Cutting Through the Matrix

This is not a dress rehearsal

Local sustainability updates - NEW!! Keir Starmer as the Devil, AI generated images - Nick and Melissa are reading C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. - Talking today with Adam who lives in Germany. - Digital IDs, scanning at the grocery store; blockchain technology. - Questions to Alan Watt such as “Where can we move that is not part of the system?” - C…

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7 months ago · 22 likes · 11 comments · Cutting Through the Matrix

I’ve had this episode of Real History with Melissa playing in the background. Melissa is Alan Watt’s widow and is dedicated to helping others understand the importance and implications of Alan’s life’s work, some of which is most readily available to us through his large collection of Cutting Through The Matrix podcasts.

She is in conversation with Alan, a man who has evidently lived in several different countries around the world and either knew Alan or was very familiar with his work.

The absolute key to what’s happening is spelled out in their exchanges. I won’t have all of it. But a few things include:

• the destruction of native cultures and communities has taken place continuously, from before we were born. Most of us paid no attention to it and couldn’t muster much empathy for it. I confess I was aware of it & paid it no heed. But this was rehearsal and refinement. As Melissa said, those with a little money used that as padding. The sharp edges don’t press on you so uncomfortably. But in the end, to the perpetrators, we are all natives.

• Nobody is coming to save us. Melissa commented (1:06.30) that often, Alan was accused of being so negative, such a downer, but he always supplied the solution. It’s to care for one another. Obviously it’s vital for a family to hold together, but even more so that a group of people in an area do so, forming what we can describe with a throwaway word, community. So much more easily said than accomplished.

I see things more clearly now. The pieces which I can see all tessellate. The explosion of middle class mobility in employment from the 1960s was a central factor in severing all links we had ever had. We moved about every 18 months to a few years during my childhood.

If you prioritise personal advancement over everything else, you get what I had by 16. I neither knew, nor cared for, nor was cared for, by anyone. This has happened to very many middle class families in U.K. and became normalised.

• Money has been used forever as both the lure to leave community one way or another and to punish by restricting it to those who were manipulated to depend, increasingly, upon the state. You can become apart from it and indeed are made divided from your neighbours, if you and they have different concerns. In many cases, money enables you to live somewhere else, temporarily, adjacent to others who also prioritise personal advancement over all else. This mechanism isn’t easy to see from the inside of its operation. Aren’t you supposed to take responsibility and to try your best?

The one thing I probably did right was to resist the hopping from one location to another. I consciously declined career opportunities which would have meant uprooting my family when the children were small.

As it turned out, they are part of community in ways they never were taught by their rootless parents.

Yesterday, I went round to my older daughter’s house. She needed help with a few things that are beyond her in late pregnancy and her partner is working on a construction project an hour from home. Just as I was about to leave, she and her neighbour took a roadside delivery of a load of firewood. So we spent the next hour building a split log pile, while her neighbours child helped her father do the same. My grandsons joined in and obviously enjoyed it, noisily.

This kind of everyday event never happened to me. Becca mentioned, as we’d talked of preparations, that what she was supplying was community. She knows a lot of people, all local. She’s lived around here all her life. It was a wonderful moment. It’s a small example & on its own, it’s no cure.

But imagine the resilience that can come from such a force, magnified?

We had our younger daughter and fiancé over for supper, as we often do. They like to and we’re delighted to see them so often. This daughter is more like me, inclined to home and family.

By good fortune, her partner comes from a family that has lived in this area for a long time. His father is a butcher in his own business. so he knows a lot of people. The son enjoys playing in the village cricket & football team, so he still knows the people he went to school with.

The irony isn’t lost on either of us. Bunny and I have conduits to community also entirely through our children, which would never have existed if we’d followed the example of our respective parents.

Her father was an example of late-Empire middle manager, assigned to manage facilities belonging to Coates, who were into dye works and fabric weaving. I may be wrong but I think Coates of Scotland was the world’s first multinational corporation. Bunny’s family lived in Mexico, Turkey and the Philippines. She was placed in boarding school at 12 and never again lived at home.

Alan Watt was a remarkable figure throughout the period prior to the events of 2020-on. It’s all there in his CTTM recordings. He has such a good voice for audio only, too.

Best wishes

Mike

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