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We live in a strange world. Check out just the recent news: putative European "democrats" support Nazis and don't seem to notice that the latter are using weapons of war, including chemical munitions, multiple-rocket launchers and ballistic missiles, against cities. We live in a world were it is apparently quite normal for the IMF/ECB/etc. to continue to send money to a bankrupt country in the midst of the civil war in total violation of their own statutes, but where an EU/NATO member like Greece cannot even get a few days worth of credit extension. In the USA homosexuals will now be "playing marriage" and continue to adopt children to pretend to be viable couples. In the Middle-East the Israelis are happily continuing to commit acts of piracy on the high seas while Canada wants to pass a law making criticizing Israel a punishable form of "hate speech". Besides being revolting, is all this not just plain crazy?!

"Democratic" countries are ruled by the 1% but "authoritarian regimes" like Russia, Iran or Syria all undeniably have the support of the masses (and the eternal hatred of the local wannabe 1%ers!).

And it is not just politics - this insanity reaches much deeper into our society. Men are not supposed to be manly any more, while women are now told that femininity is being stupid and submissive. Honor is now passé, as is obedience, kindness, faithfulness and humility.

We are supposed to be sexually free, yet there is a huge multi-billion dollar industry fully dedicated to cater to sexually dysfunctional people (sexually happy people need neither porn nor Viagra!). We are supposed to be politically free, but somehow the policies of our rulers seem to never change. We are supposed to be intellectually free (freedom of speech!!) and yet with each new generation the already disgraceful level of crass ignorance of the average citizen is getting worse and worse.

But that's no big deal as long as we maintain the illusion that the fake substitute is, in reality, the real thing. From top to bottom our entire society is based on a charade, a fraud, a pretense of reality, but none of it is real.

But when did this all start?

I know that many will disagree with me, but I see a direct cause and effect relationship between the denial of moral reality and the denial of physical reality. I can't prove that, of course, but here is my thesis:

Almost from day one, the early western civilization began by, shall we say, taking liberties with the truth, which it could bend, adapt, massage and repackage to serve the ideological agenda of the day. It was not quite the full-blown and unapologetic relativism of the 19th century yet, but it was an important first step. With "principles" such as the end justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all "for the greater glory of God" the western civilization got cozy with the idea that there was no real, objective truth, only the subjective perception or even representation each person might have thereof. Fast forward another 10 centuries or so and we end up with the modern "Gayropa" (as Europe is now often referred to in Russia): not only has God been declared 'dead' and all notions of right and wrong dismissed as "cultural", but even objective reality has now been rendered contingent upon political expediency and ideological imperatives.

Here is how Orwell defined "doublethink" in his book 1984:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (...) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality"
The necessary corollary from this state of mind is that only appearances matter, not reality. This is how you end up with a society of sexually frustrated Pinocchios desperately trying to look respectable and relevant.

If I had to pick the perfect symbol for our modern western society it would be Michael Jackson: neither White nor Black, neither young, nor old, neither a man nor a woman, at the same time both asexual and pedophile. And, most importantly, Jackson was the artificial creation of hundreds of hours of surgery and marketing.

In the political real the nearest equivalent to Jackson would be Obama. Obama has all the qualities of a car salesman: superficially charming, not too bright, but clever enough to learn sales techniques. And a world-class liar, of course. In many ways, both Clinton and Reagan had the same skills set. These are the men that sold the world ideas like the liberation of Grenada as a great triumph for the US military, the bombing of Serbia as a great triumph for human rights or the destruction of Libya as a great triumph for democracy. Characteristically, these statements are both factually and morally wrong. Thus we see the wonderful "marriage" of immorality and delusion - they always go hand in hand.

And as long as Europe was led by "great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies" (to use the wonderful words of Boris Johnson) and the sub-pathetic Yeltsin was drinking himself to death in the Kremlin, this system could more or less function. But when Putin came onto the scene this house of card came tumbling down. When faced with a real man and an officer with a iron will and an excellent understanding of how the western political system works, the likes of Obama, Cameron and Merkel found themselves completely outmaneuvered.

And now they are stuck. They would like to lie their way out of this predicament, but it is already too late for that. So they are doing what the French called "la fuite en avant": the situation in which you run forward even faster in the hope that this will mitigate the consequences of having chosen the wrong course of action.

But immorality and delusion only "work" as long as there is nobody willing to denounce them for the fraud they are. But, as the expression goes "when your head is in the sand, your ass is in the air", and reality inevitably comes back, with a vengeance, making these sexually frustrated Pinnochios completely unable to resort to one of their habitual tricks. Not that any of that will stop them - they will continue, of course, it's all they can do, but at least their lies will have less and less effect.