Gluttony does not mean overeating.
Gluttony means: the constant pursuit of decadence to the point of decay and beyond.
The unchecked pursuit of comfort, so prevalent in my own homeland, the United States of America, and exported to the world, goes far beyond food, yet is sheer gluttony.
Decadence around food plays into this as a symptom. It can be no surprise that obesity is so prevalent for self-control seems such a quaint notion in this time and place.
Don’t Blame Immediate Gratification
It is not immediate gratification that is problematic. The potential for immediate gratification is merely the natural output of a functioning and established relatively free market economy, a treasure of the human experiment that all who participate in it can be proud of.
It is the unchecked pursuit of that immediate gratification that is so gluttonous.
Face Masks In One Lesson
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Don’t Blame The Many Methods Devised To Make Life More Safe
Safety is not problematic in our world. It is a natural output of our developed and relatively free market economy. Where there is freedom, the ability to choose for oneself varying levels of safety and to manage the benefits, costs, and consequences of that decision fall on the individual.
It is the unchecked pursuit of safety in our era that is so gluttonous.
Don’t Blame The Many Tools Created To Reduce Risk
Risk reduction is no problem. It is a beautiful thing, a natural output of our relatively free market environment. Through insurance policies, commodity contracts, and many other useful tools, risk reduction can be sold by an individual to another party.
It is the unchecked pursuit of risk reduction that is so gluttonous.
Don’t Blame Our Amazing Field Of Medical Technology & Healthcare
Modern healthcare, medical technology, and methods of research, these are not the problem. They are wonderful and natural products of a relatively free market.
It is their unchecked pursuit that is the problem.
We are witness to a pursuit in the name of health, so total, complete, and unchecked that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben could credibly call it “techno-medical despotism,” and any reasonable person in the midst of this self-induced corona communism that humanity has plagued itself with would be hard-pressed to claim otherwise.
Never ending waves of lockdowns?
Perpetually covered faces?
Mothers with loving families dying along?
What has become of us?
What do we stand for to let a mother die alone?
Do we even stand for anything?
Don’t Blame The Joys Of Our Age For The Decay Of Our Age
No, it is not the joys of our age that have done this to us. It is we who have done it to ourselves, with each individual decision unchecked, gluttonous, repeated over a lifetime. None of these useful aspects of life in a relatively free market are the problem. They are wonderful in fact.
It is the existence of our era in the dearth of the life-affirming concepts of philosophy, ethics, and morality that is the problem and the individual willingness to proceed forth enabling every want without question, entertaining every feeling at every moment, subjecting oneself to emotion, in a way unchecked by that which distinguishes us from other life on the planet: the ability to pause, reflect, and choose.
That is gluttonous.
The face mask is pure gluttony. And the face mask is a symptom in our willingly lost culture that has forsaken the wisdom of the ages for the nothingness and ephemera of trends and emotions.
To Cover The Face, Against All Credible Evidence
To cover the face — against all credible evidence, contrary to science, enforced by fiat, threat, and force, and out of fear stoked by the ratings-whores we all too respectfully refer to as “the fourth estate,” “the press,” and “the media,” instead of more appropriate terms. This is the greatest extreme of mass gluttony that this planet has ever known.
An extreme can act as a wake-up call — if we let it. It can also be but an early mile marker on a very long and painful road.
The gluttony must come to an end if we are to hold on to any semblance of the culture we’ve come to know and love.
It won’t be easy. It won’t be easy to take a stand now and to vow to never ever, for any reason, wear the face mask again. What will be much harder is to wait even a day longer and to take a stand in the midst of greater societal decay. It doesn’t get any easier.
100 million deaths over the last century of civilian men, women, and children, at the hands of governments that they thought they could trust to behave with some level of decency has taught us that standing up to tyranny never gets easier. It only gets harder. That is the lesson of the last century. It can be dealt with now with some difficulty, it can be dealt with later with greater difficulty, or it can be dealt with after the point of no return has come, in which case there is zero chance to live a free life as you become a quixotic martyr to the cause of freedom that you refused to stand up for when it mattered.
Setting The Stage For The Next 41 Years
In 1948, communism descended upon Czechoslovakia. In response, decent people had mixed reactions — some fought, some fled, some settled in — as thugs roamed their streets and occupied their government. It is not very different from the playbook used by the same sociopathic lowlifes, cut from the same cloth, who have emerged in 2020. Every culture has them, not every culture humors them, enables them, and then lets them run the show.
Cultures that allow that will have that. It is what sociopaths do when given free rein in a society, and it is what weak people allow.
When it was time to vote that year, the stolen elections implausibly placed the communists in power, a power indestructible for the following 41 years. What would the people of 1948 have done differently if they could speak to the people of 1989 and know what horrors they subjected their children and grandchildren to by sitting idly by? It is not unique to Czechoslovakia and the present-day United States. This is a history repeated in a hundred countries: thugs, stolen elections, and complacency.
The Czechoslovaks were lucky. They only had to endure communism for half as long as the people of the USSR.
Why Aren’t You Doing More?
You wear a face mask that doesn’t work, and you wear this foolish rag, of all places on your precious face. You are a fool if you think it stops here without you saying “No more!” In the absence of that resistance to such nonsense, the people of 2061 will have a message to share with you in which they wonder why you didn’t do more. Why were you so compliant to the thugs, to the stolen elections, to the many face masks of life?
Why did you not pass on the inheritance of liberty that had been handed to you, rather than further enfeeble it?
I’m the traveler from 2061 telling you that you aren’t doing enough.
It is not a mass movement that changes the world. That is a behavior sheeplike. It is one brave, knowing individual, taking the risk of doing the thing he knows to be right and the ripples that sends through the world around him.
That is how he changes his own world and the immediate vicinity occupied by him and those with whom his has been entrusted.
Are you being as knowing and as steel-spined as you can be? Are you leading by example? Are you crafting your life into a model for others at every step of the way?
If you are not, you are not doing enough.
The children of 2061 need you to be better. They need you to pass them a greater inheritance than the one handed to you.
Allan Stevo’s new book “Face Masks in One Lesson” is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other platforms in electronic and print format. It debuts at an introductory price of $10 for the upcoming week before increasing to $21.99. The book presents a field-tested, individualized path for face mask non-compliance, based on the experiences of thousands over the course of 2020. It is the greatest available tool for those who vow to never again be forced into compliantly wearing a mask. Bulk orders over 10 copies are available by writing [email protected].
