The Choice in the Mirror -- C.S. Lewis, N.S. Lyons, and Our Emergent Dystopia
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Dear Reader,
For months now, TRC has wanted to take a step back and share his perceptions about where things stand overall in our society. But he has felt especially inspired in the past few weeks, ever since he read the two pieces (A Prophesy of Evil and The China Convergence) by N.S. Lyons that he recommended earlier this month, wherein Lyons provides a fantastic analysis.
So on this penultimate morning of 2023, TRC would like to take Lyons’ works as a starting point to reflect on where we are, how we got here, what the trajectory seems to be, and potential ways to respond to all of this.
This is going to be a long post, and if you haven’t already, TRC would recommend putting it aside altogether until after you have read A Prophesy of Evil and The China Convergence, even though those two pieces could take days—if not weeks or longer—to read and digest. There’s no hurry in TRC’s opinion.
Part 1 — Where We Are
In A Prophesy of Evil, Lyons wastes no words in describing society as it stands in the early 2020s. Writing of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Lyons says, “Their stories and non-fiction essays contain warnings that might have struck more surely to the heart of our emerging 21st century dystopia than any other.” We are—in Lyons’ apt words—in “an emerging dystopia.”
But what is the nature of this emerging dystopia? Lyons goes on to write in the next paragraph —
The disenchantment and demoralization of a world produced by the foolishly blinkered “debunkers” of the intelligentsia; the catastrophic corruption of genuine education; the inevitable collapse of dominating ideologies of pure materialist rationalism and progress into pure subjectivity and nihilism; the inherent connection between the loss of any objective value and the emergence of a perverse techno-state obsessively seeking first total control over humanity and then in the end the final abolition of humanity itself… Tolkien and Lewis foresaw all of the darkest winds that now gather in growing intensity today.
“Seeking first total control over humanity and then in the end the final abolition of humanity itself.”
In TRC’s opinion, this phrase almost perfectly captures the cultural, political, and social moment in which we find ourselves as the first quarter of the 21st century wraps up. But…what is the nature of the “humanity” that some are trying to totally control and then abolish? Where did it come from? How did we get to where we are? And if the “perverse techno-state” is the apparatus for the control and eradication of humanity, what is the mechanism for its full implementation?
Part 2 - How We Got Here
It seems to TRC that if we would properly appreciate and take action on our emergent dystopia, we would benefit from first understanding what the nature is of the humanity being controlled and then abolished, as well as how we went from being free, to being well on our way to being totally controlled.
The Nature of “Man”
Why does the idea of controlling humans bother us in a way that controlling cats or gerbils or cows might not? Part of the answer to this is may be that you are a human, and not a gerbil or a cat. But what differentiates a human from a cat or a gerbil, or any non-human animal? Although there may be certain similarities, a gulf separates human beings—even the weakest and least ‘advanced’—from other animals, even the strongest and most advanced. And on the human side of that gulf is rationality.
In short, man is a rational animal. He has biological similarities with other animals (perhaps even with some non-animal elements of creation), but set apart from them by his ability to think, reason, and deliberate. But there is more that needs to be addressed to really understand what is at stake in the dystopia emerging; what has been lost, and what stands to be lost if things continue on their current trajectory.
The Lessons of the Natural Law — As Understood in Christendom
It is easy enough to say that man is a rational animal, that he is obviously on a completely different plane from non-human animals and other non-human elements of the universe — but is there more in the civilizational heritage Americans are recipients of than just a recognition of rationality? TRC believes the answer to this is yes. It has become a core component of our heritage that human beings—on the basis of their humanity itself—have certain inalienable rights. Inalienable means that although an individual’s rights can be forfeited by the actions of that individual himself, they cannot be justly seized from him simply because someone desires to seize them from him. One might say, he cannot be totally controlled (at least justly), much less abolished.
This notion—deeply embedded in the civilization since almost the time of the Saxon conversion—must be overcome in order for the totalitarian project to succeed, but where did it originate, and how did it enter into the Anglo-Saxon civilization the United States comes from? TRC may have given it away by referencing the Saxon conversion, for the answer in his opinion is that the concept of humanity as having essential dignity and inalienable rights comes from Christendom. By Christendom, TRC means the periods and places in history where Christ was recognized—effectively by society itself—as God and Sovereign King, and the Church He established was recognized as His regent authority, at least until His return. And in the case of the civilization the United States is part of, the conversion appears to have have coalesced around the 10th Century AD.
