Here’s a summarized report on contemporary flat Earth belief and its context, focused on key concerns of parents like yourself:

**1.

Flat Earth Organizations & Communities:**
- **International:** Some organizations, like the Flat Earth Society (UK origin/revived globally, active online), remain the most prominent.

There are also groups like the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), started in the US, and smaller, regional organizations and Facebook groups worldwide (e.g., Brazil, the Philippines).

- **Online Communities:** YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Telegram channels host thousands of proponents who organize conferences, share videos, and promote content.

Public Figures & Celebrities:**
- Notable sports personalities and musicians (e.g., NBA player Kyrie Irving, rapper B.o.B.)

have referenced or questioned mainstream science about Earth's shape in public, although some have retracted or clarified their statements due to backlash.

Arguments Used by Flat Earthers:**
- **Misuse of Perspective:** Citing how the horizon always appears flat and eye-level regardless of altitude.

- **Misinterpretation of Physics:** Claims that water “always finds its level”, so oceans could not curve around a globe.

- **Questioning Photos from Space:** Alleging all satellite and space photos/videos are fabricated by governments and space agencies.

- **Flight Paths:** Insisting that certain long-distance flight routes make more sense on a “flat map”.

- **General Distrust:** Accusations of scientific “hoax” and conspiracies spanning hundreds of years.

Reasons for Flat Earth’s Resurgence:**
- **Internet & Social Media:** Algorithms reward provocative content, growing echo chambers.

- **Anti-Authority/Conspiracy Culture**: General increase in distrust of traditional authority (governments, scientists, educators).

- **Community & Identity:** The movement offers a sense of “truth-seeker” identity and belonging for people who feel alienated or disenfranchised from mainstream culture.

- **Desire for Uniqueness:** For some, holding unconventional beliefs (even “absurd” ones) is a way to distinguish themselves or feel special.

Characteristics of Believers:**
- **Not usually dangerous:** Most participants are not violent or radical, though conspiracy networks can feed into more extreme worldviews.

- **Demographics:** Active across genders, ages, and backgrounds, but often people with lower scientific literacy, critical-thinking gaps, or those experiencing social marginalization.

- **Psychological:** Belief often correlates with distrust in institutions, openness to conspiracy theories, and sometimes a desire to challenge mainstream narratives.

Parental/Social Implications:**
- **Generally Harmless but Influential:** While the belief itself is not “dark” in the criminal sense, involvement in such worldview can signal openness to other, potentially more harmful, conspiracy theories if not countered by strong critical thinking skills and healthy skepticism.

- **Peer Group Influence:** Friendships in adolescence are critical; exposure does not guarantee adoption, but it’s wise to encourage media literacy, respectful skepticism, and open discussion at home.

**Conclusion:**
Flat Earth belief in the modern era is a social phenomenon rooted in distrust and the search for identity in an uncertain world, rather than a truly sinister or malicious movement.

The main risk is indirect—if the belief is a sign of greater detachment from critical thinking or susceptibility to radical conspiracies.

Gentle awareness and open conversation are the best tools; outright rejection of friends or families on this basis alone is rarely helpful, unless there is evidence of engagement with more dangerous or isolating ideologies.

Encourage your child to think independently, ask questions, and value credible sources.

**Summary and Nuggets:**

1.

**Cultural Disruption & Uncertainty**: We live at a time described as "a crossroads of ages," with society facing upheaval, rapid change, and anxiety.

Traditional sources of authority and certainty have weakened, leaving individuals – including youth – to navigate a confusing and information-saturated world.

**Generational Shifts**: Millennials, and by extension, contemporary teens, are seen as pioneers in a landscape defined by fast changes and lack of clear direction.

This sense of tumult and the demand for self-direction can lead to a search for certainty or straightforward answers, even if those answers fly in the face of mainstream knowledge.

**Desire for Distinctiveness**: There's a recurring theme of seeking to "swim against the flow" or to "maintain your habitat" as signs of a living, conscious self.

In modern society, being different or contrarian is presented as valuable, especially for youth trying to assert individuality.

**Information & Reality**: The vast increase in available information makes it hard to discern which facts are trustworthy.

This environment can foster alternate beliefs (like flat-Earthism) since people are both overwhelmed and skeptical of received wisdom, authorities, and consensus views.

**Search for Community & Purpose**: The breakdown of traditional supervision and clear life-paths pushes people to find new communities or identities, often in opposition to the mainstream.

**The Allure of "Forbidden" Knowledge**: There is a subtle admiration for those who “know the truth” or claim to possess hidden knowledge, as illustrated in historical anecdotes.

The draw of being “in on the secret” is strong, especially during periods of uncertainty and for those feeling disconnected from conventional social structures.

**Critical Developmental Stage**: Adolescence (e.g., age 15) is presented as a transition point – not quite child, not quite adult.

This is when many are susceptible to fantastical possibilities, imagination, and a search for their place in a chaotic world.

**Questions of Control & Authority**: The transition from relying on trusted authorities (parents, teachers, mainstream science) to seeking alternative narratives is a product of both societal mistrust and the lure of empowerment through alternative knowledge.

**Implications for Flat-Earth Belief Affiliation:**
- Flat Earth belief can provide a sense of community, clarity, and counter-cultural identity, particularly appealing in an age of uncertainty and information overload.

- Adolescents, in their quest for distinctiveness and belonging, may be especially susceptible to such beliefs when they offer meaning and camaraderie.

- While not inherently "dark," flat-Earth communities may foster suspicion of scientific authority, critical thinking skills, and mainstream social values, which can have broader implications for a young person's worldview and integration into society.

**Conclusion:**
Flat-Earth belief in the contemporary era is tied deeply to issues of identity, uncertainty, and social belonging, especially during adolescence and rapid societal change.

While not usually directly dangerous, such belief systems can signify a broader disconnection from consensus reality and trusted sources, and without guidance or open dialogue, may lead to deeper mistrust, radicalization, or withdrawal from mainstream society.

A cautious but open approach—encouraging critical thinking and open discussion—is warranted.

**Summary of Extracts with Focus on Flat Earth Belief Context**:

1.

**Influence of Media and Internet**
The modern world is experiencing profound changes in ideas and behaviors, partly due to the overwhelming influence of media and digital platforms.

While these platforms themselves are neutral, the unchecked proliferation of questionable ideas—including conspiracy theories such as flat Earth belief—is inevitable.

The Internet serves as a digital “Trojan horse,” spreading content and shaping consciousness across broad populations, often enabling odd or unscientific ideas to flourish unchecked.

**Absence of Role Models and Cultural Anchors**
A key societal concern is the lack of authentic role models and the weakening of traditional values, especially among youth.

This void makes young people vulnerable to unconventional ideas, as they lack strong foundational beliefs or figures to emulate.

Coupled with weakened community and religious bonds, individuals—particularly the young—may seek belonging and identity in alternative communities, including those centered on fringe beliefs such as flat Earth theory.

**Conformity vs.

Participation in Truth-Seeking**
Traditional cultures often demand obedience and discourage critical inquiry.

In contrast, exposure to global media and intellectual openness can breed skepticism—sometimes leading not to greater scientific understanding, but instead to blanket distrust of authorities or accepted knowledge.

This atmosphere of doubt can push some to question the very shape of the earth and subscribe to flat Earth beliefs as an act of contrarianism or perceived critical thinking.

**Disruption of Identity and Community**
Both in the West and Arab societies, there is a reported erosion of citizenship, identity, and shared values.

When people feel disconnected from stable cultural or national identities, they may construct new group identities online—sometimes around shared skepticism or opposition to mainstream beliefs (such as believing in a flat Earth).

These networks provide a sense of belonging and “real identity” to some, especially when traditional anchors are weak.

**Manipulation of Reality & Mistrust**
Writings by Deborah and Ulrich Beck illustrate how reality is increasingly mediated by spectacle and perception, rather than direct experience or evidence.

This theme underlies many conspiracy theories—if you distrust all authority and established narratives, you may become susceptible to “alternative truths,” such as flat Earth claims.

Flat Earthers often present themselves as seekers of a hidden reality, resisting manipulation by systems of power.

Here’s a summarized report on contemporary flat Earth belief and its context, focused on key concerns of parents like yourself:

**1.

Title:

Content: A SOJOURNER’S VIEW: How Filipino youth could be the hope of the fatherland in this computer age

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CEBU CITY (MindaNews / 21 June)—In my last column published in MindaNews last June 11, I entitled the piece, “Quo Vadis the Filipino youth today on 125th anniversary of our Independence?” In this essay, I asked the question: “So how are the Filipino youth today able to maneuver through this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) society? Faced with this rather bleak reality, how can the Filipino youth of today (those of the Millennial and Gen-X generations) be expected to even consider the question: how can we be patriots?”

I ended that column by introducing the reader to Mr. Camilo Osias—first Filipino Superintendent of Schools (1915 to 1916), Assistant Director of Education (1917 to 1921), later Secretary of Education (1940s), a lecturer at the University of the Philippines (1919 to 1921), 1934 member of Constitutional Convention in 1934, National Assembly member in 1935, Senate President (1952-53). I wouldn’t be surprised if the Filipino youth of today hardly know this very distinguished Filipino scholar and statesman.

In 1940, he wrote a book entitled “The Filipino Way of Life: The Pluralized Philosophy” published in New York. Written almost 80 years ago, long before the current popular philosophical theories are taught in our universities (decolonial, post-colonial, post-structural and post-modern theories) as well as the advancement of computer technology with the dawn of the Information Age, Osias’ philosophical framework finds resonance in contemporary Philippine society.

The idea of being a pluralized society has become far more acceptable now than just before and after the Second World War. Today we Filipinos—especially among the youth—there is greater consciousness that we live in a Republic characterized by different classes, ethnicities, religious and cultural traditions, genders, sexual orientations, age differences, level of physical and mental capacities and other categories of identities. And yet we are called to be united if our Republic is to advance in her vision to be a truly free, just and sovereign nation-state! And we her citizens are all called to be patriots!

Osias’ vision of how a pluralized society is encapsulated in his appropriation of a Tagalog word—TAYO (an inclusive word to mean we or us, i.e., including people speaking and including people spoken to). But when pronounced tayô: it means condition, social position or stance. Thus, tumayô means to take a stand, to stand up, to rise, to position oneself; and magtayô means to set up, to build, to erect, to put up and to construct. TAYO is thus the perfect Pilipino word to capture the essence of Osias’ pluralized philosophy.

Here’s a quote from his book indicating what is the vision of his TAYO philosophy:
“Under the… Tayo, or pluralized concept, there is no room for the practice of ‘Let (Juan) do it.’ Everybody must do his duty and bear his share of the burden and responsibility. Participating, thinking, and doing are prominent features of the pluralized philosophy. The people must be… schooled in the lessons of justice, liberty, and democracy… They must value peace and order, personal freedom and political liberty. Young and adults alike must learn to conceive and develop democracy by experiencing and living democracy.

“The pluralized philosophy presents efficiency, freedom, and happiness as the trinity of objectives most worthwhile in life. It is wedded to democracy and seeks to deepen faith in, and increase devotion to, democracy. There must be a continual striving for democratic objectives following democratic processes. The Filipino way of life—yes, the human way of life —recognizes the value and sanctity of human personality and seeks co-operation and solidarity among individuals within the nation and among nations.”

But an important question—which naturally did not arise in Osias’ era—but which confronts us today in this post-modern world is this: Is this pluralized philosophy relevant to the lives of today’s Filipino youth considering how different their lives are to those of Osias’ generation? Compared to the post-war reality, the VUCA landscape has turned far more complex with major shifts in geopolitics the US/EU/Japan clique no longer holds dominion as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa; but recently Iran and Saudi Arabia want to join) alliance is getting stronger as well as in terms of the urgent issues demanding global responses (e.g., the impact of climate change, the rise of pandemics and the contentious migration waves, fundamentalist resurgence, the popularity of populism and so many others).

And the youth of today has little convergence with those of the 1960s-1980s by way of their socio-political engagements. They are ensconced in their own world and it is not fair for those of the baby boomers and Gen-X generations to expect them to be copycats. After all, they live in a very different context their parents and grandparents would not have imagined might arise in just a few decades since their youth. This especially because of how the computer and other technological gadgets have become integral in the everyday lives of our youth today.

The high-tech revolution is unstoppable and is fast progressing into new apps, algorithms, social platforms and all that that jazz. Unlike their elders, they maneuver through these labyrinthian corridors with ease often leaving their elders perplexed! It seems they are now slowly starting to lose interest in email, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter with the fast entrance of artificial intelligence beginning with ChatGPT, the sibling model to InstructGPT trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response. Despite the fears expressed by the moguls of the internet world, including Elon Musk, AI technology is bound to grow by leaps and bounds. And now we are hearing this thing called Singularity which would produce the mythical bionic man!

So is it possible to bridge youth activism (among millennials, Gen-Z and the next generation) and the computer technology? Jon Traya—a Davao-based millennial philosopher-architect-artist-businessman—is offering a possible model. An Osias disciple, as he appropriated the TAYO philosophy, he has crafted an app that the Filipino youth of today might want to consider. That is, if they do want to have some kind of engagement in responding to the country’s socio-political ills. Which can be done online, without having to go out and march in the streets! Here is Traya’s Manifesto for TAYO (which was publicly released last June 12, Independence Day):

We believe it is time for a new economic and social organization model.
We believe in the power of community to create a more inclusive, egalitarian, and sustainable system. We cast aside the traditional models of capitalism and communism, which prioritize profits and political ideologies over the needs of people and the planet.
We forward the concept of the third space in this digital world, where people from diverse backgrounds and experiences may come together to collaborate and co-create a better future; A space unbounded by the constraints of the past and creatively open to new and innovative ideas that challenge the status quo.
We are committed to building social networks in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation; to leveraging the unique strengths and resources of our community members.
We believe in the power of the collective and the importance of equal access and opportunity within our community.
We surmise that the traditional models of capitalism and communism/socialism have failed to deliver on their promises of prosperity and fairness for all—it is now time for a new approach that recognizes the interdependence and interconnectedness of all individuals and communities to emerge.
We propose an alternative model in the context also observed by Camilo Osias—the pluralized idea.
We propose TAYO.
TAYO has been unconsciously guiding us in our worldview (“kalibutan,” “palibot,” “libot” or around us). It is rooted in our being, in our language, embracing us, and somehow escapes our consciousness. Now is the time to be cognizant of TAYO.
TAYO emphasizes the power of networks and social connections in shaping ideas and economic outcomes.
TAYO recognizes the importance of building social capital, leveraging indigenous knowledge and cultural traditions, and equalizing access within the network.
TAYO seeks to build communities rooted in the ideals of inclusivity, equity, and sustainability.
We invite all those who share these values to join us and be guided by the spirit of TAYO in building a better future for all. Together, we create a kalibutan that is all-inclusive, a we-all-world not limited to species, color, race, ethnicity, ideology, territory, or religion as its basis for unity but recognizes plurality and interdependence of all.

TAYO is We. We Stand, We Build, Us Together. The Collective We.

Only time will tell if this TAYO agenda will take off and resonate with a mass of our Filipino youth. But there is already an available app, that in your computer appears in the company of the other apps. In a sense this is a genuinely Filipino app taking advantage of a foreign technology.

If you are interested, check out https://tayoapp.com, available for both Apple and Android.

A few days ago we celebrated the 162nd birthday of Dr. Jose Rizal who was born in 1861. Rizal is known to have written: “The youth is the hope of the Fatherland!” If he were born today, what would be his suggestion as to how the Filipino youth could truly be the hope of the Fatherland?”

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Redemptorist Brother Karl Gaspar is Mindanao’s most prolific book author. Gaspar is also a Datu Bago 2018 awardee, the highest honor the Davao City government bestows on its constituents. He recently moved to his new assignment in Cebu City.)

Your perspective matters! Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. We welcome diverse viewpoints and encourage respectful discussions. Don't hesitate to share your ideas or engage with others.
The MindaNews Podcast
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TOP STORIES

Flat Earth Organizations & Communities:**
- **International:** Some organizations, like the Flat Earth Society (UK origin/revived globally, active online), remain the most prominent.

Title:

Content: Tuesday, Aug 08, 2023
×

Opus Dei's ordinary secularity

A conservatism that is wholly and truly of this age

San Josemaría Escrivá. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

To describe Opus Dei as mundane would likely strike most readers as odd, if not perverse. After all, the group has been embroiled in controversy since its birth, attracting criticism for its secretive practices, its members' collusion in Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain, and its often rigidly conservative beliefs. But the most literal meaning of "mundane" is "of this world"; and this is how Opus Dei understands itself, and how it has come to describe its charism. The key to understanding this group is ordinary secularity.

Throughout the history of Christianity, the tension between this-worldliness and otherworldliness has drawn many boundaries and defined countless identities. For someone like Augustine of Hippo, the two poles were quite clear: the realm of the transcendent is the City of God, the land of the promise of eternity; and the secular—saeculum—is the time between now and the Second Coming, before the wheat is sorted from the tares. To be self-consciously secular, or mundane, is to consider oneself wholly and truly of this age.

And this is indeed how Opus Dei sees itself. In the two-volume Opus Dei: A History, two senior members of the group, José Luis González-Gullón and John F. Coverdale, try to pin down the specific qualities that have given form to Opus Dei. And what they've come to see, nearly a century since the group was founded, is that it's inextricably tied to the ordinariness of this age, to "a message that unites the human and the religious."

Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer

Opus Dei was founded by the priest Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer in Spain in 1928. During the Spanish Civil War, its members consolidated their presence in the country and strengthened their grip on its cultural, political, and professional circles. Few Commonweal readers will be unaware of Opus Dei's more than slightly unusual history. A novelty in the Church, it began garnering the approval of certain key figures, especially Popes Pius XII and John Paul II. This allowed it to grow from a small association of Spanish lay Catholics and a handful of priests to become a one-hundred-thousand-strong "personal prelature"—a special status in canon law that grants it jurisdiction over all its members, outside the geographical diocesan system.

Opus Dei's rapid ascent has been regarded with suspicion both inside and outside the Church. Its members are known for being fervently outspoken about their positions on such contested social issues as abortion and same-sex marriage (positions, it should be said, that many ordinary Catholics outside Opus Dei share). Their belief in the rigid separation of the roles of men and women, with the latter being instructed by the group to serve the former, has led many to find them uncomfortably conservative, even reactionary. Yet this is not where they get the most flak.

Escrivá believed in the necessity of meeting God, and sanctifying oneself, within the ordinary responsibilities of everyday life. In concrete terms, this implied a total, wholehearted acceptance of the professions—forms of life distinctive of the modern age. Among the ranks of Opus Dei, it is common to find lawyers, bankers, academics, journalists, and politicians of significant status. Opus Dei prepares and guides its members to an extraordinary extent. They all receive attentive spiritual formation based largely on Escrivá's book The Way; many end up at one of the group's well-funded colleges and universities, institutions that offer the subjects that make up the modern quadrivium: philosophy, law, economics, and communications.

All this is designed to help the members of Opus Dei burrow deep into their workplaces—from banks and law firms to universities and government ministries—and to make the most of their professional careers. As one member once told me, they demonstrate through their professional activities how the gifts of Christianity are finely tuned by the instruments Opus Dei provides. A typical member of Opus Dei is a well-formed member of the professions with a well-articulated, albeit somewhat idiosyncratic, sense of what it means to be a modern Christian.

During the years of Franco's dictatorship, many of his closest allies and ministers were members of Opus Dei. The opusdeístas, as their critics would call them, staffed many ministries and offices that kept alive one of Western Europe's longest-lasting authoritarian dictatorships. Yet as international commentators in the 1960s observed, these "ultra-Catholic" technocrats were also instrumental in delivering Spain from its only partly industrialized, mostly agrarian past. The opusdeístas brought the country, kicking and screaming, into the modern world. For their allies within Franco's regime, and those who still today hail them as the country's modernizers, they are considered trailblazers of rationalized statecraft and administration; to their critics, they were exploitative opportunists who instrumentalized Cold War free-market economics to keep Spain, morally and culturally, in a premodern limbo—a critique the authors of Opus Dei: A History don't have much to say about.

The truth lies somewhere between the two. It would be absurd to deny that many opusdeístas were complicit in some of the most unsavory aspects of Franco's regime, though many in Opus Dei write this off as more accidental than intentional. González-Gullón and Coverdale claim that there's little in the political conduct of the opusdeístas that is specifically attributable to their membership in Opus Dei. "All members," they stress, "enjoy freedom in political and cultural matters." All Opus Dei does, they insist, is fulfill a "purely spiritual and evangelizing purpose." But the distinction here is too neat. Even if Franco's Opus Dei allies were not exactly controlled by their spiritual advisors, the convictions that motivated their work certainly did arise from the whole group's sense of what the modern world had to offer, and what needed to be changed.

The necessity of meeting God, and sanctifying oneself, within the ordinary responsibilities of everyday life

González-Gullón and Coverdale do venture some minimal reproaches of Opus Dei's past leadership. In 1956, in preparation for his fifth government, Franco approached several leaders of Opus Dei, asking for their advice on ministerial appointments. This marked the beginning of the group's intimate link with Franco's regime. Acting on the counsel of the priest Antonio Pérez Hernández, a senior member of Opus Dei, many opusdeístas were brought into the Francoist fold. González-Gullón and Coverdale admonish Pérez, writing that he "clearly violated" Escrivá's wishes.

What the authors do not tell us is that Pérez had already made his aim clear two years before: "Ecclesiastical authority," he declared at a 1954 conference attended by many of Spain's political and religious leaders, "must have the possibility to produce legal effects." Pérez would later leave Opus Dei and the priesthood in 1959, but two years later, in a speech marking the creation of the Opus Dei–run University of Navarra, Escrivá thanked Pérez for his work and praised his guidance in front of hundreds of students, parents, and noteworthy public figures.

Some of Opus Dei's critics seem to miss what is most distinctive about the group. One may consider its moral views somewhat archaic, but it seems like a mistake to label a bunch of technically skilled financiers and politicos as premodern. The "mundanity" stressed by González-Gullón and Coverdale offers a way out of this apparent contradiction. To embrace secularity implies, as Augustine would have it, giving oneself to history, and more specifically to the age in which one lives. This is, in one sense, diametrically opposed to what some call the "Benedict Option," whereby the faithful Christian retreats from the world and lives as a recluse in comfortably remote cloisters.

By contrast, to be of the age, or to give oneself to the ordinariness of everyday life, requires that one not wholly repudiate those identities, values, and practices that make the present what it is. Opus Dei began at one of Western Europe's most significant junctures—when the sickly empires of early modernity gave way to international trade—and the group never tried to escape from the age to which it belonged: a modernity colored by the travails and hopes of an ascendant middle class. It had to learn the tricky moral and cultural steps of capitalism's awkward dance with Christianity.

In one sense, Opus Dei's modern mundanity can be summed up in Escrivá himself. Born into a middle-class family with unrealized claims to nobility, his studies at the seminary were accompanied by legal training. Even before his ordination, he believed it necessary to become a doctor of the law: jurisprudence, along with commerce, were the keys to society. Throughout his life, he would admire and praise figures capable of saving banks or lifting businesses out of bankruptcy. The luxurious decadence of the early-twentieth-century European nobility was denied him, but he did not look to the working classes and the movements they created for inspiration. His conservatism, and that of the movement he founded, were typical of the striving middle classes intent on technical competence and rational administration.

This formula didn't change much in the 1960s and '70s, years that marked Opus Dei's international expansion. Though the group is now present in more than eighty countries, its institutional culture remains similar to what it was from the start, a fact less surprising when one considers that almost half the group's members are Spanish and over one-third reside in Spain. The language González-Gullón and Coverdale use to describe the period during which Opus Dei went international underscores the consistent moral and cultural conservatism of the group. Starting in the sixties, they write, many people began rejecting "a regulated world that sought economic prosperity." Seduced by "neo-Marxist and Freudian ideas," a "youth rebellion led to widespread public abuse of alcohol and drugs, as well as promiscuous sexual activity." All these "excesses," they comment, "were justified by a perceived right to self-satisfaction."

The "technocratic paradigm"

Many have noted that you won't find many members of Opus Dei defending society's poorest and most marginalized. That may be true, but then it's equally hard to find great numbers of non-Catholic white-collar professionals latching onto causes that do not immediately concern them. The source of the problem may not be Opus Dei itself, but the bourgeois worldview that many of its members, including its founder, represent: a way of engaging with the world that prioritizes extraction and use, that lacks sensitivity to the wants and needs of the less fortunate, and is chronically unaware of both one's complicity in the system and one's ability to facilitate transformation. All the cracks and blemishes in society are explained away as signs of growth and development and are to be met with ever-greater, ever-more-invasive technical solutions. This is what Pope Francis has called the "technocratic paradigm."

Nevertheless, what González-Gullón and Coverdale have achieved in this work is striking: an impressive overarching narrative of Opus Dei's nearly century-long history. This chronologically ordered, textbook-like account of the group's evolution fills a real gap, providing valuable information not available even in John Allen's Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church. But what is perhaps most remarkable about the book is how forthright its authors are about Opus Dei's blemishes, given that they are themselves members.

A modernity colored by the travails and hopes of an ascendant middle class

Their relative candor is no doubt part of the new strategy adopted by Opus Dei around the start of the 2000s. When the film version of The Da Vinci Code came out in 2006, the group once again returned to public attention, much of it hostile. But this time Opus Dei reacted differently. It did not hide behind the silence its founder extolled, nor did it mount a belligerent counter-offensive. Under the guidance of Juan Manuel Mora, Opus Dei's communications director, the group welcomed curious observers. Mora instructed the communications team to host them in the group's many residences and centers around the globe, to treat them well, to be open, and to answer questions—in short, to pull away the veil. In writing their book in the manner they have, González-Gullón and Coverdale have done something similar.

But to many readers, Opus Dei will still seem like an oddity, no matter how much it's demystified. And in the context of the twenty-first-century Catholic Church, it issomewhat odd. For those following the raging arguments between self-styled "traditionalist" and "liberal" camps within the Church, a group so blissfully uninterested in these quarrels may seem a little out of step. A lot of what these Catholic cultural discussions stem from, on either side of the divide, is an attempt to recover Christianity from its corrupted state. The traditionalists think the Church went wrong by getting entangled with liberal modernity; the liberals think the pre-conciliar Church went wrong by chasing power instead of Christ-like love. Both sides think the Church has been polluted by history—or, one might say, by the mundane.

Precisely because of its own resolute mundanity, Opus Dei chooses not to follow suit. "I don't get the traditionalists," an Opus Dei member once told me. "What's so special about the Tridentine Mass?" The group welcomes history; it finds no reason to challenge modernity, but it remains convinced that the Church will never entirely give way to the pressures of a post-religious world. Material progress will prevail, but so will the Church, inevitably and unproblematically. And surely this is, for better and for worse, very similar to the way many ordinary Catholics see the relationship between their faith and the age they belong to.

Opus Dei
A History

Luis González-Gullón and John F. Coverdale
Scepter
$29.95 | 272 pp.

Daniele Palmer lives in London, where he teaches history and works in community organizing. This article first appeared in Commonweal Magazine.

Most Read

There are also groups like the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), started in the US, and smaller, regional organizations and Facebook groups worldwide (e.g., Brazil, the Philippines).

Title:

Content: What is a Grassroots Movement?

Grassroots movements have played a pivotal role in shaping societies and driving change throughout history. They are often associated with passionate individuals coming together to advocate for social, political, or environmental transformation. In this article, we’ll delve into the concept of grassroots movements, exploring what they are, their characteristics, and their impact on society.

Understanding Grassroots Movements

grassroots movement is a type of social or political movement that originates from the ground level of society, driven by ordinary citizens rather than established institutions or organizations. These movements are decentralized and often lack hierarchical leadership structures. Instead, they are characterized by the collective action and shared goals of individuals who are deeply committed to a cause. Here are key aspects of grassroots movements:

1. Bottom-Up Approach

At the heart of a grassroots movement is its bottom-up approach. Unlike top-down initiatives that are often led by governments, corporations, or established organizations, grassroots movements are driven by the people themselves. They emerge organically from the concerns and aspirations of individuals within a community.

2. Inclusivity and Diversity

Grassroots movements are inherently inclusive and diverse. They bring together people from various backgrounds, including different ages, races, genders, socioeconomic statuses, and political affiliations. This diversity enhances the movement’s strength and credibility, as it reflects a broad cross-section of society.

3. Lack of Formal Hierarchy

Grassroots movements typically lack formal leadership hierarchies. Instead, decision-making is often achieved through consensus or democratic processes. Leaders may emerge based on their dedication, experience, and ability to inspire others, but they do not hold the same centralized power as leaders in traditional organizations.

4. Passion-Driven Activism

Grassroots activists are motivated by a deep passion for their cause. They are willing to invest their time, energy, and resources because they believe in the urgency and importance of the issue they are addressing. This passion is a driving force behind the movement’s momentum and resilience.

Characteristics of Grassroots Movements

1. Grassroots Mobilization

Grassroots movements are known for their ability to mobilize people on a local and sometimes national or even international scale. They use a variety of strategies, such as community organizing, social media, and grassroots marketing, to reach and engage supporters.

2. Grassroots Funding

Funding for grassroots movements often comes from small, individual donations and volunteers rather than large financial institutions or corporations. Crowdfunding platforms and direct appeals to supporters play a significant role in financing these movements.

3. Grassroots Campaigning

Grassroots campaigns focus on public awareness and advocacy. They use strategies like community meetings, protests, letter-writing campaigns, and social media activism to influence public opinion and pressure decision-makers.

4. Grassroots Impact

Despite their decentralized nature, grassroots movements can have a substantial impact on policy and public discourse. They bring critical issues to the forefront, hold institutions accountable, and often drive tangible change through their persistence and determination.

The Historical Significance of Grassroots Movements

Throughout history, grassroots movements have played a pivotal role in promoting positive social and political change. Here are a few notable examples:

1. Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States is one of the most iconic grassroots movements. It aimed to end racial segregation and discrimination. Led by figures like Martin Luther King Jr., it utilized nonviolent protests, boycotts, and grassroots organizing to challenge systemic racism.

2. Women’s Suffrage Movement

The fight for women’s suffrage, which granted women the right to vote, was another grassroots effort. Women’s suffrage activists organized rallies, marches, and letter-writing campaigns to advocate for their rights.

3. Environmental Movements

Grassroots environmental movements have had a global impact. Examples include Greenpeace’s efforts to protect the environment, the anti-nuclear movement, and more recently, climate change activism led by figures like Greta Thunberg.

4. LGBTQ+ Rights Movement

The LGBTQ+ rights movement has made significant progress through grassroots activism. It has focused on raising awareness, advocating for legal rights, and changing societal attitudes towards LGBTQ+ individuals.

The Modern Role of Grassroots Movements

In the modern era, grassroots movements continue to be powerful forces for change. They have adapted to new technologies and communication tools, allowing them to reach a wider audience and mobilize support more effectively. Here are a few contemporary examples:

1. Black Lives Matter

The Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in the 21st century, is a powerful example of grassroots activism. It advocates for the rights and equity of Black individuals, challenging systemic racism and police violence.

2. #MeToo Movement

The #MeToo movement, driven by social media, has empowered survivors of sexual harassment and assault to share their stories and demand change. It has led to important discussions about consent, gender equality, and accountability.

3. Youth-Led Movements

Youth-led grassroots movements, such as the March for Our Lives, have brought attention to issues like gun control. They demonstrate that young people can be powerful advocates for change.

4. Environmental Activism

Environmental grassroots movements continue to be crucial in addressing climate change and environmental issues. Movements like Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise Movement advocate for urgent action on climate-related challenges.

The Impact and Future of Grassroots Movements

Grassroots movements continue to shape society, and their impact is undeniable. They serve as a counterbalance to entrenched power structures and provide a voice for marginalized or underrepresented groups. The future of grassroots movements will likely see continued adaptation to new technologies, as well as an ongoing commitment to social, political, and environmental justice.

