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Torah and Jewish Idea => Torah and Jewish Idea => Topic started by: Hrvatski Noahid on July 15, 2023, 09:24:56 PM
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Have you not heard of that prophet who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: “I have found God! I have found God!”
As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. “Have you not heard that God is dead?” said one. “Have you not heard that science explains the universe?” said another. “Are you an anti-vaxxer? A faith healer? A creationist?” Thus they shouted and laughed. The prophet sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O Earth – God lives! But how does God live? How did your best efforts not wipe God away? Have you not conquered the earth? Have you not reached the stars? Have you not discovered the building blocks of life? You abandoned God and bowed down to colourful rags, to men, and to intricate theories, crying out ‘Save me! You are my god!’.”
“You held festivals of atonement in Flanders and Dresden, sacred games in Auschwitz and Nanking. Is this how you, self-proclaimed murderers of all murderers, console yourselves after your supposed deicide? Do you not see that you are now perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?”
“Is there any up or down left for you? Male or female? Good or evil? Objective reality? Do you not hear anything yet of the noise of the seekers who have remembered God? Do you not smell the flowers that grow each spring? God lives. God will remain alive. That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed remains available to us. Remember the former things, those of long ago; for I have found God, and there is no other like Him. There has never been a greater discovery; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this discovery he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Here the prophet fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. “I have come too early," he said then; “my time has not come yet. The tremendous realization is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the hearts of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, perspectives require time even after information is acquired, before they can be understood and appreciated. This insight is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet it has been around them since the beginning.”
It has been further related that on that same day the prophet entered places of worship and there sang joyous psalms. Led out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: “what are these buildings now if they are not the Kingdom of Heaven?” (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 7)
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The first student has no master, and must discover everything himself. He researches for 70 years, then writes his wisdom into a book before he dies. The second student reads the book, and in 7 years, he has learned 70 years of research. Then he does his own original research for 63 years and writes a book containing 133 years of research. The third student reads for 13.3 years, then does his own research for 66.7 years, ending up with 200 years. Imagine going further and further. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 10)
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A genius has three abilities, which are actually the union of amateur and scientist: 1. to know the state of the art, what is known and what is not known. 2. To be able to think "out of the box". 3. To be disciplined enough to concentrate on the tedium of a formal investigation of his wondrous speculations. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 11)
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Few teachers understand that the study of history can never be to learn historical dates and events by heart and recite them by rote; that what matters is not whether the child knows exactly when this battle or that was fought, when a general was born, or even when a monarch came into the crown of his forefathers. No, by the living God, this is very unimportant. To ‘learn’ history means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 12)
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The times in which our generation lives are not ordinary times. We dwell on the interface between two worlds — a world as it was and a world as it is meant to be. Everything is in place, all the infrastructure to bind the world together as one, the technology by which all of humanity can share deep wisdom, all that is needed so that the secret of oneness can be grasped within the human mind. The stage is set. All that’s left is for us to open our eyes. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 13)
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There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark, and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing and chatting…
… you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and there are a few of us, escaped victims or eyewitnesses of the things which happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming on the wireless, yelling at you in newspapers and in public meetings, theatres and cinemas. Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for a minute…
There have been screamers at all times—prophets, preachers, teachers and cranks— cursing the obtuseness of their contemporaries, and the situation-pattern remained very much the same. There are always the screamers screaming from the thicket and the people who pass by on the road… as long as there are people on the road and victims in the thicket, divided by dream barriers, this will remain a phoney civilisation. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 14)
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the halluci-nation
the human beings
the people
see
the spiritual in the natural
through sense and feeling
every thing is related
all the things of earth
and in the sky
have spirit
everything is sacred
confronted by
the a-lie-nation
the subjects and
the citizens
see
the material religions
through trauma and numb
nothing is related
all the things of the earth
and in the sky
have energy to be exploited
even themselves
mining their spirits into souls
sold
into nothing is sacred
not even their self
the a-lie-nation….alienation
(Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 15)
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Voyager One, the NASA probe got to outer space today
With a platter made of solid gold for aliens to play
It makes its trip for all of us
A record of mankind's song
Ultimately superfluous
Because we don't get along
(Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 16)
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We're coming down to the ground
We'll hear the birds sing in the trees
And the land will be looked after
We’ll send the seeds out in the breeze
(Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 17)
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Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 20)
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While music, dance, and language are widely known to be found in every human society, the optimistic belief in a better future is perhaps one of the original human universals. From the immigrants who landed on Ellis Island in search of their American Dream to the five-year economic plans of the Soviet Union, from the blue-collar workers maintaining our infrastructure to the cavepeople who decorated rock walls thousands of years ago, the quest to make tomorrow better than today has been one of the hidden catalysts for every achievement ever made by human beings.
Our capacity to dream, to imagine, to plan, and to improve has elevated us to a position of almost total authority over the rest of the animal kingdom. This capacity has built palaces, castles, skyscrapers, and monuments. It has invented the steam engine, the lightbulb, and the internet. It has yielded science fiction, Walt Disney World, coconut cream pie, and prosecco. Perhaps more than anything else, however, our faculty of imagination and our sense of optimism have given us the concept of a utopia, an ideal society where hardship, poverty, and injustice no longer exist.
Although the word for utopia was only invented by Sir Thomas More in the sixteenth century, the search for a perfect society has been a central theme in Western thought for almost two thousand years. Indeed, ever since the characters in Plato’s Republic first explored the nature of justice and just societies through dialectical exercises, a great deal of Western intellectual effort has been devoted to envisioning optimal systems and governance structures.
Many of these efforts have been theoretical or philosophical exercises, such as Plato’s Republic, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, or Aldous Huxley’s innovative and subversive Island. However, other utopian projects have taken place in the real world and are responsible, at least in part, for some of the most pivotal movements in world history. The Bolshevik Revolution, for example, ousted the ruling class of tzarist Russia and implemented radical new ideas about economics and governance, a series of decisions which backfired magnificently, killed millions of people, hobbled Russia for decades, and had worldwide ripple effects throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Over one hundred years before the Bolsheviks took control of Russia, the American Revolution was also catalyzed by grievances regarding economics and governance. Much like the Bolsheviks, the philosopher-leaders of the American Revolution overturned monarchial rulers and established their own systems. Unlike the Bolsheviks, however, the Americans’radical and original ideas, which they outlined in a collection of founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence, birthed one of the planet’s most powerful nations, one of its largest economies, and some of the most influential political ideas in the Western world. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 21)
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Indeed, the history books and statistical records clearly demonstrate that the American attempt at utopia has been decidedly more successful than the Soviet efforts. Despite its many well-documented faults, in just a few centuries the “land of the free” and “home of the brave” has become a world leader in culture, science, technology, politics, and philosophy, as well as a leading military superpower and a primary food exporter. Immigrants from around the world flock to its borders, some even making dangerous and illegal crossings over the Rio Grande for a chance at a better life.
On the other hand, the Soviet economy was an overmanaged disaster with thousands of government offices vainly attempting to control all aspects of production and distribution, leaving many Soviet citizens without the ability to buy a car, a television set, or even many food items considered staples in the West. Furthermore, whereas the waves of illegal immigrants crossing the American border have triggered heated discussions about a border wall to keep people out, the “antifascist” Berlin Wall implemented by the Soviets was not constructed for defensive purposes, but to keep East Germans from fleeing communist rule. Dissenters and dangerous thinkers who could not escape to the West were imprisoned in gulags and worked to death in the frozen wastelands of Siberia.
An honest review of human history reveals that most utopian projects have not led to better societies, but to economic disaster, mass starvation, and even genocide. From Le Corbusier’s questionable attempt at an “efficient” architectural commune in France to the violently mechanistic attempt at agricultural utopia in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, it seems to be the case that individuals or nations with grand visions consistently end up in shambles. In the case of the Soviet Union, this can be both metaphorically and physically seen in the remnants of the Berlin Wall, torn down by East Germans in 1989 following decades of silent discontent. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 22)
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Meanwhile, the American Dream has outlasted and outperformed every instantiation of communism that has ever been attempted. Whereas the ruins of the Berlin Wall serve as a stark reminder of the costs of compliance, the records of American achievement can be found in the etched walls of Virginia’s coal mines, have been immortalized in movies like Saving Private Ryan, and even include a star-spangled banner on the surface of the Moon.
Yet even the American attempt at utopia now seems to be failing, and inexplicably so. Despite its material wealth and accomplished history, the number of Americans dying from opioid overdoses each year is now equivalent to the number of soldiers who died in the entire Vietnam War, and the suicide rate of American youth between the ages of ten and twenty-four has nearly doubled over the last decade. Fourteen percent of American youth report experiencing serious psychological distress within the last month, and about one in ten have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. These themes are reflected in the statistics of other Western nations, with assisted suicide one of the leading causes of death in Canada and suicide devices now becoming available in European countries.
Beyond the psychological misery experienced by large portions of North American society, the average person faces significant economic challenges that impact their quality of life. With the amount of wealth controlled by the Western middle classes quickly eroding and large corporations now investing in residential housing, home ownership is becoming a distant dream. Indeed, it is estimated that over half of young adults still live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression, and that the majority of those who do live on their own find their living situation hard to afford. Moreover, the savings of the average household are exceedingly slim, with fifty-six percent of families reporting that they would be unable to find one thousand dollars to cover an emergency.
Even people with careers that provide for their material needs find themselves facing unprecedented levels of unhappiness, with eighty percent of employees reporting feeling disengaged at their workplace. The top regrets of dying Westerners are centered around themes of working too hard, sacrificing one’s individuality, and neglecting important relationships, indicating high levels of life dissatisfaction. Burnout in many professions, particularly nursing and teaching, has become widespread, leading to a shortage of critical workers and ongoing systemic pressures on education and healthcare systems.
In addition to the psychological and economic troubles faced by the West, the political atmosphere in Western nations is strained nearly to the point of breaking. Ongoing conversations about race, gender, and sexuality have driven rifts between once-amicable political factions in many countries, with influencers on both sides making use of genocidal rhetoric and politicians refusing to collaborate or reconcile. The divide has become so deep, and the rhetoric so violent, that both the United States of America and Canada now qualify for inclusion on genocide watchlists. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 23)
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Perhaps most distressingly, the West seems to have lost its capacity to even engage with the kinds of bold ideas necessary for utopian visions, leaving its nations mired in short-term thinking and bitter disputes over policy issues. Consider, for example, that in the late 1940s, an American schoolteacher named John Reber drafted an ambitious plan to build two dams in the San Francisco Bay area, supporting new land development, the creation of freshwater lakes, and new transit routes. Despite the vast changes this would have made to the geography of San Francisco, Reber’s plan was taken so seriously that a scale model was built by the government to prototype his suggestions.
In contrast to San Francisco’s enthusiastic engagement with the Reber Plan, the Walt Disney resort in Florida is an underappreciated casualty of the West’s inability to pursue grand projects. Although it may be one of the world’s most popular vacation destinations, Walt Disney originally intended the “Florida Project” to be a twenty-thousand-person Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow complete with underground tunnels for cars, a circular design, and a wide range of urban planning innovations meant to serve as a testing ground for future cities. Unfortunately, following Disney’s unexpected death in 1966, the company abandoned his bold vision for the project and instead built another theme park, a much safer option that delivered predictable shareholder value.
In response to the West’s loss of interest in visionary ideas, which seems to have occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, one of the most successful investors in Silicon Valley has diagnosed Western society with a case of indefinite optimism – an optimistic belief in a better future without any specific plan to get there. In business contexts, this manifests as a vague commitment to shareholder value and a myopic concern with certain dollar figures, which often remain disconnected from more practical matters of innovation, market leadership, organizational integrity, or company mission. The ill-fated attempts of brands like Bud Light to capitalize on cultural movements are a symptom of this lack of vision, as marketers with a sense of definite optimism would have a unique story of their own to tell instead of a variation of someone else’s narrative.
Even science fiction, a Western literary genre known for depicting expansive and fantastical visions of futuristic societies, has lost the optimistic and imaginative themes that were common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whereas readers of decades past might have entertained themselves with H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, they are now treated to dystopian and apocalyptic themes through written works like The Hunger Games and The Handmaid’s Tale, or movies like The Matrix, Avengers: Endgame, and even the charming Wall-E. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 24)
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The simultaneous collapse of North America’s mental health, economic prospects, political discourse, appetite for innovation, and even sense of optimism has raised serious concerns among experts, many of whom now refer to the situation as a crisis with no clear cause or solution. While researchers have found some contributing factors to the current state of Western civilization, such as the dramatic rise in smartphone use among modern teenagers or the over-systematization of childcare and education, the problems seem to be too interrelated and complex to solve.
Attempts have been made to understand the issue, with Canadian psychologist John Vervaeke referring to the West’s current predicament as a meaning crisis attributable to the misinformation, underdevelopment, and cynicism which has become endemic in Western nations. Philosopher Terry Patten differs slightly by describing the situation as a meta-crisis, alluding to his view that the psychological, spiritual, and economic catastrophes are too inter-related to allow for the identification of root causes. Regardless of the terminology, both theorists are gravely worried about the sudden loss of meaning, significance, and continuity experienced by Western individuals in the post-internet era, which seems to be connected to technology and childcare, but in ways that cannot be fully explained.
While these diagnoses offer valuable insights into the nature of the West’s current crisis, the reality is that these confusing collapses should be attributed to unacknowledged problems within Western thought that have been outstanding for millennia. Indeed, an honest review of the Western intellectual project reveals a mind-bending level of fraudulence, corruption, conjecture, and ignorance that has left the average person deeply confused about fundamental matters of human nature, human history, and the laws of the universe. Over the past couple of centuries in particular, this confusion has cascaded into philosophies, religions, scientific pronouncements, expert consensuses, textbooks, government policies, and even artistic expressions that are hostile to human life, ultimately resulting in the meta-crisis now troubling Western researchers.
In much the same way that Marie Antoinette’s out-of-touch perspectives cost her a perfectly good head during the French Revolution, without an accurate understanding of human nature or the laws of the universe that govern social living, any nation or civilization will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own ignorance. This is what happened to the Soviet regime, as frustrated citizens began tearing down the Berlin Wall while bureaucrats micromanaged pointlessly destructive whaling programs. In a similar sense, this is also what happened to the Catholic Church following the celestial discoveries of Bruno and Galileo, and to the countless failed attempts at liberal communes that have been made in recent history. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 24-25)
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Throughout her address to West Point’s graduating class of 1974, the Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand emphasized the importance of philosophy to daily living, pointing out that the things that people believe to be true will dictate what they think should be done, and of course will influence how they behave. The beliefs people hold also dictate the kinds of public policies they will support, the kinds of politicians they vote for, and the kinds of corporations they do business with. One modern-day example of the hidden influence of philosophy is the metaphysical belief in climate change, which has influenced Western nations to spend tremendous amounts of time, money, and effort on things like electric vehicles, solar power, wind turbines, and other fossil fuel alternatives.
A more historical example of philosophy’s tremendous influence on Western society is the Declaration of Independence, which makes three metaphysical claims in its preamble that can be seen to form the justification for the entire American project. Indeed, the “self-evident” and “inalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Declaration have served as not only a constant point of reference for American leadership throughout the generations, but as guiding principles for the living of American life and the evolution of American society. Even if different groups within the country’s body politic differ on how best to facilitate these rights, to question any of them is tantamount to sacrilege and heresy in American discourse.
Unfortunately for Western civilization, although the metaphysical claims made by the Declaration of Independence are decidedly more realistic than the Soviet perspective, bubbling beneath the surface of Western thought, and therefore beneath America’s founding documents, are a series of misconceptions, delusions, theories, and outright lies that, as can be plainly seen by the current series of catastrophes, are threatening the integrity of the entire utopian endeavor.
Beyond incorrect metaphysical claims made about human life and the universe, the West’s epistemology, or way of knowing, is also corrupted. While governments and institutions within Western nations claim to be operating according to the best scientific knowledge available, the reality is that much of what is “known” about the universe is a matter of scientific conjecture or expert consensus, not provable fact, and that a great deal of our “knowledge” is fraudulent, misrepresented, or based on information taken out of context. This means that for any Westerner to gain a proper appreciation of the world they live in, it becomes necessary to not only question the West’s metaphysical claims themselves, but how that body of knowledge was acquired in the first place.
Thus, to meaningfully address the crisis faced by Western civilization, it becomes necessary to critically review the entirety of the Western intellectual project, the metaphysical assumptions it has made, how it arrived at those assumptions, and what amendments must be made to rectify the worsening catastrophe. However, with reference to scholarship in many disciplines, including thermodynamics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, media ecology, expertise studies, history, anthropology, and religious studies, it is possible to not only identify the root causes of the current crisis, but also the forms of the solutions that could salvage deeply troubled Western nations and ensure a genuinely utopian future. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 25-26)
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Although this kind of radical juxtaposition of subjects might seem unorthodox or overambitious, the synthesis of the West’s vast stores of accumulated knowledge is both a long-awaited development and necessary for continued advancement of the intellectual tradition. Following the fragmentation of Western scholastic effort into highly focused disciplines over the last several centuries, and the countless discoveries that have been made since, many luminaries have called for researchers to balance specialization with reconciliation by spending more time finding relationships and agreements between different fields of inquiry.
Among these voices are Cardinal John Henry Newman, the founder of University College Dublin, who emphasized the importance of cultivating learned minds that could systematize and reconcile new information with what is already known. They also include feminist scholar Camille Paglia, highly critical of the exclusion of biology from the field of women’s studies, and lawyer Brian Muraresku, whose investigation of psychedelic mushroom use in the ancient Near East involved a blend of archaeology, history, and chemistry that has since become known as archaeochemistry. Over the past couple of decades, other chimeric disciplines have emerged that blur lines between disciplines in much the same way as Muraresku’s efforts, among them the field of biophysics, popularized by Erwin Schrödinger, and biologist Edward O. Wilson’s controversial sociobiology.
Aside from founding new fields of inquiry in biology, Edward O. Wilson enjoys credit for the reintroduction of consilience into the modern academic lexicon. This word, with etymological connotations of parts jumping together or unifying, was invented by British polymath William Whewell in the 1800s to refer to circumstances where multiple lines of independent inquiry all converge on the same answer. The concept was revisited to great acclaim by Wilson in his 1998 work Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which introduced many readers to the value and potential of interdisciplinary inquiry for the first time.
Although it is not a word or concept most people are familiar with, the truth is that much of the physical sciences operates, at least implicitly, on consilience. For example, the Darwinian observations which gave rise to evolutionary theory are compatible with Gregor Mendel’s work on gene transmission, which itself is compatible with what is known about chemistry and basic biological processes, which in turn seems compatible with many laws of physics. Yet, while the sciences all enjoy a great deal of mutual compatibility, Wilson observes in his work that the relationship between the sciences and humanities is almost nonexistent. He further observes that many of the world’s most pressing problems, such as ecological, all require deep collaboration between the arts and sciences – and therefore the unification of all human knowledge.
