What decent person wouldn’t be alarmed about threats of the end of the world in a few years? Or death from a pervasive, uncontrollable pandemic? Who wouldn’t be moved to do something about it? Especially when couched as an imperative moral obligation.
Emotions now tend to overtake facts in public discourse. The ‘vibe’, how one feels, seems to have stolen a march over reality in the dominion of the ever-alarmed, ever-offended. Speaking truth can cost one’s job, home, business or reputation. Unsurprisingly, mental health is deteriorating as a consequence.
Fear is the weapon of choice for cultists: fear, hatred and lies. In this emotional post-truth, post-Christian era, many people have been drawn into cult-like beliefs that have little basis in fact, yet dominate the public agenda.
Tacitius,one of ancient Rome’s greatest historians believed, people are never more surely enslaved than by the lies of which they are themselves the authors. To which Ergas adds, with historical objectivity everywhere in retreat, today’s lies about the past can only fuel tomorrow’s nightmares. On top of COVID and climate change, nightmares are coming.
Modern Cults in control
Therein sits our dilemma: cults use lies to destroy our culture and more lies to paint a promising picture of the future.
Climate change, COVID and wokeism are recent cults soaking up public energy, resources and money, while concurrently undermining strength, intelligence and economy.
Division, not unity fuels cult power:
- supporters and compliant against questioners and doubters;
- educators and children against family;
- transgender against women;
- women against men;
- Greens and Teals against farmers, miners and manufacturers who provide food and services;
- Blacks against whites
- cultists against Jews and Christians.
Division is rife, cluttering the Twitterati, social and main stream media in a bubble of cult gospel. Judgement is brutal. No chance for redemption for misbeliefs in these religions; just approval or condemnation based on criteria shifting as frequently as public service rules, depending on who is in charge on the day.
In keeping with the new world order ruled by an unelected global bureaucrat destruction of our culture is underway: abolishing/distorting history, literature, music, statues, stories, education, values and economy; destroying our institutions, flag and commemorative days.
Culturally, I used to love the vigorous public debate at Writers’ festivals years ago and imaginative, technically and aesthetically beautiful art exhibitions. Now I’m saddened by shallow, dishonest one-track leftist propaganda that parades as writing excellence and art prizes awarded for woke over merit: aboriginal, Trans or feminist. No longer worth attending: they can speak to themselves.
Consequences of cult control
We will own nothing and be happy being monitored for social credits like China, using artificial intelligence (AI) tracking, under our skin no less, according to projections at the May World Economic Forum (WEF), advanced by Xi to thought monitoring today. So easily we slide from external controls by constitutional laws under which those elected by the people are accountable to the people, to internal bodily controls like mandated vaccinations, facial recognition and AI tracking of movement, food, drink and connections. Chief Health Officers excited to extraordinary powers over COVID, further excited presenters like Bill Gates at the WEF this year. Tracking individuals, already possible through smart phones, can be advanced through AI. Greater tracking means increased controls monitored by faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats in this country or by another.
Elite bureaucrats have driven the destruction of our culture, faith, families and economy. Along with corporate sycophants, they have degraded energy reliability for the fantasy of climate change and posturing on the global stage. 96 Australian government representatives attended the COP26 conference in Glasgow to hear sainted cult youth Greta Thunberg spout ignorance, emotionally.
Being controlled may be suitable for those who don’t think or want any responsibility: they can remain immature, minimal contributors to life who whinge and blame others for anything that goes wrong. Hatred is directed towards independent spirits choosing freedom.
Freedom to choose means accepting responsibility for decisions. New boundaries and ideas are tested, innovation occurs, and having a crack – all elements which have contributed to the evolution of the liberal democratic society we have today that makes Australia a desirable place to which to immigrate. Who’s lining up to settle in Russia, China, Iran or North Korea? Or other failed states like Cuba and Venezuela?
Regaining freedom
The Maturity Model (MM pages 28-32 of my book Becoming) illustrates that increased expectations, commensurately increase responsibility for others, reducing their choices. Such a position is unsustainable. Truth is not present. Remaining too long in these circumstances ends in fragmentation of individuals, groups and societies, with high social and financial costs.
Using the MM, solutions can be found in recalibrating expectations and responsibilities based on truth, in literature, art and education. For instance, under the dark destructive cloud of climate change and renewables, the less well-off are expected to carry the cost burden of pursuit of the unprovable (CC) with the folly of unsustainable, unaffordable, unreliable renewables. The powerless (politically and energy wise) are left to carry the burden of something for which they have little choice. Trouble is ahead. Security for individuals and our sovereignty become vulnerable to an omnipresent China.
“Cheaper” renewable were supposed to lower energy prices. In fact, we pay many times over for this big fat lie: in energy costs doubling and tripling; $billions subsidies to renewables; additional $billions for transmission lines; more $billions for disposal yet to be resolved; $billions in loss of landscape ecology, aesthetics and agricultural production; and $billions in opportunity cost of our failure to invest in more practical applications like dams to control and store water in this land of drought and flooding rains.
Cults foster irrational group think. Follow the science has become a mere catch cry for promoting the public narrative and control of the masses, because real science and engineering (truth) is excluded from the debate.
Wisdom through the ages
Rather than discard the culture of our historical past, as is the the first essential of Communism and Fascism, we need to be discerning about what of value we should hold onto and what to let go of in the light of new knowledge.
Plenty of wisdom from Old and New testaments has value for today, whether we ticked the box for believers in the Census or not.
On energy availability, reliability and affordability: Woe to you who load up packs too heavy for man (or woman) to carry.
On diversity, a key edict to Captain Arthur Philip when commanded to establish a settlement in New South Wales: Each person is created free and equal under God‘ There is neither Jew nor Greek, man nor woman, slave nor free man.
On false gods (CC, diversity, gender, COVID): Destruction of whole groups occurs when worshiping false gods, like the tribe of Dan, which fell to worshiping the bull (Genesis) .
Our system of governance, while imperfect and evolving, is based on centuries of Judeo-Christian tenets that have stood the test of time, refined from the Magna Carta, through the Renaissance merging Christianity and capitalism and the Enlightenment to the present day.
Contemporary cults like Climate Change, COVID and wokeism seek destruction our culture and history, as did Hitler and Stalin, to lay the ground bare, as Putin is doing in Ukraine, for socialist control as proposed by the WEF.
We are in for a rough couple of years when we must be alert to threats to our freedom posed by China’s desire to control the world, denying the historical facts of Communism which has cost over 100 million lives and enslaved and tortured millions. Is that what we want? Or is our democratic culture worth defending against the lying cults like Xi’s China Dream, and the Green New Deal.
We are not yet living in Jonestown[1]. While we have our wits about us, no need to drink the cult koolaid.
[1] Jonestown, Guyana, was the site of the biggest massacre/suicide of 900 people, including 300 children, from the Californian Peoples Temple cult, at the behest of their leader Jim Jones, in 1978. Members were incited to drink a cordial laced with arsenic.