Mystic Revolution

“Humans had set these machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary self-dom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“What does the billboard say?

‘Come and play, come and play

Forget about the movement’”

Rage Against the Machine, Freedom

We sojourn in a desert of honor.

Politicians (even down to your garden-variety city-hall con man) always emphatically remind the weary populace that they act in our best interest; that they “represent us.” They argue that they are altruistic warriors for human rights, or common sense, or *insert slogan here*. As you can deduce from my verbiage thus far, however, I consider this thinly veiled bullshit.

My insurrectional thesis for this essay, or panegyric, or soapbox or whatever, is that we should find whatever is in the State’s best interest and do the exact opposite of that thing. I find that not only is our society increasingly conducive to State tyranny, but the State is not a benefactor in any way. This should not be surprising. Every State in all of history has tended towards tyranny. If that’s the case, why do we trust the State for anything?

I digress.

Ok then- what’s in the State’s best interest, you may ask? (WARNING: at least one Brave New World, The Matrix, Dune, and Roman Empire reference ahead.)

As a broad preliminary assertion, it is in the State’s best interest for its populace to dwell in a simulacrum of reality. The rest of this essay will operate under that assertion.

It’s in the interest of the State for you to disconnect from Reality.

It’s in the interest of the State for you to be a coward.

It’s in the interest of the State for you to destroy, rather than create.

It’s in the interest of the State to invest in narcissism.

It’s in the interest of the State to take your honor.

I borrow that term, “simulacrum of reality” from the excellent essay penned by Duncan Rayburn entitled “Unplugging from the devil’s electric nervous system.” I will link it below, and I highly suggest you read it at your leisure.

https://duncanreyburn.substack.com/p/unplugging-from-the-devils-electric?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

He discusses not just the impact of modernity, but electricity in particular that has reshaped our world. He expresses this with marvelous lucidity:

“In the electric world, we attend to matters that have nothing to do with us. In the electric world, we are distracted by notifications and emails and all kinds of other things, when we should be paying attention to what is closest. Baudrillard proposed that the simulacrum can become so totalising that we lose contact even with the distinction between the truth and the falsehood. McLuhan allows for the same possibility but also allows for a remedy that precedes the distortion. He allows for the restoration of scale and proportion. This is not a simple thing to achieve, given that we are immersed in a highly technologized world. Remove one distortion of scale and another is likely to throw us out of whack in a different way.

But perhaps there is at least one way to consider, all the better to correct, the distorting effect of electricity. It is by no means to explain everything that it does to us or to suggest that noticing this is a cure-all. But if there were one place to start to get to the distinction between truth and falsehood that Baudrillard believes we have lost, it would be, to my mind, in what I’m about to say. When you turn on a light, especially a bright light, notice how sharp the contrasts are between where the light touches and where it doesn’t. In the daytime, powered by the sign, light is more vignetted, and the gradations between light and dark even in shadows are subtler. This is not what artificial light does. Flash photography reveals this clearly: reality is flattened out. Shadows are sharp, clear, and distinct. This is a helpful analogy for what electricity does in general. It throws some things out into consciousness but at the expense of the subtle variations and disclosures that shadows and shades provide. In the sharp light of the electric screen, for instance, I see what is on my flat screen with great vividness. But everything else in my world is, in a significant sense, gone. It can sometimes practically disappear from my mind.”

Reality is flattened out.

Distortion of scale.

The world is replaced by the screen.

Even the people that you interact with in the screen may not even be real (Re: dead internet theory). In this sense, on the internet, we commune with dead things– haunted shells that put on the flesh of creativity.

This is the simulacrum of reality- the Matrix (I’m sorry, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for the reference.) The screen absorbs your captive attention, forbidding any distraction. It gives an unholy, jealous injunction: look at me, and no other. Never before in history has such a simulacrum been enabled by technology- more particularly, by the Pandora’s Box of “artificial intelligence.” That is not to say, however, that never before in history has it been in the interest of the State to numb the populace. An educated, free thinking, awake populace is antithetical to the State, and therefore must be dealt with if the State is to prosper. It is much better for the State if the populace is distracted. Consider Caesar’s Circus Maximus. It is my opinion that the spectacle was not only to garner support for Caesar, but to distract. After all, it’s hard to be a free thinker when you are entirely concerned with the spectacle. Or to look at the warnings of fiction, Brave New World expounds on this very topic throughout the whole book. You cannot think differently, or think at all, if you are placid, if you take your Netflix-soma, if you are over-sexualized. In fine: if you are distracted. Furthermore:

“How do we [the State] manipulate them?… How do we control them? Well, we divide everybody up into Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, black and white, male and female, etc, etc. If we divide them, we can keep them distracted. And if we can keep them distracted, we can keep them demoralized, and if we can keep them demoralized, then we can keep them dehumanized. And then they will never ever stand up and look around and realize who the real enemy is. My enemy is not Russia, my enemy is not China. My enemy is not Ukraine, or anything else. My enemy is the person who is trying to kill me on a daily basis by taking money out of my pocket, taking food off my table, taking away my choices for how to educate my children, for how I choose to live my life on my property in my house that I own…. Putin’s not my enemy. Putin is not coming in my house and trying to take meat out of my freezer. The United States government is. My governor is. The legislature of my state is. Those are my enemies, and I can do something about that. I can pull my children out of school and homeschool them. I can choose not to participate in the “Democratic process” because I know that it is rigged and that it is all theater and I can choose to turn away from that and not participate…. It’s a joke to me, and the way that they control us is through fear and insecurity.”

Donovan Riley, The Warrior Priest Podcast Ep. 155

A distracted populace is in the best interest of the State.

That’s probably the most vicious aspect of consumerism- that it is, in some distracting sense, antithetical to freedom.

Consider:

Consumerism does not encourage discipline- in fact, it discourages it heavily.

Consumerism does not encourage free-thinking, but rather says, “do what everyone else is doing.”

Consumerism does not encourage putting to death the passions, but rather says, “let them run in the public square.”

What does consumerism encourage?

Distraction.

Distraction is also antithetical to discipline. And if discipline equals freedom, as Jocko Willink frequently points out, or if freedom requires free-thinking, how can consumerism co-exist with freedom? To put a finer point on it, then: consumerism encourages participation in the simulacrum of reality, the simulacrum of distraction. It detracts from a deeper understanding of Reality. That is the telos of discipline and free-thinking and freedom and passion-slaughter: to engage with Reality, or put simply, to live. Discipline for its own sake is foolish.

Put the brakes on though: what is capital-R Reality?

I am a Christian, so I consider the ultimate Reality to be Jesus. “I am the Truth,” He says. Scripture also says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20). That’s not a flippant saying. That is an ontological saying. This means that now, as a Christian, TRUTH resides where you once stood. You died at baptism. Only Jesus lives now. This is a mystical, but nonetheless a true, reality. Therefore, to engage with Reality means to pursue the Way to which we have been called: the redeemed, danger-fraught, peaceful-warrior Way of the righteous. This requires the aforementioned qualities: discipline, freedom, and the Fruits of the Spirit. These are given by the Lord of Lords, and ought to be stewarded accordingly. We are shepherded along this mystic Way by the Creator of all things. This Shepherding excludes the possibility of any other shepherd.

The beauty of this reality is that we are, as Christians, inherently free. This is a freedom that no one can take away. We recognize that the “I,” so to speak, is the spirit. Paul speaks this way in Romans 7. Notice who Paul is (“the good I want to do”) and notice the enemy (the flesh.) We know that no man can touch the soul. As the Reformer says,

“And take they our house,

Goods, fame, child, or spouse,

Though these all be gone,

The vict’ry has been won,

The Kingdom ours remaineth.”

Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress is Our God

That is a freedom that comes from within due to a radical change in the spirit. This freedom gives us the ability to engage more directly in Reality.

Even if you do not believe Christianity to be true, however- does our culture reconnect you with the living creation? Does consumerism make you a better thinker or a more disciplined person? Does our society encourage rebellion from the Zeitgeist? I think, whether you are a Christian or not, we can answer these questions with a profound “No.” Even if we define Reality as the world in general, we’re still disconnected. When it comes to my original thesis, the bottom line is this: if you are living in a simulacrum of reality, how are you going to deal with the actual reality of tyranny? This is in the best interest of the State. The State wants to take the place of Shepherd.

Cowardice, too, is in the State’s best interest.

Frank Herbert writes eloquently in his novel God Emperor of Dune,

“Most civilization is based on cowardice. It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You even teach the children to breathe slowly. You tame.”

Is that not what the State teaches through its seeming philanthropy, through its vile shepherding? When we began to look to the State to solve social ills, we became subjugated cowards. The State told us,

“Education? We’ll handle that for you.”

“The poor? We’ll take care of it.”

This is, as I’ve written before, The Crisis of Self-Governance: that in every area where we do not self-govern, we will be governed.

As Herbert points out, though, most civilization is based on cowardice. This is the genius of Paul Kingsnorth’s lecture,

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/against-christian-civilisation-ea2?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

Just as Christian people are inherently, to some extent, uncivilized, free people are uncivilized, in the sense that they are not tame. I don’t mean that Christians or free people ought to be cavemen. I mean that both Christians and free people go against the flow of society. They refuse to become a house-pet, and remain a wild thing from the foggy reaches. Christians were burned for this. We serve Jesus first and all other kings second. That immediately makes us enemies of literally any state. Jesus was not a tame man. He was like Aslan: dangerous, but so, so good.

