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Hrvatski Noahid:
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)

Hrvatski Noahid:
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)

Hrvatski Noahid:
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)

Hrvatski Noahid:
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)

Hrvatski Noahid:
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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