Counter-Currents
Juvenal
2,041 words
And who will guard the guardians? — Juvenal
During my long life, I cannot recall approaching the New Year with a greater sense of apprehension and angst. Looking back over the last several years, 2020 was a tipping point of chaos: COVID lockdowns, George Floyd riots and deification, an Alzheimer’s POTUS, adolescent mutilation as a “civil right,” Ukraine.
What next? Yeats?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .
Many things have fallen apart — our southern border, a very big one. So, how then can one combat the fear and desperation that causes anguish and leads to despair? The answer to that question begins with the realization that the legitimacy of our regime that has loosed “mere anarchy” upon us rests upon a vast edifice of lies. Lies are the “coin of the realm.” The ruling class’ criminality, depredations, and depravity grow and persist because the ruled continue to believe in the lies.
The first step back from despair is to refuse to believe what the regime’s spokesmen tell you is true. Always ask yourself: cui bono? Who benefits from the belief in what they say? Refusing to believe is an act of courage and independence. Don’t surrender to the social blackmail: “We won’t approve of you!” “Non-believers are not welcome here.” “You’re a racist bigot.” Believing them makes you into a fool and easy to manipulate. It takes effort not to be one. Seek out people — wise people, smart people you trust who are non-believers. Listen to what they say. Take comfort. They have taken that step before you, and will help point the way and give you confidence that you are in touch with the truth, with reality.
He is the hero, who in steadfast hope
Trusts on: despair is but the coward’s part.
— Euripides, The Madness of Hercules
Reject the popular culture; its mindless, hedonistic vulgarities and its commercial appendages that work to keep you immersed in the distortions, the mental smog, and the lies: Netflix, ESPN, CNN, FOX News, Hollywood, and the entire news-entertainment complex. Time is your most precious possession, and it is in a continuous state of diminishment. Think of that when you make choices on how to use the limited amount that remains. “Time,” as Schopenhauer reflected, “is that by virtue of which everything at every moment turns to nothing in our hands, whereby it loses all true value.”
How much of your remaining time will you devote to following sports, celebrities, and who’s up and who’s down in politics while worrying about whose opinions are important? Ask yourself, “Why should I care about the Olympics, the Emmy Awards, the Academy Awards, Hollywood blockbusters, the NFL, the NBA, March Madness, the Super Bowl, and the rest of the manufactured diversions, laden with contemporary fashion, relentlessly commercialized, increasingly infused with the propaganda of black victimization and ‘white guilt’? If they all ceased to exist tomorrow, would my life be any poorer?”
They are all part of the bread and circuses: distractions from what is being done to you, distractions from the grooming and polishing of those actively “replacing” you. They divert you from the importance of keeping your family intact, building strong friendships, and finding work that, if not done or done right, will be noticed and regretted. They also divert you, insidiously, from contact with what is real and what endures beyond the news cycle. They keep you wandering in a fog of confusion and self-doubt. Each individual who steps outside the propaganda mill of popular culture becomes one more obstacle to the ruling class’ aims; someone capable of aligning with others who resist the lies.
The Roman poet, Juvenal, an astute observer of vice, left us his withering satire of the early Roman Empire. His target was the ruling class’ rampant degeneracy and corruption:
Why tell how my heart burns hot with rage when I see the people hustled by a mob of retainers attending on one who has defrauded and debauched his ward, or on another who has been condemned by a futile verdict — for what matters infamy if the cash be kept?
Written 2,000 years ago, we read him now and his words still resonate. They sting.
For when was vice more rampant? When did the maw of avarice gape wider? When was gambling so reckless? Men come not now with purses to the hazard of the gaming table, but with a treasure-chest beside them.
Greed and flagrant dishonesty among the ancient Romans. Greed and pervasive corruption among the Americans. Vice celebrated as boundary-breaking and human progress. In pondering Juvenal’s indictment, I recalled a scene in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Michael Douglas, in his role as sleazy, corporate raider Gordon Gekko, a slick 1980s Wall Street tycoon, tells a crowd: “Greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.
The real-life Gekko was “junk bond” king Michael Milken, a racketeering maestro who made a billion dollars in four years while engaging in securities fraud. Milken spent two years in a country club of a federal prison. He paid a fine and emerged with a personal fortune (net worth as of 2022 $4 billion) intact to become a fake philanthropist[1] and obtain a presidential pardon. The characters behind the pardon compose some of the ruling class’ most reprehensible, corrupt vultures.[2] It is an American success story under the subtitle, “What matters infamy if the cash be kept?”
