I don't know how many readers have experienced this phenomenon but I find these days if I speak to anyone, even in watered-down tones, about the parlous state of the world, the country, the culture and the human soul, eyes roll and I'm told I'm talking nonsense. I have only one acquaintance in the real world who would go along with any of that. Most people simply cannot accept that the Western world in the 21st century stands on the edge of a precipice. Perhaps I just don't know the right people.
Cassandra, as I am sure you know, was a Trojan princess who was cursed by the god Apollo because she turned him down after he had given her the gift of prophecy in exchange for sexual favours. Her fate thereafter was that everything she prophesied would be true but no-one would believe her. This has echoes of Mark 6:4 when Jesus said that a prophet is not without honour except in his own country and among his own kin and in his own house. I am no prophet but the spiritual state of the world is so bad that anyone who has the slightest awareness of reality ought to be able to see it. The remarkable thing is most don't and I am tempted to say they won't either. They refuse to do so because they are too firmly ensconced in their own comfortable pseudo-reality. They will go along with the clearly biased and fictitious mainstream narrative as we saw in the events of 2020 and again more recently, and get quite angry if holes in this are presented to them. They will talk about science when it appears to back them up but utterly reject it when it does not.
Why is this? One reason is that most people are still cushioned by comfort and relative wealth. They don't want their boat to be rocked. As long as the trains run on time, so to speak, they will believe everything is fine not realising that when an electric fan is turned off the blades continue to revolve for a while but more and more slowly until they stop. The time to be concerned is when the current is cut not when the blades stop by which time it may be too late.
Then we live in a culture which has become heavily feminised and such a culture no longer has truth as a priority. It is replaced by a relativistic attitude in which there is no higher or lower but everybody has to be accepted on their own terms because we're all equal. That way we all get along, supposedly. In such a nursery world truth can seem hard and ugly, threatening even, and so you ignore it but truth is what is and what is cannot be denied. If you do you will only bring greater suffering on yourself in the long term. The Trojans ignored Cassandra when she warned them about the Horse left behind by the Greeks. They brought it inside their gates and its foreign occupants destroyed them, a parallel which should give us pause for thought today.
And then most people now have zero awareness of the spiritual reality of things. Religion has been destroyed in the UK, and the tried and tested traditional wisdom of the past has been sidelined for fashionable dogma. The takeover of the country's institutions, political, legal, educational, the media, by the forces of atheism and materialism is now complete. Some commentators speculate that these institutions have been the victims of deliberate sabotage as a result of Communist infiltration, and the process has been so insidious and so comprehensive that does to be seem the only reasonable explanation. However, even if this is what has happened we need to recognise that the agents carrying out the scheme in this world are the servants not the masters which doesn't make them any better, but we should know the ultimate source of the evil and that is supernatural.
How have they got away with this? One answer is suggested by Yeats in his prophetic poem The Second Coming when he sums up the situation in a couple of lines that have become well-known. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Evil hates good and that gives it its passionate intensity but most people's connection to the good is too feeble to make them fight for it, and this is doubly so when they have been indoctrinated to believe that fighting is morally wrong in itself because to fight is to hate. And so we are left with the strange situation in which actual hatred disguises itself as love and condemns supposed hatred, in reality love of the good, in order to delegitimise any opposition to itself.
But we have to fight for truth when it is under assault. Given the climate in which we currently live I should stress I mean fight with words and that even words must be chosen with care. Having said that, listen to what Jesus has to say in John 8:44 about the Pharisees of whom there are still a great many around today.
"You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies."
Isn't this hate speech, to use a modern term? Maybe, but it comes from the Apostle of Love which should make us think. The fact is there is evil. It has a spiritual source and it has to be recognised for what it is and fought with all our strength.
The Trojans refused to listen to Cassandra because she disturbed them. They would rather close their minds to truth than accept reality because reality challenged their comfortable illusions. Most prophets bring bad news - that, after all, is their function, to call an erring community back to God or the gods. But Cassandra was right and if the Trojans had listened to her they might have avoided their utter destruction.
12 comments:
It's a big problem. People seem to have zero interest in knowing what is true (or good) - only what is most expedient, and/or make them feel better.
The assumption is that solving a problem is a matter of making people feel better about things; and problems only exist insofar as they upset or offend people.
I have come to believe that there is nothing to be done about this - nothing positive at can be done by external influence. We cannot do good *to* people, not even for their own good.
Either people are motivated work out truth for themselves, or it won't happen.
Yes, I agree. We can only speak to those who already know but sometimes people don't know that they know and just need an external prompt to bring something of which they are aware but may not fully understand or be able to express into focus.
I have recently been reflecting on the way the diminishing interest in truth in our wider culture shows up within the organisation I am responsible for. There seems to be an increased capacity amongst groups of staff to continue doing things that are manifestly daft. Even when some can clearly see it, no one is willing or even thinks to say or do anything. The general capacity to carry on with absurd incongruence is extraordinary.
