Pop Music Psyops
And the Disneyfication of America
“You walk into a bar and music is thumping. All heads are bobbing and feet tapping in synchrony. Somehow the rhythmic sound grabs control of the brains of everyone in the room forcing them to operate simultaneously and perform the same behaviors in synchrony. How is this possible? Is this unconscious mind control by rhythmic sound only driving our bodily motions, or could it be affecting deeper mental processes? The mystery runs deeper than previously thought, according to psychologist Annett Schirmer reporting new findings today at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. Rhythmic sound “not only coordinates the behavior of people in a group, it also coordinates their thinking—the mental processes of individuals in the group become synchronized.”
- The Power of Music: Mind Control by Rhythmic Sound by Douglas Fields for Scientific American
“Music has the uncanny ability to thwart time and space. It informs a moment. It indexes lives. It creates strange bedfellows. It outlasts people — even the people who helped make the music. Music resonates more than any other art form — that is its unique power. It remains with us long after the last note has faded.”
- Jimmer Podrasky
Psychological Operations or PSYOPS are defined to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.
The purpose of United States Psychological Operations is to induce or reinforce behavior favorable to US objectives.
My first memory of pop music was in 1969 while watching the Archies cartoon on television play the song Sugar, Sugar.
Soon the flexi- disc was included on the back of Post Sugar Smacks cereal box. When I talked my mom into buying it, I couldn’t wait for the box to become empty, so I haphazardly cut the disc out of the box with a pair of surgical scissors and rushed to play it on my sister’s portable record player.
Sugar and pop music.
What could possibly go wrong?
I was eight.
A friend of an older brother across the street derided my interest in the Archies, calling them bubblegum crap or something and showed me his prized copy of “Meet the Beatles”.
This, he informed me, was real music. I remember looking at the album cover of the four faces of John, George, Paul and Ringo wearing black, on a black background. It seemed like they were floating in space.
Shortly thereafter, my sister and I had the 45 version of “Something” on side A and “Come Together” on the B side.
We would sit behind a chair in our living room and play it endlessly on the same record player.
This was the start of a lifelong fascination and obsession with popular music for me and millions of others from my generation, and the impact the music of this era had on western culture was immense.
Because Sometimes a Good Psyop Needs a Little Help Getting Started
“The public was oblivious that there was a secret star maker machinery. They were the stone-cold rock and roll professionals and there may never be a group of that caliber again."
-Jimmy Webb on The Wrecking Crew
“I had no idea that people didn’t play their own records until the Monkees came along”
- Dick Clark
“In the devil’s war against God, the battlefield is man’s heart and as a result of man’s choice, recorded history emerges.”
- Fr. Ciprian George Gradinaru
Laurel Canyon is legendary in the history of rock and roll.
Located in a neighborhood near the Hollywood Hills West district of Los Angeles, California, it was the center of countercultural activity and attitudes during the 1960s and 1970s. Some of its residents included Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Neil Young; Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, James Taylor, Jackson Browne to name a few.
Some of the seedier aspects of the area and the role it played in the nascent hippie movement are documented in Dave McGowan’s book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream.
If you’re a rock aficionado or a conspiracy freak, it’s required reading.
From Amazon:
“Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times.
Members of bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, Captain Beefheart, CSN, Three Dog Night, Alice Cooper, the Doors, and Love with Arthur Lee, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judi Sill and David Blue, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills.
But there was a dark side to that scene as well. Many didn’t make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would care to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entou- rage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians, and intelligence personnel - the same sort of people who just happened to give birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all of the canyon’s colorful characters - rock stars, hippies, murderers, and politicos - happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is the very strange, but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a hippie utopia.”
The problem was, at this point of their careers, most of the musicians making the scene in Laurel Canyon couldn’t play their instruments very well, so to get the revolution started, attention was turned to a group of professional sessions musicians in the Los Angeles area known as The Wrecking Crew.
