Humans as "Purely Material Entities"
From, "God's Footprints":
Klavan's insight about the relationship between dystopias and atheism (or scientific materialism) is also perceptive. The fictional dystopias of Brave New World, The Giver, The Matrix — and I would add, C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength — invariably depict future states where men and women are treated as purely material entities devoid of moral impulse and spiritual longing. In such dystopian societies, a reductionist and materialistic concept of human beings ensures that something important — love, freedom, human rights, justice, dignity, faith — is always horrifically omitted or suppressed by those in control.The insight is timely, given the two-year anniversary of lockdowns that we've recently observed. During that time, some states and countries were far more tyrannical than others. The worst offenders claimed to be simply "following the science." What made the difference? No doubt, how secular the culture of the place is played a role. Secularism tends to see experts as deities to be unquestioningly venerated. The God Hypothesis has consequences beyond science or faith.
The totalitarian dystopias of the 20th century replicated this pattern, but in real life. National Socialism and Soviet Marxism both cited science as a justification for their materialistic ideologies and utopian visions but succeeded only in creating hell on Earth — and, indeed, in perpetrating genocide. All of this supports Klavan's other key contention: "We need not abandon the scientific knowledge of modernity, but we must subjugate it to the needs of our humanity rather than allow its fleshless, sexless, motherless materialism to turn us into itself."
Will We Learn from That?
Coincidentally, I was listening today to radio host Dennis Prager who suggests a related question to pose to friends and family. Prager asks, "What have we learned from the past two years?" That would actually be a great subject for a book. He was referring to the widespread dystopia that was imposed with the coming of COVID: the masks, the lockdowns, the isolation, the riots, denying children access to school, the apartheid for the unvaccinated. Focused on the virus to the exclusion of all else, political and other leaders listened to the medical "experts." But few leaders or experts considered what the broader consequences, for what Klavan terms "the needs of our humanity," might be.
The nightmare goes on in some places, like China. In the United States, for the moment there is a backing away from the most damaging and tyrannical aspects of the COVID response. Institutions, including churches and synagogues, that acted with a heavy hand now have retreated, with no public apology or any acknowledgment that they might have been seriously misguided. Humans hate to say they were wrong.
A moral that Prager draws from this is that "experts" should be limited in the scope of what we're interested in hearing from them. Share medical or other knowledge with us, please, but keep your advice — what practically to do with that knowledge — to yourself. Expertise, like atheism, shades all too readily into tyranny.
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.
Reader Comments
Common sense should tell you there is something wrong. I heard the rumor there is a turf war going on between different factions of the CCP, and those lockdowns are part of that. And internal tensions China has enough.
TeaTree can help, just saying is best.
Reductionist thinking leading to "extreme order" or hell, the title of that book is probably Language of Creation.
For me, I totally got sucked into a bagel. Confined to quarters has led to some pretty beautiful, liberating elevations that no tyranny was planning on - most certainly not... Mwahahahaha!!!
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I mean really? Greer thinks having Harkonnens abound (sic) is something to aim for??? The eugenics of the Bene Gesserit? SPACESHIP DUKES AND FIFEDOMS??? Yes, there is some weeding out needs doing. That said...
The proverbial "they" can't keep the truth from brimming out of their own pots... [Link]
My PhiloSophia class in C.E.G.E.P. 1978
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_into_Hell_(novel)
I spelled that as such on purpose. Will look for another exciting link and post au cas où tu ne l'as pas déjà vu.
Reference only, Linda May.
C'est donc probablement très bon, alors, et plein de vérité...
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Musk talks briefly just before that. Live video GameS!
Not just the visuals. Her beautiful name... and yeah, I'm totally sucked right in.
Wowswers YAAAAY TO MEET YOU!!!
Thank you for the link, I'm watching...
And I found the book online to order. Merci MILLE FOIS, good Kinswoman!!!
She may just get down on her knees 😅😉
Times have finally shifted, t.h.a.n.k. God n Goddesses. Damn! Long walk!
I am sure everyone has been feeling the shift occuring in the last week. If not, pay attention. Miracles on display the the next 3-4 weeks.Tomorrow is a beautiful FullMoon in HarmonySeeker Libra and our Taurus Solar Eclipse on April.30. April.28 is hugely lucky.
Amen
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Anytime...
The Ballad --- 'special for you, Linda May. I always hear these lyrics, both versions, as if Sophia herself is singing...
Bonne nuit...
She really has the touch of philoSOPHIA. Very original and pretty pretty song and voice.
