The Virtual Person

 Once we quantify the human being by reducing him to flesh and blood alone and chemical reactions in the brain it is no longer easy to differentiate the human being from the A.I. facsimile or the robot.  Those who speak in favour of abortion often refer to the unborn baby as nothing more than a cluster of cells.  This fits with their materialist ontology, but it is unclear why the born baby, the child or the adult is any more than a cluster of cells.  From the materialist perspective we are all as soulless as the foetus.  And if we are soulless then how are we different from the robot?  A similar question arises for the non-physical virtual personality that can be created by artificial intelligence.  It is not about being physical or not.  It is rather about what it is that makes the human-being fundamentally different from technological manufactured automata that mimic us with such accuracy and potentially even seem to act spontaneously. 

There is a bizarre concept that emerged from the tech world of singularity that is known as “speciesism”.  This idea draws an analogy with racism and applies a similar opprobrium.  In this case though, to favour the human “species” as a whole is seen as a prejudiced and discriminatory approach.  To most sane people it is clear this has reduced concepts to the absurd.  While we perceive this though, the parameters of debate and the ontological and spiritual assumptions of our society mean we can no longer articulate reasons for the uniqueness of Man.  Man is no longer the imago Dei, but a consequence of impersonal evolutionary and biological forces.  We are thus silenced by the materialist limits of thought in the modern world.

We urgently need an understanding that affords an explanation of why human beings are fundamentally different from simulacra, automata and facsimiles.  Instead of adopting the reductive rationale of materialism, which deprives us of satisfactory accounts of what it is to be human, we need an understanding that affords an adequate account.

Such an exercise is only necessary if we still believe humans are more than mere mechanisms driven by a biological momentum for survival.  If we are instead ready to adopt a mechanistic and materialist view of the human being, then we must be prepared to acknowledge then the inevitable reduction of no value, no quality and a loss of any sense of why our own kind are in a special sense unique and sacred.  One might be ready to accept such a bleak world, but it means denying the value of human love, human art, human history, human faith and the intrinsic value of human life.  This, it is suggested, is not a belief system, but pathology.

In some sense Kant’s transcendental argument seems to help here.  The God postulate is necessary to explain what cannot be explained.  So much of human value, the conscience, morality, telos, requires that we postulate God as existing.  This though seems an over-rationalised and deracinated argument for higher meaning.  Instead, more convincing on a human level, rather than at a theoretical level, is our experiential existence that tells us what is real, prior to the sort of abstraction that both science and philosophy impose upon our immediate experience.

Our most real experience is as a person and it is of other human people.  All the interactions, from the babe in arms responding to his mother’s expression and touch, to our meeting of strangers - all is personal.  This is the primary and real experience.  And this is what helps us perceive the artificiality of the artificially-created reality.  Furthermore, after people we also encounter Creation itself as real, with a clear imprint of the divine Person.  Afterwards, abstract ideas are imposed that try to suggest viewing through the microscope or the telescope (perspectives that while real involve abstraction by abolishing either distance or scale) is more real that what we encounter in our lived reality as personal beings encountering one another and a personally-created cosmos.

We should not then discard the very attitude that helps us distinguish the real from the virtual.  And as stated above there is a reductive move that can legitimately be seen as pathological by abstracting to such an extent that we lose that perception.  So instead we need an explanation that affords validity to that perception and it is not to be found in abstracted philosophy or science.  It is primarily the personal encounter, which involves freedom and faith.  Freedom, because the personal interaction is not controlled and faith because we trust a higher purpose to the uncontrolled encounters.  

We must then turn to an account of the world that is deeply personal.  The abstracted and scientific mind tends to see this as biased and lacking the necessary objectivity.  This scientific attitude though is exactly the problem.  It tries to turn us into neutral observers who have no existential commitment to the phenomena we encounter.  We are taught instead to detach ourselves and observe the world in artificial laboratory conditions.  It is such an approach that means we can no longer distinguish the value of the real over the virtual.

What affords a full understanding then is that through our experiential encounter with phenomena we encounter others as persons and a world crafted by a Person.  The human being is recognised as the imago Dei and the reality of the world is understood as a personal Creation of the ultimate Person.  This affords an understanding of why the real and the actual person is fundamentally valuable in a way that the virtual is not.  There can be no artificially created human, the artificial world of virtual reality is not real.  We understand rather that it is a creation by a partial and finite person, unlike reality itself as the creation of the infinite Person.  Artificial worlds and creations have value of course aesthetically, but we understand that they are not real.  And they are valued inasmuch as they enable us to participate in something through their material parts that is of value beyond those material substances.  The great painting is not merely paint on canvas, it creates a picture of a world that we encounter because we recognise the person of the artist speaking to us about something of value.  We do not though mistake it for complete reality.

