By: Amir NOUR[1] for The Saker Blog
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”
(Attributed to Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
The dramatic turn for the worse in the evolution of humanism and in the dizzying advances in science and technology has triggered heated debate among great thinkers and writers of the 20th century[2]. And the discussion about its deep impact, on both man and the environment, is far from resolved; in particular concerning the key role the West has played, and is still playing, down such an exciting though perilous path.
Obviously, there should be no question of having a bone to pick with modern technology—overwhelmingly originating in the West—which has yielded remarkable successes and rendered yeoman service to humanity as a whole, in almost every realm of human activity. To be sure, the “same technological warp drive that has given us iPhones and streaming services has cut extreme global poverty in half. The same tsunami of data that has revolutionized medicine has, with a twist and a tweet, given us 24-hour news with its howling stridencies. We spit and get our genetic history, press a button and access all human knowledge, navigate the globe on six-inch screen.”[3]
Conversely, one can as well see this as a mixed blessing, and ask whether it doesn’t seem possible, in the midst of our digital lives, that Silicon Valley’s darkest, stealthiest triumph has been to merge personal technologies that improve our efficiency with personal technologies that alter our humanity?[4] And whether we still have control over this rapid pace of development so that to ensure that we—and our powerful future quantum supercomputers—direct research in such a way as to reap the benefits of the ongoing staggering technological progress while avoiding its potential pitfalls?
Thus, with much less benefit of hindsight than Franklin Foer and many other contemporary scholars, but with far more foresight, Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dealt with this very topic eloquently in an historic speech[5] delivered before a large audience gathered at the prestigious American Harvard University in 1978—at a time when the East-West Cold War was at its peak, and only four years after he had been deported to the West from his then communist Soviet Union. He observed that in the Western societies the defense of individual rights had reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals, and destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil, he affirms, has “come about gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature […] The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel the pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”
The Russian philosopher then asked how had such unfavorable relation of forces come about, and how did the West decline from its triumphal march to its (present) sickness? He answered by stating that the West found itself in such a state not because there had been sudden fatal turns and losses of direction in its development, since it had kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions with the help of brilliant technological progress. Rather, the mistake, according to him, must have been at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. He referred specifically to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment, and which “became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists”.
As a result of this new way of thinking introduced by the Renaissance, says Solzhenitsyn, Western civilization “became founded on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs”, and everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of subtler and higher nature were “left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense”.
The Nobel Prize winner in Literature then warned of a looming disaster which has been under way for quite some time, that is the calamity of a de-spiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness. He explained that on the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but “we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and irresponsibility” only to find out that we were being deprived of “our most important possession: our spiritual life”. In the East, he explains, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party; and in the West, commercial interests suffocate it. Consequently, the split in the world is “less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections”.
In concluding his masterful speech—which remains strikingly relevant today, apart from the facts of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the ensuing demise of communism—Solzhenitsyn made the observation that if the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history “equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance”, and that if we want to save life from self-destruction, there needs to be a spiritual upsurge, whereby humans shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to “a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middles Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era”. This ascension, he stressed, “will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on Earth has any other way left but upward”.
Today, perhaps more than ever before, humanity is in the midst of a tidal wave of change. Astrologers insist this is inherent to the “Age of the Aquarius”[6]; Solzhenitsyn and some other ingenious and visionary writers—like Yuval Noah Harari, Jonah Goldberg, and, before them all, Algerian Malek Bennabi[7]—believe it is symptomatic of the transition into the next stage of mankind’s history.
So, now that the diagnosis of humanity’s current predicament has been made, the burning question that arises with increasing urgency is how can humanity rise to the daunting challenge of offering a prescription both to cure the multifaceted ailments that are threatening its very survival, and to navigate wisely our way forward in a growingly complex world?
In his latest book[8], Harari rightfully notes that there is today just one civilization in the world. He explains that ten thousand years ago humankind was divided into countless isolated tribes, but with each passing millennium, these fused into larger groups, creating fewer and fewer distinct civilizations. Thereafter, more prominently in recent generations, the few remaining civilizations have been blended into a single global civilization. And although “political, ethnic, cultural and economic divisions endure, they do not undermine the fundamental unity”.
Rejecting the “misleading” thesis of the “clash of civilizations”, he believes that mankind is losing faith in the liberal story that dominated global politics in recent decades, exactly when the merger of biotechnology and Information technology confronts us with the biggest challenges humankind has ever encountered. Harari is convinced that “any story that seeks to gain humanity’s allegiance will be tested above all in its ability to deal with the twin revolutions in Infotech and biotech”. He, accordingly, draws the conclusion that “if liberalism, nationalism, Islam or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms and bioengineering—it will also need to incorporate them into a new meaningful narrative”.
For his part, Jonah Goldberg[9], building on the research and theories of dozens of sociologists, historians and economists, makes the case that America and other democracies are in peril because they have lost the will to defend the values and institutions that sustain freedom and prosperity. For the West to avoid “suicide” and survive, he says, “we must renew our sense of gratitude for what our civilization has given us and rediscover the ideals and habits of the heart that led us out of the bloody muck of the past—or back to the muck we will go”. In other words, he advocates a return to core, conservative values.
More significantly, Goldberg also makes an important observation which has been “oddly” overlooked by almost all book reviews, even though it constitutes the main theme of the book’s conclusion titled “Decline is a choice”; that is “whether you believe in God or not, it is simply the case that the idea of God has shrunk in society and in our hearts”. This, in turn, has greatly impacted the influence, on individuals and societies alike, of the notion of “God-fearing”—that God is watching you even when others are not. Quite justifiably, Goldberg views this notion as the greatest check on the natural human desire to give in to one’s feelings and do what feels good or even what feels “right”; and, as such, it is “the most powerful civilizing force in all of human history”. Such a negative evolution, Goldberg further explains, creates an opening for all manner of ideas to flood in, thence agreeing with the well-known dictum attributed to Gilbert Keith Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”.
A common and recurring thread in the above big ideas is the belief that civilization without religion is doomed. This is a proven historical fact that has been extensively documented.[10] It is therefore my conviction that the world is still split apart, but not exactly along Solzhenitsyn’s Cold War lines anymore. To be sure, the 20th century has been both the cradle and the cemetery of all ideologies and all “isms“. And once again, history is taking an unexpected turn: the latest of its victims, the last of the ideological Mohicans, is now liberalism, which not so long ago—having successfully dealt a death blow to its communist rival—seemed set to last forever.
Today’s split is fundamentally between believers and non-believers. If it really is the case, then the big question to ask is inescapably: how can we possibly find the best ways and means to live together in peace[11], by reconciling science, reason and faith, hence bridging the dangerously widening gap between those two components of today’s single global civilization dwelling in a rapidly changing and tightly interconnected world?
