nourishing obscurity

Exhibit 1

Ian Carstairs ran this pic below [remember the incident?] but it was the caption below which grabbed my attention:

High Society: Royal Ascot, 2011. The modern mind, far removed from the ideal of patience and tolerance, is so obsessed with status and image, drained of spiritual resources, and lacking in judgement that the least stress or provocation can trigger a descent into paranoid violence, with or without guns. In England, possession of a firearm brings a mandatory five year prison term.

Exhibit 2

The 2nd Amendment business.  A friend pointed out that they needed that because of mistrust – but surely trust would need to be at the basis of all human interaction and business dealings – not distrust?

In my current book, trust is the critical issue and when all characters feel they have reason to mistrust, it all falls apart, as one lie is exposed after another and no one can trust anyone enough to move forward with that person.

Exhibit 3

From Bruce Charlton on the gay “marriage” vote:

The infliction of deep and permanent damage on society is a feature, not a bug of this legislation; it is not an unintended by-product but the actual motivational core of the movement.

Exhibit 4

Coming back to marriage itself, the endangered institution, Jane Austin showed there was nothing new today – the lack of ethics has always been there:

There is not one in hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry.  It is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most of others and are least honest themselves.

Exhibit 5

Politically, the scum continues to rise [see this OoL post on our betters] and their influence then trickles down until it permeates the whole of society.   This is what Common Purpose is all about – getting people into key roles, e.g. in local councils and letting the poison spread.

And without adherence to a code, if there is nothing basically stopping you acting indecently towards someone, no checks and balances, no penalties of note, then the temptation is to get worse and worse and worse until you hardly recognize the same person who once was.

The Slog was on about Elm House and Richmond Council.  As if that is isolated – but it’s no more than what happens in Belgium or France or Germany, let alone Amsterdam.   Those sorts of things are and always will be.  And knowing no one trusts them an inch or has any respect, they then fulfil the expectation and are as bad if not worse than expectations.

Click pic then click then click again, then look into those eyes and tell me if you’d trust her.

Most people can take it from the upper echelons – we expect Them to be vermin in suits – but much harder to take is someone who appears to be an angel but is anything but.  What possesses someone to act like that?

It seems to me it’s when someone is in power.  Humans don’t do power well IMHO – it goes to their heads and if they’re weak people in the soul to begin with, if they don’t have any natural integrity or decency, then there is no limit to the perversions or lack of solidity.

Exhibit 6

The female.   The whole cosmetics and fashion industry is about women being what they’re not so it doesn’t augur well for honesty on their part in human relations unless they have internal integrity and that internal integrity must have come from somewhere.

And if they go for good looking men, those men have never experienced rejection, quite  the opposite, so they’ll feed her the eternal lines and it’s the triumph of hope over experience if she thinks they won’t do the same to her.   It’s also ego on both their parts – but in different ways.

Nothing makes me more suspicious than when a partner demands honesty from me – see the Jane Austin quote above.

Exhibit 7

Ordinary people in power.  The worst at lack of ethics, in my experience are those in power, such as the man above left in the corridors of power but also, in her own way, the girl in the pic to the right here.   I’ve used this pic as the basis of one character who, along with many others, is so into twisting and lying that when others also do that to her, creates an atmosphere where no one trusts anyone.

People get big ideas about themselves and start acting like petty tyrants within their sphere of influence – they see themselves as the centre around which all else revolves and the further from the traditional power bases you find this, that worse the person is.

Exhibit 8

There’s another kind of trust – trust in a product.  It used to be seen – whether myth or reality – that buying British, e.g. Sheffield steel, Morris Garages etc., was a guarantee in itself of quality.   When we had a manufacturing base, we had something to give a nation confidence and bind it in a way hot air cannot.

How does the service industry inspire confidence, particularly when people like the Finns do it better?   And knowing people within the IT world, their view is uniformly categorical about the state of British expertise.  I hear tales weekly of some new disaster or other.   British management is woeful, the tickbox and faux qualification mentality employs people who are sadly lacking in real hands-on ability and yet they’re so up themselves in biz-speak and how they’re rolling out this, delivering that.

The cumulative effect is lack of confidence.

Exhibit 9

The Tesco horsemeat.   I know the firm in Yorkshire which has been supplying much of this.

The effect – stage one

In the end, it means nothing gets achieved because it needs legalese in contracts to keep people to their word and at any moment they’ll find the loophole which then costs millions to close up until the next one is found.   Everyone is shortchanging everyone else.    There are huge amounts of rhetoric and slick talk but precious little experience and common sense, particularly with the new kind of parachutee.

In the past few days, I’ve been in the market and the lies there are sad – things advertsied as such and such turn out not to be.

What did they think – that I’d go to close it out, find an anomaly and say, “Oh well, never mind?”   This is the death and dearth of ethics.   You can groan all you like but if you have no code to give you a grounding in ethical principles, no thou shalt nots, then it’s very hard to know, beyond the obvious ones of not murdering or taking someone else’s wife, where the line should be drawn – it’s elastic, so say the least.

The effect – stage two

What eventually happens, of course, is that the whole society is corrupt and expects nothing but corruption – it’s actively condoned, aided and abetted.   I’ve seen it where the fine on the road is dishonest because it’s just for brownie points and the bribe is expected to top up the coffers.   Initially, if everyone in power is mafiosi, then the rules are clear plus the pecking order and so you’re largely left alone if you play your cards right and have protection.

In the end though, society is broken and also dangerous, bands roam around and it’s a lottery just when you will fall victim.   If there is any country where the process of reversing this is possible, I feel it’s the same country out of which the global mafia emanates, namely here in London and Scotland, the old money, the old powerbase.

The search for one messiah to reverse the trend

Will there be some political messiah?   One will certainly appear, promising to reverse the decades of corruption and PCism, to restore the natural order but scripture says there’s a good chance that one will be one you don’t want anywhere near the reins of power.

I’d say if one of these appears from above, looking down, if he mysteriously finds himself with preselection for a safe seat, don’t trust him, no matter how aligned with your thinking he seems.

Far more likely to convince is a Jeanne d’Arc, arising from the most unlikely beginnings.   It might be one of our fellow bloggers, it might be some most unpolitician-like person and the more things ring true, the more positive we can feel.   We might look at that person and think – my goodness, if someone like that can speak out, then where is my spine?

Internal

Finally, the integrity has to come from inside.  When enough people decide, for their own self-respect, that they’re not going to diddle someone, not going to act perversely, not going to take obscene salaries for very little efficacious input, there’s some sort of chance.

It’s going to come first from women IMHO.   In the Mail, on that gay “marriage” vote, the most scathing were women.   The tide of feminism having gone out, to be replaced by something worse – skankiness – was nevertheless started by Christian women who have been very vocal and have been on all the platforms and fora.

When a man, in himself, says he’s going to not diddle someone, as far as humanly possible because They set conditions which encourage dishonesty, when he rejects that lure and acts honestly, he goes down these days.   As we’re going down anyway, better to go down clean than in a pit of ordure.

So, rather than one messiah [who comes later], for now, it’s a whole lot of decent people dotted about who will start the ball rolling.

Filed under: History & Culture, Politics & economics