The Enlightenment & the Emancipation of Humanity
Charles Chevalier
To what extent was Enlightenment one of human emancipation? As Hampson (1968) describes the period “an embarrassment of wealth for the historian and the danger of being buried under his own treasure”, this essay in the explanation of the question is in danger of not only being buried by treasure but embarrassed by limitation.
Initially, the essay will define the period and the concept of enlightenment, showing the challenges that enlightenment thinkers were subject to, in the limitations of a socially primitive state with innovative ideas that were contrary to the contemporary constructs of the age.
Their purpose was to free humankind from the bonds of superstition, the monarchical state, and contradictions of Christian theology and hence the good of humanity.
The main body describes key thinkers and their efforts to emancipate man by way of science, critical reason, and political thought. The latter section of the essay will describe the weaknesses and limitations of the period and attempt to capture the socio-political mood of the era and how these limitations manifested in attitudes to gender, colonialism, and race.
In summation the essay will argue that the Enlightenment period was one of human emancipation.
Immanual Kant defined Enlightenment as man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity using reason without the guidance of others. D. Alembert defined Enlightenment as Characterized by intellectual and scientific progress of the age, but also because of the expectation of the age that philosophy would dramatically improve human life.
Enlightenment can therefore be defined as becoming increasingly independent in contemplation and process through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers. Emancipation is synonymous with enlightenment in that it is defined as the enablement of people to free themselves of the structures that dominate and constrain them, to be empowered and free from power, in the same way one frees one’s mind to realize our intellectual powers.
Enlightenment was an era that brought with it concepts of secularism, universalism and cosmopolitanism and can with confidence be described as one of energetic intellectual inquiry. The philosophes and men of letters as their mission statement meant to bring (Illumina)light and advancement to the world by the implementation of reason and reflect on the nature of man.
Education was therefore a declaration of intent, and this intent was to bring their ideas, not only to the privileged class, but in addition the general reading public. This concept was new and the beginning of a tumultuous, exciting, and dangerous period in our history.
The allegory of Plato’s cave.
Plato’s allegory of the cave and the description of one escapee from the darkness into the light of truth and knowledge can be brought to comparison, by exception, that this was a period of mass escape by many who returned and not only convinced the cave dwellers of the new knowledge but brought them to action.
This action materialized in the form of overcoming perceptions of imagined realities, the monarchical states, the church and feudalism and the extended imagined orders that developed from these constructs, for example culture, religion, and tradition.
Enlightenment facilitated emancipation of humanity by way of challenging, dismantling, and re-orienting these imagined realities and orders that had for extended periods of our history been imagined and implemented to create cohesive, stable, and successful societies, however, they had also stunted humanities growth by means of oppression and subjugation of free thought and created inequality by class, race, and creed.
The manifestation of these actions can be recognized by at times obscene brutality in the English civil war and American and French revolutions.
Wars fought in opposition to the constructs of, the divine right of kings, the absolutist state, and Feudalism. Thomas Paine, witnessing the French revolution and the fervor surrounding the abolition of feudal privileges, the institution of a constitutional monarchy, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the citizen, excitedly wrote to George Washington, “A share in two revolutions is living with some purpose”.
In polarity the actions manifested in remarkable discoveries, conceptualism, and human understanding by Englishmen such as Francis Bacon & Thomas Hobbes, and Rene Descartes of France.
In addition, the primary natural Philosophers of the scientific revolution Galileo Galilei-Earth revolves around the Sun, Johannes Kepler-works provided foundations for Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, and Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz-refined binary number system.
The publishing of Principia Mathematica 1686 by Isaac Newton and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1689 – both works becoming central and instrumental to scientific, philosophical, and mathematical advancement to the enlightenment thinkers and emancipation of humanity by science and political thought.
The emancipation from religious tyranny and the fanaticism of Christian theology was a campaign set in motion by many enlightenment thinkers to not only free the people from the overbearing influence and meddling in the lives of humanity by the church but to free their minds from blind faith driven by fear of a vengeful God in the sky, exacerbated by naivety and lack of education as intimated by Boulanger and others.
Enlightenment thinkers and their views and ideas of God and religion and the views of the Church-God and religion can be described as parallax, and indeed by enlightenment intelligentsia as quixotic, although lacking the characteristics of chivalry and romance.
Voltaire was notable in his ferocious contempt of the church and the title of “anti-Christ of the Enlightenment” was by all accounts well deserved, evidenced by his lifelong crusade against the false religion. He made use of ridicule in the form of humor directed at the clergy and the church religious zealots in his early battles for toleration.
Additionally, his attacks were not only reserved for the lower ranks of the church but against the Pope and the military religious order of the Jesuits. One must assume his courage was fueled by a fixed moral compass directed at the evils perpetrated in the name of Christianity for example, religious wars, burning heretics, and execution of women accused of witchcraft.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Swiss-born philosopher and author of the treatises the Origins of inequality and the Social Contract, was an Enlightenment figure whose work gave inspiration to the leaders of the French revolution that put an end to the absolutist state and precipitated democracy, the social contract, civil liberties, and political rights in modern Europe.
The key feature of the social contract is that the state derives its right to govern by the consent of the governed.
On publishing the social contract, “Man Was Born Free”, “and he is everywhere in chains” Rousseau rejected the idea of man handing over his liberty to a sovereign in return for safety and security proposed by Hobbes and his dystopian model.
Rousseau intimated that no man may forgo their liberty without losing their humanity thereby eroding morality. He believed that power and authority could not be in the soul domain of a sovereign as this would transform humanities equality into political inequality. He considered this idea to be a form of hoax perpetrated on the poor. Later philosopher Karl Marx echoed similar sentiment in his writings about the false consciousness instilled in the poor by the rich and the structural institutions that served their interests.
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau used social contract theory to present universal theories of the state and individual rights that dismissed traditional religious or national forms of identity to the interests of all humanity.
Enlightenment thinkers, and their key aims of tolerance and equality were not immune to contradiction via ideas of a fair and egalitarian society.
Concepts of rationalism and critical reasoning were at times subject to the same fate of contradiction, they were suspended in a socially primitive evolutionary state. There was little urgency for change in traditional gender roles during the early modern period. Despite the egalitarian principles of enlightenment thinkers of universal suffrage for all men, this did not include women, slaves, or indeed all men, only the propertied class.
For example, women were seen as not equal to men in intellect, and in marriage were considered possessions rather than equal partners. Division of labor in marriage was a distant speck on the horizon of gender equality.
Slaves were seen as not capable of using reason, and beasts, and men who did not own property were not eligible to vote until the late 18th century.
Although many enlightenment thinkers professed ideas of equality and tolerance, they were set within defined parameters.
