There is something in Man that wants others silent.
Or - shut the fuck up, as they say in the provinces.
Not as an opinion they hold. And not as a political position. But as a fundamental urge. Something older than ideology.
It happens often when a thought becomes too precise, an observation too uncomfortable, or a word too exact. Then there rises - in some of us - a desire to have it brought to an end.
Not contradicted.
Brought to an end.
You see it in the individual, in an outburst of rage at the dinner table. You see it in groups, in the quiet sanctions against whoever says the inappropriate thing. And you see it in civilisations, where it is no longer a reaction but an entire architecture.
The most revealing trait of totalitarian systems is not their violence. It is their silence. They are always built around a place where the word must not flow freely.
Communism built it as ideology. What the party said was true because the party said it. Contradiction was not disagreement, but disease. Hence the institutions. Hence the gulags. Hence the starving. They demanded unwavering Agreement. Unity. That is where the party's name comes from - you can think about that. If you are the kind who thinks...
Islam builds it as law. The Quran is God's direct word, sharia is derived from it, and law, religion, and politics are one package. There is no neutral space between individual and state. No place where conscience can stand alone. Freedom of speech is not only lost, it is structurally impossible.
China builds it as infrastructure. Social credit, facial recognition, the word not only surveilled but measured, weighted, rewarded, punished, second by second. Not one system that says no, but ten thousand small signals that make it inconvenient - if not impossible - to say the right thing.
These are three different architectures.
But the same impulse.
That leads me to what I want to say. Because it is not actually the three systems themselves - however unpleasant they may be - that I worry about. It is what is being built here.
The digital euro, which is to be programmable - which can be opened and closed based on who you are, what you buy, what you consume, where you travel, and what you think.
Digital identity, linked to everything.
Surveillance, problematisation, and criminalisation of cash.
Endless questions far into private life from banks - who constantly pretend it is done for your own safety's sake. "You do want to invest your free funds green and in businesses with transsexual owners of other ethnic minorities, right? So you can become advantage plus-plus-green-dynamo customer? Show you are on the right team?"
Disinformation directives that determine what may be said in the public space, not by judgment, but by gatekeeping.
AI systems that filter before we ourselves know what was filtered out.
Hate speech legislation that moves the boundary for completely ordinary organically adopted norms week by week - without anyone voting on it.
None of it is communism.
None of it is sharia.
It is something third.
A technocratic net, laid over a population that still believes it lives in the Europe it was born into.
And that is what is particular about our time. You no longer fall silent by punishment. You fall silent by friction. It is just suddenly a bit harder to get an account. A bit harder to get reach. A bit harder to be heard, if you say the wrong thing. Control has learned to wear silk gloves. And smile.
But the architecture is the same. There is a growing number of places where the word must not fall. And that place is growing.
The question is not whether we can stop it technically. The question is why we built it in the first place.
And here I will say something uncomfortable, which will quite certainly make me (even more) unpopular in many places.
We built it because we had stopped believing in what made us free to begin with. Freedom, as we know it in the West, is not a technological invention. Not a legal construction. Not a result of the Enlightenment alone. It rests on a quite specific assumption about man, which neither Rome, Athens, nor tribal culture could formulate -
That man is made in God's image. That in every human being there is a spark which no state, no party, no algorithm owns.
That is why we could have freedom of speech here in The Western World Order. And nowhere else. Not because we were not provoked. But because we knew that the Word belonged to the individual, not to power. Because conscience stood above law. Because something in Man was sacred in a way that made it inviolable.
We removed that. Quietly. Without struggle. And without understanding what we removed.
What we are left with is a civilisation that sees man as a resource, and climate as what we worship. Man becomes a production unit, a data carrier, a CO2 footprint, a market segment, something that must fit into a system. Managed like a neat little robot that does as it is told, in the approximately 80 meaningless years the state commits to caring for its fragile existence. And nature becomes the sacred, that which must never be contradicted, that which demands sacrifice and penance.
It is a religion.
It just will not be called that. And precisely there it always begins. In the law-religions, in the technocracies, in all systems that have tried to bring the Word under control, the first step has been the same -
To call it something other than what it is.
That is why so many words no longer mean what they used to mean. And we have wandered a good distance out. It is not just values that have been inverted. Even man and woman have been turned around.
We are still born into freedom. Still. But it is not an inheritance one keeps passively. It is kept alive by the view of man that brought it forth - or not.
And the question for us is not whether we have enough opinions. Anyone who uses the internet or - God forbid - watches that hypnotically mass-inducing TV, knows that.
We have an abundance of opinions.
The question is whether we have that place in us from which one can say something that is true, even when it costs.
Because that is the place all control systems at all times have wanted to reach into. And break.
And it is the only place a free civilisation has to stand on.
Should we not return.
To Reality.
And then remember, by the way.
The Word is yours.
Use it.
That is why you were given it.
To search Reality and seek Truth.
So let no one take it from you.
Ever.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Friday, friends.
Thank you for being here.
