OBJECTIVE MORALITY? REALLY?

No self-respecting scientific materialist would give the notion of objective morality the time of day. Values are not things, but qualities, he would object, and as such are not amenable to measurement, and therefore do not exist. But CS Lewis argues, you may recall, for just such a concept, in an appendix to his The Abolition of Man, in which he lists the moral precepts that the major religions of the world have in common. Just as reproducibility of experimental results in science establishes "facts" – reproducible measurements – as confirmations of an external reality, so the appearance of comparable guidelines and codes of good behavior across religious boundaries provides us, says Lewis, with confirmation of the objectivity of values in the form of morality - a firm, albeit hierarchical foundation for universal, ethical behavior.

This "proof" Lewis found necessary because of the valueless "flatland" being disseminated in the UK back in the early 1940ies by a couple of liberal-materialist educators. Their misguided work was an outgrowth of the cult of rationalism (promoted by Francis Bacon, then grasped more firmly after the Enlightenment, but which seems to have had its genesis as far back as Plato and Aristotle, who advanced it as an antidote to the as yet untrammeled subjectivity of the Sophists!). Rationalism has since accelerated into a full-blown nihilism with the advance of technology, and now forms the foundation of Globalism, as articulated by Yuval Harari. 

Objectivity - basically, belief in knowledge of the independent existence of things - is useful as a theoretical tool, but has no reality philosophically, and is lethal when the mainstream science that believes it is captured by politicians, as it has now been. And this exposes a central paradox: the world we apprehend is inescapably human-generated, that is to say, political. Mainstream science consists (entirely) of scientists. The world arises in the instant of being apprehended, as an undefined, quality experience from which we make sense with the help of the people with whom we must agree about its nature – i.e. scientists, and our community - positing the existence of things that account for our immediate experience of quality. Whatever consensus is then arrived at - by demonstration, coercion, censorship, gaslighting and bloodshed - is termed "the facts", or (today) "objective reality". This activity, so utterly universal and important, forms the substance of human history, and it is, as I say,  political. It leads, inevitably, to the creation of political borders, demarking the incompatibilities between independently-arising world views. Our resulting world is inescapably ethnocentric. We are, we hubristically assert, in command of "the facts"; other cultures, we declare condescendingly, merely have "beliefs". 

Scientific materialism attempts to reestablish, through faith in "objectivity", the certainties originally provided by religious faiths, but devoid of their morality. Science cannot objectively evaluate a difference between babies and bathwater. By asserting the existence of an objective reality entirely independent of humanity's thoughts about it it similarly disposes of immeasurable God as objectively unverifiable. The resulting universe is a deterministic machine. It then tries to fill the moral vacuum it has thus created by claiming, with unselfconscious irony, that Man can now be God! But in a materialist, deterministic universe there can be no free will, so it's unclear how human godliness could manifest under such conditions. This further irony is in turn papered over, by the introduction of what Harari calls human "agency", i.e. independent will by another name. 

So we are left with, I think, an insufficiently clear articulation of the real situation we find ourselves in, namely, that we are of-a-piece with the universe, yet alienated from it by thought. Thought raises, then justifies, the illusion of separation from Creation - first, with mythical tales like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, then with claims of an objective world "out there".  As a unique expression of Creation humanity cannot claim - despite all the efforts of deterministic scientism - to apprehend the world in any other way than through itself. When politicians claim to "own the science" they are power tripping, pretending a universal, scientific objectivity for their edicts that simply does not exist. This is nothing other than the claim of Papal Infallibility, updated - but with less justification!  

