The intellectual basis that informs this substack is the notion that what we see and hear every day on television and podcasts is driven by conflicts in worldview rather than the surface, observable events that play out in today’s world. The fight about controlling national borders, for example, is not about this or that nationality of people who are crossing open borders. It is about differing views about the nature of citizenship and nationalism and if we want to resolve border issues, we must address them at the level of citizenship and nationalism rather than border wall design.
The fight over whether men can become women by declaring their location on a mythical gender spectrum is not about biology but about generating chaos to reinvent the role of the family in modern society. This point was poignantly made by Rob Henderson who was raised in foster homes and went on to the Ivy League. He writes about “life in a ditch” and shows that the probability of subsequent failure in life is based more on childhood chaos than family wealth. Poor people often raise productive and well balanced children. Chaotic people almost never do.
Henderson concludes that chaos trumps poverty in destroying lives. This is mirrored in the work of Edward Banfield and summarized in his book “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society”. Banfield concludes that toxic worldviews around family formation contribute more to the backwardness of society than poverty. Similarly, my volunteering experience in a local prison demonstrated the influence of lifestyle chaos, particularly in children, as a predicter of subsequent incarceration.
My experience is, of course, anecdotal and I can’t calculate r2 and p values based on sample analysis but every prisoner I knew approached his release date with increasing anxiety. The reason for this was not hard to fathom as most of the inmates spoke quite openly about the chaos of their lives beginning in childhood. The chaos drove uncertainty which resulted in anxiety. To control the anxiety they turned to drugs. With drugs comes incarceration. For two years less a day, the anxiety was controlled by the regimen of life in a prison. In the ironic words of one inmate,
“I am never so free as when I am in prison.”
When that regimen was about to be lost, the anxiety increased because they knew that they would return to the earlier chaos of unstructured families and lifestyle choices. This would lead to the use of drugs to immunize the chaos and incarceration would follow.
Prisons are facilities for several hundred operated by a few dozens and so are reasonably efficient institutions for controlling unwanted populations. Fentanyl is a wonderful drug for introducing chaos, destroying families and increasing incarceration.
“You will have nothing and be happy.”
That is about as succinct a description of prison as can be found. Do I think some elites would be happy to incarcerate increasing numbers of our population by making life chaotic by destroying family stability? Of course. I just don’t know how many they are. If you think this is an overstatement please study the circular panopticon prison envisaged by Jeremy Bentham. In the late 18th century England, he introduced the philosophy of utilitarianism and the design of his prison. There is nothing new under the sun.
In the past month the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austen retired to a hospital for remedial/repair surgery for his prostate cancer. This, of course, is not against the law. But that he did so without bothering to tell anyone that he would be unserviceable for a couple of weeks even as wars around the world directly involving the US military were getting worse is unimaginably irresponsible.
During the Christmas season, Canada’s Prime Minister, he whose name shall not be mentioned, enjoyed a hyper expensive vacation gift from a donor to the troubled Trudeau Foundation. I am not so churlish as to begrudge my Prime Minister a bit of fun in the sun with his kids but he lied about the nature of the gift.
What was the point of these two lies? And they are emblematic of previous decades of lying. To quote Father Raymond de Souza,
Lies when thought necessary are still lies. But lies when unnecessary are lethal to public confidence, as if lies are told simply out of habit, or that not telling the truth is the default setting. Those who show themselves dishonest in small things will be considered untrustworthy in large things, and that matters a great deal.
Why did Lloyd Austin and Justin Trudeau seek to undercut public confidence in their respective governments? According to Solzhenitsyn, we are all, subject to the line of evil that passes through every human heart. But liar that I am, I try not to make them so obvious as Messers Austin and Trudeau.
Substack writer and friend Keith Lowery has written about the psychological overloading we experience when we lose trust in our institutions and calls this a loss of cognitive liberty (a borrowed phrase as he points out).
I urge you to read his post (and sign up for more as Keith is a deep thinker with funny anecdotes from the cubicle) but here is his summary,
This is what happens when institutions are corrupted. The loss of trust in institutions comes at a cost to cognitive liberty. That’s because trustworthy institutions serve to magnify our collective cognitive capacity by letting us outsource and parallelize a lot of the mental and investigative work we would otherwise have to do for ourselves. If the institutional media had not largely squandered its credibility over the last 20ish years, I could simply compare my internet writer’s claims against factual information provided by a credible institution. But lacking such trustworthy media and government institutions, I am left with the investigative and cognitive burden myself.
Why the lying? Why the chaos? Perhaps, as a friend pointed out to me, Orwell has the answer. In his book 1984, Winston reported to O’Brien that four fingers were being held up. O’Brien insisted he was holding up five fingers and tortured Winston with rats until he agreed. That is psychological chaos based on the symbology of rats - a place I don’t particularly want to go.
And it becomes sociological chaos when the Winstons of the world succumb and agree to the lie. That was Solzhenitsyn’s point in the Gulag Archipelago. It was Rod Dreher’s point in “Live not by Lies”. Give in to the lie and suffer its effects. Destroyed families, increasing chaos and someone’s version of an updated panopticon… own nothing and be happy.
Many years ago, I read Ezekial 33 and became convinced that my longevity was tied to my willingness to point out to all who would listen that they were headed the wrong way. Such earnest watchfulness, of course, missed the point and made me no friends. I now think that the allegory of the Watchman applies to the condition of lying that crowds out the truth in our public square. In the context of redeeming the truth, what is the Watchman required to do?
This message came to me from the Lord: “Son of Man, speak to your nation’s children and tell them: ‘If I bring war to a land, and the people of that land appoint one of their conscripted men to serve as a sentinel, and if he notices that violence is approaching and sounds an alarm to warn the people, then if anyone who hears the sound of the alarm does not heed the warning, when the sword arrives and destroys him, his shed blood will remain his own responsibility. After all, he heard the alarm sounding, but did not heed the warning, so his shed blood will remain his own responsibility. If he had heeded the warning, he would have saved himself. If that sentinel notices that violence is approaching, but does not sound an alarm, then because the nation does not take warning and the sword arrives and destroys their lives because of their guilt, I’ll seek retribution for their shed blood from the one who was acting as sentinel.’”
I think the Watchman must not lie and he must insist that those near and dear to him also not lie. And if the opportunity arises, he has an obligation to warn people more distant such as politicians and news people to put a stop to their lies.
The bad news is that a few of those in our society lie to sow the seeds of chaos to destroy families and to gain control over us in their civilizational panopticon. The good news is that they have exposed themselves and their agenda and we the many, the unwashed can each be watchmen and, by telling the truth, put an end to it all. At the least we won’t be held accountable to those who ignore our warnings. At best we may redeem our families and culture by reducing the chaos.
Please know that I have no intention of ever charging for my thoughts and any requests for a pledge come not from me but from Substack. I do get a thrill, however, when you like, comment, and pass this along to your friends. Thanks for doing so!
Meanwhile a religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian who was/is also a pathological liar, and a life time grifter who most probably has never done an other serving action or gesture in his entire life was once upon a time the US President, and may be re-elected too. Many of his most enthusiastic supporters are right-thinking Christians who even pretend that he was/is ""God's" chosen person to re-Christianize America.
As always, a very elucidating piece on the challenges facing many of us today