Progress and Power

A key characteristic of those who believe themselves to be progressives and to be on the right side of history is that they are sure they are good.  Progress as a notion though has done away with an idea of a Form of Goodness.  What is good is calculated and made sense of in a strictly temporal way.  Virtue has no real place and God is seen as a primitive idea. 

Progress as a concept is really based upon impoverished metaphysics.  The paradigm is predicated on meaning being reduced to power battles.  What is progress is really a debate as to how best to distribute, award or manage power.  There is no longer an understanding of Man's telos or purpose being participation in the Good through virtue and character, prayer and worship.

Of course some ideas of progress are somewhat unworldly with heterodox ideas of Heaven on Earth.  This in itself can lead to very dangerous places.  A large tendency in progressive thought though is essentially materialist with no focus on the transcendent or the life after death.  Indeed an orientation towards life after death can prove a distraction from the worldly and secular goals of the progressive.  The progressive is in reality a materialist, focused upon building a new Tower of Babel.  Man tries to be God without repentance, but with hubris.

With the English Medieval idea of nominalism we were consequently detached from the Good.  Instead of our telos being participation in The Good, with no universals all that was left was arbitrary power.

A key underlying theme of progressive thought is liberation from oppressive controls of authoritarian and "outdated" power structures.  This idea is revelatory of the underlying assumptions in progressive thought.    That is that history has a linear and benign direction ( a far greater leap of faith than that required by any of the world religions); thereby making anything old necessarily oppressive by definition.  Further, insofar as what came before was by definition benighted, so the freedom achieved is one of not being held back by tradition.  Self expression and self realisation are the inevitable liberation of breaking out of outdated power structures.  Power of course is the only way to make sense of any traditional structure, because higher meanings are discounted.    

We do live in a fallen world and that means that many of the traditions that held us together did fall short and were open to abuse.  The corollary of traditions being compromised by dint of existing in a fallen world is that revolution will also be subject to abuse and corruption, but without any participation in the transcendent that the earlier societies could depend upon to mitigate against abuses.

While Enlightenment thinking looked at inherited social forms to one degree or another as means of control, most powerfully expressed by Marx, but before by Rousseau's chains  - by overthrowing them all that was left was naked power.  

The only question now for Western Man, having cut himself off from the transcendent, was how to manage the raw power that was left.  The European intellectuals chose reductive power and cold abstract theories and rejected the opportunity of participation in the Good.  They rejected the gift of Easter - God becoming Man opening the way to us for men to become gods.  Instead, hubristically, with faith in their own powers of reason, the philosophers made themselves God through a revolutionary power grab, not repentance.  It was the old temptation of the serpent to become like God without God.

This liberation then has really meant negotiating mere and base power.  The only questions left were  who should dominate whom and how much I should be dominated by another?  Should the proletarian class seize power from its oppressor?  Should the strong man seize power?  Should I as an individual have full power over my own life through autonomy.

We think like this because we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of participation in The Good.  We no longer understand that true freedom lies in virtue and worship.  Freedom is to participate in the Good.

That means a kenotic self emptying that gives us access to love and community.  It means freedom from the passions that enslave our souls.

Instead progress has only offered us power over others or power over our own lives.

This reduction of all to power battles has meant inevitably that liberalism too, the great victor of the battles of modernity, has become power hungry.  Liberal societies that prided themselves on their supposedly self emptying granting of freedom of choice, freedom of lifestyle and freedom of speech have also descended into authoritarianism, albeit soft and subtle.  

It is in liberal countries now that speech must be managed and core beliefs about what it means to be human in religious terms must be extirpated from the public square.  Secular liberalism softly, softly is using overweening power.  Unlike the Church when believers got it wrong or failed, this is not a human failing corrupting and tarnishing a transcendent truth.  This is because when you scratch the secular-liberal surface all there actually is in progressive thought is not the Good, the True or the Beautiful, but bare power.  And so liberalism, like its modern ideological cousins, Fascism and Communism, (that seem so different but are really all offspring of post Enlightenment modernity) really boils down to one more interpretation of life as power.  The individual does not participate in a telos of seeking The Good, he is simply an absolutist tyrant in his own life, living an arbitrary existence in a freedom that is really just slavery to the passions.  

 

Progress and Death

 When people bemoan our modern world the usual retort is an instruction not to romanticise the past and to consider the lifesaving utility of medical science.  The merit of medical science, in the hands of pharmaceutical oligarchs, is itself questionable.  Modernity from the dissolution of the monasteries to the categorisation of the wise woman of the village with herbal knowledge as a witch cut us off from inherited collective knowledge.  This indicates that today large corporations simply have to rediscover ancient knowledge never analysed and then they patent it.  That aside, progress in large part justifies itself as a successful flight from death.

Through the technological advances of progress we are cossetted from the severity of our mortality.  Death is made hygienic in a place of face masks and medication.  Coffins are not open at funerals, people generally die in a sterile environment amongst medical experts.

