Ideas Are Not Defeated By Better Ideas – Part III: Identity
First, a recap.
Part one of this excursion established the interior workings of the will and the intellect. We presented two competing models of understanding the relationship between what we know and how we act, without necessarily favoring one over the other. The model that favored primacy of the intellect indicated that we must know a thing in order to act upon it, that the intellect guides the will, and that a responsible free agent always wills in accordance to what the intellect deems good, even if his intellect is in error. The model that favored primacy of will acknowledged most of this, except preserved in the will a radical freedom that the former model seems, for the most part, to exclude, while preserving a notion of differing but not-incompatible appetites of the will.
In part two, we addressed social conditioning, how that was used for social engineering, and the means and tenacity with which the world at-large can attack the will by manipulating the intellect. Although the will remains free, it is nonetheless influenced greatly by factors that affect the intellect. Conditioning in particular is something inflicted by a certain class of controllers whose interests generally don’t align with the common good.
Put another way, part one approached personal autonomy, freedom, the barest foundation upon which liberalism presumably rests, and part two depicted how this can be so easily bartered away and surrendered by means of social conditioning.
To return to the main thrust of this piece, it’s prudent to ask how liberals can both believe in a free market of ideas while also being, on average, reasonably intelligent people who comprise a majority, if not the totality, of the managerial class. That a free market for ideas has failed to come about is an observation made with even the simplest intellects, and yet, your genuine and earnest reader of The New York Times will remain utterly convinced that it has. For some, they even see this as something of a problem, intuitively recognizing that some ideas are bad while others are good, at least insofar as they serve somebody’s self-interest. Nonetheless, most liberals who value regulation of ideas consider the secular sphere so open and accommodating that a few mild elements of idea discouragement won’t harm the overall discourse of the culture.
The broader question here is why liberals believe the secular sphere to be so open at all. Social conditioning answers part of that question, but it fails to offer a fully sufficient answer. What makes them so easily conditioned in the first place?
We address that here in part three. This requires approaching the broad framework of the modern liberal belief system: what they consider liberalism to mean and how that is to be played out in reality. This is not intended to be a critique, as that can be left for the writings of professionals from the nineteenth century. The visceral comments on liberalism from de Maistre remain true of the liberal mind even today, to say nothing of more contemporary writers like Bertrand de Jouvenel. We may touch on these at a later date, but that is not worthwhile for this piece. In the mean time, we turn our attention to James Burnham, in defining the managerial class, and to Augusto Del Noce, in identifying the foundations of the liberal mindset.
The Managerial Class
Throughout this piece, we have been referring to the average white liberal as a member of the managerial class. This term requires some illumination.
More than half a century ago, James Burnham coined the term ‘managerial class’ in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. His thesis, as profound as it was prescient, particularly for its time, was in George Orwell’s words, a vision of a “planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor democratic” ruled over by “business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers.”1 It is the prediction that perfectly described the socio-economic organization of American society, and indeed, the West, all the way up through the 1990s. There would be a ruling elite, and this elite would be not the visible government representatives and officials per se.
They would rule nonetheless through such means as necessary. The elite would be cross-sectional of the top institutions of society, most of which would be located in ‘private’ industry. Burnham himself described it as such:
We may often recognize them as “production managers,” operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or in government (for they are to be found in the governmental enterprise just as in private enterprise) as administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on. I mean by managers, in short, those who already for the most part in contemporary society are actually managing, on its technical side, the actual process of production, no matter what the legal and financial form—individual corporate, governmental—of the process.2
In its simplest form, Burnham is describing rule by an oligarchy: something our democratic impulses quite naturally surrender to when given enough time and incentive. This general organization, however, has changed a little since Burnham’s predictions. As the liberal tendencies addressed in the previous two parts indicate, the figurative life force of the liberal social framework has turned out not to be production of goods but the flow of information. The revolution in technology at the end of the 1990s, and which came into full fruition by the late 00s, marked the transition from the sort of rule-by-managers that Burnham predicted into one not just ruled by, but dominated entirely by managers and the managers of managers. The acceleration of growth in the managerial class had as much to do with the shift into a service-driven economy as it did with the technological revolution that occurred in the same period.
