I was reading Berdyaev before Covid. Off and on for five or six years . My closest friend decided to move to be with his sister in North Carolina. Like me he hoarded books. Unlike me he decided to dispose of them. I boxed his books, found a few I was interested in, and a title of Berdyaev was encountered. The book was on the bottom shelf. My friend was a former true believer in communism, a former astronomy professor and a philosopher. As I recall he owned the title and never read it. Which was curious actually because the book title was The Russian revolution. The book was on the spiritual origins of the 1917 Russian revolution. The philosopher believed that its sources were “demons” living in the Russian national spirit, discovered and awakened in the works of the Russian classics, such as Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. The main reason these demons were able to take hold of the Russian national consciousness was the collapse of everyday life, and the false orientation of this consciousness toward a violent establishment of a new social order. This order attempted to create a moral of equality and fair distribution of property, while lacking a religious-metaphysical foundation.
An excerpt-The Russian Revolution has interested the whole world in Russia and the Russian people. The peoples of the West are uneasy about the Communist experiment, accompanied as it is by a forced implanting of atheism such as the world has never yet known - an experiment carried on in a vast country which is little known to, and little understood by, the West. What must be of great interest is the psychological problem How was it possible for Holy Russia to be turned into an arsenal of militant atheism? How is it that a people who are religious by their very structure and live exclusively by faith have proved to be such a fruitful field for anti-religious propaganda To explain that, to understand Russian anti-religious psychology, one must have an insight into the religious psychology of the Russian people.
After Covid hit I bought about ten titles. The first one I read was Spirit and Reality. I still come around to this title and in fact stimulated by reading it once more I think about Covid. “Far from being an abstraction of human nature, an illusion of consciousness, spirituality is man’s innermost dwelling place, the very source of his being. It is on the contrary materialism which abstracts and does violence to human nature.”
I pause here for a moment and observe that the United States is a mirror of Old Russia. For a nominally religious nation we are the arsenal of militant atheism. Only militant atheism could decide to cull as many humans as possible, in as cruel a way as possible, by using a Big Lie. Andrew Lobaczewski calls Macrosocial Evil a large scale evil that overtakes whole societies and nations, and has done so again and again since time immemorial. Looking for any sort of logic in what is told us by the mainstream media, by our government leaders, by virologists and so-called “experts” is an arduous challenge that disappears as if by magic and turns into the most cynical rationality if we only have the intellectual honesty to overturn our point of view. We should therefore renounce the comforting premise which tells us that our medical professionals, scientists, politicians, social leaders act for our good, and more generally the idea that our interlocutors are honest, sincere, and animated by good principles.
Dr. Mike Yeadon March 22, 2023
I’ve grown increasingly frustrated about the way debate is controlled around the topic of origins of the alleged novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, and I have come to disbelieve it’s ever been in circulation, causing massive scale illness and death. Concerningly, almost no one will entertain this possibility, despite the fact that molecular biology is the easiest discipline in which to cheat. That’s because you really cannot do it without computers, and sequencing requires complex algorithms and, importantly, assumptions. Tweaking algorithms and assumptions, you can hugely alter the conclusions.
This raises the question of why there is such an emphasis on the media storm around Fauci, Wuhan and a possible lab escape. After all, the ‘perpetrators’ have significant control over the media. There’s no independent journalism at present. It is not as though they need to embarrass the establishment. I put it to readers that they’ve chosen to do so.
So who do I mean by ‘they’ and ‘the perpetrators? There are a number of candidates competing for this position, with their drug company accomplices, several of whom are named in Paula Jardine’s excellent five-part series for TCW, Anatomy of the sinister Covid project. High on the list is the ‘enabling’ World Economic Forum and their many political acolytes including Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern.
But that doesn’t answer the question why are they focusing on the genesis of the virus. In my view, they are doing their darnedest to make sure you regard this event exactly as they want you to. Specifically, that there was a novel virus.
I’m not alone in believing that myself at the beginning of the ‘pandemic’, but over time I’ve seen sufficient evidence to cast strong doubt on that idea. Additionally, when considered as part of a global coup d’état, I have put myself in the position of the most senior, hidden perpetrators. In a Q&A, they would learn that the effect of a released novel pathogen couldn’t be predicted accurately. It might burn out rapidly. Or it might turn out to be quite a lot more lethal than they’d expected, demolishing advanced civilizations. Those top decision-makers would, I submit, conclude that this natural risk is intolerable to them. They crave total control, and the wide range of possible outcomes from a deliberate release militates against this plan of action: ‘No, we’re not going to do this. Come back with a plan with very much reduced uncertainty on outcomes.’
