Bruce Charlton's Notions

It's an interesting question as to whether it is worth having the mass of average stuff (not to mention bad stuff) in the arts - or whether we only really-need the really-good stuff?

Of course, it may be argued that the really-good stuff could not be produced without the average (and bad) stuff - because people need to learn. And it could also be said that we need to have the bad stuff in order that we learn what makes the really-good really good. 

Well, maybe. But once the really-good stuff has been produced, and once people know it for what it is - what then? Does the average stuff need to hang-around - does it demand attention - is it worthwhile?

It seems to me that there is a strong argument that we don't need anything but the very-good, and that we only really-need the really-good stuff. 

Indeed; it is possible that having so much average-to-poor stuff hanging around is a Bad Thing; it wastes people time, and wasted time is an evil - leaving aside the considerable quantities of the actively bad. 

Consider opera. There are maybe a score of really-good operas - and the rest seem to serve no essential value. They hang around because some people want to listen to (and perform) operas more often than we could tolerate the really-good stuff - so we get a great mass of pretty worthless opera being performed, recorded and watched. 

Yet we could just watch (and perform) the really-good stuff, and simply not go to the opera (or listen to recordings) very often. We could just do other things in the meanwhile. 

In other words, the problem is a kind of addiction. Opera people get addicted to opera, so they end up overdosing on the mediocre stuff, because the alternative is to get habituated to the really-good stuff by taking it too often. 

They consume (and perform) mediocre stuff , because there isn't enough good stuff; and they cannot stop taking the stuff: they cannot stay off the stuff long enough to refresh their palates. 

Classical music in general is the same - only a few really-good composers; although there are quite a lot of very-good pieces individual pieces. Still, so insatiable is the desire for music, that most of what gets recorded, played, listened-to is a kind of filler (and often actively unpleasant, at that !) 

Plays are even more extremely thus. There are (in English) very few good plays; and the vast bulk of plays are just ephemeral ways of passing an evening - keyed into current fashion rather than "the human condition". And the demand for bulk mediocrity is again because there just aren't enough really good things to supply the addiction. 

And poetry! There are very few worthwhile poems (even from the best poets, and there aren't many of them); and the really-good poems are all-but lost in an ocean of average-to-bad poetry - such that most people never seem to find them; and spend their lives paddling in the shallows and swamps.  

Blaise Pascal commented that all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. 

Well, not all of the problems; but the arts confirm what is seen in other domains of life; that much of what is mediocre, time-wasting, and corrupting; is due to our craving for diversion. 

And most diversion comes via novelty - not just the arts, but gossip, "news", critique - is the prime attribute of that which diverts us in the mass and social media - and everyday life. 

Hence the preponderance of so much that is average and bad in the arts and elsewhere.   

Most people seem to regard ultimate questions, metaphysics or "the cosmic perspective" as irrelevant frills (for people with too little to do, too much time on their hands) at best - but more likely as delusional nonsense, and something that ought to be avoided. 

The subject certainly is avoided (except to warn against it) in all of mainstream public life. 

My understanding is that this avoidance is very obvious, is like a veering away from somewhere that people are actively trying not to confront. 

The elephant in the room is that what people want, do talk about - is pointless. That is an implicit fact; and as such the choice is between pointless "fun" and pointless misery - so it's all about fun. 

And when life feels shallow, then depth is supposed to come from altruism, from fighting against bad things like racism, global warming; or fighting for the rights of officially-oppressed groups and their representatives. 

But if life is indeed pointless?... Or is "meaning and purpose" supposed to arise from striving to make other peoples' pointless existences more fun and more comfortable? I guess this is supposed to be how it works - but, of course, it doesn't work. 

When things are pointless, well they are pointless - and manipulating our temporary emotions or feelings doesn't affect that horrible fact. 

The assumption seems to be that there are no answers, and cannot be any answers to The Big Questions. Philosophy has even defined itself in terms of failing to answer the perennial questions; but just wittering-on about them, anyway!

