Freedoms of Speech & of Religion Open & Allow the Race to the Bottom

The basic problem with freedom of speech and of religion is that in principle, and then inevitably in practice, it opens the agora to the discussion of the pros and cons of every alternative cult. No topic is prohibited. So, no sort of doctrine or rite is forbidden within the pale. There ensues a proliferation and interpenetration and confusion of heresies and petty foreign cults. The cult of Moloch is then sooner or later bound to enter the lists. Where there is freedom of speech and of religion, no one will be able to prevent that entry legally.

Where it is legal to advocate and to practice Molochism, it will sooner or later be advocated and practiced, by at least some few.

Be Not Afraid

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

Luke 2:10-11

There are tough times ahead. Things are likely to get a lot worse before they get any better. Not that famine or plague threaten us, or even incipient war; for the time being, we are still coddled, yes and swaddled too, into a comfortable immobility, by our continued prosperity and remaining might. But for conservatives, for traditionalists and reactionaries in particular, and in general for anyone who holds normal moral convictions, a time of persecution – political, social, economic – appears to have dawned, especially if they happen to be Christian. There is reason to expect that, even in this time of burgeoning prosperity, the sword of the state might descend upon the necks of such as we.

And of course, there are good reasons to worry about global war and pandemic, and so famine. Things could go badly off the rails at any moment. This is always so, to be sure. But our condition along these dimensions seems now particularly delicate. One feels that we are poised at the verge of an abyssal precipice.

The Modern Cosmopolitan Cult Tends to the Cult of Moloch

The Cult of Moloch drives out all others.

The established Modern Cosmopolitan Cult is the Cult of No Cults. It is the Cult of Nothing. Only a Cult of Nothing could risk much room within its temenos for other cults – the Christian, the pagan, the Mohammedan, and so forth. For, all those other cults have positive principals, each of whom with his worshippers would be at odds with the others, contesting for dominance over the hearts and acts of the cosmopolitans, until one of them achieved the victory and established his own cult. Were any of them established, they would make no such room for their competitors within their own precincts. So all such positive cults will tend to engender a state of affairs in which they may be established and their competitors driven out.

Critical Thinking Strikes Again: Or What Colleges Nowadays Teach

The Motive Urge of the Leftward Ratchet: No Pain, No Gain

Virtue signalling – in sharp contrast to virtuous behavior – is free. You get what you pay for. A sacrifice that costs you little gains you little. So the virtue signalers have to keep at it. They cannot ever rest.

The Corollary of the Golden Rule

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So then likewise: as you do unto others, so would you have them do unto you.

Social Justice Warriors always project (hat tip: Vox Day). They insist that we foment violence and hatred, e.g., when it is of course they who mostly do so. They accuse us of being antiscientific, when of course they are the ones who reject the plain data and revolutionary discoveries of climatology and of genetics, which radically undermine their most precious most romantic notions of how humans really are and how life might be, if only it were not for our deplorable sort. They accuse us of being intolerant and close-minded, when of course they are the ones who are most intolerant and close-minded. They accuse us of irrational barbarity, when of course they are the ones who rage and foam inarticulately – who tear their clothes off in their madness (this is what the OT called “rending one’s garments”) – would be maenads, hapless, hopeless, who have no longer even the art of dismemberment, who know nothing of butchery, or even of sharpening, and a fortiori do not remember how to eat raw bloody male flesh.

There is no point here in rehearsing the myriad instances of such projections on their part. All of us on the Right are quite familiar with the phenomenon.

So here’s the thing that struck me the other day. Our adversaries project upon us their own emotional and intellectual defects and inadequacies. They propose radical policies in response to those defects.

The question then is this: given that they diagnose us as suffering from the defects that in fact bedevil them, may we not infer that the way they propose to treat us is the way that they think – at some deep, unconscious level of their psychic economies – they themselves ought to be treated?

Our Present Crisis: Daddy Issues Writ Large

The Social Justice Warriors project their own Daddy issues onto politics, because that is safer than confronting Daddy. It is also safer than confronting their anger at Daddy. And it is easier and safer than doing the hard, scary psychotherapeutic work, and indeed spiritual work – the work of growing up, at last – that is needed if they are to understand their Daddy issues the way that adults understand things, and so lay them at last to rest.

So is it that the Left are stuck in childhood. They cannot reason, but can only emote. Their essential complaint is that of the four year old, disappointed at the exigencies of family life: “It’s not fair!”

We can tell it is Daddy issues that bedevil and urge the Left, because they tell us so: they blame all the defects of life upon old white Christian men, like their fathers, and hate such men.

I wonder if there was something about the men of the Greatest Generation that particularly inclined them to failure as fathers, and so fostered the rebellion and resentment of the Boomers – especially Boomer daughters. Was it WWII? How?

My earliest memories are of a time when the horrors of WWII were only 12 years past. Literally everything of my earliest childhood was colored by that war. Its memory loomed over every tiny mundane thing. Was it that Great War – really only a codicil to WWI, despite its much greater extent, so that the two were one gigantic catastrophe in the history of civilization – that queered the West?

I hope not. I so do.

Grove of Academe, Air Strip One, or Inferno?

Garden of Earthly Delights (Completed 1505) by Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 1516): Right Panel: Hell

To document pictorially my increasing suspicion about the real nature of the contemporary college campus, I took my digital pocket camera to work with me today and in my spare time between classes snapped a little portfolio of vistas, which I offer below.

An Hypothesis about the Origins of the Modern Sacrificial Cult

Rhetocrates commented:

I had an unoriginal thought worked out this morning that I wanted to share. Mostly it’s already well-established, but it does go in a slightly novel direction in explaining the ‘holiness’ spiral of modern society.

Modern progressive liberalism (viz. WW2 and after) is a specific negative type of Christianity. That much is obvious. Where our once-for-all and yet repeated-daily Eucharist (Malachi) is the navel and foundation of our religion, the Holocaust is the navel and foundation of modern progressive liberalism (hereafter MPL to save keystrokes).

Christian Soteriology Proper Forestalls Specious Holiness Spirals

We can’t work our way into Heaven, for finity is incapable of infinity. Indeed, we cannot achieve anything greater than ourselves, whatever; but only, rather, what is lesser than we. So, Heaven is given to us gratuitously. Our work consists only in accepting its invitation; in wu wei.

So then, there is a difference between interior holiness spirals and exterior holiness spirals. The former are done in secret, and in service of true spiritual ends, so as to accept the invitation of the Logos; whereas the latter are done publicly, and for purposes of social advantage. As essentially worldly, exterior holiness spirals partake the Arms Race to the Degenerate Bottom. They are motivated by the urge to be accepted and approved by the mob. So do they accept the conditions of the mob, and instantiate it.

The Pharisee is an agent of the mob.