This included Glen Campbell, Dr. John, Hal Blaine, Barney Kessel, Leon Russell, Carol Kaye, Joe Porcaro (father of another famed LA session drummer Jeff Porcaro of Toto), Howard Roberts, Tommy Tedesco, to name a few. They recorded thousands of studio recordings in the during this time and since they were never credited; they were the unsung heroes of many albums by the Beach Boys, the Mama’s and the Papa’s, Sonny and Cher, The Byrds, and The Monkees to name a few.
From Wikipedia:
“Popular music of the 1960s was dominated by young bands like the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, Jan and Dean, and the Monkees. Listening to rock and roll on jukeboxes and car radios created devoted fans of these groups, whose music communicated the optimism and sorrow of a generation contending with strong countercultural forces. Record companies happily supplied the public with new songs and musical groups, all packaged with artistic photographs and biographical profiles. Left out of the story was an important historical fact: the bands, in some, but not all, cases, did not play the instruments heard on their records. Instead, the task of recording the perfect tempo, pitch, and timbre fell to a small group of accomplished session musicians. The Wrecking Crew documents the work of studio players who recorded the tracks for such hits as “California Dreamin”, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin”, “Be My Baby”, “The Beat Goes On”, and “Good Vibrations”. Interviews with produc- ers, engineers, and session musicians reveal the warmth and humor that allowed their collective talents to turn a simple chord chart into an international phenomenon.”
Prior to becoming a rock iconoclast, growing up in and around the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles, Mr. McGowan was an affirmed fanatic of the music from the 60s and 70s for most of his life but while on vacation, hoping to unplug and relax from investigating corruption in local government and law enforcement he began reading a book given to him by hist daughter about the LA music scene that she knew he loved called “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood”.
When he read about secret underground tunnels connecting homes in the area, a secret military base (Lookout Mountain AFB where they processed footage of atomic bomb tests in Utah, Nevada, New Mexico and the South Pacific), and an inordinate number of violent deaths in a scene that was supposedly linked to a peace and love and hippie nirvana, alarm bells started going off.
Add to that, a majority of the musicians in the Laurel Canyon scene seemed to come from prominent establishment families, some with military intelligence back- grounds and somehow while the Vietnam War raged and public sentiment against illegal drug use ran very high (no pun intended), these well-connected, military-aged men, were somehow avoiding the draft and evading arrest for illegal drug use and possession.
Dave, of course, asked: How?
What he once considered being an organic, counter-cultural movement, McGowan later came to understand through his research and investigation that there seemed to be enough evidence to suggest that the counter-culture, hippie movement that began in Laurel Canyon and later spread to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco and to mainstream America had all the markings of a military intelligence PSYOP designed to neutralize anti-war sentiment and demoralize society by characterizing war protesters as drug-addled, shiftless hippies.
Since his book is bereft of any reference to a Christian worldview, it seems he viewed this phenomenon on a secular level and could not see the deeper, spiritual implications of the movement and what is really at play.
While reading American Pilgrim by Roosh Valizadeh, he describes this phenomenonon during a meeting with another Orthodox culture critic named Jay Dyer and they conclude that “most human phenomena that can be labeled a trend or a norm are psychological operations to weaken and enslave us, with the ultimate aim of keeping us away from God.”
Cultural Trends as Psyops
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowl- edge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ
– 2 Corinthians 10:4-5
The oligarchs and the elite are always running multiple cultural trends or PSYOPS that encourage the masses to create idols in our lives in order to keep us from God: There’s the Sports Fan PSYOP, the Music Geek PSYOP, the Yuppie PSYOP, the Fitness PSYOP, the Sexual Lib- eration PSYOP, the Career PSYOP.
I recognize them because I’ve been a member of at least a couple of them at some point in time. In case you’ve come to this point and you think that the CIA and the intelligence community aren’t interested in controlling music, television, art or movies or have any interest in changing and manipulating the culture to steer society, read on.
Recently Terry Gross of NPR interviewed Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the CIA’s MK- ULTRA program that was created by Stephen Gottlieb and wrote a book about it called “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control”. In the book and the interview, Kinzer explains how LSD was brought to America by the CIA’s Stephen Gottlieb after it had been first synthesized in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, and implemented its use in the CIA MK-Ultra experiments to control the human mind with LSD. Many of the people who obtained LSD from the Stanford University experiments are famous names from the countercultural era of the 60s such as Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” and mentor of the Grateful Dead.
