Stonebeam 23: CBS: The Self-Immolation ‘Virus’ and Cure

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Brian Wright

Story Shot 23, by Brian R. Wright PDF Version, 04 March 2021

Note: This is the first in a series of three columns on the CBS affliction. Pt. 2, Pt. 3.

“There’s no such thing as a collective brain.” — Howard Roark,
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

Bingo! Eureka moment. This one sentence from Roark’s courtroom speech in the movie triggered the connection and led to a watershed column on what I call “collective-brain syndrome” (CBS).[1]

Which, along with “runaway” mind,[2] has kept our species from full consciousness and flourishing. What I’m writing here is a summary or foreword to two followon works of high urgency:

Decollaring Guide—my white paper expanding on this column w/fuller fixes.
Independents Rising book—I will lay out an entire Independents’ movement.[3]

The crisis, of course, is what’s upon us with the ‘covtardia’ (ref. my Stonebeam #1 footnote)-induced mass “catastrophic irrationality” and its opportunistic Great Reset infection. [There are other (related) threats in the Matrix,[4] all of which require us to End CBS NOW! and take practical political steps to resolve its antihuman effects.]

So what’s the origin and development of CBS? Two major intellectuals lie at the root of the understanding: Julian Jaynes and Ayn Rand. Continue reading →

Guest Column: Whither the Independent?

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Brian Wright

Obsolete phrase: “independence of mind”
By Jon Rappoport [Full original column here.]

Like a car with high fins and long protruding tail lights, the phrase “independence of mind” has gone out of style, especially at colleges and universities where it ought to be the most profound ideal. The thugs have taken over.

As recently as 2008, a professor of Jurisprudence at King’s College London, Timothy Macklem, described the phrase in this fashion:

“Independence of Mind [explores] the ways in which the fundamental freedoms help us to achieve something even more profound, by enabling us to arrive at beliefs, convictions and voices of our own, so that we truly come to think, believe, and speak for ourselves in the rich and various ways that the freedoms then protect. Privacy grants us the distance and refuge from others necessary to develop views of our own; freedom of speech calls on us to imagine ways of expressing ourselves that are both true to the views we have developed and innovative in their own right; freedom of conscience enables each of us to create a distinctive rational personality in which to embed the convictions that we wish to treat as non-negotiable…” Continue reading →

Guest Column: Howard Roark and the Collective

Posted on April 3, 2017 by Brian Wright

Why go to fiction to learn about power?
by Jon Rappoport [original column at nomorefakenews.com here]

Why go to fiction to learn about power?

Because in art we can see our visions. We can see ideals and archetypes. These fictional characters have the energy we strive for.

When Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead (1943), was asked whether Howard Roark, the hero of her novel, could exist in real life, she answered, with annoyance, “Of course.”

Her implication was: don’t you have the desire to discover your own highest ideals and live them out?

Roark is an architect who creates buildings no one has imagined before. His refusal to compromise his vision is legendary. He suffers deprivation and poverty and rejection with an astonishing amount of indifference. He is the epitome of the creative individual living in a collective world.

For reasons no one can discover (must there always be reasons?), Roark has freed himself from The Group. Perhaps he was born free.

Roark’s hidden nemesis is a little man named Ellsworth Toohey, an architecture columnist for a New York newspaper, who is quietly building a consensus that has, as its ultimate goal, the destruction of all thought and action by the individual for the individual. Continue reading →