The Real War is Within. It’s Against Fear.

The one point of leverage a would-be tyrant has against us is our fear. Without that, they have nothing.

Like me, you’ve probably discovered a holy boatload (nay, an interplanetary seed-colony starship load) of new heroes over these last two years.

I’d be hard-pressed to pick just two to sit in a room and converse about it all with, but if I had to, I doubt I could do much better than these two guys: Bret Weinstein and Neil Oliver.

How delightful to see these two thoughtful chaps sitting down, chit-chatting about the crazy state of the world, how they’ve come to see things differently, and how they intend to go forward with it all.

At some point their conversation touched on fear. (Indeed, how could it not?)

Neil observed that there is a kind of cultural weakness in the world. (No shit, Neil. Our ancestors were Vikings and Huns, FFS!) Most other humans, in any place or era have had to deal with a level of pain, suffering, and hardship that we haven’t. We’ve had things so cushy and comfortable for so long, that, Neil observes, we’ve developed an unhealthy fear of pain, and more broadly, suffering of any kind. But when you undergo pain, he says, you realize it’s survivable, and it actually makes you stronger than you thought you were.

(And, I would add, everything worthwhile in your life comes from facing fear, discomfort, and suffering, and coming out the other side.)

There’s a related fear I thought they might touch on next, but they didn’t.

Which is fine. I’m happy to take us there. 😎

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Fear of Self-Responsibility Makes Use Surrender Our Power to Authorities and “Saviors”

Again, probably owing to the relative comfort and lack of suffering in our modern times, we seem to have developed a fear that we are responsible for our own lives.

I’m not only talking about the rampant sense of entitlement, although that certainly is related.

More fundamentally, we have a culture that blindly worships “experts” and authorities, a faith in technological (or pharmaceutical) panaceas, and a manic worship (and/or hatred) of elected office holders.

In other words, somebody, not us, is responsible for the state of the world. And somebody, not us, will save us.

All hail the Chosen One.

There’s a long-standing tradition in our culture of chosen ones, or messiahs, or saviors.

It’s the basis of our religions, our mythologies, and even our books and films right up to the present day (e.g., Dune, the Matrix, all the superhero movies, etc.)

This person, the chosen one, will bring salvation from all our woes.

We don’t necessarily know who this person is, or in what form they will appear to us. All we know is that they are superior to us in some way, possessing a wisdom we do not.

They are the answer, and until They save us, We are royally screwed.

This what I think of as a “bedrock belief”--something so deep and foundational we don’t even think to question it.

But not questioning it, I believe, makes us susceptible to suggestion by those who claim to be our saviors.

It makes us believe things like: “If someone is running for office and they say things that make me feel good, they obviously possess a wisdom I do not, and I should elect them and surrender power over my life to them,” and: “If they are accredited degree-holders in their field, or appointed by the highest authorities in the land, they must know what they are talking about and be in possession of infallible Truth, and I should blindly trust them.”

Of course, these are absurdities which don’t stand up to a moment’s worth of critical thinking.

The Problem with “Trust the Experts”

But that’s the insidious nature of bedrock beliefs: they have a way of evading scrutiny, operating on you without your awareness.

So, someone starts speaking to you from a stage or from behind a lectern, or with a bunch of degrees (or a White House logo) behind them, what happens? Some quiet, unexamined part of you thinks: “I could not possibly know what he or she knows; I should shut up and accept what they have to say,” and your mind shuts down on command.

That’s how authority works on us. It makes us think we are unworthy of challenging it.

It makes us say “YES!” to anyone in a position of authority who promises to deliver us from our woes.

The alternative, mired in a swamp of fear most people are not even willing to wade into, is the idea that we, not some savior or authority, are responsible for making the world what it is, for knowing what is best for our own lives, and for saving ourselves.

Seditious thoughts, I know.

But consider: what if the reason evil persists in the world, and the reason the “Chosen One” never seems to show up, is that the person you’ve been staring at in the mirror every morning your whole life is the person responsible for it all?

I’m not suggesting that you are evil, or that real villains don’t exist outside you, but what if the reason they exist (and persist) is that we all give our silent assent to them, believing that we are unworthy of challenging them?

What if going along silently, keeping our head down, not rocking the boat, is what evil counts on to thrive?

What if challenging them is the thing that delivers us from them?

What if, therefore, we are our own salvation, our own “Chosen One”, and it is only unfounded, self-imposed fear that is stopping us?

The powers-that-be really, really want us to slide back into a pre-Enlightenment, Dark Ages view of the world--where authorities possess exclusive access to the Truth; where they dispense that knowledge to the rest of us as they see fit, which we are meant to accept and follow, unquestioningly; where questioning is a sin, to be rooted out by inquisitors (or “Disinformation Governance Boards”), silenced, and/or punished.

