“Fear is only reverse faith; it is faith in evil instead of good.” Florence Scovel Shinn

After several months of the COVID-19 crisis, relevant elements of analysis of this crisis are becoming clearer.

1. The enormous pressure to convince 7 billion people of the need to be vaccinated against a virus [1] whose mortality has been inflated [2] and which is said to be ubiquitous while it is disappearing or has even disappeared.

It reminds us of the 2009 operation, with the fake H1N1 pandemic [3]: same tactics, same complicity (media, political, government), same “experts”, same scenarios, same narratives with an emphasis on fear, guilt, haste and always the same stench of this omnipresent money in the form of huge profits on the horizon for the Big Pharma vaccine producing industry.

It is as if the H1N1 episode of 2009 has been used as a rehearsal.

This time, the COVID-19 episode of 2020 is poised to turn the trial into a success?

Monitoring Tests: Collect data on VIDOC-19. Source: sph.umich.edu

2.  People submitting to authority

Despite clear signs of corruption, incompetence, ignorance about eminent personalities in politics, science, medicine, many people continue to obey them.

Despite confused, contradictory, unexplained, unjustifiable recommendations, people accept the directive of higher authority.

For example, many people continue to obey them:

1) In the midst of the epidemic, the wearing of masks is not mandatory and even discouraged for healthy people.
2) As the epidemic dies out, masks become mandatory everywhere for everyone.

I highly recommend – The R-95 Reusable Face Mask! This is the best mask I have been able to find. I tried a few and they were so uncomfortable I couldn’t wear them for more than a few minutes.  This one fits great and after a while I forget I have it on.

Many general practitioners from several countries and the IHU Méditerranée-Infection de Marseilles, one of the largest infectious disease centers in the world, the largest in France, have demonstrated that hydroxychloroquine is  an effective drug for treatment of SARS and COVID-19 [4].

In Belgium, “they” say that it is a dangerous and ineffective drug and “they” prevent general practitioners from prescribing it to their patients. In the US, a media campaign against HCQis ongoing.

Contradictions, lies, false truths…

Of course, fear and conformism may explain this fabricated obedience.

We know the experiences of Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram [5].

This tendency to submission and obedience to coercive measures varies from one country to another.

Thus in Serbia :

“Broken, the relentless progression of coronaviral terror. The recalcitrant Serbs rebelled against their president when he ordered them to return to house arrest. After two days of street battles with dozens of hospitalized police officers, the robust demonstrators won; the authorities surrendered and abandoned their plans to seal off Belgrade. Shops, bistros and restaurants in Belgrade will have a curfew in the early evening; but this is much better than the complete closure they had planned. ” [6]

On the other hand, in Belgium:

“In an incomprehensible way, while the epidemic, except for small outbreaks (clusters), is gradually disappearing [7], coercive measures are once again being imposed, even extended [8] with compulsory wearing of masks everywhere, for everyone, obligation to give their details in restaurants and bars for tracking purposes [9] …”.

There is no justification for all this.

All this revives fear, terror, and leads to fears of a return to partial or total confinement (house arrest), whereas today we know that this measure is useless and harmful! [10-11]

It is as if the COVID-19 crisis is being used by the authorities as a full-scale test to assess the degree of submission of their people [12], and to see how far they can go before they encounter sufficient opposition.

I hope that the Belgian people, the bravest people of Gaul according to Julius Caesar [13], will have the courage and lucidity of the Serbian people and will finally wake up.

3. The use of experts by creating the impression of a consensus that does not exist

Governments form expert committees to justify their actions.

For the citizen, why question the measures in question?

However, within organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Medicines Agency (EMEA), the COVID-19 committee in France (CARE) or in Belgium (Sciensano-committee COVID-19), being an expert does not mean being independent, free of any conflict of interest, or even being competent from a standpoint [14-15].

Every time a government says: “there is a consensus of experts on this issue“, it is in fact a lie.

It only means that their experts have agreed, they have established a consensus without analysis and the conduct of scientific debate.

In COVID-19, you can find on all the subjects presented as a part of a consensus :

• Masks
• Hydroxychloroquine
• Containment
• Tests used
• Treatments
• Vaccination

… other experts equally valid in terms of academic credentials, reputation and professional activities, whose opinions go against official diktats, with honest arguments, solid demonstrations and multiple references.

How does the citizen weigh this up?

A good criterion is to check for a conflict of interest.

Many qualified authors and scientists with opinions opposed to those of their government counterparts are not linked to the pharmaceutical industry or to governments that ultimately want to push an ideology,  a political agenda and are increasingly accountable to Big Pharma.

These independent authors also have more to lose than to gain in this debate.

What else could drive them to take risks if not their honesty, their conscience?

This presentation PROOVES WITHOUT DOUBT that America is in for a major fight that will put you and your family in the firing line, literally… So make sure you watch this presentation while it’s still online…

It is neither fame, nor the hope of a contract in the private sector, nor money, in any case.

4. The fabrication of “fiction” may be inspired by a distorted understanding of real facts and for this, the use of a narrative that ends up being repeated over and over again, which then becomes a consensus which is no longer challenged.

COVID-19 is a fiction based on plausible facts: a virus, real deaths, a real disease, an epidemic of respiratory illnesses to which are added, little by little, distortions of truths or realities, or even outright lies (Cf. my series, COVID-19: as close to the truth as possible).

Coronaviruses are known. They exist. Two of them have already threatened humanity with deadly epidemics (SARS, MERS).

Regardless of the fact that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic was false and that experts had manipulated the figures, the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 set the stage for it is a threat and that only vaccination could save us.

Real sick people were hospitalized and some died. All of this made the “COVID-19” story plausible.

The COVID narrative was launched.

To perpetuate the fear campaign, a population-wide strategy of shock was put in place, tests presented as reliable were conducted, high mortality figures were released. not to mention indicators of contagiousness.

In this process, the role of the media in support of an official consensus was essential.

As always, they played their role well, announcing the number of deaths every day and attributing them to COVID-19 without supporting analysis.

Today,  the fear campaign is sustained by an alleged second wave, requiring a new lockdown. So-called “positive”| PCR tests are casually presented as new cases of COVID-19.

Sweden and other countries, as well as some states in the USA, have not played the game, or have followed their own agenda.

Stockholm during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Source: Quartz

They didn’t confine, they were less traumatized, they remained more human.

