“Materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy.”
From " Janus: A Summing Up ", by Arthur Koestler, 1978
November 15, 2019 - India Has People. It Needs Consumers
Supply shocks are no longer the problem. Getting the economy on track needs ordinary people to spend.
March 25, 2020 - Is retail therapy ethical during the Coronavirus crisis ?
Buying a non-essential product will be more ethical than not buying it,
July 20, 2010 - C.S. Lewis and Materialism
Materialism’s first deadly legacy is the rejection of reason and objective truth. Nineteenth-century materialists depicted our thoughts as the irrational products of environment or heredity or brain chemistry. As a consequence, the intellectual classes became convinced that only the reality was material, and thus the only true explanations were reductive. If you wanted to explain a flower, you described its cell structure, not its beauty. If you wanted to explain human beings, you looked not to their greatest achievements, but to the raw materials that made them up. This sort of reductionism permeates contemporary society, from politics and the social sciences to literature and the performing arts.
Mean-spirited Western rationalism has had its day. Or should I say it’s Millenia.
It was a good run. Literally thousands of years of socially-engineered rejection of reason and objective truth. But, when you review the articles I’ve collected here, both above and below, it’s clear to see that things had changed, well prior to the latest socially-engineered rejection of reason and objective truth known as the “Covid crisis.”
Well before the “pandemic” that’s killing roughly the same amount of people as the seasonal flu does each year, people were turning away from materialism, and from the governments that are nothing but churches of the materialistic faith.
Down through time, the fierce effort to separate church and state has been a ruse. An organized effort toward a less spiritual populace.
When I was young, NASCAR had replaced religion for many people, with families putting signs up on their lawns to show which of the small “g” NASCAR gods they worshipped. For many others, the worship of religion, itself became a religion. A spiritual materialism where you ended up at something called a megachurch .
Thinking it through, here at the end of the ages-long scam, Materialism is a Ponzi scheme, a pyramidally-constructed confidence game in which one new convert went and converted others, to the benefit of those who got the whole thing going in the first place. You know, like Amway, but without borders. Just buy or consume something, anything .
The other day, I heard someone on NPR say “according to the ancients, there were four elements: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water.” I said to my wife “did you notice how they removed the 5th element, the Ether?”
They took the spirit out of everything, deliberately. Down through countless generations, they made the people live and act as if there were no spirit , until people forgot there ever was a spirit.
“In Stoic philosophy, pneuma (Greek: πνεῦμα) is the concept of the “breath of life,” a mixture of the elements air (in motion) and fire (as warmth).[1] Originating among Greek medical writers who locate human vitality in the breath , pneuma for the Stoics is the active, generative principle that organizes both the individual and the cosmos.[2] In its highest form, the pneuma constitutes the human soul (psychê), which is a fragment of the pneuma that is the soul of God. As a force that structures matter, it exists even in inanimate objects.[3]”
“The soul (a concept broader than the modern concept of mind) was believed to be a hot, fiery breath [pneuma] that infused the physical body. As a highly sensitive substance, pneuma pervades the body establishing a mechanism able to detect sensory information and transmit the information to the central commanding portion of the soul in the chest .”
Since then, the folks in charge have successfully moved the seat of consciousness from the heart to the brain, leaving humanity rudderless, and at the whim of any mental confidence trick played upon them.
“Finally, the Stoics denied Plato’s and Aristotle’s view that the soul has both rational and irrational faculties. Instead, they argued that the soul is unified and that all the faculties are rational concluding that the passions are the result not of a distinct irrational faculty but of errors in judgement .”
The stoics had it correct. The bloodline generational Satanists whose deviant philosophies were put forward, Plato and Aristotle, were both members of the distinct and separate race we call “Neanderthal”. They hijacked the system and hard-coded irrational behavior into something as natural as, well, breathing. It was an intellectual gymnastic that allowed anyone who wished to do anything they wished. Because “do what thou wilt” shall be the whole of the law.
But the game is slipping away from them. An article below from as early as 2006 is headlined " Some Consumers Rethink Materialistic Lifestyle ."
It’s not a lifestyle, it’s a philosophy. Materialism is a world view, a dark religion.
