The podcast of Class 33 of our Orthodox Survival Course is now available at https://www.spreaker.com/user/youngfaithradio/orthodox-survival-course-class-33 .
In the podcast I announce the publication of my book The Eternal Sacrifice, designed to help the reader benefit from the readings from Genesis we hear during Great Lent. It should be available later this week at lulu.com. Just go to the Lulu bookstore and search The Eternal Sacrifice by Fr. Steven Allen.
Here are the notes for Class 33:
Orthodox Survival Course – St. Irene Orthodox Church – Rochester Hills, Michigan, Spring-Fall, 2019
Part II: Understanding the 20th Century, Dealing With the 21st
Class 33: Who are the people studying this question? Understanding ourselves and how we have been damaged.
Introduction: Before beginning our study of our current situation, let us step back and ask, “Who are the people doing this study (i.e. ourselves!)? What are their limitations? What damage has been done to them that will hinder their understanding properly what they are studying?” It is like doing scientific investigation: We ascertain first if the instruments we are using to collect and analyze the data are accurate or if, perhaps, through being damaged or contaminated, they might give false readings. The instrument in this study we are currently doing is ourselves – our minds, our souls, our perceptions and feelings and thoughts. We need to examine this “instrument,” understand how it has been damaged and contaminated, and clean it up and “recalibrate” it through greater self-understanding both through being informed – which is our job here, in our course – but also through being formed through ongoing spiritual work on ourselves. Our learning in this course will bear fruit only if we are always repenting and asking the Lord for accurate self-knowledge, for humility.
Quite often, when people first hear some of the information I am going to present, they get angry or at least uncomfortable, for two reasons: One, they have been conditioned to dislike certain truths and prefer certain falsehoods, though these falsehoods damage them, and, moreover, to react immediately without rational thought – a “knee-jerk reaction.” Two, these falsehoods have become precious to them because they gratify their passions, which is how the “bad guys” got them “hooked” on the falsehoods to begin with. The truth hurts, and they prefer to “shoot the messenger” rather than examine the message objectively for the sake of knowing the truth. (If I have to get “shot” a few times, that’s all right – it comes with the territory!).
As it turns out, we shall find that by examining ourselves, in order to understand how our “instruments” have been damaged and contaminated, we shall “kill two birds with one stone,” for we will come to better self-understanding and therefore be better able to conduct our study, and at the same time, we shall actually begin right away studying one of our historical topics, perhaps the most central and important topic, which is the Antichrist project to create a “new kind of human being.” This remaking (or rather, mutilation) of people’s minds (and their bodies!) is both the central project of the forces of Antichrist, and it is also the project that enables them to carry out all of their other projects. It is both the goal and the master plan, as well as the primary means to achieve the plan. The more mutilated and weak and powerless people become, the less they can process what is going on, and the less will they have to resist – therefore they more and more feebly they resist the “progress” that is being planned for them.
A. The Project: Redefining What It Means to Be Human
A few years back, the American politician Hillary Clinton gave a commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, in which she announced that “our” project in the 21st century is to “redefine what it means to be human.” The fact that such a Satanic boast would not only be accepted calmly, but be applauded, shows how far gone the American and “Western” elites were by the end of the 20th century. They openly preach that human nature is this totally malleable thing they can shape for their own purposes – that they are, for all practical purposes, God! – and thus those who cooperate with them are “good” and those who resist them are “bad.” It is the old “Frankenstein” project, of course, but today it is no longer the secret plan of the elites but rather their openly stated program.
Hillary Clinton is a 20th-21st century figure. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, is a 19th century writer. But if we carefully recall what we have already learned in our course, going way back to the 14th century and Nominalism, then these frightful ideas, this Satanic project, would actually not surprise us. It is in a direct line from, it is the logical outcome of, the entire development of the dominant philosophy of the Western elites since the end of the Middle Ages.
As I go along, I am going to be recommending some outside study, both of books and Internet resources. At this point, it is appropriate to remind everyone of Richard Weaver’s masterpiece, Ideas Have Consequences, published in 1948. As I have pointed out before, Weaver does not go back far enough to locate the beginning of the degeneration of Western thought, the point at which the Church’s ideal synthesis of Biblical and Greek philosophical thought began to be destroyed. He believes that the 13th century Western scholastic achievement is the high point and that things just started going bad after that. He is almost right, but not right enough! If you go back to our Classes 10 through 14, you can review our study of the Latin High Middle Ages as the direct prelude to the Renaissance. Look especially at Class 14 and what I call the three “pancakes,” three errors of Western Scholastic thought about the structure of the human mind, about the Church, and about God, which led logically to Nominalism. Weaver probably had not been exposed to genuine patristic thought – like most Western Christians of his time, he assumed that the Scholastics were the authoritative “last word” on the patristic tradition – and so quite naturally he thought that everything was beautiful in the 13th century, and then those bad Nominalists came along in the 14th century. So read Weaver, but keeping in mind Classes 10 to 14 of our course as a prelude.
