Ticket to Heaven Daily Dose

[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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)

[Hrvatski Noahid]

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)