They could always, of course, decide to opt out of the ‘system,’ if they are willing to be ‘excluded from society,’ as Bill Gates infamously said about those who would refuse the digital prison that the neo-fascists have built for the rest of humanity. I certainly would, but my guess is that most people are too immersed in social media and the technical means to sojourn there – usually a smartphone, and of course the internet – to take that drastic step.
Metaphorical mountains to climb abound in our senseless world these days. Everywhere one looks there are threats and injustices that need to be exposed, overcome, judged, and neutralised. No sooner is a peak crested than another, higher ridge appears in the distance.
Keeping it real thus also means making a conscious effort to find those spaces where the mediating practices of the elites are few and the chances for direct esthetic pleasure are many. And finally, and most importantly, keeping it real means ensuring that such mediation-free sanctuaries are readily available to children so that their personally constructed sense of beauty, with its wonderfully generative fantasies, is not canceled before it even has time to take flight.
My final rejection of ‘mainstream’ claims to authority happened during the Covid debacle. Whether a new, revitalised sense of legitimate authority could eventually be generated in the place of the spurious claims to authority on the part of those representatives of the supposed ‘New World Order’ who still wield power, only time will tell.
The transformation of the Air Force Academy (AFA) from a military institution to a progressive, liberal arts school has been incremental, relentless, and calculated. The goal to politicize the training and perspectives of cadets, who constitute about 20% of annual Air Force officer commissions, guarantees a source of influential officers who will apply and promote these ideas throughout their military and civilian careers.
As I write this, medicine is still “In the Wilderness,” but I can see a brightening horizon. We still need to formulate a counter to the nihilism of Postmodernism and Critical Theory. We still need to re-establish free speech and intellectual freedom in healthcare delivery and education. We still need to raise truth above ideology. But I now think that is a possibility.
The Complexity Science of Medicine Requires Freedom Read More
In a move that casts George Orwell’s 1984 in a distinctly passé light, these well-nigh invisible flying objects will be programmed and used by organisations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) for population surveillance, to detect so-called ‘thought crimes’ on the part of citizens. Needless to spell out, this will be done with a view to controlling people in a failsafe manner, anticipating supposed ‘criminal’ action before it is committed.
Growing evidence suggests that most of the ‘ultra-risks’ that have emerged recently have been produced by design, and that it is too late to undo most of them, although others may possibly be prevented.
Maybe I’m blind to their existence, but outside the largely narcissistic and comfortably non-personal woke rituals of remorse, I see few institutional pressures in our culture for young people, or anyone for that matter, to undertake the serious and always consequential act of examining their behaviors in the light of moral principles. Just the opposite, in fact.
Faced with the techno-scientification of everything, those of us wedded to the ideals of liberalism urgently need to recognise this threat. We need to recognise that though it is often useful, science cannot transcend the human condition. However much opportunity it brings, it cannot save us from being the limited, complex creatures that we are.
I am completely obsessed with the question of whether liberalism failed in response to Covid. As I’ve written before, I think it is perhaps the most important question in the world right now. If liberalism failed then we are now seeking an alternative to liberalism. If liberalism did not fail (or was lynched) then perhaps we are seeking a return to liberalism (or the introduction of “true” liberalism for the first time). I believe that figuring out this question will provide a map to guide us out of the valley of death that we are currently in.
Donald Trump will certainly get the Republican nomination. With that the issue of truth and honesty about what happened on March 13, 2020, and beyond will likely not be pushed by the executive branch even if Trump wins.
