The virtual community is important, but we need to see each other, too. During the Covoodoo madness I felt distant from many old friends because, while they might not have been all-in, they weren’t “hell no what the fuck is this???” out. So I sought out groups who saw through it, and we met online and in person. Tom Woods organized meetups for his listeners and I went and it was life-changing to know, really *know*, that even if we weren’t all in Galt’s Gulch somewhere, we could create a network and a community where we didn’t have to fear that our neighbors would volunteer us for boxcars to assuage their own anxiety.
My first week at (world famous) college, they used this fear of loneliness technique to make us conform to their lame ideology in a clever way. They had group facilitators come to each small group (maybe 20 people) during orientation and discuss various hot button topics, asking us to stand either on one side of the room or the other depending upon our opinion on the matter. Everyone kept ending up on the same side because nobody, regardless of their true belief, wanted to be the one person visibly singled out on the “wrong” side in front of their new friends, to be picked on (“why are you on that side!?”) by the group counselor. It was, as I later realized, cult forming behavior 101 - so creepy!
How can a person who lacks community maintain a sense of meaning (and hope) in such extreme, isolating circumstances?
Somehow, I am making it through this, and I think I know why I have been able to, thus far. But I don't know how to convey this to others.
I'll also say that this has been, and is, a test of my preparation for this task, which (during the years of my life I was preparing) I had no idea I was preparing. I was just living my life, going through things, following my interests wherever they led. It is only now, looking back, that I can see all of the different things I have done, gone through and studied (and learned) have made it possible for me to go through this covidiocy intact -- rather than disintegrate or give up.
And I mean that this is weird. Not in an insane way, but it becomes more clear over time -- and extremely hard to put into words. (Maybe this will get easier, in time.)
I could not have known or predicted the very abrupt change in my loved ones and community, that divided us almost overnight over petty disagreements -- where it became suddenly crystal clear how brainwashed they are. I kept doing sanity tests on myself because it appeared that I was the sole holdout thinking that masks were useless, that treatments were available, and that the vaccines were harmful. And later on, that I was being shunned for no good reason.
I made it through that, surrounded by the cult, resisting because my life depends upon it. Yet, my life as I once knew it has been destroyed. So there's then the question of meaning and hope -- I think I'm just determined to see this through, no matter what.
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”
Sorry but straight-up fucking brilliant writing and analysis. Today you are my hero on the internet.
I just need more inner silence to not succumb to the beginnings of hermit-dude I am seeing develop in myself as a response to the cult around me.
I can't reach them and I don't speak their language so I am using Jesus as my guide and focusing on the idea of Charity. They may be insane now but in Gods eyes or in the Cosmic consciousness they are just asleep.
And I'm more than likely at least quite drowsy myself...
There are no atheists (it's literally physically impossible for the human mind to function at more than a toddler level w/o a god); everyone worships some god. If you reject the God of the Bible, you'll worship something else; in America, the predominant gods are self or "diversity, inclusivity & equity", but they are gods nonetheless & their priests are "experts" or "consensus." If you are obeying a god, what crime is truly a crime? What atrocity cannot be justified by god?
We need to understand that every society is a god-fearing society; the only difference is the particular god they fear. Are you happy w/ these new gods?
Sorry to say, too many that resisted the Covid lunacy are now too lazy to go the whole hog to protect themselves and their children now the worst of the totalitarianism appears over.
Back to working. Sending kids to school even though they know all about the dangers for them from the (UK) Common Purpose progressive ideology. Buying organic supermarket food, watching Netflix, and staying silent is the way they’re going into the future.
Too lazy to work to provide safe food for themselves and children. Indeed one person responded to the request to share the work and purchasing of seeds/soil/polytunnels and livestock (HOGS) that they could see nothing in it for them! Safe unadulterated food is not enough. We did get someone say he’d like to set up his motor home and grow his own for free. Aka hippie freeloader.
We’ve decided to start sending them a cartoon of The Little Red hen. You know like how the hen asked everyone she knew to help and they refused. But when she finally got to the eating they flocked around to eat the product of her own hard work. And the hen said ‘where were you when I needed help? Nowhere. So you’ll get none of my bread.
