by Paul Cudenec, who reads the article here

I was rummaging around the other day and came across a folder of articles that I had been lining up in 1985, when I was 22 years old, for a zine called New Renaissance that a friend and I were planning to, but never did, launch.

I was quite surprised to find how much of it aligned with what I say today, with the only main difference being that at the time I regarded the globalist modernisation of British society as being simply “Americanisation”.

My consistency is reassuring, I suppose, although I am left with the nagging worry that I have been repeating myself for more than 40 years now!

I warned that we were living in “a system based on the right to be greedy. A system controlled and defended by those with only their own material interests at heart”.

Then, as now, I was calling for “New Life” – a way of thinking completely free of all the usual political ideologies and the assumptions that come with them.

I asked in ‘Facing the Issue’: “Why can we not hear men or women with something of some significance to say to the world? Where are the voices of the prophets, the men of vision? Where are the great minds, the long-term minds, the minds that see through trivia as a hot blade cuts through ice?…

“They are, I fear, outcasts of our society every one of them. Lunatics, fruitcakes on the fringes of modern ‘life’, they are not to be exposed to the public”.

In a piece called ‘The State of Democracy’ I wrote: “It is characteristic of Democratic states that they claim to represent the interests of their population without ever directly consulting this population as to what exactly these interests might be.

“In this respect a Democracy does not differ from a totalitarian state. The Soviet state claims to rule in the interests of socialism, Hitler’s state claimed to rule in the interests of the German race, the British state claims to represent the interests of Democracy and the British public.

“It doesn’t really matter to the state what it says it is acting in the interests of. It has control and there’s no way anyone else is going to have a say…

“Are all the political parties that fight for the votes of the gullible public and thus maintain the illusion of democratic decision-making merely opposing factions in an all-powerful state system as impenetrable as that of the Soviet Union or the Third Reich?”

Quite right, young Paul, although you should have placed the word “opposing” in inverted commas!

In ‘Mass Funeral’ I summed up the New Renaissance outlook thusly: “In Mass Society we are battery hens. Opposition to capitalism is not opposition to Mass Society. Communism and Fascism only bolstered its domination.

“We call for total rejection of Mass Society. We must strive for the antithesis of all that it holds sacred. We place quality infinitely higher than quantity”.

I still like this short piece entitled ‘The Modern Slave’.

They keep me well so I will not complain.

Without them I would have no home.

My wife depends on the security they offer.

It is their gifts that feed my children.

They grant me days in the year for myself and they give me entertainment to pass the time.

It is thanks to them that I have met my friends. We work together and are glad of our good fortune.

Others have no work at all. We all know that work makes us free.

We may act as we please, so long as we abide by their rules.

I may think as I will, so long as I think no ill of them.

When I was young, I dreamed of flight. I was foolish. There is nowhere to flee to. Without them I would die.

I give them nothing but my body, my soul and my time.

I am not a slave for I see no chains.

And I particularly enjoyed the youthful energy inveighing against “A Flaccid Reign”, an article which for some reason I was planning to publish under the pseudonym “Jean-Paul Béarn”.

“Jean-Paul” wrote:

In the christian bible, Jesus asserted that the meek would inherit the earth.

Unfortunately, they did.

Passivity is the modern malaise that is in danger of rendering impotent the whole of mankind.

A mentality has emerged in the 1980s – automised, sanitised times – that negates the fundamental essence of the human spirit. A mentality that worships inertia, inaction, passivity. A mentality that allows people to lead an existence composed entirely of second-hand experiences.

Imagine the archetypal modern man.

He poses at the wheel of his air-conditioned car, or lounges in the armchair of his warm, cosy home. He invariably watches television or listens to recorded music. He pulls his curtains on the outside world. He shelters behind his dark glasses. He finds anonymity in his fashionable attire, his superficial conversation, his well-paid and worthless career. He wastes away the years in a carpeted coffin with plastic pot-plants in the corner. He drives everywhere, sits all day. He works out his aggression in a game of squash.

Is he really human? Every one of his senses is constantly plugged into artificial “experience”.

His personal contact – and conflict – with solid reality is lost.

He is a passive observer of everything. He watches society in the same way that he watches television. He has no sense of having any personal role to play in the forming of the world around him. His existence is something remote, sheltered, in smoked-glass isolation from the stories they tell on the News.

The tiniest notion of social responsibility is beyond him. This is the norm in the vast mechanical metropolis powered by countless human cogs just like himself.

Are they really all the same? Not one of them can see further afield than his own front door-mat. And they congratulate each other on their united inertia, myopia.

“We are the Vast Majority. I am the Consensus. I am the Lifestyle. We are the People. We are the weak of will, the meek of heart and we have inherited the earth”.

But let us leave their smug whining.

Let us now speak of ourselves, the Others, the ones who are imprisoned within the hollow world of the processed pea-brains and the conforming dogs.

How do we keep on living under the Flaccid Reign? How do we tolerate the domination of the Insipid?

We don’t.

Ah, so we withdraw from their world and become recluses?

No, we do not! Hippies drop out of society. Visionaries fight to change it.

We fight. We fight against the suffocation of true emotion, fresh expression, real living.

We fight for the spirit of man.*

And we will win.

* People used “man” in that sense back in the 1980s. Today I would say “humankind”, which is what I really meant.