In our lectures, we have talked a lot about what are real traditional values, and what are fake traditional values. We again want to emphasize that the intellectual, political and religious world of modern America is not a reflection of long-term traditional values in history. No, it is not. It is a product of the last 200 years. Capitalism was developed by Adam Smith in the 18th century. Evangelical Christianity was developed by Wesley in the 18th century and other trends that are dominant today, not all, are a product, really, of the last 200 years. Now, we don't have time in this lecture to discuss the whole nature of the subject because it's a very large subject, but we'll deal with America and the West starting in the period after World War II.

After World War II, particularly in America, there was a sense - so to speak - of triumphalism ... that the American way was the best way, and that America had created a kind of wonderland, "the American dream." Unfortunately, in the real world, this was based on the largest campaign for the wholesale destruction of the environment ever seen -- and this was also in communist Russia, too, that this was based on.

 

THE MYTH OF "CHRISTIAN AMERICA"

Now America, starting in the late 1940s, had a tremendous religious so-called revival...  The 1950s were the biggest church building boom in America. Now, there are a lot of myths about  America, that of, my gosh, that  in colonial times, everybody was going to church, and the American Revolution was produced by Bible study, and so on. This is absolute rubbish. Church membership in modern America, the 1950s through even today, is at a far higher level than it was during colonial times. The consumption of drugs and alcohol today is actually far lower than it was in colonial times. So it is important that this is a false morality, a pseudo-morality, that this country was founded on the Bible, praying, religious revival. The religious revival that's often talked about before the American Revolution sort of disintegrated into a complete mess, and as we've discussed in previous lectures, the great model of Puritanism was kind of totalitarian nightmare, but also ended up failing and falling apart at the seams.

There are no Puritans in today's America, why, because the Puritan movement collapsed in the 19th century. So in the 1950s, you had a kind of fairytale view of life. There was mom and dad, going to church, having this marvelous time, having this solid family living. Blacks and women were kept in their place. Women could wait around and find Mr. Prince charming, and so on and so forth, and via the religious structure, they'd enjoy this marvelous wholesome family living , and drive around in their station wagons and then go to heaven, where - according to some evangelist who claimed they had been to heaven and come back - they claimed that people were eating hamburgers and driving station wagons in heaven. One person claimed he met Moses, and Moses was driving a station wagon and wearing T-shirt and jeans, so I mean this America was obviously a portent of heaven.

In the 1960s, all this fell apart. It was basically because it was doomed to fall apart. It was a complete house of cards, for a lot of the reasons that we discussed in the other lectures.

 

AMERICA'S COUNTER CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN THE 1960's

The 60s are a bit of a mystery as to what happened. Part of the problem was that the great liberal establishment in America decided that the really necessary thing to do was to put 500,000 American troops in a geopolitical backwater known as Vietnam. We don't have time to discuss the whole history of the war, but the insanity and absurdity of this, and the immorality of this could be summed up by the fact that Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese independence movement, had probably been America's most loyal ally in World War II, and probably the most enthusiastic 3rd world leader, in terms of admiring America in the Third World. He even had a copy of the Declaration of Independence on his bedroom wall. We, America, paid him back, by stabbing the Vietnamese independence movement in the back, and supporting the return of French imperialism in what had previously been French Indochina. Now, this was to have very grim results and set in motion a war that would devastate America and would far more devastate Vietnam. Five million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War. So, this was not a really good situation.

But getting back to America, this helped bring down the American establishment and showedthe bankruptcy of many aspects of the American establishment. Now in the 60s was the so-called "countercultural revolution", and in this countercultural revolution, the whole artificial sexual moral structure of America basically disintegrated, and people began to explore different sexual relationships outside the bigoted and unreal confines of the pseudo-morality of the 1950s. At the same time, there was widespread use of drugs and people began to explore ancient religions, alternative religions to the traditional Christian point of view.

