As a weblog dedicated to commentary from a traditional perspective on matters covering church and state, culture and society, I deem it important to take notice of current events and social trends. Viewing and interpreting public affairs through the lens of a traditional perspective, I am naturally confronted with the false dichotomy of the dialectical counterpoise of political—and, hence—partisan ideologies that govern most states in the West. In this slugfest of ideologies, in one corner is the progressive contender, challenging the reigning titleholder of all that is custom and continuity, namely, the modern conservative. Other would-be, wannabe challengers—liberals, democrats, social democrats, socialists, constitutionalists, libertarians, monarchs, communists, neofascists, nationalists, theocrats, etc. – are outside the ring, observing the combatant pugilists fight it out through parrying embarrassing questions, dodging issues, deflecting criticism, warding off deadly accusations with clever replies, pivoting to other topics, etc. Though the contest is reported round after round with bating breath in all journalism’s conservative and progressive media outlets, the reporting and commentary is often entertaining, sometimes popular, but is more often not taken seriously. Usually, it is ignored, considered as fiction. As G.K. Chesterton observed a century ago, “Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.”
Rather than bringing contested matters to a face-saving or satisfactory conclusion solving problems, the contestants are shadow boxing—punching at the air as if one had only an imaginary opponent, dressed up as a strawman, to take the blows. In a world that has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives, Mr. Chesterton again noted that the business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes, while the business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
Both Conservatives and Progressives hold strong convictions on matters of Church and State, Culture and Society. But here is where the difference lies. Conservatism is not merely preserving policy gains against encroachment, diminution, and overturning by “the left.” Nor is it a matter of “leaving things alone.” Rather, it is a state of mind that is alert, responding to events proactively, not reactively. This type of mindset requires eternal vigilance—a form of active watchfulness that is ready to act but willing to wait for the ripened moment to defend and champion long-held verities from undergoing decay or drifting into entropy. It is not fighting for ‘the past’, but for what ‘stands alive’ today. It surpasses time, is beyond time, and lies outside of time.
For the conservative, on matters of man having moral agency, the ‘truth’ about man’s nature is eternal and constant. There is no idea of progress in truth about man as a free, moral agent. But one can progress in deepening his convictions and understanding. It is expressed by St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians: “At present we see a murky reflection through a glass darkly, but then face to face. At present I know partially; but then I will know everything fully, just as God fully knows me.” [1 Corinthians 13:12] Or, as a conservative might express it, “What we now know is evanescent, but afterwards we will know eternally.”
For the spiritually-inclined conservative, [1] life does not consist of passive acceptance of the status quo. If the state of current affairs is deemed unacceptable, implicit is a recognition that “things can be better” (though not necessarily new). The attempt to make or want something better implies hierarchy. If there is something better, there is also something worse. Spiritual traditions begin with being, or existence, of present conditions. “Being in the world,” is the temporary success of the forces of disorder, in an Age of Darkness. This is recognized as a prelude to a ‘return’—a reemergence of traditional ways. The return is not a descent, but an ascent from being to Being. When societies make the leap from being to Absolute Being, they ‘put to rout’ the forces of ever-ephemeral becoming, that is, the satanic forces of disorder, disintegration, and lack of differentiation, which then prepares the pathway to the reemergence of absolute, eternal, and traditional values of authority, custom, and hierarchy.
[1] Conservatives may be religious or secular; free market absolutists or organizers of capital; Libertarians—economic or social; and those who organize and partake of the “creative destruction” [i] of societal institutions that no longer “work,” and therefore deserves to be uprooted and set aside for a new way.
[i] Creative destruction is an economic term identified with the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1886-1950). It is the process of the destruction and displacement of industries that can no longer compete in a modern economy. Older ways of doing business give way to innovations that revolutionize entire industries, replacing and making obsolete existing business practices.
