Civilisation begins at home

by John Ward

Today’s post is seminal for me. As it unfolds, you will – I’m sure – understand. It’s about realising how we got to these horribly abnormal times, and grasping that the process of getting to here didn’t simply consist of 6.99 billion very nice, balanced and ethical people being hoodwinked into oppression by no more than fifty to one hundred thousand narcissistic psychopaths.

We’ve arrived at the dystopian dawn of 2022 because of two very important behaviours, and one overwhelming attitude.
The first behaviour is compliance, and the second one is everyday collaboration with the ethico-moral change it produces as “normal”.

So for example, a large Wall Street banking concern engages in speculation for its own profit at the expense of the known needs of the client base. It lies about having done that, the authorities at last nail them in Court. There is a plea bargain. The bank refuses to admit guilt, but pays a fine….to use the vernacular, “Sets a sum aside”. There is outrage, but the lawyers say, “Whatever…..count your losses and move on”. Within two years, indulging in this activity is accepted as a basic tenet of employee training – but be sure you don’t get caught.”

Four years on, there’s a déjà vu scandal, and ordinary people are discussing it. Plenty of these people, however, say in a “smart” or “realistic” tone of voice, “What do you expect? They’re bankers.” As time goes on, the B word changes to embrace lawyers, journalists, police, politicians, priests, bureaucrats, doctors, teachers footballers et al ad infinitum and ultimately, nauseam.

Here we segue fairly smoothly into how more and more anti-social behaviours become accepted, and a change of attitude occurs which might best be summed up as “Yeh….whatever”. We live today in a ‘Whatever Culture’ of largely selfish apathy. Since the Covid to Reset via mRNA contrick, about 12 per cent of us have finally said ‘thus far, and no further’.

Significantly, however, the increasing reaction of many such individuals has been to make preparations for flight. I freely admit to being one of them, so long as that doesn’t mean “run and hide”. The two alternatives (as I posted a week ago) are ‘flight and regroup’ and ‘stay and fight’. While I think the jury’s out – depending on where you live – as to which of those is the best strategy, I cannot help but smile at all those world-weary cynics who said “Whatever” in a bored tone for decades, and are now falling over their knickers to run and hide. To repeat my oft-employed view, “Cynicism is the new naivety”.

The Nasty Brigade – surveillance, banking, distribution, ideologues, media, hitech and Davos lackeys – have not stolen our liberties: we gave them away in return for a few beads and a quiet life. Worse still, we did nothing when – long before they had the awesome powers of today – our education systems were raped by pc-fascist liblefts determined to dump the goal of civically guided and open-minded citizen potential in favour of politicised ‘right answers and wrong answers’….summed up by Blairite goons as “settled science” – without question, the dissonant fortune-cookie illogic of all time.

Surveying as they do the evidence of the last thirty or more years, the Nasties have quite understandably concluded that We The People will keep on voting for a quiet life until the last honking Untermensch has been prodded into the abbatoir. We as “one” generation born somewhere between 1950 and 1985 have been faced with several trials of strength in the new century – all of them under the umbrella of financialised capitalism, legislative dependence upon monied globalism, the creeping power of corporatised bureaucracy, the universalisation of surveillance through hitech and neoconservative militarism – and flunked it at every turn.

From the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, the Fight against Terrorism and other “movies” along the way through to the 2008/9 banking crisis, Quantitative Easing, Greek Debt, Tory Austerity, Nurses’ salaries, Anti-Waspi fraud, Opposition meltdown, Brexit, the Jabberwocky Pharma Farce, Bidenist spending lunacy, constitutional deconstruction, mandatory mRNA and bloated stock valuations….all have been filed away under ‘Whatever” and “What do you expect?” Every last cause has been lost: I should know – I’ve been on the losing side too many times not to have noticed.


If you can bear with my tectonic self-flagellating ego for a few paragraphs, then fine….because this is where what and who John Ward Joe Blob The Slog is becomes relevant. Stick with it: there’s an important point to make that applies to everyone who’s got this far without wondering what it’s all leading up to.

I am a very over-sensitive person, prone to self-doubt, ill at ease with most men, too easily drawn to independent women, short of fuse if I think somebody intelligent is being daft, at times rash, impetuous and impulsive, obsessive in many ways, incurably contrarian, crap at “moving on”, ruthlessly cutting if lied to or manipulated, and not at all good at being alone.