They is proof that the COVID-19 story in several countries (Belgium, France, Spain, Canada…) is indeed a fiction, based on manipulated data, plunging millions of people into a formidable “psychological trap”.

The COVID-19 story is a strategy of “shock therapy”. Strategies of this nature (implying social engineering) are never used for the good of the people.

The strategy of psychological shock is a reality, studied by several authors and researchers, including Naomi Klein [16], with her book published in 2007, “The Strategy of Shock: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.

The aim is to make a tabula rasa, a blank page, and on this blank page, to reconstruct what we want.

How can we do this?

“On the scale of an entire population, by destroying a country’s heritage, its social and economic structures in order to build a new society, a new order after the planned and controlled chaos.

Once the people are deprived of their points of reference, shocked and infantilized, they find themselves defenceless and easily manipulated.

This process can occur following a serious economic or political crisis, an environmental disaster, an attack, a war or a health crisis. ” [17]

The strategy of shock was applied by economic means to Greece in the wake of the 2008 crisis, dragging millions of people into misery with the complicity of their politicians. [18]

The strategy of shock was applied by means of terrorism in the USA in 2001 and in France in 2015 with the establishment of states of emergency and emergency laws that have never again been abolished [19].

[19] The strategy of shock is now being applied by means of health crises, COVID-19, to a part of the world, including my country, Belgium.

“The terror induced on a large scale in a society leads to a kind of state of daze, a situation where control can easily be obtained from an external authority.

It is necessary to develop an immature state of mind in the population in order to control it as best as possible.

Society must be infantilized.“

These ideas have been studied and disseminated by the Tavistock Institute in London, which originated from a psychiatric clinic founded in 1920, specializing in psychological control and organized social chaos [17].

It is much easier to run a society through mental control than through physical control, through infantilization, confusion, misinformation and fear.

Isn’t that what is at work today?

The Lost Ways is a far–reaching book with chapters ranging from simple things like making tasty bark-bread-like people did when there was no food-to building a traditional backyard smokehouse… and many, many, many more!

People are being infantilized…

They are told which sidewalk they can walk on, which way, when they can go into a store and where they have to blow their nose.

Fear is omnipresent.

Those who refuse the masks are penalized, looked at sideways, excluded, insulted, hated.

Thousands of people see their work threatened, their whole life compromised without the possibility of demonstrating, or opposing the Covid-19 consensus imposed by their government.

Old people are abandoned.

Young people are imprisoned in a masked and confined world.

Adults are in a precarious situation

People from the same family, separated.

Thinking and reflection, not to mention dialogue and debate are paralysed.

Protest is prohibited

If this thesis is correct, it is to be expected that our government, through “experts” and media interposed, will continue this strategy of shock and announce us more and more infected, dead and waves of COVID, irrespective of the underlying reality. The facts will be manipulated.

The examples of Sweden and Belgrade are beacons of hope in this dark perspective.

Dr. Pascal Sacré, physician specialized in critical care, author and renowned public health analyst, Charleroi, Belgium. Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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Notes:

[1] Coronavirus: l’OMS tente de mobiliser politiques et acteurs économiques en vue d’ »un vaccin pour tous » sur la planète

[2] « Le chiffre de la mortalité due au coronavirus est un faux chiffre » selon le Dr. Lass

[3] Grippe H1N1, exemple de manipulation internationale, AIMSIB, 22 octobre 2018

[4] Bulletin d’information scientifique de l’IHU, Pr Philippe Parola, directeur de service de soins et d’unité de recherche à l’IHU Méditerranée Infection

[5] PSY-OP COVID-19 : assignés à résidence !, Dr Pascal Sacré, mondialisation.ca, 11 mai 2020

[6] Belgrade libérée, par Israel Shamir, maondialisation.ca, 13 juillet 2020

[7] La virulence du Covid-19 est-elle en train de diminuer ?, par Christophe De Brouwer, Contrepoints.org, 21 juillet 2020

[8] Les décisions du Conseil National de Sécurité. Les décisions ont été communiquées aux Belges à 13h30 lors d’une conférence de presse ce 24 juillet 2020

[9] Voici à quoi ressemble le formulaire-type pour l’enregistrement des clients horeca

[10] COVID-19 : au plus près de la vérité. Confinement, Dr Pascal Sacré, mondialisation.ca, 22 juillet 2020

[11] Confinement strict, surcharge hospitalière et surmortalité, PDF, mai 2020

[12] Opération COVID-19: Tester le degré de soumission des peuples, Dr Pascal Sacré, mondialisation.ca, 26 avril 2020

[13] Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae, Wikipédia, “Of all the peoples of Gaul, the Belgians are the bravest”, often translated into French as “Of all the peoples of Gaul, the Belgians are the bravest.

[14] Politique et corruption à l’OMS, Dr Pascal Sacré, mondialisation.ca, 12 janvier 2010, réédité le 14 avril 2020

[15] Et les conflits d’intérêts, on en parle ?, 5 mai 2020.

[16] La Stratégie du choc : la montée d’un capitalisme du désastre (titre original : The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) est un essai socio-politique altermondialiste publié en 2007 par la journaliste canadienne Naomi Klein. Wikipédia

[17] MK Abus rituels et Contrôle Mental, Alexandre Lebreton, éditions Omnia Veritas, 2016

[18] Stratégie du choc : comment le FMI et l’Union européenne bradent la Grèce aux plus offrants, Agnès Rousseaux, Bastamag, 20 juin 2013

[19] Quand la fin justifie les moyens : stratégie du choc et état d’urgence, 29 novembre 2016

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The WEF was Instrumental in Closing Down the World Economy and Now They Want to Revamp It

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has just made a grandiose discovery and declared (21 July 2020) under the alarming title “This is now the world’s greatest threat – and it’s not coronavirus”. The superb discovery is listed as “Affluence is the biggest threat to our world, according to a new scientific report.” (See this).

This “shocking and revealing news” is the “main conclusions of a team of scientists from Australia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, who have warned that tackling overconsumption has to become a priority. Their report, titled Scientists’ Warning on Affluence, explains that “affluence is the driver of environmental and social impacts, and therefore, true sustainability calls for significant lifestyle changes, rather than hoping that more efficient use of resources will be enough.”

