Like St. George's dragon, the Machine has a soft underbelly. Here are some ways to pierce it...
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What I noticed most was that this was uncomputerised prose. There is a difference. Prose written with a pen and then typed up, a fag dangling from the lip. It went into The New Yorker and The New York Times, into the introductions to the classics, into the heads of readers, never to escape.
I. So wrote Ronald Blythe about an edition of W.H. Auden's essays. It was the phrase 'uncomputerised prose' that struck me most when I first read it a couple of years ago. Here, in one expression, is both a critique and a paean - a critique of machine men with machine minds^; a paean to what writing has always been and, after the Butlerian Jihad^^ being made more and more inevitable as our waxen wings grow nearer the sun, will be again: the physical act of scratching words onto paper (or vellum or stone).
Analogue technology. I write these words with a fountain pen made of metal. The paper rests on English oak. The Machine - the nexus of power, wealth, and technology whose goal is at once the abolition and deification of Man - would of course rather you wrote on a screen. Thus your words can be commodified - or, if heretical, vilified, and thrown into Orwell's memory hole. But this first act of rebellion goes deeper still. Blythe's 'uncomputerised prose' is itself blithe, if you'll pardon the pun. That is to say, it's joyous, and delights in creation for its own sake. By removing itself from the Machine's sphere of influence, i.e., the Matrix, it ceases to be useful. It denies the Machine its dreary Benthamite calculus. It evades its algorithms. All writing 're-presents' reality, but hand-writing less so than its digital simulacrum.
Note how every such act of rebellion detailed below does essentially the same thing. You can't be a victim of the gladiatorial arena if you're busy playing marbles - or conkers or hopscotch or chess - outside its walls. The people who censored Roald Dahl probably can't read his handwriting. And that's why he'll survive.
^ machine men with machine minds (HTTPS)
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II. You've got to wonder why the Royal Mint or the Bank of England has even bothered commissioning, designing, minting, and printing the soon-to-be-coronated monarch's profile, coming to a 50p coin near you. The direction of travel is quite clearly towards a cashless society, and for exactly the same reasons as above: it makes us easier to control. (Part of which is the extraction of wealth via taxes: a legal form of theft by which the useless steal money from the useful to spend uselessly.) Two strangers - one at church and one at an ice-cream kiosk - have separately told me, in just the last week, that they resent the preference for card payments, along with the self-service machines that act as cashless handmaidens.
One of the problems with discussing the cashless society is that there is no way of doing so without sounding conspiratorial. Not that this bothers me. I've discussed the idea of conspiracies in my video on the global food system^. It does, though, bother those normies who are always one bold leap away from connecting the dots. Oh well. It's a hesitation we must put aside. Conspiracies have a way of unmasking themselves. The WEF has been singing the praises^^ of the cashless society since at least 2020 (as usual, 'inclusion' is the watchword); and - without myself drawing the dots explicitly - COVID (the chief pretext for the WEF's Great Reset) merely accelerated the perceived need for a cashless society, lest we strengthen our natural immune systems by handling the coinage.
At time of writing, no UK business can legally refuse cash, whatever they say to the contrary. But just as the 'rejoin the EU' types were (and still are) banking on the old dying out, thus eliminating Brexit's core constituency, so the cashless champions are banking on much the same thing. They know that openly advocating for it would alienate old people, some of whom still have the luxury (as I do not) of remembering shillings and other lovely, weighty old measurements.
This is of a piece with all forms of globalism: to move into the future - which they call, on the one hand, a fiery hellhole of climate-induced genocide and, on the other, a sunlit upland of progressive internationalism (how's that for doublethink?) - we must efface the past. Cash belongs very firmly in the past. This is true in the literal sense. As shown in the charming series Detectorists, metal detectorists are as thrilled to unearth aureus or denarius as they are disappointed to unearth twopence. Give it a thousand years, though, and twopence will be worth a lot more than that. That these buried gems are covered in dirt is a kind of metaphor for the distaste with which the globalists regard the 'things of the earth' - and hence, you might say, their opposition to small farmers in Holland and elsewhere.
^ the global food system (HTTPS)
^^ singing the praises (HTTPS)
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III. Speaking of... I don't wish to dwell on the subject of what to eat and from whom to obtain it. To be prescriptive is for pamphleteers and bad novelists. That said, what we put into our bodies - whether in the form of medical interventions or sandwich ingredients - is of vital importance.
From at least the 80s through to the early 2000s, food talk was generally limited to how much of a given thing to eat. I remember learning about the table of food groups, and the food pyramid, in school. You were supposed to eat more fruit and veg than meat, and more meat than dairy, and more dairy than e.g. doughnuts. To criticise the food system was mainly to point out the prevalence of sugars and fat people. Except for people like the child-sacrifice proponent Peter Singer, the question of from where food was obtained (i.e. factory farms) seldom occurred to most people. It would certainly never have occurred to many people that 'Big Food' (the equivalent of Big Pharma) could be in cahoots with global political interests. They're just selling meat, no?