While such a lofty goal may seem like something to be accomplished by luminaries and geniuses in the far-flung future, it is proving to be an urgent and necessary project given the fumbling, stumbling, and crumbling that has become endemic in Western nations. Thankfully, while a comprehensive revision of the West’s accumulated knowledge reveals that some inconvenient and painful corrections will have to be made, it also demonstrates that the information, tools, technologies, processes, and wisdom required to facilitate utopia have already been discovered. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 27-28)
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Although the roots of Western civilization stretch back to Athens and Jerusalem, modern Western society sits on the branch that begins with the Council of Nicaea. This convention of early Christian leaders was held to decide, among many other controversies, on the divine nature of Jesus and the date of Easter.
The Council of Nicaea was one of the key events that set into motion the Holy Roman Empire, which dominated European culture and intellectual activity until the Renaissance over one thousand years later. Because of its position as the seat of European religious belief, Christianity’s influence on the West has been profound, from inspiring artistic works like Dante Aligheri’s Inferno and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, spurring the construction of architectural marvels like La Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, and perhaps most importantly, giving the Western world its metaphysical and ethical foundations.
The importance of the Christian worldview to the West cannot be understated. Aside from its many vectors of cultural and spiritual influence, Christian ethics can be found littered throughout Western jurisprudence, including laws named after the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the criminalization of homosexuality as an abomination, as well as implicit value judgements surrounding crime, guilt, and punishment. Even developments within the Church, such as the Protestant Reformation, spawned contributions like legal positivism, or the view of legal systems as a means, not an end.
Unfortunately for the West, and as many Christians are now discovering thanks to the internet, Christianity is a violently fraudulent and incoherent mess that has bamboozled and terrified generations of well-meaning people. Ever since Bruno and Galileo challenged the Christian cosmology, the world’s largest religion has been forced to make a series of compromises with European science, and particularly since the advent of Darwin’s theories, has been under outright assault by atheist philosophers like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
The rise of science, combined with the ongoing failure of Christian apologists to justify the existence of evil and suffering, the confusing nature of their Trinitarian deity, and other metaphysical and theological quandaries have caused one in four Christians to begin doubting their faith. Christian affiliation in the younger generations most subjected to these influences has plummeted, with the last few decades seeing the rise of a demographic who define themselves as spiritual, but not religious. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 29)
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Despite these growing insecurities, also marked by the rise of alternative church aesthetics, secretly agnostic pastors, and an openly atheist Canadian pastor, the Christian populations of many nations such as Poland, Canada, and the United States still represent one of the largest political and social influences in the West. The partial collapse of Christian faith over the last two decades has activated some of the evangelical and activist wings of the faith, and street preachers have begun appearing on the corners of many cities as Christian rapper Bryson Gray conquers the Billboard charts with a grassroots Christian fanbase.
While a casual observer might think that Christianity has at least several decades left before it eventually crumbles, the reality is that unlike many other world religions, it explicitly claims to be the continuation of another religion – Judaism. Indeed, whereas the Christian faith claims may be a matter of belief from any other perspective, whether Christianity’s doctrines are consilient with the so-called “Tanach” is something that can be objectively tested.
Most unfortunately for the many Christians who have spent their lives, and even life savings, in pursuit of Biblical knowledge, an honest review of the evidence reveals that the doctrines and texts crafted by the early Church fathers intentionally savaged, butchered, and corrupted Jewish scriptures. Moreover, they instantiated one of the first major corruptions found in modern Western thought by injecting Greek philosophy into Jewish spirituality, a desperate metaphysical fusion that has manifested in tremendous spiritual confusion amongst Christian laypeople and clergy alike.
One of the most famous verses in the entire Bible is the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the Gospel of John:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Originally popularized decades ago by the unorthodox ministry of Rollen Stewart, a sports fan with a rainbow wig and a sign simply reading “John 3:16”, this verse elegantly sums up the most salient aspects of Christian faith and doctrine.
Although many of them may not realize the true source of their faith, Christians believe in the Jewish concept of the Messiah, an extraordinary Jewish man who will bring about an era of enlightenment and world peace. Specifically, they believe Jesus of Nazareth to be that Messiah – who, as said in John 3:16, they think is uniquely special as the “son of God”.
Christians relate to Jesus as their personal savior, as the central doctrine of their religion states that the only way to Heaven is to believe in the efficacy of the blood sacrifice allegedly performed by Jesus, who the Gospels depict as dying by crucifixion for the atonement of humanity’s sins. Failure to understand, believe in, and be thankful for this sacrifice, in the Christian worldview, means one will certainly be burning forever in the underworld. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 29-30)
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Although a full refutation of Christianity can and does take many volumes, there are several obvious issues with these doctrines when the Jewish perspective on their own religious scriptures is concerned. By affirming the Tanakh as divine scripture by incorporating it into their own Bible, Christians have left themselves defenseless against the many contradictions to their doctrines found in their so-called Tanach. For example, John 3:16 specifically claims that Jesus of Nazareth is God’s “only begotten son”, which conflicts with verses from the Tanakh that precede Christianity:
“This is what the LORD says: Israel is my firstborn son…” (Exodus 4:22)
“The LORD has said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.” (Psalms 2:7)
Moving through the rest of John 3:16, there is the issue of God allegedly allowing this “only” son, Jesus of Nazareth, to become a human sacrifice to atone for the otherwise-unforgivable sins of humanity. Even a cursory reading of the Jewish scriptures will reveal that this is no route to salvation within the Jewish faith:
“Fathers shall not be put to death because of sons, nor shall sons be put to death because of fathers; each man shall be put to death for his own transgression.” (Deuteronomy 24:16)
“The soul that sins, it shall die; a son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and a father shall not bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” (Ezekiel 18:20)
As can be clearly seen, any religion that claims to be based on Jewish scriptures cannot also claim to be based on an act of human sacrifice, as Jewish principles hold that every human being is responsible for their own sins and cannot intercede on behalf of another. Indeed, this fundamental aspect of the Christian faith simply is unjustifiable given the religion’s self-stated roots in Jewish doctrine and prophecy. Moreover, even sacrifices of animals are even seen as only being conditionally acceptable in the Jewish faith, as reiterated throughout the Tanakh:
“Of what use are your many sacrifices to Me? says the Lord. I am sated with the burnt-offerings of rams and the fat of fattened cattle; and the blood of bulls and sheep and hegoats I do not want.” (Isaiah 1:11)
“For I desire loving-kindness, and not sacrifices...” (Hosea 6:6)
(Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 31)
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Another aspect of Christian doctrine that is deeply offensive to Judaism, aside from their claim that the God of Israel accepts human sacrifice for purposes of atonement, is the Trinity. Essentially, Christianity has claimed since about the second century that the Creator-being depicted in the Tanakh is one essence with three distinct personas. On its face, this is absurd from a Jewish perspective, as the central prayer of Judaism and the first words that religious Jews learn as children are an affirmation of the Jewish deity’s singular oneness, not trinitarian nature:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One.” (Deuteronomy 6:4)
However, as Christianity continued to spiral into a personality cult and began to elevate their alleged Messiah to divine status, the early leaders of the Church were forced to figure out how to make sense of Jesus’ alleged divinity given God’s status as a unitive in Jewish scriptures. Their subdivision of God’s oneness into a trinitarian structure was their best philosophical justification for Jesus’ divinity, successfully causing Christians to look past several verses that contradict their trinitarian doctrine:
“God is not a man that He should lie, nor is He a mortal that He should relent.” (Numbers 23:19)
“The Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire; you heard the sound of the words, but saw no image, just a voice.” (Deuteronomy 4:12)
“I will not execute the kindling of My anger, I will not return to destroy Ephraim, for I am God and not a man…” (Hosea 11:9)
Thus, the entire idea that Jesus is somehow divine, or even part of a trinitarian entity that places him on equal footing with the Creator-being described in the Tanakh, is outrageously blasphemous within Judaism and is a further indication that Christianity is not a legitimate religion, but rather a splinter cult that has violently appropriated Jewish texts. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 31-32)
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Astoundingly, the superstar street preacher worshipped by four billion people worldwide would not have even qualified as a Jewish prophet, much less the Messiah or the “son of God”. Not only are Jews expected to follow the exact stipulations of their religious laws, from the major observances like the Sabbath to the little things like hand-washing, both of which Jesus is depicted as ignoring, but a stipulation of someone being the Messiah is that he will catalyze a worldwide acceptance of Jewish law, not corrupt it for two thousand years:
“Moshiach will be a man who possesses extraordinary qualities. He will be proficient in both the written and oral Torah traditions. He will incessantly campaign for Torah observance among Jews, and observance of the seven universal Noahide laws by non-Jews. He will be scrupulously observant, and encourage the highest standards from others.”
Many Christians often cite the miracles depicted in the Gospels as proof of Jesus’ divinity and spiritual authority, but Jewish scriptures stipulate that even miracle-workers and diviners who encourage the transgression of the religious laws are to be ignored and punished:
“Everything I command you that you shall be careful to do it. You shall neither add to it, nor subtract from it. If there will arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of a dream, and he gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder of which he spoke to you happens, [and he] says, ‘Let us go after other gods which you have not known, and let us worship them,’ you shall not heed the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of a dream; for the Lord, your God, is testing you, to know whether you really love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul… And that prophet, or that dreamer of a dream shall be put to death; because he spoke falsehood…” (Deuteronomy 13:1-4, 6)
Furthermore, what these verses are specifically referring to is the very stringent prohibition on worshipping anything aside from the Creator-being worshipped by Israel, which Christians attempt to circumvent by saying Jesus really is that being, just in a different form or persona. However, when confronted with parts of the Gospels where Jesus is depicted as praying to “God the Father”, such as the scenes in Gethsemane, it becomes clear that Jesus is a separate entity of some kind that the Christians are ascribing worship to. This is further betrayed by the many prayers and songs addressed to Jesus specifically, and not to who Christians would refer to as “God the Father”.
This, within the framework of Judaism, is idolatry, and is considered one of the worst sins a human being can commit. This is especially the case given that Jesus is documented as routinely breaking Jewish law, disrespecting the Pharisees and their teachings, and encouraging others to follow his example. He cannot be a Jewish prophet, he could not have been the Messiah, he is not divine by the standards of Judaism, and anyone who believes that Christianity is logically and honestly based on the Jewish Tanakh has been swindled by the most sophisticated cult the world has ever seen. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 32-33)
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Beyond the glaring inconsistencies between Christian doctrines and the “Tanach” that Christians claim their religion is derived from, there are several errors, misquotes, and even outright falsifications made by the authors of the New Testament that seem to have been deployed or knowingly perpetuated to fool people into accepting Jesus as their savior. Indeed, the first chapter of the Gospels includes such an error, with the author of Matthew explicitly citing Jewish prophecies in support of the claim that Jesus’ virgin birth was foretold in the seventh chapter of Isaiah:
“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel…’” (Matthew 1:22-23)
Of course, this is not the case – a proper reading of the relevant prophetic work in its entirety reveals that not only is this prophecy contemporaneous to Isaiah, even naming King Ahaz in the seventh chapter, but that the original verse was corrupted through a mistranslation!
About two centuries before Jesus’ lifetime, when Jewish scriptures were translated into noncanonical Greek, the word for “young woman” in Isaiah 7:14, which is “almah”, became the Greek “parthenos”, which means virgin. This mistranslation seems to have cascaded into the Book of Matthew, whose author was working from the Greek translations – not the original text. This mistranslation then became canonized into the Christian Bible as the Church formalized its documents, an error that was not even admitted until recent years. Thus, even though this verse is a mainstay of many Christmas worship services to this day, the prophecy for Jesus’ alleged virgin birth simply does not exist and never has:
“the young woman is with child, and she shall bear a son, and she shall call...” (translation of Hebrew)
ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσουσι τὸ…
Similar issues can be found in the writings of Paul the Apostle, whose letters to the early churches constitute much of the New Testament, the beginnings of official Christian doctrine, and the religious groundwork for doctrines like Original Sin and human sacrifice. Among other falsehoods, Paul erroneously claims in Romans 9:25 that the kind of relationship the Jewish scriptures depict God as having with Israel has since been extended to all nations following Jesus’ alleged sacrifice. Paul justifies this theological position by making selective references to verses in the Book of Hosea and other prophetic writings, ignoring the reconciliatory verses and presenting only selections excoriating the Jewish people to give the impression that their covenant had ended.
Such underhanded practices have, unfortunately, become commonplace in Christian thinking, as even laypeople will unthinkingly and unwittingly quote pieces of Jewish scriptures that they believe support their doctrines:
“But Zion said, ‘The Lord has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.’” (Isaiah 41:14)
Myopic readings of this verse would seem to imply that the Jewish people have been abandoned due to their transgressions and sins, thus opening the door for Christianity’s “new covenant” made through Jesus’ death on the cross. However, to take this verse in isolation of the surrounding context is an act of intellectual thuggery, as can be clearly seen by the verse directly following it:
“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me.” (Isaiah 41:15)
Christian theology, evangelism, apologetics, and philosophy are full of such sleights of hand, many of which have flummoxed one in six Dutch clergy members into silent agnosticism. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 33-34)
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While it is understandable that people born and raised in Christian environments could be bamboozled into believing past the contradictions within their own holy text, the unfortunate nonsensicality of the West’s metaphysical foundations have caused tremendous damage since Nicaea’s bishops decided to endorse the Trinity.
While the disdain that Friedrich Nietzsche had for Christianity is difficult for many Westerners to fully appreciate, the German philosopher who swung a hammer to the West’s religious foundations correctly perceived that the philosophies encoded in Christian doctrines were hostile to human flourishing. One of the most harmful ideas within Christianity is the concept of Original Sin, which characterizes every human being as irredeemably wicked, sinful, and unlovable by the Creator – this is hardly the foundation for a positive self-image, nor does it provide the optimistic foundation for a prosperous and thriving culture.
Yet, Christians firmly believe that because the Biblical Adam and Eve transgressed a commandment to eat from a forbidden tree, not only did evil, death, and suffering come to Earth as a punishment, but that every human born after that was an heir to this fallen legacy. According to the Church, ever since Eve bit into the forbidden fruit, every human child was destined to born into a fallen state and require redemption through acceptance of Jesus’ alleged atonement sacrifice.
Moving beyond cultural relativism to issues of truth and fiction, what has been taught to generations of Christian children – by their own parents, and their parents before them – is a poison pill that sabotages every possible notion of human nobility. Under Christian metaphysics, which ruled the West for centuries and is still influential today, every newborn baby, face purple before their first breath, is a wretched creature that can only be accepted by its Creator through human sacrifice.
When one appreciates the folkloric maxim that one’s treatment of others is related to one’s own selfimage, suddenly the Crusades, the witch hunts, the pogroms against Jews, the Canadian residential schools, and the generations of spiritually traumatized ex-Christians make much more sense. Indeed, despite its stated intentions of being a loving and kind religion, the metaphysical beliefs that Christianity enforces on its followers facilitates unbalanced thinking and paradoxical differences between speech and action, which usually manifests in “wounded healers” and perverted priests.
Without the doctrine of original sin, however, Christianity would be forced to retreat to the Biblical positions found in the original Tanakh, where each person is responsible for their own transgressions and has the potential for being a righteous man or woman. There would be no need for a fervent belief in the saving power of Jesus’ alleged sacrifice, and no need for Jesus to be a divine, sinless, superhuman figure. In essence, without original sin, there would be no Christianity. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 34-35)
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Beyond the anti-human ideas that are core to Christianity, people who adopt it as a belief system are often left flummoxed by paradoxes they notice within Christian doctrine or become dismayed at the tragedies of life that occur despite their faith. There are many things that one might hesitate to ask their local clergy member, especially if their family goes to the same church and there is a possibility word might get around about their doubts. For example, how could a perfectly good and loving God allow people to die by the millions in the Holocaust, Holodomor, and other catastrophic events? Why do babies get leukemia? Why did my son die in a car crash?
Although some erudite answers to tragedies exist within Christian thought, the truth is that Christians ultimately must blame the existence of evil on Adam and Eve’s transgression with the forbidden fruit, absolving their trinity of any direct responsibility for the evil that exists in the world. Yet, this still begs the question of why these things are allowed to happen in the first place, which is a dead end for all but the most inventive Christians.
The issue of evil, and other philosophical quandaries like it, leave Christianity’s metaphysical foundations on shaky and inconsistent ground. The split-minded doctrines help explain, in part, why Christian organizations continually fail to live up to their stated principles, including the longstanding existence of pedophile rings within the Catholic church and other deep compromises of moral integrity. Moreover, upon receiving a serious challenge from Darwinian theory, the West’s loss of its justification for evil catalyzed a shift towards nihilism in large demographics of society, perhaps foreboding the eventual rise in suicide now being experienced. As Nietzsche correctly intuited, even though Christianity is a counterproductive and harmful religion, the existential constraints on humanity’s powers and freedoms implied by an omnipotent Creator turned out to be one of the only things between Europe and mass slaughter.
Another popular criticism of Christianity, made popular by Karl Marx, is that it is the “opiate of the masses”, an allusion to the pacifying and stupefying effects of its doctrines. Indeed, by redirecting a believer’s overall locus of control from the believer to their false savior, and by perpetrating an intentional and cunning series of obfuscations, misrepresentations, lies, and threats of eternal damnation, Christianity has managed to terrify and confuse Western countries for hundreds of years, largely based on the threat of eternal punishment for noncompliance and insufficient faith.
For many Christians, even some clergy members, being raised from birth to misinterpret plagiarized and corrupted Jewish scriptures suggests that their predicament is an honest mistake. However, reviewing the history of the early Church reveals that Christian leaders intentionally pulled Jewish scriptures out of context and warped them to suit their needs. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 36)
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Even more brazenly, the three sections of the Jewish Bible were rearranged to better suit the Christian salvation narrative, in addition to many Jewish prophecies being falsely attributed to Jesus and words like Torah being stripped from the Psalms and replaced with law. The result is a veritable wall of “proof” and sophisticated argumentation that the average layperson has almost no hope of deciphering, much less refuting.
For the clergy members responsible for propagating these falsehoods, many of them are willing conspirators, at least to some degree. If asked the right questions, they will admit that something is a “mystery”, or that they have heard this issue before but have no answer. Many ministers in Canada and the Netherlands will privately admit to being agnostic, despite leading worship services each week and exhorting their congregants to believe. Many Christians, if shown the evidence of their religion’s falsehood, will experience tremendous cognitive dissonance and ignore the facts, perhaps inspiring Marx’s opium metaphor. However, hundreds of Christians per day find their way to resources and evidence that they have been caught up in the world’s biggest lie, indicating that this cult’s days are numbered. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 37)
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For about one thousand years after the core aspects of Christian doctrine were settled in Nicaea, they enjoyed a unique position as one of the primary cross-cultural influences on European artistic, legal, and philosophical efforts. However, following the schism between the Eastern and Western branches of the Church, and especially after the efforts of early Renaissance thinkers cast the credibility of the Roman Catholic Church into serious question, the political, social, and intellectual atmosphere of Europe changed quite dramatically.
