Form and Content - The Beast System & the House of Lies

Form & content are symbiotic parts of experience. Their interaction captures the relationship between the beast system and the House of Lies.

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction to the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and other topics have menu pages above.

Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check regularly and it will be up there.

Recent posts on the House of Lies describe the current manifestation of the beast system that has inverted the traditional West. The idea is to identify larger patterns in what looks to be a society built of applied insanity and continuous dishonesty. We aren’t trying to identify how it started or trace how it got so all-enveloping. We don't have the information if we wanted to. It does have old roots and seems to have hit new depths fairly recently, but its long multifaceted development defies easy summary. To the point where claiming [policy decision X is the central cause of the beast system] means not grasping the magnitude. Building the House of Lies takes a string of events that just keep piling up.  

There’s no shortage of landmark dates on the road to the mature beast system of the 2020s. 1861, 1913, 1918, 1944, 1965 are just some of the years associated with huge advances in financialization, centralization, globalism, and regulation. The trajectory traced by these dates has two parts –  1. an underlying impulse to invert organic Christian societal self-determination and 2. the material factors that make widespread societal inversion possible.

We’ve traced the impulse to invert the basic nature of reality all the way back to the ancient world. The history of how it became a socio-cultural norm is where the landmark dates come in. So there’s no one point of origin, but a slow development along certain lines. For our purposes, what those lines are is the main issue.

The purpose of the House of Lies posts is to identify the beast system as it exists today so that readers can best avoid entanglement in it as much as possible. It’s too entrenched and pervasive to change without major – and inevitable - systemic collapse. But stepping out of it is possible to a meaningful degree, and that will best position you for what is to come. To this end, it doesn’t matter if  the War of Northern Aggression, Bretton Woods, or the umpteenth stolen election is “the most important” piece of the destruction of the nation of the American constitution. What matters is that they all trace an identifiable trajectory. A long-term Macro Arc. 

Centralization is the systemic structural necessity for the beast system. If the key socio-cultural pillars are centralized, it’s much easier for evil to obtain control over them. 

This old Marxist poster is amusing in its assumption that the masses "produce" much of value. Consider labor market participation rates. Then consider the percentage actually involved in creating something. Goods, food, energy - anything. The "service" economy means being rewarded with debt-based fiat currency willed from nothing in exchange for... well... nothing. Apart from buying into the system and perhaps virtue signaling about it.

The basic premise is correct though. Financial concentration centralizing power in the hands of those controlling allocation.

Financialization is the means. Wealth based on currency manipulation and debt creation – and not production - pools limitless resources in the hands of a connected few. This is how a selected few can take over centralized systems. 

The modern version dispenses with quaint anachronisms like "means of production". Other than "money printing" through debt issuance. 

Globalization is the goal. It's a term with different circumstantial definitions. But they all boil down to centralized control by an unchecked elite extended to the entire world. 

It is the satanic path of Babel and the overarching direction behind all the landmark events and dates.

The problem with fixating on one or the other specific event is the illusion that this centralizing path to the beast system could have been easily stopped. "Road not Taken" style. But each of the events are simply opportunistic steps towards the larger – and unstated at the time – beast system goal. Stopping one simply means they try again when the situation is favorable. You'll notice that none of the big architects ever suffer meaningful consequences in this world. So why wouldn't they just keep trying?

It is human nature to blame the recent thing. Or one's historical cause of choice. But this mistakes effects for causes and misses the larger societal flight from reality – living in a regime built on fundamental lies - that makes all the effects possible. What we are trying to do is identify the underlying patterns in the societal flight from reality that defines the House of Lies. Point out the whole rancid system so readers can reject it whole cloth instead of arguing over its minutia while trapped in its tentacles. Which comes to the point of this post.

Form and content.

Form and content are symbiotic aspects of any expression. 

Working hypothesis - if the House of Lies is the content, then the beast system is the form.

The first obstacle to addressing the beast system is the difficulty of even naming it. [Centralized socio-culture under financialized control imposing globalist distinction-crushing ideology by coercion and force] is a mouthful. We call it the beast system because that captures the satanic nature and systemic scope. Neo-liberal world order points to the political philosophy and global aspirations. Clown world gets the absurdity of basing ontology and epistemology on objective lies and the global scope. Empire of Lies gets the aggressive expansionism and inherent dishonesty. But it's also apparent that what it is and what it does are related but also different. The House of Lies describes the web of vertically integrated deceit that permeate every aspect of mainstream modern beast system life.

