Truth Over Tyranny: Biblical wisdom for defeating the Technocrats.
These are my insights for defeating the Transhumanist Technocracy movement, based on the teachings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, on the weekly Bible portion.
Freedom is currently under assault on many fronts. Here are but a few examples:
Free speech
National governments are attempting to censor free speech platforms: Brazil has banned X; France has arrested the Telegram CEO; Germany has harassed and fined Gab. And the CEO of Facebook just admitted caving to pressure from the Biden administration to censor content.
Free elections
Color Revolutions just took place in Venezuela and Bangladesh. They join globalist insurrections in Ukraine, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Israel, and elsewhere. And every day, evidence is revealed of the DNC fixing (again) the upcoming US election.
Free religious practice
Hamas invaded Israel, and their supporters have attacked Jews in many Western countries. Islamists also murder Christians across the world, along with Hindus. And, tapping into the inherent aggression of Islam, secular New World Order officials and organizations use Muslim immigrants to terrorize native Jewish and Christian populations into compliance, especially in Europe.
This level of oppression can be overwhelming. People cannot be blamed for seeing themselves as a victim, and choosing to live a life filled with suffering and feelings of betrayal.
But that is a choice. And it is not the only choice.
We are always free to choose our response to our circumstances. That is our most essential freedom. It is the freedom that we Jews have exercised to not only survive but thrive in the face of endless persecution. And it is the freedom all freedom lovers of today can exercise as we confront the tyranny of the transhumanist technocracy.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks talks about this freedom in his commentary on Parashat Re’eh called “On Not Being a Victim.”
https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/reeh/not-being-a-victim/
Rabbi Sacks starts by referencing a conversation he had with Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist discussed how he and his wife raised their daughter Mikhaila, who was stricken with severe polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis.
Rabbi quotes Jordan as making this point:
“One of the things we were very careful about and talked with her a lot about was to not allow herself to regard herself as a victim. And man, she had reason to regard herself as a victim … [but] as soon as you see yourself as a victim … that breeds thoughts of anger and revenge – and that takes you to a place that’s psychologically as terrible as the physiological place. And to her great credit I would say this is part of what allowed her to emerge from this because she did eventually figure out what was wrong with her, and by all appearances fix it by about 90%. It’s unstable but it’s way better because of the fact that she didn’t allow herself to become existentially enraged by her condition … People have every reason to construe themselves as victims. Their lives are characterised by suffering and betrayal. Those are ineradicable experiences. [The question is] what’s the right attitude to take to that – anger or rejection, resentment, hostility, murderousness? That’s the story of Cain and Abel, [and] that’s not good. That leads to Hell.”
This approach was similar to the one used by many Holocaust survivors Rabbi knew:
“As soon as I heard those words I understood what had led me to this man, because much of my life has been driven by the same search, though it came about in a different way. It happened because of the Holocaust survivors I came to know. They really were victims of one of the worst crimes against humanity in all of history. Yet they did not see themselves as victims. The survivors I knew, with almost superhuman courage, looked forward, built a new life for themselves, supported one another emotionally, and then, many years later, told their story, not for the sake of revisiting the past but for the sake of educating today’s young people on the importance of taking responsibility for a more human and humane future.”
This is what makes us human – we can choose our fate:
“But how is this possible? How can you be a victim and yet not see yourself as a victim without being guilty of denial, or deliberate forgetfulness, or wishful thinking?
“The answer is that uniquely – this is what makes us Homo sapiens – in any given situation we can look back or we can look forward. We can ask: ‘Why did this happen?’ That involves looking back for some cause in the past. Or we can ask, ‘What then shall I do?’ This involves looking forward, trying to work out some future destination given that this is our starting point.
“There is a massive difference between the two. I can’t change the past. But I can change the future. Looking back, I see myself as an object acted on by forces largely beyond my control. Looking forward, I see myself as a subject, a choosing moral agent, deciding which path to take from here to where I want eventually to be.
“Both are legitimate ways of thinking, but one leads to resentment, bitterness, rage and a desire for revenge. The other leads to challenge, courage, strength of will and self-control. That for me is what Mikhaila Peterson and the Holocaust survivors represent: the triumph of choice over fate.”
