At Padre's
Politics • Spirituality/Belief • Culture
Tommy the Savage
From Rod Dreher's Diary
August 06, 2024

Tommy The Savage

When Speaking Common Sense Is Outlawed, Only 'Outlaws' Will Dare To Speak It

 
 
Tommy Robinson from documentary ‘Silenced’

Last night I had dinner with a middle-class English couple who are in Budapest for a visit. Friends of a friend. Naturally the conversation quickly turned to the riots in their home country. At one point, I said that I had recently started listening to Tommy Robinson, someone whom I had dismissed earlier as a thug, based on his extensive history of what you might gently call “dodgy behavior.” (Seriously, look it up.)

“Did you watch the Jordan Peterson interview with him?” asked the woman.

“I saw half of it this afternoon,” I replied. “It’s shocking.”

“It is,” she said. Then she went on to say that despite the messiness of Tommy Robinson’s life and record, she supports him because he is more or less the only prominent person who is willing to stand up and say what’s happening in Britain is wrong.

“I am friends with a couple who lost their daughter for a while to a grooming gang,” the woman began. Then she told the story. I noticed that she fought back tears as she gave me the details. At one point, she struggled for words to describe what the Pakistani men had done to this 14 year old girl. The details of the deeds were too much for her to articulate. She stammered finally, “The police had to collect DNA from the child. I hope you understand what I mean.”

I did.

“In the end, the police did nothing,” the woman continued. “The poor parents, my friends, had no idea what to do. There was nowhere to turn, not if the police don’t care.”

By the end of her story, this gentle woman in her late fifties was visibly suppressing rage. I could tell that she is not the sort of person to whom rage comes easily. But there it was, and it was entirely justified by the story she had just told me. I understood perfectly well why a nice, educated, middle-class lady like her would have become a partisan of the rough working-class bruiser from Luton: because all the nice, educated, middle-class people have surrendered to the violent dispossession of the British in their own land.

It turns out that she and her husband are in Budapest looking for ways to migrate here. One of them has Hungarian ancestry, and therefore a way in. I mentioned to them that in his recent Tusvanyos address, PM Viktor Orban said that Hungary can expect a rising inflow of Europeans who want to live in a “Christian national country.”

“That’s us,” said the man.

Yesterday at The European Conservative, I published an interview with my Budapest friend Mark Bollobas, the UK-born son of two refugees from Communism, who in 2010 moved to his parents’ homeland because he saw no prospects for himself in Britain, the country of his birth. Excerpt:

[Mark Bollobas:] … I had enough of an experience in London from before, from the years I spent there studying and working, to know that it’s again a place I really probably couldn’t live as good a life as I can live here in Budapest. That includes everything: safety, public transport, religion, the feeling of culture, a sense of pride in your nation, these are things that have been eroded. So if we look now at the United States, people are not happy with the way America is. If we look at how things are in the UK, there is massive disillusionment, especially among the youth, people looking towards the future going, “Well, how am I going to survive? I just don’t know how to.”

When I was looking, more and more I began to think of Hungary. I thought of Hungary not only because I could go there, as the son of Hungarian immigrants, but also because it’s a nice place, it’s a beautiful place, it’s a kind place. And there are values there that are still important—family values. It was 2010 [the year Viktor Orbán was elected prime minister], and I knew a huge change was coming to Hungary. And I got here before it arrived. For me most of all it was a feeling of coming home, which is strange because I wasn’t born here.

It’s difficult to describe because I wasn’t brought up here, but I always felt at home here. And here, unlike in the UK, where I was always asked where I was from, here in Hungary—well, I’m obviously not from here, and I have a thick accent in Hungarian, but I’m Hungarian. I fit in and I’ve been accepted. I felt then that the U.S. was burning out while I knew in Hungary the best years were ahead of us.

Last but not least, I wanted to get married and start a family, a family based of the values and traditions I hold dear. And for that I knew I needed a Hungarian woman, whom I’m lucky enough to have found.

It is striking to me that you migrated to your ancestral homeland not looking for economic opportunity, but rather for a place that felt like home. This seems to be something that both liberal and conservative elites all over the West cannot comprehend. Why not?

Most people don’t agree with my decision because they are wearing blinders. These blinders, made in the Cold War, tell them that everything east of the former Iron Curtain is terrible, and everything west of it is wonderful. The world is nowhere near like that anymore.

I still find it strange that is a white Christian male who speaks English with a British accent that I was not welcomed into UK society. But now, having lived outside of the borders for a few years, I realize that this is the case with everyone. Either you’re a white European and you go there as a guest worker, or you go there as a person of color from a Middle Eastern country or African country, and you end up living in an atomized community or a ghetto made up of only your countrymen, paid for by the state. 

I think when it comes to the sense of home and how important it is, the West has forgotten that what made the West great was its culture and its traditions. And they came to this from a position of power and wealth and success. They didn’t really need to fight to protect any of these things, because the power that came from economic power did it for them.

