Tag: masses

A Season of Opened Eyes – What Did the Last 14 Months Teach Us?

It was not that long ago, maybe 4-5 years, that Captain1776 and myself both found out that we each knew NO ONE who thought like us. In searching for like-minded individuals in our circles, we could not even name ONE name of a friend or associate who saw society and government for what they really were. Few had the combination of moral principles along with impassioned sharing with others the many ways government has failed the people.

We tried at guessing percentages, not just in our state (only one of 50 so-called “united” States) but just in our county of 200K. Were there 2,000 (1%) like-minded individuals in our county that we never came in contact with? We were doubtful.

It was obvious to us that this is not the natural state of man (men or women) but something that comes from wrestling with the truths we know and the lies we see time and again. Looking into the history of government or any of its heroes tends to reveal what these actors are really about.

Fast forward those years and now we find ourselves on the other side of a “crisis” (real or imaginary, novel or planned) that showed just how far both society and government has “progressed” (regressed?). Nothing like a crisis to peel back the onion to expose the true core, condition and characteristics of our true core.

In a recent article by Winter Oak we find ten things (at a minimum) that have been learned along the way. Let us take these a few at a time and just reflect.

Item #1

Our political system is hopelessly corrupt. Virtually all politicians are hopelessly corrupt. No political party can be trusted. They all can be, and have been, bought.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, in your heart you KNOW this to be true right? I know, not that it would have really changed anything because the American political party only allows us a choice of two people of their own choosing. Come on now, think about it one second at least. You saw the rallies, you know your friends and family, and you still think this 2020 election in the US was free of trickery? Sorry to burst your bubble, this trickery has been around for ages as even JFK’s own father encouraged and financed a common laborer to run for the same office his son was running for ONLY because he had the same name as his son’s opponent thereby splitting the opponent’s vote. As FDR said:

Okay then, with #1 out of the way and seeing clearly that voting does NOTHING I do hope the next election you do not vote for the lesser of two evils BUT think about how a slew of NON-VOTING might be taken by the establishment and government. Knowing what we know now, millions of votes CAN and WILL be fabricated out of thin air just like the USD$ that are printed daily, but I digress.

The next four can be easily taken on as a group of four (items 2-5):

Democracy is a sham. It has been a sham for a very long time. There will never be any real democracy when money and power amount to the same thing.

The system will stop at nothing to hold on to its power and, if possible, increase its levels of control and exploitation. It has no scruples. No lie is too outrageous, no hypocrisy too nauseating, no human sacrifice too great.

So-called radical movements are usually nothing of the sort. From whatever direction they claim to attack the system, they are just pretending to do so, and serve to channel discontent in directions which are harmless to the power clique and even useful to its agendas.

Any “dissident” voice you have ever heard of through corporate media is probably a fake. The system does not hand out free publicity to its actual enemies.

If you have been reading my blog you should by now understand the real meaning of the word “democracy”, and that is “mob rule”. Nothing at all good can come out of this. When the s**t politicians that rise to the top in our very dysfunctional and evil political system (with two wings, one red and one blue) you can expect them to mouth words that are negated by their very actions. Watch what they do, no not trust what they say!!!

“…democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”   James Madison, Federalist Papers Number 10

Do I disrespect the working class in this country for backing the orange man? No, because he said the things that connected these masses with how they were feeling. The America they knew growing up is evaporating before their eyes and their hope was this politician who like Obama, promised a whole lot before he became president and delivered little. To show how much out of touch Trump still is in his political role, he is most proud of being the FATHER of the vaccines that have saved millions of lives in this country.

“I am the father of the vaccine. It was a miracle, it saved tens of millions of lives. Pausing the J&J vaccine was stupid!” – Former President Donald Trump

But I digress yet again. Trump had the opportunity to make good on his promises but instead went down the political road ignoring the very people that put him in office. At a critical point in March of 2020 he ignored sound council regarding the pandemic/plandemic and initiated Operation Warp Speed. This operation to vaccinate” ALL of America is something he would like as his legacy. Sorry, just another politician (99%) who gives the rest (1%) a bad name.

Number 6 of this list has to do with society. There is no way you can not see this. In fact, now that mask mandates have been dropped by the CDC you will continue to see this:

Most people in our society are cowards. They will jettison all the fine values and principles which they have been loudly boasting about all their lives merely to avoid the slightest chance of public criticism, inconvenience or even minor financial loss.

