The full answer is on the National Socialism page. Here is the short answer:
National Socialism is the opposite of international finance capitalism, i.e. the opposite of globalization. Under National Socialism, engineers would not lose their jobs to outsourcing, and great industrial cities would not be disintegrating and turning back to farmland. The economy would be based on industry and education, not on finance, insurance, real estate, casinos, and prisons. Students would not have to go into debt to get an education. There would be no dumbing-down policy in the schools or anywhere else. Under National Socialism, there would be no such thing as multiculturalism, or political correctness, or affirmative action. There would be no TSA lines, because the Zionists would not be running things. Schools would not teach kids to listen to hip-hop. First world countries would not turn themselves into third world countries. Just the opposite: National Socialism represents the gentrification of the world. Strength through Joy is the heart of it.
When I started working on the National Socialism page, a decade ago, I thought the subject was "Nazism". Since then I have gradually come to understand that what we call "Nazism" is a postwar creation. Hitler did not use that word. If you went to the 1936 Olympics and asked people about "Nazism," they would not know what you were talking about.
In his famous Third Wave story, Ron Jones says there was a rally that brought the Third Wave to a conclusion. He is lying about what happened, but let that go for the moment. According to him, he assembled the students who had been in the Third Wave, plus others who had heard about it, and told them there was no Leader, as they had been led to expect. While they sit there in shock and guilt, he continues:
With that I switched on a rear screen projector. It quickly illuminated a white drop cloth hanging behind the television. Large numbers appeared in a countdown. The roar of the Nuremberg Rally blasted into vision. My heart was pounding. In ghostly images the history of the Third Reich paraded into the room. The discipline. The march of super race. The big lie. Arrogance, violence, terror. People being pushed into vans. The visual stench of death camps. Faces without eyes. The trials. The plea of ignorance. I was only doing my job. My job. As abruptly as it started the film froze to a halt on a single written frame. "Everyone must accept the blame. No one can claim that they didn't in some way take part."
This is not National Socialism, which was described by Leon Degrelle. It is Nazism, which is a Jewish invention. Ron Jones's ghostly images depict the story we live in - the lies and accusations that frame our lives. It's a story. It's a story that casts a spell on us and makes it impossible to see what happened in the Reich, and what is happening now.
"Everyone must accept the blame," he says. Exactly. That is the point of the "Nazism" story. We always stand accused. We are always in the wrong. No matter how outrageous the behavior of Israel, the neocons, the Zionist TSA, or anyone else, we have no moral standing to criticize. We are guilty, eternally. All of us, all the time, no matter what. "No one can claim that they didn't in some way take part."
Does this work both ways? Does it mean all Jews must accept the blame for what Israel does, and for what Goldman Sachs does, and for what the NKVD did in Russia, and for what the current German government did to Ernst Zundel? No, of course not. It never works both ways. There is always a double standard. The same moral framework never applies to both us and them. We are always guilty, even though Ron Jones is the one who is lying.
In the "Nazism" story, there was no such thing as Strength Through Joy. There was no reform of the financial system. There was no sense of a burden being lifted when millions of jobless people found work and meaning. There was no aspiration to create a whole new civilization. According to the Jewish storytellers, nothing like that happened. In their story, it's all about the march of the super race, the big lie, death camps, and guilt.
Especially guilt.
The "Nazism" story tells us nothing about the Reich as most Germans experienced it. At the time, the Germans lived in a bright, sunlit world, not a gray world of ghostly images. They thought the Third Reich was about moral regeneration. They were proud to take part in it. The idea that they (or we) should feel guilty about it would be weird and incomprehensible to them. Feeling guilty about being part of the Reich is like feeling guilty about not smoking. Strength Through Joy is not something one feels guilty about.
In case anybody is not getting it, let me spell it out: I am AGAINST Nazism. I would like to live in the world described at the top of the page (see the National Socialism page for details). The purpose of the "Nazism" myth is to make sure that world cannot exist.
Capitalism worked in the 1950s and 60s. It could be made to work again. What Hitler called "socialism" could just as well be called populist capitalism, or participatory capitalism, or national (as opposed to international) capitalism, or productive (as opposed to financial) capitalism. Since "capitalism" was a dirty word in Germany in those days, he called his system "socialism," but that is a misnomer.
Sometimes the economy works and sometimes it does not. We need to look at examples of when it worked and when it didn't, and figure out why it works, or not. The Reich was one of those times when it worked very well. How did that happen? Could it happen again?
I am not going to give up and accept the dystopian world I live in now. Something better is possible. How to get there is a nontrivial problem, but it can be done. The first essential step is to stop lying about what happened in the Reich. Just stop lying, period. Stop lying about everything. Stop pretending that what is, isn't. Whatever we do has to be grounded in factual history.
The problem National Socialism addresses is described briefly here, in an article by Adrian Salbuchi. He describes how the Argentine economy went from bad to worse under the direction of the IMF and CFR bankers. The point is, this is happening in many places, not just Argentina. The same thing is happening in Europe right now. No country is safe from this, including the United States. He says
Argentina’s economy all but collapsed; people took to the streets banging pots and pans, screaming and yelling, calling all bankers ‘thieves, criminals, crooks, swindlers and robbers’ but... the big mega-bank bronze gates all remained tightly shut. No one got their money back.
All they can think of is banging pots and pans and screaming, like little kids throwing a tantrum. This has no effect. The banks win.
Most people have narrow horizons. They are not even aware of the IMF and the financial system in general, until it is too late. They are like dogs crossing the street, oblivious to the traffic lights and crosswalks that allow humans to cross safely. When they get run over, they don't know what happened or why. I only have so much sympathy for people who live like animals, oblivious to their surroundings. When the economy is wrecked, and their lives are wrecked along with it, they don't know what hit them.
Hitler thought that if people can't figure things out for themselves, that does not mean you should abandon them to their fate, it means you should lead them. They are like children, caught up in events beyond their control. If they don't know how to cross the street, show them.
Hitler organized the working people in Germany. They did not bang pots and pans. Hitler organized them into a party, and they took over the country and created a new society, similar to what I described at the top of the page. Hitler was, first of all, a German nationalist. The idea was to make Germany a strong, independent, unified nation. He wanted Germany to have an economy independent of the international financial system. He was also a populist: he wanted the social classes to all be on the same team, instead of having class warfare. The NSDAP was a working class party, but Hitler also addressed audiences of businessmen. The one percent were not the enemy. He called on them to do their part to build a new Germany, and they did.
The NSDAP was a nationalist party. It was also socialist, sort of, but nationalism was what held it together and motivated young men to fight for it. Nationalism does not inspire people now like it did then. Nationalism is dead, except maybe in a few places like Russia. In Europe, the EU has diluted national consciousness, but not replaced it with anything else. Nobody ever thought of Europe as "my country." Now the Eurozone itself is fragmenting. In America, various states are talking about secession. The federal government is losing its legitimacy, even in its own eyes: the word "patriot" is considered subversive. Anyone who identifies himself as a "patriot" is a suspected terrorist. Even FBI agents don't care about America anymore. When it comes down to America or Israel, they choose Israel. When you try to tell them that there is something wrong with betraying their country, that idea does not compute. In their minds, there is no such concept as treason anymore.
There is no national consciousness. No one cares about making America an independent, unified country. The cultural context for National Socialism is not there.
There may be a resurgence of nationalism in Europe. It is acrimonious nationalism. It is not useful. I can imagine a situation where nationalist governments appear in Europe, similar to Franco's Spain, or the Greek junta of the early 1970s, or the populist governments that have existed from time to time in Argentina and other Latin American countries. This is irrelevant. Nationalist, populist, right-wing governments may resemble the Reich superficially, but they miss the essence of it. They are not a step in the direction of National Socialism. They are not a threat to the IMF and the international banking system. Nothing is a threat to the system, except its own internal instability.
In a football game, the players don't just wander onto the field. They get themselves pumped up first, and run onto the field. The cheerleaders are not just there for eye candy. You can't win games without emotion. What Hitler did, basically, was to get everybody pumped up. The Germans were excited about building a new Germany. Click on that link for details. The spirit was still there after the war:
A general strike was called by the newly established union to prevent the removal of a large 10,000 ton forging press. This was the biggest press in the world and it could have brought us economic advantages. I would also like to add that the union leader still thought as a German. This matter concerned the preservation of remaining jobs and the preservation of our people. This rally also found representatives of the Ruhr business in attendance. After the many fighting speeches had been made by the union side, a businessman asked to speak. He declared: “Let them take the old thing. We used it to make our entire war production. We shall build new ones that are bigger and better!” At one stroke came the determined decision: “Yes, yes, yes!” was the answer. He had said the magic words. The old spirit of the folk-community was still alive and discoverable!
This was the essence of National Socialism. It was the esprit de corps that made the Reich unique. If you put everybody to work, and they don't just go through the motions but enthusiastically throw themselves into it, then the economy will be so productive that you can do just about anything. Without that, economic reforms are useless. Almost all countries today are getting deeper and deeper in debt, because they cannot collect enough taxes to pay for everything that needs to be done. That problem did not exist in the Third Reich.
If you go back and read the Third Wave story, it is precisely the esprit de corps that we are supposed to feel guilty about. The students in the Wave were enthusiastic about it. That is what left them open to the accusation: Everyone must accept the blame. No one can claim that they didn't in some way take part.
