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“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.”
― George Carlin
Over the past fifteen years or so there’s been a real disease that has spread throughout our society. If I can be honest I noticed when it started just based on my interactions with people and by simply observing the culture throughout my daily life.
Before I reveal to you what I’m referring to I will share with you some symptoms of what I am talking about based on some previous conversations I’ve had with close friends and family over the past few years.
I was hanging out with a few friends of mine a while back and we were talking about when the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) first came on the scene and what it was like seeing that type of competition in the early 1990s.
Now I don’t know if you follow the UFC, or if you’ve ever seen any of the UFC fights when the sport first started. If you haven’t I will warn you because there was probably nothing else that even came close to this except for the gladiators that used to fight inside the Roman Colosseum long ago.
In the early days of the UFC there was a shock factor that would either cause you to sit back in your seat at a loss for words, or you’d be jumping up and down in your living room with friends yelling at the TV. Now I’m not saying that the UFC still doesn’t produce some excitement among its biggest fans.
Of course it does, but that isn’t the point. The point I’m talking about is the original raw idea and set up involving the sport when it first began. The original idea that got the sport started was what brought on the shock factor and kicked off the wild energy that would lay the foundation for the most successful professional fighting organization that has ever existed.
So you’re probably wondering, Brandon, what was so special about the early days of the UFC?
In the early days of the UFC the entire event was formed out of the old idea and question of which martial arts discipline is the most superior? In other words, is Kempo Karate the best, or would Kung Fu be the best? Would the best discipline be American boxing, or would that title belong to Muay Thai?
You see the UFC was basically formed out of the idea where someone finally came to the table and decided that they were going to build this octagon shaped ring that was inside a steel cage. From here this is where they would throw two guys from different disciplines into the middle of that cage in order to put each discipline to the test.
Now if that idea is not crazy enough it gets even wilder. At the time the UFC barely had any rules at all. No, I’m not making this up. In the first days of the UFC there were no weight classifications, no time limits, and the fighters fought in a single elimination tournament style event.
The early days were also advertised as no rules, but they did have only three rules at the time. There was no biting, no eye gouging, and no fish-hooking. Groin strikes were not disallowed, but were frowned upon.
Now when looking at the formation of the UFC in its early days it’s no mystery as to why the sport got the level of attention that it did. Like anything else in its inception it was honest, raw, and full of personality and energy.
Sure, the sport of UFC wasn’t an immediate household success and it took a few years to work through some controversy, some regulation, and some general growing pains, but the product had a rabid base of supporters that would ensure its success. The same thing can be said for most every other sport as well involving NASCAR, the NFL, and Wrestling Entertainment.
However, like most any major sport, or business, that comes out of the gate hot there’s always a series of major changes that takes place during the growth phase of these institutions. These days when it involves these sports, or industries, this always leads to an outcome where the identity of these institutions settle on a more sanitized and watered down version of their previous selves. Without trying to sound too cynical it always seems like the growth phase leads to more corporate conformity and to less of a heterodox version of what made the original product interesting in the first place.
Loss of Identity
Granted, the UFC has retained a high level of popularity despite much of the societal changes and cultural rot we’ve had to endure over the last several years in society. Now having said that this is not an indictment on the UFC because it’s still a tremendous product, but it’s safe to say that it’s still not the same product that was first presented to the public in its earliest days.
The same thing can be said about the NFL, but in the case of the NFL in my view it’s become a horrible product as it has lost its identity over the years. Perhaps that can change, but I remember when I was a kid in the 1980s how I got the VHS tape of the NFL 25th Silver Anniversary for Christmas one year. This NFL films documentary, or perhaps I should say docudrama, was absolute gold in terms of the level of entertainment that it provided. It was an incredibly original and genuine snapshot of the history and culture of the NFL throughout the decades of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
To give you an example of how much the culture of the NFL has changed I want to include an excerpt from one of my earlier episodes here titled The American Mistake where I touched on this cultural snapshot from the old NFL Films docudrama that I previously mentioned.
The excerpt…
I remember seeing an interview from either the late 1960s, or early 1970s with the L.A. Rams defensive end Deacon Jones when I was a kid. In this interview Deacon Jones was talking about what he had imagined doing to the quarterbacks that he played against. In his own words he had said that he used to imagine putting all the quarterbacks inside of a bag and then he would take a baseball bat to beat the bag.
Now as if this wasn’t shocking enough to hear when I was a teenager, it was also the attitude that existed in those days concerning the Zeitgeist of the sport of football. Now I wanted to tell that story to you in order to tell you the following point.
