The Enemy From Within
OVERCOMING AMERICA’S GREATEST ENEMY
-Dio Lyons-
AMERICAN FIREKEEPER
americanfirekeeper.com
Our Shared Enemy
We now live in a two-tiered justice system; paid for with our tax dollars. We’re funding censorship, which means we’re paying to silence the truth. Lies, theft, and corruption are the new norm. These abuses are being levied against we, the American people.
Fake news, pornography in schools, indoctrination of our kids, inflation, mandated experimental injections, shutting down small business, illegal immigration, and a supreme court justice who can’t define what a woman is. The woke have made a mockery of our culture and of our Constitution, and the useful idiots who cheer it on don’t realize that the outcome is not a utopia, but something akin to N. Korea or China. 1984 is upon us and the brainwashed herd celebrates.
As parents and as patriots, we are frustrated. Our nation is under attack from the inside and we, the freedom fighters, are willing to risk everything to save our kids and save our nation.
We all know that life is series of conflicts and struggles. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. But what I don’t’ like, is when I fail to understand my opponent. I don’t like when I can’t see a clear path to victory. Here’s what I mean: If you exercise regularly but don’t realize the gains you envision, it’s frustrating. Contrarily, if you understand how the body functions, if you understand diet, metabolism, and muscle hypertrophy, then your efforts will become more exact and you’ll get results. Results are fun, they’re not frustrating. Confusion, high stress, high effort, bad results… those are frustrating. Patriots are not afraid of effort. Patriots are not even afraid of failure. We’re afraid of not understanding the obstacles, we’re afraid of not having a fair fight.
Let’s explore this problem together and see if we can find a new way to view it. We all want a better solution, so let’s see if we can turn our frustrations into effective actions and outcomes.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” -Einstein
That’s what I’m proposing.
THE HYDRA: SEVEN HEADS, ONE HEART
As stated, we’re happy to fight for what we believe in. But, if our intel and strategy are lacking or misdirected, we’ll get stuck. Ex: I was an artist; a painter. There were a few techniques that helped me determine if my paintings were complete. The first was, I’d blur my eyes. By doing so, I’d lose sight of the images or preconceived notions. What popped out instead, were the shapes and the colors, these are what make a painting either beautiful or ugly. The tree, the dog, and the smiling girl do not make the picture beautiful, but the way the composition and colors hold together within the four walls of the frame, does. Same holds true if you turn the painting upside down. The images and preconceived notions go away. What you’re left with are the actual four walls and the shapes and colors of the art itself.
As patriots, we’ve been fighting a seven-headed hydra. When we cut off one head, two more grow. Now, if we blur our eyes and if we stop looking at the seven aggressive heads, we might notice that the hydra has one heart. That heart is not trying to attack us. Maybe we can take aim there.
We’re fighting a war on three fronts: The political, the media, and the culture. Those of us who are not politicians and not in the media, must become active on the cultural front. We’ve mistakenly outsourced our fight to the politicians and media, but the politicians and media are not where this war began. So, let’s flip the script and blur our eyes. If the regular script has us (150 million+ people) placing our hopes with politicians and journalists (approx. 2000 people) as though democracy and voting is what holds a free nation together, then please, ask yourself, where has that gotten us?
Now, for a moment, let’s discuss our stewardship of the culture. We’re the stewards. We’re the millions of players on the field. Politicians are public servants; they are referees who enforce OUR laws. They enforce the laws so the honest players can continue playing. The dishonest players need to be removed or penalized by the referees. However, if the referees take bribes from the dishonest players, and if the honest players slowly allow dishonesty to pervade the whole game, then we’re in a race to the bottom. What happens? Instead of the players taking a look in the mirror and holding to their dignified inner-compass of fairness or the golden rule, instead of them showing zero tolerance for the decadence and dishonesty, they’ll outsource the responsibility, they’ll just vote to hire more referees, hoping the referees will compensate for a culture normalized to cheating. See where I’m going with this? More referees, whether honest or dishonest, do not address the problem. More referees, in fact, create a much bigger problem, called totalitarian fascism or communism. It’s collectivism….which just means, a bunch of people normalized to immorality, outsourcing morality to corrupted elected officials. This is as gullible and foolish as can be.
