The trial of Socrates was the most famous cancellation of antiquity, even unto his own ritual humiliation and suicide. At his trial, he was accused of corrupting the young and of not worshipping the Gods of the city; and for that he was commanded to drink hemlock, the extract of a poisonous plant.
It has been put forward that the revenge of the philosopher was to obey the state and thus provide the example for all eternity for man to be subservient, even unto their own ruination. But that’s another story.
Or is it?
The seizure of the Gods of the city, and the command of their worship, was a method of control that Empires have known throughout history. The city in the ancient world represented a distinct civilization and each city had its own Gods; and when the great empires of the past rolled in to take over the smaller Kingdoms, one of the things they would do was to seize the gods, take the Idols, and take command of the temples. They would let the locals continue to worship their Gods, but they would often join those local Gods to their own pantheon. So sometimes the Gods of the Greeks were legioned with the Gods of Rome, and when Alexander ravaged over the Levant, he placed the gods of the Persians on the altars besides his own.
The Inca, when conquering a neighbouring tribe, would remove their gods and take them back to their own temples, and there keep them under control.
Their belief was that the body is the Eternal home of the soul, and therefore their mummified remains contained the living gods of their past rulers. The conquering Inca would take the mummified remains hostage and would threaten to smash them to pieces if the client kingdoms rebelled.
The Gods of the City are the path to control. A token to worship, a binding of the tribe through conformity of belief.
They become tokens to worship. Stand-ins for a conforming opinion; and a controlling idea that all within the tribe must bow to. It is interesting that scapegoating, just like deplatforming, is an amelioration of the angry gods of the city. Socrates death was such.
To take command of the gods of the city is to take command of the population – of the ideas of the tribe, and to seize their servitude.
Each city has its own gods, and as you move from city to city you must worship the gods of that city.
The Woke elite of today have hoisted new gods on newly formed altars, and these gods have been commandeered by modern empires of global corporations and NGO ideologues.
Organizations; corporate and idealistic, whose tendrils are multinational, commandeer these woke beliefs because they are the cheapest way of buying the loyalty of a population bereft of objective ontology.
And so we see the woke corporations that embrace these new gods of wokeness and command and that all must obey and bow down to these ideas, no matter how ridiculous they are. And so we have the strange amorphous transgender beliefs which are taken on by the corporations and embraced and put and put on a new altar. All must worship and bow to it. And to disrespect the cause of the city is to be outcast from the city.
They are not universal gods of course. They are amorphous and subjective. Subjective to what is the question.
What we have seen is that these corporations have different gods in different cities. For instance McDonalds advocates for Black Lives Matter in America but when they go into another empire where they are trying to extend their tendrils, they worship a different set of beliefs and the gods of that city are strangely absent. In McDonalds in China, there are no black lives matter signs. In fact we have evidence that blacks are discriminated against in McDonalds branches in that country.
We’ve also seen that one of the Wokest coffee shops on the planet, Starbucks, who are very keen on the DIE pseudo-religious belief system (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) at home in the liberal West, are not so vocal on the DIE religion in Saudi Arabia. Starbucks, always keen to signal their woke credentials and who are not slow to discipline their staff for not keeping abreast of the latest woke taboos, are strangely un-inclusive of women in Saudi Arabia, where different cultural beliefs reign. Women thirsting for a vanilla soy latte in Saudi Arabia were told to stay outside and send their drivers in There’s No Defending Saudi Arabia After a Starbucks Temporarily Banned Women | HuffPost null Starbucks deeply held ethics seems strangely amenable to whatever local taboos are most profitable.
There is a completely different set of ideas that they worship in the West than they do in another place where different gods reign. Starbucks, as we can see from this are chasing loyalty through their fealty to the most powerful local gods. Of course they’re nothing but mercantilists who dress themselves with the dominant symbols of belief wherever they find themselves.
Blackrock, one of the biggest resource soakers and money movers in the world, vowed – in effect – to strike a blow against the poor of India who like electricity. How they put this was that they would divest their interest in thermal coal. World’s biggest fund manager vows to divest from thermal coal | Financial sector | The Guardian
Another example of plastic morality is Disney. A company who seriously contemplated never filming in Georgia because of their anti-abortion heartbeat law, reportedly filmed the film Mulan within sight of a Uyghur concentration camp in China. “Anti-racist Disney” the company who eagerly approve of all the usual Oscar woke quotas, changed their star wars poster for the Chinese market by shrinking the black guy down to midget size. ‘Star Wars’ China Poster Shrinks Black Character – Variety. That’s a funny move for an “anti-racist” community (or whatever their Russel-conjugate of choice for moneygrubbing corporation is) to make.
The list of people and companies who’s “strong ethic and moral principles” strangely wilt away when trying to get access to that juicy Chinese (1.4 billion people) market, is long and sorrowful, and full of knights of the social justice realm.
This is all obvious for anyone who logically looks at the fallacies and hypocrisy so visibly on display here, so why is it so? Enter the research of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. These guys understood the marketing ploy of repeating the message and nudging the crowd in increments.
The nudge theory described by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their 2008 book, Nudge, has made its way into the core of the persuasion strategies of media, government, and corporations alike. But in recent times it has married with an increasingly ‘religious’ lexicon – a marriage of the dark arts of persuasion with the zeal of religious ideation.
This has been one of the core sociological successes of the past decade, and we are seeing its fruits in the present mass delusion of covid lockdownerism and identity politics (with the former being a ratcheting of the latter through ceremonial displays of allegiance). In nudging the acceptance of “the new normal” – which seems to be perpetual lockdown, loss of citizen rights, and state totalitarianism – new strange language is proliferating. For instance, a recent CNN article – just one example of a proliferating trend- prepares us to expect empty grocery shelves soon using post-apocalyptic terminology.
CNN on Twitter: “If you hoped grocery stores this fall and winter would look like they did in the Before Times, with limitless options stretching out before you in the snack, drink, candy and frozen foods aisles, get ready for some disappointing news. https://t.co/Lph29YsYkF” / Twitter
If you hoped grocery stores this fall and winter would look like they did in the Before Times, with limitless options stretching out before you in the snack, drink, candy and frozen foods aisles, get ready for some disappointing news. https://t.co/Lph29YsYkF
— CNN (@CNN) October 10, 2021
“In the Before Times” (capitalized like God or the Old Testament) it says, using a grooming technique to adjust its readers expectations, it nudges us towards acceptance of the loss of freedom for the sake of some greater cause.
All must bow before the gods of the city, and more importantly; to those who hold them.