 Thinking specifically now of the human person, his qualitative value is that he is also both in his physical existence and is his body, but also something beyond this.  He is also spirit and he is made by and oriented towards his personal Creator.  He is not mere matter alone and neither is he a mere mechanism.  His existence is orientated towards the highest value and even if that orientation is awry, still like the divine Creator he is a person whom we encounter and relate to as a person and not a facsimile.  But only if we reject the mechanistic understanding of the material as the total reality, can we personally encounter the personal reality.

The tech fanatics then are rather like Chesterton’s lunatic in the asylum.  They exist in a compact and complete world that is internally completely rational and yet he is detached from reality outside of his mind.  He rejects the validity of the encounter with the person, reducing it to a merely materialist understanding.  It is for this reason he can talk seriously about “speciesism” or assert that he can be downloaded onto a computer.  We have seen though instead that the traditional understanding of God, man as imago Dei and reality as created affords an understanding that means we can recognise and distinguish the real from the virtual.    

We must remember this truth as we confront the growing potency and ubiquity of the virtual and artificial.  It seems as though the only way to survive the confusion that will compromise the value of all that is valuable is the religious outlook.

Atheism for you, Moloch for us

 Since the age of Revolution and Enlightenment, secret societies and interest in the occult have been a major factor amongst the new and revolutionary elite.  Meanwhile atheism and materialism have been promoted to the masses, cutting them off from Christ.

The atheism in our society being actively promulgated and pushed, through entertainment, education and scientific “experts” is plain to see. Only the most gullible would fail to see an intentional agenda, even a conspiracy.  Many of the powerful families in the British establishment, the Darwins, the Huxleys and others have been part of an elite that has worked to undermine faith in Christ.  The occult element to the elite is more difficult to pin down, by its very nature.  There are rather hints and suggestions.  To look at the world from a more spiritual perspective and observe the hubris of scientism, the promotion not only of atheism but sexual degeneracy, it is clear though that a concomitant agenda is at work.

Atheism clearly disempowers people, makes them feel life is meaningless, enslaves them to appetites and passions.  People lose their agency if they are cut off from God.

The elites have no desire to lose agency for themselves by contrast.  Control is their whole philosophy.  And this was achieved historically through magic and alchemy and today through manipulation of nature by science.  It is no great leap to suggest they also wish to control us.  Elites who cared for their people would not be actively promoting atheism, homosexuality and abortion.  This nihilistic society is somehow explained by the impoverished ideology of “secular liberalism”.  Is it not more the case that our globalist elites are all about control and manipulation?

It is easy to see how the promotion of feminism and abortion or alternatively, the promotion of opern borders and multiculturalism are in the interests of global capital and have by contrast created economic difficulties for our own people.  It is here contended that it is not simply about avarice and greed, but a more sinister form of control. 

The ideology of our elites is very anti-Christian.  It devalues man so that he is a mere individual driven by passions and appetites and no longer the imago Dei.  He is told this enslavement to passions that leads to the break down of society and family is all about “freedom”.  Of course it leads to unhappiness, anomie and purposelessness.  Why do our elites want this for us?  There is something more evil than the love of money, even if that was initially at the root of it, to reference the Apostle Paul.

This love of money has become further disfigured into a lust for power that thrives on the degradation of the people.  Today in the West it is seen as a matter of great cultural value that people parade the streets taking pride in their sexual sins.  We celebrate the extreme lack of virtue, loss of a telos, and indulgence in every passion.  This is not freedom, it is degradation and enslavement and certain people benefit from our degradation.

Rather like Bentham’s Panoptican, we are threatened with the surveillance society in which we are left to our passions and controlled prisoners in an open, but continually monitored gaol.

