Ideas Are Not Defeated By Better Ideas – Part IV: Execution
With part four, we approach the answer to the question implied at the very beginning of this piece. If ideas are not defeated by better ideas, what are they actually defeated by? The answer, in short, is violence.
It is overly reductionist, however, to presume that violence defeats all ideas merely by physically attacking their proponents. In one sense, we could consider such an approach the way of the world, which as we know from our Christian backgrounds, is fallen, inadequate, and not functioning as intended.
But it is nonetheless true that violence remains one means by which bad ideas are defeated. Some ideas are so bad that they’re immediately discredited the moment the person who suggested them gets socked in the face for the indecency of suggesting them. That violence was the means of this disreputation seems more coincidental to the fact that the ideas were bad. After all, good people with good ideas can suffer the same fate in the wrong company. It’s such a universal consideration that the phenomenon is a common feature of slapstick comedy. It’s funny because, to a certain extent, it’s a non-sequitur.
Others will tie the ability to commit violence to social-political power, maximizing the general sentiment expressed above. Ideas that aren’t ostracized with violence are legitimated; tolerance takes on a form of soft approval. Those of us that have survived childhood and recognize the need for discipline within the family will find here the kernel of a fundamental principle about our fallen world: authority, and law, while not interchangeable, must at times be backed up with force.
This is more complex than first appearances may indicate. The liberal recognizes the need for violence in defending his own worldview—and implicitly, likewise to those views contrary to his own, although adherence to the technological framework makes it impossible to admit that anyone save himself has a right to self defense. He sees only one side of violence as its legitimizing method, however. Only those who wield the stick are capable of validating their own ideas, despite his own rhetoric and despite his own appreciation of a contrary aesthetic.
Invoking violence for self defense is a self-evident necessity of living in a free society. The neoconservative bombing campaigns of the last few decades are logical extensions of the liberal thought: if you cannot embrace secular liberal ideology, clearly there is some oppressor who must be eradicated in order for you to do so. Even if, perhaps, you are the oppressor yourself, simply because you prefer herding goats in a society that kills pedophiles to ordering fast food in a society that glorifies them on billboards.
This sort of violence, however, is merely an extension of the technical society. Remember that according to this line of reasoning, the systems are the primary ones at fault. The systems are the oppressors. The people operating within these systems are deprived of agency as a result of the totalitarian nature of the system. The systems have to be destroyed and toppled, and that usually means bombing the unfortunate sons-of-guns who run them. At least, so they believe.
One might then ask, where are the ideas, and where is the market for them? Ideas in a technical society are mysterious bits of data that get jettisoned out the ends of well-functioning systems. Again, no one person is necessarily responsible for them. The collection of techniques around him, the synthesis of his environment and the coordination of the people in his proximity and field: these are what are responsible. “You didn’t build that,” Barack Obama famously said to a crowd of somewhat stunned Americans. “It takes a village,” Hillary Clinton repeated, only a few years later. It’s the same general mentality.
The violence presumably begins where the social conditioning ends. The unspoken acknowledgment of all trapped in the technical society is this: if the propaganda stops working, the violent state reserves the right to force compliance with violence. How often and how thoroughly this right is respected remains up for some debate, as so far, across the west, it has yet to be fully implemented. Those on the receiving end of the social conditioning have remained unwilling to force the ruling regime’s hand, and for good reason. There’s a lot at stake if they lose—and, given how our society is organized, a lot at stake to lose even if they win.
Violence is used by this regime to make examples of malcontents and troublemakers. Sometimes this entails the use of actual federal foot soldiers, such as at Ruby Ridge and Wako, and sometimes this just means the unjust abuse of the court system, which is what we saw in the wake of January 6th, 2021. In either case, when the opposition to the conditioning apparatus gets too strong, it only does so in largely isolated pockets that the regime has no difficulty putting down with force. But the spectacle of putting it down is itself part of the propaganda and part of the conditioning apparatus. The message that they have the power is the real tool at work here. Remember that they think in terms of technique.
