The Expired Myth of Liberal Progress

"In the absence of the sacred, nothing is sacred, everything is for sale." - Oren Lyons (b.1930) - Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan

I’m reading a wonderful book, written in 1998, entitled, In the Absence of the Sacred. The author is Jerry Mander (1936-2023.) Twenty years earlier, Mander had published a much-discussed book entitled, “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.” Like his post-McLuhan contemporary, Neil Postman, Mander was another ardent liberal critic of media and technology.

What stood out for me in reading this book, was how Mander’s arguments were consistently framed in a way that I took to be indicative of an older liberal view of technology and social responsibility — a view that I recalled from my own youth beginning in the 1960’s, and which was generally given to presume that intelligent people working together, would ultimately resolve their differences, in the course of arriving at just solutions to the difficult problems of the day.

To be clear, I am not referring here to the more recent “woke” liberalism. That’s another story entirely. My interest is rather in that uniquely 20th Century brand of liberalism, that arose out of the Roosevelt/Depression era, and which came of age in the post-WWII U.S., where this notion of a cohesive liberal solidarity (as a signifier for “freedom”) was broadcast by our own government and media, in large part as a propaganda response to the chilling effects that German National Socialist propaganda had on the world, and more specifically on government intelligence agencies, which had only recently assumed their "official” forms in the first few years after WWII.

As Americans, we were constantly being encouraged to view ourselves as the victorious Everyman. And if truth be told, this was a phenomenally successful and roundly supported PR campaign, to which some still comforting after-effects, passed down through the decades, are still with us today… and as deeply ingrained in our nostalgic psyches as roast lamb and spanokopita.

In 2013, Fred Turner, a Stanford communications professor, wrote a book on this subject entitled, The Democratic Surround. In it, he discusses a well-funded CIA program, initiated in 1950, called “The Congress for Cultural Freedom” (CCF). Its purpose was to lead an on-going anti-communist campaign to sell the idea of American “freedom,” both at home and abroad. The CFF included among its ranks, a large number of prominent artists, authors, and thinkers, including, among many others, the diverse likes of Jackson Pollock, Margaret Mead, John Cage, Tennessee Williams, and Langston Hughes.

A key figure in this conjoining of early TV-age liberalism and media was photographer, Edward Steichen, and his hugely popular book of that era, The Family of Man, which was turned into a touring show by the Museum of Modern Art, in the years after it first opened there in 1955. This book was one of the first and most famous coffee table books of all time, and one which I recall reading in our home, and seeing it in the homes of other families in our Southside Chicago neighborhood, most of whom, were in the early 60’s, as similarly liberal-minded as my own family was.

Mander’s liberal ethos required that we should direct our efforts towards noble objectives, which took him back to his time spent studying and working with indigenous North American Indian tribes. It is in this context that he raises and explores the idea of the sacred, and how distant that concept was in the late 90s, from our cheerful attitudes regarding technology.

Had I read Mander’s book at the time of its publication, I have no doubt, I would have fully subscribed to his humane prescriptive approach. That’s just what the 60’s children of Adlai Stevenson voters did. Also, then as now, the fascination and concern of liberals with indigenous cultures, served a secondary purpose as a useful political tool.

(Curiously enough, we can see these same strategies at work on the streets of LA just this week in June 2025, and just as they were in the BLM (George Floyd) riots of five years ago. It is a basic precept of propaganda, that to be effective, its key narratives must be distilled down to their lowest common denominators — so that they are just dumb and generic enough for everyone to believe they know what’s going on, so that anyone who doesn’t believe as you do, must be wrong and/or delusional.),

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Looking back from the perspective of 2025, however, it grows clear, that such a progressive and open-ended liberal view of science, progress, and social change, dissolves rather quickly, when faced with the realization, that almost no corrective regulatory constraints were ever placed on new developments in technology or science — not in the 25+ years, since Mander published his book.

It feels that today, the most common place that humans find themselves collectively united, is as isolated parts of an immense mechanized and Internet-connected social story-making machine, created and maintained for our own good, by today’s wannabe Olympians, who from the highest imaginable levels of wealth. power have for many years now, exercised coercive media control over the increasingly indoctrinated masses, along the way to converting us into hybrid half-man, half-machine “transhumans.”

This agenda serves to justify all exponential advances in science and technology, as expanding the technocrat’s ability to level, rebuild, and globally “reset” the basic operations of 21st Century technology, business, and finance.

But it’s also because those earlier liberal aspirations to shape a cautionary technology policy, which Mander’s perspective typifies, have all been irrevocably silenced, extinguished, locked out of future influence, and rendered socially irrelevant… and often without our necessarily even noticing it was happening.

The effect of these changes on everyday people, has been to leave them at the mercy of a totalitarian science and technology sector that brooks no hesitation that might slow the profits for those “controligarchs,” who have over the last few decades, seized windfall monopoly shares of control over nearly all major science and tech industries and agendas.

But behind this shift, something even darker is going on, if only we were more given to see and understand it for what it is. But there is a personal cost to us, whenever we dare to acquire such prohibited knowledge… which too few of the “populace” are willing to pay. Refusing to resist however, brings on a loss of will and the corruption of our human soul, which makes us even less ready to see and thus avoid the advances of their aggressive technocratic and transhumanist agenda.

