Holmes' pathodicy was so hardened that she didn't even know how deceitful and destructive her actions were. She fooled thousands of investors into dropping millions of dollars into her lie. Her deception resulted in false diagnoses and false hopes for treating conditions that could have been addressed with proper attention. It was all fully rationalized by adherence to that splendid inventor's creed: "Fake it 'til you make it." As this nightmare unfolded there on the screen, you could kind of tell that Holmes really didn't seem to grasp the magnitude of her duplicity. If she did and continued to perpetuate it, then how much more evil was that. Either way, why did she behave this way? What are the key elements involved that move anyone to do these things? While there are indeed so many aspects to this question, and while this treatise is merely a rough sketch, I've come to the realization that it has a lot to do with this concept pathodicy. I'm introducing this idea as a particular thing, although some have already given it brief consideration — at least from what I've found. What I share here may also be more regularly classified in the psychological literature as something else, and that is fine too. This is more of a philosophical, even a theological consideration, just as important part of human existence as anything else. Pathodicy is the principle of the rationalization of fixing someone else's suffering with all means necessary for the implicit purpose of fixing one's own suffering. It is founded on the emotional dysfunction of being unable to maturely distinguish particular evils occurring within one's purview and one's own painful insecurities. A calcified pathodicy leads to the effort of gaining relief by committing any questionable, even savage act necessary, or enlisting a powerful entity to do it instead (mostly a government agency, often a criminal racket) — so driven is he or she to end their codependent agony. If I believe you are hurting, you must let me fix you or I myself cannot stop hurting. If you prevent me from doing that you are just as much a part of the problem, and it is too painful to put off doing something. Often times you'll hear it bleated like a mantra, "At least do something!" The trick is if you are not doing that something they think you should be doing then you're more a problem. This entire body of death is ruthlessly exploited by World Operatives all the time to rally the faithful. Pathodicy comes from the Greek pathos (feeling) and the suffix -dicy (justification). The concept doesn't mean we don't feel deeply or love deeply or minister to others deeply. It doesn't mean we don't have some self-interest related to doing things to make others' lives better — that's a very good thing that moves us to labor and invent and build and maintain a decent society. Yet because we are fallen beings tempted frequently out of our typical abandonment fears, we are all extraordinarily susceptible to the power of the pathodicy. Ultimately it has to do with motives, it is about how we act out of our plausibility structures. It definitively involves the System's certified shakedown offices exploiting the insecurities of those without Christ and viciously afraid of death, manipulating their sentiments with the interminable desire to shout to the world "Look at me and how caring I am to others!" It never goes away no matter how much good you have done. Activating the pathodicy is a habitual routine for so many richly living by the seductive things the authorized World Ops tell them. Just look on the lawns of many homes, particularly those in entrenched ideologically liberal enclaves. When you see a "Black Lives Matter" sign out front, the "privileged" resident is saying to you "I'm a white person who is racist just like you other white people are and you should join me in acting on my guilt by doing extra nice and special things for black people." They may care about black people, I'm not going to say they don't, but the only reason they have that sign up or do any lobbying for or rallying in or contributing to the cause is only to energize their pathodicy. In a number of places I've now seen this sign: "When I wear a mask that means I care about you." These people have been browbeat with the grand metastasized lie that there is some monster disease out there that will kill you if you don't wear a mask, so they are convinced if they do their part in what they're told to do they will be commended as the best kind of good people. Look at these pronouncements. Not only are they based on heavily disseminated propaganda, but they say little about anybody but themselves. Jesus said a lot about this. "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your father in heaven." (Matthew 6:1) Here's a particularly sobering one: "Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets." (Luke 6:26) Are you in good with the System? Are you sure? No worries, you may be, you may be incessantly paying the proper tribute and that's fine. Caesar needs his cut. Everyone has at least some desire to be seen as a good person, that in and of itself is not a bad thing. Then there is what Cain did. Remember how much he thought of his brother? Wasn't as much as he thought of himself and how he demanded God approve of his offering. This is why the pathodicy is indeed the animating force behind the human sacrifice required for Cain's current governing apparatus to do its job. It is best to make any prosecutorial action look really good and wholesome to serve the purposes of the required seven-fold vengeance strength. Then I can be seen as my brother's keeper and be justified. It is mind-blowing to look out on the horizon of humankind and see so many people in lock step with the pathodicy, and it is so exceptionally administered people don't even know it is consuming them.
