The Empire of Lies
After the coronation of Charles the Great, also named Charlemagne, as the Roman Emperor of the West, a strange and wonderful thing happened:
Not just in the Carolingian realm, but in all Western Europe, civilized society, as embodied in every major institution, was aimed toward a purpose, namely, to conform the laws and customs to the purest and highest virtues that can be envisioned, namely, Christian virtues. This is the international social order fitliest called Christendom.
This period, misnamed by Petrarch as “the Dark Ages,” was contrariwise the single period of greatest enlightenment in European history. Our current period under this present darkness, these ages, these are the true dark ages.
All of our current society, as embodied in every major institution, are likewise aimed toward a purpose, but a far less noble one. The purpose is the opposite of Christendom. It is Antichristendom. The purpose is to conform the current laws and customs to the most hypocritical, perverse, and most wicked vices that benightedness can produce.
The purpose is falsehood.
Our age ventures to destroy civil order, to denature man, to defame heaven, and to establish and maintain an Empire of Lies. For our age is devout toward unreality, and worships untruth. Every major institution is fraudulent, fake, and false.
Ours is an age is afflicted with a vision of blindness.
Doubt not that the Christian virtues are the purest and highest imaginable. When asked to provide a list of better, writers like Marx or Aristotle will either list virtues that make no sense outside the Christian worldview, as proposing equality to the poor, or which Christianity holds in common with all mankind, as proposing courage and fortitude. Writers like Nietzsche, sadly, merely take a vice, as hubris, or a self-delusion, as when a man demands to be honored as a god, which pagans denounced as entirely as Christian, and calls it strong and laudable.
Please consider that even those who mock Christian virtues can only do so by assuming their validity. One cannot call Christian virtue judgmental without assuming as valid the uniquely Christian maxim that condemning another condemns oneself.
Again, one daring to call Christian virtue hierarchical or oppressive, when it is the only egalitarian dogma that rationality permits, assumes as valid the Christian maxim holding all men, rich and poor, high and low, noble and base, sage and fool, law-abiding or criminal, to be all made in the image and likeness of the divine, hence all worthy of respect and honor.
Any criticisms leveled against Christian virtues where those virtues overlap the universal consensus of mankind, as touching charges of hypocrisy, or impracticality, or severity, could with equal justice be leveled against any vision of virtue, Christian, Jewish, Pagan, ancient or modern, western or eastern.
It is easy enough to compile a list of virtues and aspirations that are noble and enlightened — the writings of Aristotle or Confucius, Lao Tzu or the Buddha will promptly do so — but these writings both agree with the Christian virtues at all fundamentals, and where they disagree, do not contradict Christian teaching, but merely fall short. They say the same things but do not go far enough. The stoicism of the Romans is as admirable as that of Christian martyrs, but Cato of Utica did not rejoice as he died, whereas the Carmelite martyrs, killed during the French Revolution, who went to their deaths singing Laudate Dominum as they mounted the scaffold.
Doubt not that the so-called Dark Ages were dark. While the collapse of Imperial power, the etiolation of commerce, the drop in population, the loss of luxuries were indeed dreadful things, nonetheless, they were also the greatest good fortune to happen to Western history, and the sole reason why the West escaped the stagnation of the China, whose Imperial dynasties merely passed on one to the next until reaching modern Marxism, differing only in name.
The collapse of the Roman Empire is the sole reason why we even have a concept of stagnation, that is, a period when growth and progress is not occurring. The idea that future generations would live differently from past, and live better, was unknown to the ancient world. History was an endless cycle to the pagan, either, as the Greek saw it, a downfall from a golden age to current lamentation, or, as the Hindu saw it, an endless cycle, age after age of rise and fall.
The Catholic Age after the crowning of Charlemagne was a period when the absolute power of kings and emperors was curtailed to lawful limits; when a maiden could not be wed against her consent, nor a matron divorced without cause; when ancient and universal practices such as infanticide and the slave trade were curtailed or abolished.
The unworldly mysticism of paganism and the vulgar superstitions of witchcraft were excoriated and exorcised; rational investigation of nature was placed on a rigorous footing; and practical technology, in eyeglasses, clockworks, millworks, jib sails, horse collars, ploughshares, made novel and permanent progress.
The abolition of the slave trade was in large measure undone during the years of Muslim conquest in Spain, Austria, and Asia Minor, and the Spanish adopted, in small, what the Muslim practiced in large, during their conquests in the New World. Likewise, the Catholic advancements in limiting the despotism of kings was largely undone during the Reformation, culminating in the modern horrors of unlimited totalitarianism.
