What a fearful mess we're in

This months podcast looks at the mess we have got ourselves into and why we are in such a pickle and how we might go about reversing some of the things that are happening to us at the moment.

Transcript

Good Morning to you and welcome to the podcast called IAMSHOKUNIN. Today I want to talk to you about the world around us. Normally I try to pick out a theme for the podcast and it generally remains in a conceptual space on its own with only a few references to the world around us to accentuate a point that I might want to make. Today I really want to talk about the mess we are inhabiting at the moment and try and draw some conceptual ideas from it. In effect I want to try and do the podcast in reverse if that makes any kind of sense.

From what I can see, and to be honest I do not spend a great deal of time watching mainstream news, we find ourselves in a world where we have been divided into haves and have-not’s. And by this I am referring to those that have been vaccinated against COVID and those that have not. In terms of people vaccinated versus those that have not, believe it or not, most of the world has not been vaccinated. You would be forgiven for believing the reverse was true, but the reality is that most of the worlds population has not been vaccinated and in fact at the present rate of output from the pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure, that is not going to change for many years to come. I rather suspect that by the time we have produced enough doses to vaccinate the whole world 4 to 6 times a year, everyone will have had COVID and developed a natural immunity to the virus anyway. 

So why am I talking about one of the most overhyped and sensationalised topics on the planet, surely everyone has had enough of this already? Well, the things I want to talk about today are related to COVID, they are not actually about COVID, the topics I want to draw your attention to are the effects of the management, if you could call it that of the pandemic, which you might also wonder at its definition.

I want to start with government and how to rule, sorry, I should have said serve because we live in a democracy right? I am going to read a series of statements now from across the ages, that will give you an indication of what  being in government entails:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” wrote HL Mencken, 

“Fear is the foundation of most governments”. John Adams one of the founding fathers of the USA

“The resort to fear by systems of power to discipline the domestic population has left a long and terrible trail of bloodshed and suffering which we ignore at our peril.” Noam Chomsky

It’s interesting isn't it that the main tool of governance is fear and not surprisingly then the main weapon of choice for that form of governance is the worlds media. Analysis conducted on the media has shown that less than 1% of the stories are investigative journalism. over 35% of the stories are related to crime and criminals, 40% of stories last for less than 30 seconds, Health stories represent over 35% of stories, There are almost no stories on culture or beneficial elements of society. In effect the news service is simply a tool used by the government to instil fear and insecurity into its population. I wish this was a new story, but there are University course teaching this stuff and whole libraries of research on how to perfect this form of governance and the worlds media and social media is alive and well and thriving on the principles I am talking about. I imagine that almost everyone in the world knows what I am talking about too, and yet, we continue to switch on our televisions, radios and social media accounts and continue to allow this slow poison to infect every waking conscious moment in our lives, to the detriment of our own sanity, the sanity of those around us and the relationships we have with everyone we care about. I find it unconscionable that as a modern society we do not see, or still allow ourselves to be influenced and programmed in this way.

For the purposes of todays podcast please feel free to replace COVID with any of the following fear inducing subjects - it won’t make any difference to the end result of the message I am putting across - here goes i no particular order”

• Terrorists
• Drugs
• Immigrants
• Brussels (if you are a Brexiteer)
• Cancer
• China, Russia or North Korea if you in the West
• The United States and Europe if you are China, Russia  or North Korea
• Pakistan if you are India and India if you are Pakistan
• Nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction
• Afghanistan when anyone wants a war
• Iran if you are the USA and USA if you are Iran
• Single mothers and those claiming state benefits
• Teenage mothers
• Junk food, Meat, Dairy, Sugar, Fat, Salt, Alcohol, Preserved meats, pickles, 
• Forever chemicals
• Global warming
• Microplastics
• Heavy metals
• Water polution
• Species extinction
• Overpopulation and declining population demographics
• Food security
• Vaping and cigarettes
• Criminals
• Floods, Fires, Volcanoes, Pestilence, plagues or any other disaster news crews can get to
• Any other political party that isn’t in power and what they might do if they win
• Corrupt police
• Guns and gun control and mass killings
• Pornography
• Child abuse
• Human trafficking
• Slavery
• Robbery and assault
• Gangs and no go areas
• Cost of living
• Homelessness
• Food banks
• Surveillance and big brother
• Cyber attacks
• Financial meltdowns and recessions

Ladies and gentlemen the list is frankly endless. You will see by now I hope that there is a theme here and it is simply this, there is no way to control a population other than through divide and conquer and this is the oldest strategy and the longest running strategy which has been in use since well before the Babylonians started to write things in clay. You enact this strategy by dividing peoples opinion around a subject and if you can make it a fearful subject all the better. You either fear the subject and give up your sovereignty to the government in return for protection or you resist the subject which gives the government the opportunity not only to point out the terrible consequences of that resistance but also engage all the supporters of the governments position to then point fingers at you and call you shameful names (peer pressure in other words) and the fear of your peers judgement. Frankly it is so terribly cynical and manipulative that it should be banned just the same way that nuclear bombs are meant to be banned. In what world does scaring the people you are meant to look after and represent, half to death on a daily basis have any form of legitimacy at all? It’s disgusting thats what it is.