Goddess love, sweet Linda May
I walk the path of insight trained
grâce à tes éfforts this day...
In every way there is to say
I love you means so much this day...
🦋🌷🦋🌷🦋
🧸 RC 🐇🐇🐇
😔
Merciiii JoeyT❣ 3❣ X ❣
"Let’s get something straight. There is no pure form of socialism, where “the government owns the means of production.”
The means of production own the government, and vice versa. It’s always collusion. Elite power players stitch themselves together like a walking Frankenstein corpse.
Socialism can be done with a smile or with guns and jails. Styles vary.
For example, the Council on Foreign Relations [CFR] believes an international “joining of hands across the water” would be just dandy.
You could call the CFR’s agenda socialism or Globalism or fascism or dictatorship or the corporate state---it doesn’t matter. For the sake of brevity, call it socialism.
At street level (not within the CFR), every proponent of the socialist “solution” either has no idea who installs it and runs it, or astonishingly believes “the government” can be transformed into a beneficent enterprise and shed its core corruption, as it takes the reins of absolute power.
Meanwhile, the ultra-wealthy elites who use socialism as a weapon, while propagandizing it as our humanitarian future, know full well THEY will run it, and they have no qualms about placing severe limits on the freedom of populations. They want to impose those limits.
Hope and Change, the slogan of the former US president Barack Obama, was perfect for street-level socialists. It was vague enough to be injected with their own vague dreams and fantasies.
Colleges---or as I call them, Academies of Great Generalities---have been turning out these fantasists by the ton. “If I feel it, it must be true and good.”
One such idealist, back in the 1960s, was a young man named James Kunen. But smarter by far than most of his comrades, he wrote a book called The Strawberry Statement: Notes on a College Revolutionary. A member of the Left group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Kunen recalled a curious event at the 1968 SDS Convention:
"…at the convention, men from Business International Roundtables---the meetings sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government---tried to buy up a few [Leftist] radicals. These men are the world's leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the boys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They're the left wing of the ruling class.”
“…They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered Esso (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left."
Rockefeller elites moving to the political Left? What?
Look at it this way. If you’re a Rockefeller man, what brand of rhetoric are you going to use to sell your con? The “Utopian-better-world-for-the-people (Leftist)”, or the “we-want-mega-corporations-to-cheat-and-lie-and-steal-the-people-blind-and-co-opt-the-government (Rightist)”?
Since any brand of rhetoric is designed to end up in the same place---global control---you’re going to pick the more attractive-sounding version.
It’s simply a matter of workability and expedience.
That’s why the lingo of Leftist socialism has come to the fore.
That’s the only reason.
If a Rockefeller operative could use, to good effect, tales of enemies invading Earth from a parallel universe, he would.
In 1928, the historian Oswald Spengler wrote: “There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money---and that [operation has continued] without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.”
Is there a college anywhere in the world that acknowledges and teaches this? The insight is not permitted. It would torpedo too many platitudes and reveal too many false trails laid down by elite deceivers.
David Rockefeller, writing his 2003 Memoirs, baldly asserted: “Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure---one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
Of course, Rockefeller stopped short of saying he and his colleagues, in the core of the CFR and the Trilateral Commission, were using socialism and high-flying utopian rhetoric merely to enlist the Left in his “one-world” cause. He never admitted the notions of “social justice” and “equality” were being peddled to the gullible masses for the same reason.
If he had come clean, victims (both real and self-imagined) would understand they were fighting against the very oppressors who were backing, funding, encouraging, and controlling them.
The sought-after global triumph of socialism is a cover for elite global management and tyranny.
“Thanks for your help. Now that we’ve won, you’re under the gun. Our gun.”
Flashing forward to today, one can see this sales job operating in boardrooms of the tech giants (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) The corporate leaders (the new Rockefellers and Carnegies) claim they’re proponents of “digital socialism,” which they ludicrously define as open access to the wonders of the Internet for all people everywhere, including the poor and bereft. But the last time I looked, those people can’t eat a YouTube video for a breakfast they can’t afford.
This nonsensical fluff hides the same core buried in old-time socialism: the leaders at the top, who have made their mega-fortunes, want to turn around and eliminate competition. Share and care doesn’t apply to the marketplace. The tech CEOs want to collude with government to gain special favors and benefits their lesser rivals can’t obtain.
“We love everyone and care about everyone, but don’t challenge us. We’re the bosses. We own the game.”
The tech giants want much more. They intend to lead the way, with their government partners, into an even tighter control of information (censorship) and a more vast Surveillance State.