Although the causes and consequences of the Renaissance are many, one of the overarching trends of this period was the consolidation of power away from the Church and feudal lords into the hands of monarchies, which later became modern nation-states. Additionally, the discovery of North America and trade routes to the Orient triggered incredible competition between these European powers for territory, wealth, military supremacy, control of the high seas, and other endeavors that required tremendous amounts of natural resources.
Whereas the ruling classes of the Middle Ages seemed content with, and perhaps technologically constrained to levying taxes on farmers, conscripting young men for the occasional crusade, and building a castle or cathedral every so often, the grand visions of post-Renaissance leaders began to require unprecedented amounts of control over not only the natural environment, but human behaviour as well. This led to the development of systems, institutions, and approaches that prioritized standardization, predictability, and compliance, a set of values that were taken to extremes following the Industrial Revolution at great cost to human health and dignity.
Indeed, while the intellectual sophistication and material abundance afforded by the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution have had many positive impacts on the West’s quality of life, the sobering reality is that the kinds of assumptions and simplifications made in the name of bureaucratic efficiency are also responsible for many of the economic and psychological troubles currently faced by Western nations. However, because these deleterious colonial-industrial forces have been at work for centuries, it is difficult to perceive and appreciate their presence in Western life, particularly given the kinds of hyper-specialized research being performed by most academics today.
One of the earliest examples of the hidden costs of “progress” involves the early misfortunes encountered by state forestry experts, who learned a series of hard lessons about forest ecology that have since become popular in books like The Hidden Life of Trees. Indeed, while modern forestry practices are deeply connected to ecological and sustainable practices, the primary lens through which post-Renaissance bureaucrats viewed forests was an economic one. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 38)
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References to trees and forests in encyclopaedic literature of the time focused on uses for trees and the public utility of forest related products, not on biological or ecological attributes we might associate with forests today.
The European obsession with the economic value of forests was so myopic and single-minded that early surveyors and forest managers became solely concerned with the volume of wood available within a given plot of land – apparently the only relevant variable to the state officials responsible for managing natural resources. Armed with their single variable and an unsophisticated knowledge of forest ecology, forest managers would clear-cut entire areas, clear away the underbrush, and replace them with orderly rows of Norway Spruce or Scotch Pine to “ensure” predictable supplies of high quality timber. Such efforts, of course, ended in disaster.
What early forest managers and state bureaucrats failed to consider was that a forest ecosystem is an extraordinarily complex biosphere which does not necessarily optimize for high timber yields. Aside from large trees, there are saplings and underbrush, decaying matter, extensive mycelium networks, and a host of forest creatures that all contribute to the vitality of the forest and its abundance of hardwood. By clearing everything but the pine trees away, early forest managers created an ecosystem that quickly depleted soil nutrients and sabotaged the entire effort within a couple of tree generations. This reality check, of course, led to more sophisticated methods, a genuine curiosity about the dynamics of forest biospheres, and, paradoxically for the single-variable bureaucrats, higher and more predictable timber yields.
The destructive short-sightedness betrayed by early European attempts at forestry is typical of modern Western nation-states, nonprofits, and corporations. By focusing on a single variable, or small set of variables, bureaucrats conveniently or unintentionally neglect the many complex interdependencies that exist between the stakeholders in their plan – often to the eventual detriment of that plan. Thus, a factory manager fixated on production output might not realize that breaks would improve productivity, or in the case of many Western nations, state officials obsessed with maintaining certain kinds of economic growth might legislate everyone into exhaustion and poverty.
These kinds of thin simplifications, as they were named by anthropologist James C. Scott, tend to have catastrophic implications for both the environment and the people tasked with warping reality around unrealistic instructions from managers. Particularly in the competitive, militaristic, and hierarchical environment of post-Renaissance Europe, the lack of communication between workers and bureaucrats deprived leaders of an accurate sense of how realistic and effective their plans were, leading to the kinds of catastrophic “let them eat cake” miscalculations that led some monarchs on an express track to the guillotine. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 38-39)
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Similar dynamics are at play in almost every modern corporation, with disconnected executives setting strategies at luxurious retreats while their blue-collar employees struggle with outdated company policies and counterproductive customer service protocols. The leaders of modern Western nations, particularly in North America, have become equally as disconnected from their spheres of influence, as can be seen by the unprecedented levels of dissatisfaction, protest, and civil disobedience that are rocking many countries in response to policies driven by “climate science”, “psychology”, and “epidemiological models”.
Not only does the Western tendency to relate to reality through reports and statistics insulate leaders from the limitations and hidden costs of their plans, but it also facilitates the reduction of human beings to mere statistics and means to an end. Indeed, the assumptions and simplifications about individual and collective human nature, which form the hidden metaphysical substructure of Western governance, led to the development of certain kinds of societies and institutions that are ultimately proving to be unsustainable. However, the surface-level thinking now endemic in Western political discourse tends towards discussions of incremental policy reform, rather than the kinds of systemic reengineering required to salvage troubled nations.
The underlying philosophy driving Western “progress” is known properly as high modernism and can be characterized by a belief in the perfectibility of nature, in the benefits of progress, and in the arrogant Eurocentric assumption that systematized knowledge is superior to “folklore” and common sense. The many faults of this philosophical paradigm can be seen in the Soviet whaling programs that decimated marine life, the pandemic lockdown measures which devastated Western economies, or the early attempts at “scientific” forestry that ruined countless biospheres.
An early signal of the popularity of high modernism and the progress it promises is Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, a pleasantly named depiction of a rather authoritarian society that purports to engender a higher quality of life. Other manifestations of this trajectory became evident in the elevation of certain European dialects to the status of official national languages, something that had not even been attempted until the Risorgimento of Italy and the Grand Siècle of France. These kinds of foundational initiatives, which contributed to the erasure of many diverse local dialects, later escalated to projects like mandatory state education, city planning, public health campaigns, and even entire planned economies in the case of the Soviet Union.
Underlying these efforts is a kind of bureaucratic faith in one’s own ability to enact the desired changes sustainably and successfully, as well as a certain level of narcissistic obsession that prioritizes the ideal future over the real. Although the claims made by high modernism are rarely questioned or even verbalized within Western circles, this philosophy constitutes a key pillar of modern Western thought and constitutes a key pillar of definite optimism and modern liberalism. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 40)
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However, despite the many achievements made by industrialized societies, the multiple complex crises currently faced by Western nations indicate that this so-called “progress” may have natural limitations that are dangerous to overstep.
Several centuries after the rebirth of scientific thought in Europe, investigations into the natural world made by scientists and researchers began to yield incredible developments such as the steam engine, first invented in 1712, and the power loom, brought to market in 1786. Within decades of their release, these machines revolutionized entire industries, particularly textiles manufacturing, and shifted the means of production from individual craftworkers to centralized factories.
After the Industrial Revolution, as it came to be known, Western nations experienced dramatic changes in both physical and social organization which facilitated even greater bureaucratic control over human life. The urban population exploded throughout the nineteenth century, with the peoples of North America and Europe trading their traditional agrarian lives for crowded, disease-ridden, and crime-plagued cities. Having so many people in one area necessitated the development of quasi-military branches of the government – police forces – who were generally responsible for enforcing a dizzying array of laws, bylaws, ordinances, zoning requirements, and other regulations while stemming the tide of violent crime.
With the plow traded for the machine, workers who would have enjoyed a laborious yet autonomous day on their family farm suddenly found themselves subjected to rigorous supervision from managers and punch clocks intent on getting every penny out of each resource. This thin simplification, which reduces everything that happens in and because of a business down to a single dollar value, has made – and continues to make – most modern working conditions miserable to the point of being psychologically unbearable, a fact that can be seen in empirical measurements of workplace satisfaction as well as popular works that condemn corporate life such as Dilbert and Fight Club.
The high modernist drive to standardize and optimize, combined with the self-induced pressures of competition and economic survival, are perhaps most to blame for the current level of psychological misery in Western societies. In much the same way that early forest managers sabotaged their own efforts by clearing away much-needed underbrush, the architects of Western civilization made a series of choices throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that depleted their ecology by making life barely worth living.
Put simply, high modernists wanted to grow their economy, so they built factories. They needed lots of people in one place to work in the factories, so they built cities. They found that cities were crowded and difficult to manage, so they instantiated police forces, bylaws, and all sorts of governance models to keep things together. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 40-41)
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All these things required taxes, which required higher productivity from workers, which required more planning from corporate bureaucrats. Combined with the kind of competition found in Western capitalism, which emphasizes price and resource efficiency, the result is an over-systematized and overworked population lumped together in cities where nobody can agree on what will make them happy. Yet, because humanity is believed to be making “progress” because it invents new things, this race to the bottom, as it has been characterized by some business leaders, shows no signs of slowing down.
In contrast to the West’s present offering, one viable alternative to the industrialized, centralized, and socialized economy now “enjoyed” by modern Western societies would be a distributed agricultural economy. Characterized by the founding fathers of the United States as the ideal model for American life, such an orientation would ensure that each household is in control of its own food supply, would offer sufficient open space to raise healthy and active children, and would avoid many of the tragedy of the commons scenarios now endemic to modern city living.
For example, whereas gardening is considered a luxury activity by many modern workers, whose long hours and intercity commutes rob them of the time they would otherwise need to tend to their natural environment, an agricultural society would have no need for the pork industry, no need for the poultry and egg industries, no need for much of the produce industry, and therefore a reduced need for the transportation infrastructure that supports those industries and the sub-industries that support the maintenance of trucks, planes, highways, and supermarkets.
The high modernist desire for progress, the single-variable mindset that focused exclusively on profitability and efficiency for centuries, and the delayed effects of the societal costs are one of the roots of the crises identified by Vervaeke, Patten, and other researchers. However, as believers and participants in high modernist systems, and arguably some of the greatest beneficiaries of its bounties, most career academics are unwilling or unable to properly identify the philosophical rot underneath the false notions of progress espoused by Western nations. Indeed, the prospect of rolling back the clock two centuries to rethink the industrial economy is simply not feasible for populations of people now scrambling to stay focused at work and make ends meet at home.
Although the Western world has since developed a dim awareness of industrialization’s unintended impacts, the momentum of the industrial machine, combined with the limited perspectives offered by state education and mass media, prevent most people from ever seeing past their current predicament to better potential futures. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 41-42)
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Instead, the high modernist delusion that more science, more planning, and more optimizations will somehow wrench utopia from the jaws of destruction keeps Western citizens dutifully focused on trying to “fix” systems that just can’t work.
While the nineteenth century saw the centralization of goods production into factories and other manufacturing centers, the twentieth century witnessed a consolidation of information processing and distribution into the mass media. This was a significant change from pre-industrial agrarian settings, far removed from newspaper distribution channels, where the stories, customs, beliefs, and teachings unique to specific regions, called folklore, was the dominant source of information.
Indeed, with most of the Western population located in cities by the end of the nineteenth century, the hectic pace of city living, along with the printing press and radio, replaced flows of diverse folkloric information with monologues facilitated by editors, journalists, and politicians. Over the course of generations, traditional knowledge like home remedies, family recipes, and even ancestral memories faded away, replaced by “popular culture” and endless streams of news, further standardizing populations already subjected to bylaws, policing, and state education.
The news and entertainment broadcast daily to the masses, directed largely by personal aesthetic judgements, vested interests, and paranoia on the part of bureaucrats and media moguls, has facilitated the development of a shared social reality that has been evolving to this day. Daily rhythms of approved information, fed to people at breakfast tables, in living rooms, and during highway commutes, gently permeated the modern psyche with things to think about, important topics as decided by producers and editors, and other “useful” information, keeping everyone on the same page and ensuring that dangerously unorthodox opinions are kept to the margins.
Subject to the same high modernist forces and values that have corrupted every other industrial endeavor, the mass media was, and is, biased towards novelty and scandal. Despite its illusion of choice, it offers an anemic entertainment environment motivated by economic concerns and trendy moral lectures rather than artistic excellence, and facilitates the centralization of narrative-building abilities into the hands of well-funded players with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. In many respects, this environment can be considered a kind of consensus reality, maintained by the implicit assumption that if something were “real” or “newsworthy”, then it would merit coverage in the mainstream.
While most Western societies would credit the mass media with the proliferation of information and the raising of national consciousnesses, in truth the mass media have enacted a series of thin simplifications on a societal scale, privileging some narratives while discrediting others and removing most Western populations from direct contact with reality. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 42-43)
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In the present day, the mass media have gone so far as to put themselves forward as arbiters of truth under the guise of “fact-checking”, relieving Westerners of the burden of having to do their own research and come to their own conclusions. Moreover, the comedy offered by mainstream sources has degenerated into thinly disguised therapy, offering audiences weary of conflicting perspectives consolation and affirmation instead of the kinds of provocation which made comedy an enduring part of Western culture.
A terrifying example of the mass media’s ability to create consensus realities can be seen in the consequences of the radio, which afforded the creation of real-time audio broadcasts and allowed for an even greater sense of group unity within cities and countries. By allowing a single speaker to address entire nations at once, this medium arguably facilitated Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, a testament to the hypnotic power of the spoken word amplified to unimaginable proportions. Similar uses of the radio were documented as catalyzing the Rwandan genocide, and even Western media have used genocidal rhetoric to demonize unvaccinated populations, contributing to the current political tensions over that issue.
The radio was later joined by the television, which offered a similar cadence of daily shows, news broadcasts, and other messaging that was carefully curated and highly centralized due to the prohibitive costs of television production. Media behemoths with their roots in the beginnings of communications technology, most famously Walt Disney Corporation, provided not only entertainment for the masses, but propaganda during wartime and a pantheon of pop culture characters for children to learn about instead of their ancestors. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 43-44)
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The rise of advertising, perhaps more accurately phrased as commercial propaganda, introduced the concept of brands to Western life, offering people petty differences to squabble over instead of building community and solidarity against colonial systems. Modern marketers even happily refer to their customer bases as tribes, too ensconced in their high modernist perspective to realize that they have been contributing to the West’s slide back to barbarism. Today, branding is such a consideration in all public communication that political campaigns like Justin Trudeau’s 2015 effort have won advertising awards for their ability to influence voters.
In his afterthoughts to a book on narcissism, American historian Christopher Lasch refers to the modern media environment as a world of flickering images, and credits the West’s focus on style, appearance, and popularity with the rise of narcissism and narcissistic behavior. Similarly, media ecology luminary Marshall McLuhan warned that whereas physical tools are an extension of the human body, electronic technology and mass media are extensions of the mind – and to use them carelessly is to invite schizophrenia upon oneself. Decades later, researchers investigating the links between mental illness and social media use have come to essentially the same conclusions, although without the appreciation for Lasch and McLuhan that a consilience-based perspective enables.
Most unfortunately, the needs of the colonial-industrial system extend beyond raw materials such as timber, ores, and money. Indeed, people are needed to work in the mines, grow the crops, oversee the machines, fire guns at the nation’s enemies, and manage the bureaucratic tasks necessary for nationbuilding. This means that from the perspective of the state and the corporation, the forces of high modernism quickly became directed towards everyday people, who are seen by states as mere resources to be developed, used, and eventually discarded.
The first person to realize these implications of the high modernist worldview seems to have been Frederick the Great of Prussia, who instituted the West’s first mandatory state education system in 1763. Although some critics of the educational system attribute Frederick’s innovation to the Industrial Revolution, this early endeavour predates the popularization of the steam engine by several decades and was primarily driven by the complexifying needs of the Prussian state. The advantages of mandatory education quickly became clear, and such systems were instantiated in the United States and other Western nations in the decades following the Prussian debut.
Much like how the centralization of “news” and other information in the mass media facilitates a kind of collective consciousness or consensus reality, delivering a standardized education to children, with the curriculum set by the state, quickly became a subtle and vital component of the high modernist project. Although every generation has its innovators who urge systems to refocus on the learner’s needs, the growing need for literate and numerate workers, bureaucrats, and soldiers has always taken precedence over the unique needs and abilities of each child. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 45)
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Most unfortunately, and in true high modernist fashion, the future economic utility of the child is often the primary consideration of education-related decisions, with performance measured through standardized testing – a method of assessment that is generally hated and mistrusted not only by students, but by educators too.
If these systems were working even remotely as intended, their continued existence would be defensible. However, an examination of the learning outcomes achieved by Western education, and particularly North American systems, reveal persistent and catastrophic underperformance. For example, it is estimated that half of Americans cannot say with confidence whether the Earth orbits the Sun, or vice versa. Even in universities, studies suggest that most graduates could not be considered skilled – or even proficient – with language or numbers.
Even worse, the much-lauded capacity for critical thinking, long considered a product of the Renaissance and the crown jewel of Western education systems, is rather scarce. Studies conducted over the past several decades have indicated that there were no appreciable gains made in critical thinking between the first and final years of a university education, and that half of students make no progress in critical thinking ability in the first two years of their degree. Distressingly, many educators struggle to define what critical thinking is, let alone teach it, suggesting that Western education has been veering dangerously off-course without the people in charge being aware.
Finally, researchers studying human lifespan development have identified a key capacity called selfauthorship that drives not only academic and workplace success, but parenting ability, capacity to handle ambiguity and complexity, and a host of other important life skills. Not only have they found that Western education systems generally fail to produce this quality in their graduates, but that simple training and development interventions can do so reliably. This suggests that not only are state-employed educators failing to deliver on the fundamentals, but they have also proven themselves unable to capitalize on powerful curricular content that is well within reach. The result is a population where two-thirds of the American population do not have a written plan for their life.
In addition to the fact that schools do not adequately teach important contemporary topics like coding or business the product of these systems are generations of progressively more illiterate and confused graduates, completely dependent on systems they do not understand, complying vigorously in the hopes of being granted a decent standard of living, or even a raise.
These issues are not new or unknown within the education sector – indeed, there have been dire warnings from twentieth-century luminaries like Hannah Arendt, well-known innovators proposing radically different philosophies and systems, and pioneers like Maria Montessori and Laszlo Polgar demonstrating incredible levels of success with unorthodox methods. However, the vested interests of high modernist systems have prevailed for over one hundred years, with each generation of students receiving a more confused and shallow education from the poorly-generated cohort of teachers instructing them – somewhat like a society-wide game of Telephone. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 45-46)
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Aside from their need to develop a pipeline of useful citizens through standardized education projects, bureaucrats and state officials have found a range of other ways to ensure a steady supply of labour for their visions. Most of these, perniciously, are centered around the nebulous issue of “child welfare”, often as defined by the state, usually influenced by the implicit view of human beings as capital. Indeed, the early decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of the helping class, a group of teachers, doctors, child welfare workers, public health officials, and other professional busybodies whose explicit purpose was to disrupt the folklore-driven practices of the populace and instantiate “safer” practices based on “official advice”. Unsurprisingly, it was around this time that traditional female birth workers and health workers such as doulas and midwives were displaced in favor of a more patriarchal and scientific system, backed in full by Western nation-states.
