Never mind The Great Reset - it's The Great Disconnect we should fear.
“When just one man says no, Rome begins to fear. When tens of thousands said no ... that was the wonder of it.” - Spartacus
Everything is Great lately, isn’t it? The Great Recession. The Great Transition. The Great Resignation. The Great Reset. The Great ... Awakening? So why doesn’t it all feel so Great? Of course it’s because ‘Great’ is not meant to describe how it should feel, but rather to signify magnitude – and the audacity – of the change around us. Any globally-scaled upheaval and restructuring is never going to be without a great deal of pain for some, if not for most people. But we are meant to subscribe to the Greatness of the endeavour and what it is believed to achieve - nothing short of a Utopia on Earth, I suppose … for some.
We can be pretty sure, if this were the path to somewhere nice, it probably wouldn’t feel this bad getting there.
The last two years have been exhausting for us all; throughly oppressive of the human spirit. It was all too intense to be focussed on Covid all the time. There were times I had to disconnect from it all - turn off the TV news, the radio, even the internet forums and social media. The Covid programming had just been so relentless, dominating nearly every aspect of our lives (as it has been intended to).
Where are we with it now, two years on? Is it any better a place? In a word: no.
It has taken me a while to write this piece, simply because it’s hard to know where to start, or end. How do you encapsulate all that has gone on in the last year alone? What do you focus on as the single most important issue to be addressed in the aftermath? My one takeaway from this period was a conclusion that the world has quite simply gone insane. (Then I heard Prof Desmet’s theory that we were indeed living through a mass hysterical event, and my suspicions were confirmed.)
The world had lost its senses, and rationality and reason seem to have no place in contemporary discourse anymore. You simply couldn’t reason with people hitherto known to be reasonable. It had left me wondering more and more – how do you engage with a world gone mad? Such a world won’t respond to reason. It tempts me to go down a path of isolation, of not engaging with the world at all (if the world only offers terms of insane discourse). Even basic civility had been trampled underfoot. Manners, etiquette, ethics, morality – they all feel like quaint relics of some ancient culture. People had been given permission to put the boot into those who didn’t go along with the programme. It feels like civilisation, as we knew it, is slowly breaking down. Perhaps that too is intentional. To ‘build back better’, after all, the existing has to be torn down first. In such an environment, what is one to do? I’ve found myself questioning (as many are) how to relate to the world in this new situation.
Sometimes, to get perspective, you need to get some distance. You just need a break from it all. While the world has been hypnotized by viral fear, seeking to understand or counteract it can lead to a kind of self-hypnosis. In an effort to understand the madness, I sought understanding, but a constant diet of too much of the one thing is bad for you, be it mainstream fear propaganda about Covid, or unprovable conspiracy theories on social media. To go away and focus on something else, something small in your own life - a hobby, a chat with a friend, read a book, watch an old movie – these little connections to your own person and life are crucial to maintain your sanity, irrespective of what the world is doing.
Disconnecting from the new unsettling reality was a mental defence mechanism for many, essential to keep sane and healthy and motivated. We could switch off the TV, but it was hard to avoid all of it - signs everywhere, warnings of social distance, and entry requirements. Bottles of sanitiser leaving sticky floor residues at the entry to all public buildings. You’d see the ubiquitous masks – the visual signal of oppression and acceptance – on the faces that you meet, each one a barrier to free and open human expression and communication. Take a short drive from your house and run the gauntlet of police questioning your activities. Our police forces - no longer policing by consent, but by diktat - became the enforcers of State mandates (an unprecedented and irrevocable shift in the social contract with the police in this country.) We now felt disconnected from them too, in order to protect ourselves from them. They had become enforcers of oppression. Will new members to the force be as attracted to the job if they no longer have the respect of the public they once had, and even face outright hostility from them? Why would anyone bother now creating a small retail or hospitality businesses when they know they could be shut down in future on a political whim for protracted periods, essentially putting them out of business? Would future entrepreneurs - the drivers of the economy - disconnect from their hope and dreams for ever owning a business of their own? Voters saw all opposition parties cheer-leading for lockdown policies to ‘keep us safe’. The only difference in opposition’s political stance was that lockdown wasn’t happening fast enough, or being lifted too soon! With no critical difference between any parliamentary party, voters become disenfranchised and disconnected from the political process. What is the point of voting, if you’re only voting for your preferred implementor of globalist policy agenda? Young people, robbed of friendship and entertainment, slipped into a hopelessness in their thinking – a ‘what’s the point’ attitude emerged. What’s the point for any hope in a good education, good grades, of even making and going out with friends, if a lockdown future was all their lives were going to be? We disconnected a generation of our young from their own futures.
It serves us well to remember now, and forever, what horrendous crimes were perpetrated on every member of society in these times.