But as the world changed and other countries became more wealthy, and in many ways England became more poor, the UK became more poor, this skill of protecting your nation, your culture, your history, taking pride in yourself, it never came back. It never came back. I don’t know whether it’s from the schools, or whether it’s definitely in colleges, because academia is—well, it’s not very pro-British culture in any way. But even among the people it sort of disappeared. The sense of community sort of disappeared. It became much more important to make money, to be a success, to be the person you want to be. To be an individual.

Those are very, very important things to do when you’re in your twenties and thirties. But then you get to a point where you have your career, but you need a family, because family is what life is all about. After you have children, that is your droving force. And we’re now at this appalling stage where we have lots of individual success stories of people who’ve forgotten, and don’t know how, to make time for having a family. Worse yet, they’ve been educated to believe that having a family isn’t important, that you can get as much joy out of work. And that’s just not the case.

This is a really, really, really big problem. I have too many friends aged 35 to 45 who are single and lonely, who want a family, yet don’t have the skills needed to create one. Yet professionally they are all success stories. Worse yet, so many people tie materialism to happiness that when the money gets low—and globally we are all about to experience a recession—this means more and more people will become desperately unhappy as their wallets become lighter, and life becomes harder.

I’m not sure whether Hungarians know something different, I think they didn’t twenty years ago. But through a combination of luck, as well as solid political leadership, we have kept family as the most important goal in life. That’s a huge plus for us. In the early Eighties, Hungary led the world in suicides and alcoholism. And although there was Communism, almost everyone had a side hustle. Or two or three. But that has changed, those times are behind us. Now when I think of the nation that is doing terribly in similar categories, namely drug overdoses and suicides, while pushing a culture of relentless side hustles, the U.S. comes to mind.

I hasten to say that this has nothing to do with why I moved to Hungary. As you’ll recall, it had to do with personal circumstances of my divorce. I also was thrilled to move here because I think what is going on in Hungary politically and intellectually is fascinating, and important to the survival of the West. But I was not and am not alienated from America the way Mark is from Britain, in part because the ideological and cultural situation in the US, for all its problems, is not nearly as dire as in Britain.

Over the course of the evening, we talked about all kinds of things. The woman told wonderful stories about one of her ancestors, a celebrated historian remembered now for work he did to preserve a particular cultural tradition that was fading away (I’m speaking vaguely because I want to protect this couple’s privacy). On the way home last night, I thought about how she spoke with such affectionate pride in her country, and her ancestors, and what they accomplished. This I contrasted with the high emotion she had expressed earlier in the evening, thinking about the suffering of her friends whose daughter was turned for a while into a sex slave of Pakistani men, and how the police did not care to help, and how the British establishment doesn’t care either.

Then it hit me: this woman has been humiliated. Deeply humiliated. She has been humiliated by mass migration. She has been humiliated by the violence some of these migrants bring with them. She has been humiliated by the authorities, who expect people like her simply to suck it up. And she has been humiliated by a ruling class that has for some time been teaching young Britons to hate their country and their people, and to accept that their rightful place in the world is to live as second-class citizens in the land of their ancestors.

If I were her, Tommy Robinson would be my hero.

What a terrible thing, to come to late middle age, and to face the prospect that leaving your home country for a land where you don’t speak the language is possibly the most sensible thing you can do to protect yourself in old age. I mentioned to this couple the interview with Mark Bollobas, the part where Mark said that raising kids in Hungary, it is a blessing not to have to worry that his boys will be taught in school to hate their country and its people, and to think that they (the boys) might actually be girls.

She shot a glance at her husband, whom I had met on his last trip to Hungary. “It’s okay,” he told her. “He’s safe.”

It turns out she is a practicing Christian. She said she can’t understand how it is that even many of her Christian friends now accept transgenderism, not as an allowance society should make out of compassion for people who have gender dysphoria, but as a positive good that should be celebrated. The subtext of her quiet commentary was: so many of my countrymen have lost their minds, and I don’t understand what has happened to us all. That she needed assurance from her husband that it was okay to express skepticism of the trans revolution in private conversation told me something important about what it must be like to be a middle-class Briton today.

I tell you, living in Europe, and seeing more closely what mass migration has done to its countries, and also seeing the flat-out lying (either by commission or omission) done by the ruling classes of these countries (in government, media, academia, and so on), has really opened my eyes. As I’ve told you, over and over I meet people from the UK or western Europe who come to Budapest for a conference or a holiday, and hear them inevitably remark that being here reminds them of their own cities twenty or thirty years ago — before mass migration and the crime and disorder it brings had shredded the fabric of public life.