In general, violence is a rule of the world. It remains a strong argument in favor of whomever wields it, and in a general big-picture sense, it decides the fate of societies just as much as it decides the fate of individuals. Civil society can only exist when the use of violence is forced onto a separate class of people, which only further underlines its utility and effectiveness.
There is, however, one thing that defeats violence, even as it seems to embrace it. It defies efforts to understand it according to the technical society. It’s so effective that the liberal even tries to emulate it when advocating for his own social action, though he deprives it of all substance.
We’re talking about martyrdom.
Reception of Violence
It is up to the liberal to make the argument that martyrdom, particularly Christian martyrdom, is a matter of mere ideas. It is up to the liberal to prove this because it is not how Christian martyrs have understood their actions, not how they have written of them, and not how they have been depicted by their contemporaries. The martyrdom of the Roman saints under Justinian and Diocletian, of the Catholics under Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth, and of the Coptics in our own times—these were not political acts first and spiritual ones second. To believe this, as the liberal necessarily has to, is backwards.
By virtue of his belief in the technical society, the liberal embraces a view that reduces transcendent reality into a generalized psychological condition unique to each individual. The private life is dispensed with just as it is embraced. As explained in the previous part, extreme skepticism traps the liberal within a reality he cannot explain, which defaults him to embracing top-down narratives built on propaganda and social conditioning. His interior life becomes prison-like because it can neither be understood nor accepted.
This is the control that the propaganda—the media narrative—reinforces with a daily frequency on the average liberal. The proliferation of media narrative exteriorly reminds the liberal that this is among the only sources of information he can trust, as it has been vetted by people he has been assured are smarter, more respectable, and more informed than he is. His interior considerations about whether these people actually are any of these things, or if they’re just misinformed clowns, are quiet grumblings of his conscience that the conditioning has long since found ways of dispelling.
What then would he have to say about those men whose interior lives so thoroughly rule their exterior behavior as to thrust them into nonviolent resistance unto death? Among the religious peoples of the world, Christianity is unique in not only the presence of martyrs in its ranks, but that it was by its martyrs that it succeeded so thoroughly in evangelizing the world.
Martyrdom requires an interior life strong enough to resist not just the temptations of the world, but to resist the pains of the flesh as well. Liberalism, whose contradictory materialism has alienated its adherents from anything resembling a spiritual life, lacks the tools necessary to emulate such resolve. A liberal does not die for his beliefs—at least, not without violence, not without putting up a fight for them. It is well known that men die for liberal ideals, but in doing so they dispense with the secular framework that undergirds liberalism in the first place. They are fighters who anchor themselves to transcendentals and traditions that preexist liberalism: a nation, a family, a people, a way of life. Things like voting rights or democracy are tied up within an identity and are effectively along for the ride.
Liberalism positions itself within the playing field of life; if you die espousing liberal ideas, then by definition, liberalism has failed you. The scope of its eschatology does not extend past the boundary of death.
But this concerns that class of people that liberalism has consigned to be its defenders. These are not martyrs; martyrs do not take up arms and die in battle. Again: liberalism has no martyrs.
Remember, from our look at Del Noce, that the liberal has no concrete eschatology, as he has no concrete ideology outside a handful of single principles that refer only to exteriors. But simply lacking a concrete eschatology does not mean that he lacks one in a general sense; progress takes on an eschatological meaning for the liberal in somewhat the same way that communism did for the communist. The End of History, famously projected to have occurred in 1991, is the clearest example of this. But as the expertocracy changed, the ends of the secular liberal order changed, as well. The environmentalist movement, terrified of carbon emissions, is one permutation of this; the anti-racism movement another; the sexual revolution, of course, is another.
All of these things share materialism in common. Past the grave, they mean nothing for the person conned into becoming ideological foot soldiers. Worse, even in life, what they stand for can come to be overwritten by some future group of progressives whose human rights causes have yet to be invented yet. Progressive heroes of the past are cast in the bronze of idol worship for only the brief moment they capture public attention. Soon afterward they are turned into political objects for use as propaganda. Years later, after they leave the public eye, they are turned inside out and posthumously excoriated for lacking the progressive values of the next generation. The constant cycle leaves no effigy unburnt.