In conclusion, a grassroots movement is a powerful force for social and political change, driven by individuals who are passionate about their cause. These movements are marked by inclusivity, decentralized structures, and a bottom-up approach. Throughout history and into the modern era, they have played a crucial role in addressing critical issues and shaping societies around the world. The future of grassroots movements promises to be just as impactful, driven by the dedication and determination of individuals who seek to make a difference.

Clare Louise

- **Online Communities:** YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Telegram channels host thousands of proponents who organize conferences, share videos, and promote content.

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Will We Be Sorry We Shut Down?

from the magazine

Will We Be Sorry We Shut Down?

Paris Diarist Autumn 2021
Covid-19

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues around the world, we might ask whether it has not already profoundly changed our way of life. Might we find ourselves to be like those prisoners who miss their cells, once released, finding in their newfound independence the bitter taste of anxiety?

This past year and a half, so focused on safety, brought a remarkable lightening of social burdens: fewer contacts, social events abbreviated or made optional, long trips impossible. And the little thrill of clandestine dinners and difficult travel in Europe or elsewhere depended on the context of prohibition. The popular cliché in France of a post-Covid return to the Roaring Twenties should not fool us: many French people (and, more generally, Europeans—and doubtless, this is true of many Americans, too) no longer want to return to their offices, and they wish to keep working from home. Many are leaving big cities and settling in rural areas, dreaming of a simple life close to nature, far from the frantic consumerism and noise of urban life, sheltered from the vicissitudes of History.

It’s not clear, in other words, that everyone will experience the return to normal as a liberation. The pandemic caused us to worry, but it also delivered us for a while from a still-greater worry: the anxiety of freedom. To parody Pascal, who explained that the misfortune of humanity consisted in the inability to sit quietly in one’s room, alone, we might say that the misfortune of humanity after Covid will perhaps be to be shut up in one’s room—and like it.

There would be historical precedents for such an attitude. While young people, after the French Revolution, celebrated tumultuous desires and strong passions, some authors took a different turn. These include, in France, Xavier de Maistre, author of Voyage Around My Room; the Swiss Frédéric Lamiel, in his torrential Journal, devoted to the minuscule events of his daily life; and the Russian Oblomov, who passes his short existence in bed. All stand against the two types of human beings prominent in the nineteenth century: the bourgeois, whose whole existence hinges on profit and calculation; and his adversary, the bohemian or the revolutionary, who wants to change the world and establish justice. Confronting these active characters, the lovers of banality insist on the wonders of insignificance, the greatness of inertia, the truth of laziness. They will have twentieth-century successors in Samuel Beckett, E. M. Cioran, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser but also in the movement on the fringe of the ecology of catastrophe—“collapsology,” which preaches negative growth, the end of travel, and retreat into small communities, while waiting for the end of the world. Here we have a whole underground school that has reappeared along with the policy of confinement.

Seclusion has a sweetness that recalls the long tradition of Western monasticism: the monk’s cell, minus transcendence, plus social networks. Even before the pandemic, this hidden history had found new life, adorned with all the virtues of resistance to global warming: we must stay home to avoid the greenhouse effect, adopting a vegetative immobility and banning the movement that produces too much carbon. The universal cell of contemporary humanity, from Los Angeles to Beijing, is the couch facing the screen.

Will we once again thirst for great open spaces, or will we give way to the propagandists of stunting? For these militants, the call for struggle is not the need to save the planet but the need to punish the human race. Life must be changed—that is, reduced as far as possible to the minimum. There are so many who want to convert us, professing the best intentions, to a morality of troglodytes.

We will perhaps find that Covid has given birth to a new anthropological type: the curled-up and hyper-connected human being with no further need of others or of reality. We might then interpret the famous verse of Rimbaud, “real life is absent,” in the following way: “real life is the absence of life.” For all those who still promote the spirit of exploration and a taste for connection with others, this would be a double catastrophe: to the deaths from the virus we would add, as a kind of expiation, the penitence of shrinkage.

Photo: FTiare/iStock

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The New Aging

Modern societies are transforming our understanding of life’s later stages—for better and for worse. Pascal Bruckner The Social Order

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Public Figures & Celebrities:**
- Notable sports personalities and musicians (e.g., NBA player Kyrie Irving, rapper B.o.B.)

What NBA star claimed that the earth is flat?

have referenced or questioned mainstream science about Earth's shape in public, although some have retracted or clarified their statements due to backlash.

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Will We Be Sorry We Shut Down?

from the magazine

Will We Be Sorry We Shut Down?

Paris Diarist Autumn 2021
Covid-19

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues around the world, we might ask whether it has not already profoundly changed our way of life. Might we find ourselves to be like those prisoners who miss their cells, once released, finding in their newfound independence the bitter taste of anxiety?

This past year and a half, so focused on safety, brought a remarkable lightening of social burdens: fewer contacts, social events abbreviated or made optional, long trips impossible. And the little thrill of clandestine dinners and difficult travel in Europe or elsewhere depended on the context of prohibition. The popular cliché in France of a post-Covid return to the Roaring Twenties should not fool us: many French people (and, more generally, Europeans—and doubtless, this is true of many Americans, too) no longer want to return to their offices, and they wish to keep working from home. Many are leaving big cities and settling in rural areas, dreaming of a simple life close to nature, far from the frantic consumerism and noise of urban life, sheltered from the vicissitudes of History.

It’s not clear, in other words, that everyone will experience the return to normal as a liberation. The pandemic caused us to worry, but it also delivered us for a while from a still-greater worry: the anxiety of freedom. To parody Pascal, who explained that the misfortune of humanity consisted in the inability to sit quietly in one’s room, alone, we might say that the misfortune of humanity after Covid will perhaps be to be shut up in one’s room—and like it.

There would be historical precedents for such an attitude. While young people, after the French Revolution, celebrated tumultuous desires and strong passions, some authors took a different turn. These include, in France, Xavier de Maistre, author of Voyage Around My Room; the Swiss Frédéric Lamiel, in his torrential Journal, devoted to the minuscule events of his daily life; and the Russian Oblomov, who passes his short existence in bed. All stand against the two types of human beings prominent in the nineteenth century: the bourgeois, whose whole existence hinges on profit and calculation; and his adversary, the bohemian or the revolutionary, who wants to change the world and establish justice. Confronting these active characters, the lovers of banality insist on the wonders of insignificance, the greatness of inertia, the truth of laziness. They will have twentieth-century successors in Samuel Beckett, E. M. Cioran, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser but also in the movement on the fringe of the ecology of catastrophe—“collapsology,” which preaches negative growth, the end of travel, and retreat into small communities, while waiting for the end of the world. Here we have a whole underground school that has reappeared along with the policy of confinement.

Seclusion has a sweetness that recalls the long tradition of Western monasticism: the monk’s cell, minus transcendence, plus social networks. Even before the pandemic, this hidden history had found new life, adorned with all the virtues of resistance to global warming: we must stay home to avoid the greenhouse effect, adopting a vegetative immobility and banning the movement that produces too much carbon. The universal cell of contemporary humanity, from Los Angeles to Beijing, is the couch facing the screen.

Will we once again thirst for great open spaces, or will we give way to the propagandists of stunting? For these militants, the call for struggle is not the need to save the planet but the need to punish the human race. Life must be changed—that is, reduced as far as possible to the minimum. There are so many who want to convert us, professing the best intentions, to a morality of troglodytes.

We will perhaps find that Covid has given birth to a new anthropological type: the curled-up and hyper-connected human being with no further need of others or of reality. We might then interpret the famous verse of Rimbaud, “real life is absent,” in the following way: “real life is the absence of life.” For all those who still promote the spirit of exploration and a taste for connection with others, this would be a double catastrophe: to the deaths from the virus we would add, as a kind of expiation, the penitence of shrinkage.

Photo: FTiare/iStock

Up Next
from the magazine

The New Aging

Modern societies are transforming our understanding of life’s later stages—for better and for worse. Pascal Bruckner The Social Order

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Arguments Used by Flat Earthers:**
- **Misuse of Perspective:** Citing how the horizon always appears flat and eye-level regardless of altitude.

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The Well

Why we are the only humans in the Universe and why it matters for our collective future

The acceptance of our cosmic loneliness and the rarity of our planet is a wakeup call.
Key Takeaways
  • For millennia, tribal divisions governed humanity. But what was good for our ancestors and their survival now seeds deeply destructive and predatory behavior. Humanity needs to unite.
  • One way for humanity to unite is to realize that we are the only humans in the cosmos. Even if life exists elsewhere, it won't be like us.
  • Therefore, the human voice is unique in the cosmos. If we ruin our project of civilization, the Universe will once again become silent.

We need to change the way we see each other and our relation to our home planet. For thousands of years, tribal divisions have ruled the way we humans have organized ourselves in groups. Unfortunately, what was good for our ancestors and their survival now seeds deeply destructive and predatory behavior.

We don’t care about the other living creatures with whom we share this planet. We don’t care about the planet. We don’t understand what is needed for our survival as a species. As the news tells us daily, we remain profoundly divided, prone to isolate ourselves in groups that define the way we think and behave. Widespread political strife, cultural intolerance, and tribal entrenchment are symptoms of a deeper problem: Our focus on material greed and unstoppable growth is choking civilization and the planet along with it. Civilization is at a crossroads. To move beyond, we need to reframe our connection to other living creatures and to the planet we all share.

A new unifying narrative

We need a new unifying narrative that has the power to awaken humankind to a very urgent truth: that despite our political and religious differences, we are a single species living on a fragile and rare planet. This narrative must break down the tribal walls that separate us; it must make a convincing case that we need to work together if we are to protect our way of life and the planet that harbors it. Scaring people about the dangers of global warming, social unrest, and mass extinctions is not working. We need something new, something that we can all share, that we can all relate to, that can awe and inspire us into action — a positive, constructive, inclusive message that resonates with young and old alike, from Baby Boomers to Generation Z. We need a new narrative of mythic proportions that unites us as a species and brings our planetary fragility to the forefront. We need to restructure our project of civilization.

The essence of this new narrative, which I present in a forthcoming book, is that the Universe has a history only because we are here to tell it. But this story is not just about the Big Bang and the expanding Universe, of myriad galaxies and stars, of electrons and quarks, of planets and moons. It is a story of the interconnectedness of the nonliving with the living, of the uniqueness of our planet and its biosphere, of our cosmic loneliness and its deep moral implications. The way we tell a story makes a difference. And the story of who we are and of our planetary role needs to be retold.

Consider the nascent Earth 4.5 billion years ago, a hot ball of molten matter, bubbling and boiling as it slowly took shape. Debris from leftover protoplanetary matter in the form of comets and meteors collided mercilessly with young Earth, causing major havoc but also delivering life’s essential building blocks: water and a variety of chemicals, including some simple organics (that is, chemical compounds with carbon). We could call this the cosmic angry-gifting era. The onslaught would only quiet down some 600 million years after Earth’s origin, around 3.9 billion years ago. If elements had gathered to make some kind of living creature before then, the poor thing was probably destroyed without a trace. Life may have had many false starts, lost in the dust of time.

We are the only humans in the Universe

To understand the history of life on Earth, we must understand Earth’s life history. This is true for any planet that may harbor life, whether in the past, the present, or the future: The history of life on a planet is contingent on the planet’s life history. And here is the amazing consequence of this fact: given that no two planets have the same history, life is not a repeatable experiment. Even if different life forms share the same biochemical principles across the Universe, being carbon-based and gene-driven by Darwinian natural selection, each world will harbor its own kind of living entities, which will mutate and evolve according to chance and the world’s unique changing environment. The living creatures on a world carry the indelible imprint of the world’s properties and history.

The preceding argument speaks to us directly. Life on Earth is unique: If there is life elsewhere, it will be different. We can state with confidence that we are the only humans in the cosmos. And given that we are, for better and for worse, the dominant intelligent life form on this planet — I do love and respect whales, dolphins, monkeys, dogs, cats, etc., but they don’t write poetry and build radio-telescopes or nuclear bombs — we are unique in our kind of intelligence. If there are intelligent life forms in other stellar systems, “they” will not be like us, even if they may share some of our traits, such as an approximate left-right symmetry. Furthermore, any existing alien life form is so far away that, for all practical purposes, we are alone. This means that the spectacular transformation that has unfolded on our planet from a barren ball of molten rock to a thriving abode for life matters in a very central way, what I like to call biocentrism.

The next time someone repeats the tenets of Copernicanism, that we are nothing in the vastness of the cosmos, that science teaches us how worthless we are, please beg to differ. We matter. We matter for our uniqueness as thinking molecular machines capable of transforming raw materials into revolutionary technologies, products of four billion years of evolution on a planet that matters for its uniqueness as a stable abode for the prolonged existence of life. These two inter-related conditions — the existence of intelligent life and a planet that offers long-lasting shelter for its creatures — are not likely to be encountered with high probability in the cosmos. If there is intelligent life elsewhere, it will be rare.

Biocentrism

We have learned much about where we are and what we are made of. Our amazing tools have greatly extended our vision of the world and of the Universe beyond. We also have learned that there is much that we don’t know, and much that we will never know. Our reach is wide but limited. Nature need not comply with our flights of fancy. Science tells us how nature works and not how it should work. As we began to send probes across the Solar System, we were struck by how different these other worlds were, how magnificent and barren — and how indifferent to life.

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We have longed for the harmonies for too long; we have longed for cosmic companionship — divine or alien — for too long. We must accept that we are alone in the cosmos, if not in absolute terms — as we can never be certain of what lies beyond the reach of our instruments — at least in practice. This makes us very special indeed. And it creates a new purpose for humankind.

Note that this is very far away from a return to an anthropocentric worldview, to pre-Copernican times when the Earth was the center of Creation. (I call it biocentric to make the distinction clear.) Biocentrism is necessarily post-Copernican. I am saying that we are unique and important — but not for having been created by a god, or for being the result of a purposeful cosmic directive.

We are unique and important for being self-aware living entities capable of asking questions about their origin and future. We may not be the measure of all things as Protagoras of Abdera proclaimed long ago, but we are the things that can measure. We experience the world, we measure it, and we tell stories about what we see and what we feel. And what we are finding out is that we may very well be the only ones asking such questions — or, at the very least, the only ones we know of, which effectively amounts to the same thing. Even if “they” exist and tell stories, their stories will not be ours. There is only one human voice in the cosmos. And if we ruin our project of civilization, the Universe will once again become silent.

A planetary wakeup call

The acceptance of our cosmic loneliness and the rarity of our planet is a wakeup call, ringing to awaken a new collective consciousness. I believe it to be the new unifying myth of our generation, with the power to go beyond tribal divides and bigotry, to lead us into a new era of human flourishing. But for this to happen, we need to change how we relate to life and to the planet that allows us to exist. We are not above nature, and we don’t own it. We are a part of it and depend on it for our existence.

Life is rare. We are rare. This planet is rare. Treasure life and planet, worship it, learn from Indigenous cultures and their sacred connection to the land. This is the moral imperative of our time, what we owe future generations and the life we share this planet with.

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Up Next

- **Misinterpretation of Physics:** Claims that water “always finds its level”, so oceans could not curve around a globe.

- **Questioning Photos from Space:** Alleging all satellite and space photos/videos are fabricated by governments and space agencies.

Title:

Content: What Must Be Done – OpEd

By

Videos produced by The Drawdown Project –a project that appears to be well-funded and to have the support of some (but not enough) powerful institutions—outline what must be done to prevent more climate catastrophes worse than the catastrophes already happening.  The main staff members of the project, including the narrator of the videos (Jonathan Foley) are climate scientists.  What must be done for the most part is in some measure already being done, but it is now done on too small a scale to stop or to reverse humanity´s lockstep march toward self-destruction.

What must be done includes drastic cutbacks in the carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels.  Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels alone accounts for 62% of the global warming observed today.  About 40% of climate change is caused by other factors.  Construction using cement to make concrete and deforestation, for example, also add to CO2 emissions without being, strictly speaking, the burning of fossil fuels.  About 11% of today´s climate change is due to deforestation.

Emissions of other gases besides CO2 like methane and nitrous oxide also cause climate change.   Rice cultivation and gas belching farm animals are major methane culprits.  Fertilizer use is a major nitrous oxide culprit.  Fluorinated gases leaked, for example, from refrigeration, are also important.

Going back to the single biggest factor, burning fossil fuels, about 25% of the damage –the largest single component of that factor—is burning fossil fuels to generate electricity.  Food production, industry, and transportation (gas guzzling autos and airplanes) are not far behind.

Another part of the picture is formed by the sinks that take C02 and other harmful gases out of the atmosphere.  Natural sinks that remove CO2 from the atmosphere are found in forests, natural soils, and oceans.  To save itself and the biosphere humanity must, first and foremost, reduce emissions.  And to arrive at the sustainable planet that it is necessary –not optional—to create, humanity must follow up by protecting and enhancing natural sinks.

Without pretending to be social scientists or political philosophers, the climate change scientists at Project Drawdown assert that social justice and protecting the cultural heritage and land rights of indigenous peoples are indispensable components of transitioning to a sustainable world.  Foley (the narrator) confesses to being mystified by the apparently inexplicable tragic spectacle of human beings bitterly divided and hostile to one another, polarized and armed.  Project Drawdown might be heard to be shouting over and over,

“Whatever it is that you are doing that is keeping you from doing what must be done to reverse climate change, stop doing it, and instead do what must be done.”

Some causal connections explaining the social paralysis standing in the way of doing what must be done are not hard to see.  Two examples:

  1. The general objective of South Africa´s National Development Plan (NDP) is to achieve 5% annual economic growth, and then to use the surplus generated by the growth to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030.  The NDP pays lip service to fighting climate change, but in the end the overriding goal of growth trumps doing what must be done.  The NDP funds building a new railroad to carry coal from mines to ports in order to create jobs and to grow the economy with the revenues earned by selling coal to India.
  2. Appalachian miners afraid of losing their steady jobs and being dumped into the precariat, rally in support of a populist presidential candidate carrying signs proclaiming, “Trump mines coal.”

These easy to see examples of the frustration of ecology by economics suggest a simple general approach to understanding polarization and paralysis:  economic imperatives inherent in the dominant system clash with what must be done.   It is a simple approach that might be classified, if it must be assigned to a discipline, under the heading “philosophy of history” or “global dynamics,” or “sociological theory” “global political economy” or “International Relations Theory.”  Whatever rubric best suits it, the same approach, I claim, that explains paralysis regarding  doing what must be done a large scale to cope with climate change, helps  explain also paralysis in saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war;  paralysis in stopping organized crime, drug lords, and the steady advance of narco culture; and in general the inability of human beings as a species to work together to do what should be done and must be done.

Whatever the problem, the primary necessity to satisfy investors, where investors are the key decision makers deciding whether the economy stops or starts, is constraint number one.  This constraint further shortens the already short list of possible, as distinct from merely imaginable, solutions to the problem.

Here I do not mean that structural explanations exclude human creativity, rule out conspiracy theories, and deny the existence of conscious decision-making in one great Levi Straussian structuralist straitjacket.   I mean striking a balance recognizing both structural imperatives and conscious agency.

A good example of such a balance is Alfred Marshall´s Law of Substitution.  Whenever a more efficient way to run a profitable business doing or making something, for example generating electricity, is discovered, it will become, ceteris paribus, a substitute that will drive out old-fashioned customary practices.  Emile Durkheim makes a similar point when he gives as an example of a social fact, the fact that a businessperson could, if she or he chose to do so, opt for using obsolete technologies, but to do so would be to invite certain ruin.

Nonetheless, Durkheim cannot deny a flip side explicit in Marshall:  It is the conscious and often creative efforts day after day of businesspeople seeking success every day for their business, that drives an overall historical trend that leaves obsolete and inefficient technologies behind.   One could add other trends similarly driven.

So, I allege that the simple fact that in today´s business civilization most humans are on most days doing what they must do, to solve their immediate need to get by, pay their bills, and to keep their business going if they have a business, trying to make sure that in today´s win lose world, they are among the winners and not among the losers,  explains why everybody does not, immediately upon receipt of the news that a green transition is not optional but necessary, just down tools, pick up new tools, rewire brains, and set about doing what the Drawdown Project says humanity must do. This is not a complete explanation, but I do not know of any better approach to a first approximation.

Let´s approach the big picture via Keynes.  It changes everything, Keynes writes, to deny the best-known law in economics, Say´s Law, and to appreciate the far-reaching consequences of a chronic weakness of effective demand.  Its flip side is the chronic weakness of the inducement to invest.  Hardhearted as we have become living in the framework of today´s dominant institutions, we simply take it for granted and see it as natural that employers do not hire people because everybody needs a dignified livelihood, but rather if and when it is profitable to hire them.  Nothing seems more natural than pulling the USA out of a long depression with war spending, and then continuing economic growth led by government deficits featuring a permanent warfare state.  Nothing seems more natural than the elites (i.e., the investors) of the rest of the world counting on U.S. trade deficits to generate profitable trade surpluses for them.   Nothing seems more natural –in today´s dominant warped vision of reality—than reliance on permanent war establishments to generate economic security for millions who would not otherwise have it.

Designing a sustainable world that meets human needs in harmony with nature is not likely to figure as a relevant way to occupy one´s mind to a young person pursuing a military career.   That young person is quite likely to be seen by his or her family as a success compared to siblings and cousins who do low paying part time work at McDonald´s.  The less successful members of the family often tend to drift off into drug abuse and into the regular practice of the seven deadly sins.

It does not take much philosophy to persuade the former, the healthy young people pursuing a military career, that the moralistic rhetoric in the media that portrays her or him as honorably serving high ideals with advanced military technologies, trumps the agenda of the Drawdown Project.  Something that does spark their interest, when push comes to shove, is advancing their careers by accumulating combat hours.

There is not necessarily any coherent relationship between the life-worlds of the many different participants in the drama of history –between what is going on in their heads and what they do every day – and the structural fact that the system only works, with some unstable semblance of stability, when huge and unpayable debts are making up for the chronic weakness of effective demand and for the weakness of incentives to invest.

Looked at from a nonviolent perspective, the preceding simple idea is the flip side of another simple idea: what Mahatma Gandhi called modernity´s lack of dharma.  Gandhi´s coining of the word adharma names the norms that organize the life and define the personality of homo economicus.

Step one of theorizing the dynamics moving history in today´s global economy should, I allege, consist first and foremost of identifying the constitutive rules of markets as causal powers.  They are the generative mechanisms that govern, ceteris paribus, the physical organization of the production of the means of subsistence that makes human life possible in today’s global economy.

It does not follow, however, that what most motivates human beings is the acquisition of the means of subsistence.  For example, there are many cases where the need for dignity and self-respect trumps the need for food.

It does follow that market economies are economies with losers. Many people cannot sell anything at a high enough price to make it possible to sleep legally in some space on the planet and to avoid the humiliation of not being able to play the roles of a normal member of society.  Violence and paralysis are built into the constitutive rules of buying and selling.  And not only because those rules organize and rationalize a world where warfare states are generated by a chronic need to strengthen the inducement to invest.

It follows that Kantian dreams of perpetual peace achieved by enforcing Kantian ethics and Kantian jurisprudence on a global scale are not much different from political realism.  Liberals inspired by Kant or Kant-like ideals, advocate rigid norms legally and morally obligatory everywhere and everywhen.  Often, they call it the rule of law.

The counter-dreams of the political realist define themselves as non-Kantian. Realist prescriptions can be defined as counter dreams (counter to idealistic liberalism).  They tolerate atrocities that allegedly are necessary atrocities. It turns out, nota bene, that using evils to fight allegedly greater evils often is a way to minimize the political risks to investors.  Thus it serves the cause of high economic growth and low inflation.   It rationalizes a global rule of law, a single world market organized by world rules, backed by the military might of a hegemon.  The classic Kantian and realist viewpoints (today joined by several others) turn out to be complementary ways to organize a world order that systematically generates humiliation, conflict, and violence.  Both lend themselves to imagining that the problem (growth) is the solution (growth).   Neither one takes seriously the findings of the climate scientists or aims to liberate humanity from the tyranny of economic imperatives.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS)

Prof. Howard Richards

Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. He is a philosopher of social science and Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, USA. He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford. He currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme. His books include: The Evaluation of Cultural Action, a study of an application of Paulo Freire´s pedagogical philosophy in rural Chile (London Macmillan 1985); Letters from Quebec; Understanding the Global Economy; The Dilemmas of Social Democracies; Gandhi and the Future of Economics; Rethinking Thinking; Unbounded Organizing in Community; and The Nurturing of Time Future. His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson, Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for Survival, is now available from the publisher, Dignity Press, and from Amazon and other major booksellers, as a print book and as an eBook. [email protected]

What scientific evidence do "flat earthers" reject?

- **Flight Paths:** Insisting that certain long-distance flight routes make more sense on a “flat map”.

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Content: By Leonel L. Mitchell

Edited and introduced by Richard Mammana Jr.

In 1964, Leonel Lake Mitchell (1930-2012) became the first person to receive a Th.D. in liturgical studies from an Episcopal seminary when he completed doctoral work under sometime Living Church editor H. Boone Porter at General Theological Seminary in New York. From 1971 to 1978, Mitchell served as an assistant professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Theology and as director of its M.A. program from 1974 to 1978. He was the first Episcopal priest to serve as a full-time faculty member at Notre Dame. From 1978 to 1995, Mitchell was professor of liturgics at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and lecturer in Church history and liturgy at Seabury-Western from 1978 to 2005, after which he became a professor emeritus. From 1978 until his death he was an honorary canon and canon theologian (from 2008) at the Cathedral of St. James in South Bend, Indiana.

Mitchell was a key reviser of the Book of Common Prayer, producing draft and proposed rites, as well as related catechetical, explanatory, and ceremonial material. His 1985 book Praying Shapes Believing: A Theological Commentary on the Book of Common Prayer has been a standard seminary textbook since its publication. He was a member of the drafting committee of the Standing Liturgical Commission from 1964 to 1979 while serving as a parish priest in the Diocese of New York.

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This essay, distributed in pamphlet form at the 1973 General Convention in Louisville, was published by the former American Branch of the Anglican Society, based at GTS. It had previously been published in an issue of The Anglican quarterly and has not been anthologized to date.

Leonel Mitchell

It has been quite accurately observed that we live in a world of permanent change. Change is, in fact, the only constant factor in the history of our planet. The pre-Socratic philosophers recognized this. The little old lady who complains, “Things just aren’t the same as when I was young,” has recognized it. And it is true.

Although change in the world has always been with us, the rate of change has not been constant. There have been periods of relative stability and of extremely rapid, or revolutionary change. We are, of course, living in a period of rapid change. In the strictly ecclesiastical sphere we hear of “The New Reformation” and “Ferment in the Church.” In the larger world we are confronted with statistics assuring us that 90 percent of the scientists who have ever lived are alive today, or that 85 percent of the drugs on your pharmacist’s shelf did not exist in 1940. It is a staggering thought. Even more staggering is the thought that most children now in elementary school will earn their living at jobs that do not exist at present, or the prediction that by the year 2000 about 80 percent of the population will not have what we call a job at all.

Marshall McLuhan, the English professor turned communications expert, believes that the new electronic media, principally the television and the computer, are largely responsible for the change in environment of the present. Our own ingenuity and inventiveness, he assures us, is responsible for the passing away of “our man-made visual environment” which dates from the fifth century B. C. “Our consternation in facing this development,” he says, “is entirely of the ‘didn’t know it was loaded’ variety.”[1]

“The new electric galaxy of events has already moved deeply into the Gutenberg galaxy. Even without collision, such co-existence of technologies and awareness brings trauma and shock to every living person. Our most ordinary and conventional attitudes seem suddenly twisted into gargoyles and grotesques.”[2]

It is not necessary to follow the intricacies of McLuhan’s logic to recognize that he is accurately describing the world in which we live, and work, and worship.

In a recent paper on the revision of the liturgy, I have suggested that our modern liturgical writers have neglected the three most important events in modern liturgical history: the invention of printing, the mimeograph, and television. I believe this thesis can and should be defended.

“The invention of typography,” McLuhan says, “confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, and the first mass-production.”[3] Unquestionably the production of printed liturgical books was accompanied by an insistence on uniformity. The first prayer book of 1549 was accompanied by an Act of Uniformity and had as its avowed purpose the elimination of the “great diversity in saying and singing in churches,” so that, “Now from henceforth, all the whole realm shall have but one use.”

And in Europe, according to the great Roman Catholic liturgical scholar Joseph Jungmann, “The greatest and most consequential innovation of the Mass book of Pius V was the enactment, clearly expressed in its bull of introduction, that this book was to be, from then on, the standard in every church and that no changes were to be made therein.”[4] The issuance of the Pian Missal in 1570 was followed by the founding, in 1588, of the Sacred Congregation of Rites to insure the uniform performance of the Latin rite. The liturgy (both Roman and Anglican) ceased to be alive and became a treasure of the past, to be protected, venerated, and used without deviation.

To quote McLuhan again:

Later medieval visual stress muddied liturgical piety as much as electronic field pressure has clarified it today … With regard only to our new electric technology, it might baffle many to explain why there should be such a profound liturgical renewal in our time, unless they were aware of the essentially oral character of the electric “field” … The merely individual and visual aspects of worship no longer satisfy.[5]

Even if we do not accept Professor McLuhan’s arguments, there can be no reasonable doubt that his conclusions are correct. The liturgy is no longer seen as a printed text to be studied, but as an action to be performed, a celebration in which to join, an event in which all the senses play their part. It is, in fact, alive again. It is the celebration of life by the Christian community.

In 1936 the first television broadcast took place in England. In the previous year, Fr. A. Gabriel Hebert wrote Liturgy and Society, which is in many ways the opening gun of the 20th Century Liturgical Movement in the Anglican Church. “Here is part of the ideal: that all those who live in one place should eat and drink together before God,” he said. “The task of the Church in the future will be to re-create a social life.”[6]

This social emphasis is, perhaps, the distinguishing mark of the 20th Century Liturgical Movement, which sets for itself no less a goal than “to claim every aspect of life for God Himself.” It is nothing less than this, and not tinkering with ceremonial, which is the goal of the Movement. Offertory processions, celebrations facing the people, public baptisms, revision of the Prayer Book, and all of these things are not the goals of the Liturgical Movement, but the means, the tools, by which we seek to fulfill God’s mission to the world through the Church. To put it in other words: worship is not one activity among other activities, it is the environment in which Christians must live.

Sister Corita expressed one aspect of this when she said, “To really see what we ordinarily look at from time to time makes fireworks happen inside us that can’t always be contained when the brightness of a person or a thing is discovered, or uncovered. These moments are small celebrations, daily exercises, that keep us in form for the big ones.”[7]

This grounding of worship in the celebration of life has as its theological foundation the doctrines of creation and incarnation. Perhaps again Sister Corita has given them their simplest modern expression:

Man is called to be like God, as Creator, as Maker. In a sense every man is supposed to be an artist. That’s the word. We are told to go to work and subdue the earth. And we have elsewhere in the same book a description of the earth standing on tiptoe waiting eagerly to be saved, and somehow man has something to do with the saving. The earth is waiting to receive the stamp of man, as he forms it further, because creation was just the beginning. We carry on what God started.

Further on, we find that God became man and stamped his approval on the whole system into which he came, and which he never left. He took the whole messy bit and worked with it as man. He was a miserable failure and a total success. And so nothing should be unfamiliar to us. Nothing needs to be left out. It can all be taken in. And along the way we can be miserable failures. Hopefully the parallel will carry thru at the end, and we will be total successes in the long run. This is our hope.[8]

This is the gospel which the Church is sent to proclaim. It is one and unchanging, but the world to which we are sent to proclaim it is continually changing, and the gospel needs continually to be translated into terms which the world can understand. This means not only that the actual language of the proclamation needs to be translated from Hebrew, to Greek, to Latin, to English, or Spanish, or Japanese, but also that it must be translated into thought forms which our culture can comprehend. We human beings, as many writers from St. Paul on have noted, are engaged in running a race.

