In one of history's best known stories, an unsung hero and a formidable villain take centre stage. Goliath was a Philistine warrior standing over nine feet tall. He wore armor weighing over 125 lbs and carried a 15 pound spear. Biblical scholars believe that descended from the Anakim, who were ancestors of a race of giants. Our hero, David, was Israel's second and most important king. His family was from Bethlehem. He was the youngest son of Jesse and part of the tribe of Judah. Along with being a warrior and a king, he was a shepherd and an accomplished musician and poet. David was an ancestor of Jesus Christ, who was often called the 'Son of David.'
The Philistine army had gathered for war against Israel. The two armies faced each other, camped for battle on opposite sides of a steep valley. Goliath emerged each morning for forty days, mocking and challenging the Israelites to fight. Saul, king of Israel, and his entire army were terrified of Goliath. No one would face him.
One day, David was sent by his father to bring back news of his brothers at the battlefront. David was just a young teenager at the time. While there, David heard Goliath shouting his daily defiance, and saw the great fear stirred within the brethren of Israel-including his own brothers. Then, David did something most unexpected: instead of being scared like everyone else, he got mad. Really mad, exclaiming:
"Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of God?"
So, to everyone's great horror and astonishment, David volunteered to fight Goliath. After a lot of ridicule and even more persuasion, King Saul finally agreed to permit David to oppose the giant. Dressed in his simple tunic, spurning any protective armor, carrying his shepherd's staff, sling, and a pouch of five carefully selected smooth stones-David faced Goliath.
The giant cursed at him, hurling threats and insults. David retorted:
"You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel whom you have defied...today I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds of the air...and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel...it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give all of you into our hands." (Samuel 17:45-47)
David was deeply offended by the giant's haughty, mocking challenges. He was zealous to defend the Lord's name. Armed with the inferior weapons of a shepherd boy, David slew the mighty Goliath. He reached into his bag for one of his stones and slung one at the giant's forehead. It found a hole in the armor and the giant fell face down to the ground. David then took Goliath's huge sword and beheaded him. With their hero slain, the stunned Philistine army fled. The emboldened Israelites pursued, killing them and plundering their camp.
Just like David, I have had it with our own modern tyrants and their Woke army. My past sense of frustration with the damaging policies of leftist bullies has moved to outrage and anger as I witness their big picture unfold. The movement from mere disagreement on key policies to the left's raw, full-throated imposition of their ideas using administrative actions rather than legislation has placed our society in danger of collapse and the real possibility of a major world war.
A combination of evil psychopaths and craven, effete professors misled and miseducated the bulk of our citizenry, creating cadres of Lenin's 'useful idiots', who can be spun into mobs at any moment. This, combined with the bumbling ineptitude and ignorance in our administrative state, all add to my outrage.
Let us look at a list of some examples of conduct that is truly infuriating:
(1) The Trudeau government continues to pile debt upon debt, with no consequences because it is not their money. They cannot be held accountable, so they just keep on spending;
(2) I am outraged that Ottawa absconded with the power vested in the federated structure of our Constitution,-which intends for equal power to be issued from Provinces-and then assigns that power to the administrative state, where bureaucratic regulations are enforced like laws;
(3) I am outraged that the Marxism we allowed into our higher education system at universities has now created hateful, anti-Israeli, pro-terrorism, leftist students who blindly believe that Israel must be eliminated;
(4) I have seething anger about the takeover of K-12 education by leftist teachers unions and school boards that indoctrinate children during their formative years in racism, victimhood, and LGBTQ matters, denounce mainstream culture and religion, and tear down the family structure, all while blocking parents from knowing about any of this;
(5) I have moved from frustration to outrage about the so-called "Trans" movement overtaking society-despite the fact that fewer than 3 in a thousand meet the psychiatric definition of gender dysphoria. The rainbow banner now requires us to pretend along with the lie under penalty of social ostracism and even criminal prosecution;
(6) I am outraged at forcing women to open their private spaces to men and the unequal physical competition in women's sports that occurs, all while everyone is expected to act as if it is normal. This is kangaroo court territory, where we are forced to repeat, under penalty of punishment, an obvious lie that gender is non-binary, and that men can have babies;
(7) I am seething that our nation is being flooded by millions of foreigners, including untracked terrorists who hate our nation, its values, its customs, its founding religion, and us;
(8) I am outraged that we continue to send so-called humanitarian aid funding to Iran and terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank, all of whom use it against us and our allies. This, combined with the appeasement of Iran, means that Iran will soon have a functional nuclear weapon;
(9) I am enraged that our once clean city streets are filled with trash, needles, open drug use, human feces, and people living in massive tent cities-which the left has purposely created as a way to collapse civil society. Those streets are then invaded by protesters waving pro-Palestinian flags who clamor for violent takeover of our nation;
(10) I am enraged that the soft on crime movement, which includes releasing dangerous prisoners back onto the streets, is a designer policy to spike societal unrest and make life hazardous for peaceful citizens.