In TRC’s opinion, this is absolutely essential for understanding what is at stake. Bringing religion into the analysis may make it seem too dependent on the appeal to Revelation, if not on a Deus ex Machina. And as referenced above, non-spiritual, non-religious observation of the material universe may indicate largely the same thing as the doctrines of Christian Revelation do (it’s almost as if Revelation comes from the Creator of nature or something…): that a gulf exists between humanity and the lower creation, such that man is rightly reckoned—even in the natural order alone—as having fundamental rights and privileges in justice, at least relative to the lower animals. TRC’s intention is not to downplay the natural law, but rather to pursue historical accuracy: simply put, the natural law-congruent concept of humanity in Anglo-Saxon civilization was not developed and institutionalized in isolation; it was developed and institutionalized in Anglo-Saxon Christendom, a society in which Christ was recognized as the King, the Church as His regent, and culture—to include civil governance—flowed from a foundational belief that every word of Christian doctrine is true. This Christian/doctrinal approach to civil society was historically essential in crystalizing an understanding of humanity that is precisely what C.S. Lewis—Englishman to the hilt—would have been referring to when he talked about the control and abolition of it.
This may be a stumbling block to those who don’t share TRC’s conviction that every word of Christian doctrine is true. And admittedly, even C.S. Lewis himself might have called TRC a ‘Papist infidel’ or some such thing, and disagreed with TRC about what constitutes “the Church” (at least in his lifetime; at least one person close to Lewis has insisted that if he had lived another 10 or more years, he almost certainly would have converted into what TRC refers to as the One, Holy, Universal, and Apostolic Church). But with all respect for Mr. Lewis and anyone who would prefer to discuss the nature of man without appealing to religion and especially without appealing to Christian Revelation, we are—all of us in the Anglosphere—formed by a culture that derived its concept of humanity from the belief that Christian doctrine was and is true.
This is especially important when thinking back to the natural law and the non-spiritual view of reality. However valid these things may be as part of discerning truth, and although it might seem obvious that a human being is special and has inherent dignity and rights, consider that you are arriving at this seeming obviousness in the 2020s AD, after more than 1,000 years of inculturation, flowing from the Christian Faith. If you take the Revealed reinforcement away from the equation, the precision and clarity provided by a Church led by men (but guided and protected by the Holy Spirit in a unique way, TRC believes), able to speak in human terms, and instead rely just on the testimony of nature itself, things that might have seemed obvious in our context…might not actually be so.
Mind you, the truth is still the truth, and nature still testifies to the truth; it is our apprehension of the truth and the natural law that are weak, and which have been incomparably helped by the fact that over 1,000 years ago—long before Donald Trump and Joe Biden existed, long before George Washington and George III existed—a civilization was born on the Isle of Britain, and it was Christian in its very essence. If you are a citizen of the United States, you are a recipient of that heritage, whether you appreciate it or not.
One Doctrine in Particular
But when it comes specifically to the formation of the concept of humanity, was there a particular Christian doctrine that helped with this? TRC suspects there was — the Incarnation. In short, the doctrine that God Himself entered into time and space from outside of them, and through becoming a Man in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, took to Himself human nature itself. Or in the words of Fr. Harrison Ayre (but emphasis TRC’s), “That God would deign to take on not just our humanity, but that Jesus’ humanity would be united to the Person of God the Son for all eternity.”
What was it about this doctrine that played such a role in our civil society’s heritage? What was its impact on human relations? Writing in The Everlasting Man about this very question—God Himself born into a cave as a homeless human baby—G.K. Chesterton writes:
It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast. It is profoundly true to say that after that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and were people bearing that legal title until the Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state. Individuals became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man’s end.
Individuals became important. A man could not be a means to an end. In the 2nd century, St. Irenaeus had said, “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.”
And around the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, St. Athanasius said of Christ’s Incarnation: “He became human that we might become divine.”
This is the patrimony of Christianity, and for those of us in the United States, of Christianity’s institutionalization in the Anglo-Saxon culture: inherent, inviolable, human dignity, of every single human being, by virtue of his Creator’s adoption. Was this ideal always lived up to perfectly in practice? No. But at least it was the ideal. Man was not a slab of meat with electrical signals; he had been lifted up to just below the level of divinity. Every man (and yes, every woman) no matter how poor or how weak.