Those who imprison us have clearly reached the height of hubris and with that comes a spiritual sickness.  This ultimate lust for power stems from the revolutions of the Eighteenth Century, which promoted the so-called values of the Enlightenment, which released the perversions of the Marquis de Sade.  The ultimate and most cruel power is sexual, the intimate control of another human being, their degradation, their torture.  This was the nature of the cults the ancient Hebrews encountered in the Promised Land.  They encountered the cults of Moloch and Baal, symbolised by the Star of Remphan.  Many in the Renaissance became fascinated by the similar occult knowledge that reached them after the sack of Constantinople.  The heart of the Christian empire in the East had a dangerous margin of black magic and occultism and this was brought to the West and helped fuel the Renaissance, humanism and a fascination with magic and alchemy.  The Western elites ignored Orthodoxy, but utilised the occult underbelly of the East.

Magic is the manipulation of Nature and in that sense a precursor of the New Science.  The occult, from the Renaissance on, was at work to undermine Christendom and was working in tandem with the seemingly secular and rationalistic Enlightenment.  It is not an unjustified inference to conclude the New Science and rationalist philosophy were a cover for the occult and revolution.  Newton himself embodied the mechanistic new science with the occult.  This is because a mechanistic view of the cosmos is one that permits manipulation and exploitation.  Empiricist philosophers such as Hume denied the existence of the soul and presented Man as a mere passive receiver of sensation thereby in the end justifying a Benthamite utilitarian manipulation.

What to conclude?  There are many hints and much uncollated evidence that the elite’s secret societies and spiritual fascinations are linked to the occult, to Moloch and to Satanism.  Whether it be the symbolism of the Apple in tech, the six colours of the LGBT flag referencing the symbolism of number six, the spirit cooking of Marina Abramovic, the activities at Bohemian Grove, the promotion of killing unborn babies, homosexuality and gender confusion, the hostility to Christianity, there is something spiritually dark at work that involves more than a simple atheistic denial of the divine and supernatural.  Atheism promoted in mainstream society separates the people from God and removes their spiritual defences.  It is promoted by those who are most likely not atheists, but fascinated by the demonic.  

We must then understand the influence of Aleister Crowley, a figure in British intelligence, on the so-called values of secular liberalism.  Crowley promoted sexual depravity as a means to harness demonic power.    His famous phrase is what the Western liberal calls for “freedom” really means - do what thou wilt.  Here is the ultimate expression of individualism that destroys the person’s likeness to God and turns him into an atomised and hedonistic individual.  This is the “value” the West has come to stand for and we should not underestimate how well-connected or how accurately Crowley manifested the state of our Western/globalist elites.

But it was always about more than simple base appetites for them - such drives were for the masses in this social Darwinist vision.  They understood they could enslave us to our hedonism.  Our seemingly benign and dusty elites, the likes of Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw were wolves in sheep’s clothing.  Taking the model of the Roman General Fabius who held back from directly confronting Hannibal in the second Punic war, they too did not promote outright revolution, but revolution by stealth.  Their group that produced so many Labour Prime Ministers, the Fabian Society, chose as its symbol the wolf in sheep’s clothing that Christ warned us to beware of and recognise as a deceiver who would consume us.  And for all their talk of progress they really represented a dark scientism to be implemented through eugenics.  The elite families of Britain were behind this Fabian Society and its current Prime Minister ( a declared atheist), introducing digital identification, is a member.

The real nature of the revolution, it must be understood, all the way back to the French Revolution, is not about politics alone - it is consciously spiritual.  It is against Christ and His Church.  It aims to enslave us for the sake of Luciferian progress, a better world as they see it, but one which is deeply inhuman and atheistic.  Because at some point atheism is not simply materialist, but is an endorsement of the revolutionary demonic forces that rebelled against God led by that hero of our elites Satan, as portrayed so effectively by that English poet John Milton (his civil-war Puritanism being a prototype for secular revolution).  Milton was confused by his fascination with Satan, later elites would embrace their fascination.

It is about power and control through revolution.  They want us unbelieving and bewildered, enslaved to our passions, so that they can rule like progressive Platonic Philosopher Kings, keeping us in our degenerate state with the “noble lie” of atheism.

The Misfit Agenda

 The modern Left has very little to do with class injustice and everything to do with individualistic sexual idiosyncrasy and revolutionary identity, usually sexual or ethnic.  It is both an outgrowth of and an opponent of the classical liberalism the likes of Jordan Peterson defend.  In its active movement it is made up of people with psychological pathologies and slaves to deviant passions.  It takes on the liberal idea of individual freedom from oppression and then defines everything normative and traditional as oppressive.  It is a movement of misfits who desire not to be healed, but a society that is degenerating and therefore making their deviance seem normative.  They talk of “tolerance” and “kindness”, but in their dismantling of all that holds a society together they are full of hatred and express this by active persecution, and destroying their enemies with an inhuman mercilessness.

