A Brief History Of Voting

The American founders faced a problem in setting up their new nation. The question was, how could it be established that all would be represented in the republic while yet allowing that the government would retain power sufficient to govern? It was obvious that certain barriers would be needed between the individual and government. Suffrage would be the vessel for carrying most of these barriers, so a difficult question revolved around who could vote. That the founders had the audacity to even ask such a question has the potential to dredge up indignation in the modern heart. That indignation demonstrates the extent to which we have been steeped in individualism. The vote has become sacred, even if most don’t exercise it, and even if less still even bother to educate themselves on the ramifications of their choices. But the founders foresaw a problem that we in our present age have in large part lost sight of. They understood the dangers of democracy, and so wanted all who would be deciding the ultimate fate of their little republic to be fully invested in what would be best for it, and not so much what would be best for any one individual. So it was perhaps thought, as goes the welfare of the nation, so goes the welfare of the individual, but not necessarily vice versa. Or, as God put it, “…seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. ” (Jer 29:7) It was settled then that the future of the nation would not be left to individuals as much as to the household by way of the male vote.  Whether the thinking behind the male-only vote was based on one vote per household or it was a matter of the zeitgeist of that age is a matter for further inquiry. But nonetheless, in God’s providence, the end effect sacrificed individualism in favor of the family unit.

There were several other barriers also installed based on collectives trumping individuals. One of those collectives was the electoral college, which would establish another barrier between the individual and the selection of the man who would fill the political office that would put the most power in the fewest hands, the president. And again, yet another barrier was inserted between the individual and the upper chamber of Congress by way of the state being charged with choosing its representatives called senators. The reasoning behind this wasn’t as much based on inserting barriers as it was the result of understanding that the states were their own sovereigns and as such in need of representation in their own right. The effect, however, was still a barrier. But it also had an additional effect of adding yet another barrier between the individual and the courts by requiring the consent of the state-appointed Senate for appointments to the bench. As we study these barriers, we can see that the founders had a healthy fear of pure democracy. They understood in their age the sad condition of the hearts of men and did what they could to protect the whole from the possibility of a mob-like majority of individuals.

As the name implies, the founding of the “United States” was a federation of groups called states. Compared to the present, the pre-Civil War Federal Government played a minuscule role in the nation’s internal affairs. It dealt with issues that were necessarily beyond the scope and ability of the states to control; issues like conducting war, and affairs of international and interstate. It might be said that the federal government didn’t so much have a relationship with the household as it did with the state within which the myriad households resided.  The average citizen in pre- Civil War America considered themselves to be citizens of their states first and then the nation. Afterward, the American citizen was more likely to see himself as a citizen of America than his state. That conflict was, after all, a power struggle between two sovereigns, the State, and the states united.  The central government from that point forward grew in power at the expense of the constitution and state governments. This eliminated a smaller collective to which the individual once belonged. It also eliminated barriers set against a strong, centralized, and out-of-control federal government.

By the early 20th century the barrier that had stood between the household and the Senate was discarded by way of the 17th amendment, which in effect removed a barrier to the courts as well. It’s worth noting in the present how different our history might have been if the mostly conservative legislatures had had a say in the appointment of senators, and so subsequently judges. History recounts many reasons that this amendment was made. But whatever the reasons appeared to be on the surface, we can be sure that it was carried along, as most historical events are, on the undercurrents that were the shifts in the mindsets of individual citizens. The end effect was no doubt a movement away from republican and toward democratic governance.

The next barrier fell 7 years later in 1920 with the 19th amendment, which was a great leap forward for radical individualism. The household vote was abolished in favor of the individual votes within the household. This eliminated yet another “collective” to which the individual once belonged. The individual’s interests would now trump that of the family’s. This amendment had the effect of abolishing the family as it pertains to representation. The husband and wife were no longer considered one, but rather would eventually join, in the modern politics of identity, two separate voting blocks. Anticipating lots of challenges to my propositions concerning this matter, and given the extent to which feminism is permeated and often borne along by emotion, and given that expounding on this exceeds the scope of  this piece, let me suffice to say that I am speaking in very broad terms with the intention of discussing the growing impact of radical individualism. My assumption in this discussion is that the reader is a conservative, and if my assumption is correct I only point to the national polls that paint the vast majority of single women as a reliable voting block for liberalism. But the mere numbers of single women are in themselves evidence of a seismic shift in worldview that has occurred since the nation’s founding. But not only this, anecdotal though it may be, this self-styled news organization posted a story on the conflict of differing political opinions within a family that this individualism has wrought on two households in particular. The story suggests that there are many households suffering from this malady, and I’m inclined to agree.