For instance, the ever-equivocal writings of Rousseau in politics on democracy are ambiguous due in part to his theoretical political model and the application of a practical model and were equally ambiguous in his views of gender equality. Rousseau viewed women as equal in a state of nature, however this view was made with the Adjunct, via civilization and nature, making subjection and privatization of women his ideal form of political order.
Therefore, the nature and development of woman then becomes what is useful to man and contradicts his views on equality of the sexes.
Mary Wollstonecraft challenged his ideas on gender differences, maintaining these differences were a product of socialization and lack of education. In John Locke we find similar contradictions in his views on gender equality, although he had high regard for women as written in the treatises, with words of encouragement to women for example preacher Rebecca Collier and both Queens Mary and Elizabeth referring to them respectfully.
Ultimately, though his views affected the change and status of women’s role within family, authority in Locke’s view was with the husband, referring to where wills meet, the man being the stronger and abler holds strict authority. Locke may be looked upon as an early progressive although hardly a champion of equality between the sexes.
Wollstonecraft dismissed the subjective ideas of writers in this era, and their sole criteria of strength in the justification of the superiority of man. Instead, she insisted reason be applied and that women be judged on the merits of their intellect and virtues on the same terms as men.
The issue of slavery in a Scots Enlightenment context is perplexing in that there were no laws in Scotland that allowed ownership of a slave and yet at any one time there were between 70-80 slaves in Scotland during the 18th century.
Moreover, when any slave entered Scotland, they were baptized, meaning they were recognized as a man of the living flesh and blood with a soul, by the very definition the natural rights of man, are apparent. An indicator of the limitations of the church, the law and while historians noted the enthusiastic participation in the abolition of the slave trade in the public sphere, documented by the hundreds of thousands of petition signatories.
The limited and strange quiet from Scotland’s philosophical elite, with no literal or vocal support, was deafening in the historical sense. With confined and restrained parameters there were exceptions, notably by the national bard, Robbie Burns pointing to the authoring of his poem, A Slaves Lament.
Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith criticized the slave trade but not the morality of it, merely the economic conditions of the enterprise or the Roman law aspect. Considering enlightenment thinkers opposition to church authority and their ideas of equality and tolerance, in Scotland the clergy were in large part responsible for the abolitionist movement in motivating the Calvinist Presbyterian Scots to action and helping Joseph Knight in his court bid for freedom.
Owning a slave, was made illegal in Scotland in 1778. A slave, Joseph Knight, became the catalyst for a court judgement which brought about the end of slave ownership in Scotland. With Lord Auchinleck declaring:
it may be custom in Jamaica to make slaves of poor blacks [but] I do not believe it agreeable to humanity or the Christian religion […] He is our brother, and he is a man.”
Where religion could foster the worst of man’s nature and place it to the fore, equally it could present and encourage the best of humanity’s nature to the fore. Hobbes and Rousseau describe both opposing paradigms as central to their political, historical and anthropological influences through the human condition influencing and directing their conceptualization of socio-political thought and their juxtaposed positions.
Enlightenment and emancipation of humanity are shown throughout the essay as characteristics of the era. The end of the absolutist state, feudalism and the hegemony of the church afforded more freedom to humanity in the genesis of fundamental human rights, civil liberties, political rights, and freedom of the mind from the limitations of these constructs.
Science was emancipated from the chains of theology allowing enlightenment figures to describe knowledge in terms of human experience and not biblical tenets and placed the prominence for change on humanity and not biblical Gods.
The Enlightenment period was transitional and the incremental evolution between two worlds, moving from the old order to the new, where reason, logic and empiricism were placed on the new altar where religion once stood. Considering the era and the implementation of the new concepts of Social contract theory, Democratic governance, civil liberties, political and fundamental human rights in the socio-political realm and the scientific application of empiricism to new discoveries, inventions, and concepts.
It can be argued in full confidence this was a unique period in our history that had profound and long-lasting effects. By Enlightenment mankind envisioned and realised emancipation of the mind, the spirit and the body of humanity.
The Enlightenment period was exceptional in humanity’s historical journey, affording us the many legacies we enjoy today, for example democratic governance, fundamental human rights, civil liberties and political rights. Currently western democracies are shifting towards an autocratic position, indicating a backward slide away from these legacies.
Are we returning to the Feudal model?
The contemporary period is in danger of fostering by tacit agreement a new form of feudalism, an elite that is distanced from the populace by a re-imagined absolutist monarchy as has been witnessed by the Davos clique at the G20, with a dress code that conjures up images of a Dune Royal family.
New imagined realities to replace the current order are being constructed with science transformed to scientism, the new religion is reduced by neo-liberalism to a commodity not based on reason, empiricism and ethics but marketized as a product of profit and control. Universality is steadily becoming a quaint concept, and cosmopolitanism is conscripted as a device of division and polarization.
The contemporary period is stained by the insidious embedding of corporatocracy by an unhinged, pseudo-intellectual elite that resembles the old, imagined orders with ambitions of world Empire. The Enlightenment spirit must once again be unleashed. Plato’s cave dwellers have been quieted and must be woken abruptly and stirred to action if we are to realize conditions that serve all humanity.
The tiny deviant faction of depraved individuals that have acquired wealth via neo-liberalism and a global economy that has gifted them a de facto power over sovereign nation-states undermining democracy and diluting sovereignty. The de-jure voter franchise is king in democratic governance are we to let this principle of democracy disappear by de facto power of these unelected, self-important upstarts.
Enlightenment and Emancipation demand your duty to resist.
Charles Chevalier is an author who has written essays various social science subject areas, ranging through history, economics, comparative politics, social and political thought and sociology. You can read more of his work on his Substack here, or follow him on twitter here.
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a good essay with way too many typos – please proofread and edit.
Did someone edit/butcher this for you before publication? I suspect your observation on Scotland should’ve read:
“An indicator of the limitations of the church, and the law; and while historians noted the enthusiastic participation in the abolition of the slave trade in the public sphere – documented by the hundreds of thousands of petition signatories – the limited and strange quiet from Scotland’s philosophical elite, with no literal or vocal support, was deafening in the historical sense.”
I was about to pick a nit with your sudden decision to refer to a country first-and-foremost to be considered a special case as if the others *weren’t*, then handwave the rather important names away as the ‘philosophical elite’, where before you were rather more respectful of identity…but then you gave me pause to consider that one can be deafened ‘in the historical sense’. It’s quite a fabulous thought.
There is every possibility that in the coming months the whole of humanity may commit mass suicide, through a global war.
And it is not very difficult to imagine its possibility, because the people who are in power, the people who have nuclear weapons, are certifiably mentally ill.
And perhaps deep down the majority of humanity has become too.
Perhaps individually people are not courageous enough to commit suicide individually, but on a mass scale they are unconsciously ready.
It seems the more stupid you are, the more gullible you are.
You have to stop NOW and come out of this stupid game of followers and leaders.
