A Walk in the Woods

Early every morning I take my dog for a walk in the forest. Often I listen to a podcast, but recently I have been making the effort to leave my AirPods behind and just listen to the birds, look at the trees, and allow my mind to wander.

The intellectual Victorians were great advocates of long walks, for health reasons, but also as a way of thinking. There is something, they posited, about the motion of walking which perfectly corresponds to the rhythm of the mind and helps us to work through problems and overcome obstacles in our thinking.

I am certain there must be some perfect ratio between the amount of information we put into our minds and the time we spend mulling it over, that achieves the best outcome in terms of understanding, productivity, and sanity! We live in an information-rich age. The result is that we can all feel, as in the popular meme, as if we are trying to drink from a firehose: we are overwhelmed, drowning.

Over the last hundred-and-fifty years or so, life has become ever faster with the invention of the steam train, telegraph communications, the telephone, and now the twenty-four hour news cycle and the internet age. We carry an ever-connected miniature computer with us everywhere we go. We are presented with information from all around the world, every minute of every day. Human beings are psychologically and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with such a deluge of information. Two hundred years ago we might have lived our entire lives within a thirty-mile radius of where we were born and known little of the world beyond local gossip and a local newspaper (which we may or may not have been able to read) printed perhaps only once a week.

Society has evolved massively in a tightly compressed period of time and now it is perhaps moving, in speed, and complexity, beyond the bounds of our ability to psychologically manage it. This in turn could be leading to the destructive pathology of modern democracies.

Our democracies are suffering because of the desires and machinations of the global elites. They are manipulating populations, and have been doing so for decades, in order to bring about their own ‘anywhere’ vision of the world in which cultures and traditions, individuality and self-realisation, are ironed out into a uniform world of living-pods, and virtual reality. In this future ordinary people will spend their free time in the Metaverse, and their working lives ensuring the super-wealthy predator class can live free, self-actualized lives, drive cars, fly their private jets, and realise their fantasies in a world without the proles getting in the way.

However this super-rich, predator class is itself a product of the destructive pathology of modern society. Clearly the aristocracy, royalty, the clan leader, have been with us (and oppressing us to a greater or lesser degree) through millennia, but never have they had the wealth and the technology to crush so many people so utterly, as they do now.

It is already within the reach of the predator class to freeze our bank accounts, track our movements, listen in on us and watch us via our computers, phones, or ‘smart assistants’.

For some years ‘cancel culture’ has really been the first expression of the social credit system in western democracies. We have been living for years in a social credit system without realising it. People from all walks of life have lost their jobs, and their reputations, for expressing opinions which did not chime with the new ideology of the elites. This highly fantastical value-system leaves many ordinary commonsensical people, certainly the vast majority of any population, confused and disorientated.

The highly fantasised notions of Transhumanism, Artificial Intelligence, Fourth Industrial Revolutions, are the deranged outpourings of a sick collective imagination. For many ordinary people there is something deeply troubling about the trajectory of these ideas away from an earthly, human way of life into the realm of nanotechnology and machine intelligence. It is as if an obscure unusual outgrowth of the collective consciousness has come to rule the entire mind. Many people going about their daily lives, do not even realise how these marginal ideas are being manoeuvred by the super-rich to become the dominant organisation of society.

Such manoeuvrings have been slow and at first undetectable, but are becoming increasingly apparent. Companies which do not adhere to new woke and environmental belief systems find it difficult to get business loans and banking services from the financial sector. Politicians and political parties who rival the anointed globalist leaders, struggle to attract necessary endorsements or lines of credit, have their lists of donors investigated, find themselves shunted off social media. And, most recently, ordinary citizens, who would not normally come to the attention of their government, have been stigmatised, criminalised, and had their bank accounts frozen, not for participating in a peaceful protest, but for merely donating money to the fundraiser for the protest.

We watch in fear for the Central Bank Digital Currency, anxious that it will bring in the social credit system and all the oppressions that allows, but we fail to notice that the social credit system, as yet unwieldy and imperfect, is already here. Aware of the penalties we may endure we have been curbing our tongues on social media and allowing activist groups to dictate the policies of our workplaces without raising so much as a question, for years.

