Dissent is Not Repentance; Or,Why Gotta Make a Living Excuses Nothing
There’s this line of thinking, mostly among secular alt-right, anti-woke, dissident type bloggers, that believes that going along to get along with the System publicly is acceptable as long such plain public submission is balanced out by private objection or anonymous/pseudonymous public dissent.
The rationale supporting this noble position? Hey, everyone’s gotta make a living!
In a post titled, “why anonymity matters in public discourse” (small caps intentional), the writer who blogs under the pseudonym el gato malo offers the following thoughts on the subject (gato’s text in italics, my thoughts in roman):
there seems to be a profound undercurrent of self-styled "intellectuals" opposing the idea of anonymous speech.
here's why, even leaving aside such basic ideas as "assess an argument on its merits as opposed to upon who made it" and the shallow credentialism and ad hominem it engenders, i think anonymity remains not only important, but vital in our current world:
I was before 2020. I still hold reservations about those who express dissent publicly under false names and alter egos, but 2020 showed me that the whole business of being anonymous/pseudonymous in public discourse has become a secondary or tertiary matter within the larger scope of things. More on that later.
we live in a technocratic and bureaucratic regulatory state. permission is required for the most mundane of activities from catching a fish to building a house to (most of all) making a living and building a business. you need a permit or license or approval for everything. you need it to operate a restaurant, serve liquor, sell a drug, issue securities, have a bank account, practice law, practice medicine, and even if you don’t, your employer almost certainly does. the list is near endless and the greater your ambition, the more you need permission. you cannot just open a savings and loan or a lemonade stand. such practice requires affirmative assent, assent that can easily be withheld or revoked.
when one reaches a certain point of pervasiveness in this trend, we're all essentially hostages and when the agencies and agents that issue licensure, permission, and prerogative get politicized and weaponized, this puts many of the most astute, educated, and competent people in a real bind.
they face a hobson's choice if they would disagree with whatever narrative finds current currency:
stay silent or lose your livelihood.
No disagreement there. The above is an accurate and valid assessment of what it means to live within the totalitarian System today. We are all essentially hostages, though I would go a step further and say slaves .
Now, here’s the thing. How should people — Christians in particular — think, act, function, and live under the shadow of such an acknowledgment/discernment? El gato malo offers the following illustrative example:
look what happened all covid. doctors that spoke out saw their medical licenses threatened and even taken. laws were passed to enable and require this. institutions lined up against anyone internally who bucked or asked questions because they themselves got the message from on high that "if you want to keep being a hospital, you better shut down these ideas."
imagine a debate about a vaccine. imagine you're the CEO or the chief science officer of a publicly traded drug company. you're well positioned to have a valid and valuable take, but if that take is one the state does not like, what will happen? criticizing the FDA is not a path to getting your drug approved. it's likely a way to get it buried. so what do you do?
it's easy for people to say "stand up anyway! adhere to your principles and sacrifice your livelihood and life's work!" but that's always really easy to say about someone else's life, isn't it? and even that is far too limiting.
so this person should allow an unrelated drug with years and 10’s or 100’s of millions of dollars in research behind it, a drug that could save or improve lives, get backbenched at FDA, harming them, putting his or her employees out of work, and harming shareholders and sick people because they wish to speak what they believe is the truth about another topic in which they are expert?
what kind of choice is that?
(it’s certainly not one that only affects the chooser.)
but this is the choice that permission based regulatory states always create the minute they get politicized. the vast class of competent builders is silenced because to speak against the narrative means you cannot build anymore because building takes permission and permission is controlled by commissars loyal to a faction that does not brook dissent.
you think loads of fortune 500 CEOs' think global warming isn't a scam or DEI isn’t drivel? they know it's a scam. but they cannot speak lest they find their businesses under fire. many thought the same about the mRNA jabs. again, crickets. you simply cannot put your business and all those who work for it and depend upon it at risk from a state that practices regulatory lawfare.
this creates a perfect, one-sided scenario where the “business leaders” who speak are nearly all “pro regime” and those who oppose it are silenced in self-censorship. they do not need to be threatened directly. they know what happens if you step out of line.
