Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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Imagination is the fulcrum on which the delicate balance between the civil society we all want and the corrupted version we despise tips one way or the other.
One of the very best books I have ever read, as I noted here, is Pascal’s Pensées, which was never really completed. It is much more a collection of observations on subjects such as reason and imagination, the wisdom of Pascal being self-evident in this quote:
“… imagination has the great gift of persuasion. Reason protests in vain”
We slave away at reason only to be treated as evil by those who imagine a different world and suppose we are all that stands in the way. Such is the war of fossil fuels versus renewables. It is a religious war for those who have made green energy their pagan god. It is, for those who stand to make trillions in corporate welfare, a war for plunder not unlike the early history of Rome. Both forces stem from imagination and are extraordinarily powerful motivators of human action, much more powerful than any amount of reason. They seduce.
Yes, the same imagination that stimulates the minds of true believers in every cause is also the foundation of corruption, particularly political corruption, which is always about money and power. The same sorts of dreams are behind the sincere man who fervently wants to “save the planet” with his imagined solution, and the man who grasps that pursuit of such a solution is just the ticket to fame and fortune. Both aspire to power. That one seeks to use it for what he perceives to be the common good and the other is in it for the money is of little materiality; both ultimately want to lord it over others.
We are now, seemingly, wedged between the two forces of imagination desiring to control us in the name of their common selfish pursuits. Indeed, the U.S. is in very deep trouble, caught in a vice between the imagination of the true believer on the one side and the common crook on the other. Our Presidency has been taken by a man in obvious mental decline who was never that good and was always politically corrupt; one who reflects this dichotomy in all that he does.
Joe Biden is anything but a leader, of course. He has forever been a follower prone to plagiarism, pomposity and politics of the worst sort. He takes orders from an extreme left and globalist green money hustlers only too pleased to use him as their puppet. Meanwhile, the national media helps prop him up, posing him as our leader, as the social media oligopoly increasingly restricts free speech that might expose the frauds. We are now at a place where we are being sold out, can say ever less about it and are facing slavery to political correctness and the whims of our elites.
Biiden, though, does give us some hope, in that he serves to illustrate the inherent problem; civil society is precariously balanced with corruption, as imagination is played out in the human drama. When things tip too far toward corruption and the lies can be more plainly observed, truth tends to emerge. We are seeing this in suddenly rising gas prices, rebounding inflation and social media overreach making the case for still newer, or perhaps older, forms of samizdat to communicate so as to preserve some semblance of free speech.
Let’s face it. We thought social media would provide the counterweight to an extremely biased national media. And, it was, until the social media giants became the new bums only too happy to promote the same ideologies and squelch any thoughts not in accord with the favored religion. It is now Facebook jail for those who dare to mention virus treatments known to work for many or anything else that might compete with the ever changing views of the nation’s highest paid Federal bureaucrat, the same man who knowingly gave U.S. money to the Wuhan lab that spawned the virus.
See what I mean? “What goes around comes around” wasn’t a silly saying. Reason does prevail in the end, most of the time anyway. Still, it could take decades to undo the imagination revolving around the planet today regarding global warming. We thought we had learned long ago the Earth revolves around the Sun! But, no, the global warming cult—equal parts true believer and corrupt opportunist—have been attempting to sell us on the idea the Sun revolves around, and must obey, the whims of our planet and abide by the hubris of its inhabitants.
We are seeing that hubris not only in the ludicrous claims of twits such as AOC, who is easy to ridicule, after all, but also our gentry class rulers who would have us believe we should be terrified of global warming just as they profess to be as they inexplicably jet from mansion to mansion, accumulating expensive energy chugging toys and otherwise do as they do rather than as they say. And, we see the profits, both real, as in cash, and unreal, as in pride at having covered for the fact they’ve done so undeservedly well while giving up nothing. They feed their egos, in fact, by ostentatious displays of hypocrisy, which serves to signal just how extremely important they are; so important the rules simply cannot possibly be allowed to apply to them.
This is why it is ultimately pointless to complain about their hypocrisy (as I just did); it only proves what they say about themselves; that they’re special, they’re elites and they deserve to govern us. It’s imagination at work yet again. Whining about it only feeds the corruption. What is needed to bring back some degree of civil society is exposure of their imagination for what it is largely represents; dreams of grandeur with no connection to reality. A little imagination on our end is equally necessary.
This is not pleasant work. It involves challenging political correctness and going against the grain in every way. It means less appeasement and more war, which is odd to say given our objective is a functioning civili society. But, what we forget is that the other side—the one trying to simultaneously assuage its guilt while not only not giving up anything but actually adding to its pile of toys, money, and power—long ago declared war on us. We just haven’t fought back. Not recently, anyway. Some 245 years ago we did so with an imagination of our own, one of freedom versus empire, but since then? Not so much, it could be argued.
How do we fight for freedom and civil society against corruption today? By rejecting global warming as a substitute religion and demanding that politicians and business leaders stop acquiescing to the power grab that is the “Green New Deal” a/k/a the “Great Reset” and other euphemisms for naked Marxism. There is nothing to be gained by playing along, which these folks have been doing for decades now.
Need an example? Consider Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon and, subsequently, Secretary of State. Put there by Donald Trump, who campaigned on withdrawing from the Paris climate surrender, Tillerson accepted and immediately began trying to convince Trump not to withdraw. Trump meant what he said, of course, withdrew and Rex was ex before long. What was Tillerson, the target of the absolutely phony Rockefeller “Exxon Knew” smear program thinking? The answer, in a word or two, was globalist appeasement. Tillerson thought he was there to represent the globalist financial empire rather than United States, and that, for the Exxon’s of the world to get their piece of the action (which included green eggs and scam) they needed to play along, taking the slings and arrows with a knowing wink of the eye conveying their knowledge that, in the end, they’d be just fine.
This is the nature of corporatism, it is corruption by any reasonable definition and it needs to be called out at every turn. We also need, though, to accompany our challenges with imagination of our own. We know the potential of natural gas, for instance, is simply enormous. We have a tremendous supply, it can be used to make hydrogen, we have the very real possibility of carbon capture if anyone cares and gas is both clean and inexpensive. It also consumes far less land than wind or solar and is a high-density dispatchable source of energy that requires no subsidies. It delivers cheap energy to urban consumers and economic development to rural production areas. And, just imagine a world where it was available to every country. It’s not hard because LNG allows it already.
That’s the imagination we need to convey about the future as we’re calling out the fallacies promoted by the global waring cult. We can do it and we can, at the same time, help drive out some of the corruption that seems to invade every aspect of civil society today. The time is now.
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