The Realm of Coercion

Yep. That's evil.

Paul Kingsnorth has done it again. He is appealing to the prepper monk in me. Yes, I am a prepper monk; I feel myself in my home office with my purloined terabytes of accumulated pith, wisdom, and memory-holed testimony snatched from the jaws of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Mine is like a small bastion of the Middle Ages. I feel myself as though my perception and articulation make me a freelance foot soldiering calligrapher saving the written word for posterity, even as the newest AIs from Adobe lower the barriers to entry to film school to boy teens hooked on destructive fantasy.

You know I know people who homeschool, and I know no one who believes American public school serves any purpose much beyond the industrial production of useful idiots. So I retain a certain healthy respect for the mastery of the book that taught most people in Christendom to read, the King James Bible. In its metaphor, it is beyond Shakespearean. Who could call the Book of Job their original masterpiece? In simple truth, those metaphors matter, even in the belly of the Roman Empire in which Christianity grew without official infrastructure. Indeed what are the forces today that sway men’s minds, unacknowledged as they are in the institutions of higher education? I imagine two anthropomorphized clouds on either side of a walled labyrinth blowing fresh or fouled air. Truth and lies are similarly blown into the air of our organizations. We call it ‘systemic’ but it is much more ephemeral than that. To be safe, one has to be at home surrounded by curated terabytes, smart filters, firewalls, moats and battlements.

I remember back in 2000 when I wanted to be a member of the Chatting Class. I had been on The Well, the granddaddy of them all, and several other early and advanced sites where even journalists paid attention to the nascent information superhighway. Of course I was attracted to the new blogosphere. Today the trends on X/Twitter bring to mind the trajectory of a beach ball in the bleachers of Fenway Park; a bunch of rowdy drunks trying to keep a stupid thing alive and circulating while the police try to deflate it and snatch it away. A few of you will know what I mean when I tell you it’s all Little Green Footballs vs Firedog Lake on the same site. It’s for journalists and would-be journalists who want power and influence.

This couldn’t be clearer than when the meme hit about an explosion at a hospital or was it an explosion of a hospital? I admit that I paid skeptical attention to this bit of echo chambered brain spew. Here is my humorous take, expressed in the exasperation of someone in the labyrinth buffeted by winds he cannot discern as fair or foul.

If you understand him as being coerced, then you might see what all the power-seeking chatting class members are doing as the work of the devil, as the bad wolf is being fed. It’s making us as crazy as this actor, and I mean ‘we’ very loosely.

In all of my years on Facebook, I have never had anything I’ve said redacted. That may be a feature of my narrative voice, which I presume to be appropriate of a smart old gent at the Yale Club, some sort of anachronistic geezer nobody heeds any longer. But I did purposefully tell my friends to the left and right that I would never seek to coerce them. I’m simply not emotionally twisted by those forces that have their panties in knots. I have removed my dog from fighting. I think it makes me something of a useful ringside announcer for the sake of people who would only see these matters as a curiosity 47 years hence. I am not a voice in the wilderness. I’m right here, right now, but I’m not bent out of shape about it and I’m not trying to bend you. This is especially the case in matters of war and peace. It is what my experience tells me from being a Neocon. Don’t even bet on Colin Powell, who once was the most popular and righteous sounding man in America. I speak. I don’t attempt to command. My ambition is not a will to power.

I will mock fools on occasion, but it even gets tiresome to be shooting Wokies in their own self-righteous barrels. Today I continue to be amazed at how many of us are stuffing ourselves on a media diet of high production value video and spatial audio of the sort which require hundreds of names in the rolling credits, until the AIs come, bless their silicon hearts.

Now I have this dangerous concept in my head that allows me to see the evil of seduction in a new old way - the way Kingsnorth sees as he works to be a proper Christian in an acknowledged dark age. Not because he’s seeking Rapture or the End Times, but simple lower case revelations. He has adjusted my vision. Let’s see where it leads me to focus.