THE NATURE OF CULTS
Cults are as old as history itself. Paging through the Bible we hear of fertility cults, death cults, gnostic cults, etc., with their own temples of worship to Dionysius, Baal, Osirus and hundreds of others in a crowded cosmos. They have come down through the centuries as irrational breakthroughs, erupting from the conventions and orders of societies. Most often they were manifested as millenarian eschatological reigns of the righteous; solipsistic worship of self through “free love” and multiple concubinage (the sharing of wives); and secret societies sworn to overthrow monarchs, republics, and theocratic rulers. These are, in the main, around which cults are formed, in which visionaries, loyal followers, and their armies of useful idiots congregate. With few exceptions, modern cults do not worship spiritual deities or mystery cults. Through cults, men and women find meaning in a shared cosmology. These shared values form a body of collective ritual. Central to the ritual is an ideal, symbolized by sacralizing an object, which gives form to the content of the ideal of worship, characterized as having an uplifting, transcendent value.
Cults that do not expand beyond a circle of ‘true believers’ [2] enter entropic decline for failing to generate the heat necessary to persuade or provoke society. They will fail to attract new adherents in a cultic marketplace, becoming irrelevant or ‘old hat’—the cult no longer pragmatically “works.”
[2] Eric Hoffer [1902-1983) popularized “the true believer” as a phrase entering popular culture from the publication of his best-known work “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements” (1951). As a non-academic philosopher, his thought was original, drawing upon his encyclopedic knowledge of cults, civilizations and ideologies—both ancient and modern. His insights into the psychology of extremism, fanaticism, and identity formation betray no sign of academic deformation or the impress of a system. Academic philosophers justify themselves when they argue against other philosophers. When they pass on to expound their own views and point out the defects of their rivals, they destroy one another mutually. Mr. Hoffer did not “suffer” from the “defects” of academic formation—rivalry, relentless publishing, and narrow specialization. He was free to expound his ideas systematically and in detail, without taking notice of any particular academic specialization.
Cults serve a function for people hungering to transcend their lives. This search for transcendence forms the basis of culture. And when culture takes flight in spectacular growth in any society, the cultural search for a transcendence collectively constitutes a civilization. It is the essence of civilization that society establish an overriding system of rituals and reverence, in order to strengthen devotion to a particular idea, or set of ideals.
All cults are organized around an ideal, for cults arise from universal longings to understand the mysteries of birth and renewal, life and death. In the civilization of ancient Rome, while cults multiplied like weeds, Roman civilization of the Civis Romanus reigned supreme over the cults of deities and of nations. Central to the Civis Romanus was the Roman familial right of paterfamilias. The “right” of the pater proceeded from essentially spiritual premises — present only wherever the paterfamilias appeared also as the priest and the leader of his own gentes, regardless of the size and extension of his family. This vision of society presented itself as an ancient organic-hierarchical order that needed to be protected and guarded against dishonor and sacrilegious forces indisposed to the Via Romana. When the family itself is dishonored, as when the cult of the ancestors and of the heroes is defamed and injured, this took the character of a sacrilege, denigrating a family’s common mode of being and by a common, differentiated sense of honor.
In Ancient Rome, we find that the single ideal corresponds well to the Civis Romanus. This is not a mere juridical form of secular, pragmatic toleration of religions as “equally useful to the rulers,” but an ethical reality of supernational validity. Rome posited that transcendent point of reference through the imperial cult, which lasted until the rise of Christianity, coupled with military rule scarcely resembling anything of cultic veneration.
With the end of the imperial cult, there came to the fore, a new kingdom promising salvation to those who accepted the trinitarian formula ironed out through various church councils. The church evolved into a strong institution, known as Caesaropapism; while temporal rule was under civil administration of an equally-strong Holy Roman Emperor ruling over a fragmented continent.
As Europe fractured into numberless cultural and language isolates, they became easy prey to Viking marauders. Organization at the marches, i.e., the Reich’s peripheries, required military organization and the application of inherited Roman Law that gave rise to feudalism. Although there are crises in almost every century of the Church’s history, relations between church and state had generally respected the separation of spiritual and temporal realms. And as for the rest, the residue of the old Roman Empire remained extant in the East. This ‘new’ civilization in the East became known to history as Byzantium, with Constantinople as its capital. This “Eastern Roman Empire” was Greek, not Roman. After the Great Schism of 1054, Byzantium became home to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Meanwhile, Catholic Church reforms of the tenth century would usher in the High Middle Ages of Scholasticism, followed by Dante bridging his Divine Comedy to Renaissance Humanism. Papal schism, the Black Death and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 shocked all Europe. With the loss of Constantinople, trade routes were closed to European traders on the Silk Road, but more significantly, a whole civilization known to the world as Byzantium disappeared from the pages of history.
