For me, to be pure of heart is to source one's motivation in life from something deep within, that goes beyond mere self-interest. It's that innate sense of right or wrong, or ethics, that I write about in the article and which is an extension of nature. I would also say that nature is the form taken by the Whole, so it could be seen as being in harmony with the overall purpose of life. Corruption creeps in when someone is unaware of their innate belonging (perhaps because of what they have been taught in our society) and therefore is trapped in a personal subjectivity, self-interest, or when they lose faith in the voice within and instead follow exterior human voices out to manipulate them.
By the way, I understand your point about not coining new words, and I would say that there are never really any new ideas, just rediscovered old ideas, but as for not coining new phrases... I am not sure what a writer would have to offer in such circumstances!
Thanks for articulating everything that I believe as well. Though I am not so certain that the uncorrupted will inevitably find each other and surmount the dominant forces. I believe that transformation may be necessary to happen first. And the transformation that I am talking about is to unblock whatever is blocking most all of us from effortlessly unleashing torrents of love. This in particular is what I am working on as though my life depends on it, which in actuality it does.
My heart is open, but it needs to open much more. I give unconditional love to others through actions and words, but it is not enough, something is blocking me from giving love that anyone can feel and that I can feel. To open the valve such that one is radiating love effortlessly. Can you imagine that this is what all of humanity must do? The transformation has to be that big.
This is just my opinion but is something that I must do in order to save my own life.
I get the feeling that most people are caught up in the game of earning a living and then pampering themselves with entertainment. What little love they have is bottled up or reserved for their nearest and dearest. Sure, they vote if they have to or watch the TV news, but they're more concerned with upgrading their house or their truck or their vacation bucket list than anything else.
Actually, it comes down to crying, crying a torrent. I stopped crying at age 7 when I learned that boys don't cry. By not crying I protect myself from deep sadness. I cannot cry, but I must. Any suggestions?
It’s nice to read a piece full of hope. I flicker between hope and despair regularly, but it’s the colder, more rational side of me that holds on to the hope, weirdly.
I grew up in Northern Ireland and witnessed a microcosm of this kind of dynamic play out as the region slowly lurched towards some kind of peace... and the desperate, thinly veiled actions of the group that had held power became more and more obvious as they struggled to keep a hold of that power. More of the fire and brimstone free presbyterian preachers out on the streets screaming hateful nonsense through megaphones, the armed mafioso on both sides getting more itchy - the biggest bomb of the 30 years came right at the end....
So these overt actions, like openly screaming for censorship, demonising large swathes of the population, turning all the powers of the state inwards on its own population (as opposed to just against the ‘unworthy others’) are all, to me, acts of obvious desperation. The power structure knows we’re coming for it, and it’s snarling back. The more that fucker snarls, the closer we are. Some brave souls got too close too early - Julian Assange for example. Look at what that power structure has done to him. But how does it pick everyone off when its thousands, millions and billions at a time?
As the ever eloquent Cornel West often says, we just have to break the back our fear. Easily said..... but let’s get it done before the police complete their metamorphosis into the army, shall we? :)
This is a great formulation, that is, the "uncorrupted" vs the corrupted. It is very useful. It's so simple I wonder why I have not seen something similar before. Before I got to the end I kept thinking Oliver Anthony is the uncorrupted! Right, if people can unite around being uncorrupted, then left/right, religious/non religious, conservative/liberal, etc. cease to be forces for division.
Unfortunately, for now anyway, the divisions are butting up against each other more than ever whilst the rest of us look on and shake our heads. I'm not sure any of these factions wish to contemplate the middle path, coming together around common goals etc. They are hellbent on destroying the other. It's their way or the highway.
Those divisions are promoted, exacerbated and sometimes manufactured out of whole cloth by the ruling class. Oliver Anthony's meteoric rise to national prominence (at least musically) is evidence that many many people are tired of that. As the goal of the Liberal establishment is to sow division, he is a threat to them. (Corrupted) Conservatives are trying to claim him as there own. But Anthony has pointed out that the Rich Men North of Richmond are not just Democrats, he is criticizing the GOP too. They have now started to disown him (via people like Stew Peters) by calling Anthony a CIA plant. In my view Peters is the CIA media plant ( I have thought so long before Oliver Anthony). Anthony's message threatens both wings of the duopoly. His songs and their popularity demonstrate that there is a great hunger among people for uncorrupted values and human solidarity.