We shall attempt to answer this big question in a forthcoming analysis.
* * *
- Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the book L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot (“The Orient and the Occident in time of a New Sykes-Picot”), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014: downloadable free of charge, by clicking on the following links:http://algerienetwork.com/blog/lorient-et-loccident-a-lheure-dun-nouveau-sykes-picot-par-amir-nour/ (French)
http://algerienetwork.com/blog/العالم-العربي-على-موعد-مع-سايكس-بيكو-ج/ (Arabic) ↑ - See Amir Nour, The Enduring Quest for Übermensch: From Renaissance Humanism to Silicon Valley’s Posthumanism (https://10.16.86.131/the-enduring-quest-for-ubermensch-from-renaissance-humanism-to-silicon-valleys-posthumanism/) ↑
- David Wolpe, Awaiting the Prophet, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 3, 2018. ↑
- Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Penguin Publishing Group, 2017. ↑
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Harvard Commencement Address, June 8, 1978. ↑
- Astrologers believe that an astrological age affects humanity, possibly by influencing the rise and fall of civilizations or cultural tendencies. Traditionally, Aquarius is associated with electricity, computers, flight, democracy, freedom, humanitarianism, idealism, modernization, astrology, nervous disorders, rebellion, nonconformity, philanthropy, veracity, perseverance, humanity, and irresolution. (Source: Wikipedia, and Geoffrey Dean et al, Recent Advances in Natal Astrology: A Critical Review 1900-1976, Astrological Association, 1977). ↑
- In his book titled L’Afro-Asiatisme: Conclusions sur la Conférence de Bandoeng, published in Cairo, Egypt, in 1956, Malek Bennabi predicted the realization of a “great human mutation” whereby “mankind, which had crossed with the Neolithic the first level of its history by rising to the level of civilizations, must now move to the second level of its history by rising to the level of the civilization of the ecumenical man”. ↑
- Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Jonathan Cape, London, 2018. ↑
- Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy, Crown Forum, 2018. ↑
- See: Amir Nour, Fighting for Survival: Whither Modern Civilization, The Saker, July 7, 2017 (https://10.16.86.131/fighting-for-survival-whither-modern-civilization/). ↑
- At the initiative of Algeria, the United Nations General Assembly adopted, on 8 December 2017, resolution 72/130 (https://undocs.org/A/RES/72/130) declaring the 16th of May as the International Day of Living Together in Peace. ↑
Wow. I’m not sure which stuns me more. That everything since the Dark Ages was a mistake? Or that Jonah Goldberg is a great thinker? We must return to the Dark Ages ASAP, back to when all people were slaves and priests had the right to kill and torture any who questioned the fairy tales. Yep, true Conservative thinking, and the culmination of the extreme hatred and propaganda against any and all “liberals”. That hatred of all ‘liberals’ and everything “liberal” was always destined to be a return to mass slavery and theological states as “the good old days.”
Precisely, Galileo. In my opinion Goldberg is about as loathsome a Zionazi bigot, racist, arrogant egotist and blood-thirsty ghoul, as they come. I see that most of the typically adulatory reviews of his sullage are from fellow Zionazis. The nepotism and group narcissism is pretty emetic, but very familiar.
Concur, Goldberg is loathsome. Nurtured by Bill Kristol.
Now packaged as the young wise man to replace the deceased conservative “thinker” Charles Krauthammer.
What a joke!
I don’t think this post and what it implies is saying that the move towards modernism was a mistake just as I don’t think in implies that modern science and technology is a mistake. My take is that we have gone about as far as we could possibly go under the rule of the modernist project. We have reached, obviously, the law of diminishing returns that implies we are required to create a dramatically new age. I believe this age will require changes far greater than at any other time in history and, as implied her, this change is towards a spiritually rich age. Solzhenitsyn had it absolutely right when he spoke–his words were spoken just after the modern age was effectively over anyway.
We now live in a post rational age–reason only takes us so far and now Faith which requires the rule of love is now a requirement or civilization will not survive more than a couple of decades. This doesn’t have to be religious as we know it because too many religious traditions have a high does of fear which always drives out love.
I concur. There is an essential flaw in the world view that came about in the Middle Ages. There are no world views without essential flaws–we are human. This article addresses that flaw as a way to salvage what is wonderful about humanistic modernism, which would otherwise lead to our destruction. Is modernism so fragile that it cannot bear criticism? Elsewhere people are being called Luddites for pointing out bothersome facts based on scientific observation–the really good side of modernist thought that should be helping all of us. Look in background and you find someone heavily invested in BAU.
This is interesting and promising, with a future analysis of the big question forthcoming.
Of course, the world isn’t, and wasn’t ever, ‘still split’. It is just perceived and presented that way, collectively and publicly, in the hope that our addled and immature minds might be intrigued enough to grapple individually with the problem and seek an individual resolution, since no collective solution will ever suffice.
Perception is all, except when it isn’t.
Thanks for this, I look forward to the next piece.
Dostoyevsky’s favorite line which he puts iften into the mouths of the liberal Russian Atlanticists of his day applies here also:”
“If there is no G-d, everything is permitted.”
Well, except that it’s nonsense. Really, look into yourself for a moment. Imagine you suddenly knew for a fact, maybe because He committed suicide right in front of you, that there was no God. Would your moral compass disappear? Of course it wouldn’t. You have ethics you believe in because they are good and true in themselves.
God is responsible for it all, if you believe.
‘The Kingdom of God is within You’.
It was Malraux, I believe, who pointed out that if there’s no reason to behave well then equally there’s no reason to behave badly.
Our personal system of ethics will govern our behaviour, by and large.
Yes-‘everything’ including universal human amity and comity, a dedication to preserving Life on Earth, justice and a decent sufficiency for all, and global peacefulness. Meanwhile, the actual record of the God-botherers over the millennia down to today does not evidence much peacefulness and love for one’s neighbours, but, rather, an endless succession of wars, genocides, pogroms, witch-hunts, autos-da-fe, Inquisitions and, as we know all too well in Australia, organised and ancient child abuse and molestation.
In my opinion, the great mistake that the socialists and Marxists made was to attempt to extirpate, or even just repress, religious belief. The better part of the doctrines of Jesus and Mohammed, and of the Buddha, Confucius and their followers, and of Hinduism, are perfectly congruent with socialism. In fact they are diametrically opposed to capitalism and Rightwing ideology. As long as religion is not used as a means to subvert socialism and reassert capitalist, neo-feudal, rule, socialist regimes should welcome its influence, as occurred in Latin America with ‘liberation theology’, before it was repressed by Wojtyla, also the patron and protector of priestly paedophiles. Which reminds me-surely, with his now exposed and notorious role in protecting priestly child abusers so well-known, it must be time to strip him of his canonisation as a ‘Saint’. No religion needs a Patron Saint of Paedophilia.