Last night I told the visiting British couple about a conversation I’d had over wine recently with a young American who had just moved here from Germany for language instruction. He told me that the difference between German cities and Budapest is striking to him. Having lived in Germany for the past two years, he said you just don’t see easygoing life on the streets like you do in Budapest. He marveled at how many people in the Hungarian capital are out and about, sitting (as we were) in a street cafe, or late at night, even young women walking to and from the clubs, not having to worry for their safety. In Germany, by contrast, he said Germans seem to have withdrawn from the public space into private life, to avoid the risk of criminal encounters with migrants or their adult children. This is especially true with German women, who run real risks just living their lives in cities where migrant men are a significant presence. And yet, he said, the Germans have neutered their own sense of self-worth, such that they seem to be under a spell that tells them they deserve what they get. How refreshing it is to be in Budapest, he said.

If you move here, I said to the couple, you will be astonished by how overwhelming, and how effective, the media propaganda is that causes people back home to think of Hungary as some kind of quasi-fascist hellhole. They laughed. The woman said that one of her relatives, hearing that they were off to Hungary for a holiday, said, “Are you going to be okay? That Orban is something of a dictator, isn’t he?”

In the future, historians may look back on this era in Western history and marvel at the psyop the ruling classes used on their nations to render peoples incapable of defending themselves and their own interests. People become self-policing, too, afraid to say commonsense things out of fear of being called evil. Are there any peoples on this earth, outside of the West, who loathe themselves as a people as much as Western liberals and progressives do?

The philosopher Matthew Crawford has a great Substack piece today in which he reveals that the UK government has long employed a psyop strategy to keep the public quiet in the face of violence that could cause them to question the dogma that Diversity Is Our Strength™. Excerpt:

One is not supposed to notice the downsides of mass immigration. In fact, such noticing has to be actively suppressed, and the present civil disorder in Britain reveals a breakdown of the UK government’s longstanding program to psychologically manage its own peoples’ response to demographic upheaval, ethnic conflict and violence.

As it happens, it was at the 2012 Olympics that these techniques were first put in place, in anticipation of a possible terrorist attack. The summer before, there had been riots across the UK that badly spooked the government, and Western leaders were watching the Arab Spring with a view to both the hazards and the opportunities for population control presented by social media. By 2019, the publication Middle East Eye was able to report that the British Home Office prepares for terrorist incidents “by pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks.” The point, of course, is to have candlelit vigils, flowers and impromptu expressions of mutual love between “communities”, rather than riots. This story is worth telling, as it parallels the US government’s re-purposing of information warfare techniques, developed in the War in Terror, for managing internal political dissent.

Read the Crawford piece for details about this operation. He continues:

All this unrest comes in the wake of the Olympic games’ opening ceremony, in which Da Vinci’s Last Supper was repurposed as a grotesquerie of sexual unfortunates, expressing hatred of the normal and healthy disguised as defiant self-love. That is what it means to “queer” this or “queer” that (in the sense made popular by Judith Butler); it is an instinct to attack all that is settled; anything that makes feel people at home in the world. Any sense of a common culture or owned space.

In 2024, the Olympics feel like a “survival” (as the anthropologists would say) that has been turned to the purposes of what right-wingers like to call GloboHomo, that confluence of corporate-state liberationism and replacism. As Machiavelli said, a wise founder-prince will keep up the old forms, emptied of content, to make his “new modes and orders” go down more easily. As my friend Ethan put it to me, the Olympics now serve as “a remnant vector of legitimation to be exploited until it no longer means anything to anyone, just one more instance of the strip-mining of our material and symbolic order for the benefit of whatever higher interests profit, however ephemerally, from the operation.”

I believe some intuition like this, and not just the immediate issue of immigration, lies behind the rage of the Brits.

Yes, this is exactly what I encountered last night in that quiet dinner with the English couple. Migration, Islamic violence, and the hatred the British state has for its own people, dominated the conversation early on, but the bafflement the woman had over how the moral order in which she had been raised had been overthrown, and the new order accepted without protest by otherwise sensible people — this left her angry, confused, and … thinking about leaving her native land, which doesn’t feel like hers anymore.

Here is a 2022 essay that Crawford has ungated, about love of one’s own people. Excerpts:

National character grows among a people from shared experience. They speak the same language and pray to the same gods; their fathers fought in the same wars; their grandmothers tell stories that convey how one ought to feel about familiar things. They are likely to have a persistent stock of nursery rhymes and drinking songs; a repertoire of gestures, subtle facial inflections and emotional tones peculiar to them. Mutually recognizable to one another, they enjoy a form of social wealth that accumulates among inhabitants of some bounded territory that has been inhabited continuously for generations by the same people. Such an inheritance is far from universal; it is enjoyed by peoples who, often for reasons of geographical accident, have been spared conquest, colonization and dispersal long enough to form a nation, for example the “First Nations” of North America (as the indigenous tribes are called in Canada). The word “nation” shares its root with “native” and “natural”, and indeed a nation may claim an autochthonous origin for its ancestors — as though the earth itself, or rather their small part of it, were the original mother or father of their common lineage.