While all Europe was threatened with invasion, the men and women of Europe raised questions contemplating their place in the world: Were men and women better, happier, or wiser than they were in simpler conditions of pagan society?
FROM MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
The catastrophic collapse of Byzantium would usher in a new age, enabling Europe to become masters of the world sea lanes and trade routes—and as the masters of their own fates and as the captains of their own souls. This new Age of Discovery began from the seafaring shores of Europe, few would have imagined the dismemberment of Christendom from the sixteenth century onwards. The century began with the establishment of the Spanish and Portuguese Catholic empires in the Americas and around the African coasts to the East Indies . Before century’s end, Martin Luther’s rebellion and his supporters among the princes of the Holy Roman Empire; the severance of the English episcopacy from allegiance to Papal Rome; and Calvinist ascendancy from the existing churches—are too well-known for reiteration here. If it were not for the reforms instituted by the Council of Trent (1545-1563), along with the establishment of zealous missionary orders such as the Society of Jesus, Europe might have become home to more than 33,000 Christian sects well before the early twenty-first century.
While Spain and Portugal went into decline over the next two centuries, England and France supplanted the former kingdoms in the race for empire. Through union with Scotland in 1707, Great Britain underwent revolutionary fervor. Scotland, home to the best medical school in Europe and host to a nation of skilled artisans and craftsmen, engendered the industrial revolution. As the century progressed, Great Britain would come to possess vast territory in North America, India, and the Caribbean. By the end of the eighteenth century, England had won the race for global supremacy, becoming the world’s first hegemon. After Quebec fell to General Wolfe under the cover of darkness in 1759, this marked the end of New France and the beginning of the British Empire. The successful revolt of the American colonies against British rule served only to slow, not to stop, the Empire’s continued expansion. While France underwent bloody revolution (1789), Captain Cooke was exploring and claiming the lands of Australia, New Zealand, and the Hawaiian Islands for the British crown. By 1800, a new spirit came to dominate the age, most exemplified by that “world-spirit on horseback,” Napolean Bonaparte. It was a cult of the artist, the hero, the Overman—who turned inward, before acting outwardly, in their search for meaning.
THE ENLIGHTENED ROMANTIC
A new form of personal expression—in art, culture, dress, and manners—gave birth to an affective cult of worship to the “authentic” self. These “Romantics” openly and publicly indulged their feelings of sentimentality to take over and submerge the public persona in order to discover the authentic self. It was widely believed that as long as one was sincere in his authenticity, it was not considered delusional. The romantic valued authenticity more than truth. Sincerity, the mask of authenticity, thus becomes a mere performative assertion, expressed as the street theatre of protest, without an envisioned stance on what is true and real.
Besides larger-than-life personages such as Lord Byron (1788-1824) dying while fighting for Grecian freedom; and Faustian littérateurs such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), completing his literary masterpiece, The Sorrows of Young Werther [1774] as a young Wunderkind of twenty-five years, Europeans of all stripes—philosophers, littérateurs, and visionaries of various temperaments—sought enlightenment through their own set of heroes and exemplars on the stage of history. Western philosophers celebrated the willful pursuit of power and ideals; its novelists championed freedom (James Fenimore Cooper); liberation (Harriett Beecher Stowe); and social justice (Charles Dickens). Communes formed in North America under the auspices of socialist, religious, back-to-the-land, and various other intentional communities. Most of these ‘communes’ vanished with the death of their founders, while a few are still extant today. [3]
[3] In August 2025, there were three “active,” i.e., living, Shakirs in the United States.
