There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man\u2019s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is.\u00a0 If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated\u2026. I would say that the decay in the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Beliefs, of course, like \u201cpersonal immortality\u201d and all others, such as the recent rise in the belief in atheism, which is as much a belief as belief in God, are, partially at least, relative to time and place, and develop out of social storytelling. The \u201chard facts\u201d on which many feel their lives and security rest are themselves dependent upon the symbols which give them legitimacy.\u00a0 Reality is indeed precarious with society suspended by a web of myths and symbols.\u00a0 It is through cultural and social symbol systems that society\u2019s meaning is transmitted to individuals, and it is within the symbol systems that the control and release of action resides.\u00a0 In today\u2019s electronic mass media world, those who control the mass media that control the narrative flow \u2013 the storytelling \u2013 control the majority\u2019s beliefs and actions.<\/p>\n Since society is held together by this myth system \u2013 the beliefs and values people live for and live by \u2013 that sustains it, societies have always had to offer symbolic \u201canswers\u201d to death.\u00a0 For without a meaningful symbolic for coming to terms with death, human action would be stymied and people would be reduced to what the psychiatrist Allan Wheelis termed \u201cintense, preoccupying yearning.\u201d Today we can hear such yearning everywhere.<\/p>\n Shortly after Orwell made his prescient comment in The Tribune, <\/em>nuclear weapons were developed and used by the United States to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians.\u00a0 With those weapons and their use, the ages-old symbolic narrative of life and death was transformed in a flash.\u00a0 \u201cThe significance of the possibility of nuclear death is that it radically affects the meaning of death, of immortality, of life itself,\u201d wrote Hans Morgenthau.\u00a0 The traditional symbolic sources that once served to allow humans to transcend death were fundamentally undercut, and the search for new modes of death transcendence was carried on beneath the portentous covering of the nuclear umbrella.\u00a0 A qualitative transformation in the meaning of human existence was thus brought about as humans, who had the weapons, replaced the belief in God as the holder of the power over life and death, since nuclear war could result in the extinction of human life, leaving no one left to die.<\/p>\n This is our world today, and it is where the Covid-19 story takes place.\u00a0 A world not just of nuclear fear, but a host of other fears constantly inflamed by the mass media that hypnotize people through the conjuring of death-fear.<\/p>\n In his great work on group psychology, Freud showed us how it was not just mental contagion and the herd instinct that got people to join in group behavior.\u00a0 People could be induced to become little children and obey their leaders because they have \u201can extreme passion for authority.\u201d When leaders speak, the children hear the inner voices of their parents telling them to be careful, be very careful, the bogeyman is everywhere, so listen and obey.\u00a0 Freud, the Jewish atheist, and Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Christian, were in agreement about people\u2019s desire to give up their freedom to authority figures who would allegedly shelter them within their warm embrace.<\/p>\n The easiest way to do this is to convince people that death is stalking them, for the bogeyman is always death in one form or another.<\/p>\n It works to get people to support the terrifying sadism of wars against fabricated \u201cothers,\u201d who are always portrayed as aliens who are out to kill the good people.<\/p>\n It works to get people to give up their freedoms out of fear of \u201cterrorists,\u201d who are said to slide and hide in the interstices of everyday life, ready to pounce and kill at any moment.<\/p>\n And it works to get people to obey orders to protect themselves from terrifying viruses that are lying in wait everywhere to strike them dead.<\/p>\n In his novel The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>, Dostoevsky said that people want miracles, mystery, and authority, not freedom.\u00a0 His Grand Inquisitor, while a fictional creation, lives on in reality.\u00a0 For the Grand Inquisitor represents those power elites across the world who wish to cower people into accepting their dicta on Covid-19 as truth without questioning its logic or rationale.\u00a0 To question has become an act of insubordination deserving death by censorship or the defiling of one\u2019s name via the term \u201cconspiracy theorist,\u201d a name used by the CIA to dismiss anyone questioning its murder of President Kennedy.\u00a0 Death comes in many forms, and the fear of it has always been used by the powerful to render the common people speechless and obedient.<\/p>\n How can any thinking person, anyone not totally crippled by fear, not question what is going on with the coronavirus disaster when reading what Peter Koenig, a thirty-year veteran economist of the World Bank and World Health Organization, writes in his article \u201cThe Farce and Diabolical Agenda of a \u2018Universal Lockdown\u2019\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.<\/em><\/p>\n There is no coincidence. There were a number of preparatory events, all pointing into the direction of a worldwide monumental historic disaster. It started at least 10 years ago \u2013 probably considerably earlier \u2013 with the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report, which painted the first phase of a monstrous Plan, called the \u201cLock Step\u201d scenario. Among the last preparatory moves for the \u201cpandemic\u201d was Event 201, held in NYC on 18 October 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n The event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the club of the rich and powerful that meets every January in Davos, Switzerland. Participating were a number of pharmaceuticals (vaccine interest groups), as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)\u2019s of the US and \u2013 of China.<\/em><\/p>\n One of the objectives of Event 201 was a computer simulation of a corona virus pandemic. The simulated virus was called SARS-2-nCoV, or later 2019-nCoV. The simulation results were disastrous, killing 65 million people in 18 months and plunging the stock market by more than 30% \u2014 causing untold unemployment and bankruptcies. Precisely the scenario of which we are now living the beginning.<\/em><\/p>\n The Lock Step scenario<\/em><\/strong> foresees a number of ghastly and disturbing events or components of The Plan to be implemented by the so called Agenda ID2020, a Bill Gates creation, fully integrated into the UN\u2019s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) \u2013 target date for completion \u2013 2030 (also called Agenda 2030, the hidden agenda unknown to most of the UN members), the same target date for completion of the Agenda ID02020.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I ask the question but I am afraid I know the answer: miracle, mystery, and authority usually defeat evidence and simple logic.\u00a0 Fear of death and free thought scare children. The Grand Inquisitor lives on:<\/p>\n But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Death: A simple idea with such a powerful punch.<\/p>\n __________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n Since death is one idea that has no history except as an idea and not a reality any of us have experienced, it is the most frightening idea there is and also quite simple. It is the ultimate unknown. It has always haunted human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously. It lies at the root of war, violence, religion, art, love, and civilization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1829,1868,1169,1170,1864],"class_list":["post-160355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-death","tag-life","tag-pandemic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/edward-curtin-e1522422941369.jpg\")
<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"