In reflecting upon this empire built on lies, it is also worthwhile to consider the fate of the empire of the Soviet Union — its descent from the supreme wickedness of a Stalinist terror-command state to the squalid, corrupt piece of disfunction presided over by the alcoholic Brezhnev. There are some depressing similarities in its trajectory of decline to those of the American empire. In its final days, the worker’s paradise was a crumbling mess run by cynical grifters propped up by a failed ideology that everyone only pretended to believe in. “We pretended to work; they pretended to pay us” captured the relationship between the rulers and their hapless subjects, sotted with vodka. Pretending was grease that lubricated the gears in the Soviet Union’s transactional machinery of corruption. Pretending is what more and more Americans must do to get by. This massive empire built by Stalin had devolved from terror into sleezy nepotism, a kakistocracy, a society run by the worst, the most unscrupulous of its citizens.
We, too, are now “governed” by the worst. The senile Biden in his assigned function grotesquely resembles the smiling “greeter” at the entrance to Walmart: a paid decoration, reciting his prepared lines. He is the front man for the oligarchs — defense contractors, tax-exempt NGOs, regulatory enforcers, the state security arm, Congressmen and their campaign funders, investment bankers, and the corporate enforcers of wokeism.
They are the real powers behind the façade of “our democracy.” The American guardians of the twenty-first century make the Soviet apparatchiks of the past look like amateur racketeers. Cultural Marxism — Rousseau plus Marx plus Freud — imported by German-Jewish philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to America in the post-war period has rolled through our institutions beginning in the 1960s. Our guardians have insidiously completed the hollowing-out of the institutions, leaving only simulacra of the originals. The predatory elite govern against the interests of the people they claim to represent. Their politics are advanced by the ass-kissing fourth estate, mutilated into a vast propaganda mill. The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, like Pravda in the now-defunct “socialist workers’ paradise,” peddle the power-holders’ fictions du jour.
How could this happen? In what kind of society does such a motley, sordid crew like Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and John Fetterman rise to high positions of power? Good operates at a disadvantage with evil because good has rules it must follow, while evil’s only rule is that it transcends all rules. Bad people have the advantage. Gresham’s Law, the monetary principle that “bad money drives out good,” can be modified and applied as a principle of governing institutions’ moral entropy: “Bad people drive out the good ones” — or, “the evitable corruption of the elites.”
Back to Juvenal: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And who will guard the guardians?”
The guardians, under the specter of corruption, must always be a problem. The answer to Juvenal’s question repeats the same disturbing question, and it goes on like a repeating decimal to infinity. The ruling class’ guardians are inevitably tempted by the blandishments of power. The guardians can never be completely trusted.
Our current guardians? The ruled will continue to believe in them until their incompetence, corruption, and venality become impossible to ignore and destroy the legitimizing myths: “government by the people,” “government for the people,” “democracy in action, “the social contract.” The myths remain the impossible confection of “freedom, democracy, and equality” — the only obstacles being hierarchy and tradition, and more recently, “whiteness.” Nice try, comrades.
The “democracy” part is delusional, however; a euphemism for mob rule modulated by vote-pandering gangsters whose retinues resemble the “families” of mafia dons. “Every election,” as H. L. Mencken put it, “is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
The “equality” part is absurdly unworkable, because in every important human dimension nothing is more obvious than that people are unequal. Worse, “equality” as a political ideal is the engine of envy. Put into practice, it fuels disappointment and resentment because it perfidiously promises the impossibility of squaring the circle. Worst of all, those disappointed with the unequal outcome (clients) pressure the guardians (patrons) to try harder to make what can never happen, happen. The guardians respond, double down, and dismantle more of what was working and punish the resisters, the doubters. Authority and stability give way to the 3 Cs: corruption, collusion, and coercion.
The myth of “freedom” becomes the reality of dismantled boundaries, which serves the interests of the power brokers. The rules constantly and arbitrarily change in favor of the clients. The future becomes more unpredictable as the rabble that make up the client base become more lawless, volatile, and unmanageable.