So we should not waste time on raising the big questions... It can only make us depressed.

What about religion, what about Christianity, what about churches? 

Well, religion is about churches, and churches are about sticking to list of rules (or not sticking to them, but pretending anyway) - which is just more of the same stuff we get plenty of elsewhere; and about "worship". 

Worship is supposedly what God (or the gods) wants us to do. And this is supposed to please (or appease) God, and make us take a better perspective on life... It doesn't, of course; but why should it - even in principle? Worship does not address the question of ultimates, of what it is all about?

From this angle, church is just part of the colossal system of evasion in which we live; just another way of whiling away our pointless, mayfly lives until we crumple and die (and after we die... more of the same worship stuff; but forever). 

If not, then what? What actually would, or at least could, be helpful?

My answer is: reminders of the real cosmic perspective. So that our mundane lives can be seen (albeit only temporarily, but maybe something will last) in their place in the scheme of things.

A reminder of where we are from, where we are going; and what positive relevance our current lives have for all this.

(I say positive relevance, because that is something grossly lacking. Avoiding stuff, self-sacrifice etc is meaningless - unless there are positive and permanent things we ought to be doing.  

It is useful, fundamentally valuable, for us to know our lives in terms of what we personally are positively we are supposed to achieve in them.

A cosmic perspective for the here-and-now and the mundane. 

That would seem like a valid activity for religion - whether in terms of teaching, reading, conversation - or of formal church rituals and the like. 

This is a marvellous half-hour 1971 "fly on the wall" TV documentary about the 1966 England football world cup winner Jackie Charlton, visiting his childhood home in Ashington Northumberland. 

I have previously written about the astonishing way that this mining village has - over several generations - produced international sportsmen - first in football, and now in cricket. 

All through my childhood I spent Easter and Summer holidays staying with grandparents in the next-door-to-Ashington villages of Newbiggin, and later Newsham; before, after and during the time this documentary was made. 

So, what is depicted is both familiar and nostalgic. Nostalgic, despite the decidedly un-glamorous nature of these smoky and coaly Northumbrian villages - a stark contrast to the bosky Devonshire and Somerset villages where I grew-up. 

We certainly enjoyed our holidays - much helped by the fact that Newbiggin - unlike Ashington - had a good beach, with rock pools, only a stones-throw from my grandparents house; and did not feel in any way deprived by comparison with our neighbours who were going abroad or to more genteel resorts.  

If you do decide to watch this programme, then you may find it difficult to understand what is being said. The dialect is mid-Northumbrian - sometimes called Pitmatic - and is still (even when the speaker is trying to speak posh) strange, or largely incomprehensible, to those who were not exposed to it as children; but in 1971 it was even more extreme. 

For me, much of the mass media output is ruined and made intolerable because populated entirely by dislikeable characters. 

Indeed "dislikeable" is putting it mildly! Most media dramatis personae (whether in TV, movies, songs, plays or novels) are people I regard as actively loathsome individuals!

I used to theorize this on the basis that it was part of the strategy of corruption; for instance that heroes were - over the past decades - replaced by anti-heroes, and virtuous exemplars were replaced by "victims". This is surely correct - so far as it goes...

But I now think the proximate reason may be simpler: 

That the authors of TV, movies, songs, plays and novels are writing about what they know - and they know evil from the inside and by-experience; and know almost nothing of heroism, virtue of Goodness. 

The authors and artists themselves typically lack such virtues to begin with; and to make matters worse have strategically affiliated themselves firmly to the devil's agenda.

I mean, they authors have embraced the anti-God, anti-creation, anti-Good agenda that is pursued by "the global establishment", top-down; and via all possible means...

From direct coercive power (laws and regulations), through subsidy and awards; to multi-pronged ideological propaganda that naturally (and very importantly) includes "the arts". 

Furthermore, the mass media world they have chosen to inhabit and in which they participate is pervasively corrupt: the world of movies and television, directors and actors, publishers and marketing, patrons and "arts administrators", reviews and critics, musicians and production...   

