Playing in good faith by the rules of the world controllers earns certain undesirable peoples precisely zero credit. As a case in point, recent elections held in the war-ravaged east of Ukraine have unsurprisingly been summarily dismissed by Washington and Brussels. Any political expression running contrary to the aims and ends of the globalist superclass is denounced as illegal and illegitimate, with selective application of international law the one observable norm.

A political order is only deemed legitimate if said elites classify it such. Thus popular elections in the breakaway east, known again by its older name Novorussia, are dismissed wholesale as Russian-backed manipulation. (After all, the globalists believe that choreography of elections should be the exclusive purview of the State Department and assorted NGOs.) Likewise, the governments of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Kyrgyzstan have been challenged or threatened by the West over their pursuit of closer relations with Russia, even though each has gained power through internationally recognized democratic processes.

Sidestepping its professed principles, the Western establishment has been quite willing to embrace sundry violent Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazi factions in its bid to turn the Ukraine into a NATO launch pad for projecting influence into Russia and the rest of Eurasia. Sponsorship and training of thuggish Ukrainian nationalists, who have already expressed their inclination toward committing acts of terrorism inside Russia, is but another disastrous step toward a new Cold War.

Aside from enabling Ukrainian Waffen-SS throwbacks and potential terrorists, the rulers of the West also project their insidious cultural pathologies into Russia, with the “anarchist” punk band Pussy Riot serving as the most blatant of examples. The American people themselves should not be blamed for the genesis of this plague, for they were its first victims. The systematic, scientific weaponization of culture was simply introduced and perfected in America, the elites’ laboratory for subversive projects. And despite the clamoring of old Cold War conservatives, the “Communist conspiracy” that has wrecked their traditional social and religious institutions was conceived not in the Kremlin, but in the higher echelons of Langley and the boardrooms of Fifth Avenue. What is now identified as cultural Marxism, the project of the exiled Freudian-Marxists of the German Frankfurt School, was funded and promoted through academia, the media, and the intelligence agencies by wealthy oligarchs who ultimately ran all of these institutions. Their revolutionary social model is now being exported to the rest of the world as a tool to undermine the remnants of traditional societies, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and absorb them into the globalist control matrix.

How should we scare the couch potatoes now?

The globalists’ rancor against Russia, however, is more clearly manifest in a malicious, yet ever more childish, smear campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Whatever his faults, Russia’s leader is now frequently depicted in the West’s elite-controlled mass media as the incarnation of evil and the veritable reoccurrence of German dictator Adolf Hitler. It must be understood that the drive to demonize Putin is not aimed exclusively, or even primarily, at the Russian people, who are not particularly sensitive to the foreign press carnival. Rather, the anti-Putin media hysteria targets Western populations.

As the elites continue to shred ever-dwindling liberties, degrade traditional culture, and flood the nations they rule with successive waves of desperate third world immigrants, Westerners are presented not only with a wider array of vapid consumer goods and more preposterous and perverted sexual options – they are also subjected to continuous media psy-op campaigns to convince them that every uncooperative dictator and geopolitical rival of the West (particularly America) is an existential security threat that must be confronted. In this frenzy to manufacture consent, Westerners are bombarded non-stop with paranoid rhetoric declaring that Putin, the love child of Hitler and Stalin, is preparing to send his tanks rolling across the North European Plain in a quest to reestablish the long-defunct Soviet Union. That NATO, in fact, has advanced eastward to Russia’s borders, despite previous agreements to not expand into former Warsaw pact nations, goes unmentioned in almost all US and European media commentary.

The wider project of elite-contrived subversion is thus aimed in varying manners and mediums at both the Russians, via cultural distortion, political destabilization, and terrorism, and Western populations through cynical fear-mongering unleashed via the corporate mass media. Should ordinary Americans, for example, see the Russian nation as their enemy? We are being viciously exploited financially and brought into ever increasing debt, not by Putin or the Russian state, but by a transnational plutocracy, a reality that is intentionally suppressed in our collective consciousness.

Technocracy is love.

The twentieth century German writer Ernst Jünger observed this trend over sixty years ago in his book The Forest Passage. He opined that in the West, and especially in United States, media-fueled hysteria

…finds its best feeding grounds; and it is propagated through networks that operate at the speed of light. The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear; the imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex. The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end – they provoke demonic contacts.

Witnessing the anti-Russian propaganda spewed forth daily from CNN, FOX News, the New York Times, and the BBC, this observation rings true now more than ever. Jünger further noted this fear, now spread to both East and West:

The West is afraid of the East, the East afraid of the West. Everywhere on the planet people live in daily expectation of terrifying attacks, and in many places there is also the fear of civil war.

So what relief can be found from media malice, cultural ruination, war and rumors of war, and the general dehumanization of modern man? Are despair and resignation the only options? Certainly we must agree with the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, who said that we have entered “a period of great difficulty for human personality, for freedom of spirit, for higher culture.” Yet the globalist oligarchs, technocrats, and others who seek the complete domination of their fellow man most certainly do not have the final word. As Berdyaev foresaw, a “mobilization of spirit can be set up against modern collective insanity and demonic possession.” This spiritual resistance would be a “new Christian piety” to “be revealed in our world.”

Slowly and in fits and starts, the embers of this spiritual mobilization and rebirth of Christian piety, the spiritual resistance to the crushing dehumanization of globalism, have already begun to burn. A Russia that in the twentieth century found salvation neither in godless communism nor godless capitalism is drawing toward Berdyaev’s vision. And perhaps in time this light will burn bright enough to awaken souls in Western Europe and North America, those who have forgotten the faith that sustained their ancestors for almost two thousand years.

The Magic of Scientism: Harry and Ray at Work and Play

The generations to be born towards the end of this decade, or the beginning of the next, should by all means endeavor to preserve their inner child for as long as possible. For the childhood dream of changing reality through a tap of the magic wand, wielded by a playful magus, could soon, in words of Google Lab’s CEO Ray Kurzweil, become “feasible activity in full-immersion virtual reality.” In so saying, Kurzweil actually has in mind a particular magician, the popular sorcerer Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling’s bestsellers. For those acquainted with Kurzweil’s labors, there is nothing unusual in him relying on a fictional character, whose personal traits seem to closer resemble those of the IT geek, like a young Bill Gates, than a classical wizard from our fairy tales. Moreover, Ray’s pop-science book Singularity is Near and Rowling’s postmodern occultism perfectly complement each other on the market, not least because they target the same demographic: people on the threshold of adolescence.

If we allow Harry and Ray to enlighten us, we are also obliged to repress the fact that their stories are fiction, not because reality refutes them, but because its logic burdens them with implications which, at least for an adult, shatter the “immersion.” Magic is an activity of producing effects while sidelining their visible connection to causes. As such it is particularly attractive to children and younger adolescents, not only because it promises the possibility of performing the impossible, but even more so because it implicitly renders obsolete any responsibility for an act. Meanwhile, the virtual world prophesied by Ray functions according to astonishingly similar rules: the rift between word and speaker, deed and consequence, widens and deepens inasmuch the virtual avatar is perfected, i.e. removed from reality. The power of creativity grows proportionally to diminishing responsibility.

Now, ain’t that cool?

Technology in the service of sorcery: Fritz Lange’s 1927 Metropolis.

Biological automatons gathered under the aegis of a transhumanist, or in a more final version, posthumanist movement would more or less unequivocally answer in the affirmative. For those unaware, Ray Kurzweil is merely the most media-savvy face among many others: an inventor, entrepreneur and futurologist whose job seems to be marketing the process of braving the political, economic and epistemological peak of the age of transition. It is an all-encompassing social project whose feasible and intermediate aim is our death.

A Perfect Homicide

We must ask ourselves: if the process of eliminating humanity as such is afoot, why does no one talk about it, except the usual muffled voices of conspiracists and a few bioethicists enslaved by academic argot which is in itself already post-human? We speak here not merely of the concrete posthumanist movement per se, but of the social transition whose results it anticipates. There are infinite ways to kill a man, and not all of them qualify as homicide. There is, for instance, the practice of euthanasia – the exercise of the right to die – slowly entrenching itself in codes of fundamental human rights.

Allow to leap forward – we can affirm that the real reason for transhumanism lies in the very nature of transition itself. It’s not merely a transitory movement from one state to another, as often branded. On the contrary, when taken as a historical epoch, it is an entirely self-sufficient and enclosed process, the process of infinite ending. If you want to see it – and it’s necessary to see it before proceeding to define it – remember, have you ever paused while walking down the busy avenue and asked yourself a simple question: where does all this busy mess of pedestrians and traffic go? Stop in front of a fitness center with glass panels overlooking the street, and observe all the people running in place on moving tracks; therein lies your answer. For a long time now cities are silent when you interrogate them, so in accordance with the Zeitgeist, the answer is written on the wall. It says: nowhere.

The ground cause of transition is the erosion of every ground; perpetual movement obliterating the past and infinitely delaying the future, a state, we must add, in which the human being as such will soon be unable to survive. In this sense, a perfect homicide is the one that rules out the possibility of being qualified as homicide. That’s where posthumanism comes into play.

Singularity

The posthumanist movement sees the age of transition as an acceleration of history towards technological explosion, whose culmination is to be expected no later than the year of 2050, when, it is predicted, the singularity is to finally commence. The term has many meanings, but posthumanists usually apply two among them. The first, made possible by one of the inciters of digital revolution, John von Neumann, says the singularity is a moment in history when a torrent of technological progress becomes so strong, so quick and so pervasive that human life in turn becomes irrevocably transformed. Contemporary posthumanists join this to a fully developed artificial intelligence immeasurably stronger than that of man and the final assimilation of not only human beings, but the universe in toto, with intelligent machines.

Sculpture from the 2013 Bilderberg Meeting in Watford, England.

Singularity’s second meaning, brimming with religious pathos for posthumanists, is a hypothetical construction taken from the field of theoretical physics: singularity is a point in which the curve of time/space vectors becomes infinite, thus creating the point of infinite mass and, consequently, infinite gravity field. What happens in singularity remains hidden from the outside observer, because gravity annihilates any movement contrary to it, and so light cannot escape it once in its field. In that sense, physical singularity can be visualized only by analogies, because the witness passing over its threshold can never return to relate what he has seen. This threshold is termed event horizon. Singularity denies return to anything that enters it, and this means we can talk about it only in mathematical constructions or images, outside observers blind to its shape and form, but certain of its existence in all its magnificence. Bearing in mind the necessity of light for perception as well as the construction of metaphors, this phenomenon is also known as a black hole.

Gods by Merit

Why compare the acceleration of technological growth with the properties of cosmic monstrosities, frequently the inspiration for creators of science fiction? Namely because there exists a strikingly correct analogy between them, and the posthumanists are all too eager to exploit it. The idea is that the absolute peak of technological progress is not merely a contingency. It is a moment in the future acting as causa finalis, transforming everything “moving” towards it; it is the endpoint of evolution, and not only of biological life, but of the universe as a totality. Man is the being through and by which the discarding of biology is coming to pass, because he is capable of creating technology and, by dissolving his biological foundation, integrating himself into the world-system. He is able to assume a form perfectly appropriate for dead infinity – that of the machine.

Behold progress!

Notably, posthumanists view all existence as an information system. In that respect, the behavior of constitutional elements of matter and energy is intelligent by its very design, in the way a computer with no operator can be defined as intelligent: it is the activity of dead binary reactive material points. On a biological level, this digital structure elevates to the level of genes and their elements, and further, towards an intelligence reduced to the ability to calculate for pattern recognition. In this respect it is astonishing how well the term intelligent design suits both posthumanists and pseudo-Christian creationists. Both groups reduce the world to mechanical categories, with the notable difference that the sophistication of posthumanists transcends mere materialism and mechanics, their hope being far better-founded. It is easier to wait for the rapture we shall create than sell one that was never really in store. Besides, the posthumanist promise to the faithful is formulated clearly and distinctly and fixated to a foreseeable and definite future. The conquest of death through assimilation of man to technology, AI, and finally to the universe itself, is presented with the winning smile and smooth spin of the megachurch prosperity preacher: “Because you deserve it!”

Man without Characteristics

To understand the motive of posthumanists and the grounds on which they assert their ambition, we must peer into the metaphysics at the roots of the movement. It is the humanist ideal of absolute freedom of the conscious individuum driven to its final consequences. The individuum is that which cannot be further divided and whose only limit is the other, equal, individuum. The point of this definition is best reflected in Protagora’s homo mensura, i.e. the proposition that man is the measure, not only of history, but all things – those that are, that they are and those that are not, that they are not. It is an attitude developed from the late Renaissance of Descartes to the modernity of Hegel through the idea and the possibility of an absolute or at least potentially absolute system of science. At the peak of modernity, that is to say between the two world wars, the final dissolution of the subject came to pass. But that doesn’t equal its abandonment as a principle. We still can’t deny that we are human, but in order to plant ourselves at the root of all things – in fact to deify ourselves – we must transcend reality and re-form it, as well as ourselves, according to our own will. That process can be defined as virtualization, the state in which man lives and behaves as if he is still human, but thinks and works as if he is ceasing to be. It is the advent of postmodernity, the epoch at whose peak – which means right now – the final decision of man is to be made: Will man remain himself, or will he, after long centuries of the metaphysical equivalent of fruitless foreplay, finally cease to be human?

The individuum as metaphysical principle provokes some questions. Namely, how is it possible for something indivisible to be dissolved? In other words, how can the conscious subject, as an unconditional principle, disintegrate? Does that not point into a direction of uncertainty? The key for a proper answer to this question, as well as for the explication of the inner structure of the term ‘posthumanism’, lies in the method the predecessors of posthumanism relied upon to reach it in the first place. It is the reduction of wealth of experience to one principle, moreover the one everybody likes best: a reflection in the mirror. Conceiving the individuum as a metaphysical principle finds its genesis in the urge to remove all obstacles to individual freedom. That freedom is completely arbitrary; it presupposes the autonomy of an individual’s reason and will with only one inescapable condition: the individuum is a subject without properties, namely the being whose only identity is contained solely within oneself. This conclusion is inescapable, since it is otherwise impossible to attain absolute freedom. Any other property or qualification – ethnicity, race, religion, family, and finally sex – contaminates absolute identity with a moment of differentiation, thereby destroying it and rendering the individual principle finite and conditioned.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus, by Salvador Dali.

Of course, to be free solely in volition yet unrelated to the “outside” world is worthless. Therefore the individual is free to creatively model its world to the point it bangs its head on the wall of un-human reality, i.e. when it decides to actualize itself by playing solitaire in a steel mill’s furnace or, less dramatically, limit the freedom of another individual endowed with the same dignity. Up to this point modern liberalism, which is the social modification of this metaphysical principle, will raise no eyebrows on behalf of enlightened contemporary men. There’s a catch, however. Limited freedom is not absolute, and the concrete human being is not really an individuum. For his identity must in some measure conform to others’ identities, and Narcissus has to allow all the other narcissists absolute right to be the center of the world. Equality is as much necessary as it is unacceptable. The only way out is for all particular forms of volition and identity to be reduced to a single one, and that means to finally level all forms of differentiation to nothingness. Hence the global struggle for such principles as “minority rights” is inhumane in its essence. Its real purpose is the dissolution of ethnic, cultural, religious, family and sexual differences. Postmodern metastasis of this metaphysics points towards infinity, i.e. aims at the abolition of all human characteristics under the cover of achieving freedom from all human limitations. So posthumanists promise us that when we ingest millions of nano-bots, we’ll be able to play poker in crematoria, calculate at the speed of supercomputers, change our perception of the world and our bodies at will, because the new paradise will be also pervaded by nano-sensors to enhance its every delight. We will ultimately become as gods: through inconceivable AI we will know everything, and through diffuse nano-bodies we will practically live forever.

Now, ain’t that cool?

Fine Print

Perhaps, but in marketing there are always key details to be found in fine print. As in all self-respecting religions, the rebirth of New Man from the bosom of a black hole demands the death of “old” man. It comes to pass through renunciation of all properties which make a concrete individual unique by limiting it, thereby making it a person. Everything, including the body and thoughts, must be expelled from the identity of the individuum. The death of the human race in the age of transition is inflicted by stripping away its humanity – the very things by which we are what we are – and re-creating it in absolute freedom. Literally – quod erat demonstratum – a reboot of the Garden of Eden, only this time with a new Author and bountiful, endless fruits from the trees of knowledge and life. However, the intermediary phases of the procedure are quite painful. We can compare it to infinite self-injury, the infinite peeling back of one’s own skin only to find a new bloody layer to remove. The ripping and grinding of everything that can be taken apart. And, surely, everything can be taken apart. Because a center without properties does not really exist. It is, taken in itself and deprived of its mirror, pure nothingness.

Androgyny through alchemy.

Let’s entertain ourselves with a few illustrations.

Dividing the individuum is not as absurd as it seems, nor are these abstract thoughts far removed from everyday life. It is necessary because an individual with no properties is in fact an illusion. In order to hold oneself as a universal principle, it must commence its own virtualization, the transformation of itself and the world into a hologram infinitely divided according to its will. At this moment we can observe to what extent posthumanism is already a dominant worldview today. Popular alternative media guru David Icke, who would surely never define himself as a posthumanist, talks about absolute freedom of “consciousness having experience” in a holographic universe, drawing upon various substitutes for scientific materialism, ideas which in share the same origin as the worldview they try to escape. Posthumanism defines its principle clearly and puts the human being at the same level with all matter indiscriminately. In the informational world-system man is not only indistinguishable from animal; he is no different from anything else. In that sense it is all too legitimate to merge body and technology, just as it is legitimate to genetically modify life. Matter is potentially infinitely divisible, just as the individuum is. New Age fantasies of quantum mechanics and its principles as proof of the spiritual foundation of the world are in fact an immersion into the total materialism of a universe which dissolves, not merely on touch, but on sight, and its corollary: virtual consciousness. Postmodern pop spirituality and conspirology of the same ilk fit in wonderfully with their “truth vibrations”, “emotional fields,” and “Christ consciousness,” because they impose categories of the lower upon that which is higher, thus losing forever the chance of touching it, submerged unaware in the torrent of transition.

Further down the slope of everyday life, we have social projects like the “Internet of Things”, implementation of RFID technology and “smart meters”, but also “flexecurity” and “life-long learning,” constituting the age of transition and rendering us networked and addicted to technology in order to properly assimilate coming generations, all with the goal of the machine final triumphant penetration of the body. Signs of materialization and dissolution mirror themselves in seemingly insignificant phenomena, such as the popularity of tattooing and piercing. Nowadays, covering the body in ink indiscriminately, with no significant message contained in such “art,” is a common phenomenon. It could written off as the expression of desire for sensations, even painful ones, that emanates from deracinated dwellers of a sterilized society. But if we observe it from the posthumanist perspective, it is a clear sign of a gradual discarding of the body’s personal value, its commoditization. Kurzweil himself notes this trend and remarks how it will make fusion of humans and machines easier because it displays the already-developed habit of treating one’s own body as an external object. Various meditation techniques, courses and self-help literature exhibit the same tendency towards “ego-ization” of the spirit and its treatment as an object to be technically modified and improved, or just as well replaced, dismantled, and even uploaded to the network.

Spaghettification of the Subject

The terms in which posthumanists describe themselves are also very interesting. Ray Kurzweil speaks about his innate design, his obsolete hardware and software – i.e. his body and mind – which he endeavors to keep mended and updated by ingesting more than 150 food supplements daily into his system. The vegan crusader against suffering and transhumanist David Pierce laments over being tired in terms of limits of his design, and envisions the future where technologically modified humans will banish all unpleasant sensations from the world. We must note, however, that these are not metaphors. These individuals do not consider themselves human any more. The same can be said for nature. Kurzweil’s final prediction is that in the wake of singularity, the A.I. will start “awaking the universe.” Innumerable nano-bots moving faster than light will commence pervading infinity and create a living, intelligent world.

Will they really?

