On September 23, 2019, President Donald Trump spoke at the United Nations about his government’s plans to dedicate 25 million US dollars to support religious freedom around the world. He illustrated the need for this initiative by pointing out that “the United States is founded on the principle that our rights do not come from government, they come from God. This immortal truth is proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence and enshrined in our First Amendment to our Constitution, [the] Bill of Rights. Our Founders”, so Trump, “understood that no right is more fundamental to a peaceful and prosperous and virtuous society, than the right to follow one’s religious convictions.” [i] No need to say that the right to follow one’s own religious convictions is commonly known as the freedom of religion.

Saved by God

On January 20, 2025, the same President said in his Inaugural Address: “Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” [ii] If America’s greatness culminates in a “peaceful, prosperous and virtuous society”, and, if no right is more fundamental to such a society than the right to follow one’s religious convictions, then the most fundamental and most urgent task for which President Trump believes he was destined by God is the protection and defense of religious freedom.

The most exceptional nation

On the 4^th of July of 2019, speaking at Lincoln Memorial, President Trump opened his Salute to America speech by stating: “On this day, 243 years ago, our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to declare independence and defend our God-given rights. […] That same American spirit that emboldened our founders,” the President said, “has kept us strong throughout our history. To this day, that spirit runs through the veins of every American patriot. It lives on in each and every one of you here today. It is the spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love that built this country into the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, and our nation is stronger today than it ever was before.” [iii]

The rights of all Men

In their Declaration of Independence, the 13 brandnew Free and Independent American States declared that they held as self-evident truths that in order to secure the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”, and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” This, and nothing other than this, is what defined the united States’ “exceptionality”. To be sure, the Founders were referring to the unalienable rights of Man, i.e. of all Men. So, when President Trump said that the United States “is founded on the principle that our rights do not come from government, they come from God”, the word “our” doesn’t mean that Americans are unique in having been endowed with these rights by the Creator of Man.

Independence and immortal truths

What makes Americans unique and exceptional is that, of all Men, they were the ones who proclaimed this immortal truth in their Founding Document. They were the ones who declared that Governments are instituted among Men to secure these rights and that Governments may be abolished and replaced by new ones when they become destructive of these ends. While the Declaration exclusively pertains to the united States of America where it specifically concerns declaring their independence, its Preamble’s immortal and self-evident truths do pertain to all men. In other words, it is not its political and military independence and strength that makes America great and exceptional, but its openly declared adherence to immortal truths.

Foreign affairs

Yet, nowhere in the Declaration did the young united States declare that their Governments ‒ i.e. the Governments of the States ‒ would or should involve themselves in struggles between foreign peoples and their governments in case the latter would become destructive to these universal ends or miserably fail to secure them. When it comes to foreign affairs, all that the Declaration could possibly imply is that when foreign governments or peoples intentionally interfere with American (State) Governments’ independence or impede, weaken or threaten the latters’ capacity or determination to secure the God-given rights ‒ in casu the religious freedom ‒ of their governed, American governments might decide to take defensive actions. If they fail to do so, it is the right of the People to abolish them and institute new ones. When it comes to America’s Federal Government, if the Declaration of Independence is indeed the manifestation of the “American spirit that emboldened our founders” and which “to this day … runs through the veins of every American patriot”, that Federal Government is also bound not to interfere with the affairs of foreign countries and peoples unless it could be proven that the latter were intentionally and actively impeding, weakening or threatening its independence and/or capacity or readiness to secure the God-given rights ‒ in casu the religious freedom ‒ of American citizens.

Fly-over and Battle Hymn

In 2019, President Trump ended his Salute to America by framing America’s exceptionality in terms of its military strength. While the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was played with a “fly-over”, he said “God bless you.  God bless the military.  And God bless America. Happy Fourth of July.” If, 249 years ago, the united States of America firmly secured their independence from the British Empire and all other “powers of the earth” to defend their citizens’ God-given rights, one wonders why, today, in a blatant showing of rabid “exceptionality”, the “most exceptional nation in the history of the world” spends ‒ “spends” as in deficit spending ‒ an exceptional amount of money to maintain its “stronger than ever before” military operations around the globe. Currently, the costs of keeping up and exporting America’s “exceptionality” by military means far exceeds 1 trillion US dollars per year.

The most fundamental right

President Trump’s first administration vowed to spend 25 million US dollars on the protection of religious freedom, religious sites and relics. In addition, it would form “a coalition of US businesses for the protection of religious freedom”. Laudable as this initiative may have been, this amount is a negligible fraction (0,000024 %) of the one trillion dollars the U.S.A. spends on offensive warfare, “colour revolutions”, counterterror operations and associated overt and covert practices outside its own jurisdiction. If it isn’t political, military and constitutional independence but religious freedom that is the most fundamental right to establish and maintain a peaceful, prosperous and virtuous society, and, if this is what defines a sovereign and independent country’s greatnes and exceptionality, then wouldn’t it be a great idea if the U.S.A. would stop interfering militarily with foreign nations’ independence, drastically reduce its defense budget and use the freed up dollars to promote and support worldwide recognition and defense of the self-evident truths enshrined in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence ?!

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[i] https://ml.usembassy.gov/remarks-by-president-trump-at-the-united-nations-event-on-religious-freedom-new-york-ny/

[ii] https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/01/the-inaugural-address/

[iii] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-salute-america/

“Dear Mr. President,

You opened your 2nd Inaugural Address with the words: ‘From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world’. ‘America’, so you said, ‘will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before’. Most likely, you are aware of the fact that exactly 249 years ago, in the month of January 1776, that memorable year when the united States of America declared their independence, it was Thomas Paine, one of your most prominent Founding Fathers, who wrote: ‘The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind’. Now that the world has become aware of what the ‘America’ of our times means by making its imperial cause the cause of all mankind, it behooves mankind to politely and respectfully ask you: What do you mean by ‘America’ when you tell the world that you want to Make ‘America’ Great Again? Whether your country will deserve respect all over the world will entirely depend upon the measure in which America’s cause is truly in alignment with that of ‘all mankind’.

Checking some premises

Perhaps, the question – ‘What do you mean by ‘America’ – may sound stupid. After all, isn’t it so that ‘everyone knows’ that ‘America’ stands for the 50 United States of America represented as stars on your American Flag! And that this is the Flag that not only symbolizes today’s U.S.A. as a poltical entity, but which also defines that specific entity’s alleged greatness. In that regard, you know that in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, the greatness of the U.S.A. is defined as ‘the Republic for which it stands’ and as ‘one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’. But, with all due respect, if this truly the ‘America’ you seek to make great again, allow me to suggest that there may be some premises you may wish to check first.

‘America’s’ greatness as an idea

“You see, if this is the ‘America’ that must be made great again, the logical question is: did it ever exist or has it always been a utopian fiction, an ‘idea’? A vision, that was conceived and promoted by some of your fellow-‘Americans’ soon after the ‘American’ colonies, represented as the 13 horizontal stripes on the Flag, had declared their independence. In other words, ín your opinion, was ‘America’s’ greatness ever fully realized and, if so, was it then lost, wherefore it must be realized again? Or, absent its realization, would you agree  with me that the idea of ‘America’s’ greatness has always remained an ideal? If so, how did that idea come to be ‘unmade’? And, must it be brought to life again, so that, once fully rekindled, you will organize its realization?”

No indivisible nation

“Without a doubt, you know more about ‘America’s’ history than this ‘Dutchman of old’. But, having studied a considerable body of ‘America’s’ historical records, I guess that we can both agree that ‘America’ as it is defined in the Pledge of Allegiance never really existed. For one thing ‒ and, to my mind, this is the key point ‒, there never was nor is there today one indivisible American Nation. As noted by political scientist James Piereson in ‘The idea of an American nation – On the genesis of the American nation-state’, an essay published in 2020 in The New Criterion review, the United States seems headed ‘toward pluralism without consensus […] and towards animus among racial, religious, regional, and national groups’ . [i] In light of these developments, Piereson defines the U.S.A. as ‘nation-state without a national idea’, which, if I may say so, leaves the reader with the inevitable conclusion that, lacking a ‘national idea’ and an indivisible nation, ‘America’ isn’t a ‘nation-state’ but a ‘state’ held together by enforced Federal power. On the rhetorical question whether it is ‘still possible to restore the ideal of a single American nation?’, Piereson answers: ‘That remains to be seen’.” (emphases added)

The 10^th Amendment

“So, if, as Piereson contends, an ‘American nation’ was and still is an ideal that must be restored, that, in your words, must be made great again, it must have somehow shrunk, shrivelled or atrophied some time ago. If it’s still alive, it must be given sufficient amounts of attention and support for it to become great again. If the Pledge of Allegiance is to be your guide in making ‘America’ great again, your task at hand is to turn it’s several definitions of ‘America’ into a unifying thread that all ‘Americans’ will accept and endorse: a Republic for which it stands, one indivisible Nation under God, liberty and justice for all. Apart from the fact that it seems inconceivable that all Americans will wholeheartedly accept and endorse such a unifying thread, you are well aware of the fact that the 10^th Amendment of the Constitution, that you pledged to support, defend and bear true faith and allegiance to,  provides that: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people’. If ‘nation’ means what it means and not something else, one indivisible ‘American’ nation can only become a reality when the States unconditionally and irrevocably relinquish their ‘reserved’ powers and hand them over to a truly National Government. Although ideas do have consequences, the idea that the States would unmock themselves for the purpose ‘nationalizing’ the U.S.A. will probably remain a utopian one forever and ever.”

A wise and frugal Government

“Permit me to proffer that there was a time when ‘America’s’ true greatness wasn’t just an idea, but that it was a ‘palpable’ reality that did exist in real life. I’m referring to the period when the United States still had a Federal government that was limited and respectful of the Constitution, which specifically defines the definite powers that Government may exercize only for certain well defined special purposes, while leaving the delegating States in full control of what Thomas Jefferson described as ‘the residuary mass of right to their own self-government’. [ii] This is the ‘America’ that was still great when, on 4 March 1801, in his First Inaugural Address, President Jefferson stated: “Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” If, Mr. President, you would succeed in making and keeping the ‘American’ Government ‘wise and frugal’ again, you will not only make ‘America’ but also the Cause of America great again, and, in doing so, worthy of becoming the Cause of all Mankind … again. And thus, your ‘good Government’ will be able to close the circle of all mankind’s felicities.”

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[i] https://newcriterion.com/article/the-idea-of-an-american-nation/

[ii] See: The Kentucky Resolution; Thomas Jefferson, 1798. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0370-0002

If happiness is something that you have a right to pursue and not something that you have a right to, then, be aware of the fact that wishing someone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year does imply that you hope and trust that the recipient of your wish will make a serious effort to pursue happiness. If this is indeed your intention, you might do well to accompany your New Year’s wish with a hint as to how that pursuit of happiness might bear fruit. Quite miraculously, that hint can be found in the very word happiness, be it that we first have to translate it into French.

Bonheur

While he served as United States Minister to France from 1785 until 1789, Thomas Jefferson translated into French the Declaration of which he was the principal author: The Declaration of Independence. In his translation, Jefferson, who was well versed in the French language, chose the word “bonheur” for “happiness”. This is how the key part of the Declaration’s Preamble …

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

came to read in French as follows …

“Nous tenons pour évidentes pour elles-mêmes les vérités suivantes: tous les hommes sont créés égaux; ils sont doués par le Créateur de certains droits inaliénables; parmi ces droits se trouvent la vie, la liberté et la recherche du bonheur.”

Celestial beatitude

While, in the simplest of terms, “bonheur” means “good fortune” and “good luck”, according to the Académie française, it also means a state of perfect internal satisfaction (“état de parfaite satisfaction intérieure”), “supreme and eternal happiness” (“le bonheur suprême, le bonheur éternel”) and even celestial beatitude (“la béatitude céleste”). Given the fact that, at least according to Jefferson and his fellow Founders, the unalienable right to pursue “bonheur” was endowed to Man by his Creator, it’s safe to say that the Latter had celestial beatitude or eudaimonia in mind when He endowed the former with this right.