Recently, however, things have changed. The above has occurred to many people. That supermarket animal products are full of hormones is now common knowledge. That it is now legal in the EU to use smashed-up crickets and locusts in ingredients is fast becoming common knowledge. And there is of course a concerted effort on the part of supranational institutions to take meat off the menu entirely. (Incidentally, this is one of the things The Matrix gets...well, if not wrong, then different to the way things are actually going. You'll recall that, before betraying Morpheus, Cypher chooses to eat a 'juicy and delicious steak'. Then again, Agent Smith, i.e. The Matrix, must have procured it for him as a form of temptation: Power knows what those subjected to power want; it is thus in a position to withhold it.)
This is all in the name of the climate, of course. The grand irony is that we ourselves are being invited to live like the food they'd have us forego: human cattle. One way of rebelling against this is to be much more picky about where you buy your food. I appreciate this is difficult for those living in cities, where the choice (as with political parties) is between a square and a cube. At any rate, I buy all my meat from a local Welsh farmer (cue sheep jokes) and am currently on the waiting list for an allotment. The next step is buying a house in the middle of nowhere but, given I'm not a boomer, this may take some time (several centuries).
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IV. Language game:
a system of manipulating spoken words to render them incomprehensible to an untrained listener. Language games are used primarily by groups attempting to conceal their conversations from others. Some common examples are Pig Latin; the Gibberish family, prevalent in the United States and Sweden; and Verlan, spoken in France.
I'd add two others: 'Nauticalese' and 'bureaucratese' (the first my own neologism). What both have in common is that they are incomprehensible to the untrained listener. This is less so with the Nauticalese i.e. nautical language because English is in many ways a nautical language. Though few have heard of the stanliff, sprit, cleat, vangs, or bobstay (barge terms), everyone has heard of 'learning the ropes', 'grog', 'pipe down', 'taken aback', and 'flotsam and jetsam'. But whether you've heard of them or not, they are undeniably pithy, wholesome, musical expressions which lend themselves to idiom. They are inviting.
The same cannot be said for the language of bureaucrats. Beige men in harsh-lit rooms speak a language borne not of life but lifelessness; not courage, but fear: they themselves may struggle to understand it, but, not wishing to appear ignorant in front of their fellow marionettists, press on anyway. It's a 'nouny' language, full of '-ions'. Euphemisms abound. The NHS defines 'bed' thus:
any device that may be used to permit a PATIENT to lie down when the need to do so is as a consequence of the PATIENT's condition rather than the need for active intervention such as examination, diagnostic investigation, manipulation/treatment, or transport...
A 'device', eh? Drivel = immoral. It exists on a continuum with political evasion:
Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. [Orwell.]
I said beige 'men' in harsh-lit rooms. In line with the feminisation of our culture, however, perhaps I should say 'women'. This is certainly the case in HR. Seventy to 80% of HR managers are women, and HR is to bureaucratese what Stalin was to lists. Should this surprise us? No. Women are much more prosocial than men, which is one of the reasons various social pathologies, such as transgender ideology (transmitted via TikTok, 57% of whose users are female) are driven by women.
If nature abhors a vacuum, power loves a language - just so long as the plebs can't understand it. This doesn't mean eschewing all technical terms; nor does it mean rejecting baroque language, for which I myself have a taste. What it does mean is that we should refuse to collude in the linguistic deception. To do so requires a long memory because Power will alter its language to evade being held accountable. For example:
Illegal immigrants -> immigrants -> asylum seekers -> refugees -> small boats
Another, simpler example (one which I wish were made up):
Paedophile -> Minor Attracted Person
Such an evolution is more than deceptive. It's positively damaging, in that it belies the true and accurate distinctions a responsible government would need to make to (a) give succour to genuine refugees and (b) reject foreign adventurers posing as refugees. The point, then, is accuracy. At the risk of cliche (citing Orwell always runs that risk), it's basically Orwell's point in 1984: to control the language is to control Thought itself, until we live in a world
in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green. [Chesterton.]
Or, one might add, in which a man is 'cancelled' for calling a woman an adult human female. By this point, the call to arms should be clear enough. Never collude with the bureaucratisation of language. To call a spade a spade may turn out to be one of the more radical things available to modern man.
These are just a handful of the ways in which I myself have - or have tried - to rebel. But we should be in no doubt as to the strength of the forces allied against us. Indeed, if I had written the preceding two sentences, say, five years ago, I would have thought myself mad. That I am now (I hope) able to 'perceive' those forces is not (again, I hope) a gnostic point. That we now live at the mercy of powerful, supranational vested interests, immune to the old norms of democratic influence, is a truth to which only the midwit is blind; to the proverbial man in the pub and to the far-seeing philosopher in his ivory tower, it is blindingly obvious. As the Machine grows in size and strength, we will need offensive instruments - excuse me, weapons - with which to slay the dragon. Friendship may be chief among them. In the mean-time, I wish you all a belated happy St. George's day!
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