The power of Mordor has issued forth - the Dark Lord (though moving sooner and faster than he might wish) has emptied the Black Land. How high is the ash plume? How deep and dark is the storm? How many hordes and armies of degenerate men have answered the call to his summons? How exalted have the Nazgul become, riding the air with winged monstrosities?
The stage is set. The director has not stinted, on giving the dramatic edge to the powers of Evil. Advantage: Mordor. Nothing new. But this time, it’s for Game, Set, & Match. At least for our lifetimes, & maybe that of Middle Earth.
But don’t worry! The experts are in charge. The elite will handle it. They’ve done so very well, so far, with everything else. If it’s bad, they were not involved, and in fact, were struggling might & main against it. It’s just because we don’t listen enough. It’s our fault we’ve suffered from the System so much. Because we weren’t committed in deep enough (like our fabulous leaders): it’s failed, & now we have to pay, and pay more. They may even have to set up a feudal Economy, as penance, and just run things directly.
Yet of course, it was designed to fail, not succeed. Or, alternatively, it has succeeded.
They designed a “tightly coupled” economic system of “high efficiency”, in order to maximize profits for the “stakeholders”, who then accumulate capital, further increasing power and leverage and allowing tighter “command and control” of the economy: a well-oiled, richly funded, lucrative machine, which relies on the “oil” of easy credit and bread and circuses for those unlucky enough to be at the bottom of the Pyramid Scheme. This is what they call the Global System, or Modernity, or whatever term you prefer. It is what we, at this journal, call “the Eye of Sauron”.
We are entering The Greatest Depression because there is no exit. Either the phantom wealth of asset bubbles completely vanishes, or the phantom purchasing power of fiat currency vanishes. Both paths lead to the same destination: systemic collapse. - Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds Blog
The game of Monopoly ends with one person owning everything. This is what “The Free Market” really means - the Market as God. As the old Russian lady said, “we learned under communism that it was evil; what we hadn’t learned, yet, was that capitalism was evil, too”.
Soon I began to marvel at just how comprehensive the business theology is. There were even sacraments to convey salvific power to the lost, a calendar of entrepreneurial saints, and what theologians call an "eschatology"—a teaching about the "end of history." My curiosity was piqued. I began cataloguing these strangely familiar doctrines, and I saw that in fact there lies embedded in the business pages an entire theology, which is comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth. It needed only to be systematized for a whole new Summa to take shape. At the apex of any theological system, of course, is its doctrine of God. In the new theology this celestial pinnacle is occupied by The Market, which I capitalize to signify both the mystery that enshrouds it and the reverence it inspires in business folk.
If one person owns everything, they are the King. In a nation like the USA, they would be Emperor. But having a sacred head of the body, a “one, true monarch”, is exactly the one thing that the mercantile caste dominating this country, will not permit. The One, True, Only Tycoon, the Last-Economic-Man (Standing), will not permit himself the indulgence (Oh, the Luxury!) to be trammeled by Monarchical affection towards his serfs. Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos will never be King Alfred. Or St. Francis of Assisi. AI will never be an ersatz for God.
Somehow, I see it ending more like this…
We cannot cooperate - even if the fate of the world is at stake
Globalization has also run off the tracks. It was all so easy for the past couple of decades: close the plant here, shift production to sweatshops overseas, drop the quality of goods to boost profit margins, and voila, nothing to do but watch corporate profits climb. Now that globalization is reversing, the herd doesn't know which way to run. Where will the easy, guaranteed profits come from now?
Energy has been cheap for so long, the herd took it for granted. Now that it appears there are actual physical limits that might affect the financial castles in the sky, the herd is discombobulated. You mean the input costs of everything will go up? Bu-u-u-ut what about the guaranteed higher corporate profits? Source
Investment only makes sense in an expanding industrial economy
For years, for what seems like infinite, uncountable Aeons, the accepted wisdom was, you save your money, you invest it, you grow it, & then, after being disciplined and “virtuous” (as if the external fact of accumulating savings was virtuous, by itself), there was a big pay off. And for years, because of the glut of cheap energy, temporary world Hyper-power status after WW2, and other favorable factors, that in fact was true. And it gave a gilded sheen to the regnant Market-as-God, training generations of us away from the land, from wealth production of real goods, & from the hard truth that accumulated capital and profits entail a large subsistence class to maintain.
Sauron, in a world of Mammon, reveals himself in-and-through Mammon. It is through deteriorating environments, civil unrest, wealth destruction, and war, that Sauron makes his appearance known on the prime material plane. A more sensitive era, spiritually, would have “seen” him sooner, but then, it would never have “gotten this far to begin with”. For us, the power of the Ring has to be synonymous with the new Civil Religion of Progress, Science, and a Future Utopia, built upon the corpse of The-World-That-Was.
Arda, as Iluvatar made it, has been weighed and found wanting. Guilty. Incestuous. Filthy. Too Biological. Prejudiced. Patriarchal. All crime against it will be rewarded, & no remains of it, will be permitted. Sauron (akin to the Smith God, Aule) will remake the world in a new image: His. What else is Noah Harrari on about, but this very thing? Will he be King? God? Whatever he becomes, it is “because Science”.
Until we’ve destroyed Everything, we haven’t done Anything. - Alfred Jarry
This is the opposite of God’s Nature, who creates out of Freedom, for the sake of Love.