Of course Wojtyla will keep his sainthood, because he was
instrumental for breaking up the Warsaw pact, and the subsequent
Great Plunder of the East (TM).
Wojtyla was hand-picked explicitly to have the Poles look West, instead of East,
which led to irreconcilable differences in the Easten block, i.e. forces
pulling in opposite directions that made the Soviet politburo decide to cut the cord
(dissolve the Warsaw pact and dissolve the USSR)
For the real owners of the West – Wojtyla willl always be a “saint”,
whose deeds should be glorified and mimicked – because they profit from it
Same with Obama & his Nobel…
No. It requires responsibility, both, on the individual level and the structural as well. Everything is permitted, that is the promise of fascism, resulting in mayhem.
Everything is possible, this is conditio humanis and his hell. Actually, the old symbol of the apple which resulted in Paradise lost.
Galileo –
Lol! Liberal stupidity at its finest, particularly for your caricatured view of the past and religion.
Not all peoples were slaves. And what slavery was sanctioned then is much the same as the slavery sanctioned today, only under better conditions hidden behind debt collectors like Visa and Mastercard and central banking.
Priests, and particularly the Catholic Church did a damn good job keeping order by slaughtering stupid heretics, the high-horsed liberals of their time, as well as akin to terrorists like the ANTIFA jackboot crowds of today trying to overthrown the social order because they want to free us from the oppressors, all so that they could seize power while shouting ‘Liberty! Fraternity! Freedom! Democracy!.”
Liberalism is a Sin. Fr. Felix Sarda did a great service explaining the stupidity of Liberalism. And every problem today is a logical result of liberal inevitability towards the bullshit theory of inevitable progress. It’s good that more and more people are waking up to the insanity that is liberalism. Particularly given it has proponents like you who only know how to repeat parroted slogans about a past history you don’t understand but were spoon fed talking points via liberal propaganda.
Are you enjoying what you liberal world order has produced today? Well, the only good things you have left are likely only the result of the bathwater of the past the liberals didn’t throw overboard. But they certainly did the baby! Which is why so many liberals like to cut them up before they are born and send their carcases away for capitalist scientific research.
Even your namesake knew he got in over his head and rightly recanted, particularly when even today the best the consensus can cook up to prove the Church was wrong is a cockamanie house of mirrors where both heliocentrism and geocentrism are physical equals according to relativity of which we can never know which one is certain, but screw it, let’s just pick the one we like better, because it opposes the institution of that past we irrationally hate.
Johnno, your last para undoes your rant, in my opinion. Are you also a believer in the Flat Earth Theory, and the Spherical Earth hypothesis being ‘…physical equals according to relativity of which we can never know which one is certain, but screw it, let’s just pick the one we like better, because it opposes the institution of the past we irrationally hate’?
@Teranam13
Dostojewski was a Gnostic himself of course, but a critical one.
The assumption that there is no God, is ridicolous because the fact of the mere existence – that IS – and not that is not, INCLUDING the realm of ideas, is absolute proof of the existence of a first cause, a first object, GOD. There must be a first cause, that is the differentiation between 0 and 1, nothing and something because as we know all things relate to each other which is only possible when they are linked, it is NOT possible in a fractured world, because differentiation between things NECESSIATES conformity or sameness on the next higher level (there where the actual differentiation takes place !!!), else no differentiation is possible or makes any sense.
The proposition that there is no god, is the proposition of infantile minds, which by it want to erect their own little gods – or in more direct language THE WILL TO POWER, the establishing of MIGHT IS RIGHT which immediatly follows of such a proposition of a multitude of gods – a carneval of madness.
We are talking about culture and civilization here, because THAT’s what it is all about, the ordering and structuring of a people. Birds and wolfes have no need for it, because they are immediate manifestations WITHIN god’s realm. The same is true for archaic hunter gatherer people, they too have no need for it because they too are immediate manifestations (although they – of course – rely heavily on learning, but it is of an immediate type).
But for post archaic people this immediacy is no longer a given, but instead they are forced to knowingly and conciously create it and perpetuate via symbolisms like language and recordings, rituals and writings. In a way it is a journey in the footstep of God, a dialog with truth, since only truth can have some permanency and thus become a foundation for righteosness and justice.
Christianity and there especially Catholicism has been taken for a ride, they have been seduced by the satanists.
One problem Christianity is plagued with is the necessity to secure their tracks as historicity. This problem arose due to the fact that authority in those days sadly due to the inability for the masses to read or comprehend had to be rooted in historic facticity of persons and happenings.
There is no factual proof for the existence of a Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure. This is a fundamental flaw of the Church, it’s reliance on historicity which is at best shaky.
To what levels a Church degenerates which relies almost solely on historical facticity can we see in the Islam, absolute based on implicit authority (and thus blind obedience), rigid, fixed into enternity, stone like. The closedness is her strength (focused power) and fundamental flaw (functional stupidity).
A real Church of God has no need for such sillyness but must rely solely on spiritual truths. The truth or falsehood within the Evangelion or Jesus Christ IS explicit in the text itself irrespective of who wrote it !!!
A real Christian Church MUST be explicit and open and thus it’s authority as well.
Only then can it gather the strength which is necessary to overcome it’s arch enemy, the Anti-God crowd or more precise barbarism (Might makes Right !).
“A common and recurring thread in the above big ideas is the belief that civilization without religion is doomed.”
I’ve heard this idea floated about several times and when you think it through it just doesn’t play out. If you think of it, EVERY civilization is doomed. What civilization, with or without “religion,” has not collapsed?
Oh. and also this idea begs the question “which religion?” Will any religion will do? Who decides? The Pope? Justin Trudeau? Donald Trump?
Are the Buddhists, the Southern Baptist’s, the Zoroastrians, the Hindu, Shia, and Anglicans all gonna get together and sing kumbaja?
Mark, the point, I believe, is that the best of all religions, philosophies and ideologies see our common humanity, and do not preach hatred and fear of others. The xenophobic fundamentalists, unfortunately, are just the opposite, and they are in the ascendant globally. Prospects are grim.
@Mulga Mumblebrain
HeHeHe, yes Fundamentalists are on the rise, it’s all pack and parcel of the dialectics interwoven into the Gnostic undertaking, the house of mirrors hellhole they installed for us. It’s all necessary on the path to the final destiny, the Golem of Trans-Humanism-Liberalism which very, very soon will be installed by FORCE !
