We can't go on like this...

The piece below was originally published on a now deleted, older version of this blog. For reasons of ‘diplomacy’ it has been sitting around in my archives, gathering metaphorical dust. I’ve re-read it and, I stand by everything I wrote in this piece. As there’s no longer any need for me to be ‘diplomatic’, I’ve made the decision to re-publish it here. A few minor changes have been made for context. The links to other pieces I’ve written have been updated.

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The title of this piece refers to modern life, its toxic impact upon all of us, and the stark fact that carrying on as we are is unsustainable. The threats we face range from environmental degradation, the growing impact of resource depletion, the geo-political instability that results from these, through to the impact of an increasingly dystopian world on our mental health and spiritual well being. We also face dire threats from those who presume to rule over us, who will not stop at any lengths to increase their wealth and their power, regardless of the cost to us mere mortals.

This piece will hopefully contribute to the process of asking the questions that need to be asked to spark the fundamental, deep, and for quite a few people, painful discussions that need to take place. The kind of discussions that can only happen if there's some recognition of the commonality of the threat to our health and well being, and to that of the planet, if we carry on along the current unsustainable and psychologically destructive path. The problem is that in an increasingly atomised and dysfunctional society, recognising the commonality of the threat that faces all of us is becoming increasingly difficult. You could be forgiven for thinking that's intentional...

'We can't go on like this' can mean different things to different people. It can mean being deeply concerned about the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), also referred to as the 'great reset'. It can mean fearing the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on many aspects of our lives, including employment. It can mean worrying about how transhumanism, a seemingly integral part of the 4IR, will profoundly and adversely affect what it means to be truly human. It can mean fears about the impact of environmental degradation, pollution, habitat and species loss, and resource depletion. It can also mean worrying about the toxic impact of modern life on our psychological and spiritual health.

'We can't go on like this' can be seen as quite a subjective thing to say. For those whose interests lie in defending the status quo, they'll be working hard to turn that 'we' into an 'I'. In other words, it's not the system that's at fault, it's you. They'll suggest that the problem lies with your mental health, not with the toxic system that serves the interests of the elites who presume to rule over us while screwing the rest of us. Naturally, they'll try to monetise ways of addressing your 'mental health' issues in ways that range from a plethora of so called 'self help' books, videos and gurus through to a life time of medication that will numb your senses and sensitivity.

As always, a piece like this is inevitably skewed by a degree of subjectivity. That means some issues get a fair bit of attention, while others are merely mentioned in passing. It's also an exercise in thinking out loud and seeing what reaction that gets. If the reactions come in the form of constructive criticism, they may well inform how my thinking starts to change and evolve.

4IR and transhumanism - a dystopian future

This is the text of a meme I produced a while back which I hope encapsulates how a growing number of people feel about the modern world and the dystopian direction it's heading in:

NO to your apps

NO to your algorithms

NO to your avatars

NO to your metaverse

NO to your blockchains

NO to your cryptos

NO to your neuralinks

NO to your synthetic food

NO to your smart cities

NO to your artificial intelligence

NO TO YOUR TRANSHUMANIST HELL

This is what we're looking at... A future where we're increasingly divorced from nature and the rhythms of the natural world. A future where those who presume to rule over us want to increasingly deny our basic humanity and plug us into their control matrix. A future that relies on an ever increasing amount of technology to monitor, control and shape us to their agenda. Technology relying on the extraction of minerals that comes at the cost of the planet and the people exploited in the process. Ultimately, a future where they want to control what we think and how we act in order to stop us asking difficult questions about their agenda and aims.

Here are a couple of readings that I hope will make you think about how we perceive what's going on in a world of information overload:

An overload - Katrina Wicks | Truth Talk | 9.3.23

It seems there has been an overload. Of information and circumstances and frankly it appears that people are becoming overwhelmed. It’s not by accident, and serves a purpose. While people are taking proverbial punches left, right and centre, it’s very difficult to view the bigger picture, or to even know which way is up.