So, who went off rails first? Did the politicians and media go off the rails first, or was it the culture? From my point of view, it was the culture. The politics and media followed. If we’re asking the politicians and media to get us back on track, when it was the culture who is the source of the problem, then that script makes no sense; it needs to be flipped. You and I are the culture’s stewards, not the politicians. The players on the field make the game happen, not the referees.
Fighting a war against a set of symptoms (these symptoms are like mirages; they do not reflect the source of our problem) is an energy intensive distraction that exhausts us and makes the dishonest people rich. So, we’re better off if we plan the attack on the hydra’s heart. Since this war must be fought on all three fronts: the political, the media, and the cultural fronts, you and I need to do our part on the cultural front, while our best politicians and journalist-commentators do their jobs on the first two fronts. We, the cultural stewards, need to do the heavy lifting. Outsourcing it to a few hundred or a few thousand politicians and journalists, is a weakness and does not in fact help our beloved America-First politicians and journalists.
Before we can ask ourselves how to sure up the cultural front, or how we can become strong enough to successfully take aim at the hydra’s heart, we need to understand the heart of it. Now, imagine our culture was a train moving quickly down the tracks. Prior to our train having gone off the rails, something was creating friction, and that friction is indicative of the train’s wheels pulling hard to the left. We ignored the squeaking friction until finally the train jumped the tracks and fell onto its side. Now, lifting the train up and placing it back on the tracks doesn’t address all the friction and misalignment that caused the problem in the first place. So, when I speak of getting at the root, don’t take it that I wish to ignore woke school boards, the fed reserve, globalism, Soros funded programs, corruption, ESG, DEI, corporate money in politics. These are byproducts of the original friction. In this discussion, we’re taking aim at the source, so let’s not get off topic.
When Henry Ford said, "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning," he was saying that the American people had already rolled over and forfeited liberty’s standards. The horrors we’re seeing today have been long in the making.
LOCATING THE HYDRA’S HEART
We’re now on a journey to get to the heart of the matter, as all other paths are secondary.
o So, let’s look past the hydra’s seven angry heads; we’ll blur our eyes until we can put our crosshairs on its heart.
o Yes, the train is laying on its side. Let’s turn that picture upside down until we locate the friction causing it to jump its tracks.
o Let’s look beyond the corruption, injustice, and the lies perpetrated by the dishonest players and referees; let’s locate the source of the game’s degradation.
If the players on the field become dishonest and untrustworthy, then as the game degrades, what will the referees do? Remember, the referees are voted in democratically, they are not ordained by God. The referees promising to fix our problems, are one in the same as the circling buzzards of the WEF, Soros’ Open Society, fake news, and the captured CIA, DOJ, and FBI. Political campaigns are being paid for by the most dishonest players on the field. To get elected, what will dishonest candidates promise to voters? “I’ll fix the problems. I’ll punish the dishonest.” It’s a psy-op, it’s a catch-22.
Not only won’t the additional refs fix the problems, but they have no intention of fixing the problems. It’s a grift that costs us exponentially, and as the cultural infrastructure degrades, the promises and the grift get bigger. It’s a game of jenga and it ends predictably.
So the big question is, what is the central point or cornerstone upon which an honest and liberty-based culture is built? It’s clear that we’re finding out what happens if we remove that cornerstone. The cultural friction originates, not in the corrupt political referees or in the dishonest players who support the dishonest referees, instead it originates with the honest population who becomes normalized to cheating and dishonesty, which means that we are the ones permitting the dishonesty. We stay quiet, hoping to outsource our moral virtues to Hollywood and public schools, and outsource justice to law enforcement. These are big mistakes.
Let’s put a pin in that for a moment while we look through a macro lens, a 30,000-foot view. Again, if we are trying to protect liberty, if we’re trying to reclaim liberty, we need to know exactly what we’re talking about.
Let’s define some terms:
First, what is a nation?
A nation is made of a people bonded by some kind of collaborative code, some kind of basis for trust-building. A nation’s people survive together as a unit, whether at gunpoint or not. The people will either live in service of the leader and elites, which is called tyranny, or the people will live for living’s sake, whereby living (collaboratively and competitively) is an end in itself, which means the leaders or elected officials are the mere referees, they are public servants working on behalf of the people’s appreciation of life-itself: This is liberty.
