My last post was surprisingly well received. It has more hits than the previous six or eight posts combined, and the number of subscribers doubled. Welcome, new subscribers! I suddenly feel a greater responsibility than I did. I hope you continue to find me worthy. A word of warning though, we touch on a lot of topics around here hardly anyone else is even thinking about, or consider too fringe to bother. Expanding consciousness is a lot of what this substack is about. I explain that in a little more detail in my introduction, if you haven’t read it.
It’s a good time to be expanding one’s consciousness, getting creative about thinking, about imagining the possibilities. Can you feel it? The quickening? Chris Hedges has been writing about the impending collapse of the ruling order for a decade and more, with a fury unmatched. He suddenly sounds a little cowed, now that he thinks it is actually here. Joel Smalley at Dead Man Talking is fairly certain the revolution is upon us. Charles Haywood is fairly certain democracy is broken and about to go exponential chaotic, and a new Caesar will rise. This guy is not too optimistic about the prospects of the mainstream. “Financial expert Catherine Austin Fitts and political satirist C.J. Hopkins explore the increasingly totalitarian shape of our brave, new, pathologized, globalized world” in this new video called, “We need to talk about Mr Global.” Amazon is censoring his latest book Rise of the New Normal Reich, in Europe.
The consensus on the midterms is the Dems will lose the House badly, but have a chance to retain the Senate, because the rationale goes, Republicans have chosen some bad candidates. I have the feeling the pollsters are underestimating Republican support, as they typically do. A lot of people these days are not going to be clear with pollsters, “Yes, absolutely I am going to vote Democrat!” Democrats losing the midterms is obviously not a sign of the four horsepersons of the apoclaypse, unless you are a Democrat in which case everything looks like the end of the world. Biden’s rhetoric lately, which is to say, the rhetoric of whoever is putting his speeches on the teleprompter, puts just about everyone not a Democrat party partisan just this side of a domestic terrorist. When you begin to see almost everybody as the enemy you are already lost.
Of course it is also possible the regime, as it can justify jabs that begin to look like they are designed to make you ill, in the name of protecting you, I imagine then the regime can justify gaming the election by whatever means necessary to get the result the regime wants, in the name of protecting you.
In fact I’m inclined to think any regime that begins to operate this way is very fragile. By the regime I mean elite Democrat and Republican politicians, prestige media, corporations generally, the banks, the military, the intelligence community, the drug cartel that is the pharmaceutical companies and their government handmaidens at the NIH, CDC and FDA, and woke social justice foot soldiers, otherwise known as empire America. The three most prominent of many signs the regime is faltering: the 171 million boosters the Biden Admin purchased, that will be distributed without human testing, the FDA just voted to authorize, while de facto deciding that new mRNA “vaccines” will not need human trial data anymore; the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that the regime has simply punted on explaining; and the military and intelligence community driving out most of their independent thinking, capable people, trying to force on them an experimental drug none of them need and and which appears to be doing more harm than good. The regime seems to believe it can do whatever it wants without accountability. That is not a sign of a resilient democracy. That is not the sign of a democracy.
It sometimes feels to the solitary individual that the regime is all powerful. This very sobering post from Elliot Freed is a reminder, whatever you think about the Great Reset or our increasingly woke institutions, the world is already a global slave state. Your money isn’t your money, your property isn’t really your property, the banks own the money and a few people own the banks, so really a very few people own everything. I have sometimes only half joked, why don’t we take the owners of the banks out to the Marianas Trench and make a deposit on a better future? Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates begin to look like little tools, of forces far greater and far more powerful, and far older.
I cross post Elliot not because he writes clearly about the banks, but because his mission is to bring people together in “therapeutic communities.”
The leviathan is more fragile than you think, because that is the way of the decline of civilizations, eventually civilization becomes too complex to sustain. The people who own the banks and everything else, and all those who think they rule the world now, have merely taken hubris to it’s most pathological extreme, thinking they are going to replace us all with machines. They have no idea how fragile they are, how weak they in fact are, because that is the nature of hubris, it blinds you to anything and everything but your perceived invincibility.
That is not to say it is all going to come crashing down around our heads tomorrow. It does mean that at any moment the people could get tired of being ruled by menacing imbeciles who are killing finally too many people with their idiot policies. That is where John Michael Greer thinks we are, with the Covid “vaccines”. Our elite have staked everything on it, they have staked their reputations, which is to say their rule, on these jabs; the jabs have been so very lucrative our elite have blinded themselves to the damage their policies and jabs have done. But the people, we Americans, are increasingly not blind to it. Only about 5% of parents having jabbed their babies is a sure sign Americans are coming to realize this is a scam, this is money grubbing, this is about trying to control us, this may be about doing harm. The more they double and triple (booster) down on this, the greater the divide between their self-importance and our lack of esteem and regard.
