Seeing in New Light

June 8, 2025 Leave a comment

“Till this moment I never knew myself.”

Recently, I picked up a Penguin Classics copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a popular novel in the Austen canon. I read it to distance myself from the senseless present en route to WWIII and to thicken my temporal bandwidth. The reason for the latter is in my post The Lines of Others.

“To interact with people from different cultures and to gain a deeper appreciation of their values, beliefs, and customs. To become more empathetic and understanding toward others, even those who are very different from me. To gain a better understanding of the diverse world we live in and develop a more open-minded perspective.”

With Austen as guide I visited rural England at the turn of the 19th century. I found an ordered world governed by rules of etiquette. Tension between social expectations and personal feelings is often concealed behind formal politeness. Austen critiques social conventions regarding class distinctions, gender roles, and marriage through the use of irony, hyperbole, and witty rejoinders.

Her narrator’s opening lines set the viewpoint of the characters:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Enter the Bennet family with its five daughters: Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Lydia, and Kitty.

Mr. Bennet is fond of books and is known for his sarcastic wit. Along with his favorite daughter “Lizzy,” he shares a distaste for the conventional views of wealth and rank. He also enjoys criticizing and teasing his youngest daughters Kitty and Lydia.

To his wife he says that they are “uncommonly foolish” and “two of the silliest girls in the country.” But his inability to step in and correct their behavior fosters his youngest daughters’ foolishness. Lydia will eventually be involved in a scandal that disrupts the social order and brings shame upon the family.

Mrs. Bennet is obsessed with finding suitable husbands for her daughters. The opening indicated this fixation but not the reasoning behind it. It has to do with a legal restriction on inheritance – an entail.

If Mr. Bennet passed, his estate, Longbourn, is entailed (transferred) to the closest male relative – his cousin, Mr. Collins. Mrs. Bennet saw no guarantee of Mr. Collin’s charity if that happened. She, justifiably so, knowing that acceptable employment opportunities were extremely limited for women in their social class, wanted her daughters to marry advantageously or she and they will be destitute and fall into social disgrace.

Mrs. Bennet’s favorite daughter, the one with “high animal spirits” is 15-year-old Lydia. Lydia is obsessed with men, especially the officers of her militia regiment. The flirtatious Lydia will become involved in a sexual scandal with a certain Mr. Wickham.

Mrs. Bennet is characterized as “a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.” She becomes fretful when her plans go awry. To ally her worries, she visits neighbors and gossips.

Elizabeth would later reflect on her father’s judgmental sarcasm, the flirtations of her wild youngest sisters Kitty and Lydia, and the unwillingness of her father and mother to control their behavior.

“They were hopeless of remedy. Her father, contented with laughing at them, would never exert himself to restrain the wild giddiness of his youngest daughters; and her mother, with manners so far from right herself, was entirely insensible of the evil.”

Beside the Bennet family, there are 20 characters in the novel. Some are charming (Charles Bingley). Some are annoying (Mrs. Bennett, Mr. Collins, Lady Catherine de Bourgh). Others, self-willed and careless (Lydia), rakish (Mr. Wickham), proud and stilted (Mr. Darcy). And one starts out very sure of herself (Elizabeth).

The characters meet at various gatherings. The Bennet sisters looked forward to every ball as dancing was a very important part of the courtship ritual. There, the daughters mingle with husband prospects and impressions are formed. At one ball, Bingley takes an immediate interest in the beautiful and shy Jane and Elizabeth danced with George Wickham.

The Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy encounter is reserved but intriguing for both. Their relationship is where the pride and prejudice of the title comes in. It begins with class distinction: Elizabeth is the daughter of a country gentleman. Darcy is a rich aristocratic landowner. 

Darcy, holding a common belief in the natural superiority of the wealthy landed gentry, walks around with the pride of rank and fortune and prejudice against the social inferiority of Elizabeth’s family. He comes off as distant. Elizabeth, equally aloof, wears her pride as independence of mind.

Elizabeth also noticed that Wickham and Darcy don’t get along. She begins to hold a grudge against Darcy based on his superior ways and on the self-serving words of Wickham that belittle him.

But she later sees Darcy anew when he involves himself in ‘fixing’ Lydia’s mess and restoring social order. She later sees herself anew.

~~~

Note: It is not my purpose with this post to summarize Pride and Prejudice. There are plenty of websites that do so. My purpose here is to bring to the foreground a character who learns to see differently. And to encourage everyone to thicken their personal bandwidth by reading great literature from the past. As you’ll see by reading Pride and Prejudice, wisdom and much more comes in doing so. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

~~~

The novel was more than I expected from a so-called “romance novel.” I came across personal growth in a character who humbled herself and let go of a grudge based on social pretensions and misjudgments. She was able to open her mind and her heart to new information and begin to see things differently. I came across Elizabeth Bennet and her Anagnorisis.

