There are some interesting developments in the Western world that has ushered in a post-truth era. Before someone thinks I am advocating for nihilism or defeatism, let me say at the outset that I believe such a development promotes narrative warfare and the inescapability of bias. These two themes have been integral to my developing thought over the past 5 years. Is there truth without a narrative contextualization? Is bias ultimately escapable and, even if it were, is that a good thing? We have seen the development of deep fakes and alleged stolen elections around the globe, from Russia to Venezuela to the United States. Whether software programs in these elections were part of the alleged steal is neither here nor there. The outworking of the data-scientists over the years to investigate election manipulation has resulted in largely a big question mark. Without access to source code, the data packets can only tell you so much. The point, therefore, is that accessibility to the truth of this or that election is not available except for maybe a few extremely talented hackers–and this is hard to say. If we accept this as an accurate description of reality, then we should pivot from getting at the truth of this or that election and get involved in narrative crafting, infrastructure building, and building critical interpersonal relationships.

The so-called great awakening–the celebrated freedom of those programed and brainwashed by legacy media outlets around the world, largely in Western countries–is less about returning people to truth and more about reorienting the masses to understand how knowledge is a political football and manipulated this way or that for some elite’s agenda. While there is a celebration in this freedom, without some underlying narrative that transcends this moment in history, we should wonder about its durability. The great-awakening is about showing humanity that the world is already in a post-truth era. The point is that the masses have been long-programmed to go along with and agree to the agenda of a political and elite class whose decisions are impossible to make sense of from the known facts. In this sense, the current great awakening is more a transition point than a movement. In this way, the original Great Awakening of the 16-18th century is strictly differentiated from this 21st century great awakening. The original Great Awakening was about solidifying a Judeo-Christian epistemic and value system into the framework of early American culture. That was a movement. This 21st century great awakening is about breaking a cult-like hold on the minds of the masses from the psychological programming of the legacy media. This is a transition point. What comes after breaking this hold is the question.

The covid-pandemic with its “trust the science,” “trust the medical professionals,” combined with the later exposures of how the science didn’t support it and how the medical professionals lined their pockets, points to making truth as those in power see fit so long as they control the lines of communication: social media and legacy media, as it stands today in 2024. To trust the science during the pandemic can be summed up in one word: ivermectin. Why not trust the medical professionals can be summed up in one short sentence: they abandoned the hippocratic oath. Much more could be said, but I will leave that to the more political involved commentators. These observations are designed to support the point that the great awakening of the 21st century is about showing the masses that we are in a post-truth era. It has not been about truth for quite some time; it seems that it has been about who controls the main lines of communication: i.e., who controls the ability to craft the epistemic framework in the minds of the masses.

Those who can control the narrative can win just about any conversation at least in this present world and time. It is a powerful tool to be able to frame the contours of a conversation since the populace at large will stay within the framework once it is rolled out. Those outside that framework will face months or years of being seen and discussed as a pariah. Thus, the pariah now must first build some credibility back before he/she can even refute the issue at hand; by the time this credibility has been built, the delay has allowed the contour of the framework to get seated in the collective minds of the people. Too little, too late, as they say.

I am not saying that truth doesn’t exist. I am saying that if the direction of civilization’s goals, values, and priorities, is guided by narratives rolled out by a very few centralized organizations, should we not assume such a process is a post-truth process? Certainly, it would be asinine to say that such centralized narratives are devoted to the truth. They may be “devoted to the truth” but whatever the central features of their narratives are, those are “their truths.” What’s the point to what I am saying? Narratives are as fashionable as ever, and there are underlying meta-narrative features interwoven into these narratives. The infamous postmodern attitude that the present world has incredulity towards meta-narratives must have failed to understand the media-apparatuses were advancing such meta-narratives in a very successful brainwashing of most Western countries. While the scholars bickered about deconstructionism and the validity of meta-narratives, the elites and their media-dogs were all the while meta-narrative constructing a post-truth world, where “truth” would be as the media framed it.

Two bigs admissions should follow from this discussion. That truth is used to compel behavior should not be denied. The postmodernist argues that truth is nothing more than a power play, a means to advancing one’s agenda. We just admit that truth does have a compelling force entailed in it, but this is not all truth is. The big question about truth is whose mind grounds truths (truth propositions); is it an elite, is it a media group, is it social media platform Facebook, or is it the Bible? We could say a lot here, but it would be a digression. Second, advancing a counter narrative is critical to any successful transition out of the 21st century great awakening. Simply, the 21st century’s great awakening does not have the resources to sustain it; it needs a meta-narrative to translate it from a transition point to an enduring movement. The Gospel would be best, but the version of God as interested in humanity’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of virtue” would suffice. And yes, you read that right, I said the pursuit of virtue because the idea of the pursuit of happiness has historically meant the pursuit of virtue. Of course, virtue is the behaviors attuned to internal attitude aligned with God’s commandments as revealed in the OT and NT. We cannot leave “virtue” open to endless interpretations since we know the media’s favorite game in the present information war is to redefine words and then repeat them with those definitions until that goes mainstream.

Dr. Scalise

There are certain identity markers to being human. If I were to put up the US’ liberal party’s platform (Democrats) from 25 years ago, we would be shocked at how “liberal” means something nearly opposite what it means today. You can check out the 1996 democrat platform here: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1996-democratic-party-platform . The truth is that when reading through it, I think, “Wow is this MAGA?!?” I don’t want to digress here, but if you want some political perspective to get you out of your bubble, reading through it will certainly open your eyes. My purpose is a bit larger, I want to ask what are the universal traits of being human, and then I want to show that the current ideological trend of the Left parties on the globe are inherently anti-human.

I will not try to give an exhaustive list to what is a universal human trait, but only enough to satisfy my intent, and I will presume we have in mind a human with all their faculties functioning normally. We must affirm at the outset that many people on the planet may have disabilities or the like and we affirm their value as equal to that of every other human. I do not want to be misinterpreted as suggesting or overtly stating that somehow those with disabilities, mutations, etc., somehow are less human. Instead, I am attempting to expose and criticize those who wish to advance ideas that diminish human wholeness. Now onto that list.