The valiant struggle for the “welfare of the child” also led to some of the greatest ethical catastrophes of the Western world, perhaps most notably the Canadian residential school system – a project that took indigenous children away from their parents to be educated in Western boarding schools overseen by Christian faith leaders. Although there were ulterior motives such as assimilation, the stated goal of the system was to provide indigenous children with the skills they would need to be successful in the colonized Canada they now found themselves in. The implicit assumption, of course, was that being raised in traditional indigenous systems would lead to a substandard quality of life, a notion that has since been debunked by indigenous thinkers and is moreover a consequence of a system that has forcibly colonized large swathes of land that would enable more traditional lifestyles.
Despite its vociferous support of freedom and liberty, the general trend in the Western world has been towards conformity ever since the great unification efforts of European nation-states. The natural world, human cultural diversity, traditional craftworks, and even the dissemination of information have all been subjected to a series of thin simplifications motivated generally by economic growth, with Western populations too distracted by the stressors and glittering prizes of modern living to notice the swindle.
Many generations into the project, most people in North America have come to love their system, one way or another. The institution that poses the greatest threat to family integrity – the school system – is seen as a crowning achievement in both Canadian and American societies. The French government under Macron has even gone so far as to try to ban homeschooling to prevent parents from infecting their children with independent perspectives. In some respects, the slaves have come to love their servitude, and some even go so far as to expect and demand that everyone share their virtual reality.
Of course, this is a mixture of insecurity and paranoia, with a healthy dose of fear of the truth. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 47)
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Perhaps humorously, over the past several decades, decolonized and alternative thinkers operating outside of the Western mainstream have developed many metaphors, words, and phrases to describe the kind of entrancement experienced by the average Westerner. From pejoratives like sheeple or non-player characters to more poetic descriptions of dream-barriers that stifle all sound or being in the Matrix, those who are aware of a reality beyond history textbooks, newspaper columns, and news broadcasts seem to have come to the overwhelming consensus that people ensconced within the Western paradigm are sleeping, dreaming, or even in a semi-psychotic state as a result of their so-called societal programming.
Perhaps the most accurate term to describe the psychological and social outcomes of these thin simplifications is colonization, a word traditionally used by indigenous scholars to describe the process of foreign powers establishing control over distant territories of land, usually for the purposes of economic exploitation. However, this word can also be used to describe the psychological mechanisms of subjugation and control applied to the people living on that land to encourage them to reject traditional ways of life and support high modernist objectives.
Signs of such subjugation include, among other things, a perverted epistemology, or understanding of how knowledge is constructed. Expressed verbally as a need for peer review or expert consensus, as well as the expectation that newsworthy items would naturally appear in mass media circulation, colonized people implicitly admit they lack the skills to navigate information and come to their own conclusions. Another symptom of colonial subjugation is the proactive pursuit of systemic goals at personal expense, perhaps a legacy factor of Christianity’s emphasis on indiscriminate and self-sacrificial love. The fact that both are necessary conditions for contemporary Western life suggests that there are many aspects of post-industrial society that must be revised if this utopian attempt is to be sustainable.
Although most modern Westerners do not fully appreciate this, at some point in history, their ancestors were convinced by a high modernist dreamer that the “new ways” were superior to the “old ways”, a process that is still ongoing in places like the South American Amazon. Often, the affordances of modern technology are presented as evidence that traditional knowledge is inferior or deficient, or, in cases such as King Mongkut’s Siam, scientific methods are used to make predictions about the natural world that are impossible for traditional practitioners to replicate.
Once traditional knowledge structures have been devalued, the targets of colonization can be acculturated to the Western world’s tradition of canonical literature, peer-reviewed science, and expert consensus, whose pronouncements are sometimes enforced as reality through instantiation in law. Thus, the consensus reality of Western thought, including and especially Christianity, spread throughout the Americas and Asia with tactics no more sophisticated than a stage magician’s. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 48)
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The primary issue with the West’s consensus reality and the systems that facilitate it rests in the fact that the average person’s critical thinking and self-authorship capacities are so atrophied that most people are unable to think for themselves – at least not in the highly complex, ever-changing, globalized economy the West now inhabits.
For example, the rate of medical knowledge alone increases at a rate far greater than any professional could hope to keep up with, which means the West relies on networks of ever-more-focused specialist to make sense of reality. The overwhelming complexity of the entire Western intellectual project means that most people are completely reliant on the pronouncements of “experts” for every aspect of their lives, while having little to no ability to judge the reliability of those experts.
This dangerous and precarious situation, reminiscent of the religious structures that modern atheists condemn, has been the root cause of countless scandals over the past several decades. Indeed, experts with vested interests in certain societal outcomes have consistently manipulated the public’s trust by using science, expertise, or even simple authority as an intellectual weapon. Examples include the sugar industry’s selfish and malicious war on fat to distract from their contributions to health outcomes, the United States’ false assertion that Saddam Hussein was poised to unleash weapons of mass destruction, and a great deal of so-called “science” now used by North American governments as justification for their policies.
When a population’s traditional knowledge becomes replaced with colonial metaphysics, colonial epistemology, and popular culture, high modernist schemers find themselves in a position where they can influence people’s values – or at least exert tremendous influence on their behaviors. The many genocidal catastrophes of the last one hundred years are solemn testaments to the importance of intellectually capable and independent populations, yet the high modernist doctrine of efficiency precludes Montessori or Polgar education from consideration.
Another example of the extreme levels of compliant taken as given in colonial societies is the famous Milgram experiment, where Western test subjects consistently administered “fatal” electric shocks to an actor. Sadly, all that was required was an authority figure and the order, along with a scenario that placed the subject in a subordinate role as a test subject. In effect, the sense of the authority, and the unknown costs of noncompliance, even in a trivial situation proved themselves to be more salient drivers of decision-making than the natural human aversion to murder.
Soldiers in World War I, seen as some of the most heroic people in the Western world, were routinely asked to walk through machine gunfire, shrapnel, and into bayonet combat – a feat so unpleasant, the history of that war is marked by spontaneous truces. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 49)
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Modern nation-states, particularly those confronted with television coverage of the realities of war, have not only had to deploy national metanarratives in service of their military goals, but create entire systems of medals and commendations to incentivize destructive human behavior. In particular, the rituals and honours surrounding medal-bearers provides many with enough incentive to risk their lives in service of – they are told – their family, community, and country.
To a lesser degree, every North American can be said to be sacrificing themselves for the system’s benefit in one way or another. As previously discussed, the rates of job dissatisfaction are extremely high, and end-of-life regrets tend to be centered around unexplored possibilities, unfulfilled relationships, and overwork.
Yet, the unwavering high modernist belief that the West is making progress, that all the effort will be worth it, and that the future will somehow be better keeps high modernist systems operational, and the promise of lifetime achievement awards, material wealth, and other life outcomes designated as praiseworthy by the system encourage proactive compliance. The idea that there could be another way to live are dismissed as dreams or fairy-tale thinking by the more “realistic” experts, leaving many otherwise capable and talented people spending their lives sacrificing for systemic benefits.
As a result of the consensus reality that has been constructed over the past several centuries, most Westerners live with some level of cognitive dissonance that they have rationalized away – usually with reference to expert prognostication. For example, the fiat monetary system employed by many countries, and particularly the fiscal policies of the central banks, can be blamed for much of the public’s wealth erosion from inflation – yet this subtle form of taxation is taken as a given.
Additionally, it is a matter of public record that most institutions currently occupying a position of public trust have significant corruption issues, rendering their pronouncements unreliable – yet they are still followed unquestioningly. Almost every North American will agree that most politicians are corrupt, and even that substantial systemic changes are required – yet continue to vote for them.
These naked hypocrisies are signs of a degenerate and complacent population, yet those who point them out, like George Carlin did towards the end of his career, are met with laughter. Indeed, much of Western culture, especially its comedy, can be seen as forms of cognitive dissonance reduction, or ways of distancing unpleasant or inconvenient ideas and reducing them to a sideshow or triviality.
In extreme cases, the high modernist narrative can become so fragile that it requires physical force to maintain. This was the case with the Soviet Union, whose extensive informant and prison network was designed to weed out all dissenting thought. This is also seen in various countries’ approach to the internet, which is heavily censored in China, North Korea, Russia, and now Canada as well. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 49-50)
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Much of the acrimonious behavior present in the contemporary “culture war”, as it has been called, is a result of two fragile realities, each with unacknowledged inconsistencies, attempting to erase opposing viewpoints from society or discredit them sufficiently enough to achieve narrative and social supremacy.
This has been, in large part, the explicit project of the Marxists and postmodernists, who responded to the inhumanities of industrialization by seizing the means of production wherever possible and dictating their version of reality to captive populations. Unfortunately, certain versions of Marxist thought have come to dominate Western institutions and discourse, presenting a potentially fatal threat to an already-precarious project. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 50-51)
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While the post-Renaissance period in the European continent and its colonies catalyzed the destruction of traditional lifestyles, the curtailment of human autonomy, and the perversion of folkloric knowledge systems, this time was also marked by trends towards democracy, egalitarianism, and universal human rights in Western thought. The triumphs and achievements of Western philosophers during this time, which included concepts like John Rawls’ original position, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract, and the metaphysical claims on life, liberty, and happiness made by the Declaration of Independence.
However, as observed by luminaries like Dr. Martin Luther King, the West’s stated values and principles are like a generous cheque that has come back marked “insufficient funds” for many demographics. Aside from the obvious prejudices and challenges faced by racial minorities throughout the history of the West, progress towards the ideals of life, liberty, and happiness has been marked by tremendous setbacks such as Apartheid, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust, all of which were, in a significant sense, products of democracy.
Additionally, the post-industrial West has always characterized by significant wealth disparities which manifest themselves in differentiated access to education, influence, and opportunity across social groups. During the Industrial Revolution, owners and executives of corporations enjoyed a tremendously higher quality of life than their workers, and wealthy landlords consolidated their share economic gains of the Industrial Revolution while depriving the working classes of leverage. The working conditions of many jobs were filthy and dangerous, particularly for miners and blue-collar workers responsible for making the high modernist visions of that time into a reality.
Even in the present day, the promises and dreams of technological utopia that could be found in the World Fairs of the early 1900s have given way to a dystopian present marked by overwork, mental illness, and information overwhelm. In such a world, particularly during the early stages of industrialization where coal mining, unsafe construction methods, and heavy factory labour were claiming the lives of countless workers, some Western thinkers became disillusioned and began to question the viability of the entire project.
Indeed, it was during the early decades of the Industrial Revolution that Karl Marx, a German philosopher and sociologist, began developing the ideas that would later come to be known as communism or Marxism. Inspired by the ruthless efficiency of French revolutionaries like Robespierre, as well as their values of liberty, fraternity, and equality, Marx and his collaborators fused the ethics of revolution with sophisticated economic critiques of post-Industrial Europe to produce the most compelling – and destructive – alternative to Western capitalism ever conceived. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 52)
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Unlike the unfettered forces of free market capitalism, which Marx correctly observed have the effect of concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the already wealthy and powerful, a communist society would transfer ownership of the factories, apartments, and farms to the proletariat, or the classes of common workers and everyday people who were otherwise being exploited. By giving everyone a share in the wealth generated by the industrial economy, Marx envisioned a higher quality of life for everyone, less wealth disparities, and especially a degree of workplace satisfaction.
The solution proposed by Marx, Engels, and the intellectuals that followed them was to overthrow the capitalist system, by force if necessary, and institute a centrally planned economy where the citizen-workers were the primary stakeholders of the factories, resources, and land. By abolishing private ownership of land and buildings, they claimed everyone would have a fair chance at decent living conditions. By abolishing inheritance, they claimed that wealth would no longer concentrate in the hands of families like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds. These, and other promises like free education, formed the core pillars of the communist plan, which generally failed to gain traction in the West but became extremely popular in Asia.
On its face, Marxism is not an unreasonable proposition given the colonial-industrial violence that has been committed against indigenous peoples, folk lifestyles, blue-collar workers, and even linguistics in the name of the Western utopian vision, as well as the economic exploitation that is an unfortunate reality in even contemporary capitalist systems. Contemporary management research has also consistently revealed that employees given autonomy, a genuine stake in the business, and the power to make meaningful decisions are both happier and more productive.
However, there are many issues with communist philosophy and economics, perhaps most importantly the mathematical impossibilities of central planning. Despite Karl Marx’s sophisticated ideas about capital, labor, and economic value, there are so many things happening within an economy, with so many variables and minor setbacks that require ad-hoc corrections, that it becomes mathematically impossible to measure the entire economy, process that raw information, and then make timely and effective decisions.
In much the same way that early foresters cleared away the most valuable parts of the forest in their attempt to standardize and optimize timber yields, the simplifications that inevitably must be made in centrally planned economies have the unintended effect of creating bureaucratic inefficiencies and bottlenecks throughout their systems. Indeed, at the height of the Soviet attempt, it is estimated that there were 46,000 industrial enterprises and 60,000 agricultural collectives, all desperately trying to maintain control over a chaotic quasi-ecological system. Of course, after decades of killing whales for no reason and delivering a substandard and anemic quality of life to citizens, many of whom were desperate to escape in some form, it collapsed in spectacular fashion in 1989. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 53)
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Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, communist philosophies had a tremendous impact on the political and social landscape of not only the West, but the East as well. As mentioned previously, the Bolsheviks of Russia overthrew the tzarist-capitalist system and instituted the Stalinist-Leninist attempt at communism, with death tolls in the tens of millions. The People’s Republic of China is estimated to have killed tens of millions during their Great Leap Forward. Over three million people are estimated to have died under North Korean communist rule, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia claimed over two and a half million lives. Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and many other countries have similar stories.
Indeed, the overwhelming trend is that communist revolution leads, one way or another, to mass graves and overwhelming government oppression. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this had become apparent to Western intellectuals through the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other whistleblowers from the Soviet regime, which presented communist-friendly thinkers and Marxist activist with a series of very difficult challenges.
The first challenge, obviously, was to reconcile the genocidal outcomes of every single attempt at communism with its stated goals of equality, social engagement, and neighbour-love, a feat that many avoid even attempting by claiming that “no true version” of communism has yet existed. The second challenge, and a more achievable goal, was to somehow advance Marxist objectives despite growing popular awareness of its deficiencies.
Fundamentally, Marxism is a group-based philosophy that divides society roughly into a binary class system consisting of the working-class proletariat who are subjugated and exploited by the capitalist bourgeoisie. Therefore, to continue their project of overthrowing the capitalist system, Marxist intellectuals injected their ideas about group-based conflict into pre-existing conversations about sex, race, the environment, and other social issues to attack the capitalist machine from new fronts.
To accomplish this goal, Marxist intellectuals leveraged European philosophical works on skepticism and epistemology to construct wickedly sophisticated critiques of not just Western economics, but their philosophical substructure. As the twentieth century continued, Marxist influences on social and artistic commentary gave birth to the school of thought now known as postmodernism. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 54)
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Over the last century, especially following the counter-cultural movements in 1960s America, these criticisms of Western traditions, values, economics, and socio-political structures became mainstream, eventually working their way into Western postsecondary institutions and into the minds of the last two generations of teachers, journalists, politicians, social workers, lawyers, and business leaders. These cynical ideas have proven to be a destabilizing force in the West, leaving North America mired in a “culture war” characterized by political brinksmanship and a lack of dialogue between parties. Many in North America and Europe, particularly the younger generations most influenced by these ideas in their schooling, have come to reject Western society in part or in whole, the most prominent targets of criticism being capitalism and whiteness.
Despite elements of validity contained within the writings of anti-Western theorists like Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, upon deeper investigation they represent a dangerous return to premodern superstition, original sin doctrine, sacrificial atonement rituals, and caste systems that claimed millions of lives throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, the philosophical tradition of Critical Theory, Postmodern Neo-Marxism, or Critical Social Justice is wickedly sophisticated, deeply resentful, and much like Christianity, colonialism, and industrialization before it, dangerously out of touch with reality. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 54-55)
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The philosophical school of postmodernism, with early iterations developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and intellectual giants like Michel Foucault advancing more sophisticated versions in the 1960s, can be most elegantly expressed as a skepticism of grand social narratives – especially the narratives that are most dominant in a culture or society. By framing Western notions of progress, justice, and equality as bourgeoisie constructions designed to pacify an exploited populace, the postmodernists injected the Marxist class struggle into cultural discourse with explosive effect.
In postmodernism’s artistic manifestations, which were some of the first salvos from the intellectual Bolsheviks, traditional Western assumptions about beauty and artistic value were boldly challenged by works like John Cage’s 4:33 and Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a tradition which also includes Andy Warhol and one of the most confusing ballets ever choreographed, known to many internet users through memes and clips.
The intellectual vanguard of postmodernism, of which Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida were the most influential proponents, launched assaults on the Western concept of reason, pointing out errors and limitations in scientific and rational ways of knowing with significant help from phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl. This allowed them to cast the folk knowledge held by minority groups as distinct in structure and equal in value to dominant Western narratives and systemic knowledge, giving rise to the high levels of cultural relativism in the modern West as well as presenting unexpected philosophical challenges for Western thinkers.
Much like the sophists of Ancient Greece who believed that language was merely a tool for obtaining power, the postmodernists advanced the idea that reality was more socially constructed than anything else, pointing to the world’s overwhelming cultural diversity as evidence. Leveraging philosophical ideas like John Locke’s tabula rasa and the evidence for psychological malleability being accumulated by early psychologists, postmodernists staked out a powerful claim that Western values are merely arbitrary constructions, a notion that became quite popular in Western academic circles throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. By attacking the philosophical justifications for Western civilization and documents like the Declaration of Independence, postmodernists were simultaneously able to absolve themselves of responsibility for underperformance, reject Western standards of behavior, and set themselves up for a philosophical revolution led by university-educated teachers and journalists. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 56)
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Unfortunately, while the acceptance and consideration of diverse viewpoints represents a genuine developmental advance for Western society that can be largely credited to the postmodernists, the rejection of Western standards of reason, debate, and even belief in an objective and scientifically discoverable reality has led to catastrophic outcomes.
One of the main problems that postmodernism has is its emphasis on cultural and individual relativity, or the notion that different groups of people, or even different individuals, can have vastly different experiences of the world based on their personal circumstances. Thus, as Kimberlé Crenshaw noted in her foundational works, a black lesbian from a lower socio-economic stratum will experience womanhood, and therefore feminism, differently than an upper-middle-class white woman. The idea that different “intersections” of race, sex, class, religion, and other factors can affect someone’s life experience in unexpected and profound ways is known as intersectionality and has since become a philosophical pillar of the postmodernist movement.
