The Price We’re Paying
Every delusion is a poison. There are, therefore, no harmless delusions
Schopenhauer
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail
Abraham Maslow
We’re nearly at the end. Just two points remain.
First, I would like to take a look at the depth of the Materialist morass we are currently mired in; and then how we came to get there.
After that, I’d like to finish the book with a few cheery predictions, because I am optimistic about our future.
But first…
What do you think of the proposition that the cult of Materialism has caused more death and misery, and more harm to the planet than all the natural disasters like famine, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes, put together, over the last five thousand years; and all in the space of two or three centuries? Outrageous?
Let’s begin with politics. Materialism first really appeared as a political force with the French Revolution, when ‘Reason’ officially supplanted ‘Superstition’. ‘Reason’ or ‘Rationalism’ actually meant for many people ‘anti-Churchism’, which pretty soon transmuted into ‘Materialism’. The first of many lexical hi-jacks.
§ All subconscious, of course. No conspiracy.
The Jacobins carried out the first mass murder in the name of atheism, killing 170,000 men women and children in western France alone, often systematically drowning them in naked masses in specially constructed boats, sunk in the Loire. Some put the figure at 450,000.
Sixty years later, Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which attempted to fit history into predictable boxes according solely to societies’ economic progress. This programme was held to be ‘scientific’ and was also famously atheistic, as in ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’. (Nash the game theorist and Marx the economist shared the left-brain obsession with neat tabulation.)
§ Marx was a great fan of Darwin, whom he saw as an ally: ‘Although (On the Origin of Species) is developed in the crude English style, this is a book which contains the basis of natural history for our views’. Darwin kept his distance, and his ‘crude English style’ remains more comprehensible than Marx ever was. I know this.
The European revolutions of 1848 saw some interest in Marxism, but it was the Russian Bolsheviks who developed and distorted it into a battle tank for class warfare, backed up by terror, torture, slavery and genocide. ‘You have nothing to lose but your chains’, Marx had claimed. Stalin disagreed, murdering tens of millions in the name of ‘progress’, and shackling the rest. He even made classes in ‘Darwinism’ (as in the perverse version of ‘survival of the most brutal’) compulsory for his victims.
§ Stalin was once returned as Communist Party delegate for Moscow with 115% of the popular vote. ‘Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.’ Stalin. Compare with ‘Vote early and vote often.’ Al Capone.
The flame was carried on by Chairman Mao who made Stalin look like Willy Wonka, killing an estimated fifty to eighty million of his own people, again in the name of ‘progress’, and all under the banner of Materialist/atheist certainty. Then there was Pol Pot, who killed you if you wore spectacles. In a purposeless universe, human life loses all value.
§ You might argue that Religion has caused a lot of bloody wars and you would be quite correct. But Religion has not indulged in the casual mass murder of its own citizens/members, and on this sort of scale. Even the medieval witch hunts and Inquisitions accounted for ‘only’ a few tens of thousands of killings. Not worth Mao getting out of bed for. (In fact, the executions carried out by Inquisitions were relatively fewer than those carried out via other processes of law. Brutal days.)
The Russian revolution occurred during the First World War, itself brought about by a general Materialist-based policy of expansionism and Empire. The war led to some 35,000,000 deaths.
§ ‘Materialist’ here does not mean a deliberate atheistic policy. It means a non-Idealist policy: ie, taking no account of the genuine (Idealist) roots of religion. Lip-service was paid of course. God famously held up the trousers of German troops, Gott Mit Uns being inscribed on the belt buckles of the men who released the poison gas.
Then we had Hitler’s eugenics programme which began by ‘mercy killing’ some 200,000 ‘defectives’, and forcibly sterilising more than 400,000 more. This process of ‘social darwinism’ was based upon the Materialist misreading, deliberate or otherwise, of Darwin’s idea of relentless competition in Nature, and the survival of the ‘fittest’.