Anagnorisis is a literary device used in Greek tragedies and in many plots since. It is the moment of recognition. The main character, typically, transitions from ignorance to knowledge. This seeing anew is a turning point in the story, after which things concerning the main character are not viewed the same way again. 

Elizabeths’ shift in perception comes after a revelatory letter from Darcy that discloses the opposite of what she had supposed about Wickham and himself. Darcy had thought it beneath him as a gentleman to speak of Wickham’s deceitful squandering behavior.

She spends time alone thinking things through. She questions her own discernment. The outcome of her interiority is summed in her words above. Elizabeth finally learns the truth about someone she accepted at face value (Wickham) and about someone that she judged harshly (Darcy). The prejudice in the title was not the latter’s but hers. She realizes she was greatly mistaken.

Elizabeth began as a rebel. She thought she was above society’s games. She’s witty but judgmental and arrogant when fixating on flaws. Her own pride mirrored that of the one she viewed as proud. But after spending time alone with the letter and hearing confirming reports, she confronts her own snobbery. Realizing how wrong she was she is humbled.

She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.

“How despicably have I acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind! But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.”

Pride and Prejudice. Chastened realism. Seeing anew. Wisdom born of humility. Wit and wisdom.

~~~

Evie Magazine, in 5 Women From Classic Literature Who Don’t Need A Sword To Be Strong, attributes Lizzy’s change of mind to her strength of character:

“When Darcy begins to show signs of being something more than what originally met the eye, Elizabeth is able to open her mind and her heart to him and discover the truth behind his distance and disdain. Her ability to do that — instead of holding a grudge — allows her to find, in Darcy, a true equal.”

~~~~~~

“Angry people are not always wise.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

~~~~~

Simone Weil once said:

“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”

~~~~~

Rosamund Pike talks about narrating Pride & Prejudice

~~~~~

Forming the Imagination Through Literature

Joshua Villarreal, Teacher Support Lead for Hillsdale College K-12, delivers a lecture on how literature forms a student’s moral imagination.

This lecture was given at the Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence seminar, “The Art of Teaching: Upper School Literature” in February 2025. The Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence, an outreach of the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office, offers educators the opportunity to deepen their content knowledge and refine their skills in the classroom.

Forming the Imagination Through Literature

Forming the Imagination Through Literature – Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast – Omny.fm

~~~~~

If you are not content to read and need a screen, well there’s this:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Five sisters in 19th century England must cope with the pressures to marry while protecting themselves from a growing population of zombies.

Filed under English Literature, Literature Tagged with , , , , ,

What Remains?

May 12, 2024 Leave a comment

Watching protesting students align themselves with the terrorist group Hamas and their Palestinian pawns, one wonders what legacy they are building for themselves. Are they – the combine of victim-oppressor social justice warriors – really acting for the greater good with their pro-Hamas and antisemitic chants? Whose interests are they serving? Will they later regret their actions and associations, or will their self-deception and moral distortion continue on the rest of their lives?

Looking back over one’s life work, one’s ruling passion, and reconciling that with what one’s dedicated service contributed to forms the basis of two of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels: An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day.

Two men – a Japanese artist in the first novel and an English butler in the second – aspired to reach the highest level in their professions. Both men were attuned to honor and dignity. Both men wanted to attach themselves to a greater worldly-good. But their singular focus, their self-constrained temporal bandwidth, shut out all else until later in life (the time period in the novels). They come to see that what they gave their singleness of mind and efforts to turned out to be not just heartbreaking and reputation damaging but devastating to the greater good.

Both men come across as guarded in their retelling of events and observations in diary-like fashion, as if they didn’t want to be too harsh on themselves. By their unreliable narration we wonder if there’s more under the surface. As things come to the fore, we learn there is a tension between how each saw the world and how the world really was. And this becomes cause for a conflicted life and one of guilt, deflection, and regret about past myopia and former associations.

Each man talks as if “you” were like them – as someone living in the same neighborhood in post-war Japan and as a butler in England. The world doesn’t extend beyond their interests. There are those – daughters, an old friend, a journalist, a housemaid, local towns folk -who try to draw them out.

The artist Masuji Ono’s narration occurs after the end of WWII in 1945 (Oct. 1948 June 1950), when Japan is rebuilding her cities after defeat. We learn that Ono is a retired printmaker who lost his wife Michiko and son Kenji during the war. His beautiful home was seriously damaged by the war as was his reputation.

