Tag: Plato

The Snake and the Mouse: How to defeat the Liberal World Order

I was asked a few times during the North Coast Gunslinging Championships off of Lake Erie where I got my rattlesnake skin grips on my Ruger Vaquero and why I had them. It’s not enough to just say they are cool, for me, as there usually is a backstory. I explained that it was good to be a snake in life, which raised some eyebrows because we often think of snakes as maniacal devilish creatures that are the embodiments of Satan. So as a crowd gathered around my story, I explained that the Liberal World Order designed for snakes to be seen that way in our society because that’s how they see themselves. They get their ideas from Plato’s Republic regarding their ability to be the philosopher kings who rule all of society. One of their big concerns in life is to gain enough social prestige to be considered to be in that category, which is one of the primary aims of government, to be among the ruling class the way Plato envisioned it. They are fine for the rest of society to be scared of snakes because they are like the snake in the Genesis story, the possessors of knowledge of all good and evil who trick Eve into defying Adam and God to eat from the fruit of that tree and bring down the whole kingdom of everlasting life with the knowledge of good and evil, as defined by that ruling class. As I’ve explained many times about John Dewey and even going back to classics like the socialist propaganda book from 1888, Looking Backward, public education itself was designed around using peer pressure to control all the inhabitants of society to do as they are told and to be fearful of the opinions of the ruling class so not to fall out of favor. That is the purpose of the ruling class over all others, which is created for us very young in public education and politics. 

As I continued the story, I mentioned that I recently had watched a snake being groomed as a pet, eating a mouse thrown into its little aquarium enclosure, which I have seen many hundreds of times over the years, but it has always bothered me. Of course, the snake wants to eat. The mouse just wants to live. They are doing what nature designed them to do, one to eat the other. But it is troubling always that humans insert themselves into that process by capturing the snake and being an intermediary. The snake is now dependent on a human to feed it. And the mouse, once put into the cage, has no defense. When the snake decides it’s going to eat it, the mouse has no option but to accept its fate. It’s always a sad thing to watch. The poor little mouse, once thrown into the aquarium, knows it’s over the moment its placed there, and the creature will do everything it can to avoid the inevitable; it will try to dig its way under a water bowl or some other aquarium feature to survive, but there essentially is nothing it can do but wait for the snake to eat it. The only defense it has is to attempt to ignore the snake and live its life normally, hoping until that last moment that it will live life as long as possible. Thus, its only defense is to ignore the problem and pretend that its crisis is not a doomsday scenario.    

My life in this grooming process was never what the Liberal World Order expected. I never developed a care for what other people thought about me going way back to 2-3-and 4 years of age. Therefore, my public education experience was utterly divorced from Dewey’s purpose for it, which was to break down members of society into their various social groups, ultimately to be led by the philosopher kings, those with the highest liberal level of education in society, and to be like the mouse in life, to live in the aquarium of their own making and to accept our fate when the snake decides to eat. Of course, the philosopher kings of Plato see themselves as the snake and the rest of the world as their next meal. That is the purpose of all monarchies, secret societies, every bureaucratic organization, even sports. But what was unique about my life is that I never accepted such an absurd concept as a little kid, and of course, that caused a lot of consternation as I got older and didn’t fit into the socially constructed categories. I never accepted the liberal world order aquarium we were all thrown into. Several times in my life, this relationship with the established order and its expectations of it rattled the participants. In the video above, I tell a few personal stories that are comical where the people trained by the Liberal World Order were disarmed entirely as to how to deal with me. One was a 5-year class reunion for the public school I went to. The other was a big presentation I was a part of with the mayor of Cincinnati, city council, all the big media at the time, and all the powerful money people for what to do with the Banks Project back in the 90s. In both examples, I represented life outside the aquarium, and the rulers didn’t know what to do with me, so they ignored me as best they could, which is a typical reaction. To them, it’s earth-shattering because they think of themselves as the snake, but when they meet someone who does not follow their liberal world order rules, they realize that they are actually the mouse in life, and they freeze and try their best to pretend that their end is not near. And it’s terrifying to them.