I like my Science “neat”, like whiskey - not mingled with Civil Religion and Novo-Gnostic Death Cults. Did people really think that Sauron wouldn’t go this far? That he only needed the Steam and the Coal in order to do some landscaping around Mount Doom? That Saruman was breeding Man-Orcs to form a Peace Corps to go out and dig wells for Hobbits? I’m not against Science, I love it a lot.
Science does not tell you what Science is, or what it is for.
Passions, deadly Sins, Libido Dominandi, lust for the Ring - these things do purport to “tell us what they are for”. They are self-explanatory, & they claim to explain everything else. This is the problem.
Because God is the opposite of this. He is not self-explanatory, nor does He attempt to explain away everything else. God doesn’t justify Himself. He is Love (which has to be experienced, and is not explainable) and He is Freedom (which has no need to destroy “the Other”, but rather, knows it and respects it.
Ora et Labora was once the cry of the West, in her youth, in Gothic springtime. That was many a moon ago. Prayer for Freedom, Labor for Love. Now it has passed Eastward. The West, unless we change, is Dying, just like Sauron’s Land. Even if we “win”, we will only bloat bigger, & rot faster.
Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, it shineth, but stinketh. - John Randolph of Roanoke
The dead mackerel rots from the head down.
They have asked for a parting of the ways, peaceably, between East and West, but that is not part of the agenda. Like classic narcissists with the burning need to control everything, Russia and the rest of Asia will not be allowed to walk away from Davos and their Eurocrat quislings, because they are the righteous saviors of humanity. Source
Protogenesis underway in Mother Rosiya
And another phrase form Rudolph Steiner from his notebook entry in 1918:
“The Ukraine is the Anglo-Saxon Battlefield for the Russian cultural germ. The Ukraine is no more and no less than the current theater of the struggle against Central Europe that has been going on since 1914” - (H/T “DFC” at JMG)
Many have pointed out before that you have to use spiritual insight to parse the Prime Material Plane. That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is has different meanings: it is context & wholes that are “given”, not any self-explanation in the terms. What makes us think that the Holon of the Cosmos is more self-evident, or less complex, than a sentence like this? Worse, our mind can create sentences like Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. So (and much worse), can create Ideologies. Ideologies are clear and distinct, but unfortunately, not creative. They are usually critical (and in our day, scientific). Since not creative, they are not in any way related fruitfully to Reality (which is Living & Active). Therefore, they are not True, no matter how convincing and pellucid they appear to the Mind. This is the entire saga of Marxism, in a nut shell.
It is necessary, in light of this, to have a Great Refusal, an Everlasting No, to Sauron.
Many will say, Sauron has done this before, that we can lose this fight, & live to fight another day.
But what is happening today is something quite different. Although something of the old spirit of patronage remains, in the main the vast engines of culture have been turned from uplifting the citizen to degrading him. Indeed, the whole point of the exercise is to turn each of us from being a citizen into being a a pure consumer; that is, from being a person who takes responsibility for himself, his family, and his community, into being a person whose self-respect is invested only in what he buys, and who is directed only by unregulated and easily manipulated passions. We are told that the economy is regulated by “self-interest,” but this is a lie. Indeed, it cannot be so, since self-interest is never something known in advance, but rather something discovered by experience. Who among us has not had the experience of getting exactly what we wanted only to find that it wasn’t what we wanted at all? And who has not feared the worst, only to find that it was all for the best? No, self-interest is revealed to us, not known in advance. What we can know—and what advertising appeals to—is our desires. Desire can be converted to self-interest only when guided by the intelligence to good ends and disciplined by the virtues to good means. Intelligence and virtue: these are the enemies of any good marketing program. Modern advertising appeals not to our virtues but to our vices. And it has at its beck and call an incredible and bewildering array of technologies capable of intruding into every corner of our lives and our souls. Source
This is not the same old fight. It is the same old fight, amplified on an enormous scale, to include the entire globe. Sure, if we lose Middle Earth, I guess we can retreat to the Ice Wastes of the North. And it’s not just geographically comprehensive - it is for civilization, culture, religion, ethnicity, family, church, state: a full spectrum affair. This is what makes “this time” different, much as World War I and World War II’s scale made those wars “different” from the past wars.
The Northern Ice Wastes - Sauron doesn’t want them, but who does?
For the first time, man has the opportunity to lay waste the earth in planetary scale.
For the first time, we have the opportunity to stop them, & end this incredibly long-standing, pervasive influence. So it’s the same old thing, but a new twist: History Rhymes, and it fluctuates in scope. Everyone is going to have their hands full, on their own home fronts. But when it is over, the Truth is going to be told about what happened here: Mordor tried to go Mainstream, with Advertising, Science, & New-World-Orders. And they almost won. They almost sold us.
We know them now, Sauron is revealed to us, the Elves, who see him: and we will never put our trust in him, to the end of time. It is this firmness, this subtle ruling the dense, which will bring about his over throw. Because he isn’t transparent to us, he is translucent, translucent with the Dark Flame.
To win this fight, we just have to get clear of the spiritual wreck.
It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. Source
Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. - Ephesians 6:13
We have to not be Ixion. How hard is it, to not desecrate sacred altars? Apparently, these days, pretty hard - see here & here. Maybe, just maybe, discerning enough vision can keep us away from desecrating the sacred groves and altars of our time, to help find a quiet corner of North America, and stay out of the way of history.
Take that in as many directions, and as at many levels, as you can, & could wish for. Victory will come from going under, and over, the plane of Mammon, that Sauron has “earned” for himself. Victory will not be obvious. That is what will make it real. You cannot defeat Sauron with the Ring: the world is perishing and passing away. Get beneath the waves and above the Storm.