So as to better understand the context of the WEF statement, lets backtrack a bit. On June 3, 2020, WEF founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab, presented what the WEF and all the elites and oligarchs behind it call The Great Reset:

“The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions… Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

Is starting to feel like it’s every man for himself, Is possible that right now, a global crisis is upon us, Without even knowing… And the virus may not be the biggest threat, but the crisis that follows, Everyday goods that keep us alive will be gone, I’m talking, food, fresh water, medicine, clothes, fuel…

According to author Matthew Ehret-Kump, the gathering included elites from “the IMF, World Bank, UK, USA, corporate and banking sector” all looking “to take advantage of COVID-19 to shut down and “reset” the world economy under a new operating system entitled the Green New Deal.”

Gary Barnett writes on July 16, 2020

“…This is the most dangerous time in the history of man. The seriousness of this plot cannot be underestimated. It is not due to any threat of conventional war or nuclear decimation, it is based on the fact that this is a psychological war waged by psychopaths against all mankind, and it is being advanced by a small group of monsters that have taken control of the minds of the masses through long-term indoctrination and policies meant to breed dependency.”

And,

“Fear is the new weapon of mass destruction, not because it is legitimate, but because the people have lost all will to be free, have lost all ability to think, and seek shelter and comfort as a collective herd only capable of existence in a society that is based on totalitarian rule.”

And finally,

“Longing for freedom without the courage to claim it, is a meaningless endeavor, as any real demand by the masses would leave the governing elite naked and afraid. All that is necessary to achieve liberty is to want it, and this alone can defeat tyranny.”

Gary Barnett also quotes from “The Politics of Obedience” by Étienne de la Boétie:

“He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.”

Well, the WEF finally got it right. Affluence and all that creates affluence and ever bigger affluence, widens the gap, rich-poor – and creates abject poverty, misery, famine and death.

According to the World Food Program (WFP), without covid, every year some 9 million people die from famine or hunger-related diseases. The WFP projects the number of people facing acute food insecurity (IPC/CH 3 or worse) stands to rise to 265 million in 2020, up by 130 million from the 135 million in 2019, as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19 (see this). Many – too many – of these people may die.

Death by famine is murder, according to Jean Ziegler, Swiss activist and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

The WEF calls for a Great Reset.

Yes, a Reset is needed, but not WEF-style.

A Reset people-style is more what can save Mother Earth and all her sentient beings, including humanity. A Reset could start with a global Debt Jubilee (debt forgiveness), so that people who can no longer pay their rent, their mortgages because due to a Deep Dark State elite-made covid-crisis they have lost their jobs, their income, their entire livelihood – debt forgiveness, so that this ever-growing segment of people will be able to keep their shelter and hopefully their sanity.

The WEF calls for “lifestyle changes”, but fails to explain what it means, and who has to change their lifestyle – the rich or the poor? While the WEF preaches for the Great Global Reset, more justice, more environmental protection, capitalism for “stakeholders”, rather than just for shareholders – RT reports that due to the covid-depression, unemployment and poverty, in the US alone, 28 million home evictions loom. And that’s probably just the beginning. Compare this with the 10 million of the 2008 / 2009 also man-made crisis.

There are currently about half a million people homeless in the US. The European Union (EU) doesn’t publish these figures, but they may be at least as high and likely higher. At the same time there are 1.5 million apartments empty in the US – about three times as many as there are homeless. Add to this the 28 million homes that may become empty in the coming months.

The 2008 crisis may be an indication. It took the banks many years to sell the 10 million “vacated” homes – and many are still not sold and rot on the rotten free market. In the bottomless depression of this covid-disaster it is even unlikelier that the banks will sell their brutally confiscated loot.

How does that fit Mr. Schwab’s, the WEF’s narrative? If the WEF was serious with the grandiose Reset for more justice, they would put the money where their mouth is – and generate the funds necessary to help the jobless to keep their homes, bail them out, or ask for a government supported debt and rent forgiveness, for all who are unemployed, with a temporary basic income of, say US$ 2,000 / month, for as long as it takes to put the economy back to work. “Temporary” – because a permanent basic income creates dependence, enslaves, and discourages the capitalist system even further from creating jobs, and use instead Artificial Intelligence (AI). This would cost a fraction from what the FED has already spent to bail out banks and financial institutions – according to the WaPo of 15 April 2020 (see this), more than 6 trillion.

In the meantime, and since mid-April, with the looming increase in corporate and banking failures, this figure may have doubled or tripled. But so what. It’s just fiat money, new debt, never to be paid back. Under this wicket principle of bailing out the rich, the FED could easily throw in another, say, 5 trillion and bail out the poor, take away a big portion of their misery, with, say a US$ 2,000 monthly minimum income for several years. Now more than ever, QE (Quantitative Easing) is of the order. Until the economy can walk again. This, in the medium to long term, would pay back by a multiple in terms of benefits to the US macro-economy. People without anxiety, without fear, would be productive and could help in reshaping the covid-destroyed economy.

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By the way, this principle of bailing out the poor applies to every capitalist country, where the first to suffer are the poor, the job-dependent people. It might also apply in developing countries, where often up to 70% of the economy is made up of the informal sector, paying the unemployed a minimum wage, regardless whether they had a contractual work arrangement or not.

Though, it doesn’t look like Mr. Schwab, alias the WEF, has this kind of justice is mind.

The amassing of extreme affluence is only possible because the west is living in a turbo-capitalist system, or in a neoliberalist scheme which is slowly but surely turning into a form of economic neo-fascism with the political consequences that will likely follow. As an example, in the two months from mid-March to mid-May 2020 – so far the worst corona crisis months, when the world was basically shut down, when unemployment and accompanying misery and famine soared to proportions never known in mankind’s history – the billionaires in the US have added another 434 billion dollars to their wealth.

Again, yes, the WEF has got it right – even saying that this has to change; the world needs a better-balanced socioeconomic system and needs to do more to protect the environment and Mother Earth altogether. Of course. Nice words. But what’s the WEF’s agenda behind the words?

A legitimate question: What is the WEF and who is behind the WEF? – What makes the WEF so omni-powerful?

The WEF was created in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, a German engineer and economist. As of this day, he is at the helm of this powerful club of the rich. The WEF was created and is as of this day an NGO. It was founded as a European Management Forum, with Headquarters in Cologny, a lush suburb of Geneva, Switzerland. Its legal status is a foundation, a mere NGO (see this).

