The idea that only the State can provide security is, of course, nonsense. There have always been many different institutions that promote security of some sort: family, church, brotherhood, community, guild. The State cannot function without them but it won’t stop them from trying.
Family secures biological life. Church secures spiritual life of a community with its complex of poetics, imperatives, and rituals. Brotherhood secures men’s access to emotional, marital, and organizational powers that would build up a civilization to secure their progeny’s future. Community is build up out of the common mores such as “driving on the right side of road. The guild secures economic life of a community and can even expand into international trade like the Hanseatic League while limiting foreign competition. The State may be apparent but it really cannot perform any function done by those five. Even the police cannot be anywhere, not when the public school teachers are the largest governmental employee group. Even under USSR, you still depend on your neighbors for insurance and security. No high tech will change this fact for the oligarchy and it showed in their preferences for Jackson Hole and the like.
When the five are networked well, it can scale up very easily, if we visualize those five as like honeycombs connecting to each other by the weak ties. We do need a State but not that much.
This guest article why I am on Substack. Beautifully written piece that hits every aspect of the motives of the deep state embedded in the US.
I especially love how she points out that the education system is designed to eliminate the critical thinking questions and focus on narrowly constructed paradigms, narratives, as irrefutable facts.
Shifting to a digital internet based “library of facts and information” Google, Wikipedia etc has enabled puppeteers to be able to change the past facts with a computer keystroke.
My personal library of real books is a treasure of knowledge and history that they cannot change to suit their new narratives. Sadly, they capture and control the masses who have gone 100% search engine internet for their facts.
Awesome stuff with this post. Thanks so very much for sharing it.
I'll have to return to this and re-read it but first impressions/reactions from a quick summary read:
Mona Sahlin... oh the shame! She is almost universally reviled or mocked here, her having been a figure of scorn and scandal well before the radical phalanx of the Socialist Democrat party annointed her as party leader, and act which almost obliterated the party's voter base. To show what kind of person she is, this little anecdote might serve:
In the 1990s, when unemployment among non-white non-european migrants was not covered-up the way it is today (it's about 60%), she appointed to professors of economics and statistics to have look and see if they could find the reason for the high unemployment rate in that group, her understated point being that it was due to "racist discrimination".
Problem was, no proof of such could be found, not even in single digits. Swedish employers simply didn't care about race - at all. Only competence and references and personality. Sahlin then fired the researchers in a borderline illegal way and tried to have their report classified as "state secrets". This led to a scandal and an outcry of protest from our academics.
She then appointed an iranian expat - not a refugee but a regime-loyal academic, and outright told him to find the "racist discrimination she knew existed", which he of course did. For this, he was rewarded with tenure at a university, where he since then has made a name for himself, threatening colleagues with rape and murder, among other things.
I could tell Mona-stories all day, but let me just say that she would have fitted in perfectly in the USSR, not because she's a communist but because she has the soul of a true appratchik and a politruk.
Fear. Why fear, has anyone ever asked why fear was made the guiding principle for western nations after the Cold War? (Before 199- it was fear of aggression from the East/West bloc, a concrete fear grounded in reality.) Since then it's been Fear as a concept, not real fear of real things. Anyone ever wondered why?
Because all the other emotional states you can build on demand actual real effecutal action against something real and tangible.
Fear doesn't. Fear can be fought off with rituals and amulets and magic chants - that's why temples and cults exist in the first place, to soothe those fears that cannot be fought and defeated by human action. And now, our nations have been turned into cults worshipping Fear, appeasing Fear the God with ritual sacrifice and scourgings of the flesh of the body of society.
It's an interesting piece of the puzzle, an alternate way of explaining how we got here, but I return ever to the Iron Laws. Think Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings."
This kind of idiocy will last only so long as it takes for things to start to come unglued. Something something 9 missed meals something civilization...
It's interesting to consider that the federal government is largely a parasitic entity that sits atop the confederation of states, in the same way the Lord in Brussels continue to exert control over the EU member Countries. At some point, fedgov/EU will have bled dry the productive, and then the farms don't produce, and the people won't eat ze bugs, and eventually politicians wind up decorating lampposts.
