Our Quest for Freedom

These essays are a prophetic call for us to become spiritually-grounded rebels dedicated to our liberation from impending tyranny, insisting that resistance and opposition must 'challenge the system, its structure, and its thinking to the very core.' The title essay explains the necessary process involving a number of interrelated stages: realising, remembering, yearning, exposing, explaining, proposing, meaning, motivating, becoming, inspiring, preparing, boycotting, building and defending. As many people now realise, George Orwell was chillingly prescient when he defined orthodoxy as unconsciousness and noted that 'the possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.' Everything is inverted – see my review of Kingsley Dennis elsewhere in this issue. We now have to resist full-spectrum control by having faith in the spirit of life to prevail over power and imposition.

An essay based on The Speech of the Birds by Attar provides some timeless wisdom, and it is interesting to find the author rooted in perennial traditionalism with its scathing critique of modernity. He is well aware of the weaponising of such labels as extremist, reactionary, conspiracy theorist, nutter and even terrorist, reminding us that genuine culture 'is an expression of natural belonging-together of individuals in a community.' (p. 85) The environmental movement has been hijacked by globalists narrowing the agenda to carbon emissions while continuing to support the notion of development, which the author boldly equates with industrial destruction. One of the most interesting chapters is a dialogue between the author and WD James on traditionalism and anarchism. Traditionalists were anti-modernists who insisted on the qualitative dimension of life and were sceptical of 'the reign of quantity.' Their discussion leads on to a spiritually informed organic radicalism and resistance to centralised power embodied in nobility of character and strength in the individual with a deep sense of belonging. What is crucial is the cultivation of the inner life and astute awareness of outer trends – the book provides a bracing dose of principled realism.