But their fragility is our fragility. Their anti-human medical policy is our ill-health. Their ill treatment of soil and water in food production is our sick dependence. Their bullshit jobs that are unproductive at anything other than transferring wealth from the productive to the unproductive, is our hollowed out economy. Their woke revolution is our lack of character. Their corporatization of everything is our passive consumerism. Their hyper financialization is our serfdom. Their 401k’s, pension funds, IRA/assorted long term investment vehicles and social security are our chains to a system that is tearing civilization apart, making a ruin of the biosphere and facilitating our more overt enslavement. Our lack of imagination about alternatives is their opportunity to take it all away and replace it with an even more centralized, command and control, total surveillance digital currency, social credit, assimilate or die State.
Whatever you think of Trump, he was right about one thing at least, that we need to rebuild America’s productive capacity. We need to be thinking about what resilience means, because this regime is not. What are the essentials? Food, water, shelter. What is resilient about any of that, here in America? You can’t drink the water in most places without extreme filtering, millions of us would starve to death if grocery stores were empty for three months, many of us would freeze to death in the winter without natural gas. Resilience is enduring strength in response to shocks to the system. How is my community resilient? How am I resilient? How is America resilient? What happens if most of the value of the stock market evaporates? What happens if fossil fuels are suddenly, drastically reduced in supply? Maybe the question is, what do we take for granted in America? Speaking of hubris, show me something we take for granted and I will show you how we are not resilient.
That seems to me the first step in getting clear about what a conservative counter revolution might look like. Put your house in order, like Jordan Peterson is fond of saying. Our house is a mess. It might be a challenge to know where to start. Of course we are not going to make society more resilient without first making ourselves resilient. It is the house that is you that has to be put in order first.
Millions of Americans are already doing that. They are tired of bullshit jobs, they are tired of a health care and food system designed to make us ill because it is profitable, they are tired of politics as usual that are becoming more overtly authoritarian, they are tired of being coerced into taking experimental drugs, or eating bugs, or denying biological sex, or accepting renewable delusions; they want more freedom, they want to be healthier, they want to be happier, they want to be more connected to others, they want to be more connected to the earth, they want to feel more clear about who they are and what they are doing in this life. They are taking a risk to find their own way, but risk is how we grow, that is how we learn, that is how we build character, that is how we rebuild America. There is an astounding amount of creativity in the collapse of a way that no longer serves. Creativity and resilience is a lot harder if you wait for the old way to fall apart first.
I told this young woman I would link her first album. This was the most enjoyable podcast I have heard in a long time. Alicen Grey aka When Humans Had Wings, just released her first album, Run Rabbit Run. I found her to be very clear headed, intelligent, articulate and inspiring. That and I found the songs to be complex, varied with intelligent lyrics, a very pleasing sound. She is genuinely talented. It is easy to be hard on young people, projecting the woke phenomenon on the entire generation. Ms Grey is a good reminder, there are plenty of young people who yearn to be creative and free. Ms Grey is like the opposite of woke.
This is a young couple I support. Their podcast is a rich source of very useful and most curious information, Isaac and A.C. know a lot of very eccentric and knowledgeable people: herbalists, fungiphiles, master fermenters, master wood and metal workers, alchemists, folk magicians and healers. They are building their homestead, they have an antique orchard, they are growing a lot of food, they are making plant medicine.
Obviously I am a “fringe” sort of character, attracted to creative people doing fascinating things mixing old ways with the new. That is not the whole of what I mean by a conservative counter revolution, but part of it. These young people might not be conservative in any modern, Republican party sense, and they surely wouldn’t describe themselves as such, but they are conserving old ways of being, old ways of thinking, making their way creatively in the modern world. Good models, I think.
I will say too, I see these young people and many of the people they know as a good deal more resilient than a lot of our fellow Americans who think this regime is eternal. The fall of the regime would be welcome to them in many ways, they would probably thrive. I suspect the regime falling would be welcome and a renewal for a lot of America. Difficult, challenging, dangerous, but a potential renewal.
Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading.
Fragility and Resilience
We're in strange times. We know collapse is coming but we don't yet know how it will manifest.
I don't mind admitting that the prospect of economic collapse terrifies me. I have read enough accounts of the collapse of the USSR (and i did voluntary work there not long after the wall came down) and other places to know that I don't want to go through it.
And yet the Empire needs to fall.
Thank you for the shout-out! I enjoyed your post "On Magic" and went to check out The Octagon Society. Synchronistically, I had been considering taking up a journaling practice, but hesitated for no discernable reason. But reading through O.S.A.'s use of journaling as an alchemical tool, inspired me to start. I already had great results from the journaling I did last night! Thanks for sharing your magick :)