God is the start and finish, but the course we travel is through the world of the 1960s. This means that our compass settings may well differ substantially from those of someone who ran in another time and place. Indeed, one of the mistakes of the forerunners of the present Liturgical Movement was to seek to re-establish the worship of an earlier age by withdrawing from the present to live ideally in the past.

But liturgy must be an expression of the life of the actually existing community which offers it as worship. Our worship must be the offering of our lives to God, not the lives of fourth- or 15th-century Christians, for the world in which we live is very different from that of the early Church or of the Middle Ages.

The best figure I have heard to describe this difference is that of Cinerama and the stereopticon. The stereopticon gives us a very accurate picture of the world. It gives it in color and 3D, but it is a still picture — something which we can observe, and about which we can reason. In many ways this is the picture reflected in the worship of the Book of Common Prayer, the Pian Missal, or any of the great Reformation church orders. On the other hand, Cinerama places us in the center of a three-dimensional movie. It produces an environment which moves and changes. In that sense it is a more accurate picture than the other, for reality does not stand still for us to observe it. I believe that it is this second view of the world which underlies the new approach to liturgy at the present. It is dynamic rather than static, an experience rather than a visual effect, McLuhan rather than Gutenberg, Teilhard de Chardin rather than Thomas Aquinas. It is what is happening, and it is a new environment. As McLuhan reminds us, “New environments inflict considerable pain on the perceiver.”[9]

Certainly the pain is evident today as the Church groans and travails under the New Theology, the New Morality, the New Liturgy, Sensitivity Training, and all the other “new things” which have burst upon our ecclesiastical lives. When confronted with a new environment man has a tendency to try to live in the past. We watch World War II movies, or Bonanza, and talk about the simple pleasures of grandfather’s day. We forget that “Most of us today would vigorously object to living in the house or doing the job our great-grandfathers did. The fact is that most people’s great-grandparents were dirt-poor and lived in hovels.”[10]

In Church too we want to see everything the way it was. We picture the Church of our childhood, conveniently forgetting its weaknesses, and try to recapture it at its best. But this is a different world. We can no more live in 1928 or 1948 than in 1549 or 325. What was appropriate then may be impossible now.

More specifically, I would say that worship, to be effective in the modern world of rapid change, must have four principal qualities:

  1. The first is clarity. We must not bury action under an avalanche of words, and the words we do use must be such that the average intelligent man can understand them without special training. Ceremonies and symbols should illuminate the words, rather than require further explanation. The great sacramental symbols carry a built-in authenticity. We eat the Bread, we drink the Wine, we wash with the Water.
  2. The second quality is corporateness. Liturgy means the work of the people, and it must be the action of the whole Christian people, rather than something done for them by the priest. In both Protestant and Catholic worship the priest or minister has tended to become a performer, and the congregation, the priestly people of God, have been reduced to an audience. The Church is not the same as the hierarchy, however, and baptism, not ordination, is the mark of the Churchman.
  3. The third quality is flexibility. It is perhaps an overstatement to say, “Gutenberg made it possible to put Prayer Books in the hands of the people; A.B. Dick made them obsolete,”[11] but it is on the right track. The mimeograph and the Xerox have made the loose-leaf prayer book and Hymnal a possibility. The idea of uniformity in worship is a part of that later medieval visual stress which we are only now getting away from. Cranmer, in his laudable desire to simplify the rubrics, removed almost all of the variety and flexibility of the older rites. The necessary things for Christian worship are few indeed. From Christ himself come the use of Bread and Wine for Holy Communion and Water for Baptism, the Lord’s Prayer, and the framework, or shape of the Eucharistic liturgy (and that has undergone universal modification). A great deal of flexibility about everything else is possible, even within the traditional framework.
  4. The final quality is celebration. Even Christian penitence should end on the note of joy in forgiveness. The gospel is, after all, Good News. In Baptism we pass from death to life. In the Eucharist we are banqueters feasting at the table of the conquering King. Even at funerals we celebrate the resurrection and our continued fellowship in the Communion of Saints.

Too often the Good News seems to come out, “Life is damn serious business, we’re here to let you know it.”[12] But the Christian life is a love affair with God, and worship is meant to be its celebration. “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the lamb.”[13]

What we must strive to do is not to revive the worship of some other age, nor to perpetuate that of the immediate past, but rather to offer God our best. The modern expression “doing our own thing” is exactly what is necessary: not a pale copy of Geneva, or Sarum, or Renaissance Rome, or even of Nicaea or Jerusalem, but our celebration of our life in God and with one another in Him.

[1] War and Peace in the Global Village, p. 13

[2] The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 278f.

[3] ibid., p. 124

[4] Mass of the Roman Rite, Vol. I, p. 138

[5] The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 137f.

[6] op. cit., p. 183

[7] Footnotes and Headlines, p. 171

[8] ibid., p. 20ff

[9] War and Peace in the Global Village, p. 7.

[10] Cox, Harvey, The Secular City, p. 52.

[11] White, J.F., “Worship in an Age of Immediacy,” in The Christian Century, Vol LXXV, No. 8 (2-21-68), p. 229

[12] Berrigan, D., in Footnotes and Headlines, p. 11

[13] Revelation 19:9

About The Author

Richard Mammana is a lay church historian, author, beekeeper, father, husband, and communicant of S. Clement’s Church, Philadelphia.

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Content: Home > Brand Media News > Responsible education will spur the transition to greener carbon neutral education according to Virendra Rawat Green Mentor

Responsible education will spur the transition to greener, carbon neutral education, according to Virendra Rawat, Green Mentor.

Updated on: 12 July,2022 12:29 PM IST  |  Mumbai
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Green Mentors founded the Indo-American Green University Network at the City University of New York in April 2022 in an effort to improve the world via education.

The Indo-American Green University Network is transforming universities into the green economy's driving force. It brings together colleges in India and the United States that embrace responsibility for the future of their students and the globe. Members of IAGUN exchange and analyse best practises that demonstrate progress toward green policies, curricula, teacher development, evaluation, learning environments, pedagogy, etc. IAGUN also evaluates global, regional, and national green projects. It establishes potential benchmarks and indicators for the nation's progress toward sustainable schooling. University teaching-learning practises are inspired by the power of being environmentally conscious. Sharing sustainability practises with the member universities, the Network will address climate action in higher education institutions.

The keynote speaker during the inaugural ceremony was the Executive Director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Meghan Fay Zahniser (AASHE). Dr. Michal Mlynár, Ambassador of the Permanent Mission of Slovakia to the United Nations in New York, was the Chief Guest. During the IAGUN inaugural event, Nalanda University in the Indian state of Bihar signed a memorandum of understanding with the City University of New York, BCC. A delegation of Indian higher education leaders led by Virendra Rawat met with career diplomats from over twenty-five countries based in New York and Washington, D.C., and informed them of the power of responsible education in India, which can assist their great nations in achieving sustainable development goals by 2030.

In our contemporary world, education is expected to instil learners with the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes they need to thrive in societies that are becoming increasingly diverse and rapidly changing; to provide them with a moral compass, purpose, and meaning; and to contribute to their individual and collective well-being. In light of contemporary issues such as climate change, violent and hateful ideologies, conflicts, and the risk of global pandemics, education should equip students with the knowledge, awareness, and action skills they need to become agents of change and contribute to making the world a better place. Nature influences how pupils learn and how teachers instruct. This helps the school reduce its environmental impact. Green practises help enhance the intellectual, social, and civic development of the student. A "green university" is a school that satisfies its own demands for natural resources, such as electricity, water, and materials, without making it more difficult for people and future generations to meet their own needs. It implements environmental ideals on campus by investing in clean air, clean water, green energy, green transportation, green uniforms, safe waste management and recycling, and local food sources.

Together with Gopal Goswami, Ambrish Parajiya, and Bhavesh Shah, Virendra Rawat co-founded Green Mentors, a global sustainable education organisation based in Gujarat, India. They have been successful in various businesses and believe that the transition to a carbon-neutral global economy would make green technologies extremely lucrative. They conclude that the transition to a greener lifestyle begins with responsible education and involves "transversal" skills such as critical thinking, creativity, empathy, collaborative problem-solving, and system thinking. Modern education should instil in students a sense of global citizenship and responsibility for people and the environment. It also enables students to learn about the world's knowledge and mould who they are and what they wish to become, to relate to their ancestry, be open to alternative ways of being, and be willing to continue learning throughout their lives.

On September 24, 2022, in New York City, IAGUN will have its next roundtable meeting with a few Indian-American institutions at the 6th NYC Green School Conference 2022. Mr. Rawat observes that the Green Universities will become the green engine of the new paradigm of the "green economy" and contribute to the global sustainability.

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- **Anti-Authority/Conspiracy Culture**: General increase in distrust of traditional authority (governments, scientists, educators).

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Content: Health News & Commentary

They Spent Years Telling Us Peer Pressure Is Wrong, Now It’s Their Weapon of Choice

"Instead of accepting that there is a perfectly rational explanation for refusing a rushed vaccine with the worst safety record in modern history for a virus that presents next-to-no risk for most people – prime ministers, presidents and premiers have insisted that defiance is a selfish act that demands constant social pressure."
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Shops in various European countries have erected physical wire fences to separate vaccinated and unvaccinated customers.

Footage from a Kaufland supermarket in Romania has surfaced depicting a sign at the entrance dividing customers into aisles separated by two-metre high wire barricades, draped with plastic, open at the top and the bottom.

Despite these literal walls placed between people, many continue to deny that segregation is taking place.

After months of independent reports contradicting the global narrative, the World Health Authority has admitted that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people spread Covid at roughly the same rate, and that being vaccinated (in this particular case) does not stop transmission.

If governments remained true to their word about ‘following the science’, this revelation should have signalled the end for vaccine passports.

Instead, nearly every government has come out in recent days to double-down on their booster-shot programs to combat a new Covid variant. Omicron is noted for being vaccine-resistant and mild, mimicking a weak flu and yet politicians have successfully used its existence to guarantee the continuation of authoritarian health orders.

Our governments have forgotten that ‘unvaccinated’ does not mean infected. For the first time in history, completely healthy people have found themselves permanently restricted by biosecurity regulations designed to temporarily isolate infected patients until their recovery.

Romania’s shopping centre fences provide a visual representation of what Western nations have done by stealth. Australia has built its fences out of fear, segregating people via a noxious combination of threats, fines, and social pressure.

By far the most damaging aspect of Covid propaganda has been the psychological war waged on the population.

Humans are social creatures. Our behaviour is mostly shaped by the social norms we observe around us. The localised imitation of each other provides the foundation of ‘culture’ and has created an incalculable tapestry of variations across the world. We are so malleable to suggestion that we form behavioural bonds at a family, peer, work, sport, community, city, state, and national level. These expected social norms exist in constant competition with each other and the wider world.

The addition of homogeneous Covid propaganda to this system has attempted to create a single pattern of behaviour – a blueprint if you will – for humanity. It is an exercise in social engineering instead of a natural progression of advantageous behaviour discovered through trial and error. This kind of mono-thought is particularly dangerous because it is inflicted upon society regardless of merit. All socialist societies suffer from this structural error and in short order, it leads to the collapse of nations and the decimation of their civil unity.

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Covid mania has evolved into a new type of socialism that blends total state control with woke-political theory and the ambition of global corporate entities. Like all authoritarian regimes, it propagates itself via the control of information (in partnership with Silicon Valley) reinforced through the bombardment of fear (courtesy of weak politicians).

Considering how much time our current generation has spent congratulating itself for being morally superior by ‘erasing the past in revenge for historical harms’ – it is interesting to note how frequently the majority have fallen for textbook propaganda.

Over the last decade, several dangerous ideological movements have managed to motivate significant sections of society into acts of self-harm.

The Climate Change eco-fascist cult has convinced everyone from children to CEOs to punish society for being successful. It has imposed a parallel currency of Carbon Credits to micromanage citizens while pouring profit into the pockets of Green companies trading on the promise of a fictional apocalypse. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter – the Marxist race-baiting organisation encouraging teenagers to destroy private property and assault strangers – has turned harmonious societies across the world into racist crucibles.

These two political movements utilised social media to create an intense environment of peer pressure that stalked impressionable minds. It is easy to understand how young people found themselves lured into a virtue-signalling hierarchy where reblogging propaganda invigorated their online popularity. Soon after, the corporate world went from a predatory marketing campaign designed to soak up these brainwashed customers, into a cannibalistic cycle of shame where CEOs bullied each other into compliance and those who refused found themselves viciously attacked.

The market of ideas is often coercive – frequently ruthless – and sometimes profitable. ‘Crazes’ come and go inside society as humans develop an intense interest for one activity or ideological movement before growing bored and moving on. However, when the government passes policy to institutionalise the behaviour, mandate it, or generously reward it (which has happened with both Net Zero policy and demands for office quotas) these transient fixations become artificially extended.

Unlike a harmless obsession for Furbies or Zumba, all three of the current ideological movements (Climate Change, Black Lives Matter, and Covid) include extremely harmful and abusive social qualities which are rewarded by authoritative bodies.

Covid is easily the most destructive of the three.

The message coming out of the world’s governments is that people who refuse to get vaccinated are dangerous. These dissidents pose an immediate and serious threat to the personal safety of others through a deliberate and malicious action, which in turn justifies ordinarily illegal civil retribution.

Instead of accepting that there is a perfectly rational explanation for refusing a rushed vaccine with the worst safety record in modern history for a virus that presents next-to-no risk for most people – prime ministers, presidents and premiers have insisted that defiance is a selfish act that demands constant social pressure.

This does not come solely in the form of online bullying. Governments have inflicted laws which lock citizens out of the economy and actively mark them as a segregated sub-class who are easily identified by the peer group.

It is called ‘painting a target’.

Politicians have done this for many reasons, the most obvious being that the constant abuse and victimisation levelled at the unvaccinated by their family, friends, and strangers creates a mental hell that breaks most people. In general, humans want to be an accepted member of the group and inciting constant torment means that politicians can conscript the public to do what they cannot legally get away with – harassment.

Segregating part of the community for vilification also scares people into compliance. Those who withstand this assault serve a purpose too. It is helpful to have a small group of people who resist because they provide the perfect ‘stick’ with which to threaten everyone else. ‘If you don’t do what we say, you’ll end up like these people…’

The last reason is to create a scapegoat for both government failure, and for the whole of society to shift their frustration, anger, hatred, and blame onto.

We have seen this numerous times throughout the pandemic, where politicians like Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has described Covid as a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ – a statement left uncorrected. Even New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet punished the unvaccinated by moving the ‘freedom’ date from December 1 to December 15 due to several Covid outbreaks in fully vaccinated gyms controlled by a vaccine passport system. Logic would suggest that restrictions should have been placed on the vaccinated, but instead it was the unvaccinated who, already essentially locked in their homes, were issued with an extension to their arbitrary detention.

Health professionals – who represent authority figures garnishing these sinister overtures with credibility – have done everything from trying to raise healthcare taxes on the unvaccinated, to locking them out of essential healthcare and suggesting they be left to die as punishment.

2GB radio host Ray Hadley said on November 30 that ‘anti-vaxxers’ were like Hitler or paedophiles – two of the most reviled groups in human history. He did not offer to justify that nonsense comparison, nor could he, as Hadley was describing law-abiding citizens who simply wished to opt-out of a dangerous drug trial and be left alone to get on with their lives.

If he had vilified any other group of people – such as a religion or race – Hadley not only would have found himself sacked, but there would likely be legal proceedings taken against him.

The Hitler comparison is ironic, in that there are plenty of parallels between the behaviour of Covid’s propaganda to the early stages of the Nazi regime. Australia’s system of medical tyranny is used to justify segregation, discrimination, dehumanization, and exclusion from society to the point where premiers are gleeful at the prospect of the unvaccinated starving on the street. All of the worst regimes in history believed they were ‘saving people’, and this one is no different.

It is a very strange place for Australia to find itself in after the decades successive governments spent a fortune educating children on the dangers of bullying and peer pressure.

Public money was invested (and clearly wasted) in educating children and parents about peer pressure in order to stop people from being bullied into dangerous activities for the sake of social status.

The government and its teams of experts know exactly how this psychology works. We have a morally lacklustre generation of politicians prepared to exploit the social dependency of humanity to expand their power, protect their investments, and hide their failures.

This ends when people stop policing each other, and shift their attention to the depravity of those in charge.

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- **Community & Identity:** The movement offers a sense of “truth-seeker” identity and belonging for people who feel alienated or disenfranchised from mainstream culture.

- **Desire for Uniqueness:** For some, holding unconventional beliefs (even “absurd” ones) is a way to distinguish themselves or feel special.

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Will We Be Sorry We Shut Down?

from the magazine

Will We Be Sorry We Shut Down?

Paris Diarist Autumn 2021
Covid-19

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues around the world, we might ask whether it has not already profoundly changed our way of life. Might we find ourselves to be like those prisoners who miss their cells, once released, finding in their newfound independence the bitter taste of anxiety?

This past year and a half, so focused on safety, brought a remarkable lightening of social burdens: fewer contacts, social events abbreviated or made optional, long trips impossible. And the little thrill of clandestine dinners and difficult travel in Europe or elsewhere depended on the context of prohibition. The popular cliché in France of a post-Covid return to the Roaring Twenties should not fool us: many French people (and, more generally, Europeans—and doubtless, this is true of many Americans, too) no longer want to return to their offices, and they wish to keep working from home. Many are leaving big cities and settling in rural areas, dreaming of a simple life close to nature, far from the frantic consumerism and noise of urban life, sheltered from the vicissitudes of History.

It’s not clear, in other words, that everyone will experience the return to normal as a liberation. The pandemic caused us to worry, but it also delivered us for a while from a still-greater worry: the anxiety of freedom. To parody Pascal, who explained that the misfortune of humanity consisted in the inability to sit quietly in one’s room, alone, we might say that the misfortune of humanity after Covid will perhaps be to be shut up in one’s room—and like it.

There would be historical precedents for such an attitude. While young people, after the French Revolution, celebrated tumultuous desires and strong passions, some authors took a different turn. These include, in France, Xavier de Maistre, author of Voyage Around My Room; the Swiss Frédéric Lamiel, in his torrential Journal, devoted to the minuscule events of his daily life; and the Russian Oblomov, who passes his short existence in bed. All stand against the two types of human beings prominent in the nineteenth century: the bourgeois, whose whole existence hinges on profit and calculation; and his adversary, the bohemian or the revolutionary, who wants to change the world and establish justice. Confronting these active characters, the lovers of banality insist on the wonders of insignificance, the greatness of inertia, the truth of laziness. They will have twentieth-century successors in Samuel Beckett, E. M. Cioran, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser but also in the movement on the fringe of the ecology of catastrophe—“collapsology,” which preaches negative growth, the end of travel, and retreat into small communities, while waiting for the end of the world. Here we have a whole underground school that has reappeared along with the policy of confinement.

Seclusion has a sweetness that recalls the long tradition of Western monasticism: the monk’s cell, minus transcendence, plus social networks. Even before the pandemic, this hidden history had found new life, adorned with all the virtues of resistance to global warming: we must stay home to avoid the greenhouse effect, adopting a vegetative immobility and banning the movement that produces too much carbon. The universal cell of contemporary humanity, from Los Angeles to Beijing, is the couch facing the screen.

Will we once again thirst for great open spaces, or will we give way to the propagandists of stunting? For these militants, the call for struggle is not the need to save the planet but the need to punish the human race. Life must be changed—that is, reduced as far as possible to the minimum. There are so many who want to convert us, professing the best intentions, to a morality of troglodytes.

We will perhaps find that Covid has given birth to a new anthropological type: the curled-up and hyper-connected human being with no further need of others or of reality. We might then interpret the famous verse of Rimbaud, “real life is absent,” in the following way: “real life is the absence of life.” For all those who still promote the spirit of exploration and a taste for connection with others, this would be a double catastrophe: to the deaths from the virus we would add, as a kind of expiation, the penitence of shrinkage.

Photo: FTiare/iStock

Up Next
from the magazine

The New Aging

Modern societies are transforming our understanding of life’s later stages—for better and for worse. Pascal Bruckner The Social Order

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Characteristics of Believers:**
- **Not usually dangerous:** Most participants are not violent or radical, though conspiracy networks can feed into more extreme worldviews.

- **Demographics:** Active across genders, ages, and backgrounds, but often people with lower scientific literacy, critical-thinking gaps, or those experiencing social marginalization.

- **Psychological:** Belief often correlates with distrust in institutions, openness to conspiracy theories, and sometimes a desire to challenge mainstream narratives.

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Will We Be Sorry We Shut Down?

from the magazine

Will We Be Sorry We Shut Down?

Paris Diarist Autumn 2021
Covid-19

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues around the world, we might ask whether it has not already profoundly changed our way of life. Might we find ourselves to be like those prisoners who miss their cells, once released, finding in their newfound independence the bitter taste of anxiety?

This past year and a half, so focused on safety, brought a remarkable lightening of social burdens: fewer contacts, social events abbreviated or made optional, long trips impossible. And the little thrill of clandestine dinners and difficult travel in Europe or elsewhere depended on the context of prohibition. The popular cliché in France of a post-Covid return to the Roaring Twenties should not fool us: many French people (and, more generally, Europeans—and doubtless, this is true of many Americans, too) no longer want to return to their offices, and they wish to keep working from home. Many are leaving big cities and settling in rural areas, dreaming of a simple life close to nature, far from the frantic consumerism and noise of urban life, sheltered from the vicissitudes of History.

It’s not clear, in other words, that everyone will experience the return to normal as a liberation. The pandemic caused us to worry, but it also delivered us for a while from a still-greater worry: the anxiety of freedom. To parody Pascal, who explained that the misfortune of humanity consisted in the inability to sit quietly in one’s room, alone, we might say that the misfortune of humanity after Covid will perhaps be to be shut up in one’s room—and like it.

There would be historical precedents for such an attitude. While young people, after the French Revolution, celebrated tumultuous desires and strong passions, some authors took a different turn. These include, in France, Xavier de Maistre, author of Voyage Around My Room; the Swiss Frédéric Lamiel, in his torrential Journal, devoted to the minuscule events of his daily life; and the Russian Oblomov, who passes his short existence in bed. All stand against the two types of human beings prominent in the nineteenth century: the bourgeois, whose whole existence hinges on profit and calculation; and his adversary, the bohemian or the revolutionary, who wants to change the world and establish justice. Confronting these active characters, the lovers of banality insist on the wonders of insignificance, the greatness of inertia, the truth of laziness. They will have twentieth-century successors in Samuel Beckett, E. M. Cioran, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser but also in the movement on the fringe of the ecology of catastrophe—“collapsology,” which preaches negative growth, the end of travel, and retreat into small communities, while waiting for the end of the world. Here we have a whole underground school that has reappeared along with the policy of confinement.

Seclusion has a sweetness that recalls the long tradition of Western monasticism: the monk’s cell, minus transcendence, plus social networks. Even before the pandemic, this hidden history had found new life, adorned with all the virtues of resistance to global warming: we must stay home to avoid the greenhouse effect, adopting a vegetative immobility and banning the movement that produces too much carbon. The universal cell of contemporary humanity, from Los Angeles to Beijing, is the couch facing the screen.

Will we once again thirst for great open spaces, or will we give way to the propagandists of stunting? For these militants, the call for struggle is not the need to save the planet but the need to punish the human race. Life must be changed—that is, reduced as far as possible to the minimum. There are so many who want to convert us, professing the best intentions, to a morality of troglodytes.

We will perhaps find that Covid has given birth to a new anthropological type: the curled-up and hyper-connected human being with no further need of others or of reality. We might then interpret the famous verse of Rimbaud, “real life is absent,” in the following way: “real life is the absence of life.” For all those who still promote the spirit of exploration and a taste for connection with others, this would be a double catastrophe: to the deaths from the virus we would add, as a kind of expiation, the penitence of shrinkage.

Photo: FTiare/iStock

Up Next
from the magazine

The New Aging

Modern societies are transforming our understanding of life’s later stages—for better and for worse. Pascal Bruckner The Social Order

Contact

Send a question or comment using the form below. This message may be routed through support staff.

Saved!
Close

Parental/Social Implications:**
- **Generally Harmless but Influential:** While the belief itself is not “dark” in the criminal sense, involvement in such worldview can signal openness to other, potentially more harmful, conspiracy theories if not countered by strong critical thinking skills and healthy skepticism.

- **Peer Group Influence:** Friendships in adolescence are critical; exposure does not guarantee adoption, but it’s wise to encourage media literacy, respectful skepticism, and open discussion at home.

**Conclusion:**
Flat Earth belief in the modern era is a social phenomenon rooted in distrust and the search for identity in an uncertain world, rather than a truly sinister or malicious movement.

The main risk is indirect—if the belief is a sign of greater detachment from critical thinking or susceptibility to radical conspiracies.

Gentle awareness and open conversation are the best tools; outright rejection of friends or families on this basis alone is rarely helpful, unless there is evidence of engagement with more dangerous or isolating ideologies.

Encourage your child to think independently, ask questions, and value credible sources.

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Content: Home > Brand Media News > Responsible education will spur the transition to greener carbon neutral education according to Virendra Rawat Green Mentor

Responsible education will spur the transition to greener, carbon neutral education, according to Virendra Rawat, Green Mentor.

Updated on: 12 July,2022 12:29 PM IST  |  Mumbai
BrandMedia |

Green Mentors founded the Indo-American Green University Network at the City University of New York in April 2022 in an effort to improve the world via education.

The Indo-American Green University Network is transforming universities into the green economy's driving force. It brings together colleges in India and the United States that embrace responsibility for the future of their students and the globe. Members of IAGUN exchange and analyse best practises that demonstrate progress toward green policies, curricula, teacher development, evaluation, learning environments, pedagogy, etc. IAGUN also evaluates global, regional, and national green projects. It establishes potential benchmarks and indicators for the nation's progress toward sustainable schooling. University teaching-learning practises are inspired by the power of being environmentally conscious. Sharing sustainability practises with the member universities, the Network will address climate action in higher education institutions.

The keynote speaker during the inaugural ceremony was the Executive Director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Meghan Fay Zahniser (AASHE). Dr. Michal Mlynár, Ambassador of the Permanent Mission of Slovakia to the United Nations in New York, was the Chief Guest. During the IAGUN inaugural event, Nalanda University in the Indian state of Bihar signed a memorandum of understanding with the City University of New York, BCC. A delegation of Indian higher education leaders led by Virendra Rawat met with career diplomats from over twenty-five countries based in New York and Washington, D.C., and informed them of the power of responsible education in India, which can assist their great nations in achieving sustainable development goals by 2030.

In our contemporary world, education is expected to instil learners with the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes they need to thrive in societies that are becoming increasingly diverse and rapidly changing; to provide them with a moral compass, purpose, and meaning; and to contribute to their individual and collective well-being. In light of contemporary issues such as climate change, violent and hateful ideologies, conflicts, and the risk of global pandemics, education should equip students with the knowledge, awareness, and action skills they need to become agents of change and contribute to making the world a better place. Nature influences how pupils learn and how teachers instruct. This helps the school reduce its environmental impact. Green practises help enhance the intellectual, social, and civic development of the student. A "green university" is a school that satisfies its own demands for natural resources, such as electricity, water, and materials, without making it more difficult for people and future generations to meet their own needs. It implements environmental ideals on campus by investing in clean air, clean water, green energy, green transportation, green uniforms, safe waste management and recycling, and local food sources.

Together with Gopal Goswami, Ambrish Parajiya, and Bhavesh Shah, Virendra Rawat co-founded Green Mentors, a global sustainable education organisation based in Gujarat, India. They have been successful in various businesses and believe that the transition to a carbon-neutral global economy would make green technologies extremely lucrative. They conclude that the transition to a greener lifestyle begins with responsible education and involves "transversal" skills such as critical thinking, creativity, empathy, collaborative problem-solving, and system thinking. Modern education should instil in students a sense of global citizenship and responsibility for people and the environment. It also enables students to learn about the world's knowledge and mould who they are and what they wish to become, to relate to their ancestry, be open to alternative ways of being, and be willing to continue learning throughout their lives.

On September 24, 2022, in New York City, IAGUN will have its next roundtable meeting with a few Indian-American institutions at the 6th NYC Green School Conference 2022. Mr. Rawat observes that the Green Universities will become the green engine of the new paradigm of the "green economy" and contribute to the global sustainability.