As the Master’s Whistleblowers tell us – you will be either in or dead, nice isn’t it ?
But yet ALL so love their iPhones.
It now all must run it’s course, we are behind the point of no return, but the endresult will be the same, they WILL loose !!
It’s a King for a day type of thing – THAT – was not told to them by their god, which is lacking in permanency, THAT is his biggest shortcoming, zero can only become zero and contains zero, but one inherits the zero, thus the King for a day.
The Anti-God is a real object, though he has no place and nowhere to go, as someone told us a long, long time ago…..
I well remember a newspaper article that I read twenty or so years ago, that reported that Abe Foxman, the chief goy-kicker of the so-called (Anti)Defamation League (that nowadays specialises in nothing much more than defamation of impudent and place forgetting goyim and ‘self-hating’ Jews)had declared that Hitler’s real crime was not genocide (of the Jews, only, of course, as per the Holocaust religion)but deicide, the murder of God, because the Jews are-well there’s no getting around it-God. Funnily enough, no Internet search turns up this amazing observation.
I think Amin Nour is blaming the wrong party. The Enlightenment accompanied the Protestant Reformation which was a reaction to the rampant corruption of the Roman Catholic clergy. Cardinals and Abbots were enriching themselves and engaging in massive spending much like the oligarchs of today. Clergy with vows of celibacy were engaging in orgies with any and all regardless of gender, much like the RC clergy today. The religion itself had become debased by money and the wealthy could buy their way (allegedly) to heaven and escape the purgatory invented by the church to enrich itself.
Something had gone wrong with Western culture long before the Renaissance. The “only true” church was hardly the place from which citizens of medieval Europe could learn ethical behavior. I am curious about the medieval and early Renaissance in Orthodoxy. Was the clergy as corrupt as in the Roman church? Love to read about this if anyone can recommend books on the topic.
The ‘Church’, was infiltrated and subverted from within, that’s how they do it, it’s a Judas thing.
@CharlesD
Yeah, Corruption was rampant, and thus the reason behind. Sounds familiar doesn’t it ? The Protestants had some points, but they were Barbarians, that was correctly recognized, AND of course then exploited by the chosen ones to make them a weapon against the Church.
In a broader context the Church always had a fundamental problem of authority – either spiritually or wordly (Power) because she was unable to integrate them properly into her fabric if she had, then that immediatly would have jeopardized the established structure of the conflagrance of wordly- and spiritual authority.
The problem can only be defuzed but always remains one of the biggest problems of any church. One of the best methods is the lead from behind approach, BUT that requires a deeply echeloned (in society) established structure which is very difficult to erect and maintain and needs a lot of time to establish. It’s a hen – egg problem.
Amir Nour writes, “rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy…. could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists”.
Reminds me of Plato’s great bugbear, the Sophists. From WikiPaedia:
“Man is the measure of all things. A statement by the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras. It is usually interpreted to mean that the individual human being, rather than a god or an unchanging moral law, is the ultimate source of value.”
Must re-read the Protagoras of Plato. Like us, Plato lived through a bitter time when Democracy and Humanism had led Athens into an orgy of Injustice, Intemperance, Superstition, Tyranny, Luxury and self-destructive Imperialist wars. Then re-read Solzhenytsin’s Harvard speech to see how far it predicts the present breakdown of ethical standards in Western Democratic politics and Humanistic philosophy. I am not sure whether ethical breakdown is really the fruit that is borne from the flowering of Democracy and Humanism. The present plague of Greed, False Witness and mass-murdering Resource Wars seem to me more like a case Original Sin: a concept which developed in Ancient Greece and Rome only after the breakdown of the Classical ideal of Heroic Humanism, and its replacement by Christian Pity, Terror and Hope inspired by a vision of God suffering on the Cross.
Dr. M; I read the myth of Faust as the key to the distortions in modern “bourgeois” Europe. Carl Jung interprets it to mean the modern ego turned from fealty to spirit and gave itself full permission to master and conquer the material world and all its powers. This requires the bourgeois ideology of denial of all internal cosmic verities. This itself is an enormous and deliberate misrepresentation of modern western science. That real science has its foundations in the quest to understand the mind of the creator. And its intent. Hence there is an acute tension in the modern paradigm of western science between those bourgeois rationalists who desperately need to believe in the Faustian formula of denial of transcendent spirit and those with an holistic approach who recognize the fundamental presence of cosmic intent inside their scientific paradigm. This conflict is so revealing as it is acted out massively inside Western class conflict. The ruling class must deny spirit in their cultural paradigm and the Left can only find itself struggling to find the real truth within the aspiration for liberation. But how many Western Leftists are capable of emancipating themselves from the bourgeois condemnation of religious tradition? So we are left with the issue of spirit being a very very loaded question inside the global class war. I like this essay because it is searching in the right direction.
@Dr NGMaroudas
Yes, Sokrates, in Plato’s testimony makes short work out of the Sophistes showing them as what they ALWAYS and FOREVER are – Barbarians – “Might makes Right”, and thus Idiots (irrespective whether they are fools or evil, which finally is identical, although the former usually is open to change, while the latter is firmly entrenched into his idiocy in thick armory, and finally succumbs to his Anti-god) !
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
Ignorance begets Fabrications
“Today, perhaps more than ever before, humanity is in the midst of a tidal wave of change. Astrologers insist this is inherent to the “Age of the Aquarius”[6]; Solzhenitsyn and some other ingenious and visionary writers—like Yuval Noah Harari, Jonah Goldberg, and, before them all, Algerian Malek Bennabi[7]—believe it is symptomatic of the transition into the next stage of mankind’s history”.
“can humanity rise to the daunting challenge of offering a prescription both to cure the multifaceted ailments that are threatening its very survival, and to navigate wisely our way forward in a growingly complex world?”
“He, accordingly, draws the conclusion that “if liberalism, nationalism, Islam or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms and bioengineering—it will also need to incorporate them into a new meaningful narrative”. ”
Loooool…….It is a good thing that “Philosophers” are separated from the definition of “scholars” or “scientists” (by the way not all scholars or scientists are doing a wonderful job either).
I have to give it to some of these philosophers, they are at least an optimistic bunch aren’t they.
Do these philosophers not realize that we are slowly crawling to one small mistake or accident away from frying almost every electromagnetic device on the planet within a matter of hours, while sending millions if not a billions of people back to their maker within a time span of a few years (after frying our appliances, think power plants people, not your toaster).
So let me get this straight….