“nice FCC license you got there, be a shame if you opened your fat yap and something happened to it”
“i see you’d like to do an S-1 to IPO your company. let’s check your social credit score!”
“hey, remember that bank account you used to have?”
it’s potent stuff to stifle and silence dissent from the “great and good.”
To summarize the above, most people probably know the System is evil and oppose it privately, but they willingly comply with the System publicly to:Make a livingKeep businesses runningProtect business and jobsEnsure efforts to “do good” within the System are not threatened or snuffed out The limits of el gato malo’s assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality shine brighter than the noonday sun, so I won’t bother wading into all of that here.
What troubles me are Christians who espouse essentially identical views and attitudes about being a slave within the System. More on that later, too.
Anyway, so what is el gato malo’s ultimate solution?
and anonymity fixes this.
it allows speech to flourish and creates a true market for ideas free from the market breaking taxation without representation of “speak up and lose your license” that has been used to such chilling effect of late as unelected as unaccountable bureaucrats become the guardians of ideological purity and their “forever state” comes to dominate the speech of professions and professionals.
this idea that people grab anon handles so they can lie and cheat is nearly all inversion and projection. mostly, it’s people wishing to speak freely and share such truth as they perceive without having to live beneath the constant hammer of reprisal against their lives and livelihoods.
were the federalist papers published under “publius” a problem or a solution? were they a cowardly subterfuge and refusal to own up to opinion or a brave attempt to move the overton window and build consensus against a regime that would have arrested such authors had they put their names on it?
“if you’re not willing to lose your business due to government depermissioning or face arrest to speak, then i guess you don’t mean it!” is a ridiculous standard and a false trade off and falser framing.
the fact that such a trade off exists in the first place is already proof positive that the permission based system of life and work is pernicious and predatory. who save a tyrant or a demagogue would choose or demand such a system?
“come out where we can shoot you!” said the powerful force to the freedom fighter.
“come sign our government registry to be allowed to speak against the government” is not the most reassuring of offers.
are we really expected to say yes?
“those who debate me must provide proper ID” is the demand of a bully planning to come for you on some other board.
if this is really about ideas and their validity, then why do you need to know who we are?
you can keep your credentials if you like and appeal to them and claim credence is due.
(how’s that been working out for you BTW? lol.)
we the anons are happy to engage from a position of no base trust and earn such respect as we may garner fairly, freely, and openly in the reputation economy.
can anyone really find principled fault with such a course?
Well, yes, as a matter of fact. I certainly can. Allow me to elaborate. Allowing speech to flourish and a true market of ideas is a dead-end road meant to trap people in the information mode of secondary thinking when they should instead be focused on primary thinking and spiritual creativity. Information, whether anonymous or not, solves nothing and advances nothing. On the contrary, it plays directly to the System’s favor by keeping engaged in System information discourse. The last thing people need is more information and debate. What people need is knowledge. Spiritual knowledge. Directly accessed and directly known. Whether this knowledge is publicly communicated as a commodity in a marketplace is irrelevant. What matters is that the direct knowledge occurred. More on that later.What exactly are people like el gato malo advocating for here? Are they suggesting that their wonderful anonymous ideas will eventually and quite magically activate some form of dissent or revolution at the level of the masses, all without people like el gato malo ever having to put any skin in the game other than to blog and tweet their defiance anonymously/pseudonymously? Do people like el gato malo really believe they are “safe” behind their pseudonyms? Seriously? Is private/anonymous dissent enough to excuse making a living while under total public compliance with and submission to the System? I’ll refer to an earlier post to expand on the problem of information and secondary thinking (my excerpt below in italics):
Those who oppose the totalitarian aims espoused by organizations like the WEF recognize the information manipulation and seek to counteract it with truthful information. Though far more noble in intent and motivation, the aim of disseminating such truth-seeking information misses the mark concerning the bigger picture of human consciousness and its relation to reality.