Now as in most revolutionary periods, there were a lot of excesses. There were a lot of excesses, and a lot of crazy things happened that were silly and stupid. One of the problems with the 60s is that this was connected to an ideology of pacifism, and an ideology of extreme left-wing socialism. However, in the 60s, the awareness, the cultural revolution of the 60s led to an awareness of the criminal destruction of the environment, the insanity of that, and it led to the rise of the environmental movement, which by the early 1970s had passed some truly revolutionary legislation that made things a lot better. Nixon ended the draft, and even though Nixon ended up being politically destroyed by his enemies, the reaction in America set in. And also the cultural revolution of the 60s had its weak points and prevented it from being a long-term success. Extreme left-wing socialism was not a very good economic policy, pacifism was a study in stupidity. So a good part of this kind of self-destructed on its own. Also, the excessive consumption of drugs, obviously not a good idea, excessive consumption of alcohol, obviously not a good idea, and so on- - so a lot of this fell apart.

However, we must understand that this laid the groundwork for the environmental movement, the liberation, the political liberation, not really the economic liberation, but the political liberation of the blacks, and the rise of the women's movement, which brought women into a state of of equality, and destroyed a good part of the misogynist structure of American life. Now, a good part of this was the people exploring a more natural view of sexuality, particularly, women exploring a more natural view of sexuality, and demanding more from men. And this created a lot of turmoil in American life.

 

THE FURTHER COLLAPSE OF THE FLAWED AMERICAN SYSTEM

Anyway, in the 70s, the recession helped do in a good part of the countercultural movement, and this was another example of the whole fairytale world of the American economy collapsing based on cheap oil, so on and so forth. And also, a lot of the postwar American boom was based on the fact that America had firebombed the cities of Germany and Japan, basically knocking out the economic competition and when those factories came back on stream in the late 60s and 70s, America was in a deep state of trouble. So the whole world of postwar America began to fall apart.

Now, in the late 70s, religious reaction began to kick for some very ugly reasons. The religious right was based on a campaign of racism in terms of opposing Carter's restrictions on white academy schools and also the Anita Bryant movement - which was based on hatred of gays  - and you have to understand particularly the hatred of gays aspect of this is the effort to raise money by religious fear-mongering.

A tragedy of American life is that while America likes to brag about how it's so open-minded, the American cultural world is actually very narrow minded, and a tragedy of the 1970s was that many people saw the only alternative to some of the unhappy excesses of the 1960s and 70s to be a quote "return to the values" not real traditional values, but the pseudo-values of the 1950s, and this was very effectively marketed via a multimillion dollar religious marketing campaigns, such as the Billy Graham Association, and so on and so forth. So a lot of people, particularly baby boomers after having had some not so good experiences with alcohol and drugs and relationships that didn't work very well, sort of returned to a policy of sexual repression in the 1980s, and this began to gain a lot of momentum. Bush the - later George Bush, the president who got us into the Iraq war, is a recovering alcoholic. He is sort of a classic example of these people that, after hitting bottom of the bottle, he adopted religious lunacy as an alternative. So this is not a very happy situation.

So in the 80s, the forces of reaction began to gain traction and this process has continued. Unfortunately, the world of the people like Reagan have built is a world that has no future. It has no environmental future, and under the second George Bush, you've had really a policy blessed by all these great pseudo-religious leaders, which can only be described as sowing the wind, it's sowing the wind for a giant global whirlwind. Huge levels of debt. Reagan started this runaway debt spending, and Bush carried it into at astronomical dimensions, unleashing the crooks on Wall Street, and not regulating them, starting a totally insane war, that was ultimately cost the United States $3 trillion in Iraq.

We could go on, but the religious world and the religious figures were false religious figures and they set in motion a tremendous disaster which blew up in 2008.

