Consumers, Marxists, Greens and Transcendence

Reading Theodore Dalrymple is quite an ambiguous experience.

I cannot help but enjoy his erudition and wry humour and the fact that he speaks with such obvious experience about the human condition[1] gives his perspective a psychological grounding that many, if not most of us would admit to a lack of. Although the picture he paints can quite often be disturbing to say the least.

His implacable atheism no doubt influences his gloomy worldview but the fact that he is a conservative and one who both acknowledges and appreciates the influence of the Judeo-Christian worldview on Western civilisation brings an elastic equilibrium to this vision du monde noir.

I am currently enjoying(?) his 2010 book; The new Vichy Syndrome: why European intellectuals surrender to barbarism and some of the insights he offers are really helpful to ponder on and perhaps provide an impetus to adjust one’s own attitudes to life. They also help to explain some of the peculiar and inexplicable things happening in our society.

For example one of the sections in chapter 6: Why are we like this is subtitled; Life without Transcendence; and speaks of the dilemma faced by people who have abandoned any idea of something ‘bigger’ than them:

“…this life is all he has. He must therefore preserve and prolong it at all costs – and he not only has to preserve and prolong it, but live it to the full. Death for him is extinction, the void, eternal nothingness…”

He then goes on to explain how the things that we replace this transcendence with tend to pall after a while. For example his take on the mindlessness of consumerism:

“The problem with consumption is that it soon ceases to satisfy. How else can one explain the crowds that assemble in every city centre in Europe (and increasingly elsewhere) every weekend to buy what they cannot possible need and perhaps do not even want?........At best there will be a brief moment of elation, followed soon after by a prolonged indifference to whatever it is that has been bought.” [p.67]

He goes on further about the vacuity of the emotions being affected by appreciation vs. scarcity but what he then has to say about experiential living reverberated for me:

“The same might be said of the experiences that people seek, the experiences that they feel they must seek if they are to live life to the full. Sports become more extreme in their competitive urgency, holiday’s ever more exotic, films more violent, broadcasting more vulgar, the expression of emotion more crude and obvious (compare advertisements showing people enjoying themselves sixty years ago and now). Mouths are open and screams, either of joy or pain, emerge. Quiet satisfaction is no satisfaction at all; what is not expressed grossly is not deemed to have been expressed.” [p.68]

This passage caused me to reflect on what we call a church service today; how our ‘corrupted’(?) emotions might influence our expectations of what should, or can take place  in our meetings.

Dalrymple then riffs about what a lack of transcendence means in the political arena and makes some salient observations:

“A transcendent meaning to life can be sought in politics of a certain kind. Marxism might have been deficient as an explanation of the world; its prophecies might have been refuted, as far as undated prophecies can ever be refuted; and as a guide to the establishment of regimes in practice, its record has been uniformly atrocious, leading to more complete tyrannies than many previously experienced by mankind, that has hardly been lacking in imagination in this matter. But the one thing it did do for millions of people, at least for a time: it gave them the feeling that their lives were a contribution to the immanent meaning of history, and that they were a contribution to the denouement of history, when all contradictions would be resolved, all desires fulfilled, and all human relations easy, spontaneous, friendly and loving. It was obvious nonsense, of course, but not more obvious nonsense than the religious ideas of those whose religious ideas we do not happen to share.”[p.69]

I daresay this could be said about the new ‘transcendence’ today, that of the ISIS or the emergent ‘new Caliphate’ phenomena being bandied about by the disaffected.

There is of course a rather more invidious, already established new transcendent belief that has captured many in the post-modern age, and in this I refer to the Green eco-fanatics that inhabit the Western world. This is how Dalrymple speaks of these:

“ ‘A New Pagan Transcendence’; Chief among these was the environment. The threatened cataclysm was not to be brought about any longer by the unbearable contradictions of capitalism, but by the unsustainable destruction of the environment brought about by human activity. As with the final crisis of capitalism, however, nothing but a complete transformation would do; and the more extreme the allegedly necessary changes, the more extremists could pass them off as prescriptions for change; extremists could pose as the saviours of the human race. Just as Leninists knew what was good for the proletariat, thereby conferring on themselves a gratifyingly providential role, so the environmentalists now know what is good for humanity and likewise confer on themselves a providential role. The beauty of preservation of the environment as a cause is that it is so large that is would justify almost any ends used to achieve it, for a liveable environment is the sin qua non of everything else. You can demonstrate and riot for the good of humanity to your hearts’ content: your questions about what life is for have been answered.”[p.69/70]

As I have said, Dalrymple makes for reflective reading. I will regurgitate (sic) more on these subjects in further blogs.

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[1] His decades long experiences as psychiatrist and doctor for a large mental hospital and its attached Prison affords him a particular ‘no-frills’ insight into the human condition.

