The Burden of Living in "Interesting Times"

There is a traditional Chinese curse that goes: May you live in interesting times.

The interesting times are the ones historians study, but they are not the ones that are pleasant to live through.

When I look out at how the world has gone mad, how a time traveler going back even merely ten years would not be believed if he described our world today, I occasionally stop to contemplate what this period will seem like to the citizens of Tomorrow.

No one will be able to explain to them why we put up with the things we are putting up with or tolerate the things we are tolerating.

A hundred, a thousand, recent headlines could have sparked this thought, but the particular one that did was: the President of the United States inviting a priest, famous for his vice and his heretical behavior, to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day.

How did it come to this?

Just imagine future humanity looking back at this time, when the Impuritans rule, urged on by the Degenerati, rewarding vice and punishing virtue.

They won’t be able to comprehend it. It will be a greater mystery than the one that baffles us: Why didn’t any of the good people in Germany stop Hitler and his brownshirts?

When I was a child, I was disappointed that I did not live in such interesting times. I would read about the Terror of the French Revolution or the rise of the Nazis, and I would think: If only I could have lived in such a time so I could have done something brave, daring.

I never could have imagined that, were I to reach such a time as that, I would have no idea what brave or daring thing to do.

Part of the blame falls on the media. In Soviet Russia, at least everyone knew that Pravda was a government-run propaganda outlet. But today, many people are still operating under the illusion that we have a free press, where the desire to scoop the competition will lead to the truth coming out.

Only, it’s not true anymore.

Media scooped each other when they were getting their money from the reader.

Nowadays, they are getting their money from a few massive advertising firms. Control those, and you control the press. They aren’t going to scoop each other. They’re owned by the same people.

Don’t believe it?

Go look up the incident where a CBS reporter revealed that Prince Andrew’s involvement with Epstein had been covered up by ABC.

Instead of running with the story and disgracing their competitor ABC, CBC…fired the reporter who had leaked the story.

Fired her.

That happened in plain sight. And yet, a large portion of Americans still believe that if their favorite news station is lying to them, another station they trust will scoop them.

While at the same time, villainizing every source that does scoop them.

And that’s before the Twitter Files brought us news of the mechanism by which the government was coercing Big Tech and, most likely also, the press.

Because here, in our Interesting Times, the supervillains who are trying to take over our world realized that to keep the peace, they only needed to really control one thing.

In order for people to organize and stand up together, they may need many things, but there is only one without which they cannot do it.

That one thing is: the knowledge that other people agree with them.

If you know you are part of a like-minded crowd, you can mobilize.

If you are all alone—seeing a truth that no one else can see—what can you do?

If you shout and shout and all you hear is the echoes of the high walls of the well into which the opposition has tossed you, what can you do?

Many people lose hope.

All that has to be done to keep people from uniting is to silence the mechanism for expressing public outrage.

Oh, the false media expresses outrage, every day, all the time. Until no one listens, because they're burned out. They’ve heard it all before. And, besides, before you could really mobilize, there’s a new Cause of the Day.

This is why Elon Musk buying Twitter has been so important. It’s one of the few places where the true expressions of outrage can still go on.

Otherwise, we speak up. We take risks. And nothing happens.

Do you know the story of the White Rose? They made a movie about it in 1982. The White Rose was a Nazi-resistant group run led five intrepid students, the most famous of whom was Sophie Scholl. You can read about it here.

They resisted the Nazis. They got caught. They were executed—for running a non-violent student resistance. At the age of twenty-one, sweet, brave, Sophie Scholl was publically beheaded.

The saddest part of Sophie’s story for me is not the failure of her movement; nor is it her capture; nor is it her death.

Brave heroine Sophie Scholl

The saddest part is that Sophie went bravely to her death believing, until her last breath, that the deaths of the White Rose students would be the spark that would wake Germany.

That their sacrifice would be the thing that set the minds of their fellow Germans free.

But it did not happen.

The fact that their death knell did not become their country’s freedom knell is the saddest thing of all.

Their sacrifice was, literally, for nothing.

In my childhood, when I wanted to do “deeds of renown without peer,” I could imagine doing something great and winning. I could imagine doing something brave and failing, but inspiring others.

I never imagined the brave, trying their best, but even their loudest battle cry not even making it out of the well of silence into which the enemy has placed those who resist.

But maybe, just maybe, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and their three brave friends did not die for nothing at all. Yes, they did not set Germany free. But they do continue to inspire the rest of us—those of us who want some conformation that not everyone in pre Nazi Germany was mad: their bravery, their devotion to what was right, their refusal to speak anything but the truth.

That legacy has been passed to us.

Let’s not let their fire sputter and go out. At least, let those citizens of Tomorrow see there were a few more like Sophie and Hans Scholl, a few that did not go gently into the darkness of our day.

Wake up. Speak up. Tell the truth.

Don’t give up!

PS: Kudos to those “happy few” who recognize the quote “deeds of renown without peer.” For you, here is a piece of music inspired by the phrase.