The Blue Flower

I come from a fairly “establishment” kind of background, from a conservative and hard-working northern English family. Like many of my time (1960’s) I yearned for a kind of freedom that I did not know how to define or express. The Establishment seemed to control and oppress. It is an old problem that goes into history. It is the reaction against one power group, and sometimes creates a revolution of the kind that happened in Catholic Europe in the sixteenth century, in France or nihilist Russia.

As a child, I was so anti-authoritarian that my father suspected psychological problems, for which an adapted education seemed to offer a solution. At age 12, I dreamed of stealing a boat and chasing the “lost chord” somewhere in the world. I started stealing things and smoking cigarettes. Fortunately I stopped short of drugs. Something gnawed at me from within. After an inconclusive experiment with Wennington School in Yorkshire, my father decided on bringing me back to the Establishment and a traditional school. Eventually I adapted. Christianity and the outward trappings of churches and church music attracted me. I was sensitive to beauty and something bigger, higher and nobler than myself. I had difficulties with the social aspect of school on account of what turned out to be autism much later in my life.

Throughout my life, I oscillated between the Establishment with its promises and a notion of wildness and “freedom”. I still feel this dialectic within me, but am able to master it rationally. A little knowledge of Hegel will explain many of these feelings in my youthful mind. Thesis – antithesis – synthesis is the classical slogan. Many of us vacillate and stability in spiritual peace comes in life as we mature and balance realities with our deepest desires and Sehnsucht.

Living a fairly isolated life since my separation in April 2021, I have followed events in the world through mainstream and “independent” sources of news and information. Google News in both French and English gave most of the main newspaper stories about whatever subject interests us. Signs of the Times is quite conspiracy theorist, and I take everything with a big pinch of salt. One can go as far as David Icke and his theories of Archons in the form of shape-shifting alien reptiles disguising themselves as humans. Perhaps he would have done better to use the analogy of the Fallen Angels, the demons of hell. These theories begin to become so absurd that we are pushed back to the Establishment and the mainstream. Yet, the conspiracy theories are based on an underlying mythology of the dialectic between society and individual freedom. It would seem that we are all torn.

For decades since the end of World War II (I was born only 14 years after the suicide of Hitler), we trusted our leaders and politicians to care for the common good and the rule of law in our societies. In my childhood, it was the same in my family, at school and in public life: there were rules to follow. Care for other people and they will care for us. We respected those in authority from my father to my schoolmaster, from the policeman on his beat to the Queen and the government. There were constraints, but nothing essentially against our conscience. Then came the lying politician, sleaze and the fractures in the social contract.

Brexit affected me, but less than if I had been living in England. I had already been living in wider Europe, another and greater Establishment for many years. At first, I let myself get into arguments and writing polemical articles on this blog (which I removed), and then… It is a bigger problem than any of us. What really brought on the Angst was the Covid pandemic.

Coming from a scientific and medical family, I knew something about epidemics and the care we have to take, especially hygiene and social distancing. Covid 19 seemed so devastating that we accepted the lockdown which was much less strict than the ones in China. The world fell silent. There were no aeroplanes in the sky, few cars on the road, just people going for essential food shopping. We were in solidarity with the sick and those who were caring for them. We were living in a state of emergency and told to stay at home. That was not difficult in the early months of 2020 living in the countryside. There was still the garden and things to do to the boat. No work came in for three months, and fortunately I was eligible for financial aid to small businesses from the French government. There were plenty of things to do, at least for me.

As time wore on, the lockdown was relaxed in stages and I was finally allowed to go sailing in late spring. We were wearing masks even outdoors, but it was obvious to me that this was absolutely unnecessary when I was hundreds of metres away from the nearest person. It made sense in a public indoor space like a shop, a bus, a train, the bank or whatever. After all, the government was listening to the scientists and doctors, and making the most prudent decisions in the face of this new strain of the coronavirus. It all seemed to be almost over in the summer. Then came the “waves” like the Spanish Flu of 1918, of which the most murderous was the second.

As the “waves” succeeded each other, people started to get angry about the loss of their freedoms. Freedoms to do what? On the whole, to socialise, to go to mass gatherings, rave parties and the like. I don’t feel the need for that degree of social life or “hanging out” with friends. As a child, I could play in the garden and be with nature alone for hours. To this day, perhaps 90% of my life is in “lockdown”, either at home or otherwise alone. I treasure the moments I spend with a good and kind person, and nothing gives me greater joy than to help, like running an electric wire to a neighbouring house whose tenant had problems with his connection, before the electricity board sent a team to do the repair. This good man, a retired landscaper and gardener, then helped me prune my hazelnut trees and dispose of the cut-off branches. Little things that make life worth living.