Can you not see how the politicians have become so very afraid of the people, now that the people can see that all of these politicians are nothing but lying psychopathic criminals.
They need to be prosecuted for their crimes against humanity, treason, conspiracy, fraud, war crimes.
Biden, Sunak, Macron, Trudeau, Scholz, Ardern, Schwab, Von der Leyen.
Terrorists who now have decided to destroy the lives, security, freedom and well being of all their own citizens.
Just look at the last three years of global insanity created by the mentally ill Davos crew, the UN, WHO, EU, G20 politicians, NATO, MIC, the Banksters, Big Pharma, MSM.
The biggest three lies are:
The pandemic hoax with it’s lockdowns, mandatory masks and faulty testing, all leading to a forced mRNA bio weapons program, mass psychosis, fear, death and serious injuries in the hundreds of millions.
The Ukraine war hoax that Russia is the aggressor, creating unnecessary death, destruction and mass casualties in Ukraine, hypocritical sanctions leading to western food,and energy deprivation, whilst billions of dollars and euros evaporate in their globalist Neo Nazi wet dream.
The global warming climate change hoax that steamrolls throughout the world taking no prisoners based upon zero evidence, incredible ignorance, propaganda and stupidity!
It seems that to be a successful politician you have to be absolutely unintelligent, a fanatic, lying, promising continuously, knowing perfectly well that no promises are going to be fulfilled, always cheating, using beautiful words and hiding ugly realities.
There appears to be no hope for real freedom to exist, ever!
Humanity for millennia has lived under the delusion of one truly unbelievable fiction.
The greatest fiction ever invented in the whole history of the world.
It is that the sacred shrine in your heart was filled with the idea of God.
For millions of years god was imagined as a giant controller in the heavens, do you know anyone who has ever met god?
The priest has always been afraid, that their imaginary god should be found M.I.A.
There are millions of priests in the world who depend on a single concept of God.
Drop that idea and all these will be nowhere.
Right now they have great prestige, power.
Who will be the pope when there is no God?
What will be his position?
The religions have given humanity great fictions to live in.
Now all those fictions are broken and the masses have nothing left to live for, hence the anguish.
In anguish, only one thing seems to be there, somehow to get out of this circle of life, hence the idea of suicide and the increasing rate of suicide.
And an unconscious desire of humanity that the third world war happens.
Do you need any of these deluded people.
They survive only on the fictions created by your misery, cunning people using your misery to exploit you and to have their power trip.
God is not there.
With him, the holy ghost disappears, the son disappears.
God is the central focus of the whole fiction.
Remove that central idea and the whole palace made of playing cards simply falls on the ground.
Just a little awareness is needed.
And it’s gone!
There is no god, there has never been any god, all definitions are inventions.
Remove god, remove Lucifer, remove heaven and hell, remove the idea of a future reward.
Remove the idea that some messiah is to come to redeem you from your suffering.
Remove the idea that anybody else is responsible for your misery and suffering.
Remove the idea that somebody can give meaning to your life.
Accept that really you are alone, born alone, and you will die alone.
You have to accept your aloneness, which in no way you can avoid.
And there is no way to change its nature.
It is you.
It is your authentic reality.
And you are escaping from yourself.
You can’t run away from yourself.
Then there will be misery, there will be problems.
Imaginary fictions cannot help much, they may give you some consolation, but consolation is not a good thing.
What is needed is transformation, not consolation.
Drop all that the priests and the politicians have put into you, and as you unburden yourself, you start having glimpses of your pure being.
That is meditation.
Once tasted, it transforms forever.
Stop dumping problems on others.
You have to solve your problems, and every individual has to solve their own problems.
And the problems are not so many.
It is one problem which you have not solved which has created a chain of unsolved problems.
The only problem is: how to enter your aloneness without fear?
And the moment you enter your aloneness without fear, it is such a beautiful and ecstatic experience that there is nothing compared to it.
It is not a problem at all.
It is the solution of all your problems.
But you have made it a problem because you have listened to others and followed them.
The blind following blind politicians and priests.
This is your existence; you are responsible whatever you are, whatever you do, and whatever happens around you.
Be mature.
Don’t remain childish.
The Enlightenment brought as the disgusting and insanitary superstition of vaccination
”The Enlightenment?” Spare me the romanticized BS. The big “E” is precisely what got us to the enslavement of the mind.
The enlightenment appears to be largely (certainly from the list of notables here) a Freemasonic drive to undermine the nation states and begin the process of removing God from public discourse and His role in the life of the everyday citizens.
Much of what see today – a philosophy based on the ‘senses’ as the goal witnessed through a culture that sees sensual pleasures of sex, drugs and music etc. as its raison d’etre entered the realm of possibility in this time due to the type of philosophers who were promoting empiricism. This was the Aristotelian ideas of experienced being only knowable through the senses reducing higher cultural aspiration and morality driven culture to one animalistic in nature and goal.
A lot of ideas of the renaissance were countered through the enlightenment and the ideas of Locke, Newton et al were the beginnings of the cultural drift away from God and higher ideals to the amoral world we witness today.
Looking around we can see exactly where those ideas featured in the enlightenment have led.
I suppose one of the most important things about the Enlightenment in general and the scientific method in particular is that it gives us an agreed-upon method to apprehend reality– and therefore arrive at agreement without violence.
I’m no longer close enough to the intellectual world to know whether a major shortcoming which was present in the 70s and 80s is still a crippling shortcoming in the philosophy of science and (I insist) in our understanding of ourselves and therefore of the ethics and political philosophy proper for us. I refer to what used to be an incredibly obtuse error of seeking identity –and especially causality– in ever-smaller physical bits.
So many philosophers and writers said that free will didn’t exist because none of the individual molecules possessed it. As if causality came from the microscopic up when quite clearly the major attributes of a cat or a man are a function of the macroscopic creature. No ONE atom possesses vision either; doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I suppose at least the philosophy of science has got beyond this by now.
Sure, the philosophy of science has progressed. Today, science will discover or confirm anything that Big Money wants.
This was an excellent comment. So I can’t imagine why it garnered two downvotes.
Though I accept the materialistic view of existence, I also accept that matter can be acted upon by higher forces – not in a supernatural sense but in the sense that the organization of matter into an ever more complex pattern must necessarily yield something beyond what individual particles are capable of.
(Note: I didn’t “upvote” your comment because I don’t like the voting system and don’t use it.)
Thanks Howard, since we’re focussed on discussing aspects of the truth it doesn’t really matter what contentless votes occur.
The other surprisingly fallacious argument encountered in philosophy of science is the argument from ignorance: “We don’t know why our experiment garnered such inexplicable results. Therefore there must be more than one reality– one in which the cat dies, and one which it doesn’t.”
Obviously the only thing that follows from “We don’t know why” is a period.