Crawford goes on to talk about how nationalism — political consciousness of oneself as a member of a nation, of a distinct people — is, to modern liberals, the source of all our problems. He quotes here the French political philosopher Pierre Manent describing “humanitarianism” as the successor ideology to Christianity. According to Manent, the cosmopolitan ruling class thinks that:

Peace and unity belong to the natural condition of mankind; its fragmentation into separate political bodies solicitous of their independence is the toxic fountainhead of everything that is wrong in human circumstances. Thus the right thing to do, the worthy enterprise, is to bring about the pacification and unification of humanity through the erasing or weakening of borders, the acceleration of the circulation of goods, services, information, and human beings, the fostering of an ever stronger and wider fellow-feeling among countries and peoples. Accordingly, looking at human things from the perspective of one’s own community — its common good and the peculiar content and quality of its education and way of life — is intrinsically wrong because it amounts to turning one’s back on the rest of mankind. Looking at human things … without the least preference (and even with a tad of healthy dislike) for what is ours — is intrinsically right and “progressive.” [Italics added]

And, conversely, to think and act with preference towards one’s own — that is wrong and regressive. This political psychodrama is why for some time now, the UK’s ruling-class institutions have been psyopping the British people into accepting their own displacement. This is exactly what Renaud Camus means by “the Great Replacement” — not only the replacement by foreign peoples, but the erasure of one’s own culture and history.

One more bit from Crawford:

The rise of populist movements has been fueled by a spreading recognition that this diversitarian turn, both in its moralistic expressions (humanitarianism as described by Manent) and in its material facts (mass immigration above all), is inextricably linked to an oligarchical development. Diversity is Our Strength, yes, but whose exactly? The political economy corresponding to humanitarian moralism and mass immigration is neoliberalism, an explicitly anti-national agenda for the globalization of labor markets, whether by the relocation of jobs to foreign shores or the opening of borders to foreign workers. Humanitarianism has been called “the sentimental justification of inhuman scale.”

Ethnomasochism is no psychological mystery, then. It serves a function among Western peoples as they adjust themselves -- or get adjusted -- to a post-national framework of government and economy. In such a framework, the proprietary pride of the citizen can only interfere. There are to be no citizens, only an undifferentiated mass of “human resources.”

I am reminded of Chapter 17 of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If you’ve read my book Live Not By Lies, you know that I believe we have largely missed the totalitarian aspects of contemporary culture because our idea of totalitarianism has been formed by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, Huxley’s model of a totalitarian dystopia is closer to what we have. It’s a dystopia that achieves total peace not through violent coercion, as in Orwell, but rather by lulling everyone to sleep, symbolically, by promising them a life of constant pleasure and entertainment to drive away anxiety.

You can read the entire text of Brave New World online. Chapter 17 begins on page 99. Here is an excerpt from the dialogue between Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Europe, and “John the Savage,” a dissident who has been raised outside the system, on an Indian reservation, reading nothing but the complete works of William Shakespeare:

[Mond:] "But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning." "You'd have a reason for chastity!" said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words. "But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices."

"But God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God …"

"My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears — that's what soma is."

The oligarchic Davos class wishes to create a utopia in which there are no nations, no borders, and the frictionless movement of people and capital. George Soros is one of the prime supporters of this vision, but by no means the only one. This is the World Economic Forum’s general view. Recall that at the WEF meeting in January, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said that the No. 1 challenge facing Europe is “disinformation” — which I take her to mean in large part publicizing facts and opinions that challenge the elite worldview.

Viktor Orban has made himself hated by these elites because he has dared to notice what they’re doing, and to oppose it intelligently and effectively. Tommy Robinson is no Viktor Orban for a variety of reasons, but I see in him something similar: that the kind of courage it takes to stand against these powerful consensus-enforcers in the national and international ruling class requires a character that doesn’t always play well with others.

Why does it fall to rough men like Tommy Robinson to say the things that ordinary Britons ought to have been saying in defense of their communities? Answer: because when speaking common sense is outlawed, only outlaws will speak common sense.

Here is a link to the X page where you can watch the Robinson documentary Silenced.

 

It’s well worth seeing. It details a famous case from 2021 in which Jamal, a Syrian refugee teenager, had water poured on his head in a playground incident. It got puffed up into “waterboarding,” and went viral internationally as an example of racist abuse. But it was a sham story. This kid, in fact, was a violent bully. Robinson shows how local authorities compelled teachers and others who knew what happened to sign non-disclosure agreements, and how the media, the judiciary, and the government conspired to silence the truth about the case, even though it destroyed the life of the kid falsely accused of “waterboarding” Jamal.

I think you’d have to have a heart of stone and a head of cheese not to sympathize with Tommy Robinson in all this. Is he a hot mess? You bet. Rough working-class lad. But at least in these matters of urgent justice, in which British people are being made to suffer, are being humiliated, are being dispossessed by foreigners and the actions of their own ruling class, which hates them — well, Robinson is one of the few prominent people in Britain who lives not by lies. You don’t have to agree with his politics, or make him into some kind of saint, in order to respect the hell out of him for speaking what millions know is true, but are too afraid to say.