The Catholic Age advances in monogamy and chastity, which improved human happiness more than any other single revolution in history, including the universal condemnation of all manner of sexual vice and exploitations, as harlotry and pederasty, was undone with shocking suddenness during the Sexual Revolution.
No-fault divorce, and the corruption of manners, abandoned women to a sexual free-for-all, with obvious and expected results: see the rates of self-mutilation and suicide among women.
Sodomy is legal, and sodomite union is honored and celebrated not just as equal to matrimony, but granted privileges clearly superior: no homosexual baker fears to refuse to make a cake for a normal couple.
The ancient horror of killing unwanted infants, the practices of Carthaginians honoring Moloch, or the Spartans tossing stunted or crippled babes into the pit of Apothetae, has not only returned in a greater number and more grisly form, it has been honored as a legal right and sacred rite.
And horrors never practiced even in the darkest years of even the cruelest excesses of Aztec or Babylonian are currently promoted as necessary medical and psychological practice, namely, the castration and sexual mutilation of children, and drugging them with hormones to hinder adolescent development permanently.
All this is done in service of a vision of the self-anointed visionaries. At one time, it was done in the name of a coming Utopia, albeit that rhetoric has trailed off into awkward silence in my lifetime.
Now all this is done in the name of nothing and no one, for no clear purpose. Anarchic riots are funded and organized by proponents of totalitarianism; totalitarian thought-policing is done by private companies in the name of safety; socialism is promoted by plutocrats; racism is denounced by racists enacting racist policies in the name of anti-racism; atheists fund and applaud jihadist terrorism; and on and on.
Each policy or group promoted by the vision of the blind is contradicted by another. The riddle has a simple answer: the alliance of dogmatic relativists, anarchist totalitarians, socialist plutocrats, and atheist jihadists springs out of their mutual hatred of Christ, of Christendom, of the Western civilization in general, and America in particular.
This blind vision has no name, for to name it is to banish it, but it is nihilist in philosophy, subjectivist in ethics, socialist in economics, collectivist in law, totalitarian in politics. In theology, it is the summation and sublimation off all prior heresies distilled and combined into one. It is hence the total rejection of Creator and of all creation, hence of all things true and beautiful and good.
As befits a vision devoted to utter falsehood, all the names it assumes are false, signifying the opposite of their nature. Whenever a name starts to take on the connotations of what the vision actually signifies, the loyalty to untruth demands the untruthful to coin a new and more misleading term: so the liberal becomes progressive becomes socialist becomes woke, despite that the worldview is antiliberal, reactionary, antisocial and unenlightened.
The blind vision of modernism is best understood to be the culmination and sublimation of all prior threads of heretical thought: Gnostic, Pelagian, Arian, Millenarian.
Gnosticism takes a variety of forms, but in main outline, it proposes that God is the devil, who traps all souls in the world-system. The world is evil, and only the enlightened are wise enough to see the devil as the savior, who will make us gods. Pelagianism proposes man needs neither works nor faith for salvation, but only his own merit, unaided by heaven. Arianism in its various forms took Christ to be a being created by God, not coequal, and Mohammedanism took him to be a mortal prophet. Millenarianism proclaims that the thousand year reign of blessedness will be here on earth, and before the Final Judgement. Cerinthus, a Gnostic from the first century, pictured the pleasures of this one thousand years in gross, sensual colors, akin to the promise of the Mohammedan paradise with fountains of wine and seventy-two virgins for each of the faithful.
The blind vision is an incoherent admixture of Marxist socialism, Nietzschean antinomianism, Antifas jihad, and the disgusting sexual abnormalities of John Money and Alfred Kinsey.
The vision is Millenarian in that it proposes utopia on earth can be brought forth; it is Pelagian in proposing that to architect utopia requires only human reason and human will, but no divine patronage; it is Arian in reducing Christ to the “Historical Jesus” of humanist fantasy, an antiquarian character of merely human stature or academic interest, no longer the aim of society; it is Gnostic in proposing one’s own inner self or soul as the replacement for the dethroned Christ.
Theirs is the motto of the unhinged egomaniac: Thou art God.
As God, each man can establish for himself what to name as good or evil, or step beyond all names, into the lightless moral void proposed by Nietzsche; as God, one is as immune from cause and effect, as from the law of supply and demand, so socialism can produce wealth as if by the miracle of loaves and fishes, somehow making abundance from want by decree.
As God, each man decrees reality to be whatso he wills, for his will is now the only divine will there can be.
To question the divine will is blasphemy, if not deicide; therefore to speak against any man’s fancy or fantasy is Hate Speech, and to think against it is thoughtcrime.
