Forgiveness? Forget it.

Paolo Veronese - Triumph of virtue over vice, ca 1555

No amnesty for crimes against humanity.

Suddenly: calls for forgiveness of Corona crimes out of nowhere. Newsletters, anti-social media, and podcasts are discussing an article in The Atlantic magazine written by a certain Emily Oster. It’s titled “Let’s declare a pandemic amnesty. We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid.”

There are three things I will not do: first, read the article; second, do a background search on the author; third, write the blank check requested.

I will not read the piece because the headline already puts a lie to it, namely that there was a lack of reliable information on the so-called pandemic. But in fact, since the beginning of March 2020, good arguments have been presented to warn of a false alarm. For three years, Corona dissidents have tirelessly pointed out that every single aspect of this campaign bears signs of deliberate (!) deception and is causing harm. But the author uses the lie of innocent ignorance to justify her demand for amnesty for her anti-life, anti-human behavior.

Who the author is does not interest me, because by using the little word “we” she reveals herself to be a member of the fascistoid cult that planned and committed what is historically probably the most extensive crime against humanity, an unprecedented violation of natural law, causing in many respects irreparable damage – billionfold. She will have somehow earned her prominent position as the mouthpiece of the supposedly contrite, just like all the other “experts,” “authorities,” self-appointed guardians of public health, and so on who seek to evade responsibility through a blanket pardon.

No, I exclude myself from this “we” of hers emphatically. I have addressed the Corona crimes from the beginning of March 2020, have categorically refused any participation in the measures and have received in return some of what you supposed in-the-dark folks “did and said”: censorship in the name of science, torture in the name of health, hate speech in the name of truth, division in the name of solidarity, disenfranchisement in the name of the people.

No, I don’t “need to” do anything at all. Perhaps I will forgive one fellow or the other, but this is on condition that the person has understood the nature of their wrongdoing, expresses this in a credible way – for example, by stepping down from positions of power, by abandoning advantages gained or by making gestures of reparation – and, above all, displays a changed conduct. Anything else would be unreasonable.

No, there is no right to forgiveness; there is certainly no right to forgetting. Forgiveness is an attitude in which the aggrieved party considers their moral claims against the wrongdoer to be settled, after they believe justice has been served. Until then, there is no “Too bad, let’s forget it,” and never a conciliatory “In your place, I might have acted the same way.”

No, I wouldn’t have.
I didn’t.

I stood by the truth and I was ready to pay any price for it. Because I know your reasoning; it is false from beginning to end; there is absolutely no doubt about it after careful consideration. Despite your initial panic, this should also have been clear to you after only a few weeks. But for three years you thought you could carry the abuses continuously to new extremes. You have taken out your mental unsteadiness and your sadism on children, old people and on critics, who were exposed to your aggression without protection. You are lying to yourselves if you believe that you can simply wipe away the mess you have caused with a cheap appeal to people’s need for harmony – people who you helped wearing down through propaganda, silencing, coercion and threats to their livelihood.

Have you ever asked yourselves what the difference between people like us alleged covidiots and people like you? Are we just troublemakers who accidentally got their Cassandra calls right? Or is it possible that we were spot-on with our warnings because there was a way to know wrong from right – which we insisted on walking – while you were desperately trying to silence us so you wouldn’t have to hear it? What would happen if you too rejected the claims of those supposedly “in power,” the “authorities,” the “experts,” and the “quality media”? Do you still believe in Osama and the nineteen box cutters? In weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? In concentration camps in Kosovo? In Putin the Terrible?

Why are the main criminals still on the loose? Why are they still in office or in position? Why are you still listening to their tall tales? Why are you still playing by their rules? How credible do you think we consider your conversion, as long as BooTube, FakeBook and InstaCensor continue to define the admissible corridor of opinion while totalitarian laws are still in place?

No, I don’t believe your sudden awakening, I don’t believe in your insight. You did not slip up for three years, you did it on purpose. You would do it again, anytime, because you still believe in the legitimacy of authorities to whom you ultimately subordinate yourselves. You lash out at every scapegoat they point their finger at: the communist, the Muslim, the ‘social parasite’, the Trump voter, the ‘anti-vaxxer’. You learned nothing from history, neither the history told in books, nor the history you helped to shape. You just rage on unabated. For a change, it’s the Russians’ turn to take your beating. Do you see my problem? Probably not. Forgiveness is not an option when the issue in question is far from settled.

To this day, I have not come across anyone who has apologized for their behavior over the past few years. I have also seen no report in your media, which specifies the particular misdeeds, which the aggrieved “need to” forgive now – because you do not understand what went wrong! You would have to be able to look at your total failure as a feeling, thinking human being, yet I do not have the impression that you are capable of it or even just willing. And as long as it stays that way, I can’t trust you, I can’t believe you, and for the time being I can’t forgive you. If that means that society–what is left of it – will come apart, then so be it. I want nothing to do with you and your corrupt institutions until you awaken from your fantasies of total control. Stay away from me with your paranoia.
And if you think that your crime will be forgotten with time, then you are waiting in vain.

[Title image: Triumph of Virtue over Vice, by Paolo Veronese]

Video: Larken Rose – Never Forget! (March 2022)

Truth or the Abyss

The Devil whispers to the Antichrist; detail from Sermons and Deeds of the Antichrist, Luca Signorelli, 1501, Orvieto Cathedral

Exploring the Problem of Evil

Part 4/4 of the Auroville & Natural Law series

Obvious lies turned into truth, malpractice purported as state-of-the-art technique, all-encompassing injustice, or the normalization of collective insanity during the past couple of years, they leave many of us speechless. What the hell is it, that plagues us in these times? Isn’t it a bottomless …. evil? Our naive forefathers would have used that word without the slightest hesitation but us 21st-century internet-wisened know-it-all techno cracks, we have a problem with it. Why is that? Is it because it reminds us so much of religious superstition? Of dark fairytale forests logged out of existence long ago? It might be a mistake to deny the existence of Evil, I’ll argue, because although religious scriptures from around the world have a lot to say about the nature of evil the matter is not at all a religious one. It doesn’t require you to believe in any creed specifically, to align yourself with what is true and real about Good and Evil.

Today, on August 15th, 2022, India, and especially Auroville, is celebrating the 150th birthday of Sri Aurobindo. India’s cherished freedom fighter, philosopher and yogi, born by the name of Aurobindo Ghose, and his spiritual companion Mirra Alfassa back in the 1920s founded an ashram in the south Indian city of Pondicherry. Aurobindo developed his “Integral Yoga” philosophy there, a school of thought that teaches the integration of body, mind and spirit aspects of the human existence. He and Alfassa, which he called “the Mother”, were concerned that the convergence of systemic crises, which became pretty obvious after World War I, would lead to a catastrophic collapse of civilization in the mid-term. Aurobindo and Alfassa were neither the first nor the only ones to say so but in their time they were among the few who attributed this existential crisis of our culture to a problem with the mindset, a lack of consciousness, they said.

The ashram and from 1968 on Auroville as well were set up to prepare the human body and mind for taking in the Supramental, as they named it, the highest form of consciousness. The inhabitants of both the ashram and the city were to live a life in the practice of the Integral Yoga, to bring about this transformational goal and to give an example to people all over the world. Alfassa, the Mother, provided guidelines for the architectural setup of Auroville under the usual provisio that the specifics were to be worked out in the light of the most progressed knowledge. From December 2nd, 2021 on, staff appointed to leading positions in the Auroville Foundation by the central government in Delhi used those guidelines to dis-empower the residents, the very key element which ought to work out the conscious transformation. The alleged goal is the quickening-up of building “the City the Earth needs”. Were that true the Foundation bureaucrats would sacrifice the indispensable natural-law preconditions of the Integral Yoga, to build its architectural vessel with brute force.

From observing the Takeover crew’s behaviour it is safe to say that their purported reasons are just pretense. On every single occasion when the Foundation and their supporters took steps they played a foul game while shrouding their actions in pseudo-legal, pseudo-lawful, pseudo-moralistic and pseudo-Aurobindian pretexts. Had laws, morals or the scriptures anything to do with sincere, albeit a bit misguided intentions there would have been no need for ploys, lies, violations of rights and physical violence against those who disagree. Journalist Ashish Kothari, early-on, could rightfully state in one of his pieces,

“Bulldozers knocking down trees and threatening built-up structures at 1 am: such action can only come from a source that has no legitimacy to work during the day.”

What a stunningly clear insight. If only all of us had had it, the Foundation Office would have created much less confusion by means of misinformation and pseudo-lawful violent surprise strikes.

People ought to stay unabashed by those events. In order for us to prevail it takes focus on knowledge of objective Morality and unwavering dedication to the highest form of Truth one has access to. This is why my four-part series on Auroville & Natural Law explained at length 1) the basics of Natural Law, and briefly described how Auroville’s residents’ failure to live by that Law causes social suffering, and 2) some basics of Auroville’s founding principles. The failure of many residents to study and live by those principles deserves an in-depth discussion within the community. There is no question that, should we succeed in reverting the takeover, the very future of our township depends on our collective awakening. This won’t be for consumption by a public, though, which cannot stomach first principles even.

“But what this community, Auroville, is going through has implications that go well beyond the destruction of a few trees and structures, and well beyond even India. There are serious ramifications linked to global trends in cultural and economic authoritarianism.” – Ashish Kothari: Bulldozing a dream? Auroville’s importance as an experiment in alternative living, January 9th, 2022. meer.com

Worse than that. We will see that ramifications reach far beyond global authoritarianism even. “It’s Truth or the Abyss,” the Mother warned all of mankind fifty years ago. What she meant by ‘Truth’ has been described in the second article of this series. In short, it is one of the many terms for That-Which-Is, Ultimate Reality, Universal Consciousness, the Creative Force, the Divine Will, or, if you don’t shy away from a loaded term, God. In the above quote ‘Truth’ is shorthand for recognizing, surrendering to, and serving THAT – or else getting consumed by its antithesis. Similar to the widening disparity in wealth a disparity between the conscious and the unconscious, between the servitors of Truth and the servitors of the Abyss(another word for Hell) divides humanity. In the long run most of the middle ground will get consumed by either one side or the other. Staying ‘neutral’ equals complicity with Evil. Choosing to stay ignorant of the forces at play equals fostering Evil. Following rules without ethical discernment equals fighting for Evil. Sounds epic? Wait, there is more.

Revelations

When you ask people who have quit the System – meaning, they fell out of the shared reality of mainstream society – how their dropping-out happened they tell you the story about one distinct moment in their life when it dawned on them that they have lived a lie. Usually the catalyst for that first step in ‘awakening’, as some describe it, was the dissonance between the very tools by which the false reality was created, the media, and the undeniable truth which they themselves experienced. The eye-opening moment felt like a revelation, shocking, overwhelming, stunning, frightening… and liberating. Suddenly so many question marks disappear; suddenly you realize that consensus reality is just one grand illusion; suddenly the world starts to make sense. It is obvious now, the emperor has no clothes on. You cannot make it unseen. This is what crises can do for you: You go through tremendous pain and suffering that may feel like dying, and you come out, newborn, on the other end of it, grateful for the experience you got to live through. You hear such people speak thanks to 9/11, you hear them praise the Corona plandemic, and you hear Aurovilians acknowledging that the Takeover is a huge wake-up call, a chance for transforming our minds and habits and for transcending our condition.

Did you know another word for ‘revelation’ is ‘apocalypse’? Yes, indeed. apocalyptic times are historical moments which reveal the truth about something existential. An old worldview – along with the world it created – collapses, a new world becomes possible. Which way humankind will go depends on the choices we make collectively; whether it’s Truth or the Abyss. The pathways that lead to one or the other outcome may look quite similar; in fact, the line between the two is as thin and as sharp as a razor blade, almost invisible. This is no coincidence. For it lies in the interest of the Antagonist to stage himself as the Real McCoy: to install tyranny under the guise of freedom, to establish fascism while pretending to be anti-fascist, to realize Asuraville waving the banner of Auroville, or to open the gates of Hell for all the misguided believers who anticipate Heaven. The latter may perhaps serve as a metaphor for the choice between a world of suffering and a world of complete consciousness. Sri Aurobindo remarks,

“At every moment of the spiritual life until one has got fully into the higher light, one has to be on one’s guard and be able to distinguish spiritual truth from pseudo-spiritual imitations of it or substitutes for it set up by the mind and the vital desire. The power to distinguish between truths of the Divine and the lies of the Asura is a cardinal necessity for yoga.” – Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, Volume I, Section 4; all following quotes from Section 6.

evil fisherman (1902, pd)
evil fisherman (1902, pd)

The Asura

The word Asura mentioned throughout this article series is used in the sense of an antagonistic or evil principle which works against the movement towards ultimate Truth. In religious traditions of Indic origin it stands for a class of beings envisioned as chaos-creating demons, evil spirits and adversaries of the gods. According to the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo who has worked intensely on the problem of Evil, “These Asuras … resemble the devils of the Christian tradition and oppose the divine intention and the evolutionary purpose in the human being.”

When Asuric forces take over a human body or get born in human form, “the Asura has no soul, no psychic being which has to evolve to a higher state; he has only an ego and usually a very powerful ego; he has a mind, sometimes even a highly intellectualised mind; but the basis of his thinking and feeling is vital and not mental, at the service of his desire and not of truth.” An Asura’s desire is insatiable and therefore he or she effectively seeks “to rule the world”. For that purpose he or she appears in “forms often false and always incarnating falsehood, sometimes pseudo-divine.”