Sasha Laptypova writes-In order to accomplish these ends, the government put in place “pseudo-legal” structures over several decades that violate the U.S. Constitution, including citizens’ human rights, with the purpose of executing a “COVID-19 vaccine” bioterrorism attack upon its own citizens, killing and maiming many thousands with complete immunity for all agencies and corporations involved.
“When a known weaponizable tech is given a liability-free, extrajudicial status shielded from all regulations, it’s not hard to put two and two together,” Latypova wrote. “The national security, DoD and Intelligence officials absolutely knew all of this. They went ahead and authorized a $10 billion purchase order of this weaponizable tech from the Fosun-Pfizer-BioNTech enterprise (backed by numerous foreign governments including the Chinese), to deliver and deploy it onto Americans, during the time of war.”
Berdyaev argues that the interior world of man is where we find truth. The forcing upon us of our interior is highly symbolic in my opinion. If we take Covid 19 in it’s complexity literally we are thrust against our desires to be exterior creatures in a rush at all times busying ourselves for escape from our interior. The law demands our confinement for our own good. Our very life is at risk if we disobey. Stay home. Stay safe. Wear protective equipment and the risk decreases you will be next to fall sick from the invisible pathogen lurking in the air, on the sidewalk, in your neighbor who wears no mask.
Is this not remarkable as the external world of fiat wealth is abducted and the familiar consumer jungle simply vanishes like a mist in the late morning sun? Two worlds are now one. Our Nightmare and our Daydream! If we do emerge from our caves the old world is an abandoned movie set. No more can we sit in the cinema, dine in the restaurant, enjoy a beach or participate in sport for the law forbids this for our safety. The world objectified then is hostile and harsh no matter how beguiling. All the movies are coming to pass.
A conundrum as the world objectified is supposed to be what is real.
All community members in this real world are at risk. The police are helpless. The government can only punish. Markets in a dizzying dance no longer represent safety. No place is safe. A flushed toilet puts you at risk. And the death toll though far less than many maladies that strike us out of the blue still shows people die from what is called Covid-19. Death that has no mercy in this land is on all sides and even worse front line workers, heroes, medical laborers, Stakhanovites, in Hazmat suits DIE from Covid-19. Science is to no avail. There is no secular cure for death when even doctors die. There is however a cure for folly. And is called a vaccine.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò writes -The faith of the disciple of the Coronavirus in the media narrative is the grotesque parody of the act of faith required of the Catholic, with the difference that the dogmas of the health religion to which unconditional assent is required are totally irrational, unreasonable, and illogical; there is not an adhesion to a truth that transcends reason but rather to a dogma that contradicts it, showing that, like all false religions, Covid crosses the line into superstition. Those who believe in Covid thus find themselves in the position of having to give proof of their submission to its sacred ministers, even in the face of concepts that are repugnant to medical science and common sense: the use of masks is obligatory even if they do not protect against contagion; the vaccine is imposed even if it does not give immunity, treatments not approved by the Health Sanhedrin are prohibited even if their effectiveness is obvious. And we should add: the more absurd the order that is given, the more the disciple feels that he is a member of the sect precisely by the very act of obeying.
It is disconcerting that those who today abdicate from reason in the face of the proclamations of the virologist-pontiffs declare that they are “rationalists” and convinced supporters of science against any sort of dogmatistic fideism. On the other hand, when people do not believe in God, they end up believing in anything.