By the way, isn’t this also a child’s view of the world?

Adulthood, if you think about it, is the realization that you are not helpless, that it’s up to you to figure out what’s best for your own life, and that you, and only you, are to blame for your choices.

It’s the realization that your parents, teachers, friends, boss, doctor, shrink, pastor, local governor, or whatever other authority figures in your life, are not omniscient, do not always know what’s best for you, and that you’re supposed to disagree with them and figure things out for yourself.

We learn from others, yes. But what the best teachers do is not indoctrinate us, but teach us to think for ourselves.

We all start our lives with nearly two decades of indoctrination. Nearly two decades of do exactly as I tell you, don’t think, just obey. It’s amazing that anyone ever recovers from this period of mental crippling.

Most never do, I suppose.

It’s an extraordinary thing when, sometime in your adolescence, you figure out that blind obedience is not what you’re here to do, and not what a human mind or body is for. Suddenly your knowledge, your perspective is different from that of the adults in your life, and you start to carve your own path.

But we all know what happens next: you rapidly encounter a world hell-bent on pushing that little independent mind back into a comfortable box of indoctrination again.

Believe these ideas. No, not those ideas, these ones. Do your duty. Follow this path. Elect this person. Buy these products. Swallow these pills. Take these injections. Truth is what we tell you. Don’t question. Accept. If you don’t you’re an evil, worthless piece of shit. Trust us, we know best.

A would-be-tyrant today has extraordinary tools of indoctrination at his disposal. Our society is a Goebbelsian wet dream.

And so, combined with the aforementioned weakness and fear (as well as a widespread hatred of Enlightenment ideals), the culture regresses into childhood. And some extremely powerful folks are all too happy to assume the role of “parents”. (Abusive ones, no less.)

The thing they’re counting on, and weaponizing against you, is the exact thing that keeps children in line: fear.

This fear tells you: you are incapable, you are unworthy, you are their lesser. You cannot know what is true or good. But happily, they are in possession of all the answers. They were blessed with the special wand of Knowing Things. You need them.

And all you have to do to is turn off your thinking mind, accept, buy, follow, play along.

How easy is that?

When people realize they are responsible for their own existence, entire structures of power underlying our society will become superfluous and collapse. It is already happening. This is what the powerful fear and what they are trying to prevent: us figuring it out.

So…

Do you blindly trust your elected office holders?

Do you blindly trust your news anchor?

Do you blindly trust your doctor? Your pharmacist?

Do you blindly trust in panaceas, miracle cures, or pills that are supposed to take all your pain and illness away?

Do you blindly trust that corporations would never poison you for profit?

Do you blindly trust that your government would never spy on its own citizens?

Do you blindly accept that a health bureaucrat is the same thing as “Science™”?

Do you blindly trust that all regulatory agencies are supposedly protecting you?

Or have you discovered, in each of these cases, that the authorities or actors involved do not seem as omniscient as you once thought, and that, sometimes they seem downright pig-headed, biased, or even ignorant? Perhaps you’ve even discovered that they’ve been captured by corporate or financial interests. Or that they’re taking orders from international bodies. Or that even if they disagree with their colleagues they are nevertheless too fearful to take a stand for fear of losing income, status, or position.

Which, of course, is not to say that there are no courageous, independent, ethical, truth-centered people working in any of these fields. Far from it. But are you perhaps starting to realize that these are the exception, not the norm?

Are you beginning to see that in every one of these cases, there’s an “old guard”, a dying, centralized institution that wants to keep you in fear, or keep you doubting that you could possibly know better than they, so that you will go on blindly trusting them?

Personally, I’m just not interested in these centralized institutions any more.

Nor am I interested in the society they would have us live in, one in which we are chipped and traced and checkpointed, where we wear masks and face shields and never gather or leave our house and fill our body with shots every six months, or three months, or once a week, or once a day…

What I’m interested in is creating a courageous populace, which means a populace that, instead of defaulting to authorities and experts and saviors, uses their God-given grey matter to think for themselves, and that creates their own decentralized institutions which serve them instead of enslaving them.

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How to Move Past Chronic Fear, Step 1: Acknowledge it’s all in your head.

All my trashing of “experts” aside, I think I can actually claim some “expertise” on something: I’m something of an expert on fear.

More specifically, fear eradication.

For two decades, as a more-or-less weekend job, I was (no shit) a skydiving instructor. That’s right: I took people’s money, hooked their bodies to mine, and jumped out of airplanes with them.

Crazy, right?