The purpose of me telling that story to that small group of Trump flag-waving gunslingers on the shores of Lake Erie was to assure them that the Liberal World Order is not scary. They are easy to beat; all you have to do is not care what they think of you. And once you do, you will gain all the power in the relationship. They have been taught by the Liberal World Order that they are the snake in life and that everyone else is food for them. But when you do not care about their controls, they are powerless to do anything to control you, and in that way, the roles become reversed, and they become the food. Watching them go through their cycles of paralysis when they realize such things is always funny. And when it is wondered about what will happen next in the political world of our current life, that is the ultimate fate for them. They were never the snake but were always the mouse, and they are food to be consumed at our leisure. And now we’re hungry, so it’s only a matter of time. And that is what I told that group who asked about my gun grips. That is how I see myself, and my work with the guns is my own reminder of that fact and the vulnerabilities of the Liberal World Order. Like the snake in the aquarium, we can eat when we see fit, and that reality of the Liberal World Order is the most terrifying aspect in the world. They have trained all their lives that their role was the other way around, that they could use peer pressure to control all of existence. But the moment they run into someone who doesn’t care about their opinions and actually sees them as food, they lose all their power, which is the inevitable fate for them all in the months and years to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Experts in Plato’s Cave: Fear of learning the truth

Plato’s Cave Wall

When things start getting disjointed and the pressure starts blurring reality, I always turn to books for clarity—the process of reading books levels out the mind in very productive ways.  I don’t care if it’s a comic book; reading anything helps solve many thought problems.  And that is certainly the case in the news these days, where various Covid variants are scaring people into looking at everything but the fundamental issues of politics.  I told everyone what was coming when we started learning about Dr. Fauci and his connection to China, how China has long ago declared war on America. Still, we have not matched that aggression, and then there are election fraud problems from the 2020 elections.  There are some big topics out there that could topple our government in a very negative way.  There is some bad stuff going on that is now well out of control, so the perspective is needed. That’s when I turn to books to solve problems, and it always works.  Doing extensive reading brought my mind back to an old topic, the Cave Analogy from Plato’s Republic, a favorite.   In the video above, I explain it and how it applies to the politics of our times.  The problem we all have is that we know what is making the shadows on the cave wall. Still, we have an expert class that insists on staying in control of what we see and hear, even though their information is entirely irrelevant for 2021 sensibilities.

If you haven’t heard it before, this problem of experts attempting to shape reality based on their limited perspective is not a new problem.  It goes back several thousand years to around 375 BC to the times of the Greeks when they were trying to figure out how to operate a Republic as a form of government.  The assumption is that we are all chained to a pole looking at a cave wall and behind us in a cave is a fire burning.  Behind us are people walking around, for which we have never seen.  All we know of them is the shadows they cast on the cave wall.  Other people chained with us to a pole facing in the same direction have learned to predict the movements of the shadows on the cave wall depending on what time of day it was.  Again, not knowing that the shadows are caused by people moving about out of our sight.  Well, one person eventually manages to get loose and turn around and see for themselves the source of the shadows.  Breaking free, they attempt to tell the others tied to the poles what can be seen, but the experts don’t want people to pay attention.  So, the freed person goes by themselves into the world beyond the fire into the people moving about, talking with them, and learning who they are.  Eventually, the person finds themselves moving out of the cave altogether, and outside they see the sun and the more significant evidence of civilization.    

This evidence of reality provokes excitement, so the freed person returns to their colleagues tied to the pole and tells them what was seen outside the cave.  This causes anger from the experts because the threat to them is genuine.  Their entire value in existence has been to predict when the shadows will appear on the cave wall and determine their movements.  Obtaining a higher knowledge of what makes the shadows destroys everything that gives power to their lives, and they find it threatening.  They would much prefer to keep the public ignorant to be important by predicting the shadows on the cave wall.  Learning what makes the shadows for such people is the worst thing in the world.  Well, that pretty much spells out the problems of our modern times.  We have a lot of people in politics who make good livings predicting what the shadows will do.  But we live in a time where information is abundant, and we don’t need experts to tell us what things mean.  We have decentralization of information, and if one expert class attempts to keep us facing a direction we don’t want to be facing, we have the choice to look somewhere else anyway.  If we’re going to know what causes the shadows, we can look for ourselves.  That is the tension of our current political world.

