Phantom Humanity

This post will be a bit of a supplementary or epilogue to the last series on Fandom. The reason for this is that we needed a piece specifically on HG Wells, but also the core of his beliefs. What was it that he was aiming for that would cause a gaggle of anti-social nerds to tear through adventure and romantic storytelling in order to transform it into materialist message fiction? Certainly there must be a core ideology to it all.

Well, there is. Not only is HG Wells at the center of it, he actually wrote an entire short book detailing his ideal utopia-- the very ideology he hung his hat on creating. It also goes without saying that this is also the utopia all the cultists and Fanatics in the 20th century strove for as well. When they say they are in the "Wells Tradition" we are about to see what that means.

Unlike the other series, this will be contained in a single long entry. This will be happening for several reasons, which will become clear as this goes on.

The slim book was rewritten a few times (this is the final edition) in order for him to flesh out his intent. However, that doesn't change the fact that this was a chore to read. Massively repetitive, intellectually incontinent, and vague, getting through it was rather tough. Despite being a contemporary of Chesterton, Wells writing on these topics does not come close. That said, it's still a short tome and can be summed up here in a single piece.

Wells ended up calling his plan The Open Conspiracy, which is a completely Utopian frame that carries the rest of the work. This could never have been written at any other time than the early 20th century with its naïve materialist look on the world.

As the introduction says:

"The Open Conspiracy was Wells' Blue Print for A World Revolution; he regarded this book as his finished statement on the way the world ought to be ordered. Possibly he underestimated, or ignored, the fact that it is often in the interest of subsets of the human race to act against other subsets. Moreover the emphasis on religion seems odd, from a rationalist."

It isn't odd when you realize that the core of Wells' beliefs are religious. He is aiming to replace traditional belief systems with his own up to date version. You will see how that works out as we go along here.

"His book The Open Conspiracy was published in 1928, subtitled Blue Prints for a World Revolution. Bertrand Russell said of this book '...I do not know of anything with which I agree more entirely' though since this was in a begging letter perhaps he was just being polite. It was revised and republished as What Are We to Do with Our Lives? in 1931."

And this is the version I will be covering here.

"In this short book, Wells attempts to answer the question: What should socialists actually do?—to which he confessed several times to having no very clear idea. It's a counter to Marx: why shouldn't non-proletarians unite to change the world?"

I realize Wells being fueled by socialism has always gained the most traction among those for and against him, but there is a larger point. He thought that Marx did not go far enough, and was very misguided about the purpose of existence.

He started from socialism, but he wanted much more than that.

"He was a socialist of an empirical, rather vague, rationalist type, disliking Marx and unenthusiastic about the managerial socialism of the Webbs."

In other words, he was a Utopian. forget the monikers, forget the ideology--what is important is that one main fact. He is attempting to think of a way to Fix The World and bring it into paradise. He was very religious about that fact, as were his acolytes. The plight of the worker or the bourgeois or whatever he was supposed to put first did not concern him much as how the world itself could be molded and manipulated. This is important to note for everything to follow.

The first chapter is about this very state of man as it was in the early days of the 20th century, when the bloody wars were just revving up.

Now, we know Wells is the originator of a whole line of thought prominent to the Science Fiction Cult that eventually destroyed adventure storytelling in the mainstream, but how much of it was prevalent in his actual thinking? Well, given that the final version of this was published around the time Fandom was starting to gain steam, one would have to realize how much of it truly began here.

"The world is undergoing immense changes. Never before have the conditions of life changed so swiftly and enormously as they have changed for mankind in the last fifty years. We have been carried along—with no means of measuring the increasing swiftness in the succession of events. We are only now beginning to realize the force and strength of the storm of change that has come upon us."

That's the thesis: humanity has Progressed. Therefore, it is now time to restructure society accordingly. This is the beating heart of "Science Fiction" and the Fandom cult. We must now create new morality and new standards, preferably around ideas that run counter to the very ones that got us to the state where we are comfortable enough to spit on them.

This was written over 90 years ago, but nothing has changed. We still deal with this same outdated thinking even today.

"These changes have not come upon our world from without. No meteorite from outer space has struck our planet; there have been no overwhelming outbreaks of volcanic violence or strange epidemic diseases; the sun has not flared up to excessive heat or suddenly shrunken to plunge us into Arctic winter. The changes have come through men themselves. Quite a small number of people, heedless of the ultimate consequence of what they did, one man here and a group there, have made discoveries and produced and adopted inventions that have changed all the condition, of social life."

Progress is just the State Of Things. We just Got Smarter, so understand that we must create a new world build around our new evolution.

"We are now just beginning to realize the nature of these changes, to find words and phrases for them and put them down. First they began to happen, and then we began to see that they were happening. And now we are beginning to see how these changes are connected together and to get the measure of their consequences. We are getting our minds so clear about them that soon we shall be able to demonstrate them and explain them to our children in our schools. We do not do so at present. We do not give our children a chance of discovering that they live in a world of universal change."

If this sounds as nonsensical as it is vague then you might as well get used to it. This is the entirety of the book.

Nonetheless, his point is clear. We now have train engines, therefore we should change our views on bestiality. This is the logic of modernism, after all.

As he goes on:

"It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century that people began to realize the real significance of that aspect of our changing conditions to which the phrase "the abolition of distance" has been applied. For a whole century before that there had been a continual increase in the speed and safety of travel and transport and the ease and swiftness with which messages could be transmitted, but this increase had not seemed to be a matter of primary importance. Various results of railway, steamship, and telegraph became manifest; towns grew larger, spreading into the countryside, once inaccessible lands became areas of rapid settlement and cultivation, industrial centres began to live on imported food, news from remote parts lost its time-lag and tended to become contemporary, but no one hailed these things as being more than "improvements" in existing conditions. They are not observed to be the beginnings of a profound revolution in the life of mankind. The attention of young people was not drawn to them; no attempt was made, or considered necessary, to adapt political and social institutions to this creeping enlargement of scale.

"Until the closing years of the nineteenth century there was no recognition of the real state of affairs. Then a few observant people began, in a rather tentative, commentary sort of way, to call attention to what was happening. They did not seem to be moved by the idea that something had to be done about it; they merely remarked, brightly and intelligently, that it was going on. And then they went on to the realization that this "abolition of distance" was only one aspect of much more far-reaching advances."

Sounds like nonsense? Well, it is. This is why the previous century is the joke that it is. We are more comfortable now, and it has made us soft in mind and body. That is all that has changed. Existence remains as it always was.

But he goes on.

"Men were travelling about so much faster and flashing their communications instantly about the world because a progressive conquest of force and substance was going on. Improved transport was only one of a number of portentous consequences of that conquest; the first to be conspicuous and set men thinking; but not perhaps the first in importance. It dawned upon them that in the last hundred years there had been a stupendous progress in obtaining and utilizing mechanical power, a vast increase in the efficiency of mechanism, and associated with that an enormous increase in the substances available for man's purposes, from vulcanized rubber to the modern steels, and from petroleum and margarine to tungsten and aluminium. At first the general intelligence was disposed to regard these things as lucky "finds," happy chance discoveries.[...] But these new powers and substances were modifying and transforming—unobtrusively, surely, and relentlessly—very particular of the normal life of mankind."

Progress was the idol of the day, and what it remained all the way through the 20th century before the hammer of Cultural Ground Zero shattered that creaking glasses into millions of useless shards. Whatever was left became incinerated by 9/11 and the fallout of it. Now the only people who believe in Progress are those who rely on authority to enforce anti-reality on the people they consider holding them back.

Anyone paying attention now realizes Progress for the scam it is. It makes reading things like this look even more quaint and outdated.

You can see that with any modern review of this work. Those who see Progress for the crock it is are very descriptive of this book's faults. Those who praise it despite reality spout the same pseudo-New Age nonsense about holding hands and conquering bad thinkers by jailing them or having authorities crack their skulls open in the streets. Peace through oppression, violence is words, and other such nonsense is unflinchingly accepted by such people.

The only people who still believe this stuff, in other words, are cultists--the very same sort that created, and still manage, Fandom. This is what Wells was making here, by the way. This book is about creating secular cult.

"They changed a world where there had never been enough into a world of potential plenty, into a world of excessive plenty. It dawned upon their minds after their realization of the "abolition of distance" that shortage of supplier had also been abolished and that irksome toil was no longer necessary to produce everything material that man might require. It is only in the last dozen years that this broader and profounder fact has come through to the intelligence of any considerable number of people. Most of them have still to carry their realization a step farther and see how complete is the revolution in the character of the daily life these things involve."

Normal people have Evolved and are smart enough to realize the old world is dead and gone, but not quite smart enough to take that Obvious step that Mr. Wells sees so plainly before him. He will now help outline that step for the rest of us simpletons.

"The favourite platitude of the politician excusing himself for the futilities of his business, is that "moral progress has not kept pace with material advance." That seems to satisfy him completely, but it can satisfy no other intelligent person. He says "moral." He leaves that word unexplained. Apparently he wants to shift the responsibility to our religious teachers. At the most he has made but the vaguest gesture towards a reply. And yet, when we consider it, charitably and sympathetically, there does seem to be a germ of reality in that phrase of his."

And now we're off to the races. That he so casually tosses away religion here is the key point. It has no bearing on the world anymore, you see. Morality has to be completely rethought via these technological changes. Can openers have overthrown the old standards. We have faster trains now so wanton murder might not be wrong anymore. It requires a very big brain to think this way.

As I've said, the mistake we've been making for so long is thinking that all the progress we made technologically on the outside has actually changed anything inside of us. It hasn't done anything to our souls--those don't change. Can't. We are still the same people we always were. Changing the rules was never necessary.

But it is necessary if you desire to change them to your favor and get a leg up on others. This is what cultists always want. This is what they've been trying, and failing utterly at for well over a century (and longer) by this point. How anyone can look at Fandom and not see that is what they have been attempting to do for nearly a century, is beyond me.

This is what they were made to do.

Will we ever stop this nonsense and try something else or finally go down another road? Who is to say. It most likely will not happen in this lifetime, especially if people continue to take nonsense like this seriously.

"What does moral mean? Mores means manners and customs. Morality is the conduct of life. It is what we do with our social lives. It is how we deal with ourselves in relation to our fellow creatures. And there does seem to be a much greater discord now than there was (say) a couple of hundred years ago between the prevailing ideas of how to carry on life and the opportunities and dangers of the time. We are coming to see more and more plainly that certain established traditions which have made up the frame of human relationships for ages are not merely no longer as convenient as they were, but are positively injurious and dangerous. And yet at present we do not know how to shake off these traditions, these habits of social behaviour which rule us. Still less are we able to state, and still less bring into operation, the new conceptions of conduct and obligation that must replace them."

You can't shake them off, Mr. Wells, because they are ingrained in our soul--the one thing that did not change when the printing press was invented. Humans don't change. Our souls are eternal and therefore require eternal rules to guide them--not fashions and trends that age poorly. Morality is conduct befitting the soul and keeping it from corrupting and crumbling. By definition, it cannot ever change. It never did, before the bloodiest century in recorded history came around.

But it must change because we have paved roads now, I guess. Though, let us be honest, he knows very well that this isn't true at all. There is a bigger ambition here.

Now the masses need a new Religion. And with a new Religion means a new Church and clergy. Buckle in, because he's going to explain it in very repetitive terms.