  

Globalism turns out to be yet another iteration of organized religion, offering certainty while seeking world domination, this time via technology, which at last promises elitists the Holy Grail of total control.  Ultimate control means complete lack of freedom for the governed. All physical and natural processes and phenomena are to be monitored, measured, and regulated. Neuralink and related technologies will complete the bio-convergence of humanity that is already under way, culminating in Klaus Schwab's dream of transhumanism via the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

A growing army of fellow heretics is searching for an authentic substitute - a replacement - for scientistic globalism as currently conceived. CS Lewis has pointed out a way to that end: a system of real morality (as opposed to the arid, virtual, flatland of expediency that is the contribution of the religion of scientism), based on a recognition of the objectivity not of "things out there", but of the human experience, which is the only real thing we know and from which everything else that we call "objective" derives. Our commonality will be rediscovered by sharing our personal truth with, yes, openness and honesty engendering trust and fostering loyalty, in pursuit of communal truth with courage, integrity and mutual respect, and not in a post-truth, Orwellian dystopia, blindly going along to get along in collective submission to an artificial reality masquerading as some external, "objective" world, sustained through fearmongering and subterfuge by power-drunk politicians with God complexes!  Whew! 😀 

 

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Pablo

IF EUROPE DOESN'T WAKE UP...

America is being driven mad.

Linked below is my interview choice of the week.  Having shared it yesterday with the heretic community, I hadn't quite the courage - or is it recklessness? - to share more widely. However, it's getting late, so caution be damned!

The roots of shared belief that feed whatever culture holds the USA together are being systematically destroyed: family, religion, sexual identity, patriotism. So, also, is the nation's physical well-bring, with junk food, obesity, fentanyl, countless chemical additives in everything, and a rogue sickness industry that pathologically profits from it all. Food itself is now being targeted, and then there's the unchecked flood of illegal immigration by the millions.  And much of the same is also happening throughout Europe. 

Recognising this does not play into the comfort narrative we naturally prefer and are very much accustomed to. Indeed, its very enormity invites excuses and outright denial. It is insufficient to say that our blindness to the overwhelming evidence of our collective destruction is approaching collective madness, because that separates the trees from the forest. The two are not separate. We don't see what's happening, because we are looking piece-by-piece at the culture that is being deconstructed and transformed from within that culture. Where else can we stand? It is - or was - us. Our culture, like our very selves, is what we have no choice but to, however cosmetically, defend.  To abandon our identity - or to have it changed for us, bit by bit, out of all recognition - is, literally, to go mad. If we were frogs the water we live in would by now be approaching boiling point, but we wouldn't notice.

  

How are we to get out of ourselves - out of the boiling pot - sufficiently to see what is being done to us? On what secure platform can we stand to do this? The answer to this vital question lies in our recognition of the very thing that is being relentlessly undermined - this by a false faith we can call, paradoxically, flat earth scientism. It's a faith that declares that all values are equivalent, that is itself - it claims - value free. 

But there can be no such thing! We have to acknowledge that we live by values. Values hold us together both as individuals and as societies. They make our world. What are those values? Well, at their life-affirming best they are none other than what defines us as a community of human beings. This is the very thing the core of our religion supports and globalism is seeking to devalue, and destroy. 

So, here's a very bright lady. She's done a lot of deep research with a large and dedicated community of others, and she lays it all out very clearly...

https://youtu.be/TtbcDJRsuig?si=PgE56iamoIjXUjZ9

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Pablo     

BURIED UNDER BUREAUCRATIC BS

Have you noticed how we are being ever more rapidly buried under paralyzing, indigestible and impossible-to-comply-with bureaucratic rules and regulations - and the small-business-crippling taxation they "justify"? China apparently leads the world in this field, with half of small-to-medium-sized businesses bankrupted during the lockdowns, to the tune of $11 trillion.

Once a hallmark of Third World inefficiency we're now smothered everywhere in bureaucratic red tape. It's the bread and butter of the UN agencies, the impenetrable smoke screen (have you tried reading the WHO IHT amendments?) for their increasingly bold stripping away of national and individual sovereignty. Our lives are commensurately dominated by CPAs and the legal profession, which alone still have the skills needed to decipher the convoluted word salad, the verbal diarrhea, that enigmatically dictates the terms of our existence in post-industrial society. When AGI replaces CPAs and lawyers those who still have jobs will be completely at the mercy of the taxman. Indeed, they already are.


As the illustration goes -
Pythagorean Theorem: 24 words.
Lord's Prayer: 66 words.
Archimedes Principle: 67 words
10 Commandments: 179 words.
The Gettysberg Address: 286 words.
The Declaration of Independence: 1320 words
European Commission Regulation 1591/87 on cabbages, sprouts, ribbed celery, spinach and plums: 5371 words. (Does this mean there were 1590 other regulations issued prior to this one in 1987? But at least Snopes declares that another, 26,000+ word directive on cabbages is "false").


