A Wilderness of Mirrors

The Age of Memes

Maybe it was always like this.

More likely it has been escalated by social media.

We live not in a world of facts and history - a science of knowing the past and the present as it truly is - but in a world of myth, story and the will to power.

Covid, Ukraine, Trump, 9/11, racism - none of the issues which fill our minds and conversation consist of any true desire to attain to some kind of higher truth. Everything is a collision of stories we tell and share in order to signal loyalties, in order to convince ourselves that we are a people superior to our ancestors and peers.

This does not necessarily mean we are doomed to live in untruth. It just means we must take care to build our lives outward and not inward, in health and not in self-righteousness.

What do you truly know?

You know that humans thrive in families. You know families require coherent community. You know that right and wrong exist. If you are wise and sincere, you will also know that you live, move, and have your being in a Creator. You will also realise that you owe gratitude to your forefathers, not only critique. You build your loyalties outward from there. That is the way of life.

You do not truly know geopolitics. You do not know Putin or Zelensky, or Obama or Trump. Covid and climate change are not tangible things you truly grapple with - only insofar as our overlords use such ideas to batter normal life.

In short, you should thus know to avoid the way of the last man, the herd-man - the one who seeks comfort by plunging himself into arbitrary online activism and indignation, and never really lives.

I, for one, am appalled by the complete lack of care and caution paid by virtually everybody to the coverage we are receiving of Russia.

After years of covid alarmism and pseudoscience, why on earth would you allow the same digital overlords access to your emotion and loyalties when it comes to their depiction of conflict in a land so complex and distant you can never truly hope to understand it?

You should know by now that covid was never really understood by anybody. Countries that are most vaccinated and masked do not have better outcomes. The science which showed masking to be useless was discarded in order to create a visual negation of your face. As I stated at the beginning, we have records of polar explorers, isolated for months from the world, contracting coronaviruses.

How can you not apply the same scepticism to this righteous indignation you suddenly are urged to feel toward Putin?

Have you not considered that Putin’s enemies were the same people responsible for millions of deaths in the Middle East, and that NATO is not some benevolent force?

Have you considered that the US would absolutely never tolerate a Mexico or Canada asking to join a military alliance with China or Russia targeted against itself and hoping for weapons of mass destruction to be installed in its borders?

Sovereignty is a myth, an idealistic fiction. Perhaps a world in which small states could freely choose their security arrangements without concern for the opinion of neighbouring powers would be desirable, but that idealism only leads to conflict. Is Ukraine better off for their great challenge to their historical rulers?

The world is in fact governed by Great Powers. NATO is an American tool, not some coalition of independent countries. Membership of NATO was granted to Eastern European states not out of concern for their security, but as a reward for their joining the Iraqi invasion, and as the means of selling more weapons systems to more governments.

Ukraine is not an independent country. They are a regime propped up by the US. The US funded their 2014 coup, which set aside a convincing election victory for their previously Russian-allied government. US diplomats, the same ones who poured money into Syrian Al Qaeda groups, chose the cabinet. The finance minister was an American only granted Ukrainian citizenship days before taking office.

Zelensky is a candidate whose policies include legalization of prostitution, gambling, abortion on demand, and the banning of the Russian language in education - for Russian speakers. He is known for corruption, for shutting down media, for arresting political opponents, and for the assassination of journalists under his reign.

What we see is nothing but a wilderness of mirrors. Putin, Zelensky, Biden, democracy. These are not real for us. These are mirrors and memes, stories and scapegoats.

What most concerns me is our great fanatical project to find a villain, in this case Putin, ignores the extinction-level dangers of our nuclear age.

The great theorist of scapegoating was the French philosopher, René Girard. Girard believed that all societies organised themselves out of the chaos of primal rivalries and envy between ourselves by identifying convenient scapegoats which allowed us to form a group identity.

Girard believed that Christianity had exposed this basic sin by revealing an innocent scapegoat, a divine intervention into our self-righteousness in which God’s own flesh circumvents our satanic systems. The suffering Christ calls us to is therefore not some kind of masochism, but the necessary rejection we must at some point face when we do not participate in the basic scapegoating structure of our world, when, like many US soldiers in Iraq, we begin to question whether we may not in fact not be the heroes of the planet.

Girard also believed that the radical secularisation of the West would unleash a new nuclear age of scapegoating without any restraint, and in this way we would be forced to reassess Christianity as something new, as revelation and not simply as tradition passed down over time.

We see this tribal scapegoating escalation in cancel culture, in white privilege theory, in masking and vaccine wars, and now in Putin. Putin’s ‘body count’ is negligible in any historical reckoning. Yet now he is literally Hitler. Even Hitler was no Genghis Khan; he was in fact not even Josef Stalin or Chairman Mao!

The trouble is now the secular west is scapegoating an intensely patriotic leader and nation who has nuclear weapons. Just like any nuclear power, they will use nuclear arms and risk global destruction rather than accept the possible destruction of their nation.

Just as we were wiling to destroy freedom to save ourselves from covid, our global media monolith is goading us to risk destruction in order to ‘save’ Western Ukraine for our fake democratic ideals.

Do not allow these ideological demons to possess your mind.

Live your own life. Unmask yourself. And if the Apocalypse is near, keep the faith and persevere to the end.