So the question that all of this begs of us is this - what do we legitimately have reason to fear in our day to day lives? If you ignore all the things that could or might affect us, which to be honest is a function of the long list of things we have just highlighted, what real things might we legitimately be afraid of in our modern day society? Lets see, how about the following list:

• Will i get my promotion at work or will I be made redundant
• Can i get to the end of the month on the money I have
• Will (someone i know) recover from the illness they have
• Will they (and this could be anyone) like me
• Can I make the speech in front of all those people

I am truly struggling with this list and as you can see it’s pretty mundane stuff, I can’t seem to find an terrorist, immigrant drug dealing Russian Mafia boss anywhere in that list at all. The truth is that our day to day lives are very safe, very normal and in most cases quite boring. We do in fact have very little to be fearful about. We should be happy.

This reminds me of a quote from the film The Matrix by agent Smith:

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.”

Somehow this statement has the ring of truth about it, it is almost as if we cannot be happy without misery and suffering, it’s almost as if we have a pathological longing for hardship. Of course this is not true at all, there are millions upon millions of people all over the world that are perfectly happy and for the most part worry free. These are the people who have decided to take charge of their state of mind and not allow the influence of others to interfere with their happiness.

Kant wrote “The motto of enlightenment,”, is to have the courage to use your own understanding.” But courage, Kant added, is often undermined by self-appointed “guardians,” who use fear to amplify “the danger which threatens” men and women as they try to think for themselves.

 The message here is clear, we have to have the courage of our own convictions in order to stand sovereign in our own conscious space in this world and we need to guard ourselves against these self appointed guardians who use fear as a method of our control. But how do we do this when we seem to be surrounded by forces out of our control?

I recently witnessed a conversation between two people - one who was vaccinated against Covid and one person who was not. I was appalled by the way this conversation went. The vaccinated person was calling the unvaccinated person shameful, stupid and traitorous for not having had the vaccine and the unvaccinated person was trying to say that he didn’t want or need the vaccine. In the end the vaccinated person said “Well don’t blame anyone when you die of covid” to which the unvaccinated person said “But I have had covid, that’s why I don’t need to be vaccinated!”. As you can imagine there was a pregnant pause at the end of this statement. 

You see when we are fearful we lose control of our critical faculties, we reduce the world around us to binary choices of black and white, good or bad, we struggle to understand all the complexities of the situation an this was just such an example. We forget that after 2 years of a virus circulating in a society that potentially over 50% of the population have caught the virus and recovered and now have natural immunity, we instead accept the narrative being pushed on us that everyone needs to be vaccinated otherwise something awful will happen. What is this awful thing that will happen - bizarrely this is the bit that we are never told.  The terrible thing that all these immigrants did in the UK that the government tried to terrify us all about, actually served tables in bars and restaurants and picked fruit and vegetables for us - truly terrifying stuff. What’s terrifying is that now that we have made them fees so unwelcome after Brexit, they have gone home, and we can’t harvest our crops or get staff for the hospitality industry and many other areas of our economy. What is terrifying is the stupidity of our leaders and our own stupidity for believing their lies! 

Life unfortunately is two things - firstly it is always complicated and never simple, if it seems simple, it is probably because you don’t have enough information available to you to understand whats really going on. and secondly, most of life has nothing to do with you and will have very little if any impact on you at all. So the reality is that if you mind your own business and only focus on the things that are going to affect you directly, you will find that much of the fear and polarisation of opinions you hold at the moment will miraculously disappear into this air. You see virtually everything we have spoken about today are simply ideas and opinions, none of it really exists at all and even if it exists in some tangental way somewhere on the planet, it doesn’t exist at number 42 fortescue street or wherever you live, the only thing you need to worry about is whether to take an umbrella with you when you go down to the paper shop on the corner.

As Ghandi said:

“It is a superstition and ungodly thing to believe that an act of a majority binds a minority. Many examples can be given in which acts of majorities will be found to have been wrong and those of minorities to have been right.”

and so often in history we find over and over again that the minority that is vilified and attacked in the end proves to have a valid argument. You will of course be well aware of the age old saying that goes like this:

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”  

There is a very good reason this quote hangs around and is put to use so often and that is that more often than not it is true to some extent. What it is actually doing is drawing our attention back to something important. It is saying stop  for a moment, stop repeating what you have been told to say, take a moment to consider whether you are missing some vital piece of information here.

Bruce Barton is credited with a wonderful quote which goes as follows:

“Nothing great has ever been achieved except by those who dared to believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances.”