They intend to build a technocratic planet, in which planned societies are the foundation. Citizens are “data-points” to be inserted into slots, from cradle to grave, as a worldwide system is constructed.
Notions of fairness, equality, and other terms of socialism are deployed as a front for this massive operation.
Some might say this version of Brave New World/1984 bears no resemblance to socialism.
But they would be wrong. This version is perfect socialism, once you realize the whole socialist “political philosophy” was never anything more than paper-thin propaganda.
It was a nothing made into something.
It falls apart and blows away, and the rictus-grin of control comes into view. The same grin existed in the medieval Roman Church, in the ancient Roman emperorship, in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, in Babylonia, in Sumer, in Mayan and Aztec civilizations, in tribes and clans long buried and forgotten.
Only the language of the sellers to the buyers has changed.
Mao Zedong (aka Mao Tse-tung), founding father and ruler of Communist China, openly declared: “Socialism...must have a dictatorship, it will not work without it.” Mao didn’t beat around the bush. In maintaining his dictatorship, he discovered he might have a problem with between 40 and 70 million of his own people. So, just to make sure, he killed them.
But don’t worry, be happy. Less violent socialisms exist in the world---as long as citizens willingly give up their independence.
For example, you could opt for Tony Blair’s vision. Tony is an accused war criminal (Iraq/2003, between 100,000 and million dead), but on the bright side, he didn’t massacre huge numbers of his own people. In 1983, Tony stated:
“I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.”
I’ll let you try to translate that generalized gibberish. Take the words “rational,” “moral,” “co-operation,” “fellowship,” “equality in our economic circumstances,” and run them to ground. Attempt to apply them to actual life. Determine what actual policies and regulations would flow from them.
Tony is one of the deans of the Academy of Great Generalities. He knows how to shovel it on wide and deep. His one skill is appearing earnest and sincere.
He shares that attribute with many of his socialist colleagues. They’ve learned their tricks at the feet of mentors, and you can trace the line all the way back to Plato.
“We’re not Stalin, we’re not Mao. Honest. We want to do good. Help us help you. We’re all in this together. There’s a bright day ahead. Just let us do our work.”
Or as Bill Clinton famously put it, “I feel your pain.”
No one heard him say, under his breath, “Of course, I pay no attention to feelings.”
I'm hoping for an equalizer that gets loose and strums up everyone on the same line. Time will tell. We've had our eyes ripped from us since before our cultures were borne (sic).
Cannibalizing collectives.
I'm dying to get out of here...
Though recent plays
make me want to see out
A few more daze...
When you've need, seek me out. We are One, and this boon is yours as is mine - forever.
Thank you. With every umbrage inherent in these stilted words we are anchored with, I thank you...
A.
Men
Ra, Ra, Rah...
Grace is mine thanks to so many on SOTT these past couple of days. The love and the dislike - both bring me to new heights...
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WE do. WE are the ghost in the machine. And WE both need each other...[Link]
Hmph. All Three of Us... Happy Easter Passover. We celebrated a dear brother's passing today... Fare Thee Well, Love...[Link]
Thanks, LM.
It's good to be back ;-)
The internet is a military installation. [Link]
Manipulated Media. I watched a Tucker Carlson segment the other night, and was sickened when he glibly told his viewers: "Throw a beer can at your television if you're with me on this one...". Authority peddling power run amok. Throw a beer can at me... I wonder what he wears under the desk. O_o
I was cross-eyed remembering the graphic novel (then moving picture) "V for Vendetta", and a spittle-flying practitioner of propaganda 'praxising' in the mirror of his shower just before he went down the drain...
Carlson reminded me of "for the people" politicos I watch sneering on the inside at their supporters.
Great video. Glad I spent some time.
What a beautiful Easter, in a way. Kinship through black mirrors, with fingers and thumbs for my lips - books and music to move me, in my soul and with rose hips...
Bullet With Butterfly Wings:
Despite all my rage
I am still
Just a rat
In a cage
Then again, there *is* that story "Frisby et Le Secret de Nimh"... ;-) It isn't going to end. We're just getting started...
If one has an entirely materialist view of life, most become apathetic, hedonistic, cynical, sarcastic, this is a belief system and the perception follows it. If one's view is there is a Creator of Intelligent Design and we are created to live and experience this life Now, and we are to continue to be as children seeing the wonder of creation, then this is our belief, even if imperfect, and the perception follows it. The first leads to desperation and fatalism and nihilism, the second leads to being and presence to the Creation.