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http://edwardcurtin.com/the-fear-not-to-be/

The Fear Not to Be

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the theologian Paul Tillich’s famous book, The Courage to Be.  Widely read in the days when an educated public read books, it is long forgotten.  In it, Tillich surveys the history of anxiety and fear and their relation to courage, religious faith, and the meaning of life.  His closing sentence – “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” – became acclaimed as an astute description of the existential need to find a foundation for faith and courage when their foundations were shaking.

His writing profoundly influenced many, even when they didn’t wholly agree with him.  This included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, commenting on Tillich’s death in 1965, said, “His Christian existentialism gave us a system of meaning and purpose for our lives in an age when war and doubt seriously threatened all that we had come to hold dear.”

I mention The Courage to Be not to engage in a recondite theological and philosophical analysis, which is the last thing we now need, but to contrast his call for spiritual courage with what we have been experiencing pouring forth from the mass corporate media for years  There is a drumbeat of fear-mongering so intense and constant that it is almost comical if it weren’t so effective in reducing people to quaking, frightened children.

Primarily about Covid and the need to obey the authorities and submit to being jabbed with mRNA Covid “Vaccines” – the idolatrous religion of bio-security – this  religion of fear goes much further and much deeper.  Scenarios of fear have been rehearsed and produced for decades by the intelligence/IT/media giants on a multitude of issues, large and small.  They are rooted in a spiritually nihilistic political propaganda campaign that is exponentially increasing fear, anxiety, and despondency on a vast scale, which is its intent.  Fearful people are easily cowered and controlled.  The elites know that regular people throughout the world are fed up with being subjected to violence and abuse in multiple forms, and if courage triumphs over their fears, they might join in worldwide solidarity and revolt, as they have been doing in various places recently. To prevent this, the authorities must use terror tactics to divide and conquer them. If people dare to rise up and even question the propaganda, they have been and will be called terrorists for doing so.  Dissent is now equated with terrorism and thus it must be censored.

All this fear-mongering draws on people’s normal fears of “not to be,” meaning dead. It is of course understandable not wanting to be dead, but living in constant fear is a living death.  Tillich, who suffered deep trauma as a chaplain in the trenches of WW I and was later dismissed from his teaching position in Germany when Hitler came to power, wrote that courage is rooted in the spiritual acceptance that underlying our individual lives is the power of Being, by which he meant God, and that fear and anxiety about our fates can be confronted only through the courage to accept in faith this foundational reality.

I think it is self-evident to anyone who glances at the mainstream media that fear is their staple.  In just the last week or so, I have seen The New York Times, an official organ of propaganda if there ever were one but known historically as the Grey Lady for understatement, tell its readers in a hyperventilating style that anxiety about climate change has spawned a growing field of therapeutic treatment for sufferers, how deer in your back yard are infected with Omicron, how the Russians are coming, etc.  This is the typical fear promoting propaganda that headlines all the media sites every day and has been doing so for years.  Any casual observer can list them on a daily basis, from major to minor matters to fear.

Yet despite this constant, blatant propaganda, governments flip the truth and warn that anyone who questions this are conspiracy theorists intent on causing trouble and therefore must be watched and refuted. Just the other day the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” saying:

The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.

After twenty years of such obvious propaganda, you would think these people would be embarrassed, but they obviously are not and intend to propagate this bullshit for years to come.  They and their media accomplices have taken their lingo lessons straight from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

On the bio-security religious front alone, Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian has recently reported that the authorities have warned us that there is a vast underdiagnosis of heart disease that may stealthily be coming to get us (not from “vaccines,” of course) and that HIV testing and vaccines look to be the next big push, for there is now the claim that a new variant of HIV is spreading in Europe.  President Biden declared in December 2021 that his administration was aiming to “end the HIV/Aids epidemic by 2030.”  While Covid restrictions may be easing, the mRNA “vaccine push” is not, and their promoters will only find different germs to defeat with “vaccines” and tests to ease the fears of the propagandized public, so many of whom have been turned into hypochondriacs.

The promulgation of the fear of germs and disease and foreign and domestic “threat actors” is permanent.  For anyone naively thinking that there will be an easing of this elite war of lies, I would suggest they rethink that assumption.  The state of siege that is the Covid crisis will be followed by many more, and this germ warfare includes a vast array of foreign variants, led by Russia and China.  We are in a permanent crisis and emergency engineered by the ruling classes to maintain their control.

This elite war against regular people has no end in sight.  The elites know that people get worn down over time and lose hope; thus, they plan for the long haul and keep hammering away.  Paul Tillich’s book is important because of its stress on the need for courage in the face of the fear-mongering.  Without a spiritual foundation to sustain one for the long haul, depression will lead to despair or surrender.  History should teach us this. The evil ones often win, at least in the short run, and each of us doesn’t have a long run.  Our time is brief.