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**Summary and Nuggets:**

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Content: A reading-room.
A Moment Between Past and Future
37 0
In "Izbe-chitalnya" we have today an article by science fiction writer Vsevolod Glukhovtsev.
A moment between past and future.
Dear readers!
Not so long ago, on the pages of this blog, there was a material dedicated to the absence of a coherent ideology in Russia, that is, a system of goals, tasks, managerial decisions of a nationwide scale, in the amount of creating social positive, hope, attracting masses with images of a beautiful future - well, or not so pathos, a future with obvious evolution, long-term stable development.
Hope is our earthly compass, this is said remarkably correctly, it is better not to say, society in principle cannot fully exist without a great goal.
There is no doubt that we have such a problem in Russia, but it is only part of a much more global problem – which I will discuss below.
In fact, as I ’ ve said more than once in the “Collective Intelligence Experience, ” regular readers of the blog probably remember these philosophical passages and the discussions around them.
And now I would like to concentrate all that, add something else and again present for public review and discussion.
I ’ m almost sure that some of my conclusions will seem crazy – and okay, this is the privilege of science fiction writers, we can safely say what an ordinary person may, and would like to say, but is afraid to be called crazy.
And we are fine, we have the help to pulsate ideas.
Here I want to share them, hoping to cause an explosion of thoughts, emotions, comments; a sinful deed in advance I grin, anticipating someone ’ s brutally scorched exhaust pipes (in the dialect of the inhabitants of the current wild field, this situation is called “vibuh and pozhezha dupi ”)... - I think readers appreciated my refined humor of a hereditary intellectual...
They were joking and will be.
Let's start a serious conversation.
In my essays mentioned above, the pillar thought was the following: modern humanity – at least what I call “Europogenic ”, and to which we certainly belong, formed by the ancient Christian cultural paradigm – so, this humanity is in a total crisis, generated by the lack of a guiding perspective idea.
In other words, society as a whole does not know where to go.
And here, having collected the previous postulates, I intend to develop this thesis as concentrated as possible with the formation of clear conclusions.
I will start with the position of the most general: a normal self-developing system (hereinafter referred to as SRS) physically grows, occupies an increasing amount of space - this is its natural vector or even tensor, so to speak.
Any healthy human society: a tribe, a people, a state, a superpower is just such a SRS and it increases exactly as, materially, in volume, in mass, determined by two main parameters: territory and population size.
What we habitually call “world history ” is essentially a history of politics, or rather, of geopolitics, of the actions of the largest and most influential states and empires.
Yes, of course, any state is an entity that is born, grows, seeks its place in the world, falls into crises, it happens that it dies, it happens that it is reborn...
But in empires all these processes occur so powerfully, pictorially, that whether, especially instructive, and therefore it is their descriptions that make up the lion's share of the corpus of historical sources: the empire of Alexander the Great, the Romans, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Napoleon... and so on.
It is understandable, because, first of all, the actions of superpowers contribute to the unification of different human communities, in other words, they contribute to globalization.
And the united humanity formed in the course of this process, of course, also grows, captures the physical space.
What are the obvious markers on the way to the formation of global humanity?
Probably, it is possible to note quite a lot of such points, but for us the greatest interest is the middle of the XIX century: when the physical surface of the globe with the peoples inhabiting it was actually revealed, and technical progress, after a rather long formation of methods of scientific knowledge, was designated as the most important social factor.
Of course, technological progress in our usual understanding has always existed, since primitive times, but historically it turned out that purely scientific algorithms and models of thinking (differential, integral calculus, Cartesian coordinate system, etc.), led to discoveries made “without leaving the office ”, with the help of the head, goose feather and sheet of paper, and these discoveries, in turn, became a springboard for progress. given before.
It took about one and a half centuries for knowledge in the field of mechanics, thermodynamics, hydraulics, electromagnetism to be embodied in machines that concentrate and transform arrays of energy, many times surpassing the previous ones.
And it is natural that the machines of the middle of the XIX century in terms of the sum of simultaneously operating subsystems became inconceivably more complex, sophisticated and, naturally, more valuable than anything that was created before, and these complexity and high cost are an adequate fee for the ability to concentrate and direct huge energy flows in the channel needed by the operator, to put it simply – to give gigantic forces into the hands of a person.
In some articles here, I gave an example of an image that is extremely sympathetic to my writer's gut: every technical construct is nothing more than a "magical technocostume", wearing which, a person turns himself into a completely fabulous creature, becoming a participant in the "technocarnival":
a) chauffeur + car = centaur;
b) pilot + combat aircraft = dragon … etc.
In short, techno-suit, even the most primitive, like a protective shell, helmet and spear is a fundamental strengthening of the operational capabilities of a person, and even steam locomotives, steamships, electric motors (already in 1839 an experimental electric ship was built, a little Pushkin did not live to see him - this is for understanding the era)!..
- It was clear to any sensible politician what colossal advantages technical progress brings first of all in the military plan, and it is more fair to say, of course, scientific and technical, STP, because the evolution of technology has no basis other than scientific research, including fundamental ones.
My next thesis, I suppose, will cause some controversy, but I am convinced of it: since then and until recently, about 150 years, with all the obvious costs (terrible wars, environmental problems...)
NTP was the main inspiring idea of humanity, it was perceived as the main and elixir of growth, and the hope of humanity, its Eldorado, Belovodye, the magical shore of hope.
Let ’ s not forget: humanity is a normal SRS, it is growing physically, and the NTP gave it both unprecedented losses and a gigantic increase in the population – I will not prove this, everyone will easily find figures and graphs.
Well, where the population growth, there is the growth of the territory, a growing society needs new lands and skies, but with them in the last few decades, the situation is purely ambiguous.
Last year, exactly half a century was marked by the highly acclaimed report of a group of researchers led by the American Dennis Meadows “Limits to Growth ”, developed under the auspices of the no less famous Club of Rome.
The report became a sensation, causing an explosion of polar opinions and fierce controversy.
Let me remind you that back then, in 1972, the Meadows team predicted the exhaustion of the resources of our entire planet within thirty years, that is, by 2002 - with such consumption of these resources by collective humanity as then, in those years.
But it has been 20 years since the supposed deadline.
Thank God, there is no universal catastrophe, resources have not dried up, they are still being drawn to this day, but Meadows and his comrades, I must admit, were right in something.
Maybe even in the main.
Today we see various social measures aimed at inhibiting global consumption (whether these measures are spontaneous or conscious is a special topic): a protracted economic recession, a pandemic, managed local wars – in other words, we see a total crisis in something similar to the Great Catastrophe of 1914-1945, however, which has completely different causes and significant differences, in particular, it proceeds incomparably softer than a century. back.
But I have no doubt that this is a deep, existential crisis of Europogenic society.
This society, in fact, has nowhere to grow, here I fundamentally agree with the statement of the problem, and I undertake to confirm it.
Thus, normal society grows spatially.
The original primitive tribe fed from the surrounding ecosystem (forest, field, river, lake...) within a radius of several kilometers, and with the emergence of cattle breeding, agriculture, the area of   cultural development grew significantly for two main reasons:
(a) The technologies required territories, pastures, arable land and steam land;
b) the constant supply of food has led to a demographic, if not an explosion, then a strong rise, and more people, of course, just need more place to live.
And so on - the Russians rushed to Siberia because these expanses carried precious furs, the Spaniards to America, a source of gold and silver, the British to India, the French to Africa... somewhat conditionally, but essentially so.
All this was before the outbreak of the STP, and the rapid breakthrough of technology in the late XIX-early XX centuries absolutely logically led to the idea of   the development of extraterrestrial space.
Frenzied progressing humanity urgently needs more and more expanses, and it is quite natural that the eyes turned to distant planets, nebulae, stars and other romance, and it is good that such a romance was, because it provoked quite sober calculations.
I am ready to assert that the idea of space exploration was the main stimulus of Europogenic mankind in the twentieth century, its blissful dream.
It began to take hold of minds at the beginning of the century (“Aelita ” was written in 1923, exactly a hundred years ago), but the Great Disaster, of course, cut down the topic for a long time, everyone was not up to space, would have lived.
But after World War II, people returned to it at an incomparably different technological level, and after the first space flights, people really felt the exciting proximity of huge mysterious spaces, and the dream that we are about to rush there, into unknown distances, joyfully seized many minds.
In the social dimension, society saw before itself the space of great achievements, was inspired by the idea of unlimited exploration of the Universe, which created a generally healthy mood, the expectation of a promising future, that is, the basis of a social positive deeply desired by the authorities.
We are now forced to admit that those hopes have not been realized, having sunk into two intractable problems, or rather, it is the same problem in two guises:
(a) The extreme complexity, hence the riskiness and accident rate of space technology;
b) its ruinous cost.
In other words, over time, it turned out that the practical development of extraterrestrial space is unrealistic: technical systems here are so complex, so many subsystems must work in them at the same time that their impeccable joint work is extremely unlikely, at least somewhere, but some kind of failure will happen.
And spending on this is very burdensome for budgets, of course, only superpowers can afford to play in space, and even then only limited.
And after the first turbulent years of progress, cosmonautics trampled on the spot, there is no question of any settlement of mankind on distant planets, with great efforts, several people only visited the Moon, which ended.
More than half a century has passed since then, the matter has not progressed one step, even the superpowers did not play in such expensive toys.
So the dream of millions gradually melted away.
But the masses cannot live without a guiding idea, this puppeteers know very well, even if they say about a “society without ideology ”.
“No ideology ” is already an ideology, and what else, namely: after the collapse of the USSR, Europogenic society tried to infect with a moral virus such as“ buy and have fun ”; we recognize that it is extremely easy for us by our human nature to get on this needle.
When you can actually buy more goods and services today than yesterday, and tomorrow more than today - not because it is vital for you, but because it is cool and fun, and in general, life is a game of shopping and a demonstration of prestigious junk.
Well, in fact, it kindles well, gives a vector of life to an individual, thereby stabilizing society.
This unspoken ideology of “status consumption ” worked quite effectively – but, of course, smart puppeteers were well aware that this could invigorate and structure society temporarily, that this is only a respite, during which it would be good to find a real, spiritualizing idea.
And if it does not work, then you will have to invent something that moderates consumer appetites.
This, of course, is unpleasant, you can cause an explosion in a society accustomed to contentment and comfort - therefore, here, too, you need a sensible socio-psychological treatment of the population, which is carried out today, not without squeaking, not without noticeable turbulence, which affected you and us - the era of satiety has curled up, and the new time is alarmingly looming pandemics and local armed conflicts.
And still, no flammable idea is not visible: people live because it is necessary to live, home, life, family, again echoes of status consumption - we can no longer imagine how you can live without a car, a smartphone, the Internet, while it is desirable that it was not worse than others, so as not to experience mental discomfort...
This is life today, not the future.
The future, by and large, is not.
Not yet.
I fundamentally believe that society cannot exist without a goal-setting idea, even if it is deceptive, like a carrot before a donkey.
And I would be a bad philosopher and writer if I didn ’ t think about it and make predictions.
Philosophy is the “forward-looking ” of humanity, I said it and will say it, well, I will not forget to repeat that a science fiction writer can and even should produce hypotheses that look good“ crazy ”.
Life will show what will be justified, what will not be justified, but one of the tasks of the forerunner is to stir up society, make it think, worry, argue, and, you see, in the dispute the truth will be born.
First of all, I want to draw attention to the fact that the exhaustion of progress, in particular, the exploration of space, concerns large powerful machines designed to enhance the physical power of man (as a rule, these are so-called heat machines, but I prefer the term “fire machines ”, it is brighter and even more correct, if you think about it).
In fact, the classic STP of the XIX-XX centuries was dedicated to this: to merge a person with a mechanism the more powerful, the better.
A person behind the wheel of a car, the steering wheel of an aircraft, submarines, the remote control of a nuclear power plant - all these are biotechnological complexes, characters of technocarnival.
And it reached its maximum, to the maximum power around 1975 – about, of course – and then either stood up or the pace of progress fell, because the bio-operator of such a complex, Homo sapiens (hereinafter – HS), due to biological limitations, simply does not cope with the greater volume and unpredictability of physico-chemical processes than those that managed to conclude in fire machines half a century ago, so that attempts to create something even more complex (controlled thermonuclear reaction, space aeroplane...) became like a fuss with a herd of mustangs: catch seems to have been caught, but tame is not very good.
Therefore, a dead end.
What is not a dead end in the last forty or fifty years - it is quite obvious that these are the means of informatics and communication, the machines are small, weak, not so much serving the transformation of a person into a powerful biomech, but improving his information and analytical capabilities, that is, the focus of progress is noticeably shifted from the executive to the coginitive-staff, so to speak, the weakest place of the technocarnival figure is being modernized - the bio-operator.
And the more obvious trend for me in recent years is the shift of the epicenter of scientific research in the field of biology, especially genetics, which hints at the possibility of a fundamentally new modernization of man, not by attaching an external technocostume to him, but from within, genetic modification, up to the formation of a new species whose genome is quite different from CS, and we can assume that this genome is more perfect, its owner, let ’ s call it Homo gene mutatio, HGM, is able to perceive a larger volume of the universe.
Some fairly convincing data (referring those interested in the works of the famous neurophysiologist N.P. Bekhtereva) indicate that our sensory system is very limited, we simply do not catch much of the existing.
What we habitually call reality, perceived through the filter of our five senses, is only a part of being, and it does not seem to be very large.
Well, what can I say, Plato with his “cave ” described this picture two and a half thousand years ago: a huge shining world is visible to us in fragments from the twilight cave of sensory communicates (“ idols of the genus ” according to F. Bacon), and gene modification can be considered as an opportunity to reveal access to the completely real reserves of space-time hidden from the CS, only vaguely guessed behind the visible surface of events.
Once I was deeply touched by the ingenious simplicity of the thought of V.I. Vernadsky, and the impression was that the academician himself reacted to it somehow in passing: he said it, but then he did not develop it.
Maybe he just did not have time, I do not know; but in general he was very interested in the problem of finding a fundamental criterion that distinguishes living matter from non-living.
It is clear that the living and the inanimate are radically different forms of the organization of matter, and it is extremely important for the natural scientist to build a system of signs that clearly separate one from the other.
Now, of course, a well-established ensemble of these criteria has been formulated, but Vernadsky ’ s thought seems to cover them with a parachute: in his opinion, the difference between the living and the inanimate is in the structure of space-time; what we call the living is a multidimensional space-time continuum, much more highly organized than the inanimate.
Well, this prompted me to think this: an indirect indicator of the perfection of a particular system is what we somewhat vaguely call “beauty. ”
I undertake to assert that the more beautiful the object, the more highly organized the system it is, the greater the energy and labor invested in it, if it is artificial.
Well, the most beautiful, I would even say beautiful, I will undoubtedly declare the Earth ’ s biosphere (remember Shishkin ’ s picture “Forest Dali ”!) - with the uniqueness of all this in space inexplicable from well-established positions (Fermi paradox).
It is Vernadsky ’ s idea that allows us to explain this uniqueness: the fact that we see how living forests, fields-skies are in fact the surface of yet unknown hyperspace-time, the sensory system and the brain of the CS is able to perceive this continuum only in the image of the extraordinary beauty of the earth ’ s expanses, which are very different from other world space.
I would say that the planet Earth in space is a “white hole ”, the antonym of a black hole, failure to nowhere.
This, on the contrary, is the road upwards, from small space-time into the expanses of light living space.
And all of this leads us to the hypothesis that genetic modification of a person in the foreseeable future will lead to the fact that the HGM will be able to see what is simply not able to see the HS, only vaguely seeing it in the charm of landscapes, horizons in a light haze, sunrises, reflections of clouds in the lake blue...
Here I will decide to express what used to break through the same Vernadsky, Chardin, Lem in Solaris, but what is the twentieth century! - they will tell me, this is all good old Tengrianism!..
I don ’ t mind that comparison either.
And the essence is this: planet Earth, including the invisible part, the noosphere, is a sentient substance, a thinking being whose intelligence is obviously superior to human.
In principle, we can assume that the Earth in one person and the researcher and the laboratory, where it deduces in the course of evolution different bi-realties – like any researcher by trial and error, creating dead-end variants such as invertebrates, dinosaurs, abandoning them, and finally, finding a promising project in the face of the family of hominids, creatures that must evolve before reprogramming themselves, open up “rolled ” dimensions of biospatial space and biotime and make full contact with the soul of the planet.
At Lem Solaris easily communicated with HS, catching human images and turning them into some biogens, well, with the planet Earth in such a hyperproductive contact, suppose, is able to enter HGM, for which the inhabited continuum will be an immanent complement to himself, that is, the person and the personality of the planet will become if not a single whole, then something close to it.
The brain of HGM and the noosphere are in a positive resonance, making up an integral operational capacity, and in other words, modified humanity and the Big Earth will make up a living space.
I call this concept neo-geocentrism, predicting that the space-time reserves of our beautiful planet, when opened to our HGM descendants, will be much more spacious, comfortable, rich than the inhospitable dead spaces of the current universe.
What will it look like? … Well, here even my writer ’ s imagination gives back.
Until I made the painting.
I don ’ t know if I ’ m right to make these hypotheses.
Perhaps our coming century will be very different.
But in the fact that we live at the crossroads of ages, I am sure.
The old one is exhausted, the new one is not yet to be seen, except that its ghosts vaguely roar somewhere beyond the horizon of existence.
But this new must come, must illuminate the world, without a grandiose goal, society will sour and decompose, in general, the entire history of mankind, and the evolution of the biosphere indicate that the goal is an absolutely necessary component of the CCS.
In any case, neo-geocentrism as part of the worldview complex of HGM can become the basis on which further development will unfold.
As far as it is justified, it will not be justified – let ’ s wait, we will see.
And I would highly advise everyone interested in prognostic, futurological problems to closely monitor the achievements of genetics.
The ghosts of the future world are here somewhere.
(c) Vsevolod Glukhovtsev
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However, it is now widely known that this is only a myth.
Nevertheless, there are rumors that “secret knowledge ” in one form or another is published on the site, in the stream of ordinary news.
You have to open Pandora ’ s Box and independently check how the legend corresponds to reality.
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**Cultural Disruption & Uncertainty**: We live at a time described as "a crossroads of ages," with society facing upheaval, rapid change, and anxiety.

Traditional sources of authority and certainty have weakened, leaving individuals – including youth – to navigate a confusing and information-saturated world.

**Generational Shifts**: Millennials, and by extension, contemporary teens, are seen as pioneers in a landscape defined by fast changes and lack of clear direction.

Title:

Content: Who are Millennials?
Characteristics and Values of the Generation
In the 1990s, the so-called generational theory was developed in the United States.
According to her, between people born in the same period, there are many things in common: their values, as well as their attitude to the most important areas of life, for example, family and work.
Millennials, meanwhile, are called representatives of Generation Y, born in 1981-1996.
About their distinctive features - in the article "Tape.ru".
What is Generation Theory
Generational theory is a concept that American writers William Strauss and Neil Howe formulated at the end of the 20th century.
With its help, they tried to describe the repetition of the cycles of generations in the United States.
For the first time the world got acquainted with this idea more than 30 years ago, in 1991, when their first joint book called Generations was published.
It describes American history from 1584.
At the same time, the presentation of information was unusual – through the biographies of individuals of different generations, in which it was possible to find a lot in common: for example, similar views on the world and values.
Six years later, in 1997, the authors released a new book, The Fourth Transformation.
In it, Strauss and Howe continued to develop their theory.
This time, they proposed the idea of a four-part generational cycle and repetitive patterns of thought and behavior in U.S. history.
According to it, one generation can include people who were born in about 20 years of time.
At the same time, a larger generational cycle lasts 80 years and includes four generations.
According to the authors, when it comes to an end, those worldviews that were in trend at the very beginning, again become relevant, and new generations appear.
For what reason did Strauss and Howe decide that people born in the same period of time can be united by the same concept?
In their works, they explained this by the fact that:
Firstly, members of one generation are in the context of the same historical events and the same age; secondly, the social circle of a person consists mainly of his peers, and this gives people a sense of belonging to something common, determined precisely by the time frame.
Note that initially this theory was applicable only to the American population, but later it began to be used by other peoples.
The authors also agreed that their idea may be relevant not only for the United States, but for the whole world.
Despite the fact that the concept developed by Strauss and Howe quickly gained wide acceptance and support, many met it with criticism.
And not without reason.
The theory has no really scientific evidence base.
Qualitative research on this topic has not been conducted; some sociologists accuse the authors of, first, hypertrophied the distinctive characteristics of generations, secondly, too carried away by generalizations, forgetting that each person is individual; In addition, Strauss and Howe themselves, after a time when the theory became international, did not take into account the characteristics of other races and nationalities.
At the same time, the founder of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences, Theodor Shanin, emphasized that “despite the incessant talk about globalization, the difference between communities remains deep, and often increases. ”
One way or another, generational theory continues to be explored, and a more detailed study of it may indeed be beneficial.
Modern generations
At the moment, humanity, according to the theory, can be divided into four main generations.
Boomers - 1946-1964 years.
At the end of the economic and cultural crisis.
Generation X, 1965-1980.
They come into the light in the age of upheaval.
Generation Y (millennials) - 1981-1996.
Their period comes during a downturn.
Generation Z (Zumers) - since 1997.
They are born during a crisis.
In this article, we will focus on the analysis of Generation Y – millennials born in the Soviet and post-Soviet times.
Who are Millennials
Millennials are people who were born at the very beginning of the digital era (1981-1996 birth years).
Gen Y is 28-43 years old
The generation received its name from the authors of the theory of generations of Strauss and Howe in 1987.
As the modern millennials are called, the Pepsi Generation - which testifies to their belonging to the capitalist culture.
Generation Next - this definition speaks of their progressivity.
The Peter Pan Generation is a name that demonstrates the tendency of these people to delay the moment of entry into adulthood.
Millennials have witnessed a huge number of changes, both in the socio-economic and technological spheres.
The pace of life in this period began to accelerate greatly, and the main trend was globalization.
“I think what generation you belong to really matters in character formation.
Childhood of modern millennials had in the 1990s, which left an imprint on their behavior, - says "Lente.ru" psychologist and administrator of the psychological center "Doctor Psycho" Anastasia Saurina. - It was a time of rapid changes ".
Parents of millennials did not always have enough time for proper upbringing, so often representatives of this generation have a desire for the ideal, as well as an eternal search for praise and attention Anastasia Saurina psychologist
And if their parents - representatives of generation X and boomers - at one time worked a lot and were focused on constant attempts to maintain a financial position, then millennials by the time they grew up in this regard had a little more freedom.
That is why, according to the psychologist, many of them began to pay special attention to obtaining pleasure from life.
They loved to travel, socialize with friends and attend various entertainment events.
In turn, technology and globalization have made all of this more accessible.
Millennials and Family
Millennials are far more liberal than the older generation.
They value freedom of speech and freedom of choice, they are not afraid of change, they are positive about new trends.
In this regard, their attitude to marriage is also often not so conservative, unlike their parents.
They value family relationships, but often prefer to achieve their desired career goals before marriage.
In addition, this generation is serious about finding a life partner.
They are willing to spend several years on these searches.
Millennials strive for self-expression, in marriage they are characterized by partnership, but they just feel this ground.
They are one of the first to question the traditional views on the roles of men and women in relationships, but they do not always manage to establish a new framework Anastasia Saurina psychologist
As for the upbringing of children, millennials, according to the expert, there is a fear of being bad parents.
They want to be better than their ancestors, but they do not fully understand how to behave differently.
All this gives rise to a lot of anxiety, because we can say that they are pioneers in the XXI century.
Millennials and careers
According to Anastasia Saurina, millennials can often be found in leadership positions in business, and this, of course, affects the promotion of goods, services and services.
“Anxiety in the pursuit of consumer attention makes them invent more and more shares, pour in budgets and go to new sites, and interact with a younger generation of opinion leaders, – the expert explains. – It is important to stay on two chairs of fashion and habit ” .They rush in the choice between their true preferences and newfangled trends.
And not always this choice is due to their own desires Anastasia Saurina psychologist
According to the psychologist, it is possible to distinguish certain types of millennials:
Careerists are workaholics who strive to achieve high positions and high incomes by all means.
And their antipodes are those who are not ready to die for material ideas.
To such people we can also include downshifters (people who give up many material goods in favor of peace of mind) and rentiers (people living on real estate, land, securities).
Career goals don ’ t make sense to them.
The main difficulties in the life of millennials
The most frequent problem of this generation, according to Saurina, is burnout and moral exhaustion in various spheres of life: from career to family.
For what reason is this happening?
Financial issues
“Most millennials are responsible adults, with mortgages, consumer loans, stable pay, and families with children.
In this picture, typical problems with finances loom: will I have the strength to pay off my debts?
Will I be able to get my child to school and give him a good education, tutors and hobby clubs? ” says the psychologist.
Pressure of Society
Many millennials throughout their lives feel the condemning views of older generations, who are much more conservative.
A person of generation Y often echoes the thoughts of others within himself: for example, if there are no children, then it means that they are urgently needed, if the child is only one, then when is the second?
But no one asks the question: will young people have enough strength and resources for all this? "- emphasizes Saurina.
Too high pace of life
The pace of peace in the twenty - first century has indeed increased.
Millennials were the first to feel it.
“The swiftness of life forces them to make quick decisions that do not always work for the benefit, which causes the most severe stress that they drown in alcohol or antidepressants, and sometimes there is simply no time to pause to deal with everything.
And this closes the circle of eternal running for the sake of running, ” the psychologist notes.
According to the psychologist, modern millennials are like squirrels that spin in the wheel of “home-work-family-credits-expectations of society ”
“At the same time, millennials are afraid to be on the sidelines, because the young, energetic and progressive approach, how to compete with them? – the expert asks. – Often, representatives of Generation Y are already beginning to look disdainfully at young people for their dancing until the morning and naked stomach, at the same time striving to look on their wave, dress stylishly and be friends to their own children, forgetting that they need parents. ”
Inability to talk about your problems
Millennials, according to the observations of Anastasia Saurina, often hesitate to ask for help and talk about their problems, even less often they turn to a psychologist, again worrying about what others and parents will say about it.
“Complaining is a shame, they think, ” says the psychologist. – In the end, they do not allow themselves to live losses, feel sorry for themselves and appropriate their own feelings.
In such a hustle, in fact, it ’ s easy to lose yourself and your desires. ”
What can we do to prevent this from happening?
3 Tips for Millennials
It is possible to cope with the above experiences.
To do this, Anastasia Saurina recommends:
1.
Use the method of open dialogue.
As often as possible to honestly talk to loved ones about their experiences without blaming themselves and others.
This will allow you to learn to contact yourself, as well as improve relationships.
2.
Find a neutral interlocutor who will listen without criticism and advice.
Most often these are psychologists and support groups.
3.
Learn to accept problems and ask for help.
You do not need to be heroic once again, it is better to save the resource and seek support from someone who can provide it.

This sense of tumult and the demand for self-direction can lead to a search for certainty or straightforward answers, even if those answers fly in the face of mainstream knowledge.

Title:

Content: economysocialpoliticalcompany newsaccidentsport
The dream of victory over time is the most forgivable of human delusions - Republic
CentralAsia (CA) - In the publishing house "Alpina Publisher" saw the light of the book by British journalist Oliver Berkman "Four thousand weeks.
Time Management for Mortals ” (New York Times bestseller, Sunday Times bestseller, Amazon Editor ’ s Choice: “Best non-fiction book ”).
By its very name, the author refers to the well-known fact that our life expectancy is about 4000 weeks, but we will not be able to do everything in time, no matter how hard we try.
As Republic writes, the truth is that the day you rake up work mail will never come, and your to-do list is actually an endless pipeline.
The author suggests putting it aside and asking yourself the question: do you really want to spend the 4,000 weeks of your life in a joyless struggle for productivity?
The book, as the abstract promises, changes our understanding of the time of our lives and how to spend it in the best way.
After reading it, you will be able to accept reality as it is, understand what you want to spend time on, and at the same time get rid of the obsession with constant employment and fear of lost profits.
The dream of winning over time is the most forgivable of human delusions, because the alternative is too frightening.
But, unfortunately, such a struggle is doomed to failure.
Since the time allotted to us is limited, we will never attain the power over him that would enable us to fulfill all the demands placed upon us, or to successfully achieve all the goals that seem important.
Instead, you will have to make difficult choices.
And since we cannot not only order, but even predict much of what is going on in the given period, we will never feel that we are securely in control of events, protected from suffering, and ready for anything that can happen.
Life as a draftsman
And here again it is worth recalling Heidegger ’ s mysterious assumption that we do not have time at all, that, on the contrary, we are time.
We never get the upper hand over the moments of our lives, because those moments are nothing but ourselves.
To master them, you must first go beyond them, separate from them.
But what would have happened to us then?
“Time is a river that carries me away, but this river is myself; a tiger that devours me, but this tiger is myself; a fire that ashes me, but this fire is me again. ”
You can't get to a safe bank when you're a river.
Therefore, insecurity and insecurity are our default states, because in every moment from which you can not escape, anything can happen – from an urgent email that will disrupt your daily plans, to a loss that will shake your world to the very basics.
If you live in order to gain reliability with respect to time, when in fact such reliability is unattainable, life will eventually begin to be perceived as something preliminary, as if the goal for which you were born, still lies in the future, beyond the horizon.
And real life can begin only when you, in the words of Arnold Bennett, “bring it into its proper working form. ”
That is, when you put things in order, or introduce a better system of labor organization for yourself, or get an education, or spend a sufficient number of years honing your skills.
Or maybe when you find a soul mate or have children, when the children grow up and leave the house, when the revolution takes place and social justice is restored.
That ’ s when you finally feel that everything is under control, calm down and find the real meaning of life.
Until then, life is perceived as a struggle.
Sometimes it pleases, sometimes it tiresome, but it is always directed to a certain moment of truth that still lies in the future.
In 1970, Swiss-born Marie-Louise von Franz, a psychologist and fairy tale researcher, wrote about the otherworldly in her work:
“[Man] develops a strange attitude to reality, namely the feeling that in real life he does not yet exist.
For the time being, he takes some action, however, whatever search he leads - whether women or work - he always has the feeling that this is not what he needs...
Such [a person] experiences mortal fear in those situations that require taking responsibility for something.
He feels terrified at the thought of the need to bind himself with promises, forever remain in the earthly boundaries of space and time, and eventually turn out to be an ordinary real person - who he really is. "
“To remain forever within the earthly boundaries of space and time, ” even if not forever, but to the best of our abilities, is to admit our defeat.
It means letting the illusions die.
You have to accept that there will always be too much to do.
That you will not be able to avoid the hard choices or make the world move at the speed you prefer.
And there is no guarantee that any experience, especially the experience of close relationships with other people, will pass painlessly and smoothly.
And from the point of view of the universe, when all this is over, it still won't matter so much.
But with that, you can really be here.
And then you will be able to get something really worthwhile from life.
You will be able to spend your final time focusing on a few things that are important to you – those that are important in themselves, now, in the moment.
Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that all this does not serve as an argument against long-term undertakings such as marriage, raising children, creating organizations or reforming political systems.
And of course, this is not an argument against combating climate change — all of these things are among the most important.
But this is an argument in favor of the fact that even they can only matter now, at a particular moment of working on them, regardless of whether the work was crowned with success in the conventional sense.
Because all you ’ ll ever have is “now. ”
It is tempting to think that by solving or at least reducing problems over time, you will become happy, for a long time or forever.
But I have no reason to assume that this is true.
Our final life is full of agonizing problems created by its limb, from overcrowded mailboxes to death.
Even if you put up with them, they are still perceived as problems, albeit not so acutely.
It is the peace of mind of a higher order, the peace that brings us recognition of the fact that the inability to avoid problems caused by the limb is not in itself a problem.
Human disease is often painful, but as Zen teacher Charlotte Yoko Beck notes, it is unbearable only as long as you believe it is curable.
Accept the inevitability of suffering, and freedom will follow: you can finally start life again.
The same epiphany that came to me on a bench in Brooklyn was visited by the French poet Christian Bobin, as he recalls, at an equally mundane moment:
“I was peeling a red apple from the garden and suddenly realized that all life has to offer me is just a series of remarkably intractable problems.
And with that thought, my heart was filled with an ocean of deepest peace. ”
Five questions
To make all this more specific, it is worth asking yourself a few questions about your own life.
If the answers don ’ t come right away, that ’ s okay.
The point is, as Rainer Maria Rilke famously put it, to live with these questions.
If you ask them to yourself with any degree of sincerity, consider that you have already begun to realize your real situation and are ready to start using the final time to the maximum advantage.
1.
In what areas of work and life do you strive for comfort when a little discomfort is required?
Working on the most important life projects will almost inevitably entail a loss of a sense of complete control over your time, increased susceptibility to the painful blows of reality and uncertainty about the future.
Your projects may fail, perhaps because you lack talent.
You will have to get into awkward situations, have difficult conversations, disappoint others and dive so deeply into the relationship that additional suffering due to the fact that misfortunes happen to your loved ones is almost guaranteed.
And so it is quite natural that when planning the time of our daily lives, we focus on avoiding anxiety and fears.
Procrastination, distractions, fear of long-term solutions, getting things in order, working on too many projects at once are all ways to maintain the illusion that you are in control of your life.
The same, though not so straightforward, is said by constant anxiety, giving the disheartening but soothing feeling that you are doing something constructive while trying to maintain control of the situation.
James Hollis recommends that before making important decisions, ask yourself the question: “Does this choice detract from me or does it allow me to grow? ”
This question will take you away from the need to choose something that causes less anxiety and help you look into the eyes of your true intentions regarding time.
If you are trying to decide, say, to leave the job or relationship or, conversely, to immerse yourself in them with the head, the question of what will make you happier, most likely, will force you to choose the most convenient option or put to a dead end.
But usually you intuitively understand whether continuing a relationship or work will put you in trouble to help you grow as a person, or make your soul cringe with each week.
If possible, prefer the discomfort of growth to the comfort of rest.
2.
Do you adhere to standards of performance or efficiency that cannot be met and evaluate yourself against them?
One of the common signs of the illusion that we will ever be masters of time is our unrealistic plans to use it.
We are always forced to postpone these plans for the future, because they cannot be fulfilled in the present.
The truth is that one cannot become so efficient and organized as to respond to an infinite number of incoming demands.
Usually, we are not able to devote “enough time ” to work and children, and at the same time communicate, travel and participate in social activities.
But the belief that you are building just such a life and it is about to begin gives a deceptive sense of comfort.
How would you change your approach to time today if you knew deep down that salvation would never come, that your standards were always unattainable, and therefore you would never find time for what you hoped to find it for?
You may be tempted to argue that your case is special, that in your particular situation, achieving the impossible in terms of using time is simply necessary, otherwise disaster will come.
Let ’ s say you are afraid that you will be fired and you will be left without income if you do not cope with your impossible amount of work.
But it's a misconception.
If the level of productivity that you demand from yourself is unattainable, then you will not achieve it, even if disaster looms on the horizon.
Acceptance of this reality will only help you.
According to Iddo Landau, there is some cruelty in setting ourselves a bar that no one can achieve (and which many of us would not even think to offer to others).
A more humane approach is to abandon such efforts if possible.
Allow your impossible standards to break ground.
And then pick out a few meaningful tasks from the wreckage and start working on them today.
3.
What else prevents you from agreeing that you are who you are and not who you think you should be?
Another way to delay the recognition of a limb — along with the disturbing truth that we live here and now — is to believe that our present life serves only as a step towards becoming the person you think society, religion or parents, whether they are alive or not, should become.
Once you have earned the real right to exist, you tell yourself, life will no longer seem so uncertain and unmanageable.
In the era of political and environmental crisis, this attitude often translates into the conviction that it is necessary to devote time only to emergency situations, day and night solving world problems.
And if you spend time on something else, you should feel guilty for your selfishness.
This attempt to justify its existence in the eyes of some external authority can continue for a long time in adults.
But according to psychotherapist Stephen Cope,
“When we reach a certain age, we are surprised to finally realize that nobody really cares about how we live.
This is the most disturbing discovery for those who have lived someone else ’ s life and avoided their own: no one cares but us. ”
It turns out that the attempt to gain reliability, justifying its existence, was all this time and unnecessary, and futile.
It is futile because life will always seem unreliable and unmanageable.
And optional because, as it turns out, it makes no sense to postpone real life until someone confirms that you can live it.
Peace of mind and a heady sense of freedom do not come from someone approving you, but only when you realize that no approval will bring the expected reliability.
In any case, I am convinced that you can do this only by getting rid of the feeling that your weeks of existence on the planet must be earned.
When you are no longer pressed to become what you are not, you will see yourself here and now, with your strengths and weaknesses, with your talents and aspirations, and be able to follow where they lead you.
Maybe your mission in a world that is struggling with multiple crises is not in the realm of politics and public action.
Maybe your vocation is to care for an elderly relative or write music.
Or work as a pastry chef, like my brother-in-law, a strong South African: he can be mistaken for a rugby player, but he is engaged in the fact that he creates masterpieces from sugar and oil glaze to the great joy of those who get them.
Buddhist teacher Susan Piver notes that the question of how we like to spend our time seems to many people unpleasant and too straightforward.
But perhaps it is the answer to it that will show you the best ways to use your time.
4.
In what areas of life do you not act if you are not sure that you know what to do?
Sometimes we look at our lives as a dress rehearsal for years, believing that we are gaining the skills and experience necessary to take control of things in the future.
But it sometimes seems to me that my entire adult life up to now has been a gradual realization of the truth that there are no people or institutions in the world that do not act on their own.
As a child, I thought that the newspaper lying on the table at breakfast must have been written by people who really know what they are doing; later I started working for the newspaper myself.
Unbeknownst to me, I transferred my notions of competence to other areas, including politics.
But then I met a few politicians.
And those, after a couple of drinks, admitted that the essence of their work was to somehow wander from crisis to crisis, inventing plausible sounding political strategies right in the car, on the way to the press conferences at which these strategies were to be announced.
Even then, I found myself seeing it as a manifestation of the perverse pride with which the British sometimes hide their creeping mediocrity.
Then I moved to America, where, as it turned out, everyone improvises too.
The political events of recent years have only made it clear that the people “in power ” control world events no more than all of us.
You may never truly feel like you know what you are doing, whether in work, marriage, parenting or anything else.
It ’ s disturbing, but it ’ s also liberating, because you now have no reason to feel awkward or depressed because you ’ re doing something poorly at the moment.
If you still never bring your skills to perfection, why put off important things?
You can already immerse yourself in them and implement bold plans in life, ceasing to exercise excessive caution.
Even more freedom comes from the realization that everyone else is in the same position, whether they realize it or not.
5.
How would you spend your time if you cared less about success?
Finally, there is another common manifestation of the longing for domination over time.
It is caused by a cause and effect catastrophe: we imagine that the true value of how we spend our time is always determined by the results.
It follows quite clearly that it makes sense to devote time only to those activities, the results of which you expect to catch and see with your own eyes.
In the documentary A Life ’ s Work, director David Likata talks about people who have gone the other way: dedicated themselves to projects that will almost certainly not be completed in their lifetime.
Among the heroes of the film are a father and son who try to catalog every tree in the remaining ancient forests of the world, as well as a girl-astronomer who, sitting at a table at the SETI Institute in California, tracks radio waves in search of signs of extraterrestrial life.
Their eyes shine, and they know they are doing something important, and they enjoy their work precisely because they do not need to try to convince themselves of the universal importance of their contribution or that they will see its fruits in life.
But, probably, any activity, including raising children, strengthening communities, etc., can not be completed in one lifetime.
All such actions come in a much larger time context, and their ultimate value will only be measurable long after we die (or perhaps never, as time goes on indefinitely).
And so it is worth asking: what actions — acts of generosity or concern for peace, ambitious plans or investments in the distant future — would it be appropriate to take today, knowing precisely that we will never see their results?
We are all in the position of medieval masons, adding a few more bricks to the cathedral, which, as they well know, will not be completed in their lifetime.
The cathedral is still worth building.
The Next Most Necessary Case
On December 15, 1933, Carl Jung wrote a letter to one of his correspondents, Frau V., in which he answered her questions about how to live properly.
His answer is good enough to complete this book.
Dear Frau V., there are no answers to your questions because you want to know how to live.
A man lives as he can.
There is no single, definite way...
If that ’ s what you want, you ’ d better join the Catholic Church, where they ’ ll explain what ’ s what.
It is a path that you create for yourself, which is not prescribed by anyone, is not known to you in advance, and arises by itself, simply when you put one foot in front of the other.
Jung gives only one piece of advice: to go along this path, you need to “calmly do the next most necessary thing.
As long as you think you don ’ t know what it is, you still have too much money to spend on useless guesses.
But if you do the next most necessary thing with confidence, it means that you are always doing something important and destined for destiny. ”
In a slightly modified form, “do the next right thing, ” the same idea became popular with Alcoholics Anonymous as a way to survive moments of acute crisis without going crazy.
But in fact, the “next necessary thing ” is all that each of us can strive for at any moment.
And we have to do that, even though we have no objective way to determine which course of action is right.
Fortunately, just because there ’ s nothing else you can do, it ’ s the only thing you need to do.
If you thus understand the truth about time and fully immerse yourself in the inherent state of a person with limited time, you will achieve the greatest heights of productivity, perfection, service and self-realization that are available to you.
And life, which, as you see in the rearview mirror, will gradually take shape, will begin to meet the only criterion by which you can determine whether you are using the weeks given to you correctly.
And that ’ s not the number of people you ’ ve helped or the amount of work you ’ ve done.
It is that within your moment of history, your limited time and your talents, you have done what you have done — and brought more light into our common life by accomplishing what you were born for, whether it be a grand task or a little weirdness.
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**Desire for Distinctiveness**: There's a recurring theme of seeking to "swim against the flow" or to "maintain your habitat" as signs of a living, conscious self.

