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.
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