The elderly Ono spends his time gardening, working on the house, with his visiting daughters and his grandson and going out at night to drink in a quiet lantern-lit bar, a remnant of the pleasure district – the “floating world” of pleasure, entertainment and drink that had at one time given him much pleasure. It’s where he escapes from his dark past.

Ono recalls his early printmaking days and his rise to be a master printmaker surrounded by adoring students in the bar. We learn of his desire to go beyond just making beautiful art. He wanted to serve a higher purpose. We come to learn of Ono’s dark past – his direct involvement in Imperialist Japan’s military rise and his work as a government propagandist.

Ono reassesses events from his past throughout the novel. He reconsiders his role in those events and his guilt. His reputation proceeds him as he enters into marriage negotiations for his daughter Noriko. He also assesses how Japan is changing since the war. He questions some of the change:

“Something has changed in the character of the younger generation in a way I do not fully understand, and certain aspects of this change are undeniably disturbing.”

“Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn’t mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something.”

Does Ono admit he was wrong to be a propagandist in the deadliest military conflict in history? Does he come to terms with the mistakes he made in the course of his life? Does he attain satisfaction and dignity when all is said and done?

~~

Mr. Stevens’ narration occurs during a six-day road trip in the summer of 1956. He goes to visit Mrs. Benn, nee Kenton, in the sea-side town of Weymouth, England. During this time, he reminisces about his days as head butler at Darlington Hall after WWI and leading up to WWII.

Mr. Stevens is a prim and proper Jeeves-like butler who speaks in a measured and precise way. He values professionalism and dignity above all else.

“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost . . . They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit. . . It is, as I say, a matter of “dignity.”

Mr. Stevens’ devotion and dedicated service is focused on a man he holds in high esteem: Lord Darlington. “A gentleman through and through” and “I for one will never doubt that a desire to see “justice in this world” lay at the heart of all his actions” and “All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile” says Stevens.

High level meetings are held at Darlington Hall after WWI. Lord Darlington lobbies leaders from England, France and America to go financially easy on Germany.

Lord Darlington, an old-fashioned English gentleman, is much like Mr. Stevens. He can’t imagine a world different from his own. He never understands the true agenda of the Nazis even as the fascists he invites to Darlington Hall seek to turn him against the Jews. Lord Darlington, “A gentleman through and through”, becomes an appeaser and Nazi sympathizer in the name of honor, fairness, friendship, and gentlemanly conduct.

The devoted Stevens views Lord Darlington as a man who had good intentions but was led astray by manipulative diplomats. “I for one will never doubt that a desire to see ‘justice in this world’ lay at the heart of all his actions.”

The devoted Stevens goes with the flow:

“How can one possibly be held to blame in any sense because, say, the passage of time has shown that Lord Darlington’s efforts were misguided, even foolish? Throughout the years I served him, it was he and he alone who weighed up evidence and judged it best to proceed in the way he did, while I simply confined myself, quite properly, to affairs within my own professional realm. And as far as I am concerned, I carried out my duties to the best of my abilities, indeed to a standard which many may consider ‘first rate’.”

The devoted Stevens extrapolates his efforts:

“A ‘great’ butler can only be, surely, one who can point to his years of service and say that he has applied his talents to serving a great gentleman – and through the latter, to serving humanity.”

Miss Kenton, the lead housemaid at Darlington Hall, is like Stevens. She takes great pride in her work. But unlike Stevens, she has emotional latitude and an independent streak. She is intelligent, headstrong, and stubborn. She disagrees not only with Stevens at time but also with the decisions made by Lord Darlington. 

Though she finds Mr. Steven infuriating – “Why, Mr. Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?” – it gradually becomes clear that Miss Kenton is in love with him. But after many years, she leaves Darlington Hall. Frustrated at Mr. Stevens’ buttoned up emotional state and lack of response Miss Kenton goes off with Mr. Benn, a footman of the house.

Years later, Stevens receives a letter from Miss Kenton. He reads it over and over believing that she might return to her post at Darlington Hall under a new owner. The letter indicates that her marriage to Mr. Benn might not be working out. Stevens’ hopes are up but well-regulated.

His new employer, a wealthy American named Mr. Farraday, tells Stevens to take some time off. He offers Stevens his car for a road trip. And off Stevens goes to see Miss Kenton.

On his way, Stevens comes into contact with several working-class characters. They challenge Stevens’ ideas about dignity. One man opines that dignity is about democracy and standing up for one’s beliefs – in other words, being attentive to what’s going on in the world and being outspoken. This, of course, is in contrast to Stevens’ conception of dignity as being about suppressing one’s own feelings in pursuit of professionalism.