However, the inner god of this gnostic and egomaniacal self-apotheosis is not a very sturdy god. To observe to a lunatic suffering from gender dysphoria or pervert that he is not the woman he decrees himself to be is an act of violence, if not murder, since said lunatic will most likely shoot himself in the head immediately. Since god is blameless, the blame for these self destructive hallucinations and acts surely lodges with you, the critical observer.
Hence the vision proclaiming all men to be omnipotent over truth, morality, and reality is, at its root, totalitarian, since only total control over thoughts and speech can allow the pretense to continue. The pretense must be universal, global, and total, that is, promoted and supported by everyone, everywhere, and at all times.
The result is the whole apparatus of postmodern society must be as devoted to the unreality of egomania as the men of the medieval period were devoted to the Truth of God.
For a time, the generous imagination might hope that the egomaniacs would curtail their mania at the boundaries of pragmatic and solid fact, as in matters of science and math, or the inescapable axioms of reason. Such hopes are not merely vain, but foolish, for the do not recognize that the culmination and point of this blind vision is to establish a kingdom of hypocrisy, where there are no limits to egomania. Surely if God can propound divine mysteries that seem paradoxical, men can do the same, and utter Orwellian self-contradictions with no fear of being contradicted.
To place underlings under a law one does not obey oneself renders one immune from law. This applies not just to literal and criminal law, but to such things as the laws of nature, the laws of morality, the laws of logic: Goods can be consumed before they are produced because I say so. Lying is a virtue, not a vice, when I do it because it is useful or pleasant to me. You wear the face-diaper of submission and shelter-in-place while I dine in fine restaurants because I decree it. You inject whatever I tell you to into your body. Good is bad because I say so. Man is woman because I say so. A is non-A because I say so.
Such insolent unreality is not just gaslighting, it is self-delusion externalized.
Doubt not that falsehood is the point and purpose of all the elaborate justifications, the Latinate jabberwocky of their excuses, the shifty-eyed evasiveness, the psychological projection, the banshee screams of gorgon and gargoyle.
These strange, sad, strident would-be godlings cannot tolerate the light of truth. They always lie; they always redouble their lies when caught; they always accuse others of their own crimes, sins, and shortcomings.
Doubt not all the modern institutions are devoted to falsehood. Let us count the ways.
- The news media is a propaganda arm of Anti-American, Anti-White, Antichristian. They are the enemy of the people.
- The entertainment industry discourages entertainment, promoting hectoring lectures instead, larded with social justice messages, and is deliberately engaged in the desecration of any and all popular franchises; they purchase intellectual properties of immense value merely to desecrate, defame, and destroy them.
- The scientific community has promoted a global warming fraud after promoting a global cooling fraud, and now promotes a climate change fraud.
- The law enforcement and espionage communities have betrayed the Constitution, and each man his oath personally, by conspiring unsuccessfully to overturn the 2016 election through a series of hoaxes, frame-ups, and false accusations, and by successfully overturning the 2020 election.
- The industrial and financial community has betrayed its investors and patrons and society itself by making alliance with fascist schemes of one-world government, the communist schemes of Red China, the Marxist, Green-Marxist, Luddite, Black Supremacist and Anarchist schemes of various mad malcontents.
- The treason of the clerks now reaches all professions, experts, academics:
- The medical community promoted a dangerous, unnecessary, and improperly-tested inoculations, and aided in the suppression of accurate information from among their own ranks as to the nature and extent of its danger, and possible alternatives.
- The universities actively discourage rational discourse, academic freedom, and refuse to transmit the intellectual legacy of mankind to the next generation.
- Grammar school grooms kids for sexual perversion, indoctrinates them to become activists, discourages reading and critical thinking.
- The entire intellectual class of the Western world is unanimously and vehemently engaged in the desolation and abolition of the civilization by whose grace alone men like them are permitted to exist.
- Christian denominations routinely excuse and support sodomy, contraception, divorce, syncretism, and a wide variety of blasphemies and heresies, and the oldest denomination of all, the Roman Catholic Church, routinely hides pederasts among her clergy, or erects idols to Pachamama in the Vatican.
All these things are done to promote a worldly and anti-Christian vision of life as it would be if reality were not real.
In sum: Priests and pastors are Pharisees. Academia is bunk. Wall Street is fake. The election was stolen. The FBI are Gestapo. The CIA are traitors. Experts are frauds. The pandemic was fake. Hollywood is here to hate you, not entertain you. The publisher of books and comic books likewise. Social media cancels truth and put lies at the top of search results. The fake news is fake.
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.