The great dissenters and rebels of the past, even when not overtly religious, kept faith with their comrades and causes because they felt a deep, unbreakable, invincible connection.  It is called different names or none at all.  Maybe faith is the best word.  Faith in what?  Some call it God, as I do. Words can’t explain it; I feel it. Others say nothing and just carry on, sustained by the invisible. Some call it faith in human solidarity.  The names don’t matter.  It is not about naming but experiencing. The poet D.H. Lawrence said wisely that we are transmitters of life, “and when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.”  And he added in his inimitable style: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.  But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.”  It is not easy, but fear helps us fall out.

There were those who called Tillich an atheist because his philosophical explanation sounded too abstruse, which is true.  But he made a fundamental point about how as human beings we participate in Being, which is the ground of our existence.  We are part of something that is far larger than our puny selves –  beings in the sea of Being.  Who can deny that?  His call to courage hit a resonant cord with believers, agnostics, and atheists alike.  Not a poet but a German trained immigrant scholar who emigrated to the U.S.A., his language was steeped in heavy philosophical verbiage, yet it found a wide audience in its analysis of fear, anxiety, and especially courage because it was about fundamental truths.  Courage is fundamental, as is faith.

The Spanish poet Antonio Machado put it less philosophically and more elegantly:

I talk always to the man who walks along with me;
– men who talk to themselves hope to talk to God
Someday –
My soliloquies amount to discussions with this friend,
Who taught me the secret of loving human beings.
….
And when the day arrives for the last leaving of all,
And the ship that never returns to port is ready to go,
You’ll find me on board, light, with few belongings,
Almost naked like the children of the sea.

We are children of the sea and courage keeps us afloat.

Humor also helps, for we are funny creatures.

It is not often that one escapes an unintended assassination attempt.  I am glad to say that I have.

This is an example of the power of fear. Where I live, the winter has been quite cold and there was a recent ice storm with thick ice everywhere on top of snow.  My wife was fearful of falling and so had bought hiking poles for herself and me as Christmas gifts.  I said I didn’t want them and wouldn’t use them; that I wasn’t afraid, that I had faith in my ability to sustain myself.  So I didn’t use them, which angered her.  One day when the ice in the driveway and on the car was inches thick, she cajoled me into using the sticks to reach the car.  She set them for me with their clips at the proper height, since they are adjustable.  We toddled down the pathway to the car, setting one pole out ahead of the other in turn.  I exaggerated my need for them, bending far over as if I were in great need of the crutches.  Approaching the driveway, I extended my right hand pole out in front and it collapsed because the clips weren’t set tight and I went flying face forward onto the ice.  She looked at me in fear, not sure if I was dead or hurt or if her fear had made her into an accidental assassin.  She needn’t worry.  It was funny.

We all fall eventually, but in the meantime, worrying about it is self-defeating.  It is a reaction to fear.  Worrying is a form of preying on oneself (etymology: to seize by the throat with one’s teeth and kill), and it can be induced – and is – by the campaigns of fear that we are being subjected to.

The courage to be was Tillich’s way of saying that we are upheld by far more than we know.  Call it Being, Tao, the Great Spirit, or God.  Courage is contagious and will carry us on.  It is what we need to resist the fear-mongers who are at our throats.

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https://www.peakprosperity.com/when-false-narratives-break/

When False Narratives Break

A Sober Warning - and an ALERT

Let me be blunt; we are all in big danger right now.

The reasons are many, but they share one cause – too many people in positions of power believe in false things. They are quite convinced their narratives are real and true, I’ll grant them that, but they are deluded in their thinking.

Somehow vaccines became a matter of belief for many people. I was always skeptical having seen too much from the pharma companies and even having worked at Pfizer for nearly three years as a fresh PhD and MBA graduate.

I know that one cannot short-cycle the safety studies without risk. I then weighed the risk of Covid for people under the age of 60 and in good health, who knew the benefits of proper terrain boosting and had access to early treatments, and decided that their 99.98% survival rate was good enough for me to wait a bit on the vaccines to see how things went.

I also intensively poured over the data on vaccine efficacy and soon noted that the vaccines wore off rather quickly consigning their advocates to an endless cycle of boosters with unknown and unknowable risks to their immune system functions.

As I waited a bit longer, more and more safety data began to pour in showing that for an unacceptably high proportion of people, the vaccines were extremely unsafe and even deadly. While that might “only” be 1/100 or 1/200, the impacts were horrifying. Clots, embolisms, strokes, myocarditis, heart attacks, spontaneous abortions, neurological damage, menstrual cycle disruptions…the list was ominously long.

According to all of my well-heeled doctor friends who treated Covid in their practices with early treatments, Covid seemed to be a rather pedestrian illness with abundant and easy remedies.

But the keepers of the narrative were adamant – no early treatments for you! They wanted vaccines and only vaccines. They wanted masks despite lacking any data that face masks as worn by regular people in their regular lives did any good at all. They wanted vaccine passports and penalties, and for people to lose their jobs and livelihoods if they didn’t comply.

These technocratic authoritarians also wanted no liability for the pharma companies or themselves, or the government, for any ills that might have resulted from jabs or lockdown policies. In other words, they wanted power, they wanted to conduct experiments and they didn’t want any of the responsibilities or consequences from exercising or conducting those activities.