"For example, the general government of human affairs has hitherto been distributed among a number of sovereign states—there are about seventy of them now—and until recently that was a quite tolerable system of frame-works into which a general way of living could be fitted. The standard of living may not have been as high as our present standards, but the social stability and assurance were greater. The young were trained to be loyal, law-regarding, patriotic, and a defined system of crimes and misdemeanours with properly associated pains, penalties, and repressions, kept the social body together. Everyone was taught a history glorifying his own state, and patriotism was chief among the Virtues. Now, with great rapidity, there has been that "abolition of distance," and everyone has become next-door neighbour to everyone else. States once separate, social and economic systems formerly remote from one another, now jostle each other exasperatingly. Commerce under the new conditions is perpetually breaking nationalist bounds and making militant raids upon the economic life of other countries. This exacerbates patriotism in which we have all been trained and with which we are all, with scarcely an exception, saturated. And meanwhile war, which was once a comparative slow bickering upon a front, has become war in three dimensions; it gets at the "non-combatant" almost as searchingly as at the combatant, and has acquired weapons of a stupendous cruelty and destructiveness. At present there exists no solution to this paradoxical situation. We are continually being urged by our training and traditions to antagonisms and conflicts that will impoverish, starve, and destroy both our antagonists and ourselves. We are all trained to distrust and hate foreigners, salute our flag, stiffen up in a wooden obedient way at our national anthem, and prepare to follow the little fellows in spurs and feathers who pose as the heads of our states into the most horrible common destruction. Our political and economic ideas of living are out of date, and we find great difficulty in adjusting them and reconstructing them to meet the huge and strenuous demands of the new times. That is really what our gramophone politicians have in mind—in the vague way in which they have anything in mind—when they put on that well-worn record about moral progress not having kept pace with material inventions."

Is this not what Fandom was fighting for? Is this not the goal of the Futurians and cultists that exist today? What has changed?

As Mr. Wells says, we must either Mutate or Die:

"Socially and politically we want a revised system of ideas about conduct, a view of social and political life brought up to date. We are not doing the effective thing with our lives, we are drifting, we are being hoodwinked and bamboozled and misled by those who trade upon the old traditions. It is preposterous that we should still be followed about and pestered by war, taxed for war preparations, and threatened bodily and in our liberties by this unnecessary and exaggerated and distorted survival of the disunited world of the pre-scientific era. And it is not simply that our political way of living is now no better than an inherited defect and malformation, but that our everyday life, our eating and drinking and clothing and housing and going about, is also cramped, thwarted, and impoverished, because we do not know how to set about shaking off the old ways and fitting the general life to our new opportunities. The strain takes the form of increased unemployment and a dislocation of spending power. We do not know whether to spend or save. Great swarms of us find ourselves unaccountably thrown out of work. Unjustly, irrationally. Colossal business reconstructions are made to increase production and accumulate profits, and meanwhile the customers with purchasing power dwindle in numbers and fade away. The economic machine creaks and makes every sign of stopping—and its stopping means universal want and starvation. It must not stop. There must be a reconstruction, a change-over. But what sort of a change-over?"

Please, Mr. Wells, tell us.

"Though none of us are yet clear as to the precise way in which this great change-over is to be effected, there is a world-wide feeling now that change-over or a vast catastrophe is before us. Increasing multitudes participate in that uneasy sense of insecure transition. In the course of one lifetime mankind has passed from a state of affairs that seems to us now to have been slow, dull, ill-provided, and limited, but at least picturesque and tranquil-minded, to a new phase of excitement, provocation, menace, urgency, and actual or potential distresses. Our lives are part of one another. We cannot get away from it. We are items in a social mass. What are we to do with our lives?"

This is the central question of Wells' short book here. Now that The Future is Here, how should we live in it? How can we finally shake off the chains of the past and seek true enlightenment away from the "pre-scientific" era?

We can now move into chapter two, and the meat of the book.

"I am a writer upon social and political matters. Essentially I am a very ordinary, undistinguished person. I have a mediocre brain, a very average brain, and the way in which my mind reacts to these problems is therefore very much the way in which most brains will react to them. But because it is my business to write and think about these questions, because on that account I am able to give more time and attention to them than most people, I am able to get rather ahead of my equals and to write articles and books just a little before the ideas I experience become plain to scores of thousands, and then to hundreds of thousands, and at last to millions of other people. And so it happened that a few years ago (round about 1927) I became very anxious to clear up and give form to a knot of suggestions that seemed to me to have in them the solution of this riddle of adapting our lives to the immense new possibilities and the immense new dangers that confront mankind.

"It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."

"Then they would say, "What are we to do with our lives?"

"And then, "Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.""

How does one even start with this insanity? Perhaps if they just called it "Science Fiction Fandom" and started some conventions people would be more welcoming. Though I suppose that is precisely what did occur.

"It seemed to me that as, one after another, we woke up, that is what we should be saying. It amounted to a protest, first mental and then practical, it amounted to a sort of unpremeditated and unorganized conspiracy, against the fragmentary and insufficient governments and the wide-spread greed, appropriation, clumsiness, and waste that are now going on. But unlike conspiracies in general this widening protest and conspiracy against established things would, by its very nature, go on in the daylight, and it would be willing to accept participation and help from every quarter. It would, in fact, become an "Open Conspiracy," a necessary, naturally evolved conspiracy, to adjust our dislocated world."

An actual revolt against reality itself. Quite the idea from a "rationalist" who runs on facts and logic. This is his plan--reshape reality.

All these smart people, nothing but pure chemicals and sparks flying off in their half-baked and insufficiently evolved brains, all so happen to "naturally" come to the same conclusions on the state of the world and how to fix it. What shall be done about this intolerable riff-raff the refuse to progress like the advancement of steam engines? What shall we do with them?

It just sounds absurd when you think of it that way, but what other way should one look back at it? It's always been absurd. We just used to fool ourselves into thinking this materialist advancement would last forever. Now we now that it's over, and not coming back.

Talking about the previous publication of this little book, he says:

"Events have hustled thought along and have been hustled along by thought. The idea of reorganizing the affairs of the world on quite a big scale, which was "Utopian," and so forth, in 1926 and 1927, and still "bold" in 1928, has now spread about the world until nearly everybody has it. It has broken out all over the place, thanks largely to the mental stimulation of the Russian Five Year Plan. Hundreds of thousands of people everywhere are now thinking upon the lines foreshadowed by my Open Conspiracy, not because they had ever heard of the book or phrase, but because that was the way thought was going."

"The way thought was going" is a religious phrase that has no bearing on material progress as he defines it. This is advocating for floating with the stream, which is not something a thinking man engages in. This is in fact, the opposite of thought.

Nonetheless, this is his plan. A bunch of eggheads with shallow philosophy are going to fix the world because they figured out how to make the trains run on time. You best let them in charge, because otherwise you're in the way.

"The first Open Conspiracy conveyed the general idea of a world reconstructed, but it was very vague about the particular way in which this or that individual life could be lived in relation to that general idea. It gave a general answer to the question, "What are we to do with our lives?" It said, "Help to make over the New World amidst the confusions of the Old." But when the question was asked, "What am I to do with my life?" the reply was much less satisfactory."

Do tell us, Mr. Wells. What will you do with your objectively meaningless life built upon your objectively meaningless philosophy?

He says it with the title of the third chapter: We Have To Clear And Clean Up Our Minds.

Indeed, we should wash them, Mr. Wells.

This is the sort of thing that, apparently, leads to an "intellectual rebirth" of some kind. I'm not kidding: this is the phrase he uses.

"Fundamentally the Open Conspiracy must be an intellectual rebirth.

"Human thought is still very much confused by the imperfection of the words and other symbols it employs and the consequences of this confused thinking are much more serious and extensive than is commonly realized. We still see the world through a mist of words; it is only the things immediately about us that are plain fact. Through symbols, and especially through words, man has raised himself above the level of the ape and come to a considerable mastery over his universe. But every step in his mental ascent has involved entanglement with these symbols and words he was using; they were at once helpful and very dangerous and misleading. A great part of our affairs, social, political, intellectual, is in a perplexing and dangerous state to-day because of our loose, uncritical, slovenly use of words."

There it is: controlling the language people use in discourse. Sound familiar? He is openly advocating for manipulating others.

We can see the root of his warped thinking as he talks about education and how it should be weaponized.

"All through the later Middle Ages there were great disputes among the schoolmen about the use of words and symbols. There is a queer disposition in the human mind to think that symbols and words and logical deductions are truer than actual experiences, and these great controversies were due to the struggle of the human intelligence against that disposition. On the one side were the Realists, who were so called because they believed, in effect, that names were more real than facts, and on the other side were the Nominalists, who from the first were pervaded by a suspicion about names and words generally; who thought there might be some sort of catch in verbal processes, and who gradually worked their way towards verification by experiment which is the fundamental thing about experimental science—experimental science which has given our human world all these immense powers and possibilities that tempt and threaten it to-day."

As he learned about the subject, he began to think more and more on it.

"But it had crept into my mind as I learnt about individuality in my biological work and about logic and psychology in my preparation as the perfect preceptor, that something very important and essential was being left out and that I wasn't at all as well equipped as my diplomas presently said I was, and in the next few years I found the time to clean up this matter pretty thoroughly. I made no marvellous discoveries, everything I found out was known already; nevertheless, I had to find out some of this stuff for myself quite over again, as though it had never been done; so inaccessible was any complete account of human thinking to an ordinary man who wanted to get his mind into proper working condition. And this was not that I had missed some recondite, precious refinements of philosophy; it was that my fundamental thinking, at the very root of my political and social conduct, was wrong. I was in a human community, and that community, and I with it, was thinking of phantoms and fantasies as though they were real and living things, was in a reverie of unrealities, was blind, slovenly, hypnotized, base and ineffective, blundering about in an extremely beautiful and an extremely dangerous world."

This was the realization the words had more power than concepts. Want to control thought and affix change? Control words. Genres, too.

"But re-educating oneself, getting one's mind into health and exercising it and training it to think properly, is only the beginning of the task before the awakening Open Conspirator. He has not only to think clearly, but he has to see that his mind is equipped with the proper general ideas to form a true framework for his everyday judgments and decisions."

It doesn't get more blatant than this. Train people to think right. Actual brainwashing. Amazing stuff here, Mr. Wells.

Think clearly, but make sure you think clearly in a specific way. That is the key.

This is why he wrote so many non-fiction books that did little but tread water. It's partially why these works are his least well known.

He even admits to creating an ideology out of thin air.

"By the time I was through with [writing] these books I felt I had really something sound and comprehensive to go upon, an "ideology," as people say, on which it was possible to think of building a new world without fundamental surprises, and, moreover, that I had got my mind stripped down and cleaned of many illusions and bad habits, so that it could handle life with an assurance it had never known before."

At least he admits it's an ideology. His successors deny it outright. Though it has hard to believe it took a 60 year old three books and many years to come to the conclusions in this book. This all sounds as poorly thought out and shallow as Lundwall's screeds from his old books, and he was barely out of his teens when he wrote those.

A full grown adult thinking like this is questionable, unless it's a smokescreen for something sinister. I suppose it depends on what you believe his motivations are, though we will certainly get to those soon enough.

"But certainly no one can possibly set about living properly and satisfactorily unless he knows what he is, where he is, and how he stands to the people and things about him."

Which is why nihilists-in-denial have set about for well over a century avoiding the logical endpoint of their beliefs while forcing others to live up to their made-up standards instead. Once we laugh these people out of the room and lock them out, maybe we can finally get five minutes of peace and quiet. They clearly have no idea where they are going and, if they do, have no interest in stopping. Enough with this "Progress" nonsense already.