I recommend Weaver, because he gives a succinct and clearly written analysis of the whole process from Nominalism through the mid-20th century, and I shall be referring to him now and then throughout our study of the 20th century. You can find Ideas Have Consequences online at Ideas Have Consequences – https://portalconservador.com/livros/Richard-Weaver-Ideas-Have-Consequences.pdf, and you can find paperback copies for sale online for under $10.
So what does a dusty old 14th century school of philosophy – Nominalism – have to do with Hillary Clinton’s speech at Wellesley? We can get from Point A to Point B by summarizing quickly the process we’ve outlined in Classes 14 through 31 of our course:
14th century – Nominalism: There is no such thing as a shared knowledge of truly knowable and immutable natures of things. Names are just tags we stick on things that seem alike to each of us. There are no knowable essences of created things.
The Renaissance: Man is the measure of all things – man, not God, is the center of reality and will decide what reality is. The rise of interest in the occult and alchemy (see Michael Hoffman’s The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome – https://truthfulhistory.blogspot.com/2017/05/new-book-occult-renaissance-church-of.html). Francis Bacon and the *New Atlantis* : future development will be controlled by a hidden elite that controls the direction of science to manipulate nature in order to monopolize power by ruling behind the scenes, using government to attain its ends. The goal of science is not religious or philosophical truth, but the domination of nature and control over society. The popes approve usury (see Michael Hoffman’s Usury in Christendom, the Mortal Sin that Was and Now Is Not – https://truthfulhistory.blogspot.com/2016/02/special-offers.html), and the limitless alchemy of usury – making money out of money – funds the Baconian project on the part of the Western elites.
17th and 18th centuries – the “Enlightenment”, Rationalism and Empiricism:
Rationalism – Rene Descartes creates a new philosophy by denying all tradition and all previous wisdom, and says that true knowledge is strictly out of one’s own head. You take cogito ergo sum as the one self-evident truth and use your “brain” to construct a series of theorems to explain reality.
Empiricism – No, say the empiricists: All you know is not out of your own head, but from your senses. All you can know is your sense perceptions. When you think something, you are just thinking about your own ideas, not “real stuff out there” – not actual or shareable knowledge about real things (John Locke – See Mortimer Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes).
The Age of Revolution: So if there is no knowable, shared reality, no Truth that is the same for everyone (and therefore binds everyone to a shared moral code), the only motive left for action is power. There is no room for philosophy, much less theology. There is now only politics, and inevitably, without a religious or moral foundation, even politics do not mean anything real anymore; they simply become a front for predatory behavior, a show for the masses. The elites create phony slogans about equality, liberty, progress, and so forth, and use them to mask a program of complete destruction of the old, Christian order, and create their new “utopia” of technocratic control over the masses. Their “metaphysics” is the utter anti-metaphysic – Nihilism. Of course, the religion associated with Nihilism is, simply put, Satanism.
Thus Hillary Clinton’s Satanic boast being accepted as a perfectly normal expression of the policy of the leadership class. “We are going to destroy everything you thought being human meant – religion, family, morality, community, nation, culture – reduce all of you to little individual atoms with nothing within you sacred or permanent, and shape you the way we want you.” And everyone applauds their own destruction.
B. Getting Us to Go Along – the Century of the Self
So that is The Project of the 20th Century. How did the elites get normal people to go along with their own destruction, and not only to go along but to applaud it? What kind of human being have they “created” (i.e. what kind of mutilation have they performed in order to damage human beings and make them into something horrible, something sub-human?). To what extent are we – you and I – this kind of human being? For this to be a “Survival Course,” we not only have to understand who the “bad guys” are and what they have done to us. We have to understand ourselves. We have to realize to what extent and in what ways we have adopted the thought patterns, unconscious assumptions, language, behavior, criteria for behavior, and instinctive reactions to various stimuli that have been “hard-wired” into us by the “training” that has been going on in the last century. Our “masters” – the people who control the official ideology, who have gained almost complete control of the wealth and coercive power of all public and private institutions, who control the media, education, medicine, food and water supply, and use this power to accomplish their geo-political and social engineering goals – this elite has nearly total control of every aspect of public or even private life, and they have enslaved great numbers of the people around us to their passions and to the grossest error and ignorance, the most fundamental disobedience to the divine plan for human life revealed by God, the most Satanic sins, the most profound unhappiness, and the most profound hopelessness. To what extent are we – you and I – enslaved?