The Great Between

This explains why, inevitably, the pursuit must take place in the reality that has always existed between Man and God, between the World’s Genesis and the Beyond, between the Mundane and the Divine Ground of Being, between the “plain” and the “mountain”, between death and immortality, between the finite and the infinite. Philosophers conscious of this “Great Between” named it metaxy. The metaxy, so they said, engenders a gravitational interaction  between its poles, a “pulling” and “thrusting” force whose natural orientation steers Men’s search for order and meaning in the direction of their own Beginning and their Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being.

Pursuing eudaimonia

How then, one may ask, does Man pursue eudaimonia? The answer to this question can be found in the very word “bonheur”, which is composed of “bon” and “heur”. “Heur” comes from Latin “augurium” (augury), which means a divination based on the close observation of signs and omens, and, by extension, a prediction, foreboding or prophecy. A “bon heur” thus means a good prediction. This is how the word bonheur not only defines eudaimonia as the goal of the pursuit, but also provides guidance as to how the pursuit can be successfully accomplished. Man was endowed by his Creator with the unalienable right to pay close attention to those signs in the metaxy that show the way to the encounter with his Creator as his eternal Partner in the search for his Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being.

Overcoming challenges …

Admittedly, the metaxy is not the Garden of Eden. It is the playground where the raw physical and the ethereal metaphysical worlds meet and intertwine, where human meets human and divine. So it is that any truthful and honest metaxic search inevitably engenders an immediately perceivable and experiential ‘First Reality’ that necessarily involves the tensions that the sometimes challenging and unhappy clashes between the incompatible aspects of that reality will entail. In fact, the tensions and challenges become an integral and configurative part of that reality. These tensions, and the opposing elements of reality that cause them, must be confronted, defined and made intelligible for them to be dealt with, overcome and resolved, so that, eventually, eudaimonia, Happiness, Bonheur will befall.

I wish that your New Year will be filled with …. BONHEUR !!!

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Nowadays, a lot of speech is spent on why it is very very necessary to abridge the freedom of speech. In their efforts to control communication, the “abridgers” face the problem that they must overcome the fact that in what is called “the free world”, the freedom of speech is held to be a fundamental human right that is enshrined as such in various Constitutions, Declarations, Conventions and Charters. In the United States of America, “abridgers” of various sorts are particularly bothered by the fact that since 1789 its Constitution contains a simple and unequivocally worded declaratory and restrictive clause which provides that Congress, its legislative body, “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.

Ulysses Pact

If “no” means what it means and not something else, and if the Constitution is still deemed worthy of respect, the USA is a country where, under no circumstance, “makers of laws” may interfere with speech that is uttered or received, no matter how seditious, offensive, “hateful”, “dis-“ or “mis-informative” that speech might be. Since the legislators themselves agreed with and enacted this restrictive clause, it can be characterized as a genuine Ulysses Pact by way of which the representatives of the “body politic” bound themselves to the mast of the Ship of State when it sails the “waters” of speech. While this may be so, this doesn’t mean that “abridgers”, don’t have unlawful ways and means to silence opponents, but, that’s another story.

Freedom of speech in the EU ? 

In 2012, the European Union’s Parliament, Council and Commission “solemly proclaimed” in a Charter of Fundamental Rights that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression” and that “this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” In addition to this, the Charter provides that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.” Do these lofty words mean that the EU’s legislative body shall make no law interfering with this fundamental right? Not unexpectedly, the answer is: no. At the end of the Charter’s Preamble, its authors also proclaimed that the “enjoyment of these rights entails responsibilities and duties with regard to other persons, to the human community and to future generations.” The Charter itself does not explicate this point. Instead, it simply refers to a “meaning and scope” provision that was laid down in a similar Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and that strictly regulates the enjoyment of the right to freedom of expression.

“Meaning and scope” …?

In that Convention, which was enacted in 1950 by the Members of the Council of Europe, the exercise of the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas, “since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.” (emphasis added)

Right or Entitlement ?

So, when it comes to the freedom of speech, in the USA, the legislative body placed a total and absolute restraint on itself not to abridge it, irrespective of everyone’s “duties and responsibilities” carried with its exercise. In the EU, the makers of laws made the exercise of the freedom of expression contingent on everyone’s “duties and responsibilities” in a number of enumerated domains of private and public life. By leaving these “duties and responsibilities” undefined in the Charter as well as in the Convention, the EU’s legislators opened the door to prescribe by law what they mean by everyone’s duties and responsibilities in what comes down to practically every relevant sphere of life. In other words, in the USA, the freedom of speech is regarded as a politically untouchable freedom that forms part and parcel of the unalienable God-given right called Liberty. In the EU, on the other hand, the “right” to the “freedom” of expression was turned into an entitlement which, although it is defined as “fundamental”, can be taken away, abridged or gauged by law that is formulated on the basis of the prevalent ideas and opinions of the sitting legislature concerning what is and what isn’t a desirable outcome when “everyone” exercises the entitlement.

Where do Human Rights come from … ?

Other than referring in its Charter on Human Rights to the EU’s “spiritual and moral heritage”, the Union remains silent about the origin of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In its Convention, the EU Council referred to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the source of human rights. Yet, in that Declaration, there’s not a word about the origin of Human Rights. All that we can learn from the Declaration is that these rights exist and that the “… recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. Other than this, the Universal Declaration provides that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Somehow, our rights and our freedom are “inherent” in all members of the “human family”. Most likely because they’re defined as … “human”.

… they come from the Creator of Man !

In the USA, the origin of Man’s unalienable rights is clearly worded in its seminal Founding Document, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Moreover, when it comes to defining the role that Government must play in defending these rights, the Declaration provides that Governments are instituted among Men for the very purpose of securing these rights. This clarifies why the American Constitution contains the restrictive clause that no law shall be made abridging the freedom of speech that is embedded in the right called Liberty. What Government must do on behalf of the governed is secure their freedom of speech, even when, in the case of seditious or rebellious speech, this would be to its own detriment.

The origin of unalienable rights is transcendental

Freedom of speech and all the other unalienable rights and fundamental freedoms can only survive in a world that recognizes, acknowledges, affirms and declares that their origin is transcendental. It doesn’t really matter what other name is given or what “identity” is attributed to what the Founders described as the “Creator of Man”. The point is that Man’s unalienable rights, although they are inherent in Man, are not “Man-made”. They did not somehow come into being or arise “in the world”. Besides this, Man isn’t free because he was born free and equal”, but because he was created free and equal.

Free speech and democratic health

Activist “abridgers” never stop finding, creating, seeking, inventing and conjuring arguments and reasons why free speech must be constrained and why Governments must control communication. In this whirl of anti-free-speech speech, defenders of the freedom of speech are inclined to formulate the value of this unalienable right in terms of its utility for society, more in particular for democracy. In The Left’s Reversal on Free Speech, an article published on the 18^th of November 2024 on Liberty Fund’s Law and Liberty website, Professor of Law Patrick M. Garry, ([i]) proffers that free speech is “a necessary condition for the attainment of truth” and, in that regard, that it is also the preferred way for a “society to discover the truth necessary to govern itself as a democracy”. According to Garry, “Americans have always believed that free speech and democratic health are intimately connected. As Supreme Court’s Justice Holmes argued [in the Abrams v. United States case], one cannot value speech if one does not value democracy. And if one does not value democracy, one will never protect free speech.” Moreover, so Garry, the “worth and staying power” of free speech depend upon its “ability to gain approval in the social marketplace of ideas”. ([ii])

Power replaces truth

It’s curious that, when it comes to defining free speech in terms of its democratic utility, the European law-makers reached the opposite conclusion. They feel that everyone’s unrestrained exercise of the freedom of expression is unuseful because it may threaten democracy rather than enhance it, wherefore it “may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society”. Apparently, free speech as the “necessary condition for the attainment of truth” that is necessary for a society to “govern itself as a democracy” is a condition that is to be feared in a “democracy” that, instead of letting it govern itself, is governed by a clique of unelected law-makers who prefer power over truth.

When truth is self-evident

Utility arguments are unhelpful and even counterproductive when it comes to establishing the “worth and staying power” of free speech because in an exchange of arguments between defenders and “abridgers” in “the social marketplace of ideas”, the latter will categorically refuse to allow this freedom its “ability to gain approval”. The signatories to the Declaration of Independence held that the worth and staying power of free speech is to be found in the self-evidency of the truth that all Men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Axiomatic truths like this don’t require “proof” to establish their eternal “staying power”. They don’t require the help of utility arguments. Their power doesn’t stem from their “ability to gain approval in the social marketplace of ideas”, but from their intrinsic self-evidency. The Founders didn’t conclude that free speech is a condition that is necessary to “attain truth”. They never considered that the truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence were the result of free speech. They held that, being self-evident, these truths inherently entail free speech as an endowment made to Man by his Creator.

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[i] Patrick M. Garry is Professor of Law at the University of South Dakota School of Law and a Senior Fellow at The Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. He is the author, most recently, of Limited Government and the Bill of Rights and has published widely on the First Amendment.

[ii] The Left’s Reversal on Free Speech; Patrick M. Garry, Liberty Fund / Law and Liberty website; 18 November 2024. https://lawliberty.org/the-lefts-reversal-on-free-speech/

Each year, on the 2^nd of November, we celabrate All Souls’ Day. “We”, i.e. those of us who still know, believe, hold or hope that Man “has” a soul, a timeless entity that exists at the transcendent side of daily life and that is to be understood as the spiritual core of the human being. On this day, we pray that the souls that passed away may continue to exist in a state of “rest” that has no beginning and no end: ”requies eterna”. And so, the introitus of the traditional Requiem Mass opens with: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis”. “Lord, give them everlasting rest and let eternal light shine onto them.”

A rest that is eternal

Because the Requiem Mass is a “Mass for repose of the soul of the dead”, its celebration signifies the expression of the age-old notion that the human soul survives the death of the human body. After its passing away, the soul “takes a rest” as it withdraws into the quietness that has no beginning and no end. In that absolute stillness there is no time, simply because there is no action whatsoever. Just to be sure, the soul’s rest is not the “at rest situation” that exists “in time” when opposing forces have reached a state of stand-still and balance while time goes on. It is a “rest” that is eternal in that it transcends the beginning and the end of the “cycle of action” that marks Man’s life between conception (beginning) and death (end).

The Divine Ground of Being

If the soul is indeed what remains after the death of the body, we may very well assume that the soul was also present and actively involved during the body’s lifetime. In any case, the soul must be assumed as present in “the living” who invoke God as the Giver of the soul’s “requiem eternam”. So, for the living as well as for the dead, “eternal rest” is the transcendental repose where the soul just “is”. This is the “Divine Ground of Being” that the soul shares “outside time” with its “Giver”, with the Lord, with God. The soul that passed away “enters time” again when it decides to involve itself with the world as a new human being.

The Great “In-Between”

Upon its “entering of time”, the soul creates what the philosopers called the Great “In-Between”, the  metaxy, which is the apparency of distance between the quietness of the ground of pure being and the world where Man is active as a human being. What remains of the “eternal rest” in this “In-Between” is, at best, a faint afterglow of Man’s spiritual origin, or, at worst, a nothingness that has become a complete meaningless void. Whatever may be the case, the soul, being the soul that it is, can’t totally abandon its divine ground and “undo” its beingness. It “haunts” Man with the idea that there’s “more between heaven and earth” and that there’s a Beyond, a divine reality, that surpasses all understanding but that can nevertheless be experienced. The soul’s presence thus induces in Man a drive to locate his divine ground as something in relation to the things of this world in which it is present, though it is not one of them. The effort may very well create an existential tension, which, curiously enough, reaches its climax when Man, unable to experience his divine ground, concludes that divine reality is a delusion and that all there is to Man is one human lifetime that must be spent in the physical universe between conception and death.