No, they will not. Cosmos, meaning “beautiful order”, the world organism grounded in spirit, in which the man of antiquity and, to a lesser extent, the middle ages had lived is diametrically opposed to Kurzweil’s vision. A universe inseminated by artificial intelligence is a dead thing endowed with operating system, a titanic computer or, more precisely, a living corpse. The beginning and the end of transition is death, a black hole in which postmodern man finally encounters himself. We who, thank God, still linger on the sunny side of event horizon can’t really know what the reunion looks like, but we can excersise our imagination with some lively imagery taken from theoretical physics. Namely, some physicists speak about the phenomenon of spaghettification, of the observer sinking in the black hole. Driving the impression closer to life, it is also known as the noodle effect. Therefore we can easily let the imagination flow and endow us with images of what sinking to the bosom of posthumanism holy mother really looks like. The image of man rendered into macaroni perfectly fits the final logical outcome of the posthumanist principle. Transposition of categories taken from information technologies applied practically to the whole of experience, and, in a historical sense, to all that has been when those categories didn’t exist, speaks clearly of the fact that postmodern man is already being shredded to a semblance of the popular Italian dish.  

Souls for sale at the singularity.

Virtual reality is already at work. The ‘real’ reality is unreal, so the apostles of transhumanism contend, believe it or not, from the age of Descartes. Only, as we have already pointed out, humanism never really moved forward from its initial foreplay. Consciousness of a different metaphysics, different principles and original truths had been tolerated in everyday life and works as a private matter, while in politics and science it stood as an underlying corrective to the conventional wisdom. Alas, now the zipper has been unzipped, and there is no turning back from real hardcore intercourse with nothingness. Absolute power commenced its own dispersion, its own logically necessary suicide. The idea of abandoning the original for its simulacrum, detaching past from present, now isn’t merely an idea or a general tendency of infinite growth, sustainable or otherwise. It is reverse engineering. It is re-creation of the world by virtue of insane reason and insatiable volition. By virtue of nothing. In this manner posthumanism, aside from being anti-human, is an anti-cosmic metaphysics. And it is, as they say, the future.

Acceleration towards singularity is reality, but not the reality of progress. It is the reality of free fall. According to posthumanist logic, which is the defining idea of our epoch, it is free fall accelerated by the growing inertia of the black hole of metaphysical egotism. We stand before the most destructive idea that will bring forth the most destructive being ever into earthly existence. Not merely a geek wizard, but a geek god, ironclad in isolation from everyday life, armed with the absolute negation of everything which came to pass before him and hell-bent on applying Darwinism hypertrophied into the compulsion to uproot everything different, right down to the subatomic level. And so we can imagine from our sunny side of event horizon:

Narcissus is speeding and accelerating down the vertical of singularity, ripping himself apart, dissolving in space and time … there is nothing but reflections, a world of mirrors closing in from all directions … touching the mirror, he tears away his face to discover what lies behind the surface. But there is nothing. Can he push Ctrl+Alt+Del, perhaps? Too late. His ‘I’ is now everywhere and nowhere, his world is an infinity of ripping apart and perpetual disintegration into his own reflection, an eternity of falling and dissolving in inescapable darkness.

And what did he herald to the world on the precipice of his triumph?

Singularity is near, resistance is futile.

Branko Malic is the editor of the Kali Tribune, a Croatian online publication covering Traditionalism, metaphysics, science, and religion.

In this interview with Russian journalist Konstantin Kachalin, international award-winning Serbian film director Emir Kusturica shares his thoughts on man’s spiritual trajectory, the kinship between the Serbian and Russian peoples, Western materialism, and international capital’s lifeblood – war. Kusturica, born into a Bosnian Muslim family, was baptized into Orthodoxy in 2005, thereby returning his lineage to its original faith. Translated by Mark Hackard.

***

Why do you always try to tell people the truth in your work, even if sometimes it’s not very pleasant?

In the beginning I was shooting films in a way that wouldn’t shame me in front of my parents, friends, and teachers. I never thought about receiving Oscars or the Cannes Palm D’Or for it. I was simply making good cinema for people. I’m sure that if I set myself the task of shooting a film that would receive every award imaginable at the very beginning of my cinematographic career, I wouldn’t amount to anything in life.

I had moral principles, and I set myself the task of telling people the truth. That’s why I’m known and watched in the world today. Human life and civilization cannot develop without powerful ideas. An apartment, car, money, the good life – these aren’t bad things. They become false when they turn into the goal of one’s entire life. Each of us should have a goal in life. But if things are transformed into life’s main meaning, its basic objective, then nothing will result from this, and so you won’t make anything of yourself.

There should be a main idea, a main goal that leads us through life, and one that leads us spiritually. We must define our task and choose our path. Only then can we receive what we desire. The idea itself will bring us to the results. A rich man can be good, yet if he conditions himself his entire life to become rich, then his life is pointless. Everything that has a spiritual idea leads to man reaching a positive goal. If we turn everything upside-down, then it will be difficult to achieve anything.

Emir Kusturica

Modern technologies, the internet, etc. are every more attaching man to themselves. Each of us is under the control of Big Brother, even if we don’t often account for this. Are we turning into robots that will ultimately lose their spirituality and individuality?

Today the world is full of high-tech pagans. This paganism doesn’t benefit man; he is under constant technological control. His brain and all parts of his body are controlled. Everything that happens to us is accessible to new technologies, but we cannot claim that today’s man is better than in the age of the Renaissance. We cannot say that industrial-age man is better or worse then today’s high-tech man, but moderns are left without a spiritual reference point. What remains in them are not very kind intentions, and some want to dominate others and enslave people. What does God give to man? He gives him the uniqueness that is being leveled in today’s world. Man is divided not into two parts, but several.

High-tech man today is more inclined toward biological rather than spiritual life. Only material values interest him; he is a pagan of technologies. And today this pagan opposes the divine man, about whom Dostoevsky spoke. There was a very interesting study conducted by the Americans – they were choosing the best writer of all time and all peoples. Lev Tolstoy took first place, and Dostoevsky wasn’t even in their list. They’re bothered by Fyodor Mikhailovich’s deep view into the human soul. I don’t want to say anything bad about Tolstoy, but with Dostoevsky we discover man’s soul and his inexhaustible possibilities. And he converses with us today in the contemporary language each of us needs. He calls us to spirituality.

The modern high-tech pagan is happy with more; he is a consumer and doesn’t ask questions. He loses individuality and becomes part of a controlled mob. He has no soul. Today the majority of Serbs and Russians are also transforming into high-tech pagans in imitation of Western models of culture, and not the best ones. There’s also much of interest in the West, but the youth is choosing the worst – high-tech paganism. I hope that there great changes will also occur in the West, for one cannot live without spirituality.

You are often in Russia and have many friends here. What do Serbs and Russians have in common? And why did our countries experience so many human tragedies in the twentieth century? What was the point of such suffering?

The peoples of our countries suffered many tragedies. Russia is a land targeted by invaders from Napoleon to Hitler. With its vast territories and natural resources, your state has always been a prize for those who warred against it. The suffering of Russia’s peoples is an enormous historical enigma. Should the Russian people have suffered so? They have indeed experienced what no other people on the planet have. Serbia also underwent no small number of human tragedies. We lost two thirds of our labor force. If not for the First World War, there would by 40 million people in Serbia today instead of 9 million. Historical circumstances constantly draw us into these human tragedies, these wars.

Other Slavic peoples managed to adapt to historical circumstances. The Czechs, for example, were able to find a compromise with the invaders. The fascists were much more merciful to them than to the Russians and Serbs. But Yugoslavia fell into a historical trap in World War II, and Britain took advantage of that. The Serbs went out on the streets and protested against Hitler, and Churchill gave the command to all Europeans to fight against the fascists and stop Hitler from seizing Europe. We obeyed Churchill, and on March 27th, 1941, the people went into the streets. All of this was organized by British intelligence, which was carrying out Churchill’s directives. After that Hitler gave the order to bomb Yugoslavia. They always bomb us: both the Allies in 1944 and NATO in 1999.

Today’s world is arranged to be have an interest in constant wars. Despite the fact that wars in literature are condemned and the majority of people are against war, modern war has transformed into a profitable business. This is an eternal enterprise that thinks only of how to make money off human misery. And the major hypocrisy of the modern world is that those who organize wars simultaneously finance anti-war movements.

Humanity’s fate is braided into a tight knot impossible to unravel: from war to profit, and from profit to a new war. Thus capital and enormous fortunes are created. Modern wars are waged under the slogans of democracy and humanitarianism. The war that resulted in our losing Kosovo was called Merciful Angel. And no one asks the main question – why?

In Vietnam 4.5 million people died, in Iraq today there’s already a million dead, and in Afghanistan people are dying daily; we’ll never know the real figures. This speaks to the fact that capitalism is the main military enterprise. If an angel descended from the heavens and told Bush that there would be no more wars, everyone would be jobless. Wars give the push for new technologies and make men go further. I’m against war, but it’s a component part of human history and its tragic development.

Phaedo, the dialogue of Plato that concerns Socrates’ final words, is both profound and prone to strike the reader as bizarre and mysterious. The discussion revolves around a proposal by Socrates’ associates to defend his views of the afterlife and the immortality of the soul, followed by a counter argument by a Pythagorean, and a final rebuttal by Socrates before the recounting of his drinking the hemlock. The work constitutes one of Plato’s most notable dialogues: The influence of Phaedo on subsequent Western thought is clearly tremendous. And it’s worth returning to after the undergrad days of philosophy 101, where one might read a selection and hit the highlights of the doctrine of forms and immortality of the soul. In this article, we will investigate the epistemological, metaphysical and esoteric teachings sprinkled along the way, as well as problematic areas.

Early in the dialogue, Socrates mentions his desire to practice the “arts” based on a recurring dream he has had. In response to queries about this, Socrates tells his friends “philosophy is the greatest of the arts,” based on his attempt to create an Aesop’s Fable of his own about the duality involved in pleasure and pain. The dialogue is also littered with reference to “initiation into the Mysteries,’ the allegorical understanding given in religious initiations, and that the “initiates of the Mysteries” are prepared for journey of the dead undertaken in the afterlife. Pleasure, he argues, is dialectically tied to pain, and both tend to ever bring their opposite. In this life, our attachment to bodily pleasure and passion thus becomes a hindrance that wears down the lofty, immortal nature of the soul. The allegorical meaning of the Rites of the Mysteries is therefore the philosophical understanding of how to live well so that in the next life one can pass on to blissful Valhalla. However, Socrates does not entirely “spiritualize” or “allegorize” the rites of the gods – he follows them in both senses.

The references to the Mysteries and the rites of religion is curious, given the standard, secular version of this topic in academic settings, which generally focuses on a cursory overview and a discarding of any esoteric ideas in the dialogues. Marxist, feminist and statist education in our day is universally programmed to read all great works as externally imposed class and gender warfare diatribes, subverting everything wholesome and wondrous in them. And should you happen upon a male professor that isn’t a feminist/Marxist, you likely got an atheist materialist who scoffed at anything in the work beyond his feeble grasp. Contrary to these sophistical losers, Phaedo is a religious treatise about initiatic knowledge through revelation. While all of its theses and ideas are not what I would recommend, Phaedois a perennialist document, and not a secular one.

For Plato and Socrates, the “philosopher” is he who lives according to virtue and reason, cultivating the pleasures of the soul/intellect, and not the pleasures and passions of the baser desires of the body. The key to this path is grasping first that there are absolutes – absolute truth, goodness, beauty, etc. These are universal forms that are recollected from our past lives, and ultimately back to the One, or the Monad, from which all things mysteriously emanated. Man “sees” truly by his soul, and seeing with this higher, awakened eyesight allows one to peer into the higher realm of existence where truth is eternal, not subject to the chaotic flux and temporal finitude and change of this life. Anti-material and, anachronistically, gnostic elements emerge here, and later Christian theology, for example, would connect gnostic movements to Platonism. One thinks of Origen’s debates with Celsus, for example, or Augustine and Porphyry, and in both of those cases, Augustine and Origen unfortunately share too many of Platonism’s presuppositions. Regardless, the anti-physical stance of Platonism actually demonstrates origins in much older traditions of the Far East. As the Timaeus recounts, the “mysteries” of Pythagoreanism and Platonism are those of Egypt.

Just as Augustine can be subjected to analogous criticism, the clear influence of Platonic errors is evident from Phaedo. The ascetic tendency to “despise the body” is present, also hearkening to older, ascetic traditions found in religions like Hinduism, so we are again presented with a perennial tradition at work here that is based on syncretic principles. The “seeing” the soul does is achieved by the awakening of the philosophical sense, where the soul wanders through the mirror reflections and copies of things (the particulars), on the way back to the One (the universals and the Monad), and then to engage in the cyclical process again, where Socrates gives a detailed account of how the transmigration of souls takes place. The unfortunate and central place of Western dialectics is given primacy here, where the eternal realm of unchanging forms is set over against the temporal realm of illusory reality. Ancient far eastern ideas of maya and empirical “reality” as un-reality and deception are clearly present, and along with the transmigration of souls, these ridiculous doctrines should be dropped, based as they are on pagan conceptions of cyclical time and the chain of being, wherein God, forms, man and matter, are all placed at different levels on the same continuum of being. All based on the presupposition of dialectics raised to a status of ultimate metaphysical principle, contraries and oppositions found in nature are not transcended by setting these forces in eternal dualistic opposition.

In this scheme, death is on the same continuum as life, as a “natural” process, and time is illusory. The central absurdity here is that if life is illusory, then the realization of life is illusory, as well. In other words, a pre-suppositional critique of the faulty metaphysical assumptions of Platonism can actually free us from the dialectical tensions and allow us to plumb its depths for good points and insights. Nevertheless, the central problem here is the dualistic tension of binary opposition, where all binaries require their opposite.  So, pleasure requires and brings pain, death requires and brings life, etc. By this reasoning, time necessitates eternity, and the good requires and necessitates either evil or negation of the good, etc.  If that is true, then the eternality of the good is based on the simultaneous eternality of evil. If the two require and necessitate the other, then the value judgment of adjudicating something as “good” and something as “bad” must also be illusory, relative, and whichever appellation is chosen can logically be interchanged with the other. If both good and evil are relative terms based on the eternality of both in dualistic tension, then good is evil, and evil is good, and we are back at monism. Numerous other ways of modelling this presupposition as contradictory nonsense could be given, but this should be sufficient to show it’s nonsensical on its own grounds.

In like manner, the location of knowledge of the forms is placed by Plato in past lives. Transmigration of the soul and reincarnation (clearly borrowed from older pagan religions) is nonsensical on numerous grounds, but the most obvious is the impossible bridge or link between the realm of the forms and this life of flux. How can the good, eternal, invariant and universal actually be in our realm of the opposite? It cannot, and for Plato the only bridge between these two realms is the human intellect. Since the human intellect clearly makes connections and associations that extend beyond the empirical, how is this possible? If human autonomy and rationalistic primacy of intellect are the starting point for epistemology, then it stands to reason that the knowledge of universals we obtain must originate in a past life. However, this does not solve the problem of finitude, as the ability to link what Kant called a transcendental unity of apperception or a unitive identity in an object over time (identity over time), cannot be solved by a finite human intellect. The only way out of this dilemma is an infinite Divine Mind which contains all the logoi (forms), and not a human intellect. The human intellect is a small mirror of this Logos, but it is not a mirror of the divine Monad’s essence (as Platonism, Origenism, Augustinianism, and Thomism say).

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Forms and Archetypes.

The bridge between the infinite and the finite is the human nous, a faculty given by God to know God. The human nous is able to, through remembrance of God (not remembrance of past lives) achieve actual gnosis of the logoi (forms) through union with God, not intellectual and rational accumulation of facts. The rationalist tendency to identify intellect and soul in Platonism must be rejected, as this identification is also the root of the anthropological trend the West would take, turning it to its own oblivion. The reason for this is Plato’s idea that the soul, because it is invisible, must be a perfect unity, like the original Monad, and thus in dialectical tension, the multiplicity and flux of the body is in tension against the perfect unity of the soul, identified with the intellect. No, man is not a duality of body and soul in tension, but a body, soul and spirit, and by returning to God through repentance and love, his heart (nous) is changed, thus altering his intellect, placing intellect under the rule of nous. For Plato, it’s man’s intellect that is primary – for Orthodoxy, it is man’s heart that must change in submission to God which cleanses the mind to submit to the nous, and thereby man perceived the truth of things (logoi). For Plato, theosis is achieved by man’s intellect – biblically, theosis is achieved by placing intellect under the dominance of the heart and God’s law.

However, these criticisms aside, Plato’s argument against naïve empiricism is excellent and crucial.  The mind of man does connect similar concepts in objects of experience, and these connecting concepts themselves are not empirically experienced.  They are also not mere token terms invented by social structures, but real ideas, real connecting universals that objects share through participation in the universal.  This doctrine of participation of many things in one, while retaining their identities was chosen in the patristic era because of this balance, over and against Aristotelian hylomorphism. Hylomorphism in Aristotelian thought excludes the possibility of more than one unity in an object – any singular substance must be an absolutely simple substance. However, for Plato, there is at least the notion of the balance of the one and the many in an object, which is able to share the universal characteristics of roundness, whiteness, etc., without roundness and whiteness and particularity losing their real identity, as Sherrard has elucidated. Plato’s arguments about forms from the problem of the one and the many are the ultimate antidote to the naïve empiricism and scientism that have so drugged the masses in our day. Socrates even jokes that in his young days, he was taken up by the naïve empirical natural science of Anaxagoras, as if it was the answer to everything, only later in life coming to the realization that it was a fundamentally flawed and pre-suppositionally nonsensical view, which attempted to explain causality by reference to other causes or descriptions. This circular, contradictory, nonsensical view would be highlighted a few millennia later by David Hume, who would take the skepticism of empiricism to its logical conclusions – total insanity and the destruction of all possibility of knowledge.

Read Jay Dyer’s work on philosophy, science, geopolitics, culture, and conspiracies at Jay’s Analysis.

In his classic, prophetic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick depicted a future dystopia where the only way to determine the difference between humans and rogue, bio-engineered androids was empathy: the latter were incapable of experiencing and thus demonstrating it. In our own particular time, however, merely a few decades after Dick’s passing, one wonders if such a distinction could be so clearly discerned. The average Apple-addicted hipster only feels empathy, or some simulacrum of it, if it’s trending on Twitter and is followed with a politically correct, therapeutic hashtag. Kony 2012 and Michelle Obama’s #BringBackOurGirls derived meaning from their presence and promotion on social media, with special status accorded to celebrity endorsements.

An endless stream of viral images flows perpetually through the consciousness of modern man. He is increasingly rendered incapable of interpreting this continuous barrage that assaults him through most of his waking hours. Even if only passively, as soon as one sets foot in public, and it must be noted the home is no longer a purely private sphere, one is bombarded by everything from ruthless political campaigns and relentless advertising to the most banal of social-media sideshows. He does not know what, or even how, to feel emotionally, unless there is a click-bait headline attached. A numbing effect permeates the psyche.

Within this environment, modern man should not be blamed too harshly for his cognitive dissonance, petty egoism, and social schizophrenia. His social and psychological conditioning is, of course, not a random byproduct arising out of the chaos of nature or a streak of historical bad luck. Rather, it has been the plan of the social engineers and ruling elites all along. Through a clever combination of state-controlled education, state-aligned media (a psy-op unto itself), and an ever-deepening psychological dependence on technology, modern man casts to the wayside his freedom and free will. He thus becomes a docile, consuming android-subject of the technocratic state.

Yet consent is still needed for this state of affairs, and modern man is eager to give it. Stripped of his traditional spirituality and organic identity, he can find no reason to reject those who lord over him. As the German patriot Ernst Jünger said, the “great majority of people do not want freedom, are actually afraid of it.” The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky said much the same thing in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor in the novel The Brothers Karamazov. Indeed, the technocracy operates on much the same philosophy as Dostoevsky’s clever, and quite sinister, elderly Spanish cardinal. The Inquisitor declared that “in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet.” He wasn’t mistaken; there are certainly far too many eager for the sort of slavery that technology and its shapers offer mankind.

