before it's too late. We are living through an attempt at a great inversion which would have us worship and cherish that which weakens and enslaves us. We are collectively sleep-walking into a monstrous spiderweb, from which no amount of thrashing will free us should we become entangled. We must awaken now.