Kesey was instrumental in the experimental parties called The Acid Tests in the San Francisco area in the mid-1960s that featured the Grateful Dead as a live act.
Lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Robert Hunter, was also a participant in the MK-Ultra experiments and became a great purveyor of LSD cul-ture and fame as the songwriting partner with Jerry Garcia (CIA). While not officially part of the MK-Ultra experiments, another associate of the Grateful dead, Owsley Stanley, was a famed LSD chemist who was manufacturing LSD in the Bay Area. Stanley was also the sound engineer for the band, financier, inspiration for the Grateful Dead Bear as well as the protagonist of the Steely Dan song, Kid Charlemagne.
He and his girlfriend Melissa Cargill, also a skilled chemist and scion of the uber-wealthy Cargill-Macmillan family were instrumental in creating 500 grams or more than 5 million doses of LSD that were made available in California.
Stanley was also a scion of another powerful, political family from the state of Kentucky. His father was an attorney for the federal government and his grandfather was a member of the US Senate after serving as governor of Kentucky and the US House of Representatives.
After the criminalization of LSD in the mid-60’s and Stanley was arrested, Joni Mitchell lamented the aftermath:
“You watched that high of the hippie thing descend into drug depression, right after Woodstock, then we went through a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked its thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic.”
Which sums up the purpose of steering the culture away from God. You destroy the underpinnings of a Christian Civilization, replace God with drugs and debauchery and pull the rug out.
Humanity left with no moral bearings descends into more debauchery.
Punk and New Wave - The Rock and Roll Psyop Phase II - Meet the New Boss Same as the Old Boss
“He seriously thought that Miles, Stewart, and I were part of some conspiracy hatched by my father and backed by the CIA.”
- Ian Copeland, referring to Bernie Rhodes, onetime manager of The Clash
“He (Miles Copeland III) should have been in the CIA instead of me. Yeah, I’m “blah blah blah,” and he’s “hush hush.”
I’m not sure he’s thought through all the implications of the power he’s got.
The next time you go to a Police concert - say, one like that in Shea Stadium, with 70,000 young minds open to whatever the Police decide to put into them-you can answer that question for yourself.”
- Miles Copeland Jr., founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency in a 1986 Rolling Stone Interview on whether his son Miles, manager of the Police was also CIA
Since all revolutions contain the seeds of their own destruction, it was time for a new spin on the rock and roll PSYOP so by the time the ’70s and early ’80s rolled around the monolithic rock and roll stars from the ’60s and ’70s had become targets of a new music movement known as punk rock and were considered over-indulgent, drug-addled, self-absorbed egomaniacs with limousines, expense accounts, mansions spending millions on over-produced, self-indulgent AOR.
Punk and it’s more commercially viable cousin, new-wave were being sold as rebellion towards bloated, indulgent and boring corporate ’70s rock.
Bands like REM, XTC, The Buzzcocks, Television, Talking Heads, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Clash, The Smiths, Gary Numan, Squeeze and The Police were promoted as an alternative to corporate rock that most considered past its prime.
It certainly appeared at the time to be a legitimate reactionary movement, especially since the only place you could hear this music was left-of- the-dial on college radio stations.
As Dave states in his book, most of the bands just mentioned owed their success to at least one member of the Copeland family, which may be the most fascinating family associated with the rock and roll phenomenon in the genre's history.
The patriarch was legendary CIA figure Miles Axe Copeland Jr.
Mother Lorraine Adie Copeland, also British Intelligence and sons Miles Axe Copeland III, Ian Copeland and Stewart Copeland of the Police.
Miles Copeland Jr, a founding member of the CIA known for his relationship with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his books on intelligence including “The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics” and “The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA’s Original Political Operative”. Copeland also played a role in Operation AJAX with Kermit Roosevelt in the Coup d’état of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953.