However, two issues are my biggest triggers. First, it enrages me that just by the usurpation of administrative decrees, the lie of Climate Change is now ruling our economy. The left's one-sided imposition of 'cures' for this false problem only has one purpose-to stop production of oil and gas while failing to consider replacements for the energy that keeps us alive.
Despite the fervent objections of most every Province in Canada, the Trudeau government has doubled down and said that UN 2030 emissions targets must be met, regardless of the impossibility of generating capacity to meet the need for replacement energy. The real goal is to force us onto public transportation or to restrict our movements entirely, placing individual mobility under state control.
Finally, this last one scares me. It is outrageous that our warmongering left, along with some very sick people on the right, got us into supporting the Ukraine war because they hate Putin and want to force Russian regime change. Suddenly, the scant remnants of our once proud military are being used to feed massive orders for war materiel, and we needed an excuse to ship billions of dollars to Ukraine-further running us into debt while lining the pockets of corrupt people all along the line. Indeed, the Trudeau government just introduced a bill that would create a free trade agreement with Ukraine, an undemocratic, socialist nation that has nothing to trade with us and is all but conquered.
Which leads me to my most seething anger of all: 156 years after we became a sovereign nation state under God and the Rule of Law, the Frankfurt School's long march through our institutions and its concomitant Marxism is complete. Socialism has won. The Canada we once knew is over. Christians and Christianity are under full blown and relentless atheist attack.
The infuriating irony is that all of the stupid, brainwashed, woke, useful idiots will have delivered full powers to psychopaths behind the curtain. We will all discover that the promised "worker's paradise" is a lie-one they believed because leftists successfully erased the devastation their policies always yield. And when the useful idiots wake up and start complaining, they will be shocked to see that, rather than being among ruling elites, they will face the firing squads along with the rest of us Christian conservative dissidents.
All of the closet socialists may finally figure out that they should have got out their slingshots and fought the tyrants. But it will be too late. Sadly, everything leftists have done will also take me and others who do not understand history down along with it. And that angers me the most, since the leftist class never had the right. So I will fight, just like David did, lest we enter a new dark age.
Not quite the same as the old Dark Age. The old Dark Age happened when the corporate governmental structure of Rome collapsed, allowing hordes of tribal heathens to overrun what had been the empire's domain. Today's Dark Age is instead happening because modern governments continue to become ever more powerfully intrusive into what were once private affairs, using their assumed authority to enforce some sort of contrived orthodoxy politicizing just about everything.
This is particularly obvious in the various fields of science. Once the means by which civilization crawled out from the old Dark Age, science today is plagued by corruption. Back when it was tasked with the objective process of unraveling the mysteries of God's natural world, science flourished. Today, science is largely in the business of acquiring politically controlled government grants. Exploiting various sexy fields of study to provide politically useful data and conclusions-even if their accuracy is suspect-is the key to professional success. Weather and climate are obviously at the top of the list for this kind of wet work. In spite of all this, there still are some non-governmental interests that manage to privately fund research, mostly to develop profitable and patentable innovations...much as in the past.
The mystical nature of climate hysteria harkens back to the old Dark Age. No detailed explanations are ever presented to support the alarm-such as how does CO2 actually trap heat on the Earth's surface, especially when it comprises less than .05% of the air? Faith in the concept is supposed to be sufficient, and skeptics are pilloried for any deviation from orthodoxy of climate superstition.