Perceptions of what we think we see - Katrina Wicks | Truth Talk | 13.3.23

AI generated ‘humans’ are becoming part of our everyday experiences with screens and ‘entertainment’, whether we are aware of their presence or not. So, within that, our perceptions and expectations of ourselves are affected, as with all the previous shifts in the commercial industries. Film, TV, fashion, music, news, politics, finance etc. All the areas that are used to have a system and standard for you to be conditioned to and to become part of. People learn an awful lot from faces, I think maybe that is overlooked sometimes. Not by those who know, it is very much thought about.

Gender roles, biology and what it means to be human

One aspect of transhumanism that particularly disturbs me is the arrogant belief that the human body can be hacked to the point where we move to something that's beyond being what we would understand as human. One example is the increasing use of medication and surgery on people who are deeply troubled by what they see as their gender identity being in 'conflict' with their biological reality. This is a consequence of a healthy challenging of imposed gender roles being reframed as a mental health condition that requires medicalising. Twisting a healthy questioning of gender roles into a mental health 'condition' is something that has to be robustly questioned and challenged to stop them not just commodifying us, but also, using us as lab rats for a dystopian, transhumanist future.

In an ideal world, if you're a woman who doesn't like the idea of raising kids, wants a career, is assertive, likes stripping down motorbike engines for a hobby and wears army surplus clothing to name just a few instances, you should be able to do just that without anyone minding. You shouldn't be constrained by having to accept gender roles that define how you should and should not behave. You shouldn't be constrained by expectations stemming from gender roles and your biology that limit your life. One being the expectation by some that if you're a woman, you have to have kids. Coming from a home background where I was never sure that I was wanted or intended, I firmly believe that women should only have kids if they really want them.

The expectations about women being 'people pleasers', putting others first, dressing and deporting themselves in a certain way in order to 'please' men, really do need to be challenged. For sure, there's nothing wrong with being polite and civil - believe it or not, that's something I try my level best to do most of the time. There's a massive difference between being polite and letting people, particularly men, walk all over you.

If you're a man, it's the expectation that you don't show your emotions and that in the event of any crisis, you 'man up', whatever the f**k that means, that needs to be challenged. If you have to show emotion, the only acceptable one appears to be anger. Even with that, there are constraints on where you can express anger as a bloke. Letting rip at an opposition foul at a football match is deemed to be acceptable. Just don't invade the pitch... Letting rip at a Just Stop Oil protester slow walking in front of your van first thing in the morning when you have a bastard of a day ahead of you on a building site somehow seems to be unacceptable.

There are also expectations on you as a man as to how you should dress and deport yourself. Any significant deviation from that is an invitation to ridicule and even abuse. Here's the weird bit... Back in the 1970s, young men did wear fashions that had a 'feminine' influence. It wasn't just male musicians such as Bowie, Eno and the like who wore stage outfits that were very 'feminine'. Back in 1973, a night out at the pub involved amongst other things, patterned shirts with massive floppy collars, a jacket (sometimes velvet) with the widest lapels possible, ridiculous trousers and platform boots! That's not to mention the long hair which in my case, was almost shoulder length. Should any of the young women we were with be wearing a trouser suit, it all got a bit confusing for the older folk in the pub...

Arsenal fans 'glammed up' at a match in October 1972. Yes, I did look like that back in the early 70s, but…I wasn't an Arsenal fan:)

In some ways, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was quite a bit of experimentation in how we looked and with some, engaging in what could be called 'gender bending' when it came to choosing what we wore. There were also some healthy discussion about challenging gender roles and expectations in order to achieve equality between the sexes. While things were far from perfect, there was some scope for making a challenge.

It seems that these days, any attempt to move away from the gender roles and presentation expected of you because of your biological sex, is deemed to be something that has to be medicalised. People should be able to freely challenge the expectations of the gender role that's assigned to them as a consequence of their biological sex. Any attempt to stifle that is putting the clock back decades. The problem is that if people want to present themselves in a way that significantly challenges those expectations, they're told they're in the 'wrong body' and pressured into irreversible, life altering and damaging surgery, plus a lifetime of medication. Challenging the restrictive expectations of gender roles is seen as a mental health condition that has to be treated, rather than a necessary process that would allow all of us to freely live the lives we want.