Word salad is the unavoidable grammar and vocabulary of totalitarianism. Its characteristics are multisyllabic, convoluted, authoritarian sentence structure, disguising a lack of meaning. The One Health policy of the UN is a typical example, both in its impossibly broad reach (everything) and in its excruciating attempts to shoehorn human language into the artificial mold that the desire to control everything requires.


Pablo

THE GRAMMAR OF OPPRESSION

To protect itself against dissent in the ranks authority applies a universal “grammar”. It goes as follows – 

• Clandestinely threaten the accuser. That failing – 

• Create an expedient “case”, turning the accuser into the accused, and initiate legal proceedings. 

• Cast doubt on the accused’s sanity, “sanity” being conformity to norms defined by the authorities. 

• Suspend the accused from participation in the organization. 

• Demand a full recantation. 

• Charge the accused with confusing the membership with misinformation. 

• Charge the accused with fomenting revolt, or revolution. 

• Convict, expel, and silence the accused. 

The on-going case against Father Jesusmary Missigbètò illustrates this invariable chain of events. The Vatican and Opus Dei have begun “a canonical process” to “expel” him from the priesthood, in official response to his theological objections to the novel doctrines of Pope Francis. He writes that he is seeking support “to continue defending the truth of traditional Catholic teaching against the moral and doctrinal errors that Pope Francis has inserted into it.”

He further reports that he has had five death threats, presumably for criticizing the Pope.

Father Fernando Ocáriz Braña, the Prelate of Opus Dei, has stated various reasons for opening a canonical case against Missigbètò: his unwillingness either to see a psychiatrist or to request a “dispensation” (i.e. exemption) from his priestly duties, persisting “in the conduct that led to his resignation from the Prelature [of Opus Dei],” confusing the faithful, and through his conduct perhaps “promoting aversion and disobedience to the Holy See.” 

We see this pattern unfold wherever high authority is challenged. It signals one of two situations: either a community member is behaving heretically, i.e. questioning or disobeying fundamental community principles and thereby threatening the integrity of the organization, or the community leadership is itself violating in word or deed those same principles to which the membership was previously pledged. In outcome, either the accused member will recant or be caused to depart the organization, or (more rarely) the leadership may be forced or voted out of office. Leadership recantation, significantly, is not an option; leaders cancel themselves by admitting wrongdoing. But upon the departure or recantation of the accused member, or replacement of the leader, those principles will be reestablished, or reconfirmed. 

If, on the other hand, the accusation is an objection to a deliberate change of principles (an accusation which can only be brought by a member or subordinate against the leadership), then for the preexisting principles to be upheld or restored requires the replacement of the leadership that made the changes. Otherwise, departure of or retraction by the subordinate signals the establishment of those changes in an essentially transformed organization. A redefinition of sanity then automatically occurs, realigning it with the new norms. 

What you may have noticed is the dishonesty that inevitably accompanies an attempt to change the underlying principles of a given community system without admitting its resultant moral transformation. Hence the necessary departure of the accusing member, absent recantation, when the accusation is inevitably rebuffed. Charter Change in the Philippines, and alteration of the American Constitution are two current examples. The amendments to the International Heath Regulations being engineered by the WHO are another particularly egregious example. The realignment of the Catholic Church with the principles of wokism, alluded to above, is another. The Great Reset being imposed on the human population by the WEF and its sister organizations is yet another – though in this case Klaus Schwab has warned us that the belief that we can go back to the way things were before the plandemic “is, you might say, a fiction”. He can afford to admit this because he knows that wholesale changes made to the terms of human existence itself will not be believed, let alone agreed to, and can only be accomplished by the imposition of totalitarian “governance” and the iron fist that finally dispenses with our permissions altogether. 