Apparently, Mossadegh wanted to nationalize the Iranian oil fields, which was met with some resistance from British Petroleum so Mossadegh was replaced by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (The Shah) and his secret police SAVAK who were more sympathetic British Petroleum and western interests.
Eventually, the CIA's dirty tricks in Iran caused blowback and resulted in the Iranian revolution of 1979, where the Monarchical government of the Shah was overthrown and was replaced with an Islamic Republic under the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
On November 4, 1979, fifty-two United States diplomats and citizens were held hostage after a group of militarized Iranian college students belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, who supported the Iranian Revolution, took over the US Embassy in Tehran and seized hostages. A diplomatic standoff ensued.
The hostages were held for 444 days, being released on January 20, 1981, and the morale of the United States was at an all-time low.
In a 1986 Rolling Stone interview with Miles Copeland Jr, he intimated that his son Miles III was angling for a career in politics, intelligence or both and suggested that The Police were a CIA PSYOP since they were able to sell tickets to 60,000 screaming, adoring fans into Shea Stadium, and thus were able to pour whatever they pleased into the minds of unwitting fans.
The interview caught Sting off-guard and the remarks were reported to upset him considerably. While Sting as all members of The Police are undoubtedly a superior musicians, I think he must be toiling under the impression that somehow his music should transcend the true purpose of the PSYOP (culture destruction/creation) and is apparently in denial that he and his music will always be regarded to those who know, as nothing more than an intelligence tool.
As an aside, I remember once in an interview with Stewart Copeland, he mentioned that Sting privately admitted to him he thought he was the Antichrist.
Miles Copeland III Svengali, rock impresario and mover-and-shaker Miles Axe Copeland III is the first son born to Miles Copeland Jr. and his wife Lorraine Adie (also British Intelligence) and is primarily known as the manager of the rock band The Police and later Sting’s music and acting career. In 1979, Copeland founded the I.R.S. Records label, producing REM, The Bangles, Berlin, The Cramps, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, The Alarm, The Go-Go’s, Squeeze, The Bangles, The Police, and countless others. His influence on 80s hipster culture and alt-college rock are immeasurable.
Copeland owns and operates Copeland International Arts (CIA, get it?), which includes the Bellydance Superstars, Celtic Crossroads, Otros Aires, Zohar, and Beats Antique. Currently he writes a blog at his website www.milescopeland.com where he muses about American politics, media, media control, foreign policy, Russia, Ukraine, the news media (Newsmax and Fox criticism), correlations between Nazi Germany and present day America, Afghanistan and even Zionism.
Ian Copeland In 1979, Copeland founded Frontier Booking International (FBI, are you seeing a pattern here?) a New York talent agency that represented many of the top new wave acts of the 1980s, including the B-52’s, The Cure, The Police, Simple Minds, The English Beat, and The Go-Go’s.
The agency grew to include hundreds of bands including the Buzzcocks, Nine Inch Nails, Concrete Blonde, The Mission UK, Iggy Pop, General Public, Charlie Peacock, Let’s Active, REM, Sting, and Morrissey. In addition to the Copeland family’s powerful connections, Talking Heads members Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz also seem to have an interesting and esteemed family backgrounds. It may come as a surprise to some that similar to Jim Morrison’s dad being a highly decorated Navy Admiral who was directly involved in the Gulf of Tonkin, Tina Weymouth’s father Ralph Weymouth was a decorated Vice-Admiral of the United States Navy.
Her niece Katharine Weymouth served as publisher of the Washington Post and is also the daughter of Elizabeth Morris “Lally” Graham Weymouth who was a senior associate editor of The Washington Post and was previously special diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek magazine during her family’s ownership of the publication.