What happens when Stevens reaches Weymouth and meets Mrs. Benn?

What does hindsight look like to Stevens? Does it look like not worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Does it look like a simple butler trying to make a small contribution count for something true and worthy and sacrificing much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, that in itself, whatever the outcome, is cause for pride and contentment?

Does Stevens, as he reflects on things at the end of the day, realize the mistake he made in his lockstep devotion to Lord Darlington? Does he take the blinders off? And, does he understand the effects of his obsessive devotion to professionalism and dignity on his personal life?

Stevens gives his thoughts on the latter to a man sitting next to him on the pier as they watch the sun going down and the pier lights come on:

“The fact is, of course,’ I said after a while, ‘I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now – well – I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.”

I return to my opening questions. Whose interests were they serving? Will they later regret their actions and associations or does willful blindness and self-deception remain?

“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

~~~~~

This post wasn’t meant to provide a complete summary of Kazuo Ishiguro’s two novels. There is a whole lot going on in each that I haven’t touched on. They are very well written human-interest stories. The Remains of the Day won The Booker Prize.

Rather, I saw parallels between the decisions youth are making today, with all ardor, for deadly causes and the experiences and feelings of the artist Masuji Ono and the butler Stevens.

I’ve read both novels. I saw the Remains of the Day before reading the book. This Merchant Ivory film is one of my favorites (There is no murder and mayhem, no car chases, no heavy breathing, no queer theory or CRT, and no Disney twaddle.)

The cast is top-notch. I recommend reading the book before viewing the movie and listening to the podcast below (spoiler alert!).

The movie, of course, is edited way down to try and give the essence of Ishiguro’s novel. But reading the text first will provide the depth and richness of the characters and much more detail of their situations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_ap4Czeo4Y&t=128s

The Booker at the Oscars: The Remains of the Day from The Booker Prize Podcast | Podcast Episode on Podbay

Filed under Literature Tagged with , , , , , ,

Polly Want a Crisis?

April 14, 2024 Leave a comment

If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us. But the stark reality is that the anointed ones have learned that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste and that a manufactured crisis affords the anointed the opportunity to wield total power for its own sake.

“When the anointed say that there is a crisis this means that something must be done —and it must be done simply because the anointed want it done.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy

The fourth anniversary of “15 days to slow the spread” has come and gone. But the harm inflicted upon our lives and our country during the COVID “crisis” has not. More “public health” strategies are being developed to tyrannize us into “wellness” (See the WHO treaty below.) We will be made to follow “the science” even into hell if it suits the anointed ones.

We (the remnant) somehow lived through the “something must be done” ill-treatment by means of the public health anointed: Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, and others of the anointed ilk.

And somehow, we lived through the abrogation of our freedom by the anointed ones. We came out the other side of the social experiment with the knowledge that the anointed ones conceived the abuse done to us and will do it again. What we had to endure mentally at the hands of the anointed arch-COVIDians was horrible: their fearmongering, their lies, their scientism, their silencing of contrary evidence, and their absurd mandates – clearly a test of wills as common sense was not considered “the science.”

The introduction of the anointed anxiety-soothing shot – the SOMA serum – has had devastating implications on the health and livelihoods. Many have suffered the loss of loved ones with an “unexpected death”, the loss of livelihood, and the loss of health. It has only been recently reported that the anointed of the CDC intentionally HID more than a quarter of a million adverse effects reports for the COVID-19 “vaccines.”

We continue to be subjected (via the anointed one’s talking heads) to the badgering about a (non-existent) climate “crisis.” We are told to do away with gasoline-powered vehicles and natural gas ranges and with all thought of fossil fuels as an energy source. We are told to become completely dependent on weather-dependent turbines and solar panels, and on hydropower and on their “climate science” directives for the energy to power a modern industrial economy.

(See my post Earth Day – Don’t Re-Greta Green Energy | Kingdom Venturers where I wrote about the exploitation of children and poor countries to secure the minerals needed for millions of electronic products e.g., rechargeable lithium batteries, sold year after year. The anointed ones have hearts of darkness.

“. . . cobalt, mined by the Congolese (and the Uyghurs in China), is a coveted substance in man’s conquest of earth. And we find, if we dare to look, that Green Energy-based colonialism is no different than the ivory-based colonialism talked about in [Joseph Conrad’s] Heart of Darkness.”)

The anointed of the World Economic Forum (WEF) had included “Climate-related risks” as “the biggest future threat facing the world.” The WEF have since moved on to “misinformation and disinformation” as the biggest risk near-term risk (to their narratives), followed by extreme weather events, social polarization and armed conflict.

Citing soaring energy and food prices resulting in inflationary pressures and a cost-of-living crisis, social unrest, conflicts, carbon emissions and future pandemics, the anointed of the WEF have created a new word for the cascading and connected crises they envision: Polycrisis.

