This piece is going to be a synthesis of thoughts that I’ve been working out here in public over the past six months. Timely as Mr. Baruth from Avoidable Contact Forever pushed traffic over here. That’s what this space has been to me: a place to set aside an hour or two a week and turn a thought over in my mind and explore it a little.
Back to business.
How to Live with a Curse
We can all agree humanity is imperfect. Turn on the news, scroll Twitter, interact with someone having a bad day at work, or just be in the wrong place with the wrong people at the wrong time and this is readily apparent. Everyone has their story for how this comes about: in Christianity this is the concept of Original Sin1 - the curse mankind brought upon himself when Adam and Eve fell and brought all the world into a fallen state with them. There are nuances around this between various sects but the core idea is that humanity is damaged, and through and in God we have a Way that seeks to restore.
The Christian response to the corrupt nature of man is one of healing and constant work. Specifically, metanoia2 combined with the teachings of the Church that the person pursues on the Way to theosis/deification/discipleship. This requires a life in the community of the Church, which is first and foremost before all other obligations. I touched on this in Mere Christianity Consumerism. A core understanding of this process would be faith-works-Grace (or Mercy) bringing about genuine change in the person themselves. In Orthodoxy, the RCC, and some Protestant sects those who have lived a life and brought themselves into harmony3 with God are known as Saints and are esteemed/venerated/revered4.
Likewise, this notion of humanity being broken is reflected in the Enlightenment projects over the past two hundred-ish years. However, instead of believing in a curse inherited from person to person there is the belief that what causes a warped human being to emerge is nothing other than circumstance. This is the driving force between the utopian ideals of Marxist revolution and belief that they can instantiate a new man and essentially a new heaven on earth; it is the driving force behind Liberalism’s tabula rasa5; the belief behind the French Revolution in all its horror; it is the belief behind managerialism; it is the belief behind the techno-optimists: man and his behavior is perfectible if only we can provide the right drug/technique/propaganda/economic system/education. However, because they eschew the transcendental and ignore the fullness of man by focusing on the mere material they can never succeed.
The US secular, meaning both non-Christian social and state, religion and the principles are not life in a community designed to bring healing, although this is a line that is used in some cases. Rather, it is the shambling, stinking, and rotting corpse of the Rights based elevation of the individual paired with the cold hard reality that individual actualization in this context is an atomizing process in which the person is free to destroy themselves; and it is preferred that they sever from communities because doing so reduces the threat they can pose. Atomization is not merely separation from the whole, but the surrender of the individual to the free floating random Brownian motion in an attempt to find their own way. I will not deny that it works for some people, but given the increasing rates of SSRI usage, mass shootings, and the rise of some morally reprehensible movements I think it is fair to say that we are experiencing a failure to tend to the flourishing of humanity.
This is a techno-bureaucratic-propaganda6 state with pretend democracy at the highest levels and some real democracy at the low levels, though the national stage takes precedence of mind and heart in the age of mass media. The process isn’t geared toward anything transcendental; it forgets what man is.
Anthropos is the Microcosm
The modern Western state seeks to reduce the individual to nothing other than material stardust which can be shaped in whatever way the system sees fit. Or, at least, in a manner that does not endanger the system’s stability or impede its function. There are plenty of internet atheists who think they’re saying something profound when they reduce humanity to mere matter, when it is just a truism in their given context, and this is a prime example7. Ironically, they are correct in a sense and just small-minded.
“In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground from which you were taken. Earth you are, and to earth you shall return.” Gen 3:19
“All go to one place: all are from dust, and all return to the dust.” Eccl 3:20
Humans, however, are full-bore microcosms, not just in the sense that we are composed of the stuff of stars, but that as the created beings made in the Image of God we are composed of the material and the spiritual. We are granted reason, we are embodied8, and we are attuned with and participate in the spiritual realm as well9. We create and destroy, we speak, we command and submit, we have our feet on the ground and our head oriented to the Heavens. In this way each and every human is synecdoche for the Cosmos. We are fallen, and the rest of nature is corrupted with us: with Christ the Way to restoration is opened. God's Mercy is infinite, it is up to us to turn to Him and have right relationship with Him and with our fellow man.
In our age and with our history the cutting off from the transcendental, or spiritual, part of our essence results in all our attempts to address the problems of humanity appearing as a twisting of Christianity’s theosis/deification/discipleship process. We are encouraged to be our true selves but without regard to our proper relationship to the world and to God. As a result we experience ever increasing depression, lack of fulfillment, and a myriad other woes that are leaving our control even our grip over the material realm tightens. We are the sand slipping between the fingers.