The first problem with intersectionality, as noted by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson in his many lectures on the subject, is that the West already solved that issue by prioritizing the individual as the primary unit of consideration in a society. Crenshaw’s proposed innovation, while seizing a tremendous intellectual beachhead for Marxist thought, is a step backwards in terms of achieving true justice as it reduces individuals to their group characteristics, and therefore makes them collectively responsible for societal outcomes regardless of individual culpability. In combination with the social critiques and reforms put forth by other postmodernists like Robert Delgado, it becomes clear that the proposed mechanisms of remediation for these grievances are government interventions and extensive reforms, forms of economic and social centralization that are pillars of Marxist thought.
The rapid changes in postsecondary education and large corporations over the last decade are a testament to the Marxist need to control and meddle, with administrative costs in universities soaring to cover the hiring of diversity consultants, equity specialists, gestures of atonement, and administrative staff responsible for ensuring that every aspect of the colonial-industrial systems are made as fair as possible. Similar trends can be seen in the corporate world, with extraordinary amounts of company dollars now being spent on consultants, workshops, special programs, and other attempts to appease postmodernist activists. This is to say nothing of the race-based and gender-based hiring quotas which explicitly exist in some organizations, and implicitly in many other organizations whose human resources staff err on the side of diversity when making new hires.
In the decades since intersectionality became a hidden weapon in the Marxist struggle, the tax dollars of many Western countries have also been laundered into “scholarship” in the humanities and social sciences exploring the many different intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability, economic class, and physical ability. Many of these papers are never cited once as a source for another work, and many others are “autoethnographies”, an academic term for essentially diary entries. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 56-57)
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Thus, the colonial-industrial system has been bankrolling its own saboteurs, as the publish-or-perish dynamic inherent in postsecondary institutions, a philosophical position driven by high modernist values, rewards high scholarly output regardless of the utility of the work. The so-called intellectuals enjoying the benefits of this swindle have, over the decades, become some of the most prestigious thought leaders within these universities, further cementing the postmodernist viewpoint into the Western psyche.
The embarrassing state of the Western intellectual project since postmodernism’s ascendance has been highlighted through pranks by more level-headed academics that reveal the lack of rigor in postmodern academica. In the 1990s, physicist Alan Sokal submitted an intentionally ridiculous article to the journal Social Text, making fashionable claims that impressed the editors so much that it merited inclusion in their Spring-Summer issue of 1996. Over two decades later, a similar series of hoaxes were perpetrated by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, who successfully published academic “research” on rape culture in dog parks, the social construct of the penis, selections of Mein Kampf remixed as feminist social theory, and other useless non-topics hailed as quality scholarship by postmodernist academics.
The shameless intellectual bankruptcy of postmodernist philosophy, especially when combined with a radical acceptance of diverse viewpoints, is that anybody can approach a postmodernist-influenced organization and claim protected status based on their unique “intersections”. Some of the most outrageous examples include an Ontario teacher wearing fetish gear to class as part of their protected right to gender expression, men claiming to be disabled women, people identifying as disabled children, white women masquerading as indigenous or mixed-race individuals, and “minor attracted persons”, the latest of many attempts to legitimize pedophilia as an orientation. All of these cases take advantage of the fact that no human can see into the mind of another human, therefore making it theoretically possible, at least in the mind of colonized and illiterate Westerners, that there is a chance these identities could be true.
Because postmodernist intellectuals and activists have concocted a pathologically accepting philosophy that cannot say no to even the most outrageous of claims, postmodernist activists have had to spend more and more effort to “control the narrative” – the embodiment of their socially-constructed reality. To accomplish this, they must quash, cancel, silence, or censor opposing viewpoints that dispute or shame their obvious fictions, giving rise to the gulags of the Soviet Union and the “cancel culture” now gripping Western societies. The fundamental alienation from reality itself was noted quite insightfully by Soviet escapee Ayn Rand, whose fundamental philosophical axiom was “A is A”, a repudiation of the violently delusional society she left behind. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 57-58)
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Instead of concentrating their disdain on the wealthy, Marxists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries focused instead on delineating the many ways in which the Western capitalist system excluded, disadvantaged, and discriminated against minority groups. By catering their messages to demographics that were experiencing genuine pressures from the colonial-industrial system, particularly blacks and women, Marxists were able to hijack movements like feminism by offering them simple solutions in the form of class struggles.
Thus, women were weaponized against men, blacks were weaponized against whites, and the degeneration of Western society into bitter infighting began. Decades into the project, many Western activists and intellectuals have realized that much like traditional Marxism, the social justice offered by these theories is a dangerous and exhausting game. The endless number of perspectives that must be accepted and respected has created a snowball effect for adherents to these philosophies, creating situations where they must adopt increasingly ludicrous claims to maintain cohesion. Any dissent with the group results in excommunication and potentially career sabotage.
Although the postmodernists’ sophisticated critiques of Western thought have added elements of nuance and plurality that were sorely needed in societies subjected to the newspaper and radio, they have also created a dynamic where people facing any kind of systemic challenge are encouraged to protest instead of adopting more entrepreneurial mindsets. Lesson plans in Canadian schools, for example, now explicitly frame the concept of meritocracy as a myth, instead telling students that their success in life will be primarily determined by their skin color or genitalia until the current system is reformed. Black students at Yale, one of the most prestigious and expensive schools in the United States, nearly rioted over the idea of offensive Halloween costumes, citing the historical disrespect towards black-skinned people as evidence of systemic oppression at work in their institution.
In much the same way that curriculums on slavery can misdirect the black mind away from African civilizational accomplishments, postmodernist feminist philosophy has been uniquely destructive to the younger generations of women that have inherited it. By characterizing women as victims of the patriarchy, or a network of social attitudes and laws set by men that demean and exploit them, feminist thinkers have managed to engender deep resentment in many women that often manifests in verbal expressions of hatred towards men. In the process, feminists alienated many women who take issue with the collectivist and over-intellectualized nature of postmodernist ideas, as well as most men, who are generally predisposed to protecting and providing for women and hurt by the group-based rhetoric. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 58-59)
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Despite its bluster and passion, modern feminism is founded on simplistic statistics, histrionic exaggerations, and a denial of the impact of biology on the male and female experience. This can be seen most clearly in the lack of women in technological fields, a longstanding issue for postsecondary institutions and businesses that hire their graduates. According to feminists, the predominance of men in engineering and computer science can be attributed to a mixture of discrimination, a lack of role models, and cultural beliefs about femininity and women that discourage them from seeking technical occupations. However, the actual science on the issue is markedly different, and demonstrates that men tend to be “thing-oriented” and women tend to be “people-oriented”, which manifests not only in career differences, but the toy choices of toddlers, newborns, and even primates of other species.
Other core feminist grievances, like the gender pay gap, evaporate under more rigorous analysis and can be attributed to differences in career choice, working hours, and childcare decisions. Indeed, the issue of “work-life balance” is almost always a focus of women’s professional conferences, whereas male professional culture, subjected to colonial and industrial influences for much longer, would typically view such discussions as almost embarrassing or counterproductive.
Feminism’s departure from reality is documented extensively by gender and art scholar Camille Paglia, who laments the exclusion of the biological sciences from the formation of the first women’s studies departments. Indeed, women’s studies as a field was founded exclusively by postmodernist English professors, a historical decision that is nakedly evident in the overwhelming focus of academics on issues of culture and discourse. In fact, feminists are typically hostile to experts in the physical sciences, like psychologist Jordan B. Peterson or biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, as the hard facts presented by the scientists undermine many of the political and social gains that feminists have made, and therefore represent an existential threat to the consensus reality.
The angry delusions fed to many young women over the past couple generations have not only made them unhappier by distancing them from men, but create endless havoc in their personal and professional lives as their versions of reality are gently or harshly rejected by the market. Consider, for example, that the “body positivity” movement, a rejection of Western beauty standards, has left many women overweight and unattractive to the kinds of high-quality men they desire. Moreover, professional women have not yet accepted that there are biological differences between men and women that manifest in different behaviors, attitudes, and skillsets. Their lamentation that women fail to be represented in executive-level positions or technological roles conveniently ignores the effects of testosterone on the pursuit of achievement, and further neglects the fact that female professionals consistently reject male attitudes and approaches towards self-development, competition, and performance. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 59-60)
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Unfortunately, the problem with postmodernist thought is a deeper issue than its accumulation of delusions. One line of investigation has revealed that Americans on the political left, who have generally embraced postmodernist philosophy, experience both a positive change in mood as well as changes in political attitude following a dose of testosterone. A completely different study found that white liberals – and not white conservatives – were prone to dumbing themselves down when communicating through email with people they thought were black. Various studies have found that postmodernists are less self-sufficient, more motivated towards interdependence, and just as capable of discriminatory behavior – as can be seen from the race quotas, segregation initiatives, and hiring requirements now in place at many institutions like Harvard and Dalhousie.
Looking at signals like these and drawing on her own experience growing up in the Soviet Union, Ayn Rand characterized leftists as being gripped by a fear of individualism, which she believed was responsible for driving them to adopt Marxist and postmodernist ideas and make attempts to overthrow capitalist systems. Whereas Rand saw free market capitalism as the highest economic expression of free choice and rationality, she framed the kinds of collectivist movements encouraged by postmodernist philosophy as a form of mutual slavery and intellectual cowardice.
Although he is most famous for his hatred of industrial technology, Ted Kaczynski outlined his thoughts on leftism in his infamous manifesto in the Washington Post. Based on his observations, he thought that these ideas appealed to people with an underlying sense of inferiority and powerlessness, which he connected to the indignities forced upon people by industrial society. By taking on causes only tangentially related to them, such as the black struggle for white women or the feminist struggle for certain men, leftists not only gain a sense of power and mastery over their environment, but can assuage their guilt over the privileges they are forced to acknowledge by their Marxist-postmodernist philosophy.
Unfortunately, both these characterizations are accurate. In addition to the colonial-industrial programming that they are forced to adopt by Western systems, activists in neo-Marxist causes inflict a split consciousness upon themselves which offers no coherent basis for thought or action. While the contradictory and hypocritical stances taken by leftists are an enduring part of modern conservative journalism, the incoherence is a feature, not a bug, of their philosophy.
Take, for example, the feminist refrain of “my body, my choice”, which weaponizes the pursuit of happiness to legitimize infanticide and remove women from the consequences of sexual intercourse. This principle, which has been an axiom of feminism for decades, was promptly abandoned as soon as the vaccine mandates provided women with an opportunity to comply their way into economic safety with employers. The feminist drive to succeed in the workplace, when set against a principle that would require extraordinarily inconvenient employee pushbacks and possibly legal action, easily prevailed despite decades of screaming that would suggest the contrary.
Indeed, as Ayn Rand outlined in her nonfiction works, people without a coherent philosophy lack values that provide limitations on their behavior. In the ruthlessly collectivist environments of leftist politics, the demands of the group, which shift over time as new claimants to historical oppression present themselves, are the overriding directive. As documented by former leftists who have left these movements, the quicksilver-like nature of postmodernist politics is exhausting, stressful, and unforgiving in similar ways to fundamentalist Christian churches. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 60-61)
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The well-meaning adherents of these philosophies, who are outraged at the indignities of colonial-industrial society and want to do something about it, are often taken in by the more cynical and ruthless elements of leftist movements. Indeed, organizations like Black Lives Matter captured extraordinary public attention for their stances on racism in the United States, but after years of enjoying tremendous public support, collapsed into corruption and embezzlement scandals. On smaller scales, influencers and grifters like Meghan Markle exploit pre-existing grievances about race to increase their own visibility, or hustlers like Amber Heard attempt to make false accusations of domestic abuse on behalf of all women everywhere.
Shockingly, corrupt postmodernist professionals have even infiltrated and co-opted entire professional organizations to accomplish the goals of their beloved interest groups. This extraordinarily dangerous plow has already resulted in the sterilization and mutilation of North American children, as well as institutionalized sexual interference in schools and psychiatric practices. These crimes and many others, facilitated by the systematized nature of Western knowledge and an over-reliance on experts, have confused generations of people and are a hidden factor in the ongoing mental health crises flummoxing Western experts. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 62)
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Despite taking great pains to emphasize the progress they have been making with their technology and science, the high modernists are now scrambling to correct for the externalities of their grand visions. With the mental health of North America now destroyed by overwork, overplanning, and substandard living conditions, the system is falling apart at the seams and spending enormous amounts of money to keep people mentally functional enough to perpetuate the project.
The accumulated pain that Western populations carry can be seen most clearly in the youngest generations, who, more than any other generation of human beings, have grown up with social media and smartphone technology – both of which have proven to be highly addictive and mentally destructive if overused. Moreover, the optimization of all aspects of human life, taken to extremes in the age of hyper-competitive Ivy League admissions processes and extracurricular activities, have reduced childhood from a time of play to a series of checklists and accomplishments, depriving the youngest generations of the very important experiences of play, free exploration, adventure, and even teenage risk-taking.
Indeed, the high modernist belief in the perfectibility of nature has long been extended to childhood, beginning with mandatory state education centuries ago and reaching new heights in the age of scientific parenting, tiger moms, microaggressions, and overprotection. Yet the youngest generations, who should be the happiest and most able given the unprecedented resources spent on childcare and education, are proving to be afflicted with maladies like anxiety, depression, and ADHD at rates never seen or heard of in human history.
Although many experts place the blame for this mental health crisis squarely on technology, and more erudite thinkers also condemn the over-systematization of childhood, the full truth is that the psychological professions and their governing bodies were infiltrated decades ago by Marxist activists. Weaponizing the “science” of the invisible mind against Western society, these utterly corrupt professionals have intentionally perverted the modern understanding of human nature, leaving modern people defenseless against sickening levels of therapeutic malpractice and outright scientific fraud.
If anyone asks a scientist what the best thing about science is, and their answer is anything other than the scientific method, that answer had better be uniquely insightful and thought-provoking. Indeed, the rigorous kinds of examination developed by Western civilization and its influences have facilitated a slow grind towards truth, which in turn have afforded the West many modern luxuries, unbelievable creative capacities, and a genuine chance at achieving technological utopia. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 63)
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The scientific method can be summarized as follows:
You are humble enough to be unsure about something and willing to investigate it
You establish what is currently known about the topic
You develop a hypothesis about what might be true
You design an experiment to test your hypothesis fairly, rigorously, and creatively
You execute the experiment and collect your data
You impartially and honestly examine the data to draw conclusions
You share your results with others for review and replication
One of the strengths of this method is its impartiality – by creating a hypothesis beforehand and then testing it with a predetermined experiment, the result is independent of the wishes or preferences of the experimenter. Therefore, the experiment can be considered a glimpse of unadulterated reality, which is further confirmed by other scientists replicating the experiment in their own contexts. This crucial part of the process, known today as peer review, is the backbone of the scientific method as it applies in social contexts.
Another strength of the scientific method, and particularly the peer review system, is that any scientific claim is open, at least in theory, to challenges from new experiments and new data. This is what happened at the turn of the twentieth century, when Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity brought powerful new perspectives to physics and changed science forever. However, whereas collaboration between Western scientists used to be more organic, with the peer review system providing a level of rigor to what were otherwise folkloric chains of transmission, modern science is conducted largely through centralized mechanisms like universities, peer-reviewed journals, and governing bodies.
Indeed, whereas the history of scientific discovery is filled with stories of polymathic prodigies like William Herschel and self-taught geniuses like Michael Faraday, the colonial-industrial system known today as “science” relies on networks of journals and professional organizations, tightly managed by credentialed authorities and funded by governments to support progress and economic growth. Although this modern approach to science provided the necessary infrastructure for many sophisticated discoveries and the centralization of vast amounts of human knowledge, the historical record shows it has left the West’s “scientific” understanding of reality open to systemic corruption and institutional malpractice. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 64)
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Although scientists of generations past worked collaboratively and organically, in modern times the verification and distribution of scientific knowledge has become, like everything else in the West, highly systematized and subject to centralized influence. Many academic circles are notoriously difficult to break into for even career academics, and the publishing costs of independently submitting research for peer review are so prohibitive as to discourage scholarship outside of government-funded university settings.
The career track for researchers in almost every field is linear to the point of being a railroad, with aspiring scientists or arts scholars looking forward to a four-year undergraduate degree, a two-year graduate program, and a four-to-six-year doctorate as the table stakes for entry. Following this, many academics experience a harrowing process of finding a post-doctorate position, and eventually a teaching position. After several decades of navigating highly political postsecondary environments, one can finally obtain tenure and release research relatively free from the fear of career sabotage – although not entirely.
Obviously, while this system affords the Western intellectual effort with certain kinds of rigor and standardization, much like other kinds of organizations, the modern academic machine has many weaknesses. Among them are the petty squabbles and personal feuds common to the corporate world, falsified or corrupted research submitted for career advancement, and political maneuvering at the expense of metaphysical clarity. Indeed, the authority structures now instantiated within the scientific method have afforded tremendous subjective influences to governing bodies like the College of Midwives of Ontario, legislated into existence in 1991 to standardize the thousands-year-old practice of midwifery, part of an ongoing effort by industrial medicine to exclude traditional female birth workers from practice and make birth “safer”.
The same is true for the American Psychiatric Association, originally a loose collection of asylum superintendents and now one of the governing bodies that defines, among other things, what a mental illness is and the different kinds of illnesses that exist.
One of the most important works regarding the philosophy and history of science was produced by Thomas Kuhn, an American historian and philosopher who developed the concept of a scientific paradigm. Defined as an underlying framework or worldview that influences the entirety of someone’s thought on a topic, a paradigm constitutes the accepted body of literature in a field, the kinds of questions that are asked, and the acceptable standards for investigation. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 64-65)
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Whereas mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and the computer sciences seem to have largely settled into a comprehensive understanding of their domains and well-tested methods of investigation, the so-called “science” of psychology is a relative newcomer to the Western intellectual project, first gaining prominence with the release of Sigmund Freud’s work in the 1890s and early 1900s. A field characterized by fierce disagreements between kaleidoscopic schools of thought that have not yet cohered into a paradigm, psychology is paradoxically the least-developed and most subjective of all the Western sciences, but arguably the most powerful.
Largely developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and thus subject to its values of systematization and optimization, the unquestioned assumptions held by “experts” in psychology have famously been the motive behind institutionalized violence against people who do not fit easily into colonial-industrial society, such as “hysterical” women treated with genital massage or schizophrenic and bipolar patients treated with lobotomies. Owing largely to its deep interconnections with social work and therefore government funding, this upstart prodigy of a science conceived not two centuries ago has obtained the power of law in many countries, with the ability to confine “mentally ill” people on wards temporarily or indefinitely, physically restrain them to their beds to the point of asphyxiation or cardiac arrest, medicate them against their will, and do all sorts of other things for their own good – and for the good of society.