I had my vaccinations in the spring and the summer. I was able to get the first a little early because I don’t have 100% confidence in my lungs. I used to smoke and I react badly to common colds, often by a spell of laryngitis and inability to sing. Someone in a shop coughed over me, a cold that was so bad that I wonder if it was an early and mild form of Covid. I will never know, but I recovered from it and my voice returned. I got my second dose of Astra Zeneca in July this year from the village pharmacy just over the road from my doctor.

We then had a succession of variants, the most murderous being Delta, first found in India. Cardinal Burke spent time in intensive care and a priest from my old seminary has recently died in hospital. Ravaged lungs and nervous systems! This is not flu and certainly not the common cold, yet most people suffer no more than that. Covid 19 beats all we already know about viruses of this type, which are not Ebola or HIV. This one is caught like a common cold. We catch it, and we might get away with a mild illness or find ourselves in hospital, in intensive care, on a ventilator or dead. Even apparently healthy people can die from this virus. It gives us enough to be very afraid – for ourselves and our loved ones.

Now we learn of a new variant discovered in South Africa, called Omicron (fortunately not Omega). It contains scores of mutations and seems to be quite unstable. It is much more contagious. Beyond that, the scientists are working around the clock in their labs and glove boxes. The remaining two questions are whether the existing vaccines will still work and whether this new variant makes people as sick or sicker than Delta. Some experts already think that this variant would infect just about all of us and cause no more than the symptoms of a common cold. If that is so, it will displace Delta and the pandemic will be over. No more vaccines, lockdowns, masks or anything. Life returns to normal and we can catch that plane and go on holiday when we want. The virus gets what it wants (being endemic) and stops killing and maiming people. Dr John Campbell supports this hypothesis.

I have always took this very seriously, and I have made the same sacrifices as most people living in France and Europe. I obeyed the rules and took the attitude that this is for the common good. Do good to others and they will do good to us.

Then the other narrative came in. We will not take a vaccine. The politicians and government are lying to us. We have lost our freedom. We must “wake up” and fight, stage demonstrations and riots, join extreme right-wing parties, loot and pillage, beat people up. Freedoms against “liberticide”, our rights! That was me at 12, except that I just wanted to run away, not join the mob. They want to be released from all constraint. For what? Their rave parties? Night clubs and discotheques? That, at least, is the caricature that we see on the news. Does it correspond with real people with whom we could dialogue on their own? I am not so sure.

One figure I have listened to is Dr John Campbell, a virologist and someone who has devoted his life to training nurses. His view has evolved in respect of the vaccination programme. They are not as effective as they were once touted to be. The governments are telling us that we need a third shot, and I have my appointment for 11th January. However, I would go with less conviction than the other two times. I have always trusted Dr Campbell and his scientific and unpolitical integrity. One thing makes me smell a rat, or rather two things. The number of hospital beds is being reduced. What is more alarming is that Pfizer and Moderna are not letting go of their patents for the sake of a humanitarian gesture. They want every cent of the money they are making. When this pandemic is over, I hope governments around the world with tax the guts out of Big Pharma! How many politicians and members of the scientific community and the medical profession are having their palms greased to maintain the emergency beyond what might be the reality?

There seems to be another agenda, perhaps to an extent making conspiracy theories true threats. I don’t know what credibility we can give to the Great Reset, the Chinafication of the world, our subjection to the social credit regime of the technocratic remnants of the old Communist ideology. The idea is frightening, and it may well be a conspiracy without the theoretical bit. It is the Dark Satanic Mill of William Blake, the Third Reich on steroids, Orwell’s 1984. The archetypes are there in our cynical minds. We fear hell on earth. Fear is maintained, that fear which leads us to the Dark Side as the Star Wars film coins.

Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

The pandemic has opened up this hell and basket of serpents. It is within each of us, this Ungrund of chaos and fear. Alongside, we have whole groups of people forecasting the day of doom through climate change and global warming. A whole segment of society seeks to “cancel” history and culture. We live in the midst of collective insanity, the hell of the collective consciousness.

