Ragnarök, or the Twilight of the Gods, was the end of the Northern mythic cycle. The home of the Gods and all heroes, Asgard, was to be destroyed by the outlander lead by that trickster, Loki. Revenge would be taken, The tribe would be destroyed. This myth drives much literature, but it is tribal.
And all tribes die.
The alternative is that there is a king, who shall return, and bring justice. This myth makes those who have banned truth uncomfortable. They would rather run our myths and mysteries into the ground, burn them, and claim this is righteous. If without a vision the people perish, it does not matter, because progress needs genocidal levels of sacrifice.
I submit to your candid judgment that if you look at a man’s financial motives, you are not seeing the whole man. Man seeks money to buy bread, but man does not live by bread alone. No culture in the history of the world ever existed without rites and rituals and sacrifice to hidden powers greater than human life. For the communist East, that power was the material dialectic of history, a sort of science flavored goddess, who demanded the bloody sacrifice of world wars, gulags, mass starvation, and endless executions. In the democratic West, the greater power was God, and, to a lesser degree, the ideals of freedom. God demands righteousness; democracy demands civic virtue and the self sacrifice of soldiers and sailors.
Now, no honest Christian would burn a pinch of incense to Caesar, and call him a god, for any amount of money. Not even the threat of death stirs the heart of the martyr.
SJW Marvel look at themselves as martyrs.
They think their goddess, history, will reward them with victory over their enemies, the conservatives, who are the sole source of all greed and evil in the world. All they need do is burn, degrade, and insult the beloved heroes of comics, and turn them all into minorities. The loss of review means nothing to them. They do not want our money.
They want the reward of righteousness without being righteous. They want to be martyrs without paying the cost in blood. Political correctness allows them to do this. All they need do it take an industry and ruin it in the name of PC.
The destruction is deliberate. They regard it as a sacrifice. This is a death cult.
But there is a King, and he will return. This time will end: the time of this age gets shorter each day. And our enemies know this. They are removing that comforting fog that allowed people to sleepwalk to convergence, and now demand that we offer our mind, soul and flesh to worship their atheist gods. This will not end well for them.
4John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, 5and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, 6and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
7 Look! He is coming with the clouds;
every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him;
and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.
So it is to be. Amen.8“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
9I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. 10I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet 11saying, “Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.”
12Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, 13and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. 14His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, 15his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. 16In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force.
17When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, 18and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. 19Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this. 20As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.
Julian linked to this, for Taleb identifies the modern eunuch. Such a person has no interest in the return of the King or the death of the Gods, nor any consideration of the future; often they have no children and they see the world as a series of case control studies. They do not see what lies beneath, nor can they modify their policies: they cannot with gentleness inform or comfort.
They are fools. It is far better to keep one’s ovaries or testicles.
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities?—?but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism?—?in fact in their image-oriented minds scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types?—?those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior?—?much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.
John did not write to those he did not know. He wrote in a time of persecution, when the pagans raged and those of faith died for they would not offer incense to the emperor. We were stronger in that time. We knew faith was a matter of life or death.
And we wait for the King to return, while the pagans fear Ragnarök.