 

A NEED FOR REAL ENVIRONMENTAL SOLUTIONS

Now since 2008, you've had the return of the liberal establishment to a certain extent with Obama, but it's pretty weak leadership, and this is been running up huge debts rather than confronting problems. So, this really hasn't resolved things. Around the world, people are realizing that things are fundamentally wrong and below the surface, no, not in the official corporate media, people are beginning to look at other points of view. You see this particularly in a country that is supposedly very unimportant, Bolivia, with the emergence of Evo Morales. Now, Morales is a flawed person and is very controversial among a lot of Bolivians, but Morales has had a tremendous impact at the UN, that's just mind-boggling, in raising moral and ethical issues, such as the issue of the climate court, whether the rich should pay for destroying the world's climate. This is an idea that the United States has repeatedly fought against, even though it claims to care about the poor, it doesn't want to pay for any of the damage it has done to the poor. So this, in the terms of American hypocrisy, this could be a 700 hour lecture, but we don't have time for that.

But the point I'm trying to make is that Morales has talked about a return to ancient religious values, he began his presidency in Bolivia with an Incan ceremony. Now, there is a limit to how serious you can take all this stuff and so on and so forth, but obviously, something is going on. And below the surface is a reawakening all awareness of ancient religions, and an awareness,  a search for real traditional values. Now we have to say a search, because as we discussed when Christianity came to power in 395 and throughout its history it had a very consistent policy of ruining destroying the old competing religions under its political control and destroying their sacred books, and and so on and so forth. So there is a tremendous level of ambiguity here about what is real paganism, and that's all unresolved all there is also a level of ambiguity as to where does the so-called "occult" begin, and where does real indigenous paganism begin. This is also unclear. Where does a disciplined use of drugs such as the religious Iowasca ceremonies in Latin America, and the kind of mindless drug taking of all the 1960s among certain elements, where does that go?

There's there's all a lot of unclear affairs here. However, something important is going on, because you can't live a lie indefinitely, you can't. You can't live a lie indefinitely, and the world that we see today, the world that we look at, it's a deception, it's a giant debt bubble - the biggest debt bubble is the environment, but particularly under Bush, you had a huge runaway debt bubble financially. So something is going to happen. Something big is going to happen, and those of us who are concerned about the survival of the planet have an obligation to offer solutions that are going to be drastic enough to solve the problems. It seems very unlikely that the official politicians are going to do that, as a result, you're likely to have revolutionary leaders come to power in various countries around the world. These people are going to be the coming lords of the Earth, and they are going to be a brutal group of people, because they're going to have to be. The current structure of the environmental, the current environmental structure of the world is almost certainly going to kill 2 billion people, at least. Probably a lot more. So, this kind of violence, this kind of chaos is going to produce brutal leaders who are going to have to sort things out and clean up the mess. These leaders are likely to reflect a kind of collective unconscious in terms of a return to pagan values.

What we see in Bolivia - and again it's a flawed situation - Morales is a politician, he is not an angel, so the peoples out there who don't like Morales, I mean yeah, there are flaws, but not to miss the purpose of a larger purpose of what's going on. So what we need to do is to help awaken people's consciousness on a whole lot of different levels, in terms of making people have greater contact with nature, exploring ancient religions, and the issue of sex does come up in terms of all openly confronting the pseudo-morality of Christianity, which is basically a toxic morality, it's a poisonous morality, it's a sick view of sex and as people look at more natural views of sexuality, as people put an end to the ridiculous views about women, the ridiculous views about gays and stuff like that, there will be a sexual revolution below the surface that will further undermine the false religion that is leading us to disaster. Today's evangelicals cheered on the war in Iraq. Not all of them in fairness, but the leadership did, and that's very significant. And the leadership have opposed after efforts in environmental reform, so there's obviously something very sick about these people.