The WEF has absolutely no legal international status or role – for example, as the United Nations does – that would allow the WEF to issue edicts and rules to the world on how it should be run and behave, let alone exert control over the world’s population and decide over the fate of some 7.8 billion people (UN est. 2020 population).

Yet, that’s precisely what the WEF pretends to do – and that already for at least two or three decades. And most of the western leaders – and many non-westerners of the 193 UN members – accept the WEF as a World Authority on economic policy and political thinking. They put the WEF’s authority above that of the United Nations.

Why? – Does anybody ever ask how an NGO, the WEF, assumes for itself the power to stand above the UN, above every nation in the world and dictates as a proxy for its corporate-finance-military complex membership, basically who is to live and who is to die, by imposing a globalized economic system that has brought only abject misery to the majority of people? – And will continue to do so, if we don’t stop it.

Similar statements could be made about the G7 and the G20 – they are not even NGOs, but merely clubs of the self-declared richest and most powerful nations in the world. They too, not unlike the WEF which works hand-in-hand with the Great “Gs”, have taken over the role of the UN – to make world economic and political policy. They pretend to call the shots over war and peace. In their elitist capitalist interest, of course. Not in the interest of the people.

This is totally illegitimate and extremely dangerous.

Now, who is behind the WEF? Who are the members and players of the WEF?

They are the cream of the crop of the elite, they are the very Affluent the WEF claims are the problem, they are those who they pretend have to ‘adjust’ so that the world can continue functioning – in a “sustainable” way. – “Sustainable”, the omni-present term everywhere, overused and abused, exactly by those who chastise the world of living in unsustainable ways. They are corporate and financial magnates, former and present politicians, Hollywood personalities – and more. They are the front window of the Deep Dark State.

They are the ones, attempting to introduce the “New Green Deal”, a deviation from the current consumption based economy, to an economy based on “green” capitalism; electric cars (largely based on hydrocarbon-produced electricity), and GMO-based bio (sic) agriculture, “clean” Artificial Intelligence (AI), “green cities”, where workers (not yet wiped out by AI) cannot afford to live – and more of that sort of thing. A Green Agenda is good propaganda. It sells easily to the populace, who doesn’t ask any questions.

Do we all grasp it? – The WEF – a little NGO of a suburb of Geneva, Switzerland – acts above the UN – and has been doing so for a while. And We, The People, let it happen. We protest a bit every January when the WEF clan meets in the luxurious resort of Davos, Switzerland, to tell us what’s up their sleeves for the future of mankind and for the world. But that’s all.

Then they go “home” and disappear behind the curtain again for a year, or so we believe, and then appear again with new ideas and rules and ways to impose behavior for the 99.999% of the people of the world. And, again, this little rich NGO, without any international legal status, keeps acting like God, way above and beyond the United Nations, which, in turn, was created by nations of the world to arbitrate over conflicts for peace. Doing nothing against the WEF, letting it be and taking ever more power, means as much as accepting heir rule – it means approving of its illegitimate status as a supreme world authority.

It seems that’s what we have been doing, lately – to the detriment of the world economy, harming the social fabric of our multicultural world, as imperfect as it may be – but it has a legitimate existence. Now that existence has been shred to pieces – yes, largely by the WEF and its cohorts and cronies, WHO, the Johns Hopkins University School of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They are behind the corona disaster. Event 201 is the last testimony to this effect.

They are supported by a myriad of other world scene actors, and extended arms of the affluent oligarchs and institutions, who pretend to rule the world, the IMF, World Bank, FED, the globe’s pharma imperia, private banking and financial institutions, i.e. Wall Street and its international affiliates, and not to forget the world’s war industrial complex.

The Lost Ways is a far–reaching book with chapters ranging from simple things like making tasty bark-bread-like people did when there was no food-to building a traditional backyard smokehouse… and many, many, many more!

The Global Destruction that the WEF now wants to fix by a Global Reset, WEF style, has been – and is being caused – by an invisible enemy, a virus, a corona virus, the same that is at the base of most flue outbreaks. The western media trumpet messages of corona fear 24 x 7 into our brains, so it must be true. But, it ain’t true at all.

The corona pandemic, what is now called COVID-19, had been carefully planned, probably for decades, at least since the 2010 Rockefeller Report, which outlines the first phase of this global destruction that we are experiencing now “The Lockstep Scenario” (p. 18 of the 2010 Rockefeller Report).

The Event 201 was the last and final important exercise, a corona pandemic simulation and its consequences – 65 million deaths in 18 months and a devastated stock market, bankruptcies no end – was the “dry run” before the outbreak, first in China, and a few weeks later throughout the world. This event was co-sponsored by the WEF, the Bill Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.

A number of today’s key actors in maintaining the momentum afloat – also called the Fear Indoctrination – were also present at Event 201, such as WHO, UNICEF, the IMF, the World Bank – and representatives from various UN agencies. The UN is fully complicit in this criminal and genocidal endeavor.

It shows that the UN has no teeth; a world body created after WWII, …. “The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 after the Second World War by 51 countries committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights” (see this).

This just shows that that the WEF, a little NGO, has more power than the UN, and has in fact coopeted the UN and many of its agencies to follow the dictate of the elitist oligarchs, or the Dark Deep State – that stand behind the WEF.

Why do we allow it?

This Great Global Reset that the WEF predicts and plans, is of course driven by another agenda than the “Good of The World”. These self-nominated masters of the universe, some of the very same affluent people the WEF claims are the biggest risk for humanity, are now turning around and giving away their riches so that there will be a better equilibrium in the distribution of Mother Earth’s wealth, more justice, more respect for human rights, less consumerism and – an absolute protection of the environment and of unrenewable resources? – Not likely.

To the contrary, as has already been proven. The planned collapse of the world economy has created unfathomable misery by bankruptcies mostly of small and medium enterprises, to be gobbled up by large corporations – and by syphoning off what was left of the social safety nets in the Global North as well as the Global South. Another enormous shift of resources from the bottom to the top – as testified by the 434 billion dollars additional riches of US billionaires (see above) – and this does not include the sum of additional billionaire-wealth around the globe.

Having said that affluence is the biggest threat to the world, without going into any details, the WEF argues that “true sustainability will only be achieved through drastic lifestyle changes” and calls “for a great reset of capitalism in the wake of the pandemic.”