We have reached a point where we have to think for ourselves and become critical of everything. This is the value of scepticism. I wrote about this a while ago – Scepticism and Freedom of Thought. From being a good Establishment and mainstream person (in this respect), I try to open my mind and distinguish the pearls of wisdom from the hubbub and screaming of the mob. I am not so sure of the wisdom of ghettoising unvaccinated people or demonising them, locking them down, crippling them financially by fines for refusing compulsory vaccination. The worst thing is using our fear to make an enemy of them. This is exactly what Hitler did by spreading propaganda against Jewish people, leading to the Holocaust. It has all happened before, and we will only repeat history if we cannot learn from it. The social engineering experiment is failing, and the technocrats are getting frustrated from being faced with human scepticism.

Dr Campbell has also been studying the effects of the vaccines on people’s health. All vaccines are potentially dangerous. I have personally been lucky, but we are taking a chance. I know a family whose daughter was made severely mentally handicapped by a polio vaccine. Most of us are safe, but some are sacrificed. I say nothing of the aborted foetus tissue that has had some part to play in the production or testing of these vaccines. Everything is in the risk-benefit ratio on an individual basis and a basis of humanity. We can’t wish these risks away. Could we do better with more care taken in the way we behave in populated places? Without “virtue signalling”, I say candidly that I have very little social life and I practice social distancing in shops and supermarkets, knowing that even that might not be enough.

Much of what we hear from the minority is hysterical and incoherent, but we have to try to decode the legitimate fears that exist. With the shenanigans of sleazy politicians (I won’t name any), our trust in our governments is being eroded. Increasingly, they are doing it for selfish motives rather than the common good. I feel sorry for obscenely rich people, but that’s by the by. We become suspicious and cynical (in the modern meaning of that word). As Oscar Wilde said, the man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. The rot goes both ways. Our view of the world is increasingly apocalyptic as our familiar markers and references rot away.

Ever since William Blake (the eighteenth century), we have feared the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the evils of the kind of capitalism that cares only for profit and the shareholders and not for the underpaid workers operating dangerous machinery with no consideration for safety and welfare. We might think that we have progressed but the work is now being done by children in China and Taiwan. The satanic mill takes new forms from the old steam-driven weaving loom. We have what I am using to write this piece, our mobile phones and the apps that allow easy communication between persons. Many books have been written on the theme of trans-humanism. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the first, written in 1816. The writing was on the wall. It is present in science fiction films. I have two pieces of plastic inside my body, put in to repair hernias. Others have metal hip protheses, artificial limbs, organs transplanted from dead people. The miracle of modern medicine has used technology to save lives and improve the quality of life. What about downloading a person’s mind and soul, his consciousness, onto a computer so that he may never fear death? What about having your head removed and transplanted onto another person’s very fit body or even a robot? This is no longer the Cyberman or the Dalek of Dr Who or the Borg of Star Trek. It is becoming “normal” to be a cog in a digital machine via our smartphone apps and our computers. Once we accept trans-humanism, social credits, being careful not to commit “thought crime”, Communist China melts into Orwell’s dystopia. At a more “popular” level, some people want to abolish gender and encourage people to have surgery that would make them look like the opposite sex. Frankenstein on steroids!!! Our human consciousness protests and yearns for another more human age in the past or in the future.

My essential point in this article is how we understand freedom and humanity. A hysterical response is self-defeating. We would just be arrested by the police, put in a cell and hauled up before the Beak for a term in prison or a big fine that we cannot afford to pay. Most of us are prepared to make necessary sacrifices to limit infection by this disease – if we understand what is going on, that we are not being kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

Society is severely fractured and cracked. We are all tempted to get into a tribe and shout down the adversary, but that will bring no good. War and revolution lie just under the surface of us all. Mob rule is something none of us would want to experience. Just read the history books! Tyranny is also just under the surface even since the defeat of Nazism. It is on the table. Some have a desire for revolution, war and authoritarianism – because they have nothing in their own soul. Just emptiness and nihilism.

I don’t know whether the social contract is already gone or merely in a very precarious state. I listened to M. Zemmour a few days ago, and to Mme Le Pen, and to several others. Their agendas are largely single-issue – immigration and expelling illegal immigrants from France. The idea attracts us if we have become convinced that they would cost us our money and freedom. As things are, I remain unconvinced by the politics of the left and right extremes. I am tempted once again to go with the middle-of-the-road, Macron and those whose policies are more inspired by pragmatism than self-interest. That can be argued! Many find fault with Macronie, but what would they replace it with? Chaos and a repeat show of Hitler in 1933? Or Stalin? Reading Nicholas Berdyaev will show you what a dark era were the 1930’s. Orwell too lived in that tuberculosis-infested era of grinding poverty and misery. Whoever we vote for, that will not solve the real problem, that of our spiritual soul.