The argument here is not that the advances of medical science should be rejected.  The human being was endowed by his Creator with the talent to solve the problems presented by a hostile fallen Nature, outside of Eden.  Nonetheless this ability is ambiguous, it also leads to a subtle Luciferianism.  This is most strongly demonstrated in the idea of Singularity from the dark technical minds of Silicon Valley, in the idea an imitation of our personality recorded on technology is a means of immortality.

Most  human beings with any consciousness of their soul understand that this method of denying death is by no means immortality.  Nonetheless, we all seek to avoid death and prolong at least a healthy existence if not an unhealthy one.  The other side of this idea latent in progress that the future will be hygienically healthy cannot really tolerate to look at the physical decline of illness and old age.  Even though the technology progress itself produced can prolong people in a sort of nether region of half-life. this is not considered hygienic and as much as the body of the deceased must be concealed, the infirm are considered to have no dignity and we take upon ourselves the right to choose when we live and die or even when others should die (as soon as their scientifically prolonged existence tarnishes the bright and clean future).

Without wishing back a time of pestilence, plague and violence, we must also recognise in the hygienic world of progress a spiritual aspect of human nature has been somewhat curtailed.  We have not and will not conquer death, but we have hidden it.  It is no longer really considered necessary to find a spiritual answer to our mortality, instead our mortality is hidden, because science will solve that question before our turn comes.

A spiritual answer to death does not require some morbid and macabre focus, as though we need to dig up our relatives' decomposing cadavers to take part in a grotesque theatre of afternoon tea.  Somehow that seems reminiscent of the frozen corpses of Americans committed only to life in this temporal world.

Pestilence, famine and war asked us serious questions about the meaning of life that a life of medical care and shopping malls somehow conceals.  We should therefore along with serious thinkers such as Martin Heidegger or Aleksandr Dugin, continue to think seriously about death and how it actually imparts meaning upon our lives.  Without death there is certainly no sense of eternity.  Only with limitation can life choices be meaningful.  Only when we think of our frailty in the face of time can we gain a sense of the eternal.

Modern man might mock the apparent "superstitions" of his ancestors who faced death day in day out, but is that not only because he hides from the question of his mortality? And in hiding from his mortality he is also hiding from the eternal.  Consumption is the answer to ignore the pressing and creeping sense of limitation.  Phrases such as "you only live once" as a justification for existential curiosity that Heidegger saw as inauthentic, are really ways to evade death not to acknowledge it.  In hiding from our mortality, in living for our passions, we are also denying the demands of eternity upon us. 

There is a political question here.  It is with GDP, more consumer choice and liberalisation of laws to "free" us to engage our passions that a global political class can keep us passive.  It means no really difficult questions are asked about what is happening and why it is happening.  Arguably a citizen of Russia or Iran is far less politically-naive than those living in Western democracies where we can sate ourselves and hide from our mortality.

There is also, more obviously a religious question.  For the Westerner death can be regarded as some sort of Malthusian solution that does not necessarily touch me.  Pestilence and famine keep the numbers down and resist the Malthusian bogeyman of overpopulation.  In reality, if we truly recognise each person as more than a mere avatar of their passions, more than a consumer whose identity is defined by his career, by what football team he supports or what genre of popular music he enjoys, more even than which political party he supports, - if we actually see the human person as the imago dei, then his annihilation through physical decomposition is an affront to all that holds real value.

If we finally look at what death really means - the seeming annihilation of the personality, we can see it as the reductive and unnatural force that it really is and therefore reject its right over us.  That though is not in terms of some artificial download onto a computer.  It is instead a theological question, a cosmological question.  How can death exist in contrast to the human person?  It is only then we can recognise that for all our technological and medical progress, the real question is spiritual.  It is only then we can see the real answer is that this fallen world, following the laws of Darwin, is not natural.  It must be the consequence of sin, of a fundamental primary distortion of reality.  That means it cannot be solved by all the cunning techne of human ingenuity.  It is instead solved not by technological or political solutions, but by personal repentance.  We should not let technological, medical or political progress distract us from this. 

 

  

Progress and Alienation

 Hegel wrote of alienation from modernity and Marx wrote about it in terms of alienation from what we create through work.  Neither with Hegel should we agree to strive to  reconcile with modernity, nor with Marx should we simply diagnose alienation as a primarily economic problem linked to  a specific economic system - capitalism.  Marxist economics were equally alienating because it was a radical Enlightenment system.  Nietzsche saw through the shallowness of modernity and advocated the Ubermensch.  Traditionalists such as Evola and Guenon were important in diagnosing this spiritual alienation as a consequence of the whole project of modernity, the reign of Quantity.  Today Dugin advocates the Radical Subject as the way forward for the traditionalist and sacred spirit.

Modernity is a project beginning before the Enlightenment, back to the Renaissance, developing through Baconite science, Newtonian Physics and then of course the  Enlightenment itself.  Its ideology is in a very broad sense liberalism. Its economics are also revolutionary and disruptive of communal life, whether as revolutionary industrial Soviet Communism,  global capitalism or the Technocratic Fourth Industrial Revolution.  Heidegger in particular was able to present an alternative view of being open again to Being, rather than trying to capture it and as a consequence being enframed by our own metaphysics and technology, cut off from Being as the concealed.