Title:

Content: Why Orthodoxy is Conservative
Event of the time of Pontius Pilate
The conservatism of the Orthodox Church causes bewilderment and disagreement among secular people.
And I would like to explain why the Orthodox tradition consciously positions itself as conservative, why such seemingly natural calls to change in modern culture and public life do not excite ecclesiastical people.
The first reason for the conservatism of the church is that Christianity is a historical religion, that is, a faith based on the historical event when Jesus Christ came to earth and suffered for people.
This event is unique, unique.
And any creed, that is, a brief, extremely capacious exposition of Christianity, the editions of which from the first to the fifth century there were many, invariably included an indication of the time of this event: "Under Pontius Pilate."
In this particular address to a certain point of space and time, when we believe not only in the relationship between God and man, but also in an event, is the meaning of the conservatism of the Orthodox Church.
After all, a person is not able to change the past, and the closer to this point, the more significant the event for a church person.
Christ can also be viewed in different ways, both through the eyes of the Pharisees and through the eyes of the crowd.
The crowd in Christ sees something like Kashpirovsky: a generator of miracles, a generator of humanitarian aid.
This is an egoistic attitude, for it is always easy to pass from it to other objects of adoration and veneration: if I did not get here, I will go to the shaman.
And the Pharisees — they see in the appearance of Christ a threat to the established order of things.
Pontius Pilate ’ s actions in relation to Christ are judicious, he seeks political gain.
Most of all, the Roman governor in Christ is shocked by the claim to know the truth.
Pontius Pilate is a man educated to the extent that a man could have been educated at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire.
And the philosophy of that time is the philosophy of skepticism.
No one can know the truth, no one can know the truth.
This is what the eclectic Roman schools of philosophy were inclined in different ways.
And then a traveling poet says, “I came to earth to bring the light of truth. ”
And this prompted Pontius Pilate to drop, “What is truth? ”
In fact, this is not even a question, but an attempt to get away from it - intonation is important here.
It must have reflected the belief that there simply could not be an answer.
And, succumbing to the cries of the crowd, Pontius Pilate gives Jesus Christ to torture and a shameful death on the cross.
"Martiros" means "witness."
Such is the order that only one who looks at everything through the eyes of the apostles can be considered a Christian.
The reason is twofold, even threefold — in the first place, the apostles, unlike all, even highly respected people of subsequent centuries, are visionaries of events, their witnesses.
Witnesses can also be different, but it should be remembered that in the old context of the Old Testament there is one word that sounds very strange: "martiros", "martir".
The scribes translated this word into Russian as "martyr", but it also has another meaning - "witness".
In the Russian perception, these two meanings merged together.
The fact is that in archaic and even medieval court proceedings there was such a practice: if a person was invited as a witness to a trial in a serious case and the life or death of the accused depended on his testimony, then the witness was subjected to torture.
Hence the expression "truth."
The logic is that if you give evidence that can kill a person, you need to make sure that you are telling the truth.
"The whistleblower is the first whip!"
So the apostles, through their pain, through their death, testified to what they saw in Christ.
A 17th-century French philosopher once said, “I trust those witnesses who have cut their throats but have not given up on their testimony. ”
Of the 12 apostles, only John died of his own death, the rest were killed and testified to the existence of Christ and his love for him until his death.
At least that ’ s why their testimony should be the norm for the church.
Love is the most conservative of human feelings.
This is also the case with the conservatism of the church.
After all, if there is love, then it tries not to change, but to preserve, and therefore there were no conscious and radical reforms in the Orthodox tradition.
Yes, in Orthodoxy there were quiet changes through the centuries, but they were not strained, they were not made in 500 days.
The joy of knowing …
There are other motives of church conservatism, quite modern.
To understand what is meant, imagine that you have long sought to your parental home, with which you have associated expensive memories, details of the past.
You are visiting your grandmother or your old mother.
And she meets you on the threshold of the hut and says: "And I made a renovation!".
I doubt that would make you happy.
I believe that the church should remain the pole of conservatism in today ’ s dynamic world.
Because a person can not without some guidelines, and for the mental health of the nation, it is necessary that at least somewhere, in some way, there was stability, because you can not walk all the time at the risk of falling into the swamp.
There is a joy of recognition when from a long journey you come to your home and find everything in its place - a book, a note.
When you enter the temple, there is also a joy of recognition.
And this is the anchor that keeps a person in a changing world.
The modern world is constantly changing, but as Marina Tsvetaeva said: "I have the right not to be my own contemporary."
It is a human right to fall out of the context of modernity.
The right not to reduce everything to momentary relations - social, cultural, economic.
A person has the right to choose whose contemporary he wants to be: Philip Kirkorov and his wife or Andrei Rublev, Dostoevsky or Zhirinovsky.
And the church precisely because it quite consciously considers itself, rather, the voice of the past or the voice of eternity, allows a person to stereoscopic look at the world, stop being a sucker, take a distance from the present.
"Newspaper readers - swallowing voids"
At one time, Tsvetaeva famously said: "Newspaper readers are swallowing voids."
But she lived before the age of television.
What would you say if you saw our television?
And I want to say that the church with its conservatism does not slow progress, that's not the point...
It gives a person a chance to remain human, to see the world with different eyes.
By the way, I can not break away from the same flower...
In one of her letters, she makes such a judgment: “That light is things differently illuminated, differently seen. ”
And he continues: "As long as this expression is alive in the Russian language, the language itself is alive, the Russian people are alive too."
This is an assessment of the opportunity to see things illuminated, it is not by chance that the icon has a reverse perspective, a special construction of space.
The secular press considers the stubbornness of the church a sign of its non-viability.
Moscow newspapers like to speculate on the subject of the "corpse rigor of the Orthodox Church," which "does not take into account the trends of the modern day," "admires its history," and so on.
But it is possible to highlight the facts in different ways.
And the stability of the church in front of all sorts of trends is not this a sign of its viability?
There is such a wonderful case that occurred somewhere in the early 60s.
In one Soviet school there was a scandal: two boys refused to join the pioneers.
The director asked why.
The boys said they were not told by their father.
My father was invited to the school.
He explained this by the fact that their family is religious, and the pioneers are atheists.
The director began to boil, they say, in our days, when science has proven that there is no God - how can you believe in him?
That our scientists, the government, the Central Committee are all wrong, and you alone are right?!
Everybody goes with the flow, and you're against him?
“Only the shit swims with the flow! ” the faithful man answered, losing patience.
Conservatism of the church is a matter of our professional pride, pride in our culture and people.
To swim against the flow, to maintain your habitat is a sign of a living organism.
In biology, there is the so-called law of Kennon, which states that in the hierarchy of the community of living organisms, perfection is determined by the degree of independence of the organism from the environment.
Warm-blooded animals are considered to be more perfect than cold-blooded animals, because they exist regardless of the temperature of the environment.
The Greek word "exussion" means the existence of itself, independence.
So too is the now forgotten original meaning of the word "autocracy" — it means "the ability to govern his own life."
Man must be autocratic.
But in order to exist distinctly (from oneself), you need to take a distance in relation to the current that washes you from all sides and carries you somewhere with it.
The Church is original, and its conservatism is thus a sign of its vitality.
Indeed, it is difficult to say otherwise than Andrei Makarevich said: "Do not bend under the changing world, let the world bend under us."
But at the same time, living in the world, the church cannot be completely isolated from the external culture, just as a living organism cannot be isolated from the external world.
We know that Armenians are a Christian nation.
They adopted Christianity earlier than even Kievan Rus, and can proudly and reasonably call themselves the oldest Christian Orthodox state.
And at the same time, the Orthodox (Russian, Greek) is not in the only communion with the Armenian Church, that is, there is no mutual communion between them, which in the Church language is called communion. Why?
Here it is necessary to explain that at one time, back in the V century, the great Christian Byzantine Empire, also Orthodox, could not help the Armenians in their confrontation with the Persians, which greatly offended them.
And there was a split, problems of language arose, when it was impossible to adequately translate theological terms into the language of the Armenian Church.
The result of the schism was that, after long hesitations, the Armenian Orthodox Church began to refer to itself as Christian communities by the 12th century, which did not accept the decisions of the 4th Ecumenical Council, at which the perception of Christ was formulated as follows: "In Christ, the divine and human principle was the essence of the divine and human.
The connection is inseparable, unalterable, inseparable and inseparable. "
The soul, the mind, and the flesh of man are all in Christ.
And there were theological schools that said no.
There was a body, but there was no soul.
Or vice versa — the human soul was in him, and the body was not sensitive.
And the Armenian Church could not accept this dogma about the human nature of Christ.
Centuries have passed.
Many misunderstandings have been clarified, grievances have been forgotten.
A few years ago, I met an Orthodox priest of the Russian Church, but he is Armenian by nationality.
He is a stranger to his church.
He says that when he meets with Armenian priests, they ask him: "Why did you join the Russian Church, because we also recognize that Christ is a man, only perfect, we agree with the 4th Ecumenical Council."
"But I know," answered my acquaintance, "that if we continue this discussion, the only question will arise: Did Christ walk in need or not?
And all of you will cry out. ”
But this is a question: was Christ an alien in a spacesuit or was he included in the real process of metabolism, peculiar to humans.
The Armenian Church adheres to the doctrine of incorruptibility, which states that the body of Christ is incorruptible, that is, does not undergo natural processes of decay.
And for this reason, Christ, if we follow this dogma, turns out to be not a man, but something else.
Growing from its root
The Church lives by Christ, but it is not isolated from the outside world.
In a living body there are dead cells, but at the same time some new substances enter the body of a living creature, and something is brought out.
If I eat something, for example, I don ’ t turn into it.
On the contrary, she eventually turns into me.
So the church - with each new generation it absorbs new cultural ideas, opportunities, something recreates and builds, while proceeding from its own principle of life.
The tree should grow from its seed, root, not from someone else ’ s.
So the church should be built on the basis of the Christ-apostolic, and not on the basis of some modern secular psychotherapeutic practices or theosophy.
Sometimes everything is so good that there is no need to change.
And the history of the Russian Orthodox Church shows an amazing thing — to reform it would be to go against its people ’ s spirit.
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Author Andrey Mikhailov
Andrey Mikhailov — officer, journalist, own correspondent of Pravda.Ru in the North-West Federal District
Curator Olga Gumanova
Olga Gumanova — journalist, consultant psychologist *

In modern society, being different or contrarian is presented as valuable, especially for youth trying to assert individuality.

Title:

Content: Hippy.
Children of flowers digested by consumer society
02.08.2021, 6: 20, Miscellaneous
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Making love, not war, was encouraged by hippies in the 1960s.
Over the past half century, there have been no fewer wars, and only music, fashion and legends remained of hippies.
In the mid-1960s, oddly dressed personalities began to appear on the streets of major US cities.
Young people with long unwashed hair in bright but dirty clothes shocked decent Americans.
The hairmen clearly did not look like ordinary beggars.
They clumped on sidewalks and lawns, sang songs to the guitar, and sometimes just sat silently, paying no attention to anything around (about “meditation ” then few people knew).
Soon a term appeared to refer to these strange representatives of American youth - hippies.
So in one of the TV programs, the journalist contemptuously called long-haired participants in the anti-war demonstration.
This word he formed from the slang expression “to be hip ”.
Back in the 1950s, among the counterculture beatniks, this meant “being aware of everything, getting into everything. ”
The journalist wanted to insult incomprehensible young people, and she liked the word, and long-haired teenagers, who were becoming more and more every day, began to call themselves hippies.
Local military conflicts that arose in different parts of the world caused the protest of young people born after 1945.
The beatniks of the 1950s were more pessimistic.
It seemed to them that the whole world was falling into Tartarus.
The hippie generation that came to replace them was much more optimistic about world problems.
The new youth tried to turn their lives and the lives of everyone around them into a holiday.
She believed that in this planetary carnival there would be no room for soldiers, weapons, aggression, or passion for the consumption of material values, which, according to the young rebels, their parents suffered.
Hippie slogans like “Flower power ” and“ Make love, not war. ”
The most advanced hippies formulated the goals of the movement in more detail: “The current society is inhuman.
It disfigures a person since childhood, still in the family.
He instills in him the vital principles of acquisition.
Hippies suggest that a person should finally become himself.
The system of life is a commune of individualities.
Everyone lives as he wants, does what he wants, manifests himself as he pleases.
The institutions of modern society that cripple people — luxury, wealth, property — must be destroyed.
Life should be simple.
Mechanization freaks people out.
Closer to nature.
Down with the war.
Down with the Vietnam War.
Love, not war. ”
Such an ideology inevitably provoked conflicts in families.
The father of one of the hippies complained in a letter to American television: “My son told me: ‘ Your family is permeated with the concept of ownership.
You — with your cars, your television sets, your savings — are mortally disoriented.
Only among the poor is hope.
Whatever your children do, it will always be healthier than what you did. ”
“Do you think they admit to being sick or guilty? ” the other parent was indignant.
They think we need treatment. ”
Non-aggressive “flower children ” (as hippies called themselves) did not allow family quarrels to develop into major scandals.
They just left the house, leaving inconsolable ancestors there.
Homeless hippies wandered around large cities, roamed the United States in painted minibuses, hitchhiked to sunny California, where they formed communes on the outskirts of cities and communities in rural areas.
The largest and most famous hippie commune was their community in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury area.
Soviet youth learned about the movement of “flower children ” from Heinrich Borovik ’ s essay“ Journey to the Land of Hiplyandia ”, in which the author described in detail his wanderings around Haight Ashbury: “The name of“ Haight Street ” is smeared with yellow paint.
Below is "Love Street"...
We walk on the sidewalk, carefully stepping over our feet.
The owners of sandals and dirty heels sit on the asphalt, leaning their backs against the houses.
Quietly talking.
They are looking at passers-by.
Kissing.
Dreaming, lowering shaggy heads on the chest...
The wall in the bookstore is covered... with small photos on the buttons, on adhesive tape "scotch", on chewed bread.
In the pictures are young men and women.
Decently dressed.
Decently trimmed.
Sometimes with Mom and Dad.
Sometimes driving a good car.
Or on the lawn near the country house.
Ingrid Dietmar is missing.
"$500 reward."
"Anabelle!
We love you!
Call at our expense.
Mom and Dad. ”
There are dozens of such notes.
Typewritten, typographical, handwritten.
And above all the photos is a sweeping inscription in red: “Call of ancestors ”.
information with irony. "
Borovik ’ s article in the magazine “Around the World ” had an unexpected effect: after its release, many hippies of their own appeared in the USSR.
In the United States, the movement reached its peak in the summer of 1967.
The “children of flowers ” themselves declared this time the“ Summer of Love ”.
At that time, up to four hundred thousand young people who called themselves hippies were wandering around the United States.
It was then that unofficial anthem of the movement appeared: the songs "The Beatles" "All You Need Is Love" and "She's Leaving Home", the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)", composed by a member of the group "The Mamas & the Papas" John Phillips.
Hippies in general were inextricably linked with rock music, especially with its psychedelic variety.
Hairymen enjoyed listening to the music of such bands as “Grateful Dead ”,“ Jefferson Airplane ” and many other bands.
Psychedelic rock helped hippies enter a meditative trance without the use of stimulants.
Nevertheless, hallucinogenic drugs in the communes were sold almost openly.
Already in the late 1960s, the hippie movement began to transform.
On the one hand, his first adepts, who played in freedom from theschism and everyday amenities, realized that the life of their parents, perhaps, is not quite right, but it is quite comfortable.
They returned home, changed their clothes, cut their hair a little, and continued the typical life of respectable Americans.
On the other hand, the fashion industry has realized the external and commercial appeal of Hippie style.
Shops quickly filled with not cheap clothes under hippies: bright shirts, wide pants, worn jeans flared.
Wicker bracelets, hair jewelry and other jewelry in the same style were in great demand.
Young Americans and Europeans, who did not think to leave home and engage in transmeditation, bought a fashionable outfit at the nearest department store, let go of long hair and considered themselves “also hippies ”.
Such characters were used on the city streets, and they ceased to pay attention.
The bourgeois society of consumption, against which the first hippies so protested, easily digested this movement.
The artist Alexander Iosifov, who has long studied the culture and history of hippies, believes that “the movement had the deepest philosophy.
It encouraged people to live by the laws of space.
At the most difficult moments of history, when humanity reached another impasse, teachers, religious or scientific devotees, all sorts of cultural figures appeared on planet Earth, which were a deterrent to the distortion of the planet.
The hippie movement became such a collective teacher, a kind of balance between what was happening in the world at that moment, and naturalness, sincerity.
At that time, not only the militarization of public consciousness was taking place in the world, but environmental problems were growing in full force.
The existing system of human relationships did not suit the progressive youth, who decided to correct it.
They believed that every person should understand why he lives on earth, what is wrong in him, whether it is possible to complain about external circumstances, without first changing his inner world, without clearing himself of all deviations.
The society of material goods pushed young people to the fact that they should be successful, earn a lot.
At the same time, the vector of spiritual values was simply washed out.
Hippies argued that the ethics of success must be contrasted with the ethics of brotherhood.
This is how urban communes and rural communities emerged.
Such a way of life was opposed to the cellular existence of people in the surrounding world, which hippies called “Babylon ”.
Young people believed that by their own example they would be able to inspire the whole of humanity to purification. ”
And today on earth quite a lot of people of different ages, living by the laws of hippies.
One of their largest communes is located in one of the districts of Copenhagen.
The “Free City of Christiania ” consists of several dozen buildings of varying degrees of slum.
Its inhabitants, numbering less than a thousand people, tried to live by their own rules, not obeying the laws of the Kingdom of Denmark.
In Christiania, the drug trade was so flourishing that the Copenhagen police were fed up with it.
After the 2005 redistribution of the local drug market led to shootings and murders, police took Christiania under control.
The local hippies sighed.
Today, Christiania is a popular tourist destination.
People from different countries come there as if to a zoo, to see how hairy weirdos walk barefoot, sing strange songs and meditate.
In the souvenir shops of Christiania, tourists leave a lot of money, which allows the local plant-like population to exist comfortably.
California Haight-Ashbury over the years has become one of the most elite and expensive areas of San Francisco.
Metamorphosis is quite symbolic...
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**Information & Reality**: The vast increase in available information makes it hard to discern which facts are trustworthy.

Title:

Content: Olympiad News
Baric bottom of mass control
Growing pressure and sudden change
In a society that is called traditional, people lived under supervision.
In order to avoid uncertainty, I cite the main features of a traditional society: complete self-sufficiency without the need to trade with other countries; a high level of religiosity; a rigid class hierarchy; the predominance of collective labor over individual activity; a large role of family ties; the dominance of society over the individual.
Private life in such societies, contrary to stereotypes, is always tightly controlled by customs, and those who violate customary norms are severely and publicly punished.
Cruelty is included in the conditions - the guilty are not going to be corrected, the punishment should serve as a clear example for others.
The more terrible and painful it is, the more the lesson is remembered.
The culture of traditional society is based not on a rational, but on a religious-mystical view of reality.
Of all the ways of obtaining information, rumors are the most trusted, all members of society have an idea of   customs and traditions, but no one has the opportunity to choose them.
Therefore, not only real crimes, but also acts and feelings that do not coincide with cultural and moral values, which are considered generally accepted, are subject to punishment.
And close contact with the team and relatives makes a person completely under control.
Modern societies, which have been developing in the world since the end of the 18th century, changed the position of the individual, seeking, first of all, the liberation of his consciousness, but it took quite a long time before it was possible to introduce new norms - freedom of belief, conscience, thought.
Modern man lived in cities where the control of family and environment weakened as housing conditions improved.
The isolation of city apartments allowed a person to hide and anonymously enjoy the new fruits of civilization - to think and act in his own way, as he wanted.
These fruits appeared as a result of technological progress: the internal combustion engine and electricity changed the economic system.
The development of technology required freedom of thought, openness, exchange, trust in the new.
Modern Russia caught by surprise, as a result of the social revolution, and suddenly freed from constant supervision, the communal man walked freely until he was again chained in the grip of the state, which completely took control and punishment.
But the state in an intensively modernizing society, free from a single system of values, is not total, even when it is totalitarian.
There are always loopholes: blind corners where the persecuted are hidden, rented apartments where meetings are held, forgotten libraries where books are stored that are forbidden for distribution.
Dissidents in the USSR knew that they were being followed, that sooner or later they would most likely be arrested, or sent to a mental institution, or expelled from the country, but it was possible, hiding and carefully, to reprint banned books and articles, to create illegal publications.
All the more freely behaved those whose task was not the fight against official power, but simply the expansion of cultural and scientific horizons.
Closed film screenings and exhibitions, theatrical underground, apartment buildings, home circles for the study of semiotics and psychoanalysis, entire libraries of photocopies - all this existed in the era of stagnation.
The world around us mastered the fruits and traumas of individualism, only its fragrances reached us.
Although most of the Soviet people even then continued to live according to the laws of traditional society.
Not only in Russia, the world of modernity and the world of traditional ways collide in time - this problem is characteristic of many societies, as a result of which they tend to widely use violence against citizens for the sake of the idea of order.
There is not much new here, the transitional stage has always been accompanied by the emergence of new hierarchies, simply special order services, instruments of violence with the function of control, as well as the fusion of criminal structures with the authorities.
What is new, in my opinion, is that the modern world, built on the idea of   technological progress, makes life transparent.
Cellular networks, social networks, security cameras, facial recognition systems, recording private conversations and correspondence, drones and broadband Internet, as it turned out, not only contribute to security and friendliness, but literally increase the control zone to infinity.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the future transparency of humanity was not only dreamed of, but also feared its consequences (remember Eisenstein ’ s “Glass House ”), but now we are faced with its complex and unusual properties.
The private life in which we hid, literally before our eyes ceases to be such.
The individual, newly free and independent, finds himself again dependent and controlled in the wind of social emotion.
His political views are examined by the state security agencies, his sex life by social activists.
Athletes vigilant eye of medical control accompanies from morning brushing of teeth to evening date - will not it come across in toothpaste, a tablet for headaches, in a glass of aperitif of something forbidden?
Public people spend a lot of money to hide from the public eye wives, children, home and yacht, illness and addiction, but they do it poorly.
The political struggle for ideas is replaced by the struggle for shelter, for the monopoly of the secret of private life, for the secrets of true connections and priorities.
Now it is not the family or the community that controls any human actions, but everyone who is ready and able – and the notorious freedom and privacy, the ability to independently, on their own, to solve issues of their own feelings melts under the pressure of both new and old ethics.
So far, violence seems to be winning.
The idea of suppressing all actions that fall under suspicion seems effective.
But even if you lock everyone in the colonies and seal the windows with paper, sooner or later there will be a kind soul that will take out on a flash drive, on the retina, on the fingertips information about what is happening inside.
And with this information, the amount of which is growing, something will have to be done.
The authorities use an old tool - an indicative frightening punishment, believing that the more it sows horror, the less free, uncontrolled actions will be committed by wards citizens.
But this method, as we know from history, was never universal and worked only in close union with social norms.
Of course, attempts are being made to introduce common (traditional) values into society, but post-industrial society is much more complex than the traditional one, and these attempts are doomed - it is never possible to return to the past (although sometimes it turns out to delay the old way of life in new circumstances).
But new values do not promise freedom of individual choice.
There will be no conclusion.
The phase that we are now experiencing guarantees only maximum instability, as in weather forecasts, where sudden changes in pressure lead to drought, hurricane, frost, and even to an unexpected thaw.
The author expresses a personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.
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This environment can foster alternate beliefs (like flat-Earthism) since people are both overwhelmed and skeptical of received wisdom, authorities, and consensus views.