Why we’ve even had some say that as we are Christians they think we will share our produce with them for free when SHTF out of our duty. One asked me if I was a Christian directly. When I responded yes he replied great, so when we need to get out of the city you won’t refuse us camping out here.
We have tried hard over the last two years to create a shared smallholding. An alternative community. We’ve given up.
We’ve also given up informing people of what’s coming anymore. We’ve done our duty over the last three years.
Now my duty is to protect our family. My land that I’ve fought hard over twenty years to retain is today only for saving my family.
Key up a goodly part of the welcoming community here ready to shriek I'm gonna burn in hell because I won't believe...
This post was like a brief history of every religion ever, because all cults are the same. Burnt at the stake by any other name...
Whatever the community is--religious or purportedly secular--it has its rulebook. Two people together, you can have a lively conversation. Three, and you got the birthings of the gang of two gonna press the third into submission. I kept thinking of CS Lewis all the way through this piece. Too smart to be fooled, right?
The best medicine has always been genuine friendships. Now, for the least distress, one is advised to find a therapist who is a person paid to listen to your deepest painful thoughts, and people need therapists because what they call "friends" these days are mostly longtime acquaintances.
It's true, as you note, that communities of the faithful held up best during the Plague Era, but they demand their price too.
"It is the mass ego that constructs dogmas and laws; for while the individual soul is, if free at all, self-poised, the mass mind is always uncertain, driven by vague, wandering aims; conscious, in a dim fashion, of its own weakness, it builds round itself a grotesque structure in the everlastingness of which it implicitly believes. When each unit of humanity merges itself in the mass, it loses its bearings and must rely on externals. The whole effort of evolution is to the development of individual souls who will dare to be free of the architecture of crowd-morality.
For when man is herded, he remembers the savage."
"Society thinks that mistakes are made and crimes committed through the human soul being too much itself, going its own way. But crimes really happen through the soul being too little itself, striving to conform, or being crushed into conformity."
I miss the Good Old Days when universities created functional alcoholics addicted to football tailgating.
Now, all I can find in the college hiring pool are Woke Warriors who tell me they'll have my job in 6 months because I am a bigoted old man, even if they graduated without understanding the engineering of our field.
It is easier for me because I have been coping with my crazy in-laws for 45 years. It made me accept that people I love can inhabit a separate reality.
Many many years ago I attended a church where they showed a how-to evangelize film in Sunday School. Now this was a respectable, conservative mainline Protestant denomination, not one of those little fly-by-night churches that spring up because someone picked up a Bible and decided to start a new church. So I was quite surprised and appalled to hear the film's narrator explicitly tell people don't waste your time on people who present a challenge by asking hard questions, but instead go after, you guessed it, the vulnerable, the lonely, those who are struggling emotionally, financially, physically. In other words, quantity or quality--we don't want potential C. S. Lewises or St. Augustines or even Martin Luthers here. Not that everyone can or ought to reach that kind of level, but you will never get it if you systematically exclude it. And by the way, speaking as someone who is living on a fixed income, we are pretty tired of being targeted by so-called well-meaning folks who claim to be helping when all they do is exploit us. We have no shortage of would-be exploiters.
Very VERY good article. Putting parts and pieces together here helps me to really untangle what has been the most baffling aspect of the COVID Event (to me): The utter complicity of doctors in effectuating mass murder. How was such a wholesale lack of conscience even possible?
I have long suspected supernatural influence on this issue. I still can't rule it out entirely, but, piecing together certain components that BC outlines in this article, I think it is possible to get there without any magic spells.
Step 1: Indoctrination. That begins in school. Eight years of being told that We Are The Only True Science is a powerful, POWERFUL thing to overcome. Given that the vast majority of graduates will slide right into an institution that continues the seductive illusion of White Coat Wizardry, the social factor here must be nearly impossible to overcome.
