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“I will not be a Doge”
Monday, 20 January 2025 at 19:12
“I will not be a Doge”
In his novel Coningsby,Disraeli wrote: ‘The great object of Whig leaders in England, from the first movement under Hampden to the last most successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of the Venetian....William the Third told ...Whig leaders, “I will not be a Doge” ...They brought in a new family on their own terms. George I was a Doge; George II was a Doge....George III tried not to be a Doge....He might try to get rid of the Whig Magnificoes, but he could not rid himself of the Venetian constitution.’
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Sarpian ‘Republick of Merchants’
Sunday, 19 January 2025 at 21:40
Sarpian ‘Republick of Merchants’
What Spinoza, followed by Locke, had theorised was Sarpi’s 'Republick of Merchants’. As in Sarpi’s Venice, the consensus of the community was that of a small clique of property-owning oligarchs. Their rejection of absolute monarchy was in fact a Counter-Renaissance opposition to any form of sovereign national rule over the economic sphere. The 1688 Dutch invasion of England, or Glorious Revolution as it was dubbed by the financial beneficiaries, established a Sarpian ‘Republick of Merchants’ on English soil, as Venetian and Dutch commercial and banking interests transferred to London. The Anglo-Dutch model of oligarchical rule was established, with the formerly centralising authority of the King transformed into the nominal authority of a Venetian-style Doge.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Collaborationist role
Saturday, 18 January 2025 at 21:49
John Locke
Collaborationist role
During his exile in Amsterdam, Locke would have been receptive to the ‘Counter-Renaissance’ ideas of Spinoza. The philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein argues that during his five years in Holland, Locke chose his friends ‘from among the same freethinking members of dissenting Protestant groups as Spinoza's small group of loyal confidants’.53 Spinoza had died in 1677, but Locke almost certainly met men in Amsterdam who spoke of the author of the Ethics, whose ideas were compatible with the expansionist ambitions of a commercial oligarchy. Locke accompanied William of Orange's wife back to England in 1688, a high profile indication of his collaborationist role in the build-up to the invasion.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Leading collaborator
Thursday, 16 January 2025 at 21:55
John Locke
Leading collaborator
Born in the same year as Spinoza (1632), John Locke was employed by Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, who as a founder of the Whig movement exerted great influence on Locke's political ideas. Shaftesbury was a prominent conspirator in the failed Rye House plot, an assassination attempt upon Charles II and the future James II, which aimed to sweep away the barriers to an oligarchical takeover of government. Locke fled to the Netherlands in 1683, under strong suspicion of involvement. It is highly likely that from this point on at least, Locke was one of the leading collaborators with the Dutch backers of the 1688 invasion.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Incompatible with free will
Monday, 13 January 2025 at 21:08
Incompatible with free will
Complete Tikkun would undo the material, differentiated and individuated world we know.The answer to ‘who am I?’ would be reduced to - ‘you are what you have to be’. It would mean the death of the self. There would be a denial of subjectivity, creativity and deviation. All you could do is understand the system, not influence it. To maximise your potential, you must understand the motivations of others and work the system; Machiavellian perhaps, but very definitely Sarpian. The Ein Sof to which Spinoza led his people was Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants', or the globalists’ vision of modernity.
Spinoza’s self-caused God, or Substance, is incompatible with the freedom of the will. Not surprisingly, both Sarpi and Spinoza feared democracy. ‘Just keep the masses cheaply fed’, insisted Sarpi, whose words probably applied to ideas, as well as food. The politicised seculariser of Kabbalah, who saw the unity or monism of all things, also espoused the unity and oneness of leadership. Spinoza’s intolerance, which resulted from his monism, was wholly compatible with a crushing of difference and humanness into a 1 = 1 sameness. In a Spinozist world, the sovereign alone would have the right to determine not only the state’s laws but also religious law.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Ultimate hypostasis
Saturday, 11 January 2025 at 22:19
Ultimate hypostasis
Recall how Spinoza began his Ethics with definitions, starting with the ‘cause of itself’ or ‘causa sui’. Definition 3 says: ‘By Substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that, the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed’. This ‘Substance’ is the sole order of nature. It is Spinoza’s great kabbalistic presupposition. It is Luria’s metaphor, Ein Sof. It is the ultimate hypostasis. With Spinoza, Zeus and the gods of a transcendent, external world order reappeared. And Spinoza would chain us again to a rock of external reality, which is opposed to the human thought which thinks it.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Fatalist, determinist and necessitarian
Thursday, 9 January 2025 at 21:41
Fatalist, determinist and necessitarian
Spinoza attacked the humanist position in which he believed ‘the ignorant violate the order of Nature rather than conform to it; they think of men in Nature as a state within a state’. Spinoza’s accusation that humanist thinkers formed a state within a state famously appears also in the preface to Ethics III,where Spinoza characterised the non-naturalist view that he opposed. In both of these passages, Spinoza criticised the assumption that man can strive for an existence outside the laws that govern the rest of nature.It is precisely this position that Spinoza underlines when he writes in the Ethics that ‘the laws and rules of nature...are everywhere and always the same’ and ‘all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature and happen in accordance with the eternal laws and rules of Nature’. It was with these words that Spinoza reduced the status of mankind to that of an animal amongst others. In Spinoza, the anti-humanist, Counter-Renaissance, project of the Enlightenment attained its coldest rationality. The subject was left with no role other than to submit to necessity. This was a fatalist, determinist and necessitarian philosophy.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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