As many mentally ill people can attest and is often memorialized in popular culture like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Patch Adams, the treatment from these systems is harsh, authoritarian, utterly rigid, and belligerent to the point of keeping patients with religious delusions in confinement without actively seeking support from religious practitioners. However, not only have these deeply ignorant and arrogant oversteps on facilitated some of the worst medical crimes in history, following their takeover by Marxist activists in the mid-twentieth century, the governing bodies that manage psychology now instantiate and enforce malpractice, sexual interference, and the corruption of children in service of disruptive Marxist objectives. While some of these metaphysical and epistemic frauds are beginning to gain awareness in Western society with the release of documentaries like Daily Wire’s What is a Woman?, the frightening reality is that the psychological sciences have been weaponized against common people for decades and mental illness is now masquerading as love.
Modern psychology, as many are aware, begins with the psychoanalytic techniques and theories developed collaboratively by Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, and “Anna O.”, which were based largely on links that were discovered to exist between childhood traumas and adult discontent. Their school of thought, known as psychoanalysis, focused on traumatic memories and incestuous family dynamics, the revelations of which were largely responsible for the explosion of psychology’s popularity in the early twentieth century. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 65-66)
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However, psychoanalysis was soon disputed by behaviorists like Ivan Pavlov and Alexander Luria, who were concerned primarily with brain activity and the resulting behaviors that were driven by them. The incompatibilities between these schools of thought, as well as some of the existing problems within psychology in the early twentieth century, catalyzed the development of third force psychology or positive psychology, an attempt by luminaries like Abraham Maslow, Erik and Joan Erikson, and Carl Rogers to reform and humanize the field by focusing on human well-being instead of traumas or reflexes.
As the twentieth century progressed and computing technology was invented, scientists and researchers began drawing many connections between the brain and their new machines. Both processed and stored information; both could make decisions, albeit the computers required instruction; both used electricity to function. In addition to many exciting research opportunities, this also created many metaphysical problems for psychologists and philosophers, as some began wondering if computers could become conscious. This catalyzed new questions in psychology, largely intertwined with philosophy and metaphysics, which sought to understand the causes and functions of human consciousness, develop an understanding of the human self, and determine the nature of human decision-making.
Despite the many genuine contributions it has made to the West’s understanding of the human condition and its improvement, the subjective nature of psychology’s research methodologies have not only laid the groundwork for endless amounts of fraud, but allowed for the corruption and misuse of otherwise-useful discoveries.
Psychoanalysis, for example, is rooted in and focused on the role of trauma in human life, a historical reality that has cascaded into the use of trauma, a clinical term, for things that do not fit the definition. Much of Western life, at least in North America, is focused on the discovery and healing of trauma or the alleviation of negative feelings – for example, it is estimated that almost thirty percent of Americans saw a therapist during the pandemic and that about one in ten Americans engage with a mental health professional within any given year. Unbeknownst to many laypeople, however, the psychological literature on trauma indicates that most people grow from traumatic events and become stronger.
This detail seems to have escaped notice from general social discourse, where traumas are used as justification for reparations and apologies, and rarely if ever framed as growth opportunities. Aside from questions of justice, which are entirely salient, the general trend began by Freud and Breuer following their collaboration with O. is a dangerous and subtle usurpation of human autonomy and robs unsuspecting laypeople of growth opportunities. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 66-67)
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Whereas the psychoanalysts favored introspective methods and subject interviews, the behaviorists discarded those techniques and focused strictly on observable material outcomes of brain activity. Although this is generally not known, Pavlov and many other behaviorists were skilled surgeons, and often obtained their discoveries by way of subtle or drastic alterations to the bodies of their animal subjects. Their discovery that much of the mind’s activity could be attributed to the brain’s functioning very quickly led to what is known as the “mind-body problem”, a central dispute within psychology which, taken alone, disqualifies it from being a paradigmatic science.
Essentially, people in the behaviorist camp believed that there is nothing in the universe aside from matter, and that what people experienced as the “mind” was largely irrelevant to the study of human behavior. This is known as monism, or the belief that the universe only has one kind of stuff. Their opponents, which include almost all religious people, believe in dualism, which holds that “mind” is something separate from matter and should be studied and treated differently. This issue has never been resolved in psychology and many researchers have stepped past it, adopting elements of both depending on their context and focus.
The development of third force psychology, in some respects, can be seen as a successful attempt to correct for some of the worst excesses of the problems of earlier schools and a movement away from a trauma focus. In a 1968 memorandum to the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, Abraham Maslow shared his experience with psychological problems that were impossible to resolve within the values-free domain of traditional scientific inquiry. He expressed a level of frustration and disappointment that psychology was predominantly focused on the sick and unwell, rather than on the thriving and fulfilled. This memorandum, and the work of people like Maslow, Rogers, and the Eriksons, gave birth to what is now the positive psychology movement and a focus on becoming one’s best self.
However, there is a problem here – what is the self? Much like the mind-body problem, which led some psychologists to logically conclude that there is no such thing as mind in the universe, the self is a nebulous concept in psychology, with several definitions competing for dominance in the field. Even more problematically, neuroscientists engaging with Buddhist ideas have put forth the idea that there is no such thing as a “self”, citing resonances between Buddhist no-self doctrine and some discoveries in their domain. This is another problem that has been largely stepped over, with many therapeutic workers implicitly assuming that there must be a self – otherwise, their work to improve others would make no sense.
The advent of possibly-conscious computers created many difficult questions for psychologists and philosophers. In some respects, the machines served as a mirror with which humanity could examine its own consciousness – and largely come away with no real answers. Indeed, psychologists do not know how we are conscious, why we are conscious, what consciousness is for, or even how to define consciousness and differentiate between “conscious” and “unconscious” brain activity. Put simply, anything to do with consciousness is wrapped up in complicated philosophy, and some of the brightest minds consider at least one of the problems unsolvable. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 67-68)
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The final conceptual problem of psychology is the deepest and lies with the inappropriate fusion of methods used to obtain information by psychological researchers. Historically and currently, psychology has been a mixture of introspective methods and observational methods yielding two different kinds of data. However, these subjective and objective findings will remain incompatible unless a brain-scanning device is invented which can confirm, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the self-report of a subject or patient is indeed reflective of the activity going on in their brain or “mind”. Without that, the discoveries from these two types of inquiry will remain, at some level, disjointed, meaning that even if the mind-body problem, the self problem, the consciousness problems, and the issues identified by Abraham Maslow are solved, psychology will never have a hope of being a truly objective science.
Given psychology’s competing and contradictory schools of thought, combined with its history of barbaric practices and “failures to replicate” famous findings, it is probably unsurprising that psychology is a field rife with all kinds of fraud, from individual research fraud to extensive institutional deception on important matters.
One area of reasonable suspicion includes the close relationship between pharmaceutical companies, hungry for lifetime customers, and the psychological industry. Concerns have been raised, for example, over the fact that ADHD-like “disorders” have been skyrocketing in young boys over the past couple of decades, demonstrably because of psychology-aware teachers who notice “symptoms” in their classroom like fidgeting, excessive talking, and impulsivity.
While folkloric common sense would hold that these behaviors are quite common in young boys full of energy, the helping professions, concerned with academic compliance and good behavior, push these boys into lifetime subscription to Ritalin or Adderall. Only in recent years have the actual experts in child psychology concluded that ADHD is over-diagnosed, and that these children’s “symptoms” are being treated unnecessarily with pharmaceuticals. Because the demographics most affected by the medicalization of childhood are predominantly lower-class and without the kinds of influence needed to question or challenge these diagnoses, some Afrocentric thinkers now assert that special education systems, with their plans and their pills, are destroying black American children for systemic efficiency. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 68-69)
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In terms of outright research fraud, some of psychology’s biggest names have been incriminated in outlandish schemes, sometimes only after decades of successfully perpetrating their lies. Philip Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which seemed to suggest that human beings were naturally prone to mistreating each other, has been found to be the result of undisclosed manipulations that created the famous outcomes. The Implicit Association Test, which purports to measure levels of subconscious bias towards people of different demographics, does not meet any of the standard definitions for diagnostic reliability in psychology, and even one of its founders has retracted the bold claims made about the test. Even the popular and seemingly intuitive concept of power poses, taught to young people everywhere as a confidence hack, becomes a placebo when the data is rigorously analyzed and replicated.
Perhaps the most unfortunate kinds of deception within psychology are the lies perpetrated over decades by governing bodies, which make claims about human nature that are then cascaded down into law and therapeutic practice. If a psychological lie makes its way into a professional relationship, it can have catastrophic outcomes for patients and clients, and may even be dangerous, as neither the client nor practitioner will be aware of the deception perpetrated by the governing body. This is, sadly, the case with homosexuality, considered since 1973 to be a positive and healthy expression of human sexuality to be treasured and protected in the same way as heterosexual relationships.
The story of homosexuality begins in the 1950s, with early research on the psychological nature of homosexuality conducted by people like Evelyn Hooker and Alfred Kinsey which formed the foundation for later discussions. Around this time, a psychiatrist named Robert Spitzer was involved in developing the third edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, a document published by the American Psychiatric Association that provides a centralized list of all known mental disorders and the symptoms most commonly associated with them.
People working with Spitzer on the project relate that it was largely driven by his singular vision, with a process that was often opaque and autocratic, although the DSM-III was an undeniable success that provided professionals with coherent language for describing many psychological maladies. However, these problems of subjectivity, and others like them, eventually led some researchers to advocate for different ways of classifying disorders, like the Power Threat Meaning Framework.
Spitzer’s leading role within the DSM made him an idea figure to weigh in on the issue of homosexuality, an urgent topic in the 1950s and 1960s which erupted into marches and riots after the Stonewall incident of 1969. At this time, homosexuality was classified in the DSM as a mental disorder, which created systemic barriers for queer people as well as tremendous prejudice. Indeed, at this time, some of the barbaric methods within psychology, such as morphine-induced nausea treatment and electroshock therapy, were being trialed as potential cures for homosexuality, making it a burning-platform issue for the then-nascent gay pride movement. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 69-70)
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As a result, the gay pride activists at the time began engaging in highly aggressive protest tactics at psychological conferences, shouting down speakers, being generally disruptive, and delivering the ultimatum that their lifestyle be removed as a mental disorder in the DSM. In response, Robert Spitzer proposed a revision to the DSM-II in 1973 which was not a scientific proposal, but another opaque and autocratic move guided by his personal vision for the document. As is documented plainly by the proceedings of the American Psychiatric Association, Spitzer elegantly defined “mental disorder” as a psychological condition that impairs general function or is unwanted by the patient, thus removing homosexuality from consideration as a mental disorder and removing it by fiat from the DSM-II. Many professionals at the time disagreed with the decision.
In all fairness to the gay pride movement, many of their concerns regarding the treatment of homosexuals at work and in society were quite valid. There are many stories of brutality and violence, countless stories of rejection at the hands of friends and family, and the kinds of invisible tragedies and hardships only made known to the mainstream through brilliant queer artistic works like RENT or Sense8. Indeed, although it is not well-known, the author of The Ugly Duckling, Hans Christian Andersen, was himself bisexual and wrote the parable as a kind of autobiographical tale.
Yet, a deeper look into the lives of Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Spitzer, Alfred Kinsey, and many others part of the poorly-defined “LGBTQ movement” reveal a number of troublesome patterns in childhood, which are reflected in a body of scientific literature that has been systematically hidden, discredited, and outright denied by the psychological mainstream since Spitzer’s 1973 redefinition of mental disorder.
Hans Christian Andersen, as related by popular sources, was born in Danish slums to humble parents and may have been dealing with alcoholism, the prostitution of family members, and potentially even sexual abuse as part of his childhood. In nonfictional autobiographical accounts, Andersen relates that he was abused at school for purposes of character improvement and was discouraged from pursuing creative outlets by the faculty. This mixture of experiences, juxtaposed with his relative success later on in life as a weaver of tales and imaginations, is roughly the narrative espoused in The Ugly Duckling. Sadly, Andersen’s love life remained unfulfilled, with persistent problems in finding a female mate as well as same-sex attractions that remained mostly unexplored.
However, there are resonances between Andersen’s childhood and the experiences carried by Alfred Spitzer. During Spitzer’s childhood, he reportedly dealt with a “professional patient” for a mother and a “cold, remote” father. He attended therapy as a teenager for these issues, as well as an outlet to talk about his fascination with women.
In fact, as noted by Sexual Personae author and lesbian dissident Camille Paglia, there is consistently a pattern of childhood disturbance present in the male homosexual community, and in one of her public opinions offered on the subject went so far as to say this was ubiquitous across all gay men she had ever known. Juxtaposed against these allegations, which would likely be decried as genocidally homophobic in the post-Trump era, is the American Psychological Association’s website, which states that there is “no consensus about the exact reasons” and that “most people experience little or no choice” in their sexual orientation. The LGBTQ movement has since rallied around these ideas, expressed succinctly in Lady Gaga’s smash hit Born This Way, and claim that their orientations are innate, biologically determined, a fundamental part of who they are, and therefore inviolable. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 70-71)
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But what does the science say?
A 2019 study on the relationship between genetics and homosexuality which involved almost half a million Europeans found that genes can only account for between eight and twenty-five percent of homosexual behavior. Although this is not a perfect comparison due to differences in the studies, genetics have been found to drive forty percent of divorce behavior and the majority of bipolar predisposition, strongly indicating that homosexuality is not driven by genetics. Investigations into intrauterine factors that might drive homosexuality such as fetal hormone exposure, as well as theories about evolutionary origins such as kin group optimization, remain inconclusive, unproven, weak, or implausible.
However, much more in line with Paglia’s estimation and the lives of Andersen and Spitzer, a study published in 2012 found that homosexuals were significantly more likely to have been sexually abused as children when compared to their heterosexual counterparts, and that this likely plays some kind of causal role. These findings were foreshadowed by another high-quality study published four years earlier and seem relevant to the treatment of LGBTQ individuals given the trauma that would cascade into other mental health issues typical for victims of childhood sexual abuse, which are many.
Furthermore, Canadian-led research on over one thousand male homosexuals in the twentieth century found a pervasive trend in the male homosexual’s family dynamic where the mother was inappropriately close, controlling, smothering, and inappropriately emotionally bonded with her male child, sometimes even becoming sexually inappropriate in similar ways that she would with female friends. Meanwhile, the father was cold, abusive, competitive, and rejecting – much like Robert Spitzer’s was reported to be.
These findings, too, have been corroborated by studies of homosexual clergy members, as well as a 2005 study involving two million Danish subjects, but have been flatly, aggressively, and even violently denied by activists who are adamant that there is nothing wrong with them whatsoever.
Given the context of homosexuality’s removal from the DSM and Spitzer’s own life history, these findings are extremely troubling and indicate there is a tremendous amount of unrecognized and unresolved pain in the homosexual community. This hypothesis is supported by a significant amount of literature on LGBTQ mental health, including studies that find homosexual and bisexual men are nearly three times as promiscuous as heterosexual men, are more likely to have been paid for sex, and engage in extreme sexual acts significantly more often. Non-heterosexuals are much more likely to be dependent on drugs and are more likely to have a diagnosed disorder such as bipolar, panic disorder, borderline personality disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 72)
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In the context of monogamous same-sex relationships, which are rarer than admitted despite the fierce fight for their recognition, homosexual relationships are more unstable and likely to be plagued by infidelity as well as more violent: male-male partners are just as likely to be violent as heterosexual couples, if not more, and lesbian pairings are the most violent kind of relationship.
The metaphysical switcheroo perpetrated by Robert Spitzer in 1973 was not entirely a terrible thing, as it catalyzed the general acceptance of not only homosexuals, but people with all kinds of diverse attributes, including disabilities and other mental illnesses. Today, homosexuals are celebrated for their many achievements – predominantly artistic, likely but not confirmedly due to genetic predispositions to extraversion and openness – and even gender-diverse people are beginning to find acceptance. At the very least, there is more room for different kinds of masculine and feminine expression and some aspects of rigidity during formative years has been relaxed.
However, the metaphysical crimes perpetrated by corrupt psychologists have had terrible costs for Western nations. The undiagnosed mental health issues of the homosexual population, which cascade into extremely promiscuous and risky behavior, have been the root cause of the AIDS crisis that took the lives of many homosexuals as well as the recent monkeypox scare. Gay pride has since turned into an industry, with abused men, and now children, paraded as drag queens on national television instead of getting the help they need.
As disappointing as these series of lies have been, the rot goes much deeper with the psychological bodies. Following the depathologization of homosexuality in 1973, LGBTQ activists with a neo-Marxist agenda began infiltrating the field, eager to gain and wield professional power in service of a demographic that had long been poorly served by electroshock therapy and morphine. However, fifty years into the deception, what started as a push for mere acceptance has devolved into the sick and calculated destruction of entire generations of children, whose bodies and minds have been sacrificed at the altar of inclusion. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 73)
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If Hans Christian Andersen, the original ugly duckling, were alive today, there is a high chance he would be either transgendered or nonbinary. Indeed, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s definitive report on transgender science and the standards of care for transgendered individuals cites evidence that over seventy-seven percent of prepubescent boys referred to clinics for gender dysphoria ended up desisting, or no longer experiencing dysphoric feelings into adolescence. The same is true for girls, for whom seventy-three percent desisted around puberty. Most of these children were documented to become homosexuals or bisexuals instead, much like Hans Christian Andersen was believed to be.
However, despite these realities, new research in transgender “science” has since swept through Western nations to the point where gender-affirming care is now mandated by Canadian law should a child begin to express dysphoria to a parent or caregiver. In many school districts, teachers can help “socially transition” children without parental knowledge or consent. Some governments in American states like California are enacting similarly radical legislation, purportedly to benefit children given the astronomically high suicide rate amongst the transgender population.
The various issues surrounding the claims of transgender activists have led to unprecedented social turmoil in North America, becoming one of the rare social issues to become as polarized as race. The West’s concessions to the “scientific” demands of have resulted, so far, in “penised women” entering spas and disrobing in front of women and female children, female estheticians being sued for not waxing a “woman’s” testicles, a woman’s skull being broken by a transgendered individual in a martial arts bout, and dangerous male-bodied offenders being housed with female inmates.
But what of this new transgender science? Where did it come from?
Ultimately, this author personally witnessed the devolution of the LGBTQ movement during his own involvement with it throughout the 2010s. Even in universities at that time, transgendered people were quite rare, although most people on campus were familiar with them. In the mid-2010s, however, the ideas became more mainstream in LGBTQ thought and therefore in academia, which leans liberal in almost all disciplines except the hard sciences. During this time, the author joined an online group dedicated to transgender science, and after observing the academic discussions for about three years, it became clear that the group had begun seeding their studies using each other and themselves as research subjects.