Social wreckage has mounted from the lawlessness and corruption unleashed by the beltway lobbyists, government contractors, and rent-seekers. Marauding bands of crony capitalists have dismantled industry and manufacturing and impoverished the white working class while they import the replacement dregs from the Third World. Middle class, white Americans are sinking into a debt-ridden, consumerist wasteland, living on credit cards and diving into chemical and digital addictions — a mass of isolated individuals distracted from the disintegration of social cohesion by the panem et circenses — bread and circuses arranged by the ruling class. Government printing presses produce the “bread” in the form of increasingly worthless dollars. The circuses stay open 24/7, coming to you anywhere on your personal devices.
The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — Bread and Games!
— Juvenal
The vast army of government manager-bureaucrats now devote themselves to “improving” the lives of people from whom they suck their bloated salaries. They have sicced that pack of snarling dogs on us that make up the “diversity” industry. Every aspect of life comes under the supervision of these relentlessly insatiable moralists: education, child-rearing, work, love, recreation — everything down to the words permitted to describe personal experience and people.
These corrupt, predatory guardians will fall when enough of us have stopped believing their lies. In the meantime, as truth-tellers reviled by those who loathe us, we can say, as Mussolini once said, “Molti nemici, molto onore — many enemies, much honor.”
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Notes
[1] Wikipedia: “According to Forbes, Milken has given away between 5-10% of his fortune, earning a philanthropy score of 3 out of 5. . . . In February 2013, the SEC announced that they were investigating whether Milken violated his lifetime ban from the securities industry. The investigation revolved around Milken allegedly providing investment advice through Guggenheim Partners.”
[2] Ibid.: “In June 2018, it was reported that some of president Donald Trump’s supporters and friends including, Kevin McCarthy, Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson [billionaire donor to Republicans, dual citizen of US and Israel], Elaine Chao [Mitch McConnell’s wife], and Rudy Giuliani, the onetime federal prosecutor whose criminal investigation led to Milken’s conviction, were urging the president to pardon Milken.”
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18 comments
“Ask yourself, “Why should I care about the Olympics, the Emmy Awards, the Academy Awards, Hollywood blockbusters, the NFL, the NBA, March Madness, the Super Bowl, and the rest of the manufactured diversions, laden with contemporary fashion“
God, I hate all those things! Except maybe the academy awards, but even that has gone way down, as there are no more good movies. It’s devolved to blacks bitch slapping each other, like the rest of American life.
thanks for a powerful rant!
While professional sportsball, with all its bells and whistles and woke genuflecting and the rest of it, is mainly nonsense, sports–especially contact sports like football–take on a significance in this deracinated, decrepit, disgusting age that perhaps they shouldn’t in an otherwise healthy society but that can, especially in a sick age, help their practitioners transcend the mess of the world around them. They should not therefore be looked down upon in the way the author suggests. Not everyone can take solace in Nietzsche and Plato or what have you. The argument here is too intellectual; bad intellectuals played a huge role in getting into this morass; and even good intellectuals aren’t going to be the main people fighting the wars that WILL have to be fought to get us out of it. I recommend trying to find the good in some of the things the author decries here.
I think Mr. Foster is referring only to “events” that are packaged and delivered to the masses by malevolent actors behind the scenes. Although, I must say, I would hesitate to attend a football game at my old high school, from which I graduated in 1986. It was at the time perhaps 98% white–at any rate, overwhelmingly so–and now according to its website is 35% white. As for the discourse being too intellectual, somewhere Mr. Johnson has written that he created this site for the over-120 IQ crowd.
ncleapyear
…created this site for the over-120 IQ crowd.
which I believe is easily the case.
I’m not opposed to sports per se, even if I suck at them, lol, I think they’re great for promoting fitness and fun, but the packaged nfl and thug worship that goes on is what I’m opposed to.
I agree, though I’d rather my kid aspire to being an NFL player these days, even (or precisely?) if he fails, than some sort of “knowledge worker,” let alone a middle-class intellectual engaged in reflections on the manifold variety of gayness that academics like to gin up enthusiasm for.
Uh, I wouldn’t want my kid to do any kind of football. Nothing that can damage your brain or result in serious injury like that. I mean that’s great for those who can and all, but I wouldn’t want that risk. Joe Burrough already has an acl tear.