(1) To think, and to speak those thoughts: the current Leftist parties, happening in the UK literally as I type, wish to censor and adjudicate what speech is allowed and that which is not. The message here is clear, “Be freed from being human in the ability to think and speak freely.”

(2) Male or female: the leftist parties, which is at its worse in the United States, wish to advocate for a great deal of so-called genders even though the underlying genetic science is xx or xy, even if there are certain mutations of this, this is central to human identity. “Be freed from being human in being male or female.”

(3) Procreate, have a family: both the globalist entities on the planet and even the US’ present leftist candidate for the 2024 election urge childlessness or a reduction of the population. This is well known as the Georgia Guide Stones famously stated that the globalists only wanted 500 million total humans on the planet. This is a depopulation campaign. “Be freed from being human by not having family and by advocating the removal of humans until we lower the population.”

(4) Be embodied: this is a shocking one, but both the fear of the Singularity by 2040 and the advocacy for human consciousness being uploaded to a digital form have created fanfare among the elites generally, both on the Right and the Left. I call this a criticism of the Left because it coincides with the depopulation agenda. “Be freed from being human by no longer having a body.”

I think these four make for a pretty nightmarish scenario. These four things hold the fabric of human civilization together. If you asked me what an anti-life equation was I would simply add these four leftist policies together and say, “here you go.” There are more troubles with privacy as well as related to (4) in particular. The implication that is not overtly stated is why should some group or groups of human have authority to determine how many people can be alive??!! It certainly is assigning a god-tier Judgment, and wow is that over the top.

I don’t think being a disembodied, arguably digital, childless, non-male or female, and unfree to think entity can be considered human. Whatever this would be is again a nightmare, an abomination. Why would this combination have any standing among humans? There is something very strange going on.

Dr. Scalise

Consumerism is what develops when the desire for that new thing replaces the actual obtaining of that new thing. If this was not the case, we would not speak of it with the attached -ism on the end. The -ism represents that it is a way of life. In this sense, consumerism is effectively an endless hunger. Truly, it is a tenacious even if not peaceful manner of life; the idea that our status should be tied to an endless process of desiring, getting, and then cycling that over and over again is not for the weak of heart. It is unlikely that those under this consumerist spell know that they are, or, even if they do, they do not have the resources to break that spell.

Historically, before the modern ideas of a radical individualism, a person set on obtaining some item was more or less set on obtaining some good. The “pursuit of happiness” was defined at that time as “the pursuit of virtue,” which was generally understood as seeking goods that benefitted oneself and the larger community. Such, of course, had a far more detailed value system undergirding it, typically of the Catholic sort. Desire for desire’s sake was not socially valued; somehow, desiring was accredited status. Perhaps it was supposed that only the rich could enjoy the luxury of speculating and desiring because the working class didn’t have the time to indulge in these things, working as they were. Since we now know tangibly and from a great deal of observable data that an entire culture can fall under the spell of consumerism, desire for desire’s sake is not only for the rich. The 10th commandment haunts us: “do not covet, this or that of your neighbor . . . .”

The net result of setting to obtain something is designed to be satisfaction, but desire for desire’s sake removes satisfaction in favor of setting up an artificial status factory. This factory is designed both to feed an endless hunger for status and imprison us to a hunger insatiable. My point is that setting one’s sights to obtain something should have an endpoint, a point at which we can say, “I have achieved, and I have good satisfaction.” What we find in people under the spell of consumerism is a behavior that seeks the next thing to desire as soon as the present desire is nearly obtained. There is little pause to enjoy the work of one’s achievement. In short, desire should be strategic for some end beyond itself and not an end in itself.

Perfection is a problem for humanity. Humans are imperfect by definition. Limitations abound on humans, and tragically humans understand this all too well by virtue of imagining what it might be like without those imperfections. Perfection is at once humanity’s Judge and Salvation; it highlights humanity’s lack yet it holds the solution to that lack. What consumerism draws out is this incessant desire for perfection. If we hold that perfection is defined by God, by a Person arguable infinite in some respects, then a desire for Him would need to reoccur endlessly. Satisfaction, however, is to be the fuel for continual and renewed pursuit of this Perfection. Desire for desire’s sake is therefore avoided. Consumerism draws out human need for Perfection through disappointment. There is something strange here. Is it that the disappointment leads to the marginalization of the importance of the object of desire in favor of the desire itself? It is hard to argue with: if those objects of desire are miserable at making us satisfied, why bother with making them responsible for our satisfaction? From this disappointment comes the specter of consumerism, the zeitgeist of the current Western world. The harmful effects play out in at least two ways although there may well be more: (1) the desirers, undeterred in their quest for perfection, become increasingly demanding that finite, flawed, and imperfect humans provide perfection, or (2) they press into accruing status through flaunting their desire for desire’s sake to a community of similarly oriented people. This second option is a kind of concession prize for being unable to acquire the first option. Nevertheless, the 2nd option also illustrates how consumerism is infectious among consumers playing into that game.

Consumerism takes advantage of something good, the desire for perfection. A dark exchange happens where the Object of Desire (God) is exchanged for an attempt to fashion perfection ourselves. St. Paul lays out something similar in Romans, where sin takes advantage of the law and so sin becomes excessively sinful. Thus, consumerism takes advantage of perfection, and so consumerism becomes increasingly evil. This becoming more evil plays out in the obvious cruelty and frustration of those trying to force perfection into limited persons and their tasks. Alternatively, the quest for obtaining perfection is abandoned in favor of gaining status by the repeated process of desiring, talk about desiring with similar likeminded people, get, and desire something else. This person becomes the perfect consumer. Covetousness is advanced as virtue, an economy of guiltless hunger transpires, and the corporations get rich.