In The Inventor was a fascinating presentation by behavioral economist Dan Ariely. I have been extraordinarily critical of behavioral economics because of the brazen and often completely silly assumptions made (even as the behavioral economists' whole enterprise is railing against brazenly silly assumptions — go figure). But Ariely is truly on-point with this one.
Interestingly Ariely did a couple more things. First, while doing all this he gave a lie detector test to the subjects, and he discovered that they did indeed lie quite a bit. But the second thing he did was the most telling, and damning. He did it again but told the subjects that the money they were awarded would be going to charity. He found that not only did they lie even more about their die roll predictions, but the lie detector failed to detect their lies. It is perfectly fine if it is for a good cause.
The massive benefits of being a non-profit tax-exempt 501(c)(3) racket.
Non-profits are exceptional ways to manifest the pathodicy. Everyone wants to feel justified, really that's what most people want. It is natural. In the Kingdom one is justified by Christ's blood, that's the only way it can happen actually. The World showcases any number of ways to look like it can happen and one of the best is smothered in the unassailable virtue of fighting for social justice. What a terrific way to distend the pathodicy. Be zealously fighting for justice in a social way. It should be noted that the idea of social justice was invented by a Jesuit, Luigi Taparelli, back in the 1840s, and he did it because observing his contemporary world he desperately wanted those in the Catholic Church to prove they could be their brother's keeper in newer, more innovative ways. The Company has fastidiously and ingeniously expanded it until today it has taken on its present form, as Eddie Scarry notes in a Washington Examiner piece:
Joel Kotkin in his "The Pandemic Road to Serfdom" calls it the clerisy. Great term, I want to use it more often — the dutiful SJW leadership as it were. Like the clergy in the Middle Ages, the ordained hypnotists today are "the media, academia, upper bureaucracy, and the ever-expanding 'non-profit' sector... this new middle class [enjoying] something of a symbiosis with the oligarchic elites who mainly finance non-governmental organizations and the universities." This vigilant pinpointing still neglects to include the most significant part of the clerisy initiating the whole thing: the Society of Jesus, the organization with the actual divine mandate in the service of Cain's agency to inform all of them about what they're supposed to say and do and bilge into ill-equipped minds. They're the only ones capable of spreading the spirit of the pathodicy in so many brilliantly blinding ways. The coronavirus hysteria: "If I can contribute to saving that one life it is worth destroying thousands of livelihoods by shutting down the economy." The racialist hysteria: "If I can make one victim of racism feel better it is worth accusing all white people of committing the worst discrimination." The socialist revolutionary hysteria: "If I can rally enough people to enlist government in expropriating wealth to make sure no one has any less than anyone else it is worth making everyone equally destitute except for the oligarchs who look really good doing all this." Think it is just the Elizabeth Holmes of the world who're the sociopaths? The narcissists? The whatever epithet we can use to blap the proper excuses? This added remark from Dan Ariely about the power of the pathodicy is quite appropriate: "She was basically doing what everyone else was doing."
What about Jesus, I mean, didn't He have a desire to save people, you know, offering salvation to others and all that? Yes, certainly, except He didn't make many friends doing it. Remember what happened to Him only because He was blisteringly honest about His intentions? Do you know what happened when He told people about Who He really was? There in the sixth chapter of John? Huh. That we're closing this writing with another gospel's chapter six. Wonder if that means anything. There are only six sides to the die... anyway... And that as much as Elizabeth Holmes dealt with blood (that was the way she did her fake diagnostics), Jesus there in this featured Scripture speaks of blood. As in... "You must drink my blood if you want to live."
There were a few who stayed. The words of Peter were so simple, yet so awesome, indeed shared after Jesus earnestly asked, "So, what about you?" "Where else would we go?" Peter replied, "You have the words of eternal life." As Jesus pointed out so profoundly, you can only have life if you give up the life you feverishly clutch, the pathodicy you bite and devour to feed. Identifying the pathodicy is a start to seeing the stunning distinction between the World that wants to serve you for dinner, and the Kingdom that awaits your attendance at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.
No, the Lamb is already the Guest of Honor. He already gave His life for you, and you just happen to be the other guest of honor.
Just make sure you're wearing the wedding clothes He gives you.