This push for medication and surgery may be very rewarding for Big Pharma but immensely damaging to those who get sucked into their toxic agenda. My comments on this issue are motivated by a desire that no harm should be done. Which is a lot more than can be said for what a number of people have termed the 'Medical Industry Complex'. The question is, how the heck did we get to this point? Here are a couple of readings for you which answer that question more eloquently and thoroughly than I can:

Who or What Is to Blame for Gender Ideology? - Eva Kurilova | Substack | 2.3.23

Put more simply, postmodernism denies objectivity and prefers a subjective and self-referential perspective. As a movement, it favours moral relativism and destabilizes language and meaning through deconstruction, yet paradoxically elevates language to a god-like status in the creation of reality. This is evident in the phrase “trans women are women,” which requires both the deconstruction of the word “woman” and a belief that words hold the power to create reality.

Humanity for Sale - Jennifer Bilek | the American Mind | 3.2.23

When sex is abolished as a meaningful category, so is humanity as we know it. This is the point of the burgeoning gender industry. Beyond profiteering—of which there is plenty, with newly constructed identities requiring a lifetime of medical attention and technologically assisted reproduction once child patients are sterilized—it grooms the public. It assesses their acceptance of biomedical intrusions that change how we see ourselves. Will people accept the abuse of children’s sex if they believe it’s in good faith? How far can we go with our techno-medical intrusions into humans and the attack on women’s humanity as wholly sexed beings different from men?

A future of control, supposedly for the 'good of the planet'

We're also looking at a future where the bastards want to control how we move around. I've written more than I care to remember about fifteen minute cities, Clean Air Zones and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods: Posts on movement. All measures that the authorities are trying to sell to us in the name of moving towards 'net zero carbon'. Also, measures that would have to be facilitated by a massive amount of intrusive surveillance technology.

There was a perfectly understandable and justified level of opposition to the idea of the Covid vaccine passes which would have been facilitated by a massive amount of intrusive monitoring and tracking. The vaccine passes failed but, the spectre of digital identity is now rearing its ugly head. It should hardly come as a surprise that when faced with the hassle of the technology needed to implement traffic control and reduction measures, people are objecting to it. There is a strong overlap between the opposition to the measures brought in to 'deal' with Covid and to the the implementation of so called '15 minute cities'. It's a case of once bitten , twice shy and all that.

Being an instinctive anti-authoritarian, I totally get why people are kicking off against the implementation of 15 minute cities and various other traffic control measures. However, while I support the struggles against the imposition of the technologies that would be implemented to facilitate these schemes, there's a massive 'but'. One that in part comes from being a non-driver who actually quite likes the idea of living somewhere that has a lot of life's amenities within a fifteen minute walk, while also wanting a decent level of connectivity with neighbouring settlements and nearby cities. It also comes from a recognition that certainly in the developed world, we're starting to reach the limits of what a finite planet can provide to support our lifestyles.

There's no denying that the elites who presume to rule over us recognise those limits as well and want to do something about them. However, that 'something' will be what it takes to maintain their wealth and power while managing down the expectations and material consumption of the majority of us. It has to be noted the the Covid lockdowns were an interesting exercise in seeing what people would and wouldn't tolerate when it came to managing down expectations and restricting freedoms. Looking at the way the carbon issue is being hyped up to the exclusion of all the other issues that constitute the very real environmental crisis we face, a kind of lockdown scenario being imposed in the not too distant future cannot be ruled out.

Given the way Covid was hyped up and the level of deceit and manipulation that was deployed to implement the lockdowns and cajole people into taking a risky, experimental mRNA shot, who's to say that similar tactics wouldn't be deployed to restrict people's movement in order to meet the target of net zero carbon? A growing number of people are starting to join the dots, see this threat coming and understandably, are kicking off against it.

