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Ticket to Heaven Daily Dose

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Hrvatski Noahid:
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)

Hrvatski Noahid:
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)

Hrvatski Noahid:
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)

Hrvatski Noahid:
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)

Hrvatski Noahid:
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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