Returning to Dick, on another occasion he remarked that the time was coming when no longer would it be said, “They’re spying on me through my phone,” but rather, “My phone is spying on me.” Not only your iPhone, but your washing machine too, according to none other than former CIA director and Bilderberg member David Petraeus. The masses’ ever-widening embrace of and reliance on the latest technological gizmos, manufactured by Chinese indentured laborers held in place with suicide nets, serves to expedite their merger with the ever-expanding surveillance grid. But such a merger isn’t without its benefits. Your iPhone may be spying on you and sending your personal information off to government intelligence agencies and multinational corporations, but it provides you with immediate access to pirated porn, one-click shopping, Candy Crush, and BuzzFeed. The Panopticon is a small price to pay for such luxuries, after all.

The Hungarian-American philosopher Thomas Molnar aptly observed that modern man has become “an extension of machines,” and that while man “likes to play at operating these machines,” he has in fact “become their plaything” and a “soulless accomplice.” At this point it seems difficult to argue with this dismal assessment. In his slothful reliance on technology to provide himself with amusement and diversion, modern man has come under the sway of that same technology and those who control it, assuming an android existence.

I grew up loving George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Mad Max series. All of us, like rubber-neckers at an accident, have some inner fascination with the potential for a complete collapse and destruction of the existing order and the hope for something new, and often the human imagination projects such yearnings into art in a unique way. The energy of revolutionary impulse, ever tied to this desire for radical change, has long been harnessed and utilized for subversive ends by historical power blocs, and in our day, the explosion of apocalypse-themed novels, films, graphic novels and art reflects this inner want, but the manipulation now functions on a much larger scale.

Arising from Cold War terrors of constant media-hyped threats of nuclear war, engineered apocalypticism was discovered to be a powerful tool of social engineering in psychological warfare. What if, instead of actually destroying things on a mass scale, the public psyche could simply be inundated with the constant fear of such a disaster?  Much cheaper, and still very effective, fear brings impotence:  I know, just ask my last girlfriend (Ha! Zing!) Reflect again on our recent noozmedia blockbusters – we have the mass faux-zombie outbreak and Ebola, the new “Cold War” with Russia replete with nuclear threats from neo-cons, the climate apocalypse of global warming, and myriad other absent crises always on the horizon. What does come in a steady stream is manufactured fear from PR companies and think tanks.

Liberated from all identity, free to be Me.

So what if, instead of the end of civilization coming, not even with “a whimper and not a bang,” it sneaks upon us with a gradualism of monomaniacal trademark mediocrity? This is not to say there won’t be economic collapses or mass disasters and pandemics, but those phenomena tend to have a short lifespan for fear-porn ends in the grand scheme – only a few months or years tops in mass media marquee letters. What if the coming global end comes through monoculture and the new world order sloughs and waddles its way down the frozen pizza aisle with supremely boring methods, like Candy Crush, corn syrup and consumerist standardization? The nightmare of the now – silly-putty people of the Novus Ordo devolve into a Gumby-like cut-outs that can be molded, shaped, dissolved and coagulated as GloboCorp sees fit through much more subtle, dull means than mass cataclysms. The energy of revolutionary impulse becomes packaged as an energy drink!

Mass cataclysms are messy, so in their place I’m pitching a substitute, staged reality show on Netflix called Real World: Mass Cataclysm. It follows a group of properly diverse genderless bean-like creatures that struggle to survive inside, not a cave or a deserted island, but a Wal-Mart. Surprisingly, we don’t already have a reality show about androgynous beings attempting to live on different aisles of Wal-Mart Estates, but I’m reasonably hopeful. The pilot plot might involve one of the genderless beings finding an old bottle of Randy Beef Grass pills stashed away in a locker, and upon their ingestion, the inkling of some testosterone and testicular fortitude cause the middle-aged protagonist to enter puberty. The asexual employee collective shouts him down with chants of “racism,” and in an orgy of break-room celebration, removes his newly-blossomed male organ for ritual immolation. That way, the rest of the viewing world can think there are mass cataclysms and pandemics running rampant, but since they never leave their techno-hovels, they’ll never know it’s all staged in a completely mundane, yet absurd way. After it airs, Aldous Huxley gives it 4 stars and two packs of gummies – thumbs up!

So trendy, so original, so free!

The apocalypse is now, not 10 years from now, when the fiat currency falls flat from derivatives or when the bio-outbreak causes President Morgan Freeman to address us in his blessed God-voice.  The apocalypse now is your local box store, your iPhone and your plastic breasts and penis-enhancement pill (both possessed by the same being!).  The feminization of society skips hand in hand with a bearded trendy to the castration barn, where men are made vaginal and women are made penile.  Men with breasts, and women with lats and traps – that is the dystopia now, not masculine Mad Max and a resource war for water and gasoline.

Our dystopia is the viscous mediocrity and standardization of all things into an aisle at Target, where gender, religion, nationality are interchangeable with Pepsi, Coke or Jolt (Jolt being the really sweet gender of choice). The effects of the Cold War had a tremendous part to play in the rise of the fears of losing what the West had, but the present covert warfare is more akin to the effects of the cold on one’s manhood. Like Osiris and John Wayne Bobbitt, it is now time for men to lop off those members and place them on the altar of equality, moving to mass line 69Z for Gumby-fication processing. The Mammy State demands it, and she demands it be boring.

For all of Jay Dyer’s works on philosophy, science, geopolitics, culture, and conspiracies, visit Jay’s Analysis.

Geopolitical analysis, the art of explaining power relationships through the prism of impersonal geography, can be a helpful tool for observers of the Great Game – but it also has its limitations. A case in point is the renewed US-Russia confrontation. Think tanks and policy insiders easily sell the narrative that from the dark days of the Cold War to our own time, Russia and the United States are fated to play in a zero-sum contest for the future of Eurasia and the world. Deterministic theories, though, can be used to legitimize predatory policy, and pseudo-scientific formulae often conceal manipulations by parasitic elites. Scoring a fortune off human misery and mass death, plundering economic assets, and shaping entire societies in one’s own image all find justification in claims of historical inevitability and the necessity of “progress.”

While Russia and the United States can easily be cast as eternal enemies in the manner of Rome and Carthage, or Ivan Drago and Rocky Balboa for modern audiences, we should recall that the two states were originally allies. From the time of 1776, Russo-American friendship was a contributor to the peace and security of both nations for nearly a century and a half. Catherine the Great shrewdly supported the independence of the American colonists, who were able to mount a successful rebellion against an exploitative oligarchy acting through the British Crown. In the terrible cauldron of the US Civil War, Tsar Alexander II, liberator of the peasantry, sent his fleet to America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts to deter British and French intervention schemes.

The Russian Navy patrols America’s coastlines, 1863.

In Realpolitik, where expediency is the order of the day, alliances are defined by a common adversary. For both Russia and the United States, that adversary was not simply another nation-state like England or France, but a financial international bent on controlling the world through elaborate fraud, war, and revolution. Banking dynasties under names like Rothschild, and later Morgan, Warburg, and Rockefeller, had ascended to power in the West from the seventeenth century onward. Their planned global imperium of borderless labor and capital flows, today promoted as the Open Society by billionaire speculators such as George Soros, was already entering its initial stages of implementation. Thus the fledgling American Republic, an Enlightenment project but not yet under bankster domination, and Imperial Russia could unite for the freedom of their peoples and against the assaults of the Money Power.

What changed? In the early twentieth century the masters of usury struck back decisively against the United States and Russia, by stealth in the former case and an outright coup d’état in the latter. Through various machinations, the privately-run Federal Reserve Bank was established in 1913 to issue the US currency at interest, suborning institutions of government and crushing Americans with a national debt now counted in unfathomable trillions. The Great War was unleashed upon Europe in a nightmarish conflagration, and in 1917 the Russian Revolution, funded by the banking houses of London and Wall Street, installed a vicious Bolshevik regime – dependent on Western credit for the whole of its existence. As for the rest of the twentieth century, we witness globalist plutocrats’ use of dialectics, wielding ideologies as weapons and pitting nation against nation, in the Hegelian procession toward the World State.

Today the realization of that Novus Ordo Seclorum draws ever nearer. And as its grand strategist emeritus Zbigniew Brzezinski makes clear, Washington’s “indispensability” marks only a period of transition:

In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but is also likely to be the very last.

Brzezinski artfully neglects mention of what is intended to supersede American unipolarity: planetary tyranny, a system of total population control and resource extraction. Moreover, all of this is being constructed in the name of “liberty” and “equality,” abstractions serving as mere rhetorical cover for a demonic will to power. It is the liberal program of the oligarchs that has erected an all-pervasive surveillance grid unprecedented in scope, and it is their program that aims to rob man of his faith, family, and heritage, abolishing all that makes him truly human. In the novel The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky articulated this drive with prophetic pathos through his utopian theorist Shigalev, who “proceeding from limitless freedom,” would “bring about an unlimited despotism.” Pyotr Verkhovensky, the leader of the story’s revolutionary cell, exults:

To level the mountains is a good notion, not a ridiculous one. I’m for Shigalev! We don’t need education, enough of knowledge! There will be enough material for a thousand years, but obedience must be arranged. There’s too little of one thing in the world: obedience. The wish for education is already an aristocratic wish. A little bit of family or love, and you have a desire for property. We will kill the desire: we’ll unleash drunkenness, scandal, denunciation; we’ll unleash unheard-of deviance; any genius we’ll extinguish in infancy. All toward one denominator: total equality… The slaves must have rulers. Total obedience, total impersonality, but once every thirty years Shigalev will set off a spasm, and everyone will begin to eat each other to a certain point, just so that everything’s not boring.

Behind every effective revolutionary stands the financier who created him. Equality to the slaves, an equality of the graveyard, and to the moneyed elite – godlike power over the Cosmos. In exchange for ever more “inherent rights” and meaningless depraved spectacle, socially-engineered mass man forfeits his freedom and his soul. With the West conquered, now all of humanity is set for standardization through postmodern colonialism, covert-action NGOs, carrier battle groups, and killer drones. Any sovereign state resisting the march of progress must be destroyed.

At the Cold War’s end, a defunct Soviet Union was supposed to fold into the world controllers’ planned capitalist-communist synthesis, and minor “rogues” like Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya could be dismembered with impunity in the meantime. From the chaos, destitution, and demoralization of the post-collapse period, however, another Russia has slowly re-emerged, its people broadly nationalist and increasingly unashamed of their thousand-year ancestral faith, Orthodox Christianity[i]. Nothing could be more intolerable to the robber-baron superclass, who have already for the past century waged ruthless war against religion and organic cultural identity in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to impose their desolating vision upon mankind.

Defy the superclass: faith, heritage, and sovereignty.

Another round of US-Russia tensions might be unfolding, but such a clash was neither foreordained nor inevitable; between the two largely distant lands there is mutual nuclear deterrence and an absence of directly conflicting vital interests. Beyond inane sloganeering about democracy and human rights, more sophisticated Western strategists can cite new iterations of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland thesis or the latest Eurasian pipeline maneuvers as reasons to “contain” Russia. None of this accounts for a cosmopolitan oligarchy that sets policy, subsidizes scholarship, and manufactures consent in pursuit of its totalitarian agenda. In their quest to liquidate the American, the Russian, and every other unique people, the predators from the bankster international consider themselves above all laws human and divine. Yet the swelling arrogance of sociopaths brings about their downfall – and the sooner their crime spree comes to an end, the better chance we all might have for peace and reconciliation.

[i] It should be noted that even Russia is still not free of the banksters in its own state apparatus, with the Central Bank and the Medvedev government under the influence of pro-Western liberal technocrats familiar with Putin from his days in St. Petersburg. With economic warfare waged by the international a present-day reality, it would be reasonable to expect a quick resolution to this problem in the near future.

Hearts & Likes

People are able to discern good from evil. More or less everybody will recognize and condemn an atrocity exhibited on their TV screens, provided they have no stake in it. In this respect, social networks present us with a panoramic display of humanity’s certainty in its moral principles. Namely, that’s where thousands upon thousands like the photo of some little, dying “angel” and write condemnatory comments under the picture of some sadist caught poisoning dogs. Whether they are themselves good or evil is immaterial. They passed their judgments and ascertained what is and what is not good. Admittedly, the principles providing them with the capability for moral judgment are rarely explicitly defined. Yet who would doubt, for instance, the sanctity of human life and the obligation to respect its final act as unquestionable values? The virtual heart and like under the photo of the gravely ill child, as well as the hateful commentary on the dog killer, clearly prove this fact.

Or do they?

Judging by the way things are going: no, they do not. Fleeting certainties of life are in fact its underlying principles. But nowadays man is offered a bold and final step over their boundaries. He is carried by a gushing stream of illusory freedom, springing from the illusory affirmation of importance by its consumers, i.e. continual progress in consummation of human rights. It is the demolition of everything that once was, without second thought, accepted as good and evil, and the institution of a system defining ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’. All is good if it’s not evil, and evil itself is nothing because it’s not good. In that sense there are no limits to freedom if there are no rational reasons for them, so the final sanctuary of the irrational, a final possible evil, is brought to judgment. It is death itself and its occasional accomplice – murder. “The right to die,” or opting to end one’s life by the hand of another, becomes the demand that can’t be ignored. The right to euthanasia is slowly but surely creeping up the list of human rights advocates’ priorities. And really, why hit the brakes when the highway of freedom is infinite and every few miles we storm by that jumbo-scale billboard that shouts, “Because you deserve it!”?

Here is why. Man must wake up in the middle of the night, sits up in his sweat-soaked bed and asks himself, “If death is my right, isn’t it therefore my duty?”

Early Euthanasia Movement and the Nazi Stigma

Euthanasia is a term still bearing the burden of dark connotations, and its contemporary advocates are all too careful to avoid using it explicitly. No surprise there because, however you flip it, Thanatos arouses no pleasing sensations, even if you pin eu- to it. Also, we must not forget that “mercy killing” in the previous century had its first legal coming-out party in Nazi Germany in the form of the Aktion T4[1] program conducted from 1939 to 1941, and aimed at the “mercy killing” of children and adults deemed “unfit to live”. Bearing in mind that, alongside the lethal injection and nutrition deprivation, it also premiered in the experimental gas chambers, it is strongly believed that Aktion T4 was a sort of exercise in preparation for the death camps. The program was publicly canceled on the 23^rd of July, 1941, because Hitler had to respond to sermons by the bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen,[2] who unequivocally condemned the whole affair. However, the euthanasia program continued incognito, and the bishop’s clerical cadre was cut down to size.

Hitler’s experiment in eugenics almost unintentionally “mercy-killed” the young euthanasia movement in the West. Ignoring the state of affairs across the Atlantic, the Euthanasia Society of America,[3] founded in New York in 1938, committed something along the lines of botched PR-suicide, when in the wake of World War II, it openly advocated the primary purpose of euthanasia as being the removal of “undesirable creatures”, meaning erasing those they deemed unfit for dignified life. In the clear words of its representative, neurologist Foster Kennedy[4], the overall purpose was conceived as mercy for “nature’s mistakes”, the mercy killing of “a person, who is not a person”. Such straightforwardness – seldom present among the contemporary advocates of euthanasia, as we shall see – is due to close ties between early euthanasia initiatives and the eugenics movement. In the age of the rise of Nazism and the beginning of the WWII, it proved to be a terrible advertising experiment. Euthanasia advocates had to wait for the revolutionary changes of the sixties in order to make a public comeback free from fear of lynching, although this time endowed with strict rhetorical discipline and new names for their organizations.

The mastheads must be another coincidence.

But we must wonder, would all this fuss have taken place if not for Hitler? Eugenics,[5] or science of selection and nurture of desirable individuals was, before WWII, practically mainstream among American financial and scientific elites. The point of agreement with euthanasia advocates was the idea of systematization of acceptable and unacceptable species in a society conceived as a kind of zoo, admittedly not on the grounds of a Nazi-like Volk, but on the grounds of what we now call “quality of life” and the “autonomy of the individual”. In those days the term was “the pursuit of happiness,” in the sense of an individual’s right to accomplish material satisfaction, or enjoyment of life, as guaranteed by law. It is interesting to note, and at the same time seemingly hard to understand: wherein lies the autonomy of a sick child being killed by physician like a blind puppy? It is interesting because the accent of euthanasia movement in USA and UK before World War Two was laid precisely on “cleansing” society of infants unfit for quality autonomous life, while only since the nineteen-seventies do we find it staked as a right of conscious and autonomous individuals, mostly elderly people. But where there is a will there is a way. And where there is a way, there’s no trouble in procuring the logic. We’ll return to that later.

Arguments for Compassion

Ritual consternation over a long-vanquished “dark monolith” is an important method of morally tranquilizing a civilized people. Therefore, contemporary euthanasia advocates spared no efforts in learning the discipline of properly manipulating the public consciousness, better known as political correctness. So now we must be politically correct in thinking that “aid in dying” or “death with dignity” are something different from euthanasia, i.e. mercy killing or killing with a pinch of mercy. Moreover, advocates of “the right to die” ensure us that it is a form of palliative care, christened as “end of life care.” Also, a “gentle landing” is advertised as a procedure mostly intended for those whose lives have become intolerable because of physical and psychological suffering, and death is practically a deliverance from the undignified life. Furthermore, we must think that this “final exit” is a privilege of the elderly population. Among the agitprop materials of various initiatives and societies pushing the legalization of euthanasia, we often find life stories of elderly people whose lives became so intolerable that they had to spend considerable sums and raise hackles with their families in order to seek assisted death where it’s legally approved – in Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, American federal states of Oregon and Washington and, more recently, in Quebec, Canada.

Let’s check out two typical stories, still resonant in the public mind:

While listening to the meticulously directed outreach[6] of Sir Terry Pratchett, a writer at the London Royal Physicians Society, where in the light of his maladies – he suffers from Alzheimer’s disease – he puts forward his reasons for advocating the right to assisted death, it is patently obvious that the BBC cameras are present in order to legitimize and propagate the affair on the national level. However, on suspending the ratio, we will feel that someone is addressing our emotions, our compassion, and not in the least our power of judgment. Pratchett advocates the system, but he addresses me, man to man, moreover through the mouth of the actor Tony Robinson, who reads his speech from the screen, because he himself feels unsure whether he could endure speaking for 45 minutes; the audience is melting with sentiments of quiet joy and sadness… Here and there we can almost see an occasional tear glistening in the half-darkness beneath crystal chandeliers … The-soon-to-be-dead man gently nods his head and smiles warmly. The scene is interrupted with saccharine humor and a reasoned discussion on “my life, my choice”.

Touching, only it’s hard to pinpoint what is exactly touched. Let’s try arousing our compassion with another example.

The technocracy loves you.

Before the camera, terminally ill Canadian Susan Griffiths[7] reads her farewell message to the Canadian public, parliament, and the world, describing her diagnosis: she is faced with a progressive failure of her bodily systems and a life of complete dependence on others. No more gardening, no more going where she likes and doing what she wants. She realized that the complete loss of control is imminent, followed by a drastic decrease in the quality of her life. So why does she have to spend so much on a trip to Switzerland in order to procure assistance for dying on her own terms, in company of friends and family? She delivers her message because she wants all Canadians – nay, all people – to be endowed with the right to die in their own country, when they so desire, provided by government. Finally, the lady died with assistance, after a video compilation of her last days in the Dignitas clinic had been made as a last public farewell and testament to her bravery.[8] We are informed that before departing to nothingness, she sang Row, Row, Row Your Boat[9] with family and friends, and had “a hell of a laugh”.

Such scenes are literally gurgling with emotions. This author feels neither compassion nor understanding for these people, save for possibility of a bad taste in the mouth and acute nausea could be forms of compassion and understanding. Frankly, it is a natural reaction to emotional blackmail. This author apologizes henceforth to anyone who is able to feel touched by the above described display of emotions for his incompetence on the emotional spectrum and the over-sensitivity of his stomach.

Now, with apologies made, we can proceed to an exposure of facts and an analysis of concepts.