“Why do you call me good? There is no one good but God.”

It is a radical thing to say that we have one King, and one King only. We don’t serve Jesus-Caesar, or Jesus-President, or Jesus-Party. Just Jesus. No qualification, no asterisk. That is a dangerous thing to say.

But I digress.

To bring things full circle, then, cowardice often pushes the coward into the simulacrum, because the simulacrum is safe. Just as Herbert says: the State teaches its subjects to deny the existence of chaos. There is, actually, a sort of vile, disconnected imitation of beauty in dictatorship, merely because it is so orderly. Everything is neat. It has the beauty of the machine- the beauty that comes out of order, even if it is an orderly killing. It’s like the Empire from Star Wars: infinite stormtroopers lined up in row after row. An emphasis on quantity over quality. Pure destructive power.

Sounds a bit like… dare I say… the State?

It is fundamentally brave to face Reality. To take ownership. To exercise discipline. To follow the path of righteousness. In doing so, you stand up against the legions which would shout you down, which would taint your soul. You stand up against the seeming indomitable quantity that arrays itself against God, and thereby against you. God has some powerful enemies, and in proclaiming the Name, we make those enemies our enemies. This is an insurrectionist thing to do in a civilized, State-ordered society. But we do this knowing that the battle is won. Death has no dominion. So we rebel against anti-truth with confidence.

And here I am, fomenting insurrection. I can check that off my to-do list.

Furthermore: it is in the interest of the State to create, or foster, a nation of destroyers. That is to say: it is easier to destroy than it is to create. It is easier to critique than it is to write. That is, after all, what Satan does. He destroys, which is to take the easy route. He destroys and does not create. This is one of the fundamental differences between God and Satan: even when God destroys, He renews. Satan never renews.

What we find in America is a nation of destroyers. Read comments on Instagram or Youtube if you want proof. For every person who is actually creative, there are ten people who will critique that creativity. If we are so busy destroying others and tearing others down, we will be docile. Ultimately, we find a nation of people who take the easy route. This is in the interest of the State because they will make it easy to be ruled.

Isn’t that really what ChatGPT encourages: destruction, rather than creation? ChatGPT makes it so easy, so simple, to outsource creativity to the machine. Creativity is hard- and it’s not hard to find examples of people taking the machine-enabled easy route.

To be different, to be punks, to be rebels means ultimately to do the hard thing. This is indeed the last true rebellion. Be creative, because to be creative is, in some microcosmic sense, to be Christlike. Being creative is, after all, participating in Reality.

It is also in the interest of the State to govern a nation of narcissists. What do narcissists do? They only care about themselves. If you have ever run into a narcissist, you know that a narcissist will avoid responsibility. They will find a scapegoat, and as my grandfather once said, they will find it faster than two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Now think about the political polarization in America.

Orange Man Bad.

Let’s Go Brandon.

All of our problems are cause by literally Hitler, or conversely, all of our problems will be solved by Trump as the literal Messiah.

Isn’t that avoiding responsibility in the extreme? Rather than dealing with the problems directly in front of us, or in our community, or in our church, or with the nearest person, we turn to the State to fix the problem.

How many previous presidents have talked about fixing homelessness?

Yeah, I’ll let you do the math.

When you look at it from this perspective, it’s easy to see why social media is so detrimental. Social media actually encourages every single one of the things I point out in this article: not least of which is narcissism. It’s no wonder that DARPA creating (or at least having a hand in) Facebook makes so much sense.

A narcissistic society will pawn off responsibility to the State, which is just another way of saying that it will give its power to the State. Considered this way, responsibility is power. Let’s take it back.

Finally: it is in the interest of the State to take your honor. It wants to break you. It wants to convince you that you are not worthy of honor. I think it is certainly evident that our society is not one that encourages honor. “Honor is the gift that a man gives himself,” says Rob Roy. It is difficult to give yourself the gift of honor if you are living in the simulacrum. Conversely, living dishonorably beckons you into the simulacrum because that is where it is most comfortable. That is where you can most easily avoid consequences for your dishonorable actions. Because at root, our dishonor rankles within us. We know it is not right. Therefore, what better way to escape than the numbing of the mind?

Ultimately, honorable people stand up against tyranny.

Therefore, tyrants cannot abide honor.

To fight tyranny, we must live in Reality. Create, don’t destroy. Take ownership. Become disciplined. Turn your back on the State and on the simulacrum. Give yourself the hard-earned gift of honor.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin…. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Reality is uncomfortable. It’s ugly. It’s where the redeemed outlaws are. But it is good.

Let’s engage with the living, and stop communing with the dead.

Let the dead bury their dead.