In conclusion; there are (by my judgement) no virtuous characters in the great bulk of mass media, simply because those who produce the mass media are themselves deficient in virtue and live-out their lives among some of the most corrupt and value-inverted human beings the world has ever known. 

And, what is worse, authors depend on the good opinion of these corrupted persons; insofar as the authors desire money, fame and high status. 

With authors being as-they-are and working in the environment they actually do; it is to-be-expected that the modern mass media is replete with actively-evil protagonists (liars, cheats, selfish hedonists, psychopaths); while the truly virtuous are depicted unconvincingly - or most-often not-at-all. 

And when there is any attempt to depict genuine virtue; because authors personally know nothing of such matters; these characters inevitably will be pathetic, miserable, simple-minded, deluded - but inevitably victims. 

It's not that authors are merely representative of the corruptions of this era - things are much worse than that! It is that authors are among the avant garde of evil: they personally are active advocates of, not merely going-along-with, the agenda of evil; and that authors inhabit a social-world of like-minded persons - the society of those who have chosen, professionally, to join the primary servants and implementers of the demonic strategy. 

(And in the midst of it all, the lying, resentment, and spite of the "MLB" antiracism debacle of later summer 2020, and its permanent sequelae in law and regulations and social practices). 

If you really try, can you remember how most people (and all institutions) behaved? What they said - and what they willingly, and with pleasurable anticipation, approved and anticipated? 

I do. It isn't a subject I think about much; but it is an era that permanently affected my evaluation of people and organizations - especially "Christian" churches. 

It was a time when true-colours were revealed - starkly exposed. The metaphorical gloves were off to reveal the iron fist inside the velvet. Proudly wearing the cloth or paper masks (and displaying selfies of it!), so many people un-masked their real natures.   

It's not so much that I dwell-upon their embrace of the agenda of evil and their reluctance to think, reason, learn - their cowardice and the short-termist hedonism that governed them...

But that - in terms of my system of mental evaluation, 2020-21 established the categories within-which I "place" entities - in terms of their motivations, their aspirations, ultimately the side they have taken in the spiritual war. 

These are the categories from-which I continue to make inferences. 

And this is why I have zero optimism - that is no expectation of things positively improving - emanating from any of the people, institutions, or systems of the public discourse, or the Establishment system. 

And this is why I am saddened and disappointed to observe so many people who are optimistic about the way things are going. So many who imagine that the West (the world?) has bottomed-out, and begun a rise to better times; or done a U-turn and begun to retreat from the strategy of self-annihilation...

But spiritually nothing has changed for the better: there has been no large scale repentance - therefore nothing substantive has been learned. 

Therefore (since change is inevitable) we should infer that those who chose the side of evil in 2020-22 have since come to endorse the assumptions of that side more deeply and thoroughly (whatever their self-identification may be). 

I regard this-worldly-optimists as not merely deluded, but as having been seduced from good (if they ever supported it), and made choice of the wrong side. 

When I was a late teenager and young adult; I envisaged being "a writer"; by which I meant some kind of creative writer - if not as a living, as a significant side-line to my job. 

Aside from a few comedy sketches for performance in revues, and scientific articles for journals (which were collaborative) I did not "publish anything much in the way of writing until I was about 28; when something "clicked"; and I suddenly became able to write fluently and quickly (and get published, and quite often paid for) essays and journalistic pieces. 

For the next couple of decades I published a great deal of this kind of stuff - and we have in the past couple of days been sorting through many boxes of such material that had been piled-up in various places for many years. 

I found it amazing, and somewhat appalling, to rediscover the sheer quantity and variety of these outpourings. 

Quite aside from a couple of hundred mainstream "papers" and a few books (which were done in relation to my academic job); it seems I also did a very large number of editorials, book reviews, comments, commentaries and columns, in all kinds of places. 

