Sick of Dystopia
The end of the world is not the end of the world, but an invitation to renewal.
„The last decade has been a demoralizing one. A path to victory is difficult to discern, for the enemy’s power is overwhelming; to the contrary, all plausible roads seem to lead only to annihilation. Within a generation, it seems, every Western people will have been fully dispossessed. We shall be rendered a despised and powerless minority in our own homelands, as half of our deranged people go with empty sanpaku-eyed grins into the great Darwinian night.“
~ John Carter ‚The White Man‘s Ghost Dance’ (Postcards from Barsoom)
„[A]s I drove home someone sent me an audio clip of an interview with a local Galway county councillor, Noel Thomas on Galway FM. It was something the host Keith Richards said, in his passive aggressive, condescending way, at the outset of this interview that set my blood boiling regarding the unlimited immigration into the country and now of Galway city and county.
“ We all have to accept the new reality “
No, actually, we don’t Keith and if we have to take down Galway Bay FM to prove that point I guess that is what we’ll have to do.“
~ Gerry O‘Neill, „Galway residents winning fight against 32 unvetted men going into a 6 bedroom house. “The West‘s Awake“
My Pitchfork journey over the past three and a bit years has had a destination as its objective. Or at least a concept of a destination. A concept best be described as „The Answer“ which would reveal itself as a coherent alignment of seemingly disparate and often contradictory strands of thinking and experiencing of the world around this writer and, supposedly, provide bearings and an intellectual place to call home. “The Answer” would resolve, as I felt sure it would, the confusing mess of signals that life in the West - Christendom would be a more appropriate label - was broadcasting whilst revealing a framework of absolute truths constructed from first moral and economic principles. The hope was that writing through the dilemmata would eventually lead to that shining citadel of insight, much like Bilbo Baggins‘ ring search would ineluctably return him via Sauron to the place he started - and know it for the first time. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.
I am reminded of the haunting stanza in T.S. Eliot‘s „Little Gidding“ which I first encountered at the age of 14, returning often to the Faber & Faber edition of his Complete Works gifted to me by my parents in the Christmas of 1978:
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.~ T.S. Eliot „Little Gidding“ (I)
In truth, I recognize that it was not so much an answer or even „The Answer“ for which I was questing, but a framework of how to think about aspects of life whose externalities and context I assumed were constant and required little thinking effort on my part. Our world is kaleidoscopic and our shifting changes of perspective alter the pattern perceived with every new step and with every fresh minute of passing time. And that is without the overlay of gaslighting which seduces or bullies us into not believing what is transparently so. God’s laws, the laws of physics, and the physics of finance provide an immutable set of constants within whose context the variables can be experienced. That is about the best I can do to impose a semblance of order on my universe.
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