Alexander Constantine - 1

Almost no one knew what the point of it all was. It was transition, evolution, revolution, and management writ large.

Weak men create hard times. Strong men create good times.

That slogan was a proof of how bad things had become. That the information systems pumped out noise and slogans as simple and superficial as that, and that so many real people just lapped up the noise and repeated these slogans without question or curiosity or scepticism or understanding was proof; proof that brain death had taken hold.

Brain death is a disease but it can be initiated and spread through entirely artificial means by men - strong or weak - up to or across both natural and unnatural borders and boundaries. Victims of brain death can infect each other and actively spread their disease consciously and unconsciously. It's possible to inoculate oneself and others against brain death wittingly and unwittingly, overtly and covertly.

Brain death is what you make it. It is a disease, malaise, threat, death sentence, tragedy and horror. It is a tool, an opportunity, a sign, a timer. The existence of a nadir implies that an apex must exist or be attainable. Thus, as always, darkness births hope in the minds of those with the eyes to see.

When I think about how the world seemed back then, it’s hard to describe accurately. It really depended upon who you were, where you lived, how much you had, how much you knew, and how much you could act. In simple political terms, the Balance of Power had undeniably swung; the fulcrum of the US-owned seesaw had cracked 20 years prior but it took that 20 years for some of the common people to realise or be shown the cracks by the truly strategic leaders and operators.

The Russians knew and so did the Chinese. Not all of them, but their seniors and leadership definitely knew because they had personally lived through the cycle of brain death in their own way. They were simply looking over their shoulders and seeing the dominant Empire now becoming infected and infirm itself, just as they had experienced themselves all those decades ago. The Vietnamese understood in somewhat different terms; having suffered at the hands of abusive power and having finally achieved a bittersweet victory of sorts over it, there was a poetic justice in seeing, within less than a lifetime, the nation of US psychopaths that had forced them to live in and fight from tunnels being led off a cliff by a literally demented, perverted, corrupted figurehead who had supposedly been freely elected by his own people, half of whom literally shouted “Fuck Joe Biden!” after electing him.

If you were no one and nothing, with not much freedom and you lived in the West, you were probably infected with brain death and didn't even know. You might have felt confused, afraid, under pressure or threat, but only some of the time and the feelings would ebb and wane. You could alleviate many of the symptoms of brain death by just ignoring the noise and slogans - the strange and invasive voices inside and outside your head - and retreating into whatever made you happy and comfortable. The opiate of whatever might have been your religion still worked to offer relief; friends, family, things, known knowns all did what they always had done: provided the means and perspective with which one coped with or hid from whatever you perceived as reality. Because you were no one and had nothing, you were kept too busy chasing a little something to feel your brain slowly rot away and notice the world grow strange and the faces around you twist.

If you had more means and more freedom, over enough time you felt and saw that you were becoming infirm. You couldn't hang on to what you had. You weren't strong enough to keep a grip on your money, possessions, property, rights, voice. Your thoughts were interrupted; you stuttered but weren't sure if it was because of something wrong with your mind or because someone, somewhere kept throwing you off. The world you knew, the faces in your bigger networks began to to look odd, unfamiliar, unfriendly, sometimes threatening. The stories you heard every day didn't seem to make sense like they used to and if you stopped to think about why, you'd find reality didn't track the stories for very long, if at all. When those pangs of confusion, fear, pressure and threat came to you, you could seek relief from these symptoms of creeping brain death just like the people beneath you did.

But as time passed, the someones became no ones because they hadn't inoculated themselves from brain death, didn't know what it was or where it came from, didn't know they'd been infected until it was too late.

“I'll tell you a secret,” my grandfather said, when we were in the library. “Everyone is a no-one. Do you know why?”

I shook my head. I was only 5 years old. I liked the library and grandfather because in between books and talking, sweets and cuddles would appear.

“They’re all no ones because they don't admit they're no-one, they don't control what and who they are, and they don't understand the real difference between a someone and a no-one.” Grandfather always looked me dead in the eyes when he told me a secret, but his expression was always open, warm and smiling. A cuddle or hug would always accompany it or follow. That was part of his teaching technique. When secrets and love are synonymous, the bond of love is strengthened by secrecy and secrecy is protected by that love. No need for coercion or threat or worse.

Love plus secrets equals loyalty plus power.