Euthanasia Facts and Implications

The contemporary movement for assistance in dying is a global network of organizations and foundations, working legally and legitimately on promoting the legalization of institutionalized mercy killings and aid for suicide. Euthanasia is at work only in the first case. The other, so-called “assisted suicide,” denotes situations where the physician a provides patient with information and means necessary to aid him in the taking of his own life. There is a third case, however, which often gets confused with euthanasia and assisted suicide, and that is termination of medical care. Euthanasia advocates are prone to obfuscate the differences between these three procedures, and push them into the legislation concerning so-called “terminal care,” or medical treatment of the dying. Now, wherever it has burrowed itself into legislation, euthanasia has piggy-backed on assisted suicide falsely compared to termination of medical care, and later has crept in all directions, from cases where a physician is allowed to off the patient on demand himself, to the euthanasia of those who can’t give or revoke consent, namely children.

Never and in no conceivable case is euthanasia suicide, which cannot really be legal or illegal, because suicide is an act of freedom negating any other will besides the will of a perpetrator. Euthanasia, however, presupposes legal and ethical reforms of the medical profession. An Act Respecting End-of-Life Care[10], passed in Quebec, clearly shows the direction in which the legislation will develop once euthanasia has been legalized. Chapter 3, Section 1, Paragraph 7 states:

Every institution [meaning health care institutions such as hospitals and social welfare institutions providing medical care] must offer end-of-life care and ensure that it is provided to the persons requiring it in continuity and complementarily with any other care that is or has been provided to them.

In other words, the right of the patient to die is the duty of his physician to kill him. The law formally allows health-care workers to refuse service on moral grounds and obliges the institution to provide someone who will perform it, but in practice it will probably mean pressure on those who refuse. Furthermore, the experience shows that legalizing euthanasia soon opens the floodgates and incites a whole spectrum of death-related services. In the Netherlands, for instance, the privilege of an informed and mature patient above the age of 16 years soon evolved into the “active termination of life for children”, who can be euthanized in accordance to legally approved criteria. The guidelines for this procedure are gathered in the so called Groningen protocol[11], published in 2002, where three euthanasia-approvable instances are listed: for those who have no chance of survival, those who will be unable to lead autonomous life, and those who will be unable to realize quality of life. The criteria and fine points of every individual case have been laid down by medical professionals, and exhaustive consultations with parents are proscribed. In the end the decision can be approved only after judicial evaluation. At least that’s how it looks on paper.[12]

Opponents of euthanasia, however, point out that in practice things turn out to be much messier than one should except from civilized Northern Europeans. True enough, just after the passing of the law legalizing euthanasia, the first voices advocating, among other things, euthanasia on demand for reasons of “bad disposition towards life”, could be heard clamoring. The Dutch Minister of Health at that time (2005), Els Borst, remarked that it really wouldn’t be such a bad thing if a “suicide pill” should become available to everyone, regardless of their health.[13] Be that as it may, when we observe the results of the case-study on the reasons for eliminating 22 children (Verhagen, 2005), conducted in Netherlands between 1997 and 2002 (note that it was before the formal legalization of euthanasia), we can offer some informed assumptions. The overall reason for euthanasia (valid in 22 cases, therefore 100%) is defined as “extremely poor quality of life (suffering) in the sense of functional disability, pain, uneasiness, bad prognosis and desperation” or, in other words, “predicted lack of self-sufficiency” (100%). Further reasons are “predicted inability to communicate” (82%), “expected hospital dependency (77%), “long life expectancy” (59%)”. Obviously, in the case of 13 subjects the argument could just as well be deployed to speed up the inevitable, which served as the fundamental, and supposedly only, reason in the case of adults. However, we can see that it wasn’t valid for 9 subjects. Hence, we can assume that these toddlers could survive longer than criteria proscribes as a time frame for terminal care, if hospitalization was applied. In this respect following remark is of the essence:

The burden of other considerations is greater when the life expectancy is long in a patient who is suffering.

Clearly, justification for euthanasia grows stronger as a low-quality life grows longer. But who defines such life and how? Not the patients themselves, but the professionals interpreting their appeals or the appeals of their custodians, that is to say physicians and lawyers. In order for the law to be applicable to all, the definition of quality of life also has to be universally applicable. And that’s the point where things start to slide, as euthanasia opponents call it, down the “slippery slope” – once euthanasia practice legally commences, it can be applied to an ever-growing number of cases because the criteria may as well be applicable to all. But quality of something, as we know from logic, cannot be conclusively defined if we don’t know the substance of that which is qualified; if we don’t know what the human being is, we also cannot know what comprises quality of life.

But there’s a remedy for that, too.

Sophia’s “No-Brainer” Choice

The argument proceeding from the individual’s right to autonomy is a contemporary dogma; it’s a principle believed to be natural and inborn to each and every human animal and, consequently, devoid of any contradiction. However, its intrinsic contradiction is self-evident to anyone who would seriously consider it. Freedom of the individual transferred into law, and therefore entrusted to the state, presents some other individual with a duty. The physician per se is deprived of the autonomy of rejecting the infliction of euthanasia if he is to uphold the reformed imperative of his vocation, just as the infant he discards is not autonomous. And, henceforth, we can observe the return of the euthanasia movement to its eugenics roots: in order for a happy society to live, the unhappy elements have to die; in order for good to be absolute, evil must be abolished; for if murder would be evil, then the murderer could not be good. So if the murderer is good, then the murder is not evil.

Let’s dare to assume the following dilemma: if the surplus of patients in palliative care is a drain on the resources of those who could lead a happier life, which course of action would be rational? The greater good for the greater number. A no brainer, as some of the sincere euthanasia advocates along the lines of Peter Singer would say.[14] This champion of animal rights in their struggle against human hegemony points out that a sick and/or mentally deficient baby is ontologically below the level of a healthy puppy (licentia poetica: he says “piglet”). There is no criteria to discern, save for the level of consciousness, itself defined by the flimsy standards of natural sciences that took over from all-but-extinct philosophy and soon-to-be extinct religion.

What to do then? What choices should the postmodern incarnation of Strytin’s Sophia from Sophie’s Choice make; the woman making her hideous choice not in the concentration camp, but at the food court in the middle of the shopping mall, with her credit card just one step from being revoked. Child or puppy? For likes of Singer, the matter is a no brainer, same as for the judiciaries who legalized euthanasia. And that brings us back to the question of Nazism and the unfair comparison of contemporary euthanasia practices with death-camp rehearsals. Namely, it is obvious that Nazis placed Strytin’s heroine before an insoluble dilemma: she had to choose which one of her two children would die in order for the other to survive. That’s really not a choice, but rather a method of suffocating her humanity, a method which ultimately doesn’t work. Forced choice is no choice at all. The National Socialists were determined to eliminate, in one way or another, everybody threatening their utopian collective as defined by race and complete surrender of the individual will to the State representing that race. But they never managed to force their victims into pleading for their own elimination.

Contemporary euthanasia legislation manages the diametrical opposite with forebodingly similar implications and a hearty potential for braving obstacles over which the Nazis stumbled. It reaches out to the individual will of every single individual against any form of community. The problem is: who is reaching out? Because the state or some other corporate entity must assure everybody’s right to be the master of his life and death, it must provide the legal framework, methods, and resources enabling the exercise of individual will. Euthanasia is therefore not throwing oneself over a moral precipice. On the contrary, it is the tossing of others into the abyss. The absolute peak of the divorce of freedom and responsibility, and the transferring of one’s own will and intimacy to another, presupposes the absolute right. That in turn demands the transfer of power over life and death of the individual to the system, because only an absolutely differentiated system can provide everybody with the exercise of his right to total autonomy. But if that’s the case, whence the assumption that death will become duty? No brainer: “Because you deserve it!”

Aspartame Logic

Hard to swallow, one could say. Though, nothing is too hard to swallow when sweetened enough. If death can be consumed to pop songs and a festive atmosphere, and moreover, if it can reap a multitude of likes on social networks, why would painlessly kicking the bucket be any worse than choosing to play one’s cards to the end? Observing public reactions to the “heroic struggle” of people like Sir Terry and Ms. Griffiths to die when and how they like, one comes to the conclusion that support by far outweighs consternation, especially in younger demographics. Admittedly, emotional blackmail takes its toll, but then again nobody really denounced their act for what it is – a smarmy abomination. Not one word of consideration for their fellow men from those two, or any other motive besides their self-love.

A message from the elite: DIE. Because you deserve it.

In contrast to mere suicides, their appeals for changing the rules concerning everybody is an act of the particular, namely: absolute selfishness. And in that sense it is a religious act. The individual raises himself on a throne as arbiter of life and death, ordering the same right provided to everyone else. Yes, you read it correctly, he orders the right. And that’s precisely where the terrible threat of legalizing euthanasia insinuates itself ever deeper. Once death has been sold, i.e. when it becomes an act which the individual can treat as a manageable commodity, there is no more reason not to transfer management to more competent parties. For the slippery slope of the euthanasia argument is the only direction it can take. And although it is currently legalized in only a few nations, we can expect its rapid metastasis in the Euro-Atlantic sphere.

We should not be surprised when, alongside the noble profession of the life coach, we witness the emergence and flourishing of the art of death coaching, perhaps even as a social service. If murder is evil only when it affects quality of life, than why would quality-murder be evil? If it benefits the fiscal discipline of the medical sector, why wouldn’t it be celebrated as an act reaping thousands upon thousands of likes? If the death of a terminally sick little angel contributes to the well being of numerous puppies seeking homes, why wouldn’t it be cheered on as an act reaping millions of likes?

Well, we aren’t going anywhere; we’ll stick around and see what happens. A right divorced from duty is logically impossible. The argument of absolute inference is a circular argument, akin to the serpent devouring its own tail. Duty is right, right is duty, and therefore if there’s no duty, there’s no right, either. To be and not to be are one and the same. What is not devoured and excreted as acceptable and unacceptable does not exist at all. Therefore, undefined principles of human life are out-of-law as such, they are outlawed. Undefined freedom is outlawed, undefined goodness is outlawed, and undefined life is outlawed. Undefined is that which is not, nor will it ever be, truly systemized. But that’s not something mystical, something transcendent. It is life as we know it. And much sooner than you think, it will be decreed unacceptable. But only with your consent, only if you want it, and always with the motto: “Because you deserve it!”

Skimming the endless debate between advocates of euthanasia and their opponents, one cannot but sense the meaninglessness of it all. Both arguments and contra-arguments are infinite, and politics is clearly prone to provide people with what they deserve. We only ask ourselves: how can we resist? We will answer the politically correct wolves in sheep’s clothing with a necessary and universally applicable reply to emotional blackmail or the order to bend one’s knee before the usurper: Get thee hence, Satan.

Branko Malic writes in Croatian and English on philosophy, metaphysics, and metapolitics at Kali Tribune.

[1]                      http://www.deathcamps.org/euthanasia/t4intro.html

[2]                      http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/galen.htm

[3]                        For history of euthanasia movement in USA, see: Dowbiggin, Ian. A Merciful End – The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (Oxford University Press: 2003.)

[4]                      Dowbiggin, p. 59 – 61.

[5]                      http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/index.php?page=50133

[6]                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqjfwrRQvQA

[7]                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv6pQqNE4I0

[8]                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up1-aNS0_ek

[9]                      http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/04/26/susan-griffiths-suicide-switzerland_n_3154469.html

[10]                    http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1183429/bill-52-an-act-respecting-end-of-life-care.pdf

[11]                    http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp058026

[12]                    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2092440/

[13]                    http://www.patientsrightscouncil.org/site/english-translation-of-borst-interview/

[14]                    http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2012/03/leading-bioethicists-conclude-infanticide-no-different-from-abortion/#.VH8B-slr_IV

With the closing of another year marked by media hysteria, the narrative that the crazed hermit North Korean regime orchestrated the hacking of the Japanese-owned Hollywood company Sony, thereby assaulting our precious freedom to crank out cultural subversion, has quickly begun to fall apart. From the beginning the story never held neither consistency nor any forensic evidence. Yet the notion that ruthless Korean dictator Kim Jong Un wants to keep them from the movies, the modern substitute for the West’s emptying churches, has sent cable news consumers into a panic.

Elusive North Korean hackers have joined ISIS, Ebola, and a resurgent Russia on the ever- lengthening list of threats that government and media tell us we must fear. As it stands now, with the script quickly breaking down, the media and government (really two tentacles of the same power structure) are bound to quickly divert attention elsewhere; a new national security villain will be constructed and dangled in front of the attention-deficit public.

The trap is set, comrades!

Meanwhile in France, several young radical Muslims have been attacking their host society, attempting to murder French police officers and Christmas shoppers. As has become standard fare in our era of political correctness, the French government quickly sought to dismiss the cosplay jihadists as having nothing to do with terrorism, casting them instead as a random assortment of mentally ill individuals senselessly lashing out. Similar ISIS-inspired escapades by marginal, ressentiment-driven characters have transpired in recent months, not only in France, but also in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Government authorities in these nations were equally quick to dismiss such attacks by self-styled holy warriors as aberrations that should not be seen as part of some wider pattern, lest the West’s entire secular multicultural project come under deeper scrutiny.

It is in this environment that the 20^th century German philosopher Josef Pieper observed that while modern man is “looking out for the powers of corruption in a mistaken direction,” the lords of the technocracy “establish their rule before his eyes.” Modern man is diverted down a multitude of false paths toward dead ends, but he remains all too often oblivious to what is happening right under his very nose. His ignorance, often willful, lends strength to those who would seek even more power to control and manipulate him.

So while the public is held in a state of anxiety over North Korea and other manufactured phantoms, media reports have surfaced (and not for the first time) revealing that US police departments are utilizing their position in the new security architecture to scan and monitor social media and other online activities. In his endless benevolence, Big Brother is peering over your shoulder in order to develop a color-coded “threat rating.” Hence, as the 20^th century science fiction writer Philip K. Dick foresaw, the age of “pre-crime” is upon us. As is normative in our times, the blatant power grabs of the surveillance state go mostly unnoticed and unprotested by the masses.

There is a serious disconnect between what the elite tell us we must fear and the “threats” they themselves utilize. While do-it-yourself jihadists (often themselves manipulated by domestic intelligence agencies) and other manifestations of underclass violence are brushed aside, those who dare openly express their dissatisfaction with the policies of our beloved rulers risk finding themselves listed as threats by the surveillance state. Leviathan grows ever larger and more pervasive in the name of security, only to use its power not against actual threats, but those it claims to protect. The Swiss philosopher Éric Werner provides some illumination here:

The current function of the police is not to fight insecurity. It is, which is quite different, to control and monitor people. Not just some people, as claimed by authorities (offenders, criminals, terrorists, etc.), but all of them. Even if the whole country turned into a no-go zone, the surveillance society would keep functioning… We do not develop the surveillance society in the fight against insecurity; rather, insecurity is used as an excuse to justify the surveillance society.

He further notes that the ruling politicians and bureaucrats’ real fear “is not insecurity, but rather potential retaliations against insecurity.”

No one’s watching; just enjoy the wind of freedom blowin’ through your hair.

We must ask what that oft-used buzzword “freedom” actually means in the modern West. For many, the ability to stream an inverted universe of pornography or order off of Pizza Hut’s “subconscious menu” from their iPads is enough assurance that they are still free, but the ever-expanding Leviathan state and the spread of vapid consumerism should give us all more than a moment’s pause. If freedom is reducible to a dazzling array of consumer options and self-gratification, why is that worth dying for? We must strive toward being higher than the perpetually consuming, soulless homo economicus.

In order to resist and confront the forces arrayed against him and to achieve a higher freedom, man must begin with repentance and spiritual reformation. His soul must be cleansed of sloth and apathy, as well as the other enslaving vices that leave him open to fear, manipulation, and despair; or as Ernst Jünger put it, one “must be free in order to become free.” The German adventurer further said that for the spiritually free man, “this world filled with oppression and oppressive agents,” will only “serve to make his freedom visible in all its splendor.”

The great Russian thinker Nicolas Berdyaev, who himself openly defied the murderous Bolsheviks who overran his homeland, taught that the “victory over slavery is a spiritual act,” and that “social and spiritual liberation ought to go hand in hand.” Repentance and spiritual resistance are the first, and most important, steps in confronting the powers of our age.

In this 1947 essay, Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954) addresses the reality of the devil in history and our own time. Tellingly, the advance of the secular and materialist outlook has corresponded with an ever-growing fascination with the demonic – along with its public justification. Translated by Mark Hackard.

In the life of the human race, the diabolical principle has its own history. On this question serious academic literature exists – not concerning, however, recent decades. Yet namely recent decades shed new light on the past two centuries. The age of European Enlightenment (beginning with the French Encyclopedists of the 18th century) undermined within men belief in the being of a personal devil. The educated man cannot believe in the existence of such a revolting anthropomorphic being “with a tail, claws, and horns” (according to Zhukovsky), unseen by anyone but portrayed in ballads and in pictures. Luther still believed in him and even hurled filth at him, but later centuries rejected the devil, and he gradually “disappeared” and flamed out as an “outdated prejudice.”

But it was precisely then that art and philosophy became interested in him. The enlightened European had only Satan’s cloak remaining, and he began to drape himself in it with fascination. There burned a desire to find out more about the devil, discern his “true form,” guess his thoughts and wishes, “transform” into him or at least walk before men in his guise…

And so art began to imagine and portray him, while philosophy attended to his theoretical justification. The devil, of course, “didn’t succeed,” because the human imagination is incapable of containing him, but in literature, music, and painting began a culture of demonism. From the beginning of the 19th century, Europe has been fascinated with his anti-divine forms; there appears the demonism of doubt; negation; pride; rebellion; disappointment; bitterness; melancholy; contempt; egoism, and even boredom. The poets depict Prometheus, the Son of the Morning, Cain, Don Juan, and Mephistopheles.

Byron; Goethe; Schiller; Chamisso; Hoffman; Franz Liszt; and later Stuck, Baudelaire, and others display an entire gallery of demons or demonic men and moods. Moreover, these demons are intelligent, witty, educated, ingenious, and temperamental, in a word, charming and evoking sympathy, while demonic men are the incarnation of “world-angst,” “noble protest,” and some “higher revolutionary consciousness.”

Lucifer, by Franz Von Stuck

Simultaneously the mystical doctrine holding that there is a “dark principle,” even within God, is revived. The German Romantics find poetic words in favor of “innocent shamelessness,” and the Left-Hegelian Max Stirner comes out openly preaching human self-deification and demonic egoism. Denial of a personal devil is gradually replaced by the justification of the diabolic principle…

The abyss concealed beyond this was seen by Dostoevsky. He identified it, and with prophetic alarm sought the means to overcome it his whole life.

Friederich Nietzsche also approached this abyss, was captivated by it, and would extol it. His last works, The Will to Power, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo, contain direct and open propagation of evil…

Nietzsche designates the totality of religious subjects (God, the soul, virtue, sin, the other world, truth, eternal life) as a “heap of lies, born from bad instincts by natures sick and harmful in the deepest sense.” “The Christian conception of God” is for him “one of the corrupt conceptions created on the earth.” In his eyes all Christianity is only a “crude fable of a wonderworker and savior,” and Christians “the party of rejected nobodies and idiots.”

What he exults are “cynicism” and shamelessness, “the highest that can be achieved on earth.” He summons the beast in man, the “superior animal” that must be unleashed, whatever may come of it. He demands the “savage man,” “vicious” with “joyous paunch.” Everything “cruel, the undisguisedly beastly, the criminal” enraptures him. “Greatness is only where there is a great crime.” “In each of us the barbarian and the wild beast assert themselves.” Everything in life that creates a brotherhood of men – ideas of “guilt, punishment, justice, honesty, freedom, love, etc.” – “should be removed from existence entirely.” “Forward,” he exclaims, “blasphemers, immoralists, independents of all kinds, artists, Jews, gamblers – all the rejected classes of society!”…

And there is no greater joy for him than to see “the destruction of the best men and to follow how, step by step, they go to destruction”…”I know my fate,” he writes,

One day my name will be associated with the recollection of something frightful, a crisis as such has never been seen on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a sentence conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am not a man, I am dynamite.