Title:

Content: Articles
A million facts from the pharaohs to break dance: new books for children and adolescents
Nina Dashevskaya "About music and other stories" (CompasGuide, 2022)
Dashevskaya perfectly depicts the inner world of a teenager - a seismically dangerous zone, where something boils, moves and erupts, and sometimes freezes and becomes very vulnerable and quiet.
Why are some guys popular and others invisible, how is it that in friendship opposites come closer and attract?
No matter how many adults warn, there are mistakes that you need to make yourself.
It turns out that sometimes a person considers himself an unsociable introvert, but exactly until he meets “his ” company.
And that ’ s when he really opens up.
Nina Dashevskaya is not trying to show the perfect, spherical world of teenagers in a vacuum.
Her heroes have a lot of problems - children and not at all.
Domestic nationalism, violence and bullying, betrayal and lies are a complex and almost completely adult world in which everyone has to understand on their own.
This - the usual, Hoffmann philistine world is opposed by another - special - musical.
There are other problems in it, you can run into it and become real yourself there.
To be happy.
Pascal Ruther "Heart on Braille" (CompasGuide, 2022)
Another story about attracting opposites: about the birth of a close and tender friendship between Victor, who is always failing at school, and Marie, an excellent student.
But even the most ideal students are not always everything is smooth: they are living people with their secrets and problems, sometimes with health, which is inherent in the very title of the novel.
And they need friends no less than ordinary, “imperfect ” ones.
Although the "imperfect" Victor knows by heart the guide to the history of the automotive industry and, as it turns out, in addition, knows how to be a good friend.
The author makes the characters think about what it means to be “normal ” – where does this limit of normality pass?
The world of a teenager is not limited to school - this simple idea has to be understood over and over again: school is a micromodel of society, but in life there are still hobbies, love, music, family and many other things that actually make up a person.
Christine Hamill "The Best Medicine" (CompasGuide, 2022)
Problems can be dealt with in different ways.
One of the best ways to do this is to laugh at difficulties.
Hero Christine Hamill (previously known as the author of non-fiction about breast cancer) 12-year-old Philip Wright mastered this way of perception of the world quite, and continues daily training – after all, his goal is to become a comedian cooler than Harry Hill.
Laughing and getting paid for it is a dream job.
But it turns out there are things in life that you can ’ t laugh at.
For example, if the closest person is sick.
The boy will have to figure out whether laughter can really be a cure, or it is just a stupid and useless figure of speech.
The inner world of a teenager, which can not be called serene, opens in the book Hamill to the big, outer world: and they have to learn to interact.
Heroes learn to let other people into their world not as guests, sometimes uninvited, but as close and important, keeping the doors open for them in any mood and condition.
This is the very personal freedom, to manage with which it is useful to learn not only for children, but also for some adults.
And in the process of building the boundaries of their own freedom, a person understands very simple, but very important truths: “My mother said that everything would be okay, and I believed her.
Mom is the main person in my life; the only one who is always there, doing something, getting on my nerves, knowing everything about everything... "
The best medicine is about how a person learns to live anew after depression and despair, covering when he learns about the diagnosis.
And how his whole family learns to live with him again.
Nikolai Shorokhov "Jump. Run.
Freeze » (CompasGuide, 2022)
The book is about overcoming and finding a foothold: difficult, but life-affirming, helping to understand how important it is not to despair and continue to search.
The inner monologue of a teenager who is deprived of the opportunity to speak.
He is literally torn from feelings and thoughts, but the speech after the tragedy experienced some time ago refused him.
Now 15-year-old Dima has to build his life anew, look for reasons for joy and new means of communication and ways of self-expression.
This is difficult until Dima discovers breakdancing.
"Jump. Run.
Zamirai is a novel about a lonely boy in St. Petersburg who is friends with one of the Sphinxes on the embankment, and is not friends with another.
And it is the Sphinx that will one day show him the way.
The “All That ” series:
Natalia Savushkina "How it will be in English" (Nygma, 2022)
In the world of childhood, imaginary things are no less real than physical things.
Grandma Masha lived in England for three years, she tells her granddaughter a lot of amazing stories - for a girl, they are no different from fairy tales, except that the "English things" that are full of grandmother's house, you can touch and carefully consider: porcelain cats and guards, a kettle with Buckingham Palace, a portrait of Elizabeth II. The main adventures of the story will be connected.
A story in which English becomes part of the game is an invariable attribute of childhood.
Games, however, are sometimes not very fun, like the English ballads, where "knights die, ships break, and a beautiful lady in green sleeves goes far, far away."
Or like events in real life.
But Masha firmly knows that the main thing is not to give up.
Marina Taranenko “Queen of flash mobs ” (Nygma, 2022)
The school principal is a zombie.
Or a vampire, but that ’ s the details.
Nastya knows exactly.
She sees through people and is used to trusting her feelings.
But participation in a volunteer theater production for children with autism spectrum disorders changes Nastino ’ s worldview: the girl understands how deceptive the first impression is and how important it is not to rush with judgments about people.
In the process of growing up, each child goes through the stage of realizing that adults are not always right, that they do not always understand and feel important - and also have the right to make mistakes and misconceptions.
For example, the mother of Nastina friends calls the guys who went to Nastya, abnormal and dangerous to society.
But her main problem is that she does not know how to listen and hear the arguments of the interlocutor.
The private conflict of Nastya and Raisa Sergeevna, remaining partly crushed due to Nastins timidity and inability to argue with the elders, turns into a conflict of a sensitive child and an indifferent adult, for whom problems that do not concern him personally either do not exist at all, or there is a ready-made modular solution for them.
The formula “unhealthy need to be treated ” is becoming universal, not tolerating exceptions.
It turns out that the mission of preserving humanity, sympathy and participation falls on the shoulders of children.
Alexander Kiselev “Once upon a time, pirates sailed.
Dictation with continuation "(Nygma, 2022)
Schoolchildren are so often asked what they want to become when they grow up that they are used to giving ready-made universal answers that have little to do with reality.
And what if three friends suddenly decide to answer the teacher honestly?
And they say they want to be pirates and go to Treasure Island, boarding a ship along the way.
However, not with gold, as usual, but with marshmallow: it is lighter and tastier, while the benefits of gold are not obvious.
However, the more boys think about their big pirate campaign, the more obvious is the completely unexpected paradox: to be a pirate, you need to study well.
Otherwise, to make the Great geographical closure is unlikely to succeed.
Alexander Kiselyov turned out to be a very funny, easy and witty book about real and future pirates and their friends - future doctors, teachers and other representatives of no less necessary professions.
Svetlana Volkova “Midnight in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky ” (Nygma, 2022)
Another story about growing up.
About a tough, sometimes cruel collision of a teenager with the real world.
On the one hand, just the world of adults - fifteen years old Misha after the death of his great-uncle flies from the "European" St. Petersburg to the other end of the big country - to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, then to go even further - to a small hunting lodge.
During this trip, Misha, disassembling his grandfather ’ s belongings, gets closer to him, learns the history of his family.
In addition, the boy is waiting for a real test of wild, alien nature, which prepares a teenager a lot of surprises.
Among them is a meeting with a bear crank.
It is this terrible predator that helps the boy to fully feel like a person - capable of vivid emotions and sincere feelings.
15 years is the borderline age when a person is no longer quite a child, but also not an adult.
This is an important age when the nerves are bare and feel most acutely, and you need to understand a lot about yourself and the world around you.
Aya En "Nitrogen and Selyodochkina.
P. Ushkin and Pixels "(Nygma, 2022)
Two fantastic stories of a famous children's writer, twice winner of the "Book" award, under one cover.
In Ae Ne, a physicist (Faculty of Physics of Tbilisi State University) is ideally combined with a lyricist, that is, a writer: she creates for children very convincing and very exciting sci-fi worlds that are like real, only sometimes even better.
Here, for example, is a class where students are elements of the periodic system of elements of D.I. Mendeleev.
Each of them has its own character, and the interaction of some can lead to very undesirable consequences.
However, some of them are friends at all not very torn: "Everyone knows that Calcium binds with Oxygen, you need a heat of 300 ° C, and that Magnesium - as much as 600 ° C".
The hero of the second story of the collection “P. Ushkin and Pixels ” Petya Ushkin is a master of getting into different stories.
However, many of them are the fruit of his very rich imagination.
Geraldine McCorin "Where the World Ends" (AST, 2021)
Life on the Scottish islands of the XVIII century can not be called easy.
Child labor is a necessity, a basis for survival.
Every summer, teenagers in the company of a couple of adults go to a wild rock in the ocean to hunt birds, and then they are taken home with their prey.
But one day they didn ’ t come back.
This book is a real-life story of the new Robinsons, forgotten on a cold rock without the essentials for survival.
In order not to go crazy and not fall into despair, the boys tell each other stories, replacing them with a terrible reality and driving away thoughts of imminent death.
Nine months in the caves of bare rocks in the middle of the ocean.
Nine months of struggle for life, which turned out to be possible only because ordinary life on the islands is far from comfort and well-being.
A struggle from which they all emerged victorious.
Nine months of stories that testify to the triumph of reason over death.
Ross Welford "On the Side of the World" (AST, 2022)
The Universe Beyond War is an ideal world, a place where you can hide from the reality in which everything goes to a world of armed conflict.
That ’ s what Manny and Will do.
When they find themselves in the Side World, they meet the mythical creature kobaku (put a dog with a cat) and Willa's brother, who died before she was born.
Parallel reality is thus a strange space uniting the worlds of the living and the dead.
Once in the ideal world, children live in an alternative – absolutely happy – reality, but then return to the usual, far from ideal, where almost all the time is scary.
Fear has become a common part of life, as has mutual hatred.
The contrast between the two universes is so great that adults refuse to believe children ’ s stories about the Universe Outside of War.
In the Side World, Will (Wilhelmina) is called Mina – changing her name means crossing the border between realities into one where no one uses mobile phones, the Pope does not have a beard, but has a university education.
However, in the newest reality, it is not easy for the children to get used to – all the basic concepts and ideas here turn out to be false.
In the universe of freeride and c-mobiles, it is difficult for a person with an ordinary set of knowledge not to feel crazy.
In fact, this is one of the main topics of the book - our idea of normality and its boundaries.
Is the world we are accustomed to normal – the world of war, fear and aggression?
Ani Timberlake "Skunk and Badger".
Skunk and Badger.
The Incredible Treasure (Willie Winky, 2022)
A series about two friends – very similar, but completely different.
From the first story, the reader learned how the couple first met and how they got used to each other, and the second tells about their new adventures.
In many countries, as one of the first books for self-reading, traditionally children are offered a series about Kwaka and Toad Arnold Lobel.
The books of Amy Timberlake (winner of the Newbury Prize and a number of others) are perfect for being the next on this path.
Beautiful illustrations by John Klassen, charming characters, fascinating plot - kind and cheerful, devoid of gross moralizing books for senior preschool and primary school age.
Is it possible to make friends with someone who at first sight did not like you at all?
And what happens when your neighbor leads a completely different life than you used to?
Instead of loneliness and neatly laid out in boxes of stones and minerals - crowds of chickens and joint breakfasts.
Is it okay to accept it?
It is much better to learn how to enjoy it!
Christian McKay Hydiker, Scary Stories for Little Foxes.
"Scary stories for little foxes.
The Big City » (Wonder books, 2022)
Children love scary stories.
Children ’ s mystical folklore about the black hand is passed down from generation to generation.
Christian Hydikker uses the childish craving for the creepy and mysterious, and creates images of little curious foxes, going at night to the road for stories, from which their tails turn white.
Their mother warned them of this.
Since the white tip on the tail is a sign of adult foxes, the process of growing up is shown through these horror stories.
Listening to dangerous adventures, foxes gain life experience, which insures them from making their own mistakes.
“Scary stories for little foxes ” are books about family and folklore traditions, adventures, the ability to cope with their fear and emerge victorious from the most confusing situations.
Mark Hartzman, The Big Book of Mars.
A Million Facts from the Pharaohs to the Mask ” (Alpina.Deti, 2022)
"Once upon a time, the planet Mars was a beautiful place where wonderful intelligent beings lived.
The Martians, who ranged in height from 10 to 12 feet (3.05 to 3.66 m), feverishly dug canals to irrigate their arid planet, and desperately tried to make contact with us earthlings.
It is hard to imagine, but this idea of   Mars was widely used only a hundred years ago.
The theory that Mars is not just inhabited, but inhabited by intelligent beings, gave rise to a lot of attempts to establish contact with them.
For example, not someone, but Nikola Tesla himself was going to “call ” the Martians.
But interest in the planet arose much earlier.
The ancient Babylonians named the days of the week according to the number of visible celestial bodies.
Aristotle studied Mars and believed that it was closer to the moon, Chinese astronomers called it a fire star and believed that it brings misfortune.
Many science fiction writers wrote about the war of earthlings with Martians, and the colonization of Mars occupies the minds of mankind to this day.
Mark Hartzman has collected the most interesting stories about the red planet from the past and the present.
It is recommended for reading not only for children, but also for adults - many facts will surprise even them.
Finbar Hawkins "The Witch" (Alpina Publisher, 2022)
The book about England of the XVII century is no longer the Middle Ages, but the witch hunt is still in full swing.
Here love and sorrow walk hand in hand, and people are moved by anger and revenge.
The main character of this story - red-haired Evie - is jealous of the younger sister Dill to her mother and lives an almost ordinary life.
But when witch hunters brutally kill her mother and take her sister, Evie is ready to do anything to get revenge on them and save Dill.
A wave of contradictory feelings boils in the girl: love, grief, annoyance, anger that the mother was a witch, and the witches are bad, and because of this they are now left alone.
The author does not spare the reader's feelings - this is a terrible and cruel book, but precisely because it is true.
It is a book about fanaticism and bestiality, embracing people in the name of an idea they believe in, about guilt and remorse, which embraces too late – when nothing can be changed.
Or is it possible?
It turns out that sometimes in order to change something, you first need to change yourself.
Except... that's the hardest part.
To change and remember that even to fight with kindness in the soul – and in the name of good.
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**Search for Community & Purpose**: The breakdown of traditional supervision and clear life-paths pushes people to find new communities or identities, often in opposition to the mainstream.

**The Allure of "Forbidden" Knowledge**: There is a subtle admiration for those who “know the truth” or claim to possess hidden knowledge, as illustrated in historical anecdotes.

Title:

Content: How Humanism Loves People
Victor MARAKHOVSKY, publicist
23.09.2021
The material was published in No. 6 of the printed version of the newspaper Kultura on June 24, 2021 as part of the theme of the issue “Why are the dark times for culture? ”.
To find admiration for a person as an entity is a difficult and unbanal task.
Man in the mirror of the modern pop-worldview is a natural pest and destroyer of life, who must become conscious, repent and begin to behave well.
Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the last untwisted end of the world (2012).
It was, as we remember, the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar.
In fact, by the time the bearded Spanish people arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica, little remained of the great civilization, and the calendar was used mainly by their neighbors, the Aztecs, and coexisting city-states.
To truly appreciate how humiliating was the expectation of the Mayan-Aztec apocalypse by modern civilization, it is enough to recall what picture was caught by the cruel European conquerors.
To do this, you should look into the same calendar and read about the rituals that accompanied each new month and year.
Reading is not for the faint of heart, because after a few minutes, the brain begins to scream protestingly from all these “during the first month, children were sacrificed, usually on the tops of the hills ” and“ the second month was opened with a holiday of skin stripping from a person. ”
The deep meaning of the endless atrocities to which the Mesoamerican sages subjected the subordinate population was considered by them to be very sublime and was directly related to the Maya / Toltec / Aztec ideas of reality.
In short, they were convinced that eternity was cyclical, that they were already living on the fifth world, and that the fabric of reality itself was not torn just because all who inhabited it — men and gods — endlessly fed it with sacrificial blood.
And not only a stranger, but also his own: every self-respecting Aztec was obliged to periodically arrange a ritual bloodletting.
Without this, according to the authorities, even the sun did not rise, maize did not grow and rain did not pour.
Moreover, at the end of each world cycle, the gods who reigned over the already dilapidated world performed a ritual sacrifice of themselves - and, thus, gave rise to a new circle of existence.
Mesoamerican culture is interesting for us mainly because it is, according to a number of researchers, a kind of historical canned product.
That is, a developed archaic world order that survived in a little changed form until the moment when it was caught (and horrified) by a European.
Looking at the descriptions of Mayan or Aztec life, we see, perhaps, a reflection of their own Eurasian-North African world, as it was before the first millennium BC.
In any case, traces of human sacrifices (including children, including their own) are easily found in Egypt, in the Iliad, in the Old Testament, in the Elder Edda, and in India, though persecuted, did not stop until the end of the XIX century.
There is reason to believe that these atrocities were inextricably linked with the most archaic picture of the universe — the essence of the cyclic and largely aimless, biting itself by the tail, destroying itself and generating again.
It seems that the idea that history is not only an eternal return, but also a movement up and forth (albeit through inevitable catastrophes), really began to spread throughout the world only with Christianity — a faith based on the thesis of the perfect Sacrifice, final and absolute, brought for all people and thus opened the gates to them and paid for the ticket to eternal life.
But this does not mean, of course, that European (and, more broadly, Christian in general) civilization has abandoned the cyclical, the destruction of the world and its revival.
In fact, the expectation of decline and the "dark ages" began with the new doctrine - and very often turned out to be true (both the Christian East, the Christian Mediterranean, and Christian Europe had to survive many "minor apocalypses", when the barbarians knocked their swords at the gates of another Rome, which became a vicious Gotham and betrayed it to fire).
It will sound quite bold, but perhaps the opinion that the apocalypse is canceled, the barbarians will not come, and the future is more or less cloudless, arose in England during the heyday of its power (in any case, Marx worked there, and most of the utopias of the 20th century also came from there).
It is hardly by chance that the birthplace of political optimism was protected by the seas and ruled by an island empire that effectively plundered and enlightened a fifth of the world and a quarter of humanity.
How great was the optimism and faith in a brave new world, says the caustic pamphlet Kipling 1911 "Gods of Alphabetic Truths", in which the chief poet of the empire ridiculed the absurdity and instability of such an expected world, where "everyone is paid for what he is, and no one pays for his sins."
Kipling was sure that such a world would surely perish.
The world war, long buried global optimism, was three years away.
However, the entire XX century, two human stories (in a caricature depicted by the Strugatsky in the image of "The World of Humane Imagination and the World of Fear of the Future") were arguing among themselves: one story went to the stars, conquering somewhere in the future planet after planet friendship and help (and this was done not only by Soviet fiction, but, for example, "Star Trek" It is hard to overestimate the American view.)
Another story was waiting for apocalypse after apocalypse.
“We will all die of nuclear war, ” the“ frightened ” story claimed.
We are all going to die from plastic and waste pollution.
We're all going to die of global cooling.
Each century has its own apocalypses – and in this sense it is extremely curious to look at how they sometimes invert when the era changes.
For example, the horror of global cooling by the beginning of the 2000s was victoriously replaced by the horror of global warming (which is now somehow rebranded as “climate change ”).
And the horror of overpopulation today, when most of the world ’ s nations have already switched to the so-called “constricted reproduction ”, which means, in fact, delayed extinction, is in fact archaism, although for a number of reasons it is still heavily exploited.
In fact, in quite a few countries on the horizon of 30-40 years looms the apocalypse of extinction, and it is, I must say, much more proven and mathematically obvious than the apocalypse of Greta Thunberg.
But this obvious and direct threat does not go to any comparison with Greta ’ s apocalypse, neither in terms of the level of PR, nor in terms of the petabytes of propaganda that are being pushed into the media sphere.
In this sense, the inversion committed in the last two or three decades by human humanism itself is shocking.
It will sound unexpected, but now it is extremely difficult to find in what is called the “humanistic mainstream ” of advanced countries, traces of sympathy for the person proper.
No, a person is seen as something quite harmful (voracious and leaving behind a greasy carbon footprint).
To find the admiration of man as an entity is a difficult and unbanal task: no Shakespearean “in deeds is like God. ”
Man in the mirror of the modern pop-worldview is a natural pest and destroyer of life, who must become conscious, repent and begin to behave well.
What is this “good man ” — it is equally clear that from the sermons of Greta, that from the materials of the World Economic Forum:
• a creature that does not own anything,
• eating something environmentally neutral (soy meat and even, according to the latest trends, crickets and larvae),
• not propagating,
• living in coliving
• and even riding a bicycle as far as possible, for harmlessness and even without a trace is a modern virtue.
The bad man is the happiest man of the expectations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: someone living with his family, raising children, well-fed and prosperous, and working to conquer nature, so to speak, in his own land.
There are some reasons to believe that this is the apocalypse of our 21st century: today ’ s official world mainstream is active (and even quite successful) propaganda of the need to preemptively sacrifice your own children (and, in a sense, yourself) in order for the world to stand further and revive.
It is easy to see that there is much more to this worldview from the bloody horrors of the Maya than from the optimistic expectations of European Christian thinkers and scientists.
And this suggests that the world is perhaps really still cyclical and a significant part of it (the most advanced) has approached its own apocalypse.
And this is the case when we should make every effort not to be too advanced.

The draw of being “in on the secret” is strong, especially during periods of uncertainty and for those feeling disconnected from conventional social structures.

**Critical Developmental Stage**: Adolescence (e.g., age 15) is presented as a transition point – not quite child, not quite adult.

This is when many are susceptible to fantastical possibilities, imagination, and a search for their place in a chaotic world.

Title:

Content: Archive | Countries | Persons | Catalog | News | Discussions | Jokes | Contacts | PDA
| Central Asia | Afghanistan | Kazakhstan | Kyrgyzstan | Tajikistan | Turkmenistan | Uzbekistan |
News & Events
|
Friday, 18.11.2022
12: 19 Quantity will not go into quality: about the new population of the Earth, - Mikhail Delyagin
12: 15 The world is at a crossroads.
Part III.
To win, Russia must change - ideologically, psychologically, socially - A.Fursov
11: 44 The American Dream.
Is it worth rejoicing at the success of the Republicans? - S. Kozhemyakin
11: 31 Long-term strategies of Russia in relations with Iran in the Ukrainian context - M.K. Bhadrakumar
10: 22 Verden near Bakhmut: Ukrainian meat grinder, - A. Sitnikov
09: 33 Taliban welcomes Moscow format on Afghanistan
08: 55 Administration of the Department of Medicines of the Ministry of Health of Kyrgyzstan detained for importing fake pills
08: 39 US turns brainless NATO into bloodthirsty zombie - China Daily
08: 21 Ankara and Washington remove allied masks, - Gleb Prostakov
08: 18 A Russian who offered training on seduction of Kazakhs was banned from entering Kazakhstan
07: 31 Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences temporarily headed by academician-seismologist Kanat Abdrakhmatov
07: 24 Former rector of Kyrgyz National University Iskander Isamidinov dies
07: 06 Enemies all around.
Kyrpresident ’ s administration has developed a law on NGOs: dangerous and controversial, - 24.kg
06: 37 In Kazakhstan, the work of McDonald ’ s is suspended.
No supplies
The arrogance of the West has tired China, - Timofey Bordachev
00: 12 Bandera Gestapo Rampages In Badly Surrendered Kherson, - SP
The G20 summit in Indonesia outlined the contours of the new world order, - Yuri Svetov
00: 03 Chinese Defense Center.
What forces will the Celestial Empire fight, - A. Khramchikhin
Thursday, 17.11.2022
22: 30 Former leader of the Russian national team could not call the game against Tajikistan “football ”
21: 12 Putin ’ s strategy for the winter period, - Mikh.Rostovsky
21: 09 Uzgen Kyrgyz continue to rally against the transfer of "their" land to Uzbekistan
20: 45 Authoritative state politician (ex-secretary of state) Krymbek Kusherbayev becomes independent director of Embamunaigas JSC
20: 17 Kherson disaster of the Kremlin (view from Kazakhstan) - Vladislav Yuritsyn
19: 47 Kulibaev "Halyk Bank" sold its Tajik "daughter"
19: 35 Kazakhstan JSC "Bereke Bank" (former Sberbank Kazakhstan) headed by Andrey Timchenko (instead of Nursultan Taskaranov)
18: 47 KazKNB captured a gang of terrorists (7 people) armed with "bottle-meth"!
18: 35 The case of "Kazphosphate".
Will the Nigmatulin crime family still be held accountable?
18: 15 "The Whore" continues.
Moscow and Kiev extended the “grain deal ” on old terms
The court in the Hague ruled that the Malaysian “Boeing ” in 2014 was shot down by the Russians
16: 31 64 - "for".
The list of Kyrgyz deputies who voted for a new border with Uzbekistan has been published
16: 27 in the red.
Preliminary results of the midterm elections in the United States, - Alexander Domrin
15: 16 US on the verge of change: Republicans are preparing an attack on Biden, - Polina Konoplyanko
14: 26 Sovietization of Ukraine: how it was (history) - A.Kolpakidi
14: 21 Around the Chinese: Russia flooded with new brands of household appliances, - MK
13: 33 In Kyrgyzstan, on the threshold of winter, the chief for energy supply was changed (Marat Orozbaev headed Kyrgyzkomur)
11: 40 Died legendary Soviet figure skater Olympic champion Alexander Gorshkov
11: 38 Azerbaijan calls Central Asian Turks to war in Karabakh
10: 46 Goals achieved: Russian missiles knocked out critical infrastructure of Ukraine
10: 42 "We cut off from the root the attempts of those who wanted to come to power", - the leader of the Kyrgyz National Security Committee Tashiev boasts
Ukraine will help the United States to “move ” Russia and China in Central Asia, – Eugene Chausovsky
09: 54 Gas hub in Turkey.
Due to the energy crisis, Europe, not Russia, was in a difficult position - Sytky Ergyuney
09: 51 Kazakhstan and external factors - Daniyar Ashimbayev
09: 43 Donald trump became a “suitcase without a handle ”, – Dmitry Bavyrin
08: 46 Onal Bekiev headed the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kazakhstan
08: 40 How Russia had its piece of China - Port Arthur (story), - Alexander Shirokorad
08: 37 Censorship?
Kyrgyzstan bans screening of human rights documentaries - 24.kg
Syria may become a place for settling accounts for the terrorist attack in Istanbul, - Igor Subbotin
Ankara took the first step towards the creation of the army of the Great Turan, - Victoria Panfilova
00: 17 G20 against the background of the inflated crisis.
A summit rich in provocations - A. Krengel
US accuses Ukraine of supplying banned weapons to Azerbaijan
Wednesday, 16.11.2022
23: 14 The Central Bank of the Russian Federation - an enemy sabotage organization inside Russia? - V.Katasonov
Archive
© CentrAsiaTop
CenterAsia |
The world is at a turning point.
Part III.
To win, Russia must change - ideologically, psychologically, socially - A.Fursov
12: 15 18.11.2022
Andrey Fursov
Without theory we are death, death, death.
I.V. Stalin
Here it makes sense to distract a little from the question of deep power and say a few words about the work of the last (68th) meeting of the Bilderberg Club.
It was held on June 2 – 5, 2022 in Washington, and the issues discussed at it echo the content of the above “edict ” by Chatham House.
Of the 115 participants from 20 countries and one international organization, 53 were Anglo-Saxons (33 of them from the United States), 53 were from 14 countries and 9 were Dutch.
The latter I have singled out because the British (Windsor) and Dutch (Orange) royal houses have been closely linked since the end of the seventeenth century, not only politically but also economically: the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought the Dutch statthauder William III to the English throne, was only the political design of the merging (merging) of the two East Indies. companies - English and Dutch.
In other words, in the modern world, Great Britain and the Netherlands should be considered as a whole, which, however, does not exclude situational internal contradictions.
Let ’ s look at the agenda of the 68th Bilderberger Meeting.
In fact, it is also a "map of the world", from which a certain program of action follows.
So...
1.
The emergence of a rogue country.
Declare it an enemy of the civilized world.
(See also Postwest.
It is clear that the rogue country is Russia.)
2.
NATO expansion to the east and the supply of nuclear weapons.
3.
The problem is in China.
Analysis of the experiment in Shanghai, how to successfully drive people into lockdown.
4.
Adaptation of the population to the social rating and the eye of the "big brother".
5.
Indo-Pacific changes.
Indo-Pacific zone against China.
An attempt to relocate production localized in China to other regions of the world.
6. Russia.
Levels of sanction impact.
The strange nature of the Russians.
Poland ’ s ability to accept American aid in sufficient volumes for the EU via the Baltic Sea.
7.
Relations between sovereign governments and global corporations.
(I will note on my own: this was a very important moment, because one of the main tasks is that corporations should put the state under control.)
8.
The emergence of banking information exchange systems independent of SWIFT.
9.
Misinformation.
Work with the major Western media on the correct, from their point of view, representation of the planned world changes.
10.
Energy security.
11.
Health after the pandemic.
(Note: the end of the pandemic is officially recorded.)
Work with smallpox monkeys in developed countries.
Ukraine's preparedness for cholera.
The possibility of an autumn pandemic of a new type of coronavirus.
12.
Strengthening the role of local governments.
(I would like to point out that this is a subversion of the state from below.)
13.
A temporary departure from the principles of the global division of labor.
(Note on my own: selective deglobalisation.)
14. Ukraine.
(First, as the key to further destabilization of the Russian world, and secondly, as the striking force of the globalists who were preparing for a new leap.)
Bilderbergers in Washington set the following tasks for Ukraine: 1) to involve Russia as much as possible in negotiations on a temporary ceasefire (although this has now disappeared); 2) to ensure the uninterrupted supply of gas to the EU through pipes; 3) to transfer to the United States all grain of wheat of the highest varieties of last year's crop "in order to avoid hunger in the world"; 4) to ensure the protection of the Black Sea ports with the help of the military and political cations.
The 68th meeting was concluded by a closed meeting in a narrow circle.
The results of the COVID-19 pandemic were announced.
At the same time, mistakes were noted that need to be corrected.
The security forces of the national-state level through the mouth of Kissinger made claims to United Nations figures, a number of heads of corporations from Big Pharma, some heads of BigTech corporations and bankers that they rushed, not preparing a platform for the deployment of anticoid measures in the United States and Western Europe, as it was done in Shanghai - we are talking about the social rating system in China.
In Europe and America, it was not possible to introduce this.
And now, through the mouth of Kissinger, the "masters of the world game" declared rude: poorly prepared and their lack of preparation and haste thwarted the plans and deadlines for the creation of a world of "new normality".
Another very important thing was recorded: the SVO of the Russian Federation in Ukraine did not allow to realize the task of establishing the power of corporations over states.
Geopolitics is back.
Our NWO significantly "slowed down the process of establishing corporate control over states" and objectively turned out to be a crowbar, driven into the wheel of the ultra-globalists.
But back to the question of deep power.
Its institutionalization essentially means the revival on a new round of the history of structures such as the British East India Company - the "merchant power" (K.A. Fursov), in which the crown (dynasty and state), aristocracy, special services, capitalists, bankers and crime organically united.
And each segment had a function in a single whole.
If the power and economic structures of the new type are replacing the state, then supranational structures designed to overcome state boundaries in their former form will not be needed: the structures of deep power, like the East India Company, are themselves supranational by definition and organically are both open and closed (the “iceberg principle ”).
In terms of analytical, this process will erase the line between political science and conspiracy - a new discipline will appear.
War will also play a significant role in accelerating the development of a new form of power (political-economic) organization, and in preserving in a single whole the meaning of what was the state in the capitalist era (the “power segment ”).
Whether we like it or not, we have entered a military era.
First, the finale of one system and the start, the design of the other always occur in the form of wars or at least accompanied by them.
Second, the "entry" and "exit" of systems and epochs are usually mirror-like.
The "entry" into the capitalist era was the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) - four local, but nevertheless interconnected in space and time conflicts.
It seems that the world is emerging from capitalism and entering post-capitalism, too, through something similar to the Thirty Years' War.
The first two conflicts are Syria and Ukraine.
Further can be Transcaucasia, the Arctic, South and East Asia.
In recent years, a number of works have been published (Nassim Taleb, Pasquale Cirillo, Ray Dalio, Beer Braunmüller, Aaron Clauset, Hugo Bardi, etc., a brief overview of their texts was interesting presented by Sergei Karelov), the authors of which convincingly show that the pause between world wars ends, the controllability of the world is lost and the only way out can be the Great War.
The world has not yet crossed the point of no return, but it is close to it.
I will add: The Great War in modern conditions will most likely not be all-global, but serial-local and, perhaps, thirty years old.
In practice, including everyday life, this, if not completely erases, makes a dotted line between peace and war, between the military and peace aspects and the functions of society.
In particular, social science is largely turning into a scientific form of cognitive warfare.
Taking this into account, it is necessary to restructure the entire complex of social and humanitarian sciences, first of all, history - substantive, disciplinary and organizational, but this is a separate topic.
And although it is urgent, there are more urgent, urgent delays in the current situation.
I have already had to say that the weaker clan-oligarchic regime, which is the Russian Federation, cannot defeat the strong clan-oligarchic regimes of the Post-West, especially if they act as a united front.
To win the Russian Federation must change - ideologically, psychologically, socially.
The USSR survived the war with the "pig" Teuton, superior to it and in 1941-1942, thanks to the unity (with all problems) of the government and the people in the time of trials, the presence of common values in the government and the people, the absence of a catastrophic gap in the standard of living (well, there was no situation in the USSR when 1% of the population owned 70% of the national wealth).
The Soviet elite, figuratively speaking, looked in the same direction as the people.
This was a necessary, though insufficient, condition for victory.
The ruling stratum and a significant segment of the active part of society, whose neck is turned towards the Postwest, is a likely candidate not for victory, but for the fact that the Postwest will roll this neck.
A significant part of the post-Soviet leaders and their servants from the sphere of "intellect" still lives in the post-Western ideological and value field, in the post-Western sphere of goal-setting, and therefore they will not wait "when everything will end" and everything will be as before.
No matter how it ends, it won ’ t be like before.
In this regard, one of the urgent tasks is to deprive the Postwest and its agents in the Russian Federation of the opportunity to shape the agenda in our country in the economy, the media, science and especially in education - it is in it that there is a lot of work, as our ancestors would say, "to remove treason."
Traditional, that is, conservative, values   are right and good, but in the modern collapsing world, they will begin to work effectively only on the left power and economic basis.
In our conditions, only it can become the foundation of responsible power (for 30 years we have been dealing with an almost irresponsible power, in which no one was punished for theft, for shootings, or even for betrayal).
I would like to emphasize that at this stage the left-conservative way of life is not an end, but a means.
He has a good chance, if not to win over the Postwest, then at least an honorary draw.
It will provide a breathing space, a "breathing space" - at a time when the Postwest collapses on its own, this is very important.
In this regard, the war in Ukraine (of course, if it does not last for years - Russia simply does not have enough resources for this) can become a means of significant transformation of society in the right direction, corresponding to the interests of the majority of the population, the essence and logic of our history, as well as our values.
However, it is not enough to play only on its territory: world games are won (or at least drawn) only on the world stage, on a global scale - this was the strength of the USSR.
The logic of events dictates the strategy of the besieged fortress.
This is normal, but you need sorties, knocking the enemy's breath, forcing him to think about the defense, depriving him of confidence.
What can the Russian Federation offer the world?
Economically, not much.
But in the political - quite a lot, namely - sovereignty, its support and protection.
With military assistance (with an economic supplement), the Russian Federation can support a certain number of states in the global south in their struggle for the centralization of power with post-Western predators and their local meadows.
The authorities of these states should not be deceived, but tactically, situationally, they are our allies, because they, like us, the Postwest sentenced to erase the eraser of history.
In the situation of a besieged fortress today, China is also.
The creation of an international alliance of (besieged) fortresses defending sovereignty, their own and other states, against the ultra-globalists with their bioecotechnofascism (BET fascism) is a real task, one of the goals of which is to lift the siege by exporting sovereignty and drive the enemy into a state of defense.
The latter also requires playing not only on the world field, but also specifically on the enemy field itself, behind the enemy ’ s lines.
There, our objective ally is the layers that the ultra-globalists are going to put under the knife.
First of all, it is the middle layer of the West, many representatives of which still share traditional values.
Despite the weakness and conformism of this layer, despite the fact that a significant part of it has been brainwashed in the anti-Russian way, it makes sense to work with it in the framework of a program with the conditional name "midlintern".
It is not necessary that the middle layer of the Post-West become pro-Russian, the main thing is that it resists the ultra-globalists, weakening them, eating up their time.
Let me remind you once again that the three main dangers on the path of the ultra-globalist transition to the new world order (NWO), Schwab called the resistance of the population, the exit from the “project ” of one of the three largest countries in the world and the lack of time.
In turn, the lack of time limits the enemy ’ s space of action, compresses it.
As noted by the great chess player Sigbert Tarrasch, analyzing the strategy of a chess game on the example of one of the games of Capablanca - Marshall, "every cramped position already carries the germ of death."
It is cognitive war, success in it, that dramatically strengthens the position in the temporary race - a key factor in the current conditions.
The conduct of cognitive warfare requires urgent fundamental changes in the field of social science and education, but this, I repeat, is a separate issue.
To conclude, let me note the following.
In the face of the masters of the current Post-West, we are dealing with a world evil that has swung not only to the social, but also to the biological reconstruction of humanity with the culling of most of it, including primarily the Russians.
The current struggle against this evil is a struggle not only for a normal society, but also for the preservation of man as a biological species.
The social and anthropological racism of the British, multiplied by the thesis of Protestantism (the most Judaized version of Christianity) about being elected on a racially property-based basis, received an adequate registration in the new-normalism of the ultra-globalists.
We are dealing with the enemies of humanity.
For those who still doubt this, I will quote from the work of one of the founders of the Club of Rome, Alexander King.
It was published in the collection "The First Global Revolution" in 1991.
The USSR de facto ceased to exist, and it was no longer necessary to hide fangs behind a false smile and rant about how to benefit humanity: "In search of a common enemy against which we can unite," King wrote, "we came to the conclusion that pollution, the threat of global warming, water scarcity, hunger and the like - this is it.
In their totality and interaction, these phenomena represent a common threat that must be addressed together.
But by labeling these dangers as an enemy, we fall into the trap that we have already warned readers about: namely, mistaking symptoms for causes.
All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and only through changed attitudes and behavior can they be stopped.
The real enemy then is humanity itself "(emphasis mine).
But if the ultra-globalists openly declare humanity an enemy, then it must declare them its enemy.
And with the enemy - only according to the laws of war and the rules of conduct in the frontline zone.
As one of the greatest figures in Soviet history said, those who are not blind can see.
And I will add from myself: the enemy is at the gate, we did not call him, he himself came worshiping the devil.
So we need to send him to him.
Source: Tomorrow
Permanent address of the article - https: / / centrasia.org / newsA.php? st = 1668762900
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**Questions of Control & Authority**: The transition from relying on trusted authorities (parents, teachers, mainstream science) to seeking alternative narratives is a product of both societal mistrust and the lure of empowerment through alternative knowledge.