There is a misunderstanding amongst what we might call “normies” that the misfit is somehow a vulnerable and persecuted victim, who deserves sympathy.  In fact, as we so often see, many of these Leftist misfits are full of hate, vengefulness and turn out to be the real bullies.  Woke ideology, which assumes an abstract compassion for the theoretical victim, is a useful cover for the bully.  It also affirms people in their pathologies, rather than healing them of their resentments, anger, sexual deviance and social alienation.  Many Leftist misfits adopt the most inhuman attitudes - hatred of parents, celebrating the deaths of unborn children, wanting the gender complementarity reversed.  They have a twisted investment in society being dysfunctional as an excuse or justification for their own social or sexual or familial dysfunction.  Society has to be made dysfunctional.  It is not really about liberation, but destruction of society, motivated by the alleged feeling they project onto everyone else - hatred.

Edward Dutton writes of the “spiteful mutants”.  While one can remain sceptical of his Darwinist analysis, he is onto something in pinpointing the supposed victims often being driven by spite and hatred, We saw this very clearly after the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Time and time again we see an abstract and theoretical picture of the victim contradicted by the empirical evidence of the bully masquerading as victim - trans men pretending to be women intimidating their critics and real women in the toilets or in sports and games, ethnic minorities relying on affirmative action and equality laws to reap unmerited rewards, the use of the moral crime of the Holocaust by Zionists to justify genocide of Palestinians.  

This is really an abuse of Christian values.  It exploits and misrepresents genuine Christian compassion and the spirit of the Beatitudes to defend sin, deviance and even full-blown Satanism.  Our society finds it difficult to resist the ideology of the misfit because already our Christian ethos has been distorted by the secularised Judaeo-Christian and classical Liberal prism, which has moved away from the central core and orthodox truth into a heretical position.  It is instead the secular justification for degenerate and immoral behaviour that must not be judged.  There is no true repentance and transformation.  So often we see Western churches describe themselves as inclusive, which downplays repentance and transformation.

Instead of true compassion, the compassion that cares enough to put someone on the right path, we have abstract rights and abstract compassion.  The person falling deeper and deeper into passions and nihilism must be affirmed in this subversive system.  Society itself must be reshaped, subverted, turned upside down, in case anyone who has fallen is judged as having fallen.  We are therefore a society that relies on the white lie, fake affirmation and a harsh individualism that abandons people to their bad choices, leading them into passions, social isolation and unhappiness - all understood as revolution against oppression.

The fear of being found out as having committed to the wrong decisions by becoming trapped by our own idiosyncrasies and deviance means society itself must deny reality.  Thus Western civilisation that prides itself on its rationalism, its compassion and secretly on its superiority is turning into a living Hell.  Everyone is going his own way and being affirmed in these deviations.  It is of course fundamentally the democratic spirit, whereby our whims and preferences are the ultimate authority.  As St John of Kronstadt put it - Hell is a democracy.  And thus we all live in a topsy turvy world in which lies are affirmed and truth is regarded as oppressive.

Imitatio Christi - the key to exemplarity

 Exemplarity is an idea that can be found in Platonism, the Church Fathers, Franciscan saints such as Bonaventure and in Orthodox theology.  It is an idea that is based in philosophical realism and a metaphysical understanding of the transcendental - the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  Since corrosive ideas such as nominalism, which denies the reality of universals, we have lost touch with the necessity of participation in exemplarity.  The fullest manifestation of exemplarity is not abstract ideas, but the Person of Jesus Christ, the God Man.

With exemplarity we can see various threads of thought and culture coming together in a virtuous synthesis.  Stoic ideas of self restraint, Aristotlian ideas of the telos of virtue and Neo-Platonic ideas of participating in the transcendental realm all come together in the figure of the exemplar.  Only in the Church is the concept given its fullest and ultimate iteration.  In Neoplatonism participation is in abstract and airy transcendentals.  In Aristotle the telos is eudaimonia, rather than full self sacrifice. In the Stoics, the personal is lost in a pantheist theology.  Only in the Church is exemplarity incarnated in the God Man, in whose life we are to participate and Whom we are to imitate.

