Due to the necessity of expansion and sheer avarice, Capitalism will inevitably turn to the international sphere and with that comes intrigue and war – and that in turn leads to secrecy and propaganda. As the public begins to grasp this, there is an erosion of trust. And if the forces of finance capital have also purchased the news media – the end result is at first mass conformity, but later this will turn to mass cynicism. For those who only see one small piece of the puzzle their already skewed viewpoint will be subject to easy manipulation. There are those who profit from fear and anger and if allowed to fester these emotional responses can take on a life of their own. And it's not just the Right that plays this game.
Globalism would inevitably lead to bigger and more widespread
outbreaks of disease – something like Covid was actually long overdue. But for
many Libertarians they had reached a point in which they no longer trusted
anything institutional. In many respects I don't either but I also know the
powers that be don't want to harm their bottom line and (as already stated) things
like lockdowns and vaccine mandates were not about social control per se but an
attempt to get the situation under control so that all of us wage-slaves can
get back to work and get the economy moving – which translates into their
pockets being lined with gold. As with all things on a large-scale it was a
mess and competing interests generated no small degree of chaos.
But for Libertarians it was all conspiracy. You can't trust
the government, you can't trust science, and you can't trust history – again, I
have a degree of sympathy will all of this but it has to be tempered. It
requires wisdom to navigate this and apart from Scripture, history is probably
the most helpful guide. But history is not something that can be pursued on the
Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, or Bret Baier level – or even the Rachel Maddow or
Anderson Cooper level for that matter. A five-minute PragerU video is not going
to give you depth and wisdom. There are no shortcuts, it requires a great deal
of investment in terms of time and patience and as such the American public is
not interested.
For some during the Covid crisis, the ruling figures that
appear on television were transformed into complete frauds – not just immoral
people pretending to be moral, not just scheming avaricious people pretending
to stand for certain values or to sincerely care about this or that situation.
I'll be the first to admit these people, these politicians, celebrities and those
connected to the media are mostly hypocrites and frauds. They are in some
respects the most vile people on Earth.
But that doesn't mean everything they say is false or utterly
a lie. They frame things in a self-serving manner. They manipulate stories but
most of it is still true. Maybe it rests on false assumptions or they omit
critical aspects of the story – and they often skip the context as it would
undermine their point of view. That said, the stories that are reported are
rarely altogether false. Sometimes they are, but that's not often the case and
it's rare to get all the major media outlets and politicians to operate off the
same script. It happens sometimes (like after 9/11) but not for very long.
There's enough competition within the circles of power that overt lies will be
called out and exploited. No, the lies are more often cases of omission and
manipulation. From my standpoint, the disagreement is often in terms of the
assumptions and the framing.
Conspiracies are real but the Conspiratorial Worldview is not
and I think it's tragic to see the young woman running Catholics Against
Militarism completely lose her way. She has become (in my mind) an emblem of
where this kind of thinking leads.
She sees so clearly the lies surrounding war – and they are
pervasive. She sees problems with the economic system – but doesn't understand
them. She fears state power and tyranny but seems to lack a way to frame it or
understand it in its context. It's highly problematic but not in the way she sees
it. Because of suspicions surrounding Covid and the more recent trajectories in
Gender-driven medicine and science there is a tendency to doubt all science and
even all authority.
Again, the materialist mindset that undergirds our culture's
assumptions is utterly false and it cannot create the unified theory or
worldview that it hopes to discover. It cannot answer the most basic questions
or give man a means to live a meaningful life. Instead it tries to sidestep
these issues. That said, science has made advances of a kind. You can't doubt
this, nor can the Catholic podcaster as she utilizes these technologies.
Again, how these technologies can be accounted for is
problematic and what it all means or how to contextualise it is something that
escapes the modern materialist. And there are many scientific claims –
especially in the realm of theoretical physics and the like that can be
doubted. A lot of the cutting edge science that so fascinates people is really
just philosophy and some of it even qualifies as religion.
All of this is to say that we needn't fear modernity. The
modern world has deep problems and yet we cannot return to the pre-modern
period. I have even argued for something of a medieval worldview, a return to
supernaturalism. I believe reality is metaphysical, spiritual and thus beyond
the ability for us to understand and in total defiance of modern Scientism.
That said, I don't believe we need to doubt the discoveries
of the scientific era. When I say return to the Middle Ages, I do not mean that
we need to return to Galen, Ptolemy, and Aristotle. That was another flawed
paradigm, a corrupt syncretism that the Medieval Roman Catholic Church bought
into. It was false, just as today's models are in many respects false.
And so for some (like the host of Catholics Against Militarism)
the answer to a world she doesn't like and doesn't understand is to retreat to
these forms, to a world she deems safe – and yet it's a world that didn't
really work either and thus fell apart because it was not sound or real. It
professed to be Christian or Biblical and yet it wasn't. The Scriptures were
read through a corrupted lens, forced to say things they didn't say.
We see this happen again with the Age of Reason and the
Enlightenment – resulting in new forms of philosophical theology and a kind of scholastic
rationalism that would ultimately implode resulting in theological liberalism.
This in turn has led to various 'conservative' reactions meant to be
correctives but in reality are just permutations of the same flawed
epistemological paradigm.
As a result of all these forces at work, we're seeing a
resurgence of notions like a Flat Earth or Geocentricity and it struck me as
tragic to see the host of this anti-militarism podcast fall into these traps.
Her confidence in the world has collapsed. The ship is sinking and so she's
reaching desperately for a life boat but instead has simply found an older ship
that has already capsized – or in reality that has already sunk. What she and
others think is solid ground is but another death trap. She has lost her way.
Her misguided commitments have led her into a state of crisis and collapse. The
false worldview she embraces has come to dominate, and now she's trapped in a
dark room and romanticism and fantasy are the only escape. This is why she's
inviting Robert Sungenis on her show and giving him a platform for his
geocentric views.
It's sobering and sad – and so terribly frustrating. I grow
tired of the smug fact-checkers on the news or those who decry and denounce
those who don't embrace their narratives about Russia or even the goodness of
the USA as 'conspiracy theorists'. They mock the notion of the Deep State, a
notion which has been around for decades and is easily embraced by the academy
when it comes to other contexts that don't threaten the American order. All of
this was thrown into an intensified chaos with the rise of the Trump cult and
the way they employ conspiracy to explain away their failures and truths that
stand in their way. As such, legitimate conspiracies have been utterly tainted
and discredited and they've given birth to a new generation of conspiracy and
conspiracists that are even further divorced from reality. It's as if we're
living in a labyrinth so complex that even Borges would recoil in horror.
I was so sorry to see what was an otherwise interesting
podcast succumb to this kind of mental rot. And now it goes on the ever-growing
list of authors, podcasts, websites and even pastors and Church leaders that I
must effectively write off – I'm no longer interested in anything they have to
say. They have lost their way. They have been consumed by the chaos-labyrinth
that is our world in the Last Days.
It's fascinating to trace out how these things develop and
how people fall into these wormholes from which they cannot escape. It's
sobering and humbling too.