HAVE you noticed how nothing is what it was any more? Perhaps not, as noticing things tends to radicalise people. Far safer are the mainstream memes of The News and its actors performing to entertain, stuffing your thinkhole with McNuggets of nonsense.
The News never reports on itself. It doesn’t report on much at all, preferring to tell you how you should feel about the Current Thing.
Here are some Current Things: Climate, Darfur, George Floyd, face masks, lockdowns, mRNA injections, Ukraine, Russia, BLM, statues, the Rainbow People, eating insects, putting on a jumper, racism, hate speech, the far Right.
The correct way to feel about these things is clearly signalled. In most cases, if you are not hysterical about The Current Thing, you are not a Good Person, and it is legitimate to hate you.
These Things are all memes. This means they are ideas transmitted with the intention of transmission. Easily reproduced, requiring no thought, simple labels for complicated issues which serve two obvious purposes – they relieve you of the awful tension produced by deciding for yourself what is right, and they fill you up with opinions.
They are junk food for the mind. This is what The News has become – a fast food-for-thought chain operating an international franchise.
So reporting and balance, enquiry and the comparison of opposing views has vanished into head snacks. This is not the only thing in life which has become something else entirely, whilst retaining the old brand name. This process of substitution has accelerated considerably in the past few years.
Food is not what it was. Much of what is sold as food isn’t, really. Food is stuffed with filler – corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, nasty seed oils, soya and other rubbish to add volume to obviously shrinking products.
‘Health advice’ is given by ministers who are either moribund or visible salad-dodgers. Low fat? High sugar. Fat is good for you, it’s where the vitamins are stored.
Safety has become safetyism, which translates to wearing a useless mask in an empty park and hissing at people who don’t. Safety is the enemy of liberty when it becomes an operating principle of prosecution.
The state reserves to itself the right to tell you what to do in your own home, outdoors, when you can go outdoors, and why you should take these injections.
Vaccines formerly were vaccines, which prevented sickness through stimulated immunity. These new ones aren’t, and they don’t. What they do appears to be to make you sicker, debilitate you and destroy your heart. You will also need to take one every six months, because that is how vaccines work now.
Duty – a sense of obligation, often to others – has recently been the proud denunciation of your neighbour’s third walk of the day, or perhaps their highly illegal barbecue. The capsizing of this former virtue into a Stasi-sympathiser’s satisfaction is appalling.
Buying instead of being, zooming instead of schooling, school instead of learning, indoctrination not investigation, credentials instead of competence.
We have transactions in place of relationships now, and the country has been groomed to accept all the foregoing by the aggressive corrosion of real-life society by what we know as progress.
It has left us isolated, paranoid and resentful, with epidemic levels of drug consumption, legal and otherwise. How many people are on anti-depressants? These pills substitute blankness for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
What is being cancelled in these substitutions is culture itself, which comes from real people talking about and doing real things with one another. The vitriol that comes with every Current Thing disfigures those who throw it, just as it marks out their targets as valid hate figures. It is hard to think of any major news item that has not been framed in such a manner.
The Roman philosopher Seneca said that people were miserly over their money, but spent their time as if it were endless. Something like this happens with mental hygiene.
If you wish to be well, you must make a friend of your mind. Drive out the money-changers from that little temple with a whip. It being Lent, it is apt to remind ourselves that all the ills above are generated by a completely normless and amoral system which is driving its own citizens insane.
How could things stray this far? Where have all the good things gone? Why is our world so fake, and why all the vices now virtues?
The greatest replacement of the fine with the flawed is the attempt to make of man a god. In this time, when we remember the sacrifice of the Lord for mankind, it is worthwhile to remember that every such attempt ends in failure. The Three Religions of Man – Communism, Fascism and Liberalism all end in barbarism. Such are the times.
If you do feel despair, then remember too that you should not have placed your faith in humanity in the first place. It does not belong there. Accept no substitute.
