Life through the looking glass

Where everything is backwards

We are living through a time of seismic geopolitical changes and great upheaval, but our mainstream news would like us to believe that everything is just fine, which is why it’s still as full of nonsensical gossipy puff pieces as ever. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who can’t afford to bribe their way out of being sent to the front line are getting killed and maimed in a hopeless war that we intentionally provoked and are desperately prolonging, and there are zero stories about what any of our political leaders plan to do when formal extradition charges are made against them for war crimes. The BBC would like us to believe that Russia is trying to frame Ukraine for the Crocus City attack, in an article that makes no mention of Dmitry Medvedev’s Apr 7 tweet that makes very clear the fact that Russia blames Western leaders for the attack, and sees the “ukrainian bandera bastards” as no more than their protégés.

This transitional age that we’re living in is characterised by ever more outlandish concepts passed off as normal and unremarkable. Gender is a construct. Drag queens should be in schools. Bombing hospitals is OK when our allies do it. This feels to me like a chattering class trying to make the world feel as unreal and unknowable as possible, to preemptively dismiss any claims of anything, on the grounds that nothing can be truly known at all. ‘Hate crime’ laws criminalise “behaviour which is intended to stir up hatred” even though that definition is entirely subjective and could apply to anything, certainly including this humble blog post.

It reminds me a little of one of the themes of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (besides all the shagging), the sense that an absurd political and social kabuki theatre lends one’s actions a weightlessness, because nothing ultimately matters. No conversation can stray beyond the trivial and the inconsequential, lest we break the spell and come crashing down to earth.

The thing that makes this change feel real to those of us who sense it, is the stubborn insistence amongst the mainstream (or the ‘aggressively normie’) that there is absolutely nothing strange going on, and you are paranoid for thinking that there is. There’s a kind of manic energy common to people who refuse to engage with the implications of the things that they say they believe: a laughing, joking - but never actually funny - affect that tacitly but forcefully demands agreement, and can pivot in a moment to anger, scorn and outrage. Asking one of these people to explain what they mean is tantamount to calling them a liar, because they know that they don’t know what they mean. Everything is fleeting and momentary, everything is a slogan or a feeling, and nothing more. Nothing is what it claims to be, if it claims to be anything at all.

We live in a technologically advanced era, but people hold tribal superstitions, informed by unseen and unknown tastemakers deciding for great swathes of the population who or what is good or bad, true or untrue. Facts don’t matter, because they can be invented at a moment’s notice, with no evidence required. Trust and faith are evidence, as has always been the case in organised religion. Facts or evidence that go against our beliefs are dismissed as fake, because believers simultaneously understand how easy it is to create convincing fakes, but trust their own side not to do such a thing.

Our new religion is digital and commercial in its delivery, but as real in its emotional weight on a person’s mental state as any religion has ever been. It’s also interactive and dialectic in a way top-down religion isn’t: with no power structure in place, zealots of a belief can appear anywhere and gain popularity for any reason, be attacked by the other side and have their online reputations destroyed, all practically without leaving the house or meeting another person in real life, and with no apparent oversight or guidance from any authority figures. All this emotional torment is experienced through computer screens, like we’re responding to computers rather than to each other. The ‘woke mind virus’ might as well be a computer virus that has mutated to infect human beings; if an algorithm were to try and find the most efficient way to confuse and divide people, it probably wouldn’t look much different to what we have now.

It hasn’t always been exactly how it is now, of course, what with our broadband and smartphones and Onlyfans accounts. The process of atomisation and degradation of the ability to think critically has been a long one, and you could argue that television is a more destructive force than the internet in this respect, since it offers no forum for reply or discussion, and no dissenting voices.

The example of Jimmy Savile/the BBC

I recently read Morgoth’s post on Jimmy Savile, and what Savile’s sordid existence says about Britain from his heyday of the 1970s onwards. It also says a lot about human psychology. Savile was on TV when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, and I can’t remember any of my peers ever thinking that he was anything other than a gross and very weird old man, but despite that, kids my age still went on Jim’ll Fix It. I was too young to understand what a paedophile was, but looking back now, it’s unbelievable that any parents allowed their children anywhere near him. He was always sinister, but the very fact of his being on the BBC and close to the British establishment apparently made him appear acceptable and merely ‘eccentric’, because that’s the power of in-group behaviour to override one’s instinctive mistrust or revulsion.