The project of modernity, with its blind faith in Progress, what the man on the Clapham Omnibus might term "change for change's sake" (the ideology really is that crude and shallow), was intentional.  The interest in the Occult and magic of the early scientists, their receptivity to the demonic, "progressed" into the ideology of the secret societies, such as the Illuminati and the Free Masons.  Whether the Freemasons today adhere to this ideology no longer matters, but there was a time in history when the secret societes including freemasonry were committed to the revolution which ultimately meant pulling down the ancien regime - Crown and Altar.  (Even if monarchs could for a time serve as vessels of modernisation and religion could be recapitulated as deism or a proto theosophy).

What was the utopia with which they planned to replace the ordained structure of human society?  Well it encompassed liberation through atomisation, technological development and universalism.  Indeed those revolutionaries who paraded the Goddess of Reason through the streets of Paris coined the shibboleth that became the cry of all subsequent revolutions - liberty, equality, fraternity.  This was not the prescriptive liberty rooted in ancient rights under the King that Burke referred to when talking of the liberties of Americans and Englishmen under the English Common Law founded upon precedent.  No this was formed by the theories of  elite thinkers such as Rousseau, whose ideas led to the formation of secret societies amongst the elites.   The Enlightenment itself was fundamental to the shift in thinking, but the very Enlightenment itself was part of the revolutionary fervour of rejecting inherited wisdom, as can be seen in Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?"

The so-called Enlightenment was a philosophical project working in tandem with the sciences to dislocate Western Man from his traditions, his history and his religion.  It was the zeitgeist of the Eighteenth Century, conceived in earlier centuries in Renaissance Humanism and the alchemy of the early occultist sciences.  It was a rising up against the Divine.  And universalism, which meant in reality complete atomisation and dislocation in effect, was its creed.

This is what has led to transgenderism and will in turn lead to transhumanism in this quest for supremacy over reality.

As technology, metaphysics and ideology have worked together, the human being has been reduced to homo economicus, a mere unit of production whether that was in the English Industrial Revolution, Soviet Russia or Capitalist-Fordist America.  This is the real alienation and it is not simply the Marxist account of losing the control of what one's own labour produces.  This is only one possible symptom of the shift to materialism that is fundamental to the idea of Progress.  A strange and irrational faith emerged that the Greeks would not have accepted - history is evolving progressively.  A new thought indeed!  Instead of a fallen post-Edenic, post Golden-Age world, we were to believe Man could again construct Babel.  The real effect was a deep spiritual alienation that manifested in destruction of home and hearth, disconnection from the home gods, the ancestors, the transcendent.

The irrational faith in Progress then, bolstered and supported by theories such as Darwin's evolution, was what really alienates us.  From ugly architecture to grotesque art in aesthetics, to dislocation and insecurity in employment and in economics we are always more and more alienated and torn away from our embeddedness.  Furthermore in a materialist paradigm we are unable to find the words to forge an argument against this pressure to move further and further, deeper and deeper into this mistake, this putting our own technological advances and liberation above the sacred and the human.

it is no accident that culture has decomposed and decayed.  In a world of alienation atomisation and ennui are the result.  This is expressed in our artwork.  It manifests in terrible and senseless crimes, in sexual promiscuity, in deviance.  There is no longer a Higher Authority, there is no longer a purpose, a telos, outside of and above this fallen world.  The only purpose is more liberation from authority and tradition.  Technology is intimately connected to cultural change and adds to our pride that we can create a new Luciferian world in defiance of cosmic law.   In the end they plan to defy death itself with their Singularity concept, bypassing the need for the Cross or so they think in their pride.

"And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."      

Of course technology in itself is not an evil.  It is to an extent of course a consequence of the Fall and linked to Cain.  Nonetheless, the Empire became Christian.  Art was created to glorify and venerate the Divine and the Saints.  Freedom is neither a moral evil.  The trouble is that by dislocating us from our cosmic position we have misunderstood freedom.  From the Greeks onwards,  Plato and Aristotle, through to the Stoics and culminating in the Church Fathers, freedom was understood as freedom from the passions and the potential to participate in the Divine.  The debased view of Man that emerged from the Enlightenment misunderstood freedom as a shallow lack of constraint by authority to be able to indulge the very passions that the ancients understood enslaved us.

The whole driving force of Progress is the passion of pride and it is pride that separates us from God and will as a consequence alienate us from our neighbour, our culture, our very purpose of existence.

Philosophers on the Right turn to the Ubermensch or the Radical Subject.  That though is still a modern response.  In "riding the tiger" of modernity the Traditionalist has already accepted the inevitability of Modernity.  There is no inevitability about it.  Man might build in pride, but Babel was destroyed.  This ideology of a universal system that now manifests in the dogmas of the WEF and the other globalist institutions, is nothing more than men of clay trying to replace God.  No paradigm is inescapable.  One simply has to look at the premise.  And the premise of modernity is Promethean.  It is an attempt to usurp the Divine.  It was the presumption that led to the downfall of Nebuchadnezzar.  However high we build we still have feet of clay.  And by attempting to usurp the Divine we have simply been degraded to slaves of the passion of Pride.  It is indeed Luciferian.  This is the dogma of Lucifer's revolution in the heavens replicated here in earth.  It is no accident that the supposedly secular advocates of Progress have always been fascinated by the occult and drawn to Lucifer as the progressive figure of Light.  It is why the Lucis Trust is so deeply entwined with the United Nations.

