The Broken Clockwork of the Western Mind

Twisted minds lead to twisted societies

In case it wasn’t obvious, the Western mind is damaged goods. Many observers would say that this is a recent state of affairs, but in truth it’s something that has been slowly building for centuries. It started with the broad acceptance of Cartesian dualism, the conceptual separation of the mind from the body that developed as an over-mechanised response to the scientific discoveries of men like Copernicus and Kepler. This “analytical mindset,” in the original sense of analysis as “the resolution of something complex into simple elements,” destroyed the manifold intricacy of organic traditional society as it was conceptually applied outside of a strict philosophical setting and into the broader stream of society. It has replaced traditional society with social systems that are ever more disintegrated.

In tandem with this has been the philosophical “mechanisation” of Western societies. Because social systems are no longer viewed as organic wholes, the divorce of soul/mind from body has led to the same within larger systems such as cultures and civilisations. This view of everything as a “machine” has destroyed the whole fabric of society and created a feedback loop that has consequently broken the holistic unity of each individual within our societies. It has reached the point where the very minds of massive numbers of people in our nations are broken. Yet, the answer is not in treating them like mechanisms in need of a new gear or a wound spring, but in trying to help people to reject this mechanised mindset and return to a traditional understanding of society and every individual’s place in it.

It’s important to understand that when we talk about a return to a more genuine and traditional type of society, that we are describing a worldview, not externals or accidentals. When we talk about “organic versus mechanical society,” don’t take this to mean that I’m advocating for an untechnological society, which has never really existed anywise. Man - no matter his “technology level,” always uses means by which to control and utilise his environment. Rather, I mean a society that has broken away from the atomised mechanistic ideology exemplified by the modern world and has returned to an introspective, self-reinforcing traditional society wherein man may exist as a more authentic self than he can in the artificial, broken world of the modern age.

Inevitably, mechanical society leads to social atomisation. Instead of each cell and tissue contributing in its own unique and irreplaceable way within the greater body, in mechanical society we are treated merely as infinitely replaceable and interchangeable consumer units. Indeed, the baleful effects of the replaceable parts mentality continues with us today! While thinking to “liberate” the individual, modern mechanical society merely turns him into a cog who can be replaced when a less expensive model comes along.

At this point, we should observe the difference between worldview and ideology, since these are often confounded. A worldview can be defined as a comprehensive understanding of humanity and its place in the greater social realm, and even within the universe. As such, worldviews tend to be holistic and self-reinforcing in a natural, non-contradictory way. Ideologies, on the other hand, typically involved a more atomised set of individual doctrines and are integrated more artificially. A worldview guides the one holding it by providing a comprehensive framework that meshes naturally within the larger belief system. Ideologies tend to be more ad hoc and artificial, driven by circumstances and exigency, changing as the contingent needs of the individual or group holding the ideology are challenged. In a sense, worldviews anchor and guide traditional societies, while ideologies give ever-evolving modern society an epistemic framework to justify that perpetual evolution.

This gets to a point about the psyche of the modern Western man. The problem with the clockwork mind is that it’s easily programmable. Because it has no firm, comprehensive basis of belief, what’s left is “public opinion" and the propaganda that he is fed. Propaganda is used to form ideology, whose ever-changing charactre lends to modern societies their “progressive” nature, even when these ideologies are “classically liberal” of some sort or another (classical liberalism is still liberalism, after all).

The hackable mind is a terrible thing. Its way of thinking is modularised and contingent - all you need to do to change the behaviour or beliefs of hackable people is to change the programming they receive.

BEEP…WHIRRR

Because their opinions are divorced from any deep, abiding holistic worldview, there’s no “body” to them, no deep substance to which the “mindset” is tied. In a sense, the “mindset” is really just a “chipset,” infinitely replaceable as circumstances dictate. Just within the past two years, we have seen this with how NPCs have been worked up into a frenzy about covid as well as with the current Russia hysteria. And if you think it’s bad now, just wait until we finally develop a working mind-machine interface where people can be hooked up to the ‘net directly. The damage currently done by ubiquitous smart phones will be multiplied a hundred times over.

It works, however, because The Powers That Be have discovered the formula for weaponising this clockwork approach to the functioning of the mind in modern man. So many modern society westerners buy into propaganda because they’ve literally been programmed by modern culture to do so. Even a lot of so-called “conservatives” have been hacked. This is why people who even two weeks ago would have sworn up and down that you can’t believe anything the mainstream media say are now banging the drums for nuclear war with Russia in defence of the most crooked regime in Europe. It’s why most Americans are absolutely convinced that consoooomerism and unbridled growth are good things, no matter the social or physical costs. It’s why most people in the West have this cartoonish worldview where they can only filter inputs through the prisms of Marvel movies, Harry Potter, or Star Wars and their only point of historical reference is a weird, sanitised version of World War II. There is literally no deeper conceptual lens that these people are capable of using.

As we’ve seen, those who are capable of seeing through this programming because their minds are undivided from their spirit and soul make up an oftentimes small minority in western societies.

This circumstance, however, creates a world in which “morality” is driven by manufactured public opinion. In our mechanistic modern society, there is no reference point higher than man himself, even when he tries to be “spiritual.” The mechanistic way of thinking has led to a nearly complete dearth of true spirituality in the West. Western man often tries to be spiritual, but it’s so often superficial and self-centred. The rejection of the sense of the sacred as something that should permeate society rather than being compartmentalised from it is merely another symptom of the mind-body division as it bears itself out in society.

Religion in the West is now about self-help rather than being God-centred. It takes the eyes of man from looking upward to looking at himself and his neighbour as the measure of all things. It’s mere psychology instead of being a means of uniting the entire man in fellowship with a perfect God. This “analysis” of society (in the denotative sense of the word) is seen most formally in the “separation of church and state.” This effectively ghettoises God away from playing a role in most of society (not just the government), which is completely contrary to the balanced, holistic role that religion plays in traditional societies. This, in turn, leads to an irreverence towards God that not only expresses itself in outright atheism and blasphemy, but even in the flippant “fishin’ buddy Jesus” of American country music and the like.

This desacralisation of our society is a direct result of the centuries of mechanistic, divided thinking. It’s driven by the part-whole fallacy involved in thinking that being able to explain some things scientifically means that we can dispense with the spiritual, which operates on a deeper and broader plane than is accessible to the merely material chipset. The breakdown of organic traditional society has led to the ills of the modern world.

What is the answer? Well, for most of society, there probably is no answer, at least until the collapse comes and the next cycle starts. Sadly, many people are simply too fractured and broken and isolated for mere words to bring them back. The best place to start with them is evangelism - society itself may no longer be permeated with God, but we should at least try to restore these broken people to God and give them support within our churches. For those of us who haven’t internalised the modernist clockwork way of thinking, we can work to resacralise those elements of our society that are within our reach. We can seek to make holy once again everything we do, whether secular or sacred, understanding that before God it should all be sacred. The goal should be the restoration of a traditional society, not because it fits an “ideology” but because it’s what actually works best to bring lasting peace and stability.