Back in the mid-1990’s, with the world enthusiastically welcoming the World Wide Web and Broadband Internet, such an overreaching capture of our future, was what many among the recently “wired” feared might happen, if science and technology got “out of control.”

(This is similar to the fears we experience today, as to what await us with AI… or with its ominous next-level General (AGI) & Super (ASI) upgrades.)

In retrospect, while it’s certainly true that things did spin wildly out of control, I would suggest that this was less because of random circumstances, the natural flow of history, political conflicts, human nature, or even the skyrocketing increase in processing power… but rather because all earnest efforts at a more reflective, ethical, or human use of new technologies, were invariably targeted, so they could be intentionally derailed, and disallowed.

This explains why today, this same powerful group of psychopathic monopolists and their lobbyists, constitute the single greatest obstacle to any regulations, or legal restraints being enacted, or to any reasonable checks being put on the flow of profits.

Bottom line, is that the once pervasive socio-cultural “liberal” perspective, that the American propaganda machine fostered for many decades, has in the 21st Century, been left gutted and flattened, by an unstoppable economic and PR steamroller, the origins of which can be partly explained by the story that the numbers shown in the chart below indicate.

That pre-millennium liberal class, as Americans knew it for so long, has died and disappeared. It just took us 25 years to realize it wasn’t there anymore.

And along the way, instead of the oligarchs responsibly compensating for their absence of moral concerns, what this alpha parasite class did instead, was to double-down on making sure that all “problems” or impediments to wealth accumulation, were handed over to their layers-deep teams of lawyers and experts in the fields of propaganda, media, mind-control, public relations, and social engineering, who were given the authority to construct the narratives for them, which though they bore little resemblance to reality, still provided a media-addicted public with an explanation for every question — which more times than not, was accepted on the shallow basis of little more than that it “sounded good.”

Absent any concern for public interest, it was sufficient that clever, convincing, and well-paid marketers fed the public a steady stream of pleasant-sounding falsehoods, that deftly avoided any suggestion that it might still be within the public’s power to stand up and demand evidence as to what these powerful and wealthy people were doing behind the scenes.

(Perhaps, the penultimate example of such a PR smokescreen is the “Trust the Science” campaign. In terms of its actual meaning, it was as witless as it was effective, even while it eliminated the “evidence" layer that had historically stood between the verifiable truth and the takeaway messaging.)

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For these and a host of other reasons, the arrival in 2020 of new bio-weaponry and bio-surveillance technologies, delivered at scale, through the same mRNA technology, served as the indispensable component of both the Covid injections, and the plandemic planner’s ubiquitously criminal depopulation plans.

This “Great Reset” takeover, provided us with many clear signs, that the world as we had long known it, was no more — that it had been retired, and in its place, there arose a very different and more merciless world order, under the demonic committee-style stakeholder leadership of elite oligarchs, institutional bankers, unelected globalists, bio-digital tyrants, CEOs, “bought” scientists, and corrupt public officials, all seemingly reading from the same master script.

So long as the stories that the propaganda media tells us, and which its various media tributaries push downstream, portray these unnatural (and perhaps not even fully human) predators, as acting on behalf of the common people, then few will be given to ask deeper questions – much less to stand up straight and demand an end to their reign of murderous extortion, which has had profound and destabilizing effects on our everyday personal relationships.

The consequences of so pervasive, (and near silent) high-jacking of reality by this huge “shiver” of blood-thirsty sharks, was to make sure that accountability could be side-stepped, that morality could be overlooked, and that absolute forms of power could become dependent for their uninterrupted profitability, on quietly raising the limits on criminal malfeasance.

And in the meantime, the public was left to slip deeper into a trance, where it becomes highly questionable whether they still retain the capacity to even think clearly, or whether its cognition had become compromised by five years of spike protein poisonings.

(For example, only a scant percentage of the world’s population ever came to understand, how their unquestioning compliance with the Covid distancing, masking, and lockdowns… provided this overseer class with all the justification they needed to keep pushing the CV genocide forward, and straight into the present.)

Reinforced by the proven success of their Covid war plan, it became clear to the immoral, opportunistic, and ambitious, that the rewards they might accrue, far outweighed the risks — which is why today, we are at a point, where almost every single social, political, and economic institution is rotted through with corruption.

So cowardly an outcome, also delivers its own eulogy for liberalism, which had no choice but to lay down its weary head, and depart its mortal coil, taking with it quaint old rallying concepts like autonomous, local. and grassroots activism, which are now almost entirely under the control of non-profit foundations, and non-governmental organizations. (The NoKings.com website lists over 200 partnering organizations.)

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As to what comes after antiquated liberalism, to restore us to a warm and caring sense of community, which knows intuitively that those key stages of life, such as birth, death, grief, and joy are not meant to remain private to the individual, but are rather shared rituals of passage that require us to join together as a community of conscience, so that we can raise each other up, at the same time we unite to bring on the downfall of tyrants.

Such a community does not rely on governments, or on any authority greater than itself, because it knows that governments will always ultimately betray them for their own gain.

So, it is left up to each of us to be courageous in heart and so work to keep ourselves ready and willing to take on such daunting challenges, for the sake of our progeny, and for all those who might come after us.

But as to the practical steps that such courage might require of us, I will have to return to that at another time. In the meantime, feel free to use the comment thread to offer your own antidotes to the cold and uncaring condition in which, we find ourselves at present.

God bless everybody!