For, the anointed of the WEF must make alarming predictions and announce sweeping solutions to create a demand for their services. These “Teflon prophets” (Thomas Sowell) predict that there will be future social, economic, or environmental problems in the absence of their anointed intervention.

It will be noted by those with an expanded personal bandwidth (informed common sense), that the cost-of-living crisis has been caused by the massive deficit spending and reckless energy policies of the anointed ones in our government. They also know that the shutdown of our economy during COVID was caused by the public health anointed ones. Wars are caused by the anointed ones. Carbon emissions have not risen to any threatening level except in the “acceptable” papers the anointed present to the WEF and the UN.

The WEF will not let their Polycrisis go to waste. They are conspiring to centrally plan the world because “something must be done” and done “for our own good.” Did anyone ask you about wanting a Great Reset?

Public health anointed ones are setting up for the next medical “crisis”. The World Health Organization (WHO) wants complete sovereignty (To call the shots!) over our health . . . and anything it calls a “crisis”. A “crisis” would include the climate, the water supply, gun ownership, how food is produced – basically, anything they can claim is an existential threat to humanity.

For these anointed ones to have complete say and sway over us, they must make an end run around to subvert our own physical sovereignty and the sovereignty of the U.S.

Dr. Meryl Nass: ‘We’re undergoing a soft coup’

Dr. Meryl Nass explains how the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty will enable the WHO “to take over jurisdiction of everything in the world by saying that climate change, animals, plants, water systems [and] ecosystems are all central to health”. In addition to that, it will remove human rights protections, enforce censorship and digital passports, require governments to push a single “official” narrative, and enable the WHO to declare “pandemics” on a whim.

In a nutshell, the WHO is all in for whatever it takes to promote disease-related pharmaceutical interventions, including surveillance, digital health passports, tracing, the ability to impose lockdowns, and mandating vaccines, even experimental ones like the mRNA COVID-19 shots. (Emphasis mine.)

More on this here: Short Videos – Sovereignty Coalition

“The COVID-19 mandates and resulting lockdowns taught us that, given the chance, governments worldwide will seek to control citizens if a pandemic emergency is declared. The World Health Organization (WHO) closed its negotiations on May 27 with the production of an accord consisting of two treaties that could meaningfully impinge on our sovereignty as Americans. The proposed WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty threatens to give unprecedented power in real or maybe even perceived “public health emergencies of international concern.” -Wendi Strauch Mahoney

The WHO Accord: Global Governance is a Real Threat to American Sovereignty | uncoverdc.com | uncoverdc.com

If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us.

Coming May 2024!!!!!!!!!

Global Health Project – Protecting the Health & Future for All Humans – The Global Health Project

You may be clutching your pearls and saying “I don’t know what to think or do.” Does Polly want a crisis so that Polly can find out what to think and do from the anointed ones?

Take Action Now!!!!! At this link: “Not Now” on the Surrender of Our Sovereignty to the WHO | AlignAct

Listen. We can’t change the past. But we can continue to learn from it and work to prevent it from happening again, so the next “crisis” doesn’t represent the death of our Constitution, our livelihood, and our freedom.

For what has happened During COVID, we must demand answers. We must demand accountability. We must demand that those who perpetrated this be tried and, as appropriate, fined and sent to prison.

The takeover of our lives “for your own good” by the anointed ones must stop now.

I am not vaxxed and not because of some partisan influence or misinformation as the Leftist media is wont to claim. I took the time to read and understand the science from various sources and I knew my own almost seventy-year old body.

I did not comply during the COVID “crisis”. I did not come to love Big Brother. I raised my voice and held strong. (See my posts since March 2020). Unfortunately, many swallowed the slogans and were like sheep led to the mRNA slaughter.

All I want from the government or any authority is information to make my own decisions. I do not want, unless authorized by me, to have decisions made for me. (One might say that a transmissible disease warrants strict compliance to “health standards” or someone might die. But there would be no evidence of such transmission, only speculation and finger pointing.)

The United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the First and Second Amendments are the Supreme Law of the Land – not the WEF, not the WHO, and not a warrantless FISA.

The eclipse came and went but the tax man cometh again and again to overshadow our lives. April 15th – the day when the work of our hands is conscripted into the service of the oligarchical ruling class.

Characteristics of the anointed one’s Big Brother approach:

Increasing depression, despondency, mental illness, and suicides.

Ugliness in tone, in art and architecture – beauty is deemed subversive.

Truth, facts and language are manipulated (Newspeak).

There is a militant focus on “misinformation and disinformation” (Ministry of Truth).

History is destroyed (doublethink).

Constant surveillance.

Systematic brainwashing (Ministry of Love). 

There is obsession with population control and control of population.

If only it was something that remained on the pages of a dystopian novel . . .the ways the anointed ones deal with us.