Dr. Scalise

Words are more powerful, more determinate, and more real than reality itself. In Christianity, the Divine Logos, the Son of God, predates reality itself. Words frame our world. Since the Son of God, the Logos, is not made of the contingent matter and mass that reality is built from, the Logos and the rational words He represents are more real than reality. Personhood and the rational words that give personhood its frame and identity are therefore more real than reality. All personhood as we find it in humanity is grounded by the Logos and imitates His inherent personal identity.

Should we find ourselves questioning if the above thesis is right, we should immediate realize that our questioning of it entails words, and those words have the power to question or tear down the reality of what I allege. Words build or tear down worlds. Only in and through words do I gain access to the world in which I find myself. Words provide access to reality. Without words, reality’s determinate structures, its intricacies, and my ability to connect to it, are little more than amorphous data toss by the vicissitudes of time and place.

We may imagine a world that has no observer, no intellect capable of organizing, but the imagining activity itself requires the very intellectual observer we are trying to remove. Not everything conceivable is possible. In this plane of existence, there is a union of reality with words, and these resulting entities are called humans. It is the immaterial mind of humans that organizes the world through a combination of material entailments: the brain with its neurons, electricity, and matter. On the Christian view, all this is very simple: the eternal Mind, God, provides the vast array of already highly organized raw materials: energy, gravity, mass, etc., etc. This universe’s raw materials are conveniently arrayed to allow for biological life on one planet in this universe, earth. The other minds, human minds, take these vast materials and, in a microcosm, arrange and organize these materials into more intellectually fashioned frameworks. These human minds are mimicking the eternal Mind. The invisible changes the visible.

Let’s zoom in now on 5th generational warfare, which is narrative warfare. This is a misnomer; narrative warfare–the war of words and stories–is really the very first generation warfare. The Christian view tells a story of how the serpent reframed and questioned what God told Adam and Eve about the tree of knowledge. It was a simple story twist. This slight change in the narrative led to devastating repercussions for all reality, but firstly for the humans, because those little humans minds now had a very different set of words framing their world. Before the first transgression, God’s message to humanity was, I will walk with you and you will procreate, fill the earth, and rule. After the first sin, work now required inefficiency, procreation required pain, male and female would make war with one another for dominance, and of course death would abound and destroy human destiny. Words are more real than reality.

5th generation warfare–to tie it in with the title–is often associated with Qanon in political pop-culture. Qanon is an alleged intelligence operation designed to wake up the sleeping American masses from the brain-washing that had led most of the public to complacency and misplaced trust in politicians and government institutions. Specifically, this operation was only called ‘Q,’ not Qanon. The -anon part of the name came from the initial interactions anonymous persons would have with the writer of the ‘Q’ posts. The Q posts provided some true intel, some fragmented intel, and some disinformation. In the philosophy of speech, there is something called speech-act theory, which differentiates the verbalization or words as locution, what is done with that verbalization of those words as illocution, and the effect the words have on the audience as perlocution. To understand so-called 5th generation warfare, we must be attentive to perlocution. The accuracy of information, its truth value as it were, may be largely unimportant when considered together with the effect (perlocution) on the audience in view. Asking certain questions, for instance, that one might already know the answers to, is considered the Socratic method; the goal of this method is not to mislead but to get the audience to heuristically engage. If we feign ignorance of the answers to the questions we pose, are we deceivers? Are we guilty of misinformation, or misrepresenting? What if my point of putting disinformation out there is simply to get my audience to care to know the truth?

Where am I going with this? We know all humans have limitations, and all humanity will always have limited information, fragmented information. Thus, the shear existence of humans-using-words is a situation that always entails fragmented information or misinformation. It is inescapable, that is, unless someone can pose a theory of humans that shows them to be unlimited, infinite, eternal, etc., and therefore their words to have always perfect accuracy. Striving for accuracy, for truth, is applaudable and should be our goal, but humans’ knowledge grows and changes, resulting in large contexts in which humans are inescapably involved in disseminating misinformation. It seems to me that there are two features we need to bear in mind when it comes to misinformation. Firstly, is the speaker sincere in his belief that the misinformation he is providing is accurate: i.e., the speaker believes he is speaking the truth. Secondly, it is further helpful to understand the intent of using the misinformation if the speaker does know he is spouting misinformation. Before the accusation comes at me that I am advocating for an “end justifies the means” ethics, we must recognize that things like rhetorical questions, hyperbole, metaphors, and the like, all put forward differing degrees of what may look like deception, evasion, or intent to distract. With language, there is a whole, whole lot of “ends justifies the means”; said differently, there is ubiquitous “end effect on my audience achieved through a vast array of language devices/means.”

Modernism–the Western intellectual movement from roughly 1600s to the 20th century–built many falsehoods into nearly unassailable assumptions. One assumption I have written on extensively is the myth of the individual against the backdrop of “God is Trinity.” The human person is always already an intersubjective entity before any thought of lone or individual can happen. A child is his mother, his father, and someone unique as well; hence, a child is already intersubjectively constituted in his very nature before he can ever have the erroneous thought that he is somehow a lone individual. Similarly, the cognitive development of a child is always built from the incoming and constitutive influences of other humans. Except for the rarest of tragedies, that somehow a child is alone all her life–how would this child live beyond a few days though–there are no cases where a child’s mind develops devoid of the building blocks of other humans’ influences.

Another so-called unassailable assumption from modernism, which likewise fuels suspicion against putative misinformation, is that truth is gained in an all or nothing manner. If truth is imagined to be inside of a building, and you only can claim to have the truth if you are in the building, then how we understand truth is an either/or situation. You are either “in the truth” or you are “outside of the truth.” Before I get accused, let me affirm that there is a place for either/or truth propositions. What I am calling a wrongheaded, unassailable assumption is the framing of the entirety of the human situation and relationship to truth on the model of “you are either in or out.” Truth is better understood as concentric circles around the central truth claim, and where someone is mapped tells whether someone is closer or farther from the truth. Our knowledge grows in proximity to the truth, gets closer as we diligently work to know the truth. In an attempt to stay away from making this truth conversation religious, I will simply aver that this model of truth-concentric-circles works equally well for science and religion.