In short, the war we are in is fundamentally a spiritual war, not an information war.
Many recognize and understand the totalitarian push to control the narrative. They fail to discern that the core problem is the exclusive and obsessive focus on engaging with narrative through secondary thinking, thereby keeping consciousness firmly entrenched in representational reality as reality (or, in keeping consciousness locked in the Information Age and its related thinking).
Clown World is not simply striving to control information and secondary thinking; they want to ensure human consciousness remains trapped in a state of information overload and secondary thinking.
Though they claim otherwise, I suspect that at the deepest, most fundamental level, Clown World and the demonic forces it serves welcome information opposition to their secondary-level information manipulations because it keeps human consciousness firmly fixated on representations as reality rather than on Reality.
Thus, keeping people engaged in information wars not only helps to distract from the spiritual war but also helps to hinder the further development of human consciousness.
I am not implying that those waging the information war against Clown World are intentionally entrapping people at the secondary level of thinking. Unlike the WEF — which deliberately uses information to enslave people in secondary-level thinking via representations that are directly opposed to God and Creation — information warriors on the side of good share representations that often can and do act as intermediaries to Truth and Reality; however, many information warriors treat the intermediaries themselves as Truth and Reality, and this is where the problems set in.
The information warriors who utilize representational intermediaries or the people who engage with the intermediaries the warriors produce — be it in the form of writing, symbols, spoken language, art, video, etc. — contribute virtually nothing to the spiritual war or the development of consciousness if they go no further than the intermediaries in terms of thinking and knowing or, worse, regard the intermediaries as Reality.
Winning the spiritual war and connecting with Truth and Reality does not and cannot boil down to being informed, an essentially passive state in which one allows the external to shape, fashion, give shape to, and teach reality via representations presented and accepted as Reality.
Being informed in that manner keeps one asleep and the plaything of Morpheus and his dream-forming brothers. Informed people who regard representations as Reality are dreamers living in a dreamland.
I am not implying that the representational is dispensable.
On the contrary, it is vital, but only when we understand that it serves as a go-between and not a final destination. In this sense, the representations the good info warriors provide are far superior to the information promulgated by the likes of the WEF, which serves more as a go-nowhere rather than a go-between. Yet representations on the side of good can only do good if they are treated as intermediaries — that is, used to orient and/or connect to Reality.
That connection to Reality happens beyond the representational, in the realm of primary thinking — the realm of non-representational direct-knowing originating from and connecting to the primal self. Although representational, secondary thinking can inspire, motivate, and guide individuals toward primary thinking, it cannot substitute for primary thinking.
Berdyaev observed that “truth has two meanings: truth as knowledge of reality, and truth as reality itself.” In this sense, information via representations (language, symbols) is truth as knowledge of reality, while direct-knowing is truth about Reality itself.
Berdyaev offers another way to think about it, “I wish to know, not actuality, but the truth about actuality. And I may learn what this truth is, only because in me, the knowing subject, there is a source of truth and because I may communicate with this truth.”
Communicating with this source of truth goes well beyond the state of “being informed”, i.e., of knowing actuality. It requires locating an innate, internal source of truth that can connect with Reality directly, moving beyond the realm of representations.
Information is intended to serve as a bridge to Reality, not substitute Reality.
Information as reality is, at best, only partial reality. We see the bridge but do not understand what it is for or mistake it for something else. Like all bridges, information provides a means to get across from one side to another. Their purpose is distorted if they remain uncrossed or if the other side into which they extend is disbelieved or denied.
As Berdyaev notes, “Truth is not something given objectively, but rather a creative achievement. It is creative discovery, rather than the reflected knowledge of an object or of being. Truth ... is the creative transfiguration of reality.”
As a final point, I will add that dissent is no substitute for repentance. All Christians must resist being “held hostage” by the System, even if it threatens their livelihoods, but in lieu of that, Christians must repent their involvement and compliance with the System, even if they don’t have any choice in the matter or even if gotta make a living.
Private, anonymous, or pseudonymous dissent is not repentance.