Whatever it’s called, readers know what it is. Arts of the West and other historical posts look at how it formed. House of Lies posts accept its current ascendance offer the recognition needed to move away from it and prepare for the future.

We are also not getting into the taxonomy of power structures. Who calls the shots and where they're called from is quite vague in real life. We have no idea how it works.

The narrative obviously extends over finance, tech, media, government, etc., but there is no way to determine who is really in control. We generally assume that if we know a name, they're not at the top of anything. But even that is an assumption.

We have identified a basic symbiosis between narrative engineers and huffers in an oversimplified graphic from an earlier post. It correctly captures the way FTS-2 willingly empowers the liars that enslave them. But it misses the finer distinctions - there are believers - huffers - that also amplify the liars by further promoting the engineers' deceptions.

It appears that one beast strategy is to put the most repellant cretins front and center. Just look at the US Congress. Or other globalist "world leaders" for that matter. This humiliation antagonizes and distracts those who reject the beast and tests the loyalty of those who do. But the sad sacks trotted out in front of the cameras are self-evidently incapable of building or running huge systems, however poorly. The absence of legitimately high-functioning “elite” implies that the top engineers are elsewhere. Although mounting signs of collapse raise the possibility that even the head table's human capital is terminally degraded. Whoever they are.

This isn’t a claim for some indeterminate Foucauldian concept of “power”. Propped-up caricatures like Foucault don’t reach fame through accomplishment. They are awarded fame because their philosophy serves the narrative at the time. But beast oracles do show us what the beast system was pushing as intellectual culture. And that helps show how it works.

Foucault [click for a post] pretends human activity is essentially metaphysical by treating it like some sort of meta[physical-cultural-natural] property. But can't call it metaphysical because the beast system is a Flatland joint. Materialism only.

Postmodern "thinkers" all orbit one ideological sun - that what we think of as reality is just some play of representations and illusions. Think about the names - Baldy, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida... Ot the ideas - discourse, simulacra, the spectacle, dynamic unconscious, decentering, no outside the text, the gaze, etc. They all pretend that the consequence of material human activity is somehow ontologically prior to the material activity that it depends on. This is the same problem that we encountered in the recent Langan posts – that something can account for something else that precedes it and that it’s actually dependent on. Literal inversion of ontological priority order.

Take Baudrillard - it's pretty much the House of Lies normalized as a natural historical process.

It's a stage 5 metastasis of secular materialism - not only is the material all there is, material reality's not really real either. For all intents and purposes. That meaningless speck on the insignificant speck in the vastness of the universe is some t.v. clips and speech bubbles. The ultimate erasure of the sovereign individual. It's more structurally Sorathic than we realized. Need to consider that further.

There's no need for a lengthy refutation of this idea. It implodes logically. Discourse can't be ontologically prior to the material world because it is a product of the material world that it claims to be prior to. What the likes of Foucault do is observe some dimension of human activity, simplify it, add jargon, then pretend it has supernatural properties that transcend... human activity. 

This is inverted - literally pretending cause is effect. But that's also its value. Because the "reality" that discourse calls a fundamentally meaningless play of representation isn't anything we'd consider the real world. It's a projection of that same beast system discussed up above. That's the twist - postmodern discourse is actually referring to beast system. Accepting it as an account of reality means accepting that what it accounts for is reality. Foucault and co. were naturalizing the beast system as "epistemic" - a made-up word pretending the lies, secular transcendence, and other inversions are anonymous meta-historical directions. The logical poverty of this dreck should have had it smothered in the cradle.

Instead it became 'contemporary intellectual culture". And collapse was cleared for take off.

In reality, power – and discourse – is created and projected by actual people operating in shifting networks of influence.

Discourse is the tentpole of Prof. X's poststructuralism. The idea that reality is made up of webs of communication and representation. It's actually not so much wrong as incomplete. What he's really describing is the perceptible aspect of the beast system. The House of Lies. What we've called fake media world. The mass consumerist culture of our 12 Axioms post. But presented as the essential nature of reality. A fake metaphysics to legitimize systemic predation while pretending a purely material ontology can simulate metaphysical processes.