The mid 20th century was marked by explosive growth in the reach and power of the federal government. The great depression opened the door for a centralized government to take on the role of caretaker and husband. Franklin D. Roosevelt remained president for a decade and a year during which time he was able to stack the bench with judges sympathetic to his cause. The constitution by design was difficult to amend. But as Roosevelt discovered, it was rather simple to reinterpret, and so reinterpreted it was.

In the mid-twentieth century, we began to see the fruit of the individualism that had been incubating in the previous generations. Religion was evicted from the government’s schoolhouse by judicial decree, which opened the door for the secular humanism that was already there to set up shop without obstacle. Divorce and illegitimacy were just beginning their skyrocketing climb. It was as if the individual was awakened from what seemed to it to be a long sleep in the catacombs of the collectives. The sovereignty of the-self was finally being realized, and the sky appeared to be the limit as every new generation was not only indoctrinated with ever-more individualistic notions in the public schoolhouse, each set out on their own trek to discover what boundary it could test and destroy. And each test had the same failing score. The boundaries were shot through with rot.

As I write this, the masses of self-sovereigns have fixed their gaze on another barrier that now stands between the individual and the presidency, the electoral college. For those who appreciate its purpose, there is at least some comfort in the fact that the nation is polarized, which means that a constitutional amendment is, at present, out of the question. But we shouldn’t take too much comfort there. It would be folly to underestimate the craftiness of a liberal judge. One thing is for sure. We are marching toward a pure democracy. And there will most assuredly come a day when many of those now demanding it will wonder what happened to the protections that once guarded them against an all-too-powerful majority, and a government that functions only on the majority’s behalf.

Note: Above is an excerpt from this piece.

Ambiguity, A Whitewash That Fills Chasms

The church you attend is divided politically. The larger your church is, the more this is true. Furthermore, the vast majority of your church is just fine with this division because it pertains to politics, and politics don’t belong in church.

I was about a decade into my Christian walk when I began to realize that there was a total disconnect between the world that I lived in through the week and the words I heard spoken on Sunday mornings. I began to realize that there was a reluctance to speak and address the evils being adopted by our governments. I also realized that there were people worshipping right next to me who supported those evils. That’s when I began to pay attention.

A thing I’ll call the cleverness of ambiguity began to materialize in my understanding. Here is an example of what I’m talking about taken from a Facebook page on my feed. It was posted by a pastor of a typical conservative-ish church in my local area:

As a critical observer of Christian leadership, one of the most valuable things I’ve learned is to be suspicious when church leaders take bold stands for things that no one is against. Hilborn is the pastor of, as far as I can tell, a typical conservative church. Neither those in his church who support the evils in our society like, say, the legalized murder of unborn children, or those who oppose these evils are going to find any reason to disagree with this “bold” post. So, while this has the appearance of a bold proclamation on the surface, in all reality it’s not. What it is is either a weak attempt to get praise from men, or it could very well be a coded accusation. I’ll get to that later.

But in defense of pastor Hilborn, I will give him kudos for entering the arena of the hell-hole that is social media where ambiguities can be openly challenged. Does your pastor post and defend articles? (update: Hilborn never responded to this article on FB. That is a common tactic by the way. Ignore, ignore, ignore.)

The Church of Jesus Christ in the West has fallen on very hard times when it comes to thoughtful considerations of the mostly ignored but profound events going on all around outside its four walls. Most Churches are held together by the relegation of everything political, and thus potentially divisive, to a category not to be discussed. Unfortunately for the flock that attends church an hour or so a week, there is a price to pay for this dismissal. These poor folks are sending their children to a schoolhouse that is more than happy to indoctrinate their children into a Godless revolutionary Utopian politic for seven hours a day. And know that in that schoolhouse, they have no problem talking about politics. So to be bold, a pastor who loves his sheep might try clearly shouting that fact. Yes, there would be a stink to high heaven about it from half his congregation, but at least he wouldn’t be taking a “bold stand” against nothing.

