Liberalism - the ideology of hedonism and covert totalitarianism

 Liberalism claims to be all about freedom, but it is a very reductive idea of freedom, one that removes virtue and human telos from cultural possibilities.  What it does is to focus on the freedom of choice as the optimal aspect of human ethics, not what we choose, not freely choosing the virtuous way.  It reduces all choices to equal worth, Bentham’s “pushpin equals poetry”, thereby reducing human eudaemonia to hedonistic pleasure.  It is through pleasure, as with Bentham’s Panopticon or the bread and circuses of the ancient world, that a population is controlled.  Liberalism is the chosen ideology of the globalist elites because it is the most powerful and most subtle form of control.  It controls us through our passions and appetites.

The end of the Second World War, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union over forty years later meant the victory of liberalism as a global force, Fukuyama’s “end of history”.  There was an added layer to the liberal perspective now.  It had played its part in history leading not to ideas of human flourishing, but to the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic.  While men in suits in America and at the Council of Foreign Relations proclaimed the victory of liberalism, looking very conservative, their ideology was one that would lead to moral degeneracy and end in the promulgation of LGBT and hedonism.  The ideology was ruthlessly implemented with colour revolutions and the subversion of conservative election victories via the power of non-state actors such as NGOs like Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

Liberalism accepted Adorno’s definition of the Fascist personality so that all authority and tradition are seen as dangerous forces to be vanquished.  All this means political manipulation and ostracising of dissent in the liberal world and outright subversion of political states in the East, from the Ukraine to Georgia.  It means acting deceptively and in a controlling way, seemingly contrary to Locke and Mill.

Nonetheless, we need to understand that what is now the globalist establishment, with roots in English liberalism, which was the offspring of English Whiggism, sees in liberalism an opportunity to control and manipulate the world population.  Liberalism is the rejection of value and therefore depends upon an atheistic mind-set where hierarchies of value are regarded as an authoritarian position.  What this means in effect is the degradation of humanity.  The moral compass of cultures is smashed in favour of a morality that says do as you will so long as you do not interfere with anyone else’s pleasure.  In this it both destroys personal integrity and fractures communities, reducing us to atomised individuals enslaved to our idiosyncratic or trite passions. Indeed idiosyncratic degeneracy is celebrated through Pride events and marches - the dominant group asserting its power over the traditionalists subdued by legislation and pressure.

Real human freedom and dignity have nothing to do with this.  Real human values recognise man has a telos of virtue and that the value of his freedom is in choosing the right path towards virtue.  When the choosing itself rather than the choice being the right one is sacralised we are on the road to degradation.  Yes freedom is fundamental because otherwise a compelled virtue is meaningless and not indicative of any internal spiritual victory.  Simply to say that whatever you choose is valid because you chose it leads to moral degradation and enslavement to our passions.  Hedonism eats up our sense of integrity, preoccupies us and makes us into malleable slaves.

So looking behind the curtain, we see that all these fair minded liberals are connected to the revolutionary elites of the Enlightenment who want to cut us off from our telos and degrade us.  If we accept liberalism we are unable to resist degradation and then the State suddenly starts to expand, despite the supposed small state of liberalism.  As atomised individuals without any of the intermediary institutions such as the little platoons to defend us from an overbearing state, we are left as isolated, degraded atoms faced with no community other than the regulatory and bureaucratic State.  Now is the real moment of power for globalist elites able to impose their absurd and misanthropic agendas they have planned for us.  Because in their deep misanthropy the ultimate revolution is against the human being.  Man is a Malthusian blight on the environment and depopulation via technocracy can now be carried out as the long term solution.  Abortion, assisted dying, lockdowns are all means of demoralising us, atomising us and devaluing the human being as the Imago Dei.

There was always a deeply anti-Christian and anti-human agenda to the Enlightenment, with discreet links to secret societies and revolutionary political bodies.  The call for liberation that identifies kings and aristocrats, the Church and the family, the male gender, the European as the oppressor will come to identify the human race as the oppressor of Gaia and Mother Nature. Only the enlightened ones are above the sin of being human.  And we discover too late that we were not liberated at all, but rather enslaved to hedonism.  We find ourselves imprisoned, surveilled, monitored and in the final stage euthanised as per the inhuman ideas of Jeremy Bentham with his hedonism and his Panoptican.

Liberalism it transpires is the ultimate and most effective means of control - no need for the Gulag or the secret police. Atheism and consumerism are far more effective. The only way to true freedom is to rediscover spiritual meaning and a telos of virtue.  Only this will free us from our enslavement to the passions, by which we are controlled.