This is his plan: turn progress into a sledgehammer for the Open Conspiracy. Where else to start with a new order for the world than with education?

"Our necessities demand the intelligence and services of everyone who can be trained to give them. The new world demands new schools, therefore, to give everyone a sound and thorough mental training and equip everyone with clear ideas about history, about life, and about political and economic relationships instead of the rubbishy head-content at present prevalent. The old-world teachers and schools have to be reformed or replaced. A vigorous educational reform movement arises as a natural and necessary expression of the awakening Open Conspirator. A revolution in education is the most imperative and fundamental part of the adaptation of life to its new conditions."

"Mental training" is quite the weasel term. You have to hand it to him: at the end of the day, he's still a writer.

This is the point where the soft-headed will reply to the above that "Of course children should be well educated! This is a brilliant point in his favor!" when this not what Mr. Wells was saying at all. He was saying that they must be educated in certain ways to achieve certain results. He is not for teaching students how to think; he is for dumping "correct" information into the heads to make the subjects Complete. It takes a complete misunderstanding of humanity to believe people operate this way. Now you can see where Fandom gets it from.

One simply has to experience education in the 21st century to see just how forcing the "Correct" information into children's brain simply doesn't work. It just damages them and, in turn, the society around them.

"The education these new dangerous times in which we are now living demands, must start right, from the beginning and there must be nothing to replace and nothing to relearn in it. Before we can talk politics, finance, business, or morals, we must see that we have got the right mental habits and the right foundation of realized facts. There is nothing much to be done with our lives until we have seen to that."

This is the exact rationalization that led to Lundwall saying that Edgar Rice Burroughs should be banned. Their backwards logic leads to doing thing upside down and overturning everything. Very little has changed since this book was written, except more failure.

But now we get into the heart of this book. It is time to tackle the issue of belief.

What about religion? What indeed.

"Yes," objects a reader, "but does not our religion tell us what we are to do with our lives?"

"We have to bring religion, as its fundamental matter, into this discussion. From our present point of view, religion is that central essential part of education which determines conduct. Religion certainly should tell us what to do with our lives. But in the vast stir and occasions of modern life, so much of what we call religion remains irrelevant or dumb. Religion does not seem to "join on" to the main parts of the general problem of living. It has lost touch."

Religion is out of date because we have rail systems and pocket watches. Now we know why Chesterton used to make jokes about this absurdity--he dealt with this every single day. I relate to him more now that I see what he had to face.

That this was written by a 60 year old man that is still taken seriously today, and worshipped on top of this, is really embarrassing for the state of all things and irrefutable proof that progress clearly doesn't exist. This is what all these people think, remember.

"Let us try and bring this problem of the Open Conspiracy to meet and make the new world, into relation with the traditions of religion. The clear-minded Open Conspirator who has got his modern ideology, his lucidly arranged account of the universe in order, is obliged to believe that only by giving his life to the great processes of social reconstruction, and shaping his conduct with reference to that, can he do well with his life. But that merely launches him into the most subtle and unending of struggles, the struggle against the incessant gravitation of our interests to ourselves. He has to live the broad life and escape from the close narrow life. We all try to attain the dignity and happiness of magnanimity and escape from the tormenting urgencies of personal desire. In the past that struggle has generally assumed the form of a religious struggle. Religion is the antagonist of self."

The Open Conspirator's philosophy is based on the fact that he has windows when his ancestor didn't know how to make glass. That is it. It literally has nothing to do with meaning or purpose, but then, Mr. Wells understanding of religion is Reddit tier. What else would you expect from the grandfather of Science Fiction cultism?

Get ready for more of this.

"But as the idea of continual change, going farther and farther from existing realities and never returning to them, is a new one, as nobody until very recently has grasped the fact that the knowledge of today is the ignorance of to-morrow, each fresh development of religion in the world so far has been proclaimed in perfect good faith as the culminating and final truth."

Thousands of years and nobody ever thought about this once, possibly because the idea of wholly ejecting the past as useless is culturally and spiritually suicidal. All this means is you will quickly run out of road with limited fuel to fill the tank with. You no longer have any solid ground under your feet, and will fall at the first sign of trouble.

Certainly enough, this is where we are today in the 21st century. Anyone who still believes the nonsense Mr. Wells spouts is ignorant to the reality they live in. They truly believe that digging down will eventually lead them to China instead of the center of the Earth where they will be incinerated. And we put up with this.

That is the biggest issue with much of the modern talk of religion--this book is no different. Mr. Wells meanders, repeats himself, says nothing interesting, tries to be profound, and comes up short every time. If no one has read this book, it is probably because it is so unbelievably boring to anyone who isn't a hyper-ironic librarian witch that posts political hashtags on social media. This interminable ranting goes on far too long.

"On the other hand there is in many fine religious minds a desire amounting almost to a necessity for an object of devotion so individualized as to be capable at least of a receptive consciousness even if no definite response is conceded. One type of mind can accept a reality in itself which another must project and dramatize before it can comprehend it and react to it. The human soul is an intricate thing which will not endure elucidation when that passes beyond a certain degree of harshness and roughness. The human spirit has learnt love, devotion, obedience and humility in relation to other personalities, and with difficulty it takes the final step to a transcendent subordination, from which the last shred of personality has stripped."

This is the sort of complete mindmush nonsense he goes on about: the very thing that defines materialist fiction writers to this day. It's all assertions based on nothing, and halfcocked phrases that says little that makes sense except to those who have detached from observable reality. That explains how loopy this whole thing is.

It should also be added that he spends in absurd amount of time on this one topic of religion. Can you guess just why that might be? There's a good reason for this. It is only a shame that he has little to nothing to say on the subject.

That GK Chesterton remained out of print for decades despite his books offering far more thought and care into them while this hackwork that has been allowed to circulate unmolested really should say it all about the cult that runs the old publishing industry. It is not about preservation or passing on anything--it's about control.

They don't want you to think. They want you at their feet. This is why they hate religion so much: they want to be your religion, even though they completely misunderstand it and its purpose completely. It's all projection, and nothing else.

"Just now I wrote Peccavi because I had written God the Invisible King, but after all I do not think it was so much a sin to use that phrase, God the Invisible King, as an error in expression. If there is no sympathetic personal leader outside us, there is at least in us the attitude we should adopt towards a sympathetic personal leader."

Thank you for proving my point, Mr. Wells. 

They don't want you believing in anything, otherwise you won't believe in them. Why believe in God when you can believe in me? Even better if I'm a self-proclaimed expert. That way, I am objectively at the top of the heap. You have to listen to your betters the experts, after all. Disagree? What are you, some kind of x-ist?

"The history of our world, which has been unfolded to us by science, runs counter to all the histories on which religions have been based. There was no Creation in the past, we begin to realize, but eternally there is creation; there was no Fall to account for the conflict of good and evil, but a stormy ascent. Life as we know it is a mere beginning."

And now they can write the new Good Book for you. This has always been the game. Ignore the nonsense he's spouting and just believe, freethinker.

"The time has come to strip religion right down to that, to strip it for greater tasks than it has ever faced before. The histories and symbols that served our fathers encumber and divide us. Sacraments and rituals harbour disputes and waste our scanty emotions. The explanation of why things are is an unnecessary effort in religion. The essential fact in religion is the desire for religion and not how it came about. If you do not want religion, no persuasions, no convictions about your place in the universe can give it to you. The first sentence in the modern creed must be, not "I believe," but "I give myself."

"To what? And how? To these questions we will now address ourselves."

Get rid of God so the state can be your god instead. This is his answer to advance humanity. Again, this is an adult, a senior citizen. Not an adolescent.

A new, "modern" religion is the goal. And who better to create it than people of his level? Sit down, shut up, and obey.

"To give oneself religiously is a continuing operation expressed in a series of acts. It can be nothing else. You cannot dedicate yourself and then go away to live just as you have lived before. It is a poor travesty of religion that does not produce an essential change in the life which embraces it. But in the established and older religions of our race, this change of conduct has involved much self-abasement merely to the God or Gods, or much self-mortification merely with a view to the moral perfecting of self. Christian devotion, for example, in these early stages, before the hermit life gave place to organized monastic life, did not to any extent direct itself to service except the spiritual service of other human beings. But as Christianity became a definite social organizing force, it took on a great series of healing, comforting, helping, and educational activities.

"The modern tendency has been and is all in the direction of minimizing what one might call self-centred devotion and self-subjugation, and of expanding and developing external service. The idea of inner perfectibility dwindles with the diminishing importance attached to individuality. We cease to think of mortifying or exalting or perfecting ourselves and seek to lose ourselves in a greater life. We think less and less of "conquering" self and more and more of escaping from self. If we attempt to perfect ourselves in any respect it is only as a soldier sharpens and polishes an essential weapon."

This only makes sense if you take away the entire point of religion: connecting with a higher purpose outside of yourself to find meaning in the chaos around you. To find higher meaning and discover your proper place in the universe is the why it exists to begin with.

Mr. Wells instead makes it about the self and "sharpening" sense and whatnot, but no one joins a religion so they can be a better person, they join it do they can more fully be who they are meant to be. Converts rarely ever convert in order to "better themselves": they convert because they have discovered the truth.

Honest people search for the truth. What else should they be searching for?

This backwards view of religion explains exactly why Fandom hates it so much. They not only see themselves perfect as is, no need to search for truth, they also believe that religious devotion to instead be handed to them. They are perfect, after all. You must look up to them.

The Utopian, at the heart of it, is in it for control. It is a cult more than a religion, though they will never admit it. There is no attempt at understanding the universe or man's relation it it all: it is about educating the Right Things correctly and stomping out Bad Thoughts. This is what this whole Open Conspiracy is, after all.

He also outright admits it is about control:

"Now, in the new and greater universe to which we are awakening, its immense possibilities furnish an entirely new frame and setting for the moral life. In the fixed and limited outlook of the past, practical good works took the form mainly of palliative measures against evils that were conceived of as incurable; the religious community nursed the sick, fed the hungry, provided sanctuary for the fugitive, pleaded with the powerful for mercy. It did not dream of preventing sickness, famine, or tyranny. Other-worldliness was its ready refuge from the invincible evil and confusion of the existing scheme of things.

"But it is possible now to imagine an order in human affairs from which these evils have been largely or entirely eliminated. More and more people are coming to realize that such an order is a material possibility. And with the realization that this is a material possibility, we can no longer be content with a field of "good deeds" and right action restricted to palliative and consolatory activities. Such things are merely "first aid." The religious mind grows bolder than it has ever been before. It pushes through the curtain it once imagined was a barrier. It apprehends its larger obligations. The way in which our activities conduce to the realization of that conceivable better order in human affairs, becomes the new criterion of conduct. Other-worldliness has become unnecessary."

This is gobbledygook, and clearly untrue when one looks at the history of scientific advancement. Here he is either lying, or a 15 year old boy discovering poorly researched YouTube channels circa 2009. Regardless of which, it is a silly point to be making and inexcusably childish.

It's also evil, a way of downplaying Good Deeds instead for vague ideas to be decided upon by a committee of Big Brains. Doing Good isn't enough, now to be Better you have to do something your betters decide is Good, and they will decide what that is for you.

"Other-worldliness" misunderstands the point of doing Good Deeds is to reflect the Greatest Good in the world as best as we can. It's a reflection of the Greatest Good of them all. It's not about Progress or comfort in a meaningless world the logically should have fallen apart many millennia ago. It's about purpose beyond ourselves. For someone who was friends with GK Chesterton, he is surprisingly ignorant on this entire subject.