It doesn't matter that Foucault was left out of this postmodernist fraud montage because they're all frauds. It is worth noting that mentally addled beast piper and Lobster Pope Jordan Peterson perfectly fits the garbled materialist lies pattern.

So our admission of ignorance isn't a claim that beast system power is an amorphous natural phenomenon. What we are saying is that we don’t know who the real power players are. Not that they are mere interchangeable expressions of impossible material metaphysical forces. That the actual structure of governance and authority is opaque to us. 

Any good lie has an element of truth, or at least an echo to give it convincing truthiness. The postmodern claim that reality is just discourse is ontologically impossible – it’s that [consequence as cause] reversal again. But discourse” does align with the representational nature of our being-in-the-world. Everything we can or know is some form of representation and not "things-in-themselves". It' just that this is actually irrelevant to whether or not the representations conform truthfully to the things they represent.

Human existence is based on imperfect representations/ understanding of an ontologically multi-level reality.

Postmodernism pretends that representation means [nothing else]. It's why they need made-up words like "discourse". Representation presumes something to represent. 

Postmodernism is a form of word-magic because it believes wishes and claims determine what is externally real. Discourse et. al. is how this lie is said to "work". If everything is representation, and we make up the representational systems, then we make up reality.

That really is the logic.

Seriously...

Preposterous, but consider what the modern beast system is Postmodern "discourse" describes how the beast system works. Not that there is nothing other than discourse. That there is nothing in the beast system outside of discourse. Everything is representational. But beast system representations don't represent empirical or logical realities. An “alternate” reality constructed of lying statements that contradict material reality and are consciously imposed by will, power, and coercion. 

In other words, postmodern discourse is simply the fake narratives that make up the House of Lies. And that's insightful enough to be worth emphasizing.

Form and content.

We realize that form and content are categories usually associated with types of communication and the visual arts. Form being how something is communicated and represented and the content being what. Of course, the two aren't really separable - there's no form without content to fill it and no content that isn't expressed in some form. But they are also meaningfully different enough to discuss separately.

Consider these two representations of the Expulsion from Genesis 3. Same basic content but totally different forms. And totally different experiences for the reader as a result.

Gustave Doré, Adam and Eve Are Driven out of Eden (Gen. 3:1-6,13-24), from Doré's English Bible, 1866

Compare the quantity and type of information, level of emotional impact, even how each narrative is structured. The representations are different despite telling the same story because the form of each is completely different. The form constrains the nature of the content. This isn't complex, but it requires a  layered awareness of what is going on around us.

The form/content distinction goes beyond different media - it also subdivides within a medium. A sonnet vs. a prose account present content differently. Likewise the phrasing of a text message vs. a formal invitation. As with most structural patterns in the material world, form/content is fractal. And that’s fine – we’re going to scale the relationship up to fit a larger context. Why? Because the form of an expression determines the nature - and limits - of the experience before a drop of content has been conveyed. On any scale. A textual description can’t accurately simulate a sound. A picture lacks the absolute infinite precision of a mathematical sentence. Within media, a limerick can’t provide the story breadth of an epic poem or a prose novel. And a system dependent on lies can't be a conduit to unvarnished truth.

Wagner libretto and Wagner performance. The words might be the same. The audience experience is completely different. Even before considering changes in the source text.

Formal – as in dependent on form – parameters limit what and how content can be transmitted. In other words, using a particular form means certain messages-transmissions-communications become impossible. This is especially important when we consider that all knowledge and communication is representation. If we want to convey anatomical knowledge, choosing interpretative dance – no matter what the specifics of the dance consist of – insures we will fail. The form is not capable of delivering accurate representation of that knowledge. Likewise, an anatomy text won’t do much to help you assess someone’s rhythm and grace. 

Now think beyond specific communicative acts to meaningful experience in general. Going shopping. Visiting a friend. Worshipping the Lord. Making ends meet. Choosing a government. Administering justice. Every one of these requires specific forms of action. The wrong form preprograms failure.

If you need car parts, the farmer’s market or grocery store won’t help.

If your friend lives in the same neighborhood, a plane ticket won’t do it.

If you’re a sincere Christian, a Hindu temple won’t do it. 