Just one of the accelerating changes over these last few years that make it increasingly challenging to keep the fan turning…
I know what you mean. Sometimes I wonder if, in situations similar to the one you describe, people are waiting for someone else to make the first move. There is definitely a certain fear abroad.
On the other hand, many people seem genuinely to believe the nonsense. This is probably part of a spiritual self-selection process because we must remember that this process is a main part of the purpose of life, especially at the present time. Choices are being made and part of the test is that to make the right choice you have to go against the culture.
Somewhat to repeat myself... I have noticed that this business of "feelings" is so socially-dominant as to force out almost any consideration practicalities - such as what is possible, and what will probably happen.
I first noticed this when working in the NHS bureaucracy about 30 years ago. A meeting to make a real-world decision would actually be "about" making everybody feel the same about a decision that had usually come-down from above in the hierarchy. So we would embark upon implementing "impossible" policies - that either could not or in-practice would not lead to the desired results - because the meeting led up to everybody feeling good about it. People would leave the meeting feeling that "something had been achieved" when all that had happened was that the people in the room felt OK about things.
When things went wrong, as they did, then further meetings would do the same.
Nothing was ever learned - the organization was like group-psychotherapy for managers.
The focus on feelings is, I'm afraid, directly related to the feminisation of the institutions as mentioned in the post. It is a product of that. It seems that any institution that admits women in any number and certainly to positions of power subordinates its core mission and function to what seems most friendly and fair, and I deliberately says seems not is. Truth is subordinated to feelings or even perceived feelings. This is because hierarchical conceptions of structure are replaced by a broadly egalitarian ethos in which truth takes second place to ostensible niceness.
I say "I'm afraid' because I know this comment will seem anti-woman and it is not meant like that at all. In fact, in my opinion it is pro-woman because it accepts that men and women have specific, complementary roles and if one trespasses in the area of the other disorder results. That is not a hard and fast rule but it is broadly correct.
Of course, this is completely at variance with contemporary dogma and ideology but that can't be helped.
Synchronicity is really real William!
Just before I went to your website, I had been watching a YouTube discussion between Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray: “ A Call for the Sane – Beauty, Truth & Purpose.” It’s long – 1 hour and 42 minutes) but I think well worth listening to. He discusses among other things, the current situation in the UK and @1.16.55 there is a discussion about Murray’s role as a Cassandra. This is because he is about to go on a speaking tour of America featuring footage he himself had taken in Israel while covering the situation there. His purpose is to try to show people just how ugly things can get if they remain in a delusional dream: “You may well be living in a most wonderful dream but if everyone else is not you better just hope you’re not just woken up one day.” (Your analogy of the fan reminded me of this.) He sees the tour as fulfilling a kind of Cassandra role and if anyone can do it this wonderfully articulate and truthful Brit can. However, I don’t think he expects to be any more successful than Cassandra was, but he will try.
I was surprised to hear that you only know one person “in the real world” who is on the same page as yourself. I know a handful and even then, I feel isolated, disconnected, and inadequate in my efforts to speak the truth.
Thanks for your comment, Isbe. I see that Douglas Murray is being criticised in some quarters as being in some way responsible for the recent disorder in the UK because he predicted it! Such is the upside-down world in which we live.
I live quite a reclusive life. Perhaps I should get out more.
Sounds so much like Atlantis.
Instead of waves from the ocean it looks like it will be waves of humanoids creating the total collapse.
Attempts were made to warn, yet to no avail.
The U.K. may one day be little more than a legend preserved on sad youtube archival footage with the comments turned off.
One aspect that is unclear about Atlantis is did they also give women such unearned privilege and social dominance?
Rome did and they soon thereafter imploded.
"The U.K. may one day be little more than a legend preserved on sad youtube archival footage with the comments turned off." That's tragic and funny at the same time.
But if it does turn out like that then it will just show that the English have become weak and useless because a strong culture and country would defend itself. If it won't or can't do that then it's not worth saving, however much it may have been good in the past. The spirit will have moved on as it did with so many other civilisations.
The irony of this 'business of feelings' is that it's not about adressing real, deep down felt issues, trauma, whatever else may be. In most cases it's more of a response to various types of conditioning and then donning the jacket of 'this happened/ was said, so i now i am expected to have such and such emotional state'. Which is of course something completely different than true feeling of any kind. I dont think we are 'too far towards the feminine side' of considering the world, but rather things appear as such. Most of the time it's just tavistock validating their newest tricks instead though. I am still on board with Iain Mcgilchrist's general notion that the integration of the 'two halves' is important, and generally we are fairly off balance so far leaning towards the (hyper) rational and logical and such. If humanity's stance was truly on the feminine side right now, it seems implausible it would still be mostly reductionist materialist. We might be conflating emotions with feelings and/ or have poor working definitions of these things in general.
The idea of integrating the two halves of the brain, rational/feeling, is alright as far as it goes but it is still largely a materialistic approach. True spiritual awareness and perception goes beyond both of these. They are complementary on their own level but the spiritual is on another level entirely.
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