Faith and Intellect

Yet, even those of us who are absolutely sure that the the soul is a fiction and that a “requies eterna”, a Divine Ground of Being, doesn’t exist because not too long ago God was declared dead, find it difficult to describe precisely what it is that doesn’t exist. They run into the problem that they must, of necessity, define God as an entity with properties about which one can only advance propositions of the kind that apply to things in the external world. But because God does not belong to and can’t be found in their secular “external world”, this circular explanation of the structure of reality bites its own tail because it a priori excludes God and divinity. If, on the other hand, we enter into a genuine search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity, we are faced with the problem of an inquiry into something experienced as real before the intellectual inquiry into the structure of its reality has begun. Our intellect, intellectus, finds itself in quest of our faith,  fides, while our faith is simultaneously in quest of our intellect. (1)

All Souls

In addition to this, the inquiry gets more complicated by the fact that Man will find that he is an active participant in the Great “In-Between” and that this in itself influences the inquiry. Man, the homo sapiens, can’t distance himself from the metaxy and observe it from an objective vantage point. For this, Man, as he struggles in his search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity, will have to assume the viewpoint of the soul. In other words, Man will have to open himself to experience his soul as real before he begins his inquiry. This requires fides, faith, trust in himself as a spiritual being, such in spite of his intellectus warning him to be very careful when it comes to unconditionally trusting his fides. In this regard, All Souls’ Day is an expression of the fides that we trust that the requies eterna is the Divine Ground of Beingness of all souls, meaning those of the dead as well as those of the living who sing “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis”.

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(1) The concept of fides in search of intellectus was put forward by Eric Voegelin in his last (spoken) Essay, titled Quod Deus dicitur (What God is said to be) (a). The key paragraph of this essay is: ““We are not facing God as a thing but as a partner in a questing search that moves within a reality formed by participatory language. Moreover, we ourselves are part of the questioned reality that we are linguistically intending as if it were an external object about which we could talk as if we were cognitive subjects facing objects of cognition. The noetic search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity is itself an event within the reality we are questioning. Hence, at every point in the process, we are faced with the problem of an inquiry into something experienced as real before the inquiry into the structure of its reality has begun. The process of our intellectus in quest of our fides, a process that also can be formulated as our fides in quest of our intellectus, is a primary event.” (Italics in the original text)

(a) Quod Deus Dicitur; Eric Voegelin; Collected Works – Volume 12; Published Essays 1966 – 1985; Louisiana State University Press; 1990.

In the U.S., the “pro choice” advocates who used to hold that voluntary abortion was a matter of choice that had to be placed exclusively in the hands of pregnant women, have now made their own choice and decided that abortion is no longer a matter of choice. The politically correct choice is now unreservedly framed as: “pro abortion”. This shift shows that the “pro choice” movement was never about choice, but about the promotion and stimulation of abortion all along. This “pro-choice”-to-“pro-abortion” move places the “pro abortion” crowd in direct opposition to the unborn. And because abortus provocatus means the ending of Life in its most pristine and fragile form, this shift also puts pro-abortionism in flagrant opposition to that unalienable Right that was defined in the American Declaration of Independence as … LIFE.

Life in the womb

In that Declaration, the new American nations made it known that they held as self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Properly understood, these words not only mean that Life is what makes it possible for Man to manifest himself and participate in “the world” as Man, but also that Life is a right to protect and defend what constitutes the foundation of his very existence. Does this apply to “life in the womb”? Well, when it comes to the existence of life in the womb, there can’t be any question that a human embryo that isn’t dead or was aborted is obviously alive. The very word “embryo” is from Greek “embruon”, a combination of “en” (in) & “bruein” (swell, ripen, become full, flower). Hence, embryo means “young one”, “that which grows within”, or “fruit of the womb”. Moreover, there can’t arise any question whether a human embryo belongs to the species called Man. All obstetricians will unreservedly agree with the fact that, without having to perform a DNA test, an embryo who lives in the womb of a pregnant woman specifically belongs to the human species. As a consequence, Life as Life and Life as unalienable Right are coincidental. And so, a human embryo who is alive is per se to be regarded as having been endowed by his Creator with the unalienable Right to protect and defend his or her Life.

“… in His own Image”

If we are to take the words of the Declaration serious, aborting a human embryo thus comes down to the elimination of a specimen of the human race as well as a breach of this embryo’s foremost right to exist as a living being. Even though an embryo is incapable of exercising its unalienable right to defend its Life, this doesn’t mean that it somehow waived this right and that eliminating him or her shall remain inconsequential. After all, we’re dealing here with a fundamental human right that was endowed to Man by his Creator when, as Moses wrote in Genesis 1:26-27, “God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; […] So, God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female He created them.”

The embryo’s natural custodian

Most likely, this is the God Who plays the leading role in the Declaration of Independence as the Creator of Man. Since He is the One Who endows Man with Life, we may safely conclude that Life finds its origin at the Divine Ground of Being and that this is why Man has the inherent and unalienable right to defend and protect it against annihilation. Evidently, lacking any means of defense against obliteration, the earliest manifestations of the human organism, from embryo to newborn child, are entirely dependent for their protection on their natural host, the mother who carries them. Like her mother, she is the irreplacable custodian and guardian of the embryo’s rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, which, at this stage of its development, means the right to oxygen, food, shelter, protection, respect and affection.

What is Life ?

In 1972, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, the Hungarian Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893 – 1986), wrote in his book The Living State, “[t]hough I do not know what life is, I have no doubt as to whether my dog is alive or dead. We know life by the existence of things for which there is no direct physical reason and, which even seem contrary to the rules of physics. Life appears to be a revolt against the rules of Nature. […] Life is a paradox. It is easy to understand why man always divided his world into ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, anima meaning a soul, the presence of which had to explain queer behaviour. The most basic rule of inanimate nature is that it tends toward equilibrium which is at the maximum of entropy and the minimum of free energy. As shown so delightfully by [Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin] Schrödinger in his little book, What is Life (1945), the main characteristic of life is that it tends to decrease its entropy. It also tends to increase its free energy. Maximum entropy means complete randomness, disorder. Life is made possible by order, structure, a pattern, which is the opposite of entropy. This pattern is our chief possession, it was developed over billions of years. The main aim of our individual existence is its conservation and transmission.”

A slap in the face

Anyone who has no more than a faint inkling of the complexity of a new human being must be impressed and baffled by the awesome development of order and structure in the pattern that actively “configurates” Man. A pattern that can already be observed during the earliest stages of his or her efforts to overcome entropy and increase free energy and conserve and eventually transmit this pattern to a future generation. Even those of us who think that Man is an accidental event in Evolution, who are convinced that the words laid down in the Declaration of Independence’s Preamble have become meaningless and who believe that the Creator of Man is just a delusion, must agree with the fact that every child, born and unborn alike, is the astounding living proof of the fact that it possesses this archetypical pattern that evolved over billions of years. In this “evolutionary” context, abortion comes down to depriving a new human being of what Erwin Schrödinger defined as his or her “chief possession” and making the conservation and transmission of that pattern impossible. This constitutes a total negation and nullification of “the aim of our individual existence”. Simply put: abortion dehumanizes Man. For those of us who do agree with what the Founding Fathers wrote in that famous Preamble and who accept the premise that Man is a spiritual being, the abortion of an unborn child isn’t merely an assault against Life and Man’s unalienable rights, it is also a “slap in the face” of the Creator Who made Man in His image. And that is exactly what Life got to do with abortion

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In 1835, a wise, observant and foreseeing Frenchman wrote …

“… I think that the type of oppression threatening democracies will not be like anything there has been in the world before; our contemporaries would not be able to find any example of it in their memories. I, too, am having difficulty finding a word which will exactly convey the whole idea I have formed; the old words despotism and tyranny are not suitable. This is a new phenomenon which I must, therefore, attempt to define since I can find no name for it.

I wish to imagine under what new features despotism might appear in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, living apart, is almost unaware of the destiny of all the rest. His children and personal friends are for him the whole of the human race; as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he stands alongside them but does not see them; he touches them without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself; if he still retains his family circle, at any rate he may be said to have lost his country.

Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed. It would be like a fatherly authority, if, fatherlike, its aim were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks only to keep them in perpetual childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind. It works readily for their happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it. It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances. Why can it not remove from them entirely the bother of thinking and the troubles of life?

Thus, it reduces daily the value and frequency of the exercise of free choice; it restricts the activity of free will within a narrower range and gradually removes autonomy itself from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all this, inclining them to tolerate all these things and often even to see them as a blessing. Thus, the ruling power, having taken each citizen one by one into its powerful grasp and having molded him to its own liking, spreads its arms over the whole of society, covering the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules through which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd. It does not break men’s wills but it does soften, bend, and control them; rarely does it force men to act but it constantly opposes what actions they perform; it does not destroy the start of anything but it stands in its way; it does not tyrannize but it inhibits, represses, drains, snuffs out, dulls so much effort that finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherd.

I have always believed that this type of organized, gentle, and peaceful enslavement just described could link up more easily than imagined with some of the external forms of freedom and that it would not be impossible for it to take hold in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are ceaselessly agitated by two conflict­ ing passions: they feel the need to be directed as well as the desire to remain free. Since they are unable to blot out either of these hostilefeelings, they strive to satisfy both of them together. They conceive a single, protective, and all-powerful government but one elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with the sovereignty of the people. That gives them some respite. They derive consolation from being supervised by thinking that they have chosen their supervisors. Every individual tolerates being tied down because he sees that it is not another man nor a class of people holding the end of the chain but society itself.”

With these foreboding words, Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, closed his historic and influential treatise in which he laid down what he had experienced during a lengthy journey around the early American Republic: Democracy in America.

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On the 24^th of September 2024, Javier Milei, the President of the Argentinian Republic, told the General Assemblee of the United Nations in New York: “I want to be clear about something, so that there are no misinterpretations: Argentina, which is undergoing a profound process of change, has decided to embrace the ideas of freedom; those ideas that say that all citizens are born free and equal before the law, that we have inalienable rights granted by the Creator, among which are the right to life, liberty and property. Those principles, which guide the process of change that we are carrying out in Argentina, are also the principles that will guide our international conduct from now on.”

Not a politician

“… for those who do not know”, Milei said, “I am not a politician, I am an economist, a libertarian liberal economist, who has never had the ambition to be a politician … and who was honored with the position of President of the Argentine Republic, in the face of the resounding failure of more than a century of collectivist policies … that destroyed our country.” In spite of being an economist and not a politician, Milei stressed that the restoration of his wrecked country doesn’t just require a change in economic and financial policies, but that it cannot be achieved without a fundamental change in the world view underlying them.

Unalienable rights

I leave the answer to the question whether President Milei is indeed a libertarian liberal economist to those who consider themselves schooled in libertarian liberal economy. But when it comes to Milei’s concept of Man’s unalienable rights, the Argentinian President shows that he is, indeed, an economist who couldn’t help himself substituting the right to property for that classic God-given right that was defined as the Pursuit of Happiness in the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence. When it comes to defining Man’s unalienable rights, this Preamble stands as the seminal and fundamental hallmark. Without a doubt, Milei is familiar with the text. He knows that Thomas Jefferson and his co-authors did not declare that the Creator of Man granted Men the right to property. No. They declared that the Creator endowed Man with the Pursuit of Happiness which they defined as one of Man’s unalienable rights.

The Declaration’s Preamble says it all

On the 4^th of July 1776, in Philadelphia, not far from where Javier Milei addressed the UN Assemblee, the representatives of the 13 brandnew American States, while they were assembled in Congress, unanimously declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Belief or holding self-evident truths

In his UN-speech, President Milei emphatically declared that Argentinians now “believe in the defense of life for all; … in the defense of property for all; … in freedom of speech for all; … in freedom of worship for all; … in freedom of commerce for all; and … in limited governments, all of them.” No matter how commendable these words and Milei’s intentions may be, the late 18^th century Americans did not believe in all these lofty principles. No. They held as self-evident truth that just Governments are limited because they are instituted to serve no other purpose than to secure certain unalienable rights and that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That’s it.

