Hello Dear Readers.
It’s been a while. About six months, to be precise, since I last published here, and in truth I needed the extended break to assess the landscape and regather my thoughts. But gather them I now have, and from where I’m standing, the landscape is looking both sunlit and upland-y.
I know, I know. I’m publishing this on election day, and as we head to the ballot box it feels very much like we’re collectively staring down the barrel of a gun, no matter what the outcome. Whether it’s a Labour super-majority or a (hope against hope) hung parliament, Starmer will almost certainly be picking up the keys to his new home tomorrow morning, and then the fun really starts. We’ll be taxed to the hilt and forced to share gender neutral bathrooms before we have time to say “Cor blimey, his father was a toolmaker.” Shortly thereafter, World War Three will kick off, I expect, but not before the Democrats have burned America to the ground.
And yet.
There’s an interesting little section right at the beginning of Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens, (p. 30-31) in which he talks about the unifying power of fiction. “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths”, he says. And he’s right. It’s what allowed us, as a species, to break away from living in small communities (packs, herds, tribes), and instead to build towns, then cities, then nations, then empires.
He gives three examples: Christians who work together to stage a crusade or build a cathedral, because they share a belief in the myth of Christianity; two Serbs who risk their lives to save one another as they both believe in the myth of the Serbian nation, and two lawyers who work together on a case because they believe in the myths of the legal system, and of money.
“Yet none of these things exist outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”
That statement is key to understanding the globalist project and the predicament we find ourselves in.
It is particularly so, when alloyed to the postmodernists’ observation that what we consider ‘truth’ is subjective, and that, therefore, we create our reality through our thoughts and beliefs. That observation, too, is largely accurate and justifiable. We all have a lived experience that is informed by our cultural and personal history, and that lived experience leads us not only to see, but also to shape our worlds around us in a particular way.
That’s not just some vague, motivational-poster statement like “think yourself rich” or “you can be whatever you want to be”. Fundamentally, at a quantum physical level, it is accurate. The Schrödinger's cat thought experiment on quantum superposition demonstrates how material reality is only resolved into matter when observed, meaning, in essence, that we live in a cloud of potential that only becomes ‘real’ when we look at it. If all that sounds super weird and confusing, I recommend the recent Apple series Dark Matter, in which a scientist invents a Schrödinger's Box, putting himself into superposition, thus giving himself access to all possible outcomes of every possible action at once (ie, the metaverse). He’s then able to step out of the box and into whichever reality he chooses simply by thinking (or feeling) it. The series demonstrates nicely that each version of reality is shaped by us — by the decisions we make, which turn us into the people we become.
“Yet none of these things exist outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”
— Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapiens’
Ok, so, so far we have:
Globalists have observed that the stories we tell, shape our culture, and that we can change our culture by collectively choosing to buy into a different story.
AndPostmodernists (aka ‘the woke’) have observed that we shape our own realities through our lived experience, and that we can change our reality by changing our beliefs.
So we see that both the globalists — that is, the people who run our establishment organisations, be they government, quasi-government, media, education and so on — and the woke are proceeding from the position that there is no such thing as “the truth.” This position allows (and even encourages) them to change the common narrative to one that suits them better. They do this in a number of ways: through government policy, through media stories, through education, and of course through entertainment, which is all (and only) about telling the stories that shape us.
It’s worth noting that they do this in one other way, too: through the use of corporations. It’s no coincidence that Harari demonstrates the concept of shared myths using the example of Peugeot. A corporation is a legal fiction, one that has a culture and requires buy-in (i.e., belief) from employees and consumers alike to sustain. It must have these things in order to survive, because that is the only way to get large numbers of people (sometimes as many as tens of thousands) who aren’t in personal contact with each other to work collectively toward a common goal, which, again, is the hallmark of a corporation. Mom and Pop businesses don’t work this way. The people working within them are in personal contact with each other and therefore coordinate their actions in the same way that tribal peoples do: through one-on-one (or two or three) interaction.
Anyway, once you understand that, it becomes clear why they spend so much time and energy lying to us.
It’s become a feature of this election to note that the Tories have promised to lower immigration consistently since they first took Downing St in 2010, and yet immigration has risen at frankly mind-blowing rates. Over two million new immigrants arrived in the UK in just the last two years alone. Whatever your thoughts on that, it can’t be denied that the Tories have clearly not kept their promise. And yet, here they are again, promising that only they can turn the boats around. Why? Do they think we’re stupid?
Well, yes, but also, because that’s how establishment politics works nowadays. In fact, it’s how all of the establishment works nowadays. It has to, because it has at its root this fundamental belief that the truth is whatever the people in charge want it to be. Thus we see that Labour are determined to reach Net Zero within the next six years (!!!); that the BBC don’t have to feature dissenting voices on climate change or vaccines because the science is settled; that at every level of education, from primary school upwards, pupils are taught that the gender binary doesn’t exist. These are the new “fictions” our elites have chosen to believe, and they are convinced that if they repeat them often enough, if they can gain enough buy-in by the masses, that they can shape reality in a way that makes these things… well, I hate to use the word ‘true’, because they don’t really believe that there is any such thing as truth.