The Rupture
With such a civilizational patrimony, how did we begin to approach the nightmarish dystopia in which we find ourselves? It may come as no surprise that TRC would trace much of it to the casting off of the Church from the position of authority it held up until the 1500s, and then the casting off of Christ Himself in the late 1700s (here TRC is speaking specifically of his native United States at the time of the American founding).
Separation of church and state, pluralism, and the religion-agnostic public square are enormously popular concepts, and TRC’s purpose here is more to trace history and its role in how we have come to where we are, and are going, than to litigate and debate the merits (or lack thereof) of these concepts. Suffice to say, whatever the benefits may have been of severing civil governance from the Chair of Saint Peter, then formally from the Savior whose vicar Saint Peter was (and his successors are), TRC’s opinion is that in so doing, the English-speaking world, and the United States in particular, have renounced the very foundation for any worthwhile understanding of human nature, human dignity, and human rights.
True, customs and precedents—at least cultural and popular—do remain around those terms, and some vestige of their proper meaning does remain in the United States as of 2023 AD. But TRC maintains that we are deceiving ourselves if we think that we can cut off our Christendom-based cultural foundation and not expect the eventual total control and abolition of humanity. And this of course doesn’t even go into the injustice to God of refusing to acknowledge Him in civil governance except in Endarkenment-era Deistic terms of a Creator Who doesn’t really have much to say about His creation. But that’s a completely different post for a different day. Today’s will approach this purely in the anthropocentric terms of the current public discourse.
Before moving on, it may be worthwhile to note that many people may point out the flaws (both real and invented) associated with Christendom (with special emphasis perhaps on its Spanish—rather than Anglo-Saxon—realization). From the failure of some of its temporal rulers to perfectly live up to the notion that Christ was the true King and they were simply His vassals/servants of His people, to the—frequently exaggerated, when not totally made up—horror stories about “the inquisition,” these flaws may have the effect of making some people glad that Christendom has seemingly faded into the haze of history.
TRC respects all those who believe and feel this way, even if he frequently disagrees with them. He believes that a genuine debate can be had on these things, and he likes the odds of Christendom winning…if and when there is genuine openness to truth and the accurate historical record. However, his purpose in this post is less about engaging in this debate now, and more in asserting that, whatever flaws may or may not have been present in Christendom, it gave the world—including C.S. Lewis, and including N.S. Lyons—the concept of humanity that they rue the control and abolition of.
Some might argue that it was the “Enlightenment” (which TRC believes would be better dubbed the Endarkenment) era of thought that did this, and while TRC would certainly agree that Endarkenment thinkers tended to inflate man’s place in the cosmos, he would nonetheless assert that:
There was nothing valid in their understanding of humanity, that hadn’t already been brought to the conversation by Christendom.
While inflating man’s place in the cosmos, Endarkenment-era thought paradoxically diminished the dignity of man in societal consciousness, by removing anything mystical and transcendent (hallmarks of the Endarkenment), such as the reality articulated by Saints Irenaeus and Athanasius above.
Regardless of TRC’s correctness or error in these assertions, one thing at least he suspects most will agree on: the five centuries since the end of Anglo-Saxon Christendom (or at the very least, the past two centuries) has seen the continual erosion of human rights as such, and the increased power of small groups of people over the masses. Indeed, Lyons himself seems to affirm this in both A Prophesy of Evil and The China Convergence. The perverse techno-state described as being the entity obsessed with control over, and eradication of, humanity, is aptly alluded to in Lyons’ quote from Lewis:
Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundred men over billions upon billions of men.
Regarding that techno-state, Lyons’ work (especially in The China Convergence) is phenomenal in analyzing the monster. Again, if you haven’t already, TRC recommends putting this post aside, and reading at least The China Convergence first. For his own part, TRC would simply say, we have most definitely lost our legal and governmental tether to the foundation for inherent human dignity and rights (and we suffer accordingly), but in his estimation, for the techno-state (and Lewis’ “few hundred men” who utilize it) to fully succeed in its project of totalitarian tyranny in the United States, the general population of the United States must likewise become fully untethered from its cultural heritage. This is something that TRC is convinced has not been fully realized yet, and is most certainly being pursued as we speak.
