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These are dark times for human beings everywhere, none more so than within the European Union.
Wales is a small country that is part of the United Kingdom. Wales voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union because unlike London and several parts of the southeast of England we’re not that wealthy, we’re the UK equivalent of the rust belt of America, mined out and left for dead by the Neo-Liberals of the 1980’s. We don’t tend to benefit from cheap migration and as a result voted to close the borders. That’s a plea that fell on deaf ears as far as the London government is concerned who to a man are very busy pretending that we’ve left the EU when for all intents and purposes we haven’t. Brexit in name only, or BRINO for short is a situation that nobody is happy with. Remainers and Brexiteers both feel dissatisfied with the current status quo which has precipitated a very nasty civil war within the Tory party, who to a man are busy being anything but conservatives.
As good stoics we do not need to be expressly political animals, but we do need to be mindful of politics, wasn’t it the great Athenian statesman Pericles who said: ‘Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you!’ This means that like it or not, we’re all soldiers in the present culture war, some of us don’t know that we’re on the battlefield, others only find out when they’ve been fired from their job of thirty years or so for accidentally misgendering someone but by then it’s too late, they are already a casualty of the war, so like it or not, we must pick a side and as good stoics we must choose the side that has the most virtue. So, what is virtue and what the hell does it have to do with Brexit, Twitter and the European union.
Let’s break it down to brass tacks so to speak, the 4 stoic virtues are Wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, their opposites are all labelled as vice. If you take a look at the political discourse of the times we live in, which has become increasingly toxic in this post 2008 economic collapse society we find ourselves in, we must ask ourselves do we see any Wisdom, Courage, Justice and Temperance amongst our political classes? If you do, please let us know.
Politicians in particular are unhappy souls, lacking in courage, and propelled by power fantasies they seek election thinking that they are the dog, only to find out that they are in fact the tail of the dog so to make up for this fact they spend the rest of their lives trying to be the tail that wags the dog!
On a personal note, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that that all politicians from the parish council and upwards should be subject to randomly administered IQ tests at least once a year, as well as the occasional test to identify narcissists, sociopaths and crooks so that we can weed them out of the system. This would be done by psychologists who would be compelled to do it, like jury duty, in order to make the system incorruptible. We’d pay them handsomely of course for their trouble, it’s high time that substandard politicians, corrupt to the core and too stupid to see or even acknowledge the consequences of their decisions were forced to quit along with all of the social climbers and sycophants of the press and media establishment the egos of which are out of control. They all seem to think that they are Hermes incarnate, delivering the messages of the gods and by doing so are vital to the structure of public life. Then we’ve got the lesser-known junior politicians and special advisors who are only there because they are either benefiting directly from the system like pigs in the trough or indirectly through some shady business world contact who is paying them to influence government policy or ask questions of the government on their behalf. This top-heavy globalist establishment is failing at every stage of the game. The health service is falling apart, it can be weeks before you are able to see a doctor, the country is tired, the infrastructure is falling apart and the police don’t solve crimes, instead they spend their time working for twitter as taxpayer funded moderators. To paraphrase Mark Steyn, everything is policed except crime! Thus, we have a picture of the emerging anarcho-tyranny of the modern UK and the western world in particular. This is no accident, but the result of policy.