Elizabeth’s mother is none other than the legendary Katharine Meyer Graham who led her family’s newspaper, The Washington Post, from 1963 to 1991 and also presided over the paper as it reported on the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Katharine Meyer Graham was born in 1917 into a wealthy family in New York City, to Agnes Elizabeth and Eugene Meyer who was a financier and, later, Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz also has some impressive military family connections. His father Robert Lewis Frantz, a graduate of West Point and Harvard Law, was a two-star Army general who commanded the 99th ARCOM, which includes Ohio, West Virginia and half of Pennsylvania and rose to the rank of Major General. His uncle was General James R. Allen was Superintendent of the US Air Force Academy and Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Powers Europe.
Jeff “Skunk” Baxter from Legendary Session Ace to Military Industrial Complex Consultant.
Jeff Baxter is a legendary LA session guitarist who played on the first three Steely Albums in the early 70s including Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, and Pretzel Logic. He was also a member of the Doobie Brothers and continues to work as a session guitarist. I can’t find out too much about his early life or his family, but his Wikipedia page says he went to the prestigious Taft school in Connecticut, so someone had the means to pony up the cash to send young Mr. Baxter there.
In 2021 tuition to Taft was $69,600/year so four years’ll run mom and dad around $280k.
Trey Anastasio of Phish is also an alum of Taft.
The interesting story behind Baxter is that in the mid 1980s he decided he wanted to switch careers and become a missile defense contractor/defense consultant, so he did.
According to Wikipedia
“Baxter fell into his second profession almost by accident. In the mid-1980s, his interest in music recording technology led him to wonder about hardware and software originally developed for military use, specifically data compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices.
His next-door neighbor was a retired engineer who had worked on the Sidewinder missile program. This neighbor bought Baxter a subscription to Aviation Week magazine, provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile defense systems in particular.
He became self-taught in this area, and at one point wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system.
He gave the paper to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his career as a defense consultant began.”
Sure.
Okay, so say my next door neighbor used to work for NASA, what do you think the odds are if he gives me a couple of Aerospace Monthly magazines, I retreat to my basement, study up on aerodynamics, physics and rocket science, write a paper, send it to my congressional representative to see if he’ll swing me a top secret clearance and score me some sweet hookups with the DOD and Northrup-Grumman?
How about zero?
But wait, not only is Baxter consulting with the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as well as consults for the US DOD and the US intelligence community, Northrop Grumman Corp., General Dynamics, the small print in his DOD contract may have said something about an obligation to play publicly with mediocre, rock and roll wannabe’s whose day jobs are as White House government officials or diplomats, so he’s also been seen playing around DC with the likes of Bush White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and Biden Secretary of State Tony Blinken as well the Hungarian ambassador to the United States.
Recently, I read an interesting interview from November 14, 2019 called “Behind the Curtain: Prepping for the End of the World with Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter”.
The interview gets off to a weird start where Baxter asks the interviewer what he would do in the event of riots in the streets. “If there were riots in the streets,” he said, “would you know what to do?” The interviewer’s response was: “Well, umm, I, uh, would lock myself in the house. Grab a baseball bat, grab my cat, hide in the tub and hope for the best.”
Apparently this answer was met with consternation and derision as the interviewer described Baxter’s response: “There was not a shred of sympathy left in his face — if there was ever any there — and he now looked at me like I was doomed beyond all hope.”
So the interviewer turned the tables and repeated the same question back: “And before the sentence left my mouth, the mustache responded. ‘I have a motorcycle filled with gas at all times in my garage’, he told me. ‘The streets and freeways will be blocked by cars trying to get out of the city and there won’t be any gas left, anyway. You need a motorcycle to weave through the traffic.’”
Sounds like he knows what’s coming.
In the interview Baxter was quite concerned about the interviewers failure to consider the possibility of civil unrest let alone not being prepared for it, and although the interview/article never goes into any specific details or he just leaves it out, he appears to be impressed with Baxter’s command of information regarding mitigating risk during a potential collapse of civilization and his understanding of these scenarios through whatever sources he is privileged to be associated with because of his connections.
The Curtain is Falling - Papers Please
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
- Laurel Canyon Alum, Frank Zappa
Neil Young, Laurel Canyon alumnus, self-proclaimed radical and freedom of speech advocate, has recently given Spotify an ultimatum to either de-platform Joe Rogan for having the temerity to question vaccine safety or remove all of his songs.