I must have been publishing something every week or two for many years. These were placed in all sorts of publications: prestigious scientific and medical journals, national newspapers and magazines; and also numerous obscure and small-circulation outputs such as literary and cultural "small magazines", professional and trade journals, and local "in house" magazines and newspapers for places I worked (and places I didn't work - e.g. I published scores of things in the Oxford Magazine).  

So I really did end-up as "a writer" - albeit I found my niche in "non fiction" rather than in the poems, plays, short-stories and novels which I attempted to write - and failed to write well - in the first decade of adulthood.  

From 2010; I all-but ceased to do this kind of paper-work, apart from four books done for Buckingham University Press and a handful of scientific papers - and instead began to blog on a daily (actually about 1.5 pieces per day) basis. This blogging amounts to a broadly similar number of words as I used to publish on-paper. 

And, up to now (who knows what comes next) this continues. 

What is strange is that (as I mentioned) it took a good decade of trying before I was able to write; at least I could not before age 28 write in the way I have found enjoyable and straightforward since. 

Partly this was a matter of psychological maturing, partly a matter of finding the form within-which my writing flows; and partly it was the "training" of writing scientific papers, journal articles - which activity made me unselfconscious and gradually take an objective attitude towards what I had written...

As a young would-be writer, I could not tell whether what I had written was any good; because I judged my own writing from the inside, and could not see how it struck other people. 

Once I learned how to do this self-monitoring: learned how to evaluate what I had written by the same standards I would apply to what other people had written - this seemed to provide the break-though I needed.  

It was writing scientific papers (as first author) and then having them critiqued and corrected by my doctoral supervisor, and other research collaborators; that did the trick for me. 

Which I still find surprising! - but that was what happened: that was what made "a writer" of me (i.e. a writer of the kind I am, and have been).  

Note: The other thing I was good at was teaching. But that was a thing I never needed to learn. I was good at it from the first attempt. This may be hereditary; since there are several good teachers in my family; including father, siblings, and a child. 

My best friend's family had one; and when I was visiting I got great satisfaction from its electronic trill (with volume control!), its shape, and the crisp way that the receiver fitted into position. 

By contrast our home phone, with its old-fashioned bell and rounded contours, was unexciting; and it was a bit lame that we needed to share our telephone line with a neighbour so that only one of the houses could talk at a time. 

Not that that was often a problem, because the phone was used very seldom and only for very short periods. Calls in that era in England were extremely expensive; and the culture was one in which letters and cards were exchanged rather than electronically transmitted words. 

For instance; when I was at medical school I made one call home per week, from a public phonebox (outdoors or in a corridor) for three minutes - but wrote at least one newsy latter (and received the same). 

It was not until I did my overseas study elective in the USA, and was house-sitting for a Harvard Professor (who gave permission for it), that I sampled that culture of endless (because very cheap) rambling phone conversations with people who actually lived quite nearby; carrying the phone around the house with me on a 30 metre extension, or even putting it beside my bed - just like I had seen in the movies. 

There was one significant problem with the Trimphone, that became evident when our family eventually got one; which was that the base of the phone was too light and the diameter too narrow, so that dialling required the other hand (the one holding the receiver) to hold the phone steady... 

Our old-style phone had been so broad-based and solid that one-handed dialling had been easy and normal.

Later Trimphones had buttons, avoiding this problem; although the buttons just triggered a kind of pseudo-dialling sound. It took another decade or so before The Post Office/ British Telecom changed their system to use tone rather than clicks to distinguish numbers.

For those of you who don't already know this interview from five years ago, I've just been re-watching it - and I found it pretty interesting!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWTMddYd_P0

In discussing whether or not Western Civilization/ Culture is worth defending, saving, rebuilding; there is often confusion regarding what it is, and to what extent distinctive. 

I tend to assume that when it comes to what might be termed "the arts" - literature, poetry, visual arts, architecture, dance, music etc - there is a kind of relativity between civilizations and cultures; in the sense that each produces what it wants; and it seems overly subjective to assert the superiority of one over others. 