You know as well as I do if any player in the league said that in an interview today there would be a 24/7 meltdown by the media and that player that made such a statement would be ordered to attend sensitivity training probably for a twelve week period. You also know as well as I do that they would have to do this while donating a significant sum of money to some charity of the league’s choice to maximize the league’s opportunity to virtue signal to the tenth power with the viewing public.
To me that excerpt illustrates a problem with many of these institutions as that description of the NFL of yesterday is clearly night and day different compared to the sanitized NFL product that exists today. So what happens to these different institutions that causes such a cultural shift? How does this generally lead to a subpar version of the product compared to the original formula that was presented in its earlier days, or at its inception?
I just recently watched the Shawn Ryan interview with the country singer Jon Rich. If you haven’t seen this interview I highly recommend that you take some time to look into it.
During this interview Jon sheds some light on the issue involving the culture change that I was just referring to within these big institutions. He explains what has been taking place with these various institutions that causes them to lose their identity.
In the interview Jon talks about how this actually played out with the record companies in Nashville. He said that there had traditionally always been a more Patriotic environment among the personalities in Nashville at the heads of the record companies. However, he said that this started to change as soon as Obama became President.
As he stated when that happened he went into detail about how the record companies started to replace the original executives with other people who were from New York and other big cities. These executives were leftist activists that started to change the environment and implement woke policies that funneled down from the leadership at the top. He said this all rolled downhill to the artists and the publicity departments. Once this culture shift was embedded it dictated what messaging was allowed in songs and the production of content in general.
Jon Rich went on to talk about how he had broken away from the stranglehold of Nashville so that he was able to work outside of the industry which in turn gave him the freedom to work outside of their control. He had engaged in what I would describe as the dictum of intentional action.
Jon Rich recognized early on that if he had remained underneath the umbrella of the Nashville record machine that he would be beholden to that machine. In other words, he knew that he would be under their boot of control if he didn’t find a way to get out from under that control on his own, so that’s exactly what he did.
You see I started out talking about the change in how these institutions have gone through these strange cultural shifts that resulted in them changing the product that made them who they are into something that is almost unrecognizable over time. However, as I highlighted the examples here with the various sports teams, I was doing so in a manner that was reflective of their change as you can observe how it managed to happen over a period of time.
However, in using the life example of Jon Rich he simply recognized the problem for himself long before the woke rot of Cultural Marxism was a problem to deal with in his industry. He simply figured out that as an individual, artist, and businessman that he didn’t want to be underneath the boot of the Nashville machine for any reason whatsoever. This was particularly true concerning the woke culture that would eventually come to pass throughout his industry.
As Jon pointed out the loss of identity occurred because the old guard of record executives in Nashville were replaced by woke activists. This was an action involving the seizing of the institutions by the communist left.
This was also allowed to happen because of a lack of competition within the entertainment industry in Nashville, along with the fact that most other artists lacked the foresight and the intestinal fortitude to do what Jon did by figuring out a path in order to venture out on their own.
Because of this the centralization of power within the Nashville record business had been allowed to grow and seize control of the creativity, voices, and actions of the artists that were under their label. In short, because of their lack of foresight the reality is that all of the artists that chose to remain underneath the umbrella of the Nashville record labels, in reality, gave up their sovereignty. If you’re thinking that this sounds familiar, this strategy involving the seizing of the music institutions in Nashville is the same strategy that has been in place in Hollywood for quite some time.
I believe this is an extremely valuable lesson for all of the rest of us no matter what industry we work in, or what it is that we do for a living. The lesson here is that it’s vitally important to recognize and to have a handle on the environment around you. After all, this is what I always talk about here on this show in terms of why it’s important to be a Zenith.
I understand that money can be very attractive and the more money that someone has dropped into their lap the more it seems like the majority of people fail to ask what comes along with that money. This may be the result of willful ignorance, or outright ignorance, but the problem is that many people fail to see, or understand, how they can end up being beholden to another entity.
This failure to recognize where the boundaries of one’s individual sovereignty exists is a problem with much of our society. It’s a symptom of Cultural Marxism having been successful in watering down the concept of individuality.
Keep in mind that your individuality goes far beyond surface level traits that may involve whether or not you get a tattoo, or dye your hair. Individuality is about an exercise in you strengthening your ability to retain your sovereignty. This involves your ability to influence, create, and demonstrate levels of competency and usefulness concerning your contributions to society.
The thought that your individuality is surface level is a reductionist way of thinking. Knowing who you are and what you are able to push yourself to do requires a personal discipline of pursuit. This is something you can exercise whether you’re engaging and helping to solve a problem in one of your study groups at school, or having the courage to speak up at your work to offer an idea about a certain policy, or a marketing strategy for a big project. Of course, it can also apply in a way that involves you making a case for, or against, something where you want to make sure your voice is heard in the political arena as well.