The global elites have captured our institutions and are now busy shoving their luxury beliefs down our throats using environmentalism as their justification for making prisons of our cities. In order to save the world, we’ve all got to give up the fruits of modernity, for example by the year 2030 women in particular will only be allowed to buy 3 garments a year. That’s one of the proposals put forward by a WEF devotee who has seemingly forgotten the nature of women in the west. My own wife has wardrobes full of clothes, some she’s never even worn, not to mention shoes, and long may it continue. I love to see her having nice things because I’m a good husband. I begrudge her nothing but I would soon begrudge any government that is going to tell her that she can’t buy a pair of shoes that she likes because it will push her over her carbon footprint because I know that they are wrong, we can save the world from ecological damage without cutting consumption or allowing unelected Geneva school internationalists like the WEF to dictate terms, creating a situation where we have to live with less so that they can have more of what they like. By the year 2030, we will be able to sell our unused carbon credits to them for pennies in a skewed market (because there’s billions of us and only a few thousand of them) and in doing so off-set their carbon emissions with our reduced life chances, reduced potential, reduced quality of life and reduced happiness so that they can keep their private jets, motor cars, multiple homes, luxury yachts and so on. Can you imagine Michelle Obama only being allowed 3 garments a year, of course not! If it’s good for the goose, it must by extension be good for the gander. In other words, we’re perfectly right in demanding the same access to consumption as the super-rich. The only limit should be how much we can afford, not the dictates of some central bank digital currency that will stop us spending even if we can afford it, because the real currency is carbon, or it would be, were it not for the fact that our carbon limits will not be able to roll over like the minutes of a mobile phone contract! We won’t be able to save up carbon credits and have a holiday for instance and neither will we be able to save up money for a nice, self-indulgent treat, every digital pound will have an expiry date, if not spent in time it will disappear into the deflationary voids of the central computer.
The future is one in which we good little consumer slaves can save the world one lungful at a time, by sitting still and breathing quietly or better yet, not breathing at all because we are the carbon that they want to reduce and the elites make no secret of this fact with their Canadian style MAID programmes that offer us the chance to just die instead of costing the state money or the climate more carbon with our foolish demands to have, for instance, a wheelchair ramp installed at home should you happen to be disabled. Save the state money, save the state carbon and just die instead, think of the carbon we’ll save by not even being alive!
The elites know that change is coming, that they’ve mined out the economies of the west that made them prosperous and powerful just like they did in Wales closing coal mines and leaving nothing behind in their wake except men in their 40’s unable to work and feed a family. Tough men, hard men, self-reliant men, some of which couldn’t read or write never worked again and were encouraged to fake an illness by the powers that be and go on to claim sickness benefits in order to keep the unemployment figures low. The present-day elites have the same mindset with their talk of nobody working and having a universal basic income instead. It’s this same class of neo-liberal globalists that betrayed their own people for cheaper coal who have now mined out the west and created the conditions to make China a superpower, despite being repeatedly warned not to by the common folk and iconoclasts out there, the result is, that lessons have been learned from China and our elites are busy building a cage for us all, in order to keep their ill-gotten gains. One of the bars of that particular cage is a highly regulated internet and that brings me on to the whole point of today’s discussion.
Reclaim the net.org posted the following (12th June 2023)
On Friday, the European Union’s Internal Markets Commissioner, Thierry Breton, confirmed that Twitter had ditched the EU’s code of practice on disinformation. He warned that the platform cannot “hide” from obligations to censor content.
“You can run but you can’t hide,” Breton threatened in a tweet.
“Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation under DSA as of August 25,” Breton continued. “Our teams will be ready for enforcement.”
Breton was referring to the censorship law, the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), a new set of rules for social media platforms operating in Europe, which require them to actively police content or risk fines of up to 6% of global turnover.
I initially saw the tweet on Friday of last week and it’s played on my mind ever since, because it’s so full of the naked Nietzschean Will to Power that we’ve discussed in other videos, and on the face of it lacks a staggering amount of self-awareness. My first thought was doesn’t he realise just how dictatorial and authoritarian it makes him and the entirety of the EU sound? Surely to God he must know how awful that sounds to people who’s first and major concern is Free Speech! I have to admit it made me angry, but then I reminded myself that I am stoic and that I don’t have to give my assent to these feelings of anger as and when they occur, I can just as easily choose not to give them my assent and maintain my peace of mind or ataraxia. Then I reminded myself of the wise words of none other than the emperor Marcus Aurelius, a man steeped in political power and near limitless authority who could easily have flown into rage and ordered the destruction of entire countries should the mood have taken him, but instead possessed the stoic virtues of wisdom, courage, justice and temperance in abundance. My readings of meditations not to mention the work of other stoic philosophers has made me realise that the enemies of Marcus Aurelius did not see themselves as bad. Nobody except the most mentally ill consider themselves to be evil. All are right, but in another direction.