Looked at across time, and across history; it certainly seems that some bits of some civilizations (e.g. the music, the architecture) are better than the same bits of others; yet the cross-cultural cosmopolitanism that is able to make such comparisons is itself not really a creative or generative culture; but a second order kind of thing - an aspect of cultural criticism rather than creativity. 

At any rate; I find it unconvincing to assert any distinctive superiority of Western Civilization when it comes to the arts and humanities. There is superiority of my civilization for me, and for people like me; but I would not expect people of a different kind from different civilizations to see things the same way. 

But Western Civilization since the 17th century does have a qualitative superiority over all others (past and until the recent present) which is science: more exactly, in terms of science as a "social system".

There have been in many times and places, and still are, individual real scientists; or even duos, or small and short-lasting groups of scientists; but it was only in Western Civilization that science became a structured and multi-generational activity. 

It was only in Western Christendom that the necessary ethic of honesty; the truth-seeking and truth-speaking of and between scientists, became large scale and sustained. 

Therefore science in the West became qualitatively more powerful and wide ranging than at any other time or place. 

I think this can now be seen clearly because science is dead - or at least real science is dead. A bureaucratic professional research activity continues, now fully integrated with global totalitarianism; but this is not what used to be science, it is not real science. 

Science has died for lack of the reason it began: the ethic of inter-scientist honesty that created and sustained science has gone. So-called modern "science" is dishonest, untruthful, selectively exaggerated, deliberately misleading - from top to bottom and in external relations: therefore it is not science. It Does Not Work. 

Science as a social activity has dwindled to near-nothingness, and we have now reverted to the science of individual persons.  

Of course; science was always double-edged in its goodness. It was exceptionally honest; but only about its chosen subject.

Science is based on models of reality, not reality; and like all models this means it is distorted at best and deluded at worst -  yet unable (from "within" science) to recognize its own radical limitations and potential evils. 

(i.e. To stay science, science absolutely needs scientists to have an external viewpoint from which to evaluate "science", and keep it honest.) 

When the West, when scientists, ceased to be Christian and Christianity was forgotten; there was no ultimate reason for scientists to be honest - not even about science; so over several decades science became, briefly, net-evil - before it killed itself from corruption and fakery. 

My understanding is therefore that it was science that - in world historical terms - was the distinctive good of Western civilization; but that is dead and gone. While Westerners like myself love much of my civilization; after the death of real science The West no longer has anything distinctive and good to offer The World. So its demise will not be mourned by the world. 

Note: Although Western Civ an old topic here; this particular post was triggered by Bonald's recent reflections at the Orthosphere. 

I don't know how unusual it is; but I find that I combine a firm belief in the reality of many supernatural/ paranormal/ occult phenomena; with an almost 100% reflex dis-belief in the objective reality of nearly-all specific examples of these phenomena, by nearly everybody.  

So, although in principle I am convinced of the reality of - in no particular order - telepathy, ghosts, miracles, synchronicity, personal destiny, magic, purposive personal evil (demons), angels, fairies... Nonetheless, I am very sceptical of the objective truth of almost every single report of such things I have encountered. 

Even among people whom I respect and trust; I find I often do not believe the specific truth of what they say or write... 

And indeed; to my mind, across such people, they have said and written a vast range of incompatible and often incoherent things. If I tried to base my life upon believing the specific information (facts and understandings) of even those relatively few sincere persons who I respect and trust - I would nonetheless be building my faith on a seething mass of sand, rubble, and water - not on solid rock!   

Something seems to happen in the process of communicating such phenomena; in the transfer of knowledge between the personal realm and public discourse, such phenomena become (to me) un-convincing: not something I feel that has the kind of validity upon which I could depend.

Thus, in almost every instance of reading or hearing about such things, I feel a rising sense of mistrust and rejection. 

This is confirmed by the apparent fact that such communications seem to take place in the context of sub-cultures of cultivated credulity: I mean groups of people who (it seems to me) have a kind of pact of mutual-belief. I have studied several of these in some depth; and this is how such groups seem to work - I mean on the basis of a tacit agreement to believe (almost...) any and all such such claims.  