Part 3 - The Trajectory
As TRC referred to in Part 2, he believes that while the dismantling of the foundation for the human rights we enjoy was largely the work of the 16th to the 18th centuries, the general population still has a cultural connection to those rights, at least vaguely. There might be some disagreement on what the rights are. For example, some might argue that it is an inherent and inalienable human right to slaughter a baby in the womb, an opinion with which TRC disagrees. On the other hand, for his part, TRC might share his opinion that there exists a limited and conditional right to keep and bear firearms (limited in accordance with, and conditioned on, the obligation of self-preservation and the obligation to defend one’s dependents; indeed he believes that it is precisely for the fulfillment of these obligations that the right to keep and bear firearms exists), an opinion about which many people could in good faith disagree with him (either because they believe that there is no legitimate right for a private citizen to keep and bear firearms, or because they believe it’s an unconditional, unlimited right (irrespective of “obligations”) and that TRC doesn’t go far enough). The point is, whatever our disagreement about the nature of what our rights are or aren’t, TRC’s perception is that the American people are not about to give up “rights” as a concept.
But will the American people (at least as constituted now) be around much longer?
The Change Cometh
In The China Convergence, Lyons quotes Bertolt Brecht’s “The Solution” satire about ‘the people’ having, through their impetuous participation in a public demonstration, “forfeited the confidence of the government,” and how it would be preferable for the government, “To dissolve the people/And elect another.”
What if this is exactly what our technocratic managerial regime, and the ‘few hundred men’ pulling its strings is attempting? To dissolve the people and elect another. TRC suspects that to some extent, this is what is taking place. But it may not look quite the way a great many people seem to expect it to look. It seems to TRC from perusing the ‘conservative’ side of media, that the concerns that weigh most heavily on freedom-loving minds fall in the areas of:
The Como (or “Woke” as most call it) Revolution
Illegal Immigration
TRC has a confession to make. He personally believes that each and every one of these is a real and genuine threat and each of these should be concerning. Each is worth opposing, in TRC’s opinion. But his intuition is that while some (relatively low-ranking) characters may be bought into each of these endeavors at tyranny, the further up the pyramid of power or technocratic managerial regime, the more detachment there is from the success or failure of each of these things, with the possible exception of the last.
Why? Because honestly, the dissolution of the American people and its replacement with another does not depend on any one, or even any combination, of these things, in TRC’s estimation.
So, by what means might it be accomplished?
Seduction and Induction
On each of the issues mentioned above, TRC would also note, that as of the 2020s, each of the above mechanisms for implementing tyranny, while enjoying support from millions upon millions of people, is also opposed by millions upon millions of people.
But there is at least one thing that does seem to enjoy almost total support and almost total adoption across every political, age, race, religious, and other demographic group in the United States in the 2020s (and since approximately the middle of the 20th Century).
Hedonism.
By hedonism, TRC means habituated lifestyles in which reason and objective Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, are subordinated to the subjective pleasure and will of the individual. Obviously, this can be hard to pinpoint and gauge across a nation of 330 million people. But there are ways of attempting at least a directional sketch of where things stand and, more to the point, where they seem to be heading.
TRC would share that there are two areas in particular, which, while not exhaustive of the evidence that the American population is thoroughly hedonistic, are extremely relevant to the regime’s attempts to change the population. That said, he is transparent that he’s no statistician or social scientist, and although he will share some links to statistics, he’s going much more off of gut intuition than science.
The Signs of a Hedonistic Population
It is a fact that according to demographic scientists, a population must average a procreative rate of 2.1 children per adult woman in the society, in order for the society to survive. In the past 50 years, the United States has had a grand total of three calendar years (2006, 2007, 2008) that even came close to 2.1 live births per adult woman. Three. Out of 50+. And the trend line since 2008 is not only below 2.1, but an accelerated decline towards 1.6 as of 2022 data. Consider also that this data pulls from across all people in the United States, not just those with a cultural connection to Christendom. In other words, among those with such a connection, it is entirely possible that the procreative rate is, and for some time has been, around half of the minimum for societal survival. This is how our perverse techno-state is witnessing the ‘dissolution of the people’ as Brecht might say.