I know for myself, there have been many friends, acquaintances and co-workers who had the brain-power to evaluate what this season was all about and instead believed it all as if they had drank the Kool-Aid themselves.

It was so sad to see, but also so enlightening. They acted like politicians in that you had to wait to see what they did when this crisis, and the government’s response, hit and not rely on the years of what they had said. Their principles were tossed aside so fast that I have only one word to describe them. Sheep. Now Jesus did not hate sheep, in fact, He had compassion for them but at the same time He did not expect any different behavior from them. I guess I have too high expectations then.

The balance of these (7-10) has to do with various arms of government. Yes, even science (Medical Industrial Complex) has made their bed with government .. so here we go:

The mainstream media is nothing but a propaganda machine for the system and those journalists who work for it have sold their sorry souls, placing their (often minimal) writing skills entirely at the disposition of Power.

Police are not servants of the public but servants of a powerful and extremely wealthy minority which seeks to control and exploit the public for its own narrow and greedy interests.

Scientists cannot be trusted. They will use the hypnotic power of their white coats and authoritative status for the benefit of whoever funds their work and lifestyle. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Progress is a misleading illusion. The “progress” of increasing automisation and industrialisation does not go hand in hand with a progress in the quality of human life, but in fact will “progressively” reduce it to the point of complete extinction.

Mainstream media’s history (Project Mockingbird vintage 1950s) should be known even pre-Covid, and the police issue (tied to politicians they can never be focused solely on public safety done correctly) the same and surely should have come as no surprise.

The rather new item is that of the science community that I belong to but am highly embarrassed by. While I have seen the corporatist leanings for some time (I actually left the military in the 1980s thinking that private business would be different, but I was wrong for the category of large businesses) I found that especially beginning with Pharma’s backing of Obamacare that pushed mandatory insurance and associated premiums on our youth who were NOT sick, as a very sick and selfish move towards their own long-term profits. While they claim there heart is with patients, they are actually most in love with big government and this past season has solidified that allegiance.

The “progress” that government has brought society has been laced with awful side-effects that can easily taint one’s own soul if one is not careful. Although I am fond of automation myself, I do know that any tool used wrongly can be manipulated to be an enemy of humankind.

As I wrote in this blog the last time, the Great Spiritual Reset is underway and the positive of this is that maybe the ‘church’ (ekklesia – the people who really follow Jesus) can impact with their love of others in. As this past 14 months have given us all new eyes to see others and government with, we are all wiser to those who might pretend to embed themselves in our circles as insurgents to report back to elements of the state.

The so-called progress has brought us all into a technocratic police state that is obsessed about geting real-time data on all subjects in the homeland called America. The 1st century church based in homes operated very well in the presence of the Roman Empire’s police state. We shall see if America’s new tools will allow them to be better oppressors of the people. Time will tell.

In conclusion, Paul Craig Roberts shares about where he sees society heading:

As I have explained for decades, a Tower of Babel has no common ground. There are no shared values, no shared culture, no shared holidays, no shared history. In their place is the cultivated hatred taught in public schools with critical race theory, the NY Times 1619 Project, and reinforced with sensitivity training in corporations, universities, and the US military. This means there is no basis for law. Whatever law exists is seen as a tool of the ruling race, not as something to respect.

One consequence is that the public interest disappears because there is no public interest—only the interests of the races, genders, classes. As has been clear throughout history, the lack of ethnic homogenuity means multicultural states are dysfunctional. They have no common basis.

White liberals will dispute this even as they live in an increasingly dysfunctional multicultural state that is thoroughly disunited and themselves spread disunity with their screams for death to Trump supporters.

The American people had a good thing going, and they stupidly let it be taken from them.

Yes, the masses are stupid and the twelve year indoctrination that most of us have in government schools seems to seal the deal on that, but this too can be used for good as well going forward. There are plenty of people that can be approached to see things for what they really are.

The elite see a preferred future along these lines according to Arjun Walia:

After having protected themselves while working class were exposed to the virus, the vaccinated Zoomers now want Vaccine Passports where immunity from prior infection does not count, despite stronger evidence for protection. One more assault on working people.

So the American Empire does what Robert E. Lee prophesied about ..

To the empire whose previous 70+ years of global intervention has accomplished, these are all coming home to roost. In this unfolding environment, anyone seen as opposed to the state will be seen as a threat. Hang on y’all .. and trust and hope that God can get us through the next season of this nation and this world.