A Bill of Rights

To underscore the limited nature of their newly established Federal Government, the Americans enumerated freedom of speech, freedom of worship, the principle of habeas corpus, etc., in various “declaratory and restrictive clauses” which, on December 15, 1791, they ratified and added to the Constitution as the 10 Amendments that became known as the Bill of Rights. [i] This was done to precisely delimit the powers of their Federal Government by expressly prohibiting it from meddling with the enumerated rights and freedoms by way of “misconstruction or abuse of its powers” and “as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government” in order to “best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution”. In fact, by amending the Constitution, Congress bound itself to unconditionally respect the rights enumerated in the Bill. It was a Ulysses pact.

Property differs from Life and Liberty

It was in that Bill of Rights that the American Founders brought up the right to property. In what became the Constitution’s 5^th Amendment, the First Congress of the United States had laid down that “no person … shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” By defining property as something that may not be taken without just compensation, the Founders distinguished property from Life and Liberty in the sense that, while property can be taken without or with just compensation, there can’t be any just or unjust compensation when Life and/or Liberty are “taken”. Neither can there be any compensation when that other unallienable right, the Pursuit of Happiness, is “taken”. Why not? Because Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are rights that are unalienable, wherefore they can neither be given nor taken. And so, it follows axiomatically, that when things can’t be alienated, matters of compensation simply can’t be of concern. Besides this, since all Men were endowed with these rights by the Creator, there’s no need to give or take what everyone is already endowed with. It took the genius of Thomas Jefferson to formulate this so simply, clearly and unequivocally in the Declaration’s Preamble.

The “unalienable” Right to Property

Does this mean that Governments are incapable of constraining and suppressing Life, Liberty and/or the Pursuit of Happiness? No. It is precisely because Governments, and the UN for that matter, tend to suppress Man’s unalienable rights that the Preamble was inserted into the Declaration of Independence. Likewise, this is precisely the reason why President Milei is trying to repair what he described as Argentina’s “poverty, brutalization, anarchy and a fatal absence of freedom” by rekindling Man’s unalienable rights. When placed in the perspective of the American Declaration of Independence, President Milei’s speech is meaningful only because he acknowledgded and expressly confirmed that the source of our unalienable rights is Man’s Creator. And, who knows, perhaps he figured that even though the Americans “of old” didn’t think that the Creator granted us the right to property, it would be a great idea to embrace and hold as truth that He did. In this embrace Milei lifted the source of this right from the secular world of Man to the Divine Ground of Beingness. Instead of wresting the right to property from the hands of the collectivists as if it were an alienable entitlement, Milei just placed it out of their reach by defining it as unalienable and granted by the Creator.

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[i] On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States proposed 12 amendments to the Constitution. The 1789 Joint Resolution of Congress proposing the amendments is on display in the Rotunda in the National Archives Museum. Ten of the proposed 12 amendments were ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures on December 15, 1791. The ratified Articles (Articles 3–12) constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, or the U.S. Bill of Rights. In 1992, 203 years after it was proposed, Article 2 was ratified as the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. Article 1 was never ratified.

On Debate and Existence

People who live in a world where facts, rational arguments, open conversation, honest disagreement and respect for the freedom of speech still matter often wonder why it is that they are being attacked, ridiculed, deplatformed, debanked, threatened, bullied, censored, smeared and vilified by those with whom they try to communicate on the basis of facts and reality. The former wonder why it is that the latter seem to experience exposure to facts and reason as an existential threat. In his essay “On Debate and Existence”, Eric Voegelin (1901 – 1985), one of the 20^th Century’s most inspiring and original political philosophers, unravels this mystery by explaining to the reader that in such instances, the “exchange of argument” is “disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence—with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God.”

Second Reality

When Worlds are so apart, rational argument, so Voegelin, no longer prevails “because the partner to the discussion [does] not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that [the Austrian essayist] Robert Musil has called the Second Reality.” No matter how rational, the argument does not achieve results. It doesn’t even reach its intended recipient, because “behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurk[s] the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.” Very true, but this still doesn’t explain why people who live in a Second Reality react with such violence toward people who expose them to First Reality.

The Metaxy

First Reality … ? That is the “world” that precisely reflects the totality of the realm that has always existed between Man and God, between the World’s Genesis and the Beyond, between the Mundane and the Divine Ground of Being, between the “plain” and the “mountain”, between death and immortality, between the finite and the infinite. Philosophers conscious of this Great Between named it metaxy. The metaxy, so they said, engenders a gravitational interaction between its poles, a “pulling” and “thrusting” force whose natural orientation steers Men’s search for order and meaning in the direction of their own Beginning and their Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being. Most certainly, the metaxy is not the Garden of Eden. It is the playground where the raw physical and the ethereal metaphysical worlds meet and intertwine, where human meets human and divine. It is First Reality because in terms of order and hierarchy, it is the reality that is “first in rank” since it reflects all the interactions and movements that take place in the metaxy. It is superior to all Second Realities because the latter merely reflect disturbed, fragmented, truncated and adulterated versions of the metaxy.

“Second Selves”

Second Realities are self-created dreamworlds whereby the dreamer not only seeks to replace First Reality but wherein he or she becomes meaningful and finds him- or herself at ease, worthy of respect and in constant contact with his or her will to generate and apply coercive powers. These dreamworlds form the fake “reality” that surrounds what one might call an  imaginary “Second Self”, which is the fake Self that was conjured to replace the original First Self. Once a Second Reality has taken shape it informs the necessary ideology or world view that serves to present it as the Supreme Reality that must not only annihilate First Reality but opposing or competing ideologies and world views as well. At their very core, Second Realities and Second Selves are the result of Man’s revolt against the tensions that are inherent to conscious existence in First Reality. In terms of consciousness, Second Realities are states of self-inflicted unconsciousness.

The Krankheit des Geistes

People who are unable to step out of their Second Realities because they are convinced that they are “real”, suffer from the spritual aberration that was quite accurately described as the disease of the soul, as “pneuma-pathology”. Cicero called it the morbus animi. Voegelin defined it as “Krankheit des Geistes”, as a condition of alienation, of deformed and closed existence in which the ability to make contact with reality is heavily disturbed. The pneumapath thus lives in a strange self-created blend of the categorically and ontologically different First and Second Reality. Instead of confronting First Reality in its entirety, it is truncated by blanking out its undesirable and inconvenient aspects, whereafter the blanks are neatly and seamlessly filled with the core elements of the utopian dreamworld of the pneumapath’s preference. This in itself need not worry us, but the “blending” inevitably engenders in the “blender” the Will to Power that is required to forcibly realize a Second Reality and efface First Reality. So it is that in all Second Realities combat, strife, coercion, war and the Will to Power become the dominant aspects of human behaviour.

Avoiding the tensions of the metaxy

In Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt, Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola College in Baltimore, Michael Franz, expert interpreter and one of the keepers of Voegelin’s intellectual legacy, explained why facts and reason no longer play a role in communicating with “Second Selves” and why this makes the effort to communicate with such Selves completely useless and in many cases counterproductive. According to Franz, since “genuine ideological consciousness within a Second Reality like Marxism or positivism is less a result of the intellectual attractiveness of the doctrine than of its capacity for dulling the tensions of open existence, a rational critique of the particulars of the doctrine is likely to be of no avail in such cases. […] Voegelin’s analysis suggests that the provision of a plausible account of the world is only a secondary project within the construction of an ideological Second Reality, and by the same token it would appear that adherence to an ideology is first a matter of faith ‒ followed by a more or less elaborate project of circumventing the dissonance between the First and Second Realities.” The basic problem, according to Franz, can be stated simply: “exposure to the ‘healthy’ tension of balanced consciousness in the metaxy is not likely to reorient the closed soul, for it was exposure to precisely this tension that first prompted pneumapathological closure.” As a result, “a reintroduction to the tension of the metaxy will bring but another, perhaps stronger, dose of the same.”

Turning the tables

The ultimate trick of the pneumapath is to install in the minds of his opponents the notion that God is Dead, that there is no Divine Ground of Being, that Man is not a spiritual being, that the human Soul ‒ the pneuma ‒ is a delusional fiction. This will desecrate the metaxy as the “playing field” where Man meets God as a partner in his quest for truth and meaning. More in particular, when Man lacks pneuma, pneumapathology and pneumapaths don’t exist. In this secularized “reality” the diagnosis of pneumapathology is not only impossible, it is automatically and inherently disqualified as offensive, insulting and as a sign of mental dysfunction and intellectual incompetence on the part of the one who makes the diagnosis. This is how the pneumapath turns the tables on his opponent and manages to shift debate and rational argument to a contest between moral values. Assuming the “moral highground” in that contest enables the pneumapath to disqualify the realist as a morally inferior human being who does not deserve standing and should be distrusted and silenced.

Detecting the dreams

Pneumapaths mostly go undetected because, as explained by Voegelin, their Second Realities are clever structures designed “to eclipse our image of reality by a counterimage that will furnish a plausible basis for the action he calls for”. In order to serve this purpose, the  counterimage “must fulfill two conditions: it must cover the structure of reality with sufficient comprehensiveness to appear, by the standard prevailing at the time, debatable as a true image; and it must be analytically obscure enough not to reveal its character of a dream image at first glance.” Of course, the dream “is never acknowledged as a dream but, in the context of the oeuvre it informs, it is meant to be the theoretical core of a true image of reality.” This is how the dream that is stealthily implanted in the counterimage of reality perverts and blurs the true image of First Reality. Hence, what pneumapaths fear the most is that the dreams they “pasted” into their counterimages of reality are detected as … dreams. As Voegelin put it, “[o]nce the dream is disengaged from its context, its conflict with reality is practically a matter of self-declaration”, and, if I may add, of the implosion and self-destruction of the Second Reality. While pneumapaths may succeed in turning the tables on their opponents, they can’t prevent the latters’ First Reality from turning the tables on the dreamworlds they wove into their counterimages of reality.

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Freedom and Society’s “moral Substance”

One might wonder how it is that people like Mrs Clinton can freely and honestly combine their intense hatred of your freedoms with their great affinity for it without contradicting themselves and being diagnosed as stark-staring mad and pathologically dishonest. Apparently, there’s more to this than just answering the question whether our fundamental freedoms come from God or from Government. The answer to this puzzle is actually quite simple and obvious. In the hands of Clinton-type people, freedom can be used as a very effective weapon to undermine, debase and destroy what they hate most of all: the “moral substance” of society. When the moral substance of a society can be molded, adulterated and obliterated, practices such as euthanasia, enforced sterilization, elective abortion and gender-affirming surgery and medication can be introduced into law as rights or interests by embedding them in the person’s fundamental freedoms and right to privacy. When taken to their extremes, in a morally debased society that lacks ethical standards, these permissive “rights” will invite, if not stimulate, a person to abolish all morality and perform immoral/unethical acts without any strings attached, i.e. without running the risk of being punished. When a crime is no longer a crime, anything goes.

Conscience is our “most sacred of all property”

How this works was explained by one of the United States’ prominent Founders, James Madison. On 29 March 1792, Madison declared that a Man’s “conscience”, which undoubtedly forms the lynchpin of a society’s moral substance, “is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a manʼs house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a manʼs conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.”

An Excess of Liberty

Madison firmly acknowledged that “government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” Property is “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.” Madison not only warned that “no man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions” when and where “an excess of power prevails” and “property of no sort is duly respected.” He also stressed that “where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause.” ([i]) In other words, a society can be effectively destroyed by simultaneously exposing its people to an excess of power and an excess of liberty. The effect, “tho’ from opposite causes”, will be a “double whammy”.