But before we get too self-righteous about Hitler, we should remember that eugenics was a hot topic in Europe and the USA and was taken seriously by respectable people. Forty thousand forcible sterilisations were carried out in the USA, for example.
§ Devotees included Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, and four once and future American presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson and Hoover. Also Linus Pauling, the eventual double Nobel Prize winner, and John Maynard Keynes, the economist. And Winston Churchill: ‘The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life’ (1899). He went on to draft the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, which defined four grades of ‘Mental Defective’ who could be confined for life. US eugenicists also wanted to restrict immigration from nations with ‘inferior’ stock, such as Italy, Greece, and countries of Eastern Europe, and wanted to sterilise insane, retarded, and epileptic people.
An Idealist society could never sanction eugenics. And even Religions (as the only large, if flawed, Idealist organisations we have so far experienced) have always been to the fore in setting up hospitals, schools, orphanages and clinics, not euthanasian ovens and fertiliser factories.
Eugenics is the natural child of Materialism: there is no purpose to the universe, thus there can be no purpose to life, and no definitive moral code. We know we must fight to survive. Thus you, who are a cripple, are an economic drain on me and my sort who are the true breed. You might as well be ‘dealt with’, tidily, as a weed.
§ The word ‘eugenics’ was coined by Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, in 1883 and was based in part on Darwin’s own work, adopting the phrase ‘the struggle for existence’. Darwin, however, says he meant it in ‘a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another’. Darwin adopted Herbert Spencer’s phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in the same sense, to mean ‘most suited to the environment’, and not ‘most brutal’. This did not stop tub-thumpers like Hitler, and some of the notables above from misinterpreting his ideas and words to support a policy of genetic cleansing. Hitler and Mussolini made repeated references to Darwin in their paranoid rants. Darwin did not favour eugenics, on the grounds that it would endanger the instinct of sympathy, ‘the noblest part of our nature’. He was thus not a ‘social darwinist’; and he would certainly not be a neo-darwinist either.
Backed up by the ‘science’ of eugenics, Hitler felt free to murder as many ‘subhumans’ as possible; notably Jews, but also homosexuals, gypsies, socialists, communists, trade unionists, Freemasons, Christians, and, on a colossal scale, Slavs. Including the systematic killing of foreigners, reprisals, slave labour, etc, the Nazis murdered some 20,000,000 people, not counting those killed in battles. See http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE3.HTM )
All scientifically defensible in Hitler’s eyes, and partially so in the eyes of many in the Western world. Churchill and co would not have descended into industrialised barbarism, but the common mind-set was there in the background. I feel sorry for people who grew up in the 1930’s, when the social options were polarized between the eugenicist Right, and the Materialist Left who turned out to be equally barbarous. Apparently Stalin’s final total for murder comes out at some 60,000,000, so he did give Mao a run for his money after all.
These numbers are all approximate, probably confused to some degree, and probably underestimated. Precise figures are hard to agree upon. But the point is made: Materialism, in its many guises, means that systematic murder becomes acceptable to many people.
I think you really could make a case for Materialism having caused more human death and misery via war and eugenics-based terror, than all the earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis etc since Man’s first appearance.
But Materialist-inspired misery comes from many quarters, not just from megalomania…
***
In the early twentieth century Behaviorism was just getting into gear. Pavlov experimented with dogs, showing how they could be programmed into ‘conditioned reflexes’ by associating food with the ringing of a bell. Eventually they would salivate just to the sound of the bell. As a Materialist he thought, and his many admirers agreed, that Man was similarly just a box of mechanical causes-and-effects (stimuli and responses). Thus, the cause of any mental problem must lie within the physical material of the machine. People were thus completely plastic and trainable: an ideal philosophy for social engineers like the Soviets.
As ‘science’ gradually shifted in meaning from ‘the systematic search for understanding’ to becoming synonymous with ‘Materialism’, more overtly Materialist principles emerged. For example, the American, John B Watson, wrote in his influential book ‘Behaviorism’ (1924)
‘Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept. The behaviorist … holds … that belief in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic.’