Anyone who does something like this for as long as I have gets the equivalent of a college degree in human psychology. Here’s what I learned in my two decades of tossing people out of airplanes…

Everybody has fear. Everyone.

We differ only in how effectively we mask it. When people show up to the drop zone to jump, they titter nervously, they joke, they are silent, or they engage in braggadocio. But the instructor knows: every single person is managing some level of terror.

One’s job as an instructor is only perfunctorily doing the training, equipment, and safety checks. Ninety-percent of what the instructor does is psychology: putting the prospective jumper at ease, putting them in a relaxed, empowered state where they feel that they’re in good hands, and capable of doing something far, far outside their comfort zone.

I jumped with close to ten thousand people over the course of my two decades as an instructor. I defy any psychology study to come close to those numbers. Every one of my “subjects” showed up with fear. Every one of them overcame it and did something that gave them immense joy.

Hurling your body out of a moving plane and experiencing the exhilaration of freefall is extraordinary, sure. But what is even more extraordinary is that these people did what most people will never do: they faced what should have been a crippling level of fear, and moved past it.

They realized that the fear was all in their head.

This is not to say their fear was unreasonable. Fear makes you take sensible precautions, like seeking out reputable jump schools, and safety checks and proper gear inspections, and the like.

But chronic fear is self-imposed mental torture.

Chronic fear is escapable.

There is no reason, ever, to live in a chronic state of fear. If you do, you murder your own capacity for joy.

And, as we well know, you make it easy for people to manipulate your behavior.

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How to Move Past Chronic Fear, Step 2: Get curious.

We fear what we do not know.

I was as scared as anyone else at the beginning of the pandemic, for example, because fear is a rational response to the unknown.

The next rational response, however, is to assess. To start looking into things, to gather information, to ask pertinent questions.

Slowly, some of us came out of the fear fog, switched our mental awareness back on, and did some research.

And this, in turn, made us question what we were hearing in the news media and out of the mouths of our officials. Some of it contradicted everything else we knew to be true, or contradicted what doctors and others researchers were saying, or wasn’t supported by data, or seemed to be inciting needless panic, or seemed to be serving someone’s agenda, or seemed unconstitutional, or was just patent nonsense.

Spartacast 02

The point is, curiosity, research, data, knowledge… made the fear vanish. The more you know, the less there is to fear.

When people jump out of airplanes for the first time, something curious happens. The instructor can feel the resistance in the first-time jumper’s body: their muscles stiffening, their pulse quickening, their breathing stopping. But then, five seconds out of the door… it all stops. The body strapped to you relaxes. A shit-eating grin lights up their faces. They exhale and usually make some vocalization that’s somewhere in between inarticulate and joyous.

It happens every… single… time.

Seems crazy, doesn’t it? You relax while plummeting out of the sky. While hurtling toward a planet.

Yes, there’s a rush of endorphins and dopamine and serotonin and all that good chemically stuff. But that’s not the real reason the fear vanishes, I don’t think. The real reason: the moment you know what the experience is, you no longer have anything to fear. I think there’s a tremendous sense of relief that the experience is nowhere near as “bad” as your unknowing brain imagined it might be. In fact, it feels pretty darn good, hence the standard instructor’s quip: “It’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

The cure for fear is knowledge. You might even start to think of fear as an action signal: your body’s way of telling you to go out and know something.

In my vast “clinical” experience, it works every time.

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How to Move Past Chronic Fear, Step 3: Turn off all sources of involuntary fear, and step out of the Cave.

Be highly skeptical of sources of “information” that constantly sell you more things to be afraid of.

In other words, turn off the fucking news.

Seriously. It’s shadow puppets on the Cave wall. That’s all it is.

And while you’re at it, log out of social media. (Or at least use it sparingly, with the awareness that the algorithms are trying to lure you into a certain way of thinking and behaving).

And if you’re really radical, stop exposing your mind to endless propaganda and pharma advertising in things like sports broadcasts. (This was a hard one for me. I’ve been a lifelong football and hockey fan. But for me, the ceaseless indoctrination has ceased to be worth it.)

Find good, alternate sources of information. We’ve all found each other on Substack, thank God. At a minimum, sub to these:

(There are other great stacks, too, but I wanted to limit myself to ten.)

This is the main reason that the powers-that-be are predictably going after “misinformation”. They don’t want you finding out that their fear narrative is bunkum, that the shadow puppets on the wall are not the same thing as reality, and that you don’t have to live in the Cave of fear any longer.

They don’t want you exiting the Cave, because that makes you un-manipulatable, which makes you ungovernable.

What you direct your attention to matters.

Our attention to the shadow puppets, and our consequent fear, is the only crutch keeping tyranny alive.

Remove it and the tyrants don’t have a damn leg left to stand on.