If we have faith though and have not given in to the materialist ideology of the Revolution then we know how this ends.  Indeed we know the victory is already won and this is simply the intermediate stage before the consummation of that victory and the building of the new Celestial City - not Babel, but the heavenly Jerusalem.

The Hideous Strength of Green Technocracy

 One way in which the Green lobby captures people's loyalty is by dressing itself up as conservationist.  We all love our natural environment and are distressed to hear of other distant environments being destroyed by Man's exploitative greed and destructive avarice.  Nonetheless, the actual specific proposals made by those using the Green agenda for their own purposes, such as the WEF, have produced a programme that really means the destruction of our actual local environment.  The technocrats have turned to intensive technology to resist the alleged dangers that so often over the years have not materialised.  From over-population to the disappearance of the ice caps, the dire prophecies never materialised at the time claimed and a new terror is then invoked. 

Ever since Climategate the alert and aware have been more sceptical about the claims of the climate fanatics.  It is notable that as global warming does not occur, the terminology has been subtly changed to "climate change", an untestable and unfalsifiable concept.

The measures imposed by global bodies and those being imposed by national governments in effect under the control of the WEF have the convenient consequence of the creation of a social credit system by stealth.  From fifteen minute cities to smart meters that can be switched off to planning to imprison those who cannot afford to turn their homes into ugly eco-compliant blocks, we are entering a level of control for which the Covid lockdowns set a precedent.  And at the very time the Globalists have caused a spike in cost of living with their proxy war against Russia in the breadbasket of Europe, the Ukraine, the high costs of Net Zero are being imposed over and above this upon ordinary people.

The most important aspect of this Globalist programme of Net Zero is though often overlooked.  It is not that wind turbines still need coal-powered energy or that electric cars are causing localised environmental and human catastrophes with lithium mining hidden from the view of the virtue-signalling Westerner.  No, it is rather that the whole programme of Net Zero is based upon a false premise and deeply misunderstands Nature.  With its pristine view of Mother Nature uncontaminated by Man there is a profound theological mistake - an outright heresy.  Ironically, in that heretical premise technology is turned to to eradicate Man from the Environment he shaped as co-creator with the Deity.  It was indeed Man's original Edenic vocation to be the gardener - the imago dei.

Yes, we understand that brutal exploitation of Nature, treating it in Heideggerian terms, as "standing reserve" is very harmful.  The environment though has its value and beauty in the way Man has worked with Nature.  Grazing livestock allow the wild flowers rather than scrubland and wilderness to flourish.  Even hunting led to the maintenance of hedgerows as fences for jumping, which are so much more beneficial for bird life and local ecology.  It is Man in community that makes the environment beautiful. That is not the same as dehumanised agri-business and developers building all over our green fields.

In their deep misanthropy and Gaia worship,  the environmentalists and the control-obsessed globalists are more than happy to eradicate Man from the environment.  Livestock farming that shaped our countryside must be destroyed in place of mono-crops for the new vegan diet.  This will be as bad, if not worse, than the much-hated large agri-businiesses rightly abhorred.  

To do away with coal fires in factories and indeed to destroy the family hearth, wind turbines will march across the green fields and rolling hills .  Dark Satanic mills again polluting our green and pleasant land.  In its hatred of the mining of coal this establishment-backed movement will turn our green and pleasant land into a horrific machine.  This technology though is alienated from Man.  Man is removed from Nature, but Nature is subjected to inhuman technology that silences the dawn chorus as migrating birds are decimated.

The home, the Englishman's castle, will be uglified by uPVC windows and doors and its heart torn out - the family hearth.  This worship of Gaia and hatred of anthropomorphic and patriarchal traditional religion has manifested in an attack on beauty and Nature in the name of Nature.

No longer can something be enjoyed for its beauty.  Now everything is standing reserve to be used for other sources of energy.  It is as though in the very pagan and heretical obsession with Gaia untouched by the stewards of Nature - Man - they are destroying Nature to eradicate that biological source of carbon, mankind.

Of course Providence ensured we would be protected from the risks of carbon.  Just as we produce carbon, so vegetation consumes carbon.  For this reason the planet is greenifying and demonstrating that written into Creation itself is the corrective for global warming.  

And the deep irony is that people are deceived  to destroy by this ideology because they do love their environment and what surrounds them.  That environment is not a wilderness.  Its beauty, what makes it sublime is Man in Nature.  That is not Man treating Nature as standing reserve, but from the chaos of the wilderness revealing, unconcealing the full beauty of Nature.

The Case against the Atheist Methodology to Knowledge - the Apophatic versus the Reductive, humility versus pride.

