by PAUL COLLITS – IDEOLOGY rejects reason. It celebrates “my truth” over “the truth” and has given us relativism, woke globalism, capitalism and communism.
It has also given us endless wars and lead to spiritual decline.
- But we owe it to the future and to the truth to connect the dots.
- It didn’t take long for the Enlightenment project to come unstuck.
- It helps to know how the world really works.
We live in the post-Enlightenment age. We also live in the age of ideology.
This is a paradox. One suggests rule by reason. The other, well, doesn’t. It suggests rule by emoting, feelings, and moral superiority based on, err, nothing. Its outcome is rule by raw power.
DESTRUCTION
American Professor of Political Science Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism – the philosophy of the Enlightenment – had at its core its own eventual destruction.
Radical individual freedom in the hands of fallen man will not end well. Adam and Eve were given freedom, with some rules. Liberalism in the Garden of Eden turned to shit. Real quick.
We are post-Christian, mostly atheist, neo-Marxist, the victims of liberal democratic tyranny and technocracy, of managerial capitalism, and (paradoxically) of big and interventionist governance.
In historical terms, it actually didn’t take long for the Enlightenment project to come unstuck. It happened in the French revolution, when the bloodthirsty acolytes of Robespierre stormed the citadels of the old, traditionalist order and overturned thousands of years of tradition.
It set the scene for everything bad that has happened since.
And they did it in the name of – reason. Reason became ideology in the blink of an eye. It has survived since.
Despite its eternal bullshit, it hasn’t always needed the pointed rifle to prevail. Now, normal people accept ideology without pushback.
When so much around us is turning to mud, it is tempting to focus our pushback on the travails of the here and now. To focus on two-tiered policing, on rigged electoral systems, on corrupt politicians and corrupted legacy media.
DISTRACTIONS
These are all relevant distractions from the main game, prosecuted far from the gaze of already numbed electorates.
By keeping the focus on these side gigs, the demonic powers abroad can rest easy that their machine is safe from prying eyes.
None of this is to decry the efforts of the noble dissident troops on the ground. It is merely to recall the higher battles in play, and to keep at least some of our focus on the meta-battles in which we are engaged, whether we realise it or not.
At its heart, our problems derive from the triumph of modernism. Its belief in the inevitability of human progress. Its rejection of tradition, of history, of nationalism, of custom-in-place.
Liberalism, a materialist doctrine born of the Enlightenment, of Spinoza and Voltaire and Descartes and Rousseau, has delivered us what we have now.
CHAOS
Permanent revolution, in economics and in social life, chaos, division, open borders (aka permanent colonialism without benefits), endless government, the deep State, wars without end, and – none of it that we agreed to.
None of it. Liberalism promised a social contract between the Sate and the governed. It has turned to shit. Who is to blame, I wonder?
Prof Deneen is right. It was always based on nothing. A peculiarly modernist paradox.
Will any of this analysis help the patriots on the ground? The British patriots being imprisoned? The Aussie patriots being demonised daily by the suck holes of the establishment media? Probably not.
But we owe it to the future and to the truth to connect the dots. It helps to know how the world works.PC