Frighteningly stupid stuff, I would say.. and one can’t help wondering how the unconscious (or, to be fair, ‘non-conscious’) Mr Watson ever realised what he was talking about, or whether he existed at all. And why did nobody else seem to spot the crass absurdity of it? Science became a big fan of Behaviorism, which I find pretty creepy and a caution to us all. It would seem that the triumph of shaking off centuries of Church oppression had produced a sort of blinkered euphoria that was proof against even common sense. ‘Consciousness (equates with) superstition’?
§ Watson later found his natural home in the world of advertising, the industry which underpins pointless consumerism, and which owes its raison d’être to Materialism and most of its techniques of manipulation and persuasion to Behaviorism.
But this nonsense was very widely (and to my mind alarmingly) accepted in the Scientific world, and this respectability legitimised the ‘scientific’ butchery of the C20 tyrants. Blame Materialism, and its adherents, like the scientist Julian Huxley, whose view of ‘defectives’ was: ‘It would have been better for them and the community as a whole if they had never been born’.
Who is to define ‘defective’? The floodgates were opening…
Materialism → Eugenics → Auschwitz
All the horrors of the industrial revolution, as documented by Engels, Mayhew, Dickens etc, can’t be placed at the feet of Materialism, but I think the abandonment of human values in favour of profit certainly can be. Hence the exploitation of the workers by materialist-capitalists who went to Church on Sunday, but who clearly had no Christian charity about them,
§ These are the men who ‘prayed on their knees on a Sunday and on their neighbours for the rest of the week’.
and the pollution and disregard for the single world ecology that makes our existence possible. This process continues to develop exponentially, with no sign of stopping, supported by the unspoken creed of Materialism, which all ‘growth economics’-driven governments support.
A dog that messes on its own doorstep is quickly corrected. Humanity will be corrected too, if it doesn’t wise up very soon. The irony is that everyone knows this, and also knows that endless consumerism is a stupid idea.. but won’t consider reining it in, so wedded to ‘infinite growth’ and ‘more and more stuff’ have we become, as we have completely replaced Idealist values with Materialist no-values. We are drugged and stupefied by our Materialist god to the point where we refuse to wake up from the nightmare of our own making, and carry on despoiling the planet as if theory and practice, never mind Cause and Effect, have nothing in common. ‘Infinite growth’ on a ‘finite planet’? We would already need three more comparable planets to plunder if everyone on Earth were to live at the current American standard of wastefulness.
An Idealist society could never carry out such an absurd act of self-destruction, as it would understand the rational need for ‘morality’ and mutual support, and the power of Cause and Effect, as mediated by the Law of Karma. There would be hope.
Under Materialism there can be no hope of any hope. For hope, you need purpose. For a Materialist there can be no purpose… so grab the ‘stuff’ while you can. Chop down that last tree. I will pay you for it with the last fish in the ocean.
I keep wondering about the harm done by Materialistic Freudian analysis. No doubt some good has come of it some of the time, but if it’s based on a duff premiss…? I wonder how many suicides and how many decades of misery were actually caused by treatment that could not empathise? I’m also concerned that dreamers of ugly dreams have been assured that all the ugliness was ‘wish-fulfilment’ when the Yogic/Esoteric Understanding is that alarming dreams are symbolic reminders of ugly karmic debts due for settlement: quite the opposite of ‘wish-fulfilment’.
And how many schizophrenics and psychotics have been left in their confusion because the Materialist ‘philosophy’ of the day will not countenance the idea that maybe these unfortunates are obsessed or possessed, despite the work of Dr Wickland being available for all to study? I would guess at hundreds of thousands of people.
And how many suicides and addictions have been caused by being brought up in the misery of a society that has no hope, as there is no hope? How many people have been traumatised by being contradicted when they reported hearing voices, or seeing visions? Or worse, been locked away and Prozacked into a stupor? How many people presenting at surgeries and clinics are in a state of ‘panomie’?