We can reject Christianity and humanism, then science and reason. The notion of progress broke down with the Holocaust, until we managed to forget it! We cannot continue with materialism and the denial of God and the spiritual roots of culture. Covid has revealed our spiritual void. We lack the knowledge of the scientists with their hand in the glove boxes and the battery of computers, but we have to see something higher. Perhaps the Omicron variant is an answer to our prayers, the end of the scourge and a new chance for humanity. I am vaccinated, but I am not more virtuous. Perhaps many unvaccinated people are prepared to live a more isolated style of life to protect others.

Many Christians bewail individualism, which can mean selfishness or the desire to discover one’s highest spiritual being. The opposite is collectivism, the State above the person that characterises Socialism and the totalitarian cult. We have a higher purpose of life than consuming or escaping death indefinitely (if we can afford it). These things must be brought into the public view and discussed, debated whilst listening to and understanding the other.

Both “sides”, the mainstream Establishment and the braying mobs, need to be kept in check and made accountable to each other. We need clear and coherent information from our scientists and political authorities, not bumbling claptrap. Darkness and deceit create fear of the unknown. Erroneous understandings of freedom also leave us in a state of fear and astonishment.

I am brought to a conclusion by Alan Jacobs in his book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. It was one thing for the Allies to win the war and defeat Hitler. It was another to be spiritually and morally prepared. A war won by technology laid the ground for a world of technocrats. A number of Christian intellectuals, Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others, sought to offer a sober and reflective criticism of their own culture and come up with a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world. That was 1943, when my father was a bright young boy of 14 filled with a desire to be a Yorkshire farmer – and his father was so far away in the Oflag near Linz (now Austria) trying to survive the harsh regime as best as possible. We are against faced with this task of Christian witness and education in a world ruled by technocracy and a diabolical delusion of transhumanism. Christ and his Gospel message are the way, the so-called “lost chord” I discuss with some measure of humour.

Our time is like the beginning of the nineteenth century, groaning from the wake of the Revolution and the Terror. We need to recover our rational minds but to humanise them and consecrate them to God, so that we may be whole persons. Freedom is given to us to enable us to attain this nobility of spirit, in the same way that playing a complex piece of music on the piano requires sacrifice and practice, conferring the freedom to express oneself as a musician. This is the freedom that Thomist moralists call the liberty of perfection as opposed to the liberty of indifference.

I read somewhere:

We who invented this thing called “liberalism” are now burying it, and building on the bare soil some technocratic state-corporate hybrid; a China-style social credit society, centralised, monitored, powered by algorithms, emphatically unnatural and unfree.

Maybe, God and our collective consciousness are bringing our salvation from the pandemic through this new variant that would just make us feel a little off-colour for a few days, and then liberate us from the entire drama we have lived. However this amnesty would have to be accompanied by our conversion and volte-face away from our futilities.

* * *

In response to a private message, I feel I should add the following:

I do appreciate that my quite isolated life in the French countryside doesn’t exactly give me an accurate appreciation of the increasing radicalisation. I recently saw this interesting interview

My own thoughts were influenced to an extent by Mr Kingsnorth who seems to be a very decent and sincere person. As I visited this site, I found this harrowing interview about Australian “concentration camps”. It is always the same thing when dealing with the police and the law – cooperate with them of suffer the consequences. As Quentin Crisp used to say “Never run away from the police. They’ll catch you“. I think that most policemen are decent persons doing their job, but some are very nasty. Recently, some policemen in France were disciplined for having a picture of Hitler in their mess room, suggesting that they fancied themselves as Gestapo men. Most are not like that.

I suspected that this would happen, but they are still using expensive airport hotels in England and having the “guests” pay full whack for shitty service. Now the infections rates are skyrocketing exponentially…

The “antithesis” people (so-called anti-vaxxers, etc) are extremely diverse between those who have a very selfish notion of individual freedom, and who are protesting for what would amount to the civil authorities admitting that they were in it for the money and that Covid is just a little flu.