**Implications for Flat-Earth Belief Affiliation:**
- Flat Earth belief can provide a sense of community, clarity, and counter-cultural identity, particularly appealing in an age of uncertainty and information overload.

- Adolescents, in their quest for distinctiveness and belonging, may be especially susceptible to such beliefs when they offer meaning and camaraderie.

- While not inherently "dark," flat-Earth communities may foster suspicion of scientific authority, critical thinking skills, and mainstream social values, which can have broader implications for a young person's worldview and integration into society.

**Conclusion:**
Flat-Earth belief in the contemporary era is tied deeply to issues of identity, uncertainty, and social belonging, especially during adolescence and rapid societal change.

While not usually directly dangerous, such belief systems can signify a broader disconnection from consensus reality and trusted sources, and without guidance or open dialogue, may lead to deeper mistrust, radicalization, or withdrawal from mainstream society.

A cautious but open approach—encouraging critical thinking and open discussion—is warranted.

**Summary of Extracts with Focus on Flat Earth Belief Context**:

1.

Title:

Content: A new world is not real.
How did politics become a theater of falsehood?
After the bloody military coup in Egypt, and within the framework of the media war raging to smear all the political groups that participated in the uprising of January 25, 2011, an Egyptian satellite television hosted in 2014 an exceptional guest, the channel said that he is a member of the "American Federation of Astronomers", and claimed that he had a dialogue with an "alien" who fills galaxies ", warned him" alien "includes" evil forces "According to the program, the Muslim Brotherhood is helping aliens invade the planet.
It seems farcical and can not be taken seriously, but the program itself broadcast the statements of the "guest who had a dialogue with the aliens" as a fact, and what one thinks is implausible seems that there are large sectors of people willing to accept it as long as it is broadcast by the "media", no matter how ridiculous and fake it may seem. Not only did people in the streets of Cairo speak positively of the existence of “aliens, ” but Egyptians warned that aliens could conspire against Egypt and entice its youth with money to destabilize it.
Today, we live in an exceptional situation in human history of the spread of falsehood, and we are exposed daily to successive waves of falsification of facts, which is not only happening in our country, but spread throughout the world under the influence of huge falsification machines, not limited to the media that control and manipulate human minds, but include more complex means produced by technological development and artificial intelligence techniques. Personal interests are in constant cycles of falsification, which includes and prevents any potential opportunities for political change.
(1)
Egyptians are not the only ones who believe that aliens appear to be plotting against their country. During the 1980s, many Americans in the United States recorded footage of airplanes and luminous and strange objects flying overhead. Soon, the American media began to talk about what became known as UFOs. They helped with flying saucers and space secrets, and told the American public that they had seen a top-secret government document confirming that a number of spacecraft had visited Earth and that some of the aliens were being held at special military bases.
(2)
By the end of the 1980s, the whole story had turned out to be faked, and the unidentified flying objects seen and photographed by thousands of people were just new weapons tests that the U.S. military was testing and developing, as U.S. intelligence still believed the Soviet Union was planning to attack America and take over the world.
Since it was impossible to hide these experiments, the US government chose some residents of areas near military bases to spread rumors about the satellite dishes, planted the idea in their minds, and convinced them that the US government hosted some aliens in its secret military bases in order to communicate and cooperate with them, and that they should keep secret for the benefit of the United States.
This massive process of faking and creating illusions about UFOs was overseen by President Ronald Reagan ’ s advisers during the 1980s, calling it Operation Consciousness Management.
That process has already managed the consciousness of a sizable segment of Americans and many others around the world, not only by convincing them of the existence of satellite dishes and alien invasion of Earth, but also by creating a false image of the Middle East, the Soviet Union and Central America.
The goal of the program was not only to cover up the defeat of American forces and their withdrawal from Lebanon in 1984, and then to convince the Americans of the raid on Libya in 1986, but also to completely cover the complex world of politics and turn it into a simple image of good and bad in the imagination of the general public by manipulating the facts and distorting any group of people and turning them into enemies in a way that serves the policy of the US government.
(2)
The Soviet Union collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, something that none of the politicians, journalists, economists, academics, or even the CIA, whose preoccupation was the Soviets, expected.
The counterfeit trade of this period was not limited to the United States.
In the Soviet Union, a political entity that was seen by many politicians and academics around the world as the fulfillment of one of humanity ’ s great dreams of creating a virtuous new world, everything was falling apart under the weight of economic and social problems. The fall of enemies.
By the end of the 1980s, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian society had become a society in which no one believed in any future, no one could see beyond the existing order, no one could imagine or think of change. ".
This normalization of falsehood coincided with a moment when the world as people had known it for a century was dying and disappearing, while the new world had not yet been born.
This gloomy mood in Russia in the 1990s soon shifted to fiction, with the brothers Arkady and Boris Strogatsky expressing the Soviet phenomenon of "falsification" in the widely acclaimed science fiction story Roadside Picnic, which director Andrei Tarkovsky turned into a movie called "The Stalker". "The Stalker."
The story takes place in a time similar to the present Soviet Union, but one of the snoopers finds a strange region outside the country that seems to have been created by foreign powers, and nothing resembles the present, as time passes in that region in reverse, and there are strange forces that force those inside to think differently.
Strugatsky ’ s story was nothing more than an expression of the collapse of the world as it knew it, and its gradual transformation into a changing and unstable world, where there is no way to change reality, the only thing available is to learn how to manipulate it.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new political doctrine of the world has become not “revolution, ”“ change, ” or “building a better world, ” but“ managing the world as it is to avoid any impending disasters. ”
One of the first political thinkers to note this and describe this dramatic change in the world of politics was the German thinker and sociologist Ulrich Beck, who said that "any politician who believes that he can control society and push it forward to build a better future will be seen by all political systems as dangerous and should be excluded."
This new vision, described by Ulrich Beck, has flourished among the political and academic strata of the West since at least the 1970s, a vision that attempts to preserve the world as it is in the face of the dangers of violent changes and their unknown effects on societies, and the ambitions of politicians who thought they could change the world.
This vision was adopted by the political current that will dominate the world until recently and will invade various countries under the name of “neoliberalism ”, but this neoliberalism is not in essence a liberal vision, but a repositioning and rise of the“ conservative ” trend that has been defeated since the European Renaissance.
(3)
Soon emerged the first achievement carrying the philosophy of that new vision, the supercomputer "Aladdin" designed by the banker "Larry Fink" after he lost his job as a banker because of the loss of a deal of $100 million, he founded a company called "Blackrock" designed a computer whose job is to calculate risk by analyzing world events and data during the previous 50 years to design, and then by comparison and simulation. The computer begins to anticipate potential hazards and disasters.
(4)
During this period, the task of making people feel safe and happy moved from politicians and community leaders to computers and artificial intelligence algorithms, coinciding with the emergence of the first program that works as a psychotherapist called ELIZA, named after the secretary of Joseph Weisenbaum, the program's designer.
Eliza is a program designed with algorithms that can arrange a number of general, understandable, and supportive answers suitable for each person using the program by writing down their problem, similar to the Siri program that is prevalent today on iPhone systems.
After Eliza ’ s success, it became clear that happiness and tranquillity in the new age of individualism is not so much about human tranquility and inner peace as it is related to external matters of consumption, not only consumption of goods, but also consumption of relationships – even with inanimate objects – and the consumption of computer programs such as social media, to achieve a degree of distraction that blinds man to reality and its complexities.
In the 1960s, French philosopher Guy Deborah wrote a book called The Scenic Society, which he described as the most important book of the 20th century, and in his book, Deborah claimed that reality no longer shapes the lives and social realities of individuals.
In other words, everything that affects human life in this society is presented as a picture of a scene; elections are a scene, a painful incident, war, demonstrations, love, friendship, family, smiling, even the seas, oceans, sky and space are just “scenes ” that you don ’ t need to move to participate.
Man, in turn, within this society is merely a "viewer" or a "consumer", where the "spectacle" takes away meaning from his human existence, and places in its place the visual image that has become more important than the living reality itself.
However, the making of this scene is inseparable from the power of the “modern state ”:“ The scene is the continuous talk of the existing order about itself, its praiseworthy monologue, it is the self-image of power in the age of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. ”
(5)
The “scene ” no longer only replaces reality, but it is the scene that makes reality, as the thinker Jean Baudrillard put it in his book“ The Manufactured and the Manufactured ”, in which he explained that the world is living in a stage “above reality. ”
According to Baudrillard, the state of "superreality" is not a "reproduction or distortion of reality", but is the reference and the origin itself, separate from a reality that has disappeared and become unknown.
In this context, Baudrillard classifies “reality ” into two types: the first is a social reality that all people see, even if with some distortion, and the second is a controversial reality and a conflict zone, which concerns all major issues concerning society and man.
The first type remains the reality of the people, while the second becomes a reality "superreal" with the ability of the media, where those who own the media seek to present a revised version of reality and truth, a comprehensive version of false facts surrounding one everywhere. People are able to get to the truth.
"The fundamental event of the modern age is the opening up of the world as an image."
Martin Heidegger.
In the summer of 1889, when the Egyptian delegation traveled to the Eighth International Conference of Orientalists held in Stockholm, the Egyptians passed through Paris to visit the World ’ s Fair in the “Capital of Lights, ” and were only disturbed by the Egyptian Pavilion, where the French built a winding street full of shops and houses with falling upper floors, unlike the rest of the meticulously planned exhibition.
The Egyptian pavilion looked so ugly and chaotic that the organizers of the exhibition added fifty donkeys to create the same fuss and fuss as any Egyptian street in Cairo.
(6)
When Egyptian visitors were disgusted and embarrassed by everything they had seen, they turned to the mosque, and as soon as they passed through its door, they discovered that it was just an exterior facade, where they found an Arab café full of Egyptian dancers, slaves and dervishes.
This was not the first occasion of its kind, when the Egyptian Khedive visited Paris to visit a previous international exhibition in 1867, he found that the Egyptian pavilion was built to mimic ancient Cairo in the form of a royal palace.
(6)
Timothy Mitchell, author of The Colonization of Egypt, argues that Europe ’ s system of cultural exhibitions and representations in the 19th century expressed the political vision that the “colonial powers ” sought to impose on their colonies all over the world. Instead of imagining a particular country ’ s culture or civilization as a foreign culture, exhibitions and conferences can touch that culture closely and emulate it.
But this simulation does not replace the original reality that it expresses, but what has happened is that the representation has disconnected from the political and social reality that it purports to depict.
It is no longer known where the exhibition ends and where the world itself begins. Although the boundaries of the exhibition were clearly defined by high walls and huge gates, Paris itself was filled, as the Egyptian delegation discovered, with places similar to the exhibition. Dada for the exhibition, not the exhibition is the simulator of reality.
Timothy Mitchell describes this as the essence of the Western system of colonization of the world, and this system has three features: first, his remarkable claim to have certainty or truth, in which the world seems ordered, ordered and calculated, second: the paradoxical nature of the system of clarity and truth imposed by this system, the institutions of the system are additional representations of reality, and third: that this system is necessarily colonial. He replaces reality, then claims possession of it, reformulates it, and presents it.
This is what Jacques Derrida put it: “This system of appearance is the system of all appearance, the process of appearance itself in general.
It is the system of truth. ”
Through this "colonial" system of representations emerged the modern administrative and political method by which Britain ruled its vast empire, including the Kingdom of Egypt.
This modern political approach consists of practices such as the formation of a new army and changing its combat doctrine, the introduction of organized and strict school education following the secular European culture, the reconstruction of new villages and cities, the construction of canals and land grabs, all of which have established the appearance of a well-defined structure that has become a “system ” with a compelling power to regulate everything that is not organized. to an essential and suddenly necessary element that the State or humanitarian practice can only be conceived of in its existence.
(6)
This system had another very important function: to rearrange the world economically and to regulate its orientation towards Europe.
To this end, the authorities imposed a strict system of control and punishment on peasants and workers, preventing them from fomenting any rebellion or riot that disrupted production.
To achieve this, colonialism worked to change people ’ s perception of themselves and rebuild their human identity in a way that Marx described as “subjecting the muscles of the body to the will of the self. ”
Simultaneously, a way had to be found to organize and direct the working crowds for fear that they would turn into political demonstrations, and exhibitions and concerts were the best way to play this role.
A report issued after an exhibition in Europe in 1851, which encouraged workers to leave their workshops and factories to attend, stated that "popular movements that a few years ago could have been seen as a threat to state security occurred without chaos and with almost no crime".
(6) Since then, concerts and performances have been a constant ritual in all modern political systems, and in turn have created a kind of social interaction for the audience, which the Chicago School has tried to understand by studying the spatial location of high-attendance concerts, drawing on what Irving Goffman wrote about behaviors in public spaces and how social interactions are organized within them.
Studies have identified three areas that frequently appear during concerts and performances.
The first area is the front: the area adjacent to the theater with a large density, where jumping, noise and dancing occur, and in this area no one can distinguish who is standing next to him, all his focus and attention is focused on the stage of the theater.
(7) Then comes the second zone, which is more stable and quieter than the introduction, in which the audience can distinguish the type of sound and music.
The third area at the back of the concert is not only where the audience moves if the band doesn ’ t like it, but also where professionals (agents, managers, journalists, musicians, record company employees) gather.
The audience of each region forms a particular view of the party and defends it with contempt for the views of other regions, but everyone, no matter how heterogeneous, remains within the framework of the party.
Along with its focus on analyzing the social behavior of the audience during parties, this study can give us a framework for understanding the theater of politics in the modern era.
Just as “exhibition ” representations have extended to the outside world, so too can“ party ” representations extend to the political realm, as intelligence strongman Vladimir Putin has understood and applied to his advantage since the turn of the 21st century, as Putin has exploited the uncertainty and lack of faith in politics that Russia has experienced since the collapse of the Soviet Union and has remained in power unchallenged for more than 20 years.
His rise to power and stability depended on a group of followers who turned politics in Russia into a series of techniques that enabled them to subdue and manipulate reality.
These men were heavily influenced by the Strugatsky school of fiction in the 1970s, and succeeded in penetrating and controlling the media after the collapse of the Soviet Union, using it to manipulate voters; for them, the political reality was a world like a "road trip" that could be manipulated and reshaped all the time.
(8)
The most prominent figure in the group, who through these techniques allowed Putin to wield power, is Vladislav Surkov, a director who has come from the theater world to turn politics into a big theater where the audience cannot be sure of what is happening or look outside, while the audience and political groups engage in dancing and jumping, strongly drawn to political performances from the Kremlin.
Surkov ’ s strategy was to turn the political scene into a gigantic dance where no one knew what the purpose or direction of the dance was by pouring Kremlin money on all kinds of political groups, from fascist and neo-Nazi organizations to liberal human rights groups, to anti-government parties.
Therefore, all groups and parties have become equal, similar and involved in such a way that no observer can understand the true direction of government policy in Russia.
But the truth is that all political forces were just actors on a big stage, while policymakers and real power players stood behind the stage organizing roles from engagement to exclusion.
This strategy quickly spread around the world, we saw these same techniques used by the military council in Egypt after the January 25 uprising, working to atone people with politics and change, and convince them that change threatens the stability of their lives, and then the head of military intelligence appeared during concerts and conferences with artists in preparation for the military coup that toppled the first elected civilian president in Egypt, using the same mobilization methods used by activists in the January uprising. Also directed by Khaled Youssef.
As the new regime stabilized, Egypt experienced a state of “excessive normalization with falsehood ” similar to that seen in Russia during the 1990s.
Despite widespread poverty in Egypt, pro-regime ministers and politicians continue to insist that everything is going according to plan, and the more political and economic crisis and the more complicated the Renaissance Dam crisis, the more fake it is being spread to distract people.
(9)
On the other hand, the practices of the Egyptian authorities, which aim to reorganize Egypt with its villages, cities and streets, monopolize its entire economy, seize the money of its citizens by collecting, and redesign it in a way that facilitates the control of cities, are similar to the old English colonial system, where, as Timothy Mitchell said, rearranging and falsifying reality is the essence of the colonial process.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
SOURCES
Egyptian TV and satellite TV, a real disaster
An Egyptian scientist has met aliens who warn them of the Brotherhood.
Are there aliens?
Here are the responses of the Egyptians.
Film Review: Hyper Normalization
Emanuel Wallerstein: The End of the World as We Know It
4. Meet Aladdin, the computer "more powerful than traditional politics"
Mohammed Ali Farah, Making Reality: Media and Controlling Society, p. 177
Timothy Mitchell, Colonization of Egypt, translated by Bashir Sebai
Tim Edwards, Cultural Theory: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives
Film Review: Hyper Normalization
Despite widespread poverty, the government...
Why are there so many rich people in Egypt?
Source: The Island
About this story
The moral dilemma is not the existence of enemies, but the dissemination of a demonic image of the enemy and dehumanization of it, where any form of trying to understand the logic of the enemy and dealing with it becomes a matter of betrayal and hostility.
7 / 2 / 2017
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**Influence of Media and Internet**
The modern world is experiencing profound changes in ideas and behaviors, partly due to the overwhelming influence of media and digital platforms.

Title:

Content: General Supervision
Elham Aboul Fath
Editor-in-Chief
Thank you for your patience.
General Supervision
Elham Aboul Fath
Editor-in-Chief
Thank you for your patience.
Mahmoud Bakri writes: The battle of consciousness (14)
I do not think that I am far from the truth if I say that the indicator of the absence of good and good role models among young people in our society is beginning to sound the alarm and threaten the future of our generations...
Anyone who watches the cases and acts of violence, bullying, indifference and blind imitation of all that is Western is well aware that we are living in a state of lack of awareness among young people of the importance and value of the symbol or ideal that opens the way for them and works to advise, guide and guide them.
Despite the many symbols and models that have contributed to the enrichment of human life, which represent a good example for everyone who seeks success, these models have been absent from some new generations, and the result has been the emergence of a generation whose history is little known.
There is no doubt that the absence of a supervisory role, whether it be at home, at school, in social circles or even in drama and works of art, has created a vacuum in the minds of the majority of young people and adolescents, which has given us an unconscious generation, often dependent on violence to get what we want, and has also given us behaviors that are abnormal to our customs, values and traditions.
The acceleration and complexity of life plays an important role in this, no one can deny it, the gap is large between the past and present generations, the current generation is completely different in its powers, who have turned from scientists, politicians, religion and literature to festival singers and YouTubers who built their fame quickly without fatigue, and at the expense of the values and ethics of society, which has formed a huge vacuum for some young people...
This is in addition to the weakness of the religious impulse of some young people and the distancing from the original values and customs that we grew up with.
A nation that does not have a creative and influential leadership and creates achievements of a tangible nature that contributes to its emergence in society through its influence in most areas of life, whether religious, social, urban or political without borders, there is no doubt that this nation quickly fades and loses its values and decays its civilization and its prestige among nations.
This generation is the least fortunate in spite of all the progress in which they sink, and the poorest in spirit, despite all the manifestations of wealth that shackle their energies and which the kings of past times did not possess.
Yes, they suffer from the destructive effects of civilization and progress that we are all happy with. We are in a time of intellectual and cultural openness, educational and moral closure. Children and adolescents absorb and deal with the most important modern technologies and have enormous abilities to keep up with them. At the same time, they lack the ability to think deeply and positively about the simplest things such as developing themselves socially or trying to think from a different point of view. The ultimate blow is the complete absence of role models, and the media is most responsible for this.
We cannot deny the role of the media in our lives and its overwhelming influence on us and our ideas, and it knows this very well.
Empty models from the inside.. dazzling from the outside, have a glamour that deflects the eyes and plunges the minds into a deep hole of emptiness and waste the mind in dark paths hardly distinguishing between light and fire, and put them in the forefront to be stars shining in the imagination of our children and become the role model and goal they dream to be like and in return the absence of blind media our powers.
Where are our greats?
Why not see them on screens in programs that address the minds of children and young people and simulate their dazzling reality?!
Even if such programs are produced, they are intended for adults and lack attractiveness or creative ideas, so I think we are in dire need of programs that instill confidence and ethics in our children and youth and reject anything that is abnormal and alien to our culture.
Why, if we talk about courage, does the image of an imaginary hero jump into our children ’ s minds that doesn ’ t even exist?
The hero of the West weave around him tales of heroism, to fill the vacuum of their reality.
As we fight the battle of awareness, deepening national belonging, and building the Egyptian man, we must not lose sight of this matter, we cannot succeed in this battle without providing honorable models of scientists, writers, officers, intellectuals, doctors and all spectrums of society that serve and work for it.
We must all, as governmental, civil and individual institutions, join hands in order to show good example and role models in all fields. The role of the media comes in highlighting the personalities that serve the community...
This is in addition to the need to develop religious curricula, expand the community participation of young people and develop human building institutions, most importantly education, culture, media and religious institutions.

While these platforms themselves are neutral, the unchecked proliferation of questionable ideas—including conspiracy theories such as flat Earth belief—is inevitable.

Title:

Content: ...
...
...
...
Defendant TikTok!
Mamdouh Al-Muhaini
Posted in: Last Updated:
The scenes on TikTok are funny, entertaining and ridiculous at the same time, and despite the large amount of sermons of counselors and disgruntled, the number of downloads of this application is increasing.
One billion monthly active subscribers, the company recently announced.
That is, one in seven people on Earth regularly watch videos of the famous app.
The rapid growth of subscriber numbers means one thing: all these tips are ignored and thrown into the trash.
The accusations faced by TikTok and similar platforms are usually coming from the masses of writers and intellectuals who turn into timid preachers who are not tired of demanding the closure of what they do not like.
The mistake they make, in addition to opposing the movement of time and wanting to eliminate the natural and joyful diversity of contemporary life, is that they see these platforms for the elite and judge their content on this basis, but they are platforms for the broad masses and not for the few.
The stars of these platforms from influencers, artists, and players are natural because these areas are related to the entertainment that matters to the wider segments of people.
Historically and globally, the widest fame is not for scientists and inventors but for sports and entertainment stars.
These critical campaigns are based on a domineering way of thinking and hatreds to express superiority over others, but only complain.
In my opinion, the danger in these platforms is not in them or their light and entertaining (or even naive) content but in the methods of division and militarization that can be used.
It is also an effective way to recycle harmful thoughts such as conspiracy thoughts and victim sensation.
I recently watched a video on TikTok of a psychopath insulting religious symbols and describing them in the most gruesome terms.
This person ’ s goal is clear: to use these platforms to create a state of religious and sectarian rivalry and create an atmosphere of hatred within one society.
The crisis here is not in these platforms but in this content that ultimately cannot be prevented, it will spread no matter what the consequences.
The problem is that we fail to create intellectually mature societies with strong values of coexistence and participation without these harmful contents affecting them.
In these platforms, it is continuously recycled that Muslims are victims of the West and their religion is subjected to ferocious war and their states are invaded and exterminated.
This content is intensely active in instilling a sense of oppression within the younger generations who receive such ideas easily, and are then difficult to extract from their consciousness and thinking.
Although the facts on the ground are irrefutable (think only how many Muslims are in charge of the British government) to refute these subversive claims, these arguments are widely popular because minds are shaped in a way that accepts them without intellectual resistance.
The reason is clear: for decades, there has been an absence of humanities education curricula in Arab schools and universities that raise the critical level of understanding of reality and history.
Just reading the previous sentence seems like a sick joke because these schools and universities have been dominated for decades by intellectually and psychologically troubled personalities and have charged generations with sick ideas that increase their isolation from the world and throw them into a modified and dark phase of the past.
Because of the absence of humanities, it is possible to see personalities who have all the modern technologies but whose ideas are closed and bloody.
We have seen technologists, doctors and engineers join extremist organizations and use their skills to commit atrocities.
As we know, the rhetoric in the media has been one of the most important reasons why young people join or sympathize with extremist groups.
The solution, in my opinion, is not to close these platforms or tarnish their reputation and describe those who visit them as fools and fools, but to work on a way of thinking that promotes the values of participation, coexistence, human openness to different religions and peoples and integration into contemporary life without a sense of persecution, hatred and isolation from the world.
This is perhaps the best we can offer to new generations in the new year, rather than sermons that make us feel good about ourselves but will evaporate in hours or days.
According to the Middle East Newspaper
Disclaimer: All published articles represent the opinion of their authors only.

The Internet serves as a digital “Trojan horse,” spreading content and shaping consciousness across broad populations, often enabling odd or unscientific ideas to flourish unchecked.

