Main Page
Welcome to MOD•wiki
modernity user manual
MOD•wiki : modernity user manual —
compiled by D.Stall, born Mid-century modern (mid '50s)
created June 2022, from compilation of information begun in the early 2000s
The purpose of MOD•wiki is critical analysis of Modernity in support of The Consumer Resistance against destruction of all Creation, in light of having awakened to the reality that American citizens have been derogated to mere consumers — to wage slaves of the totalitarian economic system, stripped of political power by way of the Second American Revolution, converted from agricultural to industrial peasants from Propaganda that our forebears were “poor”, from manipulation of our desire, and from instilling in us craving for more, by which we're sold a bunch of “stuff” that only further enriches a plutocratic oligarchy of the rich.
See — DIY•wiki, Modern Times and other films of Charlie Chaplin
MOD•wiki is NONcommercial UNmercenary FREE, always free, NOT a writer schtick, transparent, really independent, dedicated to researched, logical, reasoned analysis and critical thinking, NOT contentious, unreasonable, illogical, impassionate argument, much less lying, manipulative Propaganda (political or otherwise), or delusional, mindless ditto-heading of Propaganda — and especially NOT (as rampantly evident on the internet) imaginative fantasy musing (blogging, gabbing for the sake of gab, cerebral masturbating, talking head blathering — what my dad called “talking to hear your head rattle”). Here will not be found any right wing little "o" orthodox Christian culture war screed or science fiction, philosophical or other musings about technology or anything else.
I hereby charge Modernity with being a lie, based on lies not on Truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The illusory aspect of op art (seen in the logo and banner above) makes for a fitting symbol of Modernity, which I find to also be a form of deception, illusion, or delusion. Op art (short for optical art) is a style of visual art using optical illusions that entered the lexicon of American pop culture in the mid-60s after Time magazine coined the term in 1964.
MOD•wiki is the sum total of evidence and exhibits that I compile to argue my case that Modernity is not what it claims or is thought to be. We moderns are pigeons in a type of The Truman Show, where the everyday people we meet aren't actors who are in on the shill, but fellow puppets of the powers that be.
See — Reality or Deception (Illusion, Delusion)?
When I finish compiling and commenting, and you the reader finish purveying my evidence, exhibits and arguments, then I rest my case for you to judge, jury, and execute your verdict. Each and every one of us has free will to choose, but that comes with the consequence of having to bear responsibility for our choices.
Truth is essential to humanity and life, because only the truth is real. See — Pinocchio
It's no wonder then that a lot of fuss is made over it. But how can anyone know what's real with all the confusing twists and turns of layers of deception from which Modernity has evolved (which incidently goes much deeper than the 1960s)? The place to start digging to uncover evidence against Modernity is the four Rabbit-Holes in which modern life hides —
Humanity, Economy, Government, and Environment.
See — Fact or Fiction?, HEGE Series
Critical analysis presented here is NOT for the purpose of solving any problem, only for revealing how problematic Modernity is. The problem is not Modernity per se, but human rebellion against the Creator of all by which Modernity has been created, and for which the solution has already been revealed. Modernity is providential in that the will of Providence (God) allows Modernity to exist to serve His purpose of getting humanity “back to the garden”. By allowing humanity as much rope (Hubris) apart from Himself as it takes for humanity to hang itself (like Judas), Providence is reaping all souls who turn in humility and repentance to Him for comm-union. Modernity serves His purpose by making spiritual Truth tangible and palpable whereas before in the 50s-60s it seemed abstract, far away, and not so very real. Today, the destruction of Earth and the global totalitarianism of The Antichrist seem much more in the realm of possibility than they did in the past, however, it has already been revealed how that ends in triumph for Providence.
The Consumer Resistence fights on hoping in that world to come, Paradise, The Kingdom of Heaven that supercedes Utopia, the kingdom of man, joyful in the knowledge that even now Paradise is already transfiguring man-made, materialistic Utopia through the uncreated Divine energies of the Living “God Who Is Everywhere Present And Fillest All Things”. Resistance ascetically says NO in every possible way to dominance of Modernity (no matter how small or slight), thereby exercising knowledge that falling out of love with the modern world is key to lasting faith and hope in the Eternal, that does not die and decay as does this temporal realm built on the lie of the Father of Lies (the Evil One).