'Cognitive security' is what they're calling it. It's not the state ensuring that we have freedom from fear, it's the state setting the rules on what type of fear can be imposed upon society.
The last paragraph should raise the hairs on any rationally cogent individual. We've allowed this, and we continue to allow it with petty infighting, playing spiteful political games and allowing our media and elected officials to go unaccountable -- for decades. We're reaping the harvest of our reckless and selfish indifference in the bushels of malfeasance seen in big tech, politicized science and the strangleholds of ideological delusions. There is no security when the state targets one part of its own people due to grift and ideological poisoning. Our founding fathers were either accidentally brilliant, or supernaturally inspired.
I think she needs to change the tone of her article to the past tense. What she predicts and diagnoses is a done deal. Absent an absolute tsunami of an uprising led by leaders/politicians who have the stones and the courage to take a meat cleaver to large sections of our Federal Government, it's too late. I'm talking about absolutely closing down and locking the doors of hundreds of government agencies, starting with the most repressive like the Dept of Education, Dept of Energy, the EPA and continue with all the hundreds of departments, agencies, etc., most of which we've never even heard of. Declare the Patriot Act to be unconstitutional and delete it. Dismantle the Central Federal Reserve. Declare the Administrative Procedure Act to be unconstitutional and dismantle it. Dismantle the FBI and the CIA and replace them with a more responsible and responsive agency. Follow up with a total downsizing/revision of the bloated welfare agencies, ban the unionization of government employees, eliminate the GS system, seal our borders, and deport as many of the tens of millions that are here illegally. Do this with the goal of putting the people back in charge of the government and of ourselves.
The problem is that there are now at least two entire generations of youth who have been passed through a US education system that has focused on teaching no (or heavily revised) history, no civics, and dismissed critical thinking skills as being an evil. Instead, these kids have been thoroughly indoctrinated and rendered compliant in believing that Climate Change, DIE, Critical Theory, the Gender lunacy, BLM, Censorship, apartheid, and the entire Woke agenda, etc., are good and right, and that meritocracy, achievement, self-sacrifice, faith, community, and parents are bad.
Attributed to Abraham Lincoln is the quote "What is taught in the classroom in this generation will be practiced in the legislature in the next generation." We are seeing this concept in practice now as we suffer from the consequences of these policies that were popularized by the 60's radicals. Think of the immense influence people like Bernadine Dohrn and the murderer William Ayers had on Obama, and of Hillary's often stated hero worshiping of Saul Alinsky. We have to face the fact that our education system, over the last 20 years, has just cranked out millions of zombified adherents of these very same ideologies and over the next 50+ years, what we are seeing now will become that much worse as they grow up. And it's not their fault because we let this happen to them.
We are just now beginning to realize that we are the victims of a soft revolution and now that the fanatics and faceless bureaucrats are in charge, the hard and bloody part will become the norm. We are just now beginning to realize that our immediate future consists of living under the increasingly restrictive tyranny of the doublethink inherent in DEI. And, yes. Eventually, as all totalitarian systems do, it will fail. The problem is the sheer amount of damage and destruction they will inflict on all of us along the way to their eventual failure. Increasingly, what they are doing to the "January 6'ers", what they are doing to President Trump, what they did to Gen. Flynn, to all the people they are still openly and unapologetically destroying thru the fawning compliance of the media, Google, Facebook, etc., the use of "Disinformation" and "Hate Speech", tells me that they are becoming more and more comfortable with wielding the repression, and the gloves are starting to come off. Hold on to your hats, it's going to be a long and bumpy ride.
A wonderfully written and researched article, Dr. Monika truly has a way with words, just as you do good sir. This article elucidates a great deal about a part of the puzzle, namely how states once operated and how they operate now.
The truth is that 'once upon a time' they operated as an extension of the desires of the citizenry/people, and now they operate against them.