How does a free nation differ from a tyrannically captured nation?
In a free nation each person will need the personal inspiration that helps them act responsibly, without need of being held at gunpoint. Since the society itself exists for living’s own sake, the cultural bonds of family and community are placed above all else; if not, human life and population will crater, and tyranny is the certain outcome. A balance between survival and living, is a matter of family and community concern, not a concern for the exaltation of leaders and elites.
What are the bonds that hold a free nation together?
Bonds within the family and the community must be strong, as this keeps the power with the people. When those bonds are strong, the people will outsource very little to government referees. Imagine again if all the players started cheating, the distrust will pervade every relationship, their family-community bonds will evaporate, and the gullible public might vote to add more and more referees. Eventually, by giving more authority to referees, the corrupt referees will use it for their own benefit, and they’ll enslave the players. It’s a metastasizing disease. The gullible don’t see the irony here. They don’t trust each other, but they give trust to government officials. Absurd. In a free nation, government is supposed to be a soft referee, not a ruler. A free nation’s people are not subjects. However, if after many generations, we take liberty for granted, then we have forgotten what history has taught us; we forgot how important it is to prevent tyrannical rule, and we forgot that this must be built into the culture and into the family.
What are the rules or cultural standards that the game’s participants must agree upon?
If the people of a free nation are inspired to act responsibly, which means the players are playing for the sake of the game, they clearly love and respect the game more than they’ll willingly cheat to obtain a stolen victory. When the cornerstone of a free nation holds tight, the players remain honest, even when tempted with corruption and self-indulgence. They do this as to not sully the game itself. If you love and respect the game, more than you love winning, then you’ll play honestly. So, why will someone cheat to win, even at the expense of the game’s integrity? Contrarily, why would an honest person rather lose than cheat? Where does a person’s genuine respect for the game come from? What’s the difference between the dignity that comes of living up to the game’s standard, versus having no standard at all, thus looking only for immediate hits of approval or advantage over others? When the ordinary working man chooses to do the right thing without need of recognition, he is doing a service for his people and for his nation. He is the one who deserves the highest respect from our nation. Contrarily, the man who tricks people into believing he is a hero, is a cancer upon a free nation.
Here’s the whole point of my work: Help a child fall in love with being human, and they will want to live for life’s sake, they will respect the game, they will protect the structures that hold the fabric of reality together. Humans are not a blank slate to be shaped to work on behalf of elites. We are human, and as much as the machine wishes us to be shaped for slavery, our humanness will defy it, but only to the degree that the players maintain their love for the game. Contrarily, the players who hate life, who hate the game, will cheat, they will partner with corrupted referees. Liberty is for those who love something bigger than themselves, those who love the creation, the Creator, and the game; they live life for its own sake, and the byproduct of their love of life, is a life of meaning, honesty, and dignity. Therefore, it is our job to help our children fall in love with being human, we must help them fall in love with both the game and their team, and they will thereby minimize the need for referees.
Over the past 60 years who should our heroes have been? Certainly not celebrities.
Ans: The ordinary people who do the right thing when no one is looking; the people who get none of the social validation, but their actions help hold the fabric of reality together. In their heart is a love of something natural, timeless, and fundamentally human, they remain uncorrupted by the false promises of the rich and pandering politician. The pure of heart are those who love this life, love this world, and they do their part to keep it running. Those heroes are shaped, not by government, not by referees, not by Hollywood, and not by public schools. They are shaped by the family––– not merely by the family-itself, but by the bonds that hold the family together.
What are the bonds that hold a family together?
Let’s backtrack for a moment. If the bonds that hold a free nation together are made of our collaborations and trust-building customs, then holding a free nation together is accomplished when those of us inspired to act responsibly, collaboratively, and by a code of trustworthiness, can transmit our inspiration. Sacrifice is a display of that inspiration. That inspiration is the sun around which the family orbits. Those who do the right thing when no one is looking, are inspired. If doing the right thing when no one is looking has all to do with living for its own sake, then the family is the place where this inspired motivation is built.