This is why I try to refrain from ever communicating my own such experiences; because I know that they will be unconvincing to others, that there are many alternative mundane explanations, they can be explained-away or else my own honesty and competence will be rejected - and therefore in making such communications I feel an almost irresistible temptation to persuade, exaggerate, distort - and I assume others do also.

This is an interesting and significant metaphysical situation - I mean, one in which a whole world of vitally-important phenomena cannot (apparently) accurately and honestly be discussed in objective public discourse. 

Yet that does seem to be the actual situation! 

We can publicly discuss and analyse these matters in-general and in-principle; but, seemingly, not specifically. 

Note added: As I've said a few times before; I think the reason for this mismatch between personal and public knowledge is an important aspect of our times and place, and the nature of human consciousness as it has become. It is one aspect of the change from a pooled and mutually-aware group consciousness, to the greater freedom and agency - but also "alienation", cut-off-ness, isolation - of spontaneous human awareness and thinking. The point is not to resist or attempt to reverse this change; but to accept and take responsibility for the fact and necessity of our free agency. Explicitly to take personal responsibility for choosing our own fundamental assumptions about the true nature of reality - rather than (as in earlier eras) aspiring passively to obey "authoritative" external sources of validation.   

There are two places in the Fourth Gospel (in the Authorized Version) where Jesus is quoted as saying "sin no more": 

After healing the man by the pool at Bethesda:
5: [10] The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, It is the sabbath day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed. [11] He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said unto me, Take up thy bed, and walk. [12] Then asked they him, What man is that which said unto thee, Take up thy bed, and walk? [13] And he that was healed wist not who it was: for Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place. [14] Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. [15] The man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus, which had made him whole.

Following the episode of the woman taken in adultery:
8: [9] And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. [10] When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? [11] She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. [12] Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

The problem is that - as a straightforward order given to any human being - "sin no more" is impossible, hence nonsense; because the very essence of Jesus's teaching is that all Men are sinners and no Men can cease from sinning. Which is a major reason why the incarnation and work of Jesus is necessary. 

So the alternative is to finesse the statements into something specific, that might be true. 

But there is no context that the man beside the pool in Chapter 5 has sinned as a cause of his infirmity, so that "sin no more" seems irrelevant, as well as impossible. Furthermore, when Jesus is quoted as uttering the following "lest a worse thing come unto thee"... well, to my eye this threat identifies the sentence as a later and false interpolation. And, indeed, the entirety of verse 14 can be deleted without loss of continuity. 

What of the usage in Chapter 8? Well, here again the phrase "go, and sin no more" can comfortably be deleted; and this deletion also avoids the contradiction between "neither do I condemn thee" and "sin no more".    

On this internal evidence; I regard the phrase" "sin no more" as alien to the Fourth Gospel, alien to Jesus's teaching; and thus presumably a later addition by some other hand. 

If the Fourth Gospel is regarded as the primary and most authoritative source concerning Jesus Christ; then it seems that Jesus hardly ever (maybe never) expressed "compassion" as we moderns would understand it. 

Jesus did a lot of alleviating suffering, including in the miracles and illustrated in parables; but the purpose seems always to have been teaching, not compassion. 

Jesus did very little in the way of expressing sympathy for individuals. On the contrary, his typical tone is one of scathing criticism, even a kind of sarcasm. Jesus was very seldom "nice", mostly "nasty! 

Of course Jesus did express and act-upon Love a great deal, more than anything; but my point is that compassion is not love - but an optional sub-set of loving behaviours, and one that Jesus neither asked-for nor modelled for us. 

Going through the IV Gospel up to the events of the Passion, it can be seen that compassion was not the focus of the major episodes:

The miracle at the wedding of Cana; Jesus is pretty sharp and scathing in his words.

The Nicodemus episode; again Jesus is almost mocking towards Nicodemus, in his efforts to snap Nicodemus out of his habitual thinking.

The Samaritan woman at the well; Jesus adopts a stern tone towards the woman.