The ambiguity in this meme example can be found in the word Jesus Christ. Is he the Jesus Christ that boldly states that many will come to him in the end and he will tell them, away from me you workers of lawlessness? Or is he the Jesus Christ that takes his cues from culture and has learned that he has been totally mistaken throughout history concerning homosexuality? Is he the Jesus who pointed out that a great light has come into the world and that the world hated that light because it exposed sin? Or is it the communist Jesus who now defines injustice as one neighbor having more wealth than he deserves while other neighbors don’t seem to have enough? Who knows? Who could possibly know? But I do know that no matter which of these Jesuses an individual in his congregation worships, that congregant can easily join hands with pastor Hilborn and give him a hearty amen for his bold statement.

The starting point in seeking the truth ought to be with the truth itself. Make no mistake, no matter where you attend church, your pastor knows that the congregation is divided, and he has learned to speak in ways that appeases the divisions and to remain silent when he can’t. That is a starting-point fact.

Now, back to the “coded accusation”. Your pastor has become adept at speaking in code. I am suspicious that, in his own mind, pastor Hilborn is actually not taking a bold stand against nothing, but rather, is taking a bold stand against people like myself who see through the vague and ambiguous language pouring out of the modern pulpit. As the shepherd of what I suspect is a fairly conservative flock, I would be surprised to hear that he has gotten no pressure whatever to speak to the issues of our day from a thoroughly Biblical perspective. And we know that this would necessarily mean venturing into a land where the congregational chasms would be brought to the surface for everyone to see. This is the subconscious reason I believe that silence is the chosen course for the man who prefers peace through ambiguity. It is this very silence that leads me to see this “bold statement” as more of an accusation against those who see what is happening and desire that their leader would actually address them from the pulpit.

Somewhere along the line, your pastor has convinced himself that, to speak in any way to the political powers that are destroying your land is to cede to government that which belongs to God. “Government can’t save us.” is the refrain. Or, “If you are trusting in a political party to save you, you are misplacing your trust.” Which political party? Though we know he’s referring to the Republican Party, ambiguity is his language. Or, you might hear, “If we take our stand anywhere other than Jesus Christ, we will fall”. I can’t help but wonder if he’s ever thought about turning that around; as in, “We are falling, so maybe we should check where we’re standing”.

Another starting-point truth is that we are living in an age where homosexual marriage has been legalized, confused boys are allowed into the girl’s locker rooms, babies are legally crushed and dismembered by the millions, and those who survive the womb are shuffled off to the local schoolhouse to be indoctrinated into a mindset that approves of all of it. In other words, you are living in a very dark time. So it only stands to reason that bold proclamations that do not raise the ire of the culture are not bold proclamations at all. They are appeasements and code accusations.

This is why one side of the chasm is happy with vague and ambiguous terms and with a language that speaks mainly to the emotions. And the other side knows that something is very wrong, but they just can’t put their finger on it exactly. If the latter is you, pay attention. While I’m sure there are pastors out there who are not speaking in code and ambiguity, they are by far in the minority. Our culture is proof of that. To see through the ambiguity, simply pretend you are a leftist “Christian”, and listen to messages and watch your trajectory from that perspective. If you would not be offended as said leftist, then you can bet that holding together the “incorporated” side of the little non-profit business you’re sitting in is the number one goal at the end of the day. Still, that said, good luck finding something better.

Watch The Video, Look At The Picture, Repeat

I know that the whole NPC trope is old. But it works so well.

 

 

Watching that video is like having my mind removed and given 39 lashes. Why? I can’t say. It’s probably not as bad as being tied down over a giant hill of flesh-eating ants, but still, it is torture to me and I can’t seem to put my finger on exactly why.

Better The Company Of Wise Idiots Than Intelligent Fools.

This little saying of mine combines the interactions between intelligence, stupidity, wisdom, and folly into a handy little quip. But it does bear unpacking just a little, which I’ll attempt to do simply by defining the terms. I’ll start with the idiot.

As a person who likes to pick fights on the internet, I’ve been called an idiot probably more than any other name. But what does that mean? What does it mean to me and what does it mean to the person who has thrown it at me? 

I personally see it as an expression of frustration. It allows the person who tagged me with the term to dismiss my position as beneath consideration. It allows him to forego the hard work of examining my position, its merits, or for that matter its flaws. To resort to labeling someone an idiot is to suggest that they are wrong because they’re stupid. Or maybe the opposite, I am right because I’m smart.

But we ought not see the world in those sorts of shades. Smart people are perfectly capable of being wrong and stupid people are perfectly capable of being right. A position is right because of its alignment with reality, not because of the supposed intelligence of the person who has taken it. We’d all do well to remember that. It is my view that everyone is an idiot, the only variance being the extent to which stupidity has befallen us. When someone calls me an idiot they have no idea just how much I agree with them. 