The Treaty of Westphalia was a turning point, it must be recognised and I'm glad to see it getting more and more recognition.
Ontological security means spending so much time preparing for threats on the horizon that you ignore all the threats that have already run your pockets.
This is an excellent explanation, of what I've been laboring (poorly) to explain to anyone crazy enough to listen to me. There is an intentional, ever present and evolving underlying fabric/mechanism, that all these "things" ride on, that we see manifested around us. be it policies, agendas, burgeoning academic theory or radical action in real time.
Much like the well know graphic of orbs riding on the fabric of space/time, our existence rides on a flexing and ever changing web, that we had no hand on weaving.
This substrate, contrived by bureaucrats and academics of the past have been passed along and built upon. It float below the masses it ensnares and affects. As this piece points out, the machinations are not for the benefit and prosperity of the people, but the protection and maintenance of the apparatus, the regimes, or the agendas which are abstract in nature - not based in people, but in ideas. This is why the oppression, abuse, and murder of the common people (chattel), is done without a second thought. Their deference is to the agenda/idea, that must be protected at all costs
That this well written and argued truth bomb is too spicy for modern academia, reinforces the progress of the State's inner-colonization of it's own people...on money it steals from them.
Ontological, epistemological, and physical security are an illusion. That the mediocrities that rule us could bring them about is some dark comedy. I guess this is some sort of civilizational entropy we are experiencing across Western Civilization.
Re: education, John Taylor Gatto is required reading.
Love the art selection. I have quite a few of these sitting in folders, but cribbed from the internet without attribution. Thanks for associating a name and art movement to them for me!
If your guest would be interested in turning that art education she provided you into an essay, I would be very interested in reading it.
The State's appetite for power is insatiable. It does not want you to have freedom, or knowledge, or freedom from fear. It wants you - needs you - to be ignorant and afraid.
The idea that only the State can provide security is, of course, nonsense. There have always been many different institutions that promote security of some sort: family, church, brotherhood, community, guild. The State cannot function without them but it won’t stop them from trying.
Family secures biological life. Church secures spiritual life of a community with its complex of poetics, imperatives, and rituals. Brotherhood secures men’s access to emotional, marital, and organizational powers that would build up a civilization to secure their progeny’s future. Community is build up out of the common mores such as “driving on the right side of road. The guild secures economic life of a community and can even expand into international trade like the Hanseatic League while limiting foreign competition. The State may be apparent but it really cannot perform any function done by those five. Even the police cannot be anywhere, not when the public school teachers are the largest governmental employee group. Even under USSR, you still depend on your neighbors for insurance and security. No high tech will change this fact for the oligarchy and it showed in their preferences for Jackson Hole and the like.
When the five are networked well, it can scale up very easily, if we visualize those five as like honeycombs connecting to each other by the weak ties. We do need a State but not that much.
This guest article why I am on Substack. Beautifully written piece that hits every aspect of the motives of the deep state embedded in the US.
I especially love how she points out that the education system is designed to eliminate the critical thinking questions and focus on narrowly constructed paradigms, narratives, as irrefutable facts.
Shifting to a digital internet based “library of facts and information” Google, Wikipedia etc has enabled puppeteers to be able to change the past facts with a computer keystroke.
My personal library of real books is a treasure of knowledge and history that they cannot change to suit their new narratives. Sadly, they capture and control the masses who have gone 100% search engine internet for their facts.
Awesome stuff with this post. Thanks so very much for sharing it.
I'll have to return to this and re-read it but first impressions/reactions from a quick summary read:
Mona Sahlin... oh the shame! She is almost universally reviled or mocked here, her having been a figure of scorn and scandal well before the radical phalanx of the Socialist Democrat party annointed her as party leader, and act which almost obliterated the party's voter base. To show what kind of person she is, this little anecdote might serve:
In the 1990s, when unemployment among non-white non-european migrants was not covered-up the way it is today (it's about 60%), she appointed to professors of economics and statistics to have look and see if they could find the reason for the high unemployment rate in that group, her understated point being that it was due to "racist discrimination".