“Yes, some kinds of Asuras are very religious, very fanatical about their religion, very strict about rules of ethical conduct. Others of course are just the opposite. There are others who use spiritual ideas without believing in them to give them a perverted twist and delude the sadhak [spiritual seeker].”

The Anti-Christ

The problem of Evil haunts our species since forever, so every culture sought to find its origins, explain its workings, and accomplish its abolishment. Myths, fairy tales, paintings, sculptures, novels, poems and plays allegorize it, psychological, sociological and historical literatures rationalize it, modern cinema and crime fiction normalize it. But none of all these, today, does much to help discern and eliminate it. Quite frankly, modern science and culture add to the confusion and so become part of the conglomerate of dark forces our individual and collective lives have converged into over the Millennia.

Although human conscience can discover immoral actions quite easily, Evil has become a matter of extensive myth-making in the hands of theologians of organized religions. By their self-proclaimed two-fold authority, both as law-making rulers, and as experts on all things divine and anti-divine, they were able to turn a simple matter into a complex subject which ordinary people couldn’t and shouldn’t understand. The secularizing effect of the Enlightenment only added to widespread ignorance because it allowed for a plethora of definitions, concepts, even philosophies, of Evil to arise, including the view that it doesn’t exist – which, most remarkably, both materialist scientists and spiritualist New-Age gurus agree upon.

Evil takes many human forms, for instance the cowardly order-follower, the mindless bureaucrat, the selfish opportunist, the ignorant denier, the bloodthirsty murderer, or the type we are exploring in this article, the malicious deceiver.

Alongside the above-mentioned Asura, the Anti-Christ figure described in the New Testament constitutes another powerful allegory for the Deceiver. Christ stands for the path of true Morality and Self-realization, the Anti-Christ represents its immoral counterpart. After having denounced the scribes and Pharisees who have usurped the word of God, Jesus predicts the end of their corrupt rule. When the disciples want to know how one could recognize the impending end, he answers,

“Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet… Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.” (Matthew 24, KJB)

So the Anti-Christ is someone who takes the place of Christ while opposing Christ’s teachings. He is an antagonistic deceiver whose entrapments those on a truly Christian Path will recognize and avoid even as this implies sacrifice, while those who have preferences other than Truth will fall for the deception. In the name of a false morality they will hate, denounce, persecute or even kill the sincere disciples of the Path. But soon enough the Antagonist reveals his actual nature, and those who maintain ties with him forsake the Kingdom of Heaven.

Once again, we are not talking religion here. I am not a religious believer. Let’s take the New Testament, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita or Sri Aurobindo’s writings as culturally-coloured deep-spiritual descriptions of identical fundamental insights. We are also, at the same time, looking at archetypal workings of the psyche. Ancient religious scriptures reveal age-old knowledge on the human condition which modern science only begins to verify. To reject this knowledge indiscriminately from an atheist, anti-religious, materialist point of view marks the denier, himself, as a victim of the Deceiver.

“One of the artifices of Satan is, to induce men to believe that he does not exist.”

John Wilkinson, Quakerism Examined, (1836)

Evil’s disappearance from public awareness

The Anti-Christ is a biblical figure representing the forces of Evil in their most sneaky manifestation, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing harvesting the lambs. As such he was an avatar of Satan, the Lord of Hell, you could say. People were familiar with the Anti-Christ concept until the late 18th century when the Enlightenment philosophy and the revolutionary movements began to secularize European societies. Until then numerous political and religious figures such as the Roman Emperor, the Pope, the antipopes, or the Protestant reformists have been accused of being the Wicked One. The inflationary use of the term made a laughing stock of him. Both clerics and laymen progressively dropped their guards against Evil incarnate, and eventually the Anti-Christ became a mythological figure, of no significance to anything tangible at all.

This was, in a sense, a big step forward in understanding the nature of Evil, because it eliminated its externalisation. But throwing out the baby with the bath water did not serve humanity well. No longer “a thing”, evil forces, firmly anchored in the human unconsious, continued to undermine the fabric of Creation with increasing efficacy, and modern secular culture with its ultra-greedy hardcore-materialist never-enough worldview drove humanity at top speed to the edge of a cliff. The Anti-Christ in today’s terms would no longer act as one powerful individual – though Evil in the form of malign egophrenia or sociopathy sure has a tight grip on those in “authority”, and through them, on their order-followers. It manifests in collectives. While Evil, through dispersion, all but disappeared from public awareness and discourse in Christianity-based societies, other cultures maintained a clearer understanding of what was going on here. They looked at the worldview and the culture of Western civilization and identified those, in totality, with their own brand of the Antagonist.

“Europe is a cultural statement of Yurugu, the male being, arrogant and immature, who caused his own incompleteness, and so is locked into a perpetually unfulfilled search for the female twin-soul that would make him whole, the part of himself he has denied.” (p561)

writes Dona Richards in her book Yurugu. An African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior”. She goes on to explain how Europeans use spiritual terms such as ‘Harmony’ and ‘Order’ to express perversions of those concepts.

“Rational and harmonious order … represent two radically different modalities of being. […] The struggle to control can never lead to harmony – the essence of spiritual well-being. Rational ordering is predicated on the assumption of conflict and opposition and, in European intensity, becomes a sublimated form of violence. Rational order can never be more than a creation of human beings in partial recognition of who they are; that is, in partial recognition of their cosmic significance. […] If they limit themselves to this order, which they have created, they and their world become distorted. (p562)

Native American academic Jack Forbes names Western culture as “the central problem of human life today.” He calls Western civilization a “culture of Evil.” Native American philosophy, in comparison, acknowledges the right of every being to life and self-determination. Apart from meeting basic needs, Native Americans therefore avoided initiating unnecessary suffering and harm to humans, plants and animals alike, Forbes says, and they empathized with those who suffered. In other words, they lived by Natural Law. He also notes that, “Lying is also almost always a factor in wétiko behavior, and in fact may represent a key strand in the entire epidemiology of wétikoism.” But “How to live in this life? is the real question we all face. All other subjects are insignificant when compared with this one,” Forbes proclaims.

How do people who follow that path behave? How do they behave towards other humans? How do they behave towards the earth? How do they behave towards other living creatures? Are they doing evil? Are they free men and women who will stand up to evil? Or are they passive foot-soldiers trained to surrender their minds and hearts to their masters?” – Jack Forbes: Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (2008)

Paul Levy who in his works explores the problem of Evil named it, in psychological terms, Malign Egophrenia (ME), but later also used the Cree Native-American demon Wetiko to explain it.

“Whichever name we use, we are in the midst of a collective psychosis of titanic proportions, and one of its most stunning features is that very few people are even talking about it. Does that seem as crazy to you as it does to me? Our madness has weirdly become normalized, to the point where we don’t even notice it.” – Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko. Breaking the Curse of Evil, 2013

Overcoming Evil

In a previous article I highlighted that the Good still does exist. One must add, so does Evil, necessarily, like Sri Aurobindo or Carl Jung pointed out. Jesus himself says: “If I had not come and spoken unto them they had not had sin.” (John 15:22, KJB)

Once Christ is established in our psyche, Jung writes in Aion, “the coming of the anti-Christ is not just a prophetic prediction – It is an inexorable psychological law.” He is „an imitating spirit of evil who follows in Christ’s footsteps like a shadow following the body.“

“Every intensified differentiation of the Christ-image brings about a corresponding accentuation of its unconscious complement, thereby increasing the tension between above and below.” – C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self

C. G. Jung (1935, pd)
C. G. Jung (1935, pd)

The disciples of Truth need to realize two understandings. First of all, Evil, although it manifests in impressing phenomena and dwells in people’s minds, is not itself a separate thing nor is it a person you can kill. It is none of God’s creatures. Go(o)d doesn’t create Evil; the ultimate Truth didn’t create the lie; Divine Consciousness didn’t create the unconscious. Those dark aspects are shadows arising from the absence of THAT. God, or the Universe, if you will, provided all beings with freedom, and established the Laws of cause and effect which dish out the consequences of our free-will decisions. Satan is the son of God, just like the Christ, but the Wicked One decided to disregard the Law and so became the “fallen angel.” Evil, according to this allegory, is never happening by an act of Go(o)d, but comes into existence by a free-will decision, or a negligent falling into unconsiousness.

“Evil is not a natural thing, it is rather the name given to the privation of good. Thus there can be good without evil, but there cannot be evil without good, nor can there be evil where there is no good.” – Augustinus, Dialogus quaestionum, quaest XVI

So the simple truth is,

Evil is the denial of Go(o)d in the minds of people.

There is an active and a passive form of Evil. With your freedom to decide you can consciously choose to defy Good – which usually makes you an Asura or Anti-Christ – or you can fall unconscious of the Law and become a disciple of the Anti-Christ.

The second thing to be understood by the Truth seeker is, in the psyche like in physics, each force meets an equal counter-force when it comes to head-on confrontation. Neither attacking nor ignoring or denying the power of Evil will do anything to overcome the Antagonist but will only provide him with similar counter-strength – because both movements are basically the same force, directed against itself. Once understood, the age-old dualism Good vs. Evil dissolves. We may embrace and transcend Evil in a spiritual Jiu-Jitsu which picks up the Antagonist’s force and uses it in service to one’s own aspirations towards Truth. “The soul is never lost, there is no eternal hell,” writes Nolini Kanta Gupta, one of Sri Aurobindo’s disciples. “But man, the human soul, has to go through hell, that is to say, through trials and tribulations and ordeals in order to reach heaven.”

Conclusion

“Evil is evil, no doubt; it is not divine and it is not an illusion. It isa real blot on the fair face of creation. Its existence can­not be justified in the sense that it is the right thing and has to be welcomed and maintained, since it forms part of the universal symphony. Not even in the sense that it is a test and a trial set by the Divine for the righteous to prove their merit.” – Nolini Kanta Gupta, The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Evil is also not the flipside to Good but the shadow which results from the absence of the Light, the illusion that expands in the absence of Truth. Evil is a choice which can be undone by choosing Truth. It is that simple. This is the task before anyone and everyone “who aspire to a higher and truer life,” be they spiritual seekers or the ordinary citizen discontent with the coldness, corruption, chaos and coercion all around. The first step towards eradicating Evil should be obvious: Stop lying. Stop lying to others, even with good intentions, but most of all,

Stop lying to yourself.

To choose Good over Evil is not at all complicated; it becomes only complicated when one considers the sacrifice that might come with the decision. A truthful life remains Utopian only for so long as one is waiting for others to join in. And Truth stays a Fata Morgana only until one is willing to admit that, for some reason or another – usually lazyness, selfishness, or cowardice – one has let oneself get fooled by the fake reality of “authorites” of all kinds.

“Before dying, falsehood rises in full swing. Still people understand only the lesson of catastrophe. Will it have to come before they open their eyes to the Truth? I ask an effort from all so that it has not to be. It is only the Truth that can save us, truth in words, truth in action, truth in will, truth in feelings. It is a choice between serving the Truth or being destroyed.” – The Mother

Postscriptum

Throughout parts 3 and 4 of this articles series there has been a lot of talk about “us” and “them”, moral and immoral, Good and Evil, the Takeover gang and the residents. These dualistic phrasings do, of course, not represent the oneness aspect of (human) existence, but the diversity of its expressions. Discerning the fundamental differences in views and ethical positions is merely a necessary step in the process towards right action. They do not, by any means, establish a difference in value of one group of people versus another. A perpetrator is no less a human being than her victim. We are one, and that got to show in how we treat each other; but it doesn’t mean we become blind to destructiveness. Pain and suffering are real, and so is the Evil who benefits from it. As we have seen many times In history evil has no boundaries. Good does not always win. For it to prevail it takes our active pursuit of it. Understanding Natural Law is one fundamental faculty to start from, but that’s by far not sufficient. While the knowledge of objective Morality is indispensable the pursuit of Goodness also requires other elements such as the voice of conscience, the cultivation of empathy, the capacity to forgive and reconciliate, general goodwill, or the belief in higher planes of consciousness that guide us – which is why Natural Law rarely comes as stand-alone philosophy but is usually packaged in broader world views such as the teachings of the Christ, the Buddha, Rudolf Steiner, or Sri Aurobindo. The absence of its central tenets (the bare minimum of which I have discussed in the first article) proves the evilness of philosophies, ideologies, religions, persons and societies which deny the real nature of That-which-is:

Morality is Freedom.

Freedom is Life.

Life is Yoga.

The Auroville & Natural Law series

  1. Festering Lillies and the View Over Lush Lakes
  2. Nietzsche is dead
  3. Asuraville – The Anti-Thesis of Auroville
  4. right arrow Truth or the Abyss left arrow

What do you mean, “Do something!?” ?

School scene, by Thomas Webster, ca 1850, Provenance: Museum Schloss Moritzburg Zeitz, licenced under: cc by-nc-sa 3.0]

Thank you so much for taking the time to read through the article on “Living in Sin.” I appreciate that someone with so much more lived experience – someone perhaps with so much more mulled over philosophy – is taking a look at these thoughts, which certainly didn’t cross your path for the first time, and, who knows, may have already been discarded for good reason. That you nevertheless let yourself be touched by them, that touches me in turn.