It was my grandfather who helped me choose to be someone instead of no-one, but it was our family who helped me become someone.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the world reached that critical, crucial 21st Century low point but it was in the 2020s. It wasn't a global low. There was never a global low because the planet is simultaneously a zero sum game and a non zero sum game. If a loss is being made somewhere, there's a gain happening somewhere else, even if those things seem disconnected or indirect. In human terms, there's always a form of opportunity and a form of evasion or offset to anything else that's negative. It's simply a question of how you define everything or anything. Simultaneously, even if the basic concepts of destruction and creation are dependent and intertwined, not everything has to be a zero sum game, even when things like creation and destruction seem to diametrically oppose. It's too trite to say “it's a matter of perspective” but it is that simple and we all struggle to learn, recognise, accept and work within that simple truth.

What's not simple is what perspective is and therefore how one might acquire and grow it. If you can't eat or drink enough each day, you might struggle to get perspective on much of anything outside of food and water, unless you acquired that perspective before you began to starve. Then again, mortal threat, existential pressure and tests of survival provide perspective that might otherwise be impossible to acquire, and could lead to overcoming starvation. The skills, knowledge and perspective acquired can drive a lifetime of success and abundance.

That time in the 2020s was nothing new. Anyone with a sense of recent or ancient history could detect that it was a nadir in cultural and power shift for those under US rule. But just having a sense of empire decline wasn't enough and it certainly wasn't insightful. The situation was blatantly obvious and constantly admitted, telegraphed and even forced into the mind’s eye. The masses were along for the ride no matter what. Almost no one knew what the point of it all was. It was transition, evolution, revolution, and management writ large.

Sure, most of the people weren't ready for the economic hammering they took, even though that was a baked-in certainty that many in the finance world had been warning about for two decades. People had even been told, as soon as Covid kicked off, that this was the final sunset in the West. Weirdly, the people saying this were the ones running the pandemic and cementing their control. That's how inept, ignorant, disabled and feckless citizens of supposed Western democracies had become; they were told they would be enslaved, they let themselves become enslaved, and they barely batted an eyelid.

Grandfather had taught me about this by the time I was ten.

“You can lead people into the most dangerous situations, where they are actually harmed and even harm each other, with only fear,” he said. “It's just that you make them afraid of the thing behind them, not in front of them. That way, they all walk into the danger willingly and you stand and watch as they react in ways that are completely predictable.”

Basic analysis of political leadership for decades reveals that the big ticket headline narratives were literal cons designed to completely fool citizens into believing falsehoods. They were made fearful of shadows that their own governments made and grew. They were led to participate in economic exploitation of themselves and their fellow men, to a point of self destruction that then “justified” their final economic surrender to their rulers. It was the biggest tragicomedy in history and many inside and outside the US Empire could see the tragicomedy for what it was, so the plans and goals were never deeply secret. And yet, we got to that point in time, to that downslope, hurtling into the nadir of western democracy. Getting there with no effective citizen resistance - it was willing capitulation, in fact - was the confirmatory test; the green light moment.

The West was a barometer of mankind. It wasn't some walled-off garden.

Being raised by a sizeable and loving family, and being home schooled by my grandparents with a spectrum of tutors was, without doubt, the greatest privilege of my life. To say me and my siblings were pushed is an understatement but we were pushed in the right way and not too hard. Pedagogical expertise has been built and handed down through the family for generations. All parents become generational tutors. My role as grandfather began years ago and most of my time is spent educating our wards in the curriculum. The library is now my permanent office, although the same can be said for my sisters, brothers and cousins. We will contribute to the education of family and the expansion of familial capability, as is our duty. Life is, before it is anything else, an exercise in informational advantage.

“What's the library?” grandfather asked me.

“Where all the books are, where we go to school,” I said.

“What are books?”

“Where all the reading is.”

“What's reading?”

“Words and stories.”

“No. It's the perfect act of theft.”

I had no idea what he meant, although I understood what the basic act of theft was, having frequently been found guilty of it in and around kitchens, pantries, and wherever I knew there to be stashes of my sibling's edible loot.

“Steal a book without getting caught,” grandfather commanded as we sat in the library. Obviously, I couldn't. Even ripping pages out instead of carrying the whole book didn't work because a quick pat down revealed my guilt every time. He sat me down with a cup of sweet tea and an oatcake then wandered to the second level, children's section. I watched him shift the rolling ladder to exactly the right location and select a single, slim tome without hesitation, searching or reference to anything else. Half the oatcake remained when he laid down Selected Classical Children's Verse beside my teacup.

