A Funk
An unfortunate side effect of her being here is that I fell into a terrible bout of the powerful nostalgia to which I sometimes become vulnerable. I'm only just this morning beginning to emerge from it.
I asked her lots of questions about my earliest childhood. One revelation which really struck me was that my father wanted our family to quasi-permanently move to Japan in the mid-1980s! It's bizarre to think that in an alternative timeline, I may have grown up there, and would be a Japanese speaker today. Alas, she couldn't get any kind of commitment from my father or his employer as to how long we would be there, so she quite justifiably kiboshed the idea. That may have been for the best: I was such a sensitive child, I'm not sure how I would have handled moving to a foreign country. Either the structured society and schools in Japan would have been helpful, or I would have been hopelessly overwhelmed.
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, and during my fasting I prayed to God several times, asking Him to guide me towards whatever the future holds for me and my family. I need to ditch the nostalgia and look to the future.
On a Japan-related note, my kids and I started watching "Spy x Family". When you switch media tabs on the PlayStation 5, one tab shows black nationalist and supremacist propaganda, something with the word "Wakanda" in it or some such nonsense, while the next tab shows my "Crunchyroll" subscription-- it's Western media versus Eastern media, right on two neighboring tabs! Regular readers know I often complain about the modern state of entertainment, but Japanese output-- video games and anime alike-- seem to be in a veritable golden age! Every anime my kids and I try is extremely creative, memorable, and free from woke propaganda.
I did just read a quote from some minister in Japan saying that they would be newly committed to "diversity"-- so we are probably seeing the beginning of the end of the beautiful Japanese culture. But I'll enjoy it on its way down, nonetheless.
Lack of Spirit
This was an interesting article. This quote reminded me of Thomas Sowell's "constrained versus unconstrained" model:
"...whether it would have to be consciously theorized and then imposed by some careful policy, or whether it would have to arise without deliberate planning..."
In other words, have faith in "experts" to bring about utopia, or recognize that a bunch of people sitting around a mahogany table acting in an omniscient and benevolent way is a pipe dream. This quote is also interesting:
"Through all ages there has been a balance of spirituality and secularity. In our modernity, secularity is dominant. There is only this world."
I recall Stefan Molyneux in a recent monologue explaining how the pendulum has swung towards materialism so strongly today, that humans are essentially blood sucking, sociopathic, calculating vampires weighing everything in a cold-hearted pros and cons balance, or something to that effect. The solution is to bring religion, aesthetics, morality, and philosophy-- idealism-- back into the fold to make things more balanced.
Interestingly, game design is mirroring the current extreme-materialistic views of society: everything is about ensuring perfect game balance, with damage counters on the screen, the player being guided every step of the way, rubber banding, "guard rails", tutorial prompts, one way to play or the highway, and so forth. Playing them feels like being strangled! Conversely, there is very little thought given to whether the games have souls. They reflect the nature of their makers.
Incidentally, this is why we have the Woke Theology with us today. People are grasping for spirituality through sheer intuition, but rather than turn to Christ they are getting brainwashed and exploited in universities by evil Marxist professors.
1984 Instruction Manual
Remember how in the novel "1984", the protagonist worked in an organization where they would ex post facto splice together fake newspapers any time the dear leader or The Party got anything wrong, then redistribute that version of the newspaper as if it had always been the original version? "Look, The Party is always right, just take a gander at those predictions they nailed!"
Today's Left is doing a similar thing in real life, except with a twist: they are re-writing old books to bring them into compliance with their perverse Woke Theology! I know the Demoncrats and their ilk have gone off the rails since 2016, but they still manage to surprise me with their complete lack of self-awareness.