The concept of exemplarity requires a vertical and upwards-orientated understanding of reality.  Plato here is helpful in pinpointing reality as being in the realm of Forms, not in this material world of becoming.  The pagan philosopher though went too far in disembodying us from reality.  In the Church's teaching the second Person of the Trinity comes down into our world, incarnate.  Humbling Himself for us, through His kenosis.  The Truth is embodied.  The spiritual manifests in the physical.  The Word made flesh.   Without this we fall into Gnosticism.

If there are heights to which we aspire, if man as much as a lyre or an animal has an orientating purpose as in Aristotle, then it must be more than eudaimonia.  It must be deeper, it must then be love.  We then do not simply seek the happy life, the good life, but love in Christ.  This self-sacrificial love can account more for suffering than simply the virtue for the sake of the good life of eudaimonia.

 If life and virtue are about restraint and freedom from the passions, as with Seneca and the Stoics, then a pantheist cosmos is not enough.  Such  attainment of freedom must involve the personal, not a dissolution into the cosmos.  In the Church we participate in the Person of Christ, not becoming part of the universe.  The personal is the height of exemplarity.

The practical aspect of a chain of exemplarity is participation.  The purpose of our life is not hedonism or power, it is participation in the highest, which is about sacrifice and humility.  Exemplarity requires an orientation towards the highest.  The pagan philosophers could not find an ultimate exemplar.  This ultimate exemplar is Christ, because God as man is the perfect man.

With Christ as the ultimate exemplar, there are lower exemplars who to a greater or lesser extent manifest Christ and can be looked up to as examples and models to follow.  The Medieval notion of knighthood helps with the culture of exemplarity.  The code of chivalry was the warrior's form of participating in Christ.  We thus look up to the knight as an honourable model to follow, but as Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur reminds us, even knighthood as a worldly thing is imperfect and subject to temptation and hubris.

The saints are the greatest exemplars and that is why the churches are full of their icons.  They help us not only through their prayers, but because as flawed men and women they achieved the spiritual heights through Christ.  They can then inspire us in our participation as we follow the models of exemplarity.  The Mother of God, in particular, is to be understood as the ultimate fully-human exemplar of sanctity.

The knights, of course, had a particular veneration for the Mother of God, which was expressed in loyalty and love for their own lady.  The monks are the other zenith of human participation.  The Orthodox monks on the Holy Mountain of Athos dwell on an isthmus dedicated to Mary the Theotokos.  The Mother of God is the first Christian and the only human born in our sinful state to be personally without sin.

The figures of exemplarity are then in a chain of participation ultimately leading to Christ the God-Man.  Monks in particular exemplify this participation in the life of Christ.  As ascetics they sacrifice their life in this world for love of Christ.

Participation in the higher Good is challenging for us in the West.  With Ockham's denial of universals, with Protestantism's destruction of the saints' shrines and its hatred of the Mother of God, with empiricism turning our attention to the material and the particular and with utilitarianism's promotion of hedonism, these beliefs, linked genealogically, have separated us from the transcendental.  Popular culture celebrates revolutionary culture and individualistic self realisation.  We have become unhealthily obsessed with sexual identity.  Western Churches have reinterpreted Christ as an advocate for the secular values of liberalism.  We in the West are cut off from higher meaning.

This is why the statistics show a surge of interest in traditional religion from the young, so-called Gen Z.  Western ideals have been shown to be barren and empty, quite literally in the way our secular values have led to a demographic crisis.  Clearly aspiring to participate in the life of Christ through the Church is not ultimately about utilitarian social benefits, such as restoration of the trust society, solving the birth crisis or regaining our collective Christian identity - these are side benefits.  The true benefit is through Christ we have access to participate again in the Good, the True and the Beautiful and restore our telos, through self restraint and asceticism, in the eventual hope of eternal life with the Father through the Spirit. 

The Reign of the Misfit

 We have recently again seen the extreme point reached of the culture of the misfit, with the evil attack on a church service for children at a Roman Catholic school in Minneapolis.  The murderer and suicide was a transgender misfit, with insane and dark political views.  He was an example of the extreme of what a misfit can become: the atomised weirdo who does not fit in and is full of bitterness, resentment and pride.

Our culture is dominated by and celebrates the misfit.  Clearly most misfits do not turn into gunmen attacking children.  The misfit is made in the image of God too, a created being.  It is a long downward journey to reach the point of nihilistic evil reached by the transgender gunman.  Nonetheless there is a spectrum here of the spiritual state of the isolated and atomised social outcast.