According to public polling, over 75% of people under the age of 35 adhere to at least one aspect of what TRC makes a point of calling the como (rather than “woke”) worldview. For context, he insists on calling it como rather than “woke” because he believes that it is a set of absolute lies, and those who adhere to it are absolutely comatose about the true nature of the power structure, oppression, etc.; it is a set of lies created by the operators of the actual power structure to distract and divert the believers away from the oppression these operators are engaging in, and instead focus the believers on a false, non-existent one. And the como are absolutely asleep with their heads in the sand to all of this. However, in this paragraph, TRC’s purpose is not to debunk the como ideology, but rather to draw attention to the possibility that among the rising generations, that adoption is to the tune of more than 75%. That is the future rising.
That is the new people our rulers desire. A people thoroughly brainwashed into falsehood and the rulers’ vision for them (including the self-image the rulers want the people to have of themselves).
And also a people comprised largely of those with no connection to the Anglo-Saxon concept of humanity. For, make no mistake, Dear Reader, a population with a procreative rate of 1.6, and falling, is a population soon to be replaced, not necessarily through “illegal” immigration, so much as through voluntarily opening the floodgates of its borders for one simple reason: the collective lifestyle choices of a supermajority of its members leave it no other choice. Whatever pipe dreams may be being bandied about about ‘automation’ and ‘AI’ saving us from the ramifications of our lifestyles, TRC gives it a few more decades until the floodgates are fully opened. And TRC predicts that some of those currently loudest in demanding that the borders be closed and our culture and identity be preserved, will then be some of the loudest in saying that we have no choice but to open the floodgates.
The Fruits of a Hedonistic Population — While America Slept
In the previous section, TRC shared some statistics, especially around the procreation and education (or lack thereof) of future Americans, especially those with a heritage connection to the customs of Christendom. Admittedly, he’s going more off of his perceptions than irrefutable data and evidence. But why are the procreation rates so low, and why are a supermajority of those few Americans born since the 21st century began so brainwashed into lies and comatosity? Certainly, the ‘powers that be’ have spent upwards of a century of effort and investment into achieving these outcomes, but there is something that may get lost in the recounting of how elite oligarchs seeded these outcomes from long before you were born: the participation of the average everyday American.
Whatever role psychological operations, advertising, social engineering, and other top-down efforts may have played, America is in the predicament that it is in, because the vast majority of Americans adopted the lifestyles that led to fewer human beings, and an overwhelming incidence of indoctrination among those few that have been born and raised. Low birth rates happen in large part because the people hedonistically choose to enjoy the pleasures of life without full and total openness to (what he firmly believes is the natural law-based) concomitant responsibility of procreation of offspring. Brainwashing and indoctrination tend to happen when those few people who do accept the responsibility of procreation of offspring, hedonistically fail to embrace the corollary responsibility for the education of those offspring, education based in objective truth and objective reality, and instead hand them over to operatives (be they school-based, or entertainment-based) of the regime, who indoctrinate into ideologies and concepts of humanity that stem less from Christendom, and more from entities like the KGB and the Frankfurt School.
TRC will say it again: the vast majority. Not just the pro-gun control, pro-vaccines, pro-lockdown, left-wing, Democrat Americans. The vast majority of Americans. While the country fought over the “issues” served up by the overton-window-framing thought captains, from Walter Cronkite and network news on the left, to Rush Limbaugh and talk radio on the right, a character settled in to the American population itself, that conformed perfectly to what C.S. Lewis’ ‘few hundred men’ needed to overcome the traditions and customs built into the collective consciousness since the time when the Saxons ruled the Isle of Britain.
And yes, that character was and is hedonistic (interestingly enough, in The China Convergence, N.S. Lyons mentions several core beliefs of Managerial Ideology, and #5 on the list is Hedonistic Materialism). Unfortunately (in TRC’s opinion) for the United States, the hedonistic character of the supermajority of Americans is not the formal subject of the trajectory we find ourselves on…it’s just the context for it.
The actual trajectory TRC perceives (given everything he’s pointed to in Part 3 so far) is:
The continual shrinking of the proportion of heritage Americans (defined as anyone who has any conscious or even subconscious connection with the traditional concept of inherent human rights and human dignity)
The continual growth of the proportion of people within the United States who are more manipulable by the regime (in all of its manifestations, not just the governmental ones), either because they have been indoctrinated into narratives that serve its purpose, or because their legal status and unfamiliarity with the country keeps them off balance and precluded (by Constitutional law no less!) from exercising the rights of American citizens. Or both.