Once in a Lifetime — Talking HeadsOnce In A Lifetime by Talking Heads | SongFacts We're largely unconscious. You know, we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to ask ourselves, 'How did I get here?' — David Byrne
When I was growing up in the 50s-60s, a user manual for modern times would have been greatly beneficial for navigating the confusing world back then. Life initially had a certain quality of innocence to it in the 50s and early 60s, those early years of The American Way, but that was before Eisenhower's interstate highway system (modeled after Hitler's autobahns) tore up town and country alike, before JFK was assassinated (and MLK and RFK), and before onset of the 60s counter culture and Civil Rights movement. The American Way (The System) had only recently started coming of age in the late 40s and 50s following World War II, even though its birth had occurred over a century ago in American history.
See — Civil War
After being discharged from the Army Air Corps following end of the War in 1945, my dad wanted to buy a new car, but none were available. All industrial manufacturing had been drafted into the “war effort”, and there were even shortages of basic appliances like washing machines and refrigerators well into the late 40s after my parents married in 1946, their first child was born in 1948, before they bought a home in the early 50s and began to furnish it. Only then were household goods more readily available. As commercial production returned, engineers again took up the question of Planned obsolescence that had first appeared in the mid 1920s and 30s — what level of Fashion or shoddiness (necessitating replacement of goods) would consumers tolerate, which is to ask, to what height of wastefulness could The System aspire for “growth” in Love of Money.
The wastefulness of The System stood (and still stands even more so today) in stark contrast to Agrarianism of original American culture in which frugality was practiced and desires by necessity were restrained. William Leach chronicles how the change to new American culture of The System transpired from the 1880s, which hadn't even yet touched my parents‘ families in the 1940s when they mostly continued living a life of original American culture with few and limited consumer goods, much like the Amish. By the late 50s, my maternal grandparents had already left the land and moved to town, but for a few years my grandfather continued leasing land on which to sharecrop cotton as he had before. My paternal grandparents remained living on 200 acres settled by my great grandfather in 1880 when Comanches yet roamed freely across Texas, where they had moved in 1934. There was no indoor bathroom only chamber pots and an outhouse, no electricity until around 1960, only chopped and split firewood for a wood heater, wood cookstove and a cast iron pot for washing clothes and butchering hogs. There was pitch black darkness at night, the heavens full of stars like I've never seen since by which my dad taught me to locate the little and big dippers.
The original log cabin had vanished, but the barn with two log cribs prevailed, built from Post Oak trees felled by axe on the property. Lumber for framing the barn roof and attached sheds, from which the farmhouse was also built, was milled from the same Post Oak trees at a local sawmill. Up until the mid 70s (nearly a century after my great-grandfather had settled the place), my grandparents were mostly still raising a vegetable garden as usual, tending fruit trees (pears, peaches), keeping a dairy cow, milking, skimming fresh cream, making butter and cottage cheese, raising beef cattle, hogs, and chickens, gathering eggs, buying chicks from a hatchery to raise for fryers, butchering chickens and hogs, making sausage, and smoking sausage, ham, and bacon. The land was poor, deep sandy soil, but the Soil Conservation Service had taught my grandfather to peanut farm, by which he was able to make loan payments and not lose the land.
They had little money but I never thought of them as poor. They wanted for nothing, recycled before there was such a word. Their passions were not enflamed nor their desires manipulated by Advertising rooted in the works of Sigmond Freud as popularized in America and developed for such ilk by his nephew Eddie Bernays. A great pile of scrap metal from worn out things was heaped before the workshop garage awaiting a project for which the scraps might be used. There was no garbage pickup, only burning of combustible trash; everything else remained piled or strewn around on site. Cans, bottle caps, and scrap lumber were our playground equipment from which we created out of our endless imagination. We knew not to rip the Christmas wrapping paper on my grandmother‘s packages to shreds, because she saved the paper, folding it neatly for use another year. In the attic were stored jars and containers from store bought goods that might be put to good use. All table scraps and garbage from meal preparations were mixed with water and poured in the large crock jar on the back porch for slopping the hogs. Because of boyhood experience of their life, I know that all the blather about economic “growth” raising people out of “poverty” is nothing but yet more Propaganda of the Big Lie.