~~~~~

There are those who see themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the general public and therefore superior to Democracy and its laws created by elected representatives.

Ad hoc justice, not established rule of law, is one product of their superior ways as is remaking society with inegalitarian means to create equal outcomes. Promoting the hatred of whites to promote blacks is another product of their superior ways.

Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla had this to say about America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution:

“This dismissal of the American people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others’ comprehension . . .

“Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them . . .

“That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses . . .

“The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.”

~~~~~

Anointed ones run our cities:

The Democratic-run city of Denver, Colorado, plans to defund its police department to pay for illegal immigrants.

Denver’s police department will be hit with an $8.4 million reduction — about 1.9% of its total operating budget, the city confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Blue City Plans To Defund Its Police Force To Pay For Illegal Immigrants | (dailycallernewsfoundation.org)

The anointed ones who run our cities into the ground want to create new hell holes:

Hamster cages for humans, the 15-minute cities, are on city planner agendas. Soy boys and girls can walk around the city and look at their screens without a worry – “the idea is that every need is fulfilled within a 15-minute walk or short bike ride.”

~~~~~

“Democracy!” is in crisis, according to the anointed ones on the Left: Trump is on the ballot and might be elected! Anointed talking heads want to tell you what to think and do about it: “Whatever you do, Don’t Think. Accept what is said about Trump and “Democracy!””

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.
—Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

(Replace “liberty” with the Left’s “crisis of Democracy!” and you will understand what they are after.)