THE WOLF BARES HIS/HER TEETH

In Australia as I imagine in many other (if not most) parts of Western civilisation, the left-wing of politics has gained the tactical 'high-ground.' They have established themselves in positions of power within the hierarchy's of education, in the mainline churches, in politics and in the arts and media.

 

Our left-wing 'masters' have followed to the letter, Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony' by adopting the method of his 'long march through the institutions',(In Australia this idea is fostered through the Australian Fabian Society, a socialist movement that most of the leaders of Australia's Labor party belong to)  the ultimate objective of which is to influence the direction of the culture and most importantly; education from reception to year 12 and all the tertiary training thereafter.

 

Education (which includes inculcating values through the arts and the electronic media) becomes the long term key to establishing the values and norms of what Gramsci termed 'the new order' (L'Ordine Nuovo) so that his neo-Marxist thought becomes the normative, ruling value in the culture, in essence it becomes what we unconsciously refer to as: common sense. 

 

"The Left doesn’t even pretend any more. The ABC openly campaigns for Leftist causes, for instance, and the University of Queensland now offers a course on global warming that is pure propaganda, founded on a “97 per cent” proposition that is deeply misleading and meaningless.

Here is the course description, essentially teaching uninformed students not to open their minds but to close them:
In public discussions, climate change is a highly controversial topic. However, in the scientific community, there is little controversy with 97% of climate scientists concluding humans are causing global warming."

 

When left-wing progressivism (socialism by another name) becomes 'common sense' as in the repeatedly pronounced mantra of Global warming, then we know that the collapse of western civilisation is very close. J M Coetzee, a South African Nobel laureate now living in Adelaide wrote a prophetic book titled: Waiting for the Barbarians.....

 

I think the real barbarians are in the walls already.

TO LOSE OR NOT TO LOSE

Thomas Sowell on the current occupant of the White House: 

People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs. You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do. When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.

 

As per usual Thomas Sowell hits the nail on the head.

 

One of the most frustrating issues in life for me, especially in politics, is the reality that many people I come across in everyday life vote for politicians, parties,  or issues that they are completely ignorant about.

 

I am hesitant to point fingers because I admit to being ignorant about most things, but in an 'information age' the one thing that we cannot use as an excuse is a paucity of information at our fingertips.

 

Some years ago I was a teacher and was amazed at how many intelligent and apparently educated colleagues voted for political parties like the Greens without actually ever having  researched the party at its most fundamental level. No one I spoke to had considered reading the Greens 'manifesto', their intentions, their goals in politics and society in general, in fact most of these colleagues knew nothing about the personal ideologies of the leaders of the Greens they voted for or even who they were.

 

Some of the schools I worked at were Christian Independents and the teachers claimed to be Christian, yet many openly barracked/voted for the Greens who are unashamedly anti-Christian in both their writing and their policies. In short the level of ignorance about the people these colleagues voted for was staggeringly evidenced in their understanding of anything to do with the politics of the Greens. It made me wonder about the other 10% of the population which voted Green. These are people that are moved by the 'seeming' as opposed to the doing, about the gesture, the intention of something and how these intentions are viewed by likeminded 'elites'. 'Outcomes' is a concept found in Human resources jargon, not a reality

 

My personal 'polling' of perspectives was largely conducted in teaching staffrooms but turned out to be fairly broad because at the time I happened to be spending significant periods of time in quite a few different educational environments; public schools, independents, private and tertiary.

 

Perhaps it is bias on my part but by-and-large I found the (few) conservative to be far better informed about policies than the socialistic.

 

Which brings me to Barack Hussein Obama.

I was equally astounded during the period of 'Obama fever', just before his first election, at how similar the political ignorance appeared to be amongst friends of mine in America (and other places). Because the man was black and somehow represented hope for healing between the races, (a good thing) nevertheless they appeared to jettison any attempts to dive into his past and his ideological framework. As it turned out it was a very shallow pool to dive into and quite easily navigated.

 

His experiences (or lack thereof) can be traced in a direct line from socialist/Marxist thought, friendships with acknowledged terrorists (one mans terrorist is another's freedom fighter???) 

born into the 'faith' and subsequently mentored by Islamic scholars and hate preachers who think and teach that everything about America is ghastly.

 

I even had Christian friends upbraid me for being hesitant about Obama, a man who incidentally can trace major life influences and subsequent career choices back to Saul Alinsky, who  dedicated his most famous tract to Lucifer....all of this information is easily accessible and not at all hidden. 

 

Obama's messianic announcement about his election being the moment when the 'earth began to be healed' aside, his actions and strategy of office fits completely with the ideology that appears to have been with him throughout his life. Why would we be amazed at how much damage he has done to America. He hates it in its present form as does his wife. 