Remember: When speaking common sense is outlawed, only outlaws will dare to speak common sense.

community logo
Join the At Padre's Community
To read more articles like this, sign up and join my community today
0
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
October 15, 2025
For Alan

@bloodyskies

00:00:06
October 15, 2025
MOTW 175 - I don't go for that
00:00:31
October 09, 2025
Upgraded Sister Groc.

I think she may become a thing.

00:00:06
It's been a rough year..
It's been a rough year..
November 22, 2024
Voltaire's birthday 11-21-1694 - A brief essay by Steve Weidenkopf

Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).

Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.

Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...

Voltaire's birthday 11-21-1694 - A brief essay by Steve Weidenkopf
January 01, 2025
Local's Lounge - All are welcome

Padre - Tom Miller invited you to a Microsoft Teams Meeting series:

The Local's Lounge with the ADD Irregulars - Home of Coffee Talk, Speakeasies, Schmoozes, Tea Times, Afterhours and other gatherings.

Coffee Talk - 6:00 AM Central - Daily
Afternoon Chats - Tuesdays, Friday & Sundays at 2:00 PM Central
Other Chats as scheduled by the community.

Please look for notifications for Speakeasies, Tea Times, Schmoozes & Afterhours for gatherings of the gang. New comers welcome, become an Irregular today!!

Wednesday, January 1, 2025
6:00 AM - 8:00 AM (CST)
Occurs every day starting 1/1 until 12/31

Meeting link: https://teams.live.com/meet/9392334144614?p=4Lr3AcWswEWjbzgHsZ

post photo preview
post photo preview
October 08, 2025
The dawn of the post-literate society - A VERY LONG READ
And the end of civilisation

The dawn of the post-literate society

And the end of civilisation

 
Sep 19, 2025
 
 
Heated Debates, Burning Books | The New Yorker
 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death


The age of print

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.

Samuel Johnson: Literary Giant of the 18th Century” @ The HuntingtonLibrary - Alain.R.Truong
 

It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

The counter revolution

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”

 

Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.

What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.

Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).

Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children1.

An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

“Most of our students”, according to another despairing assessment, “are functionally illiterate”. This chimes with everything I’ve heard in my own conversations with teachers and academics. One Oxbridge lecturer I spoke to described a “collapse in literacy” among his students.

The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them.

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed2. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

That golden thread is breaking for the second time.

An intellectual tragedy

The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

After the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, global PISA scores — the most famous international measure of student ability — began to decline. As John Burn Murdoch writes in the Financial Times, students increasingly tell surveys that they struggle to think, learn and concentrate. You will notice the tell-tale mid-2010s inflection point:

The Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

A chart showing the PISA results
 

And, as Burn Murdoch says, these cognitive issues are not restricted to schools and universities. They affect everyone: “[the] decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups”.

 

Most intriguing — and alarming — is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the twentieth century (the so-called “Flynn effect”) but which now seems to have begun to fall.

The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.

The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment.

World without mind

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacycertain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

As an extreme example think of somebody trying to simply speak a famous work of philosophy. Say, Kant’s 900-page The Critique of Pure Reason or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It would be impossible to do. And also impossible to listen to.

To produce his great work Kant had to write down his ideas, scratch them out, think about them, refine them and then rework them over many years so they added up into a persuasive and logical whole.

To properly understand the book you have to be able to have it in front of you so you can re-read bits you don’t understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in. This kind of advanced thinking is inseparable from reading and writing.

The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation3. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

As Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.

These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

This is why Ong observed that pre-literate “oral” societies often strike visitors from literate countries as remarkably mystical, emotional, and antagonistic in their discourse and thinking4.

 

As books die, we seem to be returning to these “oral” habits of thought. Our discourse is collapsing into panic, hatred and tribal warfare. Anti-scientific thought thrives at the highest level of the American government. Promoters of irrationality and conspiracy theories such as Candace Owens and Russell Brand find vast and credulous audiences online.

Laid out on the page their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

The rise of these emotional and irrational styles of thinking poses a profound challenge to our culture and politics.

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

The end of creativity

The age of print was characterised by unprecedented dynamism and cultural richness. Reading is a foundation stone of the creativity and innovation that is fundamental to modernity.

It is not the case that for a society to benefit from the culture of print that every citizen must be a bookworm. And yet if one habit unites the leaders, inventors, scientists and artists who have forged our civilisation it is reading. Serious readers are over-represented in almost every area of human achievement.

Take great politicians: Teddy Roosevelt claimed to read a book a day, Winston Churchill set himself an ambitious programme of reading in philosophy, economics and history as a young man and continued to read voraciously throughout his life. Clement Attlee recalled that he read four books a week as a schoolboy.