And the social outcast himself is a consequence of the diabolical disintegration of the community in Western civilisation.  Atomisation is the cultural trajectory of our dying civilisation, which has turned its back on collective and spiritual tradition.  Community is a relational society where humans are persons, not individuals, who live interrelated through church and family and community.  The powerful in our society, the liberal elite, has deliberately worked to dismantle this.  Since the Second World War the speed of this intentional disintegration gathered pace.  Now social and cultural disintegration was seen as the antidote to Fascism.  Homosexuality was legalised, as was abortion and popular culture was manipulated to develop a lack of tradition or hierarchy or respect - all seen as authoritarian traits.  In art the CIA promoted degenerate artists who created abstract and idiosyncratic masturbatory self expression.  Meanwhile architecture was redesigned to dehumanise and break down beauty, so the morale of the human being would be spiritually crushed as a result of ugliness in the environment.  This cultural degeneration groomed the misfit, alienated from family, religion and community.  These misfits, socially outcast, unable to feel true empathy exist in a Satanic hubris of resentment.  If not reaching the extreme of suicide or murder or both, they seethe in their resentment hating their family, investigating Satanism and in the school system being bullied and rejected.  He resents being outcast, but fails to understand why he is rejected.

In the West the latest stage in the cultural revolution was the idea of woke.  This was said to be an awareness and consciousness of the intersectionality of oppression.  It manifested as a weird alliance of racial minorities and social misfits, usually trapped in perverted sexual identities.  Movements such as BLM and the Pride promotion of LGBT are specific movements founded and promoted by woke ideology.  

This is in a way a subtle twisting of the Christian message.  Christ urges us to care for the outcast, but the deceptive move in the woke movement is to celebrate the fallen identity rather than the potential to be transfigured into the full stature of Christ.  Woke leaves people in their perversions and confusions and teaches that the fallen place is to be celebrated.  This is the ideology of affirmation of the misfit who seethes in his resentment and often in his sexual deviance.

Self-regarding compassion can be deeply misguided.  It is the equivalent of giving your son a snake when he asked for a fish.  The over-emphasis on individual self-realisation means we do not steer the misfit away from his poison, but tell him to keep drinking deeply.  It tells the misfit to live in a state of pride not humility and repentance.

The misfit is then the ultimate expression of individualism.  He is abused by the group,  but is so alienated can feel no empathy himself.  He is the victim of liberalism as it traps him in his passions, but he takes pride in his passions.  He resents the idea of any authority and worships none but himself.

We read in Dostoevsky’s Demons where the misfit finds himself.  Kirillov, thinking he has achieved the state of the man-god through self realisation is exploited by a ruthless revolutionary to commit suicide as cover for a revolutionary murder. He has got into this mess because he consciously rejected the humble acceptance of the God-Man Christ and instead wished himself to be the god-man through the self asserting act of suicide.  

And this is what the alienated misfit thinks.  He rejects the God-Man, Christ, for himself and his own self-realisation.  Perhaps, most likely, he was once vulnerable, but his inability to fit in with his fellow men turns him to resentment not humility.  He falls more and more deeply into self-obsessed loathing of the world.  He chooses to live how he wants in contravention of societal norms and in a campaign of revenge.  Here we can detect the spiritual zeitgeist of the times - Crowley’s “do what thou wilt”.  As a rejected person this reduced individual gains his only sense of self from his resentment and his assertion of his own will.

What then?  Most do not end up at the final point of shooting innocent children at prayer.  That though is the final nadir of the atomised individualism that our degenerated culture celebrates in its distortion of its founding Christian ethos.  Our society is run by the empowered misfit, be that the transgender man demanding to enter women’s toilets or the homosexual demanding they too should marry as if man and woman.  Normal people live in fear of being hateful, when to hope for something better for our fellow Man, our brothers and sisters is not hate at all.

We must understand that this was always where our culture and society would end up, once we became secular.  Once our society began to aim at a reformed and progressive society rather than patiently waiting for all to be put right at the Eschaton the traits of Babel would appear, and even Sodom and Gomorrah.   Focused as we are on the here and now we became obsessed with secular notions of justice, unable to conceive of the transformative and life-fulfilling power of redemption.  So instead we focused on codified rights that emphasised the reduced individual.  Ideas of the telos of virtue or renouncing sin began to be seen as oppressive rules.  Instead we sought a revolutionary society of freedom.  What has resulted from this right to pursue our own happiness is a tragic alienation and anomie expressed throughout our society and at its most extreme point in the form of the transgender gunman killing children as the children acknowledge in humility and prayer the higher power of God.