Now, let’s look at the opposite: Often families dissolve once they gain wealth and security. Why? because they lacked the inspiration and the life-affirming story that would hold together. The feeling of fear held them together, not love, not sacrifice, not respect. They were a team in survival only, not a team in any shared appreciation for existence-itself. A shared story, a shared love of the game, a love of the field, the landscape, the creation and its Creator, goes far beyond mere survival. It’s bigger than oneself, and from that love, its byproduct is inspiration, human-meaning, and dignity. A family that is held together by a shared love for the whole of life, is a family defined by its acts of appreciation and participation. All families perform the same mundane tasks, however, if their attitude is one of coping, and not of loving, then coping is simply their worldview and not a matter of circumstance. Living up to life’s fullest sense of human-meaning, is the way we honor the sacrifices made on our behalf. Liberty is like a brain, like a heart, like anything necessary and alive, that if you don’t use it, you lose it. A family who lives in a life affirming story, is a family who operates from the same shared script, they see the same shared destiny. They love instead of cope. Anything less than both love and meaning, does not hold up our end of the bargain; it makes those who’ve sacrificed everything to secure our freedoms, roll over in their graves.
Now, imagine a people who hate and resent life, yet they must survive as a group. They resent life’s tasks, they resent each other, they find nothing redeeming about living whatsoever. How deeply could one build bonds of trust with people who hate life? Those who hate life will choose any number of escapes and deceptions, they’ll succumb to any number of temptations. People who have no gratitude for living itself, people who have not fallen in love with being human, may act like your friends, but they are not. Those who hate life, who hate the whole of it, they may tell you they love you, yet how can someone who hates the whole of it, love its parts? The parts make up the whole. You are the parts.
I’m describing a life is suffering worldview. A life is suffering worldview will not help us rise to liberty’s responsibilities or standards. Contrarily, if we fall in love with the structures of reality, we will hold ourselves to reality’s standard and we’ll want to protect it. We protect what we love, and that’s what liberty requires. If you love your mother, you don’t feed her poison. Even if she loves the taste of poison, even if she kicks and screams, you’ll do what’s right no matter how unpopular it makes you.
According to Plato, the human is born in a cave; we are chained to a wall and the elites use fire and shadow puppets to convey a specific story. The elites want to keep us locked in the cave so that our suffering will be unending. Why? Because of our suffering, we’ll do whatever they ask of us, in exchange for earned moments of reprieve. The slave lives for moments of reward from their master. The one who escapes the cave and sees Earth’s actual landscape, he will return to the cave to tell his friends. No one will believe him. He will be killed. Plato is saying that a Republic, a free nation, is only for those who are given a process by which to exit the cave. Also, it’s easier for elites to keep a person inside the cave than for those outside to convince the enslaved to exit. This is one reason why maintaining a free nation is so difficult.
Frederick Nietzsche said that many of the world’s philosophers and religions all start from the same idea: That life is unbearably difficult. This idea is the first brick they lay to build their whole idea house. They believe that life is suffering, that life is terrible.
But Nietzsche thinks this isn't a good way to start. He says that if we always think life is bad, we might try to escape it or control everything around us, which will be at the expense of our freedom and our human instincts.
He also says that people who don't like life can't truly value freedom or freedom’s responsibilities because they will easily do bad things to make themselves feel better. They're like a boat drifting wherever the wind takes them, which can lead to them doing anything they want, even if it destroys their own community. No moral compass, no inner anchor. The outcome is totalitarianism.
Nietzsche points out that Ralph Waldo Emerson, known as the father of American literature, didn't agree with the usual Christian ideas of his time. Though he was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and though he considered himself a Christian, Emerson thought God was in everything. By studying the indigenous, it becomes clear that they never thought that life was all about suffering. They had a different first brick for their idea house.
Plato and Nietzsche both agree that we must outgrow the life is suffering worldview if we’re to live as free people of a Republic. They don’t mean that we must overcome suffering, like Buddha or Christ suggest. What they mean is that until we fall in love with the creation, until we fall in love with our place in creation’s story, we are slaves. The slave-minded, no matter how much liberty given, will just build the mousetrap that they will later get caught. Liberty can only be sustained within the culture that helps its children fall in love with being human. We help them by facilitating specific kinds of experiences and by telling them specific kinds of stories.