I agree that we are being influenced by internet personalities and that the divisions are deliberately exacerbated to keep us distracted and fighting each other instead of working towards common goals.
I think the answer is to maintain central admin for infrastructure, defense and so on but everything else including healthcare and education should be decentralized as much as possible each according to their own values. Central dominance on these matters has to end. It's already gone too far.
The Oliver Anthony thing? I've heard people say that he lives on 90 acres of land and that he's an alcoholic depressive. He turned down big money offers (and control) but is doing better than most with his tour.
The fact that his song gets as big as it has on social media probably means that it was allowed to do so... for a reason.
Doesn't this remind anyone of Marxist and Bolshevik strategies that get the working class underdogs to reach for their pitchforks again?
I mean... we've already seen messy versions of that over the last three years (Antifa/BLM) but a more structured worker's revolt in America? Maybe the controllers are trying to spread a little bit of that revolutionary spirit from France that we've been seeing there.
If you get my drift, it's all about creating victim consciousness. It honestly doesn't make much difference which side you're on. All that matters is that some people somewhere are disgruntled and that you as a master manipulator can pull on those threads and get the 10% or 20% to carry out your coup.
Once you've overturned the current regime, you reward and punish everyone involved and get back to business as usual. Those at the top of the heap, the ones pulling the strings, the man behind the curtain, didn't have to change a damned thing about their lives. They figured out how to play this game a long long time ago.
OA has been very upfront with where he stands. If you desire to understand him, listen to his own words - both lyrically and his public statements. Both "sides" are trying to control what he is saying for their own ends.
It has been discussed for over ten years that the anonymous structure of Antifa was ripe for infiltration by state actors. BLM is funded by the Ford Foundation ALONE to over $100 million bucks, and they are funded by other oligarch and Big Business interests. These along with the billionaire-funded "trans movement" are what is known as "Commodified Rebellions", they are pseudo rebellions meant to dissipate and/or distract or divert rebellious energy to various kinds of political dead ends. They have nothing to do with a "workers revolt." In fact the vast majority of people who participate in these astro-turf movements are middle class white people who are straight.
Yes I agree that those movements have nothing to do with an authentic "workers revolt" but neither did the original ones. They just employ a latent energy that is always there to tap into and feed off of it.
We're dealing with an institutionalized parasitic class that understands the resource equation better than the hoi poloi. All farmers have to cull the herd at some point, but these pesky humans can't seem to get the message. ;)
Still don't understand why the guy didn't just put the money down on a small house instead of buying 92 acres and living in a camper with a tarp. Unless, of course, he knows perfectly well that he's going to be building a nice big farm house on that land where he can rock on the porch singing the blues and sipping a fine whiskey. Not a bad life in the end.
I’ve been trying to advance these ideas since the beginning of the reign of error back in 2016. I used to antagonize Right wingers, but I found increasingly that we have much in common. A tiny bit of common interest can make other disagreement more fruitful. Solidarity is the key, and it takes courage, imagination, and perseverance, but it’s the only way.
I'm encouraged by your thoughts here, Paul, although also wary of this corrupted-uncorrupted divide - this is tempting, of course, but it amounts to accepting that some are 'pure' and others are fallen. I rather suspect we are *all* corrupted but to different degrees and in different contexts. Purity is an ideal to aspire to rather than a state of being.
However, what kindles my hope in this piece is your acute awareness of the broad coalition that we must forge if we are to defend diverse visions of the good life, and the recognition of the problems that our well-cultivated divisions bring to this project. This is the problem I have been working on in philosophy (even before I joined Substack), although it sometimes feels like guarding the back door while all the action is in front.
I hope you're right. I've seen this division particularly evidenced by the verbal sparring since Covid and then the Ukraine war were fomented to distract us - namely on the issue of Climate Change. Opponents on both side of this question (take Roger Hallam and Patrick Heningsen as polar examples) actually both agree that the core problem lies with elites and a rebalancing of power and wealth. But to persuade them to agree with the other over *anything* is impossible in the circumstances, at least in social media forums.
