Benjamin ends the essay stating you can destroy a society’s belief in itself by flooding that society with mass-produced products, thereby removing its aura.

While he wrote the essay to destroy the Nazi party, applying the lessons of his essay can also destroy a Christian, democratic society.

TECHNOLOGY

Technique comes from the Greek word techne, meaning craft or art. Techniques can range from anything created by hand, to muscular and aerobic feats, or to comprehension and the art of rhetoric.

Technology utilises technique for a certain function. Technology with mass production capabilities ease the burden of technique on workers, requiring of them different roles, pursuits or rendering them redundant.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with mass production, but it’s worth asking what mass production does to society.

Books in the Middle Ages were so valuable for their sheer difficulty to reproduce that they were chained.

When was the last time you chained a book? Likely you haven’t, it’s been mass-produced, your relationship to it is not the same.

The contents, now cheaply acquired, are not considered so potent to our mind. This is true of the Bible, which we have inherited from our martyred ancestors.

Our relationship to the Bible, and to our ancestors who passed it to us, tends to be diminished, it can be a struggle finding the will to read it, let alone study it or apply it. The mass-produced Bible today gets taken for granted and must now compete in the attention economy with mass-produced filmic and digital media.

The attention economy is typically designed to be a digital panopticon keeping and monetising one’s attention.

Facebook, for example, designed its scrolling feature after slot machines; it’s designed to be addictive. Colouring the notifications in red gives an unconscious alert to our brain.

The moment one appears, it’s hard to resist, it has to be investigated. Companies spend absurd amounts of money to find ways to keep you on their app for even a second longer.

CLICKBAIT

In the case of social media in particular, the addictive interface is flooded with mass-produced digital news articles, with clickbait titles lacking substance that require the attention of the user to complete the full picture of the article.

These applications contain techniques to change our attention patterns. We are less capable of reading a book, or to read with the same attention span, and the texts aren’t as complex.

We cannot create the same works of art as those in the past and consume lesser examples, we cannot discourse properly and so often resort to the lowest forms of argumentation: ad hominem attacks and personal insults.

We’ve lost our ability to complexly analyse and comprehend, and universities are advancing arts degrees that encourage a rebellion with our past by embracing Critical Theory, the innocuous academic term for Cultural Marxism, where, among other things, it teaches that there is no such thing as truth.

A hallmark now of a Marxist society is “secondary literacy”. Primary literacy involves a society being capable of comprehending a topic on words alone without the assistance of images. Tertiary literacy is being only capable of comprehending images (like the stained glass works on churches, called “the poor man’s Gospel”).

Secondary literacy requires words and image. A news broadcast in and of itself is not wrong, but it should not be misapplied.

Currently, it is through the use of mass-produced news broadcasting that communist values and propaganda have spread virulently in the Western world.

Words alone are not the primary means of consuming news or investigative journalism, the journalism informing us is something substandard.

IDEOLOGY

Furthermore, primary sources are not the primary means of news sources. All primary sources need to be filtered through a Marxist ideology.

If the primary source differs from the opinion running over it, the opinion is given preference.

Meaning is contingent because nothing has any essence, and only an approved vanguard may accurately report the meaning or context of a primary source. When the map (strategic view) differs from the terrain (tactical view), trust the terrain.

But Marxism holds the ideal that if the map differs from the terrain, trust the map. From there, a concept-city, a new map, can be created over the city, with an illusory narrative, one which must not be informed by the city that spawned it.

This illusory city can be advertised as racist, evil or a symbol of oppression, requiring a transformative undoing of its foundations.

Society is flooded with mass-produced, ideologically-filtered, secondary sources in ubiquitous, addictive and easily consumable user-interfaces and mediums.

Protecting this is a well-connected, unaccountable vanguard that perpetuates its existence and protected by an emotionally-charged and undiscerning mob.

What does that do to a society? Is the average person more or less capable of technique? When the technique of comprehension is outsourced and mass-produced, the people outside the vanguard either submit and perform the role of enforcer, or face the social-Darwinian kangaroo court of public opinion.

Capitalism is value-based. The products that match your values gain your capital. When the values change, the market reacts and offers products or services that reflect the values of the time.

DEGENERATE

Those products are often mass-produced, replacing former morals or practices. New traditions develop and old ones are discarded. The art becomes less technical, more degenerate, more carnal.

The most effective way to make this destruction of technique within our society possible is by destroying our Judeo-Christian morals and any objects or practices of aura.

Statues have aura. Churches have aura. Our historical figures have aura. Traditional Western morality required humility, they required skill and mastery over the body.

If such a thing were attained, all kinds of good works flourished, it was a matter of patience to acquire the techniques.

Furthermore, with works of man to be considered acts of love needing to be worthy of God and neighbour, the bar was set astronomically high as to what could be achieved.

As St Dominic said: “It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.” When you’re the hammer, you strike the iron at your will, forged through temperance; the anvil takes in the strikes and lusts of life and does not overcome them.

So does morality affect technique, and in turn, comprehension skills and art, at all?

JD Unwin in 1934 seemed to think so. His book Sex and Culture analysed dozens of tribes and a half a dozen civilisations to mark their rise and fall. Sexual morality was a central indicator of the direction of either.

Kirk Dunstan writes of the book: “The single most important correlation with the flourishing of a culture was whether pre-nuptial chastity was required or not.

“Cultures that retained this combination [alongside monogamy] for at least three generations exceeded all other cultures in every area, including literature, art, science, furniture, architecture, engineering, and agriculture,” he wrote.

“When strict prenuptial chastity was no longer the norm, absolute monogamy, deism [religion], and rational thinking also disappeared within three generations.

“And if total sexual freedom was embraced by a culture, that culture collapsed within three generations to the lowest state of flourishing.”

After that, those civilisations tended to get destroyed in some manner.

REVOLUTION

In Russia of 1918, at news of the death of Grand Duchess Elizabeth of the Romanov family, Vladimir Lenin said: “Virtue with the crown on it is a greater enemy to the world revolution than a hundred tyrant tsars.”

Truly, a good man is the greatest possible anathema to the Marxists. It makes sense why they get targeted above any bad man.

If generation after generation you remove the morals of Christianity, reduce the assessable techniques used within schools, flood the market with mass-produced goods of questionable morality, society will lack the technique to think, provide or defend itself.

We are slaves to bad morals, fake news, addictive apps and the Marxist mob.

We are losing our civilisation, and are custodians of either what we have left, or of the modern mass-produced artefacts that are overseeing the West’s apostasy from God.

The human person is less capable, and calls on the government for assistance. The government is then designed to be a permanent crutch for the civilisation, until it’s entirely dependent on it.

The Ancient Greeks used to forbid slaves from training to prevent them from overthrowing their masters.