The Nobleman who asks Jesus to heal his dying son; Jesus is very matter of fact, no compassion expressed.   

The healing by the pool at Bethesda; again no compassion - mostly focused on teaching about the Sabbath. 

Feeding the five thousand; Jesus goes to great lengths to present this as Not about feeding the hungry, but instead an illustration of the transience of earthly bread compared with Heavenly "bread". 

The woman taken in adultery; Jesus is very crisp towards her - despite that she is facing a horrible death, and instead mostly addresses the accusing bystanders on the subject of sin. 

Healing the man born blind; again, no compassion expressed, instead Jesus says the whole thing (including, it seems, the man's lifelong blindness) was so that "the works of God should be made manifest in him" - teaching, not sympathy.

And so on.

Jesus's message is about what we want most. 

Is it resurrected eternal life in Heaven - or... something else? 

Those who most want compassion, and regard "compassion for suffering" as the highest ethical value, should look elsewhere - Buddhism perhaps? But not to Jesus Christ.  

Or maybe they should consider where a primary ethic of compassion will ultimately lead them...

The UK election has been "won" by the Ahrimanic totalitarians who will try to push ahead more rapidly with Agenda 2030/ Davos/ WEF plans for a perma-lockdown world.

(Fake-justified by climate, equity, environment, inclusion etc etc.)

But against this, and sabotaging it, is the Sorathic ascendancy at the highest levels of demon-affiliated leadership; subverting the mono-bureaucracy-media with spiteful chaos.

And They will be pushing for full UK participation, indeed leadership, in an expanded WWIII - plus escalation of within-UK civil aggression.

Inter- and intra- national violence, with disease and starvation in its wake...

(The covert aim being the annihilation of the UK and its population. A spiritual war, because They believe the masses have become so corrupt as to choose damnation.)

I predict that short-termist, selfish chaos will beat strategic top-down control.

Because this is an entropic world... Dis-order is just So Much Easier!

**

NOTE ADDED: William Wildblood's take on the UK election is well worth a look. 

From Ludwig Wittgenstein a memoir, by Norman Malcolm

Wittgenstein did once say that he thought that he could understand the conception of God, insofar as it is involved in one's awareness of one's sin and guilt. He added that he could Not understand the concept of a creator... The notion of a being Making The World had no intelligibility to him at all.

**

How utterly extraordinary that a Great Philosopher found the notion of a creator God not untrue but incomprehensible, when every child and almost every human being in the history of the world found it natural, spontaneous, obvious that the world was created.

How extraordinary that anyone could suppose that strong emotions of sin and guilt were the best reason to believe in a God - but That God was Not a creator.

Yet such extraordinary stuff is now normal, mainstream, official, the basis of our society.

It's as if our world has been made by people who have something seriously wrong with them, something missing - and have remade life in their own, distorted and deficient, image...

**

Note: I should make clear that for significant periods I myself believed and expounded exactly this extraordinary stuff - so I know its whys and wherefores from the inside.

Further note: Previous posts on Wittgenstein.

A Big Problem in philosophy, is picking (or rather assuming) the wrong starting point for enquiry, for analysis and reasoning; and there has been and is massive propaganda to encourage this fatal error...

In particular to ignore or reflexly reject a child's innate and spontaneous assumptions, and to start from... Somewhere else... Anywhere else!

It turns out that these alternative starting assumptions are always abstract, difficult, unintuitive, artificial.

This applies to all traditional philosophy, especially since Descartes, and to Christianity.

To be A Christian, according to nearly all churches, one must First accept as foundational dogmas several counter-intuitive assumptions (regarding the nature of creation, God, Jesus...) within-which the entirely of Christianity is Compelled to exist.

Alternatively we Could assume what is natural, spontaneous, innate...

Can God read minds, and if so - to what extent?

It seems clear that God can read minds or else prayer, for instance, would be meaningless... It seems absurd to assert that God would require thoughts to be spoken aloud, or written down. 

And if this was so, there would be the usual problem of uncertain interpretation of such indirect and symbolic media God might misunderstand!