Coming back to narrative warfare and the idea of misinformation, the 21st century’s Western governments have criminalized–or are in the process of trying to criminalize–something that is inescapable to how human knowledge develops. All human knowledge is partial, fragmented. This is why even the most well grounded scientific theories, which have utterly changed the world, are still considered provisional. Stephen Hawkins opines in his now famous A Brief History of Time that it only takes one divergent event to obliterate the sufficiency of any scientific theory. Thus, science is ever provisional and revisable. What not to miss is that asserting this about science is likewise asserting that human knowledge is limited, incomplete, and therefore has all the markings of what Western governments are calling misinformation. If the 21st century has taught us anything, it has taught us that “controlling the narrative” is a god-like ability, and whoever can control it will centralize and accumulate monstrous power.

There are other questions here. To whom is something misinformation? What knowledge tapestry is in view when someone claims something is misinformation? If I don’t provide all the context surrounding the filming of a movie–the off camera context unrelated to the task of the filming and production crews–I can only provide a reporting of it that is misinforming since the actual experience of being on set for the filming would entail those unrelated off camera contexts. If I ask certain questions–Socratic method–designed to get you to think, but you instead just assume the answer that my question seemed to suppose, am I guilty of misinformation? An example might help. Will the universe always continue to persist? My question here supposes the universe to be eternal; this is called question begging and is supposedly guilty of misinformation. The running scientific consensus by in large is that the universe had a beginning. My question, however, was designed to get you to work on the wrong assumption and likewise to get you to think about putting a historical divine attribute (eternal) onto the universe. My purpose in the question is well-intended. Claiming the universe to be eternal, for instance, is a subtle affirmation of the sufficiency of the Christian worldview, since Judeo-Christian beliefs about the eternality of things is a long standing doctrine. It suggests that humans desire the eternal.

The context, therefore, of a Socratic method question situates the misinformation. Let it not be forgotten that even in the Gospels, Jesus tells his disciples that He speaks in parables so that people will not understand, Luke 8:10. Jesus speaks indirectly with the broader populous but to his disciples directly. Is the use of such parables guilty of misinforming, especially considering Jesus was perfectly capable of explaining His teaching thoroughly and clearly: just as He goes on to do with the disciples n the Luke 8 text cited above. The point I am driving at is that human language and human relating is way too complicated to be boiled down to nothing more than, “Is so-and-so reporting the facts accurately?” Notice the modernist assumption hidden here. Why is accuracy of telling facts such a priority over say riveting story crafting? The multi-trillion dollar film and entertainment industry tells us that humans value a good story more than facts, doesn’t it? Modernism of the later Enlightenment took a war-footing against all forms of mysticism. It became infatuated with the scientific method and a “just the facts” mentality. Fast forward to today. The provisional-nature of science and the discrepancies between quantum and macro physics, for instance, has highlighted how limited human knowledge is, how fragmented it is, and thus how misinformed we continue to be. The renewed interest in “spiritual” endeavors and a new openness to mysticism has been the birth-child of the disillusionment fostered by the failed promises of both science and modernism.

A word on postmodernists: these persons thought the only reaction to the failure of modernism to capture the truth with certainty was to deny all access to truth. Many who desire power are drawn to this view. To make the truth as you wish on a whim is a god-like power as is the judgement these postmodernists make when they free themselves from all accountability. We see here yet again an either/or view on truth. If you can’t have the truth perfectly, then you can’t have any of it whatsoever. The postmodernist has it even easier than this though: they can have the truth perfectly precisely because no one else can have any of it whatsoever. A momentary sidebar here is in order. On postmodernism, they assert that the individual’s biases or subjective influences color the world so drastically that every person ultimately fails to be able to communicate (much much more could be said, but this will have to do here). There is no way to falsify the truth as the postmodernist frames it because it is solely accessible and crafted by the postmodernist alone. Of course, the entire postmodernist view of things utterly crumbles once it is demonstrated that humans are not lone subjects: i.e., humans are intersubjective entities, already built as embodied community from the DNA of mother and father.

To summarize, if misinformation is to be criminalized, and governments are to determine what is real information from what isn’t, quoting Plato’s excellent observation about governments, “who guards the guardians?” The Western governments are posturing themselves as the guardians of what is credible information. Governments, remember, have biases as well–as I’ve shown in other articles, escaping bias is impossible unless humans can remove all limitations on themselves. The question is, whence do your biases come, and why are they appropriate or not? This question demarcates the fact that with every bias there is an implied morality or at least epistemology that undergirds its appropriateness. Misinformation is part and parcel to all human endeavor since all humans and their ideas are imperfect, growing, improving. As noted earlier, to whom is this intel or claim misinformation? The atheist should claim that belief in God is incredulous and therefore misinformation, should she not? This would be nothing more than the atheist following her convictions, which I think most of us would applaud. Take that atheist and put them into a position in government that involves forming policy, specifically related to monitoring appropriate speech. From that policy forming position, that person can craft the very world you and I live in, making public affirming speech about the existence of God outlawed. Coming back to the Christian Logos, this is why I affirm that words are more real than reality. It should be that way, at least according to Christian theism, because the Logos is the blueprint for all that is, but this Logos is the Word, it is speech. Whoever wields speech, wields the world.

Dr. Scalise

Money is the life blood of this world. Why, then, is “the love of money the root of all evil?” This is a familiar way the text is translated, but we could put it like this: “The root of all evils is the love of money.” What is entailed in the idea of money? What is money? How does money work? How is value built in this world? I’ve written before that the love of money is also a love of status. I want to dig deeper on this topic built around trying to answer the series of questions I just laid out. Firstly, money is human effort, energy, and intelligence made tangible. In this sense, money is the commodification of human-energy exertion. Money represents effort, and this is why money is also status. The implication is that the more money you have the more status you have. It is plain that in our world we humans understand money in this way, and it is pervasive, no matter what country or culture you may belong to: you have money, you have status.