What kind of experience creates a life-affirming worldview? What kind of experience helps us fall in love with the creation and thereby with our place in its story? What makes us feel appreciation for the world that sustains us, as to make us want to protect it? What kind of experience delivers a person from Plato’s cave?
I’m quoting this from my e-course:
“By failing to deliver our people a complete story, we fail to give them awe (beauty, love, and order), thus we fail to draw them toward eager participation. The void that remains, is how leftism and nihilism are born. These ideologies are simply cobbled together with story fragments that turn one’s storyless-ness into a rage against a faux enemy. The story-less people come to believe that by destroying others (scapegoats), a feeling of balance will be achieved.”
The culture is not out there, it’s in you, me, and it’s in our families. If it’s not within those bonds, it won’t be found elsewhere, and no politician or journalist will fix that. As a parent; as a steward of our culture, it’s your job to live within a life-affirming narrative and to facilitate experiences that draw your people into that narrative. So, let’s do some of it now…
Let’s visualize a raspberry. Taste it, swallow it. You’ll likely forget it in seconds. Such is the simple sensory experience. Now compare. While it’s in your mouth, while you appreciate its flavorful sweetness, let’s trace that raspberry’s history back one thousand generations. If you consider how the berry’s DNA travels through time, if you consider all the humans, animals, and birds that were fed by the berry’s ancestors, and how the tiny seeds hidden in the fruit, were carried in our bellies then dropped in the distance, you can see how the multitude of plants would sprout anew as to assert themselves into time and space. New berries, feeding and sustaining the lives of ever more creatures who carry ever more seeds over the distance. Thus, from that one berry set upon your tongue, you can recognize the entire story of life on Earth and its whole interwoven web–––all the beauty and deliciousness, all of time’s endless replication of living things, that you, me, and our ancestors have depended upon. From just the mere taste of one berry, in just that single moment, the human mind can extrapolate all of creation, all of time, the whole of existence and our place in that magnificent story. The human is a story-creature, while the slave-minded is only a sensory creature. As Plato and Nietzsche suggest, the slave-minded are unfit for liberty.
Now, consider our current culture. Western culture, consumer culture, immediate gratification, disposable culture, it seems to go out of its way to capture people with sensations. So, what is a person left with if all they can do is meander between sensation and nothingness? If you live in a world of sensation, a world with no story, no appreciation, no team, no history, no game, no gratitude, no dignity to be earned, no reciprocity, no sacrifice, no love, and no meaning, then you are in a state of no identity, a state of misery that needs to be numbed by pills and amusement. Such people rightfully feel like something essential is missing, which is thereby how addicts and slaves are made. No matter what our nation’s Constitution says, such a vacuous modern mind, lacking in any context or history, is a black hole that gets filled with wokeness. Wokeness tries to fill the void where a proper life-affirming story was supposed to be.
So, if meaning is removed from the human mind, all that’s left is a slave-bot. That’s what Huxley points out in his Brave New World; he shows us how progress creates “sophisticated” idiots who will repeat slogans and platitudes, "Community, Identity, and Stability." "When an individual feels, the community reels." Sound familiar? The fake news talking heads and the twitter blue check marks, speak like this all day. Little do they know, that we humans are story-creatures who want our lives to be filled with meaning. If we lack meaning, we acclimate to sensory addictions and mindless slogans. So, who is the fake news speaking to? Not me.
If humans are built for meaning, more than we’re built for pleasure, then let’s define it. What is meaning, how does it originate? How does a sensory experience transform into meaning?
Here are my answers: The moment the pleasurable taste of the berry goes beyond the senses, when it goes into the greater thought matrix of the mind, this is the moment we begin to appreciate the time, distance, and genius by which the berry has made its way to our lips. This ability to think outside of what we see, taste, touch, and hear, is what makes us human. We don’t just fill our belly, we fill the heart and the mind. When this invisible space inside us gets filled with meaning and context, it’s is what I call, the humanness of the human. As humans, we come alive when we enter a story worth participating in. That story evokes our sense of meaning. To an infant, the taste of a berry has no context. Liberty is not for infants or the slave-minded. Our sense of meaning emerges of the mind, by the mind’s relationship to the landscape that feeds us.