Spotify opted for the latter, handing Young his walking papers.
Good on them.
Incidentally, Hipgnosis Songs Fund, who has recently partnered with The Blackstone Group, announced it has acquired a 50% interest in Neil Young’s catalogue of 1,180 songs and Jeffrey B. Kindler, former chairman and CEO of Pfizer, is a Senior Advisor at Blackstone.
Joni Mitchell, another well connected Laurel Canyon Alum from an esteemed military family, has joined the Spotify exodus.
Wrote the septuagenarian:
“I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue,”
I think we’re witnessing the unveiling of these phony rock stars that have been hiding in their mansions for decades and are now parroting big pharma talking points on cue and for those who couldn’t previously can now clearly see their affiliations.
Counterculture bands like Phish, Foo-Fighters, Dead and Company (the remaining members of the Grateful Dead who are milking every last buck out of their incognizant fans) are now requiring proof-of-vaccination documentation to attend their concerts.
Prior to developing an understanding of how the world really works, music was a focus of my life both as a fan and as a musician, but after becoming a Christian, the question that I kept asking myself is, what are the underlying messages that are being delivered through this art form?
Why do most of the artists in the music business (and there are very few exceptions) have similar social and political messages that are in direct conflict with a Christian worldview, and if they antithetical to my faith, how can I justify listening to this music?
Perhaps this is another area of my life that God is calling me to repent of.
If I am wise, I must heed this call.
Disneyland as The Gulag
America was once an economic and industrial powerhouse.
We manufactured and exported steel, textiles, automobiles, appliances and other technologies and strong, traditional families were the center of this. When the oligarchs moved into the next phase of their globalization plan and started off-shoring these jobs in the early 80s, this affected many Americans.
In my home town of Pittsburgh, the closing of the steel mills left thousands of families of union steelworkers unemployed. Generations of families who worked in those mills assumed the jobs would always be there, but it seemed like overnight, they were gone, never to return.
It was awful.
Pittsburgh began to recover in the late 80s because it still had something to offer in the realm of labor for the tech oligarchs. In the early 2000s Google, Apple and Uber set up shop to skim graduates from Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science and Robotics departments.
Steve Jobs was the first to exploit this stream of talent when for his NeXT computer system in the late 1980s.
Other industrial cities like Detroit and Gary, Indiana haven’t fared nearly as well.
America’s chief export is now no longer steel, textiles or other manufactured goods, it is culture.
Now we export degenerate cinema, degenerate music, feminism, pornography, debauchery, homosexuality and transgenderism, but arguably the top cultural export from America in the last century has been the culture of Disney which while once considered family entertainment, now includes most of the aforementioned.
In a passage from Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, Fr. Seraphim often speaks of the “Disneyland mentality of America, which was making it impossible for people to seek and find the truth.” As he looked at contemporary American life from a spiritual perspective and compared it to life in the Soviet Union, he once asked: “Do we have any image that explains our situation as well as [the Soviet] Gulag does that of Russia?”
To which he answered:
“I am afraid there is an image, most unflattering to us, which is almost our equivalent of Gulag. It is Disneyland, an image which exemplifies our carefree love of ‘fun’ (a most un-Christian word!), our lack of seriousness... unaware or barely aware of the real meaning and seriousness of life.”
In a talk at a pilgrimage in 1982, Fr. Seraphim expanded on this idea:
“The message of this universal temptation that attacks men today quite openly in its secular forms, but usually more hidden in its religious forms is:
Live for the present, enjoy yourself, relax, be comfortable. Behind this message is another, more sinister undertone that is openly expressed only in the officially atheist countries which are one step ahead of the free world in this respect. We should realize that what is happening in the world today is very similar whether it occurs behind the Iron Curtain or in the free world.
There are different varieties of it, but a very similar attack is being made to get our souls. In the Communist countries, which have an official doctrine of atheism, they tell you quite openly that you are to forget about God and any other life but the present one; remove from your life the fear of God and reverence for holy things; regard those who still believe in God in the ‘old- fashioned’ way as enemies who must be exterminated.