Savile was notoriously litigious and manipulative, which meant that no scandals erupted surrounding him while he was alive, although jokes were made about him quite openly. It’s horrifying that these things were such an open secret that people were able to laugh about them in the context of what he was actually doing, which was molesting children and ‘mucking about’ with corpses. When Louis Theroux made a documentary about him in 2000, Savile already appeared weird, and Theroux later wondered how he could have been taken in by the man and not seen all the red flags. Was he really taken in by Savile, or could he simply not believe that such a monster could exist so openly in a civilised society? It casts doubt on a lot of people, Theroux included, that it was only after Savile’s death that the floodgates opened and all his victims came forward, and those of us who had always found him disgusting shrugged and went, “well, yeah”. I remember some American and Czech acquaintances who had never heard of him until the posthumous accusations, being shocked and bemused that such an obviously creepy and unsavoury personality would have been allowed on British TV (and children’s TV!) for such a long time.

In 2022 I wrote a post about why I stopped trusting the BBC because of their coverage of the SMO, but I also mentioned Savile. Shouldn’t Savile’s presence on the BBC, and the BBC’s systemic complicity in his crimes, have been enough to tell us that we could absolutely never trust this organisation again? Yes it should, but they continue to be part of the establishment, and the establishment isn’t going to indict itself; they let Operation Yewtree expose some ‘bad apples’ and continued as normal.

The same goes for John Peel, who died a cultural hero in 2004 but who had even in 1989 admitted to having had sex with underage girls, although the severity of allegations against him pales in comparison to those against Savile.

Back to the present

But something does seem to be worse now than in the past, more urgent. Mainstream messaging is now a complete inversion of material reality, intended not to gently influence or persuade, but to actively encourage extremist viewpoints, which become ‘normal’ through this process of ubiquitous aggressive normalisation, AKA “shifting of the Overton Window”.

Doctors daring to speak up (and often risk losing their jobs or licenses) over the risks of mRNA COVID vaccines or the COVID lockdowns specifically are branded generally “anti-vax” or “anti-science”, sometimes even in publicly funded media by a developer of one of those vaccines.

We are to believe that physical sex is a meaningless and arbitrary characteristic that matters less than how a person feels about themself, and the humane and caring thing to do for someone who feels that their physical sex doesn’t match their gender - which is a totally subjective assertion, a psychological condition called gender dysphoria - is to affirm their belief, and not to discourage them from having whatever irreversible medical treatment they feel they need. We are to believe that they might commit suicide if they don’t get this treatment. We are not to think about how they might feel after the treatment, having rendered themself mutilated and possibly sterile, and having been encouraged to do it by people they trusted. We are to believe that this should extend to children.

We are told that it is vitally important we keep sending money to a Ukrainian regime that terrorises its own populace, has cancelled elections and is abducting its own men off the street to go and fight on the front line against Russia, often with barely any training, weapons or even food. The long-range weapons that we send are not only used on the front line, but also to attack civilian targets in places like Donetsk and Belgorod. It is never made clear how sending money to Ukraine is going to help them win the war (or how using that money to pay US weapons manufacturers even counts as “aid for Ukraine”), but we should keep sending the money anyway because it’s unpatriotic not to support Ukraine, no matter where you’re from.

Any amount of video evidence of savagery or terrorism by forces fighting for Ukraine should be angrily dismissed as ‘Russian propaganda’. If our media say something now that contradicts something they said in the past, we should continue to believe them anyway and not question why it was necessary to ban Russian media. We should believe that the conflict is a ‘stalemate’ because the front line isn’t moving much, although simply maintaining that stalemate narrative requires a constant supply of men to go and die to temporarily hold useless bits of territory, and Ukraine is running out of them.

It is necessary to justify or minimise literally anything that Israel does, because to not do so is antisemitic and Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023. Nothing that Israel did to Gaza or Palestine before Oct 7 2023 is of any relevance. The Houthis are ‘terrorists’ for trying to prevent the Gaza genocide operation against Hamas, which is why we need to send British warships to attack them, even if they continue to be able to sink our ships.

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Our Western, American-led culture has reached an inflection point as its hegemony is being challenged and rejected. Our elites and political class have become used to getting their way and not taking responsibility for their actions, and now that they’re not getting their way and the prospect of finally being held responsible is looming, they are attempting to turn our culture mad as a means of deflecting from them. We don’t have to let them.

We have arrogantly assumed that morality is innate in us and not something that needs instruction, and we have also arrogantly assumed that our sources of information are reliable and impartial. The combination of those two things has led to a moral crisis, an apparent inability to tell right from wrong. Many people have lost the ability or are unwilling to think critically about certain important topics, and we are suffering precisely the effects that one might expect as a result. The situation is not sustainable, but it’s hard to imagine which part of our crumbling reality will collapse first.