§ Sorry.. another new word. I’ve coined ‘panomie’ as a composite of ‘pan-‘ (everything) and ‘anomie’ (a sense of ‘rulelessness’ or lack of belonging or purpose). ‘Panomie’ means ‘a sense of detachment from values that people cannot formulate well enough to reject and hence move on from’. In other words, the feeling of nihilistic bewilderment brought about by decades of Materialist conditioning. Global suicides have increased by 60% in the last 50 years. Suicide is highest cause of death in UK males 15-50 in 2019.
The consultant at Guy’s Hospital (see Chapter 26) was in no doubt that the number is high.
On a more immediate level, why do so many young people choose oblivion via ‘designer’ drugs or loss-leader alcohol? I’ve seen students who are already in debt being interviewed on television, and each of them spends more on alcohol in one night than my family spends on groceries for the week. It’s not about money; it’s about anguish. The ‘war’ against drugs will not be won until we face the fact that people abuse drugs because they are unhappy, and seek oblivion because they can’t face their unhappiness.
Why unhappy? You can guess the answer I am going to suggest, based upon the evidence in this book: it’s because idealistic young people (along with most of the rest of us) have no purpose in their life. Materialism has washed it all away. ‘Education’ has offered them only tick-box exams to feed them into the wage-slave system, with trashy consumerism as the compensation for a pointless job, assuming they can even get one; all backed up by economists who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. A prospective life of purpose has been replaced by an existential void.
The media are almost all capitalist ventures, whose sole purpose is to make as much money as possible. They will always support any Materialist/ consumerist stance. Magazines, the fashion/pop/sex industry, television programmes… all advertise air-brushed Materialist solutions to what are actually profound spiritual problems, but the kids don’t realise this, or that there may be a real solution, as offered by the implications of DarwinPlus. They don’t realise because society is so overwhelmed by Materialism that it doesn’t even know there is a question to be asked. Science has said ‘No’. And Science knows best. Mine’s a double. And another one.
To alcoholism and addiction we can add the misery of the bulimic and the bloated: why bother taking care of yourself when there’s no point to taking care? Mine’s a double superwhopper.
Some people will think this is all a gross exaggeration. But if society adopted the Understanding that D+ offers would we have as many suicides, addictions, clinical depressions, and the millions of lives lived in a panomic state of ‘quiet desperation’ as someone once put it?’ If we were to see that Materialism is simply wrong, and that the alternative is NOT Churchy waffle but a comprehensible and rational philosophy of kindness.. then surely many people would then find a point to their lives.
Economics and Politics
My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference
Harry S Truman
Germany’s descent into madness began when Bismarck said, less than a decade after Origins came out, that ‘The weak were made to be devoured by the strong’. Hitler agreed, adding ‘darwinian’ eugenics to support his Master Race nonsense. He then developed the cult of personality (‘The world is there for the man who takes it’) to the point that his right-hand man, Martin Bormann, once said that ‘National Socialism is what the Fuehrer wills it to be’. All ethical light had been expunged as the descent into moral anarchy arrived at autocratic Realpolitik: brute force, claiming to be ‘scientific’, but really just Materialism reduced to its essence.
§ Marx, meanwhile, preached a ‘scientific’ inevitability in human history, based upon an economist/atheist misinterpretation of poor old Darwin.
‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.’ Friedrich Engels
Stalin and Hitler were closer to each other than either thought in their shared distortions of a great man’s big idea.
Apart from giving support to egotistical maniacs, the universally accepted creed of Materialism means that politicians no longer have a sense of vision. They have become Financial Managers, as politics is seen almost entirely in terms of economics, which means ‘stuff’. ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Money is important, but so far only Bhutan seems to have twigged that what people actually want is not more stuff but more happiness.
§ Bhutan’s government operates according not to the usual consumerist GDP (Gross Domestic Product) index, but to the GNH (Gross National Happiness) index. GNH requires sustainable development, preservation of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and the establishment of good governance. Bhutan is a small Buddhist country, but the idea of the GNH index could transfer to any other country, if the will was there, rather than the cynical laughter any mention of it will currently evoke in any country with a Materialist-based economy.