These activist-academics had also come to explicitly reject the standards for transgender care as espoused by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health in favour of radical and unproven notions of gender which have since become commonplace in Western discourse. By forming loosely distributed and largely informal networks of pseudo-scholars, neo-Marxist and academics who could all cite and reference each other, they – and other activist-academics – have been able to usurp the scientific method and confuse many people terribly. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 73-74)
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The result is that about eighty percent of children, if not more, who are receiving puberty blockers and sex reassignment surgeries, or even gender-affirming care that does not first investigate childhood traumas like sexual abuse, are being intentionally neglected by a corrupted discipline that cares more about legitimizing its own mental illness than it does about alleviating others’ suffering. Even worse, their parents are being told that the only other option to gender-affirming care is a dead child, with the tremendously high suicide rates of gender dysphoric individuals provided as evidence that they are obliged to comply.
Furthermore, the transitioning process, which involves hormone treatments and surgeries to construct new sexual organs, is held by transgender activists to be the panacea of the condition. Yet, the suicide rate for transgendered people who have fully transitioned remains twenty times that of the population average in some studies. Additionally, the ranks of so-called “detransitioners”, or people who regret their transition, are growing. This demographic, many of whom are women on the autism spectrum, cite other issues for their dysphoric feelings and report feeling influenced by the lies propagated by activists online.
Instead of allowing their ugly ducklings to grow into swans, a colonized and impatient population, deluded by mentally ill activist-psychologists, has become tragically obsessed with the defeathering and tearing-apart of these beautiful birds. The sickening history of experimentation that laid the groundwork for these modern deceptions, which includes child mutilation for purposes of research, is also deeply concerning and indicates deep corruption and immorality on the part of psychology’s governing bodies.
The author’s own life experience is proof that this rabbit hole goes even deeper. After attending regular talk therapy for work stress in 2019, the author discovered that some of his LGBTQ orientations, which included open polyamory and closeted bisexual tendencies, were almost completely alleviated and replaced with a strong desire for a wife and a vegetable garden. According to the American Psychological Association’s 2009 Task Force Report on conversion therapy, or therapy intended to change sexual orientation, this is not even possible if that is the point of the therapeutic relationship, let alone by complete accident.
The report also claimed to find “no credible evidence” for the efficacy of such practices, then concluded that people do not face a choice about their sexual orientation and that “affirmative treatments” are the only responsible option, much like was said for transgenderism a decade later. However, this task force seems to have been comprised of six activists in gay rights causes, with not a single actual practitioner of conversion therapy accepted to the committee, nor even a neutral party. Furthermore, their report conveniently dismissed every single paper documenting conversion therapy success as being methodologically flawed, allowing them to say there is no credible evidence while avoiding the inconvenient truth that evidence happens to exist. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 74-75)
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In fact, there are many papers and studies that document the efficacy of conversion therapy, and they seem more reputable than the LGBTQ activists would like to admit. One paper, which accurately described the author’s family dynamic despite being published thirteen years before his birth, found that cognitive psychoanalysis had a 30-50% success rate. Another researcher found that a similar proportion of surveyed homosexuals accessing therapy or pastoral care experienced a change from predominantly homosexual to predominantly heterosexual, and experienced positive changes in their psychological, interpersonal, and spiritual well-being.
Infamously, Robert Spitzer, the man responsible for the revolution of the DSM, published a study with over two hundred former homosexuals who claimed to have been cured through therapy, which he later retracted after criticism from the ideologically captured psychological mainstream.
Between LGBTQ fraud, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Implicit Association Test, power poses, the collapse of the serotonin theory in depression, further fraud in Alzheimer’s research, and a general “replication crisis” in psychological fields, modern society seems fundamentally confused about many matters of human nature. Zimbardo’s fraud cast a deep cloud of pessimism for decades, its shocking revelations about morality spreading like wildfire. Children are being sterilized, mutilated, lied to, and intentionally confused by deranged adults desperately seeking to legitimize their illnesses. The American Psychological Association has even been implicated in torture of United States prisoners.
This leaves Western society with a deep problem. If many things commonly believed to be true about human nature are fictions, and the scientific bodies involved in perpetrating these lies have been corrupted for decades, then the true nature of human nature is very much an open question to be resolved. Indeed, to paraphrase dissident psychologists specializing in narcissism, most modern Westerners live in a world of flickering images, denied the opportunity of looking in a mirror and seeing their true self.
Despite the rampaging technicolor catastrophe that psychology has degenerated into, there have been many genuinely useful discoveries over the years. Many of the well-known luminaries like Abraham Maslow and Erik Erikson have contributed several important puzzle pieces to our self-understanding and have likely helped keep the Western psyche together despite the pernicious influences from high modernists and their subversive counterparts.
Some other examples of genuine accomplishments include Internal Family Systems, an innovative kind of auto-dialectical therapy that encourages dialogue between disparate “parts” of a person. They also include the wickedly tricky Derren Brown, a hypnotist, mentalist, showman, and stuntman who uses scientific knowledge and advanced psychological techniques to conduct experiments, teach people life lessons, and empower his fellow human beings. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 75-76)
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Moreover, Abraham Maslow’s vision for third force psychology, and in his final years an even more exciting fourth force, underlies the optimistic tones now taken by mainstream psychology. Indeed, the focus of third force psychologists on values, needs, and self-actualization is one of the pillars of the modern self-help movement, forms standard knowledge for psychology undergraduates, and will mark important waypoints on the reconstruction of psychology and the blueprint of global utopia in the second section of this document. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 77)
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One of the most famous philosophers of recent memory is Friedrich Nietzsche, whose aggressive style, bombastic claims, and prescient analysis have made his intellectual legacy one of the most compelling in the Western canon. Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s scathing critiques of traditional European value systems, and grave concern at what would come to replace them, represent one of the most insightful diagnoses of Western metaphysical ailments ever to be produced.
Indeed, throughout many of his works, Nietzsche is primarily concerned with values, the metaphysical beliefs that drive them, and their resulting expression in societies. One of his most provocative concepts, later appropriated by the Nazi regime, was the übermensch or “overman”, someone who determined and pursued their own values through force of will. A person who failed to do so was, in Nietzsche’s opinion, doomed to nihilism and decadence – a self-destructive lifestyle.
One of Nietzsche’s main targets of criticism was Christianity, which he correctly intuited to lack a coherent metaphysical substructure for the values it had imposed on Europe for centuries. Writing in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries, as well as the momentous 1860 exchange between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley on the topic of evolution, Nietzsche foresaw what he called the death of God – the collapse of a widespread belief in Christianity, as well as the propagation of atheistic and nihilistic value systems throughout the void that would be created:
“Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him… What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Although Nietzsche’s fictional and poetic expression of these ideas can make it challenging to grasp their full meaning, his primary concern with the nineteenth-century collapse of Christianity is the resulting metaphysical and moral degeneration he foresaw in its wake. The “festivals of atonement” and “sacred games” alluded to in The Gay Science turned out to be nothing of the sort, with orgiastic destruction made the rule in Japan’s Unit 731, the Soviet gulags, and the Nazi death camps throughout the twentieth century. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 78)
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Given these atrocities and the consistent patterns which give rise to them, one of the most pressing questions for many modern thinkers is how modern humans are so susceptible to genocidal behavior, both in the context of religious and secular belief. While many thinkers within the Western dream attribute such phenomena to inescapable problems with human nature, the reality is that the cascade effects of Christianity, modern European statecraft, the Industrial Revolution, mandatory state education, and psychology have whipped Westerners into valuing self-sacrifice and social belonging over their own self-interests, which Nietzsche described as a slave morality. Moreover, the cascading metaphysical mistakes made by Western intellectuals over the last two millennia have corrupted the public’s self-understanding, causing large segments of the population to become decadent and preoccupied with self-destructive goals.
In a remarkable point of consilience with the Biblical scriptures he despised, Nietzsche correctly intuited that the West’s faulty belief systems were idols, something that he made explicit in the title of one of his more famous works. In a Biblical sense, an idol is commonly associated with a statue of an alleged divine entity that receives veneration or offerings in return for blessing. Strictly speaking, this classification would include everything from Buddha statues that receive token veneration to the statues of Mary popular within Catholicism. However, in ancient times, and particularly in the Near East, the most popular idols included Moloch and Baal, both of whom were venerated through gruesome forms of child sacrifice:
“And to the children of Israel, you shall say: Any man of the children of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn among Israel, who gives any of his offspring to Molech, shall surely be put to death; the people of the land shall pelt him with stones.”
Although it may seem difficult to believe given the natural bonds that exist between parents and their offspring, the slaughter of children, virgins, and other blameless group members was a feature of ancient civilizations. Indeed, monuments to Aztec bloodshed serve as tourist attractions in Central America, uncovered burial pits in Carthage provide similar memories of darker times, and evidence even exists to corroborate Biblical accounts of pagan child sacrifice in the Levant.
For most Westerners, far removed from the worship of statues and the outright slaughter of innocents, the mindset behind such a practice and its relation to present circumstances can be difficult to understand. However, there are several clues hidden throughout the scientific, historical, and religious record that provide hints as to why child sacrifice was so popular cross-culturally, and why similar patterns continue to manifest in Western society in the form of gender-affirming care and other destructive practices. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 78-79)
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The first clue comes from Jewish oral history, which relates that serving these idols provided followers with an incredible high. The second comes from an obscure-yet-influential book by neuroscientist Julian Jaynes which reveals links between the brain’s intuitive right hemisphere and the speech areas of the brain, which Jaynes believed facilitates not only the modern phenomenon of “inner voices” but also gave many ancient people an actual voice in their heads which became attributed to gods or deities.
There are also social factors at play in the phenomenon of child sacrifice, including the human propensities to comply with authority and fit in with the crowd. Insights from the Milgram experiment and other documented atrocities in modern history, including the murder of Jewish children by German policemen against their better instincts, strongly indicate that social pressures can override even the natural human instinct against murder and the natural protective instincts healthy parents have for their children. Moreover, the well-known bystander effect, which illustrates how the human desire to blend in with the crowd can take precedence over self-preservation, is another demonstration of the power of social influence.
Although a comparison of religious and secular sources is not always an easy endeavour, the consensus between rabbis and neuroscientists is that the statues themselves had no real power and were not physically communicating with their carved mouths. Indeed, this can be seen plainly in Jewish scripture, which elevates its criticism of idolatrous practices to satire:
“Neither do they know nor do they understand, for their eyes are bedaubed from seeing, their hearts from understanding. And he does not give it thought, and he has neither knowledge nor understanding to say, ‘Half of it I burnt with fire, and I even baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and ate. And what was left over from it, shall I make for an abomination, shall I bow to rotten wood?’
As all sources concur, the idols of Baal and Moloch may have had physical statues to embody their concepts, but they were ultimately just voices in people’s heads – bad metaphysical conclusions that influenced human behavior. The same is true for transgender ideology, which has been extraordinarily successful in getting the Western public to accept spurious claims about biology, psychology, and anthropology. While the transgender science now clouding Western judgement is extraordinarily more sophisticated than tribal beliefs about deities, the fact that both phenomena can be observed to operate according to similar patterns indicates that the ideologies of the post-Darwin Western world, known broadly as the isms, may also be a form of idol. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 79-80)
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Despite the West’s sophisticated technologies, as well as important civilizational advancements like the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, the sobering reality is that Western civilization is much closer to barbarism than it would care to admit. With only one in four American university graduates considered literate, many Western adults unfamiliar with the arrangement of the solar system, approximately one in ten children confused about their gender, and very little understanding of the “science” that holds modern societies together, the average Westerner lives in a world as confusing and arbitrary as any Canaanite barbarian.
Enmeshed in an extremely complex set of systems and unable to properly distinguish between the consequences of systemic decisions and the effects of natural events, the average Westerner must rely entirely on networks of journalists, experts, and other authorities to understand what is happening in the world. This dangerous situation is reminiscent of the European Dark Ages, where priests with exclusive access to Christian scriptures enjoyed a monopoly over much of Western thought, and tremendous influence over feudal governments as well.
Although the scientific literature that constitutes today’s holy scriptures is, in theory, accessible to any layperson curious enough to find it, most people lack the technical skills to properly interpret such works, and many also lack the critical thinking skills required to synthesize the information and form an independent opinion. In combination with the rise of social media and the popularity of thinkers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Jordan B. Peterson, many Westerners have split themselves into various ideological tribes with modern-day prophets and oracles at the helm. Many social media influencers have built their careers solely on interpreting and contextualizing events for their viewers, indicating the tremendous need for understanding in the contemporary climate.
The problem with this situation is that none of the ideological groups involved in the West’s ongoing “culture war” have a correct understanding of the problems they are trying to solve. On one hand, the Marxists who adhere to metaphysical principles like equity and intersectionality have misdiagnosed the suffering of the modern West and are naively attempting to systematize the whole world in response. The established powers, represented generally by Christian conservatives and “classical liberals” like Gays Against Groomers, have their own metaphysical problems which they are unwilling to examine. All the while, state education systems continue to simplify childhood, the corporate machine continues to optimize for growth, and the average person becomes more hopeless, helpless, and frustrated. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 80-81)
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While the notion that humans are being deceived on a grand scale became popular in the mainstream following the release of The Matrix in 1999, most Westerners would be shocked to learn about the extent and sophistication of the deceptions they have been subjected to. Aside from the monstrously harmful lies about gender and sexuality that have corrupted and mutilated countless children, the mass media and their trusty “experts” have warped the public’s understanding of an untold number of issues, particularly over the last several years as Trump’s popularity catalyzed the “culture war”.
From the perspective of the journalists in the mass media, it is possible that many of them genuinely believe that they are doing important work to raise awareness about important issues. However, the overwhelming focus on issues of race, gender, and sexuality over the last several years, combined with the journalists’ biases on these issues, have led to sensationalist and misleading reporting that has confused the Western public terribly and polarized it dramatically.
For example, the mass media, now largely controlled and operated by university-educated Marxists, perpetrated a series of hoaxes during the 2020 election cycle of the United States which arguably handed the election to the Democrats. From failing to report properly on Donald Trump’s infamous “very fine people” comments, for example, the mass media perpetuated the false belief that the sitting president had condoned neo-Nazis when he actually took care to condemn extremists in his remarks. This grievous mischaracterization of Trump’s statements, laundered into accusations of racism by the media, was made a core feature of Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020 with no challenges from anybody in the mainstream.
Because the articles leave out many details, corrections are issued sparingly, and stories are biased towards scandal and controversy, most Westerners are left disoriented and frustrated by their simplified and colonized understanding of the world. Much like how the radio facilitated genocide in Germany and Rwanda by providing populations with one-sided and sensationalist versions of reality, the ongoing demonization of Donald Trump, the demonstrable lies about homosexuality and transgenderism, and the mass media’s selective outrage over the deaths of unarmed black men are partially responsible for the race riots following George Floyd’s murder as well as the arson of over fifty Canadian churches following erroneous reporting on “mass graves of indigenous children” allegedly found throughout the country. Even if most of what was reported were true and properly contextualized, the average person simply does not have the time to sit down and sort through all the details of every issue, meaning that most Westerners have less insight into their environment than even many prehistoric illiterates.
For example, in addition to dumbing themselves down for “disadvantaged” demographics, white liberals also predominantly believe that requiring identification for voting purposes is racist. This false belief, instantiated by the mass media and perpetuated by Marxist activists, is predicated on the notion that black people somehow lack the resources or ability to obtain identification. Ironically, this infantilizing and disempowering belief, believed to be “anti-racist” due to its approval in the mainstream media, stereotypes black Americans as helpless or incompetent – something that many Afrocentric thinkers have pointed out is not only untrue, but racist. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 81-82)
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The ongoing war in Ukraine, which to many Westerners was a completely unprovoked invasion by Russia, is a shining example of how distanced most people have become from reality. Despite an essay released by Vladmir Putin on the subject of Ukraine, and even past media reporting on issues like the Donbas skirmishes before the war, the mainstream’s hysterical and shallow reporting on the reasons for the conflict has driven much of the public’s opinion in North America. In addition to fictious propaganda about the Ghost of Kiev, counter-propaganda about the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and misleading statistics about Russia’s position in the war, Ukraine flags have been raised on many homes and buildings without the historically “anti-war” West pausing to think about why they are gleefully cheering for their money to be funnelled into one of the most corrupt countries in Europe.
For his part, Vladmir Putin, the man who declared the Russian war on Ukraine, has accused the West of several crimes and transgressions. Among them include trying to turn Russia into a dependent country, turning Ukraine into a de facto colony following the NATO-instigated color revolution almost a decade before Russia’s declaration of war, using Ukrainian territory to engage in prohibited biological research, and engaging in genocide against Russian-descended residents of the Donbas region. Putin has also spoken poorly of Western elites, describing them as selfish degenerates who loot the world for their gain – messaging with strong roots in truth, given the evidence.
While many of these criticisms could be dismissed to some degree as wartime propaganda, the fact remains that much of what has been previously discussed, from the destruction of childhood to the metaphysical crimes of Robert Spitzer and the psychologists, are testaments to the high modernist need to exploit and control in service of narrow-minded objectives. Indeed, the idols of growth, science, and progress, meta-narratives from European statecraft and industrialization that have not yet been properly examined, seem to have largely supplanted the Christian concept of God – and to great harm, as Nietzsche predicted.
Sadly, the mountains of thin simplifications and one-sided perspectives propagated by technocrats, bureaucrats, and experts, laundered to the public as legitimate knowledge by scientifically illiterate pseudo-journalists, have left the modern West trapped in an exploitative dream. The prevailing interests that own the mass media seem to have their objectives, each of the political parties seem to have their objectives, corporations will say whatever they can, and even many journalists are explicitly sided with one faction or another.
Today is the age of idols, of ideologies, and of narratives. It is the age of the cult, of Osho, of NXIVM, of Heaven’s Gate and QAnon. While these fringe groups are rightly identified for the cults they are, the intentionally or irresponsibly faulty metaphysics of every belligerent in the Western culture war means that every ideology, liberal or conservative, is in some way, a cult. But while Christian and nationalistic fascism seem to have had their time in history, the liberals’ chance at ruling with an iron fist seems to be just beginning. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 82-83)
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Indeed, while LGBTQ2IIA+++ may be a dangerous transhumanist sex cult that targets children to perpetuate the fantasies of adults, the most pervasive and dangerous cult of the modern era, which provides governments with an existential threat to drive through expansive legislation, is the cult of the environment. Born in the mid-twentieth century following the West’s deepening appreciation for its relationship with the biospheres it inhabits, the prospect of climate change that could change sea levels and raise the global temperature is now represented in the mainstream as an extinction threat to the species that must be acted on immediately.