I suppose I am really referring to people's outlook on the world, and in particular to everything that is happening in the 2020s, rather than to their individual character and behaviour in every aspect of life. It is the identified currents of thoughts which I regard as uncorrupted, even though the individuals manifesting them can never, as human beings, be perfect! I do say that many of the corrupted are only so in a provisional sense, so I am not writing them off entirely! I agree with you, Chris, that purity is an ideal to aspire to, rather than an achievable state, but perhaps my interpretation differs from yours in that I would see those who aspire to that purity as being pure of heart. That's as close as a human being can get to purity, after all.
As long as the 0.1% print the money and land is bought and paid for, the Babylonian black magic trick will keep all the uncorrupted stuck within their tiny squares, running on the hamster wheel...
The Oliver phenomenon also gave me hope - if only he knew about permaculture he could inspire his followers to create a tiny village for themselves... Perhaps with blue paint on the rooftops the DEW death ray won't fry them. 😉
Political values? Yuck. Nature is always true, humans seldom are. The minute you identify with something outside of nature, you lose your freedom. The soul is nothing human, so take no refuge in believing or identifying with anything humanity offers. All that is non-human, just is. Anything touched by humanity becomes corrupted.
Thank you! My question is what is it, exactly, that is ‘pure’ and what is it that ‘corrupts’ this purity, exactly, in this model? Thanks! My recurring personal challenge is to try to answer these big questions without coining any new words, phrases or ideas but to simply use those already in common currency. Is this possible do you think? Thanks again!
They - the corrupted - achieve their goals via your political representative. Your local politician is the weak link which we can all exploit if we choose to. Who’d ‘ve thunk?
For me, to be pure of heart is to source one's motivation in life from something deep within, that goes beyond mere self-interest. It's that innate sense of right or wrong, or ethics, that I write about in the article and which is an extension of nature. I would also say that nature is the form taken by the Whole, so it could be seen as being in harmony with the overall purpose of life. Corruption creeps in when someone is unaware of their innate belonging (perhaps because of what they have been taught in our society) and therefore is trapped in a personal subjectivity, self-interest, or when they lose faith in the voice within and instead follow exterior human voices out to manipulate them.
By the way, I understand your point about not coining new words, and I would say that there are never really any new ideas, just rediscovered old ideas, but as for not coining new phrases... I am not sure what a writer would have to offer in such circumstances!
Thanks for articulating everything that I believe as well. Though I am not so certain that the uncorrupted will inevitably find each other and surmount the dominant forces. I believe that transformation may be necessary to happen first. And the transformation that I am talking about is to unblock whatever is blocking most all of us from effortlessly unleashing torrents of love. This in particular is what I am working on as though my life depends on it, which in actuality it does.
My heart is open, but it needs to open much more. I give unconditional love to others through actions and words, but it is not enough, something is blocking me from giving love that anyone can feel and that I can feel. To open the valve such that one is radiating love effortlessly. Can you imagine that this is what all of humanity must do? The transformation has to be that big.
This is just my opinion but is something that I must do in order to save my own life.
I get the feeling that most people are caught up in the game of earning a living and then pampering themselves with entertainment. What little love they have is bottled up or reserved for their nearest and dearest. Sure, they vote if they have to or watch the TV news, but they're more concerned with upgrading their house or their truck or their vacation bucket list than anything else.
Actually, it comes down to crying, crying a torrent. I stopped crying at age 7 when I learned that boys don't cry. By not crying I protect myself from deep sadness. I cannot cry, but I must. Any suggestions?
It’s nice to read a piece full of hope. I flicker between hope and despair regularly, but it’s the colder, more rational side of me that holds on to the hope, weirdly.
I grew up in Northern Ireland and witnessed a microcosm of this kind of dynamic play out as the region slowly lurched towards some kind of peace... and the desperate, thinly veiled actions of the group that had held power became more and more obvious as they struggled to keep a hold of that power. More of the fire and brimstone free presbyterian preachers out on the streets screaming hateful nonsense through megaphones, the armed mafioso on both sides getting more itchy - the biggest bomb of the 30 years came right at the end....