……..the savages of the ” West ” (including the less savage left overs of the Mediterranean) took the teachings of a fatherless Middle-Eastern Palestinian Semitic Jew from a town called Nazareth and kept rewriting many many of his teachings, then they started massacring each-other and their neighbors (read Crusades) using Jesus Christ’s teachings that they rewrote in the first place……
…..and once they were fed up of killing people in the name of basically their new and improved religion, they said you know what, we don’t need these old teachings anymore, lets go it alone and see where this takes us, we don’t need a God anymore……..So they go on and take over other continents, experiment in some of the biggest massacres in human history (read world wars) with their new toys………then they finally decide they are civilized after a time of very rapid technological development and a few years of peace (a drop of piss in the human historical time-scale) ????
…….and after allll of this, they blame all the world’s problems on the teachings of a poor Palestinian Jew or an Arab Shepard from a dusty town in the Arabian Peninsula ????
Hahahaha…….this has to be truly the biggest forms of Psychopathy that I have ever read about in the history of humanity.
Can we actually blame them if they nuke each-other after all they have done ?? …….Nuking each-other actually seems to possibly be the pinnacle of what they can achieve, more so than genetically modified toasters.
Anyways, it is probably better to read books of philosophers than some other strange hobbies out there lol.
Culture – is based on Identification, Identification is based on an outside and an inside. One can identify with two anchors in this universe: God and Anti-God.
The first is rooted in that which God created, the second in that which God had not created.
Western Humanity via Gnosis (led and supported by their future masters – the Judahites) chose the second together with their future masters, that’s all.
ALL isms are post-Gnosis followups and ALL of them by definition lead to self destruction.
The Judahites (The Ancestors of today’s Talmudists) rejected the God of Moses and chose the one who rejected itself (a God which recalls his Ammendments is a God against itself, which can only be the Negation or the Anti-God), it’s all in the Bible for everybody to see !! They don’t hide it !!
The jewish culture is the predominant and final driving force behind the undertaking called “Western Society”, it’s core NEVER underwent secularization thus it is firmly rooted, it’s culture unshakeable and will thus be ‘victorious’ though unknown to them, the ‘victory’ will be their downfall, because they need something to corrupt, enslave, because the Anchor is in eternal war against itself, which can only be defuzed by outward projection into another – the slave – the ones to subjugate. It IS the most perfect form thinkable for a society based on an Anti-God !
The West has proven that a society without God is perfectly feasible. Unfortunately, we never bothered to ask ourselves which side wins when a society of a-religious individuals is in conflict with a society united in religion.
Quoting the loathsome Jonah Goldberg as a source for one’s arguments is, in my opinion, ludicrous. Goldberg, as anyone at all familiar with his hard Right and Ziosupremacist rantings knows, was a supporter of the aggression and genocide inflicted on Iraq after 2003. After 2006 he changed that to a position where he declared it a ‘noble’ mistake, rather like saying that Operation Barbarossa was a noble mistake, but a very plain expression of the aggressive blood-lust that inspired the Oded Yinon Plan
He is a supporter of historic colonialism, so Zionist, and advocates US imperialism on the African continent, so morally superior, so indicative of ‘higher moral values’ than Chinese trade and investment. And on it goes, if you have the stomach for Jewish supremacism meeting American Exceptionalism.
Brilliant article Amir, thank you. Modern society has indeed lost its soul, like a peice of flotsam on a vast ocean. Lost. Digital technology has enslaved so many, all staring at their phones or laptops, and yes, I’m guilty of that right now making this comment. What is the culture of the West; and particularly here in Australia? Shopping for more stuff? Pouring into cinema’s to watch the latest brain-dead gunk from Hollywood, much of which is just pure propaganda anyway to uphold the status quo. We are atomised and alienated from ourselves and each other. Spirituality and (organised) religion are two different things. You Don’t need to go to church or mosque to have spirituality; to have faith in a higher power, and it dosn’t have to be God (as in the bible). Faith is vital in my humble opinion, otherwise we are rudderless.
Just about right for as Nick Turse closed his book “Kill Anything That Moves” that somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam America lost its soul,simply a case of over reach of a wanta-be empire,and we have been going downhill ever since.!!!
Thanatopia lost its soul long, long, long before the genocide and ecocide in Indochina.
Don’t forget our prime responsibility and obsession as Austfailians-hunting down ‘antisemites’ and banishing them from society. Next follows excising ‘antiamericans’, apologists for China and Russia and Iran, vilifying ‘Greens’, ‘do-gooders’, ‘bleeding-hearts’, ‘welfare cheats’, trade unionists, Moslems, refugees etc. A good Austfailian is kept ever busy with these virtuous civic duties, as declared by the Murdoch hate-machine and the loathsome ScoMo regime.
Great stuff, this article, if one is a loyal member of likud or one of their colonial ja ja’s.
Until we label these wars initiated by America, for what they truly are, they will continue. The United Fruit Company, miraculously evaded accountability for the naming of the banana wars.
We must refer to the wars in South West Asia and Central and South America as the Rockefeller wars!
The Rockefeller family has done more harm to America than all foreign nations on earth, and by all Islamic terrorists combined!
*The Rockefellers started the Federal Reserve.
*The Rockefellers created the CIA, formerly referred to as the Rockefeller Office.
*The Rockefellers created the petro dollar.
*The Rockefellers propagandize their wars through the Council on Foreign Relations, which they created and is run by the Rockefellers Study Institute.
*The Rockefellers, through the Rockefeller studies institute, created the Good Jobs First Program which diverts money from the Pentagon, directly to Wall Street, and the Pentagon now has $21 trillion in accounting errors!
This Rockefeller family must be stopped! Until they are humiliated and disgraced into denouncing these wars, they will continue!
The Council on Foreign Relations run by the Rockefeller Studies Institute is not surprisingly one of the most vocal proponents of The Paris Accord, because it would ward reparations to the Rockefellers through carbon tax credits for reducing their enormous carbon footprint.
The Paris Accord is based on outright scientific fraud !
CO2 causes global cooling. Volcanic winters have occurred from CO2. CO2 in it’s solid form is dry ice. The junk scientific community alleges that volcanic winters occurred nit as a result of CO2, but from sulfuric acid, which is also a blatant lie, since sulfur has exothermic heat releasing capabilities, which is why they use sulfur for matches, and not CO2.
Utter, utter, rubbish. Volcanic eruptions cause volcanic winters through the election of sulphur into the stratosphere, that becomes light reflecting sulphates. The rest is even more bizarre.
Yes sulfur does reflect light, however sulfur is exothermic, which is why sulfur and not CO2 is used for matches. Incidentally, the junk fraud science industry claims that sulfur blocks light. We have been officially living in bizarro world for quite some time now, where everything is the opposite of what we are told.