Even our present woke cancel culture promotes disconnection. It seeks to rewrite our history through the lens of their wishes – of effectively bringing us to ‘year zero’ thinking - disconnecting us from our past, from tradition, our heritage, and our culture, our families. The disconnection of the individual from all those things leaves our identity adrift. All these things deliver us into the hands of whatever comes our way, in a perfect mental state for our thinking and society to be re-written in line with the socialist globalist paradigm. But socialism has historically never worked out well. When people no longer feel invested, or represented, they can become one of two things - sheep or rebels. Yes, The Great Disconnect has been happening all around us, threatening to send human affairs spinning dangerously out of the control of even any wealthy and powerful clique. As I watched, civilisation was dissolving, in real-time, and at a pace accelerating daily, unless, and until, people stomped on the brake.
I can’t deny though that I have been as much fascinated as aghast in seeing this thing play out day-by-day. To plug back into the matrix now and then to monitor the latest developments in Covidworld has been irresistible. It’s been like rubber-necking a slow-motion train crash, seeing one piece derail after another, the next measure in line to fall and lead in turn into the next measure predetermined to fail – lockdowns, masks, mask mandates, hotel quarantine, vaccines, vaccine passports, boosters, vaccine mandates. The direction they came at us was constantly changing. They were distractions, but distractions with a purpose, meant to disorient us, to keep us off-guard and confused as to where to direct blame. And they still are. It is what they are trying to keep us distracted from that is important. They want us not to engage with the problems. They want us to simply obey. And this is exactly why we must not disconnect from it all now.
In a world where everything was moving so fast, where liberties were being taken away from us by the week, where new human rights abuses were forced upon us weekly, and enshrined as precedent for the ‘new normal’, it is vital now more than ever to engage with it. Human rights, as we have seen, can be taken away very quickly. A dazed and baffled and weary and angry public would scarcely notice which new rights are being removed from them by now. Most might accept any new imposition just because it promises to end the oppression and lunacy (as we saw with the uptake in the promised lockdown-ending vaccines.) And once rights are taken away by the establishment, they are never given back, unless at the insistence of the people.
If this is the Great Reset underway and this is just how the transition to that ‘new normal’ feels, it’s no wonder there are people who fear living in the promised land of the Reset. But there is a greater nemesis to fear than the Great Reset. While Covid may have been an opportunity taken by the elites to push forward some of their agenda wishes, they are perhaps not as in control as we (or they) think. A Great Disconnect is the main, imminent threat that demands our attention now. It is closer to us than the plans and goals of elite ideologues who are the architects of pandemic oppression. It is dangerous to ignore what has been going on around us locally, within the sphere of what we have the power to influence, and more dangerous still to let them away with it, to let those responsible escape justice, or to let them re-frame the narrative away from their mistakes, or to pretend things never were as they said they were.
During Covid, I heard a writer on the radio expound how to deal with the oppressive environment we found ourselves in: you can’t change the external things; all we can change is our responses to them. He went on to say that getting to that place of understanding is where freedom is. It’s a noble and stoical attitude for sure, but the problem I have with it is it’s essentially selfish - the ‘I’m alright Jack’ of philosophies. We inhabit a world with other people, many of whom are not alright thanks to the actions of our governors. If the price of my freedom is to be okay that many others are enslaved and oppressed, then am I truly free? If I see injustice in the world, and make no attempt to highlight it or combat it, just to maintain my own peace and equanimity ... is that the most important thing to me? Combating injustice implicitly involves seeking to change external things, to be an active, engaged, member of society, rather than a passive disconnected one. And yes, sometimes combat will cause mental grief and turmoil. We can (and should) retreat to that well of calm periodically, just to refresh ourselves to continue the good fight, but never to cower there.
Sometimes I want to be doing more to stop the trajectory of this. But we all ask: what can one person do? We all have something we can do, within our little sphere of influence (and that sphere may be bigger than you think). As Dr. Robert Malone puts it: ‘think global, but act local.’ I have my words; I can engage the madness in the world with them. I spent my down time writing, to anyone, and everyone, with the power to change the course of events - politicians, journalists, public health advisors. Articles and blog posts to try to nudge the narrative away from the prevalent propaganda. Who knows if any of it had effect, but at the very least they knew people were out there who thought otherwise, who opened the conversation to an alternative view.
Even a single word has power. Once, ‘yes’ was considered to be a powerful word, an affirmation to possibility. Now yes is simply a mark of compliance with the State approved consensus - vaccination. No is a much more powerful allay in the current situation. Never underestimate the power of a person's ‘No’. If what you happen to be saying no to is something the regime absolutely wants people saying yes to, then it has power against them. The pressure and the measures taken by that regime will intensify. So what seemed like an easy No early on became harder and harder to maintain. In the end, we prevailed. The Noes have it. What the ayes have now … is still to be determined.