 

Perhaps people are generally disinterested in politics because most politicians these days are in the 'game' for themselves, this is demonstrably true. Perhaps the pace of life has become so frenetic that most people do not have the time nor the inclination to do much research on the various party ideologies, also true. Unfortunately, what is also true is that LEST WE FORGET, a catch phrase, which has become so popular in modern day Australia means more than remembering the soldier's who gave their all for our civilisation, it also means remembering the  WHY!

 

They gave their lives for Freedom and that freedom was won at a cost. We don't enjoy the fruits of those freedoms because of some natural, evolutionary progress in the civil development of mankind (as some would have us believe)...No! These freedoms were won from men (and women) who sought to take them away; men and women whose 'will to power' was such that they tried to take other people lands and wealth by force. 

 

Unfortunately such men and women still exist and if we just sit back and hope for the best, if we don't use our God given intelligence to decide on the best political system for not just us, but the society as a whole, then one day we are going to have those choices taken away from us.

 

 

 

 

THE FRUITS OF FABIAN

Ah Labor........It is correct that Australia can be marked from the Whitlam era as has having changed profoundly. The change unfortunately has not been to the benefit of most Australians, an elite few yes, particularly those who were born into the political class which currently constitutes almost one hundred percent of the Labor line-up.

Surely that alone would give an intelligent person whose otherwise reflexive voting spasm is Labor; pause to reconsider? If the polls are anything to go by evidently not. It appears the self-delusional "gorging ones selves from the big government money trough" has not abated at all.

Oh it will have its day when the choices are no longer there and by then the big nanny state which many seem at peace with, will clamp down on the populace and totalitarianism in Australia  will have come of age.

Impossible you say, ridiculous, it will never happen here you say, you are just being one of those chicken little Green's you say you despise you say....I hope I am wrong but if world history is any judge....

I was fortunate enough to have lived in the Australia of the 'before' period and was here while Whitlam's shambolic government set into motion the disastrous legacy that he has hung around the neck of Australia. Those were days before convicted criminal Grassby got his grubby hands on the grossly misnamed 'multiculturism':

"The war against terror in Australia will count for nothing unless it is accompanied by a war against the culture that permitted terrorism to gain a foothold in the country. That would be the invidious policy of multiculturalism promoted by the Whitlam government’s notorious minister for immigration Al Grassby….Multiculturalism is a great example of elitist policy-making that should be dumped. Since the Leftist intelligentsia launched the French Revolution, Leftist elites have triggered top-down revolutions with results in Russia, China, South-East Asia and South and Central America.
Grassby and others within the Labor Party and the academia have promoted culturally undermining policies of moral equivalence of which multiculturalism is but one manifestation."[Piers Ackerman]

...................................................................

 

 “Whitlam personified the vicious ideological schism in Australia, and so his send-off was suitably marked by squabbles and uncouth partisanship.

There were the furious complaints of true believers who had booked tickets online and flown across the country only to find the organisers had stuffed up and the hall was full. It was an apt footnote for a Prime Minister who inspired with lofty ideas but couldn’t follow through with the all-important detail.

The booing and hissing of the “It’s Time crowd” outside as John Howard and Tony Abbott arrived was pure bogan panto. Whitlam would not have behaved as gracelessly but his reckless dismantling of the moral capital of his forebears spawned such incivility.

Another stuff-up in the seating arrangements greeted the arrival of Julia Gillard. Borne down the aisle by a standing ovation, video footage captured the awkward moment when an usher gestured to her allocated seat and she realised it was right next to Kevin Rudd.

As Rudd stared stoically ahead, and Malcolm and Tamie Fraser stood waiting for her to squeeze past, Gillard bobbled back and forth, waving at a friend, not acknowledging the Frasers, leaving the usher in the aisle blinking at his seating plan. She stalled until a human buffer volunteered to sit next to her nemesis. For poor Rudd, who, alone among the four Labor PMs in the hall, barely elicited a clap from the crowd, the added indignity of a middle-aged version of Mean Girls must have stung.” [Miranda Devine]

 

PANTS ABLAZE

 I have included a post from one of Australia's foremost journalists to underwrite the sad but true thesis that the arts (in this case the cinematic arts) are at the forefront of an Orwellian quest to re-write history in favour of  the socialists (neo-Marxist/Fabians) who are attempting to infiltrate every position of power in Australian society. These parasites are applying the propaganda modus operandi of Joseph Goebbels to history; which is...circulate a lie enough times and people will begin to believe it is the truth.      
                                