I’m afraid the concussion business is massively overhyped, and precisely by the same people who brought us what the late, great Colin Flaherty lovingly referred to as “the greatest lie of our generation.” In other words, it, too, as my old wrestling coach would say, “is part of the culture wars.”
Yeah, I figured that too, but it can’t be good for the brain. That’s why they started making the players do the wunderlich iq test, did you know? Because blacks were trying to claim an iq deficit, but in reality it was their natural iq deficit relative to the white players. The nfl can’t exactly come out and say “yeah, but you guys naturally have a 15 iq point deficit compared to whites,” now can they? With the tests, they have a natural baseline. That’s a clever lawsuit actually. Exploiting the unmentionable iq difference between black and white.
Great essay Mr. Foster! Just one question. Wasn’t Gordon Gekko based on Ivan Boesky? I seem to recall him giving the “greed is good” speech at some school of business.
On bread and circuses. Can anyone avoid the story of the football player that had a heart attack on the field? It’s the lead story everywhere.
Yeah, Fred, I think it actually was Boesky. Ivan Boesky, Milken, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine were all part of an insider-trading ring. They almost got away with their depredations and pocketed billions. A bunch of downtrodden detectives beat some of America’s most expensive lawyers to bring this powerful bunch of … ahem … Jews to justice. Well, sort of. The story is covered wonderfully by James B. Stewart in “Den of Thieves”.
Like you said, Millken is sitting on a 4 billion dollar fortune. I think I’d do 2 years at club fed for that.
I doubt that our belief or disbelief will have much to do with their fall. Their fall will come when their economic lunacy catches up with them. We might not win, but our enemies will certainly lose.
This is what gives me comfort in this life. Their way overplayed hand can’t last forever, and likely not even much longer.
Take a walk with me…
Physics, folk sayings, & the Ancient Wisdom all agree that the Universe is mental.
(That is why the double-slit experiment cares about your little consciousness — or that of a lemming, or an atom for that matter, lol.)
(Or why, for that matter, the global random number generator experiment went WAY off scale non-random before, during, and after the 9/11 (((inside job))) ).
It’s why optimism can work, pessimism can work, why leadership and the leadership principle can work so very well, that even prayer can work sometimes, why advertising works (on so many), and why (((they))) & their minions obsess and invest to benight, deceive, and control the ideas, imagination, and emotions of the masses.
So you are quite right we need to stop believing their lies, but we need to do another thing, we need to have controlled inner conversations on the premises of fulfilled desire — and to invoke these as well, in appropriately simplified manner, in the minds of (sufficient of), our folk.
Don’t tune out! Remember this is physics, trust the science! Lol.
Thought and feeling, Male and Female, Rational and Emotional, inductive and deductive reasoning.
That is why the great secret of success of Hermetic magic (the magic of our Aryan ancestors going back to far whenever), is a controlled inner conversation on the premises of fulfilled desire.
That is why the real magician’s acrostic is: To Know, to Dare, to Want, and to Keep silent.
The feeling is the secret. You picture the desired outcome, simplify it (as you better be absolutely clear when you ask the cosmic mind to create for you), play it over and over and the distill the essence of the feeling of the representative scene (which might be your boss handing you a fat check and you saying “Thank you”, or a Cosmic flashing glimpse of your race, secure in the 14 words, happy living on the upward path again… Then you connect to the cosmic mind (a skill you can learn if you have any potential at all — and have surely experienced “randomly” at some time in your life), and emote this feeling, this representative feeling. Then you disconnect and shut-up, keep silent, meaning don’t muddle up your controlled inner conversation with the cosmos by going on about it. If you keep on you will mess it up. You take a clear shot and get back to work.
Your rational consciousness (or at the top end the ineffable Absolute), considered the facts and inductively arrived at the desired outcome. Then it imparts the feeling of this outcome to the subjective, the female, the emotional mind for deductive manifestation.
In the case of the Absolute it is the Cosmic mind (the one that does quantum physics and everything else, lol), that receives the feeling of the thought and taking that thought as reality (which it is), creates that reality from the thoughts of the cosmic mind).
In the case of little involutions of the Cosmic mind (us), it is our subjective/subconscious/emotional mind that, if you know how to remember and hence be remembered by the Cosmic mind, sends the feeling into the cosmic mind which in turn, as you are addressing it as “one” with itself, in that moment of connection, will obey your emotional representation of the fact you wish to manifest as if it were the instruction of the absolute itself — which in that special moment it is.
