The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking. Such terms as oppressors and oppressed, the idea of classes—all that sort of thing is near to losing all meaning, so obvious are the impotence and distress of all men in the face of the social machine, which has become a machine for breaking hearts and crushing spirits, a machine for manufacturing irresponsibility, stupidity, corruption, slackness and, above all, dizziness.[1]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.[2]
The best social and political order is the one whereby it is easiest to know truth, adore beauty, and love goodness, especially the highest, most sublime, and best truths, beauties, and goods. This is so because the purpose of life is to attain holiness of soul. Not to mention that truth, beauty, and goodness is the earthly trinity mirroring the supernal Holy Trinity, and God created you and me to know, adore, and love God in His creation and Himself now and for eternity. Indeed, the best social and political order is the one that enables the most people possible to know this truth and practice it. It would be a fundamentally religious society—truly religious, that is, deeply spiritual and suffused with agape, not Pharisaical and cultish and full of hypocrisy and self-serving—founded upon and ordered to truth. Such a society would establish in positions of authority and power only those people and institutions most knowledgeable of and loving towards soul-enriching truths, beauties, and goods. And these leaders and institutions would seek to inculcate in the citizens through law and customs those virtues and practices that best enable such knowledge and love, virtues such as courage, temperance, justice, prudence, faith, hope, and love, and practices such as Socratic inquiry and dialectic, an economy of freedom, justice, charity, and leisure, and public celebrations and festivities that solidify the community in friendship and intensify our joy and solidarity by making explicit what and whom we love together.
How do contemporary societies and political orders measure up to our ideal society? Simone Weil’s words above regarding her own society almost one hundred years before today are illuminating. With those with eyes to see, the evil now is so blatant and visceral, so profound and ubiquitous, so monstrous and ugly, so inhuman and diabolical, it is akin to a Divine Revelation of evil. Murder and lies are the trademarks of Satan, and the scamdemic is nothing but murder, mass-global-genocidal murder, and lies, the greatest lies ever uttered and practiced. Anyone who has plumbed the depth of the evil of the scamdemic knows now, if he did not know before, that money and power is not the purpose of life, that lying is evil, that every human being is sacred, that God and love are real, and that this world is wonderful and beautiful, but ultimately just a preparation for eternity, in comparison to which all created things are insubstantial shadows. Here is the catechism of hell we were taught in 2020:
● Psychotic fear (as well as heart attacks and strokes in children) is normal.
● Official claims and pronouncements are always true, and arbitrary dictates, however cruel and irrational, must be obeyed without question.
● Healthy people are sick, indeed, are contagious and deadly walking diseases.
● The human face and breath are abominations to be covered and suffocated.
● Children should be tortured (mask-wearing for seven hours a day, even outside and when playing) and sacrificed (poison injections), even by their own mothers, for the comfort of adults.
● Universal and objective reality is off-limits to humanity, replaced by the declarations and dictates of self-and-state appointed “knowers.”
Let us adapt Weil’s words for our moment: So obvious are the power and triumph of all men in the face of the plandemic, which was supposed to be a machine only for breaking hearts and crushing spirits, a machine for manufacturing irresponsibility, stupidity, corruption, slackness and, above all, dizziness—but has also, by God’s grace, become a fountain of truth to embolden and enliven hearts, to empower responsibility, intelligence, purity, diligence, and above all, clarity. For those with eyes and ears to see and hear, the Scamdemic was a revelation of pure evil, and so has revelatory, through contrast, of pure goodness. We know more than ever what goodness means and how important the truth is, for we have experienced their radical absence and negation. We are experiencing a worldwide knowing of truths that has been eclipsed and repressed for so many centuries due to the mass moral and spiritual lobotomization program that began in earnest in the “Enlightenment” and culminated in the postmodern dictatorship of relativism and technocratic totalitarian liberalism.[3] What do we know now?
● The human face is sacred and must never be shunned and covered as if it were intrinsically disgusting and evil and shameful.
● The simple things in life—good work, joyful play, wholesome parties, public fellowship in honest discussion and debate—these are precious and to be guarded with utmost vigilance from debilitating, suicidal fear and hatred.
● It is pure evil to wage power and submit to it when this power is not being used for the good, when it is arbitrary and disconnected from settled law and reality.
● There just is absolute Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, and our personal and social and economic and political life must be based upon these.
● We either have God and reality as the basis of our personal and corporate lives, or we have Satan and unreality.
● Liberalism, wherein the truth (except for “science”) and the good (except for what’s good for the oligarchs) are privatized and depoliticized, is an illusion. All political orders are predicated on, embody, and establish claims of truth and goodness.
Those most complicit in today’s totalitarian evil desire hell on earth, but only as long as they get to rule over it. Those less complicit but still guilty of cowardice or greed or just apathy and passivity are okay with unreality and hell as long as they can have their little pleasures of judgment and scapegoating and their home-office tech jobs. But the rest of us want, more than ever before, reality and the heaven that is its essence, the reality/heaven that bespeaks and promises eternity and love and providence, the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man under His loving protection and guidance. What we no longer want, after experiencing its hellish unreality for three years, is “the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," to use the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy in the Planned Parenthood vs. Casey Decision of 1992. For we know that this is not the “heart of liberty” as Kennedy assured us. At the heart of liberty is reality, God’s reality, not the reality of technocratic eugenicists, sadistic billionaire psychopaths, soulless corporate and political puppets, and mindless, petty, and spiteful bureaucrats, and not even the reality as it appears to each of us in our inevitably ego-distorted consciousnesses. And we don’t want a “concept of existence,” either another’s or our own, but existence itself. We don’t want the right to define existence, but the ability to recognize, receive, adore, and love existence as it truly is.