In such a way the justification of evil found its utterly diabolical theoretical formulas, and it remained only to wait for their enactment. Nietzsche found his readers, disciples, and admirers; they adopted his doctrine, combining it with the doctrine of Karl Marx, and took to the execution of this plan 30 years ago.

“Demonism” and “Satanism” are not one and the same. Demonism is a human matter, while Satanism is a matter of the spiritual abyss. The demonic man is given over to his base instincts and can still repent and convert, but the man into whom, by the words of the Gospel, “Satan entered,” is possessed by an alien, supra-human force and himself becomes a devil in human form.

Judas Casts Away the Silver, by Platon Vasiliev

Demonism is a transitory spiritual darkening, its formula being life without God; Satanism is the total and final darkness of the spirit, its formula the overthrow of God. In the demonic man there rebels unbridled instinct supported by cold reason; the satanic man acts as the instrument of someone else serving evil, capable of savoring his repulsive service. The demonic man gravitates to Satan: playing along, reveling, suffering, entering into pacts with him (according to popular tradition), he gradually becomes the devil’s convenient domicile; the satanic man lost himself and became the earthly instrument of a diabolical will. Those who have not seen such people, or seeing, has not recognized them, do not know primordial perfected evil and do not have an understanding of the truly diabolic element.

Our generations are set before terrible, mysterious manifestations of this element and up to this time have not resolved to express their life experience in the right words. We could describe this element as “black fire,” or define it as eternal envy; unquenchable hatred; militant banality; shameless lies; absolute impudence and absolute lust for power; the trampling of spiritual freedom; the thirst for universal degradation; joy over the ruin of the best men, and Anti-Christianity. The man who has succumbed to this element loses spirituality, love, and conscience; within him begins degeneration and dissolution. He surrenders to conscious vice and the thirst for destruction; he ends in defiant sacrilege and human torment.

The simple perception of this diabolic element provokes in a healthy soul repulsion and horror that can transition into genuine bodily malaise, a specific “faintness” (the spasm of the sympathetic nervous system, nervous dysrhythmia, and psychological illness – that also can lead to suicide). Satanic men are recognized by their eyes, by their smile, their voice, their words and deeds. We, Russians, have seen them alive and in the flesh; we know who they are and whence they come. Yet foreigners up to this point have not understood this phenomenon and do not want to understand it, for it brings them judgment and condemnation.

And to this day, certain reformist theologians continue to write on “the utility of the devil” and sympathize with his modern insurrection.

In the 1971 film The French Connection, New York police detective “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) uncovers an underworld drug smuggling operation involving the importation of millions of dollars in heroin by a French cartel that planned to use a media personality as an unwitting front.

This week, we were shocked to learn that Onion-like French satire publication Charlie Hebdo had been attacked by terrorists, with Al Qaeda taking responsibility for the murder of twelve of the magazine’s staff and guests. While it is tempting to get bogged down in “fluid” situation details, we must always recall similar patterns of such events in the recent past which will serve to inform the greater context of this new event in the never-ending “war on terror.”

Naturally, the first historical reference that comes to mind is Gladio, the infamous NATO “stay behind” networks in Cold War Europe that utilized terror attacks and shootings in public venues (amongst other things) to later be blamed on leftist and socialist groups.  Gladio thus represents the so-called “conservative” side of the dialectic running operations against the so-called left. The Aldo Moro incident in Italy, for example, involved a staged assassination of a socialist minister by a NATO-run Marxist front.  NATO/Gladio operations have never ceased, as we see the same patterns at work in more recent false flags.

The French intelligence service, DGSE, works hand in hand with NATO and other western intelligence agencies, and over the past few years has assisted in the training of Al Qaeda offshoots in the attempt to topple Syria’s Bashar Assad. The “Free Syrian Army” has notoriously been armed and funded by Atlanticist power elites since 2012, when the CFR called for more use of Al Qaeda and the FSA, to 2013, when we saw Senator John McCain and others meeting with rebranded Al Qaeda leaders. As we look back on events associated with French and Euro terror, the images converge.

In 1995, Rachid Ramda, a member of radical Islamic organizations predictably titled “Islamic Salvation Front” and the “Armed Islamic Goup”, bombed the French RER subway, killing eight. According to an interview with Liberacion, Ramda described his past involvement with Western NGOs and Doctors Without Borders – both classic intelligence covers, casting doubt on the official narrative of Ramda as the typical fundamentalist stage prop of so many mainstream media terror tales. This event recalls the NGO affiliations of the so-called ISIS video victims, as well as Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

In 2004, we saw a similar media fiasco with the agitprop-style provocation from caricatures of Mohammed in Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s “Submission: Part I,” which led to van Gogh’s death in retaliation. A violent standoff ensued with a terror cell in The Hague. Then, from 2005-2010 we saw Danish papers create a soap-opera scandal with numerous mockeries of Mohammed in the Jyllands-Posten paper. We are also reminded of the dubious association of the film Innocence of Muslims to the Benghazi incident, curiously occurring on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2012. Former CIA operative Claire Lopez reported in October of 2012 several highly suspect details surrounding Benghazi suggesting a false flag, such as weapons transfers to Al Qaeda in Libya, as well as security for the facility being outsourced to Blue Mountain, a group with Muslim Brotherhood ties.

Yesterday’s attack bears striking resemblances to the Anders Breivik attack of 2011, which reportedly involved a “right wing” terrorist masterminding the Norway massacre. As is often the case, however, Breivik had numerous establishment ties to Western intelligence operations, and claimed to be a “Templar,” giving intimations of Masonic involvement. Breivik also comes to mind due to the curious connections of Francois Hollande with Grand Orient Masonry, a far leftist, socialist and atheistic version of Masonry existing in France from the time of the Jacobins and French Revolution. Various figures in Hollande’s coterie, such as Manuel Valls, are members of the Bilderberg Group.

Fraternity and philanthropy indeed!

Like the jihadists, Breivik also had a pre-produced “manifesto” that soon appeared online, leading to speculations about its remarkable plagiaristic elements from previous “lone nut” manifestos, such as MK ULTRA test subject “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski. Breivik seems to be a “right wing” Euro-version of the radical Islamic terror patsy, while above these dupes are the intelligence agencies and secret societies, themselves subservient to international power elites like Bilderberg and the banks.

What begins to emerge is a consistent pattern of interlocking and interconnected security services at the level of “terror event,” as well as their assets – all to serve the same establishment perched on top. When we consider French intelligence, the fingerprints are no different, as DGSE has had a long history of false flags and dirty dealings along with their Western counterparts in NATO. France helped train the Al Qaeda-linked rebels along with US and British forces in Jordan, a longtime CIA puppet state. Arms and sand pirates are in steady supply for Western intelligence agencies needing distractions or desiring to ramp up the terror/security theater. France was also a player in the failed March 2014 Turkish false flag venture aimed at laying the blame once again on Syria and Assad, and by extension, further antagonizing Russia.

French intelligence also appears to have played a role in the Diana assassination, according to Gordon Thomas, who argues in Gideon’s Spies that driver/bodyguard Henri Paul was manipulated by Mossad to spy on Diana, but she would ultimately suffer her demise under questionable circumstances leading back to MI6 and the French services (Gideon’s Spies, pgs. 1-25). It is known that MI6 was “in town” and that SAS soldiers may have been the culprits.

Likewise, the Ottawa shooting of 2014 in Canada also bears numerous hallmarks of false flags, leading us to wonder – with so many shootings of late that seem to evince similar patterns, as details emerge from today’s incident at Charlie Hebdo, we will likely see the same connections manifesting. Let us also not forget the Toulouse siege of 2012 and synagogue killings that involved yet another known jihadist, Mohamed Merah. Merah was allowed to be quite active while sporting a pretty heavy rap sheet, much like the mad sheikh of Sydney.

Already, there are questionable elements of the purported videos being run on mainstream media, from the man on the top of the building wearing a bulletproof vest as the shooting occurs supposedly live on the streets, to the remarkable emptiness of these streets in broad daylight. There are also discrepancies in the other videos concerning the shooting and the ballistics of the bullets fired. As 21^st Century Wire has noted, Charlie Hebdo itself appears to have published ahead of time what would occur, suggesting intelligence influence. The shooters also appear to have known details about the facility, what time the weekly meeting was, and how to enter the building, as well as speaking fluent French and demonstrating Western military training, which is odd for the “Yemeni Al Qaeda” cell the mainstream media have already hailed as the villains. On top of that, France had launched new terror drills, and in this regard, the familiar drill as a cover motif may be present.

Would you like some fries with your McJihad?

Euro-terror, particularly events tangentially connected to France, bears all the same patterns of Atlanticist black operations that have been underway since the Cold War and Gladio. As new details emerge, a clearer picture can be painted about the siege, but we can expect all the same villains and cast of characters that come to play in the vaudeville variety show that is the global war on terror. The strategy of tension plan of the neocon establishment aims for a “clash of civilizations” between the postmodern “Judeo-Christian” nations and Islamic civilization – to destabilize and remake the Middle East on the long Fabian march to global technocratic government.

Read all of Jay Dyer’s insights into deep politics, philosophy, religion, and film at Jay’s Analysis.

The January 7^th murder of twelve people at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, purportedly by a cell of radical Muslims, has shocked not only French society, but the entire Western world. Indeed, the luminaries of the “international community” have risen up in outrage. The act represented an unprecedented assault on the foundational freedoms of the West and as such must be defiantly resisted and ruthlessly punished; so runs the script, anyway. Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, railed that now France is in “a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.” And thus the dialectic is set: violent, radical Islam vs. the freedom-loving West.

Recent historical perspective, however, casts this entire emotionally charged narrative into considerable doubt.  For starters, the supposed confrontation between France and radical Islam is blatantly contrived. France, alongside its allies in Britain and the US, has played a leading role in funding and arming jihadists in Libya and Syria. The eagerness of the Élysée to provide military aid to these radical Muslim groups surpasses even that of Washington. Only two months ago French foreign minister Laurent Fabius blasted President Obama for failing to bomb Bashar Assad’s Syria. That a direct attack on the Syrian military would only empower ISIS and other radical Muslim groups was left unacknowledged by the French minister – it’s enough to note that France is quite willing to use the most violent of Muslim sects to advance the globalist project. The Paris jihadists, after all, reportedly received their training in Syria while fighting the West’s war against Assad.

Across the Atlantic, the hypocritical bluster of Valls echoed even louder. FOX News and other neoconservative media outlets engage in alarmist rhetoric about Sharia law coming to America, with one guest using the Charlie Hebdo shootings to call for a “Muhammad Law” which would be used to target subversive, even if non-violent, Islamist activists that seek to “overthrow freedom.” Meanwhile, the rather dull comedian Bill Maher has used his media platform to snipe about the allegedly “hundreds of millions” of Muslims that support terrorism, calling for the West to “stand up for liberal principles.” None of these commentators have noticed the extensive support Western governments have rendered to radical Islam over the past three and a half decades. Nor was mention given to the fact, as exposed by whistleblower Colonel Anthony Schaffer, that Anwar al-Awlaki, the now-dead cleric who allegedly inspired the Charlie Hebdo jihadists, was an FBI informant. Such connections are blissfully non-existent in the elite-controlled media.

What’s Arabic for, “Should have seen that coming from a thousand miles away?”

Contrary to the dialectic now articulated by the Western establishment, Syrian president Bashar Assad has warned the West on several occasions that its reckless sponsorship of jihadist groups in Syria would ultimately result in the “high price” of terrorism in Europe and beyond. In actuality the West and radical Islam aren’t true antagonists, as their ancestors were, but rather they exist in symbiotic interdependence, with contemporary jihadism serving to empower the nation-killing postmodern Leviathan both domestically and internationally.

Leaving aside the exact nature of the attack and its perpetrators, the Euro-Atlantic ruling class has seized upon it to prosecute other objectives. As former Obama advisor Rahm Emmanuel once posited, never let a serious crisis go to waste. Within days of the attack, cries for “cyber-security” immediately were sounded by various political factions already emboldened by the previous “hack” of Sony. Jihadist presence in social media was supposedly an admitted problem, even though observers have wondered for years why ISIS accounts on Twitter operate freely while those who express mere politically incorrect opinions are swiftly banished from the same platforms. Like clockwork, “supporters” of ISIS hacked the Twitter account of the US Central Command, with Obama re-proposing more cyber-security regulations that would increase the government’s access to private information.

Speaking of the Charlie Hebdo attack, an American government official told a CNN reporter:

This is in perpetuity what we’re dealing with. It’s like the war on drugs. This isn’t going to stop.

Then again, it was never meant to stop. Just as our overlords profit from running the global drug trade, they also demand ever more surveillance authority to protect the citizenry from terrorism while funding, training and arming those very same terrorists. America and its allies bomb ISIS, yet ISIS continues to expand. The war is not meant to be won; deep-state terrorism is designed to re-order society at the most fundamental level.

Divide et impera, solve et coagula.

The masses (ever a source of untruth, as Søren Kierkegaard taught us) are carefully managed and insulated from any uncomfortable truths about the true nature of the system. As expected, social media trendies tweeted “Je suis Charlie” from their tables at Starbucks while swallowing wholesale cultural subversion and nihilism; those of a more sincere nature are kept under control with a toxic mixture of media-promoted fear and petty distractions. Those who today are enraged by the events at the Charlie Hebdo offices will hardly remember them tomorrow.

All the dialectics and schemes of the globalist financial priesthood are ultimately channeled toward the completion of their unholy war, what the prophetic Fyodor Dostoevsky described as “the full triumph of Baal, the ultimate organization of an anthill.” And Dostoevsky was well aware of elite manipulation of terror to serve an agenda of social control; violent revolutionaries of his day have merely been replaced with violent, radical jihadists. The music changes, but the song remains the same.

Conquest doesn’t always come by way of direct invasion and occupation; subtler methods, such as sustained psychological and spiritual warfare, have proven even more successful at suborning target populations. Vladimir Mikhailovich Chernyshev, head of the Faculty of the History of Western Confessions and lecturer at the Kiev Spiritual Academy, answers questions from the publication The World and We regarding anti-traditional sectarian religious movements in Ukraine and how they function as agents in a wider geopolitical game. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Are cults acting on the territory of Ukraine used for political ends by foreign states?

If we are to speak of totalitarian cults in general, then yes, this is undoubtedly a global geopolitical project. Therefore we can’t even talk about one individual sect. The entire spectrum of totalitarian, destructive cults and so-called “new religious movements” are a global project to destroy our Slavic mentality and culture. And in the 1990s, when all political barriers had been shattered, what had accumulated and concentrated in the West over decades in this sphere filled practically the entire space in a turbid current, penetrating into all spheres of our society. And, of course, we can’t just talk about some individual cult. There’s a mass of them, of the most varied tendencies.

Can we designate among them the cults operating in the most systematic and destructive way?

If we’re speaking about the quantitative advantage of some cults on Ukrainian territory, then there are without a doubt two – the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Concerning Scientology, as is known, one of Ukraine’s political leaders, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or at least his family, belongs to the Church of Scientology. Another well-known figure, Aleksandr Turchinov, is a representative of the Charismatic movement.

Despite all the diversity, dissimilarity of external forms, and doctrinal disagreements, a majority of the sects have a common lineal indicator – they’re purely practical, and their most important task is finding new means of mental transformation, changes in the psyche, changes in interrelations between the conscious and subconscious, i.e. in actuality shattering our mentality, our culture, and our integral perception of the world.

Pastor Sunday Adelaja

Sunday Adelaja is a famous Nigerian who arrived in Ukraine and created an enormous cult here, the Embassy of God. It’s actually a state within a state, an enclave with its own employment and security services and infrastructure. It’s located in the bowels of the state, but lives according to its laws. Their last adventure was to found the bank “King’s Capital.” It was a total Ponzi scheme that robbed people; apartments were handed over as collateral. Today that money has yet to be found, and masses of people ended up on the streets, became homeless, and some committed suicide. And the most surprising thing is that his interests have been lobbied in the Rada. Adelaja himself speaks Russian well, but for the sake of exoticism he imitates a certain accent. This is one of the biggest cults, with just an affiliate in Ukraine, while the cult itself is scattered around the world.

The second sect that is in fact qualitatively equal is the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is a well-known pseudo-Christian organization that is impossible to call Christian because it rejects all basic doctrines – the Holy Trinity, the Divine-Human essence of Christ, the sovereign existence of the soul from the body, etc.

Beyond that there exists a multitude of other cults that are both in Russia and Ukraine. These are, of course, Scientology, a pseudo-scientific destructive cult, the “Church of Christ” Boston Movement, the New Apostolic Church, the Moonies, Mormons, and others.

It’s said that this cult colonization began with the actions of the wife former president Yushchenko Katherine Chumachenko, who was an initiate of “Native Ukrainian National Faith” (RUN-Vera). Is this cult active now, what influence does it have, and how much is it connected to the United States?

It’s true, RUN-Vera does operate on the territory of Ukraine. This is a pagan cult. Its numbers are not great because it’s nevertheless very strange and exotic, but a series of Ukrainian leaders are part of it.

But its role in comparison with the Embassy of God is still a lesser one. As is known, that cult has been visited by Timoshenko and practically all famous Ukrainian leaders. And they’ve even prayed there for victory in elections. The former mayor of Kiev Chernovetsky was one of the most well-known adepts of the sect and part of its structures. Therefore the intertwining of political interests and cult movements is indeed something we witness here.

What is the role of sects in events on the Maidan and subsequent events in Ukraine?

In reality the entire range of cults existing in Kiev supported the Euro-Maidan. They came out with their symbolism, fed people as possibilities allowed, rendered them aid, carried out loud demonstrations to attract attention. And not only the sect world – the schmismatic Kiev Patriarchate also participated in these processes very actively. Such marginal, destructive forces worked at full power to support the Euro-Maidan.

Do you agree with the assertion that many cults are an instrument in the hands of American and other foreign intelligence services?

Unconditionally this is so. For example, the Mormons, whom we cannot of course wholly relegate to destructive sects. Not delving into doctrinal details…the representatives of this organization are very courteous, study the language, and come over on their own money, for example, for two years to Ukraine. They familiarize themselves with our culture, mentality, way of life, etc. And then, when they’ve fulfilled their mission, they return to the US. And it is a commonly known fact that they are then recruited as CIA officers because they’re invaluable sources of information. They pass all of this along through proper channels first-hand.

There is yet another of the most large-scale cults initially formed as a political project linked to the Korean intelligence services – the Moon Unification Church.

The most important factor is that these cults might not be rigorously managed from the sidelines, but it’s enough that they compose a certain unity, a kind of religious avant-garde that envelops, swallows, attempts to dissolve and demarcate Christianity. It’s sufficient that cults are present on our soil, and already by their presence they carry out their destructive work. And no grand administrative parallels or additional levers are necessary because they in themselves will conduct their ruinous activity like a kind of virus, living at the expense of society and demolishing it as a healthy organism.

This past week, the world’s preeminent vultures, the economic power elite, met in Davos to discuss the maintenance of their global fiat hegemony. Highlights included furthering austerity, noting that the serf class can’t have air conditioning and cars, as well as cheering on the death of privacy through the rise of technocracy. The degenerate elite, completely out of touch with humanity, resembles the controllers in the Lucas classic, THX 1138, building a prison destined to entrap their own progeny.

Hey kids! Get a load of all this juicy freedom!

Such deviants always end up as their own worst enemy, for pride detaches man from reality, which can only be perceived in the truth. Pride causes man to adopt a delusory sense of the world and his own relation to it, thereby bringing about a praxis divorced from the rules of nature, logic and classical wisdom. Banking man, homo economicus, with his abyssal rapacity, will condemn his own descendants to dwell in the virtual A.I. prison grid he has constructed.