The unprecedented outsourcing of American manufacturing, production, and, for lack of a better phrase, real economy during the 80s and 90s only fueled this transition into a service-dominated society. The managers now no longer simply organize a society with real economic power, they organize people and information. This required a new class, a class of middle-mangers that arose over those two decades as Human Resources departments were established.
This was in part a pressure-release valve for academic over-saturation. There was a real need to find something to do for the bloating volume of people receiving irrelevant degrees, or worse, receiving degrees despite subpar academic performance or the declining standards of academic institutions. This pressure release valve eventually culminated in HR departments being cancerous focal points of the sort of social conditioning that was outlined in part two of this piece. Ideology infected the academies in the interests of conditioning the students, and the students went out to get what were supposed to be harmless jobs as HR reps and middle managers. They carried the ideology with them.
But there was also a legitimate need for a new kind of manager. Burnham touches on the hierarchy of the managerial class in the very same breath as he outlines its general framework, but by focusing on the oligarchical aspect of its movers and shakers, he misses the great harm that the majority of the managers could inflict as a result of self-interested delusion.
There are, to be sure, gradations among the managers. Under the chief operating executives of a corporation like General Motors or U.S. Steel or a state enterprise like the TVA there are dozens and hundreds of lesser managers, a whole hierarchy of them. In its broader sense the class of managers includes them all; within the class there are the lesser and the greater.3
The new kind of manager required by the informational age was one such manager as these: greater than a lesser manager yet far beneath the exclusively self-interested oligarchical apparatus. This would be a truly middle manager that could shirk responsibility when necessary, yet nonetheless orient and funnel ideological interests to whole departments of underlings. It was something of a set stereotype character in the 90s and 00s, but it’s now such a cornerstone of corporate reality that it’s hard to imagine the corporate workspace without her.
Keep in mind that in the forties, referencing real economy like the steel and automotive industries made sense. Had this been written in more recent years, it’d be more appropriate to reference, say, Google or Goldman-Sachs. Recall also that HR departments are tasked with hiring, training, and to some extent, even layoffs at both large corporations and government offices. Socially conditioning the sort of people who work there wasn’t particularly difficult, and the people whose jobs they control don’t need to necessarily believe the propaganda in order to be adequately manipulated. The zealots in the HR and managerial classes were enough to push the propaganda; everyone else just had to comply with it.
What we’re talking about here is the transformation of American society from one in which an oligarchical class still managed and ran complex systems, even if for their own limited benefits, and even if they partook in a certain degree of looting, into one that lacks real economic power and is oriented entirely around informational manipulation. This information includes the financial and investment industry that operates out of Wall Street. The role of the managers changed as the generations changed and the technology changed. As a result, the modern white liberal manager was born.
Portrait of the White Liberal’s Belief System
In his book Propaganda, Ellul draws a strong correlation between the impact that cohesive systems of propaganda—social conditioning—have on unsuspecting liberals and the common indications of neuroticism. Social conditioning, in other words, exists to drive men mad, to make them crazy; it exists to so thoroughly confuse and confound as to reduce the average ‘propagandee’ to a state of sordid indecision, programmed to leap in fright and scream in rage at the times and targets decided by the conditioners.
The conditioning of our age is worse still even than this, as not only is the medium designed to inflict this neurosis, the medium’s message is, too. The unremitting skepticism addressed in the last post forms one of the foundational cornerstones of liberal ideology. Writing in the mid-1970s, Augusto del Noce elaborates on this, specifying the exact framework of their conditioning. It is founded, he says, on the “unity” that “absolutely denies traditional morality and religion.” In this sense it is fundamentally revolutionary, but more than that, it attacks reason itself. He continues,
This absolute opposition, based on scientistic dogmatism—science is viewed as exclusive of all other forms of knowledge, so that all the problems that cannot be analyzed by modern science in terms of measure and verification are declared to be pure “nonsense”—necessarily means no dialogue whatsoever is possible with those who do not accept its conclusions. Supposedly, such people do not express any rational argument but only some kind of psychological condition.4
In this context, he refers to the encroaching totalitarianism of secular liberalism forcing spirituality and religious worship out of the public square. Modern secularism, he argues, is totally incompatible with Christian belief. The attack that the Faith experiences in such a crisis is worse, in a certain sense, than that it suffered under the weight of communism, he believes, because communism was able to “establish some continuity with tradition” in the form of synthetic look-a-likes and stand-ins for religious beliefs5. For these, he refers to “messianic and biblical archetypes”, present in communist ideology, such as “the idea of the proletariat as the universal mediator”6.