Find your like-minded friends and cultivate those relationships for the days to come.

-SF1

Democracy – the Dumpster Fire Requested by the Masses and Supported by the Elite

In Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s classic “Democracy – The God That Failed“, the utter weakness of this form of government is laid bare, as all non-principled people pursue the “free” things government can provide, from the poorest in the street to the upper class CEO, government becomes the vehicle of theft:

With a [democratic] government anyone in principle can become a member of the ruling class or even the supreme power. The distinction between the rulers and the ruled as well as the class consciousness of the ruled become blurred. The illusion even arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with a public government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened. While exploitation and expropriation before might have appeared plainly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end. Consequently, [exploitation will increase], whether openly in the form of higher taxes or discretely as increased governmental money “creation” (inflation) or legislative regulation.

A year and a half ago I posted “How Understanding History Helps Understanding the present and the Future” in which I quoted Hans:

The Right accepts the reality of human differences but the Left does not. Because Leftists try to make everyone equal, they favor massive interventions by the State to abolish human cdifferences.

I am not saying that the so-called Right is honest, honorable or trustworthy, it is just that it seems to be a few degrees away from evil in admitting that no entity can “make” everyone equal, except in slavery.

One must note that the so-called Left, who politically years ago were aligned more with Thomas Jefferson, has drifted very far from the thoughts of the founding document the US Declaration of Independence which says in part:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it ..

Are we really created equal. No way, no how. However, what is equal is the rights as humans created in the image of God have under natural law, that is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness retaining all the personal property we acquire honestly with our work along the way. Government was supposed to see us equal under the law. As it turned out, most in government, Democrats and Republicans, see themselves above the law.

The bent humans develop overtime can be used for good but also for evil. We should by now see start evidence of how this plays out in crisis events, tyrants and snitches at every level of society come out of the woodwork. People we have known for years seem to have abandon common sense and have a cult-like zealous look in their eyes as they argue the latest fad built on half-truths, either from the masses or from government.

Hans points out that it is not only the masses, but the elites that are on-board with this agenda:

The egalitarian worldview of the Left is not only incompatible with libertarianism, however. It is so out of touch with reality that one must be wondering how anyone can take it seriously. The man-on-the-street certainly does not believe in the equality of all men. Plain common sense and sound prejudice stand in the way of that. And I am even more confident that no one of the actual proponents of the egalitarian doctrine really, deep down, believes what he proclaims. Yet how, then, could the Leftist worldview have become the dominant ideology of our age? At least for a libertarian, the answer should be obvious: the egalitarian doctrine achieved this status not because it is true, but because it provides the perfect intellectual cover for the drive toward totalitarian social control by a ruling elite

The United States has been on this path at least since the War Against Southern Independence from 1861-1865 when the state crushed those who were following the Declaration of Independence when it said:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..

The seven secession documents outlined that these entities were taking back the powers it had given to the federation formed in 1787 with the US Constitution as they no longer consented! What, pray tell, will happen to us in the future when we lay claim to that founding principle? With the masses, the elites and the state in partnership, those that understand what is going on will be surrounded.

It has to be noted again that Lincoln’s centralizing of power was admired by Karl Marx, who correctly understood that:

So in fact it was the Republicans that led the United States down this road that the Democrats have fully embraced. How stupid is that.

Late 1930s American Communist convention

So today in 2020 we have the masses that are enthralled by “bread and circuses” while not being able to critically think what the end-game is here that the elites have for us all. Seems that most college graduates only see the first consequence of any action or decision, and rarely if ever see that the second and third consequences will be disastrous to them. But the masses are generally asses .. they go insane together in large groups and only then do some come back one at a time.

The other thing that democracy has done to society is to make it immoral. Few in society today think it is wrong to take with others have honestly earned and give it to the government to redistribute. Theft via government is honorable in their mind. Personal property of others means nothing as well.

Surf is up dude .. hang on!

Peace out.