Problem was, no proof of such could be found, not even in single digits. Swedish employers simply didn't care about race - at all. Only competence and references and personality. Sahlin then fired the researchers in a borderline illegal way and tried to have their report classified as "state secrets". This led to a scandal and an outcry of protest from our academics.
She then appointed an iranian expat - not a refugee but a regime-loyal academic, and outright told him to find the "racist discrimination she knew existed", which he of course did. For this, he was rewarded with tenure at a university, where he since then has made a name for himself, threatening colleagues with rape and murder, among other things.
I could tell Mona-stories all day, but let me just say that she would have fitted in perfectly in the USSR, not because she's a communist but because she has the soul of a true appratchik and a politruk.
Fear. Why fear, has anyone ever asked why fear was made the guiding principle for western nations after the Cold War? (Before 199- it was fear of aggression from the East/West bloc, a concrete fear grounded in reality.) Since then it's been Fear as a concept, not real fear of real things. Anyone ever wondered why?
Because all the other emotional states you can build on demand actual real effecutal action against something real and tangible.
Fear doesn't. Fear can be fought off with rituals and amulets and magic chants - that's why temples and cults exist in the first place, to soothe those fears that cannot be fought and defeated by human action. And now, our nations have been turned into cults worshipping Fear, appeasing Fear the God with ritual sacrifice and scourgings of the flesh of the body of society.
I don't fear.
I rage.
It's an interesting piece of the puzzle, an alternate way of explaining how we got here, but I return ever to the Iron Laws. Think Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings."
This kind of idiocy will last only so long as it takes for things to start to come unglued. Something something 9 missed meals something civilization...
It's interesting to consider that the federal government is largely a parasitic entity that sits atop the confederation of states, in the same way the Lord in Brussels continue to exert control over the EU member Countries. At some point, fedgov/EU will have bled dry the productive, and then the farms don't produce, and the people won't eat ze bugs, and eventually politicians wind up decorating lampposts.
'Cognitive security' is what they're calling it. It's not the state ensuring that we have freedom from fear, it's the state setting the rules on what type of fear can be imposed upon society.
Ossified society will not survive. Flexibility will return, or the society will collapse. Welcome to the new dark ages.
The last paragraph should raise the hairs on any rationally cogent individual. We've allowed this, and we continue to allow it with petty infighting, playing spiteful political games and allowing our media and elected officials to go unaccountable -- for decades. We're reaping the harvest of our reckless and selfish indifference in the bushels of malfeasance seen in big tech, politicized science and the strangleholds of ideological delusions. There is no security when the state targets one part of its own people due to grift and ideological poisoning. Our founding fathers were either accidentally brilliant, or supernaturally inspired.
I think she needs to change the tone of her article to the past tense. What she predicts and diagnoses is a done deal. Absent an absolute tsunami of an uprising led by leaders/politicians who have the stones and the courage to take a meat cleaver to large sections of our Federal Government, it's too late. I'm talking about absolutely closing down and locking the doors of hundreds of government agencies, starting with the most repressive like the Dept of Education, Dept of Energy, the EPA and continue with all the hundreds of departments, agencies, etc., most of which we've never even heard of. Declare the Patriot Act to be unconstitutional and delete it. Dismantle the Central Federal Reserve. Declare the Administrative Procedure Act to be unconstitutional and dismantle it. Dismantle the FBI and the CIA and replace them with a more responsible and responsive agency. Follow up with a total downsizing/revision of the bloated welfare agencies, ban the unionization of government employees, eliminate the GS system, seal our borders, and deport as many of the tens of millions that are here illegally. Do this with the goal of putting the people back in charge of the government and of ourselves.
The problem is that there are now at least two entire generations of youth who have been passed through a US education system that has focused on teaching no (or heavily revised) history, no civics, and dismissed critical thinking skills as being an evil. Instead, these kids have been thoroughly indoctrinated and rendered compliant in believing that Climate Change, DIE, Critical Theory, the Gender lunacy, BLM, Censorship, apartheid, and the entire Woke agenda, etc., are good and right, and that meritocracy, achievement, self-sacrifice, faith, community, and parents are bad.