Among other changes to Western society that have been either proposed or enacted, there has been a dramatic emphasis on switching to electric vehicles by way of government subsidies and taxation of gasoline. The industrial production of meat, long identified as a source of methane and pollutants by environmental activists, is now considered a luxury that ought to be phased out in favor of plant-based diets. The economic opportunities represented by retrofitting buildings with energy efficiencies, building new wind and solar infrastructure, creating walkable cities, and driving growth are also touted by experts as reasons for these very necessary changes.
It cannot be disputed that environmentally conscious commerce is the best long-term solution for humanity, however the solutions proposed by environmentalists are products of thin simplifications and ignorant misunderstandings of the realities of life. Moreover, the unstable and globalist infrastructure proposed as a panacea to global warming is creating not only environmental problems of its own, but grave humanitarian issues in many countries.
Consider, for example, the relative environmental impact of beef over a potato. Given the higher resource requirements for cattle and beef production, the experts have concluded that plant-based diets are the only sustainable alternative for the world’s current population. However, this is a thin simplification that assumes all food production is, and should be, on an industrial scale, and further neglects the realities of industrial farming.
On many residential properties around the world, cows, goats, chickens, rabbits, and other animals are used to graze on and maintain non-arable land while providing food for families. The distributed benefits of having a few chickens in most households would eliminate almost the entire egg industry and simplify that part of the Western economy significantly while providing supply chain resilience to households. The same is true for cows, of which only one or two are needed per group of households to provide sufficient milk, offspring, and meat for sustainable consumption. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 84)
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Furthermore, the monocrop approach favored by the West, which invisibly provides for the environmentalists living in cities, is specifically designed to control the entire environment, kills all animals and insects in the area, and depletes the soil over time. This systematized and industrialized solution, taken for granted by urban-dwelling environmentalists enmeshed in the progress dream of high modernism, is the less sustainable option given the tremendous amounts of work required to keep the soil fertile and the crops alive.
Indeed, reality is a great deal more complex than environmentalists currently believe it to be, as it is likely that a mixture of meat and produce would be in fact more sustainable than the idealistic vegan approach. This type of simplistic thinking, however, is typical of leftist elites who have never worked on a farm, have only lived in suburban or urban settings, and only know about the food supply chain through the mainstream media and the brochures about their organic avocados.
A relatively new talking point among environmentalists, although an urgent one given their allegations about fossil fuel emissions, is the importance of switching to electric vehicles. The “scientific” claim made to support these policy objectives, many of which are being instantiated throughout Europe and North America, have to do with the environmental impact of fossil fuel emissions on the environment. Many might believe the case is so clear, and the need to act is so great given the possibility of climate change, that there could be no question on this matter. However, this is also a thin simplification as seen from the incredible environmental costs associated with mining the rare metals needed for the car batteries.
There are also human costs associated with the Western luxury of emissions-free vehicles, as many human rights groups discovered when over forty thousand children were found to be mining cobalt in Africa to feed the West’s green dreams. This is in addition to the known child labor issues associated with many consumer goods from China, as well as many other human rights abuses tucked away under the glitz and glam of city lifestyles often favored by the political left.
Even the “environmentally friendly” option of solar power is a thin simplification for everyone in the West who has not personally grown a solar panel. Indeed, the raw materials involved in the production of solar panels, which include bone-rotting acids and many other destructive chemicals besides, are a hidden environmental cost and infrastructure burden which are not properly accounted for by the scientifically illiterate mainstream.
Perhaps the greatest test of Western rationality, ingenuity, scientific progress, and high modernist techniques of control was the COVID-19 pandemic, where global bodies were able to achieve an unprecedented level of coordination across all facets of society to achieve a comprehensive goal of death reduction. The entire weight of the Western scientific project was behind this coordinated response, with predictive models developed largely in Britain, vaccines rapidly developed by pharmaceutical companies in America, and additional insight provided by bodies like the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation, which all resulted in the public urged to “follow the science” at every new development. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 84-85)
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Unfortunately, in hindsight, it seems that even the best of Western medicine and science turned out to be an idol that far too many have been sacrificed to, from people dying alone in retirement homes to the developmental and educational delays in young children. Indeed, high modernist bureaucrats, drunk on their own power and unaware of existential constraints on their ability to control reality, demonstrably destroyed large facets of society for little appreciable gain. Their thin simplification, which proved fatal for many, was the single variable of the COVID-19 death count – a number to be minimized at any cost.
The first blunder was the extensive lockdown measures implemented in most Western countries, which have had many documented human costs yet were touted as an absolute necessity by health authorities and government policymakers. The truth to this controversy, considered unmentionable by many, is that bureaucrats became exclusively concerned with the pandemic’s death toll, which turned out to be almost entirely concentrated in the elderly, obese, and infirm. Indeed, ensuring that grandma lived an extra few years while ensuring her retirement was spent in miserable isolation contorted society and destroyed countless livelihoods unnecessarily. This is demonstrably evident by the comparison between Swedish and North American approaches, which yielded similar case counts per capita despite starkly different approaches to social control.
The second catastrophe of the pandemic response was the obsession with masks. As anyone with access to YouTube can see, even particulate matter such as tobacco smoke can pass through surgical and cloth masks relatively easily, and even N95 masks can leave holes for airflow around the nose. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 86)
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Sustained use in an indoor environment, and even outdoors, despite gleeful emphasis from public health officials, seems to be of questionable benefit given that they stop spray at best. Indeed, studies that have been performed after the fact indicate no benefits accrued from masking, which means that the extreme measures implemented at schools and hospitals disproportionately harmed children and youth who are not at risk for serious or lethal cases of COVID. The speech impediments, psychological torture, and developmental delays that have cascaded from this obsession are another form of child sacrifice that the West adopted, based entirely on ideas derived from thin simplifications and illiteracy.
The most controversial aspect of the pandemic response, without question, has been the vaccines developed by pharmaceutical companies during Operation Warp Speed. These were flatly and loudly refused by about twenty percent of the North American public, and since the introduction of booster rounds, the general population seems to have lost interest as well. While the mainstream has not questioned the safety or efficacy of the warp speed vaccines, serious allegations of crimes against humanity have been levelled by some Western factions, with politicians making reference to the Nuremberg Code, commissioning investigations into the ethicality of the vaccine, and openly condemning Western leaders like Justin Trudeau for heavy-handed responses to vaccine-related protests.
Furthermore, before and during the deployment of the vaccine, doctors and scientists from around the world called its efficacy and safety into question, including one of the original contributors of mRNA technology, one of the world’s most-published cardiologists, and doctors, nurses, embalmers, and other front-line workers concerned with the things they saw following the introduction of the vaccine into the arms of the public.
The parallel realities occupied by people who follow the mainstream guidance and those who are listening to alternative sources has created some of the starkest political divisions in the West. It has also highlighted the hidden role that industrial science, as opposed to traditional science, plays in Western life, as the weight of the institutionalized and government-funded “experts” was set against folkloric and peer-reviewed networks represented by the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, the members of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and the Canadian Covid Care Alliance, and notable dissenters like Dr. Peter McCullogh, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and even the Nobel Laureate Satoshi Ōmura.
Much like Robert Spitzer altered the course of the West’s metaphysics by elegantly defining mental disorder in a way that conveniently excluded homosexuals, and much like sexism and racism were redefined by Marxists to include notions of systemic power, and much like woman was recently redefined to include transgender women who self-identify as such, the word “vaccine” was redefined by the USA’s Center for Disease Control to mean “protection” instead of “immunity” in September 2021 – shortly before the most aggressive mandates began. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 86-87)
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This kind of language game is just one example of thousands of subtle redefinitions, incomplete perspectives, and half-truths that have been sold to the public under the guise of science to justify the injections. Zero sustained debates have taken place between dissenting thinkers and mainstream experts, with one prominent vaccine advocate refusing to speak to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the topic on Joe Rogan’s podcast, even with social media influencers putting up over a million dollars for a charity of his choice.
Unfortunately, the journalists responsible for parsing out these truths to the public were either corrupted by Marxist ideas and unwilling to question their own leaders, or scientifically illiterate and had to rely on systemic experts, or both. The public that relies on them, in turn, received anemic analyses of the conversations surrounding the vaccines and remain unaware of many of the genuine controversies that exist about their implementation. Many of the front-line doctors and nurses, particularly in single-payer systems like Canada where there is no option to enter private practice, were browbeat into compliance without the necessary discussions about ethics and consent that are standard in medical practice.
Although it cannot definitively be said that the vaccine was a population control measure, as some of the hardened conspiracy theorists have suggested, it is not clear that the mRNA project has been a net benefit to the West, nor is it clear that ethical procedures were followed during this very expensive and expansive experiment.
Whistleblowers from the clinical trials of the vaccines, which were accelerated from a decade-long process to three months, have revealed ethical and reporting issues with the approval process. Maddie de Garay, a child who was crippled by her side effects seems to have been listed as having “gastrointestinal distress” by Pfizer, a classic pharmaceutical misdirection. Despite repeated assertions that vaccine side effects are rare and minor, a German insurance company’s data suggests that there are significant reporting issues, and national data from Denmark further suggests that the vaccines may even be a net harm. While professionals sound alarms about their findings and are ignored by journalists in favor of the more “authoritative” Western experts, it is becoming starkly obvious to even the most committed modernists that these new “vaccines” do not confer long-lasting immunity, only limited-time protection, something even admitted by vaccine mogul Bill Gates in a 2023 interview. Most have since declined further boosters.
The levels of systemic aggression that were required to pull off these tremendous measures remain invisible to many Westerners, whose experiences of the pandemic were largely focused on economic, psychological, and even physical survival. However, this author, concerned with the fact that Ontario’s data suggested that the chance of myocarditis in teenaged boys was nearly double the chance of death from COVID-19, found himself answering the door to mental health teams and armed police officers in response to questions to public health authorities on the matter. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 87-88)
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After a hunger strike yielded a meeting with an elusive hospital bioethicist, the author discovered his concerns were “powerful” but that the situation involved tremendous bureaucratic pressures. This, in combination with the dozens of pages of documented failure to provide further information upon request, may well constitute a violation of Ontario’s informed consent legislation as well as established medical ethics in the province. However, the fact that there is only one way to practice medicine in Canada, and that way is through government-backed and government-funded institutions, leaves many professionals caught between their desire to help and the harmful realities of the high modernist policies they comply with.
The high modernist ideas and values that drove the West’s COVID-19 response are outlined in a publicly-available book by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, who enjoys close relationships with many of the most aggressive pandemic bureaucrats – Jacinda Ahern of New Zealand, Justin Trudeau of Canada, and Emmanuel Macron of France. In his book, ominously called The Great Reset, Schwab essentially proposes taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to instantiate a form of techno-communism on a global scale.
Schwab’s ideology, broadly speaking, is predicated on three core pillars. The first is a recognition that industrial society has had many negative impacts on the natural world as well as the socio-economic situations of many countries. The second is a high modernist assumption that a better-managed and more efficient society can overcome its own structural flaws and achieve sustainability. The third, final, and most Machiavellian pillar is a belief that a global emergency like a pandemic represents the perfect opportunity to make large-scale societal changes in service of this vision.
Although this new global system, which is already being assembled before the eyes of a crisis-weary populace, will never be called communism, it will have all the salient features of the modern Chinese iteration. Specifically, this will include strict ideological conformity, extensive government interference in economic affairs, the concentration of wealth and power into a selective elite, and significantly reduced personal freedoms facilitated by surveillance technology. Elements of this can be seen in the differential treatment for legislators and elites, who enjoy private jet flights to environmental conferences where they eat the finest foods and discuss the necessities of introducing crickets and soy into the diet of the masses. The many pictures of politicians enjoying mask-free social lives while their assistants remain muzzled are similar testaments to the kind of caste system that has assembled itself as a result of systemic policies and Marxist ideas. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 89)
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The next step for the World Economic Forum, and for many Western countries, is the curtailment of personal freedoms in the name of environmental sustainability. Now that large sections of Europeans and North Americans have been conditioned into radical compliance on account of one emergency, the thinking seems to be that the new emergency measures, which already include restrictions on farming in Canada and the Netherlands, will be accepted without sufficient protest. Alongside the reduction of agricultural activity – especially meat production – insect matter is now being introduced to children in schools, as supplements in grocery items, and in other food-like settings. Unfortunately, a deeper investigation of the issue of eating bugs reveals that it comes with many health issues and that having a few backyard chickens would be superior.
Most unfortunately, the “far-right” claim that Marxist elites dream of a society with an underclass who lives in pods, eats bugs, and is watched over by sophisticated technological systems is largely coming true. Schwab’s entire endeavor threatens to be a total usurpation of Western metaphysics, with false narratives about environmental sustainability, nutrition, human nature, and public health being wielded as holy scripture against an undereducated and overmanaged population. Without the inquiry skills, the courage, and the mentorship to research these matters for themselves and realize that the truth is more nuanced than longstanding narratives, most people have no chance – and the elites likely know it.
As can be seen, upon a rigorous examination, modern society proves to be every bit as religious as Europe under the Catholic Church. The modern Western mind, colonized beyond belief, has been raised in an educational and home environment marked by emotional neglect, a lack of true critical thinking, and a crushing lack of autonomy. Fed a steady stream of pablum from mainstream news and other official sources, much of it demonstrably false, biased, or epistemically questionable, large swathes of society live in a dream reinforced by priest-like experts and an incomprehensible mountain of academic and pseudo-academic literature backing their claims.
Nietzsche’s predictions, unfortunately, have come true, as have Maslow’s concerns about the lack of values in human-focused fields like psychology. The Christian ideal, flawed as it was, gave way to the pleasure-pain principle writ large across society, with statues and odes to suffering now ubiquitous across leftist-dominated campuses, the pursuit of happiness exploited to justify unscientific notions about gender and sexuality, obesity and drug epidemics across several Western demographics, and general civil unrest marked by unprecedented levels of violence in many North American cities.
Although a Westerner familiar with media ecology and conspiracy theories may point to the unrelenting messages about consumption, credential acquisition, and traditional success as a corruption of what people want, the truth is that the rot in Western values lies much deeper. As might be said by dissident psychiatrist Alone, the correction that must be made is in how the wanting is done, which is a function of human self-conception and public understanding of what makes humans healthy and happy. Rooting the problem in metaphysics will serve to illuminate the true challenges facing Nietzsche’s hypothetical overman, as well as the nihilistic and decadent society “he” is meant to represent. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 89-90)
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Aside from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the most famous critics of the Soviet system was Ayn Rand, who emigrated to America in the early twentieth century and became one of the most influential philosophers of her generation. One of the focuses of her work, which she saw as a continuation of the Romantic tradition, emphasized humankind’s free will and our ability to choose values, to work towards them, and to gain satisfaction from achieving those goals. The position that she took in her opus, which seemed bombastic or exaggerated to many until recently, was that anybody who even remotely espoused leftist and collectivist ideals was a villainous looter who refused to take part in the rational process of valuation and productive labor.
The heart of the issue, to Rand, was a metaphysical and ethical one. The looters in her stories wanted to deny reality and expected others to pick up the tab – much like the collectivist neo-Marxists are expecting society to do now. By denying reality, Rand said that they were attempting to steal from other people and exploit their good faith. The righteous person, in Rand’s philosophical framework, can be described as a trader, an inventor, a laborer, an artist, and an intellectual to whatever degree they are able – vocations that are often idealized or featured in her work.
Additionally, Rand’s diagnosis of Marxists remains that they were afraid of being individuals, which caused them to conform radically to outlandish and irresponsible ideas. Indeed, in the overstructured and colonized environment many Western children inhabit, lacking sufficient developmental supports in childhood and the kinds of life coaching only available to wealthy elites, it can be difficult to explore one’s own values, develop a consistent philosophy by which to live life, and develop a plan to work towards those goals and values.
Underlying Rand’s ideas is a belief in a definite and knowable reality, a product of the Enlightenment and scientific project she championed in her work. This stood in stark contrast to the postmodernist position, which holds that reality is socially constructed and nobody can ever know anything objectively. In such a subjective and quicksilver-like world, one’s ability to get their needs met is not based on productive labor, which would implicitly require interactions with reality and a consistent philosophy to support them, but rather one’s ability to manipulate others into meeting their needs.
This is the fundamental mindset behind Marxism, which rejects the outright competition of the free market and replaces it with social competition based on conformity to increasingly complexified values. This is also the key driver behind the continual expansion of the queer demographic to include disturbingly specific sub-identities such as the ampukodo, someone who believes they are a child amputee. Failure to adhere to social conventions when addressing such demographics results in expulsion from the group, akin to the Soviet gulag treatment or the public confessions favored by the Chinese communists. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 91)
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Thus, as Rand laid out in Atlas Shrugged in great detail, the honest producers of society are manipulated by shame and Nietzschean slave morality values into complying with people whose only way of providing for themselves is through this manipulation. Her proposed solution, a strike, would force everyone to face reality without the benefit of their privileged delusions. Elements of this can already be seen in Western society, as evidenced by noticeable drops in North American military recruitment, a lack of people willing to work minimum-wage jobs, and the growing popularity of alternative working arrangements, entrepreneurial activity, and homesteading lifestyles.
Although the Hunger Games story has reached hundreds of millions globally, many of whom certainly enjoyed it, the buzz over a female action protagonist seems to have eclipsed the fact that the Capitol, a decadent utopia that exists on the backs of the other districts, and which engages in televised child sacrifice on a regular basis to satisfy their cultural idols, is much more representative of the modern Westerner than it would be of the right-wing fascists many nations fret over.
Indeed, the utopian visions characteristic of the West before the World Wars has been subverted by neo-Marxist intellectuals, maniac psychologists, and power-hungry elites who have corrupted human nature, stunted intellectual development, encouraged the development of decadent value structures, abandoned history, and have proven themselves willing to even mutilate children and force-medicate adults.
Even as the West takes its final steps to emulate China’s dedication to electronic surveillance and population control, a measure of solace can be found in the fact that these ideologies, isms, idols, and other false narratives are inherently unsustainable. For example, a small cadre of scientists and activists have kept track of all relevant publications on homosexuality and kept them compiled on hidden corners of the internet – a single look at this mountain of evidence, or even a chance viewing of a video on YouTube, is enough to collapse the fifty years of false homosexual narratives in minutes.
Even the vaccine narratives that have been relentlessly pushed by all levels of government as well as their willing idiots in the media are proving to be unsustainable, as the majority of people in North America are declining further boosters. This happened within years.
Aside from his attacks on traditional European values, Nietzsche lamented the rational structures of Western society and longed for a return to Dionysian, or intuitive, ways of living. Although this must be weighted against the obvious need to be connected to reality and the value of rational inquiry, the loss of the West’s intuitive capacities is of significant interest. All too often, people are encouraged to “be rational” and to mistrust their intuition, which, as history demonstrates, is often the very capacity they need to be able to escape the high modernist dream. Indeed, the artists and visionaries of Western society have long been the ones to criticize it most thoroughly. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 91-92)