 

Just as most regard Eighteenth-century Hume as killing the Enlightenment project by his radical scepticism, so most thinkers would acknowledge Fourteenth- Century William of Ockham’s nominalism was harmful to Western thought.  Hume as a sceptic destroyed his own side so to speak by proving the impossibility of true empirical knowledge.  The Roman Catholic philosopher Ockham struck a terrible blow to metaphysics and the philosophical realism upon which religious faith is founded.

What have we lost as a result of Ockhamite nominalism?  It is understood that universals both in terms of secular classifications and the higher level universals of metaphysical realism are incompatible with the reductionism of nominalism.  When nothing really belongs to a class or species in the earthly realm and metaphysical universals such as love, beauty, goodness and truth are seen as speculative fantasy, access to meaning is cut off.  As humans no longer able to participate in identity (now just an arbitrary classification) or in the higher realm (now imaginary), we are ourselves reduced to mere atomistic individuals devoid of meaning and any telos.

For as long as we exist and think in such a paradigm fundamental beliefs that make full existence possible are inaccessible to us.  Instead religious belief and the spiritual life themselves become arbitrary and blind leaps of faith for each isolated individual.  In the consequent nihilist maelstrom, that must be seen as the final result of the nominalist cancer, meaning can only be achieved by an individual assertion of the will.  That is an underlying connection between arbitrary faith in Protestantism and the arbitrary assertion of purpose in Twentieth Century existentialism. 

Traditional religious faith stood in a different intellectual world, more intellectually rich, far less arbitrary and part of a collective human tradition of thought and spirituality.  It operated according to an ethos of humility.  This humility or recognising what one does not know goes back at least to Socrates and his assertion that true knowledge is that I know nothing.  It was followed through by the apophatic theology of the Church Fathers, in particular Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint Gregory of Nyssa.  Centuries later, Nicholas of Cusa would defend a doctrine of ignorance in the face of the hubristic claims of Renaissance Humanist thinkers. 

This humility or recognising our finite minds cannot fully comprehend divine Truth can also be seen at work in the Oecumenical Councils.  Dogma is a word much misused today.  When the Church met in Council it did so on the basis the faith and Christian Truth could not be reduced to a series of assertions.  Rather, all the Church could do was reject the heretical, that which undermined the Truth handed down from God via the Apostles.  So the Councils themselves followed the via negativa of apophatic theology.  For example, we cannot define the mystery of the Incarnation, but the Church was able to assert Arius had fallen into heresy because if Christ were not fully God as well as fully Man, Man could not be fully redeemed.

 What began to go wrong could really only take place after the Great Schism.  With the Pope’s supreme authority on doctrinal matters the Western Church moved towards a more declaratory and propositional theology.  It did not take long for a more propositional and reductive approach to theology to manifest.  Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the same century as the Great Schism, began to make syllogistic arguments for the existence of God.  Most significant was his reduction of the meaning of the crucifixion to satisfaction theology.  Christ died as a payment for our sins to God as a vengeful feudal overlord.  All the nuances and depth of Christian understanding of the crucifixion as part of the Tradition of the Church was lost as individual thinkers began to make theological assertions based on arguments thought up as individual thinkers with finite minds.  Of course the Pope himself would become the authority on dogma over and above the full Tradition.

In such a climate Ockham became possible.  It was his reductionism that we see at work in Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Western atheism.  Indeed atheism in the Western sense is only really possible where a culture has taken a wrong turn into a strange cultural aberration.   Being inside the paradigm we cannot see how pathological and dehumanising it is in reality.  

In the most prosaic and ordinary setting we find Ockham’s reductionism at work:  Ockham’s Razor!  This is the idea that the simplest explanation for the cause is the true explanation.  Of course this can be helpful, but it bears no relation to reality.  Often an effect results because of the coalescing of multiple causes.  Often a more complicated cause is the reason for something happening.  There is a certain logic in avoiding wild speculation, but Ockham’s Razor also prevents us from being able to recognise multi-faceted, higher and more complicated causes.

How has that manifested?  Roman Catholics claim the Pope is the sole authority on doctrine.  The Protestants rely on sola scriptura.  Holy Tradition, as continues in Orthodoxy, takes all into account, the Bible, the Church Fathers, the liturgy itself.  This reductionism has led to a trap for the Western mind, until we became so rationalist that we pulled down our inheritance.  In thought, Rene Descartes declared he would only accept what his finite mind could justify rationally, not recognising that there was a great accumulation of wisdom that his mind would never be able to produce, in politics this collective knowledge was termed the “wisdom of the ancestors” by Burke.   Descartes even attempted in an act of intellectual hubris to “prove” the existence of God through rational argument.  So much for the apophatic theology in the West.

In politics we saw revolution, regicide and sacrilege.  A spirit of prideful rebellion began to plague the West.  A Luciferian animus prevailed and was the ethos behind the secret societies that would foment revolution and atheism.

The reductionist Westerner thought he understood man by stretching his lifeless cadaver out and dismembering his body to see inside.  The most important aspect of the human that animated him, his soul manifested as the person was forgotten and Man was reduced to a machine – the simplest and sole explanation in true Occamite methodology.  Hence the possibility of Darwinism, reducing life to a base cause.