Again, what we have experienced since the installation of liberalism in modernity is a slow process of moral, psychological, and spiritual retardation, where the masses have lost the ability to know and love the Good, satisfied with the simulacra of “defining” it by reducing it to shallow, propaganda-conditioned emotion and sheer, irrational, arbitrary will. And those who have managed to escape the dumbing-down process, who still retain the ability and desire to receive and love reality as it is, have been relegated to the margins of culture to live out their definitions and conceptions “of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” in private social clubs.
Even after the unspeakable horrors of the World Wars, fascism, totalitarianism, genocides, IXXI, and the Global War of Terror, all of which were a sort of dry run for the more comprehensive and profound horrors we are now witnessing and to come, so many of us were still content with our postmodern bourgeoise lives of self-creation and our post-truth politics, as long as we had enough money and comfort and the freedom to live within our preferred sub-cultures. We took reality for granted, and our basic grasp of it, more or less accurate, we assumed with insouciance. And we didn’t really care too much if our views of things really corresponded with reality, as long as they were “respectable” views. Even less did we care or even want politics to be based upon the actual Good and the morally and metaphysically and theologically True, but only on our contracted “rights” and “freedoms.” If it secured those, to hell with reality, politically speaking. The Natural Law, the Tao, God’s Will? Whatever. Politics can’t be based on those now, with pluralism and freedom and all that. Most people are nice and leave you alone. We still have the power to vote and go to Church. Little did we know that in a few short years, reality itself would be taken from us and replaced with a counterfeit, a “concept of existence” of a few psychopaths imposed on the intimacies of our lives, with most of us embracing the counterfeit without hesitation and without even knowing it. D.C. Schinder articulates the pre-covid mindset:
The absence of any social quality in truth leads to a peculiar dialectic in our relationship to our convictions. On the one hand, we affirm them with an odd detachment, a 'self-irony,' such as Vattimo advocates, and which may not even be conscious. We don't really believe anything. On the other hand, whatever attachment we do have becomes absolute, because it is unreflected and immediate, i.e., not mediated by reason. In this respect, the conviction has the essential form of fanaticism, an emotional attachment that is immune to all reasoning. There is thus no incompatibility between half-hearted irony and fanatical conviction; these can reinforce each other, produce each other in an escalating way, turn immediately into each other, and even in some sense exist at once in the same mind. The tolerance that is expressly embraced as an ideal by the modern West therefore fosters at the same time an ethos of irrational violence. This ethos strangely increases at the very time that any apparent 'conflict' is neutralized; no one is denying you the right to hold it as true that leaves are green, and even to declare this publicly—under certain conditions: as long as, when you say, 'true,' you do not mean that anyone else would have any obligation to accept it against his arbitrary will.[4]
But this is all over. We are no longer ironic about our beliefs. And if we have a strong emotional and rigid conviction, it is not because we are fanatical but because we are grounded in reality. And we are indeed being denied the right to hold it as true that grass is green, but in this case, also these:
● That healthy people are healthy and not contagious, and sick people are sick and contagious.
● That masks do not protect you from a virus.
● That it is a form of mass torture to lock down the economy and mandate face-mask-wearing and social distancing of healthy people.
● That a “case” indicated by a medically non-diagnostic test doesn’t mean you are sick or contagious with anything.
● That a “casedemic” is not a pandemic.
● That experimental, untested injections are dangerous, have shown to be injurious and fatal to many, and should never be mandated.
● That many people are still dropping dead in the streets—and athletic fields, and newsrooms, and in their sleep—and it’s not from a virus.
● That there was no state of emergency due to “Covid-19,” but one due to the bioweapon injections.
● That we are in a state of global totalitarianism based upon deliberate, malicious, and coordinated lies.
● That “the science” is a code word for propaganda.
● That virtually everyone in power is lying.
We are fighting to the death now for the right, not to define reality, but to reality itself. Pre-Covid, when, as good post-modern liberals, we lusted after the right to define reality for ourselves, we inadvertently gave that right to the most powerful, cruel, and ruthless, to corporations and states and media, and finally to the evilest human beings ever to live on God’s green earth. And they proceeded to define reality for everyone else. Let us never go back to our vomit, but press on in the knowledge that God alone matters and God alone is Ultimate Reality. If we know this, we will love God and our neighbor, and heaven will come. Maranatha.
[1] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (London: Routledge, 1952), 347.
[2] Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859), 1.
[3] Michael Hanby, "The Birth of Liberal Order and the Death of God: A Reply to Robert Reilly’s America on Trial — Part 1 of 3," New Polity, February 26, 2021, accessed December 17, 2024, https://newpolity.com/s/The-Birth-of-Liberal-Order-and-the-Death-of-God-Part-1.pdf.
[4] David C. Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 18.