Inflicting Idealism
Freedom is the primary requirement of life and spirit. "For your own good" is a weapon against life and spirit.
“What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free, and own no superior?”— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Freedom is the prerequisite of human living, because it is the essence of of both human choice and spiritual growth, i.e. the whole point of living.
A gilded cage is no life at all. Why? It is in the nature of life to choose its own course and not to have its course chosen for it. “Freedom of life” is the most basic of all freedoms, and one that encompasses those cherished freedoms ostensibly guaranteed in the. U.S. Constitution as freedom of speech, religion, assembly, press, etc. To be not only trapped but permanently enclosed by the cage of another, no matter how comfortably equipped, is to harm life itself to its core and to violate the most precious of all freedoms— to live by our choices, informed by options and consequences, and guided by open curiosity and discovery.
The most pernicious and deceptive cages are those proffered (or forced) “for our own good”— Utopias, idealisms, Shangri-Las— that whisper ironically how we might just get back into the Garden of Eden and eat again from from the Tree of Life, if we simply deny the very stuff of human life, freedom. If we just forsake and turn away from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and our own conscience, then maybe, just maybe. we can live in a paradise of ignorant bliss for the rest of our days. No more worry for all the aches and pains, struggles and challenges, we will simply suck manna from the beetles of delusion, and immerse ourselves in a completely unconscious simulation of life.
What could be more enticing… or completely damning?
No good can come of a life that rejects life and its very requirements, as no good can come from a person who learns to hate him or herself. The miracle of free life offers the option to step out of these imposed cages as a form of grace. Alienation from life and choice is HEALED and redeemed in renewed faith. Persons can become whole and healthy again, and often stronger. In the free life, a sleeping giant awakens in you— the Soul— to rise again with “no superior”. Let the adversary be warned that we are not so easily fooled by the false promise found in gilded and trapped comfort. We will not sell our souls at this crossroads.
Temptation to avoid the human condition and the vulnerabilities of connection
The Soul, the learner at the helm of life, needs always to sail free, to be fully informed and to have no iota of the larger truth kept from its journey of rediscovery. This journey is one toward Love, Creation, and Creator. This is true progress— deepening in wisdom and intimacy with the divine, and in so doing, expanding one’s being to embrace all of creation, to love even the enemy in ourselves, other, and world.
But this authentic journey of freedom can be painful, fearful, uncertain, confusing, and traumatizing even in its most truthful and spiritually beneficial forms! And here we have a fateful choice to make… elevate pain-avoidance (and therefore avoidance of the necessary project of life), or more deeply inhabit that pain with love as our guide. In so doing, we transform our pain and despair through the strange and powerful alchemy that true love always brings to the trials of human life. Conscience speaks and we listen. The falcon, conscience, hears the falconer, spirit, and provides navigation to the Soul. All this requires utter freedom, and it is deeply personal.
The gilded cage, in the form of transhuman Utopias and other lies, on the other hand, worships the proverbial beast slouching toward Bethlehem. This beast, the devil is, in essence, a personification and idolization of the fateful former choice: “Why not simply do an end-run around all that pain and live in a land of conscience-free blissful ignorance?” The devil’s freedom is freedom FROM (from awareness, responsibility, care, love, concern….from life itself). This alleged “freedom from challenge” is not without great cost, however— alienation, disconnection, usury, exploitation, abuse, and oppression. For once one denies and erases one’s own suffering, one will at the same time deny the suffering of others. One will eventually be led to deny the suffering one causes another by usurping their freedom and imposing one’s designs upon them for one’s own gain, all the while claiming, of course, it if for them that we endeavor to control them.
Here is where the great lie, “for your own good,” was born, along with its relativistic social corollary: “for OUR own good.” There is no POSSIBLE way for one to know what is good for another when one has alienated oneself from one’s own suffering and from the suffering of others. One makes, in this devil’s bargain, an object of oneself. The sacred “thou”, the humanity of the self, other, and world, is reduced to a profane “it”. Fear, temptation, and resistance overwhelm the human project rather than a chosen invitation to “soften and lean into the point”, as the Buddhist saying goes.
Denial begets desperation
What are the results of capitulation into this fateful life-avoidant temptation? We get weaker and more removed from the divine, MORE desperate, not less, chasing material stimuli to give us the high that only healthy living and healthy connection can truly provide. Whether it is in retreat from others, from or our own joy and authenticity, or from the moral beckoning of care, we only drive the knife of self-alienation in further. Numbing out and compensation become our only allies, and they are fickle allies indeed, requiring both less and less (numbing) and more and more (compensating) until we are consumed in contradiction and we hit bottom, that is, IF we are lucky.
If we are NOT lucky and we succeed at gaining money, fame, and power at the expense of genuine, divine connection, freedom, and love, then we are truly lost. We become a host for what can only be called evil, the delight in sin, and the sadistic imposition of abuse upon, or the withholding of care from, others in our effort to garner ever burgeoning material rewards for ourselves. This hell of our own making accelerates and metastasizes as more and more people fall under its opportunistic sway, often consuming the innocent, as with current efforts to normalize pedophilia.