 

RETURNING TO NATURAL VIEWS OF HUMAN LIFE AND SOCIETY

There needs to be a reawakening of some of the cultural trends of the 1960s, without the stupidities of the 60s. What's coming is a much more brutal world, and the idiocy like pacifism is going to be junked, and the leaders - shall we say neopagan leaders that are to come to power are going to be a much tougher bunch - to make the decisions that stop the distraction of the planet. We are very pessimistic that this can be solved peacefully, we are because they're too many screwed up people, particularly religiously screwed up people, so there's going to be a lot of brutality, a lot of violence. That's just what's going to happen. And what we need to do is to put forth messages to raise people's consciousness in the coming turmoil, so that the revolutionary movements will be hopefully going in a constructive direction. And as I said before, this means reawakening people about ancient religions using art and music, using film, to reawaken a natural view of the world, natural views about sex, and by doing so, that by itself will tremendously undermine the pseudo-morality, the pernicious, evil pseudo-morality that's in power, that's poisoning the planet.

Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military analyst, pointed out that it's the mind that is the issue, and what we have is spiritual toxic ideas - such as evangelical Christianity - spiritual toxic ideas, such as their sick views about sex. And getting back to the issue if their ideas were so good, how come America is such a complete basket case when it comes to family living compared to the rest of the developed world? America has the most broken families, highest levels of rape, we could go on -  it hasn't produce successful family living - highest levels of teenage pregnancy, this has not produced successful family living. And we have to go back to the founder of American Christian evangelism, John Wesley, whose own family life was a complete disaster. His wife used to beat him up with a rolling pin. One wonders maybe perhaps he was a lame performer sexually. Who knows? But this obviously, didn't work. So these are illnesses, these are sicknesses, and by promoting these cultural trends, we can undermine this religious power structure as more people explore their sexuality, as more people are not constrained by who's gay and who's straight and stuff like that, they just explore what they feel, this can undermine the entire structure of the religious power structure that's leading us into a disaster.

 

THE BRUTAL WORLD AHEAD

There is a pagan revolution coming, and it's not in the all pretty. It's going to be bloody. It's going to be violent.

And we need to get ready for that, and see how to direct the revolutionary leaders that are going to come, who are going to have the very brutal job of leading the world back to a world - a concept of eternal values - where things are in harmony with nature. This is the brutal future that's coming. Some people say, "oh that's terrible...  boo hoo." Hey, life is a challenge. Life was a challenge when people before the age of technology, when people were facing nature. Every day in nature was a challenge. Nature is not the sugarcoated view of these lame, bourgeois environmentalists driving their BMWs, and babbling away about what they think Gaia is. Nature is a ferocious system. It's a wolf ripping open the throat of its prey, and it's a system that sorts out the fit and the unfit, leaving a long-term picture of health for society.

Some timid people are frightened and horrified by the view of the reality of nature, as opposed to their silly, fairytale view of nature. As we mentioned, one of the main problems with the 1960s was the idiotic fantasy about pacifism, and if your view of the future is flower power, you may be part of the problem. Whatever happens, those people are going to be removed from power. They're going to be driven from power. And the new lords of the earth,  the brutal lords of the earth are going to take charge. As we mentioned, life is a challenge. If some people are frightened of that, then they deserve to lose. And they will lose, and they will be replaced. That's just the way it is. It's the way it's always been.

So we need to be prepared for the violent world that's coming, and for the brutal decisions that are going to have to be made. Nature is a process that cleans out the unfit, the diseased, and leaves a long-term, clean situation that has a long-term future. It's not all nice and pretty. It's not. And there is a very grim aspect to the rules of real nature, as opposed to the fairytale view of nature of so many of the middle class for bourgeois so-called "environmentalists" in the West. Truth is a powerful weapon is the most dangerous weapon in the world, because it is reality. So, truth is going to reassert itself.

The political leaders may have the clocks, but nature controls the time. We are going to be returning to a long-term future. The imaginary world created by the political leaders, the bankers, the evangelists, the religious leaders is just that: an imaginary future that's never going to exist.

We need to get ready for a real future, and that's our mission, is to help prepare people for that future, and educate them. This is the end of this lecture.