Alone, the question remains, how to act properly in view of the continuously piling up of troubles in our time, and whether one can do anything at all. There are many who desperately call out to you, “Do something!?” In their inability to feel solid ground under their feet, they become part of a wave of hysteria so impressively depicted by Carlos Schwabe in 1907. But even a superficial examination raises a whole series of questions. First of all, who is the addressee? Any random person who did not flee out of reach quickly enough? The authorities? The government? Pressure groups? Professional revolutionaries? God? To what extent is it in the power of the addressee to do something?

Second, what is wanted by the addressee? That he does something, whether it is useful or not? Is there an obligation to act at all, or a justification for intervening?

Thirdly, who is the one who is calling out “Do something!?” To what extent can they demand that others act? Why doesn’t s/he simply act himself/herself?

All this is encoded in the two signs that follow the “Do something” – the exclamation mark and the question mark. The one who utters this call is not sure of himself, does not know what they want, does not ascribe to themselves any efficacy. For their fear they look for redemption in the outside.

Action, which can also be a conscious non-action – here we now come to my own position, which I share with Hermann Hesse, Jiddu Krishnamurti and the other philosophers mentioned – is the responsibility of each individual. My writing is addressed to these “Do something!?” shouters; also to the shouter in us, the helpless child who turns to its parents, who have always pulled the hot potatoes out of the fire for us. The responsibility for our being and acting, that is, the formulation of a response to the challenges of life, cannot be ceded to superior powers or delegated to third parties. It is inalienably ours, like the freedom of choice given to us from birth. We may be unconscious of it, we may reject it, we may have our reasons why we do not (or not completely and always) perceive it, but this does not relieve us of it and does not protect us from consequences. The consequences for our missteps are regulated by a higher power, superior to the human will, which the western culture assigns to the law of cause and effect. In the East, this law is called “karma” – the natural law, in any case, according to which collective immorality ends in decay, suffering, injustice and bondage, while morally right actions lead to general prosperity, justice and freedom in a society. Natural Law is incontrovertible. It requires no court of law to which we must answer, but only our own conscience, which provides the basis for our free decision to act morally or immorally. We act; the consequences are taken care of. “The details are regulated by a law,” as it was and is so beautifully called in various constitutions.

So far, so good. But what about fear? After all, it is justified, if one considers the manifold forms of violence that constantly sweep over us, with and without provocation: the violence of the state, which crushes refusal to obey with police violence; the structural violence, which commands conformity from all those who want to remain integrated in social structures and profit from them; and the violence of the mob, of the masses, which meets dissenters with disgust, malice, or sometimes even with beatings. It is only too understandable that people decide to howl with the wolves, or at least keep their heads down and strike moderate tones.

Fear as such is, in my view, not a sin but a warning signal: “Attention, it is advisable to exercise caution here.” Sin would be to infer from the presence of fear the absence of freedom of choice. The supposed impossibility of taking the right path in the face of a threat is not so much due to the nature of the path; it is rocky, steep and dangerous, to be sure. Often what it demands of us is beyond our strength here and now. But it is always open to us, teasing us, appealing to us with its obvious goodness. That is why those who do not close their ears to his call thrown back to us, “Do something!?” will always feel called to try to walk it at their own pace. Without the opportunity for right action, there would be no sin. In the absence of his invitation to right action, there would be no need for justifications, for excuses, for having yielded to the threats and lures of the generally acceptable and for having found no courage.

In spite of my pointed argumentation, nobody has to justify himself before me for his decisions. This is not what is meant by “responsibility.” The yardstick for the true, the beautiful, and the good is always only one’s own conscience. Besides, I am also not always consistently strong; I often make mistakes. I can only try every day anew to act the right way, and if I get on the wrong way, to “turn back”, as suggested in a prominent place. This can only be done by admitting doubt and acknowledging nescience – taking due care that this does not turn into a permanent state of denial or ignorance.

Of course, I do not condemn anyone for their differing understanding from my view. If someone wants to protect himself against harm, he is welcome to do so. What I condemn and sanction are attempts at encroachment: the claim that I, or another, or even all of us together, are responsible for protecting the one who wants to protect himself, and that we are morally obliged to do so. This desire is contrary to Natural Law, is opposed to freedom and personal responsibility, therefore it is fundamentally unethical. Moral behavior presupposes ethical thinking, thus requires a free and conscious decision for Right Action. Those who follow orders because those orders bear the stamp of authority do not care about the right or wrong of their actions; and those who force others to follow rules try to deprive people of their freedom, personal responsibility and thus also of their morality.

That the overwhelming majority of people do not feel addressed by such statements, to put it mildly, let alone recognize in them any form of help, is almost self-evident. Without the long-lasting state of all-encompassing injustice, which is generally taken for granted and therefore no longer perceived as harmful, there would be no need for passionate advocacy for its overcoming. Precisely because the considerations articulated by Hesse, Steiner, Krishnamurti, Drewermann, Illich and other thinkers throw sand into the gears of mass-produced thinking, they should be given space, indeed they must be voiced. Now that the time has come for them to stand the test and be proven true, I think it would be a wrong sign to speak meekly, doubtfully, or even ruefully about them. Just yesterday I read in Charles Eisenstein, “Be vigorous in rejecting any answer which your soul knows to be untrue, however flattering it may be to your righteousness.”

You cannot change the minds of those who have fallen into cognitive dissonance – self-proclaimed anti-fascists, political punks, ethics committees, clergy, vaccinating doctors, TV philosophers – but you can strengthen the backs of those who listen to you with respect by signaling that what is true and right remains true and right even if one faces inconvenience for it. Quite apart from the terrible feeling of having to live a lie otherwise, we all know where it leads when too many people hold their tongue for too long and play along for the sake of peace and quiet.

Now, as far as right action in Corona times is concerned, I cannot and will not give any concrete guidance, because it would be presumptuous to suppose that I understand the totality of all that is of importance here and now in your situation. However, it is advisable to consider principles of Natural Law. For the fact that we have brought it to this point, this crisis of consciousness that we are experiencing both collectively and individually, is, in my view, undoubtedly due to the complete abandonment of our condition. Perhaps hardship can teach us how to think, feel and act properly; how to fish instead of having the pizza cab deliver the fish sticks, lovelessly glued together from scraps, free to our door.

One thing I have known without any doubt since I can think: What is wrong fundamentally, everywhere and at all times, and immoral and destructive in the long term, is compulsion and blind obedience. It may happen that that which is done of free will, or that which is omitted, coincides with that which is commanded. One does not need to be ashamed for this, if what commanded you was wisdom, not human decree. When you do what is demanded of you, it shall be done on the basis of a free decision, consciously made for – and trusting in – the truthful, the beautiful, the good. That’s what I wish for you, that’s what I wish for all of us.

Sitting on the worn out sinner’s bench with the donkey’s cap,

Paxton.

[Title image: School scene around 1850, steel engraving by Thomas Webster, Provenance: Museum Schloss Moritzburg Zeitz, License: cc by-nc-sa 3.0]

Festering Lillies and the View Over Lush Lakes

View over a lush lake (pxhere cc0)

Freedom and its correct use

One of my countless sins of omission until recently consisted of a maintained disinterest in the question of whether human existence is determined by Natural Laws in a similar way to the material universe. To be precise, I found that the problem of free will vs. determinacy of our expressions of life could not be conclusively solved, and thus it could not be determined which decisions are right or wrong, moral or immoral. I have certainly poached a little in these philosophical meadows, investigated questions such as “What is justice?” and made considerations about the freedom of the individual, most recently in the article “Living in Sin“. In the process, I have very often arrived at the same insights that other thinkers of diverse cultures have gained over the past two and a half thousand years, thanks to my own experiences as well as observations, research, and conclusions. This honors not so much myself as those very mystics and philosophers whose insights into the nature of being, after such a long time under such changed circumstances, continue to prove true today. It speaks further for a regularity, a Natural Law, which determines perpetually, everywhere, unchangeably and inevitably the success or failure of human communities. This law is called “Natural Law” in Western philosophy. The word nature derives from the Latin “natura” (birth); it refers to the derivation of our rights from the characteristics given to man qua birth by Nature or God. Therefore, Natural Law in its validity refers to human nature, the conditio humana.

My lifelong poking around had the disadvantage that it took a long time for conjectures to condense into certainties, but it had the great advantage that the rules of Natural Law could not be dismissed as just another set of arbitrary mental constructs. They can be subjected to tests with conventional tools for verification. The derivations performed by well-known Natural Law thinkers such as Jesus of Nazareth, Thomas Aquinas, Gautama Siddhartha, the philosophers of Enlightenment, Emerson, Thoreau, Steiner, or the American Founding Fathers reveal exciting facets. However, it would go completely beyond the scope of a single article if we wanted to start our discussion with Adam and Eve, so to speak, and examine all ramifications and variants. For our purposes – to restore human self-determination – there is no need for referring to the writings of philosophical authorities. Natural Law, as employed here in the article, is self-evident. It means a principle of cause and effect of human social behavior, intrinsic to the world, which radically proceeds from the freely born individual endowed with reason and conscience. It can not only be applied in everyday life, but is even indispensable for certain purposes. I partly use contemporary texts by thinkers rarely cited in this context to illustrate my points. Such texts exist in encouragingly high numbers.

The assistance that Natural Law, or its advocates, can provide is concrete to the extent that readers are willing to live their lives in its spirit after recognizing its foundations as true.

How few of those who march through the streets protesting against Corona measures have understood that the answer to the slashing of the Constitution by the state should be more Natural Law instead of more democracy, I would rather not know. However, I can say with certainty that the following points have the highest relevance for the lives of all of us (in my opinion, even for the continued existence of that which essentially makes us human).

Hold on, it’s getting exciting.

In the nearly two hundred states of the Earth there are just as many different definitions of what is right and what is wrong and how violations of law are to be sanctioned. This is called the legal system. This multiplicity of different legal norms – think of such extreme examples as the Sharia or the U.S. Constitution – which, moreover, change in content and character over time, often tempts people to fall into moral relativism. Moral relativism is the view that what is right can be determined arbitrarily. Now, of course, there is no denying that both legal and moral ideas – which inform each other to a certain extent – in fact spring from just such arbitrariness. The rules by which we orient our behavior depend in the last instance on our conception of the human being and our place in the world, and this conception differs from culture to culture, from country to country, and from person to person. In this confusing jumble of often incompatible norms, two things have been lost: first, the distinction between law, morality and ethics, and second, the objective difference between right and wrong. The latter goes by the name of “Natural Law” in philosophy, but it has existed and continues to exist under diverse names in all cultures. The best known are probably “Thomism”, “Anthroposophy”, “Cause and effect”, “Spiritual law”, “Karma” and “The Golden Rule”.

What are law, morality and ethics?

(Positive) Law consists of formal rules established by authorities to guide the behavior of individuals and groups in a society with the help of state power. Different societies have different authorities that apply different standards, but what they all have in common is the expectation of unconditional obedience and the sanctioning of violations by state authority. Positive law – constitutions, laws, statutes, ordinances, and court judgments – are, as we shall see, in direct opposition to Natural Law, “a set of non-man-made, binding, and immutable conditions that govern the consequences of the actions of all beings capable of holistic intelligence.” (Mark Passio).

In terms of Natural Law, a right is an action that does not cause harm to other sentient beings.

A simple statement that has been enshrined in all cultures since time immemorial and that we call the “Golden Rule.” The violation of a natural right harms the recipient of the violation; it entitles the recipient to self-defense. Violations produce long-term effects in the polity, manifesting themselves as forms of disorder, bondage, and collective suffering. But not only the violation, also the observance of Natural Law has consequences: The polity in the long run gains in cohesion, freedom, justice, and prosperity. The best-known term for this dynamic is “karma” – a concept that is unfortunately often completely misunderstood as a personal balance of sins.

Morality as currently understood by the man on the streets is often, but not necessarily, identical with obeying positive laws. Morality consists in the concrete rules of conduct that apply in a community, that is, about how one should live. If these rules are standardized, one speaks of a code of conduct. Depending on the culture and subculture of the group to which people belong, morality defines their socially acceptable behavior. A pacifist will condemn any use of force against persons, a soldier will see the matter quite differently.

In Natural Law, any action that does not cause harm is moral. Whoever causes harm to others, that is, violates their natural rights, acts immorally.

Always immoral and therefore wrong in Natural Law are lying, theft, destruction of property, burglary, coercion, rape, assault, slavery, imprisonment and murder – acts that deprive their recipient of a right.

Acts of self-defense, on the other hand, are rightful and never constitute violence.

Ethics and morality are often used interchangeably. Moreover, a confusing variety of definitions is in use. Commonly, however, ethics is understood to be a set of mutable values and principles that govern the actions of individuals. In philosophy, ethics is thinking about morality; ethics provides the rationale for morality.

In Natural Law, thinking about right and wrong is the prerequisite for morally right action.

Thus, whoever does not consciously think about morally right behavior acts unconsciously and unethically. A person who does not think ethically cannot act morally; he or she does not exercise his or her rights and is very likely to violate those of their fellow human beings. In their ignorance they may act immorally and unjustly.

