Tommy Johnson from 1928. Canned heat was a toxic, cheap alcoholic concoction of which Johnson himself partook. It seems the legend of a blues man selling his soul at the crossroads was first associated with Tommy Johnson, and later connected to the more famous (unrelated) Robert Johnson.
Some quick thoughts on faith. One of the key lines in the New Testament is “Increase my faith.” Jesus even gets surprisingly harsh saying of people “O ye of little faith”, or “faithless and perverse generation”, and also that he “marvelled at their unbelief.” By contrast he says that virtually anything can be done by us if we are in faith. Faith plugs us directly into the Holy Spirit of God, just as an electrical device is very different if plugged in or not plugged in. Thus goes far deeper than simply a statement of belief, but deep into oneself at the core.
So what is the very first temptation of the Bible in Genesis? Eve tells the serpent God said not to eat of a certain tree of death will follow. The serpent tells her “You will not die,” and essentially tempts her with power. The substance of the temptation is, at least for my purposes, a bit besides the point. The essence is that the serpent has called God a liar, and got Adam and Eve acquiesce in this. The actions that follow are the inevitable chaos that follow this rupture in faith. Thus the immensity of “Increase my faith.” Everything that increases it is good, everything that diminishes it bad - though of course all this can be effected apparently very indirectly. Perhaps another way of putting it is if something is increasing or diminishing the vitality of the spirit, though again all can be seemingly indirect.
Look at Descartes with his celebrated “I think, therefore I am.” Their faithlessness is gone so far that they need some intellectual maxim to try to convince themselves they are real! “Look how clever we are - we have proven our own existence to ourselves.” Congratulations.
Wokeism is simply progressivism ideology under a new term, it’s just the continuation of the same thoughts continuing their fantastic journey through the minds of their human hosts. Leftist ideologies have their essential breeding ground within broadly the academic environment where middle-class people have freedom to think about how they could shape the world to their liking. If someone doesn’t fit within the devised intellectual system, then of course they must be removed from the carefully thought out equation. It should be pretty obvious all this itself can be very much be seen as a bourgeois phenomenon, wallowing in thought and not involved in the actual creation of anything of substance. Underneath the idealism, an awful lot of this amounts to a frustrated bourgeois taking revenge on everyone.
But where initially these progressive figures and their intellectual fantasies could, in the midst of all kinds of underlying personal emotions and desires, to some degree genuinely be concerned with real issues, better working conditions and pay and so on; now however a long way on from its initial gestation, the modern academic progressive is ever more comfortable in their bourgeois environment but also increasingly bored, and out of this boredom arise ever weirder and more distorted fantasies. They are very closely akin to a seedy ageing voluptuary who, with his weakening vitality, requires progressively more decadent and diseased stimulations to satisfy his sensuality bound self. Thus rather than boring issues like working conditions the progressive sensualist is stimulated by the idea of pathetic bullshit about pronouns, everyone being racist (here the revenge on everyone else motif is obvious), and really ramping things up to five year olds undergoing various bodily mutilations so as to “change sex” and locking up a parent who tries to stop this. As is always the case, if someone doesn’t fit within the devised system, they are removed from the equation, and so the incarcerated parent. There is no opposition allowed within their devised systems, which would be to contradict the system. This now is their ‘social justice’, and the kind of stuff it takes to satisfy their inner libidos and weird lusts for power. The earlier more prosaic issues - the dirty working classes, etc - won’t stimulate any kind of inner lusts. This actually amounts to the “progressivism” as we see it unfold - the intellectual frustrated voluptuary needs more and more progressive stimulations.
Just a bit more on that idea of the progressive dwelling within fantasies of their own devising - or maybe spiritually of some darker devising . . . Progressivism is specifically materialist and atheistic. Thus the values that count are material ones - food on the table, religion is opium, art should only serve as propaganda towards the material ends, etc. So through this lens, we see the proletariat and their masters and the agricultural classes are actually operating on the correct material plane - devoted to the production of goods including of course food. This is solidly the material world. Incidentally the left wer never st ease with the agricultural world, it was far too organic for them, and not so easily placed within their black and white categories. The industrial and proletarian worlds were far more bluntly satisfying - machines, noise, means of production. They could get off on that stuff but things growing, farmers and all that were much more awkward.
Anyway the leftist criticism of the bourgeois is that he is a kind of parasite, not creative on the material plane, dwelling in the fantasy lands of all kinds of self-serving bureaucratic systems actually without substance. Well what of the leftist academics and all their theories of future ideal systems, what forms it will take, how to get there and what to do with those who don’t want to get there. This is pure bourgeois fantasy land. It would be interesting and amusing to see the world of academia attempt to dwell self-sufficiently according to its own idealism - how much sustenance on the material plane would the body gain from all their thought in their heads? I don’t think they’d survive very long.