I have a sense of unreality as I write this. Who am I to be talking about esprit de corps? I am the last person who would go to a rally of any kind, let alone a nationalist rally or a socialist rally. I can understand throwing myself into my work, but not as a nation-building project. I don't get pumped up and run onto the field. I don't get excited about building a new forging press. I don't have any team spirit about such things. I wish I could. I would love to be in a situation where I could get excited about building something. But in America, in the 21st century, there is nothing to believe in. Nothing can be taken seriously.
I mean nothing can be taken seriously on a social or political level. My life makes sense, but I have no context for what I am doing. I am very tired of living in a vacuum, but that is the way it is.
I started rewriting this page in late September, 2011. By Christmas I thought it was finished. In early January, I erased the whole bottom half of the page, and now I am having second thoughts about this part. In the past month I have been going through an intense struggle within myself. This part of the page has been rewritten many times. I go back and forth between optimism and pessimism.
If I am going to be pessimistic, then there is no point to this discussion. There is no need to discuss National Socialism at all, if I am just going to say that we are all doomed so forget it. I might as well take a deep breath and try to find some way to get leverage on the situation, so we are not doomed. I don't want to conclude that the world described at the top of the page is forever out of reach, and Strength through Joy is gone forever.
The situation in Europe is coming to a head. It is a revolutionary moment, not only in Greece. Here is a report from Italy:
This week saw the launch of a popular uprising in Sicily, by a group known as the ‘Movimento dei Forconi’ or ‘Pitchfork Movement’. This is not an uprising of self absorbed youth who want more government handouts; but of producers who are being pushed into poverty by government taxes and regulation. The organizers are middle aged and older; this is significant, as most power and wealth is held by this generation and they have now drawn a line in the sand.
On the 16th of January these protesters began "Operazione Vespri Siciliani", a blockade of the Island of Sicily. Within two days the transportation of all goods was stopped. Over the next week, nothing entered or exited Sicily.
These are some of their demands:
- The arrest of all corrupt politicians.
- To reduce the number of parliamentarians
- To remove the provincial bureaucracy, as most of these politicians have been there for over forty years.
- To drastically cut the salaries and privileges of parliamentarians and senators
- To restrict politicians two only two terms in office
They are not demanding National Socialism; nor should they. One of the fatal flaws of the Reich was that Hitler did not address the problem of an entrenched, corrupt political class, which is what the Italians are protesting. But the point is, they are aroused, and they are not the only ones. In a matter of months, if not weeks, the upheaval is going to spread all over Europe. Other people with other grievances will be making other demands. All that revolutionary energy can be channeled in a constructive direction, or not. If everybody is acting on a false premise, the result is guaranteed to be a fiasco. Some people want to make sure everybody acts on a false premise. The lies about the Reich are there for a reason.
They want the enraged populace to charge at the matador's flag, not the matador.
With millions of unemployed people in Europe, particularly young people - the unemployment figure for youth has passed 50% in Spain - it is an unstable situation. At Davos, they are at least talking about it, and trying to figure out what to do:
As Spain's unemployment figure rose above 5 million last week, the new government of Mariano Rajoy called on Brussels to ease the country's deficit targets. Its 51.4% youth unemployment level means that for the first time in a modern European country the majority of young people are out of work. In Greece the figure is 46.6% and in Portugal it is 30.7%.
In November youth unemployment in Britain passed 1 million for the first time in 15 years, equivalent to 22% of those aged 16 to 24.
On Saturday chancellor George Osborne and Labour leader Ed Miliband joined the leaders of the World Bank and the IMF in urging action to create jobs amid warnings that youth unemployment was a timebomb under the global economy.
When they say "action to create jobs," that is empty talk. There is no way to create jobs in the present economic system. This is not just a temporary problem. The debt-based economy has reached a point where more debt does not generate more GDP - not that GDP is the right thing to look at anyway.
I am going to shut up about this until I think it through. I need to finish my sketch of National Socialism, and make it a program instead of a history lesson. But I am not sure how to do that. I don't know how to create jobs, either. Actually I do, theoretically, if you could get everybody on board, but good luck with that. The economy cannot be fixed without changing everything else at the same time. When I think about all the things that would have to be done, it's just a bridge too far.
As the Spirit said to Johann Suter in The Kaiser of California,
Why do you keep trying to fight the gold?
You can't stop the wheels of the world.
It seems to be impossible for me to arrive at an optimistic conclusion. Leaving aside my personal feelings, which are mixed to say the least, the main point I want to make here is that this is what National Socialism is about. Trying to stop the wheels of the world. Trying to fix the economy so young people have a future. Contrary to what they keep telling us, it is not about "white power" or "Nazism." It is about creating the world described at the top of the page.
I don't know if there are any young people who are interested in this. If so, the ball is in their court.
In the next section of the page, just below here, I am going to be talking about something I really do care about, with no reservations.
What matters is not the Reich itself but the fact that they are lying about it. Those lies have consequences.
The fact that they are lying about history is important, even apart from tangible consequences. If you don't understand that, then you are wasting your time here.
Nevertheless the lies do have consequences, so let's move on to that.
The Nazism myth is the main thing they use to control us. It is the Big Lie which makes us all guilty. Our guilt for Nazism - remember, Everyone must accept the blame. No one can claim that they didn't in some way take part - means we can never defend ourselves. The Nazism myth is reinforced by other myths, the most prominent being 9/11.
Most people don't care about this, just like they don't care about the IMF, or any of the hidden forces that govern their lives. They don't think in terms of cause and effect. It is almost impossible to get their attention.
However, they do care about TSA, since it impacts their lives in a very intrusive, personal, tangible way. A hand reaching into their underwear gets their attention, if nothing else does. That hand is there because of the 9/11 myth and the Nazism myth - yes, both of them.
Robin Hordon is a former FAA Air Traffic Controller at the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center. He says:
I knew within hours of the attacks on 9/11/2001 that it was an inside job. Based on my 11-year experience as an FAA Air Traffic Controller in the busy Northeast corridor, including hundreds of hours of training, briefings, air refuelings, low altitude bombing drills, being part of huge military exercises, daily military training exercises, interacting on a routine basis directly with NORAD radar personnel, and based on my own direct experience dealing with in-flight emergency situations, including two instances of hijacked commercial airliners,
I state unequivocally: There is absolutely no way that four large commercial airliners could have flown around off course for 30 to 60 minutes on 9/11 without being intercepted and shot completely out of the sky by our jet fighters unless very highly placed people in our government and our military wanted it to happen.
Why does this matter? Two reasons (among others):
TSA exists because Americans let it exist. It is based on an illusion. There are, supposedly, terrorists everywhere, trying to attack us, trying to blow up planes, and so forth, therefore Americans are willing to submit to x-rays and groping. The belief that there are terrorists everywhere comes from more than one source, but 9/11 is the linchpin.
I can remember (barely) a time when there were supposed to be Communists everywhere. In the Wilson administration, there were supposed to be anarchists everywhere, and civil liberties were abandoned, but not quite as much as they are now - you didn't have to let somebody touch your children and stick their hands into your underwear to use public transportation. Governments have been creating bogeymen for a long time.
The 9/11 myth is something that can be falsified and discredited, and then the whole house of cards comes down.
Michael Chertoff, an Israeli, former head of Homeland Security, says that 9/11 truth is in the same category as Holocaust Denial. He is right, they are in the same category, but it was a collosal blunder for him to say that in public. Now, when one lie goes, the other goes. The 9/11 lie and the genocide lie come from the same source and serve the same interests. They stand and fall together.
Mr. Chertoff said that in this YouTube video. If you want to know why TSA exists, and what is really going on in this country, you have to listen to this Israeli. He knows. He is telling us. He thinks there is nothing we can do about it.
The 9/11 lie is on its last legs - which means the genocide lie is also on its last legs.
Next time you go through a TSA line, remember why it's happening. As long as Zionists control the US government and the "mainstream" media, TSA will continue to exist and get worse. You can do something about it... but only if you think strategically.
When you think in terms of cause and effect, you can see how to get leverage on the situation and make it change. TSA is supported by a belief system. You have to attack the belief system, not TSA itself. The way to get rid of TSA is to show that that belief system is based on an illusion. This has to be demonstrated in such a way that everybody sees it, not just people who are willing to listen to Robin Hordon and others like him.
Do you follow my logic here?
You have to see how the system fits together, and how the parts support each other, and then you can find the weakest point. TSA depends on Zionist power, and Zionist power depends on the genocide lie. The strategy is to pop the 9/11 illusion, and that will bring the genocide illusion down with it.
This is where the Untouchables come in.
The word untouchable can be taken in two ways. It can have the obvious meaning - Don't touch me! So, on one level, the Untouchables are Americans who will not put up with being touched by TSA. It's not going to stop until we make it stop. We are not just griping about it, we are doing something about it.
The word also has another meaning: it refers to the original Untouchables led by Eliot Ness. They were an elite group who decided that they would stand up to the corruption around them. They could not be "touched," i.e. corrupted by bribes or threats. What we have to do now is apply that idea in a situation where the stakes are infinitely higher.
The Untouchables project has two parts. First, we wear "Untouchable" shirts. The shirts will be like a flag for us, a rallying point, a way to express ourselves in public, a way to recognize and connect with each other. Sooner or later somebody will get arrested for wearing one of these shirts - maybe a whole group will get arrested at an airport - and then everybody will hear about it. It will be in the news. The Untouchables will be the topic du jour. This leads to the next step, which is to connect with the other half of the Untouchables project, the part that nails it down.
The Untouchables are a group of men and women in uniform, men and women who wear badges, journalists, and others, whose mission is to find at least one individual who was involved in 9/11, or involved in covering it up, and persuade that individual to come forward and confess in public in a way that cannot be ignored.