The Books Beloved by David Bowie | Internet Archive Blogs
 

Or consider popular culture (not usually thought of as a particularly literary field of human endeavour). David Bowie read, in his own words, “voraciously”. “Every book I ever bought, I have. I can't throw it away”, he once said. “It's physically impossible to leave my hand!” A list Bowie wrote of his hundred favourite books includes works by William Faulkner, Tom Stoppard, DH Lawrence and TS Eliot.

In a recent book about his song-writing career Paul McCartney cited “Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg, of French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, Eugene O’Neill and Henrik Ibsen” among the authors who had inspired him.

Thomas Edison read deeply throughout his life. So did Charles Darwin. So did Albert Einstein. Ironically, even Elon Musk claims that he was “raised by books”.

Reading enriches creative work by giving men and women of genius access to the vast and priceless trove of knowledge preserved in books — “the best that has been thought and said”. The discipline of reading equips them with the analytical tools to interrogate, refine and revolutionise that tradition.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein argues in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, the invention of the printing press helped to catalyse a series of cultural revolutions which forged the modern world: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution. Other historians would add the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights and the industrial revolution.

Eisenstein explains how the tendency of reading to foster innovation played out in Renaissance universities. With the invention of printing students had increased access to books allowing “bright undergraduates to reach beyond their teachers’ grasp. Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or academic skill.” And so,

Students who took advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovating trends. Young minds provided with updated editions, especially of mathematical texts, began to surpass not only their own elders but the wisdom of ancients as well.

Modern students who are unable to read are once more reliant on the authority of their teachers and are less capable of racing ahead, innovating and questioning orthodoxies.

These students are just one symptom of the stagnant culture of the screen age which is characterised by simplicity, repetitiveness and shallowness. Its symptoms are observable all around us.

Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of “disruptive” and “transformative” inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress “is barely keeping pace with the past”.

Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.

Even books themselves are becoming less complex.

 

If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.

Our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.

Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present. Deprived of the critical tools to question and develop the insights of those who went before us, we are condemned to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.

Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.

The death of democracy

Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.

“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.

Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.

It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?

But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.

The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking.

This was what historians of the seventeenth century know as the “representational” culture of power, the highly visual system of monarchical propaganda which forced the fearsome and awe-inspiring image of the king onto his subjects. The regime displayed its power in parades, paintings, fire-work displays, statues and grandiose buildings.

Equestrian Portrait of Louis XIV by MIGNARD, Pierre
 

The system worked in an age before mass literacy. But as knowledge spread through society and the analytic, critical modes of thinking fostered by print took hold, the whole mental and cultural atmosphere which sustained the old order was burned away. People began to know too much. And to think too much.

The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy. The historian Orlando Figes has noted that the English, French and Russian revolutions all occurred in societies in which literacy was approaching fifty per cent.

Robert Darnton’s book The Revolutionary Temper chronicles the chaos unleashed on the old regime in France by the age of print. Knowledge spread through French society with disastrous effect: political prisoners wrote bestselling memoirs publicising their unjust incarceration by the state; ordinary people consumed pamphlets about the exorbitant and unjust wealth enjoyed by aristocrats; the government’s disastrous finances were suddenly debated by an incredulous and furious public rather than behind closed doors in the back rooms of Versailles.

Meanwhile the analytic, critical modes of thinking began to eat away at the mystical and emotional underpinnings of the old order. The philosophes and radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, supported by a growing middle class readership, began to ask the kinds of critical questions that are pre-eminently print-based in their tone. Where does power come from? Why should some men have so much more than others? Why aren’t all men equal?

***It’s worth noting that this highly simplified account clearly excludes many of the factors the shape the unfolding of history: economics, climate, individual men and women, blind chance. Print alone cannot usher in peace and democracy (witness the consequences of the Russian revolution). And print cannot abolish the innate human tendencies towards partisanship and violence (witness the aftermath of the French revolution). Print is certainly not immune to fake news and conspiracy theories (witness the lead-up to the French revolution). ***

But you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them.

Postman cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in which both presidential candidates spoke at incredible length and in remarkable detail as one of the summits of print culture:

Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed . . . on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond.

When Postman was writing in the late 1980s, such debates were already impossible to imagine. Ironically the televised debates that he criticised as degraded, uninformative and over-emotional strike twenty-first century viewers as almost comically civilised and high minded.

 

Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.

TikTok, as the writer, Ian Leslie puts it is “rocket fuel for populists”.

Why does [TikTok] benefit populists disproportionately? Because, almost by definition, populism thrives on emotions, not thoughts; on feelings not sentences. Populists specialise in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think. Thinking is where certainty goes to die.

The rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order may not survive this revolution.

The Course of Empire (paintings) - Wikipedia
 

Into the moronic inferno

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.

These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.

Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic.

Many people are now as suspicious of vaccines as the uneducated yokels of the eighteenth century satirised by the cartoonist James Gillray more than two hundred years ago.