What is remarkable about Natural Law is that ethical thinking and moral action always relate harmoniously to each other, because they can be traced back to the same source: the objective knowledge of right and wrong. This knowledge is based on the observation of causes and effects that has guided our species since its existence. Following Natural Law – abiding by the unwritten Laws of Nature – Humans have lived in small egalitarian groups for hundreds of millennia, as appropriate to our species as birds use to live in flocks. Only with the emergence of civilizations – hierarchically organized societies with a law-making authority at the top which cultivate order-following – do law, morality and ethics begin to diverge. The Swiss philosopher Chnopfloch aptly describes the dynamic that results from their divergence:

There is war in this world, a war between morality and ethics. The two words are equated to disguise this – to disguise the fact that the ethics of the individual and the morals of society have diverged and moved far away from each other. For only morality can be manipulated and misused by the controllers for their own purposes, and only through morality can masses of people be controlled. It is up to each and every one of us to decide which side we will fight on, and we must choose a side, because today man has only two choices: to be moral and unethical, or to be ethical and immoral. Do you listen to society and what others tell you, or do you listen to the laws of life, the inner voice that nature has written into your heart with its own hand?” — Chnopfloch: Fachidioten, Gurus und der Krieg [Pundits, gurus and the war. Aug 2021]

No jumping off bridge (pixabay cc0)
No jumping off bridge (pixabay cc0)

How does this dynamic happen?

As already described and deduced in many of my articles, civilizations are cultures that run on a program for controlling the world and reality. All their efforts are directed towards the prevention of undesired events with probability bordering on certainty and to make desired events occur with equal probability. This requires a categorization of phenomena into positive and negative ones, which are then met with standardized actions. Both categorization and standardization are nothing but arbitrary determinations. From the beginning, and to the present day, those determinations are always oriented to the interest of the person or group who makes them. Three facts, immoral in terms of Natural Law, follow from this:

1) The determinations codified in law enforce the ethics of the lawmaker. As they deny the freedom of the “subjects” they are intrinsically sociopathic in nature, i.e., immoral under Natural Law;

2) The actions prescribed by the lawmaker are often – and the prescribed sanctions for non-compliance are always – associated with violence, or the threat thereof, against recipients of orders. Thus, they are always immoral under Natural Law.

3) Following rules and carrying out orders is always immoral because the ethics of the recipient of the order play no role in their implementation. Either the order-follower must violate their ethical understandings, bend their ethics to fit the rules, or omit ethical considerations altogether. This is unethical according to Natural Law and therefore immoral and therefore violates the Law. To put it mildly:

Legality does not equal morality. If a legal or other rule contradicts Natural Law, it is invalid. If, on the other hand, it conforms to Natural Law, it is superfluous.

Legal and illegal do not matter at all in terms of Natural Law.

My long-time readers will know that the author of these lines lives in Auroville, a city founded in 1968 in service to the principles of a special form of Natural Law: Integral Yoga. Following the teachings of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, city founder Mirra Alfassa, known here only as “The Mother,” stipulated that there should be no government, no courts, and no police. No laws should apply, no money should be used internally, and no mind-altering substances should be consumed. Politics, tradition, and conventional morality were to have no influence on the actions of the residents, and gossip was to be avoided. They were to live “a life divine, but no religion” (Mirra Alfassa), aligning their behavior with the highest consciousness available to them and resolving their conflicts through good will. Why? Because all elements negated here influence, corrupt or even prevent people’s free decision for the good. Only a decision made completely freely, taking into account the objective criteria of right and wrong, can be morally right and good. Thus, in his letter to the Roman Christians, Saint Paul states that they were freed from the old, man-made law to freely follow their conscience, according to the message of the Son of God:

Christus und Buddha ( Bryce Haymond Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International)
Christus & Buddha (Bryce-Haymond, Creative-Commons-by-sa-4)

But now we have been released from the law, for we died to it and are no longer captive to its power. Now we can serve God, not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way of living in the Spirit. – Paul: Epistle to the Romans, 7:6, New Living Translation.

The objective difference of right and wrong.

And this brings us to the key point, which is the extent to which morality is not relative but objectively determinable. Moral relativism means that any moral view is considered to be equivalent to any other, because they are all basically arbitrarily introduced rules. That this is the case in practice cannot be denied. The multitude of existing moral systems testifies to this. However, this does not at all mean that all moral rules lack a concrete foundation. We find that certain rules – roughly speaking, those compatible with the “Golden Rule” – have been valid in all cultures and at all times. This already speaks for their universal effectiveness in the world of man. It shows that persons who thought ethically have everywhere come to the same observations about human nature and that they knew that every individual action has social consequences. Specifically, it can be observed that communities that obey Natural Law tend to increase freedom, justice, and prosperity; where Natural Laws are consciously or unconsciously disobeyed, mores deteriorate, injustice increases, and the community tends toward unfreedom and even slavery.

Therefore, attentive observers of the human condition at all times and in all places concluded: To take something from others without necessity that belongs to them – property, mates, life, health, security, freedom, truth – is unethical, immoral and wrong. Or, to put it positively, a right is an action that causes no harm to other sentient beings. If you confront people who believe morality is in the eye of the beholder with harmful acts such as rape, slavery, murder, or loss of property, they will concede that such acts are bad, regardless of the cultural background – unless you are talking to psychopaths. So it does matter what the moral rules are.

The entity that brings to human consciousness the intuitive knowledge of morally right and morally wrong actions is called conscience.

Evolutionists assume that every characteristic of a living being is passed on from one generation to the next because it offers an evolutionary advantage. Believers of all religions assume that the Creator has wisely endowed man in such a way that he can distinguish right from wrong actions and is free to make use of this knowledge.

Thus, the inherent agency of conscience in all human beings, its purpose and its usefulness in fulfilling that purpose are rather rarely openly disputed. We get called by our nature to listen to our conscience. Moral relativism denies conscience, obedience suppresses it altogether. Both attitudes are categorically wrong, not only because they are immoral, but because they open the door to evil. Totalitarianism requires this ethical poverty.

Why is the unquestionable knowledge of right and wrong necessary?

Following the conscience, which intuitively knows the objective difference between right and wrong, is to the advantage of all of us, because only morally right actions lead to order, peace and justice. Conscience can be drowned out by rational consciousness or emotions. That is why it is important to become rationally aware of the intuitive contents of conscience as well, and it is equally important to cultivate an empathic understanding of other sentient beings’ desire for freedom (i.e., their pursuit of rights). Knowledge of the rules that govern the human condition – in other words, knowledge of Natural Law – are indispensable to the formation and preservation of a polity that serves freedom, peace, happiness, and justice. What is self-evident in engineering, namely that a functioning construct can only be formed on the basis of correctly ascertained facts and understood principles, is also true in sociology: behaviours that ignore or deny objective morality can never result in a positive outcome; society then simply does not “function” but becomes mired in all sorts of suffering. More than that:

Only if we obey the laws of life does this allow the prospect of the continuation of our species, states novelist Daniel Quinn in his Ishmael trilogy.

The Law of Life isn’t what governs life, it’s what fosters life, and anything that fosters life belongs to the law… A biologist would probably say that what I’m calling the Law of Life is just a collection of evolutionarily stable strategies—the universal set of such strategies, in fact. – Daniel Quinn: The Story of B

Ivan Illich, like many others, was convinced that

There is, in other words, a given human nature, just as much as there is a given physical nature, and a society can only be good insofar as its principles are drawn from insight into this nature. [Illich’s book] “Tools for Conviviality” had its roots in his fear that the society he was writing about not only threatened human nature but was on the verge of abolishing it altogether. – David Cayley: Ivan Illich. An Intellectual Journey

This abolition did not begin with the application of genetic manipulation or chip implants. It results from a long process of erosion of our ability to know ourselves, that is, to live freely within the framework of what is called the Law of God, Natural Law, Dharma, the Law of Life, or Integral Yoga.

We do well, then, to pay as much attention to the knowledge of cause and effect in social affairs, which is rooted in our human nature, as we do to the laws of physics. The law of human life, i.e., the one evolutionarily stable strategy for human action, is Natural Law as practiced by each and every culture ever since the birth of the genus homo – just not by our culture, civilization.

“Oh!”, I hear sarcastic-sounding voices exclaim. “You’ve done a great job of that where you live.” Indeed, the Auroville of the 21st century is a suitable example to prove Natural Law – the law of cause and effect. Precisely because the insights of the “Mother” remain largely misunderstood and unpracticed, precisely because there is widespread ignorance of karmic action among the population, precisely because the majority of us do not “die to law and are no longer captive to its power,” precisely because we trust authority more than our own knowledge and conscience, have police patrolling the streets, call the courts, get paid for our services to others, worship false idols, don’t always take honesty seriously, play politics, let ourselves be intimidated by officials, take mediated information at face value, and confuse rule-following with morality, Auroville is currently a place that is not at the service of Truth, and therefore not exactly the city the world has been waiting for; for it is precisely because we collectively have not listened to our conscience that our polity has long been failing in its purpose. The fact that we think twice about what we say in public and that the official mold neighs at all corners shows our utter terror of the “Divine Anarchy” the Mother wanted to open up for us.

On the importance of freedom

There, this is the real topic we are talking about. Let us call a spade a spade: anarchy – or rather anarchony, the absence of a ruler – or acephaly, the absence of a headman, are what the consistent application of Natural Law amounts to socially. As the exercise of power or force and the obeying of orders or rules are invariably immoral, all government, all statehood, all forms of authority are immoral, unjust, wrong; including democracy. If in a polity free decision according to objective moral facts is inhibited or prevented, even by popular vote, then the people in it are unfree.

This society is deeply immoral because it directly threatens our viability.

It deludes itself about its slavish incapacity for self-responsible action, engaging in hollow debates about constitutional freedoms and postmodern discourses on the equivalence of various definitions of freedom or morality.

In reality, however, you don’t have to write or read long books to explain or understand freedom. It is quite enough to look out over a lush lake, for example. All the beings you see there are free in the true sense of the word. Freedom is the basic regularity of all living nature. And civilization has turned against this very regularity. – Steffen Pichler: The Golden Springtime

The American bio-philosopher George Gorman elaborates on this idea:

Intentionally moving one’s own body, interacting with others, preserving one’s gains and questioning one’s options play essential roles in shaping the experiential processes of everything alive. Like ourselves, other animals and plants are skilled trackers of personal value, since nothing but their own will power is guiding them to live in terms of their personal needs and desires. It’s not automatic … It’s natural that experiencing a life without freedom is abhorrent to the living. Even the simplest bacteria behave in unpredictable ways not wholly determined by identifiable causes, including the molecular processes of their internal chemistry. Because they’re free.– George Gorman: We, the Living vol. 1

And this has consequences for the quality and ending of our lives, as book author Steffen Pichler quite correctly points out. He concludes that in nature – in contrast to the domesticated humans, animals and plants of civilized culture – there is little extended sickliness, because this restricts the freedom of development of the living being.

It is very important not to imagine a natural instance that determines the end of any living being. It is vice versa: The natural system ensures, in a somewhat automatically way, that life ends when it no longer comes along with the state of healthy freedom. In this respect, life is freedom, and if it, freedom, ceases, then life also ends automatically. – Steffen Pichler: The Golden Springtime

In view of such considerations, I have long been asking myself whether we, insofar as we obey the state and the pressure of mainstream views, can actually still be called fully alive, or whether the condition of the majority of our fellow human beings should not be described as a stage of advanced zombification.

Thomas Aquinas in the Basilica di San Prospero
Thomas Aquinas in the Basilica di San Prospero

Corruptio optimi pessima

And Auroville? What chance does the rest of the world stand if model projects like this township fail to implement Natural Law in everyday life? Well, first of all, one can state with Shakespeare that „Lillies that fester smell far worse then weeds“ (Sonnet 94). The stench of rotten thought emanating from the dominant culture of our day is horrible enough. But the same stench becomes much worse when it emanates from those people or places to which one has looked with admiration: the pop star who has had his parts sung by others; the professor who copied his thesis from the works of others; the priest who abuses his protégés; the environmental protection organization that got paid off by the dirtiest corporations; the peace party that starts a war under cheap pretexts; the rebel who surrenders to a public mania just when her ability to criticize is needed most urgently; and of course the intentional commune that no longer understands its own principles and therefore practices the exact opposite of what they actually intended.

It is extremely painful when noble goals turn into something that causes damage, because it thoroughly destroys the hope for a better world, and it effectively puts the misguidedness of people on display. Ivan Illich, with reference to the canonized church teacher and Natural Law thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), when characterizing such conditions applied the Latin saying corruptio optimi pessima

The corruption of the best is the worst.

The inhabitants of Auroville, more so than ordinary people, have the task of learning to understand their principles, the core of their humanity, anew, to right the abundance of wrongs. The fact that the founding documents of the city still hold undiminished validity, despite the massive undermining by the neoliberal system, can be an advantage in this. The tension between what is and what ought to be, between reality and utopia, creates irritations and pains that eventually reach a breaking point that forces a decision between “Just keep going!” and “Stop the nonsense!” I believe that this breaking point has arrived, locally, nationally and globally.