This hubris is fed by the technological power that the scientific method achieves.  This in itself though is Promethean.  It is about power, control and exploitation.  In the end as we see today with A.I. it becomes dehumanising.  Deep thinkers of the contemporary philosophical tradition from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Ellul have written powerfully on the ethical questionability of advancing technology as its takes on a life of its own, enframing us and reducing us.

The fallacy of this reductive spirit is to reduce everything to the lowest explanation so that the most important aspects of the world are invisible to us – the cosmos as a theophany, Man as the Imago Dei, the possibility of participation in the Divine.  We have lost the understanding that life and knowledge are part of a collective tradition within which we make sense of our particular lives.  The very opposite of the Cartesian obsession with individual verification.

In the end, as the Jesuits would say, it all ends in the absurdity as is emphatically demonstrated by the inverted world of today’s West.  Even gender is no longer clear.  The objectivist scientists do not understand they are the reason biological reality is being denied.  You cannot have biology with any meaning without the transcendental.  Gender has a metaphysical aspect.  A woman acts and moves in a feminine way because of her feminine spirit, not just because of the mechanical operation of her biology.

This is all down to a Luciferian rebellious pride.  An assertion of my individual understanding over long tradition.  It means we only understand the most base causes.  We are blind to higher meanings.

The clear absurdity that the scientifically minded who pride themselves on their objectivity are blind to is that they have argued for a random and arbitrary world.  They have an unquestioning faith in the laws of science such as physics, but they have no reality in a random world of chance.  The atheists believe the most simplest explanation of evolution and survival of the fittest can explain love, art, religion.  They do not realise that what their philosophy reduces to mere accidents in our evolutionary story are the highest aspect of life’s meaning and what it is all for – the telos.  Through the human personality, his energies, we can recognise that is the most important part about him and that therefore the most important and highest aspect of existence is the person, or rather Three Persons in harmonious and loving relationship.  Communion and love between persons is the highest point leading to participation in divine energies, not survival of the fittest.  Apply Ockham’s reductive razor though and you are left with the lowest and most trivial explanation.

Neither can the scientist ever overcome his contradictory faith in laws of physics that he can never prove, as David Hume so powerfully demonstrated.  The scientific method can never predict the same rules will apply tomorrow, because he rejects God.  Everything is random and arbitrary.  The ideological scientist is even forbidden by his dogma to posit an Aristotelian Prime Mover, let alone the Person of the Logos as that which holds together the laws of the cosmos, ensuring everything does not disintegrate into chaos.  In contrast the true scientist rather than the adherent to scientism, understands that like the Church Councils he can only say what is not true, he can never fully define what is true.  A spirit of humility applies to true science too.  Quantum physicists are ready to take Platonism seriously.

And so in contrast to the hubristic claims of the humanists, the empiricists, the rationalists we can only return to a full and meaningful life if we adopt an approach of knowing ignorance in humility.  Only if we recognise our limitations and that the full Truth is infinitely larger and higher than we can comprehend will we come anywhere near to Truth. That does not mean we know nothing.  We have the accumulated spiritual experiences that feed into Holy Tradition.  We also have our own personal spiritual encounters that we are able to make sense of within the wisdom of Holy Tradition.  We cannot claim to know it all or assert that what the Church has understood by revelation, by Scripture, by the lives of its saints, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is irrelevant because my finite mind cannot comprehend it.  Instead in a spirit of humility, recognising our ignorance, we must come home to the Church and its Tradition through personal encounter, which is centred on love.

The Final Stage of the Revolution - technocrats, occultists, elites and sexual rights.

 

 

Western Churches in their rather ineffectual and half-hearted attempt to resist the sexualisation of our society (sometimes turning into their full abject surrender to the agenda) are often accused of being obsessed by sex.  Of course the real problem for the churches is they are trying to survive and perhaps even rescue the sinners in an age dominated by sexualisation.  It is becoming all the more apparent that in the 1960s there was not so much a social and sexual revolution as a major project in social engineering directed by elites in power.

The CIA now acknowledges its own involvement in the cultural revolution of the 1960s with the MK Ultra project encouraging drug usage and in other manipulation with the promotion of abstract art against traditional forms, by supporting artists such as Jackson Pollock, or in promoting radical politics such as backing Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse.  In terms of drug usage, sexualisation of society and feminism it seems highly likely the CIA was generally involved. Ostensibly this was to present a Western society as “free” and avante garde in contrast to the Soviet Union’s oppressive restrictions and its Soviet realism in art.  While the early USSR had been extreme in its social progressivism after the Revolution, this changed during the Great Patriotic War.  Stalin, party to the original social liberalisation, recognised to win the War and defeat the Nazi threat he needed to give people access to their churches again, bring a halt to abortions and homosexuality and restore some level of traditional values again.  For pragmatic reasons, the Soviet Union had dispensed with the path to moral degeneracy; in a couple of decades time, the West fully embarked upon moral degeneracy during the 1960s.

