“the right to be unhappy”
January 24, 2021 Leave a comment
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,” he said.”
This conversation between John the “savage” and Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, takes place in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian science fiction novel Brave New World.
Mond had explained to John the World State’s system of castes, control and consumerism established to create order, stability and happiness. Under the World State the world’s population, economy, technology and culture are made to serve the mission statement: “Community, Identity, Stability”.
John, reared on the Savage reservation and raised on Shakespeare, rejects Mond’s world as described here:
Everyone in Mond’s society belongs: nobody experiences the pain, loneliness, and rejection that has been part of John’s character formation. Nobody in the World State ever suffers any material want, such as hunger or overcrowding. Everyone lives in a clean, new, sterile, sanitary, and bright world with lots of things to buy. Everybody is conditioned or drugged to be happy…
To John, those elements of life Mond has jettisoned are exactly what make us human. Life for John is not worth living without the possibility of deep relationships and intellectual exploration and discovery.
What brought this novel to mind is the Left’s concerted effort to produce a similar globalist World State via the Great Reset. The “public health crisis” and the (illegitimate) 2020 election are the Left’s “gain of function” mutation of our rights and laws to bring about a World State.
Leftist professors, politicians, media provoking agents, Progressives, and even the Pope would have us believe that differences of class, race, income or XYZ can be resolved and that equality and freedom can be won by “A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.”
The Pope after the 2016 election:
“It it has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom”. [emphasis added]
So, are we to believe that communists think like Christians (based on the communist seizure of Acts 4:32)?
Are we to choose to live under a flag of “Community, Identity, Stability”, where the people, the poor … achieve equality and freedom, and then (theoretically) be free of worry, material want, hate, isolation, disease, and would then be happy!?
I have tried to understand the heuristic behind those choosing freedom and those choosing to be free of freedom and desirous of living in a communist state. The Brave New World suggests to me that there are those who choose fail-prone freedom over happiness and those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom. These two views are at odds. I see the difference going to the very nature of what it means to be human.
As we heard in John’s response above and from your own experience, you know that freedom involves choice. And, being able to choose goes to the very essence of being human, does it not?
A material object cannot choose. Artificial Intelligence cannot know the sense of adventure and surprise inherent in the act of choosing. Objects and AI cannot know a sense of failure or of happiness or of worry or of hope that a choice may bring about.
For those who choose fail-prone freedom, life is tragic, romantic and the sum of all human potentialities. Value is created through freedom and choice: love, goodness, charity, etc. These, taking the initiative freely, will say, “I see what needs to be changed, and it starts with me.”
(Now, you don’t want to make the same choices John “the savage” did. You’ll end up in a very dark place. But you get the gist of what I am saying.)
Those who choose fail-safe happiness over fail-prone freedom, it seems to me, trade their freedom and choices for a doled-out life of (theoretical) material security and certainty. These lay the burden of responsibility for their happiness on the World State. You can see this in the growing welfare state.
These seek to avoid pain and suffering and any effort that might bring about pain and suffering inherent in a choice. These seek the material comfort and surety promised by socialism’s “workers’ paradise.” These, lacking the initiative to choose, will say “I see what needs to be changed and it starts with you.”
For, those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom, in order to obtain fail-safe happiness, go on to coerce, cancel and control the lives of those who do not conform to the manifesto of the World State of Happiness.
Tragically, fail-prone freedom outliers are considered less than human by the World Staters and are sent to internment camps. You either live in the ‘civilized’ World State of the ‘enlightened’ ‘real’ people or you live as barely human on the Savage Reservation.
There are no families and no religion in the World State. Babies are engineered and hatched in the World State. Babies occur naturally within families on the Reservation. There is a syncretic religiosity on the Reservation. Those of the World State voyeuristically watch the savages and worship the assembly line developer Henry Ford.
When the World State requires you to give up your freedom along with your rights and your property so that it can mete out happiness in the form of physical well-being and solidarity with others in similar chains, what will happen to you? Years ago, I wanted to understand the World State of Happiness, aka, communism, and the threat it imposed on humanity.
During the early eighties I read the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s’ The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (I doubt that Pope Francis has ever read these accounts of the devastation to human beings under communism. He prefers messaging that affirms his Marxist World State religion.)
As I learned from my reading, communism dehumanizes. And, as humans are wont to do, Solzhenitsyn rebelled against the imposition of inhumanity – a communist rule. The rule had begun as an ideology to put things right and ended as an institution of purges, mass murders and gulag camps.