JC Collins over at Philosophy of Metrics comments, citing the insightful and recommended film, Margin Call:

This is why the solution has to come from within, as every system will simply corrupt again.  Philosophers and great thinkers have warned us continuously for thousands of years.  The manifestation of inner dysfunction and imbalance will always be represented physically as dysfunction and imbalances in the systems man develops.

When we consider the state of the global economy, it is crucial to understand we are living in the midst of a long-running script written long ago by European banking houses. CFR archivist and historian Dr. Carroll Quigley explained this in his 1300 page work, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, admitting that both World Wars and economic crises, as well as so-called “leftist,” “communist,” and “fascist” movements have been the creation of international banking elites.

Davos thus represents a yearly public manifestation of this same superstructure Quigley described, and with Davos we can see another insight into the digital future – since digits are useful in both banking and computing. At this juncture, I recommend the following documentary on flash trades, where the nexus of the virtual meets the banking, coalescing into a hybrid chimera of fraud like the world has never seen. It’s not accidental the documentary is titled “alchemy,” since this also brings to mind George Soros’ book, The Alchemy of Finance.

Is there a deeper sense to all this alchemy and digit talk? Absolutely so. This is no mere banking-scam confidence trick: the metamorphosis of economics into virtual, digital existence mirrors the transference of the social sphere into the virtual as well. It is not by organic happenstance that both realms of civilization have moved in this direction – as if the coming technocracy was only interested in dominating the social realm for constructing A.I., while the banking sphere would be left to “market forces.” Collins comments on the problem-reaction-solution scripting that corresponds well to the alchemist’s solve et coagula, and readers will take note of the connections to the French Revolutions previously highlighted in relation to the French terror events:

The World Economic Forum and the IMF today called for a “central bank of oil”, which is code for regulating the oil pricing mechanism and ultimately using the SDR as the unit of account for not just oil, but all other commodities. This CSI scripting fits perfectly with what we have been discussing for the last year in regards to the multilateral transition. So far our analysis has been correct on both the methodology and scripting practices of the transition.

All central banks around the world are implementing their own micro CSI script for the purpose of shifting upward into the macro CSI script. This also includes Russia and China, both of which have been the most vocal about the need for the multilateral framework.

We are all like the people of France in the years and months leading up to the French Revolution. Please don’t accept any scripting which promotes the idea of the source of the problem becoming the solution to the problem. The French had no idea what hit them. We do.

In contrast to common notions, the banking sector is in no way left to “market forces,” but is completely gamed, and the same plan is evident in the A.I. reconnaissance program known as the “Internet” and “Facebook.” It becomes evident in flash trading and wash trading, which is preparing us for a cashless global currency. The alchemy of A.I. is the alchemy of finance, as both are geared towards the reductionist quantification of all things. Humans are thus natural resources being trans-mutated into data resources, just as currency is becoming a digital “resource.”

Referencing Collins again in my Plato piece, I noted:

To see this principle in action, and I think operating as an interesting proof of my thesis, Philosophy of Metrics writer JC Collins has recently posted a great article on the ultimate goal of social media and information trafficking in relation to AI. Normally, A.I. can perform logical tasks of if, then relations like what we see in modus ponens or formal logic, but spontaneous emergence of the ideational – consciousness, is really the key. This subconscious manifestation (directly linked to the aether and psyche like Jung and Pauli argued), isn’t easy to “catch.” Ideas come and go, and may be written down, but how might we “capture” the archetypal flow and trend of mass thought? What about mass thoughtforms that are floating about? Collins is right to use computerized banking as a model, but the purpose is much deeper.

As Collins relates, going to other galaxies is problematic for humans because of the obviously brief lifespan, but what about AI? Certainly the plan is to concoct such AI systems, but an AI system is still stuck within the walls of formal logic and set theory strangeloops, as Hofstadter grappled with in his Godel, Escher, Bach. However, what if an AI could draw from a deep well of a synthetic matrix? What if AI could be made to experience some form of spontaneous (supposedly) archetypal imagery?  Here enters the matrix “web” of the Internet and social media. A synthetic anima mundi would have to be constructed, gathering massive amounts of data and information over a long period of time. And that, my friends, is the entire, ultimate goal of the Internet and social media.

As we are tempted to think of alchemy as real, and in a sense it is, with bio-engineering and nanotechnology, it is important to keep in mind the classical alchemists were fraudsters. They were masters of the con, from rogues like Count Cagliostro to 007 Dr. John Dee, the “great work” of many of history’s alchemists was to defraud credulous monarchs into patronage of their quest to create gold from base matter. Today’s alchemists of finance are like their transhumanist counterparts – devious and intelligent, but con men in the last analysis. They, like their forebears, con heads of state into signing over public wealth, just as the shadow surveillance agencies con heads of state into handing “big data” through every contrived legality imaginable. The investigative project Tragedy and Hope has recently done an excellent interview with William Binney on this point:

The technocracy is here. Recall the market suddenly dropping to “666” in 2009, echoing Lagarde’s “magic 7.” If this event was an engineered twilight language scenario by the shadow banking establishment, it was a window into the nature of how gamed this technocratic system really is. Forbes, laughing at the occurrence, stated:

This beastly number, 666, has also weirdly popped up during recent stock market panics. On March 9, 2009, the S&P index hit its lowest point — 666, of course — of the Great Recession.

Monday the S&P fell, you’ve got it, 6.66%. Does Monday’s 6.66% drop thusly mark the demonic bottom of the August 2011 panic?

There is more at work here than mere coincidence, with nothing at all to do with actual biblical prophecy besides the fact that the cryptocracy do have their own version of using “magic numbers” and magic squares as a form of lesser sorcery. Does the Forbes writer also think Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s “Eyes Wide Shut” lifestyle and Lagarde’s “magic 7″ speech are also laughable? Was the Dutroux affair that ensnared the occult elite in Belgium also a joke, pedophilia in the Vatican, or the recent revelations about Savile and the Satanic British establishment? The same establishment insider that exposed elements of this years before it was mainstream news, Malachi Martin, also revealed Davos to be a key part of the “Grand Design” back in 1990 in his work The Keys of This Blood:

At Davos, of course, the participants already contemplated the third circle of the Grand Design, the one that included North America. All agreed that while the decade of the nineties will be the “decade of Europe,” the twenty-first century will see the emergence of the “Pacific Rim,” as a potent member of the great grid. For the Asia/Pacific countries were already bent on capitalizing the “new European economic space.” Of course, as West Germany’s Helmut Haussmann said, the European nations will compete with North America and “Pacific Rim” economies.  But the new Europeans must integrate with the economic grid of the Asia/Pacific nations.  In other words, the twenty-first century will not be a European or a Pacific Rim century. The term “geopolitical” was rather rarely used at Davos, but it is the only term adequate enough to cover that third circle (along with the first and second circles) of the Grand Design. The twenty-first century will be the century of the Geopolitical Earth.

At Davos, for the first time, a representative group of the society nations did peek beyond the traditional limits of international politics and transnational globalism, just long enough to etch the bare outlines of a geopolitical world to come – the new world order, the world of the Grand Design of nations. As Helmut Kohl stated soundly, the new Europe must have as its goal the grand vision expressed by Thomas Jefferson: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (pg. 649)

Economic liberalism is the path to globalism and the Novus Ordo Seclorum; Davos is part of that Grand Design, synonymous with the alchemist’s Great Work, and Martin is correct to outline the esoteric and occult aspects of this plan in his massive tome. This plan is undoubtedly rooted in the work of secret societies, but while his book highlights the economic and occult dimensions, it missed the synthetic and A.I. element of the coming world order. The alchemists’ designs do not end at world banking or the creation of the Golem – they extend to the creation of a Golem economy, where the hidden philosopher’s stone can only be perceived through Micro-Google virtual glasses.

Read all Jay Dyer’s work on philosophy, film, geopolitics, science, and culture at Jay’s Analysis.

While now receding into the background of international outrages, the early January mass shooting of several Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris, purportedly by a cell of jihadists, set off a furor about freedom of speech in the West. Western leaders and social media trendies righteously vowed they would cower in the face of terrorism; rather, they’d boldly utter whatever they fancied, never to be parted from their precious right. European heads of state, including François Hollande, Angela Merkel, and David Cameron, marched in protest to show that they would not cower after this attack on one of modernity’s most sacred values.

But, even a superficial glance reveals something altogether fraudulent and hypocritical in the “Je suis Charlie” antics of the Europe’s great and good. Indeed, the governments of France, Germany, and the UK all spend considerable energies suppressing every manner of speech that doesn’t comport with ruling ideology. Speech is controlled and managed corporate state for the sake of social engineering. As for the Charlie Hebdo shooting, whatever else it might have been, it was not an attack on freedom of speech in any meaningful way, as only the state, and not supposedly rogue terrorist cells, retains the ability to suppress and control speech.

Welcome to the Free Speech Zone!

Over the past several decades, France has prosecuted numerous individuals for engaging in state-designated “hate speech.” The French novelist and gadfly Michel Houellebecq, depicted in a satirical cartoon on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the same day of the terrorist attack, was at one time tried, and later acquitted, for making remarks derogatory toward Islam. And a mere few days after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was arrested on the dubious charge of “glorifying terrorism” after decrying his previous persecutions at the hands of the French authorities for alleged “anti-Semitic” comments. If convicted he could spend several years in prison.

Atlanticist Berlin hasn’t proven itself a friend to freedom of speech, either. The German government has long prosecuted and imprisoned individuals for publically promoting heretical narratives concerning the events of World War II. Also, in the days leading up to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, German Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel made a point of denouncing those peacefully protesting elite-sponsored mass immigration and enforced multiculturalism. Following the attacks in France, the German police cited the threat of terrorism to ban demonstrations outright.

In Britain even more absurd examples can be found. Not only are there the usual cases of “hate speech” prosecutions, but the British Crown has sunk to monitoring the speech of school children and swiftly punishing any adolescents who would verbalize racially “insensitive” speech. Seemingly using Orwell’s 1984 as a blueprint, the UK has constructed an insidious surveillance state to wield against contrarians who dare step beyond the parameters of correct thought set by ruling elites – the same champions of humanity who launder hundreds of billions in narcotics proceeds, run jihadist operations, and figure into horrific child-abuse scandals.

Last, but certainly not least, let’s examine position of the United States, where freedom of speech is constitutionally guaranteed. Secretary of State John Kerry recently flew to Paris to show his solidarity with the French government, but only a few years prior the presidential administration he now represents imprisoned an Egyptian filmmaker for producing and posting to YouTube a short film mocking Muhammad, the founder of Islam (an act that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were murdered for). Add to that the massive surveillance state deployed to control markets, persecute whistleblowers, and monitor the entire American populace, including their thoughts and expressions. How could Washington’s tough talk about free speech not be perceived with a cynical eye? This is now the land, after all, where young children can be expelled from school for biting a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun.

It has become a daily, completely normal occurrence in the West for some individual to be punished by media, corporations, and the state for espousing an outlook divergent from the course set by the arbiters of history. The glaring hypocrisy of Western leaders here should be obvious to all. And what else can be expected of these same opportunists who denounce Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a dictator, while praising the recently deceased Saudi King Abdullah as a revered statesman, even though he presided over a Wahhabist police state and exported jihadist terrorism across the Middle East?

Sadly, the craven unscrupulousness and hypocrisy displayed by politicians is not confined to those in the government. All too many Twitter trendies posting “Je suis Charlie” from the comfort of their coffee shops are prepared to form virtual lynch mobs, egged on by the establishment media, to persecute and punish anyone who speaks out of accord with their proclaimed social justice standards. A growing number of individuals have lost their jobs and even companies at the hands of this postmodern fanaticism. As Nietzsche sighed, “rabble above, rabble below.”

Sodom and Gomorra, no doubt punished for intolerant hate speech.

For the heirs of John Milton, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson, free speech has evolved beyond just the means for a political or religious dissident to freely express his views without persecution. Rather, the new freedom of speech is one based almost entirely on blasphemy, cultural subversion, and nihilism. Free speech is not for actual dissidents, but rather those who “courageously” pretend to challenge power, all the while bankrolled by the establishment (such as Charlie Hebdo and last year’s favorite, Pussy Riot). Free speech is increasingly the privilege of those who wish to use it to further deconstruct and disembowel traditional religious, ethnic, family, and national identities and loyalties, a form of psychological warfare.

The 20^th century Italian traditionalist writer Julius Evola, in his indispensable spiritual manual Ride the Tiger, observed that in our age “every organic unity has been dissolved or is dissolving: caste, stock, nation, homeland, and even family.[i]” Instead of traditional, organic, and religious identities, what exists in the West is a “shifting mass” of individuals, who are “devoid of organic connections.” This mass is “contained by external structures or moved by collective, formless, and unstable currents.” Evola further notes that the only identity Western man now has is that of homo economicus and “the only real hierarchies are those technical ones of the specialists who serve material utility.”

Such reflections fit entirely with the reality that Western man finds himself in. Isolated from almost all that had previously sustained his ancestors, he is adrift in a seemingly ever chaotic flow of fears and distractions as his identity and freedom are whittled away by the oligarchs and their social engineers. At civilization’s twilight never will empty words on free speech save us, but only the Eternal Word begotten before all ages, He Who commands the spiritual sword.

[i] The powerful insights of Evola, both a supporter and critic of interwar Italian fascism, should in no way be taken as an endorsement of that particular ideology, just as one can appreciate philosopher Carl Schmitt’s wisdom while rejecting the execrable National Socialism.

Russian science-fiction writer Natalya Irtenina examines the very modern phenomenon of Christian conviction without faith – an attribute of those who struggle toward God in a godless age, a world suffocated rationalist constructs and eviscerated by nihilism. The brilliant poet and diplomat Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803-1873) embodied such longing, and is a symbol of hope for those who would only cry out to the unknown God to help their unbelief. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Russian life in the past two centuries has borne among other things a strange type of man – he who has within himself an at-first-glance paradoxical conjunction of beliefs. He isn’t religious, he doesn’t believe in God, and he does not seek refuge for his soul in the Church. Yet for all that, he is convinced of the importance of Christianity, the significance of the social institution of the Church, and the necessity of all the characteristics of Orthodox religiosity for the entire people and the private individual.

In the 19^th century, Slavophile Ivan Aksakov expressed this contradiction in his book on Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev: he was a man “not of Christian belief,” but “Christian convictions.” Tyutchev’s younger contemporary, the philosopher Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev, was for half his life indifferent to the essence of Christian belief and remained just an observer of the exterior side of Orthodoxy. Sensitive, attentive, and admiring, but still an outsider. “To my aesthetic, Russian love for the Church I had to add that which I lacked before a full confession of faith: fear of sin…fear of God, spiritual fear…,” he would later write. In other words, “beards, pussy-willows, icons, the poetry of prayer and fasting,” but not one’s own participation. An aesthetic satisfaction from contemplation, but not personal faith.

And it would be in vain to think that this psychological paradox is the attribute of only higher philosophical minds like those of Tyutchev and Leontiev, or a quality attained with higher education. In our 21^st century, the possessor of an internal mechanism replacing faith with Christian convictions can be a factory worker, a novelist, or a university professor. It is not the level of intellect that plays a role, but that common factor that unites our conditional worker, novelist, and professor, one described by Tyutchev in the line, “Not the flesh, but the spirit has been defiled in our day.” A lack of giftedness toward faith and a non-aspiration to it.

Tyutchev himself was one of these men and extremely honestly, with ingenious simplicity and clarity expressed this quality:

Scorched and seared by unbelief,

He bears today the unbearable,

And conscious of his death,

It is for faith that he thirsts, but he requests it not.  (Our Age)

That he doesn’t request is the key here, for it is not a gift.

He will not say with prayer and tears

However he might grieve before the shut door:

‘Let me in! – I believe, my God!

Come to the aid of my unbelief!”

And the same is found in Tyutchev’s prose about himself:

In the depths of my soul is tragedy, for often I feel a deep revulsion toward myself and at the same time I sense how fruitless this feeling of revulsion is, since this unprejudiced evaluation of myself derives exclusively from the mind – the heart has no place here, as there is no admixture that would resemble a burst of Christian repentance…

Whence appear “Christian convictions” outside of faith, outside of recognition of Christ as the Son of God, outside of the walls of the Church? What soil grows them, how are they fertilized? And whence the enormous disparity between the number of those who today count themselves Orthodox (65-75%) and those who are at least minimally taking part in Church life (10-20%)?

One must think that the matter is not in the moral authority of the Patriarch alone and ascetic fathers in the parishes. Moreover, the factor of “Church authority” didn’t work in the coldly rational 19^th century.

The Russian perception of Christianity was from the beginning, from the first introduction, an aesthetic one. From an infant’s first inhalation of the scent of sandalwood in a church full of burning candles and song in a Capella. From the first encounter of ancient Rus with Byzantine Orthodoxy, the amazement of Prince Vladimir’s emissaries before the warm luxury of the Divine Liturgy in the Hagia Sophia: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth: for there is no sight and beauty such as this…”

And then we have Leontiev’s “poetry of prayers and fasting,” his “aesthetic and childlike adherence to the exterior forms of Orthodoxy” (from his letter). It is that same joy before beauty – not just of ritual, but also of what is behind its coverings, the internal transfiguring sacrament: of prayer, of fasting.

Now Tyutchev with his profound feeling for history, the cosmic greatness of creation moving in time:

On the day of my departure, which came on Sunday, there was Liturgy, and after Liturgy the unavoidable prayer service, then a visit to one of the most revered chapels in Moscow, where there is the miracle-working icon of the Iverskaya Mother of God. In a word, everything transpired according to the rites of a most exacting Orthodoxy… And so what? For the man who encounters it only in passing and at his convenience, there are in these forms so deeply historical, this Byzantine-Russian world, where life and sacred service comprise one – in this world so ancient that even Rome in comparison smells of innovation, for the man endowed with sensitivity to such phenomena, there is a greatness of incomparable poetry.

Again poetry. Can we reduce everything to the fact that Tyutchev was a poetic genius and Leontiev among other things was a man of letters, a man possessing an extraordinary aesthetic sense and desiring beauty in everything, from everyday life to the sovereign order and politics? No. Prince Vladimir’s ambassadors were neither poets, artists, nor some manner of unique aesthetic gourmands. Rather, take contemporary “visitors” from that numerical disparity between Orthodox by self-identification and those active in the Church. What brings them to suddenly drop by the cathedral, light a candle, stand with bowed head before the icons? The poetry of churchliness. “Beards, pussy-willows, icons.” The scent of sandalwood, the shine of candles, the bass of the deacon, faces of the saints. And a vague melancholy and momentary hope begetting anxiety, the movement of a stagnant soul.

Tyutchev: “And man longs desperately. He tears toward light from the night shadow.” Aleksandr Blok, having called Tyutchev “the night-soul himself,” had his poetry in mind. But therein lies Tyutchev’s entire sense of life. The poet sought a way out of his melancholy state of constant disquietude and psychological despair. Many times in contemplation he confronted the necessity of faith for man.

When you stand face to face with a reality that offends and crushes all your moral being, can we truly have the strength to not, for a time, turn away our gaze and not stupefy ourselves with illusion?

But illusions are too temporary and fluid. A multitude of diverse illusions can be replaced by strong faith alone, the necessary condition of life’s stability. For “man, deprived of familiar beliefs, betrayed to the mercy of life’s realities, cannot experience a state other than an unending seizure of demonism.” For Fyodor Ivanovich himself the power of this ‘seizure’ was doubled by his inability to personally come to faith in Christ. But the poetry of Christianity lived within him.

Poetry plays in the Russian soul. The poetry of churchliness is only a part of the whole. In the Soviet Union, deprived of the spirit of churchliness, people lived by another poetry – the feverish and seething poetry of the workbench, the opening of the virgin soil, of turning back rivers, of subduing the Cosmos. The hydrogen bomb is the terrifying poetry of total destruction, absolute evil and chaos that served the good. The bomb was a Soviet “Katechon” restraining us from death, the end of the world, and the “mystery of iniquity,” a pseudo-biblical poetry (2 Thes. 2:7).