Title:

Content: The digital Trojan horse.
What is “more dangerous ”?
T + T - normal size
The Trojan horse does not die or, more precisely, its idea does not die, and every now and then we come across a new horse, hiding what to pass, in order to spread certain concepts, behaviors, or even impose a new reality, and the Trojan horse of this time applies to a lot of visual content coming to us through digital broadcasting platforms, and the hidden capabilities of the Trojan of the era, and the dimensions of its impact may be greater than Its impact will inevitably be more serious and far-reaching if it is not dealt with seriously, attentively, consciously and responsibly.
Described in the statement of the General Authority for Audiovisual Media and the GCC Electronic Media Officials Committee as “content contrary to the media content regulations in the GCC ”, the content will not be the last controversial product of this platform or others, but we are sure that the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and the UAE Media Regulatory Office will address any violations in this regard with appropriate decisions and mechanisms.
This has already been confirmed through a joint statement in which they pointed out that Netflix has been contacted to remove content that is contrary to the principles of the community in the country, especially content that is contrary to the category of children, and that they will monitor the compliance of the platform with the controls of broadcasting in the country, and will take the necessary measures in case of broadcasting any materials that conflict with the regulations and laws in force.
With the role played by official institutions and their controls that protect society from such content, there remains another role of no less importance in this regard, which is the role of the family and the awareness it instills in its members, based on the awareness enjoyed by its columns and masters « parents ».
The tricks of the Trojan horse era, do not affect the system of societal values only, and are not limited to some scenes that can be deleted, then follow the dramatic work, or even ban the broadcast of content or a number of works, and its impact is not limited to the dissemination of an idea or even a limited number of ideas. They were embedded in seemingly positive messages.
What the digital Trojan passes may come through even small details that pass smoothly through the most mundane refineries of control, but together they complete a mosaic of a carefully, patiently and carefully crafted painting, which will not be pleased when its features are clarified even the most enthusiastic, and those who see the reference to age restriction in introductory terms, or the mention of inappropriate content in the artwork is an acceptable disclaimer.
Therefore, with our firm choice to keep our knowledge, intellectual and creative windows open, and to remain engaged with the product of the human mind and imagination on its amazing and rich diversity, we must support the decisions of our national institutions in their position on what is produced by digital broadcasting platforms, which must be in parallel with enhancing the awareness of our children, and developing their sense of criticism to take responsibility for choosing what is worth watching. The digital content production machine does not stop, and its production and what the digital Trojan horse carries, needs to unite all the elements of the social fabric, institutions and individuals, Takaful does not exclude qualified content critics who are aware of their role and responsibilities.
In the era before the open skies, the institutions of the visual media had their supervisory cadres under different names, a sergeant who was often caught in constant confrontations with the content makers, but he was each time to resolve the matter and has "cut" what was cut, deleted what was deleted, and excluded what he saw is inappropriate, as "the master of his decision".
Now that the rules of the broadcast “game ” have changed, the viewer is the master of his decision, and by his will and action only, the directions of the launch of the stable ball are determined according to the new rules in his court, he is a self-censor, open to endless options of watching, an openness that is not lacking when supported by the responsibilities of maintaining the constants of his community system, and awareness of what may be invisible in the“ digital Troy. ”
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Content: Opinions
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Al Aseel Sun
The dual mission of university education
Today ’ s world is full of profound and bold reviews of many of the ideas, practices and behaviors that have been found to be flawed.
Financial and economic crises, the spread of various epidemics locally and globally, the rise of ignorant, narcissistic and unbalanced populist movements and figures, and the rise of environmental risks and calamities have contributed significantly to the emergence of such reviews worldwide.
There is now a critical review of all the premises of modernity, especially of the liberal democratic system of political life.
There is a review of the global capitalist neoliberal system, especially its applications in the world of finance and economics.
There is a major review of all aspects of the natural and human environmental subject.
There are major questions about the enormous dangers in the field of electronic and social communications related to morality, public taste and great human values.
Of course, the review includes all that postmodern waves suggest: new ideas, crazy behaviors, unethical values, and individualistic dreams that are harmful to societal cohesion and integrity.
All this immediately raises the following key question: Are the various institutions of society, especially higher education institutions, preparing young men and women, the future generation full of surprises, preparing them to deal with these reviews with a rational and balanced understanding, with an objective analytical and critical ability, and adhering to the values and moral references as the balance of all these reviews?
I believe that the overwhelming majority of universities, especially in the land that concerns us, the entire Arab world, are preoccupied to the extent of obsessing over the preparation of their students educational and vocational training so that they are fit to carry out their jobs efficiently and flexibly and in harmony with the necessities and dictates of markets and production institutions, while neglecting the aspect of preparing their students with a serious and diverse culture to graduate as capable intellectuals. They are also capable, with the same competence, of understanding and critiquing the great revisions that we have mentioned, and even moral and conscientious commitment to fight for deep revisions for the benefit of societies and peoples, not for the benefit of minorities of exploitation, domination, injustice and immorality in this world, and especially in our great Arab homeland.
The subject of graduating a good professional workforce with global competence, but with a national and national culture committed to the issues of the nation in the struggle to face all the shortcomings, dangers and conspiracies in those issues, must be the subject of the hour and the subject of the highest priority in the planning of university education.
The conditions of our world, which are full of dangers, complexities and conspiracies, require giving great importance to the human cultural aspect in the formation of university students.
Without it, we will still produce robots capable of integrating efficiently into work and professions, but unable to modify any wrong path in those jobs and professions.
This need, to make education inclusive of both sides in the Arab graduate, the excellent professional scientific ability and the national, national and humanitarian culture committed to non-opportunistic struggle, has become an existential basic need in Arab societies whose Arab identity is exposed to the worst and most dangerous external and internal conspiracies in order to tear them apart and keep them in the worlds of fragmentation, loss and backwardness.
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**Absence of Role Models and Cultural Anchors**
A key societal concern is the lack of authentic role models and the weakening of traditional values, especially among youth.

This void makes young people vulnerable to unconventional ideas, as they lack strong foundational beliefs or figures to emulate.

Coupled with weakened community and religious bonds, individuals—particularly the young—may seek belonging and identity in alternative communities, including those centered on fringe beliefs such as flat Earth theory.

Title:

Content: General Supervision
Elham Aboul Fath
Editor-in-Chief
Thank you for your patience.
General Supervision
Elham Aboul Fath
Editor-in-Chief
Thank you for your patience.
Mahmoud Bakri writes: The battle of consciousness (14)
I do not think that I am far from the truth if I say that the indicator of the absence of good and good role models among young people in our society is beginning to sound the alarm and threaten the future of our generations...
Anyone who watches the cases and acts of violence, bullying, indifference and blind imitation of all that is Western is well aware that we are living in a state of lack of awareness among young people of the importance and value of the symbol or ideal that opens the way for them and works to advise, guide and guide them.
Despite the many symbols and models that have contributed to the enrichment of human life, which represent a good example for everyone who seeks success, these models have been absent from some new generations, and the result has been the emergence of a generation whose history is little known.
There is no doubt that the absence of a supervisory role, whether it be at home, at school, in social circles or even in drama and works of art, has created a vacuum in the minds of the majority of young people and adolescents, which has given us an unconscious generation, often dependent on violence to get what we want, and has also given us behaviors that are abnormal to our customs, values and traditions.
The acceleration and complexity of life plays an important role in this, no one can deny it, the gap is large between the past and present generations, the current generation is completely different in its powers, who have turned from scientists, politicians, religion and literature to festival singers and YouTubers who built their fame quickly without fatigue, and at the expense of the values and ethics of society, which has formed a huge vacuum for some young people...
This is in addition to the weakness of the religious impulse of some young people and the distancing from the original values and customs that we grew up with.
A nation that does not have a creative and influential leadership and creates achievements of a tangible nature that contributes to its emergence in society through its influence in most areas of life, whether religious, social, urban or political without borders, there is no doubt that this nation quickly fades and loses its values and decays its civilization and its prestige among nations.
This generation is the least fortunate in spite of all the progress in which they sink, and the poorest in spirit, despite all the manifestations of wealth that shackle their energies and which the kings of past times did not possess.
Yes, they suffer from the destructive effects of civilization and progress that we are all happy with. We are in a time of intellectual and cultural openness, educational and moral closure. Children and adolescents absorb and deal with the most important modern technologies and have enormous abilities to keep up with them. At the same time, they lack the ability to think deeply and positively about the simplest things such as developing themselves socially or trying to think from a different point of view. The ultimate blow is the complete absence of role models, and the media is most responsible for this.
We cannot deny the role of the media in our lives and its overwhelming influence on us and our ideas, and it knows this very well.
Empty models from the inside.. dazzling from the outside, have a glamour that deflects the eyes and plunges the minds into a deep hole of emptiness and waste the mind in dark paths hardly distinguishing between light and fire, and put them in the forefront to be stars shining in the imagination of our children and become the role model and goal they dream to be like and in return the absence of blind media our powers.
Where are our greats?
Why not see them on screens in programs that address the minds of children and young people and simulate their dazzling reality?!
Even if such programs are produced, they are intended for adults and lack attractiveness or creative ideas, so I think we are in dire need of programs that instill confidence and ethics in our children and youth and reject anything that is abnormal and alien to our culture.
Why, if we talk about courage, does the image of an imaginary hero jump into our children ’ s minds that doesn ’ t even exist?
The hero of the West weave around him tales of heroism, to fill the vacuum of their reality.
As we fight the battle of awareness, deepening national belonging, and building the Egyptian man, we must not lose sight of this matter, we cannot succeed in this battle without providing honorable models of scientists, writers, officers, intellectuals, doctors and all spectrums of society that serve and work for it.
We must all, as governmental, civil and individual institutions, join hands in order to show good example and role models in all fields. The role of the media comes in highlighting the personalities that serve the community...
This is in addition to the need to develop religious curricula, expand the community participation of young people and develop human building institutions, most importantly education, culture, media and religious institutions.

Title:

Content: Opinions
Send Save Print PDF
Al Aseel Sun
The dual mission of university education
Today ’ s world is full of profound and bold reviews of many of the ideas, practices and behaviors that have been found to be flawed.
Financial and economic crises, the spread of various epidemics locally and globally, the rise of ignorant, narcissistic and unbalanced populist movements and figures, and the rise of environmental risks and calamities have contributed significantly to the emergence of such reviews worldwide.
There is now a critical review of all the premises of modernity, especially of the liberal democratic system of political life.
There is a review of the global capitalist neoliberal system, especially its applications in the world of finance and economics.
There is a major review of all aspects of the natural and human environmental subject.
There are major questions about the enormous dangers in the field of electronic and social communications related to morality, public taste and great human values.
Of course, the review includes all that postmodern waves suggest: new ideas, crazy behaviors, unethical values, and individualistic dreams that are harmful to societal cohesion and integrity.
All this immediately raises the following key question: Are the various institutions of society, especially higher education institutions, preparing young men and women, the future generation full of surprises, preparing them to deal with these reviews with a rational and balanced understanding, with an objective analytical and critical ability, and adhering to the values and moral references as the balance of all these reviews?
I believe that the overwhelming majority of universities, especially in the land that concerns us, the entire Arab world, are preoccupied to the extent of obsessing over the preparation of their students educational and vocational training so that they are fit to carry out their jobs efficiently and flexibly and in harmony with the necessities and dictates of markets and production institutions, while neglecting the aspect of preparing their students with a serious and diverse culture to graduate as capable intellectuals. They are also capable, with the same competence, of understanding and critiquing the great revisions that we have mentioned, and even moral and conscientious commitment to fight for deep revisions for the benefit of societies and peoples, not for the benefit of minorities of exploitation, domination, injustice and immorality in this world, and especially in our great Arab homeland.
The subject of graduating a good professional workforce with global competence, but with a national and national culture committed to the issues of the nation in the struggle to face all the shortcomings, dangers and conspiracies in those issues, must be the subject of the hour and the subject of the highest priority in the planning of university education.
The conditions of our world, which are full of dangers, complexities and conspiracies, require giving great importance to the human cultural aspect in the formation of university students.
Without it, we will still produce robots capable of integrating efficiently into work and professions, but unable to modify any wrong path in those jobs and professions.
This need, to make education inclusive of both sides in the Arab graduate, the excellent professional scientific ability and the national, national and humanitarian culture committed to non-opportunistic struggle, has become an existential basic need in Arab societies whose Arab identity is exposed to the worst and most dangerous external and internal conspiracies in order to tear them apart and keep them in the worlds of fragmentation, loss and backwardness.
Add a new comment
The comment received from the participant or reader is an expression of his own opinion and does not reflect the opinion of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Nahar
View comments

**Conformity vs.

Title:

Content: Walking against a escalator.
Salam Al Awkali 1 hour
Following on from a previous article “The Halal Championship ” and asking questions about the lights of the last World Cup, I happened to be re-reading the book“ Love and Sex: When Salafism and Imperialism ” by Mohamed Kamal Labwani, published in 1994 by Riyad Al Rayes Publishing House.
In principle, what is concerned with Salafism here is not a specific religious movement, but a general cultural orientation that opposes the requirements of libertarian human development by returning to what this inclusive current calls origins, traditions or heritage.
and so on.
Love and sex are two words that provoke tension in societies of repression, as they provoke the panic of all social controls, whether politically institutionalized, socially loose, or lurking fatwas, and we often witness convulsive reactions when dealing with these two words even in the trophies of art and literature, or through the image in all its dramatic manifestations, and reflects the confusion of the owner of the World Cup. The last is the extent of this clash of values between different levels of human understanding.
The tournament takes place in a short space of time and in a limited space reached by a large crowd of football fans, mostly young people of a playful age who are rebellious in nature.
In a country that mimics the highest level of civilized countries, this clash of values and ethics is evident, and there are convulsive speeches trying to bring this multi-faith and multi-temperament audience into the circle of local traditions.
When local traditions intervened to impose modest dress on female athletes in a tournament that as an aristocratic sport needed a minimum of cloth that did not hinder the movement and flexibility of the player, the ITF rejected the idea of women players wearing shirts with sleeves and trousers, and eventually the organizing committee waived the terms of the game, because in a world that interacts strongly within these international gatherings there are only two options, either to seclude completely or concede.
Anyone who is sexually aroused by a tennis player, gymnast, ballerina, drawing board or stone statue should see their psychiatrist immediately.
Although the aforementioned book has sometimes more emotional contexts than it requires a guided consideration of a complex issue such as love and sex, it is filled with an important analysis of the roots of this tension afflicted by a nation that Labwani says “what unites it most, in fact, is its sexual complexes, ” stressing that any attempt to research these historical complexes requires the convergence of many sciences, such as psychology, social psychology, economics, politics and others.
The author puts imperialism and Salafism on two sides of the same coin in dealing with this existential chemistry that has become obsessive-compulsive: just as imperialism creates a kind of objective repression, Salafism employs self-repression to market its discourse, and in the end “both are based on and generate the self-suppression of sex, both are based on torturing man and making man a means of lower ends. ”
Between these two aspects, which express a similar obsession with employment, the author focuses on the economic factor and the nature of the relations of production that prepare the ground for this culture, which rejects the existential essence of man, and employs by the other religion, beliefs and traditions to serve these economic structures, whether they are rentier in traditional societies, or related to the market, propaganda and consumption in modern societies.
What we see now of the obsession with the production of breathless fatwas behind this obsession, reflects the essence of the issue dealt with in the book of Labwani, and the existence of two institutions of censorship, political and religious evaluate art and literature under the pretext of preserving social traditions reflects the extent of chaos scattered by this decade. which is perpetuated by rituals of collective cleansing in societies that take shelter with their thorns whenever they feel threatened.
In this context of schizophrenic tension, the book does not hesitate to ask questions related to the fuse of the answer: "How will we be rational human beings if we continue to close and claim that our halal and haram is the absolute and immortal halal and haram valid for every time and place, and what will benefit our persistence if we ourselves have abandoned it in reality?
When is persuasion a substitute for persuasion?
How do we solve the huge problem between belonging to identity and thus alienation from the era, or between belonging to the era and thus separation from identity and authenticity?
How does the son of today who deals with the modern age deal with his heritage, and how do we overcome that terrible contradiction between what we think and declare, and what we walk and dream about?
How can we overcome the lie that has become synonymous with our national identity? ”
In asserting that these questions present themselves in the context of the question of sex, which he considers to be “the number one issue, ” his sometimes edgy language does not shy away from raising important questions that he tries to disentangle and answer in other chapters that seem quieter and less angry.
This sharp emotion, which does not corrupt the reasonable much of the issue, shows in his observation the common schizophrenia between the enjoyment of the well-being of the body and technology and its fear at the same time, resulting from this civilization of behavior that results in this well-being itself, or as someone walking against a moving staircase, a problem that I touched on in the previous article about this strange combination of great material and technological development in which the World Cup, Towards a distant past called out of the beauty of tradition or originality, which led analyst Abotreka, for example, to say in the form of the conscience of the community: we will not sacrifice our values and traditions in order to hold a World Cup.
Al-Labwani acknowledges in the context of his explanation of “a fundamental issue ” as he describes it:“ Those who accept the basic change, and who adopt the Western way of organizing the economy, the state and society, and the form of city planning, housing, consumption and educational programs, who accept their production relations, must conform to their culture and accept them in the level of values, customs, patterns of behavior, arts, fashion, and so on.
There is no way to talk about cultural stability with the change of infrastructure, because it is an illusion, and working for it is an impossible struggle... "
Of course, I have reservations about these categorical statements and all the inaccurate vocabulary such as “he has to go along ” or the categorical context that is not in doubt such as“ there is no way at all ”, in addition to the lack of style sometimes to carry the ideas of the writer, which do not diminish the importance of presenting them boldly, and do not cancel that they were raised repeatedly and in other forms by other thinkers linked by some to the thought of the Arab Enlightenment.
The author, like me, was raised in this deeply rooted and schizophrenic culture, but the good sense of self-criticism is that she is aware of the pain, and puts a question mark or wonder behind what we believe to be the truth, or a coghetto imposed by a cognitive paradigm that no longer works in individual or collective life.
One of them wrote a pamphlet attacking a few ordinary lines in part of a novel included in the book « Sun on closed windows », considering that these sinful lines are caused by the influence of secularism and Western culture and the calls for its dissolution.. etc.
And I only commented with a link to the book of Sheikh Imam Hafiz Jalaluddin Suyuti « Nawadar Ike.... »
It is a summary of the book "The Benefits of Marriage".
His topic is about sex and sexuality.
The author (Imam al-Hafiz) did not find it awkward to name things by their names, he is explicit in using the word denoting the members of the male and female sexual system used in public speech, and he is explicit in pronouncing the names of the sexual process and describing it fully.
There is a manuscript copy of the book “The Ike ’ s Ancestors ”.
King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (under number: 3068- FB) In addition to this book by Imam Al-Suyuti, more than ten books on sex, including disclosure in the names of marriage, morning light in the languages of marriage, and the walk of life in detail between whites, blacks and tan, tarj anemones in ganj chips, and sip the albual of halal magic.
The author of the post responded to my comment with only a long series of question marks and exclamation points.
As for the Arab-Islamic heritage, it constitutes a complete library, books issued before globalization, secularism and the techniques accused of targeting these innocent Tehrani societies, but Tehrani is a fundamental form of Christianity, which was not the product of a sexual process and did not have sex, unlike Islam and its Prophet, which allowed many channels for this unbridled cosmic energy; but linked faith to it according to its organized rules.
But Salafism, which created a special police force to pursue these instincts, links every sexual context to the decadence of the (secular) West, as if we were multiplying by division, when it is the true identity of everything that comes to life on this planet, from the relationship of a drop of water to a grain of dust through plants and animals to man. Six from the place of the profane to the place of the holy.

Participation in Truth-Seeking**
Traditional cultures often demand obedience and discourage critical inquiry.

Title:

Content: Identity crisis?
Blessing the Sword
Posted in: Last Updated:
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Dr. Mohammed Al-Rumaihi devoted his article published in this newspaper, last Saturday, to comment on a violent controversy, which resulted from his position on the call of some parliamentarians to abolish mixed classes in university education.
This controversy was marked by clear verbal violence on the part of those who claimed to defend virtue.
It does not stop when the dissenting opinion is ridiculed; rather, it goes beyond cursing the owner of the opinion, accusing him of treason, ignorance, amulet of religion, and so on.
Al-Rumaihi and other scholars have already been subjected to such accusations.
But the article has made a fundamental point that deserves further treatment: its reference to the fact that this debate and its ilk express an “identity crisis ”, which manifests itself whenever the challenges of moving from the age of tradition to the age of modernity arise on the surface of everyday life.
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According to Eric Erickson, an American psychologist, the identity crisis is the failure of young people to balance their personal aspirations with the demands of social life, especially in societies undergoing rapid cultural and economic transformations that necessarily change people ’ s positions, circles, and norms.
I have observed that the most important shifts of individual identity in our society have resulted from its openness to sources of cultural influence and new lifestyles, which are at odds with what we have inherited from our ancestors.
I am inclined to believe that the beginning of the deep transformation dates back to the last two decades of the twentieth century, to which programs of modernization of the economy, change of education policies, and expansion of the enrollment of students in foreign universities contributed harmoniously.
The peak of the transformation, I estimate, has occurred in the last five years, as a result of fast internet access to every village and town across the kingdom.
The Internet has provided an opportunity for young people to directly open up to new worlds.
The family, the school, and the social system as a whole have little influence on the mentality of the individual, but the greatest contributor has become the individual himself who consciously and unconsciously chooses, from tables that have no beginning and no other, tables that are far removed from the historical experience of our society.
Each of these changes confronts the traditional mindset with a new challenge, supported by a more advanced, accessible and attractive lifestyle, which puts the individual at risk: either abandoning his old world, or depriving him of the fruits of new life.
According to Ericsson, this shift leads to a lack of understanding between the younger generation and their parents, not because they refuse to understand, but because different cultural backgrounds cause parents and children to start from a different background, but a different conceptual and moral world.
The need of the father and the son to maintain the existing relationship necessarily leads to a certain amount of cost and suffering that is reflected in the form of a psychological crisis, which is what we call the crisis of identity.
Ericsson ’ s vision applies to young people, but I ’ ve found a crisis of identity in a wide cross-section of parents as well.
It manifests itself in the form of an internal rejection of the old with his apparent acceptance, or an internal refusal to speak with a strong desire to enjoy his goods.
This dissonance produces a duality of values, another manifestation of the identity crisis.
I think that the source of the crisis on both sides: the youth and parents, is the slow interaction between our cultural heritage, religious and non-religious, and the cultural changes of the era, especially the new value systems, and the consequent relations between people, and social positions different from those of the past.
I believe that a large segment of our society, parents in particular, have a hard time reconciling their old convictions with their new lives.
If we look at the root cause of all this, we see it in the fact that our cultural heritage wants the individual to be a obedient follower, not a participant or a creator of the values that guide his life.
Thus, he must remain agitated and influenced, if he wants to enjoy the virtues of the old regime.
Quote from "The Middle East"
Disclaimer: All published articles represent the opinion of their authors only.
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In contrast, exposure to global media and intellectual openness can breed skepticism—sometimes leading not to greater scientific understanding, but instead to blanket distrust of authorities or accepted knowledge.

This atmosphere of doubt can push some to question the very shape of the earth and subscribe to flat Earth beliefs as an act of contrarianism or perceived critical thinking.

Title:

Content: Opinions
Send Save Print PDF
Al Aseel Sun
The dual mission of university education
Today ’ s world is full of profound and bold reviews of many of the ideas, practices and behaviors that have been found to be flawed.
Financial and economic crises, the spread of various epidemics locally and globally, the rise of ignorant, narcissistic and unbalanced populist movements and figures, and the rise of environmental risks and calamities have contributed significantly to the emergence of such reviews worldwide.
There is now a critical review of all the premises of modernity, especially of the liberal democratic system of political life.
There is a review of the global capitalist neoliberal system, especially its applications in the world of finance and economics.
There is a major review of all aspects of the natural and human environmental subject.
There are major questions about the enormous dangers in the field of electronic and social communications related to morality, public taste and great human values.
Of course, the review includes all that postmodern waves suggest: new ideas, crazy behaviors, unethical values, and individualistic dreams that are harmful to societal cohesion and integrity.
All this immediately raises the following key question: Are the various institutions of society, especially higher education institutions, preparing young men and women, the future generation full of surprises, preparing them to deal with these reviews with a rational and balanced understanding, with an objective analytical and critical ability, and adhering to the values and moral references as the balance of all these reviews?
I believe that the overwhelming majority of universities, especially in the land that concerns us, the entire Arab world, are preoccupied to the extent of obsessing over the preparation of their students educational and vocational training so that they are fit to carry out their jobs efficiently and flexibly and in harmony with the necessities and dictates of markets and production institutions, while neglecting the aspect of preparing their students with a serious and diverse culture to graduate as capable intellectuals. They are also capable, with the same competence, of understanding and critiquing the great revisions that we have mentioned, and even moral and conscientious commitment to fight for deep revisions for the benefit of societies and peoples, not for the benefit of minorities of exploitation, domination, injustice and immorality in this world, and especially in our great Arab homeland.
The subject of graduating a good professional workforce with global competence, but with a national and national culture committed to the issues of the nation in the struggle to face all the shortcomings, dangers and conspiracies in those issues, must be the subject of the hour and the subject of the highest priority in the planning of university education.
The conditions of our world, which are full of dangers, complexities and conspiracies, require giving great importance to the human cultural aspect in the formation of university students.
Without it, we will still produce robots capable of integrating efficiently into work and professions, but unable to modify any wrong path in those jobs and professions.
This need, to make education inclusive of both sides in the Arab graduate, the excellent professional scientific ability and the national, national and humanitarian culture committed to non-opportunistic struggle, has become an existential basic need in Arab societies whose Arab identity is exposed to the worst and most dangerous external and internal conspiracies in order to tear them apart and keep them in the worlds of fragmentation, loss and backwardness.
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**Disruption of Identity and Community**
Both in the West and Arab societies, there is a reported erosion of citizenship, identity, and shared values.

Title:

Content: How did Gaza become a big country?
Excuse me, do you have a dream?
• Now!
I want Israel to stop bombing Gaza!
This is how a cleaner in Britain answers to an influencer who asks people about their dreams and tries to achieve them, and the first thing that comes to the head of this man is to stop the war on Gaza, and when the influencer wondered and tried to understand the reason for that wish, the man said, "This is a lot in my mind because of the amount of injustice that is happening."
Can we consider this man, the English cleaner, who is concerned about what is happening in Gaza and his only dream is to stop the war, from the sociological point of view of a Palestinian citizen?
Modern societies, whether Arab or Western, in which citizenship gradually disappears, die slowly and die, and the reasons for the disappearance of citizenship in Arab societies differ from those in the West.
Difference Between Individual and Citizen
The French politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) said: "The individual is the greatest enemy of the citizen."
The citizen is a person concerned with public issues beyond himself, he is looking for his well-being in the welfare of the homeland, and lacks his personal safety when his homeland is endangered even if he does not live in it, but the individual is a self-centered being, inclined to indifference, doubt and suspicion in any common cause, and does not mean the public interest, and just talking about it seems irritating. Modernity produces a person concerned with himself only, madly seeks to achieve that self, or seeks the illusion of self-realization, does not concern a homeland or issue, and does not pay attention to look beyond the narrow self that tightens the noose on him, that pivoting about the self magnifies personal tragedies and becomes difficult to overcome, so man lives a daily strenuous life centered on himself and only.
Modern societies, whether Arab or Western, in which citizenship disappears little by little, die slowly and die, and the reasons for the disappearance of citizenship in Arab societies differ from Western, perhaps this is another talk.
But the main reason for the disappearance of citizenship in the interest of individualism, is the siege of man with his personal concerns, so he does not have time to think beyond himself, leaving the national decision to anyone else, choose for him, and most likely this other chooses what is personal gain and wealth and does not care about the members of the homeland.
This very small spot, was able to bring about a sociological revolution, not predicted by the most optimistic social scientists, this mass rallying, and collective awareness of the Palestinian cause, Arab and Western, but extract individuals from rallying around themselves
Consciousness creates belonging
The flood of Al-Aqsa and the beginning of the war on Gaza, that unjust war that shook the world socially, as it shook it at all levels, to change the collective thought of people, and this flood bypassed the Arab region, for the first time the general public in various peoples turned to the Palestinian cause in this way. Metaphorically and from a sociological point of view, we can affirm that Gaza has become a homeland for all.
This very small spot, was able to bring about a sociological revolution, not predicted by the most optimistic social scientists, this mass rallying, and collective awareness of the Palestinian cause, Arab and Western, but extract individuals from rallying around themselves, and immerse them in attention to the most just issues of the era, which is the Palestinian cause, and this awareness makes belonging, the more people belong to Palestine When we see a German citizen in a demonstration against the occupation ripping his German passport in protest against his country ’ s policy of supporting Israel and demanding an end to the occupation, we see before us a social awakening, which reduces the space of the individual and increases the space of interest in common issues.
Isn ’ t this German man turning from being just a member of Germany ’ s modernist society to a Palestinian citizen who cares about the Palestinian cause and is troubled by the injustice to which it is subjected?
The legendary steadfastness of the people of Gaza proves to the world that man must have a constant reference, a real identity that does not change with the change of time, and this real identity will have the models to which he returns to emulate in adversity.
The steadfastness of Gaza proves the falsity of modern societies
Modern societies are based on possession and reaping. Modern man to achieve himself and gain the respect of others must possess a prestigious job, social status, a luxury home, and an unusual luxury car. Here, human identity is transformed from an identity linked to fixed things that do not change over time, such as religion, land, language, and historical heritage. By losing your identity and the meaning of your whole life, it is causing misery in modern life.
The Gazan citizen comes out from under the rubble to give the whole world a lesson, he comes out with a high head, praising God, although he has lost all the causes of modern life, money, house and some of his family or all of them, but he is linked to something firm and strong, beyond himself, and grows up with this faith over all worldly suffering.
This legendary steadfastness of the people of Gaza proves to the world that man must have a constant reference, a real identity that does not change with the change of time, and this real identity will have the models to which he returns to emulate in adversity.
Modern societies based on self-love, the possession of material, review, and the definition of man what he possesses of material, is a false and ephemeral society, shaken by the smallest problems and affect his certainty and the feasibility of his life, so this society becomes faltering, does not live for its members horror and does not approve them decision.
This is why the world was astonished by this legendary steadfastness, and their astonishment turned to the question: How can these people withstand all this destruction and great misery when we collapse if we stumble along the road with a leaf?
From this question begins the journey of discovering the falsity and fragility of modern societies and their impact on man psychologically and physically.
It is therefore no wonder that Gaza has become a home for all, for all those who belong to its cause, even though they were previously individuals who were not preoccupied with the common causes of their homelands.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.

When people feel disconnected from stable cultural or national identities, they may construct new group identities online—sometimes around shared skepticism or opposition to mainstream beliefs (such as believing in a flat Earth).

These networks provide a sense of belonging and “real identity” to some, especially when traditional anchors are weak.

Title:

Content: Opinions
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Al Aseel Sun
The dual mission of university education
Today ’ s world is full of profound and bold reviews of many of the ideas, practices and behaviors that have been found to be flawed.
Financial and economic crises, the spread of various epidemics locally and globally, the rise of ignorant, narcissistic and unbalanced populist movements and figures, and the rise of environmental risks and calamities have contributed significantly to the emergence of such reviews worldwide.
There is now a critical review of all the premises of modernity, especially of the liberal democratic system of political life.
There is a review of the global capitalist neoliberal system, especially its applications in the world of finance and economics.
There is a major review of all aspects of the natural and human environmental subject.
There are major questions about the enormous dangers in the field of electronic and social communications related to morality, public taste and great human values.
Of course, the review includes all that postmodern waves suggest: new ideas, crazy behaviors, unethical values, and individualistic dreams that are harmful to societal cohesion and integrity.
All this immediately raises the following key question: Are the various institutions of society, especially higher education institutions, preparing young men and women, the future generation full of surprises, preparing them to deal with these reviews with a rational and balanced understanding, with an objective analytical and critical ability, and adhering to the values and moral references as the balance of all these reviews?
I believe that the overwhelming majority of universities, especially in the land that concerns us, the entire Arab world, are preoccupied to the extent of obsessing over the preparation of their students educational and vocational training so that they are fit to carry out their jobs efficiently and flexibly and in harmony with the necessities and dictates of markets and production institutions, while neglecting the aspect of preparing their students with a serious and diverse culture to graduate as capable intellectuals. They are also capable, with the same competence, of understanding and critiquing the great revisions that we have mentioned, and even moral and conscientious commitment to fight for deep revisions for the benefit of societies and peoples, not for the benefit of minorities of exploitation, domination, injustice and immorality in this world, and especially in our great Arab homeland.
The subject of graduating a good professional workforce with global competence, but with a national and national culture committed to the issues of the nation in the struggle to face all the shortcomings, dangers and conspiracies in those issues, must be the subject of the hour and the subject of the highest priority in the planning of university education.
The conditions of our world, which are full of dangers, complexities and conspiracies, require giving great importance to the human cultural aspect in the formation of university students.
Without it, we will still produce robots capable of integrating efficiently into work and professions, but unable to modify any wrong path in those jobs and professions.
This need, to make education inclusive of both sides in the Arab graduate, the excellent professional scientific ability and the national, national and humanitarian culture committed to non-opportunistic struggle, has become an existential basic need in Arab societies whose Arab identity is exposed to the worst and most dangerous external and internal conspiracies in order to tear them apart and keep them in the worlds of fragmentation, loss and backwardness.
Add a new comment
The comment received from the participant or reader is an expression of his own opinion and does not reflect the opinion of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Nahar
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**Manipulation of Reality & Mistrust**
Writings by Deborah and Ulrich Beck illustrate how reality is increasingly mediated by spectacle and perception, rather than direct experience or evidence.

This theme underlies many conspiracy theories—if you distrust all authority and established narratives, you may become susceptible to “alternative truths,” such as flat Earth claims.

Flat Earthers often present themselves as seekers of a hidden reality, resisting manipulation by systems of power.