Sound familiar?
All plant and animal life on Earth, including buried fossil fuels, is made up mostly of carbon and its various chemical compounds. All such carbon was once extracted from the atmosphere. The fatuous mysticism underpinning weather hysteria is classic dark age stuff. Science, however, does not work this way. Peer review, the exposure of one's findings and conclusions to possible criticism by others working in the same field-in order to more thoroughly validate such findings-is the foundation of scientific progress. Paying and bullying researchers to follow dictated guidelines in order to get politically expedient results has nothing at all to do with scientific progress.
Another sign of this drift into superstition involves the cost of modern health care. Expanding governments are using our desire for personal health to further control us. The solution we always hear is contained in one poison pill: abolition of private medical practice, thus securing a complete monopoly for government. Coupled with the magical New Age twaddle from the 1960's & '70s and the rebirth of astrology as a serious worldview, nutritional mythology achieved new prominence. "Organic" became a mark of special quality. No actual scientific evidence has ever existed to attest to its value. It does, however, cost more, and so must be better. Today, fear of Roundup weed control concentrate dominates New Age consciousness. We are thus constantly told that our offspring will not live as long as us oldsters because of Roundup.
Taxation remains a focal point. Regular folks would be much more prosperous and thus live better if the metastasizing Dark Age Trudeau government was not abusing its power to confiscate so much of our money. The City of Calgary just increased property taxes, charged to owners of land purchased with after tax dollars. Meanwhile, Canada remains the only North American nation to impose property tax on its citizens, including on heat in one of the world's coldest climates.
The most conspicuous manifestation of this drift into a new Dark Age is the litter of idle vagrants despoiling our cities and towns. All kinds of statistics show a steady increase in their numbers. Why? After all, economic progress has more or less continued over the past several years-and yet, we still have increasing squalor and resulting devaluation of once desirable locations. The answer is simple and completely consistent with civilizational decline. Our legal and political rulers are being undeservedly nice to these people. They mistakenly believe that coddling street bums is what society wants and that doing so will enhance their popularity. They even go to great taxpayer expense to provide vagrants with basic amenities while also compelling retailers to look the other way when their merchandise is plundered. This does nothing to discourage such obvious pathology. What is needed instead is neglect, to let them suffer in their own "state of nature". Perhaps then they will begin to clean themselves up and rejoin civil society.
The 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes memorably, and quite dramatically broke from the political-moral tradition of his ancient Greco-Roman and medieval Christian predecessors by insisting that there was no ultimate good, such as the happiness or flourishing of citizens; that the political institutions of societies exist instead to serve. Rather, there is a greatest evil: a violent death. Politics are therefore meant to mitigate the fear and likelihood of a life that is nasty, brutish, and short.
Anyone can kill anyone, Hobbes insisted, for the physical and mental differences between human beings cannot fully immunize the strongest and smartest against the predatory designs of the weakest and most insipid.
Regarding physical prowess, "the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself." As for mental powers, there is even greater parity among people, "for prudence, is but experience; which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto."
One need not be a full-throated Hobbesian to appreciate the profundity of his insight here.
The Warrior-Scholar Ideal Revisited: New Essays on an Old Vision is a recently published book of essays intended to supply readers with an ethical vision to promote self-empowerment through self-transformation. For this reason, it deliberately avoids expressing partisan positions on topical political issues. It is not a political book at all. It does however contend that despite conventional fare of moralistic rhetoric to which we have grown all too accustomed, fear is a dominant force driving our lives and politics.
It is not just that the fortunes of politicians and their counterparts in corporate media are predicated upon tireless fear-mongering. From "mostly peaceful protests" of one sort or another to promises of riots and cancel culture, the threat of violence-whether overt or covert-is constant.
In order to change our politics, we must change ourselves. In order to do that, we must manage and face our fears, particularly our fear of violence; and in order to do that, we must muster the courage to be like young David-to fashion ourselves after warrior-scholars.
Thucydides was perhaps the Western world's first historian. His History of the Peloponnesian War is remarkable for reading like a modern work. Equally impressive is that its author was a general who fought in that very war. Thucydides is credited with having said that
"A society that separates its scholars from its warriors is one that will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."
