The author of “The Rise of the New Normal Reich” joins Chris to dig into the system that seems bent on destroying civilized life as we now know it. They also discuss his book and the proclamation of the “New Normal” that went with the initial Covid propaganda blitzkrieg in March of 2020, the global lockdowns, the suspension of constitutional rights, mask mandates, censorship, and the segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated.”
And when all is said and done, they discuss how the systems operate and why they seem to promote the mass psychosis infecting our world.
Don’t miss this important video tonight, June 9, 7 p.m., EST. Here at Peak Prosperity.
Editor’s Note: There is no Part 2 for this episode.
Having just finished his book I am very much looking forward to this conversation as it is likely to be a great one, especially given Hopkins talent as a political satirist!
I really enjoyed his consent factory. Keep forgetting to subscribe on substack. Now if only I’d get enough time to ready my rather lengthy “read next” list!
I currently read CJHopkins email letter updates. I am also a Solari subscriber and through CAF I was introduced to CJ Hopkins. I love what he has to say. With so much passion for humanity, he does not shy away from stupidity. I have to admit I have not read the books he has written that are on my list
This was everything I hoped it would be! Loved the conversation and additional insights that can only come from dialogue. Well done and more like this please!
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That was an awesome four course meal, I’m going to loosen my belt now, lay back in a chair, and attempt to digest what I just listened to.
I don’t expect to have a synopsis before the weekend - but I remember it being quite filling…
Chris states, “But he decoded that phrase that money is the root of all evil to say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Money’s neutral. It’s a it’s a thing. But you have to take the whole phrase, which is for the love of money, is the root of all evil, which means it’s our relationship to it.”
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who clearly pinned the tail on the market place merchant donkeys in his Parable of the Madman, published in 1882.
"Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” – As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? – Thus they yelled and laughed.
“Whither is God?” he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers.
But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us – for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.] In the parable the madman asks the market place merchants. “How could we drink up the sea?” - By shamelessly filling the sea with plastic and pollution. “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?” - Nuclear weapons. [And] “Unchain Earth from its sun?” - It is the sun that is the organizing principle in this solar system. It is also a metaphor for God, who is and has been the ultimate authority and organizing principle for life on Earth and the cosmos since primitive times. The Earth itself is the unifying symbol and principle for all life on the planet as seen in photos from space - Trans-humanism removes “God” as does the market place merchants by making everything a cynical unit of production for objectified people, now called consumers, where form is no longer sacred and made by the Creator. Instead it is de-sacredized under mass production where uniqueness is lost under microscopes and in labs and extreme arrogance of people who nothing of humility and limits.
Imo Ideological Capitalism Is A Regional Phenomenon, And Is Losing Its Mojo
This was an intriguing conversation, and it provoked some thoughts.
It’s not clear to me that ideological capitalism is as global as both Chris and CJ assume. It seems it is global to us because we are looking at it from inside the bubble where ideological capitalism is nearly total, so we are looking out at the world as if from within a tinted bubble, an ideologically tinted bubble, that causes us to see that tint everywhere in the world we look. But I have been reading a lot that originates outside our Western European-North American ideological assumptions and I see something different. I see resistance to the effort to make ideological capitalism globally ubiquitous, and rejection of the project.
Right now we have, for example, India telling the collective West to go pound sand, and Turkey moving away (ever so gingerly) from slavishly following DC’s lead. We have Russia advocating for a different ideological lens, one in which nations leave one another alone to develop and express their own values through their unique cultures; they call it a “fair world order.” Middle Eastern countries are not giving the leaders of the West the time of day; Southeast Asia is largely thumbing its collective nose at us.
There is arising across the globe the sense of newly awakened dignity and power, so that the ideological capitalists are less and less in the driver’s seat. Our leaders still think they are sanctioning the misbehavior of rogue nations, and seem stymied when their punishments don’t bear the fruit they expect. But the majority of countries are steadily cordoning off our ideologically captured countries, shutting us out of the emerging global order. The majority world doesn’t want to go down this road any further, and is turning away.