“The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau [although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.—Shelley’s note], and their disciples, in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself”.
A Defence of Poetry
P.B.Shelley
This quote of Shelley’s offers again the basic rule of thumb that poets, great as they may be in their field, should tread lightly upon other fields of endeavor.
Shelley needed nothing but his “Ozymandias” to establish himself as a genuinely intellectual poet. His poem says more about human vanity and hubris than all the works of the Enlightenment put together.
But there’s much more to those works than any element even so great a poet could express.
The local Co-op had a major robbery last night and it struck me that this could be a new kind of covert warfare i.e. that the Deep State uses its criminal connections to step up the crime rate as part of the assault on the public.
George, I understand that Soros is paying for the campaigns of certain District Attorneys in big cities, and that all of them are so easy on crime that the perpetrators are out on the streets again immediately & that punishment is too seldom to retard their criminal careers.
Regardless of anyone’s beliefs, there is no denying the value of the 10 commandments as a righteous moral code. Meaning that if everyone lived in accordance of those laws, the world would be a better place to live.
The people of this world, especially leaders, have poor character and are primarily amoral. This makes the world more hellish than not.
Morality must be taught and encouraged, and cannot be mandated by government. People holding people accountable with equal treatment under the law.
“Morality must be taught and encouraged, and cannot be mandated by government.”
Unfortunately, there are some, bent both by nature and environment, whose morality and ethics run contrary to those in the 10 commandments. As you stated, such people tend to end up in positions of power and influence.
The Times:
“Flu vaccine would be refused by quarter of adults, survey says
Almost a quarter of adults would refuse a flu jab, despite hospital admissions for influenza climbing to the highest level for five years, a survey suggests …..
Influenza has bounced back after being suppressed by social distancing during the pandemic. Hospital admissions for flu rose by 40 per cent last week, to overtake Covid patients for the first time. If the trend continues, admissions for flu could exceed those in the 2017-18 outbreak, when nearly 30,000 people are estimated to have died.”
How dare they refuse ANY vax! Don’t they understand how the new pharma capitalism works?
Obviously we’ll need to whip up the hypochondriac unpaid policing contingent to do the witch hunts!
I would only caution using the term “hypochondriac” as a kind of label for anything.
I have unfortunately been somewhat of a hypochondriac most of my life; but even I wasn’t fooled by the Covid/Flu/Monkeypox/Strep hype.
I am now a confirmed, card carrying anti-vaxxer. All it took was learning the facts: they’re enough to send the squeamish running screaming from the room.
“‘Influenza’ has bounced back after being
suppressed by social distancingrebranded as Covid during the ‘pandemic'”.With no “Scientific” explanation, only unofficial hints.
All the wars fought during the Enlightenment of the 18th century were fought for power, as were all the wars before and since. This can be illustrated in the examples of its most ardent supporters Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia. Frederick died before the French Revolution, and probably would have supported it as his conservative successor did at first, because of Prussian rivalry with Austria. Catherine did live to see the revolution, and changed her philosophical outlook when the heads of the aristocracy began falling into baskets. Power always trumps philosophy.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
‘The Enlightenment’ the profound period of global change, catalysed and fuelled by Freemasonry laying the cornerstone of society today.
Let’s look a bit more closely at Thomas Paine….
There’s no direct evidence Pain was a Freemason. However his belief system (deism, hostility to throne and altar) is highly congruent with Freemasonry, he wrote a pamphlet on the origins of Freemasonry (claiming it had been passed down from the druids) and he hung out with a lot of Freemasons and other secret society types (like Ben Franklin). However Paine is Illuminati Confirmed. The Bavarian Foreign Minister wrote a letter in 1791 naming Paine as a member of the Illuminati (along with the Duke of Orleans, Necker, Lafayette and Mirabeau).
Edwige, Freemasonry did not always have today’s agenda– Indeed some branches even today are not used for recruiting conspirators. I think there’s even a photo of George Washington wearing the apron that was worn at mason meetings.
That some mason’s covens were up to no-good was unveiled rather dramatically & the result was that Washington & a few other Founding Fathers left the organization.
Not sure that’s true. I believe Washington’s funeral was a Freemasonry ‘event’.
Regarding Freemasonry’s ‘agenda’ not sure you can claim either what it is or what it was, as by its nature its secretive. Even within Freemasonry itself the ‘idea’ is that the lower orders are kept in the ‘dark’ regarding its true motives.
Albert Pike who wrote the ancient and accepted Scottish rite certainly was clear about the purpose of Freemasonry which was to ‘deliver the light’. However as he later confirmed that light is not the ‘light of Christ’ but the ‘light of Lucifer’.
I am sure that most Freemasons when they join are understand that but Freemasonry was ‘built’ out of the old mystery religions so was always occultic in nature and origin. It doesn’t take much research to find that out.
I think approx 95% of the Declaration signees were Freemason’s and the American revolution like the French revolution was a Freemason’s revolution. Behind that agenda was the desire for certain ‘internationalists’ who hated the nation states to destroy the monarchies that were seen to thwart their power.
As this site likes to suggest there were 2 sides (a fake binary) and neither side was truly on the side of the people. Plus ça change…
Should be ‘when they join don’t understand that‘ …
Seansaighdeor, thanks for your comment. Very interesting. I’m reminded of John Kennedy’s railing against secret societies.
They managed the first three buy the last issue is moot. Humanity, the mass of Homo sapiens is less ‘good’ – stable- than their evolutionary predecessors because we are transitional beings, half on land half in the water, rightly unhappy with our present adventure. The Mind is powerful buy too disconnected, a great spinaker sail but not a compass. Evolution will provide, but Kali Yuga first has to demolish many Dogmas and Desires to make space,
The burning issue of our time:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64012628
“UK schools must teach about antisemitism, says government adviser”
It seems that antisemitic incidents in the UK have “reached a record high”. No doubt the legacy of that Evil Corbyn creature.
But the real issue comes in the last paragraph:
“The Online Safety Bill will mean that what is unacceptable offline is also unacceptable online. Where the abuse is illegal, social media companies will need to take robust action to tackle it.”
So presumably, to inspire passion for censorship, the “trans-phobia” issue isn’t whipping up enough (because it’s such a patently absurd joke). So back to that little shouting moustache. Always a winner.
I suppose it’s good news that people are waking up.
From LBC (presumable London Broadcasting Company, through it could also be Ludicrous Boring Crap):
“Wash hands regularly, Brits urged, as faeces and deadly bacteria is found on self-checkouts
Health experts have warned shoppers to wash their hands more regularly over Christmas, after a study revealed the amount of bacteria that lives on self-service checkouts and other objects.
……
The researchers found E.coli, a bacteria that can cause diarrhoea and vomiting, on almost all objects that were tested.
Microbes and faeces that can cause urinary tract infections (UTIs) were found on self-checkouts.