Tucker Carlson: For the Third Time in Three Consecutive Cycles, Secretive Federal Agencies are Trying to Rig Our Presidential Election – This Is What They Call ‘Democracy’ (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

~~~~~

You won’t get the common sense found in the words and writings of Thomas Sowell from the anointed ones.

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society (youtube.com)

Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.

“…the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

The vision of the anointed — with Thomas Sowell (1995) | THINK TANK (youtube.com)

Thomas Sowell and a Conflict of Visions (youtube.com)

Original air date: October 12, 1995

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Were you assigned George Orwell’s 1984 in school? I wonder if it’s being assigned in schools today.

We are living in an age that is increasingly characterized by the eerily prophetic 1984. Authoritarianism and coercion. The censoring of speech. The mandates. The propaganda. Utopia for the brotherhood elite. Dystopia for the rest.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orwell’s dystopian novel where the state rewrites history, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – and Big Brother is watching you

Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Novel Conversations: “1984” by George Orwell

 1984 follows the life of Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of ‘the Party’, who is frustrated by the omnipresent eyes of the party, and its ominous ruler, Big Brother. Orwell effectively explores the themes of mass media control, government surveillance, how a dictator can manipulate and control history, thoughts, and lives in such a way that no one can escape it.

“1984” by George Orwell

“1984” by George Orwell | Evergreen Podcasts

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Mike Johnson Is Fighting to Protect the Government Spy Program Used on Trump (youtube.com)

Filed under 2024 Current Events, 2024 Election, cultural Marxism, Economic World Forum, Health, Political Commentary, Progressivism, propaganda, social commentary, totalitarianism, WEF, WHO Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Lines of Others

March 24, 2024 Leave a comment

“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”

Simone Weil

Last year I spent several months with the Oblonskys, the Shcherbatskys, the Karenins, the Vronskys, the Levins, and a host of others. I did this, not as a foreign exchange student living in Russia, but as a mind traveler using the “guise of fiction” by a writer of genius.

Reading the 742 pages of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) was a way for me to experience humanity in another time and place.

In community with them, I saw how they lived. I saw what they saw. I heard what they said and thought. I learned what transpired from what they had said, thought and done. During my time with them, I became aware of the inner personality of each person and recognized matters of love and of good and evil that are timeless.

I watched Anna change from a warm and appealing person at the beginning of my stay into a small, spiteful, and self-absorbed woman at the end – all because of her vain imaginings about love and about how the world and those around her were thought to be. With ongoing self-deception, she came to think in terms of extremes and therefore made herself believe she understood everything and everyone in totality: it’s all the same and life was a Darwinian struggle for survival.

Looking back at my time with Anna, I see her narcissism, a personality disorder impacting many today, as a shrunken one-size-fits-me “temporal bandwidth” (see below). I learned a lesson from her toxic attitude: life is not about me.

Stiva, Anna’s hedonist brother, was consistently evil in an absence-of-good way. He forgets, neglects, and fails to act. He’s put his own household into chaos. He lives entirely in the present without regard for the effect he has on his family and future generations.

Dolly, Stivas’s wife, was a consistently good woman who showed self-giving love. She raised children married to such a husband.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, over time, matured. He came to understand love as he watched his wife Kitty. And I witnessed Levin’s spiritual journey to faith in God.

A similar mind traveler experience occurred when I spent months in Russia with The Brothers Karamazov – Dmitri, Ivan and Alexei and their father Fyodor Pavlovich and his illegitimate son, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov. Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova, Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva, Ilyusha, and Father Zosima, the Elder also lived nearby. Quite a cast of characters when you get to know them and quite a legacy of behavior and thought they provide.

In Chekhov’s world of short stories, I shared in the experiences of many. I laughed, cried and saw myself in the everydayness of those I met along the way.

Why read 1800s novels Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov and learn about people with weird names when I could have spent that time watching Yellowstone and taking in a C&W vibe?  Why did I read Love in the Time of Cholera when I could have watched another car chase scene or another mindless comedy? Why did I read Death in the Andes when I could have watched a detective series. Why did I read My Antonia or Heart of Darkness or King Lear, for that matter, when I could have been on social media amusing myself? Why did I read anything outside my context as a Christian? Isn’t there some self-help personal growth book that will give a perspective on the world so I don’t have to venture out of a theological “safe space”?

 I’ll give an answer a foreign exchange student would give for wanting an out-of-context experience:

“To interact with people from different cultures and to gain a deeper appreciation of their values, beliefs, and customs. To become more empathetic and understanding toward others, even those who are very different from me. To gain a better understanding of the diverse world we live in and develop a more open-minded perspective.”

Why read great literature from the past?

To rewire my brain from a competitive judgmental either/or reactionary mindset to a more deliberative way of thinking. To train my brain to think before leaping to conclusions. To employ such reading as a dopamine-hit buffer.

To gain the wisdom of those before me.

To grow faith and love. Imagination is required for faith. Imagination is cultivated by reading the unknown. Reading requires attentiveness. Love is attentiveness

To keep in mind that the prodigal son went looking for the Now thinking that anything could be better than what came before. He found the Now and it affirmed him to be a hungry desperate slave who longed to be fed what he fed the pigs (Luke 15:11-32).

To see another point of view and how it was arrived at.

To be a humanities archeologist. Everything came before Now. And up until broadcast media came around, all we had were the lines of others – words, music, and art.

To not be a reed in the wind. To cultivate “Temporal bandwidth” – “temporal bandwidth is “the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”” – Alan Jacobs, To survive our high-speed society, cultivate ‘temporal bandwidth’

To not live as a presentist, as someone whose temporal bandwidth has narrowed to the instant something is posted on social media.

To imagine the future using what I learned from the past. For example, I read Solzhenitsyn to understand what it’s like to live under communism.

(If your temporal bandwidth is expanded even somewhat and you are not “amusing yourself with lies”, you see what was plotted before happening now. Joe Biden, along with abetting Globalist Progressives, is implementing the Cloward-Piven Strategy first developed in 1966. That strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by swarming the country with mass migration, overloading the government bureaucracy, creating a crushing national debt, have chaos ensue, take control in the chaos, and implement Socialism and Communism through Government Force.