This gets to some of what I think drives the sense of emergency and hurry that we feel coming from the Western power brokers: they can see it slipping away, just when they thought they were about to complete their global project. And it’s largely because Russia refused to knuckle under, but instead has steadily reaffirmed her own culture internally, and developed robust anti-boarding strategies and tools to keep the globalists from taking over her ship of State. Now (after Afghanistan) the collective West’s ideologues need the win in Ukraine to keep momentum, and they know they’re losing it. The spell of the charade of inevitability is breaking.
I think ideological globalism is failing. It is now collapsing in on itself - which means, in on us. And from within our several Western countries it is also facing increasingly boldened opponents - internal subversive elements. It adds up to this: We are likely to become the last ditch targets of powerful, ideologically-captive persons and institutions that can’t win outside the West, and so turn their frustration and wrath at being thwarted inward.
They will double down to “decode” domestic culture and thought divergence at home, seeking some kind of a win to assuage their bruised narcissistic egos. The problem they have is that the more successful they are at decoding culture, the less remains over which to rule. Because as culture is broken down, social cohesion crumbles, community is atomized, and atomized individuals become internally incoherent.
It’s like crushing a clod of dirt in your fist: the more pressure applied, the more it breaks toward individual grains of sand, and the more successful the crushing effort, the more difficult it is to hold onto the individual grains. They slip through the fingers and nothing is left - exactly because all value is subjective.
Capitalist ideology - which seeks to reduce all things to their exchange value, and understands no value other than what is exchangeable - seeks, CJ argues, to “decode” culture, values, intellectual processes, even our bodies. I think he means that totalizing capitalism as an ideology seeks to reduce everything to its exchange value. But since value is subjective, the subjects of that process at some point lose all sense of value - personal, social, cognitive, cultural. They don’t care, because they don’t know how to care. Decode value and meaning and you decode the soul. Take out the human soul and all that’s left is a zombie, walking dead, brainless and purposeless. Zombies are lousy subjects, because atomized individuals are internally incoherent, therefore pointless (and finally impossible) to manage.
This system is dying. I don’t think there’s an off-ramp for Western societies as constituted. Indeed, collapse is the best that we can hope for; lingering on will be more devastating. What we need are alternative systems of meaning and value growing up alongside, and in the midst of this dying beast - like persistent weeds in a vegetable garden. Or (a more fruitful image), like vegetables that insist on producing fruit in arid soil that otherwise only grows weeds and brambles.
So I’m taking a lesson from Russia and reaffirming what is good and essential in my faith tradition, and using it to re-member what it means to be a whole and wholesome person. A person with a soul, with a spiritual life. Value is subjective; and I am reflectively choosing what to value; what to pay attention to. I am consciously and intentionally rejecting the tinted view offered by my State, which is death of all I hold dear about humankind, and instead am choosing to see myself, my neighbors, and the world through the tint of what I’ll call practical faith, by which I mean, traditional spiritual values and perspectives that must be practiced, must be embodied, must be exercised to have imbued value. Thoughts are insufficient, intentions fall to far short and have no value in themselves. But thoughts and intentions that feed and empower deeds that build up the soul - of an individual, of a community, of a people - those are valuable, and give meaning to my life.
Chris, you ask a great question here. What’s missing? Why the urgency? Are any of you familiar with Chan Thomas and the Adam and Eve story? Ben Davidson (Suspicious Observers on YouTube) has some interesting videos on the earth disaster cycle and it would appear that we are due for one in our lifetime.
I’m not saying I am 100% in agreement with all that, but it is a possible scenario that is worth considering. Cheers!
Excellent post VT. Worth a second read - after a second listen to the podcast of course! Regardless of where the world is headed, your point #3 is essential from my perspective.
Thanks VT. My friend James says (paraphrased) “show me your Faith, and I’ll show you my actions as a result of my Faith, and Faith without works is dead.”
An author and playwrite with his neurosis and ever present Marxist thought clouding reality. If this is where PeaK Prosperity has gone. I won’t be back. You should talk to Catherine Austin Fitts instead of this clown.
Well it seems Catherine Fitts is a fan of this guy. Maybe I should listen again. It’s just so difficult getting past his neurotic sounding voice and actions. ?
From your profile, you have been around less than a year here at PP. Is it wise to jump to this conclusion, with your limited exposure, to who and what this site is all about?