The “heart of liberty”

What “excess of liberty” actually means in this day and age became manifest when, on 29 June 1992, in its Opinion rendered in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court constitutionalized such an excess of liberty by stating that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define oneʼs own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” ([ii]) In this case, the Court specifically affirmed a woman’s “freedom” to end her pregnancy as a “right” that can be found in this “heart of liberty”. In order to  avoid having to define “abortion” as the cruel ending of the life of a new human being, the Court rephrased the act as the ending of a pregnancy. By implication, the Court showed to be in full agreement with the notion that an unborn child plays no role in the “mystery of life” since it lacks any attributes of personhood. Had it not deprived the unborn child of a place in the “mystery of life“, the Court might very well have been accused of granting pregnant women and their physicians a plain license to kill. To circumvent having to  address these moral and existential issues, the Court conjured the “heart of liberty” and infused it with what Madison described as an excess of liberty. However, this sleight of hand does not efface the fact that per the American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language, “being pregnant” is still synonymous with “being with child“,

“Libertad liberal”

What this means in terms of “moral substance”, was very well explained by Professor of Cultural and Political Science Danilo Castellano in his essay “Qué es el Liberalismo”, where he described excessive liberty as “the liberty exercised with liberty as its sole criterion.” This “libertad liberal” is, so Castellano, “essentially a vindication of independence from the order of things, that is, from the ontological ‘datum’ of creation and, in the final analysis, independence from itself. It, therefore, claims consistently, although absurdly, the sovereignty of the will, whether that relates to the individual, society or the State. It always seeks to affirm freedom from God and liberation from His law with the intention of affirming the will and power without criteria and, as fully as possible, admitting those criteria and only those that they derive from it, and that ‒ when depending on it ‒ are not properly criteria. This leads to a vindication of the so-called ‘concrete’ freedoms: freedom from thinking as opposed to freedom of thought, freedom from religion as opposed to freedom of religion, freedom from our conscience as opposed to freedom of conscience, etc.” ([iii]) (emphasis added) And, as we know since Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche published “Der Wille zur Macht” (The Will to Power), the unconditional veneration of the Sovereignty of the Will will inevitably energize the Will to Power, the Libido dominandi.

Deconstructing society’s moral substance

In the end, promoting liberal liberty as a Constitutionally protected human right boils down to empowering unlimited liberty and the sovereignty of the will. It is a Luciferian trick aimed at seducing women, and men for that matter, to accept that in what the Court defined as their “zone of conscience and belief” there lives a heart of untrammeled liberty. The effect being that, when that heart is given unlimited power, it will disrupt and eventually destroy the very “zone” in which it beats. This is the zone in which the moral substance of society is rooted. Once detached from the natural order of things and the ontological “datum” of creation, that “zone” will become arid ground and, as a result, a society’s moral substance will wither and die. In the Casey case, the Court supported its attack on morality by disqualifying pregnancy as a burdensome period of suffering, of anxieties, physical constraints and sacrifice. And so, the unique bond between a mother and her infant may be destroyed at the drop of a hat because “the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition.” To grant a woman the liberty to abort her unborn child when that liberty is alledgedly “at stake”, the Court unmoored liberty from its anchors in the woman’s zone of conscience and belief and so affirmed and gave free rein to an excess of liberty.

The excess of liberty is returned to the people

Admittedly, in June 2022, in the case of Dobbs v Jackson, the Court decided that “[t]he Constitution does not confer a right to abortion” and “returned” the authority to regulate abortion “to the people and their elected representatives”. However, the Dobbs Court carefully refrained from assessing the strength of the “heart of liberty” argument on which its Casey decision was based. And so, the Court returned to the people the right to freely exercise the excess of liberty that Madison defined as having the same maleficiant effect as an excess of power, “tho’ from an opposite cause”, and that Danilo Castellano defined as the absolute “sovereignty of the will”.

The prohibition of judgment

Eventually, in this world of unbridled self-assertion, any concept that is selfishly and egocentrically developed as “one’s own” is now as good as anyone else’s “own” concept. What’s more, because the excessive freedom to define one’s own concepts of existence, meaning, the universe, the mystery of life and, ultimately, of reality, is a legally enforceable right that was inserted into the “heart of the American Constitution”, the excess of liberty must inevitably lead to the concomitant excess of power that is required to validate and uphold such self-conceived concepts as “real” and worthy of respect. This is not accomplished by evaluating the concepts on the basis of their intrinsic accuracy, truthfulness, consistency and merits (if any), but by forcefully restraining anyone from exposing them to inspection, debate, scrutiny, rational assessment and/or moral judgment. In fact, it provides legal protection to any concept formed in the “heart of liberty” against any kind of judgment. In the end, the enforced prohibition of free and honest judgment signals the death of a society’s moral substance.

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[i] The Papers of James Madison. Edited by William T. Hutchinson et al. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962–77 (vols. 1–10); Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977–(vols. 11–).

[ii] Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (Nos. 91-744, 91-902); decided 29 June 1992; Opinion of the Court delivered by Justices OʼConnor, Kennedy and Souter.

[iii] Qué es el Liberalismo; Danilo Castellano; Verbo, núm. 489-490 (2010), 729-740.

The history of Liberating liberty commenced in 2014, when, in September 2014, in Cambridge (Maryland), I had the honor and privilege of giving a keynote address to a large audience celebrating the Sacred Fire of Liberty event organized by Constitutional lawyer Jonathan Emord’s law firm Emord & Associates on the occasion of its 20th Anniversary. Now, 10 years later, and after 18 months of campaigning for the U.S. Senate to “save Virginia and save America”, Jonathan Emord will again move to the courts his fight to keep the “Sacred Fire of Liberty” burning by resuming his work as managing principal of his law firm and his constitutional law practice. In addition to this, Emord also accepted his appointment as member of the Alliance for Natural Health‘s (ANH/USA) Board of Directors and as the organization’s new General Counsel. In the latter capacity, he will “spearhead litigation for the group against federal government agencies that deprive Americans of their rights to health freedom”. ([i])

Liberty Education

Broaching the work at hand in an hour-long video-conversation, Emord explained to ANH’s founder, Executive & Scientific Director, Robert Verkerk that fighting and winning legal battles won’t be enough to defend our unalienable rights and fundamental freedoms against suppression. ([ii]) While affirming that these rights “come from God”, Emord stated that “the approach” to effectively protect them against being suppressed by what he defines as “Authoritarians” is “in one part an education … that used to be based on the Founding Principles.” […] “At root,” so Emord, “people need to understand that in order for us to evolve, innovate, have a better standard of living and overcome new challenges like new disease, there is only one way that is possible and that is through a wide open, robust, free speech environment in which all individuals who have anything to contribute, or think they do, are given an opportunity to communicate and are allowed to participate in an unrestricted environment of debate and that [this] in term leads to discovering hidden secrets that are the answers to most of these problems. We can always overcome obstacles that confront us if we’re free enough to do it.”

Accepting self-evident truths as … true

If, as Jonathan Emord so strongly suggests, Liberty Education must again be based on the Founding Principles, then the first and foremost “lesson” of that curriculum must inevitably concern the concisely worded Principles laid down in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is precisely what, “at root”, people need to understand and … unconditionally accept as self-evident truths. All knowledge gained in Liberty Education will eventually “fall by the wayside” unless the “student” agrees without any reservation that it is true that God does exist and that, as a consequence, it is equally true that He, the Creator of Man, is the source of Man’s unalienable rights. If this truth is not acknowledged and understood as truth, i.e. if rights do not come from God, they will automatically come from …. Men, and in that case, rights become bones of contention in the ensuing “war of all against all”.

Liberty is a sacred right

In other words, before engaging in the study of all the legal, political and societal issues that must be addressed in keeping Man’s unalienable rights safe from being suppressed by governments and their acolytes, the “student” who wants to learn Liberating Liberty must first of all succeed in becoming aware of the truth that Man is a spiritual being, who was endowed with Liberty by his Creator as He created Man in His own Image. This concept rests upon the self-evident truth that Liberty as such cannot be “shared” as if it were an alienable “good”. It is a right that cannot be endowed by one Man to another Man, for the simple reason that it already belongs to each and every Man. It’s unalienability stems from the fact that all Men already partake in the infinite and divine Liberty that “permitted” their Creation and that is now required to pursue Happiness by overcoming obstacles in an “unrestricted environment of debate”. Liberty is not an entitlement that can be given and taken at will by governments. Governments are instituted among Men to secure their Liberty.

Man’s pursuit of Happiness

Because Man is a spiritual being, Liberty is not a human right, but a sacred one. Sure enough, in what the Founders described as “the course of human events”, Liberty can be suppressed, especially by corrupt and corrupted governments that grossly abuse their “just powers” against the consent of the governed. But it can never be destroyed. The totalitarian enemies of Liberty can only succeed in completely suppressing it by continously attacking, impairing, undermining and taunting Man’s awareness of himself as a spiritual being. Which is why the principal obstacle that confronts Man in his pursuit of Happiness is his agreement with the falsehood that Man is no more than one of the many outcomes of an evolutionary process in which only the fittest will survive. Wherefore any serious attempt to Liberate liberty from its shackles must begin with becoming fully aware of the truth that Man is a spiritual being.

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[i] ANH Press Release / 18 August 2024; ANH Appoints FDA Dragon Slayer as General Counsel; https://anh-usa.org/anh-appoints-fda-dragon-slayer-as-general-counsel/

[ii] Conversation between Jonathan Emord, Esq. and Dr. Robert Verkerk; https://rumble.com/v5awxn6-anh-usa-newly-appointed-general-counsel-jonathan-emord-in-conversation-with.html

If St. John of Patmos, the author of the New Testament’s Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, could have looked down from heaven to watch the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics, he might have wondered what two of the Four Horses that form part of the Revelation that was imparted to him when he was “in the spirit” were doing at the world’s most prestigeous sports event. Obviously, they were not going to compete for medals in the Olympic equestrian disciplines. In fact, one of “his” two horses would right away have been disqualified to compete for a medal, because it was an ingenious technical master-piece designed and constructed by the French atelier BLAM. ([i]) And, in terms of Olympic medals, the atelier’s artificial horse wasn’t made of Olympian gold, silver or bronze, but of  … iron. Although made of iron, it magically withstood the laws of gravitation when, during the Opening Ceremony, it galloped in Christ-like manner across the waters of the river Seine.

A symbol of “peace, solidarity and unity”

The Iron Horse was an Olympian gift from the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Winthrop. ([ii]) According to Sanofi, Thomas Jolly, the Artistic Director of the Games’ Opening Ceremonies, “wanted to bring out a galloping horsewoman launched up the Seine, symbolizing the entire route of the world’s delegations, and embodying all the values of Olympism.” Jolly’s artificial horse, so Sanofi, must be understood as a “symbol of resilience, peace, solidarity and unity”. Embodying “the values that have been at the heart of the partnership between Sanofi and Paris 2024”, this powerful symbol “is also the result of the know-how and spirit of scientific and artistic innovation […]”. Underlining the undying importance of Sanofi’s contribution to the Games and mankind, Paul Hudson, the company’s definitely British Chief Executive Officer, stressed how “the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 showed the world French cultural audacity”, wherefore “the horse that rode up the Seine will remain one of its most striking symbols.” Honouring the value of “openness to the world”, the Iron Horse will outlast the Paris Olympics since it will be on display at La Maison Sanofi, the company’s global headquarters in Paris, from October 2024.

The Iron Horse is the Pale Horse

Well, so far, so good. Yet, given the very audacious and sometimes intentionally provocative nature of most of the Ceremony’s “acts”, one may wonder if that’s all there is to the Iron Horse and how St. John might have found out that the Iron Horse represented one of “his” horses. Scrolling through Sanofi’s Olympic Ceremony webpage, visitors are invited to open various embedded youtubed videos illustrating and commenting on the event’s highlights. In one of these videos, a certain Astromeda draws the viewers’ attention to the fact that the colour of Thomas Jolly’s iron Jumper is pale. Astromeda then emphatically confirms that the Pale Horse “that we witnessed during the Olympic Games opening ceremony” is indeed “one of the four horses described in the Book of Revelation”. ([iii]) According to Astromeda, each of the four horses “represents a different aspect of the end times”. The Pale one is “often used to convey messages about mortality, transformation in the fragility of life”. Answering the rhetorical question “why was this symbolism used at the Olympic Games”, she replies that the Pale Horse “could represent the challenges humanity faces especially in light of recent global events. It’s a reminder of the resilience and strength needed to overcome adversity.” Portrayed as a “blend of ancient mythology and contemporary context” it “could be tied to celestial events”. This “astrological context adds another layer of meaning to the ceremony, emphasizing themes of resilience and renewal.” Astromeda ends her video by kindly asking its viewers “what do you think about the Pale Horse’s appearance at the Olympics?”