He argues, however, that modern secular liberalism is “a totalitarianism of ‘disintegration,’ because the complete negation of tradition coincides with the negation of all ‘fatherlands’,” into which “large corporations and political parties take the semblance of fiefdoms.”7 Technology like the internet has only made this change and shift more obvious, particularly where branding and marketing are concerned. The development of target demographics into consumer-slaves, brand loyalty, etc. are all surface-level indicators of a deep cultural neglect and avoidance of the transcendent.
Speaking more relevantly, the development of a monolithic media-entertainment complex tasked with delivery of both news and entertainment seems appropriately at home in this model, as well. Where Del Noce distinguishes between corporations and political parties in the quoted excerpt, we can recognize today that little meaningful difference exists between the two parties of the American system, and even less difference exists between the political theater and the media that promotes it. The incestuous relationship found between politicians, lobbyists, investment banking, and the media is so blatant that it’s a wonder more people aren’t aware of it.
But its obviousness is, perhaps, part of the point. The average white liberal is frequently a member of some element of the elite structure, be it in defense, banking, education, or journalism. They’re aware of the structure above them but accept it and the people who comprise it as the expected and correct status quo. Of course everyone you ever get your information from graduated from the same three universities. Of course they’re all married, related to, or otherwise connected to one another. Of course they all hail from the same top-percentile neighborhoods. “Why would it be otherwise?” they ask, even as they simultaneously believe in diversity quotas and a free market of ideas.
On this, Del Noce builds off of what he referred to earlier in his career as “irreligion”, something situated at once both against religion and against hard atheism. Atheism, particularly in how it became a cornerstone of Marxist thought, developed into its own pseudo-religion under the communists of the twentieth century. By delivering the theory into the realm of praxis, Del Noce notes how communist atheism established itself as a direct competitor to, and therefore it shared basic elements of pragmatic exercise with, religious customs and belief—specifically with Christianity. Although it was explicitly anti-God, it was not in theory anti-salvation. Instead, as noted in the previous post, the revolutionary character of the communists understood salvation as “the secular translation of eschatological thought into the philosophy of history.”8 The communists embraced atheism by replacing supernatural salvation with a myth of attainable utopia.
Del Noce goes a step further in his analysis of irreligion, however. In The Problem of Atheism, he casts the above dichotomy into the molds of empiricism contrasted with rationalism, where empiricism resulted in a general irreligious agnosticism, and rationalism the hard atheism of the communists. And even within this, he considers it necessary to mark a distinction between what he considered ‘old-style agnosticism’ and ‘new irreligion’:
Old agnosticism affirmed that we are not equipped to decide which of the two propositions “there is a transcendent God” and “there is not a transcendent God” is true. But it hinted that the truth of the first proposition was preferable, and it professed that asking the question of God was an inescapable necessity for the human mind. Conversely, for today’s irreligion the exact opposite is true: there is no reason to raise the question of God because the affirmation of his existence is logically meaningless. Furthermore, even shifting the question to practice is not allowed because, with respect to social questions, asking the question of God would be, people think, disastrous. They say: democratic politics can only be de-mythologized politics, which keeps rigorously to the temporal sphere.9
Democratic politics are the politics of the modern secular world. As has been discussed at length earlier and by many others, the secular space is one that is presumed, by the average liberal, to be the competing marketplace of ideas. It is supposed to be the neutral place that carries no intrinsic ideology: a thought-space of objective non-preference. This presumption is itself the error being made, however, as presuming an objective, non-preferential treatment of ideologies is the same as foisting onto the Christian’s worldview—and more specifically the Catholic’s—the baggage of atheism.