In evil, control, not connection, becomes the currency of the world. This emphasis on control OVER people is very much at the center of a so-called “Great Reset” or “New World Order”— “idealistic” top-down imposition of control “for your own good” in order to “save you from yourself”. And who decides?: Your betters of course, the technocratic apparatus, using “object-ive (“it”)” science to engineer a perfectly saccharine future, devoid of the troublesome meddling known as individual freedom and choice.
The principles of this control are laid out in an apocryphal quote, attributed to Henry Kissinger but likely a third-party summation of the assertions Kissinger made in a 1974 security memo on the levers for population control:
“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world”
Transhuman is, in fact, anti-human
This path has at its core a complete rejection of the project of conscious, creative, carbon-based, “unruly” humanity in favor of an unconscious, algorithm-driven, silicon-chip-based designed and designated future. In an inversion of human creativity, which is richly and inherently unpredictable, this transhuman mentality controls and cajoles everything inexorably toward death. It fabricates phantoms of a “sure-disaster if we don’t _____” (fill in the blank) to IMPOSE a top-down formula that only creates the very disaster it purports to avert.
We certainly saw this with Covid measures, but just about every intervention follows the same predatory path: extract under the guise of false giving; jack up fear while promising to relieve anxiety, dangle “free money,” while hiding the fact that it is coming out of your own pocket with loan-shark level interest added. Leave everyone poorer. It is the same every time, and somehow we keep falling for it.
Once this corrupting Trojan horse is acceded to by the public through the currency of fear, then the door is opened to get rid of individual freedom and choice altogether. We see this in the galloping encroachment of an homogenous global security state and in international pushes toward digital IDs, digital global currency and centralized “pandemic” coordination which supersedes national sovereignty. The list goes on and the appetite for complete power among those removed from their own souls appears to be insatiable.
Predatory “idealism” can only lead to tyranny, collapse, and death
Empowering would-be tyrants by giving up our own freedom and responsibility, whether they be impersonal bureaucratic agencies (the neo-liberal flavor) or charismatic demagogues (the neo-conservative flavor) leaves us where deception and cowardice always leave us— at death’s door. We follow along, and then what? The absurdist drama winnows and winnows to a point where the full concentration of wealth and power remains in a few hands, and all of us basically have to rent or ask for permission to use any property.
Our news becomes heavily censored so no one gets out of line or forms an independent or original thought, and then we perish because there is no physical diversity and no inventive diversity of ideas. One weak link in a damningly homogenized world can kill everyone, since it is diversity itself which creates the effective buffers and protections against any one challenge.
We do not have to choose this pre-programmed future, however. We can positively rebel, and create a stronger competitor whose core of meaning and purpose is animated by the spirit instead of manipulated by the material. However, to do so we must forsake the idols of hijacked idealism and notice we are being played against our own well-being. Our empathy is being used to “care for the earth” in ways that only cede power to so-called elites to destroy the earth in the name of saving it. Our fear for our loved ones is used to peddle unsafe and ineffective medical intervention so we “don’t kill grandma.” Our concern for equality is being weaponized in a “woke” mania that imposes intolerance and reinforces both contempt and bullying.
Inversion is everywhere, but we can keep our heads and hearts about us. We must experiment with unplugging from every form of propaganda and manipulation, including putting away our smart phones and refusing to use our electronics as narcotics. We must once again turn to the classic virtues updated for the modern world.
Contemplating timeless virtues, calling out persistent vices
So, yes, let us get back to the timeless virtues and return to virtue ethics elevated over a framework of relativistic, spiritless materialism and its vices. Let us call out the vices and embrace the virtues in our beings. I will do a more in-depth discussion of these seven “C” vices and seven “C” virtues in a later post, but right now I invite you to simply contemplate both below, inventory them both in your life, and take the time to get in touch with your spirit to account for the vices and commit to the virtues. Let me know how this exercise goes in the comments below:
The 7 “C” Vices:
Cowardice
Corruption
Calumny (vicious speech)
“Correctness” (imposed ideology)
Cooptation (fake virtue, tokenism, manipulative “philanthropy”)
Copying (mindless imitation)
Control/Centralization (“do as I say, not what your spirit says”)
The 7 “C” Virtues:
Courage
Compassion
Creativity
Curiosity
Conscience
Capability/Competence
Critical-mindedness
Again let me know what came up for you as you meditated upon these vices and virtues in your own life.
Be well, Citizen Zeus
Inflicting Idealism
So much truth in your article but to walk that “freedom” in life does take lots of courage. It almost ties into Regina’s coming talk, Free Will. It would be great to see you both do a live talk about this in Our Neighborhood. Very thought provoking to really dig deep within ourselves to see where we fit in in life.
At first blush, my comment here is that avoiding the vices (and I find it interesting that you chose 7 of each, seems to correlate to 7 seals/chakras/deadly sins) will help one to develop the virtues. The virtues will not exempt one from suffering; in fact the exercise of these may increase one's exposure to traumatic experiences. However, the virtues lead to true joy, a resonance of spiritual bliss in the most highly tuned instrument in the cosmos- the human. The vices lead to despair, death and enslavement.