Now, we know that the consequences were steep. The lockdowns cost more lives than they saved once you factored in all the harms. All-cause mortality was higher in 2021 with the vaccines + policies than they were even in 2020 itself. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses shuttered their doors forever. Amazon and McDonalds and Target and Walmart scooped up all the business traffic from the smaller failures.

More terribly, hundreds of thousands of people, I am convinced, died needlessly as Fauci, Walensky, and the FDA all conspired to block early treatments that were used effectively by so many doctors and even entire countries. The evidence that these treatments work and work well has been staring every one of us in the face for nearly two years.

Worst of all, if that’s even possible, it’s also abundantly clear that dozens of named players in the US and global virology community conspired to hide the lab origin, and their role in its creation, from the world. You’d think, if anything, everyone would be more upset with these folks and their role in creating and then perpetuating and sustaining the Covid-debacle than they would be with, oh, say, Joe Rogan the podcaster.

But, nope. More people are more visibly upset with Rogan than with Fauci. But that’s not my main point. It’s a side point.

My main point is that the Covid debacle was a mishmash of false narratives, misaligned incentives, and a completely defective media apparatus that was unable to do anything more than parrot the obvious lies of the power centers.

In other words, it wasn’t the Covid that was the problem, but having the wrong people in power and allowing them to foist some clearly wrong and defective narratives upon us all.

Truckers Arise!

Now the Canadian people, led by their truckers, have finally popped the lid on some long-simmering, working-class, common-folk grievances. And it’s about time!

Just so you know where my sympathies lie, I am 100% in support of the truckers, the people, and wish for nothing less than for their actions to help sweep aside every single defective and broken public “servant” who has been bungling their role these past few years.

In fact, if you gave me the chance, I’d install the truckers in every position of power at the CDC, FDA, DOE, HUD, CIA, and all throughout the judiciary. That they know nothing of what those roles require would be a blessing. They’d figure it out in time and do a lot less damage than the current administrators along the way.

The reason I hold this view, which may seem reckless, is because I know how many other failed narratives are in play right now. Covid didn’t break the healthcare system, it merely revealed how broken it was all along. Covid didn’t push Fauci past his limits to where he was an ineffective boob, it merely revealed the extent to which this horrible excuse for a human being had been running scams and rackets the entire time. Don’t believe me?  Then read The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK, Jr. and get back to me.

So what other false narratives are lurking, ready to pounce with even greater cruelty that Covid?

There are so many I might as well begin here. The US Federal Reserve has utterly destroyed markets to the point they really only serve now as conduits for freshly printed funny-money to be shoveled straight into billionaire portfolios.

Or even their own pockets, as the grubby actions of the Fed Chairman Jay Powel have revealed. He was actively “front running” Fed meetings, placing his own private money in play in ways that he knew were the slam dunks were for gains. So did many of his key lieutenants.

Make no mistake. The Federal Reserve decided to print money to make the rich richer and they didn’t care at all about inflation or social friction, let alone anything that might look reasonable, fair or just. They had bought so deeply into the false “rich = good” narrative that they saw nothing wrong with rewarding the rich. At everyone else’s expense.

So, if the truckers want to protest against those practices, and against the Fed shoveling money to BlackRock and other private equity parasites so those firms can buy up all the housing stock (to rent back to everyone for huge returns), then I support that too.

Russia

Equally concerning is the fact that there are deluded neocons infesting all sorts of agencies and news desks agitating for the U.S. and Europe to get into a war with Russia over Ukraine. Their false narrative goes like this, “we’re really powerful and Russia is kind of weak, and we haven’t really suffered any consequences from a war and so we don’t believe we personally will, and war is very popular with the military contractors, so let’s do this. What could go wrong?”

What could go wrong? Everything. Very bad things. But the neocons haven’t had to suffer any consequences – not one of them lost a job over the disastrous Iraq War II – and they are full of hubris and themselves. The possibility of a very bad outcome here is actually quite high. If you haven’t seen the video of Putin looking exasperated and reminding the NATO neocons that Russia might be outmatched, but it has nukes, you really should. Watch his face and read his emotional tone. He is a man making a final warning. The neocons don’t care. After all, it’s never them or their sons and daughters who die in their unnecessary wars.

Conclusion

The tie between the neocons and the CDC? They are both stocked to the gills with lackies and true believers and nobody in their respective organizations has any agency to hold up a finger and say, “hang on, I’ve got a quite different thought here.”

Watch how Justin Trudeau has zero ability to see a vast swath of his fellow Canadians as anything other than reprehensible misogynists, racists, insurrectionists, and even terrorists.

Ditto for far too many in major positions of influence all throughout political offices, government agencies, universities, newsrooms and corporate offices. These keepers of the status quo are completely unable to see just how far off course we’ve drifted. They have no serious plans for the future, and care not for the ultimate consequences of their actions or inactions.

We are facing an epochal period of brinksmanship, only there’s no JFK anywhere on the political horizon. We are facing huge predicaments in our supply chains, oil shortages, insect apocalypses, environmental toxins, possible wars on several fronts, a vital lack of investment and ruined universities no longer training minds but closing them down.

If you thought Covid was a debacle, just wait until you see these next acts spill their cargo across the stage of life....