-SF1

Face Masks = Fear Masks = Psy-op Courtesy of the CDC

Disclaimer: If you feel the need to wear a face mask .. :

  1. Because you have flu symptoms and desire to keep OTHERS protected (alternatively, you could just isolate yourself)
  2. Because you on the journey towards truth and still trust the CDC over your own research .. (alternatively, you could just isolate yourself, otherwise, please order the most effective* mask on the market above)

* – your mileage may vary, I am not a doctor so this is NOT medical advice as “effective” does not related to physical health but mental health 🙂

.. then fine, go ahead. However, you should know the ramifications of going out in public with your fear, err I mean, face mask on. Allen Stevo from Lew Rockwell’s site explains:

There’s a thing about masked faces. They freak people out. People like seeing the full, healthy, relaxed faces of those around them. Reading faces is one way our primal selves avoid danger. Masked faces increase cortisol. They tell you something is wrong. There’s a reason doctors try to avoid masks during hospital rounds: a face is more comforting to a patient.

Truth. You who proceed to don the fear mask and go into society only helps to drive UP the fear component that the CDC and US Government seems to thrive on to either ..

  1. .. hide their hideous mismanagement of the financial state of the US since 2008, since the 1970s when we went off the gold standard, the 1930s when FDR confiscated gold OR in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was established apparently to squander the value of the USD!
  2. .. or use at this point in time to double down on ensuring the masses understand their slave status on the government plantation, driving 20 million out of work and swell the unemployment roles (weren’t unemployment rates bragged about until the last few months?) and move another subset of society toward dependence on the government, sucking any remaining dignity from their life and having them resolved to just live out their remaining days with no purpose in life. Totalitarianism in general taking either the socialism or Marxism route to Communism. It is just a matter of time once you go down this path.
  3. .. or BOTH!

You see, this kind of psy-op was accomplished almost 20 years ago as well. This is the next generation surrender pose to the one we all have had to do at the airports since 9/11, you know, arms over the head as we get scanned by the TSA?

.. the pose that is drilled into you every time you pass through airport security. You must enter the naked body scanner and do the pose of submission. If you don’t you will be barked at, eye-rolled at, and huffed at until you do.

Notably, this “I surrender” pose is mere security theater. It looks like it works. It doesn’t actually work. That, alongside the dehumanizing: take off your shoes, get groped, and throw away whatever items you recently bought that happen to be more than 3.3 ounces.

Even more than this, it is the more affluent that have been morphed into sheep in the past two decades:

… it does work at is taking some of the most affluent members of society – air travelers – and bossing them around until they submit. The more affluent you are (to a degree) the more you travel by commercial air. The more you travel by commercial air, the more you get put through the compliance tester and obedience enforcer. This is a predictable way to make the most affluent in a society more compliant…

Barf right? But you can see how this first generation ‘surrender pose’ set the stage for the one we are seeing now right? Can you see this Plandemic clearly now?

Psy ops (alternately PSYOPS, Psychological Operations, or Psychological warfare) is a behavior intended to psychologically weaken a target. The US government is renowned for this.

While I don’t know what is an intentional psy op in my life and what isn’t, I know fear is psychologically harmful to me and those around me. To live in a constant state of fear is hell. It shortens life and reduces the quality of the short life you have.

The government desires a sick population so they can be society’s “savior”, whether it is managing their health, managing their fear or managing their life. Totalitarian governments desire to embed themselves in every detail of their citizen’s lives.

“When stress is prolonged,” writes Aphrodite Matsakis, “The adrenal glands and some of these helping biochemicals can become depleted. This depletion can lead to depression, panic attacks, mood swings, rage reactions, and problems responding appropriately to others.”

The government and all those entities that depend on the government (individual and corporate) do not want a healthy population with a robust immune system. If society were made up of free and responsible adults that were responsible for their own actions which respected the lives and properties of others, government would not have a place.

This is and always has been the dividing line between the masses and the remnant, as Allen Stevo wraps up using the word “gadfly” which is defined as:

A gadfly is a person who interferes with the status quo of a society or community by posing novel, potentially upsetting questions, usually directed at authorities.

The work of the gadfly is some of the most noble work that can be done in a society, for it brings others into a more accurate relationship with reality and helps them to live a life that is more effective, more in touch, aware.

That is not readily appreciated by all.

Bloated, with inaction, expert committees, legal liability, risk mitigation, the corpulent hind quarters of the ass barely responds to the gadfly’s goading toward the truth. It seeks to pass the rest of life in slumber, to paraphrase Socrates.

The best gadfly is the one who is determined to live life honoring his own boundaries, and to be as truthful as possible with others about where those boundaries are. That person is a natural gadfly. He does not exist to sting another. His mere living of his life, however, is an affront to those who refuse to respect their own boundaries and honestly state those boundaries to others.