"To avoid the positive evils of war and to attain the new levels of prosperity and power that now come into view, an effective world control, not merely of armed force, but of the production and main movements of staple commodities and the drift and expansion of population is required. It is absurd to dream of peace and world-wide progress without that much control."

It is absurd to dream of because it will never happen. To believe such a thing is possible is to not understand human nature in the slightest. Though we have established that the one thing Fandom understands least in this world, aside from religion, is other people.

To avoid conflict, we simply need a World Government to watch us all in our sleep so that we don't have bad thoughts. Of course, we all know who will be in control of such things.

Yes, he argued for this out in the open, and yet he has been not once ever criticized for it. Not only that, but this has been kept in print, out in the open, without any supposed freethinkers ever saying a word against it while they devour this ideology whole. It's quite amazing.

"They can be controlled, however, only by an effort more powerful and determined than the instincts and inertias that sustain them. Religion, modern and disillusioned, has for its outward task to set itself to the control and direction of political, social, and economic life. If it does not do that, then it is no more than a drug for easing discomfort, "the opium of the peoples."

In other words, that religious impulse must be put towards the State instead of anything higher, like it was meant for. You are going to worship your world leaders above all else. Do it, fascist. Otherwise you are holding back Progress.

Doesn't sound too different from today, does it?

What mankind must do, is listen to HG Wells.

"Let us make clear what sort of government we are trying to substitute for the patchwork of to-day. It will be a new sort of direction with a new psychology. The method of direction of such a world commonweal is not likely to imitate the methods of existing sovereign states. It will be something new and altogether different."

Anyone reading this knows what resulted in this. How is the modern world that people like Mr. Wells supported working out for you?

"Existing states are primarily militant states, and a world state cannot be militant. There will be little need for president or king to lead the marshalled hosts of humanity, for where there is no war there is no need of any leader to lead hosts anywhere, and in a polyglot world a parliament of mankind or any sort of council that meets and talks is an inconceivable instrument of government. The voice will cease to be a suitable vehicle. World government, like scientific process, will be conducted by statement, criticism, and publication that will be capable of efficient translation."

This is a massively ignorant view on human nature brought about by a deep-seated hatred of others. If only they were as nonviolent and smart as you then they wouldn't start wars. Why can't human beings just be smart like me!

"The fundamental organization of contemporary states is plainly still military, and that is exactly what a world organization cannot be. Flags, uniforms, national anthems, patriotism sedulously cultivated in church and school, the brag, blare, and bluster of our competing sovereignties, belong to the phase of development the Open Conspiracy will supersede. We have to get clear of that clutter. The reasonable desire of all of us is that we should have the collective affairs of the world managed by suitably equipped groups of the most interested, intelligent, and devoted people, and that their activities should be subjected to a free, open, watchful criticism, restrained from making spasmodic interruptions but powerful enough to modify or supersede without haste or delay whatever is weakening or unsatisfactory in the general direction."

Who decides who the "equipped groups" are? It takes a special kind of deluded headcase to believe that all one has to do is put the Right Person/Group in charge will lead the world into Utopia. Humanity does not work that way.

And no, they will never "evolve" or be guided into being like that. We have a century of endlessly chasing Wells' moronic dream to realize it isn't ever going to happen.

It is time to finally expose and dump this failed venture for the lunacy that it is. We've been treading this waters for far too long now.

"We aim at a particular sort of unification; a world Caesar is hardly better from the progressive viewpoint than world chaos; the unity we seek must mean a world-wide liberation of thought, experiment and creative effort."

As I said: Lunacy.

"This candid attempt to take possession of the whole world, this Open Conspiracy of ours, must be made in the name of and for the sake of science and creative activity. Its aim is to release science and creative activity and every stage in the struggle must be watched and criticized, lest there be any sacrifice of these ends to the exigencies of conflict."

"Take possession of the world." For Science!

"The economists, however, will attend seriously only to the current set; the rest they ignore; and the Marxists, with their uncontrollable disposition to use nicknames in the place of judgments, condemn all others as "Utopian"—a word as final in its dismissal from the minds of the elect as that other pet counter in the Communist substitute for thought, "Bourgeois." If they can persuade themselves that an idea or a statement is "Utopian" or "Bourgeois," it does not seem to matter in the least to them whether it is right or wrong. It is disposed of. Just as in genteeler circles anything is disposed of that can be labelled "atheistical", "subversive" or "disloyal.""

Okay, Mr. Wells, would you like a better critique as to why "Utopian" is a good critique for dismissing an argument as stupid as yours? It's actually very simple and based on observable reality. Because humanity does not work that way. 

You can not create a perfect world where every single person is happy and thriving and perfectly good because we are fundamentally broken on a spiritual level. Anyone who has dealt with real evil know that a simple patch job will not fix it. Utopians have objectively broken views of existence and they should never be allowed any sort of control.

This also doesn't go into the fact that whatever world system you set up, even if it was for good reasons, will always eventually be overtaken by someone far craftier and selfish than those you imagine in your deluded brain, and they would weaponize it against all the people they do not like. And as Fandom has shown, they hate normal people quite a lot. Just look at the dying spaces they run today! Do they seem like pleasant places you would want to spend some time in?

Essentially, no matter how it goes, a one world state ends with the majority of people crushed under the bootheel of evil elitists who hate them. It will always be the result.

Therefore, striving for one is evil and stupid, and anyone wishing to build such a thing is either both of those things, or exclusively the former. The definition of Satanic is backwards, and that is exactly what such a thing is.

Is that good enough for you, Mr. Wells?

Technological progress is not any sort of equivalent of the immortal, unchanging soul. People aren't things meant to be tinkered with. We are not cogs to be slotted into the correct clockwork to function the way you desire--we will always find a way to break the insides.

That is simply humanity. Learn to live with it already.

"We know nowadays that the nineteenth century expended a great wealth of intelligence upon a barren controversy between Individualism and Socialism. They were treated as mutually exclusive alternatives, instead of being questions of degree. Human society has been is and always must be an intricate system of adjustments between unconditional liberty and the disciplines and subordinations of co-operative enterprise."

Forget the 20th century, we are still living in the 19th. Talk about tired and overdone.

"But the thought and investigations of the past century or so have made it clear that a classification of property, according to the nature of the rights exercisable and according to the range of ownership involved, must be the basis of any system of social justice in the future."

Like I said, we're still in the 19th century.

"Our antagonists are confusion of mind, want of courage, want of curiosity and want of imagination, indolence, and spendthrift egotism. These are the enemies against which the Open Conspiracy arrays itself; these are the jailers of human freedom and achievement."

No, the antagonists of humanity are Utopians who don't understand the cracks in the human soul and wish to fill them in with the watered down paste they made in their moonshine-stained bathtub. You can't fix human nature because you are a human and your flaws are built in just as they are with everyone. You are not above others, no matter how much you hate and look down on them. You will not Evolve your flaws, your humanity, out of you. It does not work that way.

"We have now stated broadly but plainly the idea of the world commonweal which is the objective of the Open Conspiracy, and we have made a preliminary examination of the composition of that movement, showing that it must be necessarily not a class development, but a convergence of many different sorts of people upon a common idea. Its opening task must be the elaboration, exposition, and propaganda of this common idea, a steady campaign to revolutionize education and establish a modern ideology in men's minds and, arising out of this, the incomparably vaster task of the realization of its ideas."

The originator of Science Fiction Fandom, everyone. This is the ideology this false "genre" was built on, and why it has always been a den for degenerates and destined for the state it is in today. It is a weapon for raving misanthropists.

This is what they took adventures stories away to create.

"These are tasks not to be done in vacuo; they have to be done in a dense world of crowding, incessant, passionate, unco-ordinated activities, the world of market and newspaper, seed-time and harvest, births, deaths, jails, hospitals, riots, barracks and army manoeuvres, false prophets and royal processions, games and shows, fire, storm, pestilence, earthquake, war. Every day and every hour things will be happening to help or thwart, stimulate or undermine, obstruct or defeat the creative effort to set up the world commonweal."

Everything is x-ist and you have to point it out all the time. Never resting, it is your destiny to be a slave to the New World that will be ordered by the big brains who will always be noble and pure of intent because perfect beings such as yourself put them in charge.

That is all you must do. Then everything will be fixed and we can join hands across the whole wide world. Simple!

"The Open Conspiracy is not necessarily antagonistic to any existing government. The Open Conspiracy is a creative, organizing movement and not an anarchistic one. It does not want to destroy existing controls and forms of human association, but either to supersede or amalgamate them into a common world directorate."

The people who scream "fascist" at you for not wanted to be controlled? This is the world they want to create. It's not hypocritical; it's simply projection on their part. Competing visions are objectively evil and must be crushed. Your motive must be the opposite and equivalent of theirs because their hatred has dulled their intellect. This is why they must be crushed--otherwise they will never stop trying to crush you. Sometimes one needs to attack in order to defend. This is why gatekeeping exists and is only ever subverted by those who wish to destroy.

You can't be loyal to anything except the vision. Otherwise, you are to be stamped out. This is how such enemies to humanity think.

If you doubt it, he outright says this is what they must do in order to crush you and everything you love. See for yourself:

"The Open Conspiracy is necessarily opposed to all such implacable loyalties, and still more so to the aggressive assertion and propaganda of such loyalties. When these things take the form of suppressing reasonable criticism and forbidding even the suggestion of other forms of government, they become plainly antagonists to any comprehensive project for human welfare. They become manifestly, from the wider point of view, seditious, and loyalty to "king and country" passes into plain treason to mankind."

I hope you see the irony in the above insanity. He's calling you treasonous to humanity for simply being a human.

The origins of Clown World at work.

"In the great mass of the modern community there is little more than a favourable acquiescence in patriotic ideas and in the worship of patriotic symbols, and that is based largely on such training. These things are not necessary things for the generality of to-day. A change of mental direction would be possible for the majority of people now without any violent disorganization of their intimate lives or any serious social or economic readjustments for them. Mental infection in such cases could be countered by mental sanitation."

"Mental sanitation," he says. We all know what this means.

Mr. Wells assertion that everyone will just fall in line with this nonsense betrays classical ignorance of a man of his time and place.

"Ordinary religious organizations, again, exist for self-preservation and are prone to follow rather than direct the currents of popular thought. They are kept alive, indeed, by revivalism and new departures which at the outlet they are apt to resist, as the Catholic Church, for instance, resisted the Franciscan awakening, but their formal disposition is conservative. They say to religious development, thus far and no farther."

Again, he was friends with GK Chesterton. He could have probably told him quite easily how myopic this view is.

Now I really do think Chesterton should be canonized. To think he had to deal with this on a constant basis without blowing his top. We could all learn valuable lessons in patience and charity from GK Chesterton.

I couldn't imagine listening to this nonsense with a straight face:

"Here, in school, college, and church, are activities of thought and instruction which, generally speaking, drag upon the wheels of progress, but which need not necessarily do so. A schoolmaster may be original, stimulating, and creative, and if he is fortunate and a good fighter he may even achieve considerable worldly success; university teachers and investigators may strike out upon new lines and yet escape destruction by the older dons. Universities compete against other universities at home and abroad and cannot altogether yield to the forces of dullness and subservience. They must maintain a certain difference from vulgar opinion and a certain repute of intellectual virility."

This explains a lot about how degraded many of these places are in thought and influence today in the modern world. They are followers of the World Brain, they do not seek to connect others--they seek to operate above them. 

A dead thing floats with the stream, not against it. The modern world is as dead as it gets.