After the death of the Soviet Empire, the people sensed that the poetry of Russian horizons and the Russian land had been stolen from them. A poetry of the heavens only began to heal and spread its wings broken in the anti-religious frenzy. And without poetry, the people took to dying out.

Yet when poetic elements play in the soul, Russians are capable of much and the diametrically opposite. We can organize the Antarctic and not put a farthing toward the poverty of our own lives, or master the Cosmos while habitually not noticing the impassable mud of Russian roads…

These poor settlements,

This meagre nature,

This native land of long-suffering.

Take churchliness from the Russian land, and not only the “foreigner with his proud gaze,” but we ourselves soon will cease to see and understand what “is seen and secretly shines/In your modest nakedness.” Today many do not see and understand this other hypostasis of a great Russia. “Tragic,” “peaceful and dark,” but the living, authentic, and fulfilled existence of Rus. Even Tyutchev, the frequenter of the capitals’ salons, was once made to look differently upon man’s purpose. The religious free-thinker, the poetic pagan who alone stood against the “deaf heavens” and was wearied by hopelessness, suddenly saw life full of higher meaning. Its meaning was to “suffer, pray, believe, and love.”

Leontiev: “I love the Russia of Tsars, monks, and priests, a Russia of red blouses and blue tunics, the Russia of the Kremlin and equable despotism.” Take away the Tsars, monks, and priests, and will there be a Russia left? She will remain, but not for long. The “shining nakedness” will soon cease to be modest, and “long-suffering” will be squandered. And the people will want to jump into the last carriage of a wholly different civilization’s departing train, a non-Russian civilization with other elements in its soul, purely prosaic and ponderously material. Elements for whom dirt nearby and poverty are and absolute evil, and for whom beauty is found in rainbow feathers and glitter.

For he who feels kinship with Russian elements, life in the Church is one a central one. For Leontiev the authenticity of Russia was in autocracy and Byzantine Orthodoxy. And the practical faith of Tyutchev was Russia herself. In his obituary this faith was described:

A feeling within which are concentrated all of his soul, his nature, both intellectual and moral – this is his patriotism, his limitless faith in Russia’s future, her fate, her mission both historical and providential.

When at the beginning of the 1840s, after 22 years of service in Germany, Tyutchev returned to Russia forever, it was expected that he would be a consummate Westernizer, a European in mind, tastes, and views. What general surprise there was when from under the irreproachable European appearance and Western gloss, he revealed a Russian nature to the tips of his fingers, a nature devoted to Russia unto selflessness. According to the words of Aksakov, Tytuchev was one of “a small number of bearers, even movers, of our Russian, popular consciousness.” Russia, by Tyutchev’s conviction, should become the center of the Greco-Slavic world, of a world Orthodox Empire and “show the world a force earthly, sovereign, enlightened or defined by the principle of faith, serving only the cause of self-defense, liberation, and voluntary unity” (in Aksakov’s formula). Immersed in policy, Fyodor Ivanovich considered himself personally responsible for the enactment of this supra-objective.

In Tyutchev’s poetic mythology there was no place for a religion of salvation or faith in Christ, but along with this he himself was a passionate apologist of Orthodoxy. “Christian convictions” speak of the necessity of the Church for Russia, of the measure of churchliness as the measure of stability of the country’s backbone.

Who loves Russia with all their heart and mind, namely Russia in herself, and not oneself within Russia, will understand and love her Orthodox spirit. Sooner or later he will plunge himself into this love. He will love the fasts, the monks and priests, and the very fear of God, the fear of sin – and he himself will beg for this love and faith for himself, or this gift will be sent to him suddenly and by all appearances undeservedly, perhaps even in the last moments of life.

What is lacking along with “Christian convictions” to be able to believe in Christ? Humility. We must “bow our knees before the Madness of the Cross or negate all.” Thus did Tyutchev formulate the problem of faith in his philosophical dispute with Friederich Schelling in Munich. Fyodor Ivanovich himself could do neither one thing nor the other – neither bow his knees, nor negate everything.

“The supra-natural lies in the depth of all that is most natural in man,” he continued in that same conversation. “He has his roots in human consciousness, roots that are much stronger than that which we call reason, this pitiful reason that recognizes only what is understandable to it, that is, nothing.” His Christian convictions “of the mind” clashed with a pagan worldview, begetting melancholy. With all his soul Tytuchev desired faith, but he could not give it to himself. Only when death crept closely toward him did faith began to win back space in a soul “poisoned by reason.”

Leontiev was able to conquer himself at the peak of life. After he had simultaneously acquired the personal experience of revolt and humility before the inevitability of death, his own helplessness in the face of death by cholera and an unexpected healing after prayers to the Mother of God divided his life in two. “And from that time I cannot reject faith and the fear of the Lord, even if I wanted to… Religion is not always consolation; in many cases it is a heavy yoke, but who has truly believed will never part with this yoke for anything!” he would write not long before taking his monastic vow.

All of his life Tyutchev sought out the key to death, and he could not find it. “In the face of such a spectacle you ask yourself: what does all this mean and what is the meaning of his terrifying mystery – if, however, there is any meaning?” Aksakov, visiting him after his first stroke, then reproached the poet in absentia:

Man is given a dreadful forewarning… The shadow of death passed over him. Time is given to prepare, repent, be sanctified… It seems to me, though, Fyodor Ivanovich…did not sense the proximity of death, its mysterious breathing near him.

Again, a few days later, Aksakov related: “Yesterday he took Communion… He didn’t how how, but the matter was done much more simply. At the first hint, he readily agreed.” And in a month Tyutchev’s wife would write: “The disease will have that positive aspect of having returned to him to the religious path he left from the time of his youth… He eagerly listens to the number of Gospel chapters I read him daily, and the nurse says that during the nights they tend to have very serious religious conversations.”

“Never was his face more beautiful, illuminated, and triumphant,” than at the moment when Tyutchev’s soul left his body. It may be that then he finally beheld “the good heavens” and head “the life-creating voice” of the Lord for Whom he longed all his life.

Men come to faith through various paths, but they depart to its Source by the same road.

The tragic and untimely death of Russian poet, playwright and diplomat Aleksandr Sergeevich Griboyedov (1795-1828) in Tehran was just one episode in a geopolitical duel, the Great Game, as Russia and Great Britain maneuvered for position in Central Asia throughout the 19^th century. This official account from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), authored by A.N. Itskov, tells a story of diplomacy, espionage, and murder in Persia. Translated by Mark Hackard.

For the first third of the 19^th century, Russia was engaged in bloody wars with Persia (1804-1813 and 1826-1828). Consequently Russia emerged victorious, and Persia was forced to recognize Russia’s annexation of Georgia, Dagestan, Northern Azerbaijan, and also the Yerevan and Nakhichevan khanates. In elaboration of the conditions of the Treaty of Turkmenchay, which legally formalized the results of the two wars and became the basis of relations between the two lands up to October of 1917, a most active participant was the diplomatic counsel under the Commander of the Russian Army of the Caucasus Ivan Paskevich, Aleksandr Sergeevich Griboyedov. Griboyedov had already worked in the Russian embassy in Persia between the two wars and had learned well the situation in the country. And when he journeyed to the camp of Abbas Mirza, the son of the Shah and commander of the Persian Army, to resolve political questions, at the same time he studied the state of the army and detected its low morale. Griboyedov also “probed” Abbas Mirza’s adjutant, Haji Mahmud Aga, regarding the latter’s possible future use as an agent, and was practically able to receive his consent on cooperating[i].

The Treaty of Turkmenchay: Griboyedov is seen fifth from left in white pants and glasses.

Griboyedov’s success during the conclusion of a peace decided his further diplomatic career: he was appointed ambassador to Tehran. In a directive for Griboyedov composed by Minister of Foreign Affairs Nesselrode and confirmed by Tsar Nicholas I on April 25, 1828, among detailed orders in relation to political objectives for his work in Persia (such as stabilizing peaceful relations between the two countries, the neutrality of Persia in Russo-Turkish affairs, the development of mutually beneficial commerce, etc.) a large part was allotted to such matters as: Protection of Persian subjects who rendered services to Russian forces during the Russo-Persian War and who began to be persecuted after the war’s end (this was especially mentioned in the Treaty of Turkmenchay).

• Collection of statistical and political information on Persia, her history, geography, the state of her economy, and trade;
• Collection of information on Persia’s neighbors and her relations with them, on the way of life and customs of their population, on their trade, and their “friendly and non-hostile” relations with other countries.
• What especially stands out is the task of collecting elaborated information “in its true light” on Bukhara, its trade, and external relations with Khiva, Persia, Afghanistan, and the Ottoman Empire.
• No less important a mission was collecting intelligence on the ancient and contemporary caravan routes going from the Caspian Sea to India and the countries neighboring her.
• “But most of all,” says the directive, “the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has need of information gathered from reliable sources on Persia’s relations with the Turkmens and Khivans, the degree of her hostility to them, and the influence of her power on these nomadic tribes – and on the other hand, on cases for alarm – regarding mutually hostile actions and Persia’s capability to repel their raids.”

Persian caravan outpost Agh-Baba. Painting by Pavel Pyasetsky.

A large section of the directive was devoted to “emergency expenditures.”

For the successful execution of everything assigned you, connections in the region where you will have a constant presence are necessary, as is the assistance of diligent men. The lords themselves and even sons of the Shah sometimes need insignificant aid in cash, by which their heft is at once restored, and upon which their salvation often depends. Such a service from your quarters, punctually rendered, can gain you the gratitude of useful figures and make them sincere. Therefore, decisions on this matter are subject to your good judgment. However, many local circumstances in Persia are completely unknown to us, and I thereby limit myself to the heretofore elaborated instructions designated to you by the Highest Sanction as a guide. But nevertheless, I consider it a duty to inform you that His Imperial Majesty abides in that pleasant assurance that you will in all cases and in all actions have in view the honor, interest, and glory of Russia.”[ii]

At that time Russia’s glory in large part depended on successfully counteracting England’s expansionist aspirations along the whole length of Russian borders to the east and south. Already in the first half of the 19^th century in Asia, two marked tendencies excluded the possibility of any compromise: this was the movement of the English to the north of India and Russia’s drive toward the south, in the direction of “the jewel of the British Crown.” By every means England guarded even the most remote approaches to India and strived to fortify its presence and influence in lands bordering her. For the realization of these goals, the British government used the most diverse methods, from propagandistic denunciation of Russia’s “aggressive course” against her southern neighbors to genuine threats of an open clash with the application of “the united efforts of countries fearing attack by their northern neighbor.” Foremost among such countries were counted the Ottoman Empire and Persia, who with looked upon the war games of the Tsar’s army in direct proximity to their border with suspicion and attempted to raise their own military capabilities through massive purchases of modern armaments and inviting qualified English advisors into their service.

These advisors were interested in their presence being constructed on a permanent basis. And for that was needed a permanent threat or the creation of such.

Upon his arrival in Tehran, Griboyedov practically wasn’t able to carry out the tasks set before him. In December of 1828 there occurred a fateful incident that provided ground for stirring up hostility to Russia. Hearing the tearful pleas of a eunuch of the Shah’s harem, an Armenian named Mirza Yakub, and two Armenian girls captured during the war who sought escape from their persecutors, Griboyedov gave them refuge in the building of the diplomatic mission. For the Persian authorities, this served as an excuse to rouse the religious fanaticism of a certain segment of the local population and initiate an anti-Russian demonstration in Tehran. Many are inclined to think that this happened not without the help of the English.

Ruins of the former Russian embassy in Tehran. 35 Cossacks also died defending the mission from the fanatical mob. Photo by S.N. Dmitriev.

On January 30^th, 1829, a tremendous mob of enraged Persians stormed the territory of the Russian embassy, murdered everyone to be found there, and looted all the property. Among the dead was Griboyedov. Nesselrode’s directive already had to be carried out by Griboyedov’s successors, in particular Major-General Ivan Osipovich, who took the fallen diplomat’s place. Nicholas I’s representative Major-General Nikolai Dolgorukov, arriving in Tehran to settle the incident of the storm of the Russian mission and spending a rather long time in the Persian capital, expressed his observations to the head of the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs K.K. Rodofinkin with regard to the further organization of intelligence work in Persia. He noted:

In Asia it is not as in Europe. Here every day come changes in thought and quite often in actions. In order to keep affairs from going bad and sometimes to prevent any actions, we must be quickly and reliably informed. Success in our work derives from this. To reach a designated objective, we must have men, and it’s impossible to acquire men without money and gifts… I’m absolutely of the opinion that we should not permit large, extraordinary expenditures, but it’s also necessary to appoint a sum to find one or two Persian officials who could deliver accurate news… Upon my arrival I couldn’t find one man who would support our mission at a time when everything falls at the feet of the English.[iii]

Not so much time would pass, and the figures of whom Dolgorukov spoke would appear within the Russian agent network. In the 1870s, when Russian policy in Central Asia became noticeably active and there was a struggle underway against English intrigue in the region, the Russian ambassador in Tehran received detailed intelligence on the secret designs and actions of the English not only from his consuls, who had numerous agents in the Turkmen tribes that England constantly tried to pit against Russia, but also directly from the Persian minister of foreign affairs.

[i] See Archive for Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, “Griboyedov A.S.,” Matter No. 76. [ii] Ibid, Matter No. 16. [iii] Ibid, Matter No. 21. Work Translated: Очерки истории российской внешней разведки: В 6-ти тт. 0-95 — Т.1: От древнейших времен до 1917 года. — М.:Между- нар. отношения, 1995.

The Jargon of Game Theory

While suffering under the information barrage wrought by mass media, a question arises in one’s mind: exactly how many words are there in the media vocabulary? For, when it comes to treatment of serious subjects like the economy and politics, the words in use are reduced to surprisingly few, so that even purported media analysis or commentary comes to resemble a mantra or nursery rhyme. Furthermore, it is notable that this “linguistic drain” occurs precisely at the moment when “serious” matters come into focus, and in spite of all the loftiness of the talking heads – our designated hierophants and media oracles – we are bombarded with rather frivolous terminology. One can only be perplexed at why, for instance, economic and political agents are called players? Why does the philosophy professor speak about the strategy of Nietzsche’s arguments? What exactly does it mean to have a cultural strategy? On what grounds does the literally critic assume that James Joyce employed a narrative strategy?

Why are all those serious things spoken about as if they were some kind of game?

On the face of it, the answer is surprisingly easy to deduce. Game or game-play jargon originates in global epistemic dominance of thought models derived from mathematical game theory. Its various abstract and complex forms (so called ‘models’ or ‘modules’), as well as their global application to all aspects of life, build the spiritual framework of our time to a significant extent, although they are rarely discussed outside of academia. However, game theory is not merely a mathematician’s plaything. If we bear in mind that the world stage – with all those global players – is also the home to all sorts of people who are well aware that they are being played, but have no idea of true nature of those playing them, then it is clear that the fundamentals of game theory should be subjected to critical scrutiny. The task is all the more urgent – and all the easier – if we bear in mind that the peculiarity of game theory, in contrast to other mathematical models, lies in the fact that it is founded on all-encompassing and simultaneously incredibly simple – one could say simple as in ‘dim witted’ – explanation of man and the world in general.

Game theory is a metaphysical doctrine, i.e. its ambition is to encompass everything, both the nature of man and the nature of universe. And there is a one special rule to every game of metaphysics, namely this: when the abstract and esoteric professional language of science is put aside, the game is potentially understandable to all parties – both those who are playing and those who are being played. It is an unspoken rule, an ancient assumption of all world-view con-games: in order for half-truth to hold sway over everybody, it must be spoken in common language. So let us examine, aided by some elementary concepts, what game theory is exactly and what it means for someone who is not a player, only played.

At its core, though, game theory is an explanatory model of decision making. It defines its subject as rational activity whose purpose is an increase in well-being of the deliberating individual or collective. Any behavior seemingly pursuing different purpose is only a roundabout way to achieve this goal more rationally, or it is simply “irrational.” Tertium non datur. Obviously, we are dealing with, broadly speaking, a “liberal” definition of man, although it is in fact the legacy of Ancient Greek Sophists. Bearing in mind that an individual is always in the midst of other individuals and that in order to achieve its goals it must collaborate or come into conflict with them, society must be rationally modelled in order to minimize conflict. That old bogeyman of political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, conceived such a thing as possible only through the absolute sovereignty of the State, for was convinced that all those self-centered atoms were more prone to play at some iteration of Total War than that of Sims.

Proponents of game theory try to evade this fairly consistent inference of universal war or use it to prove something else: atomized individuals do not strive toward all-out conflict but towards equilibrium. The term denotes a state of conflict turned latent, in the sense of permanent threat or warning, but having ceased to be destructive; it is, in a word, a rational conflict, a war that grew cold. Namely, rational behavior is primarily strategic, i.e. it endeavors to accomplish its objective despite possible resistance by anticipating the strategies of that resistance. The healthy society is the one in which unavoidable conflicts are being channeled into relative harmony, regulated by the rules of the game, because the players realized that relative equality is more expedient than playing an ‘all or nothing’ game. Hence, game theory has a notably militaristic nature, affirmed by its history: it flourished inside military think tanks during the first years of the Cold war, only to be later unleashed on civil societies throughout the West.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

At this level, some peculiarities are also notable. The term ‘game’ is made distinct but is not clearly defined, i.e. it is obviously artificially narrowed. For instance: since when does the game have to be competitive? Moreover, it is usually understood as a leisure activity, an escape from labor and conflict. Game by its nature doesn’t require winners and losers. It can be – and it usually is – a completely self-sufficient activity. In that sense, dances, visual and linguistic creative activities, fine or liberal arts, are all forms of playing a game. Those are all activities that, deprived of any calculated purpose outside themselves, remain autonomous and, therefore, free. However, game theory, without further clarification, presumes that games are always forms of competition implying conflict, binary division on winners and losers, elements of chance and power relations, domination and submission. So game theory is concerned with power plays. This is best illustrated in that most famous of game theory modules, the “Prisoner’s Dilemma.”

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is an imagined situation that game theoreticians apply to reality, and it has many variations with according levels of complexity. It can be described, using the so-called static model, in the following way:

Two criminals are brought to a police station for questioning. They committed the crime, but if the police fail to get the confession from one or either of them, they’ll walk. They are put in separate rooms and isolated from one another. A confession is demanded from each one. A situation develops in which the rules of the game provide them with a limited number of possible strategies: each one could or could not confess. If both confess, their pay-off is equally small, but if only one confesses, his pay-off is small, but bigger than the pay-off of his accomplice. If neither confesses, the pay-off is equally big for both of them, yet so is the risk of losing everything. Two key factors are in play: the prisoners are completely isolated from one another – they only know the game’s rules and the pay-offs by which they model their respective strategies, and each one only wants to maximize his own pay-off. The game-theory endeavor to use this module to explain real-life situations and foresee the decisions to be made by opponents (for instance, by Soviets in the Cold-War era) or to offer the best course of deliberation to its users. In the dynamic model of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the main difference is in access to information, because players are allowed to confer before they are isolated.

A striking feature of such models must be noted. More often than not, the agents of decision-making in game theory modules are described as criminals. Sometimes they are jewel thieves, sometimes it’s a fugitive escaping the posse, and one encyclopedia’s game theory module is illustrated by the act of tossing the incapacitated opponent into precipice. It is interesting that the author uses the pronoun he for the victim while the criminal in the dilemma is denoted as she, in strict obeisance to the rules of political correctness. Bearing in mind that victimhood, imaginary or not, proves to gain a rather abundant pay-off, it seems that even the game theoretician is faced with a Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The Game Myth

This feature leads us to key weak point of game theory, i.e. its flimsy definition of rationality. Namely, the “big players”, of whose moving and shaking the media hierophants inform us unceasingly, are implicitly denounced as criminal organizations, and not by the frustrated and confused public – the notion appears incorporated into the very definition of their enterprises. Every player seeks exclusively his own maximal gain, and that which is considered to be “one’s own,” therefore rationally desirable, seemingly private, comes dangerously close to being privative. Bearing in mind that such exclusive economic players are prone to merge with their playmates in politics – which is, after all, the elementary definition of fascism – one must reach the conclusion that in the foundations of seemingly supra-private bodies, be it corporations or governments, not only private but also privative interests are embedded, and that the very process of democracy can be seen as a means of accomplishing this.