An excerpt from “In the Stranglehold of the Untruth”, by Gerd Reuther, Rubikon News – (translated from German) – may put the WEF’s agenda in yet another perspective:

“A “pandemic“ of overwhelming false-positive test results, mask obligation without an increase of infection risk, Covid “mass-outbreaks” without sick people, gigantic money transfers without compensation. Corona made possible what no counter reformation or counter information was able to achieve. How many Covid-deaths did you know personally? Probably not many. In the meantime, however, almost everyone knows someone who went crazy. Societies have bypassed the planet on the way to the abyss.”

We can only speculate what the Great Reset could mean for the world’s citizens. Let’s give it a try. This is what the affluent oligarchs through their corporate, finance, pharma and military affiliation, may intend to impose on the “big masses below them”.

• To achieve the WEF’s Great Global Reset, number one is maintaining or increasing the cadence of the ongoing false fear propaganda and lies, as described above by Gerd Reuther in Rubikon.News. This has to be a relentless effort and should not be a problem, as all western Anglo-American propaganda and news outlets and their other-languages affiliates are fully coopted.
• Another one or more lockdowns with masks and social distancing, confinement, to further diminishing human contact through isolation; a “masked society” loses self-esteem, the fear and anxiety lower people’s immune system, making them vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, especially the mask obligation which has people breathe their own highly toxic CO2 –anything exceeding the level of 1,000 ppm CO2 is above tolerance – wearing a mask may increase inhaling CO2 to a rate of 10,000 ppm, or higher (see this).
• Less consumerism, through extreme austerity, low-wage work, gigantic unemployment to continue, causing insecurity, anxieties and fear for survival, thus, preparing the populace’s mindset for more manipulation, more enslavement – and desperately waiting for THE VACCINE.
• Replacing the fruit of work, namely wages for proud labor, by a universal basic income (UBI), creating a dependence on the system and demolishing human work and what’s left of self-esteem.
• The WEF also calls for “stakeholder capitalism”. Anybody knows what it means? Google describes it as follows: “Stakeholder capitalism is a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. … Under this system, a company’s purpose is to create long-term value and not to maximize profits and enhance shareholder value at the cost of other stakeholder groups.”

In other words, this would be a drastic and welcome change from the neoliberal corporate shareholder capitalism, if by “other stakeholder groups” the common consumer is meant. Highly unlikely. – More likely is that long-term benefits (profits) should accumulate more equally to shareholders, as every shareholder is also a stakeholder. But not every stakeholder is a shareholder. Consumers, common people, are left behind.

• And finally, there is a strong drive to reduce the world population; Bill Gates is one of the key drivers and has said so openly on various occasions. One of his most flagrant admissions is his TED Talk in 2010, “Innovating to Zero”, in California, where he says nonchalantly, “if we are doing a real good job, we may be able to reduce “the world population by 10% to 15% – see this. This eugenics agenda fits the WEF agenda perfectly. Less people, fewer resources. Those that remain, can be more abundantly shared among the beautiful and powerful.

To close this essay on the WEF’s Great Global Reset, let me repeat the quote from “The Politics of Obedience” by Étienne de la Boétie: “He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.”

If you’re interested in learning more old remedies, you should read The Lost Book Of Remedies.

The physical book has 300 pages, with 3 colored pictures for every plant and for every medicine.It was written by Claude Davis, whose grandfather was one of the greatest healers in America. Claude took his grandfather’s lifelong plant journal, which he used to treat thousands of people, and adapted it into this book.

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Any serious study of the relevant scholarly literature reveals at least four possible paths to “human extinction”: nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G and biodiversity collapse.

Moreover, as I have documented previously, under cover of a virus  labeled COVID-19, the global elite is conducting a coup against humanity.

That is, by bombarding us with fear-mongering propaganda to focus our attention on the ‘virus’, the capacity of virtually all people, including activists, to devote attention to the coup, and to resist it, has been effectively eliminated.

Unfortunately, it has also meant that, despite documented evidence of  the threat to human survival, it is even more difficult than usual to get people to focus on this point.

This means that engaging people to consider the evidence for themselves is extremely difficult: it is easier to live in delusion, reassured by elite-driven narratives promulgated through education systems and the corporate media which effectively convey the message that there is either no serious cause for concern (yet) or, perhaps, that the timeframe allows for an adequate official response in due course.

In either case we, as individuals or groups, do not really need to do anything differently; going along with the elite-driven narrative, including timeframe, will ensure our survival.

This presentation PROOVES WITHOUT DOUBT that America is in for a major fight that will put you and your family in the firing line, literally… So make sure you watch this presentation while it’s still online…

Of course, as those paying attention to the evidence already know, being obedient to the elite-driven narrative is a recipe for extinction. We have already exceeded 2°C above the pre-industrial temperature, the ongoing and rapid deployment of 5G will be catastrophic, biodiversity is already collapsing (and will be seriously accelerated by the rising temperature and deployment of 5G) – for just the latest in the ongoing stream of disasters, see ‘Calls for swift action as hundreds of elephants die in Botswana’s Okavango Delta’– and, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear war is now a greater possibility that at any previous time in human history.

In this article I would like to explain why people are so terrified of the truth and what we can do about it so that an effective response to each of these threats can be implemented (assuming, problematically, that there is enough time).

Why are Most Human Beings so Terrified?

Virtually all human beings are terrified and they are terrified for the same reason: the child-raising process that sociologists like to label ‘socialization’ should be more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’. Why? Because from the moment of a child’s birth, parents, teachers, religious leaders and adults generally regard themselves as responsible for terrorizing the child into obedience of the commands, rules, conventions and laws that define the nature of permissible behaviour in their society.

This means that provided the child responds obediently to parental (or other adult) commands, obeys any rules imposed (by the parents, teachers and religious figures in the child’s life), learns all relevant social conventions for their society and, ultimately, obeys the law, they are allowed to live, recognized as compliant citizens, in their society.

Unfortunately, from society’s viewpoint, evolutionary pressures over vast time scales have led to each human individual being given Self-will to seek out and fulfill their own unique destiny: evolutionary pressures do not predispose any individual to obey the will of another for the simple reason that obedience has no evolutionary functionality.