“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
What is certain if you choose fail-safe happiness over freedom: your claiming the right to be happy will not be heard. For, you will have been “reduced to matter”. Your human nature will be eradicated in your quest for security and stability, aka, happiness.
Further reading:
George Orwell’s 1984, Animal Farm
C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength
Theodore Dalrymple’s The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World
Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs: A Last Look At A Remarkable Presidency – Issues & Insights
Added 1-25-2021:
As the World Turns
May 30, 2021 Leave a comment
The made-for-TV melodrama General Fauci has aired for a year and a half. Its storyline of a global pandemic, mimicking the fantasy narratives of the “We’re-all-gonna-die-unless-somebody-from-science-saves us” pandemic movies of recent years, has a twist. Instead of the pandemic creating zombies, the pandemic mitigation methods – masks and vaccines – creates zombies.
The main character of General Fauci is scripted as the main character of pandemic policy for the nation. His background in funding gain-of-function research and of telling people what to do is the basis for his moral high ground authority. Entire episodes are viewed through the eyes of the main character.
The doctor believes that he can bring about a Great Reset of humanity if only people would do what he says. The supporting cast, media and other hand-wringing types, is an approving Greek chorus. But the audience is kept guessing as to what the doctor is saying, as noble lies come out of both sides of his mouth.
Each daily soap episode presents the same cast of grim-Woke actors and the same set and props. Each daily soap episode is designed to play on emotions to gain viewership. Each episode is a storyline to be continued to gain repeat viewers.
A subplot of the General Fauci soap was added last November: insurrectionists install a feeble-minded puppet dictator in the White House. The Great Reset of humanity is placed in his hands.
Before General Fauci aired, a Washington-based Dark Shadows style soap production aired for over a year. All My Collusions depicted the creepy, campy, and cultish world of psychotic Democrats.
Now, after a year and a half airing of the tedious General Fauci, viewer’s questions arise: “When does it end?” and “Is there more to life than meets the media eye?”
In answer to viewer’s first question, the word on the street is that a new soap opera is in the offing. As the General Fauci series winds down, another melodrama will replace it: a climate justice series called “The Days of Our Earth”
The new soap will present the daily ordeals and hardships of Mother Earth as she deals with the effects of climate change. Fearing the immediate end of the earth, Dark Green religionists join the Build Back Better Brotherhood to save Mother Earth by ridding her of excess carbon-based humans. Script writers have been working on the soap for several years.
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Fluff. Ubiquitous fluff. Cheerios for breakfast. Disneyland for vacation and TV productions for 24 hour-a-day viewing. Fabrications of fluff abound in art, architecture, and cinema. Because of fluff’s pervasive immediacy, you may not have noticed that it is a replacement of what is real. Fantasy objects are the substitute. These offer a quick detachment from reality and immediate gratification as real emotions become involved.
As people subject their healthy truth-seeking imaginations to today’s pandemic of fantasy, more and more fluff is required to be injected into their minds. This past year we’ve seen that political correctness and scientism abhor a vacuum. Both have gone wherever people let it in. And, so has Marxism.
Now under the cover of the “Build Back Better” (BBB) promotion, Marxism proposes, using historical materialism as its determinant, salvation via a collective will. We are to believe that through BBB, man will have the ability to perfect himself. And, that BBB will overcome the world’s ills: pain, suffering, poverty, conflict and sadness. And that the earth will be saved from mankind. And through BBB, technology will produce a transhuman man who will be immortal – basically, a nihilist who’s all fluff for all time.
Despite its almost universal marketing by college and university professors and by the “Build Back Better” political harpies, Marxism is a dangerous fantasy drug. Those who take Marxism into their lives will feel a sense of security and power at first. But they will soon come to feel great loss and emptiness. For, the Marxism addicted are injecting the fluff of nihilism into their system.
Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kolakowski, called a “thinker for our time” by philosopher Roger Scruton, was exiled from Poland in 1968 for his criticism of Marxism and Communism. He had firsthand knowledge of the fantastical machinations of Marxist ideology. Consider the following passage from his 1976 essay On the So-Called Crisis of Christianity:
Christianity is thus the awareness of our weakness and misery, and it useless to argue that there exists or could exist a “Promethean Christianity,” that is, that Christian faith could be reconciled with hope for self-salvation. Two great ideas of the nineteenth century which, despite all that separates them, perfectly embodied this Promethean expectation –those of Marx and of Nietzsche – were anti-Christian in their roots, and not as a result of accidental historical circumstances. Nietzsche’s’ hatred of Christianity and of Jesus was a natural consequence of his belief in the unlimited possibility of mankind’s self-creation. Nietzsche knew that Christianity is the awareness of our weakness., and he was right. Marx knew this too, and from the young Hegelians, he took over and transformed the philosophy (more Fichtean than Hegelian) of self-creation and futuristic orientation. He came to believe that the collective Prometheus of the future would reach a state in which his thought and action would be indistinguishable and in which even “atheism” would lose its reason for existence, since people’s self-affirmation would be entirely “positive”, not negatively dependent on the negation of God.
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To answer the soap viewer’s second question “Is there more to life than meets the media eye?” we must look elsewhere. . .
Have a good look at the birds in the sky. They don’t plant seeds, they don’t bring in the harvest, they don’t store things in barns – and your father in heaven feeds them! Think how different you are from them! Can any of you add fifteen inches to your height just by worrying about it?
And why worry about what to wear? Take a tip from the lilies in the countryside. They don’t work; they don’t weave; but let me tell you, not even Solomon in all his finery was dressed as well as one of these. So if God gives that sort of clothing even to the grass in the field, which is here today and on the bonfire tomorrow, isn’t he more likely to clothe you too, you little-faith lot?
So don’t worry away with your ‘What’ll we eat?’ and ‘What’ll we drink?’ and ‘What’ll we wear?’ Those are all the things the Gentiles fuss about, and your heavenly father knows you need them all. Instead, make your top priority God’s kingdom and his way of life, and all these things will be given to you as well.
So don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow can worry about itself. One days’ trouble at a time is quite enough. (Matt. 6:26-34)
Long before the melodrama of General Fauci, long before “emergency use” vaccines, and long before historical materialism’s death toll of millions, the Son of Man walked 30-some years in an unsanitary disease-filled world. All manner of health threats – smallpox, parasitic infections, malaria, anthrax, pneumonia, tuberculosis, polio, skin diseases including leprosy, head lice, scabies and more – existed in the first century.
Jesus was fully aware of the pain, suffering and groaning of his creation. He was fully aware of the reality that people were dealing with. He knew that many people of that time had only the bare necessities. Many lived hand-to-mouth. What did Jesus offer when he saw the growing crowds and went up the hillside, sat down, took a deep breath and began to teach them? (Matt. 5:1-2)
Jesus did not offer vain words and soap operas to play on emotions. He didn’t paint people as victims. He didn’t peddle ideology. He didn’t offer the Power of Positive Thinking. He didn’t offer critical theory. He didn’t offer diversity, equity and inclusion training. He didn’t pander for their attention with talk about skin color or gender or sexual preference. He didn’t offer collective Promethean self-salvation.
Jesus didn’t tell the crowds to rise up as one collective will to revolt and destroy what is and build a socio-economic system to produce the outcomes they desired. No.
What did Jesus offer? Jesus offered the kingdom of God – a physical-spiritual reality that Marxism denies. He offered a new Torah that fulfilled the old Torah. He offered a change of focus. Outsiders are now insiders. The first will be last. Washing feet, and not stepping on feet to get ahead, is the kingdom way.
Jesus spoke in terms of individual human agency. He said that his followers would be blessed if they acted in the ways he described. They would know the happiness and joy of life in the kingdom of God (not available under Marxism (cf. Psalm 4: 7)).
He offered awareness of reality from the perspective of a shepherd caring for his sheep. Jesus’ hillside discourse is found in the gospel according to Matthew (Matt. 5, 6 & 7). The first verse of Matthew’s gospel records that Jesus is a descendent of David, a shepherd who became king.
As we read in the Matthew passage above, Jesus offered the world as it turns – a cosmology of Creator love and care. He pointed to aesthetic flora and forage-to-mouth fauna as empirical evidence of his Father’s love and care for the evolutionary creation he put in motion some 13.8 billion years before.
“When does the melodrama end?” It’s up to you. People believe what they want to the believe. Psalm 1 tells us that there are two paths that one could follow.
“Is there more to life than meets the media eye?” It’s depends on where you look. Psalm 103 relates a worldview of good – blessing and benefit, compassion and concern, and righteousness and redemption – as man relates to God.
As the world turns you may feel like you are in a dryer drum on an Air Fluff cycle. In such a state you easily become discombobulated and distressed. You will want to take to heart Psalm 4 – David’s plea for deliverance from fluff – vain words and lies – that disturbs his sleep.