This is not the same secular space as was dragged into the public sphere after Westphalia. The old world begrudgingly acknowledged the impracticality and inability of the Church to stamp out the Lutheran and Calvinist heresies, and the Protestants likewise admitted their inability to either prove or do anything about what they perceived to be the Church’s illegitimacy. The Westphalian peace, which resulted in the early modern secular space, was one that allowed at least the mostly-peaceful coexistence of European polity while acknowledging the deep and prevailing religious rift that scarred the continent.
But liturgical, theological, and spiritual considerations aside, there was a broader Christian consensus that made the secular space of the seventeenth century far more preferable, by any measurable standard, to what the secular space became over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Del Noce’s studies on Marxist thought, though inappropriate for even a brief treatment here, is correct in effectively asserting that the transformation of that secular space occurred as a result of the rise of modern atheism.
The secular space has an innate opinion. By placing prohibitions on certain reasonable conclusions about the world and reality, it naturally asserts atheism by default. But rather than the hard atheism of the Marxists, it is a soft atheism that is presupposed but never necessarily announced. This is what Del Noce refers to with “irreligion.”
For Del Noce, “irreligion” dispenses with God so entirely as to mark Him as a non-entity, signaling a greater erasure of the transcendent than hard atheism. Out of sight, out of mind, as the adage goes. God, under the liberal democratic order, “is useless with regard to our decision to come together to build life,” he explains. This is “not even mere indifference… because indifference presupposed the idea of a single morality valid for all men.”10 He ascribes the rise of this humanistic callousness—or distinct, absurd indifference, depending on how it’s framed—to “trust in technology and overcoming all nostalgia for the past by accepting the technical world,” adding that “it is trust in progress as a consequence of trust in technology.”11
The liberals do not declare themselves atheists per se. Some may, but others won’t; ostensibly, atheism is not an inherent component of the liberal ideology. After all, one encounters so-called liberal Catholics and liberal Muslims and liberal agnostics in modern society with regular frequency. The belief set that the average liberal has to work with makes no declarative statements about the transcendent and the supernatural, and therefore avoids the trappings of the ideological failures associated with hard atheism and communism. As a result, this irreligion that Del Noce refers to is more harmful, more insidious, and more dangerous an enemy to combat. It has no real solid position except the various competing interests and neuroses of the liberal mind.
The gap that opens up in the liberal’s framework of irreligion, which the communists filled by trying to immanentize the eschaton, is filled not by antiquated and hokey-sounded appeals to utopias, but rather to a general, ill-defined sense of progress. Del Noce is key here to distinguish the progressives from the revolutionaries for this reason. They in fact “do not coincide at all,” as progressives are “tied to the new science,” he claims, as opposed to the eschatological preoccupations of the revolutionaries.12 This new science, this obsession with technique, must be understood if the liberal mind is to be made any clearer at all:
According to Marcel, the technical spirit must progress towards a radical de-subjectification of the world, towards a world without soul and without interiority: the characteristic perfectibility of the world of technology constantly perfects depersonalization. In the technical vision of the world, man appears to be the only centre of order and organization in a world that, by all appearances, has been produced by chance, or has been torn away from chance by a violent act of human emancipation; therefore, the technical vision of the world is essentially tied to the Promethean myth.13
This should sound familiar. Jacques Ellul, in our last part, emphasized the use of propaganda in alienating the propagandee, depersonalizing him and removing him from his surroundings—plucking him out, as it were, from the relevancy of his immediate social conditions and history. Del Noce here refers to something almost identical, but within a different frame of reference. It is technology, by which he means here technique, or the overly naturalistic approach to understanding the world, that grounds these presumptions in the liberal mind.