In my breaks from Covidland I took to some old familiar TV shows I enjoying rewatching. One such show is Babylon 5. It contains a very powerful episode of a real-time interrogation story. It resonated anew with me on rewatching this time. It is a battle of wills and coercion, much like I experienced (though never expected I would) in vaccine mandates and passport restrictions. In the episode the hero says that you just have to keep saying ‘no I won’t’, one more time than they can say ‘yes, you will.’ When the interrogator asks if he thinks he can win that way, he simply replies: ‘every time I say no.’
It is only the oppressor’s constant attempts to coerce that give us the opportunities to be victorious.
Also during this time, I’ve been impressed by the many real-life unexpected heroes who have emerged. At a time when it felt like I was battling alone in isolation - one of the few who saw the madness around - suddenly there emerged other rebels in the trenches, others who knew all this was wrong, and had their own unique qualifications and opportunities and platforms to present the case. When it all seemed so dark and hopeless, when we seemed on a pre-planned path to totalitarian reset, there emerged previously unknown heroes, an alliance of the brave, with knowledge from the inside of the medical industry – Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Bret Weinstein, Steve Kirsch, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Byram Bridle, Sen. Robert Kennedy Jr., Dr. Marcus DeBrun, to name just a few experts (who you won’t hear on mainstream media channels.)
Not just the experts, but ordinary brave folk taking personal risks for the sake of the truth and freedoms – all the unknown individual marchers, and truckers, farmers, and parents, who lent their presence to the many protests for freedom that have been happening, sometimes facing down the law and the policing muscle of the State. It is only the protest and resistance of individuals, coming together, that makes these authoritarian measures too much trouble to be worth enforcing, and forces them into retreat.
What has been the greatest lesson to me in all this is that we have to trust people. I don’t mean some chosen experts, or politicians, I mean the people, plural. The human spirit is indomitable. These people were the human antibodies that sought out the more dangerous viral human behaviours of the corrupt, the deceitful, the .. evil. (Let’s not be afraid to say that word, to call it what it is, and to call it out when we see it.) It is good that in this time, the evil had become bold enough to show their hand. We have seen the face of the enemy; more and more people are now aware that the globalist elite have their plans for us, and have let slip their architecture of oppression in cash bans, digital IDs, subverting law with feared-but-unprovable health and climate emergencies, censorship, job loss, detainment, asset seizures, etc. We have been given a peep behind the curtain of the Great Wizard and see the pathetic, flawed human hiding behind it. They are not beyond being toppled from their self-constructed dais that they mistakenly believe sets them apart and protects them from us. We are all equal, all subject to the Great leveller. And we all have a unique part to play. The Greatest victory they could win over us is to break our spirit, to make us believe it is hopeless, that their change is all inevitable. If we were all to disengage from it, it would be inevitable. Nothing else is so certain.
While this groundswell is encouraging and healthy, caution needs to be applied because there are always intentioned actors eager to use and manipulate any popular movement, or any division, and conflict, to suit their own ends. We see that now with the latest pandemic-quashing, economy flattening distraction – the war in Ukraine. Gen. Sir Nick Carter believes that the economic crisis in wake of Covid could stoke nationalism, risking repeat of the chaos of the 1930s, which as we know set the scene for World War II. In the country-cancelling culture we find our self in today, where Russia is asserting its nationalism and is shunned by the world for it, we can perhaps see nationalism beginning to influence world events again. It is, I would suggest, different this time, as there is the tension between Globalism in the mix with Nationalism now. We must remain vigilant to new sources of danger and encroachments on human freedom. We must be judicious of what we are being told. We must remain engaged, each of us, in whatever little way we can. We must educate ourselves to the reality of what is going on, from all sources, not just their curated propaganda channels. The pandemic has taught us that they are deciding and filtering what we can know. The first causality of war is truth - propaganda as much a weapon as tanks and missiles in the battle for hearts and minds. The establishment does not want you making decisions for yourself; it wants to be making decisions for you. They do not want you thinking for yourself. We must think for ourselves. We must fear a Great Disconnect more than the Great Reset. Because if we disconnect ourselves from what is going on around us right now, if we let them do our thinking for us, if we don’t engage, then we become subject to whims and agendas of others, however Great or grinding those agendas turn out to be for us all. If we let the protracted psychological attack grind us into passivity, then we will quietly let anything, any foul repression or restriction, pass us by. The final coda from the last episode of Babylon 5 chimes with the world we are currently experiencing too: ‘we had to create the future, or others would do it for us.’
Don’t let them create your future. Create it yourself. You have a voice in the shape of that future. And it is your voice they require and fear. Just don’t ever disconnect ...