You may or may not know of Girolamo Savonarola. Back in the 1980s, when I was a great devotee of the art of the Italian Renaissance, Savonarola was the big bogey man, the good guy turned bad. Very bad. A priest in Florence with a high opinion of himself. Considering many of the wonders of the Renaissance to be pagan and classically inspired, and therefore decadent, damaging, and far from God, he organised for great burnings in public places. Irreplaceable manuscripts, books on evil subjects such as divination and astrology; sculptures, paintings by folk as prominent as Botticelli: all went up in smoke - or, if not easily burnt, were just smashed to pieces. And in this way Savonarola helped God create his kingdom on Earth.
Neil Kramer has recently written about how friends and colleagues of his are having their Savonarola moment, in the shape of seeing their accounts closed by the giants of social media: Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest. The reason is that their views, though often backed up by independent research, do not conform to the political models preferred by those aforementioned social media providers. In particular, he noted, true libertarians and neo-conservatives are victims of the new Savonarolas.
Rather than rant and rave about modern totalitarianism, as plenty of folk may be inclined to do (including Pale G.V. when it's in a strop), Neil remains sanguine. It is their prerogative, he points out. But we need to be aware that Twitter is no better source of unbiased and impartial information than are the mainstream newspapers and television channels. In the meantime, there are companies emerging with truth and integrity at their core. But there may be 'blips and outings' of info in the short term.
It raises the question of whether this blog should move ground. This would entail convening a meeting of the Board of Directors, however, and we all know what a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings they are....
Part Two
The Savonarola syndrome comes round from time to time. Sometimes it manifests in really dramatic fashion, such as the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria by early Christians, thus wiping out centuries of knowledge-based literature accumulated by the Wise Ones of the pre-Christian world. European persecutions of witches, burning of heretics - oops, it's the Christians again - were similar attempts to remove knowledge of deeper realities from the public realm.
In one respect it is a good sign, that the perpetrators of the great artifice, the forces of synthetic darkness, feel sufficiently under threat to act in ways that any decent human can see as, well, indecent. In order to maintain its apparent dominance and control, the Great Lie has to continually martial enormous amounts of resources, fuelled by gigantic quantities of finance and humanpower.
To sustain Great Global Falsehood is a mammoth task: lies are not easy to keep going, especially when the eyes of the Shark of Truth are out there examining your every move. Though it may appear strong, unbeatable, even, the Mainstream Monster walks on shifting sands. One of its main tricks is to try and persuade you that it is indispensable and omnipotent, whereas the reality is rather different. Its foundations are in truth weak, non-existent. It is a Monster of increasing desperation, and despair requires extreme measures for its continuation.
Why is Mainstream Monster not as all-powerful as people like to believe? And what is the Great Lie? The two questions are interconnected.....
The Great Lie is that we need this crappy system of control in the first place. That we need big power politics and big power politicians; that we need crappy scientists, philosophers, academics, and commentators to tell us how the world works and how our world should work; that we need popes, priests, gurus, in order to experience anything of spiritual worth, and to become anything decent in this life.
A major function of the Great Lie is to keep everybody down, in place - to turn everyone into blobs, as Neil Kramer once succinctly put it. Independence, individuality, are bad news, creating troublesome people who question the status quo, the received view of the world. Mediocrity, robot behaviour, are the favoured styles, and ones which are encouraged from an early age.
Once the nature of the Great Lie is understood and absorbed, everything falls into place. We see how current acceptable attitudes and ways of thinking and behaving are not just accidents, but have a purpose. 'Victim culture', political correctness, multiculturalism as an article of faith and ideology, as opposed to a genuine appreciation of other cultures. Corporate living, corporate mentality. All have the effect of discouraging independent thought, independent living, discovering personal uniqueness. They are focal parts of the big business of creating mediocre hive blobs.
Part Three
A lie inevitable hides a truth. And a Great Lie has to hide a Great Truth. It is a truth most marvellous, most miraculous indeed. It is the Great Truth that, to put it in the terms that Timothy Leary once used : You are God! Or Buddha. Or the Divine. Or a manifestation of Universal Mind. As you wish. But you are it. Your sovereignty is, by definition, yours and yours alone. You don't need priests, politicians, news analysts, to push you around, tell you who you are, tell you about your own tiny little place in the world. Once realised, your sovereignty can be taken away by no one.
The Great Lie exists as an instrument of disempowerment. It appears real and necessary only while enough people bow to its synthetic, self-created reality. While enough people believe the propaganda, that it is indispensable. Anything or anybody who points out the truth about the Great Lie - whether mentally, through 'alternative history, news' etc or through direct experience, as in alchemy, mysticism, and psychedelic exploration - is inevitably in for a hard time. A desperate system will resort to desperate measures.
Savonarola better eat his spinach; he sure needs it.