For those who DID manage to question the narrative, however -- perhaps after seeing so many nightmarish ventilator-assisted deaths, or perhaps managing to wonder how or why a novel therapy (mRNA) could possibly be so safe without extensive testing -- there's
Step 2: Guilt-Avoidance. A doctor who was previously complicit has every reason in the world not to awaken to the truth: Not only would it be outright terrifying in its implications (yep, this really is a planned murder spree, folks) -- it would implicate said doctor in the plot. Who wants to admit to being an accomplice to murder -- ESPECIALLY when, given one's training, one should have known better? (Ahem -- seriously. Giving a drug that causes kidney damage and subsequent fluid backup to a patient who is already leaking fluid out of their lungs, then shoving a small tube down the patient's throat, while leaving the patient in a SUPINE POSITION so that GRAVITY can't even help them clear the fluid -- seriously, never mind physiology courses, did these people forget basic physics?)
Yeah. LOTS of psychological incentive to deny one's instinctive inklings.
Then, of course, if that all didn't work, and the doctor was STILL on the fence about it all, there's
Step 3: Good old fashioned threats to one's livelihood. These were only effective, of course, because the doctor was aware of how few other options existed for him or her due to the effectiveness of Steps 1 and 2 on his or her peers.
Truly nefarious, and now, the big question to me becomes: "What next?" ... The medical establishment as a whole has utterly destroyed its last feeble shred of credibility. It has revealed itself to be -- as the title of BC's article suggests -- a "cult," and one that operates for the benefit and behest of narrow corporate interests (pharma). Unfortunately, its collective members still represent a vast body of skill and training. Is there any way to redeem them? How does a doctor come back from this -- is it even possible?
I have spent most of my career doing academic research on depression and anxiety.
After interviewing hundreds of patients, it is clear to me that the root causes are lack of meaning and lack of community.
Pills and brief courses of therapy are not lasting solutions.
The virtual community is important, but we need to see each other, too. During the Covoodoo madness I felt distant from many old friends because, while they might not have been all-in, they weren’t “hell no what the fuck is this???” out. So I sought out groups who saw through it, and we met online and in person. Tom Woods organized meetups for his listeners and I went and it was life-changing to know, really *know*, that even if we weren’t all in Galt’s Gulch somewhere, we could create a network and a community where we didn’t have to fear that our neighbors would volunteer us for boxcars to assuage their own anxiety.
My first week at (world famous) college, they used this fear of loneliness technique to make us conform to their lame ideology in a clever way. They had group facilitators come to each small group (maybe 20 people) during orientation and discuss various hot button topics, asking us to stand either on one side of the room or the other depending upon our opinion on the matter. Everyone kept ending up on the same side because nobody, regardless of their true belief, wanted to be the one person visibly singled out on the “wrong” side in front of their new friends, to be picked on (“why are you on that side!?”) by the group counselor. It was, as I later realized, cult forming behavior 101 - so creepy!
Gaty.substack.com
How can a person who lacks community maintain a sense of meaning (and hope) in such extreme, isolating circumstances?
Somehow, I am making it through this, and I think I know why I have been able to, thus far. But I don't know how to convey this to others.
I'll also say that this has been, and is, a test of my preparation for this task, which (during the years of my life I was preparing) I had no idea I was preparing. I was just living my life, going through things, following my interests wherever they led. It is only now, looking back, that I can see all of the different things I have done, gone through and studied (and learned) have made it possible for me to go through this covidiocy intact -- rather than disintegrate or give up.
And I mean that this is weird. Not in an insane way, but it becomes more clear over time -- and extremely hard to put into words. (Maybe this will get easier, in time.)
I could not have known or predicted the very abrupt change in my loved ones and community, that divided us almost overnight over petty disagreements -- where it became suddenly crystal clear how brainwashed they are. I kept doing sanity tests on myself because it appeared that I was the sole holdout thinking that masks were useless, that treatments were available, and that the vaccines were harmful. And later on, that I was being shunned for no good reason.
I made it through that, surrounded by the cult, resisting because my life depends upon it. Yet, my life as I once knew it has been destroyed. So there's then the question of meaning and hope -- I think I'm just determined to see this through, no matter what.