….
We found multiple examples of E. coli and a bacteria called Klebsiella on computer keyboards.”
So …. covid was really quite manageable. But now there are BAD THINGS EVERYWHERE!
So, there may be another wave of much ado in ICT, this time using no-touch (contactless).
I am a child of the Enlightenment, my young mind was nurtured in the shelter of its “shallow, sensible, kindness”. So I cannot contest its parental authority. Yet certain things make me uneasy about its “self-evident truths”:
“The Rights of Man” are by no means self-evident, but must be fought for: or, as Vladimir Putin says, negotiated between contesting parties with due regard to the legitimate interests of each.
“We’ll drink a cup of Kindness yet” is sensible but that idea owes more to the New Wine of the New Testament and than it does to Voltaire and Bertrand Russell.
Blake’s suspicion of the shallowness of The Enlightenment came early:
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beam divine;
The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
Before Blake, Spinoza had already prophesied that one cannot understand the Universe unless we understand its smallest particle; and vice versa. In our age, Quantum Theory has exposed the Suprahuman ingenuity that underlies Newton’s simplistic particles of Light: “not only stranger than we imagined but stranger than we seem able to imagine”.
D’Alembert the mathematical physicist and Rameau the music composer were friends of the Enlightenment, and produced rational theories which are still useful: but D’Alembert departed Rameau’s company when the musician blasphemed to the physicist by declaring that Nature’s Laws must be more like the laws that govern musical waves than the laws that govern Newton’s atoms.
Lastly, there is Goya’s prophetic sketch entitled: “The Dream of Reason Begets Monsters”.
It was “Dear old Jeremy Bentham, he did so much less harm than Hegel” whose dream child was the Pan-Opikon”: an enlightened prison where supervision is so omnipresent that it ensures good behaviour among the inmates – because none can be sure of not being spied on. The Age of Enlightenment was the first to plan this prison that Techno Globalcop is now perfecting.
Blake’s poetic unease at all this kindly but shallow mockery coming from the Enlightenment of the 18th century was capped by a cry from Solzhenitsyn at the end of the scientifically and technologically advanced but ethically horrific 20th century; a cry from the ancient Hebrew prophets: “Men have forgotten God!”.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-men-have-forgotten-god-speech/
“Editor’s Note: This article originally ran in the July 22, 1983 issue of
National Review remembering Solzhenitsyn’s profound speech on the centenary of his birth.
“Adapted from the address Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave on the occasion of his acceptance, in London on May 10, 1983, of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. In announcing the 1983 award, the Templeton Foundation described Mr. Solzhenitsyn as “a pioneer in the renaissance of religion in atheist nations.” The address proper was delivered at the London Guildhall. Today, December 11, 2018, is the 100th anniversary of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s birth.”
Graud:
“NHS announces Covid booster jab teams have visited every care home in England”
“Taking care” of the oldies (in the Al Pacino sense).
My greatest waking nightmare was the time I had to fight a court case to release my wife from a care home under Law Con-19 where inmates could be whisked away to Solitary and die without the presence of their loved ones. The care home was good but The Law is still a Hass.
If Plato’s cave parable serves as a model tale of enlightenment, it’s probably worth remembering its protagonist comes to no good end returning to the cave to enlighten others. While this may recall Socrates’ last supper of hemlock, it also implies Plato’s more ‘utopian’ (dystopian) revision of the ‘philosopher king’ (enlightened despot) atop a ‘republic’ (elite rule) in which ‘noble lies’ of caste insure cave-dwellers know their place.
The Enlightenment thinkers were freethinkers still variously bound to upper and ruling class interests, similar to Plato, and Aristotle. Some, like Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, suffered for their dissidence. But generally they were, by purse and persuasion, reformists rather than abolitionists of class-based society. The danger of their criticism lay in ideas like liberty, justice, equality being taken seriously by the hoi polloi, and translated into a politics from below that would threaten the ‘natural order’ with ‘mob rule’ of democracy. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had just that kind of impact, contributing to anarchy in action among commoners to reclaim the commons, and for such revolutionary results Paine suffered consequences of his own.
Reviewing history (or his story) as a history of ideas among key thinkers (men) may reveal differences and contradictions among them, enough to enlighten one against the monolithic illusion of language that the Enlightenment existed as one thing, like a noun. But it still perpetuates ideas of the ruling class insofar as it prevents more radical realization among common people by reason of monopolized culture and knowledge by those who deem themselves the stewards of society; much like the patrician founding fathers of the US who engineered a constitutional coup to set up their own ‘republic’ to protect their imperial independence from Britain from the revolutionary potentials of the people. In short, the enlightened govern, under cover of their enlightened ideas, while we the people are governed.
Rather than the more static, status-quo history written by victors in idealist terms, a more dynamic, dialectical, revolutionary reading is found by understanding the movements of history in materialist terms of class struggle. The scientific enlightenment then shows itself as struggles with medieval hangovers like Aristotelianism, alchemy, and astrology still surviving even among its protagonists in no small part due to patronage and control by feudal authorities or, as with Galileo, the reinstitution of inquisitorial authority upon the heels of the Counter-Reformation. Modern science developed more freely in Protestant nations not because Protestants were more enlightened but because these nations had a more developed and literate class of low and middling merchants, miners, and mechanics who provided an economic base for practical as well as theoretical advance of science beyond the aristocratic paradigms of the past.
Compared to royalty, monarchy, theocracy, early capitalism, itself long in the making even before breakdown of feudal (re)production by Black Death and the rise of the burgher class, provided a new economic system for liberating and revolutionizing the productive forces of society, particularly through scientific and technological innovation. But it wasn’t long before bourgeoisie sought to consolidate their class power in ruling institutions which eventually turned science into modern superstition like racism to manage the productive forces of labor under wage, debt, and chattel slavery.
Early on with colonial development of plantation economies of tobacco, sugar, and cotton, race was a politically expedient divide-and-rule strategy, as with Bacon’s Rebellion in the colony of Virginia. By the time of the US Constitution, Black slaves had become three fifths a person, while White labor was provided ideological illusion of superiority. With industrial development of the nineteenth century, race became established as a legitimating ideology of capitalist class rule in the pseudoscience of eugenics.
Modern racism represents not only the perversion of scientific enlightenment by capitalist class rule, but the betrayal of political enlightenment in ideals of liberty, justice, equality, serving as a longstanding laboratory among ‘savages’, slaves, immigrants, and colonial subjects for the social engineering that developed in the twentieth century into the sciences of population control generally, now being revolutionized by the global technocratic takeover of nation-states (which maintains essentialist, biological race mythology in progressive pretenses of equity and woke cultural revolution).