In order to better understand this, we return to Ellul. “Technique,” he says, in an introductory note, “is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency.”14 It is a term that denotes methodology, but a methodology that has so completely consumed society that, as Del Noce notes, little can be found of the nuanced traditions that the society is actually founded upon. Technique is not an organizing principle so much as an attempt to inflict one upon a world that ultimately defies it. It presumes that there is a system for everything. Everything can be categorized, rationalized, compartmentalized, dissected, analyzed, and therefore systematized. If we only have enough data, we should therefore be able to know the totality of everything that exists and then therefore predict the future.
Consider the crises of the last couple years, particularly the virus hysteria and its proposed solutions. As William Briggs has echoed time and again, it has been a tyrannical rule by experts. Likewise, on a more dystopian note, the search engine algorithms at work for the last twenty years—particularly those efforts by Google—can be understood in conjunction with the development in machine learning and sophisticated artificial intelligence apparatuses. The result has been the attempt to track, plot, and therefore influence the billions of users who interact with Google platforms across the globe. Take into consideration what we already know about how closely-knit Silicon Valley is, how much the tech giants work with one another, and even the government’s involvement with the likes of Google and Facebook, and you can hopefully see the pattern emerging. There’s a reason they want everyone online and no one anonymous; the internet guarantees, if they can pull it off, a sort predictive crystal ball—a Laplace’s Demon for the social sphere.
This illustration is meant more to shed light on how these people think rather than the validity of their thought. It requires the maintenance of a network of experts, independent of the hard logistical wiring of the physical machinery involved. You’d only try to develop an AI Laplace’s Demon if you thought such a thing were feasible and possible, and indeed, if you thought it was a worthwhile endeavor. If you’re a member of the expert class, of the managerial class, then you already believe that it’s a good thing. Society has to be monitored, controlled, for the betterment of mankind, to alleviate suffering, to make the social conditions of Western life increasingly better. Left unsaid—or, in some settings, said far too loudly—is the contrary fear: if it is not monitored, it might spiral into the sort of chaos that could produce another Adolf Hitler. World War Two founding mythos is a powerful component in the liberal eschatology—and make no mistake, they certainly have one. It’s just not as obvious, openly stated, or even coherently organized as their more left wing ideologues.
Expertocracy is one of the key hallmarks of the white liberal managerial class. Experts have to be defaulted to. Experts know what they’re doing. Experts don’t lie, aren’t swayed by worldly desires, and act consistently in the best interests of humanity. Anyone with credentials who fails to meet these standards, such as experts presenting data contrary to the narrative embraced and propagated by most of the media, must then by definition not be experts. They’re cooks, crazies, discredited morons, et cetera. The managers have to know what they’re doing. Even if they don’t, we have to believe that they do.
Meanwhile, experts might often be wrong, the liberal is more than willing to concede, as experts are only human. They might get facts wrong, they might be in error, they might even brush over very obvious and glaring half-truths that discredit their conclusions. But these factors are to be decided by other experts, who each form some indispensable part of a great expert apparatus into which outsiders like us—and the white liberal class—are unable to gaze. We’re not smart, specialized, or credentialed enough to see behind the curtain. This is why the average white liberal’s understanding of the term “peer review” is more or less analogous to ex cathedra statements by the ruling oligarchy.
The strive for a soft utopia drives this preoccupation with systems and experts, but in the process, it empties out the liberal’s mind. A technical approach to the world depersonalizes the one wielding whatever method he’s advocating in the interests of progress. For any error committed by any person or group, there is a system at play that forced their hands. The systems at play infringe on any meaningful definition of social action, forcing agency into the margins as the preoccupations of whatever system exists to dispense justice. People have to be punished in society not because they are ultimately responsible for doing wrong, but because there’s a system that, due to some greater problem in the social machine, still requires penalties to be carried out in order to balance the equation. The wrongdoing is the fault of the system, and the person being punished is the unfortunate pleb who just happened to be holding the bag. We see this mentality play out when zealots discuss things like institutional racism.
