OTF (Own Two Feet) Party, Part Fifteen

What religion gets right, and why the OTF will lead to a better society

This has been an article that has evolved during the writing of the rest of the series. Initially more about introspection. It is now also an amendment of the start of the series and a further delve into why it is so important to fight the politics of today.

The start of the series was about looking at hopes and fears for the normal person: This article will also look at the need of government in how to behave with regards to controlled force.

Finally, I round up with a review of how hopeless it probably is, but nevertheless a few pointers to go on the attack with. The article doesn’t quite read like a polished essay and jumps awkwardly from one thing to another so I apologise beforehand, I have had enough of putting it all to paper!

The loss of our church going

Up to the Second World War religion gave us our moral upbringing. For all the silly quirks of all of them and a need to kill people of other faiths in the name of peace, they got a lot right from thousands of years of inherited wisdom as they evolved.

All suggest one should be helpful and giving to those within the group at least that are struggling, be it frailty or, say, unable to make something.

Where they all score very highly is concerning how one can be a better person to one’s self. They had worked out that there were two states of ‘happiness’ people craved, pleasure and satisfaction. Pleasure is generally destructive. Satisfaction is a form of happiness derived from working towards something, an exam, paying off the mortgage or even being surrounded by a large family of responsible, well-behaved descendants.

Religion suggests pleasure should be at least moderated before it consumes you. Many religious commentators suggest that abstinence is preferable as moderation is very difficult to control. Almost anything you find pleasurable or gives a high can be destructive. Drink, drugs, gambling, social media, to name a few. Even, say, reading books could be destructive if you were doing so at the detriment of other matters that needed dealing with.

The effects of standing on your Own Two Feet

To live a responsible life requires one to control pleasures and force yourself to do more unsavoury things, like paid work.

Also, it means you have flown the proverbial nest. The welfare state prevents us from doing so and behaviour becomes more infantile with it. This is often missed as most people look at how being controlled affects how they are to other people and the knock-on economic failings.

Standing on your own two feet produces a better character of a person. You have earned everything around you and you don’t appreciate others that gain without the pain. If you have to live a moral life, you are less likely to be impressed by someone else not doing so.

Knowing you have overcome challenges to succeed by your own resourcefulness, it is a lot easier to be resilient and confident in dealing with anything that comes upon you as you meander down life’s merry road. No hiding behind the sofa, triple masked because a cold is doing the rounds.

Life needs to be precious but cannot be sacrosanct

This needs to go at the start of the series and one of the crucial points on which a lot of policies are guided.

There isn’t a numerical price on life, but it isn’t priceless. No one accepts that putting a whole country’s resources into prolonging one life is feasible, in fact to do so would mean earlier deaths for many more in their place. A group can only do so much before the laws of diminishing returns make the said effort counterproductive.

Along with this there is also the other side of the equation, namely that controlled harm is also sometimes necessary. A pacifist world doesn’t stay that way for long – to the detriment of the pacifist.

So here’s some areas where these ideas have bearing.

Health

We cannot afford to keep everyone alive forever. The cost of treatment is already rationed and if a new treatment is too expensive then it doesn’t get used. If on welfare, pain relief is a must as a humane course of action. But after that medical care should be limited. Although horrible at the time, and there always being the thought of losing people too quickly, in the long term it will probably mean less prolonged suffering.

We are also in the impossible situation of trying to square the social care circle. We currently can only do so by importing labour that requires an ever-expanding population, until it bursts. Children no longer make roots near parents and as both work it is difficult to care for parents at home. Add in the extra problems with dementia, we may have to accept that if we cannot look after them within a family, then care is not going to be what we would one day hope for ourselves.

Injury to criminals

We are right for police not to generally bear arms, as the courts should decide a person's fate not a heat-of-the-moment decision. However, a man's home is his castle and if a criminal breaks in then the criminal is fully responsible for the consequences of his/her unlawful actions. Criminals are the ones that should be scared, not the law-abiding majority.

Death penalty

Against EU law, I don’t believe that all criminals should have a chance of redemption. Many should never be freed. However prison is expensive. If someone is never to be let out then there is no reason to look after them for what could be decades. Better the short drop. Long-term prisoners would be offered a peaceful way out on owning up to crimes and as a final act of contrition. Wouldn’t be many but each one is less to deal with.