So these overt actions, like openly screaming for censorship, demonising large swathes of the population, turning all the powers of the state inwards on its own population (as opposed to just against the ‘unworthy others’) are all, to me, acts of obvious desperation. The power structure knows we’re coming for it, and it’s snarling back. The more that fucker snarls, the closer we are. Some brave souls got too close too early - Julian Assange for example. Look at what that power structure has done to him. But how does it pick everyone off when its thousands, millions and billions at a time?
As the ever eloquent Cornel West often says, we just have to break the back our fear. Easily said..... but let’s get it done before the police complete their metamorphosis into the army, shall we? :)
This is a great formulation, that is, the "uncorrupted" vs the corrupted. It is very useful. It's so simple I wonder why I have not seen something similar before. Before I got to the end I kept thinking Oliver Anthony is the uncorrupted! Right, if people can unite around being uncorrupted, then left/right, religious/non religious, conservative/liberal, etc. cease to be forces for division.
Unfortunately, for now anyway, the divisions are butting up against each other more than ever whilst the rest of us look on and shake our heads. I'm not sure any of these factions wish to contemplate the middle path, coming together around common goals etc. They are hellbent on destroying the other. It's their way or the highway.
Those divisions are promoted, exacerbated and sometimes manufactured out of whole cloth by the ruling class. Oliver Anthony's meteoric rise to national prominence (at least musically) is evidence that many many people are tired of that. As the goal of the Liberal establishment is to sow division, he is a threat to them. (Corrupted) Conservatives are trying to claim him as there own. But Anthony has pointed out that the Rich Men North of Richmond are not just Democrats, he is criticizing the GOP too. They have now started to disown him (via people like Stew Peters) by calling Anthony a CIA plant. In my view Peters is the CIA media plant ( I have thought so long before Oliver Anthony). Anthony's message threatens both wings of the duopoly. His songs and their popularity demonstrate that there is a great hunger among people for uncorrupted values and human solidarity.
I agree that we are being influenced by internet personalities and that the divisions are deliberately exacerbated to keep us distracted and fighting each other instead of working towards common goals.
I think the answer is to maintain central admin for infrastructure, defense and so on but everything else including healthcare and education should be decentralized as much as possible each according to their own values. Central dominance on these matters has to end. It's already gone too far.
The Oliver Anthony thing? I've heard people say that he lives on 90 acres of land and that he's an alcoholic depressive. He turned down big money offers (and control) but is doing better than most with his tour.
The fact that his song gets as big as it has on social media probably means that it was allowed to do so... for a reason.
Doesn't this remind anyone of Marxist and Bolshevik strategies that get the working class underdogs to reach for their pitchforks again?
I mean... we've already seen messy versions of that over the last three years (Antifa/BLM) but a more structured worker's revolt in America? Maybe the controllers are trying to spread a little bit of that revolutionary spirit from France that we've been seeing there.
If you get my drift, it's all about creating victim consciousness. It honestly doesn't make much difference which side you're on. All that matters is that some people somewhere are disgruntled and that you as a master manipulator can pull on those threads and get the 10% or 20% to carry out your coup.
Once you've overturned the current regime, you reward and punish everyone involved and get back to business as usual. Those at the top of the heap, the ones pulling the strings, the man behind the curtain, didn't have to change a damned thing about their lives. They figured out how to play this game a long long time ago.
Just saying.
OA has been very upfront with where he stands. If you desire to understand him, listen to his own words - both lyrically and his public statements. Both "sides" are trying to control what he is saying for their own ends.
It has been discussed for over ten years that the anonymous structure of Antifa was ripe for infiltration by state actors. BLM is funded by the Ford Foundation ALONE to over $100 million bucks, and they are funded by other oligarch and Big Business interests. These along with the billionaire-funded "trans movement" are what is known as "Commodified Rebellions", they are pseudo rebellions meant to dissipate and/or distract or divert rebellious energy to various kinds of political dead ends. They have nothing to do with a "workers revolt." In fact the vast majority of people who participate in these astro-turf movements are middle class white people who are straight.
Yes I agree that those movements have nothing to do with an authentic "workers revolt" but neither did the original ones. They just employ a latent energy that is always there to tap into and feed off of it.
