Don't just live the Gospel

 

El Jefe de Colorado Tweets

@jefe_tweets

Ezra Taft Benson: "There are some who apparently feel that the fight for freedom is separate from the Gospel. They express it in several ways, but it generally boils down to this: Just live the gospel; there's no need to get involved in trying to save freedom and the Constitution or stop communism.... Should we counsel the people, 'Just live your religion - there's no need to get involved in the fight for freedom?' No we should not, because our stand for freedom is a most basic part of our religion."

Transmission - knowledge, values

 

Krzysztof Szczawinski

@Kristof_Poland

The Transmission Problem. Every civilization faces the same final question. Not the barbarian at the gate – that can be fought. Not the economic collapse – that can be recovered from. The question that cannot be survived if answered wrongly: did you pass it forward? The torch changes hands or it doesn’t. The light doesn’t go out dramatically. It goes out quietly, generation by generation, when the transmission fails – when what was built is not explained, when what was defended is not named, when what was beautiful is not shown to the child who would have loved it if someone had taken the time. 1. The transmission mechanism is the most important institution in any civilization – and the least visible. Not the army, not the economy, not the government. The father who takes his son to the edge of the kingdom at dawn and says: everything the light touches is our kingdom, and one day you will stand here with your own son. The teacher who hands the student a book and says: this will change how you see everything, and it changed how I see everything, and someone handed it to me. The civilization that knows what it is and says so, clearly, to the next person in the chain. The torch doesn’t pass itself. Someone has to carry it, deliberately, to the next set of hands. 2. The long march understood this before the West did. Gramsci’s insight was precisely about transmission – the ruling class maintains power not through force but through controlling what the next generation is taught to think is natural. Capture the school, the university, the media – the transmission mechanisms – and the cultural hegemony reproduces itself automatically, without enforcement, because the next generation never learns that it could think otherwise. The march didn’t attack the civilization directly. It attacked the transmission. Which is more efficient and more permanent – because a civilization that has lost the ability to transmit itself is defeated without ever being confronted. 3. The family is the primary transmission mechanism – and therefore the primary target. Not because the family is politically significant in itself but because it is where the first transmission happens: the values, the stories, the sense of what is worth admiring and what is worth fighting for. The child who grows up in a family that knows what it is and says so becomes a person who knows what they are. The child who grows up in a family that has been taught that its own values are suspect, its own history shameful, its own civilization merely one option among many – that child is already a partial transmission failure. Multiply across a generation and you have what we are currently living through. 4. The school is the secondary transmission mechanism – and the most completely captured. The curriculum that replaced the canon with the critique of the canon. The teacher replaced by the facilitator. The examination replaced by the self-expression. The standard replaced by the affirmation. This is not incompetence – it is the long march’s most successful operation. Deconstructing a civilization’s transmission mechanism produces, reliably and by design, a generation with nothing to transmit. That was the point. The generation that cannot read the primary sources cannot assess the argument that the primary sources are oppressive. It simply accepts the conclusion, because it has no access to the evidence that would allow it to disagree. 5. The culture is the tertiary transmission mechanism – the stories, images, music, and beauty that transmit the civilization’s values below the level of argument. Homer transmitted Greek civilization for centuries before anyone theorized about what Greek civilization was. Shakespeare transmitted the English-speaking world’s understanding of human nature for four hundred years. The fairy tale transmitted the moral grammar of European civilization to children too young for philosophy. The long march captured this too – Hollywood, the prize committees, the arts funding, the music industry – and replaced the transmission with its own content. The child who grows up on a cultural diet produced by the captured mechanism is being transmitted to. The question is what is being transmitted. 6. This series is an act of transmission. Not primarily an argument – an attempt to pass forward the vocabulary, the framework, the sense of what the civilization is and what it is worth, in the format that reaches the person who will not read the primary sources but who will read this. The secondhand dealer in ideas, in Hayek’s formulation – making thinkable for millions what the primary producer made possible. Every piece is a link in the chain. The chain runs from Homer to Aristotle to Cicero to Augustine to Aquinas to Montesquieu to Burke to Tocqueville to Hayek to this feed to the person reading it now. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The weakest links are the ones the long march attacked. This is an attempt at repair. 7. The transmission problem has one solution and it is not institutional – it is personal. You cannot transmit a civilization through a policy. You can only transmit it through a person who has received it and passes it forward deliberately, to a specific other person, in the full knowledge that the chain depends on this act. The father and the son at the edge of the kingdom. The teacher and the student with the book. The writer and the reader with the vocabulary. Every act of genuine transmission is an act of civilizational resistance – because the managed reality depends on the chain being broken, on each generation starting fresh without the inheritance, on the past being made inaccessible so that the present can be managed. Break the managed access to the past. Pass it forward. To your children first. Then to everyone else. The torch changes hands or it doesn’t. You are holding it now.