Emperor Nero - Woke LGBTQ+ Icon

 In these strange times that persecutor of Christians and sadistic pervert and matricide Emperor Nero seems to be undergoing a rehabilitating revision by academic historians.  A closer look makes clear why.  Nero was all about breaking sexual taboos and having a sense of entitlement to validation regardless of objective and aesthetic judgement.  Whether charioteer, poet, or musician, Nero expected praise. He was an all-powerful and mad millennial snowflake in ancient Rome.  One can possibly see his character type in the very masculine transgender who demands to be told he looks feminine.  

Contrary to our own era’s revisionists, we know from sources as different as Suetonius and Tacitus that Nero was a complete degenerate.  In particular his sexual depravity is well known. Suetonius recalls a scene, one perhaps fitting for a future Pride parade:

“Nero practised every kind of obscenity, and after defiling almost every part of his body finally invented a novel game:  he was released from a cage dressed in the skins of wild animals, and attacked the private parts of men and women who stood bound to stakes.”

Tacitus recalls his cruelty to his wife Octavia and finally her death:

“But Octavia was bound, and all her veins were opened.  However, her terror retarded the blood flow.  So she was put into an exceedingly hot vapour bath and suffocated.  An even crueller atrocity followed.  He head was cut off and taken to Rome for Poppaea to see.”

His elaborate plots to commit matricide on his mother Agrippina reached burlesque levels.  She had ensured through cruel Machavellian politics his accession to the position of Caesar, but he decided he wanted rid of her.  Collapsing boats failed, but she was eventually despatched.

For centuries the Western world regarded Nero’s vicious perversions as a sign of moral turpitude, but in the modern West this is celebrated and seen as something to be proud about.  He hated the Church and  had the martyrs thrown to the lions in the circus for the voyeuristic entertainment of the masses.  Today our masses gorge themselves on the bread and circuses of reality television, artificial food and consumerism.  It is almost as though Nero prefigured our culture.  In particular, just as in Nero's Rome the Church is hated by our own establishment elites.  

Nero has sometimes been identified with the number of the Beast, six-hundred and sixty six in the Apocalypse.  Whether it was murdering his brother, his wife, or his mother or engaging in depraved sexual acts, the proud and easily-offended Nero, so needy of praise, looks like the lowest depth to which humanity could sink, despite his elevated position as Emperor of the whole known-world.     

And yet despite the martyrs, despite his depravity, despite his vanity and despite his cruel murders it was at this time that the Apostle Paul, to be put to death and martyred by Nero in Rome, instructed the Church to honour the emperor as being ordained by God.  It might have been that declining pagan Rome produced Nero, but the office itself was still a bulwark against the forces of chaos and a capstone of the order of society.  The Church is not a politically-revolutionary movement.

As we look at today's political attacks on our Christian inheritance it seems to be often directed through attacks on supposed sexual-restrictions.  In that sense we are seeing a manifestation of Nero's spirit that expressed itself in pushing sexual taboos to their limit.  If Nero can be identified in some sense as a type of the apocalyptic beast then as the enemies of the church use "sexual liberation" and "pride" as their key weapons of attack we seem to be participating in a dark and demonic pattern.

The right to be able to practise any form of sexual deviance is now how those in the Pride movement define their identity.  To condemn, question or be repelled is seen as an injury to them, analogous to not enjoying and sycophantically praising one of the Emperor's recitals.   The most opaque aspect of the Pride movement is the mysterious "+".  What is this intended to promote?  There is surely a point when sexual passions pass a boundary of acceptability?  For a society to function it cannot simply be a permissive arrangement of “anything goes”, but rather we have to hold together the general consensus of decency and morality.  Under Nero, Rome still had some residual sense of sexual standards and public probity and an idea of what a good emperor should be - Augustus.  Nonetheless, for all Seneca's stoical instructions of the young Nero, nothing stopped the reprobate's depravity, even Seneca himself became his victim.

What we must therefore be very wary of then is politics dedicated to liberation from taboos and that this does not push us yet further.  If we want to understand where we will end up, we should remember the Emperor who fed the Christians to the lions and burnt down the city of Rome.  Political movements dedicated to the destruction of taboos and the celebration of the passions will not benefit the common weal in the long run.  And the survival of the common weal requires an enforcement of common standards of moral behaviour, not simply tolerance alone.

Atheism as State Control

Since the French Revolution and its idol of Rationalism, atheism has been linked to State control and terror.  The Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union presented yet more evidence for the link.  For all the horrors the blame for which has been laid at the door of the Church over 2000 years, the short periods of atheistic power have led to terror unmitigated and harsh oppression.  And yet atheists continue to consider themselves to be the champions of freedom and progress.  Is this pattern linking atheism to state terror just a coincidence or is there an unavoidable link between the two?