You might say it’s not the government’s job to supply happiness, to which the obvious retort is ‘Who says so?’ And ‘Who says it’s the government’s job to supply more stuff?’
§ A BBC poll recently found that 80% of the UK population agree with the statement that ‘A government’s prime objective should be to achieve the greatest happiness of the people, not the greatest wealth’. Is anybody listening?
We are so soaked in Materialist ‘stuffism’ that we see ‘more ‘stuff’ as the only solution to all social ills, ignoring the fact that it is stuffism which is supporting or even causing these ills by encouraging dissatisfaction with perfectly good things, thus encouraging greed, envy, waste, insecurity and all the other negativities that consumerism generates. Ever more moneystuff does not mean more happiness; just cheaper booze and cheeseburgers, more landfill sites, the destruction of more millions of hectares of habitat, ever-increasing pollution of the land, the sea and the air we breathe, and more misery. The average Briton has never been so rich, so fat, or so unhappy, according to many surveys.
It has been calculated that wealth brings happiness up to a certain point, after which it brings problems and unhappiness. The current example given is the wealth level of Portugal. Enough is enough, and good. More is too much, and bad, especially when unchecked consumerism (ie a deliberate programme of waste) is promoted by a massive advertising industry. Once we had only worn-out wellingtons and broken crockery. Now we have disposable nappies, made of complex materials, many of which will not rot, ‘disposable’ cotton clothing (cheap in money but very expensive in ecological terms [a ‘disposable’ T-shirt requires 2,000 litres of clean water to make: over a dozen bath-tubs full] but far away, in China, so invisible), and are bombarded by advertising into the notion of disposable sofas, and by endless television make-over programmes, into the idea of whole kitchens and interiors being disposable fashion items. The whole world of consumer electronics exists on planned obsolescence, and creating a lust for the latest cyber-gimmick. And what happens to the old stuff? Junked, if it hasn’t already broken down. And ‘junked’ means pollution of land, sea and air via toxic landfill, poisonous run-off, and biologically-dangerous aerosols from incinerators.
We have been duped into thinking that buying new stuff will make us happy. But if it did, we wouldn’t keep needing to replace it, would we? People run up enormous debts on credit cards just to get the latest stuff, and have been so swept up in this gigantic con, that they seem to have lost the simple understanding that if you ain’t got it, you can’t spend it.
Why do they keep doing it? Because they are seeking happiness, the only way that our Materialist society allows them to be ‘happy’: by getting more stuff. It’s a drug, and ‘the system’ is the pusher. Mr Big, in the background, never seen or acknowledged, is Mr Materialism, who whispers over and over ‘More Stuff is What You Need’ so… ‘Just Buy It’ and ‘Now Buy It Again.’ And nobody knows of any other way to ‘happiness’.
Politics has swallowed the Materialist/Behaviorist nonsense of John Nash (ie, that people are motivated only by selfishness and material reward) so deeply that I’ve seen it seriously suggested that people should be paid for walking their children to school, as opposed to driving them in their 4×4’s which clog up the roads and poison the air. Nobody is screaming from the rooftops how demeaning this is, and how it is actually an assault upon personal responsibility, as it is the kindness and consideration for others which holds a society together.
We see Nashness at its nashtiest in the bonus culture that is ripping the element of service or duty and even human dignity out of society. It is demoralising us all.
§ Mr Nash developed paranoid schizophrenia as a student, and later thought he was receiving messages from outer space. Might this have coloured his thoughts? One wonders why anyone other than psychopaths and economists ever took his ideas seriously by applying them to social policy. I’m thinking of Thatcher and Reagan here.
