North Stoke Life

How forgotten homesickness becomes obedience, and how responsibility and reconciliation can begin the journey home. Why do people demand freedom, then fiercely defend authorities that require them to surrender their judgement? Why do movements against oppression so often acquire the habits they once condemned? And why does questioning a political belief sometimes provoke a response more suited to an attack on someone's very existence? Across several essays, I have approached these questions through different ideas: Obedience Theory, Exile Anxiety, the Spoken Mirror, using myth as a signaling tool, the Agentic and the Penitential State and reconciliation which lies beyond the Popular Front. I now propose that they belong within one framework: the Theory of Exile and Return. Its foundation is a familiar human experience: the sense that something essential is missing, even when our material needs are met. I describe this as exile from our true source - a homesickness whose ori...

When we the people have become decadent, the worst among us always rise to the top.  "Decadence": means a falling away from a prior peak of excellence, characterized by moral decline, cultural decay, or excessive self-indulgence. And these 'worst among us' are put there by we, the decadent. We use these 'worst' as a proxy for our decadence. But why? By doing this, we believe we have created an escape route for our decadence:  "by electing these worst among us, we can blame wealth and power for our decadence and escape from our national duty and obligation to our descendants" We think we've been clever about it. Yet this is the perfect definition of a 'midwit'. "Midwit": a person of average or slightly above-average intelligence who mistakenly believes they are exceptionally smart, insightful, or elite You can spot us a mile off. We will say things like voting this way or that will 'split the vote'. We talk about voting t...

The Bridge Beyond the Popular Front Political conflict usually begins with a genuine disagreement, but it becomes existential when each side concludes that the other cannot safely be allowed to exist. The established order sees the emerging force as a threat to peace, rights and democratic restraint. The emerging force sees the established order as corrupt, unaccountable and determined to suppress necessary change. Once these images harden, compromise looks like surrender and reconciliation looks like treason. Yet the two sides carry different parts of what society needs. The Popular Front carries the need for continuity, protection, institutional memory and restraint. The emerging force carries the need for renewal, truth, accountability and adaptation. Neither is sufficient by itself. Order without renewal becomes stagnation and repression; renewal without order becomes destruction and chaos. Conflict can therefore be avoided—but only if both sides cease trying to embody ...

Those who oppose Britain’s present political order often imagine themselves confronting a single ruling class, an ideological machine or a cabal of wealth and power. From within what they call the Popular Front, the picture looks very different. We see a loose democratic alliance of people and institutions that disagree about almost everything, but recognise a common danger in movements willing to concentrate power, discard constitutional restraint and turn vulnerable minorities into instruments of national renewal. Definition: A Popular Front is a temporary alliance of otherwise competing groups that cooperate because they believe a common challenger threatens the democratic conditions under which their differences can continue to exist. We do not necessarily agree about the ideal society. Radicals want transformation, liberals want rights and restraint, institutions want continuity, businesses want stability, minorities want protection and political parties want to remain electorall...

I agree with your points and understand them fully. I have a differing philosophy about life. I would find the aftermath an incredibly exciting prospect in spite of the grotesque results and the harsh prospects ahead. The challenge of that would be the restoration, of a life to live once again. Rather than a living death surrounded by a tamper of gold and a pusher of marble. Today the west, perhaps civilisation itself is in sharp decline. Maybe at the same scale as we saw in Rome and maybe for the same reasons. Maybe irreversible. There seems to be no return to 'normalcy'. We're being led by demagogues on all sides of the political spectrum. And being compelled to say things we know are obscene and untrue by the so called law all sides equally demand is enacted.  And the gifts handed out magnanimously by past heroic victors are being squandered by the vanquished and their newly granted power is being abused, at scale, in a bitter and spiteful revenge for not sta...