Literature is such a good method of resolving problems because, as in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato had the same issues then as we do now.  There is nothing new about what we see out of the behavior of humanity.  There might be some modern tapestries to what we see, but the essence is always the same.  But what we should expect is to learn from history so that we don’t keep repeating it.  I think we can feel sympathy for those experts who only see the value of their lives in predicting where the shadows come from.  Or we can hate them for their attempt to control us.  Dr. Fauci comes to mind, a government expert who has spent his whole life predicting shadows and trying to scare us into behavior the government desired.  For him, we long ago untied ourselves and could see what was causing the shadows, even as the government has insisted that we not look behind us to where the fire cast its shadows.  Notice how we are talking about a Covid variant, but we never talk about a natural solution such as hydroxychloroquine. That’s when you know the expert class doesn’t care about you; all they do care about is their retention of power, their ability to scare you into behaving the way they want you to do, and they use the shadows to do it.  Once you know what causes the shadows, the experts lose all their power.

We have the same problem with the election fraud deniers, who want to look at the cave wall and let the experts translate what we see.  The election fraud of 2020 happened in the world beyond the fire, so the shadows of their existence don’t even show up on the cave wall.  Yet it happened all the same.  It just occurred beyond the vision of what we are looking at.  If we get up and away from our pole and look, we’ll see the evidence in the corner of the cave just beyond the firelight.  It’s not that the evidence isn’t there, but the experts expect to hide it from us by keeping our perspective from turning around and seeing it.  Because if we do get up and see for ourselves, the experts lose their power, which is terrifying.  Then what will happen to them once we realize how much we have been lied to.  For all those reasons and more, I love time with my books.  They are not connected to the internet.  Nobody is tracking what I’m reading by keystrokes.  It’s just me and my book in my reading chair.  If all the power in the world went out, I would still be fine and able to read history and reflect upon it.  And that is very empowering, especially in times like this.  But knowing something is only half the battle.  The trick is in making history different based on what we’ve learned.  And that is what our next step will be. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Star Wars and Political Science

Star Wars and Political Science

I have to report something that many, many people will find excessively disturbing. Now, in the context of what I’m about to say, keep in mind that I am well read, and have studied history about as extensively as a non-professional can without becoming professional.

Of my favorite books that I’ve read is the wonderful series by Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God four book series. I’m a tremendous fan of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I just completed A Patriots History of the United States. I love the book the Mothman Prophecies by John Keel, and all his further reporting of the strange and unusual. And I have read many of the popular modern news anchor books, such as Glenn Beck, Bill O’Rielly, and many of the others. I particularly enjoyed Arianna Huffington’s Pigs at the Trough. The point of this qualifying statement is that my reading range is varied and not party influenced. And it is extensive enough to make proclamations.

And the proclamation that I’m going to make is that the work in Star Wars, not just the films, but the books, is some of the best work of political science done in the history of mankind. And I say that as I pour over The Federalist Papers, and The Anti-Federalist Papers, and The Second Treatise of Government by John Locke 1667. In the Star Wars books, starting with the New Jedi Order series which started in 1999 and went on for 19 books, all the way up through Fate of the Jedi, the content while typically Star Wars is quite deep and universal in their exploration of political and human deficiencies.

How popular is it? Look at this tribute to John Williams, whom I think is the greatest musician there ever was, not just because he did the music for Star Wars, but most of the memorable, and inspirational music ever created. He will surpass Beethoven, Mozart and all others in the context of history.

Anyone not familiar with Star Wars, or who haven’t taken the time to work through the story line, let me bring you up to speed. The Jedi Knights are protectors of the Republic Government throughout a galaxy. The Jedi became complacent by their unchecked power. So a Sith Lord, an opposite of a Jedi in political motives, infiltrated the government, manipulated his way to become Emperor, and ruled the galaxy with an iron fist. The Emperor works with the Force, an unseen god-like presence that embodies all matter, much the way Jedi do, but otherwise is very similar to the motivations of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Alexander the Great in real historical concept. The Jedi are all but destroyed and are forced into hiding.