Duchess, if I have to choose between ALL the Academies of Science and scientific societies on Earth, and 99% of actively publishing and peer-reviewed climate scientists, and one denialist brandishing a match to dispel the gloom of this gargantuan, global, multi-generational, conspiracy-well, the choice is hardly difficult, I must say.
Go for it then. By that analogy, CNN, NYT, Washington Post are the world’s most credible news sources, since 99% of news papers agree with what they say. Jump off a bridge because everyone else is. 99% of the population used to think that the world was flat, just sayin’.
Other things that 99% of scientists agreed on, that eating eggs every day was dangerous, that GMOs would save humanity, that smoking was good for you, that drinking 2 glasses of wine a day is beneficial to card vascular health, that radiation kills cancer…. I’ll just go with radiation kills everything.
This whole discussion is based on Western mentality, not Eastern. Western mentality is based on a First Cause from which everything including both materiality and morality, which is non material, emanates.
Whether it is Indian Dharma, or Taoist or Buddhist Tao, or Confucianism, these mental operating systems, I don’t call them beliefs, are based on vast interconnectivity. There is no center. The first mass produced book was not, as Western egotistical thinking ‘believes’ was the Bible. In fact the first mass produced book was The Diamond Sutra, written by Indian Buddhists and migrated to North Asia. Its central premise is that there is no central premise. We think we are what we are, but in fact, we are limbs, then parts of the body, then molecules, then atoms, then atomic particles, and the more scientists look for the ‘Center’, the one indivisible ‘Thing’, they can’t find it.
The Buddha, when asked what is the greatest cause of suffering, replied not that it comes from physical suffering but from Attachment to Views. Yet, we humans are so desperate to make sense of this vast and incomprehensible bombardment of infinite phenomena, that we try to create a system to understand it. We thus reify it, which creates a separation from Real Reality, ‘Things as they are’ and ‘what we conceive them to be’ or worse, what we want them to be. That separation is the source of the existential anguish people experience. Which is exacerbated by modern life, in which the Real is separated from us by–quite literally–the Media.
It is the reason why the world is so messed up, both spiritually, materially, politically, and so on.
Someone I know who worked with traumatized soldiers said that the ones who suffered most were the ones who killed others especially innocents. Why? Because they had the delusion that they were separate from and no doubt superior to, those they killed and tormented. What they didn’t understand was that on the quantum level, they are not separate from those they objectify. Thus, in killing others, they killed themselves.
As long as people see themselves as a self existent ego entity, rather than an assemblage of trillions of mutually interacting phenomena, both inside and outside, they will feel alienated and isolated, and so are vulnerable to false promises of Totality, as in Totalitarianism whether in political or religious form.
Few understand this point, and as Einstein said, ‘Everything has changed (technologically) but our way of thinking. And so we drift to catastrophe.’
People mistakenly think that the Buddha was an atheist. In fact, it is getting caught in dualistic thinking of whether God exists or does not exist, separates us from the core issue….how are we to live in harmony with those we see as ‘the other’.?
This realization entails us to take real responsibility for our own thoughts, beliefs and actions, rather than pass it off to ‘The Boss’, whether imagined spiritually, or in the form of ‘Rule of Law’, artificial reifications of the real.
As Lao Zi said, when all is in harmony, there are no laws. So here we are: The more the US talks about ‘Rule of Law’, the more lawless it becomes.
The country is run by crazy egotists, who actually believe in the fake reality they deludedly created.
The question of the Self and the Other is central to our existence. Leo Strauss, the greasy eminence of the Zionazi ‘neo-conservatives’ who control the USA’s aggressive and genocidal drive for world conquest, in a letter to his mate, the Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, whose doctrine of the leader as he who makes the exceptional (Nazi ideology meets ‘American Exceptionalism’-who’d have thought it?)was central to the whole process of aggression, mass torture, rendition, genocide and utter contempt for International Law (so much for the current hypocrisy about ‘The Rules Based International Order)that was crafted by the Zionazi neo-conservatives and their Sabbat Goy stooges after 9/11, stated;
‘….because man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against – against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men…the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state’.
Now, if that is not a concise summation of the psychology behind Talmudic Judaism, Zionazism (not to forget German Nazism), American Exceptionalism, the Zionazi ‘Clash of Civilizations’, the Oded Yinon Plan and all the other xenophobic, chauvinistic and genocidal doctrines that have bedeviled humanity from the year dot, to now, the veritable End Times of the ecological Holocaust, then I’m sadly mistaken.
@SubHuti37
The Buddhists are Gnostics – at best it is a school how to best commit suicide – at worst just plain dumb materialism. Both of them are barbaric.
Buddism is based on empirism filtered by sensuality – a very toxic combination.
However beyond the One, they indeed make correct assumptions, there is lot to be learned from them regarding dynamisms of the world !
The TAO however is something which should be studied in order to get a feel how things are to be arranged not into a zero sum game but something divine – where the sum is more then it’s constituent parts – something which is totally alien to a materialist, it is not really a religion just like Buddhism, more a way of life, which is not a bad thing at all.
Rather like Talmudic, Pharaisaical, Judaism, a cult of self-worship and a modus operandi for a parasitic way of life utterly separate from, but, where possible, exploiting the rest of humanity. As Bernard Lazare the French Jewish socialist observed at the end of the 19th century, Judeophobia long pre-dates Christian Jew-hatred, and has been seen in almost every society in which the Jews have existed, despite all the differences in those societies in terms of race, religion, social arrangements, history, geography, relative power and influence etc. As he sensibly observes, some, at least, of the causes of these antipathies must be due to the nature of Judaism itself. Of course, today, the ‘antisemitism’ religion that is being forcibly imposed on the West through a massive purge of society, and politics in particular, declares that ANY criticism of the behaviour of ANY Jew, ANYWHERE, MUST always be malicious, and motivated solely by hatred of ALL Jews, everywhere. Even the mildest criticism, and, as we see in the UK, telling the historic truth (Livingstone) doing precisely nothing (Wadsworth) or daring to answer the Zionazi lynch-mob back (Williamson), will get you lynched and purged from polite, dare I say groveling, ‘society’.
I agree. I believe we have reached a climax of the predator paradox. And there is no “god” but the whole she-bang that is cosmically miraculous, reverence for which precludes ignorant, egocentric violence, supremacy and other forms of self-destructive “evil”. We keep denying the fact that although we are organic miracles in progress, we remain merely self-conscious yet mainly unconscious animals who have become the top predators in the planet’s food chain.
“There came one and knocked at the door of the Beloved.
And a voice answered and said, ‘Who is there?’
The lover replied, ‘It is I.’