Del Noce elaborates on some of this, though in a sense with farther reaching ramifications than a mere justice system:
For the technical spirit the world is a machine whose operation leaves remarkably much to be desired due to defects and errors for which nobody is to blame because nobody is there. Man is somebody only in front of an imperfect mechanism; and in fact he is perfectly ready to treat himself in the same way and to reabsorb himself into a depersonalized cosmos. It is natural that, from this perspective, life becomes the only value, and an action is good or bad if it contributes or not to foster it.15
Life, he writes, without defined purpose, is the only indicator of value for the liberal mind. But without defining a purpose, life ceases to have a coherent definition to begin with. The broad categories of liberal interests, from animal rights to infanticide, all owe themselves to this fundamental confusion. Life can only be defined in terms of sense proximity. If I can’t see something is alive, but I can see something else is alive, and that something else seems inconvenienced by the former, then the case for infanticide practically makes itself. That this makes absolutely no sense, and in fact that it verges on the diabolically sociopathic, escapes the zealot’s grasp.
As an aside, the average liberal, fortunately, remains somewhat tied to the moral prerogatives of life and death, even if they parrot the propaganda. That he may not go on the record to champion disposing of fetuses in garbage cans or selling off their organs to make skin cream is not a cause for celebration, however; social conditioning goes a long way. Their innate skepticism, and the degree to which they’ve been conditioned to trust the narrative over their own lyin’ eyes cannot be understated.
Remember that the liberal adheres to extreme skepticism about exterior realities, at least in a theoretical sense. When Del Noce refers to life here, he’s referring to how the liberal considers his own life, and then how he abstractly applies that consideration to other people. The liberal does not consider life valuable in the same sense that the Christian—or even the genuine religious person who acknowledges the transcendent—does. Indeed, throughout the preceding paragraph, Del Noce goes to great length to show the gap cloven between the religious mindset and that of the liberal’s: “indeed religion is the exact opposite of technique,” he writes, in that “it establishes an order in which the subject is placed in the presence of something that he is not allowed to grasp in any way.”16
As outlined above, this is more than a simple rejection of the supernatural and the transcendent. It is the attempt to replace it with the self, but it does so by obscuring the self with the abstract presumptions of humanity and freedom. The more general term we have for this ideology is secular humanism: the odes, presumptions, and pretenses of Christian morality emptied of both its substance, its aesthetics, and its accouterments.
In a more horrifying sense, the irreligious framework sets about at work to destroy belief in God in the exact opposite way than the hard atheism of the communists did. They attacked God and religion directly, and in doing so, they terrorized and oppressed the human soul. But they did not openly destroy the soul. For some, unfortunate as it was, the terrors could be considered perdition or purgation, galvanizing the soul and preparing it for martyrdom. In great trials are souls purified, so to speak.
Irreligion, however, built as it is off of this liberal technical society, seeks to destroy belief in God by erasing the soul from existence. It positions the self at the center of all reality and then carves it up and empties it out of willpower by attacking the intellect. You aren’t responsible for your actions: some greater system that governs you is. But you have to hold the bag. You can’t really be certain of exterior realities: experts are. But you have to believe them when the science evolves.
In the presence of such absurd beliefs, numb Pavlovian group behavior becomes somewhat standard fare. Thanks to the media narratives providing them with propaganda, they’re able to function beyond the drooling mess of their own ideologies. Nonetheless, common conversations are not-infrequently littered with the landmines that the propaganda has planted in their intellect to combat their own wills. The media exists today in order to keep and maintain those landmines, to keep the average liberal in a position paralyzed as much by his own skepticism as by the horror of rejecting the programming. As Ellul pointed out in the last part, however, this is not necessarily unique to the liberal: those who do not consider themselves politically liberal can be every bit as beholden to the technical society as the liberal.
Conclusion
The managerial class of the country is one that includes, but is not limited to, the experts. Experts exist to furnish oligarchical interests with convenient sounding propaganda so the gears of the social machine remain well-conditioned. Sometimes those experts are actually right. Whether they are or not is ultimately irrelevant for the oligarchs; most if not all of these sorts of people are so obscenely narcissistic and self-interested that they make the comic book villains of the sixties come across as nuanced.