This will be an Emperor's New Clothes moment.
It will be an even bigger shock than the 9/11 event itself.
This website - at least what I have written so far - does not reflect who I am. It is misleading to put National Socialism at the top of my home page. Politics is not and never has been my main interest. A few years ago I wrote a page called Why I am not a Nazi. It is somewhat out of date now, but still mostly valid. My first reason for not being a Nazi is: I don't define myself in political terms at all. Politics usually divides up in such a way that I am not on either side. This applies to extreme parties as well as Republicans and Democrats.
The Untouchables project is neither left nor right. It is not "political" in that sense. It is just patriotic.
The only bumper sticker I ever had was one that said "DARE to think for yourself."
There are piles of books all over my living room. A few examples:
This is a representative sample. Note what is missing. There is nothing here that would be of interest to a political activist or pundit. The most important thing I have read recently is
an article by Rich Hickey about identity and state in Clojure. This is the world I normally live in. The website should reflect that.
The math page, the nanotech pages, the cellular transformation page, and the Singularity page are the ones I care about. They all need a lot of work. The math page is the only one I have worked on recently. The others have been neglected for years. If I put politics aside, I would have time to finish them. Eventually I want to restore geniebusters to its original subject. The Untouchables project will have a website of its own. The discussion of National Socialism may still be on this site, but not on the home page. I am very tired of this subject. I want to get back to my real work. But, as I said below, you may ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.
Over the years I have spent more time with Robert Alter, Vladimir Arnold, Aryeh Kaplan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Searle, W.V. Quine, Sigmund Freud, and other Jewish authors, than with Hitler. I am the last person who would want to get rid of "Jewish physics." When I was a student I went to the library and read back issues of Commentary all the way back to the 1940s. I know Atlas Shrugged a lot better than Mein Kampf. I don't take Ayn Rand too seriously anymore, but John Galt is still a role model in a way that nobody in the SS could ever be (not to mention Arkham House).
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Robert Alter and his extended family want to lock me up for saying that a non-gas chamber is a non-gas chamber. The Big Lie just goes on and on. There is no getting away from it. They keep rubbing it in our faces. That is why my home page begins as it does. As we approach the Singularity, not too many things matter, but this matters.
In the late 1990s, I became aware that the "thought police" are not a unitary phenomenon. There are two kinds of thought police. First you have the narcs, who have their roots in the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire. But you also have another kind of thought police, the Orwellian kind. George Orwell said "The right to say that 2 + 2 = 4 is fundamental. Given that, everything else follows." In Germany and several other countries, it is illegal to say that a non-gas-chamber is a non-gas-chamber, even though it is as obvious as 2 + 2.
Our thoughts are controlled on many levels. My growing awareness of this has complicated my life tremendously.
Everyone must accept the blame. No one can claim that they didn't in some way take part.
This applies to them, not to us. We are not guilty.
They are guilty.
There is no such thing as a right to lie. There is no such thing as a right to make false accusations. Still less is there a right to lock people up for pointing out that a lie is a lie.
They can accuse us, but we cannot accuse them. They can tell us that we don't have a right to speak, but we cannot tell them that they don't have a right to speak. Not yet. This situation has already started to change, and it will continue to change. It is reversing.
What they are doing is self-defeating. They are cutting the ground out from under their own feet. As they continue to weaken themselves, the time is coming when they will not have the power to lie, or at least they will not be able to lie and make it stick. They will no longer have the power to impose their lies on everybody.
They are going from Leviticus 26:3-13 to Leviticus 26:14-39; from Deuteronomy 28:1-14 to Deuteronomy 28:15-68.
From
And five of you will pursue a hundred, and a hundred of you will pursue ten thousand, and your enemies will fall before you by the sword.
to
And those left among you, I will bring faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies, and the sound of a driven leaf shall pursue them, and they shall flee as in flight from the sword and fall, with none pursuing. And each man shall stumble against his brother as before the sword, with none pursuing, and there shall be no standing up for you in the face of your enemies. And you shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall consume you.
There is nothing they can do about this, except to stop lying.
Meanwhile we are going in the opposite direction, from weakness to strength. As we go through to the other side, we are going to leave the Thought Police behind. This is part of what it means to go through to the other side. This is part of the Singularity.
In the 1980s, some idiot introduced a bill into the California State Legislature, which would have made it illegal to do anything that would change anyone's consciousness. This was intended to apply to hypnosis. Somebody pointed out that the law would make it illegal to draw, to listen to music, and to make love, all of which may lead to profound changes of consciousness (not to mention getting drunk, which is one of the favorite activities of legislators). The legislature let the matter drop, and didn't pass the bill into law, fortunately. But I think a lot of people agree with the intent of the bill. If pot is illegal, why not hypnosis?
Some people take this very seriously. One time a so-called "friend" stopped speaking to me, permanently, because I told him about my deja-vu experiences. He is Objectivist, and to him, deja-vu is "mysticism." Well, I take it seriously too, from the other side. I intend to win.
On the original 915 page, I spoke of the "American agenda," i.e. the attempt to create a drug-free society and an integrated society, but the war on consciousness is not specifically American. About 500 BC, Pythagoreanism was a religion, or "cult" if you will, that had hundreds of adherents. Many of them moved to southern Italy. They had meeting places similar to churches. The locals attacked them, locked them into their churches, and set them on fire. They burned them alive. That was the end of Pythagoreanism as an organized movement.
There is an ongoing war between philistines and people who want to go into trance states. It has continued down the centuries, taking different forms in different cultures. In an issue of Yoga Journal, I found an item about yoga in Poland:
Although capitalism has made it possible for yoga schools to open, yoga has earned its infamous place on the official list of sects published by the Polish Church. Though not prohibited, the smaller the town, the more clandestine yoga becomes. I practice in Warsaw where we rent the sports hall from a local school in the afternoon. Children who play on the field outside often taunt us and bang on our windows, sometimes joined by inebriated adults.
At least they didn't set fire to the building. (Not yet.)
When I say I am building a gateway through the Singularity, part of what I mean is that I want to create a protected space that can defend itself against such attacks - and not just defend itself, but reverse the situation. What has been "outside" will be "inside".
The editor of Counter Currents, a New Right website, asked me if it would be all right to publish "Ministry of Illusion," and I said yes. It appeared here. I also participated in other threads on that site, about art, 9/11 and Islam, and Judaism (and a few others). If you are interested in my National Socialism page, and you would like to have a forum in which you can discuss this sort of thing, Counter Currents is a good place. However there is no guarantee that I will continue to participate. I lost interest after September 11 and have not been back since then.
The postwar "Right" - starting with Savitri Devi and continuing through Charles Manson, George Lincoln Rockwell, Tom Metzger, etc. and on to Harold Arthur McNeill in the present - is the Shadow of the Third Reich. The postwar "Right" is as far as you can get from the sunny world the Germans actually lived in, the world that comes through so clearly in the movies. It's a long, long way from Wünschkoncert and Strength through Joy to The Order of White Monks and their Haunted House. However, I found some kindred spirits on Counter Currents, and I don't find too many of those anywhere else.
The Reich was not 100% sunny. The Shadow there all along. As I said on my National Socialism page, the "Nazism" story is a monstrous lie, but... the Germans left themselves open to it. They deserve some of the bad press they get. There is something sinister about the black white and red Swastika flag. The 1920s were a creepy time, in Germany and elsewhere. Hitler tried to climb out of that creepiness, into the light. He didn't quite make it. His intention was not focused. He did not aim high enough. Like other things Hitler tried to do, this task remains unfinished in our time. The creepiness is still here and we are getting deeper into it.
In one sense, Hitler did aim high enough. He did address the "human material" problem, the problem everybody else ignores. Whether you have a free market economy, a dirigistic economy, or anything else, the question remains: where do you find enough honest people to make it work?
When communism was collapsing, and people were talking about establishing democracy in Russia, somebody wrote an article in which he posed the question: How can you have democracy in Russia - where is the human material for it? In other words, how can you have democracy in a country of thugs and crooks? You can't.
The same thing applies to Germany, the United States, and everywhere else. How can you have a government that acts in the public interest, in a country where there is a complete lack of public spirit among the people?
"Neither the wisest Constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt." - Samuel Adams
Degrelle said:
Hitler knew that the task he had set himself would be immense and difficult to accomplish, that he would have to transform Germany in practically every respect: the structure of the state, social law, the constitution of society, the economy, civic spirit, culture, the very nature of men's thinking.
We have to do the same thing in our time. This is where John Wesley comes in. More about him below.
I read two articles about Greece today (9/26/11), one referring to the other. The first was an article in the Daily Bell, Are the Tribes of Europe Ready to Explode? It is an interpretation of the original article by Paul Mason in the Telegraph:
Dmitris Andreou made the last sale out of his small estate agents business in June. His wife Mary, makes her living preparing high-school students for English exams. But her living has dried up. Their savings are exhausted, their disposable income has dropped by about 50 per cent in two years, and they are angry.
"Some days we only buy the basics and a few days lately we were not able to buy even those. We have to count our cents to decide between buying bread, milk or butter," says Mary. "Some days are better, but some are difficult. We don't buy clothes any more. People don't go out. There is simply no money around out there."
In their neat apartment in an Athens suburb, surrounded by family heirlooms and lace tablecloths, they are a world apart from the anarchist demonstrators who snatch the headlines whenever opposition to the EU-imposed austerity measures is discussed. But what's happening in living rooms like theirs presents the bigger danger to the future of Greece. People are switching off: from politics, from the mass media, from social life.