THE FATE OF INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES
Intentional communities had been tried but found wanting. What had been a search for authenticity in personal surrender to the communal ideal, became passé in an age of industrialization and rapid change. The teachings of Christ and the guiding precepts of various “foundresses,” “mothers,” and “brothers,” etc., did not answer the felt need for hope and salvation through planned communities, apart from the ravages of society.
Instead of “belonging,” i.e., living in intentional communities, men and women took to the community writ-large, namely, the nation, social class, or abstract humanism – in search of authentic existence. Mid-century manifested two events marking the transition from intentional community to a new age of ideologies. In 1848, Europe became engulfed in revolution, while America expanded across the continent, snatching California while finding gold in the process. The new intentional communities became grounded in ideologies associated with class [socialism]; race [slavery abolition]; and gender [female suffrage]. They are extant today in various progressive movements associated with ‘political correctness.’
Ideologies have a compelling appeal. People are drawn to stories of injustice, which stirs their conscience to impel them to take action. They seek moral redemption—for themselves and for society. Ideology is found to be more emotionally compelling than religious fervor or established political parties.
Besides being based on a central idea, i.e., an ‘ideal,’ ideologies give deracinated men and women an opportunity to live authentically, in personal surrender to the communal ideal. Ideologies, per se, are not the problem. They become a problem when the ideal is made out to be the whole or the absolute [4], rather than being one of several alternative ways to the same vision.
[4] This type of Idealism is associated with the 19th century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). It is characterized as Absolute, accounting for The Whole of existence beyond the categories of mind that classify reality through man-invented terminologies. Thought relates each particular experience with some ‘infinite whole’. Platonic forms and Aristotelian categories hinder, rather than help us, understand the truth—the whole truth. The whole truth assumes coherence and harmony among all thought—all forms and categories. American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916) proposed that our thoughts are mere ‘fragments’ of the Absolute in our limited, separate selves and persons. He held that individual selves (as parts of the Absolute) are able, through loyalty to an ideal, person, or way of life, find deeper and comprehensive meaning, which forms personal identity through dialectical struggle in thus approaching the Absolute.
IDEOLOGICAL PRECURSORS
Before political ideologies came to the fore in the 20th century in the form of the various “-isms,” i.e., fascism, socialism, etc., Progressivism was mostly a reform movement focusing on remaking societies and its institutions to achieve social objectives unmet by the failure of political parties. The establishment of Settlement houses, city management as a profession, and urban planning institutes are fruits of that movement. As these movements had gained steam in the urbanization of America, shadow movements in the second half of the 19th century witnessed the establishment of cultic worship of the self, which would promulgate liberation from tradition and custom. They are represented by three of the giant minds of the 19th century. These cults of the self would form the basis for the ideological conflicts that would tear the world asunder in the 20th century.
FREUD. The first “cult of the self” focused on repressed, guilt-ridden man operating from a multiplicity of motives—both conscious and unconscious. To overcome repression and guilt, man as patient underwent psychoanalysis, to determine causes of unease and conflict among multiple ‘drives’ affecting one’s personal agency. The signature advocate for Psychoanalysis was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). His ‘talk therapy’ attempted to identify the source of conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst. It also presumed a distinctive theory of mind, and human agency derived from it. Rather than freeing patients from guilt, its precepts assume man is, by nature, “driven” and willful, therefore needs to be controlled by the artifice of societal conscience.
NIETZSCHE. The second cult of the self, Friederich Nietzsche, has been covered in several of my earlier posts. Here, I just want to point out those seminal insights that inspired the art, literature, and numberless aphorisms that fed the ideological frenzy of the 20th century. Although he renounced his Prussian citizenship and rejected antisemitism, his name became associated with German nationalism and its political system of National Socialism that derived its authority from the “masses,” i.e., the volk or the nation, rather than from traditional orders of the realm.