The bottom line is that the loss of identity is the problem and is the real disease that has spread throughout our society. Oh yeah, I said I was going to reveal the problem to you after covering the many symptoms of this issue.
The Wrap Up
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
–2 Timothy 1:7
According to the Lukin Center For Psychotherapy there are essentially five signs that are associated with one who is suffering from an identity crisis.
These signs involve the following:
* Questioning your basic understanding of who you are.
* Feeling anxious, agitated, or dissatisfied with your life.
* Going along to change yourself to fit other situations, environments, and relationships.
* You have trouble answering questions about yourself.
* You feel like you lack the ability to make good decisions.
In my view if you’re experiencing a lack of confidence, or something more severe such as an identity crisis the way I believe that you can pull out of this is by shifting your frame of mind. You can make this shift away from holding yourself where you’re in a defensive posture to transitioning your mind into a place where you can position yourself into a more assertive offensive posture.
This shift from a defensive posture to an offensive posture makes all the difference in the world in terms of how people will react to you in certain situations. Mind you this is a fact whether we’re talking about individuals who go out and face life on a daily basis, or if we’re talking about an entire nation that is trying to assert its place on the global stage.
For example, you can see just how clear this is when we take a moment to examine how the United States has been viewed on the global stage for the past four and half years.
In other words, if you think about the enemies of the United States and how they must have viewed our country over the past four years, they could clearly see how our nation was completely signaling that we were in a defensive posture, or probably even worse a more submissive posture.
So what exactly do I mean by this and how exactly would a defensive posture be a bad thing?
Well if you take a minute to examine what our country looked like through the lens of our enemies you would see a nation that has been ceding over more and more control to foreign influence specifically involving the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In addition to this you could also see how we have been suffering from intense political division. You could see how we have been weakened from the Marxist infiltration of our institutions where our military was more concerned about transgenderism and racial sensitivity rather than warfighting. You could see how we were willing to spend ourselves into oblivion by propping up literally every other nation in the world except for our own.
When you factor in all of these insane actions that were being positioned as top priority by the leaders of our nation, you can understand that our enemies could start to see us in much the same way as an advancing fighter would see his embattled opponent on his back heel and up against the ropes.
In the case of the United States we were in a total state of collapse due to an ongoing chain of domestic disasters from the Hawaiian fires all the way to a flooded and decimated Asheville, North Carolina.
At the same time that these domestic disasters have been hitting the nation, we've also seen how this domestic instability led directly to foreign instability with the war between Ukraine and Russia, the Middle East War, and with the potential of the CCP trying to make a move on Taiwan in the Pacific.
However, since President Trump has taken office now the picture of our nation looks a lot different through the lens of our enemies. Now looking at the United States both our friends and our enemies can see a President that is not willing to hesitate in order to do what is in the best interest of the nation.
Now you have seen a President with the most prolific negotiating skills in history come in and broker trade deals with both our so-called friends and enemies by using tariffs in order to create an environment of fair trade.
You’ve seen a President that has been willing to follow through on deporting illegal migrant criminals and terrorists even in the face of radical judges that are constantly trying to undermine his Article II Powers.
Furthermore, you’ve seen a President that was willing to send some B-2 bombers across the world in the dead of night in order to decapitate a mountain to destroy the nuclear facility of a sworn enemy without dragging us into another forever war.
President Trump is demonstrating to us exactly how powerful it can be to take on an offensive posture, both in terms of being successful in one’s own career, as well as, what it takes in order to reclaim the greatness that a nation has firmly held since its founding.
The identifying quality here is that the President has never wavered, or doubted what he believed and who he is as an individual. He never budged from that even when the entire world was trying to drag him down.
As a result of him embracing his individuality and staying in an offensive posture we’re now seeing that it is resulting in an effort, through God’s blessing, that is moving to save the world.
The fact is that the country temporarily went through an identity crisis and because of this the world moved to take advantage of the situation until the good Lord sent a guy along that was completely sure of his own identity and the direction that he was wanting to go. The Lord simply sent us an authentic American to remind us of who we are and what we should be striving to do.
I would imagine that if Aldous Huxley were here he would say that if we could embrace our individuality, as we have learned from President Trump, that it would be the significant exercise in demonstrating what it takes to be the ultimate anti-automaton.
Do you currently engage with others at work, school, or in social media settings to express your individuality?
Are you currently in a place where you are struggling to get a foothold on where you can exhibit your own talents and skills in life?
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