Miyamoto Musashi, a 17th century undefeated Japanese Samurai swordsman, expressed essentially the same idea:
"It is said that the warrior is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways...Even if a man has no natural ability, he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the Way."
Human beings are not souls inhabiting bodies. We are spiritual unities, psychosomatic synergies, bodies and minds. Our physicality, psychology, and emotionality are mutually reinforcing. How we move our bodies impacts how we think and feel, and how we think feel in turn affects how we move our bodies.
Put simply, all that we do must be done in and with our bodies. We are corporeal beings.
This being the case, the Warrior-Scholar ideal beckons us to train so as to maximize the efficiency, the ease and comfort, with which we move ourselves. To do this, we must have a specific goal in mind toward which to train. Movement for its own sake is abstract and aimless. The goal posited by the ideal for whose restoration we contend is that of nothing less than victory in moral and spiritual combat.
In other words, in training to successfully defend ourselves and our loved ones against those who imminently threaten our well-being, we train to move our bodies subtly, as fluidly as possible. Subtle movement is refined; it reveals mastery, and is difficult for our enemies to track.
Yet mastery of body movement is also, and can only be, mastery of the mind. Martial means "of or pertaining to war." Historically, it was understood that the marital arts are warrior arts; arts of war. Training in a warrior art demands a focus of the will. As the body becomes harder and sharpened, so too the mind-as goes the mind, so goes the body. A refined mind is an educated one; it is a mind discriminate and discerning, appreciative of nuances and skeptical toward sweeping ideological dogmas that become conventional wisdom.
Plato remarked that philosophy springs from wonder. Doubtless, there is something to be said for this view. Yet if it is to avoid collapsing into proverbial navel-gazing, philosophy and critical thinking must stem from where we are-in the joys and tribulations of our embodied existence.
Training in an art of war, entailing as it does the subjection of one's body to a measure of trauma designed to stimulate the trials expected in actual life-or-death situations, forces us to come to grips with reality. It grounds us. As Mike Tyson famously put it:
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
Training to prevail in potentially mortal combat combat against homicidal aggressors is another matter, however. It is training to win the battle of and for your life-one that we hopefully will never have to wage. But because one trains to master the use of violence against the violent, one is that much more disposed to avoid trouble, and to avoid it by seeing nonsense for what it is. Additionally, training in an art of war helps us to acknowledge our fears for what they are, and to differentiate those that are rational from mere paranoia.
Politics will change when we begin to see ourselves and our world through a new vision, that of the Warrior-Scholar.
David was such a Warrior-Scholar. His faith in God caused him to look at the fearsome giant from a different perspective. Goliath was merely a mortal man defying an all-powerful God. David looked at the battle from God's point of view. If we look at gigantic problems and seemingly impossible situations from God's perspective, we come to realize that God will fight for and alongside us. Once we put things into proper perspective, we see more clearly, and we can fight more effectively.
David chose not to wear the king's armor because it felt cumbersome and strange. David was confident with his simple sling, a weapon he was skilled at using. It was his martial art. God will use the unique skills he has already placed in our hands, so that we need not worry about wearing the king's armor. It is enough to be ourselves, to use the familiar gifts and talents with which God has equipped us. He will work miracles through us, so long as we have the courage that David showed to be a warrior.
When the titan Goliath criticized, insulted and threatened David, he did not stop or even waver. Everyone else cowered in fear. The Israelites waited 40 days to begin the battle because they were all so afraid of Goliath. Not even King Saul, the tallest man in Israel, stepped forward to fight Goliath.
David ran to the battle. He knew that swift action must be taken. He did the right thing despite the discouraging insults and mortal threats of a nine foot giant. Only God's opinion mattered to David.
We in Canada are now all facing what presents as a giant problem or impossible situation. Let us stop for a moment and reconsider. Only then can we see the case clearly from God's vantage point.
We all need to take courageous action in the face of the globalist insults, threats, and fearful circumstances prevailing in Canada today. We need to be Warrior-Scholars like David.
We can only face the fearful giant out to destroy us if we trust that God will fight for us and with us. In the end, it is only His opinion of us that matters. We must gird ourselves up to face our fears and fight for what is right-lest we suffer His ultimate judgment.