Social goodness does not manifest all by itself. First of all, you have to know what is good without a doubt, you have to want it with every fiber of your being, you have to consciously decide for it and finally you have to actively implement it. People must and people will put their entire existence on the line for it, because anything else would be a decision in the sense of “Just keep going”, and this would be tantamount to a death sentence for the good in us, perhaps even for the species. We were not created for loneliness, slavery, falsehood and greed. The cries of every bottle-feeding newborn, the rebelliousness of every latchkey child, and the incessant rebellion of the adolescent, about whom even the ancient Sumerians already complained, ought to tell us just as plainly the obvious truth about our inhuman culture as our own discomfort before leaving home in the morning, our stomach churning at encounters with so-called authorities, the sense of meaninglessness in our lives, our addiction to “forgetting,” or the irrationally destructive behavior we exhibit in conflict situations. No one wants to live like this, and yet the overwhelming majority have subordinated themselves to the machine, to the system of the locust. The regularities embedded in Natural Law give all seekers of freedom, justice and brotherhood a stable foundation on which they can build, using the abilities they have been given. Those, however, who believe that they cannot live without authority have their further path clearly marked out for them: As wage slaves, gullible voters, target group members, consumers, taxpayers, cannon fodder and guinea pigs for experimental therapies, they will eke out their lives by the sweat of their brow until the end of their pointless days. And if they are not allowed to die, they will slave away forever.

The Auroville & Natural Law series

  1. right arrow Festering Lillies and the View Over Lush Lakes left arrow
  2. Nietzsche is dead
  3. Asuraville
  4. Truth or the Abyss

Who owns your body?

Slave caravan

It is the central question the answer to which shows the profound divide between the proponents of, and the resistance against, the plandemic measures. Who owns a person‘s body? Years before any of us anticipated our getting stripped wholesale of constitutional rights one fellow by the name of Mark Passio already held lectures on Natural Law which unambiguously answered that question. Your body belongs to you and nobody else. Period. In a presentation called The Science of Natural Law he dismantled the notions of “authority”, “legality”, “government”, and “jurisdiction”; he spoke to their role as tools for enslavement and why they are wrong, illegitimate, immoral, and dysfunctional means of pursuing order, peace, and freedom. False understanding of what a Right is keeps people loyal to a constitution which, rather than protecting them from tyranny, holds them hostage to the illusion of the state’s right to exert violence. Asking men and women on the street about their understanding of some core tenets of Natural Law Passio develops what he purports to be their actual, objective meaning, workings, and ramifications.

Removing the interviews I edited the presentation for focus on the core tenets. (Watch the complete version.)

If you intend to continue resisting to the powers-that-be and remain standing upright this is the kind of knowledge you might want to ingest, and I highly recommend you also watch his eight-hours Natural Law Seminar in New Haven, CT, which explains things in much more detail. It is really worth your time. Among others you will learn what Transhumanism, Eugenics, organised religion, scientism, New Age spirituality, order-following, Democracy, and Fascism are having to do with Satanism.

I am not saying here that this is the most widely accepted description of Natural Law. Various versions have been developed throughout history by many cultures before Passio came along. As someone who through personal experience discovered many of his points to be highly relevant I am saying that he makes a lot of sense and that his words are worth considering. After all, he says that Natural Law is a science, and as a science it should be verifiable in reality.

So here we go with quotes from the presentation:

Natural law refers to a set of universal, non-man-made binding and unchangeable conditions which govern the behavioural consequence of beings with the capacity for holistic intelligence.

A “right” is an action that does NOT initiate harm to another sentient being.

While we have always free will to choose which behaviours we will conduct we are not insulated from the moral consequences of our behavioural choices.

Natural law is also known as “Moral law”, “Cosmic law”, “Universal law”, “Spiritual law”, “The law of cause and effect”, “Consequentialism”, “The Golden Rule”, “Karma”, and many other names.

The non-aggression principle is one of the main principles of natural law. This principle means that it is morally wrong to initiate aggression or violence upon other sentient beings. This brings us to another important principle of natural law, the self-defense principle. Individuals always reserve the natural right to use physical force to defend themselves against acts of violence conducted upon them. Self-defense is NOT and should NEVER be considered to be violence. Self-defense against violence is an inherent right of all sentient beings.

Everyone possesses EXACTLY the same natural inherent rights as everyone else, and there are NO exceptions to this rule for individuals in government, police, military, or any other societal institutions. This is what is meant by “equality” under natural law.

Legality does not equate to morality.

All so-called human authority is morally illegitimate because it is not voluntary, and it is based upon coercion and violence, which is itself immoral behaviour.

Governmental authority is an illegitimate man-made construct that does not exist in nature. The belief system that certain people have somehow legitimate authority over others or that some people have more or less inherent rights than others is one of the most fundamental causes of unparalleled suffering and death in our world. Authority is and always has been an untrue, illusory, illegitimate, and immoral claim which is unfortunately accepted and believed in by most human beings with absolute religious fervor. The delegation of authority to politicians, police and military is inherently morally illegitimate and cannot actually be done in nature, since it is impossible to bestow or delegate a “right” to someone else which no-one possesses as an individual.

Taxation is theft enforced by the threat of coercion and violence.

People own their body and have a right to choose what they put into it.

The only legitimate human interactions are those which are voluntary, meaning they are mutually agreed-upon by all of the involved participants. Man-made laws including those which decree and enact behaviours such as prohibition, taxation, and licensure are not voluntary in any way. They are commands of compliance which are always backed by the threat of violence or actual violent behaviour. Man-made laws are arbitrary decrees of a ruling class calling themselves “government” who are believed to possess a magical “right to rule”. Their subjects, the people living under their so-called jurisdiction, are believed to have a moral obligation to obey this ruling class’s arbitrary commands called “laws”. Understanding that such a system is entirely based in behaviour that is coercive, violent and immoral and conducted to bring human behaviour into compliance with the will of a dominating ruling class we can arrive at the unwavering truth that the term “government” is simply a euphemism for slavery – and that is what the human condition truly is: slavery.

Slavery exists when certain individuals make a claim upon the body or the fruits of the labour of others, making them subject to them by violent and coercive means.

Slavery can exist in covert form where mental manipulation is used to legitimize or justify the duress, coercion, and violence that is used to perpetuate the immoral conditions in which people are unjustly kept.

This immoral human condition is maintained by the occult ruling class by manipulating people into a state of ignorance and confusion regarding the actual difference between right and wrong.

What is moral in one place and time is moral at all places and times.

The knowledge of this objective difference between right and wrong behaviour is called “conscience”… The problem is that most people do not possess this knowledge, or they are extremely confused regarding it. To behave with right action is moral, and to behave with wrong action is immoral, yet this fundamental understanding is often grossly misunderstood. People do not get to decide what morality is. Morality is based upon whether an action initiates harm or not. This dynamic exists inherently in the natural world.

The inherent rights of human beings are their inalienable universal birthright and can never be granted or removed by any action or process of mankind. Our rights come from nature, meaning they are pre-existing and inherent to creation itself.

The law of freedom governs the states of freedom or slavery of entire populations of beings who possess the capacity to comprehend the objective difference between moral behaviour and immoral behaviour. The natural law of freedom dictates that, as a society collectively becomes more moral they collectively become more free, and as a society collectively becomes more immoral they collectively lose their freedom and become more enslaved.

As morality increases, freedom increases; as morality declines, freedom declines.

Therefore human freedom is entirely dependent upon educated judgments that align with natural-law-based morality – the objective knowledge of the difference between right behaviour and wrong behaviour.

Believe it or not, you have just been given the secret of secrets of all secret societies throughout human history.

True freedom can never exist in a society that embraces moral relativism, a society where people believe there is no objective difference between right and wrong behaviour. Knowing the difference between right and wrong and then willfully choosing right action over wrong action is the foundational basis for the manifestation of the condition of freedom.

Wrongful action can never create goodness and harmony, and right action can never constitute a violation of rights. 2+2 will never equal 5.

All living beings are endowed with self-ownership as an inherent birthright and therefore possess the natural right to exercise their own free will to live in sovereignty, free from the initiation of harm or coercion by other human beings. These principles of human freedom and rights are the very basis of morality and are governed by the spiritual laws of behavioural consequence. Any and all violations of these principles are wrongdoings, chaotic actions working in direct opposition to the generative self-ordering dynamics of natural law as designed by creation itself.

Never Again is Now

Nuremberg Court

Considering the Basis for and Purpose of Another Nuremberg

Explaining the findings of the German Corona Investigative Committee regarding the so-called Covid-19 pandemic, attorney-at-law Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, in October 2020, spoke of “crimes against humanity“. The filmed statement has been shared widely and was watched millions of times. At the same time, there were first demands in the resistance movement for “another Nuremberg”, a tribunal that would legally investigate the Corona complex. A first article in February 2021 told the story how I myself arrived at the conclusion that such a tribunal is badly needed. This second article deals with preconditions and possible objectives of such trials.

Early in 2021, the call for a comprehensive legal reappraisal of the injustices of the Corona régime became increasingly audible. One driver was of course the enormous extent of the “collateral damage” of the measures to contain the alleged pandemic. Another source for the demands was the hard-headed refusal of decision makers to take seriously indications of the complete disproportionality of their actions. The request to take note of alternative opinions and expert reports was and to this day still is answered with a constantly intensifying volley of measures, with unjustified defamation against dissenters and persistent silence about differing information. In those few trials in which judges around the world have ruled on pandemic facts rather than administrative correctness it has turned out time and again that the governments’ files contained no documentation of factual evidence. At the same time, indications are mounting that the adverse consequences of the measures were consciously accepted, and in some cases must even have been the actual goal of administrative decisions. Critics of the Corona régime have pointed to the structural similarities to the emergence of totalitarian societies, especially of course during the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. That some kind of denazification as well as “another Nuremberg” is needed to put a society gone rogue back in its place quickly seems almost obvious. Numerous furious comments on internet platforms demanding the harshest punishments for perpetrators and intellectual arsonists testify to this.

On the question of necessity

For its illegal, unconstitutional and destructive measures the Corona state – more precisely, its agents – must be called to account before a special court; thorough reappraisal is necessary for a number of reasons, legal and other.

Firstly, the Corona complex is about crimes that occurred in lockstep worldwide; they affected billions of people in a similar way. We faced – and still face – the systematic breach of fundamental moral, legal, professional and conduct norms. Therefore, there must also be a systematic analysis that looks into the question of how it could come to this and by which factors, structures and actors this onslaught of harm was triggered and fuelled. How was it possible for all government agencies, parliaments, administrations, courts, associations, institutions, organisations, corporations and media in large parts of the world to be brought into line? How could the collective psychosis develop? How could the inhumane measures have been tolerated or supported or even actively enforced by the majority of the population? Which participants acted deliberately, and who acted indifferently or negligently, and for what reasons?

Secondly, the tribunals are necessary for practical reasons because individual sentences on a mere case-to-case basis would generate a labyrinth of contradictory legal decisions that would shroud the causes and mechanisms in twilight rather than shine a spotlight on them. Due to their high number, the proceedings would drag on for several decades; many of the aggrieved would pass before the verdict was pronounced, and some would fail to get through with their complaints. The timely clarification of historical events and the legal assessment through landmark judgments can help the law to prevail while it is still relevant to the victims.

Thirdly, the tribunals are of course a matter of justice. This includes the recognition of the damage that has been done. The suffering of the victims of measures becomes public. Getting heard plays a crucial role in justice perception, and this in turn allows the victims to let go of negative feelings; one becomes free to heal one’s psychological trauma and seek reconciliation with the perpetrators. As I have written elsewhere, I consider this to be one of the central arguments for “another Nuremberg”, because it was only because of the unprocessed psychological traumas of earlier catastrophes – Wars, Imperialism, Slavery, Industrialism, “Development”, Ecocide – that the world once again sank into wholesale barbarism. Justice also requires that the perpetrators be confronted with the victims so that they have the opportunity to become aware of their personal responsibility for what happened. This is often enough neglected, on the one hand because the perpetrators usually refuse to accept it, and on the other hand because trials are often brought for the purpose of deterrence and retribution only.

Judges at the benches of the International Military Tribunal 1945/46 (US Army, public domain)

Schopenhauer once said: “To forgive and forget is to throw precious experience out the window.” So should one never forgive? That would be neither wise nor humane. At the latest when those who have acted show insight into the consequences of their actions and when they seek to make amends, it is advisable to let go of the pain inflicted. But we should not forget, either personally or socially, because it goes without saying that valuable life lessons must not be lost. The enormity of the Corona complex therefore deserves – fourthly – a memorial. A sign must be set that we are determined to learn lessons from history. This historical phase must be given a special marker in the collective consciousness that will have a positive impact beyond the generation concerned. Humanity is currently going through an apocalyptic crisis, the successful overcoming of which the tribunals will stand for as boundary markers and monuments. A new era is beginning, a new form of society is dawning on the horizon. Understanding the deeper causes of the crisis will be of enormous importance in building a more humane way of life. The very way in which the tribunals are conducted and the outcomes they produce could set an example for our future togetherness.

Therefore, “another Nuremberg” cannot be primarily about punishment. I believe, given deeply held humanist and spiritual values in much of the resistance movement, that we will not go for death sentences or public executions, even. This would only add another traumatic wound to the nightmare already experienced. Instead, the tribunals should serve the primary purpose of restoring justice and peaceful coexistence. Perpetrators, victims, applauders, acquiescents, silent onlookers and those somewhere in between can use the insights gained with the help of psychologists, sociologists, historians, economists, medical experts and so on to gain understanding of each other’s motives. The new state must promote personal, national and international reconciliation through various programmes; it must give every individual the opportunity to learn conflict management strategies, awareness and techniques for handling uncomfortable feelings or information. Still, perpetrators have to be liable with all their assets, lose their unlawful privileges and must be stripped of their decision-making power over people. Only where perpetrators refuse to restore peace with their victims arises the need for their removal from society through appropriate means, such as imprisonment or banishment.