Now you are just one drop in the ocean so you can’t (and shouldn’t), wish the desires of all those other drops away, but as you are also the entire ocean in a drop you can cause the Cosmic mind to create.
But it may have to work in those “mysterious ways”, lol, to bring you what you rightly expect without destroying the ongoing creation of reality through the lenses of all those other drops.
Blah blah – Wake up! This is why (among many other things), this is why, the one and only real and cosmic reason why, counter currents matters.
The evil through lies bends the weaker (yet still part of the cosmic mind and able to direct creation), minds of the masses to create their Cancer on Creation.
Counter Currents discovers and disseminates aspects of truth. Truth is the only cure to the Cancer on Creation.
Truth is not enough, as you all know and feel well enough.
To know to dare to want and to keep silent – remember?
You have to know, but then you have to dare, you have to want — correctly!, send this want into the Universal Mind (which you are a shard of and still subtly connected to), and then Keep silent (let it work while you work on the things you have already in hand).
And not just you, not just you and I, not even a great leader like uncle Adolf.
We have to (and this was Hitler’s real power), do the magic process described above:
See the desired outcome.
Simplify it down — so it cannot be misunderstood by the cosmic mind (hence “be careful what you wish for”, lol), nor by the mind of the masses which it also must fit into.
Become for a moment “one” with mind you are a part of (careful, touch that stove for more than a moment and you will get burned).
Then get back to work.
Do you need to know all this, master all this?
You already know. You know you must know the truth, you must believe (not that we can win, or will win, but that we have won, then let it work for us while we get back to our work in hand.
You also know, like it or lump it, that we — as a whole, as Team White, including counter currents and other groups of various types — we have to get our light into as many of our drops, and our annoying drips, lol, as possible.
As a wiser one you do weigh more in the balance, but the Cosmic mind is impersonal, it does listen to even the most benighted of our folk in those odd moments when they even partially connect, when they try to manifest the lies (((they))) feed them to suborn their divine spark of consciousness (dim as it may be), into helping (((them))) create their cancer (which includes genociding the best (individually or collectively).
On the plus side, if you can take from a cosmic and impersonal view, cancer always dies — by the cure or by the death of the host.
Of course I think we can agree that we would much prefer to see our enemies destroyed by the cure instead of the death of Earth our corner of the co-creation. We’d like to see where our folk and that upward path can go!.
So yes indeed, stop believing the lies, but also work together us all to know and believe in and feel and send (into the minds of our folk and the cosmic mind), the truth.
Counter currents is part of the magic. You are part of the magic.
The real magic.
It’s physics remember (and ancient wisdom, ancient science), and this is the science we really should trust.
Happy new year!
Today, I got a glimpse of this guy named Hakeem Jeffries, whom I had not seen previously because I don’t pay enough attention to news anymore. Have you seen his face? His arrogance? Yet it’s down to the optics of Jeffries against McCarthy, who is an older white man, well dressed, well mannered, well-spoken, never mind his politics. We’re down to the wire between the dramatic differences of these two men, and how the choice will affect us for at least two years, if not for many years like Pelosi. Yet another evidence of the horrid breakdown in our country so elegantly written by Stephen Paul Foster above. The ascent of Jeffries is evidence of everything that is wrong in this country and much of the rest of the globe, but especially the geography once called “The West”.
Wasn’t Juvenal’s original use of the phrase just a joke about unfaithful wives?
Our “watchers” are the FBI, DEA, IRS, DHS, CDC, etc etc and on and on till we start at the “local” and see the true horror.
Yes there are good ones. So? A knife-wielding Aztec atop the pyramid was a “good one” if he cut clean and minimized the poor sacrificial fellow’s suffering. But in the end our watchers are working for Israel and as to “Who watches” them… take a trip, visit Tel Aviv and the various other places where your tax dollars pay for your local police advisor.
Rome had troubles, but not like us. They had no web of communication and surveillance that we got to build and pay for that others can use against us. Some deal that. How about the Interstate Highway system we spent 30 years building, the better to shuffle “migrants” to every corner of the country.
By the same people watching the watchers, of course.
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