Consequently, it takes enormous terrorization during childhood to ensure that the child surrenders their Self-will at the alter of obedience. To achieve this outcome and largely unknowingly, parents use a large range of behaviours from the three categories of violence that I have labeled ‘visible’ violence, ‘invisible’ violence and ‘utterly invisible’ violence. See ‘Why Violence?’ and‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

A common element of this terrorization is that the child is frequently threatened with, and/or actually suffers, violence for being ‘disobedient’. Of course, this violence, assuming it is even recognized as such (given that ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence are just that to virtually everyone), is invariably labeled ‘punishment’ so that we can delude ourselves that our violence is not harmful. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

This means that virtually every single individual has been successfully terrorized into being submissively obedient. And, fundamentally, this obedience includes accepting the elite-driven narrative delivered by education systems and the corporate media in relation to issues crucial to human survival.

So despite our preference for believing otherwise, those individuals in our societies who survive the education system capable of thinking for themselves, or even of ‘clear thinking’, are rare. And then they must also survive (preferably by refusing to access it) the propaganda (that is, lies) presented as ‘news’ by the corporate media. Given that another outcome of being terrorized throughout childhood means that most people are very gullible, perceiving lies is a huge challenge in itself.

Of course, this powerless imperative to believe the lies we are told and to behave obediently in response is always reinforced by the fear of violence (‘punishment’), including the fear of social ostracism for resisting elite narratives, but it is also reinforced by other fears: for example, the fear that makes people feel powerless to respond in any meaningful way, the fear of changing their behaviour, and the fear of feeling out of control of their own destiny. After all, if extinction is imminent and we are to avert it, we will need to do some fundamental things – including thinking and behaving – very differently. But we are not allowed to think or behave differently, are we? That would be disobedient.

This can be readily illustrated. When a young child does not get what they need, the child will have an emotional reaction. This will always include fear, it will probably include anger and it will probably include sadness, among other feelings. However, almost invariably, parents behave in a manner intended to prevent the child from having their emotional response (and using this information in formulating the appropriate behavioural response in the circumstance). They do not listen to the child while they express their feelings. Instead, they act to make the child suppress awareness of their feelings.

At its simplest and apparently most benign, the parent might comfort the child in the misguided belief that this is helpful. But it is not, unless you want a submissively obedient child. See ‘Comforting a Baby is Violent’.

Another simple and common way in which we suppress the emotional awareness and, hence, capacity for emotional expression of a child is by giving them food or a toy to distract them from how they feel. The fundamental outcome of this act is that we unconsciously ‘teach’ the child to seek food and/or material items as substitutes for feeling and acting on how they feel. But this is absolutely disastrous.

The net result of this behaviour is that virtually all people in industrialized societies have become addicted to material consumption, and the direct (including military), structural and ecological violence that makes excessive consumption in these societies possible. All so that we can suppress how we really feel. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

And, therefore, the very notion of substantially reducing consumption – a central part of any strategy for human survival by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production and transport, checking the collapse of biodiversity by halting the destruction of habitat such as rainforests, denying financial incentive to deploy technology for 5G, ending wars (and the threat of nuclear war) for resources – becomes ‘unthinkable’.

Because the fundamental imperative of materialist societies is ‘Consume!’ (so that corporations can profit). And we do not have the emotional power to disobey that imperative because deep in our unconscious remains the childhood terror of resisting the offered food or toy and insisting on expressing how we feel and behaving powerfully in accord with that. It is far simpler to just put something more in our mouth or use one of our ‘toys’. Who wants to feel scared, sad or angry instead?

In essence, the individual who has been terrorized into obedience is no longer capable of thinking for themself and then behaving in accord with their own Self-will. This means that imperatives of the global elite – mediated through its agents such as governments, education systems and the corporate media and enforced by legal systems, the police and prison cells (see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’) – are readily obeyed by the vast bulk of the human population.

And because the global elite is insane – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – this obedience means that we are submitting to the elite coup and complying with its imperatives that are fast-tracking humanity to extinction on four separate paths, as noted above.

To reiterate: At this most critical moment in human history, when a coup is being conducted against us and four separate threats to human existence and all life on Earth require our engaged attention and powerful response, it is almost impossible to get people to even acknowledge these threats, let alone to consider the evidence and act strategically in response.

Which means that profoundly altering our approaches to parenting and education, so that we produce powerful individuals, is critical to any strategy to fight for human survival.

Conclusion

Given that submissive obedience is the primary behavioural characteristic of all ‘good citizens’, it is going to take a monumental effort to defeat the elite coup and reverse the tide. This is because most common human behaviours – from parenting to consumption habits – have been shaped to serve elite interests, and it is these behaviours that must change.

Of course, this is also why lobbying elite agents – such as governments and corporations – cannot work. Apart from the fact that they exist to serve elite interests and obey elite directives accordingly (rather than respond to grassroots pressure which they function superbly to dissipate), governments and corporations cannot meaningfully impact the crises that confront us.

That power is ours but we must use it, and deploy it strategically.

Is starting to feel like it’s every man for himself, Is possible that right now, a global crisis is upon us, Without even knowing… And the virus may not be the biggest threat, but the crisis that follows, Everyday goods that keep us alive will be gone, I’m talking, food, fresh water, medicine, clothes, fuel…

USA needs help. Let’s face it: our democratic institutions aren’t working well; our president is behaving like a depraved, spiteful monarch; our police, with almost 19,000 independent units nationwide, are unmanageable; our unprecedented social and economic divides are growing; the health of our citizens is declining; new digital platforms are sources of unprecedented hate and threats; our media is so polarized, we don’t know whom to believe. (Then there’s Covid-19.)

Across the globe, wherever a nation is in crisis—by hurricane or earthquake, mounting disease or plunging poverty, military attack or teetering government— whether requested or not, others are alerted and assistance from abroad mobilized. The U.S. (as projected by American media) is in the forefront of concern for others (except those on its sanctions list— e.g. North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Yemen). Genuine humanitarian aid is dispatched from NGOs and private, religious and government agencies. Assistance flows in cash, in materials and advisors, observers and medical experts (along with military intelligence and troops where it’s determined to be advantageous to American policy).

Today America itself is a nation under internal threat and in dire need. Along with signs that the U.S.healthcare system and its leaders cannot control the Covid-19 disease, more examples of police brutality are exposed. Underpinning and exacerbating both ailments is political instability (although few would identify it as such).