We don’t appreciate a thing until we measure it against something fixed. That’s what context is, measurement from a fixed reference point. Context leads to appreciation, and that appreciation makes us want to protect or pay homage to that which we appreciate and respect. A liberty-based culture can only be sustained by the trustworthiness of its people and that trustworthiness is expressed in our show of sacrifice for those things bigger than ourselves––the things that deserve our reverence. It’s very hard for me to care about the death or the pain of someone who feels entitled, who shows no regard for truth, principle, Earth, or life-itself. We don’t fret over the ruin of a cheater or someone who cheapens life’s magnificence.
If the berry is taken for granted, if it’s just a sensory entitlement, then there is no gratitude felt or expressed, no respect, no reciprocity, no story. What remains is nihilism, addiction, self-centeredness, corruption, etc.. These are byproducts that reveal something decayed and demonic that overtakes the culture. Again, we don’t want to stand up for those people who take life for granted. Liberty requires we stand up. However, if the culture loses its connection to the things worthy of our gratitude, then no one will feel that the culture itself is worth standing up for.
When we look closely at the world we live in, when we begin to appreciate how the parts of the creation add up to the whole of creation, our appreciation gathers in our heart and is looking for a way to be expressed. Our stored appreciation wants to give proper thanks to the story we’re part of. Such a mindset is the non-negotiable standard for building and upholding a free nation. A FREE NATION IS FOR A PEOPLE WHO LIVE WITH MEANING, who don’t succumb to corruption or to sensory self-indulgence.
Just to recap: Meaning-itself, comes from the invisible, symbiotic relationship between seemingly separate things, between the berry and the bird. Our mind doesn’t invent meaning (as existentialists and those who hate life believe), our mind recognizes meaning as clearly as we recognize gravity. Meaning is in our recognition of the relationships between all that holds life on Earth together, and meaning is where our deepest appreciation comes from, it’s what jumpstarts the human heart.
Our appreciation makes us long to show our gratitude, to reciprocate with the entire invisible symbiosis of existence. When a person falls in love with the whole of life, they wish to give thanks to the entire symbiosis of the world, and that symbiosis is what people throughout history have called, God. When we give thanks to God, we are thanking the invisible relationships that make the whole web of this delicious world.
So, giving kids sensory experiences, but failing to help them question the distant origins of these experiences, namely how a berry travels through time, will prevent kids from discovering the world they live in, it will prevent them from discovering who they themselves are in this world. By failing to give a child a life-affirming story, we fail to give their sensory experiences any context. The consequence will be kids who suffer meaninglessness and who lack of worthy identity; they’ll have nothing worthy of protecting but their own kink addictions. Those kids will be unfit for liberty because they are unfit to love, unfit to build bonds made from a shared respect for things bigger than themselves. Liberty hinges on our shared desire to acknowledge the things that deserve our highest gratitude.
CONCLUSION:
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Gratitude activates the heart of who we are, it pulses through our veins, fuels our actions, and enriches our relationships. However, in the barren places where gratitude is not found, where the heartbeat of appreciation has ceased, the menacing hydra thrives. This creature of chaos and discord finds its home wherever we fall short of liberty's noble standards. As we stand at this crossroads, we must ask ourselves: do we plunge a dagger into the heart of the hydra, or shall we self-reflect on our shortcomings? If liberty’s stewards strive to uphold liberty’s standards, our values will radiate with such brilliance that the darkness will have no place to hide.
Indeed, our institutions and Constitution were founded upon a singular, life-affirming premise. Unless that cornerstone remains intact, our institutions and Constitution will crumble. That cornerstone is our humanness itself!
We must protect our humanness, as it is the wellspring that fills our hearts with gratitude. Let the feeling course through our veins and be expressed in each and every deed. Let us uphold our standards and values, that the hydra be banished from our midst. It is not about defeating a beast, it’s about affirming our commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; it’s about living in a life-affirming story, one that makes us grateful and fills our life with meaning. Why else bother living at all?