Now we are reaching a very critical situation in which soon, even if we are still permitted to vote in elections there will be no meaningful choice left to us, because any real opposition to the globalist leaders will have been squeezed out of the political race. If this is not here already, it is coming very, very soon. These next elections in each of our nations are probably the last ones in which we will have a chance to genuinely alter the course of our countries.

This last chance still remains because the predator class has not completely broken and disempowered us yet. Many, many ordinary people have been protesting over the last year or two. Good. Many of us, whilst falling well short of the wealth necessary to be a part of the ‘elite’ own our house, have some investments, or at least a savings account. There are enough of us possessed of this tiny morsel of power, financial stability and the owning of an asset or two, to prevent society from being too quickly and easily turned into their technocratic vision.

Of course a significant minority of westerners do not have these protections against their ruling class. The average American had $73,100 in savings, in 2021. Around twenty-seven percent of Americans have nothing saved at all. In the UK one in ten people have no savings at all, a third have less than £600 saved, and in 2020 average savings were £6,756.81.

It is a worry. They want us to ‘own nothing’ for a reason, because then we will have no power. We are not there yet. In order to hasten our impoverishment and increase their grip on power they destabilise the economy by upending the world around us.

Years of ‘pandemic’ have disrupted supply chains, making everything more expensive, and now beginning to impact upon food production and distribution. War has brought further chaos. Fuel prices rocket, impacting not just our day-to-day journeys but the price of goods which must be transported, which is everything.

It is hard to know at this point whether this will be a slow process of draining our resources, diminishing our quality of life, or whether there will be rapid destruction. In 2012, in response to the 2008 financial crash, the Cypriot government confiscated its citizens' savings, straight from their accounts, without notification. “Everyone with a bank account containing over €100,000 had to contribute 9.9% to the empty coffers of the State, and those with less paid 6.75%.” This shocked me at the time and now I realise how any government could do this. When ready to launch a Central Bank Digital Currency, each government can, and with impunity, seize any money and savings in bank accounts, and simply issue digital currency in exchange. We have seen millions marching against lockdowns around the world to little or no effect: would protesting stop our governments from seizing our money? And if each attendance at a march saw more of our digital currency confiscated would we persist?

This technocratic, Fourth Industrial Revolution, ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy’ future maybe a sickness, a tumour on our unhealthy society. It seems the worst among us have become too rich and powerful, or perhaps were simply corrupted by wealth and power. The rest of us are weakened by our constant exposure to too much information and too much stress.

We are living unhealthy, unhappy, unrooted lives. We have been sucked into the slipstream of the ‘anywheres’, the nomads. Even if we live where we were born our minds are online, our brains are teeming with endless reams of information about every other place in the world, whilst we know nothing about our own neighbours. About one in ten Swedes, one in six Brits, and about thirteen percent of Americans take antidepressants. This has been rapidly rising over the last few decades. We are wealthier and more comfortable than ever before and yet as individuals and societies we seem to be becoming less and less happy.

Being overwhelmed by information, most of it unpleasant, and feeling helpless in the face of all the problems in the world, being disconnected from our community, feeling purposeless in our work, all contribute to this sense of unhappiness. This is the immunocompromised society that is falling victim to the toxic predator class. They have not overwhelmed the system yet, but they are very close to doing so.

Our predator class is sickened by a surfeit of wealth and power, but, like the pastel-coloured popinjays feasting in the Capitol in the Hunger Games, they purge so they can gorge again, never satisfied with what they have. The extremely, obscenely, dangerously wealthy are a symptom of societal sickness. Capitalist society has become corrupted to the point of loosing the last bounds on profiteering excess. From the revolving door between Big Pharma and the so-called regulatory agencies, to the massive number of DC lobbyists, to the unholy alliance between the political establishment and Big Tech censorship, there are deep-seated pathogens at work on the body politic and the answer is to improve the health of society.

We can strengthen ourselves, and the society in which we live, by giving our minds space to think and our souls some peace in which to rest. As I walked today, I did not solve any of the great problems that confront us, but I did clarify my understanding of them. If we can’t grasp a clear understanding of the dangers we face, we will never be able to overcome them. Pacing out the lie of the land as I strode along the forest paths was a worthwhile step on this road to holding off the dark forces. This is the work we must do to bring society back to a place where we are safe from the vast power and terrifying visions of our predator elite.