Some Observations on the Feast of St Anthony the Hermit
In a column earlier this week, I observed that the Left in 2018, for the first time in my life, was interrupted in its sequences of uninterrupted victories in their ongoing efforts to destroy life, liberty, joy and faith wherever found.
These are folk who favor contraception, abortion, gay marriage, and campus thought-police. They love riots and turmoil. These are folk who burn the flag, kneel for the anthem, and trample the crucifix. They want to make Santa Claus gender-neutral and Dr. Who a girl, and they insist on banning “Baby, it’s Cold Outside” as problematical. Each time you think society has reached the basement floor of ugliness, insanity, pointlessness, and inhumanity, the floor breaks, and deeper, darker abysses beckon. There is no bottom.
I proposed in that prior column that the war against spiritual darkness in high places would be lengthy, but not hopeless, for in four areas must the Moorlock’s ghastly stranglehold over the hearts and souls of their Eloi slaves and foodstuffs be pried away: in the press, the schools, in the law, and in the high-tech censorship companies ruling the internet.
For those of you unfamiliar with this quaint slang, the Left is divided for convenience sake into two taxonomies: the Morlocks are the self-aware Left, who know and love evil, and are not self deceived. These are the masterminds, the prime movers, the men who know better. The Eloi are the useful idiots who, acting against their own common sense and self preservation, are lured into a mob, whipped into a frenzy, and stirred into reckless self destruction by the Morlocks.
The names come from a famed science fiction fable where the pride in man’s evolutionary progress is curtly suborned in the reality that progress sometimes means devolution. Also, Morlocks are cave dwellers who work the mechanisms keeping the plantation in motion. The Eloi are their victims and livestock.
The distinction is made lest anyone blame the Eloi for their own self deception. They are guilty of negligence, not malice, and some are so foolish and proud that they have no idea the lemming horde is heading toward the cliff. They think a futuristic paradise awaits them once they leap into the sea. What awaits them is Venezuela, USSR, Cambodia, and Detroit, otherwise known as Famine, Plague, War and Death.
In any case, after I wrote this column, a wise reader wrote to remind me that I failed to mention the first step.
The first step of any crusading knight in his crusade is, of course, to stand vigil in prayer before he takes up his sword.
The unmitigated disaster of the Twentieth Century, to be known hereafter as the Hundred Years of Tears, was caused not by the determination and courage of the enemy, but by the craven dithering and sloth of our forces.
The first foe to overcome is found in the looking glass, friends. We have been allies of the powers of darkness, some of us more openly or less, for longer periods or shorter. The conservatives retreated and surrendered with never a single battle fought to the end for decade after decade from the time of our grandfathers to now.
The are no doubt many reasons for this, but there are two chief reasons.
First, each man in his heart secretly yearns for pride and lust and wrath and sloth to be triumphant, so that his own dark sins will be invisible against the dark background of a benighted society. It is easier and more fun to go gambling and whoring, to cheat customers and partners, to indulge in gluttony and injustice, and to trample the faces of the poor if everyone around you is doing it along with you. Then sin is just all good fun, and anyone who voices an objection is a prig, a killjoy, a pharisee and a hypocrite.
Indeed, the main barb directed against conservative by the Left in my youth was the endless accusation of being a hypocrite. (This was before they were shameless enough to utter endless accusations of being a racist. Back in the day, the endless false accusations from the Left could be false, but not openly and obviously false.)
Second, conservatives tend to see the issue of vice and virtue, order and chaos, fair and foul as civic matters: in civic matters, whatever was not political was personal. By habit and upbringing, conservatives regard political issues as open to compromise, and private issues as not open to discussion.
On the other hand, the Left regards these matters as more important than life and death: to them, it is a spiritual battle ending in the paradise of earthly pleasures or else in jahannam.
For them, it is the battle for eternity. Not just one men nor just one nation is at stake, all things are at stake.
For them, the personal is political, and the political is a fanatical death-cult governing every last nuance of life, the universe, and all.
The global weather patterns over the next century is governed by the cult, the use of two-letter pronouns in thought and speech is governed by the cult, biological reality, economics, diet, entertainment, everything down to who gets awards for the year’s best science fiction short story no one has read — all things are governed by the cult.
Nothing is too small to be overlooked, and nothing is ever forgiven.
Against the patient and fanatic zeal of antichristian cultists who never compromise, never retreat, and never tell the truth, the honest but indifferent conservative stands no chance.
In private matters, the conservative, particularly those of libertarian sentiment, is willing to let the sexual pervert have his way, because he regard the matter as private: but the pervert, in return, will harass a Christian baker until doomsday if the baker dares not join in a public celebration of sodomy.