‘Go hence,’ returned the voice;
‘there is no room within for thee and me.’
Then came the lover a second time and knocked and again the voice demanded,
‘Who is there?’
He answered, ‘It is thou.’
‘Enter,’ said the voice, ‘for I am within.
Rumi
Dear Mulga
I don’t know if you have expressed your views on the Australian Court decision re Cardinal Pell. I would appreciate your ‘take’ on this.
Over at Aangirfan is a you tube video clip of Pell arguing with Tony Jones – Pell stating that the Jews who lived in Judae after fleeing the mighty Egyptian Empire were simple shepherds and not particularly intelligent. In just that short clip I found TJ to demonstrate execrable chosenite behaviour.
Tony Jones is scum, in my opinion, as is his odious wife. Pell is, I would say, a vicious homophobe and misogynist, a hard Right ideological thug specialising in anthropogenic climate destabilisation denialism, and nasty abuse of environmentalism. In other words the perfect Rightwing thug bound to be promoted by Wojtyla that patron saint and protector of priestly paedophiles, and a hero for the Murdoch cancer and hard Right ideologues.
As for his conviction, I smell a set-up. Vastly more cogent charges were all dismissed, and this one charge, which is somewhat less convincing, concentrated on. I expect the elite judges on the Appeals Court to reverse the verdict, and the Right will crow, and get right back to their favourite pastime-kiddyfiddling.
Many thanks MM for your audacious persistence in speaking your truths.
I come to this Vineyard to learn. But one thing I know: for every Catholic paedophile priest that is brought to justice in the glare of media publicity, there are a hundred assorted ‘others’ protected and maintained by the mass-colluding-status quo.
Original thinkers are definitely not wanted in our country; it is the eternal refrain
Babs, we had a Royal Commission into Institutionalised Child Abuse in this country (opposed by the Right in Parliament)which revealed hideous abuse, physical, sadistic, sexual, psychological, by numerous institutions of the Established Order, not just the Holy Roman Catholic Church, although their contribution was marked and diabolical. Something is and has long been very rotten in our society, but I know that we are not alone in that.
Sadly MM I gleaned all my own bitter, brutalising experiences within the very institutions which were investigated by these Royal Commissions. Now we have the Royal Commission into Aged Care. It seems to me that the said institutions (Defence, Children’s Services, Aged Care et al) run on fear, and are hurtling ever faster on their trajectories to hell. Everything you said here is true, but the majority of people are in denial. Just doin’ their jobs.
Those who do not transform their wounds transmit them.
Given that the topic is a world still split, we can do no more than to work on the Unity within, hence the Rumi poem at the beginning of my conversation here
Dear Rumi-bless him and Keats, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Li Ho, Li Shangyin (my old copy of Late Tang Poets is one of my most precious friends) Han Shan, and all the other poets. Poetry is Love in Vibration, one of the Musics of the Spheres. What an odd phenomenon we are-on one hand John Bolton, on the other Emily Dickinson.
When people do not believe in God, they feel compelled to act as gods, as in the surveillance state, the biotech state, with MIT biosynthesis professor George M Church wanting to recreate cro-magnon man, with the tech sector, wanting to integrate brain implant micro-chips in the global population to control them as slaves, with Harvard University wanting to bio-engineer the earth, which is illegal under international law, but more importantly, under the law of God, and or of mother nature, for those aetheists and agnostics.
Lockheed Martin spraying sulfur dioxide in a bio-engineering effort to cool the earth is dead wrong, and would result in increasing acidification in the ocean, leading to exacerbated species extinction, would result in decreasing H2O on earth, and would cause increased temperatures, rather than cooling.
To quote Warren Buffet- “Don’t just do something! Stand there!”
Boiling-down to the quick, what is the meat of it? — that is, what it means to be a posthuman, an afterling.
I think that all our light is darkness. Beauty is not beauty; truth is not truth; no thing is even a thing — everything is nothing. Nihilism is eclipsed by . . . it will be left to the odd survivor, and resurrected souls to name it accordingly.
Never . . . since the world began
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’.
‘How can humanity rise to the daunting challenge of offering a prescription both to cure the multifaceted ailments that are threatening its very survival and to navigate wisely our way forward in a growingly complex world?’
I would like to join Amir Nour on his spiritual journey with a few thoughts of my own. Many of the atrocities of the 20th century have been put down to the absence of religion. Before that religion has been seen as the major cause of suffering. I won’t go into too much detail. If the readers want more they can go to: https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
The Thirty years War has been described as the last war of religion. What is overlooked is that many of the protagonists did not align themselves on grounds of Reformation/Counter Reformation, but for reason of power. The two biggest Catholic dynasties, the Bourbon and Hapsburg families, were on opposing sides. France joined the Protestant states to fight its long-term power rival Austria. A century later Frederick the Great of Prussia, an anti-clerical supporter of the Enlightenment, fought numerous wars to make his kingdom prosperous and secure. And he did. It was not about ideas, but power. A hundred years on, as the 1800s came to a close, France and Russia became allies: the former a pluralist republic, the latter an autocratic monarchy where to sing the Marseillaise was an act of subversion. Why did they come together? Because of their common enemy Germany. The Second World War saw similar configuration: the west joined with the USSR against Hitler. The threat was far greater than their philosophical differences.
The pattern of history is clear. Power (manifested as interest) has been present in every conflict of the past – no exception. It is the underlying motivation for war. Other cultural factors might change, but not power. Interest cuts across all apparently unifying principles: family, kin, nation, religion, ideology, politics – everything. We unite with the enemies of our principles, because that is what serves our interest. It is power, not any of the above concepts, that is the cause of war. That threatens our survival, banishing those who survive to a very simple future.
Solzhenitsyn was a great writer and made a truly compelling impact upon the world with his novels and historical works. But he was not quite in the same mold as Dostoievski, and it is interesting to compare the two, since both had devastating experiences with the gulag. I can remember my own Russian teacher, who had migrated to the US much earlier, being sad that Solzhenitsyn didn’t, he thought, use his standing to encourage the postive aspects of what he found in the US at the time he was here, and I would repeat his criticism. Instead, Solzhenitsyn indeed found much to discredit, and that was to his credit and accurate – but to put the blame on the emphasis on individual human rights, which others are currently also putting forward, is in my book wrong.
The best points of human individuality are, to my mind absolutely fundamental to any belief in God. If you don’t feel those are important, how can you believe in God? For that was the whole point of Christianity, that Jesus Christ is both perfect man and perfect God. So, there is a perfection, an ideal, for the individual, certainly not achieved by any of us, but to be found in him. And this is not a new thing – one of the earliest Christians was asked by a pagan, Roman I think, “Show me your God!” To which the Christian replied “Show me your man!”