"A vast amount of moral force has been wasted in the past hundred years by the antagonism of "Labour" to "Capital," as though this were the primary issue in human affairs. But this never was the primary issue, and it is steadily receding from its former importance. The ancient civilizations did actually rest upon a broad basis of slavery and serfdom. Human muscle was a main source of energy-ranking with sun, wind, and flood. But invention and discovery have so changed the conditions under which power is directed and utilized that muscle becomes economically secondary and inessential. We no longer want hewers of wood and drawers of water, carriers and pick and spade men. We no longer want that breeding swarm of hefty sweaty bodies without which the former civilizations could not have endured. We want watchful and understanding guardians and drivers of complex delicate machines, which can be mishandled and brutalized and spoilt all too easily. The less disposed these masters of our machines are to inordinate multiplication, the more room and food in the world for their ampler lives. Even to the lowest level of a fully-mechanicalized civilization it is required that the human element should be select. In the modern world, crowds are a survival, and they will presently be an anachronism, and crowd psychology therefore cannot supply the basis of a new order."

Did you see what he inferred with this passage? Ancient civilization was built on serfs and slavery, but now the things we need are much different from those days.

However, he never said serfdom itself was outdated. This is a key point his acolytes and unknowing followers decades later are completely ignorant on. That is the truth slavery is good when it is for the New Order. The World Brain will do your thinking for you--all one has to do is follow the new morals and rules they will decide for you.

"The Open Conspiracy can have little use for mere resentments as a driving force towards its ends; it starts with a proposal not to exalt the labour class but to abolish it, its sustaining purpose is to throw drudges out of employment and eliminate the inept—and it is far more likely to incur suspicion and distrust in the lower ranks of the developing industrial order of to-day than to win support there. There, just as everywhere else in the changing social complexes of our time, it can appeal only to the exceptionally understanding individual who can without personal humiliation consider his present activities and relationships as provisional and who can, without taking offence, endure a searching criticising of his present quality and mode of living."

Is there really anything to say to this? He thinks of you as an amoeba, barely worthy of consideration. And he's also going to fix the world by molding you correctly.

This post is long enough, and I'm not even going to bother with the chapter where he insists not-westernized cultures be inundated with westernized modern thought about progress, since you already see that going around today. We should move it along. It's just more of the same elitism from a plague of modernist thinking that has never really gone away.

"There is no "we," and there can be no "we," in possession of the Open Conspiracy.

"The Open Conspiracy is in partial possession of us, and we attempt to serve it. But the Open Conspiracy is a natural and necessary development of contemporary thought arising here, there, and everywhere. There are doubts and sympathies that weigh on the side of the Open Conspiracy in nearly everyone, and not one of us but retains many impulses, habits, and ideas in conflict with our general devotion, checking and limiting our service."

As has been emphasized many times, this is a cult. The entire aim of this "idea" is to control the idiots via the handpicked elite that will be pure because pure people picked them. It sounds insane no matter how you slice it.

"Can the modern mind work in societies? May the daily paper be slowly usurping the functions of morning prayer, a daily mental reminder of large things, with more vividness and, at present, lower standards?"

I think we all know the answer to this, especially in the 21st century. The human mind wasn't built for modernity, and it has never fit. We've been hammering a square peg in a round hole for centuries at this point, refusing to give up on this failure.

And now it is coming down around our ears while our very smart elites still strive for this ridiculous unachievable pipedream utopia.

We will never get better until we live this all behind.

"The modern temple in which we shall go to meditate may be a museum; the modern religious house and its religious life may be a research organization. The Open Conspirator must see to it that the museums show their meaning plain. There may be not only literature presently, but even plays, shows, and music, to subserve new ideas instead of trading upon tradition."

And there you have the Pop Cult of today. Are you enjoying reading about the Wells' tradition of propaganda for impossible functionally impossible utopias? Perhaps you now know why something such as the Pulp Revolution was necessary to break out of the modernity ghetto.

We can't put that genie back in the bottle, nor should we strive to. Instead we must finally abandon these failed ways that have lead to the destruction of sanity around us.

"We cannot compromise with these vestiges of the ancient order and be faithful servants of the new. Whatever we retain of them will come back to life and grow again. It is no good to operate for cancer unless the whole growth is removed. Leave a crown about and presently you will find it being worn by someone resolved to be a king. Keep the name and image of a god without a distinct museum label and sooner or later you will discover a worshipper on his knees to it and be lucky not to find a human sacrifice upon the altar. Wave a flag and it will wrap about you. Of yourself even more than of the community is this true; these can be no half measures. You have not yet completed your escape to the Open Conspiracy from the cities of the plain while it is still possible for you to take a single backward glance."

Does this not explain every modern problem we currently face from those who wish to usurp old orders to create new ones with themselves at the head of it? The assault on the past is an ongoing effort to make certain you have nothing to return to, and have no thoughts outside the new acceptable orthodoxy being enforced around you.

Mindlessly react to everything you see in the news. If not, you are the villain who must be purged from polite company. You are an enemy if you aren't rewriting the past for the glorious oncoming Utopia. Only enemies question the World Brain.

This is why an upcoming Worldcon will be held in China outside concentration camps, run by the very same people who live off saying how politically and socially righteous they are, while they detonate their own scene around them. They will beleive whatever makes them feel like they are the most righteous and brilliant person in the room.

They care very much about Progress, you see; the Progress they were taught to unthinkingly believe in. They just hate normality far more, especially those who are normal. Look hard enough and you can even find insulting nicknames they created just for the average man!

That you won't let your betters control your life makes them all very angry and unpleasant. How can we live in peace if you aren't repeating the homilies network news anchors are feeding you? Get with the times, defect.

"I have told already how I have schemed out a group of writings to embody the necessary ideas of the new time in a form adapted to the current reading public; I have made a sort of provisional "Bible," so to speak, for some factors at least in the Open Conspiracy. It is an early sketch. As the current reading public changes, all this work will become obsolescent so far as its present form and method go. But not so far as its substantial method goes. That I believe will remain."

He was right on that one. It is still around, even dumber and more decayed just as entropy promised it would be. The Open Conspiracy is a good name for it, because it's right there in plain view, everyone can see it, but no one offers resistance to its insanity.

Hence the terrible modern state of things.

"At present this propaganda has to go on among adolescents and adults because of the backwardness and political conservatism of existing educational organizations. Most real modern education now is done in spite of the schools and to correct the misconceptions established by the schools. But what will begin as adult propaganda must pass into a kultur-kampf to win our educational machinery from reaction and the conservation of outworn ideas and attitudes to the cause of world reconstruction. The Open Conspiracy itself can never be imprisoned and fixed in the form of an organization, but everywhere Open Conspirators should be organizing themselves for educational reform."

This is something else that happened. All one has to do is look at how terrible schooling is today as well as what is taught in them. They are teaching stupid things, not to educate, but to make them empty vessels to pump in constantly updating propaganda.

The Science Fiction Fanatic's highest joy in life has come true. The Futurians would be crying tears of joy.

"Fundamentally important issues upon which unanimity must be achieved from the outset are:

"Firstly, the entirely provisional nature of all existing governments, and the entirely provisional nature, therefore, of all loyalties associated therewith; 

Secondly, the supreme importance of population control in human biology and the possibility it affords us of a release from the pressure of the struggle for existence on ourselves; and 

Thirdly, the urgent necessity of protective resistance against the present traditional drift towards war."

Boy, he really did lay it out, didn't he? Even the last three years as of this writing show all of this at the forefront of every media campaign against the normal man and in great force. All for the Greater Good, of course.

It hasn't worked, and it never will work, but they aren't going to stop trying any time soon. Utopians live in a bubble reality, after all.

"People who do not grasp the vital significance of these test issues do not really begin to understand the Open Conspiracy. Groups coming into agreement upon these matters, and upon their general interpretation of history, will be in a position to seek adherents, enlarge themselves, and attempt to establish communication and co-operation with kindred groups for common ends. They can take up a variety of activities to develop a sense and habit of combined action and feel their way to greater enterprises."

Watch as he goes on and on to describe Fandom itself.

"We have seen already that the Open Conspiracy must be heterogeneous in origin. Its initial groupings and associations will be of no uniform pattern. They will be of a very different size, average age, social experience, and influence. Their particular activities will be determined by the things. Their diverse qualities and influences will express themselves by diverse attempts at organization, each effective in its own sphere. A group or movement of students may find itself capable of little more than self-education and personal propaganda; a handful of middle-class people in small town may find its small resources fully engaged at first in such things as, for example, seeing that desirable literature is available for sale or in local public library, protecting books and news vendors from suppression, or influencing local teachers. Most parents of school children can press for the teaching of universal history and sound biology and protest against the inculcation of aggressive patriotism. There is much scope for the single individual in this direction. On the other hand, a group of ampler experience and resources may undertake the printing, publication, and distribution of literature, and exercise considerable influence upon public opinion in turning education in the right direction. The League of Nations movement, the Birth Control movement, and most radical and socialist societies, are fields into which Open Conspirators may go to find adherents more than half prepared for their wider outlook. The Open Conspiracy is a fuller and ampler movement into which these incomplete activities must necessarily merge as its idea takes possession of men's imaginations."

Here he is telling you how all the nonsense of modernity got cooked up by this kooky cult. This is the legacy of those in Fandom and so-called "Science Fiction" who wish to reshape the world itself. They are not looking towards a future: they are looking towards your enslavement.

"Since they are bound to be different and miscellaneous in form, size, quality, and ability, any early attempts to organize them into common general action or even into regular common gatherings are to be deprecated. There should be many types of groups. Collective action had better for a time - perhaps for a long time—be undertaken not through the merging of groups but through the formation of ad hoc associations for definitely specialized ends, all making for the new world civilization."

This, by the way, is why your hobby spaces were invaded, subverted, and destroyed, and if you complain about it you are called every name in the book. It's also why you're not getting those spaces back. This is how the cult operates.

Either join them, or you can have nothing. They don't make the rules, they just mindlessly follow along with them.

"At the utmost seven broad principles may be stated as defining the Open Conspiracy and holding it together. And it is possible even of these, one, the seventh, may be, if not too restrictive, at least unnecessary. To the writer it seems unavoidable because it is so intimately associated with that continual dying out of tradition upon which our hopes for an unencumbered and expanding human future rest.

(1) The complete assertion, practical as well as theoretical, of the provisional nature of existing governments and of our acquiescence in them;

(2) The resolve to minimize by all available means the conflicts of these governments, their militant use of individuals and property, and their interferences with the establishment of a world economic system;

(3) The determination to replace private, local or national ownership of at least credit, transport, and staple production by a responsible world directorate serving the common ends of the race;

(4) The practical recognition of the necessity for world biological controls, for example, of population and disease;

(5) The support of a minimum standard of individual freedom and welfare in the world; and

(6) The supreme duty of subordinating the personal career to the creation of a world directorate capable of these tasks and to the general advancement of human knowledge, capacity, and power;

(7) The admission therewith that our immortality is conditional and lies in the race and not in our individual selves."

It is nice for him to easily sum up his madness like this, because otherwise he rambles on and on. I'm having to skim a lot at this point.

Here he makes it even more obvious:

"Science is a hard mistress, and the first condition of successful scientific work is that the scientific man should stick to his research. The world of science is therefore in itself, at its core, a miscellany of specialists, often very ungracious specialists, and, rather than offer him help and co-operation, it calls for understanding, tolerance, and service from the man of general intelligence and wider purpose. The company of scientific men is less like a host of guiding angels than like a swarm of marvellous bees --endowed with stings—which must be hived and cherished and multiplied by the Open Conspiracy.