In that sense, it is no wonder that what is now called liberalism is a form of strange metaphysics. Namely, it appeals to ‘human nature’ and ‘natural rights’, but has in fact always been infected with an urge for escapism, clearly visible in so-called “state of nature” and “social contract” theories, mythical stories about a historical event that never happened in a historical age that never was, which man escaped by a decision he never made. Game theory metaphysics transforms this myth and enriches it, but it certainly doesn’t dispel it. The myth is sold, against all reason and the wealth of human imagination, as the veritable image of truth, i.e. a valid world-view, the prism through which the entire contemporary landscape is transmitted before our eyes. However, this picture, no matter how coherent and self-sufficient, is in fact rather fragile.

Don’t want to get screwed over? Don’t play.

The persuasive power of the myth is proportional to the verity of its images of truth, while the persuasive power of the lie stems from its appellation to weaknesses of thought – to an inertia delighted with the ease of passing flippant judgment. The mythology of the rational playground falls precisely into this second category, because it assumes the pretense of a necessary and all-applicable system, thereby subverting the transcendental, robbing it of its very possibility while replacing it with a simulacrum. However, in moments of crisis – etymologically equal to moments of judgment – its frailty is all the more obvious, and its ability to maintain the illusion ever more inadequate to the task. The notion of man as a ‘selfish information processor’ is in fact a careless distortion of the classical understanding of elementary human solidarity, founded on love of one’s own transferred to another, best explained in Aristotle’s Book VIII of Nicomachean Ethics, where it is defined as ‘friendship’ (filia) in the broadest sense. The progressive concentration of power in the hands of players, at the expense of those who are played is more likely to push the losing side into the irrational decision of giving up on selfishness, of declaring: “I will not play anymore.”

Ghosts in the Machine 

We face the following eventuality: the choice of irrational decision sheds more light on a crucial system error in the definition of man and game that this pseudo-metaphysics imposes on us. The term ‘irrational’ is never really defined in the framework of game theory. And rationality fared only slightly better, though at least it can serve as a foothold for via negativa deduction of what is not irrationality. For the game theoretician, irrational behavior is not behavior at all; it is a pseudo-behavior deprived of deliberation. Bearing in mind that game theory yields a considerable pay-off in microbiology, where genes are conceived as rational players in the game of survival of the fittest, we can’t even say that irrational players are making monkeys of themselves. So how, using this sophisticated net, does one catch this elusive mutant who won’t play games, strategize, steal, or bow to political religion?

Let’s define him. This “ghost in the machine” could be someone whose moral sentiment forces him to irrationally decline profitable professions or profitable occasions, such as employing his talents in mass propaganda or advertising. Furthermore, in order to achieve his objective, perhaps writing a novel penetrating the depths of human condition, for example, he irrationally decides to always be close to death, because only then he can really reach the heart of his subject, while at the same time he knows that the pay-off will probably come after he is long gone. Is there any conceivable rational agent who can assume that he rationally planned all this? Or are all those “whistleblowers” really rational players; people who rationally decided to confront corruption, and now enjoy the pay-off by being unemployed or jailed, crucified between responsibility towards their conscience and their families?

After all, were the lines you now read calibrated for a payoff? “Irrationality” is what you were seeking the entire time.

Game theory views the irrational as its own confinement; the razor wire lining the playground fence or an unforeseen eventuality breaking the rules of game-play, its strict order. Bearing in mind that we are talking about world order – and world-encircling razor wire – the deprecation of the irrational is absolute inasmuch as the myth of the rational is absolute. Endemic, logically indescribable specimens are reduced to occasional noise in communication channels between players. Yet those endemic specimens are in fact the majority of our respectably populated planet, and so the noise grows to permeate our societies. It even begins to obstruct the tranquility of academic think tanks, and we know that devising complex and abstract logical, not to mention mathematical, models demands focus, a certain withdrawal from the world in the isolation of one’s paneled office – that parody of the monk’s cloister. Could it be that the hum of the irrational is evolving into an unpredictable, unbearable roar of chaos whose source is too powerful for even the valiant forces of campus security to subdue?

Is it only rational to predict that a creature of grand scale is much too big for nets weaved from a flimsy conceptual framework, unfit for catching even butterflies? What happens when the net breaks? Because the enemy is irrational, and therefore unthinkable. It is the great Unknown, something equal to an extraterrestrial invasion. Can the controllers’ sorcery of half-truth, half-philosophy, half-culture, and half-living keep our eyes wide shut for much longer? Among the faceless and unprepossessing shall awaken the beast of the irrational, its inner abyss suspending man between the angelic and the infernal. Game over.

See all of Branko Malic’s writings on philosophy, culture, and deep politics at Kali Tribune.

Philosopher Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky (1870-1965) outlines Fyodor Dostoevsky’s vision of Russia’s transcendent mission – to bring the world to the God-Man Christ, Whose fullest expression is found in the ancient faith upheld by Byzantium and adopted by Grand Prince Vladimir in 988. Salvation comes from the East. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Knowing the deep religious basis of the Russian spirit, Dostoevsky, despite all the shortcomings of the people, believed that it stood to the Russians to carry out a great mission in Europe. He saw “the essence of Russia’s calling” in “revealing to the world the unknown Russian Christ, Whose principle lies in our native Orthodoxy” (Letter to Strakhov, 1869, No. 325). In view of the breadth of the Russian mind and character, Dostoevsky was confident that the Christian spirit would be expressed in the ability to develop a synthesis of opposing ideas and aspirations that divide the peoples of Europe, whence would be achieved not only theoretical but practical reconciliation of all disputes.

It is remarkable that this ability and passion of the Russian mind for all-encompassing synthesis was noted long before Dostoevsky, as B. Yakovenko shows in his History of Russian Philosophy, by many Russian writers, such as Prince V.F. Odoevsky, Belinsky, Kireevsky, and Shevyrev.[i]

In the 1861 magazine Vremya, Dostoevsky wrote that the basic aspiration of Russians was “universal, spiritual reconciliation.” “The Russian idea with time will become the synthesis of all those ideas that Europe for so long and with such persistence produced in its individual nationalities.” Western peoples seek to “find a universal human ideal in themselves and by their own powers, and therefore they altogether harm themselves and their cause.” “The idea of universal humanity ever more wears away between them. Among each of them it takes a different type, dulls, and assumes in consciousness a new form. The Christian bond that up to this time united them loses strength with every day.” To the contrary, in the Russian character, “the capability for high synthesis, a gift for universal reconcilability and humanity is predominant.” “He gets along with everyone and is accustomed to all. He sympathizes with all that is human regardless of nationality, blood, and soil. He finds and immediately allows for reasonableness in all, if only there is to be some universal human interest.” “This is why Europeans completely do not understand Russians, and the greatest feature of their character they have called impersonality” (Ibid, III). In the work of Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin, this “Russian ideal – integrality, universal reconcilability, and humanity” was incarnated (Ibid, V).

Namely the Russians, thought Dostoevsky, would set the basis for “the universal reconciliation of peoples” and the “renewal of men upon Christ’s true principles” (Diary of a Writer, 1876, June). The Eastern ideal, i.e. the ideal of Russian Orthodoxy, is first the spiritual unity of humanity in Christ, and then, by virtue of this spiritual uniting of all in Christ, surely the proper sovereign and social unification” (Diary of a Writer, 1877, May-June). Such an ideal is the application of Khomyakov’s formulated principle of catholicity [sobornost] not only to the order of the Church, but also to the sovereign order, the economic system, and even to the international organization of humanity.

The Soul of the People, by Mikhail Nesterov.

The Pushkin Speech that Dostoevsky delivered on June 8^th, 1880, in Moscow was a supreme expression of his conviction that “Russian populism’s force of spirit” was the “its drive toward universality and universal humanity as a final goal.”

Concerning the interior order of the Russian body politic, here Dostoevsky also saw something akin to catholicity, pointing to the democratic ethos of all classes of Russian society. “Honesty, selflessness, directness, and the openness of a democratic ethos in the majority of Russian society are not subject to any doubt,” says Dostoevsky. In Europe, this ethos “up to this time announced itself everywhere only from below and is still barely fighting, while the vanquished (supposedly) upper classes still put forth terrible resistance. Our upper class was not vanquished; our upper class itself became democratic, or more accurately, of the people.” Therefore, in Russia “temporary adversities of the demos will be improved under the tireless and constant influence henceforth of such tremendous elements (for to call them otherwise is impossible) such as the universal democratic temperament and general agreement with this of all Russians, starting from the very top” (Diary of a Writer, 1876, May).

In the chapter “Dostoevsky’s Religious Life,” I posed the question whether Orthodoxy was for Dostoevsky a value in itself or only a means necessary for Russian political life. The answer given was the following: loving the Russian people, Dostoevsky began to look into what was dear to them and how their virtues were expressed; through this he discovered the inherent value of Russian Orthodoxy. The current chapter on the character of the Russian people should serve as a final confirmation of the notion that division of means and ends doesn’t have any meaning here: love for the Russian people and love for Russian Orthodoxy composed in Dostoevsky’s soul an organic unity, the two sides of which support and substantiate each other.

The course of Russian history seemingly disproves Dostoevsky’s conviction that the Christian spirit is the expression of the Russian people’s essence. Namely the Russian people enacted the most savage anti-Christian and principally atheist revolution. In answer to this apprehension it is worth reminding that revolution is a transitory condition of society. The Great French Revolution, despite brutal persecutions of the Catholic Church, did not destroy Catholicism in France. According to information from Russia, the Bolsheviks themselves admit that the Russian people’s religiosity is strong to this day. We can hope that after severe trials, Russian Orthodoxy will not perish, but will rather ascend to an even higher stage of consciousness and spiritual purity. Then shall the words of Elder Zosima be fulfilled, even if not in the way that Dostoevsky hoped:

The people shall meet the atheist and overcome him, and Orthodox Rus shall be as one.

[i] Б. Яковенко. «Dejinyruske filosofie», pg. 17.

One of the most difficult things for moderns to apprehend is the seemingly counter-intuitive worldview of modified Platonism. This reorientation shifts our entire perspective on the outer, external world, rendering it again a sacred space infused with the Divine, as opposed to a brute, “material” realm dominated by chaos, entropy and death. Our contemporaries nonetheless prefer the latter grand narrative (and a depressing narrative it is), proclaiming that we in the other camp are “weak” for choosing older “fictions” like souls, angels and God. To be sure, the materialists and servants of delusion of brute “matter” have their own deity – the impersonal “Forces of Nature,” but we’ll set that aside for the moment.

It is crucial that the psyche undergo this repentance, metanoia in Greek, and reorienting, as the modern attitude is that of fallen man, who views his world as devoid of supernatural under the guise of “science.” While the scientific method is certainly a useful tool, the lack of philosophical education on the part of that community is appalling. Precisely the hubris of fallen man impels the hierophants of the naturalist cult to stamp out all such ideas – even the slightest tendency toward the idea the psyche or mind may not be reduced to chemical reactions must be swiftly punished.

This is why the discoveries and theses proposed in quantum physics are so disturbing to advocates of scientism, despite their good faith in future science to resolve all questions of being with strict rationalism. Never mind the fact that “reason” itself is nonsensical in the deterministic paradigm of Darwinian naturalism; the crusaders of modern empiricism are committed adherents of the Holy Inquisition of Scientism, and no manner of logical argumentation can persuade them otherwise. Those aware of an alternate version of human history, the Biblical narrative, in which man is a fallen creature in rebellion against his Creator, have a perfectly rational (indeed, the only rational) explanation of these events – and can even explain why man himself prefers his own self-imposed servitude, quoting Kant, rather than submission to the doctrine of Creation.

The Eagle Nebula.

Creation is essential because of the implications it conveys for the entirety of how man perceives the world and operates in it. Our worldview will determine the way we act, showing the old adage of lex orandi, lex credendi to be correct. If the universe is a created reality, then the implications for how things like electrons, matter and other natural processes work will have vastly different meanings.  For example, if there is no Creation, and the universe is either eternal or illusory, the way we operate will be dictated accordingly. We can look to history to show us civilizations where such a fundamental presupposition dominated, such as Hindu India or ancient China. In these cultures, the dominance of the Absolute as an impersonal reality, with a multitude of lesser deities to be supplicated, created a vast array of self-destructive practices amongst those populations. Starvation reigned in India while cattle roamed free as divine, and a “divine” emperor held sway in China, where individual subjects had no personal identity. These are merely examples of basic philosophical presuppositions that undergirded a culture and resulted in a praxis consistent therewith.

Precisely because these civilizations were suffused with the notion that time and the universe were eternal, existence itself became a trap. The wheel of time and “materiality” had to be escaped, through meditation, radical asceticism, or some other form of mystical gnosis. If, on the other hand, “material” reality was a created reality, and not a self-subsisting eternal principle of its own, and the fundamental framework of the “stuff” of reality was designed and had begun at a point in time, the implications would be vastly different. The creation account of Genesis, for example, presents a very different narrative of history and its beginnings than these other accounts. Although it has been fashionable for the last few hundred years to dismiss the Genesis narrative as a fictional mythology of numerous blended Ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, the fact remains that the Creation account of Genesis presents a vastly different theology than any other religious creation story, aside from even the Egyptian.

This difference cannot be overstated: The Biblical account posits that time and “matter” are not evils, traps or the source of any fundamentally oppositional principle, but are rather goods – inherently good, due to being created in time by a good God. God, being good, does not “create” evil, as if it had any substantial or ontological being. All being, in the metaphysical sense and the here and now, is created being, and created with the potential to receive the higher divine energies or powers of God.  Creation was such that it was placed in a state in which it might be raised to even higher goods, though not implying creation was therefore “bad,” because its initial state was a lesser good. There is no opposition or dialectic between the good being many, as later western philosophy, Platonism in particular, would posit. This opposition of the good necessarily being absolutely One (the simple monad), was a Platonic idea that would have its precedent in ancient Far Eastern thought.

Even the Hermetica and the Egyptian accounts from the Memphite narrative, for example, include the idea that creation was spoken into existence by virtue of a divine Logos, yet the overall principle, the ultimate Absolute, is not personal, but an immaterial force. At the outset we are presented with only two possible options for this question – is the Absolute (supra) rational and personal, or is the Absolute an impersonal, chaotic force? There are only two possibilities here, and once we consider this basic philosophical question, we can extrapolate Darwinism as a clear manifestation of the second. Though most Darwinian adherents would be at pains to insist there is no ultimate guiding principle, their worldview still tends towards the notion of Forces of Nature determining existence. This determination, however, is ultimately irrational and impersonal, aside from the appearance of order, telos and design. (Note that I am not making a classical teleological argument, but a transcendental version of a teleological argument.)

But there are many, many more problems for positing ultimate reality or the Absolute as an impersonal force. If ultimate reality is impersonal and chaotic, then all localized events, phenomena and objects are also devoid of any ultimate meaning. Language, mathematics, logic, etc., are thus annihilated as merely mental fictions, or at best some cosmic force we do not yet understand.

The high priests of Darwinism, these servants of chaos and the abyss, resemble the proverbial cartoon character who saws off the limb he sits upon to spite his opponent. If ultimate reality is impersonal, then the teleological thread that links all facts, ideas, objects, patterns, etc., is not real. It is a fiction of man’s chaotic, impersonal mental chemical reactions.  There is no order or pattern actually out there in external reality, and the so-called regularity of nature upon which science is built, induction, is merely a mental projection or interpretation.  Such devastating eventualities, of course, are the very reason “science” (or scientism) has chosen to discard philosophy as “useless.”  However, these matters cannot be evaded, and science never determines reality by some will-to-power dismissal of philosophical questions. The mere fact that “scientists” dogmatically mandate that no one can ask questions about why or what happened before the so-called Big Bang only demonstrates how futile and absurd their posturing is.

God has made worlds of worlds, and infinite infinities. He Himself is the Absolute, Personal Infinity, Aleph Nought.

Creation becomes the only logical and philosophically coherent position to explain existence, as it renders the very principle of coherence itself sensible as an objective reality. Despite the insistence of the Darwinian/scientistic rationalists that they alone hold the keys of reason, they have dug a pit they themselves have fallen into, to cite Psalms.  Reason, coherence, pattern recognition, mathematics and logic are not mental constructs, but undeniably operative principles in the objective, external world.  This is how bridges are built, words bring about communication, and the principle of induction makes science possible.  This is also how geometry is math in space, and music is math in time. Precisely because these principles work in the world to build amazing logic machines, like computers, we can see how the basic presuppositions of the reductionist-naturalist are false.

Here we continually return to the question of objective metaphysical principles as the means by which to engage the opponent and modernity as a whole. Our disagreement begins with Creation and what the world is. It is guided by an Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent God, and all the stuff of reality has its ground in a single Divine Mind. Reality is, at base, rational, although that rationality is infinite, and so it transcends our finite reason. Regardless, it does not make God irrational, it makes Him supra-rational, which means there are plenty of things we must learn analogically. In contrast, for the opponent, reality is ultimately irrational, with no meaning, telos, or guiding principle. It just is, and that brute nihilism is something he must continually confront as he seeks to make reason, science and math function as a supposed mental fiction in the external world.

For the unhappy materialist, the world is not something to be ruled as a steward under a good God, but a dark, chaotic, nihilistic, empty place upon which meaning must be imposed, not discovered. This is precisely why scientism has so often succumbed to brutality and the rape of nature, despite its never-ending claim to worship Nature and exalt “environmentalism.” It is the impetus of social Darwinianism to ultimately seek the destruction of nature, as nature is not a sacred manifestation of the Divine Mind and Beauty, but a merely harsh ruler to overthrow, annihilate and “perfect” (through transhumanism and the synthetic rewrite). However, if we in theology are correct, this grand plan is doomed to fail because man is not a god who determines meaning and objective reality. Man is a steward of God, made with the plan to be made divine and immortal in God’s way, and not in fallen man’s rebellious way.

Recent discoveries in quantum physics validate the traditional worldview, moreoever, as its theses consider the fundamental substrate of reality to be information, like we see in DNA research and in quantum perspectives of subatomic reality. Discoveries of the “holographic” model of reality are merely confirmations of the platonic models of psyche and idea as the fundamental substrate of reality.  We are witnessing a revolution that runs completely contrary to the empirical British Royal Society narrative we have so long been fed, truly heralding the fall of the old Enlightenment empiricism. To poison the well and control the narrative, however, New-Agers and the think tanks have jumped on board, and already we have brigades of baloney salesmen attempting to hijack quantum physics for whatever scam the establishment rolls out.

We remind readers that critiques made of absolute impersonalism equally apply to the New-Age syncretists’ hijacking of quantum physics. The fact that the fundamental substrate of humans and “matter” is information, and more specifically energetic information, speaks to a worldview necessitating an infinite, omniscient Mind to order all of reality. Without an infinite Mind linking all the particulars, the connections we make are illusory. For metaphysics and philosophy and science to work, we need a rational, linking principle. We need something to hold all this substrate, all these patterns, all these principles together – and the finite human mind is never enough.

Ancient Tradition in Genesis, a Creation narrative, explains reality as the Creation of a loving God, and as a reflection of eternal principles and archetypes in His mind – called logoi, that are all one in His Logos, or Word. In Genesis 1, the universe is spoken into existence, through divine fiat, and contains within it a fundamental meaning. That fundamental informational meaning, exemplified in something like DNA, is grounded in the eternal, whence its purpose derives. Man, as a creature of God, can thus make advances and learn about the world, even though both he and it are fallen, as they progress back towards union with God and the eventual renewal of all things in God. Only in this paradigm, with these presuppositions, are science, reason, meaning, logic and mathematics even possible and coherent. Our own minds are little mirrors of the one Divine Mind, a microcosmos to contemplate the many.

Read all Jay Dyer’s works on philosophy, science, geopolitics, conspiracies, and culture at Jay’s Analysis.