“Whenever you're ready, pick a poem you like the sound of. Then do me the kindness of reading it aloud to me, my darling.”

From a Railway Carriage

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches,

Charging along like troops in a battle

All through the meadows the horses and cattle:

All of the sights of the hill and the plain

Fly as thick as driving rain;

And ever again, in the wink of an eye

Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,

All by himself and gathering brambles;

Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;

And here is the green for stringing the daisies!

Here is a cart run away in the road

Lumping along with man and load;

And here is a mill, and there is a river:

Each a glimpse and gone forever!

Robert Louis Stevenson

As I recited my chosen verse for the first time, grandfather rolled a cigarette, smiled and nodded at me encouragingly, to smooth past my stutters and hesitations.

“Excellent. Did you like it?”

“Yes, the rhymes are nice! I like the trains and… “painted stations whistle by,” was good. They do whistle in the station, don't they!” While I didn't fully grasp the poem's full frame of reference, it connected in simple memory and guttural sensation.

“Once again, please.”

So began an exercise in rote memorization by recital. We began with the whole poem, over and over. Then a single line, seven times in a row, then the next. I should have grown tired with it very quickly, like any child would but grandfather had already laid in my mind an idea that transcended repetition as a boring act. There was some other reason.

“Well done, my love,” he said as he sat back and gestured for me to put the book down, “that's half an hour, 10 full recitals, twice through each line seven times. Let's have a break.” He took my hand and lead me to the nearest door to the kitchen garden. He sat on the step, lit his cigarette and pointed into the garden.

“Run and pick some things for later. Anything you feel like.” He enjoyed a culinary challenge because it was yet another lesson for us, although we didn't realise it at the time. When I returned with a basket I could barely carry, he hugged me, kissed me on my forehead and sat me on his knee.

“Faster than fairies, faster than witches,” he whispered.

“Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches,” I replied quite loudly.

“Charging along like troops in a battle,” he continued.

“All through the meadows the horses and cattle:” I said.

With barely a stutter we each recited half the poem, then did it again the other way around.

“That's enough fun for now, my love. Let's take these goodies to the kitchen.” Grandfather led me by the hand to the southern door, the heavy basket swinging by his side. In the hall, he stopped dead in his tracks, gasped and ran back to our table. I watched him frantically flick through the book of verse, a panicked look on his face. He breathed a sigh of relief and briskly returned, smiling.

“What's the matter, grandfather?” I asked.

“For a moment, I thought someone had stolen a poem from the book. But it's still there, thank goodness.”

He never needed to say another word about the value of the library or anything in it, ever again. In half an hour he had bestowed upon me a lifelong love and visceral understanding of the act of reading, and education in general. With a simple act he created a perfect student whose energetic curiosity was always self-directed to the place and things that sated it. That kind of education cannot be bought because it is an act of focused love whose intent is to manifest permanent, independent strength through basal information advantage. Pitch perfect method and delivery; a kind of “show, don't tell” approach that he both tested and reinforced in myriad ways, across subjects, concepts and moments. The time I spent in Eton and Oxford was all about socialization, not education. I was way ahead of any school curriculum. I had a double first in two years but knew most of what I needed to before I turned up. Those two years were the minimum socially acceptable time Oxford stipulated because they quietly labelled me a genius, even though I am not a genius and have never taken any formal tests to justify the label. I'm simply a product of rich, sophisticated, loving education that had no constraints when it came to fostering learning. I am what we all are.

“Being different is a curse and a blessing,” grandmother said. We were in the kitchen eating her bacon sandwiches. She always cooked bacon in lard then dipped the bread in it. I always thought of her cooking as war food because of her age, but it wasn't. It was, as was all cooking up to a certain point in time, a well balanced and totally naturalistic dietary approach that those who were uneducated abandoned to their detriment. “As long as you show love, kindness and commonality or similarity to people, your differences to them won't matter. You can keep your differences quiet or show them when it's OK to.”

The six of us were different enough to challenge our tutors and tire our grandparents. Our family pets and animals were a deliberate means to instil empathy, care, responsibility and tolerance in all of us while simultaneously keeping us active. This was essential for integrating socially at any level, although there was the natural bias towards the privileged and elitist schooling system. This bias was tolerated for a key reason, which I accept and will not deviate from in my pedagogical duties.

