Början på ett mediakrig om mångkulturen?

We got to talking about the last two momentous years: what had changed and how it had changed us. Something big, we both agreed, had shifted, but neither of us could quite pin it down. On the surface, of course, we could point to the obvious changes. The unprecedented biosecurity state which governments had imposed in response to covid. The accompanying media censorship operation. The vaccine passports and normalisation of mass surveillance. The digital attempts to enforce uniformity of opinion on key issues. Deepening political divisions. Crumbling public trust in institutions. Supply chain collapses. Coming food shortages. European war.

These are the symptoms of the times, but there was a shared sense that something else was going on behind them, and it wasn’t just the beer talking. We both seemed to feel as though something huge was moving beneath a deep ocean and we could only see the ripples on the surface. Whatever was happening, it somehow didn’t feel rational, or even really explicable. It felt like some psychic force was at work; as if some eruption from the underworld was playing out around us.

‘Sometimes’, my friend said, staring into the flames, ‘I feel like I’m living in 1913. Like we’re on the brink of something, but it hasn’t quite arrived yet.’

Throughout history it has always been the poets, the prophets and the mystics who intuit what undergirds the tenor of the times. Generally the reward for their perspicacity is to be ignored or laughed at, but they are usually far enough from the centre not to notice or care. René Guénon, who I wrote about last time, was one of them. He believed we are living through a ‘reign of quantity’ as a result of what he called the ‘Western deviation’ from eternal truth. This was a world of pure negation, a ‘counter-initiation’ characterised by ‘inverted symbols’, but it was not the result of purely human action. Guénon, too, felt something moving beneath the surface, and as a Sufi Muslim, he wasn’t shy about naming it. To this age, he wrote, ‘the word “Satanic’ can indeed be properly applied.’

Presenting disorder as order and truth as lies - this, wrote Guénon, was the way that Satan rolled. The ‘more or less direct agents of the Adversary’, he explained, using the Biblical name for what Europeans would later come to call the Devil, always aimed to invert reality. Right is wrong, black is white, up is down, there is no truth, do what thou wilt: this has always been the Adversary’s line, and today it is prominent in all quarters. Dis-integration is the tenor of the times.

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The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet.

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What Progress wants is the uprooting of everything

Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a ‘new totalitarianism’. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth:

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What Moloch wants - Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks - is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments. What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach. Everything in that world is up for grabs. Anything, from rainforests to the human body, can be claimed and reshaped in the interests of advancing the realm of the human will. It is the oldest story.

The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards - where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people - they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.

What Progress wants is to replace us.

Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.