My mom was in high school during the war, and remembers her family having a ration book in which merchants kept track of what was bought per year, with restrictions on quantities, such as only 1 pair of shoes per person and 1 set of tires. Once rations were used up in the book, no more purchases could be made for that year. In other words, America instituted a regulated, planned economy in the 1940s and that was alright by the monied capitalist industrialist powers since it enabled them to fatten themselves on war profits like Daddy Warbucks, but after the war such regulation was denounced (by way of Propaganda of the Ad Council) as “socialism” and “communism” that threatened The American Way of life. From WWII, America learned that war was good for the economy (having lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression), not just the sale of munitions and supplies for the war itself, but rebuilding that commenced after the war when taxpayer dollars were “loaned” as aid to the war ravaged and the money pocketed by American contractors, yet another shill game of Organized Crime perpetrated on an unsuspecting American public. And so The System grew more and more powerful post War by way of Permanent war economy, making “defense contractors” major employers along with Big Government bureaucracy,
We now know that McCarthyism and the whole Red Scare (that had us grade school kids scrambling under our desks for “Duck-and-Cover‘air raid drills) was nothing but a ploy to distract from what was becoming The System of Organized Crime. Conspiratorial lying of the John Birch Society (stepchild of McCarthyism), especially its parlor game of “Creeping Socialism”, has continued to be played well into the 21st century and has only gotten worse for wear. Christians especially should have known all along that stealing lands of First Peoples and exploitation of human Labor by way of indentured servitude and slavery for no purpose other than for riches, for Love of Money, constituted Organized Crime, and that such is not only unethical, but immoral from a Christian perspective. True Christianity should be antidote to all such evils, and should have opposed development of The System instead of aiding and abetting its development as American “Christianity” has over the many decades with its heretical Prosperity Gospel that posits riches (in Calvinistic Puritan fashion) as being proof of favor from God. This lie was evidenced initially in the Great Barbeque of The Gilded Age and Gay Nineties in the 19th century continuing through to the Roaring Twenties in the 20th century, laid low only by the Great Depression. The same “Christian” form of Mammon worship was revived post World War II (after a short New Deal reprieve from that initial liberalism) by neo-liberalism beginning in the 80s and continuing through Reagan, Bush I and Bush II years into the 90s, continuing on through to today, thoroughly supported by both political parties as usual.
See — Michael Woodiwiss, Jonathan Marshall, John Loftus, American Foundations, Albert E. Burke
Today, a user manual for modern times is even more critical than before, as it still appears “The Times They Are A Changin”, but underneath it all things remain pretty much the same — “progress”, economic “growth”, “Growth”,“GROWTH”, “World's Highest Standard of Living” by way of The American Way: The System of Organized Crime, that is turning Earth into a giant landfill. From a Christian perspective such exploitation, degradation and destruction is fulfillment of the intents and purpose of the devil, in his jealousy and hatred of God, to destroy all God's Creation (including humanity, especially), turning Divine Cosmos back into Chaos from which Cosmos was created. American Foundations of the contemporary reigning, global form of Modernity are thus found guilty of Love of Money (not of being Christian as right wing political ideologues proclaim), which makes for A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, totally desecrated, disenchanted, desacralized and devoid of the spiritual, devoted solely to the material (the temporal, temporary not lasting), destined to decompose back into the dust from which it comes.
The time has come to destroy those who destroy the earth! — Revelation 11:18 Love of money is either the chief or a secondary motive at the bottom of everything the Americans do. — Alexis de Tocqueville 1831
In Christian terms, The System that conservative “Christians” worship is Mammon worship not True worship of the one, true God, which is to say idolatry, devil worship (worship of the Father of Lies, the Evil One) — the very ungodliness and immorality that political “conservatives” protest and claim to abhor, but in which they themselves participate by way of political affiliation with Love of Money. Such politicization of Christianity is not true, is akin to what occurred in Nazi Germany, and has no place in The Church if she is to maintain her saltiness of true purpose, her true counter-culture contradiction of the lies of the Father of Lies (the devil) to enable attraction of lost souls and puppets of the principalities and powers that be to comm-union with their true ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords. The obsession of American conservative “Christians” with legalistic moralism, and with political theocracy as means of enforcing such moralism, are the very things of which delusion of The Antichrist are made. In Christianity, The Antichrist is the final culmination of human self-worship, of the cult of man-god that originated out of Sumeria (Mesopotamia), linked to the cult of the goddess Ishtar or Isis (the Whore of Babylon), which is diabolically opposed to Hebrew monotheism and its Mashiach, and indicative of the worst form of tyrannical totalitarianism that conservative “Christians” fear and claim to oppose. Hebrew sacred scripture is clear: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” (Psalm 146:3-5), yet that is exactly what is done with such political conservative theocratic ideals that risk turning America into the Daughter of Babylon, the legacy of Babylon that falls, crumbling into complete and utter destruction, collapsing the global economy thereby which the end of time commences and the appearance of The Antichrist is initiated.