Some might point to the secular West as an example of a liberal system that has enshrined freedom and secularism.  That is though, to misunderstand the concomitant destruction and decline of Western culture as being unrelated and unplanned.  Freedom is tolerated in the West precisely because it is really a “chosen” enslavement.

By looking at Western liberal democracy we can see how the atheism of the leaders of a society is the cause of terror and oppression.  The extreme violence of the Stalinist or Robespierre regimes was not merely a coincidence, it is directly related to its atheism, because atheism is about political control as much as it is about anything else.

There is no Terror in the West of today, many will argue no doubt.  This can be agreed, but the reason there is no Terror from the State is because the atheists in control of the West are subduing their people more subtly and craftily.

It is first and foremost enslavement to the passions.  The old slogan of bread and circuses applies to the culture of consumerism and entertainment promoted as a means of stupefying the voters and citizens of the West.  Then there are the carefully structured political systems, that ensure no ideas that really challenge the political system can gain any power.  The oligarchs remain in control and powerful.  The secret societies still determine the direction of the so-called open society.  Perhaps there is more of the occult and the Satanic amongst the powers that be in the West, but atheism is promulgated, because it disempowers people.

One way atheism is such a useful tool in the hands of the elites is that it is used to destroy the family in the name of “freedom”.  As Chesterton has pointed out:

“Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticise the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.”

The family is the unit of stability and autonomy that stands in the way of the absolute power of the totalitarian.  And atheist ideology is therefore used to undermine and challenge the family.

All that upon which the family is succoured is attacked by atheist dogma - no sex before marriage, the headship of the husband, the unbreakability of marriage.  All these are undermined by atheist ideas and dressed up as liberation.  As a result families are weakened, often fracture and split.

Most of the establishment’s favourite causes - feminism, LGBT, promiscuity, abortion - are promoted as a means to weaken that which stands in its way - the loving family.  The totalitarian state needs us to be atomised, trapped by anomie and easily manipulated by a popular culture that reaffirms and promulgates the atheist dogmas.

Atheism is a means to power for the corrupt and the totalitarian.  The State becomes the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong and cannot be measured by a higher standard.  All the rhetoric of freeing us from enslavement is used by those promoters in the “noble lie” to deceive us into the servitude that we are only fit for, if we are permitted to exist at all.  The atheistic interest in depopulation and eugenics is another way in which this evil perspective is a means of cruel control.

We can see, without any use of the jack boot or the secret police, that Western democracy uses all these means to set up a future totalitarian state.  And it can only do this by cutting a people off from God.  Atheism is the key weapon in the arsenal of the oppressor.  

We must therefore come to understand that when atheism is promoted by the powerful it is as a means of oppression and power.  Our degenerate lives in the West are not about our own personal mismanaged freedom so much as the State deliberately putting us into a situation where meaning and purpose disappear and only the passions are left to enslave us and make us into easily-controllable masses.  The atheism of the West is a more subtle application of the same mechanism in the USSR with the same goals.  Terror itself nowadays is somewhat too obvious.  Now instead the manipulation is far more subtle, but the purpose of atheism remains the same - the enslavement of the imago dei by those Faustian elites with their Luciferian pride and ambition

Mercy Killings and Suffering

 As the arch- liberal and secular British Parliament looks at legalising mercy killings, the main opponents rely only on pragmatic arguments.  They point to the very real risk that in a society as materialist and focused on gain as the United Kingdom, elderly parents or sick relatives may come to be regarded as burdens and that pressure subtly would be brought to bear on them to “choose” to be killed.  This is a very real risk, but the chief reason to oppose this change in the law is deontological - life is a sacred gift from God and not our own individual possession to be disposed of as we see fit.  

This is a difficult and sensitive subject, where good points made too coldly and logically will only alienate the reader.  Our freedom is precious, as is our gift of life and suffering can be very cruel, but crucially it is permitted although rarely inflicted by divine authority.

While Man must be free from an oppressive political State he must also be protected from harming himself, because his sovereignty is not unlimited.  He holds his life on trust as a gift, not as an absolute possession.  Otherwise self harming, sexual sado-masochism, suicide or anorexia would merely be a matter of personal choice.  We have a telos, that is to live virtuously and find our full participation in the divine.  Of course participating in the divine cannot be forced, but neither should acts that completely desecrate what God has given us be tolerated.

We owe it to God first not to desecrate our souls and bodies, but also owe this to our community.  If we behave badly or in a depraved way, we do not only harm ourselves, but the communal body, the common weal.  And this gives society rights over our “freedoms”.  If we become so enslaved to our passions that we change the moral life of the society then society has the right to stop us.  Sexual vice, greed and avarice, are not to be immune from collective sanction.  We can see where the liberal nihilism of the West has led - to the Pride parades and the destruction of the wholesome family.  As a consequence, Western society itself is disintegrating and everyone is suffering.  There is a clear negative externality to everyone else if libertarianism and moral anarchism is permitted.  The permissive society of the West has led to more misery, more suicide, more mental disorders for all its material wealth.  Each person suffering is a victim in one way or another of permissiveness.