If Americans will not admit that they’re engulfed by this unprecedented crisis, outside observers note it with growing alarm. Countries close their borders to Americans while the pandemic spirals out of control. Across the world, people are questioning the very idea of American democracy. Longtime U.S. allies are flummoxed by its unpredictable foreign policy. Even before these multiple crises emerged, commentators pondered our teetering democracy.

We’ve had flawed, embarrassing state primary elections in Georgia and Wisconsin; we had the Democratic National Committee interrupt the presidential primaries to install its preferred candidate Joe Biden. Public doubts are increasing about how November’s election can be legitimately conducted. Every week presents us with more fears about this democracy. Management of the pandemic is undermined when the CDC, one of America’s most highly regarded health agencies, is bypassed by a White House order to divert medical data to a branch of Homeland Security. Most recently we have unidentified paramilitaries circumventing state and local authorities to confront protesters, first in D.C. now in Portland, with threats of similar directives to other cities.

This slide towards greater political instability looks unstoppable.

Another country experiencing a similar crisis will surely be the object of outside assistance, or interference. There’ll be offers of economic assistance, dispatch of intelligence advisors; international peacekeepers might be sent; a U.N. Security Council resolution would be proposed.

But who will help America? Who could? In 2007 Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez donated heating oil to American families struggling through the winter months. Cuba’s offer to help early in the Covid-19 crisis was spurned, (while from its side Washington blocked Chinese assistance to Cuba, interfered with a shipment to France, and essentially commandeered a Chinese Covid-19 supplies meant for Canada).

I can think of just three states—Israel, Australia and the U.K.– who might offer assistance. Israel is a dependable training site for American police, and a highly valued intelligence service for the U.S. Australiamaintains an opaque but firm military alliance with America, readily falling in with the Pentagon’s needs. On intelligence sharing, the U.K is a solid partner. Although one wonders how much economic assistance England could offer, preoccupied with its own pandemic. Plans for new U.S-U.K. trade agreements to thwart the European Union are delayed. As for guidance from England on democracy, its parliamentary system differs markedly from U.S. federalism and few British understand America’s election processes. The White House occupant might reach out to Russia; but that would raise other problems, even among Republicans.

What about India? Historically beset by discord between two major ethnic groups, multi-cultural India might be a model. But the rise of Hindu nationalism under Modi has been fiercely uncompromising. Advice from India is out.

Maybe South Africa would step up to guide us. The U.S. backed the anti-apartheid struggle there, and South Africa’s victory established an exemplary racial reconciliation system.

Scanning the rest of Africa, the Middle East, and South America, we find few candidates who might help us.

But wait! We have billionaires, lots of them—609 out of 2,208 globally.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg and his peer Apple’s Tim Cook responded to Governor Cuomo’s call for help during New York’s Covid-19 crisis, and George Soros promises more support for Black Americans’ struggle for justice. Some very wealthy Americans offer to pay more taxes.

The alternative to all these solutions is: people in the streets.

U.S. stocks and bonds are at all time highs in a relentless ‘melt-up’ that seems to ignore anything you can throw at it: Iran, Hong Kong or the Trump’s war on China mean nothing. It’s the longest bull run in history, surpassing its 10th year in December.

How long can this go on? …and are we at the peak yet?

Certainly, it doesn’t comfort anyone that some of the most respected investors of all times have turned to prolific writers on the subject. Ray Dalio, for one, seems to be on a march to prove everyone that we are at the precipice of an epic social meltdown.

John Templeton famously warned of the four most dangerous words in investing (“this time it’s really different”) in 1933. Since then, people couldn’t stop, but trying to come up with reasons why it is.

So is it this time? Well, it’s not impossible. Even John Templeton admits that when people say things are different, 20% of the time they are right.

It is hard to put finger on anything systemic that could cause the next recession. Instead, something much more sinister is lurking under the surface — the colossal levels of cheap money in the system. All this easy money is looking for home, being pushed into all asset classes in investors’ desperate search for yield. Markets are ‘melting up’, propped by the free money. It is sinister because we don’t control it, nor do we understand it — we don’t have a historical precedent for it.

Feeding off the historically low rates, corporate debt is up 50% from the 2008 levels. All of this debt is funded by insurers, pension funds and other institutional investors who have been forced to push their money into private markets because the rates on treasuries and other government debt are so low that they simply can’t fulfill obligations to their customers.

As a result, corporate debt is cheap, very cheap. Tesla’s $1.8 billion high-yield bond just touched its full face value again this week, meaning demand for corporate debt is surpassing all expectations again, and companies can fund their growth at near zero rates.

It is a C-suite dream come true: management is using cheap borrowed money to fund buybacks and acquisitions, further propelling market prices to all time highs. All this does, of course, increase risks of a sudden deep collapse should there be a change in rates pushing thousands of zombie companies into delinquency in what could become a self-feeding downward spiral.

But how could this happen?

There is nothing structural that could cause such a reversal. We are all hyper-alert to any signals that the next recession is coming. The 2007/08 crisis has left us with deep scars, and thanks to its cataclysmic nature, it was also a great topic in a new world dominated by the rise of social media. This near paranoia feeds through all levels of society, so that regulators and authorities feel acute need to prevent and stop any wrongdoing.

Nor does the economy show any signs of overheating. Yes, it was the longest, but also the slowest bull market in history. In FED’s chair Jerome Powell own words: “There’s nothing that’s really booming that would want to bust, … ”. For now, FED has absolutely no reason to be concerned about inflation that would force it to start hiking. Wages simply can’t pick up despite low unemployment levels. Numbers show that jobs are being added in the lower-earning groups. Better and newer technology means that same amount of work can be done with fewer people, a phenomenon that is increasingly finding its way to higher-skill jobs. There is also the argument that consumers are more clever and less demanding: the mantra of the post-2008 age is less is more.

Yes, everything seems to be ticking along just nicely. But wait a minute.

A lot of that record corporate debt we’ve mentioned above comes from private investors: private equity groups and other institutional investors. Should things really go bad, delinquent companies would fall right back to private hands. What this means in theory is that even in case of a large public default, it shouldn’t get contagious, as it would stay on private books.

But that doesn’t solve anything, does it? When WeWork failed its IPO, it fell right back to Softbank’s hands. And what did they do? Print more money (Softbank is planning to issue $3 billion loan to mend WeWork’s failure).

More importantly, WeWork’s debacle shook the market to its core, not due to its size, but because of its structural significance. Private investments in venture capital have been the primary source of gains for large investors in the post-crisis years. In the era of free money, the creeping realization that the likes of WeWork and UBER may not be worth their ballooned valuations is troublesome because they were the last bastion of superior returns.