If you urgently need a job to pay bills don’t bother with a site that matches volunteers with opportunities.

Seems obvious. So why belabor it?

Well, what sort of formal content limits does an "election" system have that 

a) has huge and unaccountable waves of "mail-in ballots"

b) has no externally verifiable chain of custody for votes

c) outsources tabulation to multinational corporations with proprietary software, internet links despite their illegality, and no capacity for impartial audit

d) has ballots cast numbers that routinely exceed the registered voter count

e) allows unregulated ballot harvesting

f) pretends money is "speech"

g) resists any meaningful attempt at securing voter identity

h) can't produce a count in anything resembling reasonable time

h) routinely find ballots not noted as missing because b) and instantly accept them. 

We could continue but this is sufficient. Actually think about it - all of these characteristics are easily verified things that regularly happen in the US electoral system. They are part of the form of the systemic ritual that confers public legitimacy on government. But that's a problem, because that form precludes the supposedly desired [will of the people] content.

And it's recurring.

A corrupt, manipulatable system can’t reliably deliver a government that reflects the will of the people. It might by chance, but not as a formally guided outcome. And it certainly isn't what happened. Regardless of the platitudes. The form precludes the stated content..

Do the courts. A "judicial" apparatus built on a historical web of lies, hostile to the impartial letter of the law, and/or philosophically opposed to constitutional freedoms can’t consistently deliver just response to offences. Regardless of the platitudes. The form precludes that desired content. 

We can tell you that a limerick contains the lexical content of the OED. But you know that the form precludes it. You would assume we’re lying. 

So why are the stacked integrated lies of the beast system considered more credible?

A corrupted government built on false fronts and fixed elections [form] delivers tyrannical, foreign, illegitimate rulers [content]. A lying hostile “judiciary” [form] delivers judgments that protect and empower the wicked [content]. A short, five-line poem [form] falls way short of thousands of pages of definitions [content].

All the rhetorical blather in the world is irrelevant if the form precludes the promised outcome. 

This should be obvious. So why do blathering retard “conservatives” bleat about “the Constitution” when it's beyond obvious the Constitution has been increasingly ignored, marginalized, and ultimately exorcised from the running of the country? Simple cross-referencing of its words with the organization of US society indicates US society is formally incapable of constitutional rule. And it gets better...

Quick! Where does the constitution state that any realistic federal office-seeking requires affiliation with private organizations called parties?

Read this and observe the political process in the US. Then actually think how functionally retarded it is to believe that metaphorical  roll of 18th-century toilet paper is anything more than a fragment of a lost time.

Think how often the nominally conservative bleat about the “hypocrisy” of people who hate them, want them dead, and revel almost orgasmically in abusing them... well... hypocritically. With impunity and often reward for doing so. Morality [form] produces moral judgments [content]. If they don't accept your form, its content is meaningless. We could go on, but the real question is clear. Why expect outcomes that they system is formally incapable of delivering?

The underlying problem is that the lies and corruption are layered deeply over a very long time. The US was itself founded in fake Enlightenment secular transcendence as noted in numerous posts. And more lies and deviations from that starting point kept piling on. To the point where there is no longer any obvious foundation for people to stand on and point towards the truth. Critiquing one lie draws on more lies. This condition is the House of Lies – a holistic ersatz world where everything beyond immediate daily details are fake – and a lot of them are too.

So the form/content problem is also stacked...

The formal constraints of a limerick are a subset of the formal constraints of poetry.

The formal constraints of poetry are a subset of the formal constraints of linguistic communication.

The formal constraints of linguistic communication are a subset of the formal constraints of semiotics.

The formal constraints of semiotics are a subset of the formal constraints of consciousness.

And so on.

Just as the formal constraints of corrupt governance, judiciary, medicine, media, etc. are subsets of the formal constraints of the House of Lies itself. That's the relationship. It's the fractal reiteration of the same [actual form can't deliver desired content] lie on different scales. The vertically integrated part of the vertically integrated House of Lies. 

Clarify the relation to some recent stuff, because these conceptualizations overlap. We aren't being sufficiently systematic - more on that momentarily.

We aren’t talking about the representational nature of human reality in general. That's something the Band has really been considering a lot lately. Everything we think and know is filtered through representation. But representations have varying levels of truth value and the House of Lies doesn’t. It's in the name. Deviating from and inverting the truth is integral to its nature. 