Even in its political sense, liberalism has no grasp over the universal appeal of the Christian martyr. The liberal has to believe that the martyr invokes an ideal that moves beyond tangible reality and into the transcendent, but by casting the martyr in such a light, the liberal fails to grasp exactly what the martyr is even dying for in the first place. The language of ideals chains the liberal’s thought to the material and the transitory, and more specifically, to the political. A martyr’s death, although carrying with it political implications, is not a political act. Casting it in such a light simply confounds efforts to understand the reality: that an innocent man willingly and actively embraces death that he is delivered unto by an evil world.
Make no mistake, the liberal understands some general element of martyrdom’s aesthetic. He sees the impact—feels it himself, even—of an unjust man pilloried by a cruel regime. Much of the Civil Rights era was defined by propaganda geared toward pushing exactly this sort of imagery. Media forced a narrative of peaceful noncompliance upon the marches, riots, and disorder that came in the wake of desegregation and legal reforms, not unlike what happened in 2020. But in the 60s, at a time when the country was far more identifiable as a thoroughly Christian nation, the media knew to present imagery that mimicked the general sense of martyrdom so intrinsic to the Christian ethos. The secular mind recognizes something to be admired in the image of people oppressed purely because of what they believe in, even if he cannot articulate what, specifically, is admirable about it.
This echoes Del Noce’s considerations of revolutionaries naturally embracing something of an inversion on Christian religiosity; despite dispensing with what Christianity is, they nonetheless embrace the very same structures and aesthetics that make the religion, at least in abstract, so appealing. The liberal, irreligious as he is, cannot shake the religious aesthetic; he has just lost any ability to engage, articulate, or express it.
Any movement trying to supersede Christianity has to wrestle with the issue of martyrdom. A similarity between the revolutionaries and the progressives is that both have attempted, with only limited success, to co-opt it into their own paradigms. But neither have produced actual martyrs: only victims, soldiers, or suicides.
Christian Martyrdom
The Christian martyr does not die for an abstraction like some political ideal. He does not die for a vain hope in an uncertain future, either. The martyr’s ends, as stated above, are only political insofar as there are political ramifications to his spiritual extremism. The martyr is wholly unconcerned with these political ends. The martyr does not seek the eschaton of a political idea or the realization of a social utopia; he seeks the perfect union with God that comes only with sainthood.
Martyrdom is beyond peaceful noncompliance. It’s beyond personal or civil defense. It’s beyond protest. Martyrs are not warriors dying in the armed defense of their cause—valiant and noble as that is. Martyrs are not protesters gunned down by authorities while trying to storm a barricade—even if their cause may be just. These dead go by other names, and some, it’s possible, may even be saints themselves. But martyrs are different.
Martyrs are those sixteen Carmelite sisters of Compiègne who sing the Laudate Dominum to the last, as one by one they are led to a scaffold and beheaded by Parisian Revolutionaries. Martyrs are like St. Jean de Brèbeuf and the Ontario Jesuits, captured by Iroquois while evangelizing the Huron, and then tortured to death and eaten. Martyrs are like St. Irenaeus of Lyons, sentenced to be killed in Rome, given a voyage across the Mediterranean to contemplate his end, and there in the middle of the Colosseum, torn apart by lions.
These men and women did not simply abandon life, embrace a death-drive, or absolve themselves of free will. The martyr does not resign himself to the grave. He does not embrace death or commit suicide. We can consider the case of Thích Quang Duc as a contrary example: despite the popularity and narrative repeated by the secular west and his contemporaneous monks, his famous self-immolation is far from the arena of martyrdom properly understood. Upset with the ruling party’s decision to ban the Buddhist flag in Vietnam during the turbulence of the early 1960s, he set himself on fire and burned to death as a public spectacle of political action.
He doused himself in gasoline. He lit the match. He chose action that placed himself at the center of a fundamentally political act. It is impossible to read a spiritual element into his political action, in spite of the hardness of will required to carry the act out to completion.