For the Andreous, it is hard to see how things get better in the short-term. They face four more years of austerity, their savings are gone, and the chances of a university education for their daughters Phaedra, 16, and Ira, 12, are evaporating. Right now though, they have more pressing problems. At the two girls' secondary school, the autumn term has started without textbooks. The pupils have been handed CDs instead. "It feels like we're in a post-war situation," says Mary. "There's no optimism; we don't know what happens next. We just try to survive."
Over the past six months I've stood in the middle of Athenian crowds so furious that they will withstand tear gas and endure near-lethal stampedes to make their point. What's been obvious, each time, is the ordinariness of the people involved – bank clerks, interior designers, even a concert pianist once, their faces painted with alkaline liquid against the sting of the gas.
But it is this seething anger of those who have never been on a demo that is really frightening - because we have no model for what happens if the middle class of a developed country simply switches off from politics and gives up hope.
Not since the 1930s, anyway.
Paul Mason intends his closing statement to be alarming, but it can also be taken in the opposite way: here is a chance to make a fresh start. In 1933, Germany was as destitute as Greece. A few years later, Germany was the most dynamic country in the world. If you have not already read the National Socialism page, you can click here for the story of how it happened.
Countries can climb out of the hole. It has been done.
The encouraging thing about the situation in Greece is that ordinary people are waking up to what is happening. "We can't watch the television news any more," says Dmitris, shaking his head. "If you watch it, with the constant uncertainty, it can make your psychology very low. It's like a nightmare we can't wake up from. Perhaps it's fortunate that we've had to cancel our cable TV subscription. I don't trust the media any more: I get all my news from the internet."
Turning off the TV is the first step. Good for them. But that is not the whole story. Let's look at how Greece got into this mess. Here is John Mauldin quoting Michael Lewis:
The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement.
‘If the law was enforced,’ the tax collector said, ‘every doctor in Greece would be in jail.’ I laughed, and he gave me a stare. ‘I am completely serious.’ One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. ‘The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,’ he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe.
The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. Individual Greeks are delightful: funny, warm, smart, and good company. I left two dozen interviews saying to myself, ‘What great people!’ They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion.
Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing. Lacking faith in one another, they fall back on themselves and their families.
The structure of the Greek economy is collectivist, but the country, in spirit, is the opposite of a collective. Its real structure is every man for himself. Into this system investors had poured hundreds of billions of dollars. And the credit boom had pushed the country over the edge, into total moral collapse.
This is the opposite of the esprit de corps of the Third Reich, which still exists in Germany, to some extent, even now.
Other countries have been a lot deeper in the hole than Greece. In the long view of history, destitution is the norm. This is from England Before And After Wesley by J.W. Bready:
Demographic statistics for early-to-mid eighteenth-century Britain are available only for the City of London, yet the picture which they generate is typical of the industrial-era cities.
Three-quarters of all children died before age five. While irreversible disease accounted for a large percentage of the fatalities, the most callous neglect, not to say wilful cruelty, accounted for the rest. Among the poorest people, and amidst the human impoverishment which accompanies material deprivation, the child mortality rate was almost one hundred percent. Mr. Hanway, a governor of the Foundling Hospital (established in 1739, one year after Wesley's conversion) commented on this aspect of English social life. "The pagan Chinese may legally drown female children; but an English Churchwarden, or 'Father of the Poor' . . . may suffer children to be starved to death or poisoned with noxious air." Scores of thousands of children were entrusted to nurses who pocketed the paltry sum given them for "caring", permitting starvation to overtake the child who was too expensive to feed. And since remains were too expensive to inter, infant corpses were routinely thrown onto manure piles. At birth the very poorest children were commonly abandoned in the street to perish. Frequently destitute parents blinded, maimed or deformed their child in hope of teasing out a few more pennies when the child was sent forth to beg. "Saddling the spit" was the highlight of parish entertainment; parish officers commandeered the monies paid to the parish to care for resourceless children and treated themselves to a large-scale drunk. The children, as many as five hundred at a time, were simply forsaken.
In 1684 Britain distilled 527,000 gallons of spirits. By 1750 the flow reached eleven million. (For a total population of only five million people!) Of the two thousand houses in St. Giles, London, 506 were gin shops. The record of proceedings from the Old Bailey, England's principal criminal court, informs us of the tragedy of Judith Dufour. She had removed her young child from the workhouse, strangled her, thrown the body into a ditch, sold the child's clothing for one shilling and four pence, and finally spent the money on gin, which she then shared with another woman who had collaborated in the murder.
Across the Channel, things were no better:
...Jean de La Bruyere's seventeenth century description of human existence in the French countryside gives an apt summary of what historians for the past several decades have been uncovering in their research on rustic communities in Europe at large during the entire late medieval to early modern epoch: "sullen animals, male and female [are] scattered over the country, dark, livid, scorched by the sun, attached to the earth they dig up and turn over with invincible persistence; they have a kind of articulate speech, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face, and, indeed, they are men. At night they retire to dens where they live on black bread, water, and roots."
To be sure, La Bruyere was a satirist and although, in the manner of all caricaturists, his portrait contains key elements of truth, it also is cruel in what it omits. And what it omits is the fact that these wretchedly poor country folk, for all their life-threatening deprivations, were not "sullen animals." They were, in fact, people quite capable of experiencing the same feelings of tenderness and love and fear and sadness, however constricted by the limitations of their existence, as did, and do, all human beings in every corner of the globe.
But what Lawrence Stone has said about the typical English village also was likely true throughout Europe at this time - that is, that because of the dismal social conditions and prevailing social values, it "was a place filled with malice and hatred, its only unifying bond being the occasional episode of mass hysteria, which temporarily bound together the majority in order to harry and persecute the local witch." Indeed, as in England, there were towns on the Continent where as many as a third of the population were accused of witchcraft and where ten out of every hundred people were executed for it in a single year. In one small, remote locale within reputedly peaceful Switzerland, more than 3300 people were killed in the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century for allegedly Satanic activities. The tiny village of Wiesensteig saw sixty-three women burned to death in one year alone, while in Obermarchtal fifty-four people - out of a total population of barely 700 - died at the stake during a three-year period. Thus, while it is true that the Europeans of those days possessed the same range of emotions that we do, as Stone puts it, "it is noticeable that hate seems to have been more prominent an emotion than love."
At the time La Bruyere was writing (which was a good bit later than the time of Columbus, during which time conditions had improved), the French "knew every nuance of poverty... At the top were those who "at best lived at subsistence level, at worst fell far below," while at the bottom were those described as dans un e'tat d'indigence absolue, meaning that "one had no food or adequate clothing or proper shelter, that one had parted with the few battered cooking-pots and blankets which often constituted the main assets of a working-class family." Across the whole of France, between a third and half the population fell under one of these categories of destitution, and in regions such as Brittany, western Normandy, Poitou, and the Massif the proportion ascended upwards of two-thirds. In rural areas in general, between half and 90 percent of the population did not have land sufficient for their support, forcing them to migrate out, fall into permanent debt, or die.
The destitution and chaos in England and France, described above, is the default condition of human society. We can fall back into that state, or at least go back in that direction, at any time. (Compare Detroit today with Detroit 40 years ago.) The world is no more stable or robust now than it ever was. In 1914, after a century of peace and progress, Europeans thought the good times were here to stay. They had no idea that they were staring into the abyss. In 1929, nobody saw what was coming. In the 1930s, in some parts of America, life was about the same as life in Britain in the "before Wesley" era. There is a book about the dust bowl refugees, The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. The title is an exaggeration. It was not the worst, but it was bad enough. When you are starving, you are starving, in any century or any country. Even now (October 2011), middle class Americans (formerly middle class) are using food stamps and going to food banks for the first time in their lives. Some are living on the sidewalk and looking through dumpsters. As the financial system continues to unravel, there will be many more. And we don't have a John Wesley or Louis XI to turn us around.
Louis who??? - I will come back to him in a minute.
The other side of this is that human society is not always like that. We can also go in a positive direction. John Wesley introduced a moral reformation that had an effect over the next several generations. Eventually Britain emerged as a first-world country. Of course technical progress contributed to this, but if Britain had remained in the demoralized state described above, I'm not sure if the technical progress would have happened. The Wesleyan movement had a bracing effect on the whole country, and this made the Industrial Revolution possible.
In France, also, things turned around. The French Revolution may have been a fiasco and a tragedy in some ways, but reforms were introduced that made France into a first-world country.
A dramatic turnaround occurred all the way back in the 15th century.
The Commonwealth of France's Louis XI: Foundations Of The Nation State by Pierre Beaudry
When, in 1429, Joan of Arc took charge of a broken down French army - demoralized from decades of fighting England - and led it to a stunning first victory at the battle of Orléans, it seemed that France, and with it, the known civilized world, was doomed. Nearly 95 percent of the population still alive was suffering in utter poverty. In spite of all of this, by the middle of the century, France had produced a leader, King Louis XI, who in the course of his reign (1461-1483), transformed this depopulated scorched earth into the most productive nation-state in the world, and a model for nation-building efforts of Spain, England, and eventually America.
Louis's development of France was based on the idea of the commonwealth, government on behalf of the physical and cultural enrichment of the people and the nation-state - the common good - as opposed to the territorial looting of an empire. Such a commonwealth could only be achieved by means of improving the productive powers of labor of that population. In this fashion, the nation-state must be ruled in a dirigistic fashion from a centralized government which commits itself to fostering man's ability to reflect this general purpose through breakthroughs in art and science. In turn, the elevated individual soul will ennoble the nation-state by making a contribution to its advancement and progress.