Revisit one account of vertical integration of lies. A broad stratum of arrogant Dunning-Kruger midwits receiving credentials for beast system ideology and socialization. 

Successful absorption is awarded positions. Sometimes the coveted title of expert. The most privileged servants are showcased on beast media, making them "authorities". Technical skill abounds and some genuine creativity.  At no point is alignment with empirical or logical truth a criterion. 

So the House of Lies is a set of representations like everything else, but a specific, false one. And we're not talking about “discourse” either. Unless you're a metaphysically gelded postmodernist, discourse is just representation. The House of Lies does put words over reality, but it isn’t the absurd pretense that human activity is functionally metaphysical.

On unsystematicness. We're planning on taking the time to write an integrated metaphysics book. The Ontological Hierarchy and related insights do seem significant enough to merit systematic treatment. More to come. We'll share what's happening here in updates or excerpts. Time - as always - permitting.

The House of Lies isn't metaphysical. It has a metaphysical initial cause in the Fallen nature of humanity. Moral entropy is real. But the House of Lies itself is a mesh of human creations. It's the material consequence of centralization, excessive ease, imbalanced resources, and learned helplessness. It has a history that is knowable. And alternatives that are conceivable.  

It starts with the false assumption that a complex society/culture/civilization based on a foundation of moral principles keeps functioning without them. It's analogous to thinking a road across a river continues to function normally after the bridge it's built on collapses.

 

It is a particularly toxic modern delusion that objective “moral principles” external to human desire can exist without a higher ultimate reality to ground them. Secular morality is an oxymoron - mutually exclusive from eternal values. But fading Western Christian sociological norms and high-trust society - organic culture - carried the illusion it wasn't into modernity. For a few generations of running on air like the Coyote after going off a cliff. 

It remains a flawless metaphor for the whole late 20th-early 21st century Macro Arc. 

Coasting on cultural momentum after destroying the conditions that enabled the culture in the first place. But the pillars of the West - Christianity, Classical thought, and the organic nations of Europe no longer shape the official cultures. 

Now, anyone who looks honestly can see that the grand Enlightenment experiment has failed. It had to - it was built on the core inversion of the whole beast system. That's old friend secular transcendence, the logical absurdity that abstract ideals can inhere in a temporal, purely material world. We could include Fallen as well, but that's something the Enlightenment denies. Sticking to purely materialist ontology indicates the retardery on their own terms. Organic cultural norms carried over the metaphysical inversion for a while, but those have been systematically erased. And with the public de-moralized to an historic extent, culture grows more overtly satanic.

Consider how much Western morality depends on variations of the dignity of the individual. Self-governance, bodily autonomy, human rights traditions - even the various "secular moralities" assume some permutation of "fairness" as a virtue a priori. There's a herd logic to it wanting that. But the same smart, smart boys who like their secular morality also love genetic determinism. And that's what mutual exclusivity looks like. 

What makes fairness a priori virtuous and seeking to maximize your advantage not? We clearly don't all possess equal gifts or effectiveness.

Pleas that we're "more intelligent" and therefore transcend our animal natures presume that = [virtues] and not just [projected self-interest]. Virtue can't be contextual. Nor it it temporally mutable. It transcends individual - or even collective - circumstances. Self-interest and the greater good alike. That requires understanding objectively real timeless truth exists.  And that's metaphysics, which post-Enlightenment secular materialism can't accept. Running on air...

There is no reason to curb self-interest without an appeal to something external. 

"Fairness" as universal, context-independent a priori good has to answer the question where does the a priori come from? Because a priori truth is necessarily ontologically "higher" than contingent circumstance. The very presumption that something can even be a universal value - or virtue - is rules out a purely materialist ontology. In a purely materialist sense, fairness is an R-selected survival strategy that is only "good" to the degree it benefits those using it. It can have no higher claim to universal morality than the will to power does because there aren't universals in a materialist ontology. Words notwithstanding.

Think how much blather there has been about building fairer societies. Now look objectively at the modern "secular" West and consider how fair or moral it actually is. By the fruits, globalism is profoundly unfair. To the point where its two class model of elites and [pod-dwelling bug eaters] makes unfairness insurmountable. Pod-dwelling bug eaters have no path to the overclass. It's perpetual bifurcation until/unless the system collapses.