Why “Nuremberg”?

Would the trials take place in Nuremberg again? If they are so different in focus, scope and purpose from the war crimes trials of the 1940s, why evoke this historical setting?

It is questionable whether the city of Nuremberg can provide the appropriate setting that such an elaborate undertaking requires. Probably one would conduct several series of negotiations in different places all over the world, separated according to problem areas, levels of responsibility and cultural aspects of the Corona complex, and one will probably coin a new name for it. Preliminarily, however, the word “Nuremberg” is a suitably short term for communicating the idea of having a tribunal that is investigating crimes of unheard-of proportions. Now and then, an ideologically hypnotised majority of the population supported unlawful government action that has claimed the lives of many millions of people and ruined the lives of countless others; it is not quite impossible that the same currents and circles of people are behind it, i.e. that there is continuity with the crimes of the twentieth century, as Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav, for example, believes.

Trivialising history?

Does recourse to historical events of the 1930s and 40s trivialise Nazi crimes? Some are of this opinion, but I myself believe that no inadmissible identity is being claimed here. The crimes of the Third Reich and its collaborators were unique in their historical dimension. The Corona crimes are not to be equated with them, because they have their own character and context. However, in my view, the reappraisal will undoubtedly make the structural parallels of both events visible and adequately acknowledge the suffering of those affected. The documentation of the Corona complex might help to prevent future generations from making similar mistakes. Numerous Jews, for example, pointed out that Holocaust remembrance must above all help preventing the beginnings of another genocide. For decades it was “Never Again!” Well, if we are to succeed with stopping the train to Auschwitz, “Never Again” has arrived. It took eight years for the targeted discrimination against Jews to culminate in systematic extermination. Comparisons are not equations, they are the necessary juxtaposition of events, in this case for the purpose of keeping history from repeating itself.

While the first Nuremberg Trials could not prevent the re-emergence of a totalitarian regime – more comprehensive and profound even than its fascist predecessor – they have been the inspiration for a far greater, quicker and more determined resistance movement as compared to the 1930s. We do not yet know whether the tide can be turned in time, but the day will come when the régime collapses. We’d better prepare for it.

Is there a sufficient data basis?

The documentation of the crimes around the Corona complex is especially important to the German resistance. Since July 2020, the Stiftung Corona-Ausschuss (Corona Investigative Committee Foundation) is working on establishing the factual basis for the pandemic and the measures implemented to combat it. Another initiative called Corona Cases has recently started to collect relevant judgments and legal opinions. Corresponding lawsuits are sometimes deliberately initiated by lawyers in order to have core questions of the critics of the measures clarified or to highlight weaknesses in the current functioning of society. At the beginning of December 2021, a Centre for Reappraisal, Clarification, Legal Prosecution and Prevention of Crimes against Humanity Based on the Corona Measures (ZAAVV) was founded as a necessary main pillar for collecting evidence that can be used in court. They will not run out of work for a long time. The number of publicly accessible materials alone is incredibly large. The film testimonies of victims of the measures, for example, probably count in the tens of thousands already. Tragically, the mounting “collateral” goes unnoticed by large sections of a population which clings frantically to the story of a new kind of killer virus.

Evidence archive at the Nuremberg Trials 1945/46 (US Army, public domain)

Is there a legal basis?

Lawyers will be able to provide far more in-depth answers about the legal basis of Corona tribunals than could be discussed in a cursory examination like mine. Nevertheless, several noteworthy points stick out.

As already mentioned, obvious fundamental violations of laws and national constitutions have been committed by numerous actors, ranging from false statements about a drug, incitement, corruption, profiteering, medical malpractice, abuse of office, obstruction of justice and bending of the law to dehumanizing treatment, deprivation of liberty, child abuse and homicide. Criminal and civil law, as well as state and national constitutions, already provide sufficient basis to initiate investigations in all countries.

The Nuremberg Trials themselves provide the precedent for a tribunal of international stature. They also created – at the time – new law, first and foremost the Nuremberg Code, the worldwide ethical standard for medical experiments, which emerged from the medical trials. A whole series of other international treaties resulting from the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s would have to be directly applicable, including the United Nations Charter. The UN, for all the criticism that can be levelled at its role in undermining our communities, also holds relevant norms such as the Convention against Torture, or the Convention on the Rights of Children. Whereas in the 1940s, international ethical regulations existed only with regard to war crimes and breaches of treaties, meaning that Allied judges had to retroactively declare obeying immoral orders unlawful, most of the ethical norms relevant to the Corona complex have long since been transformed into applicable law in most countries. In Germany, for example, there is a duty for state employees, such as teachers, police officers and soldiers, to refuse unconstitutional orders. The Constitution itself, Article 20.4 enshrines a general right to resistance when the democratic order as a whole is in danger:

In the absence of other means, all Germans have the right to resist anyone attempting to do away with this [constitutional] order.

So the judges of the Corona tribunals do not need to refer to some fictitious universal morality, which the perpetrators would not share anyway; they can judge on the basis of existing law that applied at the time of the crime. Therefore the perpetrators cannot plead ignorance, they cannot claim that they simply followed orders and they could in principle be held accountable in any country in the world.

Pending questions

Since the considerations of having “another Nuremberg” already arrived in places outside lawyers’ forums – some take tribunals almost for granted – it seems to me that the time has come to discuss the idea publicly and, if necessary, to flesh it out. If it’s just a matter of settling accounts with the regime, there’s no need to go to great lengths. Kangaroos can’t make mistakes. However, a unique opportunity opens up here to use the instrument of the tribunal for the improved reconstruction of our societies. The “Nuremberg” reference may seem exaggerated or inappropriate; admittedly. But it is the most memorable term at the moment for addressing the necessary reappraisal of the Corona complex.

Of course, in a short essay like this, no conclusive recommendations can be made and certainly not all questions can be answered. For example, it must remain open how to seize hold of the perpetrators, who the judges will be, whether juries will be involved, in which places the sessions will be held and who should decide on all these things in the first place. As a very general recommendation it might be good advice to seek broad international consensus, including from non-lawyers. Principles of humanism and compassion would have to be the benchmark from the beginning.

[Title image: The Nuremberg Palace of Justice at the time of the Tribunals, 1945-46; US Army photograph, public domain]

Killing Sophie Again

Sophie Scholl

haGalil, a German webzine on Jewish life, announced a demonstrative performance “under strictest observance of the mandatory Corona protective measures, including the testing of the participants” and “in close consultation with the appropriate authorities.” And thus, three days later, a spooky scene presented itself on May 9th 2021, the 100th anniversary of Sophie Scholl’s birthday, to onlookers at Munich’s Königsplatz (The King’s Square) as well as the viewers of a live video stream.

A definition of cognitive dissonance

At a distance of about twenty meters from the visitors, Dr. Hildegard Kronawitter, the managing director of the Weiße Rose Stiftung (White Rose Foundation Germany), was giving her emotionless opening speech by reading from her notes. She explains that she wishes the actors much joy at the performance and that Sophie Scholl may accompany them in their everyday lives. She thanks “the audience which has shown up in exactly the numbers permitted” by the authorities. Then she proceeds with reading a short welcoming speech from Munich’s mayor Dieter Reiter who couldn’t participate personally “because the conditions to be observed under Corona made that impossible for him.” His text honoured the theatrical artists’ upcoming performance as “a living monument” for Sophie Scholl whose actions “have broken the Nazis’ claim for monopoly over public opinion.” He proclaims that “Remembrance today means that we stay vigilant and do not remain silent when people get affronted, ostracized or attacked on confronting cheap propaganda” and closes his address by emphasizing how “fundamentally important it is to stand up for freedom, peace and justice – every day, and in every situation.” So far, so good. But then…

What follows would have been a bizarre sight even before 2020. One hundred young people come walking through the side gates of the Propylaea, a monumental arch in Greek classicist style. They are dressed in black pants, bright red shirts and … dark FFP masks. A few years ago one would have correctly guessed that those masks were symbols for abolished freedom of speech; today you’ll be cut short by the managing director of the White Rose Foundation if you assert as much. The youth march to their positions in front of the gate, exactly two meters apart from each neighbour, where, for about forty minutes, to the sound of Scholl quotes, they go through their theatrical motions without moving much from their places.

It is not up to me to judge the performance which has surely been given with the best intentions and in a spirit of devotion by the students, but as I said already, the scene felt utterly spooky and bizarre when seen in the light of the occasion, the celebration of a young woman who has been killed for committing simple acts of non-conformity to government orders. Set to the recitation of her demand for freedom a group of one hundred students – “under strictest observance of the mandatory Corona protective measures” and “in close consultation with the appropriate authorities” – through their large-scale demonstration of obedience make a nonsense of the very matter to be celebrated: an individual’s decision to follow her conscience even under the threat of death. If you need a definition of cognitive dissonance, here it is. And if you ask me whether it is justified to quote the words of Sophie Scholl, Anne Frank, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer in defiance of their second slaughtering by contemporary bureaucrats, be blessed.

Atrium of the University in Munich where the Scholl’s were caught dropping leaflets. (wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Civilization and violence

In a certain way each era has us living in unprecedented times – times which have never before unfolded like these. It lies in the nature of our linear view of history, but more so it lies in the nature of the subject of history, civilization, a culture in eternal making-over. As civilization amasses lands, people, stuff, knowledge, it grows constantly bigger until it eventually reaches its peak, the maximally achievable size and power, before it collapses into a heap – the end of history. Reinhold Niebuhr, an American theologian and social critic, in a typical misconception of the civilized philosopher stated that,

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,” [Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, 1937, p39]

The thing that Niebuhr almost touched without noticing is that the apparent peak of civilization is not only a turning point but the most intense illusion of grandeur. What he, like most everyone I know, overlooks is the fact that the great architecture, the nicely chiseled rhetoric, the elaborate theories, the astounding technologies, the dolce vita and the fantastic wealth of civilized culture have at their basis the rape of peoples and lands. Violence, in other words, is not the exception to the supposedly lawful order of civilized culture – it makes up its very foundation. So we lie to ourselves when we think that violence is uncivilized, a typical characteristic of “primitive underdeveloped” people(s). We lie to ourselves when we think that we could keep violence in check. We lie to ourselves when we think that “best practices”, “progress”, and well-chosen leaders were able to overcome the predicament. At the apex of civilization, violence immerses everything, penetrates all places, and is baked into the morals, the knowledge, the technology, the law, the religion, the arts, and even the most ordinary rituals of everyday life. To say that violence got institutionally established – which it is – does not sufficiently describe its seat, its role, and its effect within our societies.

Directed switching-over

This becomes increasingly highlighted by the tyranny whose grip for power, for the first time in all history, does not radiate from one centre. It does not rally around one leader. Those who seem to take decisions are so obviously puppets that we cannot attribute full responsibility to them. Though they are guilty as shame for issuing inhumane unconstitutional orders they cannot be mistaken for the source of the global all-pervasive violence which is wrecking the illusion of the supposedly benevolent culture. No longer may we point to a Führer who verbatim took all responsibility on his shoulders. Violence has become a background radiation emanating from countless sources.

As I pointed out repeated times, and as it should be quite obvious prima facie, every single state, national and public institution or organization in India and most of Europe – the regions I have an overview on — has been turned into a zombie of the new régime. Among the most efficient of the numerous techniques applied to this effect are 1, the appointment of outsiders into leading positions – a non-police as head of police, a non-journalist as editor or publisher, a non-politician as minister, a non-physician as chairman of the board of the medical association etc –, 2, a strictly hierarchical culture of obedience, 3, the induction of fear of an elusive source of danger, 4, financial incentives, 5, misinformation, secrecy and censorship, and 6, social control and mass-psychological manipulation.

The technical term for this process in the German language is Gleichschaltung. Introduced by the Nazis in 1933, The technical term for this process of zombification is Gleichschaltung. Introduced by Germany’s National Socialists in 1933,its literal meaning is the simultaneous directed switching-over, the result of which is social synchronization among all public, economic and private entities within a country, to achieve a declared purpose. Neither the origin nor the intent of Gleichschaltung – whether you call it by that name or not – have anything to do with democracy, even as the parliaments castrate themselves and many of the institutions and organizations seem to spontaneously fall into lockstep all by themselves.

Volksgerichtshof, Freisler
Roland Freisler (centre) at the Volksgerichtshof (Bundesarchiv, Bild 151-39-23 /CC-BY-SA-3.0 Germany)

The moral collapse of respectable society

Some people object to the use of such terms (or any statements at all from that time, for that matter) in today’s context because these supposedly refer to specific events in the thirties and forties of the last century, while today’s societies – on the level of declarations – seem to differ tremendously from back then. Let’s take Frau Kronawitter, the above-mentioned managing director of the Weiße Rose Stiftung, as an example again. In November 2020 she said that her institute “disfavours” the use of Sophie Scholl quotes by the “Corona opposers”. The White Rose members had rebelled against a dictatorship which oppressed opinions and persecuted dissenters brutally whereas today, she said, the rule of law guaranteed free speech and the right to demonstrate.