Hence to understand the biblical text above while also understanding how humans go about their business in the world of money is to know that “the love of money” is likewise the “love of status” or even more specifically, “the love of self-elevation.” Status is a tricky idea because it can be accrued without a tangible monetary thing, like a dollar, attached to it initially. At the end of the day, however, when something is full of status, it ultimately becomes enduringly tied to monetary wealth. Hence, the online influencer goes about putting up posts, and, through this behavior, eventually is able to gain status and finally to monetize that status to make a living. The reason for this is because money represents human energy output; that energy output is the intangible raw material that can become status. This intangible status later becomes tangible wealth. Status is the raw material that underscores or constitutes tangible wealth.

Money in this world is founded in limitation or scarcity. Humans as we go about putting out effort to build, grow, work, or otherwise be productive, do so with limited amounts of time and energy. This is a result, on the Christian view, of God’s curse put on the world after humanity’s first sin. That curse made production more difficult and roughly put pain in the processes of both work and procreation, and it put enmity between man and women, between humans and other life-forms. Humans are an interesting conjunction of the finite and the infinite: again on the Christian view, we humans have a beginning (finite) but no end (infinite). Arguably, although humans have a lower limit of activity–I.e., complete lifelessness–there may be no upper limit to human activity. These great merits of humanity, however, do not obtain in the present, cursed world. Paul writes in Romans 8 that the whole creation longs to be freed from its slavery to futility. Money, status, wealth, in this world, are all born from and framed by scarcity. Gaining wealth has a definite time-line on it with death as the end point. That humans have a certain limit of total output they can achieve in this life places a hard cap on energy exertion. Human output is a resource, and it is a scarce resource due to the ticking time bomb that is death. Scarcity defines human output in this world. As such, since human output is the raw material of status, status is defined by scarcity. It is obvious to everyone who works in the world that money is scarce; i.e., people live pay check to pay check, and such an expression colloquially captures this sense of scarcity.

With all this said, we may now go further thinking through our biblical text: “the love of money” is likewise then “the love of scarcity.” To be clearer on this, we might expound and restate it: “the love of money” is “loving the value-system built from and constituted in scarcity.” In this world, scarcity is tied to the continued ability to live. In this world, scarcity will increase until it reaches critical mass, which is max entropy, or what the physicists call the “heat death of the universe.” According to the 1st and 2nd law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, it goes from more organized ever towards growing disorganization, which is why, at some point in the distant future, the universe will be nothing but darkness and absolute zero. Even when we think about the light from the stars, at some point all stars will fail to give light, leaving the universe in pure darkness. If we imagined ourselves the final observers of the last star burning out, we might know that there were still planets out there, and we might still feel rock beneath our feet, but all light and heat ending effectively makes everything nothingness to a hypothetical observer. It is only through light/heat that all things take form and have their being–that’s a endorsement of biblical thought if I ever heard one.

Therefore, scarcity in this world is of the ever increasing type; said differently, things we need to live will become ever more scarce as time ticks by. This is why the universe “longs for the revealing of the children of God . . . for the creation was subjugated to futility, not by its own will but by the one who subjected it, in hope, that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Romans 8:19 – 21).” The love of money is a dedication to a system whose ultimate end is annihilation. We can make it even simpler: the love of money is the love of nihilism.

Let me distill down the former paragraphs into a tight line of thought that shows how the love of money is the root of all evils since I have just spent the time in long form to explain it. Money itself represents human effort and status. In this world, both human effort and status is limited and has its final end in the death of the human. Human effort, human status, and human wealth are all defined by scarcity, and not just any scarcity, but a scarcity that grows over time. Since human effort, human status, and human wealth will grow ever more scarce as time passes, we can also say that human effort, human status, and human wealth, in this world, have only one inescapable end: nothingness, annihilation. Evil is the tangible and intangible influences that moves life towards and ultimately to death. We see the final end of the matter. Why are we loving a thing (money) whose final utility is nothingness? To love money is to be a devotee to a system of value which cannot preserve value. To love money is to be dedicated to a failing system. To love money, therefore, is to love absolute nihilism.

Dr. Scalise

There is a recent uptick in governments putting regulations into place to censor speech, which is a direct censorship of thought as well. The Western governments of this earth have no choice but to give up on the charade of “being for individual rights.” I note the Western oriented governments because the communists, autocracies, and the Islamist States, do not pretend to protect or value individual rights. The DSA, the European Union’s 2023 “Digital Services Act,” is already trying to establish the EU has the arbiter of online speech. The sovereign value of the individual, which is most profoundly displayed in the authenticity and freedom of his or her speech, has been discarded as though it is some worn-out, antiquated notion. The EU, recall, is a transnational entity, and its leaders are far from being born out of populism. This is a problem for the United States as well despite its wonderful Constitution enshrining the Freedom of Speech in the First Amendment. The US’ leaders have largely enacted a form of fascism to effectively outsource its censorship behind the scenes. Elon Musk’s Twitter Files exposed this in a carte blanc sort of way. By fascism here, I simply mean that there is a collusion between the State and corporations in order to perform the will of the State. It can be out in the open or done in secret; in the US, during and after the exposure of these censorship efforts, this violation of the 1st amendment has been flushed out into the open. The Biden administration appointed a disinformation Czar, Nina Jankowicz, had openly called for the government to verify, edit, and even remove online speech deemed “inappropriate.” Appropriate to whom is the critical question. I will drop a bunch of links from left leaning and right leaning sources that corroborate these details. What changed in the 21st century that forced so-called “governments of the people” to become god over what you can say? In a word, internet.