We continue in the march of technology and technique in hopes that we will eventually stumble upon a solution to the burdens we pile on and on. As a result we become ever more specialized and ever more detached from our underlying reality. We disconnect from our unchosen communities: family/tribe, local clubs, even the nation we are born into and largely replace them with online communities and self-chosen identities. These ersatz substitutes are where people try to find meaning and bow their heads in prayer at the phone altar - “Techno-gods, please, bring me a woman’s touch.” “Did you see the latest movie? Wow, those zingers were some good! Did you know it’s exactly like the war between East Asia and IngSoc? Their leader is literally Hitler.” This is exceedingly American - the libertarianism, individuality, and a purposeful separation from everything else. There is good in America and in Americanism, yet there is also much capacity for evil and infinite capacity to lie to ourselves that what we are doing is good.
We choose a carefully constructed self-identity instead of identity as revealed to us and becoming fully who we are. We fear constraints against our behavior and grow neurotic in the extreme trying to keep up with the trends and traps of the day. At the bleeding edge of identity we subsume ourselves not into even a brand, fandom, or other externally anchored thing but within ourselves and we grow mad believing that which can never be, but we want everyone to act like it is true and respect us no matter what we do. Tabula rasa and so the defenses against all manner of evil fall - we are just meatbots and can be molded any way we desire. Moreover, as we are meatbots and everything is subjective, we can simply name or define reality as we please. This is the type of proposition which man can easily believe when we spend our lives with mediating layers stacking up between us and physical reality.
To wit - sin for a Christian is showing us where we are to be healed and what we need to work on - removed from this proper place sin itself can become an identity. As the ancients would say10 - we become ruled by our passions, moreover, we become in a real sense our passions and obliterate ourselves in the process and in the final accounting. When people say they are a gamer or a gay man or whatever they are correct. Their actions are defining them and they are dissolving themselves wholly into their behaviors which are not directed toward anything but some internal self-realization instead of finding their proper and true selves in relationship. When we give over our children in their most tender and formative years we enact the greatest divorce: cutting off from parents is the end stage. When the October Revolutionaries wanted to create their new man they took the children from their parents knowing that would be key. Now we send them to schools where they receive indoctrination and care not from their parents, but from a new Father and Mother.
Paths to Take
The easy path laid before us is to melt into the secular and keep our Faith wholly private. We are constantly hounded about how Christians should not be imposing their morality upon the nation while the state religion imposes its values and its morality upon us. We render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and no more, and when they demand we become their spiritual slaves it is time for us to respond with love for one another. This is the struggle we have today, and the response has been lacking. Where are the great Church leaders in the face of ever increasing moral degeneration? When the emphasis becomes too much on accepting everyone not as they are but as they choose to be - even when it is in defiance of God we cede the very ground we should have defended from the first.
“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you.” John 15:13
Then Cyril said [to the Saracens], "As individuals we forgive our enemies, but as a community we lay down our lives for one another. For the Lord has said that there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's neighbor. As a community, we protect one another and lay down our lives for one another. Not only is your aim to enslave us physically, you also aspire to enslave us spiritually. It is for this reason that we defend ourselves. This, therefore, is justified."
I outlined easy steps to begin recovering oneself from the constant barrage of the modern day. Stop watching the news, disengage from mass media which is a propaganda machine in ways subtler than you expect, teach your children and keep them close. The harder steps, if you’re a person of faith, are standing by the Faith in public and insisting that, no, it is not acceptable what people do in their own privacy. No, consent is not a real basis for a moral system as people can consent to all sorts of evil, and they can grind and wear down others into nominal consent. We can manufacture consent through the propaganda state. Consent, and will, are necessary, but they are not sufficient.
We must show the truth and we must be doggedly on the path, we must finish the race and show the way. We are not called to construct a façade, but know this, when I was puttering around on a motorcycle before I had my license, my oldest wanted me to run around with him in the parking lot. I set aside my desires and played with my son. A natural thing to do, and the man who had ridden the bike there told my wife, “That’s crazy. That would never have happened in my family.” We empty ourselves for and into our children’s lives, as we should, and this is abnormal in a world where people put off kids because they want, I want to have X, Y, and Z experiences first.