The involvement of psychiatry in this process is inevitable, involving the undeclared canceling of preexisting definitions of sanity on the invidious pretext that the new conditions self-evidently override the old: they are, declare the authorities, self-referentially good. Protesters are therefore judged as if the changes authority is introducing are already in effect, and the old principles guiding the morality of the protester no longer apply. Moral certainty is replaced by moral ambiguity, and might becomes right.

Pablo

New and Damning Evidence

The tribal thinking that holds us together as a society is nowhere more in evidence than in political institutions like the British House of Commons. Political parties everywhere think and act as one. While there is a consensual component to this synergy, what ultimately holds a political party together is its leadership. US President Harry S. Truman, you will recall, enshrined this principle in the sign he kept on his desk: "The buck stops here."  This reassuringly paternal statement has a dark side, articulated in another aphorism, attributed to Lord Acton*: "Power devolves to whomever is prepared to take responsibility"*. 

Responsibility for what, you may ask? Ah! That's the  question! You and I are who we are and where we are because we lack the stomach - or perhaps the opportunity - to make decisions and give orders that may terminate the lives of thousands, millions...or billions. But there are always individuals prepared to make just those decisions and give those orders, and they are accordingly handed - or seize - the reins of power (think Boris Johnson, persuading Volodymyr Zelenskyi to continue the butchery of young, Ukrainian men - not to mention Zelenskyi himself. Zelenskyi could not say 'No' to Boris. So to whom was Boris reporting?).  And so down the chain of command the directives go, each recipient guiltlessly becoming the willing minion of those above, with the tribal justification "I was just following orders".  And the alternative? There is only one: to be a traitor to the herd, and face the punishment meted out to those who fail to toe the party line: excommunication (e.g. Andrew Bridgen), or worse (name your martyr). ln exactly this way the herd perpetuates itself. This process is amply documented. It's called "history".  

The task for the vast majority is to go along to get along. This is the social contract. There's only one potential problem, from the perspective of those nearer the bottom of the heap: they (we) have no control. And today they (we) are becoming "useless eaters". They (we) are no longer inside the tribal tent. They (we) are now, unfamiliarly, among the thousands, or millions...or billions. Resist, and we will be labeled traitors - "terrorists" is I think the current term. So - continue to go along to get along?  The twenty individuals named in Bridgen's request to Sir Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (see the link, below), have, like Bridgen himself, chosen the path less traveled. If we can't be heroes and heretics like them, should we at least be starting to reexamine our bread, to determine on which side it is buttered?  

https://youtu.be/wXcMhWEjkqE?feature=shared

Pablo

* I've been unable to track this to its alleged source, but its validity - its logic - is, I think, self-evident. 

The Climate Agenda and Climate Science

 

Whether true or false, there's obviously an agenda behind the relentless climate change alarmism we're being subjected to by our leaders both elected and un-. It's aimed at justifying a radical alteration of human consumption patterns. 

Heretofore loyalty to our Establishment had proven survival value. Censorship of alternative views was self-evidently justified, coming as it did from our trusted authorities. They were honorable; they had our best interests at heart; they accordingly acquired our trust, and with it our loyalty. Those outside the fold of our beliefs (recognized by us as "the facts") were, simply, wrong - hence  censorship of alternative views was not merely justified, it was a manifestation of natural order: the proof was that the social contract worked to our benefit.

But trust in government is now at an all-time low. We are coming to the uncomfortable realization that we are superfluous to the long-term goals of our leaders. We are, increasingly, no longer productive. We are becoming "useless eaters". We are polluting . There are too many of us. AI and robots are replacing us. And we are being told all this. It is not a secret! But because we depend, more than those who lead us, on the social contract, we can't afford not to trust it, or them. And so we're continuing to run on automatic, clinging to the underlying assumptions of a belief system that has served us so well.  But are they still valid? Do they apply to present circumstances? 

To increasing numbers of us, once-agreeable censorship of anything that contradicted the government narrative now feels oppressive, unprecedented, alien. What has changed is not censorship per se. That was always there. What has changed is that the pyramid of value intertwined with authority that justified it is unraveling. Value and authority in a healthy society are inseparable. The two are mutually supportive; the one justifies the other. We submit voluntarily to authority that supports our values. But when the two diverge, as now, and authority alone comprises the pyramid, then it ceases to be a voluntary arrangement. It becomes coercive. This signals the elimination of mutual honesty as the guiding principle of the social contract, and the censorship we once embraced becomes a very tangible imposition, a mental prison.