The 20th century centralized all information provided to the people through radio and TV. This provided the god-like ability not only to tell the people what to think about, but it allowed for the framing of the Overton window. Take this montage as an example of just how the news is artificially scripted and then I will discuss this Overton window a bit.

This window is framing the two sides of any conversation, and it sets the parameters of how far speech should go on a particular subject. Hence, the notions of Right vs Left, or Democrats vs Republicans or Conservative vs Liberal. Such a framing sets up the Hegelian dialectic with its harrowing “solution” needing to be some medium or tertium quid. If radio and TV can set the parameters of the topic, then it can advance a definite agenda albeit slow moving. Why should radio and TV control the framework of how and what can be discussed? My point in all of this is that TV and radio in the 20th century enabled governments to control speech and thought through these media agencies. The governments could promote themselves as the good guys, as the defenders of freedom and speech while at the same time control speech and limit freedom. I have to admit I admire the pure craftiness of it while also hating it. The alleged CIA “project mockingbird” is a long known and discussed conspiracy; this project was designed to craft the narratives for the news rooms across the nation in order to craft the Intelligence Agencies’ narratives. Interesting as the allegation is, it is moot at this point. The montage ab0ve–along with many more if we cared to look–provides the evidence of coordination. The topics discussed and how they are presented all point to a fascist collusion between government and media. Figuring out if it is the CIA or what have you is irrelevant for my purpose here.

The internet and more specifically the social media platforms introduced the first cracks in the governments’ ability to frame public conversations. I used to teach epistemology, and I always taught that if I can frame a conversation, then I can win that conversation. To cite one hotly disputed recent event in American politics, was January 6th an insurrection (hard left) or a riot (Fox news Rino position)? This is the Overton window or the framework that has been set for how this event must be understood by the public–the boundaries the conversations must stay within. Before this gets entirely too political, the takeaway is to realize that someone is settings the frameworks for thought. Social media has now enabled the population to set their own frameworks and to popularize them without the governments consent or meddling. This came to a head in the past four years, culminating with Musk buying Twitter, Trump starting Truth social, and the ascendency of Rumble. There are other platforms too that are not guilty of the fascist censorship collusion with government: i.e., bitchute.

We know Twitter was guilty of massive censorship under the directives of government via the reporting of Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files; Taibbi testified before Congress with the subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in 2023. If you want to read all the exposure of the Twitter Files–it is voluminous–go to Musk’s twitter and search for Twitter Files. If you search for it on almost any search engine, you’ll be met with some AI or top search result designed to discredit it. I just did a search on Brave–which is arguably “freer”–and my top result was Wikipedia, which only three paragraphs in asserts: “A major aspect of the examination surrounded false assertions by Musk and others that Twitter had been ordered by the government to help presidential candidate Joe Biden in the coming election by suppressing an October 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.” If you watch this clip from the testimony before Congress, you’ll see that Taibbi discusses in detail the collusion and direct line of control the government had on Twitter in respect to not only the laptop story but, according to Taibbi, 100,000s of accounts and their content.

This testimony effectively contradicts wikipedia’s reporting on the matter, which is a disappointment, since I had so much hope in wikipedia in my 20s that it would be a democratization of knowledge, yet here we are.

The argument before all this exposure went something like this: the 1st amendment only prevents the government from stifling speech, it does not apply when a private company like Twitter censors speech. Back then, we would have to take the line of argument that twitter is now the new town hall and therefore should allow for just as extensive freedom of speech as what could happen anywhere in public places, which would entail allowing all speech. In Taibbi’s exposé, he likewise reports that ex FBI and ex CIA agents all had long and prominent positions inside of Twitter. The government could say, “hey we are not censoring speech, that’s Twitter, and they can do what they want.” We now know that the FBI and other agencies had a direct line to Twitter and worked together, which made Twitter the enactor of the will of the State while allowing the State–before all this came out–plausible deniability.

The Western nations “had it good” in the 20th century; they could set the frameworks of thought and speech without many even thinking to question it. Internet has produced two very different routes. On the one hand, the internet can provide the governments of this world the ability to control, collect intel, and obliterate all privacy that every historic tyrant would be jealous of. On the other hand, the internet can become the most powerful tool for the protection of a free press, protecting a people’s ability to become or stay free. Freedom of speech only matters when someone’s speech is disagreeable to my own. If someone echos my opinion, then her speech doesn’t need to be protected from me trying to stop it. That governments in Europe–and to some degree in the US even if beat back in our courts many times–are criminalizing certain speech as “hate speech” may be a very dangerous slippery slope. The pertinent question is, “hateful to whom?” The free exchange of ideas cannot survive governments determining what speech is hateful and what is not because ‘hateful’ and ‘protecting government power’ will align to some degree at some point. To suppose otherwise is a fundamental naiveté and abysmal misunderstanding of human nature. Lord’s Acton’s quote lives on infamously: “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Who has more power than governments with militaries? Who has more power than transnational entities like the EU that represent many militaries?

Dr. Scalise

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2023/12/sen-cruz-presses-biden-administration-on-taxpayer-funded-censorship

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/damning-report-details-biden-admins-big-tech-censorship-push

Former Biden Disinformation Czar Launches Group to Defend Online Censorship

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-seeks-stop-biden-administration-censoring-american-media-companies

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponization-committee-exposes-biden-white-house-censorship-regime-new-report

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/biden-administration-blocked-from-working-with-social-media-firms-about-protected-speech

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook/2023/07/07/bidens-former-disinfo-czar-would-like-a-word-00105251

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/12/18/brussels-launches-legal-action-against-musks-x-over-illegal-content-disinformation

https://european-union.europa.eu/easy-read_en

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-services-act/europe-fit-digital-age-new-online-rules-businesses_en

We will often hear someone discuss scientific consensus on our news channels. During these discussions, often someone will state, with a confident authority, “Science is not a matter of consensus; it is facts.” In historiography and other scientific disciples, the idea of “Brute Facts” gets bantered around. The Latin for the word ‘science’ simply means knowledge. To speak of brute facts we assume a number of things. First, that there are observers of said facts. Second, that we care to discuss those facts and to perhaps utilize them. Third, we appropriate or accept said fact as part of a knowledge base that contextualizes the fact and gives it both form and meaning. Saying that Jesus “came back to life” means little in terms of the Bible because many people were reported to come back to life. Jesus brought Lazarus back to life. There was a little child, Talitha, that Jesus also restored to life. We could name more in Scripture. The knowledge base that contextualizes Jesus’ coming back to life to give it form and meaning are the prophecies and Jesus’ teaching about the uniqueness of His coming back to life. This is why we say He was resurrected while all the others we simply say they came back to life–and these others had to die again at a later time.