File:The cow pock.jpg - Wikipedia
 

As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.

Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.

As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.

Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Welcome to the post-literate society.

1

When George Orwell reported on a newly-published study of children’s reading habits in 1940, he found that children were “voluntarily” reading works by Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, GK Chesterton and Shakespeare. These children, he noted, were “aged between 12-15 and belonged to the poorest class in the community”.

2

I protest that I read my Peter Brown and accept this is a simplistic (though I hope rhetorically forceful) characterisation of late antiquity. But I also think recent fashionable attempts to rebrand the “dark ages” as the “light ages” can be a bit overdone. Literacy rates did decline in late antiquity.

3

People sometimes object that Socrates bemoaned the death of writing. Havelock’s detailed argument as set out in his book Preface to Plato is worth reading in full. One point he makes is that Socrates himself was the product of an intellectual climate already being profoundly influenced by writing. Plato, according to Havelock, was an active campaigner against pre-literate modes of thinking.

4

This is not to say literate societies are “better” or more intelligent than oral societies. As Ong writes, oral societies are capable of feats of memory that are staggering to outsiders. But it is true that literate habits of thought seem to be essential to the kind of advanced and complex civilisation we live in.

 

 

Subscribe to Cultural Capital

Read full Article
October 04, 2025
Why They Will Never Be Honest About Islamist Violence
From Konstantin Kisin's Sub Stack

Why They Will Never Be Honest About Islamist Violence

 
Oct 04, 2025
∙ Paid
 
 
 

Have you ever wondered why in the wake of every Islamist terrorist attack, our media and politicians bend over backwards to make the extraordinary claim that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam? The answer is a mixture of things, but the central reason is easy to understand if you think about it logically.

To avoid offending morons, let’s not talk about people and talk about apples instead. As you know, there are red apples, green apples and yellow apples. Let’s imagine for a second that a small percentage of green apples are poisonous and can injure and kill people. It is difficult to distinguish the toxic green apples from the other green apples which are perfectly “peaceful”, “law-abiding” and so forth.

Now imagine that you are the public health authority whose job it is to protect the public. If your concern is solving the problem of the small minority of toxic green apples, you would immediately do a number of things.

You might devote significant resources to identifying the toxic green apples and removing them from the supermarket shelves. You might commission thorough research into how and where the toxic green apples are grown. You might crack down very, very hard on anyone who knowingly participates in growing or distributing such apples. You might even say that while you are dealing with the problem of deaths caused by toxic green apples, bringing more green apples into the country is liable to worsen the public health crisis until suitable measures are identified which allow you to separate the bad green apples from the good ones.

This is how you would act if your primary concern was the safety of the public. But what if you, as the public health authority, had spent the preceding decades claiming that all apples are the same? That to suggest that a small minority of green apples are potentially toxic is fear-mongering and green-o-phobic? What if you had been openly encouraging unfiltered importation of green apples and actively resisted calls to thoroughly check whether such apples are in fact, digestible for your citizens? What if your mantra for the last 20 years has been that anyone who believes there may be significant variations between the toxicity of different types of apples is a bigot who must be suppressed for fear of emboldening the “far right”?

If you were, in fact, responsible for the fact that people were now being killed on the streets of your country by the small minority of toxic green apples, would you not do everything in your power to explain that the diversity of apples is our greatest strength? That the toxicity of green apples is nothing to do with them being green? That any doctor who suggests that the government should carefully regulate the importation of green apples specifically is a racist?

The central premise of our elite consensus is that we must continue to pretend that all apples are the same. No matter how many people pay for this lie with their lives.

Read full Article
September 27, 2025
post photo preview
More thoughts on Forgiveness
Thoughts from 2022 with a new addendum for 2025

Thoughts on Forgiveness from April of 2022 with a 2025 Addendum

In Cath-O-Land we are celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday. Be you a believer or not, do you think that people are defined by their worst traits or decisions and thereafter imprisoned by them? Once a murderer, always a murderer? Is there a path of redemption, rehabilitation or restitution for that person, or are those dark choices and acts irrevocable? For the victims of vile crimes, they are unforgettable, they can be experiences that are life changing or life ending.

I guess it depends on the circumstances. I am not a fan of letting criminals skate free. If you commit the crime, do the time. I know it sounds simple, and we live in a world of decaying justice and manipulations of the courts that can prompt all of us to be cynics about justice. Dial back the clocks just a century and domestic violence and abuse was often ignored unless it erupted into murder. If you saw your neighbors beating their children or a husband beating a spouse, it was often ignored unless dealt with specifically within the family. I am not even sure that was the case, but that certainly is the impression I got from listening to my parents and grandparents talk about abusive neighbors by today's standard.

 

Justice - Mercy - Forgiveness – Contrition - Reconciliation - Healing

Justice - everyone has to face their choices, good & bad. If you believe in a Divine Judge who knows all, no one skates free. Everyone must face their story and how they wrote it by their actions.