To wit, beside the ongoing invasion of the U.S., our nation is incurring massive debt. There is the ongoing silencing of dissent by the DOJ, FBI, and social media cohorts. There is a push to impose digital IDs and digital currency along with WHO oversight to control us. The misanthropic handling of our lives should be a clarion signal to you that communist totalitarianism is coming!)

Books are safe spaces. But if you believe that words are violence (Toni Morrison in her Nobel prize address: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence. It is violence”) then you’ll stay in your “safe place” and refuse to be “breaking bread with the dead” (or listen to opposing views) where one can be an interlocuter and ask why and not just assume things and express rage.

I see going to a “safe space” as the closing in of one’s “temporal bandwidth” much like what Anna Karenina did. It has the exact opposite of a fortifying effect as one is made tenuous, anxious, and very susceptible to narcissism and Groupthink. (Ironically, that is also the effect of DEI.)

Here are two quotes from someone who championed the idea of Great Books, Allan Bloom that apply to what’s been said:

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.


Why read the realist fiction of writers such as Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others? To break bread with the dead and step out of my context into the lines of others.

Alan Jacobs, the Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture encourages what I call “mind travel” to the past in his book Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Readers Guide for a More Tranquil Mind.

What the book’s publisher said:

W. H. Auden once wrote that “art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present—and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our “personal density.”

Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every thought—plus a sense that history offers no resources, only impediments to overcome or ignore. The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs’s answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know.

 . . .

By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer.

In his web article To survive our high-speed society, cultivate ‘temporal bandwidth’, Alan Jacobs writes with regard to bolstering “personal density” (as derived in Mondaugen’s Law, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow):

. . . benefit of reflecting on the past is awareness of the ways that actions in one moment reverberate into the future. You see that some decisions that seemed trivial when they were made proved immensely important, while others which seemed world-transforming quickly sank into insignificance. The “tenuous” self, sensitive only to the needs of This Instant, always believes – often incorrectly – that the present is infinitely consequential.

The title of this post is a reference to the 2006 movie The Lives of Others. The plot involves the 1984 monitoring of East Berlin residents by Stasi agents of the East German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler is told to conduct surveillance on playwright George Dreyman and his girlfriend, actress Christa-Maria Sieland. As Wiesler listens in from his attic post, he finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives. You’ll have to watch the movie to see if he is changed by listening to the lives and lines of others and becomes a “good man”.

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Of course, the lines of others must include classical music, a rich and diverse soundscape. The soundscape of Now is constant noise.

Fauré: Elegy (Benjamin Zander – Interpretation Class) – YouTube

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Reading for a More Tranquil Mind

Cherie Harder speaks with Alan Jacobs about the benefits of reading old books. Jacobs makes the compelling claim–using a phrase from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow–that spending our time and attention on writers from the past can increase our “personal density.”

Reading for a More Tranquil Mind

Episode 36 | Reading for a More Tranquil Mind | The Trinity Forum (ttf.org)

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What if we viewed reading as not just a personal hobby or a pleasurable indulgence but as a spiritual practice that deepens our faith?

Reading as a Spiritual Practice (youtube.com)

Episode 75 | Reading as a Spiritual Practice with Jessica Hooten Wilson | The Trinity Forum (ttf.org)

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Gary Saul Morson, a Dostoyevsky scholar, writes in a Plough article about Fyodor Dostoevsky and introduces a graphic novel adaptation of “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov.

Here is an excerpt:

In Dostoyevsky’s time, numerous schools of thought, ranging from English utilitarianism to Russian populism and socialism, maintained that they had discovered the indubitable solution to moral and social questions.

This way of thinking appalled Dostoyevsky. With his profound grasp of psychology, he regarded the materialists’ view of human nature as hopelessly simplistic. Deeply suspicious of what intellectuals would do if they ever gained the power they sought, he described in greater detail than any other nineteenth-century thinker what we have come to call totalitarianism. Even in its less terrifying forms, rule by supposedly benevolent experts was, he thought, more dangerous than people understood.

 . . .

For Dostoyevsky, the Christian view of life, which most intellectuals regarded as primitive, offered a far more sophisticated understanding than materialist alternatives. . .. he regarded it as a profound mistake to rely only on technological solutions to social problems, a perspective that, if anything, needs to be challenged all the more strongly today. Man does not live by iPhone alone.

For more on The Brothers Karamazov see Jacob Howland’s article in The New Criterion: A realist in the higher sense | The New Criterion

The Grand InquisitorDownload

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Screen Captured or The Negative Effects of Social Media

JON HAIDT  AND ZACH RAUSCH answer the question . . .

Why does it feel like everything has been going haywire since the early 2010s, and what role does digital technology play in causing this social and epistemic chaos?

 . . . with their article What we’ve learned about Gen Z’s mental health crisis (afterbabel.com) and the included research-based articles:

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic. Here’s the Evidence. By Jon Haidt

Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of them Work. By Jean Twenge 

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere. By Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt

Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest. By Jon Haidt

Why I am Increasingly Worried About Boys, Too. By Jon Haidt

Play Deprivation is a Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis. By Peter Gray

Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear for Gen Alpha. By Freya India, and see also Do You Know Where Your Kids Go Every Day? By Rikki Schlott.

The Case for Phone-Free Schools. By Jon Haidt

Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus. By Jon Haidt

A recommendation: NO smartphones for your children until at least 16 years of age. They can use a simple flip phone till then.

New book:

The Anxious Generation: HOW THE GREAT REWIRING OF CHILDHOOD IS CAUSING AN EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL ILLNESS by Jonathan HaidtHOW THE GREAT REWIRING OF CHILDHOOD IS CAUSING AN EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL ILLNESS

By Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness: Haidt, Jonathan: 9780593655030: Amazon.com: Books

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Filed under Literature Tagged with , , , , ,