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So it’s different this time, but it is not. Crises are certain; they are inevitable like death and taxes because we are all driven by the crave to earn superior return. It is human to chase sensations. Last time it was the subprime mortgages and derivatives that no one understood; this time it is the tech sector.

We all needed some excitement after the depth of 2007/08, and the start-up economy gave us just that — the promise to create an infinitely more efficient and cleaner way of doing things, exchanging factories and steel for smartphones and abstract products.

It all went well until now. Companies like WeWork and UBER have become the religion of future, and people forgot to value them on the cold basis of profits & losses. They have freed themselves from the dryness of discounted cash flow to take the investors on a trip to forever, growing to billion-dollar valuations buoyed by private money.

Scarred by 2007/08, people are looking for the next big short; the next Collateralized Debt Obligation that could bring the market down. But there might not be one this time round. All crises are caused by some form of a market bubble; a moment when no price is too high, which eventually leads to a reversal and a downward spiral. WeWork, UBER and other utopian giants have infected markets with a profound belief that they are about to revolutionize world. Cash-burning giants with a zero cost of capital.

Their eventual (and unavoidable) collapse may prove to be systemic, dragging down the market, not because of their size (which is insignificant), but because investors will reprice the market, taking the promise of infinitely more efficient tomorrow out of the equation.

Ray Dalio’s dark prophecies may just be right: when the ‘dream companies’ (UBER, WeWork) fail to deliver on their promise, and the only way for pension funds to make good on the obligations is to chase debt, there might be a moment when investors say enough and began pulling their money out of the system, causing massive repricing and a surge in rates.

It would be impossible to time exactly when this happens, although Dalio seems to be trying to do just that — his fund is rumored to have bet $1.5B against the stock market in November.

We bring to the attention of our readers, this timely and incisive article by Radhika Tikku, Ph.D candidate at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

millions of people Worldwide are suffering from depression as a result of the global crisis which is affecting humanity.

The pandemic is based on fear. it’s a big lie.

People are being manipulated. They have accepted the consensus imposed upon them: economic collapse, social engineering, poverty, despair and depression.

The impact of this crisis on mental health is beyond description. The Anti-dote is “Reconnection”: Solidarity and Mass Social Action against this diabolical project.

***

Depression is a global problem that’s on the rise.

In Lost Connections, Johann Hari offers practical solutions for how to tackle it. Unfortunately, he misses the crucial point that personal sacrifice is the only way we can discover what makes us content.

Hari explores the sources behind depression and anxiety.

Knowing depression, Hari considers two main explanations for why depression occurs. Each blames the individual. One is that depression is the result of overactive imagination, or weakness of the will. The other is that depression is caused by brain malfunction. The brain’s chemistry is “off” and needs to regain equilibrium.

Hari scrutinizes both explanations. For the first, the sheer numbers suggest depression is not the effect of false consciousness, or that depressives lack fortitude. The second is not supported by science. So, Hari offers an alternative explanation.

Depression requires us to revise the way we live in the world. In fact, we should ask: What does it mean to be human?

Depression “is a normal response to abnormal life experiences”. [1] It’s like grief. Grief is human suffering that stems from loss. Grief is relational. We grieve the death of a loved one because we stand in a bi-directional relationship with them.

Death is not an abnormal life experience; however, modern culture has made it so.

We intellectually know that death occurs, but we do not live as if we ourselves will die.

We live out of joint with the world, as if we’re invincible. Thus, Hari’s alternative explanation is that depression is a social problem. Depression is the illness we contract when disconnected from sources of meaning. The disconnection is disorienting because we lose a part of ourselves. The antidote: Reconnection.

Hari offers sources from which we might draw meaning. All involve the individual changing life in substantive ways and becoming part of a community, closer to the soil. Our ancestors understood this fact better than we today.

Hari is skirting around the problem of the ego. It has practical, political consequences. Hari looks at ways to overcome depression, but he could have gone further: We have to change our relationship with ourselves. We need to talk about identity and how it negatively impacts us.

For instance, we’re not the “author” of our own stories. That slogan is false, because it doesn’t account for the way the world actually is. It cloisters us from the very freedom and choice we so desperately desire. Identity functions like a map; it aids in the navigation of familiar and uncharted territory.

But there’s no use clinging to a moth-eaten map, where a portion of the legend and other key elements are missing. Ancient scholars understood that a person’s identity can be self-imprisoning, which is why they advocated for the renunciation of the self. Thinking yourself the hero of your life—just like thinking yourself the victim of all that’s happened to you—can obscure real knowledge about yourself.

Hari doesn’t go that far. He should have touched on renunciation of the self and how to go about it.

Renunciation of self has three dimensions. First, it requires a relentless on-going engagement between self and the world. This includes ideas. Maps are always subject to revision or wholesale rejection given new conventions or interests.

For example, Hari’s case of the reconstitution of Kotti, the tenement housing in Berlin, leaves this out. When people create a neighbourhood to force recognition of prohibitive rental increases, Kotti’s struggle was not over when the German government made concessions. But living in community, if it is really about connection, is constant negotiation toward rejuvenation of the group and ideas presupposed in one’s identity as a group. Otherwise, old ideas remain in place, obstructing real constructive change.

There has to be a constant forsaking if the objective is really to discover what it means to be human because we live in a dehumanizing world, the full nature of which is not always evident.

It’s a risky prospect.

Second, renunciation involves personal sacrifice. You have to actually give something of value up to discover new ways of living and being in the world. Sacrifice is not valued, culturally. The global pandemic forces us to do without that which we believed to be essential. New social conditions compel us to decide what is essential and give up the rest.

Third, this matters to truth. Just because map-makers reconfigure maps in light of new conventions and interests doesn’t mean anything goes. Maps are accurate or they are not; they either aid in the wayfinding experience, or they don’t. Similarly, personal sacrifice can lead us to living life more truthfully, thriving instead of merely existing.

Hari’s conclusion about a return to community and to nature to heal ourselves, to become self-possessed in ways that were previously impossible, shouldn’t be surprising but it is. It has consequences that challenge other beliefs, some cherished.

There’s more to be said though because we have to confront ourselves to get past ourselves. The ancients understood this point on a much deeper level than us.