This was not an act of martyrdom: it was a public protest with a man’s unsightly self-murder at its center. Martyrs might be condemned by secular interests for having placed themselves into dangerous situations by virtue of their uncompromising devotion, but martyrs themselves are never the ones who take their own lives. Martyrs do not walk toward the fire, so to speak. The fire comes to them, and if given the opportunity to flee, they stare the fire down and deny it. The fire has no power over them; they are guaranteed everlasting life. Martyrdom, though exteriorly seeming to embody death, is the perfection of a true life within a fallen world.
Why is this? What compels a man to choose death in the face of an easier way out? The Roman martyrs needed simply to light incense. The English and Japanese martyrs to simply cease a public profession of faith. The martyrs of the Caliphates needed only to say three sentences in order to be left alone. St. Stephen, perhaps the first Christian martyr after the Resurrection, needed only to stay quiet.
What the liberal fails to understand is that Christianity is not simply a system of ideas or an organizing conceptual framework. It is the development of a relationship with God. Someone cannot call himself a Christian who never prays, never attends Mass, never considers the words of Scripture. Absent the liturgical and mystical elements of Christian life, Christianity ceases to exist. The liberal, obsessed and immersed in the technical society, has no way to make sense of the Christian life for this very reason. It isn’t simply that the Christian life includes and encompasses the supernatural; it is also that it defies the scrutiny of technique. Those who strive to live as Christians cannot be easily analyzed and categorized according to the methods of the liberal mind.
A Christian’s relationship with God forms the foundation of his belief. For the Christian, the supernatural is not considered a vague abstraction or an impersonal element to reality. On the contrary, the supernatural is an infinite and personal mind with which the Christian can relate, even if apparently without significance. And yet, the Christian’s faith is predicated upon his interior life and his active prayers, and not even that these prayers may be answered per se, but simply on the assurances that these prayers are indeed heard.
God should be the Christian’s best, closest friend, his first relation, his tie to existence and to others. His love for God enlivens his love for his neighbors just as his devotion to God enlivens his devotion to his activities. Through God does the Christian know, not merely believe, that all things are possible, because the Christian makes his best effort to know God, assured in his belief that God has reciprocated his efforts far beyond his own meager efforts deserve.
It is this relationship with God on which the martyr stakes his life. God is someone he knows, someone he loves, someone for whom he would rather die than denounce or betray. God is alive and aware of him at any given moment, there with him in his sufferings and the source of his joys. The martyr’s love for God is unshakable. It is not reducible to systems or techniques; it is not explainable according to self-interest or psychologisms. And more, the martyr is also keenly aware that this relationship is readily available to all who seek it. It is a special bond insofar as his own relationship with God is unique, but it is not special in the sense that only he is privileged to have a relationship with the Almighty. The martyr wants nothing more than that an analogous relationship be found within the heart of his oppressors—indeed, martyrs fervently pray for the conversion of their murderers with their last gasps. Often, these prayers are answered.
The perfidy of liberalism is exactly as Del Noce describes it from our previous section. By introducing such extreme doubts into the liberal mind, soft atheism indirectly—but effectively—attacks God by attacking the human soul. The liberal finds himself utterly cut off from any sense of understanding the martyr’s behavior. The martyr bewilders and disorients him. His system of technique leads him to conclude that the martyr is simply insane, a madman, an idiot operating according to a nonsensical logic that defies explanation.
And yet nothing could be further from the truth: the martyr’s proximity to God is exactly why he operates as he does. Far from irrational, the martyr’s behavior is the sanest behavior conceivable. Who, upon having learned of and grown close to God, would then renounce him for any reason at all? The martyr’s love for God is on full display. That is what he is dying for. But the liberal’s framework has no place for genuine love, only cynical systems predicated on mutual self-interest. What is irrational is rejecting the love freely extended to all. It is sin that is irrational, and yet the liberal mind is so accommodating toward sin that it cannot imagine life without it.
Del Noce considers Christianity the antidote to the technical society, and for our purposes, to propaganda and social conditioning as well, because of this pragmatic radicalism. We may see the martyr and consider that the call to emulate his zeal is extraordinary, but it is no more extraordinary than what we are called as Christians—as adopted sons of God, all—to emulate. This is what we were born for. Our eschatology and our understanding of creation, the first sin of the Fall through to the redemption of man and the culmination of time: these have directly relevant political implications. Who Christ is plays a greater role in our political praxis than modern presumptions about human nature. This, as much as anything, must be rediscovered.