A longer article about Louis can be found here.
What Louis XI built did not last. Nothing ever does. Life is a perpetual struggle against entropy. (Not just physical entropy, but social entropy - human stupidity, dishonesty, carelessness, etc.) Most people lose. According to Gregory Clark, everybody in England in 1800 was descended from the richest 10% of the population a few hundred years earlier. The other 90% did not reproduce. Their line died out.
Nevertheless we can build a life for ourselves, even when everything is falling apart. Entire countries have emerged into first-world status and stayed there for generations. This requires a moral reformation that may no longer be possible for countries, but individuals, families, and city-states can still create first-world islands in the midst of skid row conditions.
As I said, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, reforms were introduced that turned things around. If you click on that link and scroll halfway down the page, it turns out that what Gaspard Monge and Lazare Carnot did in the aftermath of the Revolution was a continuation of what Louis had started.
And since the Jacobin terror had destroyed the laboratories and guillotined the scientists (such as Lavoisier), there was no better and more necessary idea than to establish a curriculum based on geometric discoveries, as the catalyst that would lead to the discovery of the creative process of the human mind, and give France the scientists, the engineers, the metallurgists, the chemists, and so forth, that the nation-state needed so desperately. And so began the real French Revolution when, in 1794, Robespierre was defeated by Carnot, and the Committee of Public Safety passed a resolution for the creation of the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Arts et Métiers [Arts and Trades]. As Poncelet, one of the very first student brigade leaders would later express it,
We do not intend to teach you a method and a process for each art, but instead what is the principle common to all of the arts ... with the purpose of making inventors out of you, inventing new machines and new processes.
As we approach the Singularity, it is more true than ever that nothing lasts. We cannot expect to build a new financial system or a new society. We cannot do what John Wesley did, at least not on the same scale. There isn't time. It does not make sense to undertake any project that cannot be completed in 10-15 years. What we can do is change ourselves. We can turn around and go in the right direction. The Singularity is not going to be the absolute end. Some of us are going to go through it and come out the other side.
I am not saying we should not try to do what Monge, Carnot, and Poncelet did. Of course we should. We should just do it with a different time horizon in mind. We should also try to do what John Wesley did. The Untouchables project is very much in a Wesleyan spirit. I grew up Methodist, but I stopped going to church a long time ago. In all the years I went to Sunday School, they never told me what the method was. They didn't know. The Methodist church is practically defunct now. John Wesley would not recognize it. The most famous Methodist of recent times is George Bush. That speaks for itself.
In religion, as is other areas of life, we need to make a fresh start.
We should not have any illusions about being able to finish what we start, but that is beside the point. Start anyway.
We can create first-world islands in our own minds, if nothing else.
There is always time to turn around and go in the right direction. I'm not sure it matters how far we get. Saint Francis of Assissi was visiting a monastery and helping out with the farm work. A monk asked him what he would do if somebody told him the world was going to end in an hour. He said "I would go right on plowing this field."
The main thing I want to do in politics is to make the Emperor's New Clothes moment happen. Then events will run their course. When the house of cards falls, it will fall hard. Some people take treason seriously. [So I thought.]
It is hard to say what happens after that. More and more people are estranged from politics. The Democrats and Republicans are both irrelevant. There is a vacuum waiting to be filled. Nobody is saying what needs to be said - with the possible exception of Ron Paul, and there are a number of problems with Ron Paul.
Like everybody else, he ignores the human material problem. How can you have a libertarian society in America? Where is the human material for it? How can you have a libertarian society in a nation of sociopaths? Not all Americans are sociopaths, but quite a few are - enough to ruin it for everybody. Irresponsible people have gamed the system and made off with billions, and left the country's economy a hollowed out shell. Does Dr. Paul seriously think we would be better off if they were even more unregulated than they already are?
It is true that we should move in a libertarian direction, in general. It would be fine with me if they wiped 75% of the laws off the books. Government should mind its own business and not try to micromanage people's lives. But in some areas we need more laws. The financial system is broken. The middle class is disappearing, and a new class of oligarchs is forming, similar to what happened in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. Libertarianism is not the way to deal with this.
When I was growing up, banks were regulated. Glass-Steagal required retail banking and investment banking to be kept separate. In my state, branch banking was illegal. A bank had to have one physical location, period. If they wanted to have a drive-up teller across the street, they had to dig a tunnel under the street, so the drive-up was physically connected to the main bank. Other corporations, besides banks, were also regulated. They had to convince regulators that a merger would not harm the community. We need to re-instate those laws. If similar regulations had been in place all along, the abuses of the past decade would not have happened.
We also need more enforcement of existing laws, specifically the laws against treason and misprision of treason. Ron Paul has nothing to say about this.
Ron Paul seems to think he can set everything right by closing the Fed. He thinks that is the key point to lean on, the best way to get leverage on the situation. This indicates that he does not understand the problem. As long as we have the same crew in New York and Washington running things, closing the Fed would make no difference. I am not a big fan of the Fed, but I think that issue is way overblown. We had the Fed in the 1950s and 1960s, and the economy worked just fine. (A more intelligent discussion of the national bank concept can be found here. Unfortunately, this article is based on the ideas of a man who is non compos mentis, but if you leave ad hominem considerations aside, the ideas themselves make sense. This also applies to the articles about Louis XI and Poncelet, referenced above.)
Another thing that bothers me about Ron Paul is that he is running alone. He does not have a slate of candidates running with him for the Senate, Congress, governor, sheriff, etc. If he did become President, he could not get his program implemented. Congress would block him every step of the way.
That's not to say I don't support him. He is so far above the other candidates, there is no comparison. He is an honest man, running for President. How cool is that?
Nevertheless... I hate to say this, but it is impossible to take him seriously. Ron Paul is not saying what needs to be said. Not even close. The vacuum is still waiting to be filled.
Ron Paul is raising hopes that will be disappointed. When he loses, or is taken out of the race, his followers are going to be irate. (I am writing this in early January, after the Iowa caucuses.) When someone comes along and does say what needs to be said, they will be more than willing to listen.
I am not a political person. Not yet. But I am coming around to the point of view that I have to be involved in politics. We all do. There is no way to escape from it. This country is going to boil over, and it is safer to be in the thick of things than to try to hide. You may try to ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.
In 1920, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, most Russians in the countryside thought they could just ignore the Communist government in Moscow. They were survivalists. They had their farms. They could survive no matter what happened. So they thought. A few years later, their farms were confiscated and turned into collective farms. They could not hide from the commissars.
The same thing applies here. It is an illusion to think that if you ignore politics, it will go away. It won't. A few years from now there will be checkpoints everywhere, not just at the airport. You can't hide from TSA.
We are not going to be able to resist effectively until we start calling things by their right names. TSA is Zionist.
So, back to the Untouchables. The Untouchables could become more than I originally intended. What if we had hundreds of candidates running for office on an Untouchables platform? It could be a huge thing, much bigger than the Tea Party.
I think most of the Untouchables candidates will be veterans. In America, the armed forces do not act on their own initiative. They report to civilian authority, which is as it should be. When you are a veteran, this constraint no longer applies. You can be the civilian authority. You can stand up and say what needs to be said, and do what needs to be done.
Veterans, especially combat veterans, are uniquely qualified to step up and assume responsibility.
I don't know how many veterans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it must be well over a million. They come home and find themselves treated like terrorists. When they start organizing themselves into an effective political force, then the country will change. You don't have to be a veteran to be an Untouchable, but I think they are the logical ones to lead the way.
I saw some pictures of the demonstrations in New York. One picture shows two veterans with a big sign that says
2nd time I've fought for my country
1st time I've known my enemy
That's fine as far as it goes, but I think they are just beginning to know the enemy, and occupying Wall Street is not what needs to be done. This is like the bull charging the matador's flag.
In politics, as in war, you have to think strategically.
The enemy has an Achilles heel, and that is where you have to attack.
I imagine most people read this far down the page without clicking through to the Untouchables page, so let me quote part of it to give you an idea of what it's about:
The question is, how do we take our country back? It cannot be done by setting up a confrontation between the people and the government. Change has to start within the government. I'm not talking about a coup. What I have in mind is to set the wheels of the law in motion. That is the only thing that could possibly work.
To set the wheels of the law in motion, first you have to have at least one individual who can serve as the starting point - someone who has demonstrably committed a crime. Then you have a prosecutable case. In Watergate, the burglars were caught red-handed, so the starting point was given. It was just a question of who was giving the orders. This time no one was caught in the act. We have to find them.
The first step is to find at least one individual who was involved in 9/11, and persuade them to come forward and confess. Pull the curtain aside so everybody can see what happened. Get the whole thing out in the open,
so much so that it is impossible for anyone to still be in denial. When someone confesses, that will bring all arguments to an end. At that point we will all be on the same page, and we can proceed from there.
When I wrote the original Untouchables page in 2007, I was addressing myself primarily to law enforcement and military personnel. My basic message to them was:
Your job is to defend your country and/or enforce the law.
Do your duty!
And their response is...
You have obviously mistaken me for somebody who gives a shit!
They have no honor.
If you are fighting for Israel against your own country then you are a traitor. If treason is happening on your watch and you let it happen then you are a coward.
The Emperor's New Clothes moment is coming, with or without you.
Aligning yourself with Israel is not just cowardly, it is stupid. Israel is going to implode and take you down with it. But that is not my business. That is between you and God.