Reflecting on this I read Berdyaev. Man's fate is a mystery, not to be unraveled within the small section of eternal life which we call man's earthly, empirical life. The destiny of every man is immersed in eternity, and in eternity the deciphering of its meaning is to be sought. Within the limits of our brief life, everything appears accidental, meaningless and unjust. But everything takes on meaning and finds justification in eternity. (The Philosophy of Inequality. (1923), 42)
Man is a being who transcends himself, passes out beyond his own limits, a being with a tendency toward mystery and the infinite. But the experience of the transcendent, of transcending, is an inward, spiritual experience, and in this sense it may be called immanent. But here immanent does not mean than man remains within his own bounds, but rather that he passes out beyond them. The transcendent comes to man from within, from the depths. God is deeper within me than I, myself, as St. Augustine has said, I must transcend myself. The depths within a man may be closed off, and these depths demand a break-through, transcendence. Through this transcendence the secret in man is made manifest: this is revelation. (The Divine and the Human. (1947) 62)
It may be that transcendental consciousness has firm and immovable bases for knowledge, but transcendental consciousness is not man: man is fated to be psychological consciousness which is in the power of relativism. And there is no explanation of how transcendental consciousness takes possession of psychological consciousness, or how the latter can give rise to transcendental consciousness. It is of no help to me as a man, as a living, concrete subject, as one who has given himself the daring aim of knowing, that there is such a thing as transcendental consciousness, that in it is a priori, that in this ultra-human sphere scepticism and relativism have been conquered from the very beginning. For me it is important to conquer scepticism and relativism in the human sphere, in the man who knows.... I wish to know, myself, and not leave knowing to some ... world-reason: I want knowledge as a creative act of man. (The Destiny of Man. (1931) page13)
Man may know himself from above or from below, from his own light, from the divine element within him, and he may know himself from his darkness, from his elemental-subconscious, from the demonic element within himself. And he may do this because he is a dual and a contradictory being, a being polarized to the highest degree, god-like and beast-like, high and low, free and slave, capable of rising to the heights or of falling, capable of great love and sacrifice or of great cruelty and limitless egotism. (Freedom and the Spirit. (1927-8) I,19)
Once a man has recognized that he is a free and creative spirit, by this very fact he makes the solution of life's tragic conflicts dependent on his freedom and his creativity, and not on the abstract acceptance of a uniform universally-valid law. (The Destiny of Man. (1931) page 167)
The Transhuman’s Holy Grail is achieving immortality, but alas, without a truly human body. Such a post-human dream is a dead end street because it strips away all that it means to be human. Transhumanists believe that as technology grows increasingly sophisticated, particularly research into artificial intelligence (AI), a moment— “the Singularity” — will come in which the cascade of technological advances will become self-generating, unstoppable, and uncontrollable. This crescendo of scientific leaps forward will culminate in everlasting life via the ability to upload our minds into computers. Once safely in cyberspace, transhumans can live indefinitely, perhaps melding their cyber-minds with others, being downloaded into a cyborg, their own cryogenically frozen heads attached to new bodies, or perhaps into their own clones. The details can become a bit murky, but Google’s Ray Kurzweil believes that software heaven will be with us by the 2040s. https://www.technocracy.news/flashback-transhumanisms-wail-of-despair-for-immortality/
In closing I leave the last word with Berdyaev. In the cultural and ideal tendencies of our epoch, dehumanization moves in two directions, toward naturalism and toward technicism. Man is subject either to cosmic forces or to technical civilization. It is not enough to say that he subjects himself: he is dissolved and disappears either in cosmic life or else in almighty technics; he takes upon himself the image, either of nature or of the machine. But in either case he loses his own image and is dissolved into his component elements. Man as a whole being, as a creature centered within himself, disappears; he ceases to be a being with a spiritual centre, retaining his inner continuity and his unity. To the fractional and partial elements of man there is offered not only the right to autonomy, but to supremacy in life.
From the collision of atoms reason and meaning can never be developed.
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
Love this perspective, it made me think of C.S Lewis quoted below.
The last paragraph is interesting, with the comment, "dehumanization moves in two directions" as I have thought it is our disconnection with nature that causes dehumanization, not sure where to go from there?
“For the wise people of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue,” Lewis writes. “For science the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of people: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious…”
But because in this “objective” view there is nothing whatsoever to separate humans from the material of the natural world – nothing that humans permanently is – humans themselves become material available to be manipulated and reshaped at will, just as the natural world can be manipulated and reshaped. And while it “is in humans power to treat themselves as a mere ‘natural object’ and their own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will,” Lewis warns that indeed, “if humans choose to treat themselves as raw material, raw material they will be…”
In such a world, in which techniques of technological control must come to be applied to people just as they are applied to tree or iron, it is not humankind as a whole that will gain such power. Rather, inevitably, “the power of humans to make themselves what they please” means in truth “the power of some people to make other people what they please.”
And if, “What we call humans power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some people over other people with Nature as its instrument,” then ultimately:
Humans conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundred people over billions upon billions of people. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on humans side. Each new power won by people is a power over people as well.