If what brings us together is our shared respect for the landscape that feeds us, our respect for the invisible bonds that hold that landscape together, our respect for the creation and its Creator, then our show of respect to life-itself, to humanness-itself, will create a mutual civility between us, and where this kind of civility or dignity emerges, the child will fall in love with being human.
There is a reason that slave owners all over the world didn’t want their slaves to learn how to read. Reading creates context. The modern American slave was made a slave when denied context. To the slave-minded, the sensory experience, and a heaping serving of victim narrative, is everything. The slave is denied context by the very people they look to for protection and security. That’s the irony of the modern left. Like Plato said, the slave is given sensory experiences and symbols, without being given real context. Unless we are given a deep and wide context, there is no way to tie the components of existence together into a life-affirming story. In the life-affirming story, its symbiotic parts add up to a magnificent whole, and in that story, we are its lucky participants.
So, if you want to raise liberty’s next generation and not raise a bunch of mindless slaves, then every adult must know how to turn a sensory experience into a meaningful experience; you need to know how to expand a moment of time into all of time itself; you need to turn the parts of creation into the whole of creation. When this insight is felt and appreciated, one sees all of life’s structures as worthy of our thanks and protection, and this shared appreciation brings a culture into participation. That’s the bare minimum for upholding liberty’s standard. Plato and Nietzsche are saying this too, it’s not just me. Our kids must fall in love with being human so that they’ll play life’s game honestly. If they’ve fallen in love, doing their best is an end in itself; winning is secondary.
I’ll be happy to facilitate such an experience for you. I’ll do it for free. If it becomes obvious that such an experience sets the foundation upon which a free nation’s culture must be built, thus what a family and a marriage must be built, then I hope you’ll take my course and join our storytelling community. We are story-creatures. That’s what a free people do. Contrarily, the slave-minded fill their pie holes merely to fuel their complaints. Blind to irony of it, they will ask their master for more pie. Slaves all over the world are denied the great story, which is why they remain slaves…. even under the banner of democracy and freedom. The slave-minded are incurable by whatever money and freedom they obtain. Only when a person falls in love with the landscape, and falls in love with their place in it, will they be liberated. That’s when they finally get the punchline.
PREPARING FOR THE TASK
The only way to build and sustain a free nation is by living up to liberty’s standard, which begins with an experience. That experience is the foundation upon which a life-affirming worldview is formed, and again, this is not the worldview we’re born with, and it’s not created by a set of laws. We must outgrow the slave-minded meaninglessness and the life-is-suffering worldview. Instead, the life-affirming worldview creates an honest means of exchange; honest players have minimal need for bloated, corrupted, referees.
So, if you’re serious and if you want to do your part as a steward of a liberty-based culture, then we must offer a process of transformation to our children. We must offer a story that depicts a feeling of coming home to the landscape, thus coming home to oneself––– home to the source of meaning–––home to the invisible symbiosis that allows everything to exist. Those invisible relationships are worthy of our appreciation and humility, as nothing in the world has ever lived outside of that symbiosis. Again, no one is born with context or appreciation, we are born in Plato’s cave, and to become free, we must find our way out.
Before we point the finger at anyone else (at the woke), let’s start with ourselves and set the example. Our personal stories about falling in love with life, stories that reveal how that love has taught us where to earn dignity, will help inspire others to choose liberty’s responsibilities over self-indulgence.
The politicians and the journalists are not addressing the issues I am speaking of, because that’s not their job. The war is on three fronts. We don’t need the politicians and journalists to stand on the third front, that’s our job. The refs and commentators need to stay on the first and second fronts. So, if you love our best politicians and our best journalist-commentators, we can help them best by fighting on the third front. Become fluent in the experience that leads our young people to fall in love with being human, help them to see the life-affirming story. A life-affirming experience will become the sun around which our families orbit. That’s how family bonds are created. We can expand those family bonds out to the community and nation. (Again, anything less than what I’m listing, leads to totalitarianism. Here, I have outlined step one of establishing a free nation. Step two doesn’t matter if we ignore step one. If we can’t help our young people fall in love with being human, then liberty’s responsibilities will be ignored. When people try to outsource or externalize liberty’s responsibilities, liberty dies.
Contact me anytime. Let me facilitate this experience for you.
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