The horse represents Man’s intelligence

Yes. Good question indeed. What to think of the Horse’s appearance? To answer that question, allow me to suggest that we consult the German anthroposophist, erudite theologian and co-founder of the Christian Community, Emil Bock (1895 – 1959). In 1951, Bock published an in-depth clarification of the true meaning of the Book of Revelation, his book bearing the same title: Apokalypse. Lending insights from Bock’s monumental work, I explained in my book Liberating liberty that the horse is to be understood as the symbol that represents Man’s intelligence. In the Apocalypse, there appeared four horses that were to be distinguished by their colour: white, red, black and pale. By way of its colour, each horse represents a specific state of human intelligence and this state is the result of the way its Rider approaches and deals with reality. So it is that the White Horse works in full alignment with its Rider’s respect for the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. It produces truth and deals with the fullness of existence. The White Horse is ridden by a Rider who was given a crown and who holds a bow that he can use in aiming at his Mark. The Mark is the Biblical symbol that epitomizes Man’s highest spiritual Self. Having hit the Mark, the Rider of the White Horse overcomes the physical universe and frees himself of the self-imposed bondage that is the result of only using only his senses to create knowledge and experience truth. (Revelation 6:2)

The Red, Black and Pale Horses

In St. John’s words, the Rider of the Red Horse “was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword.” Clearly, this Rider’s goal is to sow discord by preventing people from hitting the Mark. (Revelation 6:4) The Rider of the Black Horse “was holding a pair of scales in his hand”. This Rider is weighing and measuring material things as they make up the physical universe. In fact, and such in analogy with what is called the “quantum enigma”, the act of measuring “collapses” (materializes) the metaphysical worlds of the white and the red horses. From there on downwards, it’s no longer about creative or destructive power, but about nothing other than physical force applied in the material world. (Revelation 6:5) Eventually, on the Pale Horse, we find a Rider named Death who was followed by Hades, the God of the dead and King of the underworld. Death and Hades “were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill by the sword, by famine, by plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth”. (Revelation 6:8)

Changing Horses

In the setting of St. John’s Book of Revelation, a human mind’s “paleness” indicates the death of its “Rider’s” soul and his complete disconnection from and denial of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Using his “pale” mind, Death will only cause randomity, entropy and chaos. Obviously, the Rider whose name is Death cannot ride the White Horse just like that. But he can decide to turn his life around and “change horses”. For this to happen, he must first of all seek to come alive. To come alive, he must become aware of and accept the Mark as his Mark. He must then “hit” the Mark, which is situated at the heart of his spiritual self. This is how he may become the crowned Rider who can ride the White Horse. In Revelation 19, almost at the end of the Apocalypse, St. John encountered this Rider and his White Horse in the opened heaven after they had successfully completed their journey: “Now His eyes are like a flame of fire, and upon His head many diadems, having a name having been written, which no one except He Himself knows, and having been clothed with a garment having been dipped in blood. And His name is called The Word of God.”

The Olympic White Horse

Now, let’s return to the French Olympics and let’s suppose that the symbolism used in the event’s Opening Ceremony was indeed meant to reveal a deeper layer of meaning and that we are to take the prominent role of the horse in the Ceremony as a genuine and honestly intended clue that this layer of meaning is to be found in St. John’s Book of Revelation. In that case, the Ceremony took a truly “Olympic” and lastingly meaningful turn with the dramatic changement of the artificial Pale Horse for the living White Horse that made its glorious appearance at the foot of the Eiffel tower toward the end of the Ceremony. ([iv]) Seen from this perspective, while the Pale Iron Horse and its “horsewoman” may have symbolized “the entire route of the world’s delegations” by galloping down the Seine, it was the White Horse that, when it calmly and majestically strode forward toward the white slope that led up to the official Olympic podium, actually turned the sportspeople from the countries participating in the Games into its Rider’s followers. While atelier BLAM’s ingenious Iron Horse may very well be described as “the result of the know-how and spirit of scientific and artistic innovation”, it was the living, breathing and proud noblest of all animals that, by being what it was obviously intended to be, the White Horse of the Apocalypse, exemplified that, it is the true symbol of “resilience, peace, solidarity and unity”.

Noblesse olblige

As the prototypical symbol of peace, solidarity and unity, the White Horse’s plain and untouchable presence at the finale of the Opening Ceremony also conveyed a powerful yet silent indictment of the International Olympic Committee’s exclusion of all Russian sportspeople from its 2024 Games. Having regard to that “other layer of meaning” that the organizers added to the Opening Ceremony, the fact that the Olympic flag, after it had finally been placed in the care of Olympian Officialdom, was raised ….. upside down, may very well be interpreted as an Apocalyptical acknowledgment and celestial approbation of the White Horse’s silent condemnation of the “International” Olympic Committee’s politically motivated exclusion of Russian sportsmen and sportswomen. Perhaps, if Sanofi genuinely and unreservedly wants to make an honest “this side up” statement in honour of the value of “openness to the world”, it should put the living White Horse on display at La Maison Sanofi alongside its artificial Iron Horse, to acknowledge that it was the White Horse that shall be remembered as the Opening Ceremony’s most striking symbol. After all, isn’t it so that French “cultural audacity” demands the honoring of the very French saying: Noblesse oblige !!!

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[i] Atelier BLAM, Nantes, France. https://bl-am.fr/info-en/

[ii] See Sanofi’s website: https://www.sanofi.com/en/magazine/paris-2024-partnership/paris-2024-opening-ceremony

[iii] Astromeda; Video; The Pale horse of the Paris Olympic Ceremony; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5PQ7JGdJCE

[iv] Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-rMkZ23naE

In case you’re a “fact-checker”, “media literacy expert”, “academic researcher”, “news producer” or “news consumer”, “regulator”, “content moderator”, or, if you’re professionally or otherwise engaged in imparting and receiving information, you may wish to know that you are urgently in need of help. At least, that’s what the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) says on its website. You see, EDMO is extremely worried that even those of you who have mastered “strong media literacy skills” are not always capable of distinguishing information from disinformation. The problem is, so EDMO, that some or most of you are unaware of the fact that “[l]ow-cost digital publishing tools and online platforms allow malicious actors to spread false, misleading, and manipulated information through an ecosystem of cut-outs, proxies, aggregators, and amplifiers that can effectively mask the original source of information from information consumers.” (emphasis added)

The Information Laundromat

In the eyes of EDMO, its “stakeholders” are credulous targets of “information laundering”. In today’s online information-jungle, even those of you who are professionally engaged in dealing with information can’t be trusted with detecting and evaluating “the biases, political agendas, and credibility of information sources”. You are helpless in “effectively combat[ing] information threats, including those from hostile state actors.” EDMO promotes itself as the unbiased and friendly guide by offering its “stakeholders” the tool to overcome their incapacity to “tackle disinformation”: the Information Laundromat. This is a “lead generation tool” that can be used “to determine if and how websites share architecture and content” and find out whether “a queried article has been shared across other sites, including known propaganda or disinformation sites.” (emphasis added) Of course, it isn’t you, but EDMO that knows which known sites bring known propaganda and known disinformation and which sites don’t. Most likely, EDMO used its own Information Laundromat to determine who’s bad and who’s good, and that’s how it came to know that “Russia” ‒ what else … ‒ is a very bad actor, while other bad actors are COVID-19-sceptics and Climate-Emergency-deniers.

EDMO is a creation of the EU Commission

Anyone who is endowed with a grain of “media literary skills” can see who is the actor that’s behind EDMO. Yes, indeed, it’s the European Union that’s acting as the truth-loving and utterly reliable good actor that is prepared to put aside its own biases and political agendas when the Common European Good is at stake. Briefly put, EDMO is an EU-funded “Project” ‒ numbered “SMART 2019/1087” ‒ that started its activities in June 2020. Initially, EDMO received a “start-up” sum of more than 11 million Euros. Its funding for the year 2024 amounts to no less than 8 million Euros. The EU Commission created EDMO “with the aim of supporting an independent multidisciplinary community to tackle the phenomenon of disinformation”. EDMO is composed of “regional hubs” and a central platform and governance structure which supports and coordinates them. According to the Commission, a Hub “involves organisations active in one or several Member State(s), that will provide specific knowledge of local information environments so as to strengthen the detection and analysis of disinformation campaigns, improve public awareness, and design effective responses relevant for national audiences. The activities of the hubs are carried out in full independence from third-party entities including public authorities.” ([i])

Outsourcing censorship

You may wonder why the EU “outsourced” the tackling of disinformation to “communities” such as EDMO and instructed EDMO to carry out its tasks in full independence from third-party entities including public authorities. Well, just look up Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2012), which concerns the fundamental right of “Freedom of expression and information” and you’ll see that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression” and that this right “shall include the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” Apparently, the EU is well aware of the fact that its own Fundamental Rights Charter prohibits it from directly tackling and interfering with information. In its Guidance on Strengthening the Code of Practice on Disinformation the Commission solemnly proclaims: “From its inception, the EU approach to countering disinformation has been grounded in the protection of freedom of expression and other rights and freedoms guaranteed under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. In line with those rights and freedoms, rather than criminalising or prohibiting disinformation as such, the EU strategy aims to make the online environment and its actors more transparent and accountable, making content moderation practices more transparent, empowering citizens and fostering an open democratic debate. To this end, the EU has sought to mobilise all relevant stakeholders, including public authorities, businesses, media, academics and civil society.” ([ii]) (emphasis added)

No “prior constraint” for good and bad actors

In other words, even “malicious actors” spreading disinformation can’t be deprived of the fundamental right of expression and information laid down in the Charter. Which doesn’t mean that they shall be protected against being exposed and identified as bad actors and that, as the case may be, their information shall not be exposed as disinformation that must be “countered” to foster “open democratic debate”. Just in case EDMO’s relevant stakeholders would be uncertain as to what kind of information they should be “countering”, in its European Democracy Action Plan (EDAP), ([iii]) the EU Commission provided us with the following definitions:

“misinformation is false or misleading content shared without harmful intent though the effects can be still harmful, e.g. when people share false information with friends and family in good faith.”

“disinformation is false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm. ”

“information influence operation refers to coordinated efforts by either domestic or foreign actors to influence a target audience using a range of deceptive means, including suppressing independent information sources in combination with disinformation.” ([iv])

So, even when it comes to takling known bad actors, the European Public Authority, to wit, the European Commission, publicly pledges to honour its Charter of Human Rights and refrain from legislation that imposes a “prior constraint” on imparting and disseminating disinformation by prohibiting it as such. Even when public harm is caused by disinformation spreading “influence operators”, in the European Union Article 11 of the Human Rights Charter stands as the Holy Grail.

Violating Article 11 of the ECHR

Yet, there are instances when the European Public Authority concludes that it has no other option than to descreate the Holy Grail that is filled with our Fundamental Rights. You see, there are potentially very very very bad actors in the EU whose freedom of expression and imparting information must be completely suppressed by unconditionally constraining their freedom of speech prior to the “speaking”. These actors are sooohh bad, that even in case they make non-misleading and purely informative statements or claims about the effects of their products, they shall be prohibited by law to utter such claims. These actors were identified and singled out by the EU legislature as “food business operators”. By way of the European Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation (NHCR / Regulation Regulation 1925/2006/EC), which was enacted in 2006, the European Union prohibits the use of “unauthorized” claims about the beneficial effects of foods (“health claims”) in what it defines as “commercial communication”, i.e. information originating from food business operators. The prior constraint concerns all information concerning the relationship between a food and human health provided by a food business operator in its “commercial communication”. So it is that, since 2006, all health claims should first go through the wringer of the EU’s Health Claims Laundromat to determine whether or not they deserve authorization by the EU’s Public Authority.