In that context we can now approach the difficult topic of human suffering from illness leading to the desire for death.  We do not need to be distracted by liberal arguments about individual autonomy on such a serious question.  It is clearly a mercy to relieve suffering and if we take a more shallow utilitarian position of maximising pleasure a case can be made that unhappiness will be reduced by allowing others to assist a suicide.  Of course this is based  on a very simplistic and shallow analysis of happiness.  We must rely on the superficial  Benthamite definition of happiness as hedonism or pleasure.  Such an understanding of happiness is far removed from Aristotle’s eudaimonia, a type of joy based on virtuous living.  It seems by contrast that this Benthamite utilitarian view of maximising happiness and of minimising unhappiness is too superficial.  It takes no account of the resulting guilt, the feeling of transgression of a deep moral law, or the fear of eternal consequences that would inevitably result.  It would be like saying a woman who has an abortion to pursue her career is not deeply wounded internally, even if she is in denial about that.

We could rely then on Aristotle’s account of doing the virtuous thing as being the way to true eudaimonia.  But the real question here is not addressed.  With life-preserving medicines, people can live much longer and suffer therefore more from their terminal conditions and degenerative illnesses.  Is it right or compassionate seemingly to force people to suffer?  Are we simply imposing a rule with no regard to the specific situation?  Would a loving response not be to relieve suffering?

Herein though is the Promethean move.  Even while acknowledging the developments in medical science means people just as much as having symptoms relieved will also suffer illnesses for longer than nature would have once allowed, to take the positive step of ending a life does surely cross a deontological line.  It is  a case of us taking power into our own hands as to whether we or our relative should live or die.  Are we really saying it is for us in the modern West to decide how much we should suffer?  Does this not in some profound way disrespect all the suffering around the world?  Is it as though we as First-world Europeans do not deserve to suffer like other people?  What gives us the right to shake off trust in Providence and declare that we are exempt from the law of suffering?

For our collective human life has been all about suffering since the Fall.  We are all both mortal and susceptible to physical suffering.  Suffering seems cruel indeed, but it would not be permitted if not for some deep reason that is to our benefit.  Suffering shapes our lives every step of the way.  It in a sense is the way to glory for the fallen human, dominated as he is by his passions and death.  And we are aware we are promised God will not put us under any trial that is beyond us.  Life is not and never has been about pleasure, it has rather been about how we grapple with suffering.  Technological and medical advances, combined with a hedonistic utilitarian philosophy have perhaps led us to misunderstand what life is about.  In the midst of life we are in death.  All around us is decaying, its beauty fleeting - a mere hint of the Transcendent.

It is all too easy to pontificate on a deontological rule in the face of the suffering of others.  There is, though a reason for doing so - if we believe life has a sanctity over and above mere individual choice, then we must see life as the embracing of suffering as a way to change us and lead us to virtue and to God.  Once we take life and death into our own hands in such a way, it is a Promethean move, it is a claim to an authority we cannot and should not have.  It is a revolutionary grab.  It is the atheistic Stephen Fry attempting to hold to account Almighty God for the child with bone cancer.

This is not just about God as a powerful authority though, but that the ultimate Authority over the cosmos is all-loving and all-good.  It is about trusting while suffering in this fallen world, full of distractions, temptations and hubris, that God really does know what is best while not compromising our free will by eradicating the consequences of our Fallen state.  Suffering was not given in Paradise, but after the Fall suffering became a part of our existence and ultimately, in a mysterious way, this will all be to the Good. 

If we juxtapose it to the alternative brave new world the advocates of scientism and our eugenicist elites advocate for, a world with no physical suffering or want, but Man remaining fallen and in a state of rebellion, we can then easily envisage by contrast a world where love becomes impossible, control absolute and temporal existence the seeming totality of life.

Instead, we should resist any move to such a temporal utopia that claims to eliminate suffering and its dread lessons about our own nature, our own capacity for love and kindness, for faith, for hope, our own susceptibility to despair, to anger, to human frailty.  Suffering may well be the route to our spiritual transfiguration - the reason we are all here.  We should not make such a Promethean move against the law of the cosmos, written by the hand of God.  .  

Judaeo- Christian - Contradictory or Complementary beliefs?

 

Politicians in the Anglo Saxon parts of the West frequently refer to our common Judaeo-Christian values.  What does that really mean?  Certainly theologically there is a vast chasm between the Christian and Jewish faiths.  