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”
Romans 1:21-30, 32
Sing it, el gato.
The one step people can take to spark instant meaning in their lives is to transition from consuming to creating.
Then add sharing what you create with a community of appreciative kindreds, and you have transformed that meaning into purpose.
And this is why I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Substack—and Substacks like yours, specifically—can save the world.
It is what Vonnegut calls a kan-kan—the instrument that brings us together—as I describe in this piece:
• “Letter to My Karass” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-my-karass)
the support riley and others are gaining tells me this shit show is almost over
waiting for the implosion
Sorry but straight-up fucking brilliant writing and analysis. Today you are my hero on the internet.
I just need more inner silence to not succumb to the beginnings of hermit-dude I am seeing develop in myself as a response to the cult around me.
I can't reach them and I don't speak their language so I am using Jesus as my guide and focusing on the idea of Charity. They may be insane now but in Gods eyes or in the Cosmic consciousness they are just asleep.
And I'm more than likely at least quite drowsy myself...
There are no atheists (it's literally physically impossible for the human mind to function at more than a toddler level w/o a god); everyone worships some god. If you reject the God of the Bible, you'll worship something else; in America, the predominant gods are self or "diversity, inclusivity & equity", but they are gods nonetheless & their priests are "experts" or "consensus." If you are obeying a god, what crime is truly a crime? What atrocity cannot be justified by god?
We need to understand that every society is a god-fearing society; the only difference is the particular god they fear. Are you happy w/ these new gods?
Sorry to say, too many that resisted the Covid lunacy are now too lazy to go the whole hog to protect themselves and their children now the worst of the totalitarianism appears over.
Back to working. Sending kids to school even though they know all about the dangers for them from the (UK) Common Purpose progressive ideology. Buying organic supermarket food, watching Netflix, and staying silent is the way they’re going into the future.
Too lazy to work to provide safe food for themselves and children. Indeed one person responded to the request to share the work and purchasing of seeds/soil/polytunnels and livestock (HOGS) that they could see nothing in it for them! Safe unadulterated food is not enough. We did get someone say he’d like to set up his motor home and grow his own for free. Aka hippie freeloader.
We’ve decided to start sending them a cartoon of The Little Red hen. You know like how the hen asked everyone she knew to help and they refused. But when she finally got to the eating they flocked around to eat the product of her own hard work. And the hen said ‘where were you when I needed help? Nowhere. So you’ll get none of my bread.
Why we’ve even had some say that as we are Christians they think we will share our produce with them for free when SHTF out of our duty. One asked me if I was a Christian directly. When I responded yes he replied great, so when we need to get out of the city you won’t refuse us camping out here.
We have tried hard over the last two years to create a shared smallholding. An alternative community. We’ve given up.
We’ve also given up informing people of what’s coming anymore. We’ve done our duty over the last three years.
Now my duty is to protect our family. My land that I’ve fought hard over twenty years to retain is today only for saving my family.
Key up a goodly part of the welcoming community here ready to shriek I'm gonna burn in hell because I won't believe...
This post was like a brief history of every religion ever, because all cults are the same. Burnt at the stake by any other name...
Whatever the community is--religious or purportedly secular--it has its rulebook. Two people together, you can have a lively conversation. Three, and you got the birthings of the gang of two gonna press the third into submission. I kept thinking of CS Lewis all the way through this piece. Too smart to be fooled, right?
The best medicine has always been genuine friendships. Now, for the least distress, one is advised to find a therapist who is a person paid to listen to your deepest painful thoughts, and people need therapists because what they call "friends" these days are mostly longtime acquaintances.
It's true, as you note, that communities of the faithful held up best during the Plague Era, but they demand their price too.
"The House in Dormer Forest" by Mary Webb 1920
"It is the mass ego that constructs dogmas and laws; for while the individual soul is, if free at all, self-poised, the mass mind is always uncertain, driven by vague, wandering aims; conscious, in a dim fashion, of its own weakness, it builds round itself a grotesque structure in the everlastingness of which it implicitly believes. When each unit of humanity merges itself in the mass, it loses its bearings and must rely on externals. The whole effort of evolution is to the development of individual souls who will dare to be free of the architecture of crowd-morality.