Not even close.
I don’t expect bloggers like el gato malo to “get” any of what I have covered above, but it is my sincere hope that (at least) some Christians out there will/do.
The rationale supporting this noble position? Hey, everyone’s gotta make a living!
In a post titled, “why anonymity matters in public discourse” (small caps intentional), the writer who blogs under the pseudonym el gato malo offers the following thoughts on the subject (gato’s text in italics, my thoughts in roman):
there seems to be a profound undercurrent of self-styled "intellectuals" opposing the idea of anonymous speech.
here's why, even leaving aside such basic ideas as "assess an argument on its merits as opposed to upon who made it" and the shallow credentialism and ad hominem it engenders, i think anonymity remains not only important, but vital in our current world:
I was before 2020. I still hold reservations about those who express dissent publicly under false names and alter egos, but 2020 showed me that the whole business of being anonymous/pseudonymous in public discourse has become a secondary or tertiary matter within the larger scope of things. More on that later.
we live in a technocratic and bureaucratic regulatory state. permission is required for the most mundane of activities from catching a fish to building a house to (most of all) making a living and building a business. you need a permit or license or approval for everything. you need it to operate a restaurant, serve liquor, sell a drug, issue securities, have a bank account, practice law, practice medicine, and even if you don’t, your employer almost certainly does. the list is near endless and the greater your ambition, the more you need permission. you cannot just open a savings and loan or a lemonade stand. such practice requires affirmative assent, assent that can easily be withheld or revoked.
when one reaches a certain point of pervasiveness in this trend, we're all essentially hostages and when the agencies and agents that issue licensure, permission, and prerogative get politicized and weaponized, this puts many of the most astute, educated, and competent people in a real bind.
they face a hobson's choice if they would disagree with whatever narrative finds current currency:
stay silent or lose your livelihood.
No disagreement there. The above is an accurate and valid assessment of what it means to live within the totalitarian System today. We are all essentially hostages, though I would go a step further and say slaves .
Now, here’s the thing. How should people — Christians in particular — think, act, function, and live under the shadow of such an acknowledgment/discernment? El gato malo offers the following illustrative example:
look what happened all covid. doctors that spoke out saw their medical licenses threatened and even taken. laws were passed to enable and require this. institutions lined up against anyone internally who bucked or asked questions because they themselves got the message from on high that "if you want to keep being a hospital, you better shut down these ideas."
imagine a debate about a vaccine. imagine you're the CEO or the chief science officer of a publicly traded drug company. you're well positioned to have a valid and valuable take, but if that take is one the state does not like, what will happen? criticizing the FDA is not a path to getting your drug approved. it's likely a way to get it buried. so what do you do?
it's easy for people to say "stand up anyway! adhere to your principles and sacrifice your livelihood and life's work!" but that's always really easy to say about someone else's life, isn't it? and even that is far too limiting.
so this person should allow an unrelated drug with years and 10’s or 100’s of millions of dollars in research behind it, a drug that could save or improve lives, get backbenched at FDA, harming them, putting his or her employees out of work, and harming shareholders and sick people because they wish to speak what they believe is the truth about another topic in which they are expert?
what kind of choice is that?
(it’s certainly not one that only affects the chooser.)
but this is the choice that permission based regulatory states always create the minute they get politicized. the vast class of competent builders is silenced because to speak against the narrative means you cannot build anymore because building takes permission and permission is controlled by commissars loyal to a faction that does not brook dissent.
you think loads of fortune 500 CEOs' think global warming isn't a scam or DEI isn’t drivel? they know it's a scam. but they cannot speak lest they find their businesses under fire. many thought the same about the mRNA jabs. again, crickets. you simply cannot put your business and all those who work for it and depend upon it at risk from a state that practices regulatory lawfare.
this creates a perfect, one-sided scenario where the “business leaders” who speak are nearly all “pro regime” and those who oppose it are silenced in self-censorship. they do not need to be threatened directly. they know what happens if you step out of line.