In these current times one should make clear that identifying any difference or separation between Jewish and Christian values is not a comment upon racial difference, does not imply any eugenicist agenda or must entail hostility to one religion or the other.  The purpose instead is to identify how this attempt to synthesise two Abrahamic faiths can be used to justify a particular political or cultural agenda, namely the Post-War liberal settlement, founded on a reassertion of Enlightenment values.

Let us go back tot he very beginning, the point of separation of Jews and Christian.  Following the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in AD 70 a new form of religion emerged from the Hebrew tradition, the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism that over the next few centuries developed a new sacred collection of writings in opposition to the New Testament - in particular the Talmud.  Those Jews who did not accept the Resurrection and did not become part of the Church from 70 AD, as Christ had warned, lost the Temple.  Instead, in replacement of  a faith centred on the physical Temple, the focus was on the Rabbinic tradition and the synagogue.  Over the following centuries the Talmud and the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, where prophecies about Christ were revised became the sacred texts. Only after some centuries had passed did Rabbinic Judaism emerge as a coherent and fully-fledged religion.

The Church emerged following the Resurrection and before the sacking of the Temple.  The Church was in a sense the continuation of the Temple after the physical building was destroyed.  The Christian Old Testament was the Septuagint, with an older history, where prophecies relating to Christ were clearer..  

There are fundamental differences between these faiths that both claim to be the continuation of the Hebrew faith.  The Rabbinic Jews revised and rejected the earlier multi-person Godhead, as found in Genesis and the Book of Daniel, emphasising instead a radical monotheism, as would later be found in Islam.  The Church, in the tradition of the three angels visiting Abraham and the Son of Man appearing in the fire in the Book of Daniel, and the many other Old Testament theophanies of God's energies, believed God to be triune - Three Persons in One Godhead.  The Rabbinic Jews saw the Messianic prophecies as to be about a future Messianic political state.  The Church interpreted the prophecies as being about Christ directly.  In a sense Rabbinic Judaism defined its theology against the Church.

And so in theological terms Judaism and Christianity are contradictory.  In terms of religious praxis, because of the Incarnation, iconic representations of Christ are permitted and condoned in the Church.  Rabbinic Judaism is hostile to the religious image.  Christians are freed from the dietary laws, Jews must follow kosher.

In terms of eschatological beliefs the two religions oppose each other.  For many Jews the Messiah will come when the Temple is rebuilt.  For many Christians the rebuilding of the Temple is the harbinger not of the Messiah, but of antichrist.  

In terms of ethos, Christ taught to love our enemies.  For Jews revenge on the enemy is a sacred duty.  We have seen this following 7th October 2023 in the mass killing of women and children in Gaza.

How then can these two faiths be seen as complementary?  Advocates of Judaeo-Christian “values” from Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray see Judaism as a fundamental building block of Western values.

A well-known advocate of the importance of Judaism to the West is the homosexual conservative writer Douglas Murray.  For him it is a more significant blow if Jews die than Christians, because there are more Christians.  Despite Jews being on the edge of European society historically, he regards their values as fundamental to what it means to be Western.  Throughout the history of Christendom, the Jews were though regarded as the “other”.

The reason centre-right thinkers value Rabbinic Judaism does not lie in the contradictory theologies.  For Murray and his like, it is rather that Enlightenment values and modernity emerged from the chemistry between the two religions.  The separate religions have different ideas of the sacred and the sacred is what holds each faith in its own unity.  For Murray, who is an atheist, it is the “values”.  This becomes a somewhat nebulous concept.  There is very little that can be seen as Chrsitian in the current actions of the IDF in the Middle East.  Neither was the dispossession of Palestinian families from their ancestral lands during the Nakba a Christian approach.  Nonetheless a reductive approach can find commonalities if the sacred is removed.  Indeed the reduction of us all to atomised individuals might be seen as the lowest common denominator of the two cultures denuded of their ideas of the sacred.

Protestantism was a significant factor in the injection of a more Jewish flavour to European culture.  The new world after the Reformation saw the growth of the banking sector, the importance of compound interest (usury had been forbidden by the Church).  In the translation of the Bible the reformers relied on the Rabbinic Masoretic text. As we moved towards the market economy and a more revolutionary society, our culture found common links with Judaism.  Much of what had been regarded with suspicion in Christendom - banking, revolution, trade - and linked to the Jewish other, was now endorsed and promoted in Protestant countries such as England and Holland.