While there are no advantages to being an idiot in and of itself, there are advantages to realizing that you are one. That advantage manifests itself as humility. It asks questions like, is it possible that I’m wrong? How would I know it if I am? What do I not know? What do I “know” that is not true? What avenue of reason have I failed to explore? Humility has also made peace with error. Better to be corrected than to continue in error for pride’s sake. It’s also better to espouse a position and be corrected than to secretly hold a position that is flawed. It’s always better to bear the scorn of the reformed idiot than to glory in the way of the proud, stiff-necked fool. 

All this said, humility is no weakling. It extends grace to those with whom it disagrees, for it understands the frailty of the mind, both in the one with whom it disagrees and in itself. To challenge the humble is to send him back down to check the foundations, to examine them brick upon brick, precept upon precept, to once again ensure that they are able to bear the weight. But having an examined foundation also means having a sturdy edifice, not very easily swayed.

A smart fool, on the other hand, is an idiot like the rest of us but is unable to see it. He thinks he knows much more than he does and so thinks himself smart, and as such has become a smart fool. He fails to understand that intelligence does not guarantee wisdom. It wasn’t the guys, for example, who mow your lawn, or who repair your car that first dreamed up the folly of two men marrying each other, or that wearing a dress makes a man a woman. George Orwell aptly quipped: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” The Bible says that pride comes before the fall, and that, “Thinking themselves wise they became fools”.

Someone may be capable of learning more than the average person. He then jumps through a bunch of academic hoops and over a bunch of academic hurdles after which he is christened by a bunch of fellows who created that obstacle course as smarter and better. The fall is sure to come to that one who buys it, and who thinks that because he has been christened he is beyond reproach. Perhaps if his christeners would have just stopped at smart, the likelihood of things working out well for the average, poor, starved soul who finds himself beneath that cap and gown, would be better.

Be sure also that “smart fools” is not a description of only those who think themselves little gods in academia. Money, prestige, and fame also convince poor souls that they are above foolery. Because a person can sing well, or recite memorized lines with such emotion that it makes us cry, or throw a football, or read a teleprompter, they convince themselves that they have brand-new answers to age-old problems. 

Having said this I feel it important to add a disclaimer. By no means am I saying that wisdom and intelligence are mutually exclusive any more than I would say that being a stupid fool is always the plight of the idiot. What I am saying is that wisdom is a virtue regardless of one’s intelligence and that being a fool is never a good thing no matter how smart the fool happens to be. I am saying that it is better to seek wisdom, knowledge and understanding than it is to assume that you possess them already and then to proceed headlong into folly. And most of all it is to say that it is better to seek the company of wise idiots than that of intelligent fools.

In Defense Of Liberals

An enduring attribute of the “liberal” is the apparent belief that a government’s access to wealth is infinite. A quick perusal of a liberal’s expectation from their government bears this out: free education, all you want; free healthcare; a right to a minimum income and basic needs such as food and housing.

Someone like me looks at a list like that and asks, where is all that money going to come from? This is especially true for any conservative because he understands that the government, not only doesn’t have infinite resources, it doesn’t have any resources at all. He understands that it must confiscate every penny it spends and gives away.

This divide is not a logical one. The liberal must keep himself willingly ignorant and appeal to some… I don’t know, some greater-than-man entity out in the cosmos or something to make his reasoning make sense. It can be shown to a liberal that if every last penny of wealth was confiscated by the government it would still run out of resources in a couple of years, and that is given its current, relatively tight-fisted spending policy. I say tight-fisted because the government, as of yet, has not attempted to guarantee every one of its citizens, along with anyone who has managed to land on our shores or cross our borders, this liberal laundry list. I suppose it will eventually get around to that, but it hasn’t yet, which qualifies it as tight-fisted.

But reality has made me a liar. I’ve been bellyaching for decades about deficit spending. But somehow the government spends like there really is some sort of entity in the cosmos that magically balances the books in reality even if not on paper. I’ve warned of a day when deficit spending would destroy the country, but it has chugged along just fine. The liberal has never experienced anything that would suggest his view of the government’s access to wealth is flawed. On the contrary, it would appear that it is my view that is flawed.