Attributed to Abraham Lincoln is the quote "What is taught in the classroom in this generation will be practiced in the legislature in the next generation." We are seeing this concept in practice now as we suffer from the consequences of these policies that were popularized by the 60's radicals. Think of the immense influence people like Bernadine Dohrn and the murderer William Ayers had on Obama, and of Hillary's often stated hero worshiping of Saul Alinsky. We have to face the fact that our education system, over the last 20 years, has just cranked out millions of zombified adherents of these very same ideologies and over the next 50+ years, what we are seeing now will become that much worse as they grow up. And it's not their fault because we let this happen to them.
We are just now beginning to realize that we are the victims of a soft revolution and now that the fanatics and faceless bureaucrats are in charge, the hard and bloody part will become the norm. We are just now beginning to realize that our immediate future consists of living under the increasingly restrictive tyranny of the doublethink inherent in DEI. And, yes. Eventually, as all totalitarian systems do, it will fail. The problem is the sheer amount of damage and destruction they will inflict on all of us along the way to their eventual failure. Increasingly, what they are doing to the "January 6'ers", what they are doing to President Trump, what they did to Gen. Flynn, to all the people they are still openly and unapologetically destroying thru the fawning compliance of the media, Google, Facebook, etc., the use of "Disinformation" and "Hate Speech", tells me that they are becoming more and more comfortable with wielding the repression, and the gloves are starting to come off. Hold on to your hats, it's going to be a long and bumpy ride.
So, what if I am inclined to the near total destruction of the State and technocracy?
A wonderfully written and researched article, Dr. Monika truly has a way with words, just as you do good sir. This article elucidates a great deal about a part of the puzzle, namely how states once operated and how they operate now.
The truth is that 'once upon a time' they operated as an extension of the desires of the citizenry/people, and now they operate against them.
The Treaty of Westphalia was a turning point, it must be recognised and I'm glad to see it getting more and more recognition.
Ontological security means spending so much time preparing for threats on the horizon that you ignore all the threats that have already run your pockets.
https://open.substack.com/pub/argomend/p/book-smart-and-street-smart?r=28g8km&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This is an excellent explanation, of what I've been laboring (poorly) to explain to anyone crazy enough to listen to me. There is an intentional, ever present and evolving underlying fabric/mechanism, that all these "things" ride on, that we see manifested around us. be it policies, agendas, burgeoning academic theory or radical action in real time.
Much like the well know graphic of orbs riding on the fabric of space/time, our existence rides on a flexing and ever changing web, that we had no hand on weaving.
This substrate, contrived by bureaucrats and academics of the past have been passed along and built upon. It float below the masses it ensnares and affects. As this piece points out, the machinations are not for the benefit and prosperity of the people, but the protection and maintenance of the apparatus, the regimes, or the agendas which are abstract in nature - not based in people, but in ideas. This is why the oppression, abuse, and murder of the common people (chattel), is done without a second thought. Their deference is to the agenda/idea, that must be protected at all costs
That this well written and argued truth bomb is too spicy for modern academia, reinforces the progress of the State's inner-colonization of it's own people...on money it steals from them.
Ontological, epistemological, and physical security are an illusion. That the mediocrities that rule us could bring them about is some dark comedy. I guess this is some sort of civilizational entropy we are experiencing across Western Civilization.
Fantastic essay and cool art to boot. Bravo.
Re: education, John Taylor Gatto is required reading.
Love the art selection. I have quite a few of these sitting in folders, but cribbed from the internet without attribution. Thanks for associating a name and art movement to them for me!
If your guest would be interested in turning that art education she provided you into an essay, I would be very interested in reading it.
... knowledge + action = security and freedom
... ignorance + fear = purpetual slavery.
The State's appetite for power is insatiable. It does not want you to have freedom, or knowledge, or freedom from fear. It wants you - needs you - to be ignorant and afraid.