The European secret societies that grew in power throughout that period were fascinated by the Kabbalistic texts of esoteric Judaism as well as other forms of the occult and esoteric.  It was then as we moved both towards an economy based on banking and a revolutionary political and cultural position that the specific variant of Western society emerged, which would later be defended by Western Judaeo-Christians.  This is what is being defended when we hear about the Judaeo-Christian culture.  It is not about the sacred, where the two religions are in contradiction.  It is about a liberal secular society, with its roots in the revolutions of the Eighteenth Century - revolutions in thought, values and politics.

A fundamental change occurred in the Nineteenth Century when the Scofield Bible was published.  This was funded by Zionists at the time who wanted the Protestant Churches to support the creation of a Zionist State.  The Bible was annotated in a way to suggest the prophecies about Christ were more to do with the creation of a Messianic State of Israel.  Christians were (conveniently) to be moved out of world history through a so-called rapture.  This heresy of dispensationalism spread throughout American Protestantism and shaped the folk view of Jews and finally the Israeli State, regarded almost as fellow believers in a sense.  This was a vital ingredient in the American popular political support for Zionism.

The secular values that link cultural or civilisational Christians and Jews are not about the sacred, but about secular liberal shibboleths such as individualism, rights, equality, liberation.  The very beginning of the USA was in the foment of the Enlightenment and the milieu of various secret societies focusing on throwing off traditional hierarchies and institutions.  

In this sense Judaeo-Christian is not a meaningful idea from a traditional perspective.  It dismisses the ideas of the sacred that are incompatible as irrelevant - looking only for materialist answers.  It focuses on the worldly and revolutionary values of the Enlightenment West, not Christendom.

In terms of geopolitics, the idea of Judaeo-Christian values has put the West on the side of revolution and progress, not tradition or an idea of the sacred.  It is not simply about Israel, but in a topical matter our way of forcing change on the proxy of Ukraine we force them to abandon their Church and their more conservative values.  Judaeo-Christian is a phrase uttered by Western conservatives who are merely yesterday’s liberals, who have little sense of tradition, hierarchy or the sacred.  They are the dull men of business and money, not the heroes of honour and virtue.  Their conservatism is the conservatism of an enervated culture, emptied of its true values and sacred beliefs.  The conservatism of the bottom line, profit, the mercantile class.  True conservatives stand for our own sacred, our hierarchies, our traditions.  This older conservatism, supplanted by the Judaeo-Christians, is about the Church and the institutions that flow from it in the Christian world. 

The Sky Daddy and Anthropomorphism

 Two famous accusations, with an underlying tone of mockery indicative of bad faith, are often made by New Atheists.  One can be easily dealt with - that there is as much reason to believe we are created by a personal, triune God as by a “spaghetti monster”.  The suggestion of arbitrariness is perhaps somewhat credible against Protestantism and even Kierkegaard’s anguished leap of faith, notwithstanding the disrespectful and deeply blasphemous tone.  In terms of traditional Christianity, which, like the Neoplatonists, sees a transcendental order to the cosmos, this somewhat childish accusation does not hold.  Indeed, the advocates of scientism, such as Russell, have more explaining to do, when they claim the cosmos, finely tuned as it is, is simply there with no cause or reason.

A second accusation against Christianity that can also be made by Neoplatonists and Buddhists, who do believe in the transcendental, but not a personal Creator, is that the Christian God is a consequence of anthropomorphism.  As the disrespectful New Atheists put it, we have a need for a Sky Daddy.  Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras would not disagree, referring to the erotic yearning for God.  The Neoplatonist sees the One as impersonal, the Buddhists acknowledge the transcendental meaning of reality, without accepting the personal nature of the Creator.  

In a recent debate on Youtube, between esteemed cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and Christians Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Hall, Vervaeke builds on this perspective, arguing there might be a latent crypto-egotism in Christianity.  For all its claims about kenosis, the person survives and has a relationship with God as a Father and Lord.  This means it is not true self emptying and instead preserves my existence and anthropomorphises God.  Vervaeke is of course not as crude or reductive in his arguments as someone like Dawkins.  He recognises love and care participate in transcendental reality, but rejects that it works both ways.  Contrary to Jordan Hall’s reciprocal openness at a divine level, Vervaeke sees the care of God for us and our personal existence at an eternal level as unnecessary and unjustified.  Further it contradicts agape as the highest form of love - we have a secret vested interest in our faith - selfishly we want to live forever and be loved by the highest reality.

The discussion can be found here:  https://youtu.be/Vp_08T0Ucik?si=_IH0L9q5pnun-uaK

In this we see the great divide between Eastern religions and the Greek philosophy of Neoplatonism on the one side, where the person is completely absorbed to the point of benign annihilation, versus the Christian belief that the personal is central to reality.  God created the cosmos as a personal god and Man as a person is the imago dei.