Mercy - One can find forgiveness of sins, make restitution for their crimes. In this life, or the next. No one is a prisoner to their past, but no one gets to ignore it either. Mercy is meant to lift us above our past, pull us back on the path, reset the world we live in even if our acts have shrunk that world by our choices. Some may only fine mercy by a life in prison because their acts make them unworthy of living among us. While not a fan of the death penalty, finality of life often opens the door to reflection. The mask comes off when you are going to die, are you a harden & hateful soul, or can you in your final moments have contrition for your acts? In my world, mercy is only going to be received when I am willing to provide it. Mercy flows through me, or it bypasses me. My choice.

Forgiveness - It does not ever mean that the wrong someone has committed against us is acceptable. Forgiveness is not asking us to close our eyes and pretend everything is ok. Forgiveness is the ability to see beyond the wound, to emancipate oneself from the memory that has become our mental prison, to let justice be in the hands of another when we cannot obtain it for ourselves. Forgiveness is a choice - we can decide to offer it or withhold it. few things are worse than letting someone who injured us live rent-free in our heads for a life, imprisoning us in an inescapable memory when we have the keys of our freedom in our own possession.

Contrition – You are sorry for your offense and take accountability for it and are willing to live with the consequences of it and the possible need to make amends for it. Contrition belongs to the perpetrator of the act, and the victim may freely tell them to the go to Hell if they please.  Your sorrow for your acts does not depend upon their recognition or reception of your repentance.  

Reconciliation - It takes two, and it is not always achievable. When forgiveness and contrition are experienced, there is the possibility of reconciliation. You can't be reconciled with someone with someone who fails to take account of their own actions. In a more perfect world, reconciliation is always the goal. You can't be reconciled with a person who is a slave to addiction, especially if that addiction is behavioral altering. The addiction will always come first until they leave it behind. If someone says they are sorry and they alter their acts, reconciliation is possible. But contrition without change is empty. Few things can heal our hearts more than real reconciliation, but it is something not entirely in our control, as all the best things in life are, others have to meet us on the path of their reconciliation and work through the mess and injury however great or small it might be.

Healing - Be it victim or perpetrator - there is healing. If you have a healthy mind & heart, you choose the acts that define you. You choose the emotional weight to give to those acts and how they roam about in your thoughts and feelings. No victim need be a prisoner to the worst crime committed against them. *Victimhood is the surest path to an unhappy life.* Perhaps for some it is inescapable because they have developed a mental illness that will ever prevent they from rising above the pain. But if you are not mentally ill, defining your life as a victim may be one of your worst choices. Healing for the perpetrator can only come when they face their acts and do what they can to make amends.

Well, that is a lot. If you read it all, you probably need another cup of coffee. As always comments are welcome, even if you disagree with me on some of the points. It is after all just my ramblings about it. I hope you have a great day my friend, fellow pilgrim and one willing to lead me some minutes to read this. Peace.

*2025 Addendum for the Coffee Talk Crew 

I couldn’t agree with Fred more than recklessly inviting evil into your life is stupid. Nothing could be more stupid than knowing beforehand that someone is going to do evil and you welcome it pretending that it somehow won’t take place.   I can agree that that type of naive wishful thinking is profoundly stupid.  Europe is doing that with Islamists and the Center & Right of American culture & politics does that too often with the LEFT. There is no such thing as pre-forgiveness. If you come to commit evil, I pray you are stopped.  If it takes you leaving life to protect those I love, I vote you go home to God first rather than my loved ones. I am not happy about not having a choice but violence, but violent men/women have to be stopped with violence, not nice words or hopeful prayers.  Pray for their souls, stop their actions. Contain their evil. Predatory evil needs to be identified and ended. 

I don’t think Charlie Kirk’s wife is stupid for forgiving the murderer of her husband.  She still wants him to face justice and punishment for his crimes, but she is not going to live in the wound created in her life by his vile act. She did not have to forgive; she could have chosen to wait on it or never offer it to the murderer. She made a choice, and one that happened early on because she is serious (not perfect) about her faith.  I admire hr for her seriouness, I don't think I could arrive at forgiveness that quickly. 

At the core of Christian Discipleship is the dynamic of forgiveness – contrition and reconciliation.  Disciples are aware of how much they have been forgiven by God. Disciples know that if they want to seek God’s mercy, they must offer it to others.  I don’t think it has to be an immediate thing, massive wounds of hatred, violence and evil take equally massive amounts of time, grace and healing to mend.  The wounded will know their scars forever, how they chose to think about them is a choice.

Most Christians, and all Disciples should know that forgiveness is essential if they pay any attention to the Our Father.  “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I can’t imagine praying those words and not trying to live by them. Again, I don’t think it means forgiveness has to be immediate, thoughtless and a given, but it should be something or somewhere I hope to arrive in life.  I should want to forgive eventually even if the pain of the offense at the moment is too fresh, deep and crushing.

Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals