Things are come over the last few days, and indeed hours, to a peculiarly acute pitch in America, and so in the wider West of which she is by historical accident – which is to say, by divine Providence – at present the head. America is now, for better or worse, the lead ram of the herd. Whither America goes, the rest shall follow. So we find that the entire West is at this hour poised on a world historical knife’s edge. If things go one way in America, the entirety of Christendom outside Russia will fall into rank apostasy, and so, into social chaos, poverty, and war. If they go the other, then might the West join with our Russian brothers in a renascence of Christian orthodoxy, and so of social health; of sanity, and so of peace, and of justice.
Multicultural Living
Green Grocer Placards, circa 2020
The Concerted Salients of Our Demoralization
The morale of the West – and, thus, its capacity to morality under pressure, so then its economic vigor and geopolitical power – has throughout 2020 been assaulted on many fronts at once, more and more acutely. It is odd that things seem to have gone so badly in so many ways, all at the same time, and as it were in concert. The question naturally arises, whether that concert is orchestrated.
What You Can Do About the Election
Pray to the Saints in Purgatory for the Spirit of America; for her life as lived in us her children.
What Is It Like To Suffer a Preference Cascade?
What is happening right now, globally, in re the Chinese Flu, is an inflection point in human history. This is so, no matter what the facts might actually turn out to be – the facts medical, epidemiological,, financial, economical, political, cultural, you name it – which now all appear to all of us so obscure, and (we cannot but think) intentionally obfuscated and obscured, by those in the higher reaches of the global culture interested in this or that outcome, for their own purposes, rather than for the sake of the good, the true, the beautiful. It does not really matter what those facts might turn out to be. Ex post, they shall, certainly, tell. But, for the moment, being mostly unknown, they simply cannot; almost every datum is now somewhat masked by countervalent noise of some sort. So, we proceed all of us on the basis of what we know. And what we know extends not much further than our own households, and beyond that our familiar networks, intimately connected via the web despite their geographic dispersion.
The Worst Good Friday of This Age – So, the Best
The present global corona virus lock down, however well-meant or effective or warranted it may be, is unquestionably the greatest assault on human society since WWII. It’s nothing near as bad as that titanic war, of course, but it’s bad. It attacks man on all fronts: biological, financial, economic, social, psychological, cultural – and, of course, and at root, and so most importantly, spiritual.
Almost no one is going to be able to worship in Church today, or what is far worse, the day after tomorrow. The churches will be almost completely empty this Easter.
This means that the lock down is a gigantic tactical victory for the Enemy. The whole Church is in abeyance, for a time; and this is massively hard on morale in our ranks. It means then that this Lent, and especially this Triduum, is bound to be a time of unusually intense demonic oppression. At this time, more than at any other in recent memory, our Enemy is likely to press his attack with utmost vigor. And indeed, priests and deacons all over the world have reported a huge surge in demonic activity, ranging from spiritual lassitude, dryness, heaviness or despair, to possession.
Letter To an Investor
A client wrote me over the weekend, asking if I thought recent news of apparent flattening of the curve of new infections of Chinese Flu in Italy, Spain and, perhaps, even New York City, portended incipient prevalence over the virus. I responded:
Diversity in a Time of Plague
The Wuhan Virus pandemic, having shut down the campuses and sent the undergraduate cohorts into a wide diaspora, teaches a lesson about multiculturalism and diversity. Dissenters from the reigning New Puritanism think of multiculturalism and diversity as abstract and arbitrary schemes for a total and malicious re-ordering of society. They are right, but it is possible to go further. Multiculturalism, the doctrine, and diversity, the implementation, root themselves in a grossly corporeal way in the compulsory physical crowding of human masses – which is why colleges and universities, with their large numbers of student-residents, furnish the primary ground for the radical re-ordering project. It is not a wrought thronging-together of individuals, but a wrought thronging-together of groups with the aim, among others, of abolishing individuality by preventing its formation. This marshaling of the multitudes, once they are present, commences with the division of them into groups – or to be precise, into one heterogeneous group with numerous sub-groups and another group conceived of, falsely and invidiously, as entirely homogeneous. The division bases itself mainly on skin-color but also on traits like homosexuality, which the “woke” claim as ontological but interpret morally. The supervisors of the project regard the heterogeneous group as embodying the “good” side of their Manichaean morality and the homogeneous group the “evil” side of the same. Thus does embodiment in its dumbness advance to the fore. Multiculturalism and diversity exhibit no interest in the spiritual character of the individual person; in fact, multiculturalism and diversity exhibit fierce hostility to the individual person, considered as spirit. Rather, multiculturalism and diversity emphasize the body, its biological traits, and quantities of bodies. The institution recruits bodies to serve its ends – and its ends justify its means. When events have dispersed the bodies from their vulgar concentration, however, the diversitarians pull at their marionette strings in vain.
The Press That Cried Wolf
I’m in the investment business, so I was particularly alive to the market correction of last week in belated response to news about the corona virus.
Apologetical Weapons: Projection Manifests a Conviction of Personal Evil
It is a commonplace of neoreactionary and reactionary discourse that Social Justice Warriors always project. Once you’ve digested a Red Pill, in respect to any domain of life, you cannot help but notice this phenomenon. No one in the modern West is as hateful as the haters of haters; no one in the modern West is as blind to his own hatred.
It is worth remembering, then, that as Jung first developed the notion of projection from his own vast clinical experience, projection is of those traits that people most abhor in themselves. It arises from their deep conviction of their own personal evil. What we most hate in others then is – so Jung found – a pretty reliable indication of what we hate in ourselves, but would rather not confess to ourselves, or of course a fortiori to anyone else.