Kant once quipped he was living in the Age of Enlightenment in an unenlightened age. If there remains any real possibility for us to progress beyond the dark age of the present, it will be based on a revolutionary movement of enlightenment beyond the chains of class rule, and all the divide-and-rule captivity by which the associated producers of the wealth of society have been prevented from claiming their common power as the working class.
Niko, hear! Hear! Thanks for a most enlightened comment.
I could not agree more! Enlightenment was nothing else than the process of replacing the monarchy and the clergy with the bourgeoisie mostly masonic which had capital but no political power or influence! In France all of the instigators of the revolution were affiliated with some branches of the English freemasonry. The most prominent of those conspirators were Phillip 2 (Duke d’Orleans) prominent Freemason and sucessor to the throne as were Lafayette, Mirabeau, at a later stage Robespierre and prior to them Voltaire who was resentful of the monarchy and the clergy because he was not part of the noble upper class despite his intellectual brilliance. The rebuplic of France has its core tenants directly derived from Freemasonry up to this very hour… funny enough the french people ended up with an emperor while thinking they had disposed a king at very high cost!
The monarchy was replaced by the bourgeoisie with lot of capital legitimized by lofty ideologies and vague principles and the clergy replaced by scientism and its dogmatic method. These have led to the catastrophic state of the world of today.
Maybe we should start seeing the Enlightenment as merely an attempt at defining some kind of workable society free of the Church and the Monarchy – not an easy task after thousands of years of Popes and Kings.
That way we won’t consign ourselves to second-guessing it. Or trying to explain why it didn’t go as planned: intellectuals generally leave the planning phase to others – usually a very bad idea.
The kind of people who can “make things happen” are not always the best suited to be vested with authority.
Christianity was prepared and served to the world by the same forces that shaped the enlightenment. Cheka was far worse than the czar’s secret police.
Free from …could unleash a period lasting hundreds of years of unspeakable violence torture and horror. From where you are how many people rely on relief from personal burdens.
They will no boarders none on any Continent, you won’t be able to communicate to the person stood blocking a pathway.
And that’s just at a 1960″s football match.
Terrible
Re Trump…
Keys to unlock the mystery why Trump pushed the vaccines
https://stopworldcontrol.com/trumpkeys
— what do you think?
No Mystery
Drumpf is a bankster puppet like his replacement Creepy Joe. These puppets come in different flavours to give hope to one or other segment of the population.
Cool photo …
The psychopaths, playing god, want to turn humans into enlightened (th)ings, englightened meaning that they are happy in the new slave system.
“The late Barbara Hubbard, a Rockefeller-funded New Age guru, was critical to the development of the ideas, beliefs and technology necessary to market transhumanism as spiritual enlightenment.”
A very good article here:
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/05/investigative-reports/barbara-marx-hubbard-godmother-of-transhumanism-and-synthetic-spirituality/
We never had an enlightenment; what we had was actually more of an endarkenment. While it may have promised liberation and freedom, what it actually delivered was a new, more efficient form of slavery. Under the feudal-agrarian system, which had prevailed since the dawn of civilization, the ruling élites may well have had the arbitrary power of life and death over their subjects. However, since they depended on those same subject for their food, they certainly couldn’t kill them all off, could they! Thus, the medieval peasantry had — at least collectively — some leverage over the Man. We, on the other hand, have been completely severed from the natural order, and now find ourselves utterly dependent on the Man for our sustenance. I submit to you that the old system, for all its shortcomings, was still preferable to this one. Abstract ‘rights’ written down on paper aren’t going to save us, folks.
We are dependent on the Man due to enforced urbanisation, centralisation, globalism, etc. This is slow-motion capitalist enslavement, a counter-revolution that, after earlier failures, gained speed from the late 1970s.
Sounds like the ChesterBelloc — two authors I quote frequently. Especially Chesterton, one of the very few English writers who consistently opposed Capitalism, Eugenics and Fascism during the period 1900-1938.
The real enlightenment is on, though whether the masses will catch on is doubtful.
The only way out of the system is to stop asking others to change and to change oneself and get out of dodge. Stop trusting corrupt bureaucrats, most say they don’t but they still become indignant when politicians lie. Like, wtf? Get out of cities. Buy local, organic. Stop paying council tax and other fraudulent charges.
But most want comfort and convenience so they bring their own slavery upon themselves.
Why we the people are nowhere near enlightened: It’s the stories they make us believe, then and now!
Why can’t the anti-vaccine movement win with its evidence?
Because vaccination isn’t a science…
Vaccination is a ritual, and ritual trumps data, facts and evidence.
Food for thought: what ritual does the anti-vaccine movement offer in place of vaccination?
The way I see it, we are not “anti-vaxxers”.
We are actually anti-philistinism. We are against any group which uses money and rank as weapons against its fellow man.
Whether or not it is related to ‘enlightenment’, intelligence should rank higher than stupidity by any logical measurement. Nobody needs to treat the dull-witted as essentially inferior beings, but we can’t have them running things if we wish to survive.
Vaccination is just one of the many things which our current control freaks find useful to bully us into submission to their ignorant tyranny.
However, we are not against them because of the vaccines, but because of their general assumption that we should be their slaves.
That said, it’s a good video, which makes a good point.
It wasn’t Voltaire who claimed that ‘we live in the best of all possible worlds’ it was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Voltaire spoofed that notion in his story of Candide. Voltaire was above all else a rationalist. He looked around at all the misery and brutality of humanity and concluded if this was the best of all possible worlds, its creator must be fairly inept.
Bertrand Russel, whose doctoral thesis was on Leibnitz, explained that the great logician meant Creation of “the best of all com-possible worlds”, Creation (The Word becoming Flesh) is a messy process: in the World of Words everything is Possible, but in the World of Flesh not everything is Com-possible with some other practical requirement.
So, according to Leibnitz, the Creator made the best of His Mission Impossible.
Voltaire was shallow: he attributed the discovery of fossilized fishes in the Alps to accumulated bones thrown away by monks in monasteries throwing away remnants of their superstitious Fish Friday. It was up to an earlier and deeper mind than Voltaire’s to give the true explanation: Leonardo da Vinci said the earth’s crust contains rock of different densities; some sink below the sea, and then are raised again above it.
Not long after Voltaire, two more great minds, Goethe and Darwin, deepened the Enlightenment’s shallow Humanistic idea of progress by lifting it to the level of Evolution of Nature. The young Darwin records his thoughts on finding marine fossils in the high Andes:
“This earth we tread on is even less stable than the wind that blows”. — Voyage of the Beagle.
Is the world truly “cruel” or just mostly not the easiest environment to live in? Does the world go out of its way to make you freeze to death, or did the person choose a bad location to live or fail to recognize the danger and fail to build shelter and fire?
The world is what it is, and we have basically leaned how to live in some of the harshest environments.
People, who exercise free will, are cruel and brutal, not the world. People deep down in their heart know what is righteous and what is evil.
