Life In A Cult

H/T to commenter Cassander. I came across the link to the article I've excerpted below in another link that he provided.

Right now I suspect many of us are feeling a bit groggy--a feeling induced by the bizarre carnival atmosphere of public life in America, in which established liars are suppressing truth in the name of ideological purity. It's as if we were living inside a cult, while resisting full membership in that cult. Already back in 1949 in his The New Science of Politics Eric Voegelin had described this feeling as characteristic of life in the modern West. 

The American republic was established on the basis of a civil theology that reflected a generalized Christian tradition that embodied a philosophically articulate vision of human nature. This generally accepted civil theology is what breathed real life into the institutions established in the paper document we call our Constitution. 

However, as the societal consensus that allowed for a common civil theology broke down, various liberal ideologies began warring to replace Christianity as the new civil theology--Libertarianism on the right and on the left a Progressivism inspired by Hegel's Neo-Gnostic ideology. Both of these ideologies rest upon a radical denial of human nature, and Progressivism has developed into an increasingly explicit gnosticism that espouses a Globalist order to transform humanity--the Transhumanist Global Reset. Their goal is to inform our constitutional institutions with the spirit of that radical denial, as a civic ideology rather than a civic theology (God having been removed from public consciousness).

Ideologies by their nature share characteristics with what we commonly call "cults." Above all, both cults and ideologies engage in a systematic denial of the objective realities embodied in human nature in favor of a desire driven effort to overcome reality and establish a new reality. This manifests itself as a type of libido dominandi in the political sphere, and naturally entails the suppression of WrongThink of every sort--censorship of any expression that contradicts the drive of ideology.

UPDATED: Christopher Dawson's Profound Understanding Of Modernity

I turn once more to the ideological roots of the Current Crisis and, in an ultimate sense, even of what the Russia Hoax is largely about. Big Picture stuff.

When I was growing up I lived in a house that was full of books, and of great importance for me was my father's collection of books by Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), the great English historian. He's little known now, and sometimes sneeringly referred to as an "autodidact" and enthusiast of the Catholic nostalgia for the Middle Ages. But he was much more than that. Dawson was a philosopher of history--as you can learn from these Dawson references on this blog. In his day he was ranked with such as Toynbee and in the 60s was sought after for lectures at Harvard.

So I was delighted to discover a Twitter feed that preserves the memory of Dawson's profound understanding of the nature of Modernity. Dawson died in 1970, but already in the 1930's he had a clearly developed understanding of the coming tyranny of Modernity that we see emerging in fully developed form around us--Post Modernist, Gramscian Marxism. And the "Church of Vatican II" is among the most ardent converts to the message of the Neo-Gnostic prophet of modernity, Hegel. (See, for example, by the Italian historian Roberto de Mattei: The Roots and Historical Consequences of Modernism)

Of course, such movements of thought or of the human spirit of rebellion, have deep roots. Dawson traced those roots to the Reformation but, as I've tried to show on this blog, the roots go much deeper into the Platonic and Augustinian traditions that are the true Western tradition. Here is the tweet that first caught my attention yesterday, in which Dawson captures in his typically condensed and trenchant form (almost a paradoxical style for a shy, retiring man) the roots of Modernity in the "Reformation":


Christopher Dawson:‏

@cdawsonquotes

What Hegel valued in the Reformation was in fact that it had destroyed the Church as a substantial unity and had restored the unity of human consciousness in one universal objective moral organism — the State.

12:33 PM - 1 Mar 2019

​And this is precisely the agenda of Modernism and of the Church of Vatican II (V2). Rather than two kingdoms, one of which orients Man toward Christ the King who directs Man on earth--with all the limitations of human institutions that implies--toward his transcendent goal, the V2Church rushes to embrace the tragic results of the Protestant Revolt--the State ascendant in all human life, an Ecumenic State for a new Ecumenic Age (Eric Voegelin's term). And this is quite explicit in the V2Church's embrace of and idealization of the two State sects--Anglicanism and Lutheranism, one named for a country, the other for a man.

​This explains, if explanation is needed, the nature of Bergoglio's "ecumenism", which is intended to include all men in a universal earthly State without borders--one State to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. It also explains why the V2Church has no sympathy for persecuted Christians, e.g., in China or in Islamic realms.