Oikophillia?

It's not a term you come across every day. Coined by the late Roger Scruton, it means a love for place - home - where shared things of value can be passed along from one generation to the next.

It's an important ideal to value in a moment when my country sees both trust and caring becoming deemed something irrelevant to those in power, who want to replace such meaning with the dross of greedful gain and vile self aggrandisement at the expense of the loss of everything that should be cherished.

What brings about such a radical adjustment?

It really all boils down to how you see another person.

Are they - 

a momental work of art

a product of unceasing utilisation

a vector for continual exploitation

Those are the three principal choices on the table in 2022.

Option 1 seems pretty 'away with the fairies' to most, who want something more pragmatic than that.

Option 2 sits nicely with those wanting us to accept the agenda (whatever it is today), but it also provides little resistance to

Option 3 - where we can be well and truly 'attached' to the "Metaverse" for as long as we're deemed 'viable' (generating wealth for others), and then - striked out.

That's almost certainly what the last few years have been all about - seeing how a variation of John Calhoun's famous rodent experiment would run amongst us in real time, with virtualisation becoming the only legal means of escape. it's a "game" that's been in motion for most of my adult life, and the roots go back way before that.

The second and third options are generally acceptable today because they are sold in the wrapping of offering 'security' in return for your acquiescence. The cost is high ( individual freedom in respect to mobility and expression are gradually removed ) but the 'high' is the dilution of moral responsibility for anything that is not deemed imperative by the "rights" provided as essential. Internment, in other words, even euthanasia, become rational and critical given the right imperatives are understood and accepted.

Exclusion is equally correct when anyone - a school girl or a training minister - seek to pause and ask what is happening - deviation is pestilent.

So, in the emerging universe, there is no sound as the tree falls in the midst of a great wood, because there is no one to hear it - we are entirely deprived, or will be very soon, of a real sense of Oikophilia, not only in respect to place but the vital values that imbue such a sphere with "moment" - connection that makes us beings with eternity in our hearts.

That's where option one comes in.

Recall the moment when you fell in love, or saw someone you loved again for the first time in a very long time, or shared the moment when your beloved gave birth to your first child - pick your moment (there are loads to choose from). Suddenly, the "light" of a far greater realm adorns the occasion with a charm and elegance that transcends time and space and fills you with a joy that barely fits into words. You totally inhabit the fact that something much richer than the norm is happening, and you want such a juncture to spread out and fill your days, but even though that won't happen, those moments provide a source of comfort and delight in your days ahead.

You see the genuine significance, the majesty, of what we are... and what we were meant to be.

Well, that's the case when you allow the mindset of option 1 into the world.

The trouble we face continually everywhere right now is the mindset which is relentlessly seeking to rub that option out entirely - to make us 'test tube' examplars of a world without sex, without genuinely individuality, without roots, without hope - creatures driven by fear of loosing the security 'they' provide, and therefore, conformed to the consensus.

"What a work of art is man", noted Hamlet, echoing the themes of scripture, but we inhabit the day of the demon of denying and dissolving that work, and it is making us evil, in the worst possible way.

Will we see a return to better days, or is this indeed the eve of our destruction?