Heading ever deeper into a clusterf**k

Rubbish left hanging in the trees and bushes flanking the River Avon after the floods back in the early winter. A visible symptom of how the planet is literally being trashed:(

This is where I need to explain my 'buts' about the resistance to restrictions on how people move around. As I've written before, we live on a finite planet: The future of movement on a finite planet 20.2.23. Continuous growth in material prosperity is simply not feasible when there are only so many resources to go round. Setting aside the issue of carbon, there are issues with air and water pollution, habitat and species loss and the loss of fertile land that have to be confronted and dealt with. Anyone who takes a few steps back to rationally assess where we are will realise that the trajectory we're on is physically unsustainable and that change has to happen. The point is that this change has to come from all of us, voluntarily, and not be imposed upon us by the elites, supposedly for the 'good of the planet' but actually to retain their wealth and power while screwing the rest of us down.

As well as being unable to carry on as we when it comes to our use of resources on a finite planet, spiritually and psychologically, we can't afford to carry on as we are. Life in the modern world takes a toll on all of us. There's the constant bombardment of advertising trying to convince us that we won't be happy until we buy the spurious product or service on offer. There's the increasing fragmentation and atomisation of society as the divide and rule merchants get to work, creating a culture of fear and mistrust. The so called 'culture wars' are pitting us against each other in a way that makes any kind of measured dialogue across ever widening divides. There's an increasing alienation from nature and from the planet that supports us.

We are talking about a crisis of loss…

• The loss of a sense of community and belonging as people have been more or less forced to uproot themselves to move to where the work is.

• The loss of attachment to a place.

• The loss of attachment to a landscape.

• The loss of any sense of a relationship with nature.

• The loss of the familiar in a world that’s changing ever faster and increasingly, in ways we can’t understand.

• The loss of the familiar that will provoke a backlash, trust us on that…

• The loss of certainty and continuity in a rapidly changing and increasingly baffling world.

• The loss of attachment to each other that comes from having to live in a hyper mobile society.

• Now with the Metaverse, AI, ‘work from home’, the loss of any sense of workplace solidarity, replaced with an increasing feeling of isolation and fear.

A lot of this has been going on for decades. Some of this has been going on for centuries. What's truly worrying is that the slide towards what can best be described as a dystopia is accelerating at an increasingly alarming rate. I've got over six decades on the clock and am moving towards notching up the seventh and having lived through a fair number of crises, what we're going through today feels weirder than anything I've ever experienced. Weird to the point where some days I ask myself whether I actually want to be around in another ten years. Weird to the point that some of the dystopian science fiction I was reading back in the 1970s and 1980s is turning out to be a prediction of what's happening now. It feels like what were supposed to be warnings have been adopted by some nefarious elements as the f**king manual!

Conclusion - is there a way out of this?

The title of this piece is 'We can't go on like this'. We genuinely can't if we want a just, sane and sustainable future for the whole of humanity. At some point, sooner rather than later, the grip that the global super rich have over us has to be broken, once and for all. Their transhumanist, techno-fascist dystopia has to be shown up for exactly what it is and utterly destroyed. As to how we achieve this, I'd love to say that I have the answers but, that would be disingenuous to say the least. There are many obstacles in the way...

One being that a number of the issues raised in this piece are, according to my now former comrades, 'not up for discussion'. Attempting to raise the issues brings forth accusations of being a 'bigot', a 'conspiracy theorist' or sometimes, both at once! Theoretically, the door is still open for open discussions to work out how we go forward from here. In actual reality, I'm not going to be raising my hopes for them to be smashed yet again.

Along with people I've 'met' online and formed alliances with because of our shared opposition to the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, transhumanism and techno-fascism, we're starting to form the basis of a loose movement that can bring about the change that has to happen. Change that comes from the bottom, from each and every one of us in our neighbourhoods and communities.