When I was young, the world insanely said “everyone buys a new car every year.” I can see their faces in my mind’s eye. My family wasn’t that way, but I knew it was What To Think.
There’s plenty of everything for everyone in this world. It’s only that a psychotic (and genetically-related) One Percent of the populace have hoarded 99% of everything that makes it seem like that’s not the case.
The great news is that, during this engineered “crisis”, we’ve witnessed a lot of amazing acts of generosity. And it’s even more inspiring to note that crime was dropping before the “crisis.” Charitable giving was rising higher and higher prior to the “crisis”. People were cooking and baking more, well prior to the “crisis”.
I’m using the term again and again in the hope that the reader might use reason and objective truth and consider if “crisis” is the most accurate word to describe this situation.
I think the world is going to continue to improve, and rapidly. I think there’s going to be a backlash to this engineered “crisis”. I don’t think the approval rating of “the government” or “science” are going to be going up, after this.
Mark my words, this social engineering gambit is only going to hasten the demise of those who have executed it.
Jeff Miller, Brooklyn, New York, May 4, 2020
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January 5, 2006 - Some Consumers Rethink Materialistic Lifestyle
February 8, 2006 - Materialism is bad for you , studies say
But Kasser argues that when people turn to material things to feel better, they compound the problem, because they seek experiences that “don’t do a very good job of meeting their psychological needs.”
Ed Diener, a University of Illinois psychology professor and happiness expert, said in an e-mail that he has found that “those who value material success more than they value happiness are likely to experience almost as many negative moods as positive moods, whereas those who value happiness over material success are likely to experience considerably more pleasant moods and emotions than unpleasant moods and emotions.”
September 10, 2007 - Do es Capitalism Make Us More Materialistic ?
July 20, 2010 - C.S. Lewis and Materialism
“You say the materialist universe is ‘ugly,’” wrote C. S. Lewis to a young skeptic in 1950. “…If you are really a product of the materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there?”
Nearly half-a-century later, Lewis’s question still resonates. Modern society continues to operate largely on the materialistic premises of such thinkers as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Yet few today feel at home in the materialist universe where God does not exist, where ideas do not matter, and where every human behavior is reduced to non-rational causes.
C. S. Lewis spent much of his life debunking the sterility of materialist thinking; and his insights are as relevant now as when they were first offered, because our culture remains dominated by four of materialism’s most deadly legacies.
Rejection of Reason and Truth
Materialism’s first deadly legacy is the rejection of reason and objective truth. Nineteenth-century materialists depicted our thoughts as the irrational products of environment or heredity or brain chemistry. As a consequence, the intellectual classes became convinced that only the reality was material, and thus the only true explanations were reductive. If you wanted to explain a flower, you described its cell structure, not its beauty. If you wanted to explain human beings, you looked not to their greatest achievements, but to the raw materials that made them up. This sort of reductionism permeates contemporary society, from politics and the social sciences to literature and the performing arts.
August 9, 2013 - Public doesn’t trust government
Mike Gousha says the latest Marquette Law School poll shows large numbers of people distrust government
October 6, 2014 - America doesn’t trust its experts anymore
March 26, 2019 - ‘Inspector Chen’ novelist says Chinese society crumbling under materialism
May 15, 2019 - Los Angeles, CA - Drop in auto sales indicates consumer spending is weakening
September 22, 2019 - Why are people not buying electric cars ?
October 7, 2019 - The Public Doesn’t Trust Autonomous Vehicles . Here’s Why That Won’t Matter In The Long Run .
November 15, 2019 - India Has People. It Needs Consumers
Supply shocks are no longer the problem. Getting the economy on track needs ordinary people to spend.
March 17, 2020 - At this point, a new NPR, PBS News Hour, and Marist poll shows that 47 percent of the public doesn’t trust what they hear about the viral outbreak from the media.
March 18, 2020 - On the issue of “social distancing” a recent Harris Poll found that 81% of older Americans still planned to attend a family gathering and 91% of seniors still intended to go to a grocery store. 77% of those over 65 believed they were unlikely to contract their virus in their day-to-day activities.
March 25, 2020 - Is retail therapy ethical during the Coronavirus crisis ?
Buying a non-essential product will be more ethical than not buying it,