Nothing drove this home more than the events of late. The government, after destroying its income base,  glibly wrote a check half the size of last year’s entire bloated budget. How does it do that? But it did, without the least reservation or contemplation. It was at that moment that I knew that the liberals had been vindicated. Why would anyone fault the poor liberal for thinking that any old government can make education, healthcare, and prosperity a right? And why stop there? What other pipe dreams can we dredge up? Why put limitations on anything at all given that the government just proved to everyone watching that all the fiscal-policy naysayers are just devils trying to make life miserable for all the good folks across the land. These naysayer’s insistence that the government not share its infinite access to resources with the world actually is mean spirited.

Of course, we set a course long ago in our little boat called America on a collision course with reality. That that reality is delayed, or seemingly far off, does not negate that it is there, or that it ain’t soft. The higher the airplane is that we jump out of without a parachute, the more time we have to close our eyes and convince ourselves that all is well.

Our Fear + Their Sinister Motivations = Forgetfulness

Call me a cynic, but I never did buy the line that our country ought to be shut down. Why? Well, why did the people in the village stop running out to help the boy save his flock from imaginary wolves? I’d like to say that they’re not stupid, that’s why. But, as of late, I’ve been forced to reconsider that reasoning.

A quick search rendered several sites giving us lists of media scares. I liked this one, which gives us 12 examples but doesn’t even mention C19, even though it was already on the horizon. And then there is the grandpappy of all of them, global warming, a scare that’ll do when they can’t find anything else to be afraid of.

Some say, well COVID is different. Sure. It’s different all right. It happened along in an election year with a president that has leeched out the hatred of America and himself from every dark corner.

Then there’s the lie within the lie. Lie 1, we’re going to shut down the country to flatten the curve. That was the lie. But did anyone ever stop, in retrospect, to ask, what curve? Or why, after the curve never materialized, that reason for destroying the economy quietly faded? It was just forgotten as if it never was. It was like it was thrown down a memory hole or something, traded in for the lie within that lie: “We’ve got to eradicate the virus”, which interpreted means, “We’ve got to wait until we’re sure we can steal this election with mail-in ballots”.

So, if I understand all this correctly, we might end up living in a police state where we have to brave the chaos and jackbooted government thugs to push our wheel barrels full of government checks to what’s left of the market to buy a slice of bread, but at least we won’t have to worry about dying of COVID, ’cause I can’t think of anything worse than that. Can you? No way!

As with all things democrat media and government power, I find myself skeptical… and not only that but a class A cynic. Nowhere in history has a government, or more aptly put, government men, been satisfied with its allotment of power or its “share” of the people’s resources. Not ever, and not now. Power is the motivation.

In addition to the motivation, there is the tactic, fear. Fear makes us forget. It makes us willing to hand ever more control of our lives over to those who smell power like a shark smells blood. We actually assist them in putting the chains on our very wrists and ankles, forgetting what it feels like, one scare at a time, to be free.

Breakfast At Tiffany’s, A Review

The short review, in a sentence, goes like this: A whack-job, feminist, gold-digging liberal with a cat with no name escapes the whack-job decisions she’s made in life so far to, presumably, marry the only orbiter in history to ever win the affections of the center of his universe.

Released in 1961 this must have been cutting edge for its time, what with the morals of the last few centuries thrown out like an unwanted cat. But for obvious reasons, the trans-Atlantic accent was retained. No reason for degeneracy to actually sound like degeneracy, or to look like it either for that matter.  No, better to give the world of collapsing morals an air of sophistication. It makes all of us who have succumbed to that dream feel better… and allows us to cling to a more haughty view of our depravity ta boot.

To explain the worst of it away, an old man from the backwoods, Jed Clampet, enters the scene just long enough to raise the specter of child abuse to excuse what would become a self-destructive life for the oh-don’t-we-feel-sorry-for-her, but-ain’t-she-strikingly beautiful, protagonist, played by Audry Hepburn.

Ah, but all movies have to have redemption. But in this tragedy of collapsing civilization one individual at a time, the redemption is thrown to the viewer as a civilization-sized question mark. Does the center of the universe marry her orbiter? Or does she regroup and start her search anew for another rich dude? I’m personally betting on the latter. But such selfishness and self-destruction don’t sell films. An Encounter with that true love, on the other hand, does, and amazingly enough, it still does. So if you’re into unicorns and saps, George Peppard is your man and this is your movie.

I spent $2.99 to rent this from Amazon.  For some reason, I honestly think that I’d rather have set a ten-spot ablaze.