"ACTRESS Cate Blanchett epitomised her role as the poster girl for the age of self-delusional entitlement when she eulogised Gough Whitlam on Wednesday.
“I am the beneficiary of free, tertiary education,” she trilled.
Whoops. I was paying taxes when Blanchett was born and I was a contributor to the cost of her education.
If I, and millions of other Australians were paying for her degree, it was not free. Similarly with the “good, free healthcare” she benefited from.
That healthcare cost a mozza – and it’s costing more now. Hyperbole and extravagance of speech and gesture are the stock in trade of actors, the gestures have to be large so those in the back row can see and hear and perhaps Blanchett had this in mind as she played to her audience at the Sydney Town Hall.
“I am a product of the Australia Council,” she gushed.
That may be, but the Australian Council for the Arts, the Australian Film Development Corporation and the National Film and Television Training School were established during Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton’s term, according to the National Archives.
The so-called “free” education and healthcare she benefited from enabled her to put the “little I earned after tax and rent … towards seeing shows, bands, and living inside my generation’s expression”.
Among the examples she offered of her generation’s expression was a 2004 film called Little Fish: ‘‘A story like Little Fish would not have been told without the massive changes to the Australian cultural conversation initiated, and shaped, by Gough Whitlam’s legacy.”
I was one of the unfortunate few viewers who, having contributed to the production of the film through my taxes, ­actually paid an admission fee to see what they were creating with my money. In truth I found it to be one of a number of bleak movies made with taxpayers’ money which depicted sleazy drug addicts doing what most drug addicts do – lie and cheat and destroy lives.
As Blanchett acknowledged to swoons and applause, she was “but three” when the Whitlam government came into office and has many reasons to “be grateful ‘til the day I die”, but in reality she has many more reasons to be grateful to the taxpayers who bankrolled the great man’s many excesses.
Of course Blanchett was merely supporting the myriad of myths that now enshrine Whitlam’s legacy. The legends have grown since he was sacked in 1975 and flowed ­freely since his death on October 21, almost all of them untrue."
[Piers Akerman –, Saturday, November, 08, 2014, (11:58pm)]           

TRUE GRIT

It is always ever only the courageous few who stand against the mainstream and who get things done. The entire world is impacted when one or more of these courageous individuals leads a significant nation.

The current illusion is that when 'we' (the collective) stand together as one, this and that happens; the real truth however is that the collective often ignore the bad things because:
a) it is politically correct to not make waves or,
b) it all depends on what 'side/tribe' you're on.

I am becoming very disturbed by the current vogue amongst 'conservatives' to follow the socialists opinions (the busy re-writing of history) of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Such 'perspectives' are tainted by Hollywood's ideological machine and could not be more erroneous:

"Here, from his Brandenburg Gate citizen-of-the-world speech in 2008, is Obama's characterization of what happened a quarter-century ago:
People of the world – look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.
No, sorry. History proved no such thing. That's comforting pap, but it's not what happened. In the Cold War, the world did not "stand as one". One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people - the Barack Obamas of the day - were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because "the world stood as one" but because a few people stood against the pap-peddlers. The truly courageous ones were the fellows like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and a thousand lesser names, who had to stand against evil men who would have murdered them if they'd been able to get away with it. That they were no longer confident they could get away with it was because a small number of western leaders had shovelled détente into the garbage can of history and decided to tell the truth. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and John Paul II been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire would have survived and the wall would still be standing."

Dear Cory!

A letter I have just emailed to Cory Bernadi:

Hi Cory.....I wonder about the option of voting for a 'fringe' party these days. I am considering involving myself with the Family First party, even voting for them, a position I have studiously avoided for numerous reasons. However, lately I have become so disgusted with the Labor-lite approach of the federal Lib's that I wonder why I bother with them (other than a few obvious stand-outs). Why can't they make at least some attempt at bringing the ABC wolf (in increasingly tatty sheeps clothing) to heel before the next election? I am offended by the use of our money to promote such; 'lets all hate Australia, neo-Marxist polemics'. 

Unfortunately I can understand how this has come about because the left-wing have so effectively corralled the media, entertainment/arts and education that they have effectively massaged into the silent majority a centre-left world-view as the acceptable norm. Even many Christians these days blindly adhere to philosophies that only 10 years ago would have seemed blasphemous, never mind that huge, non-reflective 'silent majority' to whom philosophy means nothing and who appear too easily distracted by 'bread & games'. The problem is that when it all comes tumbling down these will be among the first to whinge and blame others for the collapse ( the actual 'vanguard' are usually those of the  'intellectual/elite caste').

Lest We Forget has become a somewhat ironic emblem for the cultural disintegration we are witnessing all around us. We might remember the soldiers who gave their lives, but we are forgetting why they died and for what. Most people I speak to actually believe that our freedoms, our culture, our laws and the financial blessing of the West are the result of an evolutionary 'progression' in the history of mankind. This is, by the way, the limit of 'history' that most embrace.....and forgive my cynicism but I speak as a qualified teacher/lecturer.

It appears that we conservatives have lost the culture war. 

What can be done about this state of affairs other than pray for divine intervention? 

A slumped shoulder, conservative, teacher, artist.................mike