You have to be quite blind – or biased – to not see the brutal physical and verbal violence against the peacefully acting dissenters of today, dissenters against an already established authoritarian régime under which oppositional views no longer reach the general public through ordinary, established channels. Being ignorant of the atrocities committed by the system, said Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, is no excuse, though, for there are always means to acquire knowledge through means outside the official framework. Sophie Scholl who has been beheaded around the time Traudl Junge joined Hitler as a secretary, might have agreed, I guess. At her trial before the Volksgerichtshof (the NS supreme court) she said to Roland Freisler, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.” In another quote attributed to her she stated,

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature.

Frau Kronawitter is not one of “those with no sides and no causes.” Even as she disagrees with the critics of the corona measures, her position – as a guardian of the memory of historical resistors to tyranny – might rather have obliged her to give those who quote from Scholl’s legacy at least the benefit of the doubt. ‘I understand the outrage,’ she could have told the journalists, ‘but I believe that we are far from the kind of situation the members of the White Rose found themselves in.’ Instead, in denial of the writings on the wall, she uttered the words abuse and absurd to denounce the protesters’ concerns. To my ears, it’s her own words that sound grotesque, not only in the face of the current situation but also with relation to the declared goal of the Weiße Rose Stiftung: At the end of the closing credits to the film Sophie Scholl, The Final Days (2005) it says that the foundation “informs relentlessly … on civil courage and resistance – even today.” In other words, keeping the memory of historical lessons alive is an ongoing task that requires vigilance with regards to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Early warnings need to be taken seriously, and active resistance should set in before it becomes a suicide mission. Yet obviously, like so many other leading figures in the memorial business, in music, literature, politics, science, medicine, philosophy and leftist circles, Kronawitter fell for (or instrumentalizes) literalism which means she cannot concede that under the shallow surface of differing phenomena the same old patterns drive the same old game for power toward the same old goal. But their literal understanding of what the assertions of the oppressors and the statements of their adversaries mean from a broader perspective is outdated since at least the 1960s.

Hannah Arendt

Lessons from history

Ever since people wondered what had befallen humankind during Europe’s totalitarian period, historians, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists have been using the actual terminology of that time in a more general sense to describe the phenomenology and mechanisms among groups of people and whole societies sliding into barbarism – or hyper-civilization, I should say. History does not repeat itself; it does rhyme quite regularly though. In other words, the lessons of history speak of active patterns, not of identical actors or events. Hannah Arendt as one of the better-known, well-received socio-historical analysts, dedicated her life’s work to finding the patterns underlying the fascist state. In her speech on Personal Responsibility Under a Dictatorship (1964), she made the conditions we live under remarkably well discernible:

“Totalitarian society, as distinguished from totalitarian government, is indeed monolithic; all public manifestations, cultural, artistic, or learned, and all organizations, welfare and social services, even sports and entertainment, are “coordinated.” There is no office and indeed no job of any public significance, from advertising agencies to the judiciary, from play-acting to sports journalism, from primary and secondary schooling to the universities and learned societies, in which an unequivocal acceptance of the ruling principles is not demanded.”

Most of today’s governments work in open breach of their democratic constitutions; yet so far they act merely authoritarian, not totalitarian. It is society itself – following impulses from its executive branch – that has slipped into totalitarianism, with all its elements “coordinated”, streamlined, lockstepped, gleichgeschaltet. If you don’t wear a mask you cannot enter the shop. If you don’t test negative you cannot enter the classroom. If you don’t vaccinate you cannot go to work, or to concert, and you cannot cross the border. If you kiss your friend or have a birthday party or publicly read from the constitution you get arrested. If you outspokenly disagree with the official health paradigm your publisher rejects your book or record, your chief editor refuses to print your article, your bank cancels your account, your internet provider drops you, your boss fires you, your landlord boots you out, your social-media hangouts silence or de-platform you, and your friends stop speaking to you. Hannah Arendt, in her effort to understand what had happened eighty-five years earlier to herself, described the same “incredible ease with which lifelong friendships were broken and discarded.” At the root of the phenomenon there was “fear-inspired hypocrisy”, she explained, but also an “early eagerness not to miss the train of history … among a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture” (ibid.), just as we can observe today. And there was a righteousness in them that defied all reason, all empathy, and persisted beyond the collapse of the violence-enforced lies as became overt in the post-war trials.

But even those who drifted along for fear of sanctions or who thought they were somehow choosing the lesser evil washed their hands of all responsibility. They felt that, as cogs in a machine, as functionaries of a system, they had no power over its atrocious deeds whatsoever. Nevertheless – according to Arendt – they have been and remained human beings which could and should be held accountable for their participation in the events, because they always had a choice. “All governments rest on consent,” she quotes US founding father Madison, and added that the fallacy rested in mistaking consent for obedience. Therefore the correct question to be put before the followers in a tyranny was not, ‘Why did you obey?’ but ‘Why did you support?’ (This is also part of the spiritual practice of taking responsibility for one’s life; instead of telling oneself, ‘I have to go to work’ one concedes ‘I choose to go to work.’) “Monsters exist,” says Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” [The New Republic, Feb 17, 1986]

Making a difference

Hannah Arendt tried to find an answer to the most fundamental question in which way the system’s supporters and the non-collaborators differed. She concluded that the non-collaborators, “called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves.” They carefully decided on the limits of how far they could go and still look in the mirror, and even under force would prefer to die rather than step beyond those limits. The others, though, the system’s supporters would cling to established rules which were hijacked by those in power:

“The total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable … Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves,”

writes Arendt (ibid.), whereby she points to a generalization to be derived from the experience collected under the Nazi régime. As unique as the extent and the particular forms of evil under that specific tyranny may seem, underneath lay psychological and behavioral patterns which can be traced across all of civilization throughout all of world history, and they came to the foreground, again, in March 2020, clearly visible to anyone with open eyes or sensitive guts. If the Holocaust memorials, the war tribunals and the public commemoration days ought to have any meaning in today’s world beyond simple sorriness for irrecoverable losses, if the legacy of the Scholl siblings tells us anything at all, it is this one word: Beware!

For the time to stand up and disobey has arrived.

The tiniest sign of humanness

Human dignity is inviolable

(Image: Article 1 of Germany’s constitution, “Human dignity is inviolable”, inscribed on the walls of the Regional Court of Frankfurt, Main, at the request of Fritz Bauer)

Fritz Bauer, Attorney General in the Auschwitz trial, said in an interview for the Hessian Radio (HR) in 1964 that he was waiting for “the tiniest sign of humanness” from the people sitting in the prosecution bench towards the surviving witnesses whose families had been completely wiped out. The victims’ families, all of Germany and the world could breathe a sigh of relief then [arte film documentary “Fritz Bauer, Generalstaatsanwalt, Nazi-Jäger”; 42:38]. But nothing of the sort happened. At the beginning of the trial they all pleaded “innocent” and stayed with it until their final plea, even though they had to admit in the course of the trial that their behaviour had cost lives. What should they have done? After all, orders were orders. “Befehlsnotstand”, as the German wording goes.
The same thing happened in the other war crimes trials: the Nuremberg Main Trial, the Nuremberg Medical Trial, the Bergen-Belsen Trial, the Ravensbrück Trial, the Dachau Trial, the Mauthausen Trial, the Buchenwald Trial, the Flossenbürg Trial, the Mühldorf Trial and the Eichmann Trial. Would it have been so awful – guilty or innocent – to express some sympathy for the fates of those affected and their families, as is not only customary but inevitable in personal encounters?

Considering that the few hundred who were held accountable in court are representative of the leadership, many of whom escaped justice by fleeing the country or committing suicide, and considering that tens of thousands of employees were actively and directly involved in the extermination machine, and considering further that the common people, who silently collaborated, were unable to talk about their wartime pasts until the mid-1960s, then it is fair to say that, apart from its symbolic effect, the legal examination of the Nazi reign of terror has been a failure. Leading Nazis were able to obtain lucrative and responsible posts in both German states, Austria and also with the Allies, which signals that no effective denazification took place in society either. What is quite certain, however, is that psychological processing, disassociation and reconciliation on a human level were practically completely absent. Nowhere did perpetrators stand by their deeds after the end of the Third Reich.

This allows for two possible conclusions.Firstly, that the war crimes trials produced gigantic legal misjudgments or else equally gigantic legal abuses – in other words, that those sentenced to death were actually not guilty. This is contrary to the apparent evidence of a massive flood of clues, testimonies and proofs, as well as to the simple logic of totalitarian regimes, as can be observed elsewhere, and would be tantamount to Holocaust denial. I would like to leave that aside for ontological and ethical reasons. The second possible conclusion seems psychologically more logical anyway and more probable from experience: that the accused – and with them all those who actively or passively participated in the crimes of the regime but remain silent to this day – are incapable of admitting the evil of their deeds to themselves or to others, and that they are therefore unable under any circumstances to show human emotions, such as Fritz Bauer would have expected from people who had committed a mistake but remained basically decent: There was no admission, no mea culpa, no regret, no remorse, no apology, no reparation. And people like Günter Grass lied or remained silent about their SS membership all their lives. This conspicuous absence of human emotion in the face of the most atrocious crimes prompted Fritz Bauer to quote Hölderlin:

Generalstaatsanwalt Fritz Bauer pd
Fritz Bauer
You see craftsmen, but no human beings, thinkers, but no human beings, priests, but no human beings, masters and servants, boys and set people, but no human beings.

The Third Reich is by no means an exception. The same applies to active participants in the GDR dictatorship, in the Soviet Union and the fascist dictatorships of Southern Europe, for the collaborators in France, Quislings in Norway, the countries of the BeNeLux and from the fascist and later real-socialist vassals Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. It was the victors who exhibited individual faces of the overthrown regime in show trials and then had their heads rolled for public effect. There was no atonement, no reconciliation, and therefore no new beginning. On the contrary: Helmut Kramer, former judge at the Regional Court of Braunschweig, reported that resentment against emigrants and opponents of the regime had formed among the people because they had allegedly “evaded their responsibility”. Bauer’s hope that the complete discrediting of anti-Semitism would finally make reconciliation between Jews and non-Jews possible was perhaps dashed because the perpetrators assumed that their victims were not capable of this. Yet it was the perpetrators and their sympathisers who lacked both empathy and imagination and thus the will to make peace with the past, the victims, the emigrants and the members of the resistance.

Thinking about the time after the Corona dictatorship, this gives me a sense of foreboding. After all, making a comparison with Germany’s years of terror means for me not only looking at their conditions of origin, their mechanisms of repression and manifestations of violence in order to be able to correctly assess their counterparts in the present, but also to reflect on their end and their overcoming. In view of the fatal post-war years, it is to be feared that parliamentarians who voted for the Enabling Act will assume the most prestigious office in the new state, that torture doctors will head medical associations, that wartime engineers will continue to provide destructive technologies, that ordinary block watchmen will become mayors,that the informers of yesteryear continue to defend the government against the people, that mobs of thugs become policemen, that murderers of the judiciary are now to dispense justice, that a member of the old junta heads a state government, or that the flatterers of the Ancien Regime are allowed to lull the people even after the collapse, as happened in the early FRG.

It is not hard to identify such personalities in our time. It will be more difficult to convince the affronted silent majority not to fall into the same trap again, but to open up to another possible reality: conviviality (literally: living with one another), which says goodbye to disenfranchisement through mass production and to the institutionalisation of all human activities, from learning to mobility and the distribution of goods to health care and the celebration of one’ s faith.

What gives me confidence is the high number, by German standards, of groups that have formed in response to the worsening barbarism; they strive to counter blind obedience to the rules with education and appeals to compassion. It is striking that apart from numerous quasi-religious reactions – from silence to ridicule, distortion of facts, personal vilification, existential and violent threats to actual deplatforming, beatings, imprisonments and assassinations – there is no engagement with the content of the critics of the measures. Therefore, at this point, and hopefully only for the time being, I must conclude my text with an excerpt from Fritz Bauer’s Hölderlin quote:

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)

The virtues of the Germans, however, are a shining evil and nothing more; for they are only makeshift, wrested with slave labour from the empty heart out of cowardly fear, and leave every pure soul desolate, which […] cannot bear the discordant sound that is shrieking in all the dead order of these people. […] And that is why they fear death so much, and suffer all humiliation for the sake of their oyster life, because they do not know anything higher than the fabrication they have stitched for themselves. […]
I spoke for all those who are in this country and suffer as I suffered there.
I now wanted to leave Germany again. I no longer sought anything among this people, I was offended enough by relentless insults, I did not want my soul to bleed to death completely among such people.

But Hyperion returns, not for the sake of the people but for the sake of his beloved and the beautiful country. And he remarks conciliatorily:

Like the quarrels of lovers are the dissonances of the world. Reconciliation is in the midst of strife and all that is divided finds itself together again.

(Friedrich Hölderlin: Hyperion, Book 2 Tübingen, Cotta, 1799)

Another Nuremberg

I haven’t been shopping since March 15, 2020, the first day of curfew in India. Lockdown is the neologism for this – for once an apt expression, because it is a technical term originally used by prison administrations. I haven’t been to the doctor for a year, until last week not even to the dentist, although there was every reason to do so. I don’t go to the movies anymore, I don’t enter an office of the administration anymore, I don’t enter a cashier’s office of a bank anymore. I no longer travel, neither short nor long, neither by cab nor by train or even by airplane, the latter of which has become completely impossible. A book manuscript lies unprinted on my hard drive, gathering digital dust because the mere thought of crowded shops and city streets already feels suffocating. Invited by friends I went to lunch at a tiny cookshop that didn’t require specific clothing; I couldn’t enjoy it, though. I did resume work at the library, mainly at the insistence of the manager, who assured me I didn’t have to follow any rules, even if everyone else did. In the office, to myself, I have time to catch my breath again. But the way there, a few kilometers by bicycle is an ordeal. Not that anyone would talk to me about the missing mask, no. I wouldn’t like that. I wouldn’t like that at all; I can’t stand the sight of people anymore and avoid being seen on my part. Me and people, we are a divorced couple.