I mentioned before that I erased the bottom part of this page in early January (it is now February), and I am dissatisfied with the upper part. It is out of character. I am not speaking with my own voice.
My "first-world island" concept does not have enough juice to motivate anybody to do anything about it. It is just an ad hoc term for a concept that has not been made precise. Even if somebody liked the idea, I have not given any specific steps that can be taken. When I say "we" should try to do what John Welsey did, that is a vacuous statement, unless I am proposing to do it myself, i.e. be an evangelist. As for doing what Poncelet did, that too is a vacuous statement, since we are not in a post-revolutionary situation. Not to mention the fact that the articles about Louis XI, Carnot, Monge, Poncelet, and Hamilton were written by followers of Lyndon LaRouche. This stuff is just not going to fly. LaRouche is right about a lot of things, but he does not understand that politics is all about psychological leverage. Archimedes said "Give me a fulcrum for my lever, and I will move the world." You have to find the right fulcrum to make things happen.
Narcland, Texas, where I grew up, was as first-world as any place ever gets. Superficially, it resembled the Third Reich in some ways. The economy was based on industry, not a FIRE economy. In the mid to late 1950s, Narcland had the highest per capita income and the highest per capita years of education of any metropolitan area in the United States, and the most millionaires of any city its size. It was one of the first cities to have a shopping center away from downtown. Almost everybody had a job. People lived in houses, not apartments. There were no homeless people. There was no multiculturalism, no affirmative action, no school busing, no dumbing down, etc. The schools were excellent, and we were encouraged to stretch ourselves.
Sounds like it ought to be my kind of place, right? Wait, there is more.
The idea that everybody was on the same team and working for a common purpose was completely absent. Narcland had no purpose. It was "first-world" by accident, not by design, and it contained the seeds of its own destruction.
There were no political rallies, but we did have pep rallies at school. I hated them. They were in the homeroom period, the second period in the morning. In my senior year, I stopped going. As the other students were going from their homerooms to the gym, I would step into a vacant classroom and spend the next half hour studying. When I heard them coming back, I would go out and mix with the crowd, and then go to my third period class. After a while some of my friends noticed that I was never at the rallies, and when I told them what I was doing, some of them joined me. We had our own little study hall while the others were screaming in the gym. The teachers never caught on, or if they did they never said anything.
The Shadow of the Reich was also present. When the John Birch Society was founded, Narcland had a chapter from day one, and my pediatrician, Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, was a charter member. She ran for Congress on the Constitution Party ticket. When George Wallace ran for President as a third party candidate in 1968, she led the Texas delegation to his convention, and she made the speech putting his name in nomination. The Narcland public library subscribed to Human Events, and the local radio station carried H.L. Hunt's far-right radio program. It was perfectly natural for an ambitious young man like George H.W. Bush (whose family had Nazi connections, so I'm told) to go to Narcland to make his fortune.
Narcland billed itself as "the city of churches." There was/is tremendous pressure to conform. I mean both social pressure and physical pressure - long prison sentences, including all that prison entails. But this is not about pot, specifically. It already felt oppressive when I was in high school, and I did not even know what pot was in those days. But I knew that I was not free to think certain thoughts. A certain space was forbidden. It was like the story I told above about the yoga class in Poland.
As soon as I finished high school, I was out of there.
When I talk about creating first-world islands, does that mean I want to go back to Narcland? Certainly not. "First-world" is not even the right concept. As I continue to rewrite this page, I am gradually getting a better idea of where I am going with it.
I would never go back to Narcland, but compared with the nightmare I live in now, it had its good points. Life does not give us easy choices. Which nightmare do you want, the one on the left, or the one on the right? - the frying pan, or the fire?
None of the above.
It may be true, as I said above, that politics has never been my main interest, but it has always been there in the background. One of my basic principles is: life does not have to be the way it usually is. Something better is possible. When life gives us impossible choices, we can invent new alternatives.
John Wesley organized prayer meetings with his brother and a few friends. At first they were still in the Anglican church. They invited others to join them. An invitation from John Wesley was not easy to refuse. He was aggressive and persistent. The meetings grew, and eventually the Wesleyans, later known as Methodists, split off and formed their own church. Wesley traveled thousands of miles on horseback, establishing churches. He was a preacher who confronted people and told them in no uncertain terms that they had better get themselves straightened out and get right with God.
He moved with such force that millions of people followed in his wake. If he did that now, the Jewish "cult watch" organizations would be on his case, big time. The Methodist movement was a lot like the Third Wave. It may be true that the esprit de corps of the Third Reich can never happen again on a national level, but it can happen in other ways, and they are afraid of it.
Or at least they say they are. It is possible that Ron Jones is waving the matador's flag.
It took about three generations for Wesley's efforts to have an effect. In the early 1800s, the older men in Parliament had to watch their language to avoid offending their younger colleagues. The young men were strait-laced and did not appreciate coarse language and dirty jokes. The Victorian era had begun.
The Victorian era has been over for quite some time. It would take another three generations to revive it, assuming it could be revived at all. Even if it were possible, that would just be another path that leads back to Narcland.
I never intended to be a pundit or editorial writer. I certainly never intended to advocate returning to a society where conservative Protestants tell everybody what to do.
When you try to write a home page, you learn a lot about yourself.
As I get older, and look back through layers of experience, I am finally beginning to understand what happened in my life. When you are young, and caught up in the rush of events, you don't have any perspective on it. That only comes later.
Occasionally I see somebody wearing a t-shirt that says "I survived Catholic schools." That is how I feel about Methodist Sunday School. I left that behind many years ago, and I have been trying to recover from it ever since. I am anything but a Methodist. The Methodist church gave me a basically false model of the psyche, and in particular, a distorted view of sexual relations. We were supposed to just blank out a lot of things. Even now, I am still just beginning to understand what happens between men and women - or what happens between anybody and anybody, not just on a sexual level. I guess it was my family that was to blame here, more than the church, but the family and the church were reflections of each other.
Methodism is part of who I am, and part of my strength. I don't want to get away from it completely. I have reframed the "methodist" concept so it is no longer a Christian thing. It is like Benjamin Franklin's systematic approach to cultivating virtue, described in his Autobiography. Actually there is more to it than that. I am making every effort to lead a nonrandom life. I try to control my thoughts from moment to moment.
The Nonrandom Mathematics Curriculum will eventually be like a mantra, or a video game that you keep playing until you reach higher and higher screens. It will include more than mathematics per se.
I am going to restore most of what I erased on January 7, omitting a few things that are better left unmentioned, according to the "don't touch the tar baby" principle:
I went to the Timewave Zero seminar at Esalen, hosted by Terence McKenna, in November of 1988. That was the first occasion when the 2012 concept was discussed in a more or less public venue. There were only about twenty of us. We thought that 2012 would continue to be an obscure, esoteric thing known only to a few initiates. We thought that whatever was going to happen in 2012 would catch everybody by surprise. It never occurred to us that as the year approached, 2012 would be part of general awareness. Just about everybody has heard about it by now. There is even a book called 2012 for Dummies (which lives up to its title) and a movie (which I did not see). There will be plenty of disasters this year, financial and otherwise. People will connect the dots and think "Aha! It's 2012. Those damn Mayans were right after all."
If they think that, they will be wrong. That is a totally dumbed down idea. It's not about the Mayans, and it's not about disasters. There will be disasters, but that is not the point.
At the Esalen seminar, I didn't really believe it. I was one of the skeptics in the group. The fact that the Mayan calendar comes to an end means exactly nothing. The Mayans did not say anything about the Timewave, and in any case it does not matter what they did or did not say. The Mayans have nothing to do with it. Terence McKenna and Jose Argueles made up the whole thing about the Mayans. If the ancient Mayans could hear what people are saying about them now, they would fall down laughing.
Terence's Timewave comes from his DMT trips, plus the fact that fractals were a trendy thing in 1988. The Timewave does not make sense, mathematically. It is not the right context for understanding what is happening.
Attaching significance to dates is superstition. Calendars are artifacts with no real significance. Anybody who predicts the end of the world on a certain date is a crank, like Harold Camping. When Terence said the end date is 12/21/12, that should have given it away. That's numerology. It's bullshit. He was right about the general idea that we are on the last lap of history, but he was wrong about everything else. Hiroshima is the wrong starting point, the end of the Mayan calendar is the wrong endpoint, and what he predicted (a cosmic event comparable to the Big Bang) is not going to happen. He was just wrong. Let it go.
That was my conclusion in September, when I decided to erase all this stuff and start over. (It has been erased more than once!) But in spite of all the bullshit, there is something to it. He was not "just wrong." He was wrong about a lot of things, but right about the main thing.
When I go to church, any church, I am an outsider. At Terence's seminar, I was not an outsider. He did not have the whole story, but he was living in the real world in a way that Harold Camping is not. Of course that's not setting the bar very high.
Actually I was an outsider at Esalen, in some ways. Esalen has a vegetarian kitchen. I am almost vegetarian, but not quite. I am one step up the food chain. I am a cannibal. I eat vegetarians.
The only kind of prophecy that matters is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other prophecies are illusions and can be safely ignored. The 2012 scenario does not have enough juice to make itself happen. There is enough juice in it to make something happen. The fact that some people expect to go through a transformation of consciousness at the end of 2012 means that they will. It will also have an effect on people who don't believe in it. It will bring the End Times meme to the forefront of everybody's attention. When the world does not end on December 21, it will tend to discredit all End Times prophecies. It will have an effect similar to Y2K and Harold Camping. The world is going to end... yeah, right.