We Jews were taught this truth from our inception as a nation. Our first and greatest teacher, Moses, repeated the lesson many times as he prepared us to enter the Promised Land:
“‘See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you heed the commandments of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; and the curse, if you do not heed the commandments of the Lord your God, but stray from the way I am commanding you today’ … Deut. 11:26-28
“Throughout Deuteronomy, Moses keeps saying: don’t think your future will be determined by forces outside your control. You are indeed surrounded by forces outside your control, but what matters is how you choose. Everything else will follow from that. Choose the good and good things will happen to you. Choose the bad, and eventually you will suffer. Bad choices create bad people who create bad societies, and in such societies, in the fullness of time, liberty is lost. I cannot make that choice for you.”
Throughout time, Jewish teachers have continued Moses’ lessons about our free agency, including the prophet Jeremiah:
“The choice, he (Moses) says again and again, is yours alone: you as an individual, second person singular, and you as a people, second person plural. The result was that remarkably, Jews did not see themselves as victims. A key figure here, centuries after Moses, was Jeremiah. Jeremiah kept warning the people that the strength of a country does not depend on the strength of its army but on the strength of its society. Is there justice? Is there compassion? Are people concerned about the welfare of others or only about their own? Is there corruption in high places?
“Do religious leaders overlook the moral failings of their people, believing that all you have to do is perform the Temple rituals and all will be well: God will save us from our enemies? Jeremiah kept saying, in so many words, that God will not save us from our enemies until we save ourselves from our own lesser selves.
“When disaster came – the destruction of the Temple – Jeremiah made one of the most important assertions in all history. He did not see the Babylonian conquest as the defeat of Israel and its God. He saw it as the defeat of Israel by its God. And this proved to be the salvaging of hope. God is still there, he was saying. Return to Him and He will return to you. Don’t define yourself as a victim of the Babylonians. Define yourself as a free moral agent, capable of choosing a better future.”
Jeremiah’s response to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was remarkable: God caused this tragedy because we had abandoned His ways. We cannot claim victimhood. Our enemies beat us because of our moral failings. In that regard, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Granted, blaming ourselves has burdened us with guilt. But we carry this burden with optimism, because with it comes the power to make better choices:
“Jews paid an enormous psychological price for seeing history the way they did. ‘Because of our sins we were exiled from our land,’ we say repeatedly in our prayers. We refuse to define ourselves as the victims of anyone else, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, fate, the inexorability of history, original sin, unconscious drives, blind evolution, genetic determinism or the inevitable consequences of the struggle for power. We blame ourselves: ‘Because of our sins.’
“That is a heavy burden of guilt, unbearable were it not for our faith in Divine forgiveness. But the alternative is heavier still, namely, to define ourselves as victims, asking not, ‘What did we do wrong?’ but ‘Who did this to us?’
“’See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse.’ That was Moses’ insistent message in the last month of his life. There is always a choice. As Viktor Frankl said, even in Auschwitz there was one freedom they could not take away from us: the freedom to choose how to respond. Victimhood focuses us on a past we can’t change. Choice focuses us on a future we can change, liberating us from being held captive by our resentments, and summoning us to what Emmanuel Levinas called Difficile Liberte, ‘difficult freedom.’”
None of this is to say that people are never victims. But even true victims can realize their free agency in how they respond to their victimhood:
“There really are victims in this world, and none of us should minimise their experiences. But in most cases (admittedly, not all) the most important thing we can do is help them recover their sense of agency. This is never easy, but is essential if they are not to drown in their own learned helplessness. No one should ever blame a victim. But neither should any of us encourage a victim to stay a victim. It took immense courage for Mikhaila Peterson and the Holocaust survivors to rise above their victimhood, but what a victory they won for human freedom, dignity and responsibility.
“Hence the life changing idea: Never define yourself as a victim. You cannot change your past but you can change your future. There is always a choice, and by exercising the strength to choose, we can rise above fate.”
I would add this:
The global tyrants keep trying with fanatical obsession to control our physical world: to capture the planet’s resources via endless war; to confiscate our possessions through a “great reset;” to regulate our health and fertility with disabling drugs.
They try like heck to make our future seem bleak — filled with inevitable destruction and chaos — so we would simply relinquish our freedoms and capitulate to their technocratic rule.
But, based on Rabbi Sacks’ teachings, there is clearly one freedom the technocrats could never take — and we could not give away even if we wanted to: our freedom of choice. Deciding to voluntarily become a cog in the technocracy wheel would itself be an exercise of that freedom.
The choice is clear.