There is a long history of early traumatization; life since hasn’t been too kind either. Of course, I could try to see the positive sides of life. Why don’t I try to see it more positively? Why don’t I start anew somewhere else? Why don’t I… ? – I guess because by now I lack the necessary faith that the grass is greener elsewhere. As I said, there is a long history, but it does not matter for what I have to say: That all of us individual cases with our human problems, our likes and dislikes, our opinions, insights and realizations, we don’t count any longer. Beyond our function as consumers, employees, taxpayers, cannon fodder, we have long since ceased to play any role in the way matters get handled. We are merely the objects of observation and control, generic members of statistically ascertainable norm groups. Gendered, risk-evaluated, labeled, sorted, directed, manipulated, exploited, eventually dumped.

The raised index finger for all those without a mask.
We comply with the Corona rules.

[Billboard by the City of Berlin, paid from taxpayer money]

New Barbarism

Corona just caps it all off. Hardly any intellectual fails to mention that the Corona State finally flushes to the surface what had been pushed underwater for so long: all kinds of toxic garbage, looted goods, gasping victims of terror, gnawed-up floaters, fears and traumas, screwed-up biographies, stolen dreams, lost raison d’être, abdicated freedom. Add to all that the codified injustice, the structural violence, and a mountain of epistemic baggage that keep our polities stuck in unreformable rigidity. In the face of nightmare societies competing for the worst way , one can hardly tell the difference whether I am writing about Germany, India, or say, Mexico.

A lot of words that, in short, are supposed to explain why, these days, my trust in the human capacity to bond, in the manifest social structure and – yes, also – in the specific individuals that surround me, has slipped away. I have lost the desire to see anyone anymore, lost the joy of hearing what is going on with this or that person. In the same way, when I think of the big names of our time – people from music, philosophy, politics, science, etc. – I’d rather they kept their mouths shut, because what comes out of there usually offends the mind. If the verbal garbage remained just words – ok. But unfortunately the call for ostracizing the dissenters and the demands for harder punishment of “deniers”, along with all the other fantasies of social barbarism get implemented without big scruples only too soon after… and the whole pack of established media provide a platform for the hysteria. The state’s regulations regime has overtaken many a satirical exaggeration within a few weeks by issuing ever more repressive orders. And then there are the non-state ‘measures’. A friend from Berlin writes:

“The day before yesterday I was actually physically attacked for the first time in my adult life in the park by an aggressive but at the same time somehow calculating man. Afterwards I did some asking around and in fact it happened to my roommate in a very similar way. The girlfriend of another acquaintance was slapped in the subway; another one was yelled at in the supermarket because of the distance rules. People here are starting to go crazy.”

Doublethink

There is an archaic conception of man at work, incompatible with my worldview: it’s not autonomous individuals endowed with dignity, embedded in loving communities, who shape their lives in a self-responsible manner, but fear-driven government subjects incapable of making rational decisions, who must be kept on a leash for their own good and who — as self-appointed guardians of the status quo – habitually obey pre-emptively. Real dangers have given way to obscure statistical risk potentials, your neighbor is always a danger to your life, denunciation is a civic duty, children’s birthday parties get broken up as criminal gatherings. How quickly the turnaround has happened is frightening in itself already, because as far as typical features of Nazi Germany were concerned, the rule went, NEVER AGAIN! But already in early May, six weeks into the curfew, my mother wrote from rural Black Forest:

“My physiotherapist, who is friends with a policeman, told me that in [the county seat] 1000 people call every day to report friends, relatives, neighbors and acquaintances to the police – for Corona misconduct!”

In the eyes of a not insignificant part of the population, freedom and human dignity are no longer inalienable rights, but privileges that have to be earned by conformity – and thus are reduced to absurdity. Civil and human rights dwell in best company with other terms that have been usurped into Newspeak: Attitudinal journalism operates as “reporting”, Nazis masquerade as “Antifa”, “solidarity” is understood as forced conformity, “development aid” drives whole continents into poverty, “humanitarian intervention” stands for genocide, “vaccination” has become another word for genetic manipulation, forcing women about to give birth to wearing masks is part of “health care”, the authoritarian regime pretends to be a “democracy”, mob rule prides itself on “civil courage”, the middle finger replaces the “index finger”… I could go on like this for hours and literally fill a whole dictionary – the neo-liberal dictionary of falsehoods, which I already mentioned in earlier articles.

Those who feel reminded of George Orwell have long since no need to fear overstretching the comparison. Dystopia can hardly be manifested more clearly and obviously. In the novel “1984” Orwell writes:

“[‘blackwhite’] means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.”

Introduced later, the technical term for “doublethink” is “cognitive dissonance.”

De-Coronification

Here the question arises how after Corona — assuming the nightmare has a happy ending — a new togetherness can come about at all, given that such a massive slide into barbarism was supported by virtually all governmental, social, scientific and economic institutions, but especially by so many fellow human beings. How can one restore that trust to one’s arbitrary neighbor that is needed to build a relationship, how can one again look into the eyes of the perpetrators, of whom one knows that in their world one exists merely as an object?

I have my doubts that a simple “No hard feelings” approach is enough, because I cannot dismiss Schopenhauer’s remark that “to forgive and forget is to throw precious experience out of the window”. Prior to forgiveness, there must be recognition of one’s own transgressions and subsequent repentance. It involves the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own actions, to accept punishment, to repent, to make amends or at least to mitigate the damage. Then, and only then, may one forgive, but rather not forget. We must not allow ourselves to wrap the cloak of silence around the people’s role in the oppressing, torturing and murdering of millions, as we did after the disaster of the Third Reich, because at that time the historical traumas of hundreds of millions of people in dozens of nations remained buried deep in the individual and collective psyche. Uncured they continued to smolder within the closets of apparently purified hearts and minds, affected the world view of three or four subsequent generations, and found expression during the so-called pandemic in a mass hysteria unlike any other in history. The failed Denazification of post-WW2 – failed because it got stuck with mere criminalization of identified perpetrators — must be made up for in our present.

Denazification today means de-coronification. Without another trial based on the Nuremberg model – because of the symbolism (tribunal and codex) it should indeed take place in Nuremberg – a credible and trustworthy restoration of social cohesion is simply impossible. The enormity of what has happened demands a complete reappraisal, while those responsible for the worst mass suffering in human history must be held accountable. The thirst for revenge, the cry for crucifixion of exposed representatives of the Corona regime, however, must under no circumstances guide the trial. As now impressively demonstrated, with the death of the Nazi grandees, self-afflicted or on the gallows, the phantom of fascism was by no means banished, but could return in full glory as self-declared anti-fascism, as totalitarianism in democratic guise. The goal of a tribunal should be to educate the population about its own role in the emergence of tyranny. Of course, it is also urgent to ensure that the main characters in the Corona scam are permanently prevented from further agitation. Immediately thereafter, however, the real clean-up work begins: our language, our institutions, our laws and regulations, our economy and currency, our international as well as our personal relationships, our relationship to technology and food, and our use of art, medicine, science – basically, simply all elements of existence – must be examined. A complete revolution of our way of life becomes due, the core of which must be the confrontation of our traumas: a personal Nuremberg for each and every one of us.

“NO MASK NO ENTRY” – Ivan Illich and the exercise of freedom

The early Christians made … community by sharing the simple communion meal through which they remembered their Lord, and by a mouth-to-mouth kiss through which they shared their spirits in a conspiratio or breathing together,

states Canadian radio broadcaster David Cayley in a book on Austro-American social philosopher Ivan Illich’s views. [David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future. The Testament of Ivan Illich. House of Anansi Pr., 2005]

 

So this is what it means to conspire. Rather than theorizing on others doing it, we are called to do it ourselves. Which brings me to a message published in our local gazette, the News & Notes 839. It says,

Mask dilemma

The Covid Task force in its weekly communication with the community in the News & Notes, on Auronet and through many Bulletins has done a heroic job! The Pandemic in India is  certainly  not  yet  under  control  and  we  are asked  to  take caution;  It  is  required  by  law  to  keep  social  distance, wear masks while going out and in public places and do not hold or go to large gatherings. As Auroville and Aurovilians, we have to follow the law.

Lately there are more voices of dissent, people who absolutely refuse to wear a mask in Auroville’s public places: going to the Financial Service, PDTC or Pour Tous, (despite clear signs that say: ‘NO MASK NO ENTRY ‘. Unpleasant, jarring, impatient and hot arguments were heard in PDTC at the entrance attacking the amazing people, who keep this service going since March, in a spirit of selfless service, wearing their own hot masks all morning!! and providing us with all our food needs, meanwhile keeping a beautiful atmosphere.  Over the carrot-and onion displays someone went ballistic: shrieking to another customer who dared to inquire why she wasn’t wearing a mask. This was shocking painful and hurtful to everyone present. If some Aurovilians feel so strongly not keeping these simple rules, they of course have the freedom to stop shopping or use Auroville services and do their errands and business elsewhere. It  would  great  if  these  simple  rules  could  be  accepted  and followed by everyone -whatever people’s private opinions are- without the necessity to enforce them.

Stay Healthy!  ~ L.

I have a lot of questions about this piece of writing. What exactly is heroic about sitting in a self-appointed group passing down rules from the Central Government to The City The Earth Needs?  Why are those who work for a wage called selfless, and inhowfar does their self-torturing behaviour make a good example for everyone? It is certainly not ok to accuse or even shout at them, but where is all the rage coming from, did you ever wonder? From the threat of enforcement of ‘voluntary’ obedience, perhaps? Where can they go when all public doors are marked with Get-lost signs? Can they visit alternative offices when there aren’t any? Are they supposed to starve to death in their homes? What has become of the Aurovilian pride in all the non-allopathic methods and ways of healing we once practiced? Once there were Chinese, Tibetan, Ayurvedic, Homeopathic, Yogic, Shamanic and all kinds of ways, now there is only one, the control-obsessed Western-orthodox approach, or rather a perverted politicised version of it that defies all scientific and common-sense understanding.

Despite the many questionable points in the above opinion piece, I’ll focus on the topic of obedience alone. Mirra Alfassa, the founder and “Mother” of Auroville, also called the place The City At The Service Of Truth, and she made clear in many of her statements that laws, rules, traditions, morals, or religions alongside money, police, courts, politics, governments etc. should not rule its ways. A life divine, but no religions, as she famously said.

source: Pixabay

As can be seen from the following quotes, to no surprise, the New Testament as a spiritual document anticipates some of the things that the Mother, along with many other wisdom teachers, said about proper relation of the truth-seeker to rules.
Let me quote from Cayley’s book [in italics]; not in order to establish yet another authority or to argue theological points, but to give a perspective on what the insistence on obedience might mean.

What the Samaritan does is to step fearlessly outside what his culture has sanctified in order to create a new relationship and, potentially, a new community. He does not seek God within a sacred circle but finds him lying by the road in a ditch. His possibilities cannot be predicted or circumscribed. He lives, in the apostle Paul’s words, “not under the law, but under grace.” [Cayley]

“We are released from the Law, having died to what was binding us, and so we are in a new service, that of the spirit, and not in the old service of a written code.” [Paul, Letter to the Romans, 7:6]

In other words, the spirit defines our relationship, not our man-made arbitrary rules. One of Illich’s central tenets was that even the duty to help and the obligation to solidarity eliminate empathy and spirit from the good work. Before everything else, there ought to be compassion, not judgment. The person that comes to your doorstep is a person in need. Right action does not draw its direction from the norm or from fear of breaking rules.

 

“If I had not come and spoken to them they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin.” [Jesus, Gospel of John, 15:22-23]

While modern political and social theory has it that societies are shaped and held together by their rules, the bond of community is understanding. It doesn’t mean that laws, traditions or rituals are absent in community, but that they do not have precedence over compassion. Through the message passed on by numerous voices such as the Buddha, Jesus, or the Mother, we have been made aware of our freedom to act compassionately, and that the strict application – not the breach – of rules is a sin:

 

Sin, in this new context, no longer means just a violation of the law, but something more — a coldness or indifference to what has been revealed and made possible. [Cayley]

Don’t take ‘sin’ for the religious crime codified by the Roman Church, but for the betrayal of the relationship established by the loving trust of the Samaritan into the commonly despised stranger.

“Sin,” Illich says, “is refusing to honour that relationship which came into existence between the Samaritan and the Jew, which comes into existence through the exercise of freedom, and which constitutes an ‘ought’ because I feel called by you, called to you, called to this tie between human beings, or between beings and God […] It is not in any sense offensive of a law. It is always an offence against a person. It’s an infidelity.”

To value the law over the person, that is sin. Freedom, though, is not about permanent rebellion against rules in general, but about unrestrained acting in the spirit of the good: compassion, truthfulness, community.

Sin, on this account, is not simply an evil, or a moral fault. It is a failing against the Spirit, possible only for those who have heard and ignored what they have heard, and visible only in the light of that freedom that Paul says is identical with “the forgiveness of sin.” [Cayley]

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