To give you an idea how popular Star Wars still is, here is Harrison Ford at the 30th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. (THE 30TH ANNIVERSERY! Most people don’t know who the president was 30 years ago, but they still know Star Wars)

Eventually the Jedi led by Luke Skywalker overtake the Emperor. They replace the government with the New Republic, and the problems commence. What kind of government do they replace the Emperor with, as many power hungry factions emerge to fill the power void, and what role do the Jedi play in that government? For the next 30 to 40 years the Jedi watch many governments rise and fall, while they try to build their role of protector of the galaxy back to a respectable position, all the while fighting political squabbles, the re-emergence of the Sith, the Jedi’s own insecurities in becoming too power hungry themselves, and the role of spiritualism in the whole enterprise.

This video from the Celebration V in Orlando Florida, August 2010.

The ongoing struggle of the Jedi v. government, and the Jedi v. Sith, and the Jedi v. self is a marvelous and highly sophisticated exploration of political science done against a science fiction back drop. It is because Star Wars is more than just pure entertainment, but at a deep subconscious level, food for the mind, that it has become such a memorable story that is so endured by the public to this day.

More from Celebration V.

And here is a word of warning to the entire political structure as it now exists. The world has moved to a place you cannot follow. With Star Wars, many similar science fiction stories have emerged. And now with the emergences of on-line gaming, whether it be Halo, or Gears of War, Modern Warfare, or Madden Football through Xbox, or Play Station or more advanced games like World of War Craft, and Star Wars on the PC game front, the youth, and in many cases the middle agers playing them, are starting to see through the smoke screens employed by politics for all of human history. Such tactics have worked in the past, and up to the last thirty years, were very effective. Even though the last 15 years seem to have made tremendous gains turning the republic of the United States into a socialist country with a European blueprint, this is an illusion. It’s the tail behind the head of the snake. The head is already moving in a different direction.

Here’s George Lucas talking about the Smithsonian exhibit in Washington D.C.

Sure, many will look at current personalities like Glenn Beck and call him seditious. But they are only looking at the symptom. Glenn Beck has emerged to fill a market need. He is not the market itself but has only emerged to supply to that market, and that is where many of the fools that cast blame in his direction go wrong. Beck is a product of the same generation I am, and we grew up asking questions, and all one has to do is read history to see that fiction has its roots in reality.

George Lucas on the Clone Wars, animated TV series on Cartoon Network.

And Star Wars has done much to ask the questions that a technological society like the one we currently have, needed to ask. And those questions are much bigger than Fannie and Freddy, or the government take-over of GM. They are bigger than government bail-outs, and Union deals with government officials.
One of the most sophisticated video games I’ve ever played in my life was the first Knights of the Old Republic. It is a Star Wars game, but I’d just as soon call it a training game for becoming a Jedi Knight. In that game you do everything from fighting Sith and other criminals that seek to harm the innocent, to helping solve crimes in complicated scenarios that most lawyers would find difficult. The goal of the Jedi is to see beyond the obvious, to the truth, and to fight for that truth. Because many criminal elements have hidden their crimes behind legitimacy, such as how our current government works. And that has worked for a long time, but it is changing as people think about the concepts discussed in Star Wars and other popular fiction.

Even though the game is several years old now, it still looks exciting.

Call them nerds, those people that sit and play games and read comic books and ramble on about The Force. Make fun of them because they don’t know much about sports and don’t play golf. But the world is changing. And politicians don’t understand it. They think the same old tricks will work, so they ignore and ridicule what they don’t understand.

Here is a big Star Wars Fan. Give him credit. At least he knows what makes him happy.

But even 50 years ago, there wasn’t anything like Star Wars out there for the public to digest. There was Plato’s Republic. There was Shakespeare. There was Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, there was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all books that helped shape political policy even to this day. But Star Wars puts out a significant book at least twice a year for a couple of decades now, and each book goes deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of personal relationships and spirituality, against the conflict and impulse of politics. And that is a new element to the tapestry of human history, one that will have a significant impact on the future of our race.

I’m proud of my wife for reading over 57 Star Wars books. But this guy is doing a pretty good job.

Anyone that says entertainment can’t also be meaningful is not paying attention. Below is the preview of The Force Unleashed, another Star Wars game that I will be playing.

So while I explore my own ideas in the overmanwarrior concept, the work in Star Wars is where everything starts. And it is one of the most important stories that have ever been told. And the Star Wars stories are more important than anything the current president has to say, or the speaker of the house, or anyone that currently thinks they are the authority to the human race.

Rich Hoffman

www.overmwarrior.com