This really is all about Being.  We can see how this sanctity of humanity has degenerated in the secular West into liberal individualism - a true cult of egotism.  There is no intention here to make a case for that perspective.  Nonetheless, there is a different and fundamental point - yes the Fathers recognised God is both Being and non being.  God is above existence so it is in a sense true to say God does not exist, not in an ontological sense.  Indeed God is something more like Beyng as opposed to Being, to use Heideggerian terminology.  God is non-dual, above the divisions into Intellect and Soul of the Neoplatonists.

On a more fundamental level then, the personal exists.  God is Three Persons, in part because he overcomes duality and also is One as an aporia.  

It is somewhat arrogant to attempt to compete with the intellectual ability of John Vervaeke.  All that can be said in unsophisticated and laymen’s terms is why this simply does not ring true for me.  Yes God is in a sense above all superlatives.  Included there is love, goodness, truth and beauty.  But all of these participate in God.  The personal is the highest level of existence.  In human beings it is the person that makes us more than a mere sum of our parts (and more than the passions that lead to the consumer individual of liberalism too).

Yannaras points to our encounter of the personal energy of other humans as indicative of the Supreme Personal of God.  What is fundamental to understanding any of this is the separation of energy and essence.

What happens in most Eastern faiths is in one way or another, the human person is dissolved in the divine essence.  True Christianity does not accept this, because Creator and Creature are of different natures on a fundamental level in an unbridgeable way.  Nonetheless, participation in the divine energy is not only possible, but the purpose of our existence.  This was always the orthodox perspective, but was most clearly articulated in the arguments St Gregory Palamas made in defence of the monks of Athos and their practice of hesychasm - specifically the Jesus Prayer.

It is surely the case that love is only possible if personal identity is retained and through the existence of energy.  Energy is what is personal.  Yannaras refers to the capacity we have to recognise the distinctiveness of Mozart’s music or Van Gogh’s art - neither are the substance of the person, but both are expressions of the unique energy.  We find God, we find faith, not through propositional arguments, but in recognising the divine energy expressed through creation, which is not in itself God.  Relationships are in the realm of energy not essence.  This is how Orthodox Chrsitian philosophy saves the human person from annihilation.  It is also how love is real.

In our personal human relationships, true love is the intermingling of energy without dissolving the other person - they retain their fundamental existence, their being.  This is why the so-called “sky daddy” is so central, so important and worth defending as that which Christianity is about,  The relationship is all made possible through the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos (the principle, the wisdom, the Logos, the Sophia) as man - God in the flesh in time and space.  We can thereby overcome the barrier - our fallen nature.

Is this crypto egotism?  Not so, it is rather what makes love possible.  It is in recognising the eternal sanctity, through eternal being of the person, we can truly self empty through love.  The Three Persons of the One Godhead and the personhood of the Imago Dei are why there is being and how we can achieve kenosis, because persons are real and eternal and can be loved. 

Liberal Totalitarianism

 Liberalism  defines itself as anti-totalitarian, it is the ideology of freedom.  There are certain qualifications here.  Freedom is the freedom of the individual and the nature of his freedom is freedom from oppression rather than freedom to possess or have something.  The word “liberal” in the United States is associated with the Left, whereas in Australia or the United Kingdom tends to refer to classical liberalism of Locke and J S Mill, which in the Anglo Saxon countries at least is associated with conservatism.  In any event the argument here is that all ideologies have a tendency towards totalitarianism and that liberalism is not immune from this tendency.

It must be acknowledged that the thinker in the vanguard of this is Alexander Dugin, whose Fourth Political theory is predicated on the claim that all three ideologies, Fascism, Marxism and Liberalism have a totalitarian logic to them.  We have seen recent manifestations of totalitarian moves in Anglo Saxon countries.  Canada froze the bank accounts of protesters against Covid measures that would affect the livelihood of their trucking businesses.  Australia was notorious for its Covid lockdown measures.  The United Kingdom is imprisoning people for expressing controversial opinions on social media in the wake of a brutal murder of innocent little girls.

The classical liberal would argue that these moves were contrary to the principles of liberalism, but that does not change the fact that liberalism is by definition reductive.  It does as someone like Robert Nozick argues have certain transcendental principles that come from a mysterious origin - property rights have a real as opposed to nominal existence for example.  He derives this from Locke who was a nominalist on every aspect of reality bar rights of property.  This aberration is not usually explained.