And in TRC’s opinion, these are the social conditions that will directly enable the total control over, and eradication of, humanity. Regardless of the outcomes of presidential elections, making social media safe for free speech, the second amendment, AI, transhumanist ideology, and climate change controls—as important and real as these battles are—the trajectory remains towards totalitarian tyranny. Ironically, it appears set to arrive not with jack-booted thugs and weapons pointed at the people (at least not primarily, not at first), but with one lifestyle choice at a time, one American at a time.
A Possible Different Path?
As TRC writes these words in late 2023, it occurs to him that although it seems that, to a certain extent, the ship has sailed on American society itself, all might not be lost quite yet. Of particular interest to him is that much has been made in recent years, especially—but not only—by Rod Dreher about the soft totalitarian nature of our current rulers. This is in contrast to the hard totalitarianism of Nazi Germany, Leninist Russia, Mao’s China, etc. (although, as Dreher points out, soft totalitarianism is the precursor to the harder version). It suggests that there may yet be time to take a different path.
Given everything that TRC has pointed out about the hedonistic nature of our population, it seems to him that at least as of the early 2020s, the question of the abolition of man is fundamentally a question of self-abolition. The day may come when the abolition of man is imposed directly by the rulers, but it appears that today, for the most part, the most that they can do at scale is try to induce you to abolish yourself, one human choice at a time.
Certainly that is what is on the table. The deal is straightforward: the technocratic managerial regime offers you pleasure and their concept of “rights.” Your part is to have fewer offspring who might speak the English language and adopt the beliefs articulated by Saint Irenaeus and Saint Athanasius as quoted in Part 2 of this post. They offer you comfort, convenience, and relief. Your part is to abdicate your responsibility to speak the truth and teach the truth to your children, and entrust them to the narratives of the regime. A government re-education camp public school will suffice, but ideally it would be augmented by an electronic device that your child’s (and your!) eyes and intellect would be glued to, and that one of the regime’s corporate entertainment arms would use to convey and continually reinforce its messages about reality.
This latter point is something in particular that TRC would like to emphasize, especially given his point about the nature of hedonism transcending almost every demographic category in the United States. In his opinion, if you are giving your child or yourself access to such a device, taking in an enormous amount of content, and that content is created by one of the corporate entertainment arms of the regime (Disney, Netflix, cable, etc. etc. etc.), then you might as well forget about reality and the objectively Good, True, and Beautiful playing much role in your life. Nor is concurrent mitigation likely to be a successful strategy in TRC’s estimation — no matter how much you tell your child at the dinner table that good is good, evil is evil, etc. if the images and narratives beamed into your child’s intellect through their electronic devices tell them that evil is good, that lies are true, that ugliness is beautiful, eventually, they are going to see evil as good, lies as true, and ugliness as beautiful.
It just seems to be how our consciousnesses work. If you still don’t understand how an entire generation of Americans went from seeing certain behaviors as unspeakably depraved, to seeing those exact same behaviors as beautiful expressions of “love” in just a few years, think back to how the regime-sponsored entertainment apparatus depicted those behaviors—and the people practicing them—during those years, and how it depicted people who frowned upon those behaviors.
Finally, when it comes to certain behaviors that still—as of 2023—are regarded by the vast majority as unspeakably depraved, but which are starting to be discussed by some operatives in a more positive light, do not deceive yourself into thinking this indicates ‘the left’ or the “woke” revolution has ‘reached its Waterloo.’ Most likely, in 20 - 30 years, these behaviors will be thoroughly approved of by anyone who has had their intellect formed by the regime’s “educational” and entertainment apparatuses.
This sidebar aside, the ability (as of now) to take the hedonistic bargain or not take it, illustrates that, at least for now, the choice really is in the mirror. The trajectory towards the self-abolition of man, is the trajectory for those who take it.
Part 4 - What Do We Do Now?
To review, in part 1, TRC tipped his cap to NS Lyons’ diagnosis of the way society seems to be moving, specifically towards totalitarian tyranny. In part 2, TRC attempted to articulate his opinion that the notion of humanity or “man” that would have been held by C.S. Lewis is inseparable from the legacy of Christendom (and in Lewis’/Lyons’/TRC’s case, Anglo-Saxon Christendom). Then in part 3 he shared his intuition that the primary means by which Lewis’ ‘few hundred men’ will try to move the masses, from where they are as of 2023 to the point of the actual abolition of man, will be further seduction into hedonistic unreality, en route to the transformation of the population.