This is good. Any prophecy to the effect that something will happen on a certain date is bullshit, period. Prophecies involving dates should be discredited. That whole concept should be discredited.
An example of a self-fulfilling prophecy would be my statement that there is going to be an Emperor's New Clothes moment. Once that idea is out there, it has to happen.
I used to have a longer discussion here, about who Terence McKenna was and the culture from which 2012 emerged. It was depressing to write, and probably not too enlightening to read, although some people may have been surprised to learn that Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA during an acid trip.
Just about everybody has heard about 2012, but it remains true that only a few initiates know what is really happening.
We are going though a psychedelic change, not merely a physical change, and most people are not even going to see it. Whatever happens on the physical plane will just be a reflection of what is happening on a spiritual level. If you look at things through a journalistic lens, you will just see a series of apparently random events.
For some people, there will be a profound shift of consciousness. They will have more and more intense deja-vu's, until they have an entirely different perception of time.
"Time is very much stranger than you think." - Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood's End
In the near future it will be possible to redesign our cells and tissues. Instead of getting old and dying, we can transform ourselves into a higher form of life.
People for whom this is not science fiction, but simply the reality they live in, are usually known as transhumanists. For a long time I accepted this designation. I called myself a biocentric transhumanist, to distinguish myself from machine-centric transhumanists. I no longer think this is viable. But regardless of what you call it, I agree that we - some of us - are going through a metamorphosis, and the result will be something "beyond human."
Transhumanists expect nanocomputers and AI systems to reach a transhuman state first - i.e. a level of intelligence beyond human intelligence - after which they (the computers) will help us to "upload" ourselves into new hardware. I think this is nonsense. I propose an alternative scenario in which we transform ourselves from within, by redesigning our cells - and by redesigning our language.
Cellular transformation -- The cell already is a self-programming computer -- almost. It's crude in some ways, but it could be improved. It could be perfected. Its model of itself could be made more articulate and more explicit.
Nanotechnology without Genies is my critique of Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. When I first published this site, in March of 1999, this was the whole thing. This is where the site got its name.
Machine-centric transhumanists consider Engines of Creation to be a seminal text which describes what's going to happen as we approach the Singularity. I agree that it's a seminal text, but I think it is fundamentally flawed. However, we have to come to terms with it. The book is flawed in a nontrivial way, and it's essential to understand what's wrong with it. Getting the philosophical errors straightened out is part of the metamorphosis.
Transhumanists have a belief system involving artificial intelligence, cryonics, PC issues such as "diversity", the so-called "skeptic" magazines, mass emigration into space to solve the population problem, and various other things. I don't buy into this belief system. They are wrong about how the Singularity will happen, and what is involved in the metamorphosis. They put everything into the wrong context. Transhumanism is inherently secular, and secular humanism is bogus, with or without the trans- in front of it. We differ about so many things that "biocentric transhumanism" is an oxymoron. It is time to reframe this whole project.
The concept of sacred space has disappeared from modern life. For secular humanists and transhumanists, this is a good thing. They want to live in a world without sacred space. I don't. That is the basic difference between us.
The metamorphosis is closely associated with the Singularity, but they are distinct concepts. According to transhumanists, the Singularity comes first, and the transhuman metamorphosis follows. I think it is just the reverse. The Singularity is the result of cellular tranformation and intelligence amplification.
In his famous paper on the Singularity, Vernor Vinge says
One conversation [between Stan Ulam and John von Neumann in the 1950s] centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
He also says
Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ... soon.
The opaque wall is just a few years away now. It is impossible to say what the world will look like in twenty years. There will be robot wars, and anybody can play. When robots come in all sizes, down to the microscopic level, and there are swarms of them, millions of them, out of control, that will be a singularity in the von Neumann sense. The proliferation of drones will bring us to a point beyond which human affairs, as we know them, cannot continue.
This is not hypothetical. The drone arms race has already started, and there is no way to stop it. It will proceed to its logical conclusion. How long it will take is hard to say.
But this is not what Vernor Vinge had in mind. According to him, the Singularity will come from ultraintelligence. When machines reach our level of intelligence, they will be able to redesign themselves and become still more intelligent. This will supposedly result in an "intelligence explosion." Ultraintelligent machines will create ever more intelligent machines, with each iteration happening "on a still shorter time scale," and human intelligence will be "left far behind." So he says. I beg to differ.
My Singularity paper is a reply to Vinge's paper. I don't know of any other place where you can find a critique that meets this idea head on and takes it apart point by point.
Suppose you have a rocket moving at 1000 km/hour, and it is accelerating. Its velocity is increasing exponentially. After a time it is moving 20 billion times faster... No, wait a minute. Is that possible? If you multiply 1000 km/hour by 20 billion, you get a result that makes no physical sense. Velocity is not the kind of quantity that can be multiplied by an arbitrary number. The same question can be asked about intelligence. Does it make sense to start with a certain level of intelligence, and then multiply it by 20 billion?
It makes even less sense. At least velocity is a measurable quantity that can be multiplied, sometimes. Intelligence is not. Vernor Vinge's argument is based on a category mistake. Intelligence is not the kind of thing that can increase exponentially. For further discussion I refer you to my Singularity page and Part 3 of Nanotechnology without Genies.
The idea of artificial intelligence increasing exponentially is a red herring. We should not even be looking in that direction. Our mental power can be amplified, which is all that matters. The computers act as midwives, like the Overlords in Childhood's End. We can use them to build immersive environments around us, like Versailles or Chartres, so we can draw ourselves into a reality that cannot be expressed in words. We use the computers to learn (or invent) an entirely new language, like the unfortunate experiment in The Black Cloud.
My Singularity page is not merely negative. I don't just talk about what isn't going to happen. I think there is going to be a momentous event in the near future, but it's not going to be an "intelligence explosion." On a physical level, it's going to be like the Cambrian explosion, or maybe the transition from anaerobic to aerobic life - but it's not just going to be a physical change. It should be noted that my Singularity page was originally written more than a decade ago, and revised in 2003. It does not reflect my current thinking about what is happening. What needs to be said is that when language penetrates down to the atomic level, that will be the Singularity.
As we approach the end - and we are approaching the end - it behooves us all to be realistic about what is happening. C.S. Lewis said it is always possible for a man to be entirely mistaken about what kind of situation he is in. We had better figure out what kind of situation we are in. We had better get it right. There is no second chance, and no margin for error.
The Singularity concept is not given in advance. Its nature will become clear as events unfold. What does it mean to say that the world is ending? Which world are we talking about? To think in terms of earthquakes and floods shows a complete lack of imagination. Yes, there will be earthquakes and floods, worse than anything in human memory, and lights in the sky, and so forth, but this is superficial. To think of it in terms of technology reaching some kind of climax is better, but that still misses what is really going on.
When we talk about the end of the world, the world we need to focus on is the one in which the physical substrate is in the background. We live in a story. The story is the world we live in. To say that our world is ending is to say that we are losing the plot.
The old stories are losing their force, and our lives are incoherent until we find a new story. That is what is happening. The Great Incoherence. The Cosmic Dumbing Down. The Final Destruction of the Tower of Babel. The end of the world is the end of language.
Actually a number of things are happening all at once, so it may be a misnomer to talk about "the" Singularity. The technological singularity is one thing; the spiritual Singularity is something else. The relation between them is not given in advance. It will become clear as we get closer to the end.
In any case the end is not only an end, it is also a beginning, and it does not just happen on the level of stories - the physical transformation is part of it.
Sometimes I feel it coming. I feel it within myself. It's like a gyroscope, spinning, stabilizing, until steadiness is established. Sometimes it's like a light-body guiding me from inside, forming me into its image. I let it guide my movements, and suddenly I slow down and move gracefully, firmly, and precisely. I never knock things over when I am guided by the spirit. My breath is smooth and free, and my thoughts are as steady as my movements. The steadiness extends all the way down to my cells, and the molecules within the cells; or maybe I should put it the other way around: it comes up from that level.
When I say physical transformation, I mean a transformation that can actually be seen - glowing health and reversal of aging.
Matthew 17:2 - "There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light." Romans 12:2 - "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind." If you look at the original Greek you discover that the word "transfigured" in Matthew 17:2 is the same as "transformed" in Romans 12:2. In both verses it's the verbal form of the Greek word metamorphosis.
No such thing is happening in churches, whether they are fundamentalist, liberal, or whatever. Churches have no concept of metamorphosis. I am not the only one who is exasperated with today's Mickey Mouse churches. I am not the only one who feels a need for a church which is focused on metamorphosis, no matter what it takes - meditation and prayer undertaken with absolute concentration, yoga, pranayama combined with chanting and singing, visualization, and philosophy.
You don't have to believe in the Singularity. It is happening, no matter what anybody believes or doesn't believe. The Singularity is not something you can hide from. That would be like trying to hide from gravity, or time, or language. There is no use trying to be a "survivalist" when the universe itself is turning inside out. There is only one way to survive.
That is not to say it's useless to build a sheltered space. We need to build "arks" to get through the tribulation - actual physical structures, islands of stability in the midst of chaos. This will be a major project in the coming years.
Only a few find the narrow gate that leads to life. Most people don't even try. They are all over the place and don't even care. They lead random lives, drift into old age, and have a crash landing.
The Spirit is emerging into the world. Some people will let it guide them, others will try to ignore it or fight it off. They will discover that they can't hold themselves together during the great incoherence. Either you have help, or your nervous system disintegrates along with everything else. As the end approaches, more and more people will lose it. They will have nervous breakdowns. They will go postal. The gates of hell will burst open.