Pathology of young people

"Never before has a human been able to know so little, be able to do so little, control themselves so poorly, and yet possess such unshakable conviction that it’s precisely HE who should be lecturing all previous generations of people on how the world should have been arranged."

Daniel Foubert

@d_foubert

Translated from Polish

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE PATHOLOGY. 1. We’ve produced a generation of people who have access to the entirety of human knowledge in their pocket, yet know absolutely nothing at the same time. They don’t know history, geography, economics, or their own country, but they have an opinion on EVERY topic. Back in the day, to be an ignoramus, you at least had to lack access to books. Today, ignorance requires active effort. 2. They don’t control their own emotions. Everything is “toxic,” “traumatic,” “problematic,” or “triggering.” Criticism becomes an attack. Discomfort becomes suffering. Failure becomes trauma. Instead of teaching a person to cope with reality, we’ve taught them to develop ever more sophisticated vocabulary for describing why reality should adapt to them. 3. They also can’t appreciate what they have. They live in one of the safest and richest periods in history, surrounded by technology their great-grandparents couldn’t even have dreamed of, yet they act as if they’ve been exiled to a salt mine in the 14th century. Warm housing, a full fridge, a smartphone, vacations, streaming, food delivery to the door—and a permanent sense of grievance. 4. They’re poorly raised. Not because they don’t know which fork to use for fish. Worse: they don’t understand that public space belongs to other people too. Blasting speakers on the bus, scootering through crowds of pedestrians, phone calls at the dinner table, screaming in public places. The world is a stage, they’re the main characters, and the rest of society needs to get out of the frame. 5. They can’t wait. They can’t be bored. They can’t sit for five minutes without stimulation. The phone has to be checked during meals, conversations, walks, work, and probably someday their own funeral. The generation with the greatest access to information in history has trained itself to have the attention span of a goldfish on amphetamines. 6. They can’t fix anything. They can’t build anything. Some can’t even cook five normal dinners, sew on a button, unclog a drain, or organize their own day without an app. But they know perfectly well how the entire society should be reorganized. 7. They have no patience for competence. They want results without practice, positions without hierarchy, money without experience, and authority without achievements. If someone’s been doing something for twenty years, they’re not an expert. They’re a “gatekeeper.” 8. They don’t understand money. Subscription here, delivery there, coffee for 25 zł, phone on installments, five apps deducting money from the account every month—and then the great economic discovery: YOU CAN’T SAVE. 9. They have no relationship to the past, because for them, the past starts roughly around 2016. Everything before that is either incomprehensible or morally suspect. A person without historical memory looks at institutions that have existed for centuries and, after fifteen seconds of reflection, declares that they’ve just figured out how to fix them. 10. They don’t even live in the same reality. The algorithm gives everyone their own private universe, private facts, private authorities, private outrage, and a private epidemic of a problem that a normal person has never even heard of. Then they log off the internet and are surprised that society didn’t read the same feed. The most impressive thing, however, is the combination of all these traits. Never before has a human been able to know so little, be able to do so little, control themselves so poorly, and yet possess such unshakable conviction that it’s precisely HE who should be lecturing all previous generations of people on how the world should have been arranged.

Theology and personal experience

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

Joseph at the graves People fixate on the golden plates and miss the real origin story. Joseph Smith was a man who buried his children. He and Emma lost a son the day he was born, then twins, then more. He buried his brother Alvin, then his father, then his brother Don Carlos. He sat in a jail in Missouri in the dead of winter and asked God where he had gone. The theology he received is the theology of a man standing at open graves. Families can be bound past death. The dead can be reached. No branch is ever finally lost. It is no accident that the first sermon on baptism for the dead was preached at a funeral. The heart of the doctrine is the family because the heart of his life was loss, and he was handing nineteenth century America an antidote to the same erosion that is finishing the job today.

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2101149077279007207?s=20

Derek B

@DerekEBoucher

·

2h

So the theology and doctrine was birthed out of a personal experience??

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

1h

Yes. Name one that was not. Moses at a bush, David over a dead son, John in exile on Patmos, Nicaea because of Arius, the icons because emperors were smashing them. God sent a baby to a village under Caesar Augustus, who spoke Aramaic, told stories about seed and sheep because that is what Galilee had, and learned obedience by the things he suffered. Revelation always comes to a man standing somewhere.