Yet, if free will or agency is real (which, for Christians it must be), then there must be something inaccessible to God.

Yet again, it makes little sense to suppose that we could conceal our plans from God, and successfully lie to God. 

Did Satan do this, at first - did he conceal his real nature and plans from God?

My conclusion is that God knows our conscious thinking, but neither God nor our consciousness has direct knowledge of our ultimate selves. 

Thus God cannot read-off our ultimate nature, cannot know by observation and fully and for-sure - how we really are - and neither can we do so.

In other words, God can know our thinking, but our thinking is not our-self. 

Both God and our thinking only know ourselves by inference, by observing what our-self does, including what thoughts emerge from our-self.

God could only know Satan by observation and inference.. Albeit that  observation included Satan's thinking.

But this model can't be complete (no model can be complete!), especially because it has only one-way traffic from the self to consciousness, which would mean the self could not learn. 

Since the self can learn, the self can't be divided from consciousness... 

Indeed, this is another of those "polar logic" situations where self and thinking may be distinguished but not divided, since they are not separate in origin or nature... 

Both thinking and self are attributes of All Beings, but the self stands for that individual unknowability which enables agency...

That "bit" of us which God cannot read.

Thus it was that Satan deceived God as to his nature and plans. It was possible because Satan was also deceiving himself. 

Satan did not even Know himself, except by observation and inference.

And neither do we.

 I find very little awareness of the profundity of shift in our civilization. A civilization renews itself across generations, but ours seeks its own annihilation.

This is just a fact, and quite explicit in detail. In every field or domain, subversion and inversion are most valued. 

There was, in all civilizations, a handing on and preservation of the meaning and importance of symbols whether in poetry, or science, or anything. Symbols carried the civilization through time, and the symbols linked back though the middle ages to Roman, to Greek civilization and beyond - for good and for ill, but that was the way it worked.

At some point the symbols began losing their objective nature. We were no longer sustained by the objectivity of the symbol. The symbol did not impose itself upon us...

What then happened, which was an evil thing - motivated against the divine - was that symbol was replaced by bureaucracy. Instead of continuity by objective symbol, continuity became organizational - from the overlapping personnel and procedures of system.

Now, "objectivity" comes from bureaucracy, and the actual bureaucracy works to subvert/invert the symbolism linking us to the past - and thereby remove a rival to its power and domination.

This is why poetry, science, music, farming, law, crafts, patriotism, religion... have all declined or collapsed: they are all symbols actively being killed by bureaucracy.

We no longer inhabit a civilization but a bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy is primary; because it redefines and deletes symbols at will, in order to weaken and destroy them.

In order to destroy creation, and thereby deny and replace creation.

 I'm currently rereading George Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein, and (first read) a short biography of Graves by Bruce King. Graves was a very early craze of mine, beginning age 14; and I began on Wittgenstein about a decade later. 

This time I'm struck by similarities between them. Both ruling class, both in the avant garde (contemporary members of the same circles): and/also sexually Platonic by nature. Both capable of "superb" statement - charisma and/or self-righteous and aggressive arrogance. 

Both made insightful diagnoses of the civilizational problems, both on the wrong side when it came to answers - their ultimate affiliations were to their "class", hence (in the twentieth century West) on the side opposing God and divine creation.

I have always, both before and after being a Christian, found it easy to know that I was doing the wrong thing (and, to a lesser extent knowing what I shouldn't do) - but very bad at discerning my proper future path.

Although I have known plenty of people who mapped out their lives and stuck to, and sometimes accomplished, their plans - I always thought they were making a serious mistake.

Nowadays I regard my inability - my personal deficit - as (through no virtue of mine!) in accordance with the real nature of the human condition.

We are supposed to be committed to those we love (at least, within the inevitable constraints of mortal life), but beyond that we sin by living for our future planning - and this is indeed one of the cankers poisoning the heart of human civilization.

Something maybe inevitable but a necessity we ought to repent rather than praise.