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.
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