Let us turn to geography for a moment to get at this. Is it a hard fact, a brute fact, that the Mississippi River is the western border of the state of Tennessee? To say yes is to already affirm the influence of other humans on the so-called brute fact. That this body of water is called the Mississippi River came from someone at some time. That there is a demarcated geographic location called Tennessee is again the result of human subjective influence. At some point, a tech company integrated its location in an app, and, before this, humans created representative maps of the area–all designed and influenced by humans. The more accurate the representation of the Mississippi River, the more accurate or scientific our knowledge base.

My point is that science is relative to humans, and speaking of facts is only meaningful to sentient, human life. To read of facts in a book is to read of an initial adventurer who first observed said fact. This would later get penned into the written word. The question of interest is what context to said fact was included or omitted? All human life and recording apparatuses are limited; my smart phone only has so much data in which I can store things. When I record a video on it, what context of my actual experience is left out? Brute Facts are only meaningful as subjective entailments. What I mean by this is that without subjective humans to contextualize, give form, and provide meaning to the notion of “brute facts,” the entire concept ceases to exist. Of course, on my theistic view, I might argue that God would still observe all things and so perhaps “brute facts” would endure, but this is far afield for my present purpose.

If brute facts can only exist in, with, and through subjective humans, then indeed the idea of scientific consensus is more accurate than just saying that science is facts. As soon as we speak of a human’s knowledge (i.e., what the word “science” means in Latin) we are already intimating that human’s subjectivity. Hence, the importance of the scientific method to try to get accuracy in observing the physical universe. The controlled experience of the scientific method still faces the same challenges of everything in the world: i.e., limitation. What conditions are allowed? Who–which scientist–decided on those conditions? What scientists were marginalized and disallowed from weighing in on the conditions? What was reported from the experiment and what was omitted? What order were the results of the experiment laid out? Was one result emphasized more than others? If so, why?

Dr. Scalise

Been working on notions of humanity built from the idea that God is Trinity. The raw framework of the world is unities in diversities. Individualism was roughly cobbled together as a kind of defense of property rights against governments and monarchies. That someone might be considered a “collective person,” having no identity per se apart from the broader community, was a problem for the tyrannical instinct among human rulers. The point is that much of the 19 and 20th century has been a reaction to protect and defend the common man against the elite, against the privileged, against royalty. Individualism, then, is much the birth child of a politico-economic theory even though in today’s parlance is it tossed around in pre-dominantly psychological ways. If every child born is the union of a mother and father, how would this child be an individual? Isn’t the raw makeup of this child already a community event? Once born, isn’t every feature of that child’s thinking an accepting and using of what he or she is taught, mimicking it, and then extending it into new avenues? If every child is biologically already the mother and father, and every thought that child has is already the thoughts of others made his own, how is it that an individual could exist? If we concede that an individual is really “a community in a person,” why bother with the term individual at all? It is misleading.

Prime Theologian

Capitalism has done much to improve the world, but a certain dominance of corporations as part of capitalism has produced ill effects on family. Such an assessment of corporations would be unfair if we did not mention in the same breath the endless, fiat money printing happening in the United States. In this sense, my title for this article is too short. Nevertheless, the movement away from an agricultural-centric system, mixed with the growth and dominance of global markets, has diminished the solvency of the family unit.

That a husband in the 1950s could work to provide for his whole family while his wife stayed home does not address the absence of the father in a standard 9 to 5. Enter the fiat, non-gold-backed, money printing that happened in the 1970s and is still happening today. It is strange, isn’t it, that most primary or undergraduate courses on economics teach that a small amount of inflation in a monetary system is good? Why would we ever want to pay more? Let’s illustrate how money printing changes the value of that dollar in your hand. If there are 10 dollars in an economy, and that 10 dollars can buy 10 carrots, what happens when I print another dollar without something backing it, without value behind it? Each of those dollars now is only worth $0.91 rather than worth $1.00–the calculation is 10/11. The value of the carrots, however, is still the same. We now have to pay $10.98 for those carrots, nearly a 10% increase in what it costs me. The question is, has my pay at my job increased by that 10% during the same time period? Doubtful. What does this have to do with the decline of the family. If corporatism and 9-to-5-jobs took fathers away from families most of the day, then the fiat money printing system took mothers out of the home next. When one parent can’t make enough to provide for the family, there is one typical solution: the mother must work too.

The eye-opening question that comes to mind next is who is raising the kids if both parents are out of the home most of the time? There is no magic formula for putting in the time with the kids. Either you do or those intimate connections, influences, camaraderie, healthy rapport, and the like, with the kids decline. The single-parent family due to unnecessary divorce became fashionable in the latter half of the 20th century. This led to the unhappy dependence, for many families, on government: welfare, food stamps, or other government subsidizing. Dad or Mom are now displaced by government. Much of this was sold on the promise that we–those loving, caring politicians, despicable as most of them are, postured themselves as moral preachers for these causes–should just be there to help and to care; what has become potently obvious over the past 30 years is that government helping raise kids comes at a high cost. Firstly, this is the utter, systematic annihilation of the centrality of the family unit. Government displacing parents is every communist and totalitarian regime’s dream: i.e., Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, etc. If this decline in family isn’t abysmal enough, consider those dependent on the government programs in this way are nearly extorted–even if willingly–into continuing to support whatever politician will uphold the life-line.