Loyally swallowing political rhetoric dubbed, with post-religious conviction, "the science", is no longer a good survival strategy. We have to start thinking outside the box of our beliefs. 

The anthropogenic warming argument is politically driven, like everything else. This authority pyramid was once, as I say, to our apparent benefit, reflecting a value pyramid culminating in God, the source of all value as of all authority. Today its coercive political nature is hidden behind a new facade of supposed infallibility - "the science". But what are the scientific data that support the new climate agenda? If I say there's mounting expert opinion questioning it, then on what basis - what authority - are we to trust these contrarian, maverick experts over those endorsed by our government? 

We urgently need to reassess our credibility criteria. "Independent fact checkers" is an oxymoron. On what basis is the source supposedly independent? Where's the funding coming from? Does the "expert" have respectable credentials? Respected by whom? On what basis do we assess the expert as honorable?

A revolution of belief is required. We have come to believe that science can be a substitute for religion; that is, that science can direct values. It can't. The situation is exactly the other way around, and when we invert the order we stand our world of values (what we affirmingly call "facts") on its head. Everything becomes its opposite. The result is a world not of truths - i.e. stuff we honestly believe to be the case, regardless of our own desires, but of propaganda - stuff we want others to believe, guided by our will to power. When propaganda replaces truth, then we're in a different political landscape, one in which ends justify means. Call it Communism; call it Fascism, but that's exactly where we are now. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/prominent-scientists-challenge-key-data-underlying-climate-change-agenda-5593800?utm_source=RTNews&src_src=RTNews&utm_campaign=rtbreaking-2024-03-05-3&src_cmp=rtbreaking-2024-03-05-3&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAceUjeh8BzOHP4bIHsitaBLnLFWHe5F4Od4cMr593NMWW

Pablo

As The Herd Turns The "Facts" Change

The job of our authorities is to tell us what to believe. All "facts" not directly experienced are of the nature of beliefs. A little reflection reveals that any product of thought is of such a nature: our entire conceptual world is, obviously, a system of beliefs inside us, not of "facts" out there. And so it is that, within the limits set by our human nature, what we claim to be facts change in sync with changes in the authorities who inform us of them. Because we unquestioningly follow our authorities we accept these changes in the facts, and dismiss the accompanying cognitive dissonance, i.e. the thinking part of us that posited a supposed fact standing behind that belief. Let's please, then, be clear about this: Loyalty to our culture - our system of beliefs - undergirds thought, not the other way around; hence the axiom attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer, that all truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, and finally it is accepted as self-evident. Changes in facts are changes in beliefs. Facts are fluid, because they are beliefs. And, finally, beliefs ("facts") are dictated by our culture.

With Biden exiting the White House certain beliefs that have had an enormous impact on our recent lives will change, and new facts will replace them. After some resistance, and with modifications to protect the guilty duly underpinned by peer reviewed papers in Establishment-approved scientific journals, we will accept these new facts as self-evident.

But there is a greater socio-cultural upheaval underway. As just stated, our culture is what we collectively believe, a collective agreement about the meaning of experience indoctrinated in us by our authorities - a process we refer to as education. Now, as culture informs thought, so if you destroy culture it follows that you destroy thought. Some beliefs now being fed to us by our authorities fall outside what the nature of the majority can accommodate. These beliefs are either being rejected, or are causing sufficient cognitive dissonance to undermine the thinking process itself. Western culture is predominantly cerebral. As such it presents, of all cultures, the greatest threat to the New World Order being relentlessly pursued by the UN and its lead agencies. Western culture is accordingly being destroyed by the means just described.


https://rumble.com/v4cm063-dr.-naomi-wolf-is-cynical-mass-illegal-immigration-being-deployed-against-o.html (14 minutes)

(If you've the time, Dr. Naomi Wolf reads her essay "What is Culture?" - 56 minutes)
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/what-is-a-culture-d90?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-21140f02-79cf-43e7-9df1-98c2d24c60e1