"But so soon as we have the Open Conspiracy at work, putting its plainly and offering its developing ideas and activities to those most preciously preoccupied men, then reasonably, when it involves no special trouble for them, when it is the line of least resistance for them, they may be expected to fall in with its convenient and helpful aims and find in it what they have hitherto lacked, a common system of political and social concepts to hold them together."

Are you Trusting The Science yet, Chud? You better, because it's mandatory, even when it's openly admitted that its massaged for ideological aims. Just shut up and unthinkingly obey. That's all you need to do.

"The Open Conspiracy must help the man of science to realize, what at present he fails most astonishingly to realize, that he belongs to a greater comity than any king or president represents to-day, and so prepare him for better behaviour in the next season of trial."

The Free Thinkers are really living up to their moniker, no? Keep in mind, all of your rebel writers and artists all fall in line on this point. They were not for Free Thinking, they were for Freedom From Thinking. They just need you to think what they pump into your head.

Science!

"So in relation to science—and here the word is being used in its narrower accepted meaning for what is often spoken of as pure science, the search for physical and biological realities, uncomplicated by moral, social, and "practical" considerations—we evoke a conception of the Open Conspiracy as producing groups of socially associated individuals, who engage primarily in the general basic activities of the Conspiracy and adhere to and promote the seven broad principles summarized at the end of Chapter Fourteen, but who work also with the larger part of their energies, through international and cosmopolitan societies and in a multitude of special ways, for the establishment of an enduring and progressive world organization of pure research. They will have come to this special work because their distinctive gifts, their inclinations, their positions and opportunities have indicated it as theirs."

Now you know why they have such frothing hatred for things such as morality, the social contract, tradition, and common sense. This is because they wish to overthrow it all for their own kingdom of dung.

If you wish to know why they allow so much stuff to go out of print and then slander and libel it into the dirt, then there is a very good reason for that!

It's built into their creed.

"We have already pointed out that there is a strong disposition towards conservatism in normal educational institutions. They preserve traditions rather than develop them. They are likely to set up a considerable resistance to the reconstruction of the world outlook upon the threefold basis defined in Chapter Fourteen. This resistance must be attacked by special societies, by the establishment of competing schools, by help and promotion for enlightened teachers, and, wherever the attack is incompletely successful, it must be supplemented by the energetic diffusion of educational literature for adults, upon modern lines. The forces of the entire movement may be mobilized in a variety of ways to bring pressure upon reactionary schools and institutions."

He sure is describing what life is like in the 21st century a little too well, no? Almost as if someone has been following his blueprint for him.

"The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It will have become a great world movement as wide-spread and evident as socialism or communism. It will have taken the place of these movements very largely. It will be more than they were, it will be frankly a world religion. This large, loose assimilatory mass of movements, groups, and societies will be definitely and obviously attempting to swallow up the entire population of the world and become the new human community."

This is the endgame, yes. None of this is surprising if you've looked into the Pop Cult, rabid Fandoms, the Science Fiction watercarriers, or the Death Cult. This is what they all strive to create: a completely unfeasible world based on a misunderstanding of humanity.

And they all hate you.

"Consider, for example, the movement for a scientific study and control of population pressure, known popularly as the Birth Control movement. By itself, assuming existing political and economic conditions, this movement lays itself open to the charge of being no better than a scheme of "race suicide." If a population in some area of high civilization attempts to restrict increase, organize its economic life upon methods of maximum individual productivity, and impose order and beauty upon its entire territory, that region will become irresistibly attractive to any adjacent festering mass of low-grade, highly reproductive population. The cheap humanity of the one community will make a constant attack upon the other, affording facile servility, prostitutes, toilers, hand labour. Tariffs against sweated products, restriction of immigration, tensions leading at last to a war of defensive massacre are inevitable. The conquest of an illiterate, hungry, and incontinent multitude may be almost as disastrous as defeat for the selecter race. Indeed, one finds that in discussion the propagandists of Birth Control admit that their project must be universal or dysgenic. But yet quite a number of them do not follow up these admissions to their logical consequences, produce the lines and continue the curves until the complete form of the Open Conspiracy appears. It will be the business of the early Open Conspiracy propagandists to make them do so, and to install groups and representatives at every possible point of vantage in this movement."

Do I have to add anything to this insanity? This is what Fandom actually believes, after all. That is, if they think their worldview through at all.

"Whenever possible, the Open Conspiracy will advance by illumination and persuasion. But it has to advance, and even from the outset, where it is not allowed to illuminate and persuade, it must fight. Its first fights will probably be for the right to spread its system of ideas plainly and clearly throughout the world."

Perhaps one could consider hitting people with bike locks a good start.

"But there is still much actual warfare before mankind, on the frontiers everywhere, against brigands, against ancient loyalties and traditions which will become at last no better than excuses for brigandage and obstructive exaction. All the weight of the Open Conspiracy will be on the side of the world order and against that sort of local independence which holds back its subject people from the citizenship of the world."

You will always have pesky freethinkers that must be stomped underfoot. Notice also how he frames "ancient loyalties and traditions" and how they will "become at last no better than excuses" admitting that it will take great deception to get these people to hate things they traditionally loved and gave them order in their lives.

No room for that with your new scientific masters. Now you are a puppet. You are "free" according to Mr. Wells' backwards moon logic, but you are a Free Puppet.

This is the absurdity of the scientism that undergirds modernity.

"It is no part of modern religion to incur needless hardship or go out of the way to seek martyrdom. If we can do our work easily and happily, so it should be done. But the work is not to be shirked because it cannot be done easily and happily. The vision of a world at peace and liberated for an unending growth of knowledge and power is worth every danger of the way. And since in this age of confusion we must live imperfectly and anyhow die, we may as well suffer, if need be, and die for a great end as for none. Never has the translation of vision into realities been easy since the beginning of human effort. The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price --and who can tell what that price may be?—in toil, suffering, and blood."

This is the plague of humanism; nihilists who are to frightened to do anything but strive for more physical comforts and chemicals to ease the pain of their worthless existence. Your life might be objectively meaningless, you see, but you have to pretend it's not so you can at least have small bits of scientifically-proven chemical reactions known as feelings overtake your empty husk of a body every now and then.

Anything to avoid believing in anything, or believing in nothing. You have to pick one, but humanists always choose the laziest way out of the choice. The one that allows them to blind their senses with sugar highs in order to avoid thinking about the issue.

He even says as much himself. This is his shallow version of what "happiness" is:

"The oppression of incessant toil can surely be lifted from everyone, and the miseries due to a great multitude of infections and disorders of nutrition and growth cease to be a part of human experience. Few people are perfectly healthy nowadays except for brief periods of happiness, but the elation of physical well-being will some day be the common lot of mankind."

He goes on:

"And not only from natural evils will man be largely free. He will not be left with his soul tangled, haunted by monstrous and irrational fears and a prey to malicious impulse. From his birth he will breathe sweetness and generosity and use his mind and hands cleanly and exactly. He will feel better, will better, think better, see, taste, and hear better than men do now. His undersoul will no longer be a mutinous cavern of ill-treated suppressions and of impulses repressed without understanding. All these releases are plainly possible for him. They pass out of his tormented desire now, they elude and mock him, because chance, confusion, and squalor rule his life. All the gifts of destiny are overlaid and lost to him. He must still suspect and fear. Not one of us is yet as clear and free and happy within himself as most men will some day be. Before mankind lies the prospect not only of health but of magnanimity."

They will be happy, unless they decide to paint outside the lines. Then they will be forcibly restrained and either executed or have their brain scrambled in order to prevent disturbing the lobotomized sheep grazing in the pastures of hippie world.

This is the key flaw in all of this nonsense that has held up the shaky foundation of Fandom and all its adjoining cults. Human beings do not work this way. Your average person is never going to stop questioning assumptions, looking at alternate avenues, or disagreeing with you in general. No matter how much you call them bad names, or turn off their bank accounts, or threaten their lives, there will always be a large contingent that will simply be against you on a base level. This is human nature, it is built into us. It will never go away.

I suspect Mr. Wells knows this, which is why he is Open Conspiracy involves forever stepping in the neck of anyone outside the World Order, whenever they arise, to keep their garden of lies forever watered by the blood of the lessers.

Most think you shouldn't attribute bad intentions to malice, but stupidity, which is itself a malicious lie. It is easily disproven with basic thought.

A "stupid" idea like putting ice cream on your pizza will hurt you, as it should. The resulting heartburn will stop you from ever doing it again. It was a dumb idea, and you will stop. There is no maliciousness here, because it's pure stupidity. That is what pure stupidity is, free from evil. There is nothing complex about it, because little or bad thought was put into it to begin with.

A complex plan and scheme that requires rewiring human nature itself is not stupid. A stupid person would never be able to gather the thoughts to make such a proposal. It requires malicious intent, which Mr. Wells states outright in the book.

There is some level of stupidity in misunderstanding humanity to that extent, but maliciousness outranks by far. 

Hanlon was incorrect. Evil ideas are malicious first, stupidity far behind it. This is simply how humanity works. There is no situation in which the opposite is true. all this does is give cover to evil people to continue scheming, or running your country.

"The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare, an infantile nightmare, of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light of day thrusts between our eyelids, and the multitudinous sounds of morning clamour in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously, "Was there ever such a world?""

For instance, this is stupid. No one will deny that. However, it has its roots in a fundamentally evil idea that deliberately ignore the evil it will inflict on its subject. The stupidity rolls off the evil intent this entire ideology is baked in.

This is how he chooses to end the book, with a question of an idiot with no conception of past of present, most likely drooling into a cup. This is the Utopian future Mr. Wells imagines.

And this is what Fandom has always desired. This is why the "genre" they champion is always left with him as figurehead. This is the world they fight, lie, cheat, and slander for. This is why adventure storytelling had to go, and why the "Science Fiction" ghetto is the current home of mindless cultists giving their friends awards that don't mean anything for stories that exit as little more than propaganda tracts.

All of it is for the world of H.G. Wells.

So when one speaks of a "Wells tradition" one must keep in mind they are referring to a totalitarian ideology based on control through propaganda and brainwashing. There is nothing here about entertainment or higher purpose: it is about control.

An entire scene was built around this ideology, one that beats at the heart of what is happening in the wider world today. Fandom runs, and has always run, off this anti-humanity agenda, their hatred for God and reality at the forefront of it, masked in their love of popular culture trappings. There is no art to be found in such things.

The truth is that Fandom is on its death bed, modernity is on its last legs, and all the things HG Wells strove for are long gone and forgotten, much like this book. There is nothing to be gained here--whether as an artist or a human being. There is just rot and ugliness beating at the heart of this morass we allowed to fester for far too long.

Instead, it is time to move on to better things, as Mr. Lundwall said long ago. We will not being moving on to his world. No, that one is as dead as Mr. Wells' fever dreams in this sad little book. We will be moving on to a better one, free from the shackles of the festering bloat corpse of modernism still chained to our ankles.

Once it is gone we can finally reach those better days we have long since been waiting for. Then we can finally bury the dead where they belong.

All we have to do is face the world.

Modern stories in a classical vein!

Tomorrow

Over the years since starting Wasteland & Sky I've learned a few things. I must admit that they aren't things I expected to learn, but that's how life goes. They are takeaways, regardless. Times change, and so do thoughts and opinions. No one stays the same.