From the age of two I was raised with my pet Rottweiler, Zeus. He was born in a litter of 4, to Caesar and Coco. Zeus lived to 15, which is normal for our Rottweilers but unusual for the breed. I have emotional memories of Zeus from when I was probably three years old, and can recall full memories of him when I was four and he was nearly taller than me. Even when he was a pup, he was an instinctive guardian and always a friend. Animals have that ability to be a parent, friend and ward all at the same time. Zeus had a stoic pride, calmness and practical intellect that was obvious in his work and play. All of our dogs develop high linguistic capabilities that support our capabilities. As soon as I could read I read out loud to Zeus all the time, in order to train both of us. Our pups are put onto systematised language training to get them to maximal comprehension as soon as possible. Counting, single clause sentences and thousand word vocab is the base standard for our dogs on our system.

To care for something is to understand it and optimise its well-being, symbiotically if possible. That is a standard by which our family lives and treats every member, including our pets and livestock. The bond I had with Zeus is only matched by that with his son, Storm, and now his grandson, Zeus II. They are perfect canine companions that fundamentally cared for me with their very souls. The purity of our relationships are why all people should foster connections with animals. That we have abandoned such aspects of our existence is a root cause of some of the ills in the world, even though we don't recognise it at large scale. We think of ourselves as separate and superior, which is why we have a disconnected, anthropocentric causality and stewardship model, which is ultimately faulty. We are not a natural centre of the planet; we are an over-dominant influence that consciously and unconsciously induces imbalances that serve to justify aspects of our existence through fake purpose. In short, we create unnecessary problems of all kinds, waste time and effort addressing them (but rarely fixing them), then tell ourselves that the problem and the hamfisted response was all necessary. This is largely because we struggle with consistent impulse control and make more decisions emotionally than rationally. When you recognise this, you also recognise that we are not superior to animals; we are animals that have told ourselves we're not animals, despite behavioural evidence we are. In my experience, it's extremely difficult to foster this understanding in societies because self-labelled intellectuals prejudicially refuse to believe it and that poisons wider thinking, institutions, behaviour, attitudes, policy, law and so on. Also, what's misunderstood is consciousness and our knowledge and understanding of it. We don't understand it, and most averagely educated people don't realise we don't understand it. Therefore they don't question a faulty assumption that humans are superior to animals and other non human species. That assumption spills out into our species-wide decimation of nature despite our complete dependence upon it. None of this is anything to do with the control stories that manifest in the climate change agenda, but it is to do with pollution, resource efficiencies, effort and waste, and the fundamentals of civilisation, all of which we're still abysmal at dealing with.

We maintain traditions such as the rite of passage for very clear reasons. By the time I was 5, I'd been taught all basic outdoor survival skills by simply camping with the family. Shelter, water, fire, foraging, basic cooking and understanding that not eating wasn't dangerous had all been drummed into us. On my seventh birthday I was sent on a 48 hour expedition in central Wales with Zeus and basic gear, including a walking staff that was actually a spear. I've never told anyone because it is a family secret, although we aren't the only family that follows these traditions. My mission was to safely spend the time alone, avoid other people where possible and collect an object from a specific peak. I had no safety net. No phone, no radio. I believed it was just me and Zeus. Only when I was 21 did my father admit to me that he had shadowed me at distance, fully camouflaged to assess me and ensure safety in the event of extreme hazard, which was more likely to come from other people rather than the environment. Of course, this is inspired by Spartan culture and the agoge, the principles of which are sound. What I learned over those two days stayed with me for life. In retrospect and adult terms there were four key lessons that my expedition bestowed upon me at an instinctive level:

• Survival and therefore life in its least abstracted form isn't primarily material; it is a combination of spirit, sense of self and complimentary companionship (family & community).

• To be able to be alone is a skill and exercise in discipline in itself.

• Fear comes from within and changes everything within oneself and beyond, so must therefore be mastered in order to perceive reality accurately.

• In some ways there are no mistakes, only information, analysis, decisions, lessons and iteration.

On the peak was our reward, which I found mid morning on the second day. A six inch, dark wooden cube branded with our family seal was hidden just inside a wide crack in the rock. I gave it to my father when he met me at the recovery point. At home, during my birthday celebration, my father cast the cube into the fire as Zeus and I watched. It burned away to reveal a fine platinum chain and stout platinum collar chain. In front of the green room mirror, my father set our rewards about our necks and congratulated us on our success. Without doubt, Zeus understood what his gift symbolised: recognition of an unbreakable bond of companionship and familial love.

Such experiences were critical training for my part in the future that my family had envisioned generations ago.