Marcus famously said:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
The part that resonates with the current issue is the ‘we were born to work together,’ line in the above quote, ‘like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.’ On reflection of this I was calm.
Thierry Breton probably thinks that he’s a good man, that he’s doing right, because he exists in a political establishment that is scared of losing ‘control of the narrative,’ (a term I hate, because there is only the truth and it’s opposite and not a world of competing stories.) He exists in a world of misinformation, mal-information, dis-information, which by the way are all terms used to describe methods propagandists use to cause confusion and distrust in an enemy’s population, lowering morale in the process. What is truth in Thierry Breton’s world? Well, from his point of view I can only presume that truth is whatever trite statements are put out by the EU, their globalist pals and the world’s most influential billionaires. The problem that this modern-day aristocracy has of course, is that yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s fact. The amount of times these guys have been wrong or have asked us to believe complete claptrap is staggering. We live in a world now, where conspiracy theorists are more trusted than the government because they’ve been proven to be correct more often! The details of which I can’t and won’t get into because YouTube won’t allow it.
The other thing to consider is that the member states of the EU don’t recognise innate rights in law, they have no conception of common law rights for instance. They take the view that everything is permissible until the government passes a law that forbids it. The UK with its strong common law tradition, exported to the anglophile world takes an opposite view. Our rights as human beings are inalienable, in other words they are a product of nature. This is the real reason for Brexit! There’s enough of the indigenous population of the UK still left that collectively understand this concept, at least subconsciously, they might not be able to explain why they have the belief that free speech is fundamental and should be unrestricted, but it is nevertheless in there, within the collective unconscious of the UK population, an inconvenient left over from our common law traditions, an archetype of freedom that is expressing itself within the collective unconscious of the populace with its demands that our leaders be accountable to us in person, face to face through the legislature and not and not be some unknown, far away, faceless bureaucrat that you can only contact through an online form. Common law rights are God given and cannot be removed, one of those rights is the freedom to speak freely. If nothing else, it’s this hill that we and to an even greater extent Elon Musk, the present owner of Twitter must die on. Even if well intentioned today, new laws can be abused by a bad government in the future.
When we decide to look at the political situation writ large, to see the big picture so to speak, we can see that foreign governments and bad actors on the international stage have the ability to inject large amounts of disinformation, misinformation and mal-information into the public discourse through electronic platforms in order to undermine the power, authority and position of the ruling elites making such things an existential threat to them. We should also be under no illusions that we too are busy doing the same thing to our enemies, the internet has become a battleground as competing powers chase after ‘mind control.’ Hence the scramble to make the once glorious, world spanning and totally free internet into a series of walled gardens cut off from the outside world, full only of curated information deemed to be ‘good messages,’ for the population by our masters who believe none of it.
As mentioned earlier we are all on the battlefield in the culture war and must pick a side. What I would say to the ruling elites is that there’s no need to fight fire with fire, the correct response to any lie is always the truth. Truth is real, it’s the sum total of all known material interactions, truth can always be determined even after the facts, because we live in a deterministic universe, if that wasn’t true it would be impossible to be a police detective and solve murders for instance. ‘A’ leads to ‘B’ which inevitably leads to ‘C,’ that’s truth, in an investigation of ‘C,’ we know that ‘B’ and ‘A’ preceded it. Put the truth out there and let the public decide, truth needs no defence, it simply is what it is!