One truth remains and that is that there is no real end of history. The world goes on and on and eventually it will all end, but history itself doesn't. It's always going to be behind us, and we'll be taking it with us when we leave to wherever we have to go next. This doesn't mean the truth can't be hidden from us by parties with more power than we have, but it still doesn't change what actually happened and how it rolls out to affect the rest of the world. Regardless of if you believe the grass isn't green that doesn't suddenly mean it is now purple, even if you believe it is from the bottom of your heart. Wishes don't change anything.

The world is what it is, whether you take it or leave it.

As I've covered more than a few times here, there are plenty of people today who believe they are writing some grand narrative in their head that will refashion and alter reality to be the way they want it. Writers today are trained to do this. Whether it is by hating the audience and aiming for a fictitious replacement for them that exists only in their head, or by creating new "genres" out of their personal pet philosophies in order to conquer public discourse and warp minds, this isn't a new happening. It's just gotten far too accepted over the course of the 20th century. Keep the artist and the audience completely separate and don't be surprised when they have radically ideas of the definition of such simple terms such as "good" or even "reality." We're living in the ruins of such thought processes today in the post postmodern world.

Regardless, there was a time when art was created for the audience first and then everything flowed from there. Over time, however, as we've seen, slowly we've twisted definitions of words and group definitions to now make the customer the enemy, the original sources aberrations of the now "accepted" new canon, and the traditional morals and people that allowed all these things to be made to begin with as objectively evil and wrong groups who should be destroyed and spat on whenever the chance arises. In other words, everything is now backwards and we are just supposed to accept this new state of normality. All while depression, drug usage, and suicide, is constantly on the rise. It's a mad world, after all.

This is one of the reasons the 20th century is not going to be looked back well on at all in the future. When you look at all of this from a bird's eye view you can't see what is going on today as anything other than Clown World, where everything is stupid and falling apart at the seems. The main reason to not despair over this is the truth that Clown World can not continue on indefinitely. Despite how it might feel, and how long this inane modernity might be dragging on, the way things are will not last forever.

The times do seem to be getting worse just about every day in the modern age. You see it every day if you bother to watch the sensationalistic news or go near any of the corporate owned media franchises. It all consists of weaponry against normality and sanity, bent on making you a zealot for the here and now cause they decided at their whim. Hard to deny this if you've been paying attention for the last half decade or so. The people in charge hate and wish to control you, and will do just about anything to cause division with you and your neighbor and family in order to gain the authority position in your life. Things are getting nasty out there, and they are going to get nastier.

I'm certain you've heard much of the doom and gloom bathing everything, especially recently. For the last four years or so there appears to be a new crisis every few months. Aside from that hysteria, which is bad enough on its own, we can't even have any escapism to get away from it for even a few seconds. You see all sorts of comments from people with "power" and "prestige" the correct ways to create, despite they themselves not being able to create much at all. Even worse is some of the defeatism that comes out of even those who should know better to excuse the current state of things. These are people who will do anything to avoid moving on.

You've probably heard some of the following things said. No one reads anymore, so we shouldn't write. Everyone watches television movies in theatres streaming, so we should meet the audience where they are and pander to that. Video games are the future, but only certain types. Don't color outside the lines and do what is currently successful. Invest in something--as long as it's visual and Hollywood-like or on the internet, even though Hollywood is currently dying and the internet is being locked down as we speak. Whatever you do, you must keep up with the ever-changing modern world and meet the present where it is. Think about tomorrow by doing what is popular today.

But, that was yesterday.

The nonsense that has piled up over the last few years should prove one thing for most of us, and that is that the current way of things is already passing on. In an era defined by rushing to the newest thing at faster and faster rates throughout the past century, we've long since hit the wall. Nothing lasts for long, and everything is a flash in the pan. Everything.

Think of the last really popular new thing you know, by which I mean a phenomenon extremely popular among large swaths of people, and you won't find much, and what you do find is nothing that stuck around very long before the next new thing came around. We are always hunting for the next trend at faster and faster rates. We refuse to be satiated for even a moment.

This is not a sustainable way of creating art. It's just trend chasing for novelty and the next buzz. Nothing sticks for long because everyone is just looking for their next hit, the newest drug. If that is all art is going to be treated as, which is what it has been for some time now, then why bother making it at all? There is no point participating in a grinding conveyor belt machine of product meant for little more than another buzz before cranking out the next one.

I'm not talking about creating things quickly: the pulp era was a century ago and they worked fast. I'm talking about consuming it like it were alcohol then tossing it aside before instantly moving on to the next mug. Creating work meant to be disposed of and forgotten instantly after usage is not really creating: it's supplying. Art isn't a fix.

That isn't creating--that's supplying soma. There is no reason to be part of a system like that, especially when megacorps are already falling over themselves doing that for their personal streaming services and failing big bookstores. The big dogs are already pandering to the lowest common denominator as you read this. What is the point of independent and smaller works being created if they're just going to match this failing model that has no future?

We should think higher. Not in terms of high and low art, but in terms of what the art is meant to invoke in the first place. Consuming and disposing is not a purpose.

I know there are many artists of all mediums worried about relevance and success in the modern day, but they also appear to be missing the point of creating art to begin with. Much has to do with today's expectations, most of which are tied to the most popular pieces of their childhood from the 1970s through the 1990s. None of that takes into account that those years were an aberration on how art has worked throughout all of history, and that the era of your childhood is long over and currently a haunting specter over how everything works now. It appears a new perspective on this subject needs to be given: a perspective much older than any of us.

The first is a realization most probably don't want to hear. There is a very real possibility that you will never make much of anything off of your art in your lifetime, or that no one will read it as long as you breathe. It could very well happen.

This wasn't even that uncommon in the much imitated 20th century. H.P. Lovecraft died in poverty. Robert E. Howard's success mainly arrived decades after he had died. There are countless bands from the Velvet Underground to The Replacements that had no real success when they were around but became influential and known after they had already broken up. The JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series took multiple decades for it to crack success worldwide, mostly from a new anime adaption. Blade Runner was infamously a bomb in its original release before going on to become one of the most influential movies of the century. These are just a handful of examples.

In other words, obsessing over the here and now is missing the point, especially when one doesn't know what tomorrow will bring. Plenty of things do not take off how or when you wish they would. We work on God's schedule, not our own. You don't know what tomorrow will bring.

One of my favorite pieces on this subject is author John C. Wright's essay entitled "Your Book of Gold." It was one he had written years back that still sticks in my mind today.

The article states, in part:

"If you only write one book in your whole life, and only sell 600 copies or less, nonetheless, I assure you, I solemnly assure you, that this book will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time, and it will come to him on some dark day and give him sunlight, and open his eyes and fill his heart and make him see things in life even you never suspected, and will be his most precious tale, and it will live in his heart like the Book of Gold."

If even one person reads your book, or indulges in your art, for even a second, and they get something out of it: then it is a success. Do not concern yourself with numbers as you have limited control over those. Concern yourself for making your art all it can be. That is your job.

Art can do wonders to the soul, especially if it connects. Should you do your best to connect, then it is hard to imagine not being able to do so at least on some level.

This is, after all, the main point. Monetary reward is secondary. Yes, even with pulp writing. That doesn't mean it isn't important at all, but it is not first.

As an example, Weird Tales was a middling success when it was around. It did decently but had little in the way of budget and had to use tasteful nude covers to attract buyers. The market back then was tough, after all. Many authors left Weird Tales for higher paying markets like the splatter and shudder pulps to make more money. That was their prerogative--who knows how much they needed the money, after all.

However, Weird Tales is now looked back on as one of the most influential and important magazines of its time. Any author who ran in its pages is given automatic prestige today for being in it. Those higher paying magazines? All gone and forgotten: most never reprinted. But the work many thought would never get seen? It's highly sought after now. The magazine has such prestige that modern grifters think buying the name and slapping it against their modern stories gives them instant credibility. This wouldn't have happened without the passage of time.

You simply do not know the future. That is the point.

But Mr. Wright goes on:

"I write for that one reader I will never see, the one who needs just such a tale as I can pen, in just such a time and place, some rainy afternoon or dark hour, when providence will bring my book into his hands. And he will open it, and it will not be a book, but a casement, from which he will glimpse the needed vision his soul requires of a world larger than our own, or a star in a heaven wider and higher than ours, a star aflame with magic more majestic than any star mortal astronomers can name.

"I humbly but strongly suggest you write for that unknown reader also, and not for worldly praise, or influence, or self, or applause. The world flatters popular authors, and the clamor of the multitude of brazen tongues is vanity. It is dust on the wind. The unknown reader will greet your work with love. It is a crown of adamant, solid and enduring.

"You will never meet that one reader, not in this life. In heaven he will come to you and fall on his face and anoint your feet with tears of gratitude, and you will stand astonished and humbled, having never suspected."

The future is unknown, but one thing is for certain: what you do matters, even if you do not see the results tangibly in your lifetime, and even if it isn't much from your point of view. This all goes on after you are gone, after all. Everything you do effects someone else somehow in someway you will never see or experience in this world. This is what our art should reflect. That's just how the world is and always was.

And I take that seriously.

I had a dream not too long ago. In fact, this was being added to the post when I woke from it. This was not the sort of dream I tend to have, so I found it best to write it down here. It is very relevant to the changing world around us.

What I remember was bizarre because it came oddly clear to me. I was in the mall of my youth, most of the stores were now gone and replaced with either empty rooms or far inferior establishments with little to be seen in them aside from old paint jobs and sparse décor like a handful of white curtains on the walls (there were no windows). There were few to no people in any of the shops, it was so empty you could hear the footsteps echoing down the halls. The parking lot outside was also almost barren with around two cars to be seen. There remained an odd feeling of smallness as I looked over it all where it once seemed so big when I was a child.

Speaking of the outside, it was even more odd than the mall. Half the stores across the street were also closed, either being rebuilt or constructed, or simply taken down. The road itself hadn't been repaved recently, crumbling quite badly after decades of neglect. The people nearby were confused at the world around them, the one they knew so well and so long, appeared to be going away. And sure enough, in real life, it was and is.

The entire experience reminded me of the song "Sunstroke" by the band Less Than Jake. The subject is one I think is more relevant today than ever.

When did I become

A tourist in the city I got my name from?

How did construction sites

Rise up on streets with shoes tied to old power lines?

And I'll never question why

Or where I draw the line

I'm too stubborn to decide

It's like living on a fault line

And I'm too stubborn to decide

The old saying goes

You're only missed when you start to like being alone

I'm left here in a pose

With steel beams and the fact that I'm just flesh and bone

And I'll never question why

Or where I draw the line

I'm too stubborn to decide

It's like living on a fault line

And I'm too stubborn to decide

That song was about Gen X getting older and realizing the world they grew up in was physically gone, and only really exists now in their memory. It was more metaphorical when it was written nearly a decade ago. The difference today is that these things are vanishing a lot more quickly and are more noticeable in scope and frequency.

The thing is, the real life area of the above dream is not too far from actually looking like this. Most of the places near where I grew up are long gone and paved over. It's now a patchwork of badly-aged brutalist buildings both empty and barely functional, mid-20th century megacorp franchises that just won't die, and rusted steel and badly paved roads that haven't been touched up since I was a grade schooler. It's fairly dead, and it isn't ever coming back.

It's all part of yesterday. There is no tomorrow coming for them.

Outside of that dream, I had been thinking about several other areas just like it for some time now. I remember what these places were like when they were full of people, of actual life, decades ago, where now walks almost no one, empty lots of torn up pavement with grass growing through the cracks, and barred windows under old, unclean signs. The dream might not have been the exact reality, but it definitely represented what had happened to it quite well. At the rate we're going, the place I grew up in will be a ghost town within a decade.