Do we put ourselves first; do we define what we want and pursue it above all else? This is the path that our society encourages and it appears to be leading us down the road to destruction. We “liberated” ourselves and become slaves to the machine. Both parents must work, kids are too much and we’re so selfish, I take pills so I can do my data entry job at work and when the med shortage happened the work was unbearable. I have a funko pop collection and watch all the MCU movies and debate about them online. Is this a real community? Will they sacrifice for me when I need help or will my cries go unheard as I cradle a shotgun in my arms?
More than a decade ago, a Deacon suggested to me that I enter into the Order and seek to become one myself. I shrugged it off at the time. I still hesitate - what if my motivations are impure, what if I am doing this to score points in some way? I have the mental capacity to develop any and all reasons not to do something and a stubborn unwillingness to let go and fall into God’s hands.
It’s easy - all I have to do is fall.
Why can’t I do it.
Anyway - SEND TWEET
Or Ancestral Sin since it implies lineage but not direct imputation
Turning around, changing of the mind - translated as repentance in English
Right relationship/resonance/restoration/participation in His energies
But not worshipped as that is reserved for God alone
I often wonder how this is squared with the Enlightment leaning on Reason and the belief in genetic trait inheritance - but that’s a circle to square for another day
We need propaganda to manufacture consent and provide a veneer of legitimacy to the state through the notion of Vox Populi, Vox Dei since our franchise has been so expanded and the republic so degraded
See also: bro the universe is so big and we’re so small! lol it must make us meaningless. Thank you, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and followers for thinking that degrading humanity is the winning play
A related concept is the deepitude, e.g. “no human is illegal” though certainly humans perform actions which are illegal and we can thus punish them but MAH WORD GAMES
Not we inhabit bodies which nudges us towards Platonism (if I remember that one right) or some thought that the material is itself corrupted and the spiritual is pure.
Occasionally I have dreams that are not dreams - a moment out of time comes to me or I go to it. A place I’ve never been, an interaction I’ve never had, and then they happen; sometimes it’s a delay of years between the vision and the reality occurring
Seneca, I think, would understand this, as would any number of ancient thinkers
I read Richard Hanania and he posits that religion is unnecessary to our society, and his proof was surveys over the last several decades showing how as we become less religious we also become happier. I found this claim to be dubious at best for a couple of reasons: first, happiness surveys are always inaccurate. A year or two ago Finland was the "happiest" country on earth. Someone who knew Finns said that was preposterous: people seem to have a sort of resignation towards the status quo in that country. How in the heck could they be the happiest? Second, there is absolutely no way to quantify happiness. Sure, you could measure wealth and use that as a proxy for happiness, as we know that life is easier if you have some money and one would think that would make you happier. But even as I look back at my own life, some of my happiest days were days when we were counting pennies to see if we could afford a package of spaghetti, margarine, and parmesan cheese so we could eat dinner. We walked to the supermarket to save on gas. It was great. At any rate, I saw someone in his comment section call him an edgelord, and I think that's a fairly accurate way to describe Mr. Hanania.
"People are dicks" or rather "people can be dicks" I think is a perfect way to think about humanity. I think The Bible gets it right, recognizing that we are fallen and giving us God's word to aspire to. I have to admit that I keep my faith a pretty quiet part of myself. I'm a fairly private person to begin with. Everyone here seems to love nothing more than telling everyone else every last detail of their weekend. I'd rather just say "Hello!" in the mornings and get to work without the pointless smalltalk. But at home, my wife (a Japanese woman who grew up offering prayers at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines) has become more and more interested in it to the point where she's reading through a (children's) bible she borrowed from the library. One of our kids questioned her about her faith ("I thought you were Buddhist!") and when I said I had converted her she did not argue. I occasionally wonder if that is God answering my prayers for her to find a path towards Him. (she found an interesting interview on youtube with a 2nd generation Chinese boy who became a gang banger and unironically found Jesus and rehabilitated himself which got her to thinking more and more about it)
I know I come up short when I measure myself against God's words in the Bible. I spent a walk to work one morning last year wondering just what I should do to be better about everything, and as I waited for the stoplight to change "Lowrider" by War came on my headphones. I know that was Him telling me not to be too hard on myself. I do what I can. I fail. I pray for forgiveness. I always try to be grateful for everything I have in this life, it is all a gift and I do not want to take it for granted.
I'm not sending you tweets because Twitter is stupid.
Brilliant and insightful.