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We're not only replicating what happened in Rome but what has happened in many other places over the course of this marvelous six-to-ten millennia-long history of humankind. 1794 Reign of Terror, 1917 Russian Revolution — these come to my mind only because they're the ones with which I personally have become acquainted. Historians may cite any of a dozen others, all featuring exactly the same dynamic: powers and principalities doing their supernatural work through the perpetually convulsive interactions of the sanguinely imperious governors and the brashly impotent governed. It's as if they get the guiltiest pleasure in their rudimentary task of culling large chunks of the human population every once in a while. But that Rome thing, very well taken. Victor Davis Hanson added this in light of the present absurdity playing out right here in the once generally calm and stable United States:
The tension and furor are reminiscent of the last generations of the Roman Republic. In its last century, Romans began to adjudicate politics by obsequious partisan town criers (their version of our media), mass demonstrations, and freelance street gangs. Looters, arsonists, and demonstrators did pretty much as they pleased in the streets of Rome without fear of legal consequences.
Very few know much about how all that happened in Rome, because they can't hold down the profound religious dynamic involved. Many shrug about Hanson's remarks because they think it ends there, The Conflagration merely the most convoluted trash-talk and street-fighting, not much more. But people don't behave that way in a vacuum. They are intractably influenced by someone. In Rome the main influencers were the priests, and sure enough duly ordained institutionally obligated clerics do that very same work today. Back in Rome the top priest was Pontifex Maximus, the most renowned of them Augustus Caesar. He was the first to make sure the "crises" Hanson cites do not go to waste. As all top religious and political potentates, Augustus didn't want to have to do much yet still ensure things didn't get unnecessarily difficult, so he hired the best to advance his newly minted autocracy for the simple purpose of moving people into a deep abiding worship of the state. His executive chief-of-staff was the very capable Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, but it was his personal counselor and extraordinarily proficient PR manager who managed The Simulacra. That would be Caius Maecenas, regulating the flow of information to the masses with the grandest spectacle he could produce. One of his most significant tasks was the promotion of new draconian laws related to rearrangement of the traditional family structure — the idea was to generate more childbearing but in the long run only contributed to the empire's quite ostentatious demise. The problem was the moral decay had already set in too deeply even by the time Augustus took the reigns. Enacting the Rex Julia only made things more convoluted, establishing all kinds of perverse disincentives and entrenching the quasi-codified immorality even more.
It'd do you well to openly practice signifying your exuberant enthusiasm for the authoritatively accepted LGBT+ items or face prosecution in some form. The complete reenvisionment of the family is the most significant thing that will destroy the United States, and it isn't even Joe Biden, he's just a widely showcased spokeshole. It is far more the vast academia-media infected technocracy whose fiercely intractable sentiments are richly informed by The Society. That cat is already out of the bag. In fact, the whole barnyard has fled — indeed now the animals have taken up comfortable residence in quite a few homes.
The Great Reset nuke is already traveling at warp speed toward ground zero. The power players worshipping at Davos have already assured us of that. This piece at Off-Guardian articulates the mandarins' objectives and implementation, but stops short of illuminating the recurring truth about what eventuates from these efforts: dramatically stunted agricultural production leading to widespread food shortages, if not full-on mass starvation. Already the pandemic hysteria over the mythological coronavirus boogie monster will result in a United Nations estimated 270 million famine casualties.
But it doesn't matter. Either way the ecclesiastically empowered technocrats win. And they must, God told them they would when He expressly gave the first instructions for World System dominion to Cain. See the fourth chapter of Genesis for more. As much as people continue to hypnotically trust in their provocateur potentates and the abundantly broadcast promotions of whatever Rex Julia spectacles capture the imagination, they will be subject to the most demonic dissolution of their nation, their communities, and most harrowing, their families. What am I saying. It's already happening. Just as it has hundreds of times before around the globe. Go ahead, read the history of Rome and how deftly its operatives instituted a more metastasized version employing the services of the most ferocious primordial Catholicists misapprehending that they'd triumphantly stalled it. Look back at the delightful wonders of “Égalité liberté fraternité!” and see how Robespierre entranced by the philosophical auspices of "people power" champion Rousseau chopped off the heads of anyone who simply wasn't kind enough. Rediscover how Lenin educated in the finest humanism-propelled universities painstakingly got just enough people to form a critical mass to overthrow his country's Caesar so he could manage every-single-person's economic livelihood and establish the worst lasting misery in Russia — as well in all the places who eagerly wanted to replicate that splendid dystopia. The Jesuits gleefully win every time —
Unless you have Christ.