Restoring the Paragon

 Our equalising and resentful culture despises the paragon.  While for two thousand years the West has understood we are flawed and fallen, we now live in an age where virtue itself is pilloried.  We are taught heroism and sanctity are fake, unattainable and are just a cloak for hypocrisy.  As a result exemplarity and virtue are turned om their head.  And we instead condone personal vice, immorality and loss of innocence, while demanding adherence to superficial and schematic ideological programmes as though that is where virtue lay.

Our ruling class is deeply afraid of the concept of virtue as much as it is of beauty.  Just as our streets are filled with ugly modern architecture so our stories and entertainment celebrate so-called liberation through moral degeneracy and confusion.  To question this is to be at best prudish but more likely it is seen to be judgemental, intolerant and hateful.  We once were taught to hate sin and hate evil.  Today hate itself is the only sin, by which our ruling class often means opposing the lifestyles of those it wishes us to celebrate.  People though were once wiser.  They were able to distinguish between sin and sinner.  As Saint John of Kronstadt put it:  "Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is within him."

Today though we most certainly live in confusion about Man as the Imago Dei.  Man defiled, lost and fallen is celebrated.  He is no longer recognised as the imago Dei who has something precious that can be marred by sin.  Loss of innocence is regarded as gaining important life experience.  In a culture of hedonism trying the forbidden fruit is to be commended as a sort of personal development.  And this error rests in the first error of losing the sense of Man as the imago Dei and this proceeds from the campaign that those who run our society have worked on with an extraordinary assiduousness to the point of fanaticism to convince us God does not exist and religion is an oppressive force of the past.  And our masters have been aided in their agenda by liberal clergy who sadly never take a stand but instead give a Christian tone to the secular shibboleths that secular Man is so obsessed with as a compensation for his renunciation of personal virtue in favour of political correctness.

Such a framework cannot allow paragons.  If anyone overcomes their passions they are a threat to a society based on hedonism and self indulgence.  The woman who chooses to struggle bringing up a child alone strikes fear in the hearts of those who promote killing the child in the womb - such a woman must be discredited as a slave of the patriarchy.  The man who seeks a girl who has maintained her innocence is ridiculed and attacked as a shameless and controlling misogynist.

Paragons, male and female, are a serious threat to the system, a system that rests on control by enslaving us to our appetites and passions.  This is why sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, female hyper-sexualisation, no-fault divorce and same- sex marriage are promoted - to attack Christian virtue and to enslave us to our weaknesses and appetites.  By contrast, to inspire people to be better, to follow an ascetic spirit is dismissed in popular culture with zeal and rigorous enthusiasm, because such a spirit must never be permitted to revive.  

Men enslaved to their appetites are easy to suppress.  It is why Israel beamed pornography onto television stations in Rafah.  It is why Hollywood promotes God-less ways of life as though about freedom, not enslavement.  When a man loses his integrity and his sense of his own virtue he loses his own self respect and cannot resist the emasculating oppression by our corrupted political class.

We can see that this way of thinking goes back to the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno's description of the authoritarian personality.  He feared the strength of the man who could exercise sexual restraint as a dangerous political force nigh impossible to control.  Such thinking has fed into the way popular culture manipulates us to become morally loose and unable to master ourselves with integrity.  

And this is why the landscape of the Western city is a multicultural and atomised place with Pride parades taking place on streets of dystopian and anti-human architecture.  The alternative is a restoration of traditional values in traditional and rural communities.  Yes we are fallen, but through prayerful connection with God men can again become virtuous, even holy.  For such men women will keep themselves pure.  For such men gangs of people hostile to our culture will no longer have the temerity and the contempt for us to attack us.  A culture of virulence and virtue would not have turned a blind eye on the grooming gangs.

A culture that has a sprit of asceticism will not be made up of people easy to manipulate either in terms of their behaviour or their political thoughts.  Far more important than the temporal political benefits though would be the preservation of our humanity, that gift from God and furthermore the transfiguration from our fallen state into a redeemed existence.  And this is where one realises the stakes are even higher.  Our eternity is under threat.  If politicians and multinational capitalists have selfish and cowardly interests in degrading us, there is a far more serious matter in question.  