Everyone in a medieval society was required to appear for public worship in the Church of Christ. Likewise, everyone in modern society is required to genuflect in public worship in the Church of Sodom.
Again, in political matters, the conservative, being by nature a pragmatic and realistic soul, will seek compromise, will truck and bargain, and support imperfect laws in order to maintain the social order and continuity. Bad cases and small injustices will crop up from time to time, but everyone must pay his taxes and serve when drafted. Such is life.
But this is not so for the mad fanatic. Faithful true believers dare not compromise, not even in small things, because compromise in matters of faith is heresy and anathema.
He can call on the conservative to compromise, but, by this, he means only that the conservative should surrender.
To the godless spirit now mainstream in Leftist life, life is Darwinian: an endless battle, red in tooth and nail, in which there can be no compromise, no quarter, no mercy.
You see, to the “woke” soul, the reality to which he wakes is the realization that all life is about power, and all human relationships are power relationships.
To the godless spirit, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial economic trade. The investor is always a vampiric parasite and an exploiter, and the employee is always a slave and a wretched victim. The White Man is always the oppressor and the Black Man is always the victim of racism, always, always, always, even when the Black Man is president of the United States and the White Man cannot make it into Yale because his place is taken by a less qualified minority. The Husband is always a tyrant and the Wife is always an abused slave.
It is an interesting, if sickening, mental exercise to attempt to picture the grim and dismal world of the Left in one’s imagination.
Every relationship, bride to bridegroom, parent to child, lawgiver to citizen to foreigner, lawyer to client and doctor to patient, buyer to seller, debtor to creditor, almsgiver to poor, every relationship, every, every, every one is a ruthless exploitation and mutual hatred where no compromise is possible and no mutual benefit is found.
Every song contains a secret message telling men to rape women. Every gesture and pronoun contains a secret micro-aggression showing hatred and contempt for minorities. And everyone is a minority except the faithful Christian.
Somehow, by some mystic alchemy of the leftwing brain chemistry, we are always the bad guys, and all of Western society emerged as triumphant despite, not because of, the Christian worldview.
Compared to the bottomless darkness of the perpetually offended, the political and civic conservative stands no chance. The casual athlete who engages in fisticuffs on the weekends, fighting by the Marquess of Queensberry rules, stands no chance against the drug-addled berserker, frothing at the mouth and eager to die for the glory of the Prophet Obama (or whoever).
Conservatives have been bringing chessmen to gunfights (if I may mangle an old metaphor) for a century now.
It is time to realize what is at stake: it is Christ versus Antichrist.
What is behind all the darkness, hatred, malice, cruelty, smugness, and lies, the endless lies, the absurd and unconvincing lies, of Leftism is not communism, not intersectionalism, not nihilism nor any other worldview. These are surface features. The foundation, core, and spirit of the Left is hatred of Christ.
They have tried to live in a postchristian world, and they find, but cannot admit, that the matter is illogical and impossible. If you turn your back on God, you turn your back on reason, on life, on truth, on virtue. The organism devoted to death will die. The society devoted to dissolution will dissolve.
Why hatred? Why such scorn for us and all of us?
Let us state it as an equation: Guilt plus pride equals hatred.
Hatred is the sole smoky flame to warm their wretched souls against the desolate and icy winds blowing from the glacial floor of Hell, where all the traitors are buried in the ice next to the weeping Satan.
So they hate Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer. They hate seductive love songs. They hate feminine girls and masculine boys. They hate polite speech and beautiful buildings and fine arts. The hate Santa Claus but they hate Saint Nicholas more so, and they surely and deeply hate the Lord to whom Saint Nicholas bows.
In the name of an utterly imaginary overpopulation scare, they hate children, and seek to kill them in the womb by the millions. They hate babies so much that they use your tax-money to kill them in astronomical numbers, and harvest their little organs for sale. And then the ACLU sues in court to prevent the wee, little corpses from having a decent burial.
In the name of an utterly imaginary racism scare, they hate national borders and law enforcement.
In the name of an utterly imaginary eco-fraud called global warmingcoolingclimatechangingwhatever, they hate the human race and hope for our mutual extinction.
Meanwhile real problems, like a global Jihad bent on terrorist violence by ambush against randomly selected innocent targets, those can neither be named, nor discussed, nor solved.
So, no matter what tactics can and must be used to fight this darkness in high places, the first step in the crusade is to kneel. Only by dedication to Christ have we the power to trample these scorpions and serpents unhurt.
Do not be deceived: a revival is coming, and that dawn must break in order for the light to be strong enough to drive the Morlocks back into their holes, and wake the blinking Eloi to the reality of their grim estate.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