Without all those features, however, I wouldn’t be able to utilise an unfailing bollocks monitor, write persuasively and engage people, be good value at the supper table, defend my independence, scare scam-artists into crawling back under stones, build a good track record of knowing what’s coming, analyse the flaw in logic, stats or hardsell, draw on experience of social anthropology, put people at ease, be a good parent, help others and never tire of pointing out Royal nudity.

That’s it: classic Right/Left brain internal struggle, but a lot more success than failure. Whatever I am, it comes with the territory. As Frank Sinatra once sang, “You can’t have one without the other”.

For people who only have a superficial grasp of what I’m about, I am a very difficult person to get on with. However, with those who take the trouble to move beyond very shallow observation (“You’re a bit of a baby really, aren’t you?) I am the most loyal, kind and stimulating real friend they’ll ever have.

Sensitive and inspired left-brain instincts about people also produce a trigger-happy right-brain reaction to unfair or insulting criticism. That’s me. I’m far more stable now than I was thirty years ago, but I’m not going to change or suppress that which is a gift for a quiet life.

Thus, over the last nine years since the corporatist drive moved up two gears, I have lost – hankies at the ready, folks – almost exactly 95 per cent of my “friends”, and a wife. I don’t like that situation, because I am garrulous and social by nature and I remain convinced that ‘alone’ hermit-thinking is profoundly unhealthy. But what I’m not prepared to do is stumble about under the weight of undeserved blame.

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OK, self-analysis over. The point is this: unless there are enough difficult people in a culture, that culture will degrade and civilisation will collapse.


Difficult citizens refuse to accept new values merely because the majority can longer live up to the old ones. Obsessives produce high levels of service, and trains that run on time. Blunt people don’t dilute truth with the deceptively warming balm of pc – letters which mean, if we’re being honest, politely craven as much as politically correct. And aggressively suspicious individuals are healthy if only in that they don’t trust the State.

I’m indebted to Slog threader Martin for finding a George Carlin riff which sums up that last personality feature – and explains why I still call Carlin The Last Great American:

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that’ve long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them.”

The prescience of Carlin’s 2004 remarks (and where things were going) is truly astonishing.

Robert Kennedy Jr is a difficult man who has alienated many in his family. But the Nasties fear him.

Now before anyone jumps onto the bandwagon of “Well there you are, see – he’s comparing himself to Carlin and Kennedy” that is precisely what I am not doing. We all play to our strengths – RFK in particular is a hero purely because he speaks publicly despite a tragic voice-box condition.

I suffer from stage fright, I’m nearly 74 years old, I have a ruptured shoulder and my feet are buggered as a result of jumping out of a house fire fifty years ago. (Calling me “frail” on that basis is a cheap shot)

Almost every day of the week, I do something that gets in the way of Macronism. There are only four of them, but they all involve non-compliance with creeping surveillance and stealth taxes….and no, I’m obviously not going to reveal what they are.

Overall, the bottom line is really this: on a macro basis, I refuse to run and hide; and on a micro basis, I will make life uncomfortable for any person who tries to mislead or use me.

In the first instance, there is nowhere to hide in the end. In the second instance, there is no revenge motive: it’s merely that I’m unwilling to be “philosophical” and move on. My inclination is always to keep on persuading those high or low that they can’t behave badly and keep on getting away with it.

You see, the trouble with moving on is that you wind up in 2022.

More broadly, I think the underlying point (for me anyway) is for those of good heart to leave this perhaps odd piece with a determination to stick with an unbending rule: don’t comply, complain.

With most people, there is always a Mr Grumpy and a Mr Giggly side by side in there, jockeying for position. What some State gargoyles try to lay on others as an “explanation” to convince us that they’re really virtuous and deserving of free Wimbledon tickets forever is so dumb that laughter is both the best release for the recipient, and the most effective way to slice the perpetrator in public. When private individuals do it, I retain my long held view that every culture is no more or less than the sum of private citizens that make up the whole. With me, they will never get off lightly and I will never apologise for my anger. Of course they are damaged themselves, but we all have traumas from our past. How we do or don’t deal with them is, for me, the ultimate test of character. Evil triumphs in the absence of character.


Postscript

Sixty four years ago today, eight young players of Manchester United were killed in a plane crash at Munich Airport, returning from their European Cup tie at Red Star Belgrade. With more understanding from League officials – and more honesty from German safety bureaucrats – their deaths could have been averted. This is the last line-up.

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