He shared with National Socialism a rejection of Christian morality with its restraints on manly virtue, as well as its elevation of pity and compassion as supreme virtues. To Hitler and Nietzsche, Christianity represented an antilife ethos that ensnared the whole nation in fear and trembling. Both Hitler and Nietzsche start with the assumption that man is an unbridled Dionysian, who ‘overcomes’ the world with soldierly courage, without flinching at death. For Nietzsche, this was an ethos appropriate to a small band of the Overman type. For Hitler, the unbridled passion lies in the nation, the Volk, governed by the triumph of the will. Although Nietzsche saw a deadly danger in a state governed by ‘supermen’ with a will to power beyond good and evil, his disdain of the common man, or, as he called them, the rabble, left German citizens at the mercy of relentless propaganda, coupled with impunity by the state.
Its sinister purpose was to anaesthetize our wills and paralyze our moral instincts—surely something that Nietzsche would not have championed in his more lucid moments.
DARWIN. Although not technically associated with philosophies of human agency and the self, British biologist and naturalist Charles Darwin had an arguably greater influence upon economic, social, and political ideologies than either Freud or Nietzsche.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is best known for his theory of evolution. His evolution was dubbed the Law of Natural Selection, and it became the foundation and focal point of his whole theoretical superstructure. From the beginning, evolutionary dogma assumed that animals, esp. primates, had a proto-common ancestor with homo sapiens Man. It is unclear why he could hastily arrive at that conclusion since the pongids, [orangutans] and later the hominids, [Great Apes] evolved under the same conditions as the cercopithecids [Old World Monkeys]. As to who is naturally selecting whom in aping each other is not clear. Selection presupposes a selector—a “being” that presumably has agency to choose to pick out from among several alternative scenarios. And how could such a selection be considered “natural”, unless it was based on some clockwork-like mechanism? After all, Mendelian genetics was not known until after Darwin’s death, nor was the science of heredity known at the molecular level until its discovery in mid-20th century. Moreover, molecules, as the microscopic building-blocks of carbon-based life, are identical in Nature. This would preclude any form of natural (i.e., environmental, scientific) selection (i.e., an agent deciding who or what is fit to survive).
Molecules do not change, because molecules have definite properties. Evolution implies continuous change, but the molecule is incapable of decay, of destruction, of generation, of growth. This calls into question the whole progressive narrative, which pits environmental determinism against natural selection of the fittest. Other than the production of offspring, nowhere is fitness described in terms of necessary properties. The progressive narrative assumes change is progress on a narrow range of issues based on feeling more than rational conclusions based on sound premises, nor on inductive observation. Its impact on public policy will be discussed below.
THE IDOLS BECOME POLITICAL
Each of the three idols mentioned above achieved their fame in distinct specialties: Freud [in medicine, esp. psychiatry]; Nietzsche [philosophy]; and Darwin [evolutionary biology]. Each made distinct and original contributions in their chosen life’s work. All three had countless disciples that spurred social movements and new scholarly specialties into being. All three men would not live to see the day when their conclusions morphed into movements that would scarcely be recognized by their creators, and, in fact, would find whole movements that completely missed the point, being contrary, or totally opposite to, the substance of their lifetimes’ work. This is a lesson of how ideas are misapplied in history.
Freud’s impact on society went well beyond medicine. From his work came the concepts of free association, dream interpretation, repression, transference, and the unconscious. So far, so good. The fault with Freud lies in the conclusions drawn from his clinical assessments about human nature, human agency—and its near-cousin—freedom of the will.
Of the three modern Progressive politically correct movements of the current day—race, gender, and class—Freud’s science had its greatest impact in the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s, especially on matters of gender and sexuality. From his views on aggression, guilt, libido, neuroses, and the Oedipus complex, came feminism, i.e., women’s ‘liberation’ from traditional roles; ‘free’ love; the “authentic self’ of Abraham Maslow, and the palliative effects of tobacco [5] and cocaine. From ‘sex and drugs’ would emerge new movements that would abolish gender itself.
[5] Although Freud was a lifelong cigarette and cigar chain smoker, many attributed his habit to a desire to focus his concentration in his quest for psychological insights in his work with psychoanalysis. When he dropped cigarettes in favor of cigars, he did not receive sudden insightful revelations into an enlarged understanding of the operations of the libido and the pleasure principle. After all, smoking has many ramifications. But sometimes a cigar is still a cigar.