“Follow your conscience” is a powerful tag line, but taking government subsidies to care for your kids likely eradicates every chance to follow conscience. What is, after all, a more conscience-able act than ensuring food is on the table for the little ones? The answer is obvious if we are brave enough to face it. The more conscience-able behavior would be to work out a living situation or work situation or marriage situation that enables the parent to be free from government and to actually follow his/her conscience. This brings us back to the title, what is it that corporations strain in the family unit that leads to this abysmal reality of government-dependence? Before we lay blame whole-sale on the corporations, it must be recognized that the influence of global markets and a trend towards transience as part of the American project was opportunity as much as it was a gut-punch to the family unit.

Strikingly, Karl Marx penned many complaints about global markets and the destruction of the community and niche-societal structures there contained in his now famous Communist Manifesto, written in the 19th century. His complaint wasn’t centered on the family unit; the concern with the family unit is instinctual in many respects, but the Abrahamic traditions–Christianity, Islam, Judaism–are or were particularly sensitive to protect the family. Marx targeted capitalism while we here explore the destructive effects of corporatism on the family unit. The truth is there might not be a solution to corporatism inasmuch as there is not a cure for the human craving of status and wealth. Capitalism falls prey to what every economic structure falls prey to: human greed or, more accurately, human-craving-recognition, the love of money. The question is how well does a economic system channel and keep greed from excess? Furthermore, how well does an economic system decentralize wealth and status?

Corporatism can take two faces: a drive to produce capital thoughtful of family units or a drive to produce capital for capital sake, whatever the cost. The former can only maintain its integrity while tied to a belief system that radically prioritizes and values others. The latter form of capitalism does not have resources in itself to place the other above self or corporation. It is the instinct to provide for the family, the so-called darwinism “survival of the fittest,” that removes all possibility of prioritizing others. It is a simple thought: the more money the corporation makes, the more money I bring home to the family, or at least I hope the corporation shares. Too bad it is the parent that the family needs far more than money. Money provides opportunity; a parent’s presence provides the character and training for a child to optimize opportunities. We can argue about which belief-systems actually uphold the inherent value of the other, but for now, we simply presume the death of the Christ on the Cross for humanity as an obvious belief that centers value on the other. Further, this death of God-incarnate to bring family into His fold is an interesting sharing of power; said differently, this is a decentralizing act for the sake of reunion.

The historic centrality of agriculture tied family-units both to the land and to one another. Communities were small, and resources were often locally sourced. The family unit strove together for food and for trade. There is hope on the horizon with the big uptick of both home-schooling and self-sufficient families. The next step is to broaden these into self-sufficient communities and then to begin bartering and trading with other self-contained sufficient communities. Sick of taxes? Barter. Sick of paying uncle Sam, set up local trade. Simply solved, hard to enact. The goal is not to be separate, like the Essences in Qumran, isolated from the wickedness of the world. The task is to disengage the global currents and controlled markets in order to reestablish the primacy of the family. Corporatism as it now slides deeper and deeper into entrenched secularism simply does not have any resources for elevating the importance of others, and families. Corporations will always offer a bit of self-proclaimed victory in caring for others by providing their product and providing jobs/livelihoods. This is not unimportant and credit should be given. Better to have jobs than anarchy. The test of being other-centered, or family-centered, only comes when a corporation stands to lose considerable and extended revenues from prioritizing families. We might object and state that we would not want to invest in said company since shareholders need a deep and unmoving commitment from the corporation to generate and prioritize profits. This highlights how the corporate-finance-systems likewise devalue the importance of family. Before I start sounding like a snob, I do not claim to know of better investment mechanisms that are similar in structure. What I can wonder about, however, is what the world would become if we invested in our families like we invest in our 401ks, or if we invested in our families like we dedicate ourselves to our corporate jobs? This might be a city on a distant hill, but its distance away doesn’t make it unattainable or undesirable. And, yes, I work a corporate job. I am not just some academician protected from what I speak here; I endure such trials and decisions daily.

Prime Theologian

I’ve written before on how AI will mimic the biases of its creators. Given the woke (Chat GBT) and hard-conservative (Gronk, Musk) AIs created and deployed at this point, my prediction on this end is proven true. This is not really all that amazing, however, given the nature of sequential thinking and algorithms. What do I mean by this? Human thinking and computer processing is tied to sequence. Implied in all sequence is bias. Why is one topic or thought at the first place in the sequence of thought or processing? We must select what starts a chain of thought. What is more amazing is that the age you live in–for instance, 5th century BC versus A.D. 2024–will influence and control your thought as well, giving us a different starting point for thought than what a different age would offer. This is long known. What we presume in 2024 is not what was presumed in the 5th century BC. Much of what we assume in A.D. 2024 was questioned in 500 B.C.; what those in 500 B.C. assume, we now question in our day and age. What we assume today, I have no doubt will be questioned in A.D. 2124. My point is that if we program our AI to presume 5th century B.C. assumptions, the conclusions that our AI users come to will be quite different than if we give the AI a woke agenda to roll out. For the public to really know the danger and promise of AI, the public must first understand that AI is an AI amplifier for the AIs’ controllers. Further, we need the public to know that AI has precisely zero hallmarks of non-bias or non-partisanship nor can it achieve either. Moreover, we must finally arrive at the mass-public conclusion that AI is inescapably a slave to the thoughts and sequences of its creators. We could even dare say that it is a tool of propaganda, but this would be misleading since propaganda assumes malice in the misinformation it delivers in service of its agendi. If we can achieve little more than getting 60% of the populace to understand that non-bias is a myth, both for humans and AIs, we will have a huge victory in the public opinion battle, which, sadly, controls virtually everything.

Dr. Scalise