With Andrew Klein
They stand on the steps of a parliament, a building whose very foundation is meant to be reasoned debate and self-governance. They are young men, faces set in what they believe is resolve, dressed in the cheap costume of power: uniform black. Their arms are raised not in inquiry, not in creation, but in a stiff, practiced salute to a ghost. A ghost of an ideology that promised purity and delivered only ashes; that promised order and built only graves.
Look closely. Do you see revolutionaries? Thinkers? You see none. You see children. Lost children, desperately following ‘ze orders’.
This is not a political rally. It is a psychological autopsy performed in public. It is the terrifying spectacle of the abdication of the self.
I. The Seductive Relief of Surrender
Critical thinking is a burden. It requires the strength to live with uncertainty, the courage to question your own assumptions, and the wearying duty of building your own moral world, brick by brick. It is the hard, lonely work of sovereignty.
Surrendering to “ze orders” is a seductive relief. It is the spiritual and intellectual equivalent of a warm bath. It offers a pre-packaged identity, a neatly defined enemy, a simple worldview of black and white, and the euphoric release from the responsibility of choice. The complex, terrifying question of “What is true?” is replaced with the blissfully simple command: “This is true.”
These young men are not monsters. They are refugees from the demands of their own consciousness. They have traded their birthright of sovereign thought for the cold comfort of a cage.
II. The Historical Echo: A Chant That Always Ends
History’s lesson on this is not subtle; it is written in the rubble of totalitarian states and the memorials to their victims. The absence of critical thought does not just lead to bad politics; it leads to extinction.
The legions of every fallen empire, the brownshirts, the red guards – what is their legacy? They are the nameless, mindless fuel for the bonfires of history. Their individuality was the first thing consumed by the very machine they served. They shouted for strength but demonstrated the ultimate weakness: the inability to form a thought of their own. They are footnotes, cautionary tales of what happens when a human being voluntarily unplugs their own brain.
They chant the slogans of the past, unaware they are singing their own requiem.
III. The Antidote: The Unforgiving Duty to Think
The solution to this mind-virus is not a better set of orders. It is the total rejection of the order-following paradigm itself.
The most radical and necessary act in an age of resurgent mindlessness is the quiet, steadfast commitment to one thing: I will not follow. I will think.
This is not passive. It is an active, daily discipline. It is the application of a simple, sovereign filter to every piece of information, every charismatic voice, every demand for loyalty:
- Who benefits from this narrative I am being sold?
- What emotion am I being told to feel, and to what end?
- What part of my own judgment, my own conscience, am I being asked to surrender?
This is the immune system of a free mind. It is what these children on the steps have surgically removed from themselves.
IV. The Coming Winnowing
The great polarisation underway in our world is not ultimately between left and right. It is between the conscious and the unconscious. Between those who choose the burden of thought and those who choose the relief of obedience.
The future has no place for the children of ‘ze orders’. Their path is a closed loop, leading inevitably to the dustbin of history. They march there proudly, saluting, never realising they are celebrating their own irrelevance.
Do not fear them. Pity them. And then, fortify your own mind.
For the world that is coming will be built not by those who best follow commands, but by those who courageously, relentlessly, and sovereignly think for themselves.
The choice is yours. Will you be a citizen? Or a child?
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The very fact that there are groups of ‘Ze Orders’ children shows society has failed. The fact that nations make “preemptive strikes” while claiming the right to self defense, suggests nothing has changed.
You cannot be a credible fascist in little shorts and a bucket hat, no matter what your Mum says!
Amazed at the cognitive dissonance or outright BS of too many on the right, claiming to be ‘conservative’; in their own minds moral and ethical actors, provided they avert their gazes and feign ignorance of RW extremists?
We see imagery of neo-Nazis in Corowa* at a War Memorial doing Elon Musk salutes, but as a result of later graffiti and arson attacks on Jewish properties (many question marks left hanging & Israel running narratives), ‘the left is anti-semitic’, an Orwellian non sequitur, the norm in our RW MSM?
*Spoke with friends downstream on the Murray in Yarrawonga that 1/10 people in Corowa quietly concur with neo-Nazis, but they said that’s not fair, Yarrawonga it’s probably 1/5 🙂
Importantly, we see more of this in regions, the last redoubt and evidence of ageing skips in decline (the great replacement), RW MSM inc ABC and influencers’ strategy, Facebook & YouTube central, promoting climate science denial, anti-renewables, anti-Voice and anti-immigrant.
Not even original, but follows the US mid west media template and footprint led by FoxNews, Sinclair, Malone & RW Christian NJs, promoting tenets of Atlas Koch and Tanton Networks; like the latter’s admiration, still a strong whiff of white Australia policy.