No One Organizes A Mob

While no one in particular organizes a mob there’s plenty of blame to go around when one forms. As with all things human, we are capable of using the raw material of our humanness for good or for destruction. As it pertains to mobs, I’ll focus on a particular part of that raw material, man’s herding instincts. These instincts can bring about a supportive community. But it can also burn it down.

To start we must first recognize that we are all sheep-like. The only difference between sheep and humans is that sheep are stupid and humans, in the grand scheme of things, are a little less so. Sure, we like to think of ourselves as too smart to be sheep-like, and in a narrow view of things we are. We’re just not so smart that we can not function the way we were designed by our creator to function, which is to behave much like sheep behave as far as it concerns the fact that they function as a herd.

As a side note and a disclaimer, I have no problem with the fact that I, as a human, was designed to function within the confines of a herd. I do prefer to call it a Body of folks, but herd is fine. And it was, evidently, fine with Jesus too. He often referred to his followers as sheep. That’s because he knew that we were like sheep. But probably unlike sheep, pride blinds us into thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to, so as a result many reject the blatantly obvious and join the herd that has convinced themselves that they are not a herd. Our humanity is the raw material. We are what we are, whether we are in the Body or are a member of some other sort of herd.

Our humanity does, on the other hand, offer us an advantage over sheep… or maybe it’s a disadvantage. As humans, we have the ability to be members of several different herds at the same time and in different ways. We are layered and multifaceted. There’s family, work, church, play, politics, and so on, all of which, in their own rights, are herds that impose themselves onto us the mentality of each particular herd. In addition, these herds will also tend to share some consistency. Those who find themselves in a herd of prostitutes, for example, will likely feel more comfortable with a herd of drug dealers. And for them, someone wearing body armor and driving a four-door without door handles in the back will look more like a wolf than a sheepdog.

For the sheep, it’s much easier. It’s all pretty much about grass and haircuts. For them it’s wolf = run. For humanity, with its layers and facets, the wolf is not always as easily detectable. But the fundamentals remain the same. Wolves eat sheep so sheep are afraid of wolves and act accordingly. Humanity is afraid of all sorts of more complex things real and imagined and so it will also act accordingly when confronted by these things.

Our biggest commonality, therefore, with our dumber herding counterparts is fear. That might well be the reason that Jesus told us so many times to fear not. Fear is contagious in the herd. In addition, our sight is limited. What is going on all around us within a small parameter can easily overwhelm our knowledge of the reality that exists outside of that parameter. Or, put differently, peer pressure is strong, even when we know better and even when we’re older, and especially when the stakes are high. If everyone around you is afraid it’s easy to lose the confidence necessary to not be afraid. And the more you find yourself in the not-afraid minority the more you question your lack of fear. Like an Alaskan tide rolling in lifting first that boat way out there, and then that one a little closer, and then the one tied to the pier you’re standing on, so does fear overtake us and erode our confidence in what we believe to be true.

The problem for sheep when they run is that they scatter which makes them easier prey. The problem for humans is a little different. We can get incredibly stupid and do incredibly stupid things and have the destructive potential to become a mob.

Human mobs range in size and complexity. Of course, the larger and more complex the more damage they are capable of inflicting. If a “herd” of folks, for example, have been raised on cornbread and victimization for their entire lives, they might burn down their hometown because one of their homeboys got shot by someone they saw as a wolf. But that’s small beans compared to what a much larger and more complex mob is capable of. It can burn down an entire nation without striking a match. But whether it’s a few sheep who think they see a wolf, or a local community that has been programmed to see only wolves, or it’s a nation, or even a multinational civilization, the fundamental element is the same. Fear.

At the zenith of the Roman empire, the thoughts of it committing economic harakiri because of a remote chance that some of its citizens might perish was impossible. Bad news traveled fast even then, but not that fast. It was an empire that encompassed the entire Mediterranean Sea. Even a hundred years ago such a thing would have been impossible. Why? Because they, even then, did not have the 24/7, moving-pictures-with-music “news” cycle. It’s one thing for the boy tending the sheep to shout into the village that a wolf was attacking the poor sheep. It’s another thing altogether when that message is pumped none stop into every house, state house, university, railroad station, senate chamber, planning room, conference room, airport, car, newspaper, magazine, and almost every living room. After all that hammer-broadcasting, whether or not there is actually a wolf is irrelevant. There’s a wolf even if the Shepard crosses his heart and hopes to die that there isn’t.