Regarding all this, something from Crime and Punishment came to mind where the serving girl Nastasya asks Raskolnikov, the impoverished former student, lost in his own fantasies, why doesn’t he do anything productive like teach children now:
A very famous New Testament passage below:
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s
Why is this so powerful and maybe so annoyingly true? Why are we so drawn to other people’s mistakes rather than our own, even where a typical inner response or rather inner reflex is even with this quote to think of someone else and say, “Yeah, this is exactly what he’s like”! There’s no mystery as to this so powerful inclination: the pleasures of easy self-righteousness, on the egotistical plane how we are justified or exalted by someone else being beneath us, etc … This is all pretty obvious stuff, but here, and I’ll try to be brief, I’ll try to focus in on how this happens, how this pleasurable mechanism so easily is set in motion, an inclination so strong as to be virtually a biological drive, not just some minor whim, and so receives such strong emphasis from Jesus here.
Well the spiritual and the physical or even simply inner worlds are far from clearly delineated - and so just think about the external world in the visual sense, which is the most obvious way we interact with it, and ourselves. Well, in this natural domain, with obviously the main centre of pull being towards the face, being the face, everyone else can be physically seen by us, and we by them. There is one person excepted though from this visual interaction, and this person is ourselves! We are the one exception. Of course a mirror can be brought into play, but this isn’t really the natural, external life anymore. (This is all besides the point but for one thing, this mirror image is not us externally that we are looking at, so this is something much more odd, artificial and fraught with the possibility of neuroticism.)
So even simply as physical beings, our gaze looks out on the world beyond ourselves, of which we are the exception to the rule in terms of who we see. So simply on the inner sense, it takes some special effort to draw ourselves in, and not dwell “externally”, and be wholly unaware that we are doing so. Then of course there, there are all the reasons to keep this process seamlessly going, rather than forcibly undertake the ascetic struggle with ourselves, the engine room behind all this wallowing in externality. Of course, this all goes very deep, but just to try to elucidate that one even crude point about the ‘organic’ visual plane and how this relates to our selves, and how we evade our own gaze.
“The structure of evil in the soul is impossible to destroy as long as it is rooted firmly in pride. Do you want the destruction of this house of evil which the devil I builds in your soul by continually using as stones various plausible and senseless pretexts, whether material or mental, and by constructing its foundations out of thoughts of pride? If this is what you really want, keep the humility of the Lord in your heart and never forget it.”
St Mark the Ascetic.
There obviously is principally talking of the individual level, but the same truth extends into whole ideologies and structures at societal level. You can get right back to this root. Who knows, we might one day get some ideological movement or other even calling itself Pride. That’s unlikely though. This above an extract from Volume One of The Philokalia, an anthology of texts within Orthodox Christianity,
Pride as it affects the soul is akin to the soil around a plant that is very hard, and so even if the plant is watered, that hardness renders its roots impervious to receiving the water and the fruits of it. And in the longest run, to remain in one’s pride is “to die in one’s sins.”
Holland doesn’t have alot of land but does have quite a lot of people, and so you might have imagined that a most highly valued segment of Dutch society would be the agricultural one - that which feeds the population as a whole. But no, farming is very bad apparently for the present future of the world, and so the Dutch government want to drastically reduce farming and farmers in Holland, and with the police are using fake “protesters” to perpetrate violent acts to discredit the protesting Dutch farmers. In the video below in absolute full view is false flag methodology as the “extremist protesters” retreat to the police van to escape the furious farmers who know exactly what’s going on. But the cause of course is a very good one. Farming bad, pregnant men good - I think that’s the general gist of things.
Our intellectual sophistication and integrity is rising wonderfully. Let no one stand in the way of our ideological advancement cos we’re obviously supposed to be progressing somewhere, and doubtless it’s somewhere wonderful. And isn’t, by the way, that Donald Trump dreadful. I hate him so much. And remember the rest of the political classes, the good ones, are willing personally to go hungry through lack of food so as to save the world. It is they and the ideologues who will suffer first before they allow anyone else to feel the pain. And seminal figures like Al Gore and Barack Obama are even willing to buy fabulous beach properties in spite of the rising sea levels which will almost certainly drown them very, very soon. And, as we’re now beginning to see, not only are they willing to drown, they’re willing to drown hungry. The ultimate sacrifice.
A mathematician made some basic error in his reasoning, but didn’t notice the error and finally formed some equation or other following on from the error. This equation received great acclaim, became the cornerstone of an entire world, a mathematical ideology. Someone did notice the error, it was even quite obvious, and he tried to point the mistake out, but amidst all the acclaim and excitement he found to his surprise he was ignored and even - after he tried in the interests of truth to persist in his pointing out - essentially ended up cast out from decent mathematical society.
“My whole idea is that since vicious people unite together and constitute a power, then honest people must do the same.”
Spoken by Pierre Bezhukov from Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
There’s a much hyped new music group emerging from the bowels of the entertainment industry - Corporate Whore Revolutionaries. Their debut song is titled “Corporate Whore Revolution.”