For when man is herded, he remembers the savage."
"Society thinks that mistakes are made and crimes committed through the human soul being too much itself, going its own way. But crimes really happen through the soul being too little itself, striving to conform, or being crushed into conformity."
I miss the Good Old Days when universities created functional alcoholics addicted to football tailgating.
Now, all I can find in the college hiring pool are Woke Warriors who tell me they'll have my job in 6 months because I am a bigoted old man, even if they graduated without understanding the engineering of our field.
Great times!!
It is easier for me because I have been coping with my crazy in-laws for 45 years. It made me accept that people I love can inhabit a separate reality.
Many many years ago I attended a church where they showed a how-to evangelize film in Sunday School. Now this was a respectable, conservative mainline Protestant denomination, not one of those little fly-by-night churches that spring up because someone picked up a Bible and decided to start a new church. So I was quite surprised and appalled to hear the film's narrator explicitly tell people don't waste your time on people who present a challenge by asking hard questions, but instead go after, you guessed it, the vulnerable, the lonely, those who are struggling emotionally, financially, physically. In other words, quantity or quality--we don't want potential C. S. Lewises or St. Augustines or even Martin Luthers here. Not that everyone can or ought to reach that kind of level, but you will never get it if you systematically exclude it. And by the way, speaking as someone who is living on a fixed income, we are pretty tired of being targeted by so-called well-meaning folks who claim to be helping when all they do is exploit us. We have no shortage of would-be exploiters.
Very VERY good article. Putting parts and pieces together here helps me to really untangle what has been the most baffling aspect of the COVID Event (to me): The utter complicity of doctors in effectuating mass murder. How was such a wholesale lack of conscience even possible?
I have long suspected supernatural influence on this issue. I still can't rule it out entirely, but, piecing together certain components that BC outlines in this article, I think it is possible to get there without any magic spells.
Step 1: Indoctrination. That begins in school. Eight years of being told that We Are The Only True Science is a powerful, POWERFUL thing to overcome. Given that the vast majority of graduates will slide right into an institution that continues the seductive illusion of White Coat Wizardry, the social factor here must be nearly impossible to overcome.
For those who DID manage to question the narrative, however -- perhaps after seeing so many nightmarish ventilator-assisted deaths, or perhaps managing to wonder how or why a novel therapy (mRNA) could possibly be so safe without extensive testing -- there's
Step 2: Guilt-Avoidance. A doctor who was previously complicit has every reason in the world not to awaken to the truth: Not only would it be outright terrifying in its implications (yep, this really is a planned murder spree, folks) -- it would implicate said doctor in the plot. Who wants to admit to being an accomplice to murder -- ESPECIALLY when, given one's training, one should have known better? (Ahem -- seriously. Giving a drug that causes kidney damage and subsequent fluid backup to a patient who is already leaking fluid out of their lungs, then shoving a small tube down the patient's throat, while leaving the patient in a SUPINE POSITION so that GRAVITY can't even help them clear the fluid -- seriously, never mind physiology courses, did these people forget basic physics?)
Yeah. LOTS of psychological incentive to deny one's instinctive inklings.
Then, of course, if that all didn't work, and the doctor was STILL on the fence about it all, there's
Step 3: Good old fashioned threats to one's livelihood. These were only effective, of course, because the doctor was aware of how few other options existed for him or her due to the effectiveness of Steps 1 and 2 on his or her peers.
Truly nefarious, and now, the big question to me becomes: "What next?" ... The medical establishment as a whole has utterly destroyed its last feeble shred of credibility. It has revealed itself to be -- as the title of BC's article suggests -- a "cult," and one that operates for the benefit and behest of narrow corporate interests (pharma). Unfortunately, its collective members still represent a vast body of skill and training. Is there any way to redeem them? How does a doctor come back from this -- is it even possible?