What we should do to prepare for the Singularity is what we should be doing anyway. You have to have a support group; you have to know what's real and what isn't (easier said than done); and you have to have a daily practice that gives you strength. You have to be able to hold your mind together when everything is coming apart. All this is true regardless of when it happens, and regardless of how it happens.
There is no need to speculate about whether there is going to be a Singularity. Wait and see. Press on with the metamorphosis. You will find out what happens when you get there.
As for timing, the only thing that matters is whether we finish the metamorphosis before the drones put us all out of business.
The metamorphosis is not a prophecy, it is a project. I am not predicting that there will be a metamorphosis, I am just doing it. If I am building a house and I say "This time next year there will be a house on this lot," I am not making a prophecy, I am stating an intention.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay
As we approach the end of ordinary history, the pressing questions are: Which direction are we going? What are we going to become?
As far as I am concerned, the metamorphosis begins with a change of consciousness, which leads to a transformation of our bodies from within.
As Michael Murphy put it in Jacob Atabet,
In the religious traditions, the goal of life was generally conceived as release rather than embodiment... Part of what I'm doing is simply to show what a frontier there is in the simultaneous transformation of consciousness and the body, what an adventure there is in embodied existence... A new vision of human nature and destiny is emerging, a vision that was not possible until this moment in time.
Jacob Atabet combines modern biological science with the ancient shamanic tradition of southern Siberia, far western China, the Himalayas, and south-central Asia - the same tradition that gave rise to QiGong and Yoga. I agree with that, but with one quibble. Murphy seems to have no interest in mathematics or computer science.
My vision differs from his in that I am firmly rooted in the "western" tradition, starting with Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes, etc. in ancient Greece, and continuing through Gauss, Faraday, Poincaré, Frege, Carnap, Hilbert, Strawson, etc. in the 19th and 20th centuries. Transformation of consciousness requires thinking, and that includes thinking about science, including the mathematical sciences. It requires improving our model of the world. It includes, specifically, inventing a new language for biology, similar to a computer language. Instead of "biocentric," I could just as well describe my philosophy as "logocentric."
We are going to use translation to take the concept of 'reading' to a new level. When you translate something, you can't just pass your eyes over the page. You have to come to grips with it. If you are corresponding with someone, and you translate each other's comments before responding, it is much easier to stay on point and not talk past each other.
Translating from one language to another is just a small part of what I have in mind. The next step is language reflection. Suppose you have a text in Greek. You translate it into another language, say Japanese. Then your partner translates that text back into Greek. You compare the result with the original Greek text. Then you adjust both translations, i.e. adjust the software that facilitates the translations, to make the reflected text match the original. There are further steps beyond this, of course.
The intelligence amplification program will eventually have its own website. It will be the Caltech of philosophy.
The metamorphosis won't be a general event that happens to everybody at once. Somebody will get there first. In other words, if you think of this as a race, somebody will win. It will be somebody who has the best model of reality on all levels, including, specifically, a correct philosophy of mind. A correct philosophy of mind requires a correct understanding of logic, semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Thus, for the first time, we have an objective criterion of philosophical truth: the correct philosophy is the one that leads to the metamorphosis.
Since we have to survive between here and there, and we have to have enough money to do certain things that need to be done, the metamorphosis also requires a correct model of the financial system. I mean business models designed to survive depression and/or hyperinflation. I have little interest in academic economics. - If you don't know why that link is funny, then you are not one of us.
We have to have a correct model of everything, including a correct model of 'model'.
Let's return to the question, which way are we going? The default answer is that we will continue in the same direction we are going now. The same thought police who run our lives now will still be in power right up to the end. They will achieve the Full Spectrum Dominance that is their avowed goal. Remember the end of 1984 - a boot in a human face, forever.
TSA lines everywhere. This is our default future.
This is not going to happen. Their strength is already broken - they have cut themselves off from their source of strength - and on the other side of the Emperor's New Clothes moment, we will be in a completely different reality.
As we approach the Singularity, the world will still be a mess, and life will be very difficult for most people, but the Zionist dystopia they have planned for us is not going to happen. In that respect, at least, we are moving in the right direction. For some of us, the coming years will be a time of renewal as well as destruction.
My alternative vision is that someday we will live in a world in which the Tower of Babel has been rebuilt, and the thought police no longer exist. We will not stand accused. No one will constantly remind us that "Everyone must accept the blame." Our cells will be like tiny cathedrals with perfect acoustics, and our minds will be full of light. We are going to live in a narc-free world, and a rap-free world, a world where perfect bodies dance fearlessly on a psychedelic beach.
In the original 915 Manifesto, I wrote
We are approaching the moment of transcendence -- the culmination of our long evolutionary journey. The government should be providing a supportive environment within which we can finish our metamorphosis safely. That is its only proper function. No other government has a right to exist. Since our present government is trying to prevent the transformation from happening, we are going to replace it with a government that is on our side. We don't want a liberal government or a conservative government. We want an intelligent government which does what it is supposed to do at this stage of history.
Our enemy is insane, and insanity cannot prevail. Lies cannot prevail. In the long run we have to win, because reality is on our side.
When I wrote that, in 1999, I was still thinking in terms of external government, government as a social institution. We cannot depend on somebody in Washington (or some other capital) to do what needs to be done. We have to provide our own supportive environment.
The only way to solve the human material problem is to be the material.
Sanity begins at home. We have to govern ourselves. We have to establish order in our own minds before doing anything else. The Kingdom is within us.
Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
I am not going to go into details yet. For the moment I just want to say that virtue can be learned. By virtue I mean strength of mind - the opposite of being "all over the place".
What people normally think of as virtue - doing the right thing - is the *result* of virtue in that sense. If you have strength of mind, then you can behave virtuously, but the behavior itself is not virtue, it is the fruit of virtue.
My "be transformed" statement is a quotation from the Bible (Romans 12:2). Does this imply that the way to renew your mind is to be a Christian? Well, I have to point out that England and France were Christian countries at the time of the horror stories I recounted above. It was parish officers, after all, who "commandeered the monies paid to the parish to care for resourceless children and treated themselves to a large-scale drunk," leaving the children to starve.
There are some exceptions to this, but in general Christians are as scattered as anybody else, and as dysfunctional as anybody else. Exceptions are just that, exceptions. Going to church does not give you the strength you need as we approach the end. More precisely, it does not automatically give you strength. You can get strength from the Bible, but only if you know how to read it. You can get strength of mind from joining a religious community, but only if they know how to generate strength. They generally don't. In most cases that is not even what they are trying to do.
There is nothing in the New Testament to the effect that you could pick Christians out of a crowd because of their glowing health. Throughout history, Christians have never been known for being conspicuously healthy.
Vivekananda said "The best guide in life is strength. In religion as in all other matters, discard everything that weakens you, have nothing to do with it."
Sometimes joining a church changes people for the better, but when it happens, it happens by accident. If you want to make sure it happens, you have to have a method. If you want a definite result, you have to have a definite plan and use a definite technique. As of today, no existing church has a method for teaching virtue, and that includes the "Methodist" church.
Remember the proverb: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and he can feed himself for the rest of his life. A church may give you a fish, but it will not teach you how to fish.
What I have in mind is not exactly church in the usual meaning of the term. This is something entirely new, something that could not exist until this moment in time. This is as different from Christianity as Christianity is different from Judaism. I am not waiting for the messiah. I am not waiting for the Singularity. I am not waiting for anything. I am going to do whatever it takes to make the metamorphosis happen.
I also want to take the parable of the talents seriously. No matter what you think about the rest of the Bible, the parable of the talents is a True Word. Gold bugs, survivalists, and Christians who passively wait for the Rapture all have one thing in common: they bury their talents. This is just wrong. Whatever happens, multiply your talents.
I am only going to say so much about this on the website. It is time to start having meetings where I talk about these things to a live audience - not just talk, but demonstrate. In person I can make you feel the power of the "gyroscope" that I was talking about before. That is the Spirit, upwelling from within, reforming everything. The time is coming when everybody will feel it, for better or worse. It is time to start building resonant strucures that will serve as arks, or islands of stability in the midst of chaos. The end is not in the remote future. It starts now. We are poised at the top of the roller coaster.
Our minds exist within a larger mind - a mind within which we live and move and have our being (as Paul said, quoting Epimenides). When you join yourself to God, it's like a note becoming aware that it is part of a chord, part of a melody, part of an oratorio - an oratorio that is always there, eternally, but normally outside of our awareness.
The idea that God is sound occurs in both Yoga and Christianity. When churches were established in pagan Europe, the church bells and the choir superseded the random noise of farms, workshops, kitchens, and nurseries. To become a Christian meant to enter a musical space. This idea has been lost for centuries, but at one time that's what it meant to become a Christian. (Of course that's only part of what it meant.) In Yoga, too, joining yourself to God means entering a musical space - letting a mantra fill your mind, and letting your body resonate with it. The church building was a resonant space where this could happen.
The church building was supposed to shape your mind. When you enter the sacred space, the images in your mind are replaced by the images in the church, and the sounds (including voices) in your mind are replaced by the music and liturgy. This sets up a dynamic process in your mind. Certain thoughts, sounds, and pictures fade into the background, others emerge into the foreground.
You can go ahead and imagine this happening, before you have the actual building. You have to construct the building in your imagination before you can start the actual construction. Leading a nonrandom life means creating that structure in your mind.