Modernity is not a separate, unrelated phenomenon to Western Christianity (Catholicism and Protestantism). It is not diabolic communism at heart opposed to godly capitalism, as political conservatives would have everyone believe. Capitalism is not godly or Christian at heart, because Love of Money is not Christian or godly. Capitalism is a function of the apostasy of the west from true Christianity, and a contributing factor to that apostasy. Because the secularism of Modernity is the outgrowth of western Christianity, a different Christian perspective and POV (Point of View) is needed in order to examine the modern situation, a magnifying glass with which to look out from within the Looking Glass of Modernity in order to clearly see Modernity for what it truly is.
See — HEGE Series
The magnifying glass capable of shedding light on the modern west, the one that is utilized at MOD•wiki is Eastern Christianity, aka (also known as) Eastern Orthodoxy, or Orthodoxy, a Different Christianity as Robin Amis once called it.
So, let the trial begin! Plaintiff call your first witness.
Your Honor, I call Modernity to the stand. . . .
Reality or Deception (Illusion, Delusion)?
The Truman Show | Wikipedia - Trailer
— Truman Burbank, “Chosen out of six unwanted pregnancies to be the first child legally adopted by a Corporation”
“True Man”: the one who comes to understand the true corporate controlled condition of modern man and choses to forsake it all for Real Life
Quiz Show (film) | Wikipedia — Trailer
Twilight Zone: The Movie | Wikipedia — Trailer
Simulacron-3 (Counterfeit World) | Wikipedia — 1964 science fiction novel
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) | Wikipedia — Trailer YouTube based on Simulacron-3
The Thirteenth Floor | Wikipedia — Trailer loosely based on Simulacron-3
The Matrix (franchise) | Wikipedia
— Trailers: Matrix 1999, Reloaded 2003, Revolutions 2003, Resurrections 2021
The Matrix Tried To Warn You — @Moon-Real | YouTube
It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World | Wikipedia
— The quintessential spiritual parable of America and the West — “every man for himself” in the proverbial fools’ chase after money (gold)
Drunk on Foolish Pleasures: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Ancient Greek comedy | Wikipeda — Fools are what make “comedy” in the classical sense, to be pitied not emulated
See — American Foundations, Love of Money, Totalitarianism, The Beast
The World Is Mad — Archbishop Averky (1906-†1976) The time will come when people will behave like madmen, and to him who does not, they will say: you behave like a madman because you're not like us. Fool-for-Christ Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. — 1 Corinthians 3:18-19
Madness of Modern Life: What's It All About Alfie? | Emperor‘s New Clothes
The Age of Insanity: Modernity and Mental Health
Culture and Psychopathology
Your Faith is Making You Well: Psychotherapy in an Orthodox Christian Context
See — HEGE Series
The Hatter and the March Hare are referred to as “both mad” by the Cheshire Cat, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Fact or Fiction?
It's always been hard enough to separate fact from fiction, but in this day and age of deception, illusion, and delusion (and now AI Deepfakes), I'm not sure it's possible any more, especially when most today seem to have forgotten their 3rd grade lessons for distinguishing between the two. On top of that, we're bombarded daily by Propaganda. As Alex Carey has noted, Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet. Politifact.com and Snopes.com can help, but most of us make decisions based on our emotions, not facts, and often fail to distinguish between what isn't factual but merely opinion or an impression, what's only possibility or probability, circumstantial, anecdotal, or conjectural.
The court of public opinion is just that — opinion, not fact, or necessarily good judgement. It's nothing but mass mentality, or herd mentality that's easily manipulated into political “constituency”, or mob, by those who know how — who have means, motive, and opportunity (See — Criminal investigation). It's true that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. But a lot of the people are fooled a lot of the time, and typically refuse to listen or follow the few who historically aren't fooled and who exhibit good judgement.
In the Information Age, it's imperative to train ourselves to think like lawyers building court cases. We must learn the basics of logical fallacies so as not to fall prey to them. How many today know the difference between raising the question and begging the question, especially when their arguments mainly consist of ad hominem attacks on those they oppose? If we cannot concede to “point taken” or that we simply don't know, then we are not reasoned beings. And if our evidence is unreasonable and will not stand up in court, then we must accede lest we be thrown out of court and lose our conviction, or worse, maintain it on the false basis of claims to “conspiracy theory”, “truthiness”, or “alternative facts” and become guilty of slandering our neighbor.
Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies !
Thou shalt not suffer cognitive biases !
It's taken me a lifetime to unravel the mystery of Modernity, and that's what this wiki is about — information gathered and organized in such a way as to aid in seeing through the noise and confusion of the world in which we live, to the heart of Modernity.
MOD•wiki is not a conventional wiki that seeks to catalog factual information, which may not even be entirely possible because humans are subjective, tend toward some degree of bias or another, and are corrupted by falsehood. That's evident in how sometime before June 29, 2022 it was discovered that — Someone Slipped Hundreds of Fake Articles About Things That Never Happened Onto Wikipedia. Apparently, Chinese and Russian language versions of Wikipedia suffer from this the most, but the English version is not immune either. (See Wikipedia links below that illustrate complexities and controversies surrounding Wikipedia attempts to maintain veracity and objectivity.)
Such as the Wikipedia controversies won't happen here because I'm sole administrator, but that in itself is an issue of objectivity. It follows then that this site is only as convincing as the evidence and the arguments I present. I follow the principle of what I call C3 methodology — Clear, Concise, Comprehensive (but not exhaustingly exhaustive). The content here is presented for analysis and interpretation; it primarily consists of links to outside information with some quotes from linked pages together with my comments. I also try to include pop culture associations where possible to enable information to make more of a connection with everyday life, and to hammer it home, sink it deep into memory so it sticks.
Information selected and how it's organized is key. For instance, Planned obsolescence is a marketing strategy so I've placed it as a subcategory of Marketing (which is a subcategory of Business). Fashion is a subcategory of Planned obsolescence because it functions in the Economy primarily that way. It could be argued that Fashion is primarily Art or Culture, (and I do mention and link to it there secondarily) but that would only obscure the role Fashion plays in the Economy by way of Planned obsolescence, and the role of Economy as the primary idol of Modernity.
History of Wikipedia • What Wikipedia is not • No original research • Accuracy dispute • Verifiability • Criticism of Wikipedia • Do not create hoaxes • List of hoaxes on Wikipedia • Reliability of Wikipedia • Wikipedia is not reliable • Conflict of interest editing
Wikipedia Review | Wikipedia
The Wikipedia Review]
Wikipediocracy | Wikipedia
Wikipediocracy
Our Mission: We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with its structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense that issues forth from one of the world’s most frequently visited websites, the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit....
[E]ven after 20 years of existence [Jan 24th, 2022], it’s still too easy for Wikipedia to be manipulated by clever and/or tenacious bad actors, even when those bad actors aren’t particularly well-versed on the rules, or even particularly skilled at lying.
Through The Looking Glass is a metaphor for any time the world appears strange or unfamiliar, for when things get turned around or upside down like Alice inside the mirror. Lewis Carroll's book Through The Looking Glass uses chess and mirrors as themes, with many things mirroring the opposite of reality, such as clocks running backwards. Alice goes through the looking glass (and down the Rabbit-Hole in Alice's Adventures In Wonderland) where she finds a clearly recognizable world, yet one turned around or inside-out, like looking out from inside a mirror.
And so, onward! HEGE!
Through The Looking Glass
of MOD•wiki we go...
Starting here ⮕ MODERNITY
The Matrix of Modernity opens into 4 different Rabbit-Holes — Humanity, Economy, Government, and Environment. We moderns can get lost, and all tangled up in them.
Various periods of time within later modernity have had their fads and slang. With the introduction and rise of “smart” phones, text abbreviations have become all the rage, and now everyone's communicating not just in slang, but in acronyms formed from the first letter of each word in a phrase — LOL (laughing out loud) being one of the most ubiquitous.
So, I've coined an acronym for MOD•wiki — HEGE (hey-guh), formed from the first letter of the title of each series of entries or Rabbit-Hole portals on MOD•wiki —
• H-umanity
• E-conomy
• G-overnment
• E-nvironment
Email : mod [at] dstall.com
MOD•wiki is unmercinarily always free to view as it unfolds.
So, enjoy free access!
All site links open in the same window.
To open links in a new tab or window, right click and select "Open Link in New Tab" or "Open Link in New Window"