I think Dostoevski was working towards this concept in his novels, always trying to find an individual most Christlike, and finally achieving it in his last novel “The Brothers Karamazov.” You can see it developing in Alyosha, and its fruition in Father Zossima. With a hugely important link provided by, of all people, Grushenka.
The US at its best moments has brought this characteristic to the fore. How can one believe in God without Christ? says a Christian, and why? Because it is his qualities as the Son of Man that make God our Father as well as his. That is the connection between the infinite and us. Because he took on flesh from his Mother, who was fully human as we are. Perfect man; perfect God. We can’t just leap to a real connection with God without recognizing what it means to be human, the best human it is possible to be.
I am an immigrant in the US, and yes, I have noted with dismay the disintegration of its society at large. But the ideals of the liberal class when that word ‘liberal’ wasn’t a bad word are sound ideals.
Show me your God!
Show me your man!
An Israeli rabbi is proclaiming the return of the messiah, as far as I am concerned, Julian Assange may be the return of the messiah, and Trump may be the return of Pilate.
Many have in the West have ripped off the Indian Yuga cycle, and attempted passing it off as their own observations. These same individuals that proclaim to be modern day Gurus seem to have very selective memories in gauging history, or very limited knowledge, or both.
I would never proclaim to hold powers of divination, particularly on such a macro scale with nearly infinite variables and a large time line, and would be very skeptical of anyone who claims to posess such knowledge and would either consider them a crack pot, or a con artist.
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be some form of operant conditioning attempting to induce a state of learned helplessness, or not, but for those among us who do not believe in determinism, which includes practically every religion other than Protestantism, the future is not carved in stone.
When economic calamities, engineered by global bankers occur, the world still has the same amount of natural resources, factories, trained workers, and general knowledge. The only difference is in the money supply, who controls it, and who controls the means of production, and who controls the government.
It should be noted that some of these also are able to right off 2 world wars in their analogies.
If Silicon Valley and tech companies around the world, including Asia, truly had even the slightest goal of empowering the individual user, the device would be able to tell a user when eons was attempting to hack or spy on them, and the IP address and name of the individual, and fire back with a cross server attack. That is a product that all users would love!
What they are really interested in is total control and total enslavement of the entire world population, under The Human Brain Project, in Geneva Switzerland, funded by the EU, in Stanford University, and many other countries in the world.
These individuals are sick as hell, and should really be locked up for life and totally removed from society! The CIA has long been involved in these perverse projects as well.
Best essay of the day, in my reading so far. Multi-culturalism is in fact a part of western society, whether people like it or not, which is really not the issue, as far as I’m concerned, but what is the issue is that society is literally falling apart at the seems. Obviously there are many sub groups within each society, which share unique cultural interests, references, liguistic characteristics, role models, icons, etc… However, if anyone is interested in communicating a message or a solution that will resonate with the society at large, considerations must be taken accordingly, eliminating arcane bits of knowledge for references, unless fulling explained, but of course, when within those sub-groups, it is not only an acceptable, but preferred means of communication.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-01/view-brextanic
Great article, but I must disagree with the author on certain issues. In essence, there is nothing wrong in anthropocentricity. After all, even Abrahamic religions are anthropocentric and if perceived otherwise, it’s the perception that has to be examined not the message.
The way I see it, the legacies of the Ancient Greek Wisdom, Christianity, the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment have all given the West many opportunities to develop not only technologically, but also spiritually and philosophically. To this effect, I believe that the technological achievements of the last hundred years or so have not been matched at the philosophical level because they have been derailed by three men; Darwin, Freud and Einstein.
Darwin reinvented atheism under an allegedly scientific camouflage, Freud accentuated the importance of the ego-individual, and Einstein replaced Newton’s natural philosophy of order with chaos.
Amir Nour (author of the article)
Dear readers of The Saker Blog,
Just a quick word to extend my appreciation and gratitude to all those who have devoted some of their precious time to read and comment on my modest contribution to a particularly important topic, that is a reflection on, no less than, the fate of humankind…
Quite obviously, I will refrain from making any comment on any viewpoint expressed by readers of my piece. they are all most welcome to enrich the debate. I wish though to share with you the following insightful comment made by retired Turkish Ambassador Aydın Nurhan (http://aydinnurhan.com/) :
“Dear Amir, one of my favorite aphorisms is “reaching the level to ask the correct questions” in ilm [Arabic word for knowledge]. I see you are asking the correct questions; questions of our century. In an article I wrote for Star newspaper, I had discussed education. When a student enters primary school, the teacher waits with an adze in hand. A human has two legs; material and spirit. So the secular education starts to chop the spirit leg. The higher the education, the more the spiritual leg is lost. So ending college, the kid is left with only one leg, a lame person with just material being. Then he goes to psychiatrists, yoga sessions, etc. to find solace.
The problem lies in the secular education. It can only produce “deists” or “agnostics”, or “atheists” as we see in postmodern societies. In Turkey, the number of deists is snowballing due to secular education; especially among college grads. Through the ideology of secular education, humanity is destined to lose spirituality. Perhaps that is the intention.
The process? Pendulum effect, Greco-Roman materialism, medieval spiritualism, Renaissance/Technological revolution materialism, to be followed by a new spiritualism? Secular education is a barrier against the new trend.
A vivid contemporary example is Turkey. Atatürk had a simple idea. He was simply a materialist. Deeply influenced by the French revolution, he was convinced that spiritualism was totally bad; we had to be materialist.
To sum up, it is the PENDULUM process. Turkish pendulum went to extreme materialism, now approaching the center, the equilibrium.
I hope we, Muslims, can harmonize this world with the next as we are heading for eading to robot-humans.
Just a last note: I returned to my original profession, attorney at law. I started thinking of the computerization of High Court ijtihads [Arabic word for the exercising of discretionary judgment in order to deduce a law or rule of conduct which is not self-evident in the scriptural sources]. Soon computers will consolidate all decisions on similar matters. At one point, all decisions will be mathematical, pure logical, as Mr. Spock’s decisions on Star Trek. Thence comes the question: Is justice pure reason? What is conscience?
Salaam, congratulations and thanks for triggering my thoughts.
Aydın Nurhan”.
Satanism and Luciferianism is the elephant in the room and the collapse of humanity is planned by the elite so they can instate a control structure that will be impossible to escape.
One day you will beLIEve you are flying to space and you will be actually shoveling cow manure in real life because your brain has been chipped and interfaced with a Nuralink forced upon the world via a technological master race which will rule the world.
If you think this is a joke, you have already lost your free will and given it away.