Podcast: What if everything you ‘know’ is wrong?

Back with Bosco and Creda on the Saints and Scholars podcast.

Building Your Dry Stone Wall of Truth

Pulling together the pieces of the puzzle presented by this moment in history is a tricky business in a cultural context booby-trapped by misdirecting slogans like ‘conspiracy theory’, ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘far right’, designed to make the truth a no-go area for the uninitiated.

To find a way through this maze requires resourcefulness, know-how, but also the determination and strength of character to overcome the obstacles and landmines.

In this podcast with Bosco and Creda, I revisit the territory of the past nearly two years in the context of what has been happening in the past quarter-century, remembering and making connections.

It was, in retrospect, a positive thing that I always seemed to be on the minority side of public discussions. Back in the mid-1990s I tripped across the wires leading to the present moment when I found myself demonised for confronting an extremist form of feminism that seemed more interested in destroying men than in valourising or helping women. These were the first stirrings in Ireland of what is now called Cultural Marxism. I encountered similar hostility when I tried to speak of the centrality to human functioning of the religious impulse. Little did I know that I had blundered into the earliest attempts to foster chaos and demoralisation in Irish society.

The journey that began back then has more recently drawn me into defending, in a variety of contexts, the Irish Constitution, and the logics and freedoms enshrined therein. It has brought me into conflict with some of the darkest forces ever to descend upon the public life of Ireland, and never was this truer than in the past 22 months.

Now we are seeing in unfiltered fashion that:

* what is called ‘liberalism’ is a charade: It does not believe in freedom;

* journalism is a rancid activity, in the pocket of Power;

* ‘public representatives’ no longer represent the public, but despise those who have put them where they are.

The ‘pandemic’ is a charade to camouflage the takedown of the economic system and its replacement by a totalitarian economics of perpetual emergency. 

We have been duped. Reality is no longer what we think it is. Even our own minds may not be ours anymore. We need to pay closer attention — to what Power is and what it wants, to the process by which we obtain information, to the motives of those who are its conduits.

And now we face into a year that will most likely be the worst in the history of our independence.

In several decades of trying to figure out what was happening to my country, I learned that, to have any chance of putting things together in a coherent fashion, I had to stop dismissing things because they seemed too crazy or implausible, but instead to become open to any and all attempts to interrogate the pure nature of reality and events within it. I adopted a technique similar to building a dry stone wall — surrounding myself with the available stones, and seeking to assemble them in the optimally coherent fashion, trying each one out in turn, discarding none but leaving aside the ones that did not immediately fit, keeping them within sight with a view to the day that any of them might be the vital element to draw everything together.

The truth, once you know where to look for it, is no more than 30 seconds and perhaps three clicks away.

But it is necessary to begin from the idea that everything we ‘know’ is wrong.