Baudelaire once said that the Devil's greatest trick was convincing men that he did not exist.  As we arrogantly live impure lives, manipulated not only by Hollywood and liberal politicians, we are also manipulated by Satan himself.  He has his own game - to steal from us our eternal future he has shut himself off from due to his incorrigible pride.  Enviously he wants to degrade the image of God in each one of us.  He wants us to sleep around, become addicted to drugs and alcohol, to be lured into more deviant sexual practices, to live for money, to work for a usurious system.  The politicians and film makers and media class and global capitalists are in this sense just his tools.  They only seek to emasculate and enslave us in this world.  But there is a far more serious threat and it is the prize of our souls and their eternal future.

For this reason virtue and asceticism must be rediscovered.  We must again strive to be paragons and no longer live for hedonism.  We must realise we were made in His image and that by Christ there is a way back to the restoration and transfiguration of our state.  We must therefore look to paragons of virtue and ourselves strive against our fallen nature, to be saints.  In so doing we will also find we are rebuilding the traditional society. 

Resisting Progress

 It is an article of faith and a hidden presumption of the secular West that progress is real and that it is an unqualified good.  Modernisation is a necessity it is taught and must be imposed.  Resistance is reactionary and morally suspect.  It was modernity though that produced totalitarianism, environmental exploitation, loss of the sacred, nihilism and anomie.  Progress then makes a totalitarian demand that is imposed on us, regardless of what of value is sacrificed to facilitate this.  Value is the main loss, quality is neglected for the sake of quantity.

From Heidegger to Guenon, Leontiev to Weaver, very different thinkers have challenged the unquestioning faith in progress as a force for good.  We have seen the secularisation of belief and the enframement by technology.  As much as we recognise benefits such as ease and efficiency, the eradication of disease and the increase in comfort we must realise we have in a sense become disconnected from authentic existence.

A key factor is quantification, whereby everything is measured and reduced to data.  This mathematical process is reductive, it always leaves a remainder - that remainder is quality, which cannot be accounted for by the modern mind.  Quality is therefore dismissed as merely subjective.  The Platonic triad of the Good, the True and the Beautiful once having transcendental authority and meaning is now reduced to mere preference and idiosyncratic tastes of the atomised individual.

This shift to quantification of existence leads to atomisation be that via Marxist Socialism or free-market capitalism.  Value has to be measured and therefore all that counts is a materialist assessment.  This is reductive and anti-spiritual.  It also means that whatever we attempt to measure we cannot take into account the true spiritual value of the quality.

So the real process is one of disintegration whereby hierarchies and organic connections are dissolved into individual atomised and dislocated units.  This degeneration is justified both in terms of a positivist scientific process and a political achievement of liberation and equality.  Liberation though means dislocation and equality means the destruction of uniqueness found in the traditional and organic hierarchies of human society.  In economics all that is measured is the data of productivity, so purpose and activity occur on the basis of consumerism, not principles.  Hedonism becomes the only purpose, replacing asceticism and sacrifice.  This is the totalising event of modernity.  It turns us all into identical units driven by passions and appetites.  The only value is material quantity.

A key turning point was the development of nominalism by William of Ockham, whereby universals were rejected and only the particular was regarded as valid.  The connection with the realist tradition back to Plato was broken and the march of modernity through meaning and telos was initiated.  With the Renaissance and the release of occult and kabbalistic theories from fallen Constantinople, a further turn brought complementary ideas of manipulation and magic as power over reality.  Modernity developed further in hubris and the infatuation with technological progress and political revolution grew more.

Modernity, the dream of the Enlightenment and the revolution is the reduction of human existence, the loss of the spiritual level and the separation from our ancestors.  Modernity then kills the value of human civilisation. 

The resistance to progressive disintegration must be a focus on a return to the sacred, the hierarchical, the meaningful, the telos and at an overarching level the transcendental Logos.  This return to the Logos is not to be misinterpreted as reductive rationalism, but in a rediscovery of transcendental meaning and overall a structured and purposeful cosmos. This is then in reality a reinvigoration of our civilisation and culture by a reassertion of what Saint Vincent of Lerins described as Quod Ubique, Semper, et Ab Omnibus. Progress, by contrast, has meant disintegration and reduction and the atomisation of the human being whether as a self-interested rational actor or an egalitarian member of international sameness, disconnected from tradition, heritage and culture.  We cannot continue on this path of quantification and disintegration.