Defense of Society
There can be no society comprised purely of martyrs, however, and neither is it reasonable to expect one that consists mostly of virtuous people. Personally, we should strive to emulate the martyrs in their zeal and their steadfast commitment to God, but it’s impossible to formulate—much less implement—a social model based on such radical devotion. Not everyone will have it. Few strive to enter by the narrow gate.
Nonetheless, a society must respect some baseline of public morals in order to function. As has been commented on at length by others: the foundation of political liberalism is a luxury sustainable only when the forces it seeks to undermine are too rigid to give way. In other words, if you have a high-enough trust society, liberalism’s degenerative and destructive modes are kept at bay. This is still playing with fire, however. All it takes is a few of the wrong people in the wrong places to evicerate society’s trust level with civil and legal reforms, which is precisely what happened in the 1960s. People generally obey the law when it is sensible enough, convenient enough, or otherwise poses too great a challenge get around. The more the law bends to accommodate evil, the more evil the society it serves becomes.
The average white liberal of the managerial class would not disagree with this, though he might take issue with words like sin and evil. The law maintains the limits of civil society, but because of his belief in a technical society, he resigns the existence of crime over to uncontrollable forces of complex social systems. This is one reason why the liberal so often argues from exceptions; his misplaces the benefit of the doubt to hardened criminals under the presumption that the ‘wrongdoer’ in any given situation is simply the technique or system involved. That men might choose to be bad, and that the evil they commit is theirs to own escapes his grasp. It is irrational to be bad, he believes, except, as he knows himself, if no one is watching. Since evil is irrational, then, something beyond the person must be compelling them to commit it.
In much the same way, the liberal cannot grasp why the humble man ascribes any good he is credited with to God. A man’s image and the public eye play an immediate role in the liberal’s understanding of good and evil, and not just in the simplistic manner of how mobs formulate their own preferences. By turning his back on God, the liberal soft-atheist shuns the one thing he has direct access to which can ground his understanding and his actions. He ascribes to society the measure of objectivity reserved for God alone.
There are indeed some things that should be defended with force. As touched on above, Liberals acknowledge this, though few are fain enough to take up arms themselves. A Catholic who sees a man about to desecrate the Eucharist, for instance, should do whatever is in his power to prevent such a thing from happening. No one with a stomach should think it acceptable to sit by and do nothing when a known pervert takes custody of a child. A woman on her way to an abortion clinic to have her child murdered should be stopped. For any of these instances, if words don’t work, considering force is more than appropriate.
A liberal might insist, however, that these aren’t simply ideas. We’re looking at bodily harm being done. And yet, the same liberal, under a different guise, might well surrender that the first is simply a matter of religious differences, the second a matter of sexual liberation, and the last one a highly-politicized issue over body autonomy. There are ideas that are nonetheless on trial: that God should not be desecrated, that kids shouldn’t be beholden to predators, and that women don’t have the right to murder their offspring.
As Christians, we are called to prevent, where possible, great evils from being committed within our sight. Liberal democracy provides the indication that we could, conceivably, be the ones with our hands on the levers of power—were it not for how liberal democracy is actually run, particularly as it atrophies into an authoritarian oligarchy. But part of the blame for this transition should lay squarely at the feet of those men who once held power and who squandered it and fell asleep at the wheel.
There was a time in this country when all it took was the organization of Catholics in order to bar filth and obscenity from proliferating over the silver screen. Bishops could organize Catholic resistance within major metropolitan areas in order to accomplish well-oriented political ends. This was possible because there was still a sense of faithful Catholicism to be found in America, and it wasn’t just sequestered in various ‘traditionalist’ hubs administrated by niche groups. It was very nearly the default mode of diocesan administration. The 1960s ended all of that.