Maybe that's what a secular materialist a priori could be...

Empirical reality does tell us that the only consistent driving impulse in a purely material worldview is power. Actual dominance. Do what thou wilt. He is the prince of this world after all…

Not to say that everyone is motivated by power. Most of the NPC masses want to be left alone to absorb screen time and low-quality calories with minimal exertion. The Band wants to be left alone to pursue thoughts and grow family. We're talking driving impulse - the networks and individuals that seek and obtain control over society. Which means the individuals within society. Increasing webs of regulations, restrictions on organic communal development and socialization, censorship, resource extraction, etc. - fundamental inequalities of power that are imposed on individual sovereignty.

Some graphs on just the scope of government regulatory activity. Consider that it leaves out pretty much the whole gamut of social control - from local boards and governments to corporate actions. We recently savaged the oft-repeated and moronic lie of representative government. Anyone authorize representatives to approve all of this? 

Of course not. This is imposed on us by overlords above any consequence and funded by resources stolen from us by force. Power. And each step was enacted by real, identifiable individuals, whether or not we know who they are.

Click for the link to the articles for the first and for the second.

This - like the beast system and its House of Lies - is possible because of centralization. Not only within domains, but between them. Central control of regulation, justice, business, media, education, etc. creates small enough groups of controllers for mass collusion. Which is how we wound up with an interconnected elite marching in lockstep across society.

The centralized nature of the beast system allows driven power-seekers to attain power over how others can live.

Compare this reality to beast water-carrier Baldy Foucault's facile amorphous systemic "power". The convenient fig leaf over willed predation that accounts for his prominence in a predatory beast system. Although to be fair, we can't conclusively determine if this was conscious strategy or - what we think more likely - if he was too stupid to evaluate his own thoughts. Postmodern "thought" is vacuous blather across the board, but Foucault is dumber than most. 

Want to see if you're smarter than Foucault? See if you can grasp this modified seven pillars of influence graphic from the last House of Lies post. 

The reality is that the beast system is controlled by amorphous structures and actual identifiable human agents. Power is the two working in concert. There's a structure. And someone sits in the chairs.

What the puppet degenerate mistakes for materialist metaphysics is the centralization - the integrated modern institutional networks that enable centralized control. The potential for abuse and tyranny is intrinsic in this, but like any machine, it goes where the drivers direct it. Any polity needs administrative capacity. But it's who the administrators are that determine the direction. Morally and otherwise. There's nothing materially stopping the controllers from dissolving the House of Lies other than their own desire not to. Obvious with a moment's reflection. 

If pure secular materialism can't offer a universal moral foundation for "fairness" beyond contingent social utility, where does that persistent myth come from? The answer is that same steady Western de-moralization and secular transcendence we've been pointing to since the Band started. The pretense that Christian values are coherent without Christian metaphysics. That values exist independent of the conditions that give them existence. And that means...

It's not difficult to grasp with that moment of thought - unless one suffers from that peculiar modern mental illness where the ontological make-up of a reality one has no control over is emotionally triggering. It's a two-step necessity that we've just worked through. Non-temporally contingent universal values require something metaphysically external to purely material reality. And that externality has to possess some aspect of fairness that overrides the self-interested will to power that measures success in purely material terms. Something like all men are ensouled and worthy of salvation. Regardless of material status or accomplishment.

The same applies to the moral foundation of truth. Many non-Christians have described truth as virtuous. How many can explain why? Or why their explanation is ontologically binding? Christianity goes well beyond arguments for collective utility [why is collective utility morally binding without appeals to ultimate reality?] or alignment with the external world [what makes alignment with the external world morally binding without appeals to ultimate reality?] by connecting truth to an ontologically coherent appeal to ultimate reality. The ontological ground that is required for moral consistency and which vaporizes the logical possibility of materialism.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). 

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever - the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him (John 14:16-17).

They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth (John 17:16-17).

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (John 8: 32).

Carl Bloch, Transfiguration of Jesus, 1872

The same holds for the value of  moral consistency. 

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other (Luke 16:13).

All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one (Matthew 5:37).

Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place (Ephesians 6:14).

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up (Galatians 6:9).

You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too (1 Corinthians 10:21).