I have toyed with the idea of the Great Barrington Declaration. Protect the elderly and vulnerable by isolating them for the necessary time. Then let the virus rip until herd immunity would be achieved – populations “vaccinated” not by a vaccine but the disease itself. Perhaps the hospitals could cope with the younger “fallout” whilst the elderly were protected. Here in France, such a strategy was condemned as discriminatory. So, really, the only solution is lockdown, Australian style, for the slightest numbers of infections and using brutal methods of repression for enforcement. Most state authorities have argued from a humanitarian point of view – reduce the numbers of deaths and serious ill in hospital.

The present is a boot stamping of a human face forever. We have allowed it to happen. I don’t applaud this revival of Nazism and the Chinafication of the world. I didn’t vote for any of the people responsible for this. Yes, we “sheeple” can “wake up”, protest and go on demonstrations. Then end up tortured in a police cell and fined more than we could ever pay. Defeat.

The best thing would be Omicron being extremely infectious but mild as a pathogen, able to displace the virulent strains. It would do what post-rational humanity couldn’t do. For a long time I was in denial about the total stupidity and incompetence of political authorities, even for a simple matter of logistics to distribute masks and vaccines. Even today, it is very hard to get an appointment in a city for vaccinations. You have to jump through hoops.

There are different theories about the risks of the vaccines and whether they are experimental or proven to have an acceptable level of safety. All vaccines cause some tragedies and ill effects to some people.

Yes, it is political incompetence and self-interest that has caused this dialectic. So far, France is teetering on the brink of going extreme right-wing with Zemmour or the slightly more moderate Mme Le Pen. I suspect a good shake-up would do some good, and Macron seems to represent big money, but he also seems to appeal to our sense of being reasonable and rational, perhaps a last light of the Enlightenment. So far, France has resisted compulsory vaccination and mocking down the unvaccinated. We have the passé sanitaire – I have only shown mine once or twice to go to a café with a few people, and since then I have has so little social life, not because I am forbidden but because I have other priorities in my own life. Most infections are caused in private homes and in families, not in shops and cafés. Austria changed its policy to lockdown for all. Compulsory vaccination is planned but I don’t see how they can enforce it. Same in Germany. I fear that France will be in general lockdown by the beginning of next year, which will mean admitting that vaccination was a gigantic failure and that Macron might as well hand his keys directly over to Zemmour and the other national populist zealots.

The other problem is the lack of transparency and the ongoing flip-flops. We lose trust in such governments. I have some sympathy for the counter-narrative, but I refuse to let radicalisation, emotion and fanaticism take over. I find the counter-narrative as irrational as the “mainstream” narrative.

Oh yes, Big Pharma. I mentioned that in my article. Pfizer and Moderna should be nationalised and their patents removed. There is too much self-interest. We are told so many things for and against the efficacy of the vaccines. Is there a truth? We seem to be in a multiverse down a rabbit hole!

In some countries like Singapore, the non-vaccinated are told that they can pay for their own hospital treatment if they catch the virus and become very sick. Another form of coercion and blackmail? Perhaps. There is no solution other than let the virus take its course like the Spanish Flu in 1918-20. About 50 million deaths, no vaccine and just a few compulsory masks.

We are all discouraged. I prefer to hope that this is a transitory phase of human history rather than the end of all. The usual theme of the science fiction films is the totalitarian dystopia and marginal people living outside in abject poverty. Often, some human value comes through a story like Mad Max. It is the same in the Church with the “thesis” of Pope Francis’ and Archbishop Arthur “Padlock” Roche reforms and control over the traditionalists, and then the “antithesis” of the traditionalists. I would not be able to vindicate either position. I am a bit like that with the China-like lockdowns and social credit system and then the hysterical people provoking the police and getting beaten up and tortured. Both “sides” are either wrong or excessive.

All I can suggest for some of us. Live far away from it unless you want to become a politician and get more power than the bastards of the “other side”. I couldn’t. Perhaps I am a coward, and will pay for it one day by being dragged out of my home, put on a train and then into a gas chamber! I fight by trying to keep culture, reason and humanity, and above all spiritual life. Read the little book of Rob Riemen (Nobility of Spirit) that resumes Thomas Mann’s reaction to Nazism in the 1930’s and during the war. Let us write and express ourselves, then no one can blame us for being cowards!

Different people deserve different answers. Some are selfish, others are afraid and their fear is caused by political deceit / sleaze and incompetence. Most of us are confused, and our culture, reason and humanity are not the way to deal with this situation.