It can be no surprise that those who abhor truth, who contort their minds to avoid reality, who want to be coddled in the myth of riskless existence, are those most bothered by the very existence of the gadfly.

Some part of them wants to kill him.

They are “triggered” by him. They build “triggering” into an axiomatic evil, and build morality around the inability to trigger, around the inability to be a gadfly.

Here, coddled society comes into conflict with the free man.

Yes, so here we are, as we will always have the coddled society that see government as its lord and savior and the free man, the remnant who respects all but fears none.

Arrrrgh

-SF1

Does An “In Your Face” Crisis Change One’s Worldview? Rarely for the Masses

Crisis events does tend to make one a bit reflective, at least for me. As I reflect on a couple of my previous “crisis events”, it was evident that my resulting worldview change took years and then took a crisis for me to make the final step into my own new land and new worldview.

I think it is by design that truth makes itself know in a process verses just being taught. While knowledge helps, there is nothing like a crisis to unpack that truth that had been simmering for months and years before.

I have wrote about this just last month when I said:

May a new generation and a new remnant of Americans see though the infectious nature of government and decide for the future that they will take responsibility for themselves, their livelihood and the education of the next generation and never trust any government again.

However, I do not think that the masses ever achieve this kind of mind shift, for I think there are limits for the typical broken person to make that transition well. What I mean by that is, that in time, to be “well” on the other side means to actually be grateful for the process. That the new land is much more freeing than the old. I call this being gratefully disillusioned.

The fact that the masses typically can’t or won’t make this transition is why in my quote above I used the word “remnant”. That word came to me over five years ago on one of my journeys through the political path that included people like Ron Paul and Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey had a libertarian hub that I was a member of for a few years that allowed me to purchase books at either free or $X levels. One of these was Albert Nock’s books written during the Great Depression that acknowledged that the masses were not to be prioritized in expending energy towards opening their eyes to a new worldview. Here is a quote from Gary North in his 2002 article about the remnant:

Nock warned against deliberately appealing to the mass-man. There is no audience there, he said, for any developer or defender of ideas on liberty. Individualism does not appeal to the mass-man. This is why he is a mass-man. Any attempt to whoop up the troops will fail to attract the Remnant. Indeed, it will alienate them. They will go elsewhere.

Nock took as his starting point God’s call to the prophet Elijah after Elijah’s public confrontation with King Ahab, when Elijah’s temporary victory in front of the assembled representatives of the nation backfired. Elijah was now on the run from the king. He despaired. God told him this:

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him (1 Kings 19:18).

His ministry was to them, not to the masses, God reminded him. He had failed to persuade the masses. He did not need to persuade the Remnant, which already agreed with him. He merely had to speak the truth in the name of God before the Remnant.

So as you may see, a prophet in these days (not foretelling but forth-telling) is one who sees things differently than most, and yet to them, it is crystal clear.

I have done this truth-journey thing two or three times in my six decades of life here on this planet. The beauty of this is that there were overlaps to these journeys chronologically, which in a way helped with the process for me in hindsight.

My first worldview change journeys started for me as a 5 or 6 year old. I was not totally aware yet, but my parents were going through a huge change in their marriage complete with lies and distrust. For me, at this naive age, all I knew was that I had a new baby sister, but beyond that I was pretty clueless as my world was small and included just a few compartments.

  1. Faith (is God real, what is this church service thing, what is this mid-week catechism thing and Sunday school thing)
  2. School (what is this friends thing, why do some of the richer kids talk to me sometimes and not other times, playground unwritten rules all at a Christian school)
  3. Home-life (parents who facilitated “home” but were not on the same page offset by an awesome 1960s freedom to play outside ALL DAY long on weekends and after school on weekdays).

In my youth then there was church and school, and what to believe about these two areas which was mandatory for me verses my free-range suburban neighborhood freedom which came naturally.

In today’s post I only offer one of these journeys and will cover the other two more major ones in subsequent posts.