Turn off the Air Fluff cycle and remove the lint from your life. Have a good look at the birds in the sky. Take a tip from the lilies in the countryside. The unchanging One who put the universe in motion, feeds the birds, and dresses lilies in lavish beauty will look after you as the world turns.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. James 1:17
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The following is not a soap opera. Pastor Artur Pawlowski was recently arrested by the Canadian Stasi for his staunch defiance of the pandemic lockdowns. Pastor Pawlowski conveys the reality of the self-salvation ideology of Marx, Nietzsche, and the collective Prometheus. He speaks of God’s salvation.
FROM COMMUNISM TO GOD
Pastor Art Pawlowski Tells His Life Story: From Communism to Man of God – Rebel News
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Keep these people and their needles away from your kids:
Day 110: The Same People Who Lied to You Over the Wuhan Lab Now Want You to Vaccinate Your Kids. (thenationalpulse.com)
Number of COVID Cases in Delhi Crashes After Mass Distribution of Ivermectin (humansarefree.com)
Keep these people and their pornography away from your kids:
Earth to Loudoun County — We have a problem… – CITIZEN FREE PRESS
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Call to action:
Actress Samaire Armstrong: “What’s coming down the road is so much bigger than this moment.”
Actress Armstrong Gives Powerful Call for Moms to Fight Back Against Filthy Disgusting Masks on Kids (rumble.com)
America’s Frontline Doctors Sue the Federal Government to Prevent Forcing Experimental COVID Vaccines on US Children (thegatewaypundit.com)
“Understand, you are agreeing to be in a medical study when you take any of the COVID-19 vaccines.”
PDF >>TEN MEDICAL FACTS REGARDING THE COVID-19 EXPERIMENTAL VACCINES
“{The AFLDS is] seeking temporary injunctive relief against any existing or further authorization for use in children under the age of 16, of any of the COVID-19 “vaccines”1 that have been approved under the Emergency Use Authorization (“EUA”) . . .”
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COVID Court:
Dr. Peter McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and Professor of Medicine at Texas A&M College of Medicine and he is warning against the Vaccine.
Facebook exposed in global effort to silence dangers about Vaccine.
Facebook Whistleblowers LEAK DOCS Detailing Effort to Secretly Censor Vax Concerns on Global Scale – YouTube
Mask Psychosis: NYT Confirms The Liberal Mask Cult Is Here to Stay – Revolver
commie lee jones on Twitter: “MIT researchers ‘infiltrated’ a Covid skeptics community a few months ago and found that skeptics place a high premium on data analysis and empiricism. “Most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution.” https://t.co/jsoAG8G2VT https://t.co/CpEvCKz2HK” / Twitter
Model Stephanie Dubois Suffers Blood Clot, Dies Days After Getting COVID Shot (newsweek.com)
[Michigan] is working through a process to make permanent its workplace COVID-19 rules, enforced through the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Michigan’s push for permanent COVID-19 rules sparks battle with business leaders – mlive.com
Will the legal dept. save us from some COVID totalitarianism?
“The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has put employers on notice that should they attempt to require employees to receive injections of experimental COVID-19 gene-therapy vaccine a resulting adverse reaction will be considered “work-related” for which the employer may be held liable.”
Employers may be liable for ‘any adverse reaction’ from mandated coronavirus shots: OSHA | News | LifeSite (lifesitenews.com)
40 Million Fake Masks, 200,000 Counterfeit COVID Tests Seized. – The National Pulse
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A Story of Survival
Like humans, flowers inherit their appearance from genes. Pigments are “born” into these plants, producing a range of colors across the spectrum. The same chemical, carotenoid, that produces pigment in tomatoes and carrots, also produces yellow, red, or orange color in certain flowers. Another chemical, anthocyanin, is responsible for producing red, pink, blue, and purple-colored flower petals. While many people see these plants as purely decorative, flowers aren’t colorful just to be pretty – they need their color for survival.
Why Flowers Have Color (konicaminolta.us)
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The Manufacturing of a Mass Psychosis
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Image © Jennifer A. Johnson, 2021
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Filed under 2021 current events, Christianity, COVID-19, cultural Marxism, Culture, pandemic, Political Commentary, social commentary, socialism Tagged with Anthony Fauci, Christianity, COVID, culture, fantasy, Marxism, mental health, pandemic, Sermon on the Mount