“nice FCC license you got there, be a shame if you opened your fat yap and something happened to it”
“i see you’d like to do an S-1 to IPO your company. let’s check your social credit score!”
“hey, remember that bank account you used to have?”
it’s potent stuff to stifle and silence dissent from the “great and good.”
To summarize the above, most people probably know the System is evil and oppose it privately, but they willingly comply with the System publicly to:Make a livingKeep businesses runningProtect business and jobsEnsure efforts to “do good” within the System are not threatened or snuffed out The limits of el gato malo’s assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality shine brighter than the noonday sun, so I won’t bother wading into all of that here.
What troubles me are Christians who espouse essentially identical views and attitudes about being a slave within the System. More on that later, too.
Anyway, so what is el gato malo’s ultimate solution?
and anonymity fixes this.
it allows speech to flourish and creates a true market for ideas free from the market breaking taxation without representation of “speak up and lose your license” that has been used to such chilling effect of late as unelected as unaccountable bureaucrats become the guardians of ideological purity and their “forever state” comes to dominate the speech of professions and professionals.
this idea that people grab anon handles so they can lie and cheat is nearly all inversion and projection. mostly, it’s people wishing to speak freely and share such truth as they perceive without having to live beneath the constant hammer of reprisal against their lives and livelihoods.
were the federalist papers published under “publius” a problem or a solution? were they a cowardly subterfuge and refusal to own up to opinion or a brave attempt to move the overton window and build consensus against a regime that would have arrested such authors had they put their names on it?
“if you’re not willing to lose your business due to government depermissioning or face arrest to speak, then i guess you don’t mean it!” is a ridiculous standard and a false trade off and falser framing.
the fact that such a trade off exists in the first place is already proof positive that the permission based system of life and work is pernicious and predatory. who save a tyrant or a demagogue would choose or demand such a system?
“come out where we can shoot you!” said the powerful force to the freedom fighter.
“come sign our government registry to be allowed to speak against the government” is not the most reassuring of offers.
are we really expected to say yes?
“those who debate me must provide proper ID” is the demand of a bully planning to come for you on some other board.
if this is really about ideas and their validity, then why do you need to know who we are?
you can keep your credentials if you like and appeal to them and claim credence is due.
(how’s that been working out for you BTW? lol.)
we the anons are happy to engage from a position of no base trust and earn such respect as we may garner fairly, freely, and openly in the reputation economy.
can anyone really find principled fault with such a course?
Well, yes, as a matter of fact. I certainly can. Allow me to elaborate. Allowing speech to flourish and a true market of ideas is a dead-end road meant to trap people in the information mode of secondary thinking when they should instead be focused on primary thinking and spiritual creativity. Information, whether anonymous or not, solves nothing and advances nothing. On the contrary, it plays directly to the System’s favor by keeping engaged in System information discourse. The last thing people need is more information and debate. What people need is knowledge. Spiritual knowledge. Directly accessed and directly known. Whether this knowledge is publicly communicated as a commodity in a marketplace is irrelevant. What matters is that the direct knowledge occurred. More on that later.What exactly are people like el gato malo advocating for here? Are they suggesting that their wonderful anonymous ideas will eventually and quite magically activate some form of dissent or revolution at the level of the masses, all without people like el gato malo ever having to put any skin in the game other than to blog and tweet their defiance anonymously/pseudonymously? Do people like el gato malo really believe they are “safe” behind their pseudonyms? Seriously? Is private/anonymous dissent enough to excuse making a living while under total public compliance with and submission to the System? I’ll refer to an earlier post to expand on the problem of information and secondary thinking (my excerpt below in italics):
Those who oppose the totalitarian aims espoused by organizations like the WEF recognize the information manipulation and seek to counteract it with truthful information. Though far more noble in intent and motivation, the aim of disseminating such truth-seeking information misses the mark concerning the bigger picture of human consciousness and its relation to reality.
In short, the war we are in is fundamentally a spiritual war, not an information war.