Freud’s speculations would result in the deconstruction of the family, gender roles, and the abolition of gender itself. Gender and sexuality would no longer be a binary construct of nature, but an ever-fluid ephemeral continuum upon which men and women would be free to choose. Same sex marriage [6] is only the most common one. “Transitioning” and the call for ‘gender affirming care’ are only the latest in a long line of ‘liberations’ from Being itself. God’s plan, or Nature’s plan, if you will, differs from modern progressiveness. To the progressive, destiny lies not in the progress of man to the heavenly city, but to the future of an illusion of a happiness in the pursuit of pleasure as a guiding principle for a lifetime.
[6] This is not equivalent to same gender marriage. Two males joined to each other in holy wedlock do not engender being. Ditto for two females. Marriage is a public matter, a state concern, to encourage the stable formation of families. Same sex marriage has no such compelling purpose.
Nietzsche was a classically trained philologist. He had a gift for languages, having mastered classical Greek, Latin, French and his native German, [less so, Hebrew], while still attending Gymnasium before entry to university. For the strength of his voluminous publications, he was offered a professorship in classical philology at the early age of 24. Due to recurring illness, he never was able to handle the required teaching load, and was finally awarded a small pension at the age of 35.
After his retirement, he largely abandoned philology, turning to philosophy. He abhorred Christianity’s “spiteful transvaluation of values,” exposing a slavish, Ressentiment opposition to the strong-willed overman. Considering his own poor health, he comes across as a sickly, pathetic narcissist who was bereft of physical, soldierly courage. It was just one short step from his hero Siegfried in Twilight Of The Gods to the cult of the Fuhrer, thence to the millenarian ‘new man’ of the German volk. Germany had looked into abyss of defeat and humiliation, and turned to nationalism.
After a winter of neglect following the defeat of Nazi Germany, renewed interest in his work took root in academia in the tumultuous 1960s, and spread to popular culture. Like much of youth culture at that time, Nietzsche rebelled against tradition and authority. His influence on new movements of the late 20th and 21st centuries would have a profound impact, especially in schools of philosophy such as existentialism and postmodernism — as well as on art, cinema, literature, and politics. His appeal in popular culture fostered archetypal heroes and villains, i.e., Superman; masters of the universe; high tech nerdish, eccentric billionaires of the information age; and the shift to artificial intelligence (AI). AI represents untold opportunities for heroes and villains alike. In the face of such accelerated change, we are witnessing a resurgent populism and nationalism, which puts a premium on reconstituting civilization and culture as the evolutionary outcome of an AI world. It will be globalistic institutions, rather than the nation, that will be contemned as belonging to the forces of reaction against a higher vision of man—eternal civilization.
Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection may sound plausible as a sufficient account of evolution in broad outline, but fails in the details. Nothing has been shown to be necessary, such as a mechanism for explaining processes from carbon-based life formation as represented in the chemical bonds of organic chemistry for the permanent mutation and transformation of an entire class, order, genus or species.
Nature does not change or evolve; to do so would require a redesign of nature’s building blocks, i.e., molecules and atomic structures, in order to create nature in another image. Nature cannot redesign itself. Creative evolution, as the term is used, requires an agent that creates and designs. The creative act is a priori to designing. The creative ‘mind’, as it were, follows up with a sketched blueprint to show man the inner workings of nature. Only an acting agent creates the blueprint of nature. This presupposes an agent with freedom to act. By acting, i.e., taking action, the creator is willing something into existence. Nature does not have a will. The will, as represented by Artur Schopenhauer’s will as idea, is pantheistic. In the progressive context, the will of the people in the progressive narrative is revolutionary and a complete break with the past. There is neither a sequence of change, nor a development of properties. The progressive, who stakes all on the future, is beholden to a fallacy that evolution is necessary, as a support to a historicism that enables the ahistorical to disown one’s own historical legacy.