And an eternal perspective helps. I've come to realize that, really, Adam and Eve happened yesterday. Everything about what they did has happened in the lives of every individual anyway. It is no use sloughing off the affair as some pointless mythology from some benighted time a gazillion years ago. A wise individual once said to me "We are all in Adam, we need the Holy Spirit to make us less dangerous." Furthermore, we are all passing away in the very next minute. Waiting a minute? Go ahead, I can wait. Annnd now insisting you haven't died? Just wait one more minute. How foolish we are to believe the entertaining visible machinations can save us from that immediate eventuality. The horrifically retrogressive things of the World System's now expansively social media enabled soap opera are derived from deep operative designs you'll never identify unless you see with Christ's eyes and listen with His ears. Today? This one last moment we are all experiencing right now? I happened to pick this up from a piece on Biden's budding technocracy about an organization that will simply be the executive branch, note the name, "WestExec." On their website is a map that displays a "straight line which runs between the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Building." From the website itself: "It is, quite literally, the road to the Situation Room, and it is the road everyone associated with WestExec advisors has crossed many times en route to meetings of the highest national security consequence." These people are not lobbyists, oh no, for shame to think such a thing. They're instead "strategic advisors." Since we are all supposed to trust them so buoyantly, the piece itself mentions, "No need to disclose their highly secretive client lists, whom they work for, or from where those dollars seep." The even more penetrating question is, who is informing those clients about what they will reliably do as ministers of Rome's current hegemony?
Don't know? Please, there are quite a few who claim to know. Many think they've got a firm grasp on all the rotten entanglements between the political and the corporate, the deep state and their darkweb crowdfunders. Many pride themselves on going deeper and risk being tarred with the ugliest epithet "conspiracy theory kook." Indeed many others in centuries past have been severely persecuted for pointing out that there is indeed a straight line that runs from the West Wing right to Rome, no matter who holds the title of most revered US administrator. Most modern-day muckrakers, however, are just posers ultimately hooking up with The Great Reset ("Let's work together on shaping that global paradise!") or The Kraken ("Let's fight tooth and nail against The Power!") And one of the most significant reasons they don't get it is because they confuse Rome with The Kingdom.
When the very next day the Pope names a few more cardinals at a ceremony replete with the proudest mask-wearing and social distancing protocols featuring an impassioned plea that these newbie authoritarians refrain from using their office for political advantage, personal gain, or stepping on the little people, he is dutifully on the job in the very necessary position of managing the universal, as such catholic, sinfulness of a reprobate populace. The Great Resets throughout history succeed because so many are seduced by the interminably rampaging and sensationally multi-faceted narrative hammered into them by Rome. They obsequiously lurch right into, as C.S. Lewis once gave as the title of a book about this very thing, "that hideous strength." From impassioned devotees to zealous rebels, all of them are being basted for placement on the altar. The Kingdom is waaay over there, small rickety gate at the end of a slim windy path, but right there is a beautiful shepherd with nail-scarred hands smiling upon any and all comers. Should anyone dare to look at Scripture and consider it seriously they'd confidently and joyously find solace in the truest most meaningful resolution of the whole thing. Take a good long look at the one seminal moment in that history book about the one intersection of the eternal and temporal, of genuine justice and abiding mercy — the most important singularity in the universe. What happened on the cross at Calvary. Your life depends on it. Otherwise — Kraken, Great Reset, whatever Rome's latest boffo extravaganza is, it doesn't matter. However thrilling it is to be right in the middle of The Conflagration — You're dead meat.
*** Let a righteous man strike me - that is kindness. Let him rebuke me - that is oil on my head. My head will not refuse it for my prayer will still be against the deeds of evildoers. - From the 141st Psalm
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*** Scripture | Homepage | Site Map Archives XVIII #
All photographs inserted were taken from the web. Forgive me for not including attributions. I make no money directly from this web effort. Thanks nonetheless to those who posted them so I may reproduce them here. Thank you. This page was originally posted by David Beck at yourownjesus.net on November 29 2020 |
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