This is the bigger point here. All the things that were prosperous so long ago are dying now. That era is over.

You never know what the future is going to hold. This is why the current obsession with trying to be big today, in the here and now, when things are at their bleakest and rot covers everything like a disease-infested blanket, is a losing game. Being king of the junkpile might feel good for a few minutes before you are dethroned by the next flash in the pan constantly being rotated in by our fast moving ADD culture. You are missing the forest for the trees trying to fit work of vitality and life into a climate that is on its death bed and falling apart at an astonishing speed. Aim higher than modernity's mediocrity. You're going to have to, at this point.

If your work is truly relevant in a culture of destruction then no one will pay it any mind today regardless. Most modernists are too busy consuming the things that are killing them to even notice. A smaller, more discerning group will be looking for what you offer--and they might not even find you in your lifetime. There is no way to know. But they will never find you if they're trying to get away from the dross that chased them away from your genre or medium to begin with, while you stay behind reveling in it hoping for kudos instead. This is backwards.

You're going to have to aim higher than this; there is no choice but to do it. Get better, go big, and do what you've got to do. Floating with the stream isn't going to get you ahead; you're going to have to risking sinking by swimming hard.

This is the way it's going to be in the roaring '20s. We no longer have much in the way of safety nets of reliable plans going forward. All the roadmaps are for roads that no longer exist and places long since torn down. The systems we thought would always be there are on their last legs. The world you knew is more or less over.

So many of us asked for this, and here it is: tomorrow. The page has been turned, and there is no turning it back. The sun has set on the old world.

What will you do, in the meantime? There is a lot coming down the turnpike, many of which will be ignored or forgotten out of the gate. Perhaps this new thing will eventually hit later, perhaps it will only hit a niche group. The point is that this material will be new, not rehashed or rewarmed leftovers from some stale zombie age that refuses to die. Will you cling to this moldy carcass forever, or will you finally let it go and bury it in the grave it belongs? Whatever our decision is, it will impact what comes next.

Let us then make it something to remember, then. Let us finally make a step forward and away from these endless mistakes of a century that won't die. We can do this. We just need to finally out the past where it belongs.

This was one of the reasons I assembled the free book on Generation Y. We are 25 years divorced from Cultural Ground Zero and the bottom is finally falling out of the old world. This book is the final word on this undying era, and it will hopefully let us move on to what awaits us ahead. Generation Y might be defined by the past, but we can use that to build a new future that expands on it, instead of living in the scraps of a world that has been over for a long time now. 

There is no Star Trek utopia coming, no matter how much useless lore one spouts about it--the 20th century is done, as are its visions of utopia. We're going to need larger dreams moving forward. Better ones.

This doesn't mean that we throw the past away. Of course not since the past can't be killed. However, we are going to need new things to aim for, more than the temporal, more than the here and now, more than visions of unrealistic materialist utopias that will clearly never arrive, and more than corporate product. There is more to shoot for than the same mistakes of the bloodiest century on record repeated indefinitely forward.

Even though there is no end of history, times do in fact end. New eras begin as others fade into the past. We are at that point right now, and it is about time.

Tomorrow is here. I can't wait to see what this new day brings.

Have you been feeling down, pushed around

Feeling like everything has been done before?

Do I need to understand every word from every man

Or everything from every band?

Can I say it's all been done before?

Religion, science, similes to metaphors

Can it be that there's nothing new

When there's more ways of looking at the truth?

Of looking at the truth...

The more things seem to change

The more they just stay the same

But now it's called a different name

Can you say things are new

When you look at magazines

And things you've seen in the news?

And can I say it's all been done before?

Religion, science, similes to metaphors

Can it be that there's nothing new

When there's more ways of looking at the truth?

Of looking at the truth...

It's 4:00 AM

And I just passed the westside buildings, all the broken glass

As I try to shake the cold away, but anyways

It's late at night and I'm about to crack

And decide to just walk the tracks

That I just walked yesterday

But have I been thinking too much tonight

When I realize just how my life's gone by

I check the time!

It's 4:00 AM

And I just passed the westside buildings, all the broken glass

As I try to shake the cold away, but anyways

It's late at night and I'm about to crack

And decide to just walk the tracks

That I just walked yesterday

But have I been thinking too much tonight

When I realize just how my life's gone by

I check the time!

It's 4:00 AM

And I just passed the westside buildings, all the broken glass

As I try to shake the cold away

But I'm okay.

Check out these stories of adventure and rock n roll!

Generation Y: The New Lost Generation

Find it Here!

Now for a surprise release that some of you might know of! I have been working with authors Brian Niemeier and David V Stewart to put out this book of essays (and a handful of stories) based on a topic we have all been looking into for some time now: Generation Y!

Compiled from blog posts over the last five years, and edited together by yours truly, you can now explore the discovery of this new cohort as it happened. Split over four sections from defining Gen Y, the difference between other generations, who they are, and what the future might hold, we covered the spectrum on this topic.

What's more: it's completely free! You can download the entire full work here.

We also included some paperback and hardcover files, so if you wish to print a personal version for whatever reason, you can do that, too. Clearly there are some who would prefer a physical edition if given the choice, so have at it if that's what you desire. Just don't put it up for sale. This is a free work and isn't meant to be monetized.

It has been done this way because we wanted to get it out to as many people as possible. We still hear people asking what Gen Y is to this day (while others use stupid names such as "Xillennial" or "Geriatric Millennial" or any number of ridiculous titles) and now you have a completely free resource to give to them in order to explain it to them. This is the first book to attempt to describe an entire cohort of people that has been unjustly ignored for decades, so be sure to let others know just who they are.

This year is also the 25th anniversary of Cultural Ground Zero, where the world froze into the state it's been stuck in ever since. Though recent events have shown it might be finally cracking, now makes it the best time to highlight the generation who remembers the shift most clearly and what it might mean for the future.

Here is the description:

Generation Why?

There is an epidemic in the modern age: a crisis of meaning. Why is it the world we were promised back in the 1980s and 1990s seems so far away now? Whatever happened to those hopeful kids from back then? Whatever happened to Generation Y?

From authors Brian Niemeier (Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You), David V Stewart (The Keys to Prolific Creativity), and JD Cowan (The Pulp Mindset), comes this collection of essays about a lost generation trapped in a modernity they were never prepared for.

Read on and discover how Madison Avenue shenanigans, social instability, mindless progress, and general ineptitude, led an entire generation of people through the cracks--and how we can find them again.

This is what is included inside:

Part One: Defining Generation Y

• Nostalgia Chronicles: Gen Y by David V. Stewart
• Lost Generations by Brian Niemeier
• Generation Green by JD Cowan
• Y Television by JD Cowan
• Gen Y and Millennials: A Difference in Software by David V. Stewart

In the first section, we go over the early information we assembled to form the picture of Generation Y. These are some of our earliest pieces on the subject, The point is to help walk new readers through the reasoning that led to the rediscovery of this forgotten cohort. It is not all sunshine and roses, however. We discovered some things we didn't like.

Part Two: Generational Differences

• Strauss & Howe Revisited: Marketing Millennials by Brian Niemeier
• The Millennial Obsession with Harry Potter by David V. Stewart
• Boomer Hate by David V. Stewart
• Generation X & the Desert of Identity by JD Cowan
• Fumes & Leftovers by Brian Niemeier

We then go over the differences between Gen Y and the differences and relationships with other Generations. This one covers a bit of a spread, but it's necessary to understand the place Generation Y fits into in the overall frame.

Part Three: Understanding Gen Y

• Jimmy Turns Thirty-Five by David V. Stewart
• New Toys in the Old Attic by JD Cowan
• The Transactional Past by Brian Niemeier
• Gen Y Stares at the Mirror by David V. Stewart
• Cultural Ground Zero by JD Cowan

This section is Gen Y criticism. Early critics of Gen Y theory were adamant research was only being done because of some ill-defined hatred of Millennials and an attempt to boost this cohort above them. The third section should entirely erase those charges from the record because these pieces are anything but fawning. What this part is meant to do is understand why Gen Y are what they are, and how they got there.

Part Four: The Future

• A Lonely Existence by Brian Niemeier
• The End of Nostalgia by JD Cowan
• Middlebury by David V. Stewart

The final part is obvious from the title. What does the future hold for a generation defined by its past? How do we move forward? Is there a place for us in the modern world? We come to a conclusion that should make perfect sense in relation to what came before.

These pieces all span across the last half decade, so please enjoy them compiled and edited for you today! This was a long time coming.

Once again, you can find the entire book for free here! If you managed to nab it early, then I recommend re-downloading the digital file. There were a couple of formatting errors that were ironed out. Otherwise, we included paperback files as well as covers for both hardcover and paperback should you wish to use them for personal printing, possibly in a service such as Lulu. The reason for this will become clear as you read the collection.

We also wanted to get this into as many hands as possible. So please spread this around as far as you can. It is free, after all.

The reason this needed to be written was because the truth had been obscured so long and by just about everyone involved. From the clueless Boomers in charge to the fleeing Generation themselves, all succeeded in pretending this group didn't exist and burying them. All this has done is alienate and atomize a cohort of people that already lived in a world that had no place for them any longer. That isn't just, and it needed to be brought to light.

Generation Y is real, and now that we all know it, we can do something about it. We can put things in their proper place, and finally move forward, even as the world collapses around us. We aren't in the '90s anymore.

This book also kind of represents the end of an era, in a way. It's been 25 years since Cultural Ground Zero, and recent world events have proven that the ever-present and complacent defeatism and nihilism is turning rabid around us. Soon enough, these subjects might be forgotten in the haze to come. As a result, this is the moment for a work like this.

Now is the time for Gen Y to reclaim their identity and place at the table. This might be the last opportunity before they are effectively erased for good by the shambling culture around us all.

It's been a long time since 1997, but little has really changed culturally until recently. Thankfully, it won't always be this way. Eventually times are going to have to shift past this, but that doesn't mean we should forget what happened to lead us here. Learning from the past is invaluable in order to create a future worth living in for upcoming generations beyond modernity. We have the tools to make that very future. We just have to use them.

Thank you for sticking with Wasteland & Sky for nearly 8(!) years! I never really expected it would last this long, and we still have longer to go. Should you want to know why it's been lighter in content so far this year, well hopefully you understand now. Projects such as this are the reason why. There is much going on in the background and many gears turning, and there is more on the way. There is much to come in 2022.

It's been fun, and it's not over yet. We've still got many more roads to travel down.

Time slipped right by me 

It didn't stop to take a look 

Everybody knows my story 

It's written on the pages of some open book 

I thought I had my defenses 

I fell victim to sleeping all day 

Got caught up in my intentions 

Can't let that get in my way 

But I can drive all night to get away from what I saw 

But I can drive all night to get away from what I saw 

Another day, another time, another place 

I take a look back at my better half 

Or should I say at the other six? 

I can look back and laugh about 

The things that I know that I just cannot fix 

I thought I had my defenses 

I'm pretending to sleep all day 

Got mixed up in my intentions 

Can't get let that get in my way 

But I can drive all night to get away from what I saw 

But I can drive all night to get away from what I saw 

Another day, another time, another place 

I can look back and laugh at 

The things that I know that I just cannot fix

But I can drive all night to get away from what I saw 

To get away, to get away 

But I can drive all night to get away from what I saw 

To get away, to get away 

Another day, another time, another place 

Slips through my mind.

And don't forget Pulp Rock! 12 weird adventure stories inspired by rock n roll!