Eugenics. Belief in what “experts say…” have had a pernicious influence upon movements that have justified the division of peoples based on race, gender, class, occupation, and wealth, according to some hierarchy. These divisions have at times morphed into new classifications that amount to pseudoscience, e.g., phrenology. As for the science of evolution, it begot numerous movements that applied natural selection to human populations. For example, within a year after Darwin’s death, a new science came into being. It was called eugenics, as coined by Francis Galton in 1883. As a polymathic innovator of applied mathematics and statistical methods for measurement, he encouraged reproduction among the “fit”, and discouraged it among the ‘ unfit.’ His natural selection included traits that enhance survival, so that the strong survive. If it sounds like a tautology, it is. But then he goes on to say that the strong should dominate the weak, especially in rewarding the strong in economic and political contexts. Others went further. They would advocate selective breeding as social policy to control human reproduction, as progressive, which considered restrictions of eugenic policies as Luddites blocking the march of progress. The Brave New World of sifting populations to produce planned outcomes is discussed below.
The pseudoscience of eugenics has been associated with radical, socialist-leaning ideologies, beginning in the progressive salons of Victorian England. It migrated shortly thereafter to the United States. New York City served as ground zero of the eugenics movement, taking root in Greenwich Village, a then hotbed of radical politics, in generally left-wing political movements. Its principal advocate, Margaret Sanger, stated her commitment to promoting birth control began after witnessing a woman die following an illegal abortion in 1912. Shortly thereafter, Sanger began to promote birth control. She founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 in Brooklyn as a small birth control clinic, and fought against laws banning contraception.
A word on eugenics. Eugenics is the science of improving society through creating the “good race” through controlling reproduction. Sanger agreed that genetics was the cause of human poverty and therefore believed poor individuals were incapable of developing into useful members of the human race. Allowing the poor to “breed,” would “swamp” the privileged elite through sheer numbers. The swamp, in her view, represented a dead weight of human waste. In 1932, Sanger laid out a plan for worldwide peace, which would require nations to implement sterilization policies, using segregation to separate and sort the fit from the unfit. Although these policies have largely been abandoned, Planned Parenthood and its progressive allies still target poverty-stricken sections of America’s inner cities for the bulk of its business. Such are the limits of progressive thought.
THE “WOKE” CULT OF PROGRESSIVISM AND THE FUTURE OF MAN
WOKE is a word that everyone thinks they know what it means, yet no one can agree upon a definition. Its original meaning was defined in a time where racial segregation was the rule in America and in European oversea empires that ruled African and Caribbean “coloureds.” With the Return to Africa movement of the 1920s, a raised awareness of racial discrimination and unjust exclusionary policies compelled African Americans to arise from their slumber to demand rights long denied. This was the origin of woke, which went into decline during the civil rights era. The term wokeness reemerged in the 21st century, migrating in meaning to an ideology of social justice that went far beyond the battlelines of civil rights ‘affirmative action’ usually associated with the African-American community. Wokeness would be transferred into a progressive political cult that extended far beyond traditional civil right concerns, i.e., voting rights, to new constituencies fluidly and malleably shifting identities in the new age of progressivism. Gender fluidity would be recognized as real, and some would say scientific, as the number of genders increased to 62 distinct ‘correct pronouns’, according to the social media company, Facebook. Climate cults, non-binary cults, trans- cults, etc. would spread like crabgrasses, generating their own heated grievances, but failing to spread much beyond the cocoons of their safe spaces. .
It is no coincidence that all the madness associated with politically correct ideology has spawned in an identitarian age of civilizational awareness. People no longer look to international bodies for reform and renewal. What they care about is bullied out of them into submission. Mass migration is an invasion; progressiveness has become a death cult to all that is considered hearth and home; censorship is the tool to suppress speech and imprison grandmothers for expressing thought crimes. Disinformation threats cannot break the bonds of a people to each other and to the cult of the ancestors.
As in two previous world wars, the European peoples will look to America for their deliverance from tyranny and displacement. There can be no consensus and common ground with the orcs of Brussels. America has become a new hope for the world. In regaining its civilizational values, America will shine as a city on a hill for its faith and freedom, leaving in its wake a twisted woke universe, trapped in a hall of distorted mirrors.