There was perhaps more to it than merely a good propaganda opportunity to present the United States as the land of the free.  On both sides of the Atlantic, elite intellectuals shared certain progressive ideals often meant to be achieved by sinister methods.  Eliminating religious faith, sexual liberation, feminism, eugenics and an all-powerful State were the ideals of the Transatlantic elites.  Important families -  the Rockafellas, the Rothschilds, the Huxleys, the Darwins were part of an elite linked to progressivism.  The Fabian idea of a slow technocratic revolution promoted by the Webbs, H G Wells’ vision of a new world, Betrand Russell’s dry atheism, all were complementary to each other in an overarching elite and anti-Christian idea of progress.  Valiant opponents spoke out such as G K Chesterton, C S Lewis via his novels, even George Orwell from a non-traditional perspective.  What is sometimes overlooked is the fascination with the occult sitting alongside commitment to atheism and a religious scientism amongst these elites.  Secret societies were popular.  There was undoubtedly an elite agenda following in the tradition of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, secret societies and the French and American Revolutions.

It is important to understand that atomisation and Socialist Revolution go hand in hand.  The real technocratic Socialism of Wells, Mr and Mrs Webb or Russell, rather than the small s socialism of a Schumacher.  And we should not be too distracted by Socialism, an ideology that has probably served its purposes – one of which was to violently destroy Holy Rus and another to achieve a type of Benthamite panoptican.  An obsession with free love, population control and elite power were the Babel preoccupations of the Western elites at the beginning of the last Century.  A brave new one- world government would be achieved by the elites managing the talking monkeys (a degraded view of Man and rejection of Man as the imago dei).

Combined with this were to come structural economic changes that created an opportunity to implement the final revolution.  As capitalism moved from its Fordist stage which had been aided by social engineering to replace the extended family by the nuclear family, the capitalists in the late Twentieth Century now needed dislocated individuals, they needed women in the workplace and a certain cosmopolitan rootlessness as capitalism in the West became global, factories moved abroad, migrants were brought in as labour.   In the Post War era manufacturing’s time in the West was limited.  It was not only militant unions that destroyed industry.

Throughout the sixties Governments still obviously dominated by liberal elites passed laws that “liberated” or atomised us.  Instead of living a life in a context of traditional values and responsibilities we were encouraged by legal changes and engineered popular culture to think what was good was what was pleasurable and aided my passions and appetites.  Homosexuality and abortion were legalised.  Divorce was made easy.  In America elite liberals had pushed for the creation of an effective contraceptive to break people from the responsibilities of child bearing (an early transhumanist move). This further facilitated the shifting of women out of the family home and into the workplace, usually into lowly jobs trying to find money for childcare.  Racial hatred laws were introduced for what would be the inevitable future multiculturalism of an increasingly global capitalism based on shifting cheap labour from poorer countries into richer countries.  They would be a means to prevent discontent boiling over in the face of mass migration.  Whatever the merits of such laws, they were drafted with an eye on the plans for the future.   

Most central to everything was the sexual relationship.  If the most personal and sacred encounter between two people, the act at once most intimately physical and spiritually unifying could be extracted from the sacramental union of marriage and taken out of the family home and was no longer between two spouses, but rather made casual, then alienation and atomisation would be achieved.  The powerful elites, with their occultist interests and their Darwinian reduction of men to mere intelligent apes saw the power of sexual desire.  If taken off the yoke of social taboos unrestrained sexual desire would create a new race who could never really connect, who were driven by their passions, which they felt it was their right to sate.  Harm between persons and distrust would turn us into the isolated individuals subject to anomie and self-loathing, but preoccupied with our rights, and the technocrats knew they would be able to control people thus demoralised.  We would become exactly the sort of alienated and isolated individuals that would be passive in the face of an ever encroaching progressive system.  Furthermore if deviant relationships could be promoted, the family would be undermined, the greatest bulwark as Chesterton pointed out against the oppressive State.

Another development was in the elite’s favour – the invention of television.  The visual image is far more powerful than the spoken word of radio (already a propaganda tool).  Serials with popular characters were written pulling at the heart strings to make radical changes in what was socially acceptable achievable.  The social revolutionary themes of freemason Mozart’s operas entered popular culture with narratives of oppressive patriarchs being ridiculed.  The propaganda would develop to actively promote what was once seen as taboo in sitting rooms across the country, via that glowing, talking box.  With the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s role television could be used to push boundaries of taboos until unwittingly a conservative society would become liberal.  In America former propagandist Edward Bernays had already utilised the social-engineering potential of advertising.

And so the elites who long planned this seem to have achieved their goal.  The bread and circuses of entertainment, sexual promiscuity, LGBT, and the impact of feminism have all helped towards Malthusian goals of population reduction.  People are unable to think as they focus on consumption.  Churches are in decline.  Marriage is in decline.  These are the very aims of those Occultist progressives at the start of the Century.    What is more they cannot tolerate the survival of any foreign government not fully on board with the revolution of “liberation”.  International tensions are therefore escalated to pressurise countries to abandon not only economic freedom from debt to globalist institutions, but also their traditional values.  Western NGOs are often focused not only on protecting human beings from oppressive regimes, but more on promoting the new subverted values of the revolutionary West.  So much so that the six-coloured banner of LGBTQ+ has come to be seen as a flag of globalist imperialism in many non-Western countries.