We have noted above the distinction between classical liberals and those liberals of the Left.  This is only a relevant nuance from within liberalism.  All forms of liberalism reject the old hierarchies of value as oppressive and preventing individual self expression.  What seems a fundamental difference to liberals, as they argue amongst themselves, in terms of negative and positive liberty is merely a fine detail from other perspectives.  The key point is, apart from the anomaly of property rights having real existence for classical liberals, real metaphysics have no claim upon our ethical behaviour.  We are not participating in a higher or collective meaning, but pleasing ourselves alone.  The one standard that unites liberalism of Right and Left is the individual is the measure of all things - that might be to withhold his possessions from others or it might be to impose obligations upon others for my own right to certain things - such as restricting freedom of speech so as not to be harmed by offensive comments.  The person concerned with imposing upon others is still concerned about themselves as an individual and not about  higher Good.

So liberalism sees any higher Good as oppressive and the enemy of individual liberty.  This is because the liberal atomises the person as an individual neither linked to any vertical or horizontal good.  He is disconnected from God and his neighbour.  In this sense that other Enlightenment ideology, Marxism, has an unexpected family resemblance to liberalism.  Marx too rejects any higher principle other than the materialist physical laws of science whereby yes at first collective action throws off the oppression based on the false consciousness of higher values, but this is to attain eventually pure individual liberty unencumbered by the demands of tradition, society or religion.  Marx was at heart a liberal too.

This liberalism is rooted in nominalism and the idea of each individual being his own isolated monarch.  In other words the cosmos follows the law of power not of any higher value such as Dante’s motivating love.  Hobbes was as much of a liberal as Locke.

The liberals reduce all to a mere contract, relying on a fictitious or imaginary state of nature that provides the basis for a contractual form of government.  This is the ideology of the money-driven mercantile class.  Any sense of a higher meaning to our world is rejected and the powers and thrones and dominions of the heavens are ignored.  Instead we exist in an arbitrary world where the only solid fact is supposedly the individual.  Here the person is imagined as the modern buffered as opposed to the porous self of the ancient and Mediaeval worlds.  This distinction is set out by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In the enchanted pre-modern world people were participating in higher meaning and vulnerable to infiltration by infernal forces.  Human life was a microcosm of the cosmos, holding the cosmos together as the imago dei, not an arbitrary random individual disconnected from everything and everyone else.

How though does this contractual state, protecting us from the arbitrary state of nature, lead to totalitarianism?  Well Hobbes is the first to provide an answer.  For the sake of freedom from the misery and state of war that the state of nature leads to, we surrender to an authoritarian state.  Underlying every liberal perspective is the secret belief that the State is there to protect individual rights and we have therefore contracted away absolute freedom.

Whether it be to protect property rights or protect my rights to self determine my gender (given only the individual perspective counts - realism is rejected), the State is there to enforce those rights.

We can see two trends in the modern West - the growth of private property rights in every aspect of life that can be enforced and also the enforcement of the individual’s right to determine reality in restrictions to freedom of speech.  Without any sense of a higher reality above the individual there is no limit to enforcement potentially if individual rights are violated.

The negative liberty of private property rights comes to have power of legal enforcement over public areas.  Monopolies occur and public goods become private without individual rights being violated, but we find ourselves trapped in a world of enforcement.  There is no hope of everyone having the private property envisaged by Chesterton of three acres and a cow - most of us end up as tenants subject to private enforcement companies.  ON the other hand, in the world of woke liberalism, the statement of a true fact can lead to legal sanctions through cancel culture, or the destruction of one’s career.  The State has the right to take children who want to change their gender from concerned parents on the basis of the sovereignty of the individual.

What happens with liberalism, as with all revolutionary movements, is that to secure liberation the ends justify the means and higher principles can be violated.  It is no accident that the liberal ideology of utilitarianism, where individual pleasure, hedonism, is the measure, all principles can be violated to achieve the end in sight - there is no deontological limit to Bentham’s consequentialism.  In the end we have the Panopticon of prisoners living according to their pleasure under absolute surveillance.  Here the individual can be sated but observed, while higher ideas of human dignity are ignored.

It is the case that J S Mill with his rule utilitarianism tried to lever in a sense of value not really compatible with pure utilitarianism and that Nozick tried to synthesise Locke and Kant with a deontological emphasis on the metaphysical realism of individual freedoms, particularly private property rights.  Both fall into the same problem that they have to rely on a level of metaphysical realism to reintroduce value and once that step is made, how does one avoid the scaling up to the Good, the True and the Beautiful?  How does one avoid the case that there are real things of value, there is a real meaning over and above mere individual desires?  Once we distinguish between pushpin and poetry or assert there is a metaphysical reality to property rights we are acknowledging the legitimacy of philosophical realism and a hierarchy of value.  The individual is no longer the measure, there is instead a transcendent level over and above the individual.

The liberals were seeking a limit to arbitrary power, but their whole metaphysics are arbitrary and rooted in a radical scepticism that in the end can find no argument against oppression in the name of abstract and arbitrary individual rights.