We're dealing with an institutionalized parasitic class that understands the resource equation better than the hoi poloi. All farmers have to cull the herd at some point, but these pesky humans can't seem to get the message. ;)
Had fun reading the comments here...
https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/separating-truth-from-fiction-in-oliver-anthonys-ascent/
Still don't understand why the guy didn't just put the money down on a small house instead of buying 92 acres and living in a camper with a tarp. Unless, of course, he knows perfectly well that he's going to be building a nice big farm house on that land where he can rock on the porch singing the blues and sipping a fine whiskey. Not a bad life in the end.
Who's the "farmer"?
Exactly!
I’ve been trying to advance these ideas since the beginning of the reign of error back in 2016. I used to antagonize Right wingers, but I found increasingly that we have much in common. A tiny bit of common interest can make other disagreement more fruitful. Solidarity is the key, and it takes courage, imagination, and perseverance, but it’s the only way.
Thank you for your thoughts.
Reign of Error 😂 i’m stealing that one!
I'm encouraged by your thoughts here, Paul, although also wary of this corrupted-uncorrupted divide - this is tempting, of course, but it amounts to accepting that some are 'pure' and others are fallen. I rather suspect we are *all* corrupted but to different degrees and in different contexts. Purity is an ideal to aspire to rather than a state of being.
However, what kindles my hope in this piece is your acute awareness of the broad coalition that we must forge if we are to defend diverse visions of the good life, and the recognition of the problems that our well-cultivated divisions bring to this project. This is the problem I have been working on in philosophy (even before I joined Substack), although it sometimes feels like guarding the back door while all the action is in front.
While there's life there's hope. 😁
I hope you're right. I've seen this division particularly evidenced by the verbal sparring since Covid and then the Ukraine war were fomented to distract us - namely on the issue of Climate Change. Opponents on both side of this question (take Roger Hallam and Patrick Heningsen as polar examples) actually both agree that the core problem lies with elites and a rebalancing of power and wealth. But to persuade them to agree with the other over *anything* is impossible in the circumstances, at least in social media forums.
While the fires in places such as Maui and Kelowna have been tragic the one upside is all the forms of “mutual aid” these communities are engaging in.
The end of the pandemic and the rise of Oliver Anthony are other hopeful signs.
I believe in a future.
Thanks Paul
I suppose I am really referring to people's outlook on the world, and in particular to everything that is happening in the 2020s, rather than to their individual character and behaviour in every aspect of life. It is the identified currents of thoughts which I regard as uncorrupted, even though the individuals manifesting them can never, as human beings, be perfect! I do say that many of the corrupted are only so in a provisional sense, so I am not writing them off entirely! I agree with you, Chris, that purity is an ideal to aspire to, rather than an achievable state, but perhaps my interpretation differs from yours in that I would see those who aspire to that purity as being pure of heart. That's as close as a human being can get to purity, after all.
I’m a few of those categories. Father, dissident, permaculture practitioner and rapper. I’m with you all the way baby. Here’s my current take in song form https://open.spotify.com/track/1uf9fcR7B4sQn6GtjzkRHw?si=0jU5TgxnTfSvvV6tURUzJQ
As long as the 0.1% print the money and land is bought and paid for, the Babylonian black magic trick will keep all the uncorrupted stuck within their tiny squares, running on the hamster wheel...
The Oliver phenomenon also gave me hope - if only he knew about permaculture he could inspire his followers to create a tiny village for themselves... Perhaps with blue paint on the rooftops the DEW death ray won't fry them. 😉
Political values? Yuck. Nature is always true, humans seldom are. The minute you identify with something outside of nature, you lose your freedom. The soul is nothing human, so take no refuge in believing or identifying with anything humanity offers. All that is non-human, just is. Anything touched by humanity becomes corrupted.
That's pretty harsh! Humankind is, after all, part of nature. The problem is that most people, in this society, are not conscious of this reality.
Thank you! My question is what is it, exactly, that is ‘pure’ and what is it that ‘corrupts’ this purity, exactly, in this model? Thanks! My recurring personal challenge is to try to answer these big questions without coining any new words, phrases or ideas but to simply use those already in common currency. Is this possible do you think? Thanks again!
They - the corrupted - achieve their goals via your political representative. Your local politician is the weak link which we can all exploit if we choose to. Who’d ‘ve thunk?