What we desire most is Justice, which from a stoic point of view can easily be understood as the ideal that everyone be treated the same, having equal access to all of the opportunities allowed by modernity. We don’t demand equity (which is something else entirely), but demand equality. In other words, we demand that everyone is treated the same by government and authority figures alike, equal under the law, with equal rights and equal responsibilities, the gold standard being that everyone is to be treated the same way that you too would like to be treated, that’s justice! That’s why whatever freedoms and privileges the elites amass for themselves we too must make a point of demanding the same rights and privileges for ourselves and vice versa. So, if there’s to be restrictions on our freedom of movement, our freedom to consume, our freedom of speech then these very same rules must be applicable to the elites. If we’ve got to eat the bugs and live in the pod, then it must be a criminal offence for the likes of Bill Gates to eat steak and live in a house! They make the standards; we must judge them by their adherence to their own rules. A climate conference that sees the elites and top politicians meeting every year by private jet, limousines and yachts moored of the coast with helicopter flights to and fro is a disgusting abuse of power and a stunning display of hypocrisy that we should call out whenever they occur. We live in an age when we can send orders to Martian Rovers in under 20 minutes and near instantaneously around the world, why do they even need to meet at all unless of course it’s for mutual back slapping, shady off camera deals and virtue signalling, none of which possess any virtue! A two-tier society is very unequal and not a good recipe for a happy life.
Politics is all about the will to power, or more correctly the ‘be like me,’ expression of it. Whenever people act against your interests it’s because you have something that they want and in this case that is power, the people have power and the elites want to take it away. We must remind them that we the people are the dog, they are the tail that wags, and we decide when they wag, power resides with us, and they can only exercise it with a mandate from us. They don’t dictate to us, we dictate to them and demand that they have virtue and be in office for the right reasons, that they are there to serve the people and not their own self interests. Should this be proven not to be the case then they must be sacked immediately and without benefits or golden handshakes and so on. They pick up their box of personal effects and leave the building immediately and then be forever barred from high office, in either the political or corporate world. This sounds harsh but there’s no penalty for failure at present for inept politicians, when they fail, they pop up somewhere else and usually on even bigger salaries to make an even bigger mess of things. They fail upwards! In contrast there’s no shame in willingly stepping down haven bitten off a bit more than one can chew. We need politicians to be intelligent people steeped in worldly wisdom, courageous, full of justice and temperate in their desires. I fully admit that I’m not the brightest bulb in the department store, but I know my limits, I know where my abilities end, I know the things that I do not know. I’ve spent years studying philosophy in order to better understand myself and put my own life in order, making the best of what little I have.
I’m mindful of Epictetus who on the subject of work said:
“Don’t undertake to do things that are beyond your means. If you do, you will not only embarrass yourself, but you will also miss an opportunity to do successful things that are within your means.”
The Good life handbook or Enchiridion (Dr Chuck Chakrapani)
The more traditional translation is ‘If you have assumed any character above your strength, you have both made an ill figure in that and quitted one which you might have supported.’
Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus said:
“You will earn the respect of all if you begin by earning the respect of yourself. Don’t expect to encourage good deeds in people conscious of your own misdeeds.”
― Musonius Rufus, Musonius Rufus on How to live
In other words we have to embody the standard that we judge others by. So we can’t afford to be angry, we must engage with our enemies, those that express their will to power in a direction that we do not like, we must be wise for them and embody the stoic virtues of Wisdom, Courage, Justice and Temperance and make it plain that we do not like this direction of theirs whenever the opportunity arises, be that in online consultations, street protests, political meetings and so on. We must remind them that the future they desire, one in which they get to keep their ill-gotten gains is within their reach because we stoics are not interested in their money, wealth, lifestyles or power fantasies. The man that delights in wealth, hoarding it for his own gain, indulging the fear of loss is a very poor man who suffers from a deep sickness in his soul and we stoics may like our comforts but will happily adapt to not having them should the present moment require it. They can keep all of it if they leave the political arena or channel themselves into the pursuit of virtue doing their best for all, putting the people of the empire first and foremost like the noble emperor Marcus Aurelius, my own personal favourite stoic who said:
“Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.” – Marcus Aurelius – Meditations.
We’re not fans of revolution or the increase of suffering in the world if it can be avoided, but by embodying virtue and promoting ethical values, we can inspire positive change in society and contribute to the well-being of the community as a whole. ‘We were born to work together like hands and feet, like two rows of teeth upper and lower.’
Sources:
https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-twitter-digital-services-act-threat