My formal day school journey was probably the quickest one to unfold. Like I said before, my K-4th grade experience was at a Christian school which had an underlying caste system in place that separated at times the more wealthy middle-upper class kids from the ones whose parents struggled to pay the school tuition. My whole demeanor during those years was one of hiding in the shadows, hoping that the day passed quickly so I could get home to my neighborhood for my daily dose of free-range freedom. Besides my 2nd grade teacher who on the 1st day told the class to look at the ceiling and notice the holes in the tiles followed by “that is where I pinned the ears of the kids last year who misbehaved”. These were 10 foot ceilings!!! Other than that, most teachers were fine except when it came to reciting Bible verses in front of class, graded on the exact word for word repeating of various combinations of these verses every week. I guess I would have appreciated some context for each of these verses but rote memorization apparently is what this religion wanted. Most all complied and thought nothing of it, I myself thought that the exercise was misguided, but who would listen to a 6 year old?

The crisis that would finally diffuse my own distaste for much of the school environment would be the decision of my parents to separate, with my mom, sister and myself moving to another state (California) for the school year. To underscore my distaste of my K-4th grade experience, my first question to my parents when they broke that news on that August Sunday afternoon just a few weeks before school was to start was NOT .. “Can I see my school friends before we go?” BUT “Do I have to go to Christian schools in California?”.

The answer was “no” and with that I had no more questions actually. I felt so free and ready for a cross-country trip to arrive in a totally new neighborhood and a totally new school. This “re-start” allowed me to be who I was in this new environment. This fresh start overnight changed my personality so much that I did not really care for what others thought of me or my ideas. As Popeye would say “I yam what I yam”

This is a remnant characteristic, as Albert J. Nock would admit later in his life:

“And so it was that at the age of thirty-five or so I dismissed all interest in public affairs, and have regarded them ever since as a mere spectacle, mostly a comedy, rather squalid, rather hackneyed, whereof I already knew the plot from beginning to end. I have written a little about them now and then,”
― Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

The journey out to California in a 1963 Chevrolet Impala towing a U-Haul trailer was eventful in itself, as my mom was not too good with directions, so my role as a co-pilot was great for my self esteem. I was needed.

I always love maps, and so this was an epic drive:

As a 5th grader, being ten years old, I then experienced my best grade in school to date. I met new friends from all over the spectrum (red, yellow black and white as well as Christian and non-Christian) and I was fine with all that. I walked home from school past strawberry fields, cow pastures and a golf course to our apartment and then proceeded to pick up my 5 year old sister from her babysitters, feed her a late lunch and then go to the apartment complex pool for a few hours of swimming. Livin’ the dream!

At the end of that school year my sister and myself would fly back to the Midwest on a TWA 707 to be with my father that summer.

Shortly thereafter my parents would divorce and I would complete my schooling in the Midwest, but I always treasured my school year out in California in the late 1960s! I was now part of the “remnant”, even if I did not know it yet.

Below at the end of this post are the words of Albert Jay Nock (available in MP3 from the Mises Institute) explaining the role of a prophet verses that of a promoter. The financial rewards of being a prophet are few, however, being true to one’s own soul is priceless!

Just be you! You have been made for a unique imprint on this earth for a time.

-SF1

Nock’s wisdom on display:

Here is what Nock wrote about the prophet’s job. He used Isaiah as his example. The prophet’s job is not the job of the promoter.

Everyone with a message nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager to take it to the masses. His first, last and only thought is of mass-acceptance and mass-approval. His great care is to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses’ attention and interest. . . .

The main trouble with all this is its reaction upon the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one’s doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit. If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message. . . .

Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favour, and answerable only to his august Boss.

If a prophet were not too particular about making money out of his mission or getting a dubious sort of notoriety out of it, the foregoing considerations would lead one to say that serving the Remnant looks like a good job. An assignment that you can really put your back into, and do your best without thinking about results, is a real job; whereas serving the masses is at best only half a job, considering the inexorable conditions that the masses impose upon their servants. They ask you to give them what they want, they insist upon it, and will take nothing else; and following their whims, their irrational changes of fancy, their hot and cold fits, is a tedious business, to say nothing of the fact that what they want at any time makes very little call on one’s resources of prophesy. The Remnant, on the other hand, want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about. . . .

We all know innumerable politicians, journalists, dramatists, novelists and the like, who have done extremely well by themselves in these ways. Taking care of the Remnant, on the contrary, holds little promise of any such rewards. A prophet of the Remnant will not grow purse-proud on the financial returns from his work, nor is it likely that he will get any great reknown out of it. Isaiah’s case was exceptional to this second rule, and there are others, but not many.