The “rights” of sexual freedom, from heterosexual promiscuity to LGBT are now being used to increase the reach of the Panoptican, so that speech is suppressed if it makes a case for a return to traditional values.  The surveillance system via the State and Big Tech is the other side of the revolutionary coin to the “rights” rhetoric.  And so in the name of freedom not only have we been enslaved to our passions and appetites, isolated and atomised, but we have lost the freedom to speak out and question the agenda imposed by long-established families and secret societies that are in their deepest beliefs hostile to God, the Church and Tradition.

FAITH AND PLUNDER

 

It is difficult not to call to mind the Fourth Crusade when hearing that the holy relics in the Kiev Caves Monastery are being seized and distributed to Western countries and the Vatican.  After expelling the monks from one of the holiest sites in Orthodoxy, the Government in Kiev has now seized the relics and is working with UNESCO, a globalist organisation rooted in the Lucis (Lucifer) Trust, to distribute Orthodoxy’s sacred relics to the Latins.

The Government in Kiev is run by oligarchs and politicians whose support comes from the Uniate parts of Ukraine and who are deeply hostile to canonical Orthodoxy.  The Western media, very quick to report on arrests in Russia is silent about the persecution of Orthodox Christians in the Ukraine.

Strangely the idea of religious freedom and protection of sacred sites does not seem to apply in the Globalist system if the target is the Orthodox Church.  This though is nothing new and is a deeper reflection of our spiritual problems in the West.

Back to the Fourth Crusade (1204 A.D), when the West claimed to be protecting Byzantine Orthodoxy from Islam, but instead sacked and plundered Constantinople committing sacrilege, the theme is a longstanding one.  True there had been tensions and conflicts between the Greeks and the Latins with a terrible attack on Latin merchants – that though must be understood as the resentment of ordinary people towards the monied foreigner rather than a sacrilegious attack.  In the case of the Fourth Crusade, it was the knights of Christendom who sacked the Second Rome and plundered it of its holy relics of the saints and martyrs, while committing acts of sacrilege.  The holy relics made their way back to Western Christendom and flooded the market of indulgences.

Given the transactional theology of satisfaction via the crucifixion in the West these holy relics quickly acquired a market value.  Buy your way out of Purgatory by purchasing the relics.  So egregious was the situation that a certain German monk used the unedifying situation to nail 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Church.  Thus were unleashed the powerful forces of the Reformation, destroying Western Christendom and splintering further the schismatic Patriarchate of the West.  And we then can see the journey of the West into fragmentation, ideology and spiritual decline.

It is from such a fragmented culture that there is something grander than a mere geopolitical strategy emerging.  Whatever one thinks of the regime in the Kremlin, it is clear that there is a religious conservatism able to flourish there just as the West is on the point of stamping out any reference to higher power, devolving all to the fragmentary culture of unitary individualism  - not the person but the mere consumer for whom even gender and sexual preference are a purchasable choice.

There is an End of History narrative in this Western liberalism, not only to be found in Fukuyama, but in a more sinister way in the secret planning of Fabians and secret societies for the ultimate Panoptican where pleasure replaces joy and is used as a tool to control society.  Most obviously articulated in Klaus Schwab’s language of the Great Reset a new Tower of Babel is planned governed or rather controlled by a soft totalitarianism of surveillance and pleasure.  From H G Wells to Aldous Huxley this plan is laid out plainly before our eyes so that the secrets are disclosed to us through literature just as today via Hollywood films.

The reason this connects to the scandal of the Fourth Crusade is that the seeds of this Nominalist and utilitarian ideology were fertilised and multiplied by the shame of the consequences of the sacking of Constantinople and the reaction, which through Protestantism led to a subjective individualism.  A genetic journey can be traced to liberalism and utilitarianism. 

Today as we stand on the cusp of a type of inauthentic and materialist existence, in Russia itself there is a Christian cultural resurgence.  This is not to deny the geopolitical interests, the Wolfowitz doctrine, the Neocon strategy of regime change in those countries that refuse to take on interest debt to globalist institutions. 

There is though a higher level aspect to this.  Russian culture, for all its post-Soviet troubles, presents a spiritual threat to the nearly-triumphant ideology of fragmentation that will lead to a new form of control.  Nothing is a greater threat to the Globalist elites than the Church, just as Constantinople by its very existence threatened the legitimacy of the Holy Roman Empire and Papal Supremacy.  That is the real Russian World that the secular and liberal West fears.

And so it is not a mere coincidence that as the Slavic Christian lands are ravaged by war an opportunity for plunder is taken.  This is not just any plunder, it is sacrilegious plunder like the crimes of the Franks and Venetians.  It is the seizing of the relics of Orthodox saints to be taken by the Vatican and other Western countries, all administered by UNESCO, with its deeply anti-Christian origins.  The sacrilege of the Fourth Crusade in the end burnt Christendom with the maelstrom of Reformation fragmentation; so now there may be long term spiritual consequences for the West, whatever the outcome of the geopolitical struggle.