Appropriation without remuneration

This “Laundromat” was installed in Parma (Italy) at the offices of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The laundering procedure works as follows: food business operators may “apply” for the EU’s approval of a health claim by submitting it to the European Commission together with the claim’s scientific substantiation; the Commission then submits the “application” to EFSA; EFSA then “launders” the claim and its substantiation, and in case it finds the claim to be sufficiently “clean”, i.e. substantiated by scientific research, it notifies the Commission of its findings; after some additional political scrutiny, the Commission then authorizes the claim and publishes it in a public register; whereupon all food business operators marketing the particular food to which the health claim applies may then use the claim in their “commercial” communication. This is how the EU misappropriates the work, time, energy and investment of one food business operator ‒ and, in some cases, the applicant’s intellectual property ‒ by “authorizing” the relevant health claim in order to turn it into a public good without any remuneration going to the applicant. The result being that all health claims made in the European Union in food business operators’ communications are now “owned” by the European Public Authority and originating from its official Register of Health Claims.

Masking the source of health claims

Of course, consumers are completely unaware of the fact that a health claim that they come across in what they understandably perceive as “commercial communication” coming from a food-product’s manufacturer is in fact information that is owned, controlled, authorized and registered by the State. This is how the European Public Authority manages to substitute commercial for its public information by inserting the latter into the former without informing the public about the insertion. This sleight of hand is accomplished by depriving the apparent originators of the health claim used in their communication ‒ the food business operators offering a specific food-product to consumers ‒ of their fundamental freedom of expression and so coercing them to serve as the Union’s “cut-outs”, “proxies”, “aggregators” and “amplifiers” in order to effectively mask the fact that the health claim is coming from the European Commission’s official Health Claims Registry.

The key issue

Lets leave aside the question whether the health and knowledgeability of European consumers are better served by the EU’s ex ante facto system, that combines an absolute prohibition of health claims with a complicated authorization procedure, than by an ex post facto system of sifting out and prohibiting, as the case may be, claims that are found to be unsubstantiated. The key issue here is that in order to replace the latter system by the former, the European Union had to breach Article 11 of its Charter of Human Rights. By taking control of all information that concerns the relationship between a food and human health in consumer-oriented (B2C-type) information, the EU legislature arrogated and usurped the food business operators’ fundamental freedom of expression, as if that freedom were a right that exclusively belongs ab initio to the legislature.

EDMO and the NHCR

Now, coming back to the EU’s EDMO project, the next question is: why is the EU prepared to respectfully and unconditionally honour its Charter of Human Rights by abstaining from directly ‒ ex ante facto ‒ interfering with the freedom of speech of “known” information influence operators who are “coordinat[ing] efforts […] to influence a target audience using a range of deceptive means, including suppressing independent information sources in combination with disinformation”, while at the same time subjecting a specifically targeted group of business operators to a prior constraint type of censorship that prohibits that entire group’s speech before it is reviewed and before it occurs. Comparing the EDMO framework with that of the NHCR, a bona fide food business operator who is prepared and willing to diligently and truthfully inform consumers about the health benefits of his food-products ranks lower than a malicious information influence operator who spreads “known” disinformation. In other words, instead of being brandished, mouthcapped, side-tracked and discriminated ex ante facto as “despicably malicious actors”, shouldn’t food business operators be allowed to exercise the same fundamental freedom of expression that the European Commission is granting “information influence operators”?

Who will speak for you?

In case you’re not a food business operator, you may think that your fundamental right to freedom of expression is still in safe hands, even though EDMO may be “countering” your factual and truthful information by labeling or mislabeling it as mis- or disinformation. Just be aware of the fact that the NHCR shows that the EU is more than prepared and willing to breach its own Charter when it seeks to control speech by “authorizing” what may and what may not be said. Perhaps, we should mind the words spoken in 1946 by the German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they [the Nazis] came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” Transposed to our current time frame, Niemöller’s words could very well be paraphrased as follows: when the European Commission came to take the right to freedom of speech away from food business operators, many of them, including yours truly, did speak out. But that didn’t stop them from from taking away our freedom of speech. When the time comes when they come to take the freedom of speech away from what they call “bad actors”, will we go along because we’re not bad actors? Or, while condemning what they say, will we defend their fundamental right to speak? And then, when the time comes when they take away the freedom of speech from the good actors, will there be anyone left to speak for them and, last but not least, for you?

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[i] See the European Commission’s website – Overview of EU funded projects; European Digital Media Observatory; DIGITAL-2024-BESTUSE-TECH-07-EDMO; https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/digital-2024-bestuse-tech-07-edmo

[ii] Communication from the Commission; Guidance on Strengthening the Code of Practice on Disinformation; Brussels, 26.5.2021 COM(2021) 262 final; See: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/2022-strengthened-code-practice-disinformation

[iii] See: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/new-push-european-democracy/protecting-democracy_en

[iv] Definitions provided by EDAP can be found in footnotes 18, 19 and 20 on page 5 of The 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation; European Commission website; https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-disinformation

D e m o c r a c y  ! ! ! ! ! !

Practically every day, We the People are being lectured by our governments about the undying and almost sacred value of “democracy”. More in particular, our rulers and governors inform us that they are busy taking drastic steps to protect “democracy” by constraining their peoples’ fundamental freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. So it is, that in the European Union, its unelected Government, to wit, the European Commission impudently declares that it is actively “tackling the spread of online disinformation and misinformation to ensure the protection of European values and democratic systems.” (emphasis added)

European democracy

According to the Commission, “… European elections are a flagship of European democracy”. Without a doubt, the unelected Commissioners are acutely aware of the fact that in EU elections, voters can elect members of the European Parliament but that neither the EU “parliament” nor the voters who elected its members have any decisive influence on who is appointed to take a seat in the European Commission and how the “seating” is arranged. While it is true that the EU Parliament can block (veto) the EU Council’s appointed nominee to the Presidency of the European Commission, [i] European voters don’t play a direct role in the formation and activities of the EU Commission and its vast bureaucratic entourage. [ii] In spite of this, the European Commission boasts about protecting “European values and democratic systems.”

It’s about REALITY

Whatever may be the case, we’re being told that drastic measures must be taken because “disinformation actors from inside and outside the EU seek to undermine the integrity of the electoral process, trust in democratic processes at large and sow division and polarisation in our societies. According to the Eurobarometer, 81% of the EU citizens agree that news or information that misrepresent reality or is even false is a problem for democracy.” (emphases added) When an undemocratically selected group of governors keep on lecturing the governed, in casu the European “demoi” (peoples), about democracy, one wonders why it is that the former show such a great interest in defending a political system ‒ democracy ‒ that doesn’t really affect or hinder them in any way. Is this project really about saving “democratic systems”, or is it something else that the Eurocrats seek to protect. Well, the answer to this question is actually provided by the Commission in its very own statement. You see, solving this “problem for democracy” requires the censoring of “news or information” that “misrepresents reality” or is “even false”. Apparently, it’s reality, not democracy, that seems to be in need of rescue.

False Reality = Second Reality

Of course, it is not your or my, but EU’s officialdom’s version of “reality” that serves as the touchstone of what is “false” and what is “real” reality. As explained in my book Liberating liberty, “misrepresented” or False Reality is also known as “Second Reality”. Second Realities are self-created dreams, whereby the dreamer not only seeks to replace real or First Reality, but wherein he or she becomes meaningful and finds him- or herself at ease, worthy of respect and in constant contact with his or her will to exercise the coercive powers required to install ‒ immanentize ‒ the dream in order to realize whatever Utopia it is that the dreamer conjured.

Inaugurators and masters of 2nd Reality

In an essay (“On Hegel”) written by Eric Voegelin (1901 – 1985), the eminent political philosopher revealed how all such dreamers and imaginators shift “the meaning of existence from life in the presence under God, with its personal and social duties of the day, to the role of a functionary of history; the reality of existence will be eclipsed and replaced by the Second Reality of the imaginative project. In order to fulfill this purpose, the project must first of all eclipse the unknown future by the image of the known future; it must further endow the construction of the ages with the certainty of a science – of a Wissenschaftslehre, a ‘system of science’, a philospophie positive, a Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus; and it must, finally, conceive the future age in such a manner that the present imaginator becomes its inaugurator and master. The purpose of securing a meaning of existence, with certainty, in a masterly role betrays the motives of the construction in the imaginator’s existential insecurity, anxiety and libido dominandi.” [iii]

The European “Green Deal”

In light of the foregoing, one might suppose that the EU Government’s determination to defend “democracy” by safeguarding “reality” from misrepresentation and falsification concerns the validation of First Reality in conjunction with the dismantling of all sorts of utopian Second Realities. So, let’s see what kind of reality the EU Commission might have in mind when it speaks of “reality” as the touchstone that shall be applied in distinguishing First from Second ‒ misrepresented or falsified ‒ Reality. In a speech given on the 15^th of May 2023, the President of the European Commission, the recently re-apppointed Mrs Ursula von der Leyen, proudly unpacked her “European Green Deal” as the instrument that was designed to usher in the reality of “a 21st century clean-energy circular economy”. This Deal, so von der Leyen, is also “our plan to fight climate change and become the first climate-neutral continent.” And, what’s more, “[i]t is also our new European growth model for a prosperous, responsible and resilient economy” as well as “our blueprint for a systematic modernisation of Europeʼs industry.” On Thursday the 18^th of July 2024, during the successful effort to secure her re-appointment to the Presidency of the Commission, von der Leyen again vowed “to not weaken Europe’s efforts to tackle climate change, […]. In a document setting out her plans for a another term, […], von der Leyen committed to propose new climate policies, including a legally-binding European Union target to cut emissions 90% by 2040.” [iv]

The European Union as “social market economy”

This European Deal is Green because, so von der Leyen in her March 2023 speech, “in the long run, only a sustainable economy can be a strong economy.” In a non-sequitur, she continued that this must be so because “[o]nly a sustainable economy has the resources to invest in a healthier and in a fairer tomorrow.” With “sustainable economy”, von der Leyen means that we have to say bye-bye to a “growth model centred on fossil fuels”. In the world view of the EU’s Politburo’s governors and administrators, that model is “simply obsolete” and therefore, so von der Leyen, “we need to decarbonise our economies as quickly as possible.” We must shift to a “sustainable economy” which she described as a “social market economy”. “This is”, so stressed von der Leyen, “the mission that drives us today. This is the spirit of the European Green Deal.” She then revealed that “[w]e do not have to start from scratch.” In case it had escaped anyone’s attention, the EU’s “social market economy” has been around for some time as the compass that directs the minds of the Brussels’ “green & social gnostics”. In von der Leyen’s own words: “[o]ur compass in this endeavour are the longstanding values – the true values, if you get it right – of the European social market economy.” (emphases added).

“Green” in reality means socialism

Juggling with future, past and present tenses, von der Leyen avowed how the Commission’s Green Deal, that she constantly referred to as “our” social market economy, isn’t just some futuristic utopian dream, but that it was ‒ in the past ‒ and is ‒ in the present ‒ an actual reality. In her own words, with past and present tenses underlined by yours truly, the social market economy “was never exclusively about economic growth”. The Green Reality, “was always about human development. It never had the sole goal of market efficiency and liberalisation.” To the contrary: “The social market economy functions in the interest of the worker and the community. It opens opportunities, also to set very clear limits. It rewards performance but also guarantees protection for the big risks in life. Beyond growth, it focuses on public goods such as healthcare, education and skills, workersʼ rights, personal security, civic engagement and governance – good governance. Our social market economy, if you get it right, encourages everyone to excel, but it also takes care of our fragility as human beings.” It would have been easier for European citizens to understand von der Leyen’s true intentions, if she would have described the Green Deal as a “socialist market economy”. If she had deleted the word “market”, she would have been even somewhat clearer. Had she also deleted the word economy, she would have made herself perfectly clear. The Green Deal is all about socialism. No wonder that, on the 18th of July 2024, the “Green” and socialist fractions in the EU parliament joyfully welcomed von der Leyen’s re-appointment to the Presidency of the Commission.