The great tragedy is that the Nash approach has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Offer people money to walk their kids and they’ll take it. Why not? Everyone else is grabbing everything they can (bankers come to mind) so why not me? After all, more money means success, status, and happiness, doesn’t it? Everyone says so…
It’s a tragedy on an appalling scale. The old adage of ‘When in a hole, stop digging’ cannot possibly apply because nobody even realises we are in a hole: it’s so big. It’s the void that all those falsely-Prozacked patients and millions of other desperate and depressed panomics are constantly staring into: the miserable void of hopeless Materialism.
Education
In 1997 New Labour came to power amidst huge sighs of relief after the squandering of the public silver by Thatcher and co, and the depressing credo of ‘Greed is Good’.
§ And that famous social darwinist phrase ‘There is no such thing as society’. I wonder who the Grand Lady thought paid her wages?
But all we got was more of the same, all based upon the sterile theory that personal gain is Man’s only motivation, and competition is the means to encourage this. Hence the stealthy privatising of the health and education systems and the postal service. ‘Competition is the Key!’ Drive up Standards by Imposing Checklist Targets! Turn Health from a care system into a massive labyrinth of expensive and competing bureaucratic empires where ticking boxes matters more than putting food within reach of patients or washing bacteria off your hands. Impose more and more pointless exams and targets onto schools until good staff crack up, and you can’t get applicants for headmasterships because nobody became a teacher in order to fill in directives and forms for six hours a day.
Let’s pit school against school, and boost this one and close that one; let’s make this one a specialist in science and that one a sink. Then let’s tell people that thanks to introducing ever more competition they now have more of the magic Materialist/consumerist/stuffist mantra: CHOICE!
And never mind the fact that for most people the choice offered is of the same order as between dining at the Ritz and sleeping on a park bench. We have forgotten that our real choice is between accepting this gigantic Materialist confidence trick of pseudo-choice, and genuinely choosing something healthier and more rational.
Even the word ‘choice’ has been hi-jacked by Materialism.
Why won’t politicians realise that what people want is not more counterfeit choice, but simple quality? And above all, what people want is to be happy.
§ A Stanford professor whose name eludes me says: ‘Choice is not an unalloyed good. Choice can also produce a numbing uncertainty, depression and selfishness.’
This of course would mean a radical re-think of what government is all about, and nobody wants to bite that particular bullet, except in Bhutan.
The word ‘education’ derives from the Latin ‘educere’, and means ‘to lead out (something which is already within)’. It is concerned with developing a child’s mind, via logic, reason, and observation and all those other good things, like clear judgement and self-confidence, to enable him to eventually make use of his own inner-tuition and to thus learn how to gradually become wise.
But over the centuries, and particularly over the recent decades in the UK, it has been debased to the point where, as a BBC news reporter recently put it, ‘a degree is a passport to higher earnings’, meaning… ‘access to more stuff’. Scan the airwaves and print media, and you will never see the words ‘education’ and ‘wisdom’ in the same item. The great con marches on…
§ But with nobody to blame, of course. It’s the near-global mind-set that is the con, not any person or group, although lying advertisers do know perfectly well that they are in the brainwashing business. Their karma awaits them.
Meanwhile, Materialism has been so profoundly absorbed that I have been unable to find any mention of it being discussed or evaluated in a science syllabus at GCSE, ‘A’ level, or degree level. It is simply absorbed en route as a Truth. Thus students at all levels are actually being indoctrinated in irrational Materialism without anybody, staff or students, realising. And the dogma that does not state its name is consistently confused with ‘reason’, ‘rationalism’, ‘Darwinism’, and even ‘science’ itself.
This is very serious stuff, and can only lead to ever greater confusion and despair in society.
What are we teaching the young? They deserve better. So do we all.
Sadly, there’s more……
More Materialist Invasions
The Arts
The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.
Jawaharlal Nehru
I think these two pictures sum up the influence of Materialism on the arts. Both are concerned with death. One profoundly moving. One vapid. One a work of brilliant craftsmanship. One involving sticking on sequins. One genuine. One cynical. One dignified. One vulgar. One priceless. One worth fifty million pounds. One Idealist. One Materialist.
Interesting ideas and logic? Please share them with someone else!’