Essays in Idleness

I notice, from a piece that got through the censors this morning, that a genuinely peaceful protest in New York — a rally for free speech — was violently dispersed by Antifa. On past performance, these free speech advocates will soon be slandered as “white supremacists” in the meejah (after all, they were pro-Trump) — even though half the protesters weren’t white; and almost all the thugs were. This is how things are, now. And at the next debate, Mr Trump will be solemnly asked to denounce “white supremacy,” yet again. After the Election, I expect things to be worse.

The world spins. It is currently upside-down. We’ve come to a time when even Sean Ono Lennon is rightside-up. (God bless him, for somehow turning out sane.)

While it is not in my interest, currently, for gentle reader to get off the Internet, the idea must have occurred to him. In times like these, why put yourself under watch from Big Brother (or, Big Sibling, as he might prefer)? Why surround yourself with his electronic eyes?

Granted, Nanny State was devising ways to track its citizens, and to exercise “crowd control,” long before the Internet was invented. But we had the advantage with them, for they were incompetent, often laughably inept. Too, they were long restrained, by unambiguously Christian traditions. However, Internet-plus-meejah-plus-activists-plus-Kafkaesque-bureaucracy makes a more formidable adversary.

I am not recommending a systematic withdrawal from the world. That is for people with a religious calling, or some grave eccentricity. Rather I am thinking of self-defence, in the spirit of buying a gun. Of course, I am writing from Canada, one of the countries where owning a gun is more-or-less illegal; as is any other form of self-defence. (“When seconds count, the police will be here in minutes.”) Though I have noticed that, upcountry, the “No Hunting” signs tend to have been used for target practice.

The “other side,” as I see it, which always worked on numbers, now has algorithms. “Artificial Intelligence” can home right in on “uncomplying” citizens whom its masters wish to silence. The Nanny State never took the individual seriously, except when he was offering a threat. Now it is threatened by anything human. It is, as it were, utilitarian in outlook — “the greatest good for the greatest number” — along with other fatuous concepts, unamenable to reason. By its nature, it is positivist, nominalist, relativist, and “idealistic” in a very abstract way.

Whereas we, so far as we are human, take ourselves quite personally. In a clinch, we often prefer our own survival, and the survival of family and friends, to the requirements of a bureaucratic “policy.” That this is “selfish” should be immediately affirmed.

Because the masses are now deprived of a Christian education, they misconstrue the “selfishness” of Christian teaching, which tells us that we ought selfishly to become saints.  Our intention should be to get ourselves to Heaven, along with any we know who can be taken with us. But charity is not “selfish,” except in a modern sense, where the meaning is inverted.

Likewise with “culture.” Under modern tenets of “multiculturalism,” even fidelity to the old Christian view is decried as a form of selfishness, calling out for persecution. This is because it is “cultural,” not “multi” — in all the many languages it speaks, and in all the variety of communities it comes from. All are eventually banned, for refusing to bleach out.

Our enemy wants us to eschew uniqueness, and become instead “diverse” — by which it means homogenized and narrowly interchangeable; or reducible only to skin pigmentation. Increasingly, this adversary has the means to enforce its arbitrary will.

Yet, by using the brains God gave us, we can still achieve a certain aloofness. Unplugging the machines remains in our power.

Moreover, we were always told that this is desirable. “Give unto Caesar” was specifically upheld, in the spirit of bailing out a sinking canoe. “Here, take it back, and now leave me alone.” We can, or should try, to live without the State’s generous gifts of water. For the emergencies, we must learn to swim.

“In but not of” is the Christian expedient. While it is presented as advanced technology, the Internet and its extensions are nothing new. They are the world. Our lives here are fleeting. Our calling is to see through the world (oh please, someone explain this to the pope), and when necessary to check out, through the facility of martyrdom. To squeeze out through the “Jerusalem Gate” of Our Lord, so to say.

The squeeze, today, is between the Spirit of the Batflu, and the Spirit of the Thugs. These are the most visible weapons currently in use by the other side: to keep us imprisoned in our bat-muzzles and our fears. How to resist them?

Protests are no use, nor old-fashioned appeals for elementary justice, now that justice has been redefined by the thugs and their allies on the Left. To turn to the government for protection is naïve. Such help as we are going to get, comes from elsewhere. We can’t demand it; we can only humbly pray.