But what are we to do about all of this? Speaking for himself, TRC is extremely excited that N.S. Lyons has stated that now that A Prophesy of Evil and The China Convergence are published, he will spend more time addressing this very question. Because this is a question that it will take a lifetime to grapple with, and let’s just say, TRC is subscribed to The Upheaval (and some other substacks that he hopes to formally recommend in the coming weeks or months). This question will need to be grappled with, trialed-&-errored, and discerned.
Certainly, TRC senses that although this is by far the longest post he’s written to date, it does not even begin to scratch the surface of any of the matters addressed in it. And that’s ok. Lord willing, there will be time in the days and years to come to at least scratch the surface. But if he could share a thought now, it would be that whatever the solution(s) may be, it will likely incorporate the virtue of fortitude.
As the virtue that opposes the vices of sloth, effeminacy, and yes, hedonism, fortitude is a logical antidote, if TRC is correct in surmising that seduction into hedonism is the primary mechanism by which Lewis’ ‘few hundred men’ and their technocratic machine will attempt to take a still somewhat-free people, and turn them into a different people, a people conditioned and set up to be totally controlled, and their humanity eradicated.
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
As so frequently in this post, TRC returns to N.S. Lyons’ observations about the emerging dystopia, and in particular in A Prophesy of Evil about the nature of our rulers’ designs (totalitarian, and not just simply tyrannical):
In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet breaks down how generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly mechanistic thinking, can lead to a (narcissistic) psychological need to exert more and more control over the external world – and ultimately to the delusional need to control all of reality itself. An individual or society’s “flight into [this delusion’s] false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.”
The delusional need to control all of reality itself. This differentiates totalitarianism from other forms of tyranny, which—however unjust—at least admit of some check, in the form of reality, on themselves.
If our rulers and our regime deny any objective reality, and instead insist on their own control of reality itself, let us be all the more insistent on the existence of not only objective Truth, but also of objective Beauty and objective Goodness.
Realism — And Civilizational Collapse
This may be a jarring departure from everything that TRC has written about up until now, but he would also posit that if he is correct that the civilization we live in dates to circa 900 AD, at the time of the Saxon triumph over the Danes (and other pagan tribes) for Britain, and simultaneous conversion of the general population to Christianity, then our civilization is a little over 1,100 years old. It may be that we are due for a civilizational collapse.
This may not happen overnight, but it is worth considering. When looking at the bigger picture, both in terms of the technocratic managerial regime’s looming totalitarianism and the general population’s descent into hedonistic decadence, it seems to TRC that both might well fit the pattern that would be expected in a late-stage civilization shortly before the total collapse. It seems reasonable to TRC that at this stage, enough pleasure, comfort, and convenience would remain for the regime to attempt to weaponize them in pursuit of totalitarian tyranny, but underneath the surface, system failure and the breakdown of the infrastructure powering hedonistic materialism lurks.
On the other hand, the end of the civilization holds the possibility of something better, but only outside the context of the mechanistic systems of the regime. TRC isn’t necessarily advocating Luddism and running for the hills, but this would be a great time to disengage from the structures of centralized control of the population, if only because they are due for collapse.
If nothing else, we would benefit from being realistic about our predicament, and what appears to be coming down the pike. Optimism and hope (and TRC is especially happy to get this post out before the end of the Octave of Christmas 2023, when the Reason for Hope’s birth is celebrated) are excellent qualities, but Polyannish hopium is not. There is very little value in pretending that something decayed and withered is actually thriving and healthy.
Fortitude
When TRC refers to fortitude, he is alluding to resoluteness in the face of the loss of pleasure and comfort, or resoluteness in the face of the suffering of pain. Living by the objective transcendentals (Goodness, Beauty, Truth) is going to require fortitude. Facing the reality—and potential civilizational collapse—of the situation we are in is going to require fortitude. And rejecting the hedonistic bargain is going to require fortitude. Here’s hoping that we (and especially TRC) can develop it and live it.
It’s a war. And the choice to fight it is looking at you in the mirror.
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