Self destruction/ suicide

There needs to be protections, but if a person that is fully compos mentis, and can rationally articulate while they no longer wish to live anymore then they should be allowed to die with dignity in a caring environment, without fear of recrimination. Life is about quality, not just quantity.

Abortion law

I imagine there are few abortions within a secure family unit where the couple have only one child, or even no children at all. The abortions by European middle-class people are not what’s damaging the birth rate amongst them. There are many outside factors, many the OTF would put right, that are preventing people being in relationships to bring more children into the world.

Romania banned abortion and there were many children in orphanages in the most terrible conditions. So just banning abortion other than for religious reasons doesn’t necessarily work for me.

I think MPs in this area have debated this area carefully and thoughtfully – and I would see no reason to change abortion law as it is now. I would be very wary of reducing the latest date they can be performed.

Authoritarianism

One big conspiracy at the moment is that the world is being directed by Klaus Schwab and the WEF. I don’t think that is quite true, but it is fair to say that around the (especially) Western world a form of 1984 groupthink has emerged among the political class. The thinking has its roots in socialism, and even the so-called right wing people are that far removed from a world without socialism that they don’t know any better.

They believe they are cleverer than us, more learned and that we are incapable of deciding well for the betterment of our lives. They have been brainwashed by the computer modellers into believing we are moving from one potential crisis to another – to me the equivalent of being taken in by the emperor’s new clothes. On the back of this they are implementing policies that Chairman Mao at his maddest, pales in comparison with the potential damage these policies will befall upon the world.

And they have soon forgotten, (or secretly admire) the wrongs of totalitarianism in the middle 20th Century. They are happy to force medical interventions against our will; lock us in our houses; make energy, and therefore all goods even more expensive, making us poorer. They want to be able to monitor every financial transaction, and even use that as a further method of control. They are also scaling back the growing of food, which is mental beyond belief. It is like the Mayans, and Aztecs, happily sacrificing millions in the belief it will delay the end of the world.

This is the war we must win, and reverse these courses of actions where we can. Even if the OTFs’ purer ideals have to stay their hand.

Control Vs freedom – not right vs left

The OTF is neither Left or Right Wing. It is on a different spectrum of being for freedom as opposed to control. It may be that humans on average need more control than the able people of this site, but the control dial has gone far too far in the wrong direction.

Comparing Socialism & Communism vs Fascism & Nazism is not about economically different messages. They were authoritarian creeds which used left and right to differentiate themselves. And being close siblings, hated each other with a passion. Capitalist economics does not sit on this left/right spectrum at all. What the socialists have done, as identifying themselves as left wing, have confabulated the capitalists with the right wing authoritarians.

Freedom is about being grown up, independent, responsible. It is what should happen naturally when we become full adults. A giver to society, not a taker. Being controlled means being treated like you’re never fully matured and incapable of fledging the nest, and controlling relationships are always abusive…

The warcry for the OTF party should be something along the lines of: Do you want to be a controlled child, or do you want to be a free adult?

Final note

Although there isn’t a lot of original thinking, as the wheel doesn’t need reinventing, I hope I have set up a sensible set of arguments that would, if allowed, produce a far better society.

The issue is how to convince people. Hayak suggested it was impossible to be done through the ballot box. What was needed was to get the intelligentsia onboard. The IEA developed independently from his writings and claims to have some amazing successes, but anyone looking at the Western world and the rise of the WEF mindthink must realise that that method has failed spectacularly too.

I think there are a great many people, the kind of people that voted for Brexit, that want a standard bearer again for the ordinary person, in the way many thought the Labour party would be during their rise. They are silenced on social media, and denigrated as unworthy by the powers that be. Somehow we need to get to an inertia point where they see this as a viable option and that a vote could win a seat and make a difference – Brexit showed they will if they think it is worth it. They need to be made to feel that they wouldn’t lose the few protections they believe they have (they don’t), like good health care, education, and old age provision, and in fact we could only be better.

Since Hunt was made Chancellor of the Exchequer at the start of the Liz Truss coup, I am looking for ways to make this party real. I can’t lead it, but will amateurishly push it forward and see what traction it can gain. Without knowing how to go about tackling spending cuts for our benefit, and allowing people to opt-out of government welfare, the other ‘Freedom’ parties have no reason, other than the fear of immigration, to risk voting for them and we will have to dance to the tune of the WEF brigade or die a violent death resisting away from the ballot box.
 

© Jerry Mandarin 2022