This world is an anvil upon which your soul is forged into a tool, or thrown into the fire.
Loot
The fact is that the “enlightenment” was financed by genocide, slavery and plunder. The industrial revolution was funded by the loot that flowed into England after the British victory at Plassey. It is the heirs of the enlightenment that have presented us with the gulags and gender role reversal and the horrors of the Plandemic. It accelerated the destruction of the natural world and the depletion of resources.
Very useful discussion. Chevalier supposes the “un-education” interpretation of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. But i would like to take a closer look at the details of the allegory that can reveal a deeper root problem: reality vs depiction. Plato’s propped conditions, “prisoners are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed”, require someone to imprison, chain and LOCKDOWN.
When I first read the allegory in 2002, after seeing The Matrix, my take was coming from my own personal experience of the 21st C. Schools and our 1% managed society are the fixed and chained prisons, the shadow makers the 1% managers and the realm of the sunlight above, the physical reality of life on an Earth. And when taken to the surface, ecosystem reality & truth, the once prisoner convulses in shock and fear, reflexively attacking the truth bearer as enemy. The depictive artificial reality of shadows and scripted alienation is arranged by our owner class and meticulously maintained for as long as possible. If one points this out to the sleepers, in opinion, in protests, in art, in conversation, we are scolded, marginalized or even thrown into real jails.
Once humans disabuse ourselves of the trance of depictions, we can evolve to egalitarian co-ruling adults and depose the FAKE adult tyrants wielding authority over us as caged children. Depictions, representations, language and visual communications are merely tools to enable better collective solutions. For me, this is our evolutionary path. These assholes must have their greed, violence and shadows caged for the rest of any future we might have. They have created for themselves a neo-royalty with our semi-conscious complicity.
“Enlightenment and Emancipation demand [our] duty to resist.”
Ya, they got “enlightenment”, and we get “wokeism”. They got more rights, we get more letters (LGBTQRSTUV).
Relative to the enlightenment period however, doesn’t England still have a King?
Whatever, we need a new period.
The “enlightenment” movement was/is based on lucifer, aka, the light bearer, the one of gives light and knowledge [arcane]… and engineered by the jewish luciferian cabalists of the synagogue of satan.
Emancipation? yeah, their ideal of emancipation was to get rid of God, christianity [catholicism], family values and even nationalism… but a second aspect of ’emancipation’ was in mind: the emancipation of the jews, the ones who engineered the “renaissance”, “reformation”, “enlightenment”, the french revolution and its ‘god of reason’, the russian revolution, etc. The ‘human rights’ created after the french revolution was in reality the human rights of jews!!! As their influence on societies again grew, nations and people got exploited and enslaved via usury and other diabolical methods.
Most liberals nowadays still haven’t grasped what the ‘enlightenment’ is really about: the inversion of all morals and the destruction of the fabric of societies as dictated in the jewish luciferian cabala.
Erm… Unfortunately; you are correct. But usury banking has been the tool of many diverse interests. The Talmud rather prescribes the method… Exploitation appears to be universal, regardless of the cover story…
Well if the Jews ‘engineered’ the renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment their humanitarian record is pretty good on paper, I think. How many human lives have been saved by advancements in science, say, born out of these eras?
I think you could possibly find better evidence for your bigoted views. A2
If no one cares to counter with anything more than faceless downvotes may I suggest this is also an indicator of the strength of your argument and logic. A2
Here’s some enlightenment for the children:
https://www.virtualhospice.ca/maid/media/3bdlkrve/maid-activity-book.pdf
Over the hills and far away,
Medically assistance in dying comes to save the day!
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I’ll begin ….
“The word “medical” means the science of medicine, and “assistance” means help. So MAiD means that medicine is used to help someone with their death. A doctor or nurse practitioner (a nurse with special training) uses medicines to stop the person’s body from working. When their body stops working, the person dies.”
No Timmy! Put your hand down! No questions! Just listen!
“The three medicines work like this:
The first medicine makes the person feel very relaxed and fall asleep. They may
yawn or snore or mumble.
The second medicine causes a “coma.” A coma looks like sleep but is much deeper
than regular sleep. The person will not wake up or be bothered by noise or touch.
The third medicine makes the person’s lungs stop breathing and then their heart
stops beating. Because of the coma, the person does not notice this happening and
it does not hurtit does not hurt. When their heart and lungs stop working, their body dies. It will not start working again. This often happens in just a few minutes but sometimes (rarely) it can take hours.”
Stop that snivelling! Look! Here are some questions!:
“Would you like to see the person’s body after they have died?
• Yes • No • Not sure right now
If you are there in person, would you like to:
•read them a message, poem, or short story?
•whisper something to them?
•hold their hand?
•give them something special?
•think or talk about time you spent together?
•give them a kiss goodbye (in person or by phone or video)?
•say a prayer or make a wish?”
Just remember children, that it’s really alright to feel terribly upset about all your friends and family turning blue and falling apart. It’s a bit like that doll you lost your temper with. And of course you can always get another one!
And perhaps if you’re all good boys and girls and non-binary receptors, tomorrow you can go to the mortuary. And if you’re really good, you can stay there and it will be your new home!
Enlightenment… Clearly the bulb was burnt!
The herds of degenerate uman animals were never enlightened.
It is not beyond my understanding why a writer thinks he can address the modern world without talking at great length about the major forces in it, namely the USA, their economic ideology, and their empire…….I know why he does it, because he wants to hide it, and confuse you with misleading dead ends. I would call it scrambled history, the US propagandists do a lot of it. So yes, American economic dogma & ideology are leading us to a feudal society…..see I fixed it.
Pending
Now, I am not clever, and only a little bit, residually intelligent.
What I see here is missing the point that the Enlightenment was the misnomer or euphemism for shutting down the Pre-Enlighenment Occult appreciation of the World, that was… wait for it… bigger than the sliced and diced, half world of the Enlightenment.
This is big because even if you read only David Riggs’s account of the education of Christopher Marlowe you will see how education has been turned into a eunoch of what it was.
The ‘enlightenment’ was the usurpation by The Intellect over The Body…Abstract, estranged, reified knowledge, obtained by The Scientific Method, became an instrument of Power…(“Knowledge Is Power !”)
That should be ‘Repressive Intellect’…The French Revolution was the coming of age of The Intellectuals, and The Red Terror…(“Off With His Head !” was plagiarised from The Frenchies by Lewis Car roll)…
The brain’s left hemisphere, with its tyrannical, repressive logic and reasoni, has dominated ever since…
I’m not all praise for the right hemisphere, but until the hemispheres are re-integrated, and the left one stops repressing and restricting the right one, dont expect real change for the better…
Start by abolishing schooling of the young, and its regimentation of the mind by left hemisphere subjects…
I agree les online. Our crumbling system is left brain patriarchy over-expanded and out of balance. We all need to respect and grow our right brain elements – feminine energy, respect and connection with Nature, art, creativity, intuition, compassion, nurturing, seeing beyond the facade, feelings, our bodies and all our senses.