One might take, as a symbol of our carefree, fun-loving, self-worshipping times, our American Disneyland; if so, we should not neglect to see behind it the more sinister symbol that shows where the me generation is really heading: the Soviet Gulag.”
The Darkened Nous
This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ.
– Ephesians 4:17-20
In the beginning, there was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God
– John 1:1
How can generations that have had their minds darkened by a toxic culture that promotes drug use, sexual promiscuity and pornography possibly come to know truth?
I recently heard an E. Michael Jones interview regarding his latest book, Logos Rising talking about the mind of modern man and his ability to discern truth and said that if man violates the Principles of Practical Reason (The Thomistic ethic that defines the First Principle of Practical Reason as “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.”), his mind becomes darkened and he cannot discern truth.
As a result he becomes closed off to Logos, he spins deeper into deception with his eternal soul in peril.
Similarly, Father Seraphim Rose wrote concerning his interactions with young people that were growing in the culture without direction and how troubled he was at its effects.
Inspired by the work of an Athonite Abbot and an Orthodox Priest and in an essay called entitled “Forming the Soul,” he described the Orthodox philosophy behind his understanding of this phenomenon.
Keep in mind this was in the 70s:
“The education of youth today, especially in America, is notoriously deficient in developing responsiveness to the best expressions of human art, literature, and music.
As a result, young people are formed haphazardly under the influence of television, rock music, and other manifestations of today’s culture (or rather, anti-culture); and, both as a cause and as a result of this - but most of all because of the absence on the part of the parents and teachers of any conscious idea of what Christian life is and how a young person should be brought up in it - the soul of a person who has survived the years of youth is often an emotional wasteland, and at best reveals deficiencies in the basic attitudes towards life that were once considered normal and indispensable.”
When someone spends the first part of their life adrift in the toxic cultural American cesspool and comes to the end of themselves, where is there to turn?
Few options really and I don’t think that’s by accident.
When I came out of a 25 year relationship with the world realizing all of it was a lie, I was able to get help through AA and the recovery community and while I was grateful for the help that I found there, I quickly realized that the idea of God had become so diluted and open to personal interpretation in that community (perhaps we can thank the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation for that), that I realized that it’s a good place to start, but if it’s The Truth you’re looking for, you need to get sober and move on.
Being an obtuse Boomer, it took me another 20 years wandering in the spiritual desert to find the Truth of Orthodoxy so I ended up attending mostly nondenominational churches and had all but given up on Church.
One day when listening to a podcaster that I discovered who had some interesting views on culture and geopolitics started talking about Christianity, I took notice.
He described Protestantism in unflattering terms and I remember him calling himself a Christian, so assumed he must be Catholic (perhaps another example dialectical indoctrination, IE: Coke/Pepsi, Liberal/Conservative, Republican/Democrat, Catholic/Protestant).
But then it became clear he wasn’t Catholic either and I’m saying to myself, “well we’re running out choices pretty quick here...”, but then talked about how he considered Orthodoxy as the true New Testament Church and it was one of those moments that I’ll remember for the rest of my life where I had a moment of clarity and later feeling pretty stupid since Orthodoxy wasn’t even on my radar and being from Pittsburgh, the Orthodox Church is very prominent.
The following Saturday in 2018, I went to my first Vespers service, and became a Catachumen and was eventually Chrismated in the Orthodox Church the following Pascha.
I was among seven Catechumens at my Church (me being the oldest by decades), and we eventually discovered that we all held similar understanding on how the world really operates, not how we’re told it operates. We came to the Orthodox Church because we were and still are searching for the Truth. I don’t think it was a coincidence we found each other here.
What gives me hope is the young people and families that I see coming into the Orthodox Church in search of the same.
These individuals don’t believe the lies the world tells them and they are rejecting the toxic culture.
The things of the world don’t seem to deceive them.
Perhaps this is part of the Remnant that is spoken of in Romans:
But what does the divine response say to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace.
- Romans 11:4-5
Thank God.