In modernity, we find ourselves in a constant state of warnings about wolves over here, over there, everywhere with the breathless news shows, warning us that we’re all going to be killed, sickened, oppressed, ripped off, robbed, shot, stabbed, enslaved, controlled, judged, offended, over-charged, lied to, or worse than all that, not getting our fair share of scarce resources for one reason or another. Oh, and our planets going to overheat because the silly peasants for some completely ridiculous reason would rather not live in poverty.

It’s a constant drumbeat by the most serious of serious faces that the wolves are about to devour us tail to snout. Sometimes it sounds so credible that every facet of our human experience begins to believe it and act accordingly which gives it a snowball effect as one herd watches another and another not realizing that the herd that they are watching react is reacting that way because they are watching your herd react. The fear is itself contagious and resonates between them all. It sells. It’s great for ratings, and it’s politically expedient by nature. Save us!!! Save us!!! Save us!! becomes the herd’s refrain as they take off in full sprint. In human terms, we would call this flight a mob.

Was it a conspiracy that caused our current Covid19 mob? No! Did some conspire? Without a doubt. Did the conspirators have the same motivations or the same ends in mind? Not a chance. Were some convinced that a wolf was about to devour them? Most certainly. Were some convinced that there was a wolf because they had lost confidence in their own discernment? Without question. Did some have the most honorable of intentions? Absolutely. Was anyone, top to bottom, smart to stupid, beautiful to ugly, knowledgeable to ignorant, rich to poor, conservative to liberal, powerful to powerless, immune? No way. We are all sheep. It, like death, is the basic equality of the rawest of the material that ends up being us. We are not immune to fear, and especially not immune to the fear of the herd.

The mob, therefore, is not by its nature a thing that comes about through organization. An attempt to organize a mob is like an attempt to create a humanoid robot. Both have the form of a living thing but are obviously lifeless. A mob has a collective life all its own, albeit a short one. The only thing enduring about a mob is the destruction it causes. The trick then is to understand the mob always with the perspective of from the outside looking in. To pull this off will require a vaccine that will help you to be immune to the contagion of the mob. Here are 5 vaccines that will help your heart and mind resist the mob contagion:

1. Don’t be myopic. Fear and panic cause tunnel vision which causes fear and panic. We can become more afraid of being eaten by one wolf over there while not realizing that there is a wolf salivating right next to us.

2. Turn off the wolf-criers. Why are we so willing to trust those who cry wolf day and night through the years? We shouldn’t be surprised when those who listen to this none-stop tend to see a wolf behind every bush and live continuously in a state of fear. There are things to fear, for sure, but you won’t know what they are because you listen to those who can’t do anything at all but cry wolf. They will, in fact, be the ones who will be distracting you from them.

3. Ignore the hype and look around you. Pay attention. Sheep all around you are being eaten by ravenous wolves all the time, but how? What does such a thing look like? They look like perversions, government education, state worship, Secular Humanism, divorce, infidelity, fatherlessness, abortion, addictions, folly, tyranny, to name a few. You have much more to fear from these things than a microbe. Those crying wolf are blind to them, yet there they are, blatant, their teeth ripping away at flesh.

4. Know the difference between a fake wolf, a wolf, and a sheep in wolf’s clothing. There’s only one way to know these things and that is by being grounded in God’s precepts which discern good and evil, man and his hubris be damned. Those who are yelling into your ear morning and night fear the violation of arbitrary law, an ever-changing law, a law that calls evil good and good evil, a law that devours and destroys. But God’s precepts protect, preserve, and keep the wolves at bay.

5. By faith. It’s one thing to have a compass. It’s another thing altogether to trust that it is accurate. The more that you focus on your compass and trust what it’s telling you, the less you’ll be swayed by the winds and the waves of fear that pummel your being. Make sure you’re in a herd that’s looking at the same compass, and that that compass is good and true, pointing to something objective and timeless. You will be less compelled to run every time you hear someone scream wolf. And you’ll know it’s time to run when no one is screaming anything.

 

Why is “I Don’t Know” So Hard

Why is “I don’t know” so hard?

 

I am by my nature a skeptic, but not nearly as much as I should be. When I hear a bit of news I generally ask a few questions like;, How do they know this; How CAN they know this; What are they not telling me; What do they want to be true, and, to account for my own biases, what do I want to be true?

 

As a skeptic, when I ask these question I try to separate what is known from what is spun or conjectured, or just a plain lie. I try to separate pseudoscience, like the models for so-called climate change for example, and reasonably dependable facts. Those facts include, not only what I see with my own eyes but also reality.