I love this quote because it talks directly to the spirit of the challenge that we are talking about in this podcast today, we have to dare to believe that our opinion, our choices, our chosen actions are the correct ones, when despite all the messages we are receiving around us are telling us we are wrong, we have to have the courage and audacity to stand alone and believe in ourselves. It is truly a remarkable statement. It is one of personal accountability, courage and critical thinking. It doesn’t mean that you are going to be necessarily right in everything you choose to believe in and it doesn't absolve you from researching whatever view you have and you still need to have enough humility to change your stance if you get information that changes your opinion, but if you are not getting new information that changes your view, then you need to stand strong and resist!

It is always about this time in a conversation like this that the expression “what’s the worst that could happen?” I love this expression, because the the worst that could happen is almost always “you could die!”. and the reason I love this is that it is true, that is almost always the worst that could happen to anyone, but the reality of this is this is that that option stalks us throughout our lives, we could drop dead at any time, either from illness, an accident or something else. Once we accept that living itself comes with the permanent possibility of death and ultimately the inevitability of dying, you realise that there is actually very little to fear in the world at all. We are born, and we die, that is life, the only thing we think we have is a choice or some level of control over when we die or how we die, but the reality for most people is that we don’t really have very much control over this either. If we accept this logic, then we are free to explore the true peace and beauty of the world around us on a daily basis. When you accept this gift of insight, you start to see how stupid and small these games that are being played with us by others. You start to see the power of the word “no”. As Ghandi said passive resistance is not a physical fight it is a spiritual fight. Just saying “no” and refusing to comply causes such a large problem for the people trying to impose their will on you that ultimately their plans collapse. We know this phenomenon as civil disobedience, or mass non compliance. We obviously don’t get told about this by the media but we have many many excellent examples where societies quietly go about doing this anyway. In the UK we have a law which states if you go over a certain number of penalty points on your driving licence, you lose your driving licence for a year. Research has shown the over 75% of people who lose their licence continue to drive anyway. They do this, because the law is preposterous, most people can’t live without the car, so they choose to ignore the law. Research in the UK has shown that despite all pregnant mothers being told to have a covid vaccination, 85% of them have refused. It seems that pregnant women take their safety and that of their unborn child seriously enough to be critical of mandates imposed upon them. In many countries where the taxation laws if followed to the letter of the law would impoverish a nations population, everyone keeps two sets of accounts, one for the government which is a work of fiction and one for themselves which speaks to the real performance of their business. 

You see what I am getting at here, mass disobedience is actually more normal that you would think, societies have a way of eventually seeing through the propaganda and false narratives that they are being fed and simply stop doing what they are told. This is when the minority is joined by a large part of the disenfranchised majority and form a new majority that has a contrary view to the prevailing narrative. In government circles this is called “losing control of the narrative”, funny how they have an expression for it. Other words for this are a revolution a coup, a revolt - yet more words that are used to try and scare us which in reality are just a representation of the majority of people who are saying they are fed up with the rubbish and lies they are being fed and are refusing to go along with the story they are being told.

In the end if history teaches un anything it is this. No matter how badly we are lied to or manipulated, scared or threatened, in the end ordinary people make up their minds about things and eventually form a majority point of view, and when they do, the dancing queens of politics change sides instantly for fear of reprisals. The power is always with the silent majority, no government has ever successfully suppressed an entire population for ever, even in places like North Korea civil disobedience is actually the norm at a basic level in the population and rulers hold on to power in ever more tenuous ways, in the end people win through virtue of sheer numbers and will alone.

So where does that leave us. I wanted to try and create a message for everyone in this podcast - to those of us that are fearful and can’t understand why people are resisting all the mandates and quarantines and so on that are taking place in the world today and to those of us who are resisting the current narrative. I wanted to show that we are all being played by the same system and that we will only start to make progress as a society and as individuals once we stop playing the game. We need to chose another pitch to go and play on and we need to take the football with us. We need to say “no” and we need to engage with each other and understand how we are being manipulated and decide together to get on with “our” lives. There are simply not enough policemen or military forces in the world today to be able to control everyone if we decide to do the opposite of what we are being told to do. Ultimately this is the voice which is called DEMOCRACY. Democracy is not voting at the polls once every 4 to 5 years for some dancing queen, democracy is the voice of non compliance, it is the majority saying “no” to the nonsense and refusing to abide by the impositions placed upon them. Miraculously, once we start this process, it happens very quickly and easily and change occurs. but for it to start, you have to start with “NO”.

I hope you enjoyed this months podcast. I am not sure where it came from or why I decided to be confrontational this month. Sometime the world around me seems to be descending into a bottomless cave of madness and I just simply want to say what I want to say despite everyone. I am pigheaded at the best of times and tend to hold my own opinions fairly strongly and this has worked remarkably well for me over my life. If you think there is something of use in this weeks podcast then please share it with friends whom you think might find it interesting. In the meantime I look forward to talking to you all soon.