Saving the Green Deal from democracy

This is how, fully in line with what Eric Voegelin wrote in “On Hegel”, the President of the European Commission and the Green and socialist cohorts that obediently support her eclipse of the reality of existence try to substitute the Second Reality of the imaginative ‒ Green Deal ‒ project for the “eclipsed” reality of existence that most of us still experience and know as real. The future is no longer “unknown”, since we know it as the “longstanding values” of the “social market economy”. The Green Deal, the “construction of the ages”, is endowed with the certainty of a science, of a Wissenschaftslehre, a ‘system of science’, a philospophie positive, a Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus. This is the Wissenschaftslehre, the practice of magically conjuring “scientific consensus”, on which the idea of climate change and the concomitant decarbonization and “greening” of our economies is based. And, finally, the Project must conceive the future age in such a manner that its present imaginator becomes its inaugurator and master. Most certainly, as the inaugurator of the Green Deal, Mrs von der Leyen is doing a matchless and more than perfect job. Whether she will remain this Grand Project’s master, well, we’ll see what happens when the Deal implodes when it meets First Reality. In any case, the current “masters” of the utopian Universe that listens to the name “Green Deal” are still doing their very best to shield it from being exposed to a realistic and democratic assessment of its dream-like character. They are doing all they can to preserve their eclipse of “life in the presence under God, with its personal and social duties of the day” and avoid a confrontation with the fullnes of reality.

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[i] The EU Council is composed of the heads of state or of government of the EU member states, the President of the European Council, and the President of the European Commission.

[ii] The Council of the European Union, in agreement with the Commission’s President-elect, adopts a list of Commissioners-designate based on suggestions from European Union Member States. The President, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the other members of the Commission are then subject, as a body, to a vote of consent by the Parliament. On the basis of this consent, the Commission is then appointed by the European Council, acting by a qualified majority.

[iii] On Hegel, Published Essays 1966-1985; Eric Voegelin; Louisiane State University Press; 1990

[iv] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-vows-not-weaken-green-policies-bid-new-term-2024-07-18/

Outsourcing Human Intelligence
Artificial intelligence, better known by its trendy abbreviation as “AI”, is on many influential lips as the ultimate tool that is absolutely indispensable in the progression of Mankind toward more and more happiness. Those of us who still prefer to use their natural intelligence are being frowned upon and disqualified as irritating and deplorable remnants of a past that has become irrelevant and burdensome. Still the obsessive drive to coerce us to accept and counterintuitively use something artificial instead of its natural version should make us suspicious of the reasons behind this heavily promoted campaign to outsource our natural intelligence to computing machines. After all, we’re dealing with people who use their intelligence to create and operate the computing machines with the intention that the latter shall eventually replace not only our, but eventually even their own intelligence. Our suspicion is especially warranted when we consider the fact that AI is at the top of the bucket list of people like the World Economic Forum’s founder Klaus Schwab. Most certainly, Dr. Schwab isn’t alone in showing this curious libido for turning the AI artifact ‒ an unwanted feature not originally present in Man’s natural intelligence ‒ into a highly desirable “wanted feature” of transhuman intelligence. But he’s a shining and prominent specimen of that small yet very powerful and influential section of the human race that belongs to or shows unconditional affinity with the ideas of what is also known as the globalist “Davos crowd”.

Artificiality and Artifacts

In the real world, when people have the option to chose between something natural and that something’s artificial imitation, most if not all of us intuitively prefer the natural version. Although imitations may be considerably cheaper and more durable, if we can, we try to avoid artificial sweeteners and flavors, artificial meat, artificial flowers, artificial leather or wood, artificial manners, laughs and smiles, artificial pearls and diamonds, artificial …. you name it. Without having to open a dictionary, most if not all of us have an inkling of the fact that the word “artificial” means “made by humans, especially in imitation of something natural” and “not arising from natural or necessary causes; contrived or arbitrary“. An “artifact” is defined as “a phenomenon or feature not originally present or expected and caused by an interfering external agent, action, or process, as an unwanted feature” and as “an inaccurate observation, effect, or result, especially one resulting from the technology used in scientific investigation or from experimental error”. And, last but not least, “artificiality” is defined as “lack of sincerity, ambidexterity, disingenuousness, insincerity and phoniness”.

Natural trumps artificial

So, if the words artificial, artifact and artificiality mean what they mean and not something else, these terms don’t arouse much enthousiasm when used in describing the quality of a product or the feature of someone’s personality. On the contrary, the word “natural” is the magic word used in the marketing of natural versus artificial products. So it is that natural vitamin C easily trumps its synthetic version and that tap water is no match for natural spring water. Natural chemicals (such as “organic” foods) are heavily promoted as healthy and benign, while while Genetically Modified Food (GMO) and synthetic chemicals (such as the additives that keep processed foods from going rancid) are standardly positioned as dangerous and toxic. No need to add that when it comes to judging human behavior, someone who behaves “naturally” is invariably preferred over someone who behaves “artificially”. But now, when it comes to intelligence, we’re supposed to accept that Man’s natural intelligence must be replaced by AI.

Natural Intelligence

Human intelligence is mostly understood as Man’s natural capacity to think and reason. Some of us are convinced that natural intelligence is one of God’s endowments to Man. They also regard the Creator of Man as the source of Man’s unalienable rights. Others hold the view that “Nature” is the source of our innate capacity to acquire, create and use knowledge. They regard Nature as the source of Man’s natural rights as distinct from the legal rights that are the result of man-made legal systems. Still others are of the opinion that human intelligence mysteriously arose during the evolution of … Evolution. Yet, whatever the source of human intelligence might be, it is by way of this natural, inborn, intelligence that we are able to form ideas about our intelligence and its artificial version. Most certainly, we are capable of learning and improving knowledge through experience, but we can only learn from experience when we use and don’t switch off or replace our … natural intelligence. Which doesn’t mean that learnedness and erudition are necessarily a sign of someone’s superior intelligence. Quite some “learned” and “erudite” persons show no or few signs of natural intelligence. So does AI.

Artificial Man

Dr. Schwab’s World Economic Forum strongly proposes that we won’t be happy until we will own nothing. If nothing means what it means and not something else, we will be happy only when we will no longer own the God-given rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, when we will no longer own truth, and when we will no longer own the wisdom and knowledge that will lead us to the enjoyment of God. Most of all, we will no longer own our own person. We shall give up our ownership of the unalienable right to pursue happiness, because happiness will be given to us by the Forum. We shall give up our ownership of truth, because truth will be given to us by the Forum. We shall give up our ownership of the knowledge that paves the way to the enjoyment of God. We will no longer own our own person, because the Forum’s founder has stepped forward to lead us on the path to a new kind of Man, the transhuman Man, the “Transman”. This Transman was described by him as a fusion of Man’s “physical, digital and biological identity”. The Transman shall be living to the tunes of the digital algorithms and the artificial intelligence designed by those who seek to squeeze the Transman ‒ the transformed you and me ‒ into the Utopias and Second Realities that shall replace First Reality.

The Übermensch

There is nothing new in Dr. Schwab’s pneumapathological world view. The Transman, or Transmensch, is the reincarnation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, now dressed up in 21^st century clothes. Nietzsche had to murder God to put the Übermensch, in casu himself, in His place. A formidable task and a rare accomplishment. One and a half century later, with God and His Son Jesus Christ done away with, Man is now being prepared for being groomed and controlled by the artificial intelligence developed by the wizards who regard themselves as the “fulfilled” Nietzschean Übermenschen whose task it is to definitively transhumanize their underlings. We, the new chattel, will all be placed on a forcefully intubated digital ventilator that will replace our natural capacity to inhale and enjoy Life and Liberty in our Pursuit of the Happiness that we strive to accomplish. What the Forum’s ventilators will pump into our system will be beyond our influence and control. There won’t be any need for us to know what we will inhale and we shouldn’t ask any questions because we don’t have a choice in what is brought to us as the inescapable Fourth Industrial Revolution. But we will be rewarded when we forfeit everything including our God-given right to pursue eudaimonia in liberty.

AI is an Attack on Man’s Soul

What all de- and reconstructors of Man have in common is their obsessive hatred for Man’s spiritual nature, his imago Dei. Although God was murdered a while ago, Man shall now be wiped clean of what might have remained of His image. This drive to effectively de-divinize Man is routinely accompanied by the promise that Man, after having been completely deconstructed, can be reconstructed or, to put it in the terminology that is now in fashion, “built back better” and become “transhuman”. Lecturing his audiences and the readers of his books, the darling and pet child of Schwab’s WEF and its entourage of Western “Leaders”, the Israeli “historian and philosopher” Yuval Harari, misleadingly promotes the Transman as “Homo Deus”, which is also the title of one of his bestselling books. Harari sugar-coats his deconstruction of Man with the vision that Man can become God. This vision, though, is empty and rather disingenuous because Harari’s “Man can become God” scenario is to take place without the real “Deus” playing any role in it. You see, Harari’s God isn’t the God Who informed Moses that His name is “I am”. If that were the God of which the Jewish Harari speaks, the promise that Man can become God would be quite in line with what Jesus Christ prayed for: “That they may be One even as we are One.”

We are Pigs

Harari turned the Creator of Man into a creation of Man. Man’s Creator became Man’s createe. In his book Homo Deus, Harari shared with his readers the idea that “… it is far from clear that we should be aiming at immortality, bliss and divinity. Adopting these particular projects might be a big mistake. But history is full of big mistakes. Given our past record and our current values, we are likely to reach out for bliss, divinity and immortality – even if it kills us.” When it comes to the search for the human soul, Harari the philosopher lays his scientistic cards on the table without a shadow of hesitation, reservation or doubt. “For thousands of years people believed that all our actions and decisions emanate from our souls. Yet in the absence of any supporting evidence, and given the existence of much more detailed alternative theories, the life sciences have ditched the soul.” Concerning that lack of “supporting evidence” and the “alternative theories”, Harari reports how “[s]cientists have subjected Homo sapiens to tens of thousands of bizarre experiments, and looked into every nook in our hearts and every cranny in our brains. But they have so far discovered no magical spark. There is zero scientific evidence that in contrast to pigs, Sapiens have souls.” We’re as soulless as pigs and so are the King Pigs who try to make us believe this kind of nonsense.

Happiness means physical Pleasure

It is Harari himself who offers us a glimpse of his totalitarian world view as he dealt with that outmoded idea called Man’s Liberty. In his book Sapiens, of which Homo Deus is the sequel, Harari asked “… Liberty …?” His answer: “There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree. And what about ‘happiness’? So far biological research has failed to come up with a clear definition of happiness or a way to measure it objectively. Most biological studies acknowledge only the existence of pleasure, which is more easily defined and measured. So ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ should be translated into ‘life and the pursuit of pleasure’. […] We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.” That’s what you get when you replace reason, natural intelligence and knowledge by belief, especially by the belief that turns genuine science into the belief in science, also known as scientism, which is Yuval’s stock-in-trade.

AI and Utopia

In the context of my book Liberating liberty, out the window go the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, the Creator of Man, self-evident truths and unalienable Rights. Harari/Schwab/WEF-type Governments shall no longer be instituted among Men to defend Man’s unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. No, the “Hararian” Government shall now be instituted among Men to provide pleasure and whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of the end of providing nothing but pleasure, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their biological pleasure. Since pleasure is, according to Harari, “more easily defined and measurable”, the result of his narrative will inevitable be that it will be relatively easy for Governments to gauge, provide or withhold pleasure, especially when everyone’s biological and intellectual “data” can be tracked, computed and molded by the algorithms of AI. Pleasure can thus be defined, redefined, tweaked, steered, withheld and simultaneously given by Governments that will no longer run the risk of being abolished as long as they provide at least some form of pleasure in sufficient quantities to a politically sufficient number of “voters”. AI has thus become the indispensable tool for governments and their supra-government handlers to stay in power. Give a little, take a little. In the Utopia where you will own nothing and where more in particular you will no longer own your soul and your natural intelligence, you will all be happy consumers of AI-designed pleasure.

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