Heinrich Hofmann, Christ in Gethsemane, 1886, oil, Riverside Church, New York

It’s the authority of God’s will – ultimate reality – that provided the grounding for Western values. Without divine Will – and the reward and punishment that that entails – what real meaningful impetus is there for “doing good”? Consider all the "secular arguments for morality" and determine how many possess a mechanism to compel acceptance. That isn't simply another group of people passing judgment. For that matter, how is “good” even defined without appealing to inherited Christian precepts? Vacuous secularists love tautology - the Good is what is most good for the most people. As if higher-order principle can be defined by its lower-order application.

Why does as an individual consciousness care about the relative happiness of strangers? Why should they? What makes empathy a measure of moral weight? On a genetic propagation level, self-sacrifice for others is self-defeating. Especially if there are no materially contingent and coherent compulsions like bonds of kinship or nation. But "materially contingent" compulsions are orthogonal to abstract and timeless moral imperative. Once again, if you want a consistent moral principle, it requires the existence of an objective reality external to material considerations.

These aren't new ideas...

... but that's the thing about logic. It does have an element of "timelessness". It is true - as noted in the last CTMU post - that logic is temporally sequenced and therefore not atemporal in the manner of ultimate reality. But its structural relations and truth value are independent of material context. If it was logically true 2500 years ago, it's still logically true.

The historical reality is that the West was built by logically applying Christian ethical principles to the cultural reality of the European nations. Until they weren’t separate things as much as a common civilizational set of beliefs. A comprehensive morality that individuals could defy but not deny. The Flatland of modern secular materialism wants to pretend that the moral principles are somehow authoritative without the the authority. That things like humility and honesty are moral drivers despite their detriment to success in any purely material terms. 

This isn't simply abstract. It's believing in things that are real. And more specifically, not expecting outcomes that systems can't  deliver.

This is only “true” if people are recognized as having an intrinsic worth - moral standing beyond the contextually contingent - outside individual material differences in value.  That is, all ensouled creations created in God’s image.

If not, human value is contingent on material considerations. And self-serving useless eaters can be oppressed and liquidated for reasons as vacuous as elite comfort.

"Hypocrisy" is only a sin if truth is valued independent and regardless of material costs. Otherwise, it’s materially self-defeating to the point of demented not to press an advantage because of something you might have said once.

Sounds familiar.

Which brings us back to form and content. Consider...

Point A) Modern Flatland materialism can’t deliver moral reality-facing society. The logical necessities of objective morality can't exist in a secular materialist ontology. 

Point B) But attitudes shaped by the objective Christian morality of the historical West expect society to behave morally. While demanding vanities and vices that banished the Christian ethos that created the historical moral expectations being whined about. 

It’s like a plague of morons that want the fruits of an ontologically full account of reality without wanting the constraints that come with it. A world where some degree of doing what thou wilt is cool, but a rigorous Christian-derived moral authority holds in the areas that matter to said morons.

But it’s not a cafeteria. 

Pointing this out is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if anyone "gets it". What matters is that modern secular materialism is incapable of moral grounding, and that the societal collapse that is currently happening is the result. Whining and gotchas won't change a single iota. The form - secular materialist ethos - precludes the desired content - traditional, Christian derived Western morality. Click for the link to this drivel.

By the fruits...

[Lying maggots jacking popular support to savage civilization for personal gain] is a happens when the are masses too retarded not to invest in a system that formally can't deliver their desired content.

There are always lying maggots. But mass acceptance them as "leaders" - supporting and defending them - requires layers of de-moralized fake narrative-huffing.

If you want moral content, you need moral forms. Forms created and developed to produce moral outcomes, and root out immoral ones. It's not complicated. If you want truth, rights, consistency, and rule of law as societal content, you need the form that includes truth, rights, consistency, and rule of law.

Here's the connection...

The House of Lies is the content that the ontological poverty of post-Enlightenment secular materialism as form can produce. 

The relationship between the beast system and the House of Lies is a form/content one. Want no House of Lies? That requires abandoning the logically nonsensical secular transcendences of the modern, post-Enlightenment world altogether. But whining like a boomercon about the “way things are today” without considering the onto-epistemological inversion that modern life stands on is pointless.