The average white liberal, however, believes the propaganda. They have been equipped, by means of social conditioning, social uprooting, and their own depersonalized neuroses, to latch onto the one element of certainty that they’ve been conditioned to embrace: the propaganda. Narrative and self-interest are the glues that hold their entire framework together, and that framework is one that has the utmost, unshakable faith in not the liberal order per se, but in the technical society addressed above. It is a depersonalized, desensitized, and utterly materialistic presumption of the world and its workings that can only exist as a result of adamant rejection of the Christian reality.
This is true even for the ‘liberal Catholics’ or other such denominations of faiths in the West. By ascribing liberalism to himself, the believer chooses the irreligion of modern secular agnosticism over the faith he claims to support. Unlike hard atheism, which indeed has a creed, the irreligious creed allows—in fact, embraces and encourages—this sort of subversion. The ends of irreligion include the completely atomization, depersonalization, and psychological enslavement of all society. Ridicule this as hyperbolic if you want, but the creeping technological superstate dystopia is, for the most part, already here. The simplest way to refer to its ends is ‘soul-crushing’.
There is a theological component here that shouldn’t be brushed over, though a more lengthier treatment is would be appropriate than what we have space for here. The relationship between God and man, individually, is personally and uniquely crafted to every individual soul. Obviously broad similarities exist across the collective interior life of all mankind, but given that each will is free and unique before God, that each soul stands before Him at its final judgment, and that each soul is informed by God whether he is and has been a friend or a stranger to Him—this is enough to indicate the depth of the relationship between how ideas can attack belief in God and how they attack self-identity.
The broad framework of secular humanism outlined above attacks this relationship between God and man more insidiously than hard atheism ever could.
To a great degree, it is the rejection of secular humanism that has fueled the dissident right in the last couple of decades. Too often, however, they reject secular humanism’s aesthetics without actually rejecting, at its core, the notion of the technical society that underpins it. As mentioned in the last post, the tendencies toward revolutionary forms of modernist authoritarianism indicate that they’re barking up the wrong tree. At the other end of the same spectrum, radical anarchism, even when cast in the language of Nietzsche or Jünger, likewise fall into the same trap. There is value to be found in diagnosing social problems and formulating remedies to them, particularly when steeped in the blood and tradition native to the people who suffer from these ailments. But it is necessary to avoid the presumptions of systems and technique, the broad strokes of social generalizations, and the taking too seriously of any theory that brought one to a seemingly viable praxis.
The fervent devotion and maintenance of one’s interior life is the remedy. As Del Noce pointed out, religious belief, specifically Christianity, creates a lifestyle that is antithetical to the technical society. Self-definition comes first from knowing God and then positioning oneself, hopefully, within His light and within His gaze.
Society is not the depersonalized interactions of systems and experts governed by nebulous facts. If you believe that it is, you agree to engage with the conditioning and are inevitably subsumed into the Matrix-like trap of the revolution. This would mean living a life divorced of meaning and absent of purpose, rejecting the transcendent, and subject to the impulses of the flesh and the enemy. But you have to choose to engage with it in the first place. And you have to choose to continue to engage with it every time you make a decision. And the choice, ultimately, is a very simple one: embrace Hell, or embrace God. There is no third position.
1George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”, included in The Managerial Revolution ( Lume Books, London: 2021), i.
2James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (Lume Books, London: 2021), 73.
3Ibid.
4Augusto del Noce, “The Shadow of Tomorrow”, from The Crisis of Modernity, translated by Carlo Lancellotti (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Chicago: 2014), 94-95.
5Ibid.
6Del Noce, “Toward a New Totalitarianism”, from The Crisis of Modernity, 90.
7Del Noce, “The Shadow of Tomorrow”, 95.
8Del Noce, “Notes on Western Irreligion”, from The Problem of Atheism, translated by Carlo Lancellotti (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Chicago: 2022), 248.
9Ibid, 240.
10Ibid, 245.
11Ibid.
12Ibid, 247-248.
13Ibid, 252.
14Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson (Vintage Books, New York: 1964), xxv.
15Del Noce, The Problem of Atheism, 253.
16Ibid.
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