Many recognize and understand the totalitarian push to control the narrative. They fail to discern that the core problem is the exclusive and obsessive focus on engaging with narrative through secondary thinking, thereby keeping consciousness firmly entrenched in representational reality as reality (or, in keeping consciousness locked in the Information Age and its related thinking).
Clown World is not simply striving to control information and secondary thinking; they want to ensure human consciousness remains trapped in a state of information overload and secondary thinking.
Though they claim otherwise, I suspect that at the deepest, most fundamental level, Clown World and the demonic forces it serves welcome information opposition to their secondary-level information manipulations because it keeps human consciousness firmly fixated on representations as reality rather than on Reality.
Thus, keeping people engaged in information wars not only helps to distract from the spiritual war but also helps to hinder the further development of human consciousness.
I am not implying that those waging the information war against Clown World are intentionally entrapping people at the secondary level of thinking. Unlike the WEF — which deliberately uses information to enslave people in secondary-level thinking via representations that are directly opposed to God and Creation — information warriors on the side of good share representations that often can and do act as intermediaries to Truth and Reality; however, many information warriors treat the intermediaries themselves as Truth and Reality, and this is where the problems set in.
The information warriors who utilize representational intermediaries or the people who engage with the intermediaries the warriors produce — be it in the form of writing, symbols, spoken language, art, video, etc. — contribute virtually nothing to the spiritual war or the development of consciousness if they go no further than the intermediaries in terms of thinking and knowing or, worse, regard the intermediaries as Reality.
Winning the spiritual war and connecting with Truth and Reality does not and cannot boil down to being informed, an essentially passive state in which one allows the external to shape, fashion, give shape to, and teach reality via representations presented and accepted as Reality.
Being informed in that manner keeps one asleep and the plaything of Morpheus and his dream-forming brothers. Informed people who regard representations as Reality are dreamers living in a dreamland.
I am not implying that the representational is dispensable.
On the contrary, it is vital, but only when we understand that it serves as a go-between and not a final destination. In this sense, the representations the good info warriors provide are far superior to the information promulgated by the likes of the WEF, which serves more as a go-nowhere rather than a go-between. Yet representations on the side of good can only do good if they are treated as intermediaries — that is, used to orient and/or connect to Reality.
That connection to Reality happens beyond the representational, in the realm of primary thinking — the realm of non-representational direct-knowing originating from and connecting to the primal self. Although representational, secondary thinking can inspire, motivate, and guide individuals toward primary thinking, it cannot substitute for primary thinking.
Berdyaev observed that “truth has two meanings: truth as knowledge of reality, and truth as reality itself.” In this sense, information via representations (language, symbols) is truth as knowledge of reality, while direct-knowing is truth about Reality itself.
Berdyaev offers another way to think about it, “I wish to know, not actuality, but the truth about actuality. And I may learn what this truth is, only because in me, the knowing subject, there is a source of truth and because I may communicate with this truth.”
Communicating with this source of truth goes well beyond the state of “being informed”, i.e., of knowing actuality. It requires locating an innate, internal source of truth that can connect with Reality directly, moving beyond the realm of representations.
Information is intended to serve as a bridge to Reality, not substitute Reality.
Information as reality is, at best, only partial reality. We see the bridge but do not understand what it is for or mistake it for something else. Like all bridges, information provides a means to get across from one side to another. Their purpose is distorted if they remain uncrossed or if the other side into which they extend is disbelieved or denied.
As Berdyaev notes, “Truth is not something given objectively, but rather a creative achievement. It is creative discovery, rather than the reflected knowledge of an object or of being. Truth ... is the creative transfiguration of reality.”
As a final point, I will add that dissent is no substitute for repentance. All Christians must resist being “held hostage” by the System, even if it threatens their livelihoods, but in lieu of that, Christians must repent their involvement and compliance with the System, even if they don’t have any choice in the matter or even if gotta make a living.
Private, anonymous, or pseudonymous dissent is not repentance.
Not even close.
I don’t expect bloggers like el gato malo to “get” any of what I have covered above, but it is my sincere hope that (at least) some Christians out there will/do.
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