Of course, form/content relationships are also stacked. [Post-enlightenment secular materialism]/[the House of Lies] is the most foundational. But within the House of Lies, second, third, fourth, etc. order form/content relations also mystify FPS-2. These don't even need a grasp of foundational ontology to see through. We just mentioned elections - failure to do away with vectors for easy manipulation necessarily prove that an accurate account of the popular will is not the formal goal. But there's more.

A medical system awash in pharma money, wokeism, and political interference is formally incapable of patient-centered care. Funding, workforce, and policy are irrelevant because the form of the system can’t do it.

A media supported and run by murky globalist financial structures and carrying water for the corrupt political system formally can’t deliver accurate information.

Updated that classic six media companies rule it all graphic. Disney bought 21st Century Fox and its properties AT&T bought Time Warner and spun it off into the Discovery merger. It's Warner Bros Discovery now, with more outlets under the web.

An educational system that is self-declaredly not meritocratic, not reality-centered, and not outcome oriented formally can’t orient towards knowledge of the truth. An economy based on debt instead of production formally can’t materially enrich the citizenry at large. We could go on, but it should be clear. 

Here's the point. The vertically-integrated webs of lies in the last House of Lies post is fractal. At least in some instances. On the level of form being incapable of delivering claimed or desired content, any how. Macro-level [secular materialist beast system] can't deliver [traditional Western socio-economic expectations]. But right below that, institutions and megacorps are just as incapable of bringing about the desired outcomes if they wanted to.

Why are the uninvolved legally required to give more money to the grasping wastrels that couldn't live within their means? Or the grifting "fund managers" who built these Ponzi schemes?

Should anyone really be surprised that a society built on parasitizing future generations for naked greed and an grotesque lack of personal accountability can't make morally-sound policy? Boomer criminals whining about the "taxpayer" while enjoying stolen rewards with no intention of ever making good on their debts. Slugs of all ages with the expectation of unaccountable support and no intention of ever working. Criminal politician co-dependents happy to sell out their civilizations for some fleeting votes in the here and now.

The whole system top to bottom is based on the lie of entitlement to things that you have no actual claim on. At least Harry and Lloyd thought to write IOUs.

It's funny, but ultimately claims are irrelevant whether sincere or not. Because the form cannot produce the content in any circumstances. Any more than a photo can convey the complete writings of Shakespeare. Before the first promise is made, the first candidate announced, the first ad run the formal structure has precluded the accounting for the public will.

Thinking of form and content really is just structural analysis with slightly different words. One subset of the structural analysis process. But it simplifies a universe of possibilities into a simple binary relationship that is easy to identify. And it has to be simple to see the hierarchical arrangement and seeing fractal chains brings the contours of the House of Lies into view. Cascading through layers of beast system like a perverse materialist pantomime of the Ontological Hierarchy. 

The House of Lies depends on putting words over reality. Promises over deeds. Words and promises that it isn't capable of delivering on. It’s why the idiot masses endlessly rehash the same pointless disputes over fake choices in areas where the formal structures are systemically incapable of the stated purpose. There is no education reform in a system formally incapable of educating. Or providing health. Or relaying information. Or increasing standards of living. Or selecting the popular choice of leader. And yes, all these are symbiotic. They all support each other. Because they’re all lower order effects of the ur-form/content confusion that is the modern beast system itself. 

There’s no fixing any of these problems while the beast system form and its House of Lies content remain in place. Any more that shuffling the words and letters of a sonnet will replicate the sights and sounds of a new location. It’s precluded by the nature of the form through which the societal content is delivered.

But it can be identified and avoided. 

Form is the opposite of words over reality. It’s based on assessing what is actually real, how it is constructed, and what content is or is not possible to deliver within that structure. Start here, and House of Lies words can be judged against formal reality - instead of the pretense it determines it. But that’s the inverse of the whole fake onto-epistemology of the beast system itself and therefore can only happen outside the beast system.

Unfortunately the House of Lies is sufficiently advanced to make that almost impossible in its entirety. But we are told to be in the world but not of it. To function to an extent on its ground –  rendering unto Caesar – without buying in or crossing moral red lines. Opting out as much as possible for organic community, intergenerational bonds, local sourcing, etc. Of course, that requires recognizing the beast system for what it is. And that means paying attention to the form as well as the content.

Pawel Kuczynski, Speech