 

Reality is important to me because it allows entrance into my thinking things like, if you jump off of a cliff everything will be just fine for a little while depending on how high the cliff is. Or, you can run up debt and be just fine until someone knocks on the door demanding payment. Or, you can tolerate baby-killing for just so long before you incur God’s wrath. Or, you can indoctrinate masses of people into blindly worshiping the government as an all-knowing, all-powerful god capable of controlling the planet’s temperature; arbitrating right and wrong, running interference between man’s depravity and the consequences of that depravity; and ensuring peace, prosperity and libertine freedoms for every single individual regardless of their choices, for only so long before the masses actually believes that it is only self-evident that such is the truth.

 

Another reality is that, my own pride be damned, mankind by its nature has a herd mentality and we trust our shepherds. So, as reality dictates, the only real question we have to ask ourselves is not whether or not we are sheep, but who is our shepherd. Man’s pride rejects this notion, of course. We say because we are not in that flock over there, we are not in a flock. But we are. We are designed to be. It’s reality.

 

At the root of it all is the question of questions. What do I actually know for certain? This comes with ancillary questions like, what have I been programmed to “know”? And how can I cut through the fog of ignorance which is the reality of my state of being?

 

For beginners, I begin with admitting that I don’t know. I also must admit that neither do most others, even the experts, and even if those experts do know more than most about some particular things. An epidemiologist, for example, may know a whole lot about epidemics but very little about economics, or the trials of living in poverty while forced to not work.

 

I must also understand man’s herd mentality and how easy it is to just go with the flow of my particular heard. In the end, the way I see it however, I must be a skeptic, and more so with what my heard is telling me than what the world’s folly happens to be saying at a given time.

 

In conclusion, I must, as all others must too, fall back on faith. In the end, all people, even the devout atheists, live by faith. Some have faith that when they die they will be dead and will not be held accountable for the life they’ve lived. Some have faith in mankind, if only mankind could somehow rid itself of the silly notion of a creator and relish… no, not relish but worship our differences, as in diversity, and the whole world could just, as John Lenin put it, live as one. There’s a slew of other faiths, some of which I find myself allied with and others which I find myself in fierce opposition to. As for me, I have put my faith in a God who has revealed himself in the same scripture that he has also been big enough to superintend through the ages. I must admit that I am but a tiny island of knowledge in a vast ocean of ignorance, but also that I have God-given eyeballs, a brain, and God’s revelation in order that I, a sheep in His flock, am able to hear my shepherd’s call, and am able to run when the imposter comes.

Political Theater, Why The Dems Owning The House Is Not As Bad As It May Seem

We are living through a time in history that’s fairly common given our nations polarized state. It is a time when a congressman or senator can vote for whatever he thinks will get him attention with no fear of it being passed. You may remember a few years ago that the Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare. How many times did they vote for that? I don’t know… more than once? Several times? It didn’t matter because it was nothing more than theatrics. They knew it would be vetoed. We now know this (I brag. I knew it then) because their tune changed when they gained control of Congress and the Whitehouse and their votes could actually change policy.

Now the tables are turned with the same result. Trump is in the Whitehouse, and the Dems own the House Of Representatives. So they can vote for the most outlandish schemes imaginable to Karl Marx himself knowing that it will never leave the lower chamber. The same is true for the Republicans in the Senate. They can vote to end infanticide resting assured that it will still be legal to allow babies to die after botched abortions when the sun sets that evening.

This is not the best scenario, but then again it’s not the worst. The worst would be if the Democrats could vote for all the communism they wanted and get it passed into law. Obamacare showed us that the Supreme Court, with all of its “conservative” appointees, can’t be relied on to ensure that leftist laws are constitutional. It is, after all, a living and breathing document, and so is, therefore, a changing, morphing-according-to-the-whims-of-the-moment document.

The best scenario would be the replacing of the pro-infanticide, state-worshiping, homo-love “Republicans” with constitutional conservatives and then the gaining of a majority in Congress along with a truly conservative president. Not that I hold out hope for such a thing. Our politicians are downstream of our culture, and there’s no way our wicked culture could bear the ramifications of our constitution.

So for now, there’s gridlock. Nothing significant is going to get done. So we can rest for now that, even though our liberties won’t be being restored, they won’t be further eroded. And our politicians can put on a spectacle for us of what they want us to think they actually believe.