The “zombie” movies are an image of what is going on. One by one, or in whole groups, people around us are being turned into “zombies” – post-human kind of humans who look like Uncle Joe or the girl next door, but on the inside have become something possessed, controlled by demonic powers, something that is part of an unthinking, unfeeling mass of hypnotized, programmed, robotic beings who no longer have real personalities, who are controlled by a central, demonic will or impulse to destroy, and who are bent on turning everyone else into zombies. In the movies, the heroes realize little by little that they are part of a shrinking minority of normal human beings, and the horror of the whole thing is the process of seeing the people closest to them becoming part of the zombie army, and then realizing that perhaps they too are sinking into that state as well. Of course, the people who control movie making are using these films to send us a message – they are revealing what they have done and are doing to us. This is called “predictive programming” – a certain kind of future is predicted for you, and you hear the message so often that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You give up all hope and decide to love “Big Brother” (more on “Big Brother” in later classes) cliquez pour plus d’infos.
So to what extent am I still acting like a real human being (much less a Christian, much less Orthodox!), and to what extent have I become a zombie? It will help us to answer this question if we examine the methods that have been used to change us, what those changes are, why they are bad, and what we can do to reverse these changes within ourselves and recover our humanity as understood in the light of Christ. Of course, the Church ultimately has the answers. We are not going to embark on some kind of secular self-improvement or “libertarian” or “survivalist” project to “save ourselves.” Only Christ can save us, in every sense, both in this age and the age to come.
I entitled this section “Century of the Self,” after the title of a four hour documentary you can see on YouTube (thanks to Metropolitan Moses of Toronto for telling me about it). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s The documentary starts with the theories of Sigmund Freud about human behavior, that we are all dominated by the sex drive, and that “happiness” is sought through overcoming “sexual repression,” and then it goes on to explain how Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, pioneered the vast apparatus of advertising, public relations, and propaganda – in short, mass brainwashing – and how this apparatus was used through the 20th century to enslave people to the egotistical pursuit of gratifying their passions by training them to react unconsciously to the stimuli provided by those who control the brainwashing apparatus. But by training people to be obsessed with themselves, paradoxically, they have destroyed the true self, the self made in the image of God, and have created a new, demonic “self” of some kind of sub-human personality.
Now Freud himself said that Christian civilization was built on repressed sexual drive (see his Civilization and Its Discontents). He was a beneficiary of this civilization, being a resident of 19th century Vienna, perhaps one of the most civilized, humane, and pleasant places anyone could ever have lived in all history. He knew and taught that all of this beauty, this order, this aspiration to higher ideals was built on controlling the passions. But, not being a Christian, and in fact hating Christianity and hating Austria and the old Europe formed by the Church, he simultaneously hated and resented this Christian order of life, and he wanted to destroy it. This is the paradox of the 19th and early 20th century revolutionaries – they are the beneficiaries of a vast repository of goodness caused by the Church, they know it, and they hate it. (Who most of these people are, and why they so irrationally hate the Church, is a subject for other talks.) Edward Bernays inherits this program, this agenda, and – with demonic intelligences helping him – he founds the modern technology of mass control through the media.
What kind of “new human being” did Bernays and company want to create, to what extent have they done it? We shall go more deeply into this subject in our next class. And, most importantly: to what extent are you and I now this kind of human being? For we cannot get into the mindset of “they are bad and we are good.” Yes, these enemies of Christ and of the human race are evildoers. But we must remember that in His Divine Providence, God has allowed all of these things for our salvation. So we do not hate Freud and Bernays and all these people, though we must fight their successors with everything we have got, to the point of giving our lives to do so. But in order to fight successfully, we must undo what they have done to us. We must be free of our passions and self-centeredness. This involves accepting some uncomfortable truths about ourselves, overcoming a profound ignorance of the fundamental errors we have to a greater or lesser extent accepted as axiomatic bases for our choices and behavior. We must return to being the kind of people our great or great-great grandparents were before the “end of the world” in 1914-18, the inauguration of the current reign of Satan and the demons. This coming to self-awareness, and finally to repentance, is the first step in our survival program.