Balance – the ruling principle of the universe.
Now, I am not clever, and only a little bit, residually intelligent.
What I see here is missing the point that the Enlightenment was the misnomer or euphemism for shutting down the Pre-Enlighenment Occult appreciation of the World, that was… wait for it… bigger than the sliced and diced, half world of the Enlightenment.
This is big because even if you read only David Riggs’s account of the educatin of Christopher Marlowe you will see how education has been turned into a eunoch of what it was.
Silvia Federici addresses that too, in _Caliban and the Witch_
“Re: The Enlightenment
Amazing, is it not, how ideas set down in writing were so widely disseminated, discussed, considered and debated in a time when the great bulk of the population not only did not have benefit of formal education but were functionally illiterate. Of course today that is not the case.”
“The concept of the Divine Right of War Racketeer Corporate Fascist Eugenicist Oligarch Mobster Psychopaths seems to be confronting WE THE PEOPLE (Humanity) today.”
“Lets put it this way, you are going to get shot one way or the other. Drink the Cull Juice! Corp Fascism and Eugenics forever!”
Excellent comment. The “enlightenment” was limited to the “cultured” few who were afforded an education. The rest of the populace was strolling in streets filled with horse manure and filth.
You can paint lipstick on a pig. But its still a pig…
I can’t help wondering if this article was a translation. There are too many linguistic infelicities for it to have actually been written that way, even if it were a summary of the author’s referenced essay.
All definitions of “fundamental human rights” were and are, complete nonsense. Sorry. “Enlightenment” failed to illuminate the populace in matters of trade and commerce. The enslavement of mankind is strictly economic. End of story.
The last few paragraphs is a saving of grace. Until then I question the value of this image of an Enlightenment that somehow brought us closer to universal rights, etc.
I rather doubt the veracity of “progress” presented here and the importance of these elite Western thinkers in bringing about a “higher order” of “civilization”.
Mr. Chevalier provides a rather linear trajectory with little regard for the period of middle ages (sometimes referred to as the “dark” ages post-fall of the Roman Empire). That this perspective has brought us here demonstrates that such a linear rendering is not true. As a point of departure the middle ages is sometime presented as one of the freest times for the plebs regarding lessened authority and means of sustenance without excessive indentured-ness.
Civilization, itself, should be taken to task regarding “right” whether these be state edicts through laws (and elite elected officials) or naturally imbued upon birth, not only for our species but all.
Civilization can better be defined as domestication. 🙁
Yes, but that’s only one element. Civilization is a subject of people like Derrick Jensen, Kirkpatrick Sales, John Zerzan, Paul Cudenec, Larkin Rose and many others have devoted volumes to civilization as the arch-enemy of human existence. It is a contrast between it and the natural world which the civilization project has seen as enemy raison d’etre.
But of course to accomplish this you need obedience and what can be called domesticated subjects. We’ve lost most of what’s needed for self-sufficiency and self-procurement. The people have been feed an opium of convenience and technology which replaces self-awareness.
Domestication of the herd (goyim).
Everyone was very thick before the enlightenment. Now they’re really clever. So clever they’ve discovered that the common cold is such a deadly threat that they stick needles in their arms and inject some devil’s brew that doesn’t do what it says on the tin hoping to ward off the spectre of doom. Science has triumphed over superstition.
Couldn’t have put it better myself! I’m very happy to be a person living in a modern society benefiting from genuine science, no hocus-pocus.
The same darkness is at work today as was at work through the ages. The world will never be free of types who want to rule the world which is why education, free thought and free speech are so important.
Those who wish to eradicate these are your true enemy.
The last NWO regime tried but failed to hold back the work of Nicolaus Copernicus. What a world we would have if the Vatican had succeeded in shutting down all worldwide discourse on the subject. The fake moon landing would never have happened and we would never have seen the changing colour of planet Mars. BTW, parachutes don’t work too well in near zero atmosphere with 1982lbs attached to it.
Humanity is being ushered into a very dark place by charlatans, disingenuous salesmen, and useful idiots who think they are helping.
Visionaries embrace the colour spectrum species. So much so its one essence of love and understanding Knowledge.
If the West has seen such a triumph of reason and secularism, perhaps someone could explain this?….
https://twitter.com/terror_alarm/status/1570792597152731136?lang=en
The West is a disguised Fundamentalist regime, a crypto-theocracy. The religions involved however are not the original versions of the so-called Abrahamic religions.
Corbett doesn’t usually venture into such territory but even he noticed recently that one of the vaccination prgrammes (the Japanese one for infants I think it was) is named after Baal.
Reason and science are no better indices of the health of a society than gods and devils. Anything and everything can be purloined by unscrupulous persons and made to serve any unreasonable and unscientific agenda.
Everything everywhere serves the biggest collections of money: in short, Globocap.
In other words, the concept of “natural rights” is derived from a BELIEF that we are all created equal.
The Age of Reason, begets the Age of Unreason.
From Bentham and Mill and the British empiricists, the direction was subsume to Bergson and the irrationalist school which was projected outwards as a tendency to destroy the objectivity and truth of natural scientific knowledge; and moreover it was directed towards the introspection of an isolated parasitic individual divorced from the life of society during the imperialist period. The same could also be said of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler – with bells on!
And now reason and objectivity are themselves under attack from Individualistic, woke and power unreason which exhibits a new ‘Will to Power.’ The wheel of history and philosophy turns yet again.
It seems interesting that Germany again seems centre of this trend but it also extends to the US and the Bergsonian repudiation of the late science of the post-modernism.
If you wish to understand the high priests of the New Order just listen to specimens like Annalena Charlotte Alma Baerbock and her sidekick, Robert Habeck, ex German, Greens, who will certainly fit the bill.
That an advanced (sic) western nation – putatively Holland – should destroy its agriculture, needs no further elaboration of the suicidal direction in which the west is heading.
I think you need to consider that, far from Holland promoting a ‘suicidal’ direction, it is promoting rather a genocidal one. You aren’t seriously suggesting, are you, that the politicians, apparatchiks and behind-the-scenes puppet masters aren’t going to ensure that they get the food they need, when they need it, in the amounts they need it?
They are looking to enslave the rest of the population, and the reward for doing this for their globalist masters will be a given size of bung.
“They are looking to enslave the rest of the population, and the reward for doing thisfor their globalist masters will be a given size of bung.”
This is the game worldwide, not one politician in one country anywhere gives a flying **CK about his/her country/ populace. Everyone of the is bought and paid for…..or if not, they’re blackmailed.
Exactly, well said.
Holy Crap, R. … at first glance, I read that as a “good sized bug”!