Let’s look again at that quote by Harari: “none of these things exist outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”
Harari and his ilk mistakenly believe that the word “fiction” means “a lie”. Therefore, they think any lie can be inserted, like a game card into an old X-Box, and the new reality will simply play out as required. They believe that by telling lies, those lies can become the new principles around which our societies are constructed, and they believe they can choose their lie at will, to suit themselves.
But “fiction” and “myth” aren’t synonymous with “lie”. Rather, they can better be thought of as “meta-true”, that is, the overarching truth, with all the exactitudes of individual experience stripped out.
“If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.”
— Isabella Blagden, ‘The Crown of a Life’
Good fiction, a story crafted well, takes a whole lot of real life and boils it down to its essential components, then repackages it in a way that makes it accessible to as many people as possible. That’s why, when you watch or read a really good piece of fiction, you get caught up in the story. The characters’ hopes, fears, and emotions become your hopes, fear, and emotions. You get to live this novel scenario through the eyes of the inhabitants of the story.
In fact, that’s what fiction is for. It’s not ‘just’ entertainment; it allows us to live out multiple lives from multiple perspectives, thus broadening our experience of life. And that, in turn, helps us to make more sense of our own lives, to make them more meaningful and more successful. In watching Elizabeth Bennett navigate relationships, we learn something of how to navigate relationships. In watching Neo defeat Agent Smith, we learn how to exit the Matrix and defeat our own Agent Smiths. In reading about Frodo’s trials, we learn how to defeat Sauron.
Of course, not every story is a hero story. In watching Joker, we learn that giving into nihilism and the victim mentality will pitch us into hell. It’s a difficult film to watch as a result, but an excellent piece of fiction nonetheless.
Stories that don’t accord with the meta-truth aren’t useful. That’s fundamentally why the whole of Disney’s woke output recently has been crap. It’s not meta-true, and so has no value to us, as humans who live in reality.
So Harari and Co cannot, in fact, insert any old game card into the X-Box. It has to be one that’s X-Box compatible, that is, one that accords with the underlying architecture of reality, in order to be played successfully. They don’t have a card like that in their back pocket, and that gives the rest of us an opportunity, because if We The People can slip an X-Box compatible card into the console before they take it away from us, we get to direct the future of our civilisation in a way that benefits us, not them.
There is a word for the globalist fictions that don’t accord with meta-reality. That word is: bullshit. As in bullshit jobs, bullshit propaganda, bullshit election promises.
Anyone can spot bullshit because you don’t have to be intelligent to do so, you merely need to be in touch with your life force, which is something that anyone can do. Children are particularly good at it. On the contrary, intelligence, in fact, appears to get in the way, which might explain why so many apparently intelligent people can’t spot globalist lies (Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Sam Harris, even, dare I say, Douglas Murray lately, I’m looking at you).
That’s why the legacy parties are doing so incredibly badly in the court of public opinion right now. Even if Labour get a majority tonight (and all indications are that they will), they won’t have won the election so much as not lost it as badly as everyone else. No one but a handful of zealots are actively voting in favour of a Labour government; mostly people are voting against bullshit, and they will continue to do so until the legacy parties and their establishment cronies are run out of town. The game, essentially, is up.
As we’ve grown closer to the election, conservative / right wing voices have been growing ever louder in calling for a renewal of conservatism in Britain. Obviously the Tory party has completely abandoned any trace of conservative thought, buying wholesale into the globalist project instead. Reform, conversely, are doing well because they have seized the ground ceded by the Tories. Take this frankly ground-breaking speech from Reform funder Zia Yusuf at the party’s recent rally in Birmingham, which drew a crowd of 5,000 people.
The last time I heard a speech like that, it was being given by Donald Trump shortly before he won the 2016 Presidential election. Indeed, this election cycle has felt very much like 2016 (both Brexit and the Trump win), in that The People are stirring quite loudly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Reform pull something quite special out of the bag this evening.
Yet Reform have a problem: Nigel Farage, and many who surround him, don’t consider themselves conservatives, but classical liberals. To an extent this is a semantic and deeply boring political junky sort of problem; I mean, who out there in ‘ordinary’ Britain, in which ‘ordinary men and women, up and down the country’ live, really cares much about whether Farage takes his politics from Mill or Burke? No-one, really. But it does mean that the new story around which the right of politics will coalesce in the coming days, months, and years, is still up for grabs.
And that’s where our opportunity lies.
Whatever happens today, starting tomorrow, those of us who reject the establishment and their bullshit fictions must start writing the new myths that will shape our civilisation for potentially centuries to come. Those myths must be grounded in the essential underlying architecture of reality in order to work, which means we must reach back into our past to extract from it what is fundamentally true, while leaving behind what was meant for that era and not our own.
How do we do that? Well, that’s the subject of another blog, for another day. But for now, I’m off to vote.
Happy Independence Day.
Brilliant writing!
It happens to accord with where I find my own thinking right now, but this strips none of the power from your words.
Have a GOLD star.