This sort of action was still predicated on force: if whole neighborhoods demonstrated their unwillingness to entertain certain excessive ideas pushed on them by municipalities or boroughs or even states, the implication was that there would be some sort of active resistance. Shreds of such an attitude can still be found in what pockets remain of ethnic enclaves in old American cities, but at least from a cursory glance, it’s harder to come by the bluer the state is. A half-century ago, most of these communities either folded after the regime made a few examples during desegregation, or they were otherwise systematically targeted for dispersal under the guise of Urban Renewal.
As things presently stand, we can expect no help from the federal government in sorting out an apparently irreversible social decline. Our elected representatives in DC have every interest in aiding and abetting the evil regime that has pillaged the American people and plunged it into neurotic disarray. Nothing good will come from continuing to expect help from that apparatus—and the same must be said of the Supreme Court. As for the remaining branch of government, the time has long passed since we could hope for executive change. The last man to occupy the White House had his chance, but it wasn’t good enough.
At the state level, however, things are different. Organization is still possible, albeit difficult. Tolerable governors are exerting their authority in greater capacity than hitherto seen before 2020. The states they manage are found dotting the union like patches of bandages across diseased and pock-marked flesh. This is not something to rest on, however. Already, the liberal exodus from ruined blue state dystopias has begun colonizing red strongholds. Politically, things are going to get dicey. The center is falling apart, and things cannot hold.
It remains up to the American Church to hold things together. Our prelates are due for a very rude awakening as the weight of both the Democratic Party and the Federal apparatus begins caving under their own respective dogmas. Some have been awake this whole time, others are rousing from a deep generation-spanning slumber—not unlike much of the flock. Even still, it will be an uphill battle. And when it starts to get bad, we have to remember not to fear the violence of the regime.
But to defeat the enemy, it is not enough to simply be unafraid of violence. The martyrs were unafraid of violence, but this was not what made them martyrs and saints. The martyrs were only unafraid of violence because they loved God with so much greater zeal than the violence could ever overcome. Lacking that zeal, the violence will win.
Conclusion
A lengthier conclusion is necessary to summarize the full scope of these four pieces, so an abbreviated version will have to suffice.
The liberal’s ideology is a mess of contradictions by design. It exists less as a coherent set of moral and political principles and more as a demoralizing system of social conditioning to control a swath of managers. It is an ideology that is freely engaged with, but it is introduced and pushed on children such that they come to believe there is no other respectable way of thinking, and no other means of stabilizing their own conditioned neuroses. Its architecture is one that functions with both a carrot and a stick: a carrot that relinquishes the liberal of personal autonomy, and a stick that ostracizes predictable targets according to media narrative.
The use of force under a liberal regime takes the same form as it does under any other political system, at least inasmuch as it is used as the dividing line between the in-group and the rest. The difference is that the liberal framework officially excludes violence in the formation of acceptable opinion. Violence is used to legitimize the narratives used to control the managerial class. As a result, it is deployed against the very society the regime ostensibly protects as often or more than it is deployed against foreign bodies. Liberalism, then, results in a social system that is barbed at both ends.
Speaking for the liberals themselves, as a class of people, they are ones who have convinced themselves that the barbs do not exist. That there are barbs pointed outward, away from them, they acknowledge; a society has a right to self defense, after all. But that these barbs are also pointed at themselves, and not that, but in fact even embedded in them already, is something the white liberal absolutely cannot see for himself. To recognize this feature of liberalism would be like ripping the curtain down to expose the real machinery.
This brings us to the conclusion of this work, which will be treated with greater detail and at more length in an eventual project planned for later this year: what are ideas defeated by, if not by better ideas? This question has a short answer: violence. But this is inadequate to fully grasp both what is being asked and how it’s being answered. What ideas are, how they’re engaged with, and why they spread have to be addressed, as we have addressed here.
History is not the culmination, movement, and clash of ideas. The liberal believes this is the case, as the liberal buys into the soft atheism that denies God his rightful dues. As a result, he interprets history through the same means of technique as he does the rest of society and the world. Events become emptied of agents. Figures become flattened characters in a story that has no meaning. All he has left to work with are ideas, because people are no longer the vehicles of history, and God is no longer its author. But ideas are ethereal. People change their minds, but their actions, once committed, cannot be changed.
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