In the aftermath of any headline event, like the trans-killer-who-shall-remain-nameless church killing last week, it is always instructive for me to read the liberal commentary solving it all by taking guns away from far-right literally-fascist racist-sexist-homophobes gun nuts -- or transphobes, as the case may be.
My “living truth” is that everything is the fault of the educated class, because it is our educated liberals that sit on the commanding heights of both politics and religion, the locus of power in our society. They created today’s world with their secular religious faith that with the right politics they would create heaven on Earth. So if anything is anyone’s fault, it is the fault of our ruling-class liberals. Period, full stop.
For instance, it is coming into focus right now that SSRIs -- “a class of antidepressants that work by increasing the levels of serotonin in the brain” -- are being prescribed all over the place and some people react in crazy ways when drugged up on SSRIs. I know: why didn’t the experts tell us? Could it be that lots of experts have NGO grants to research the benefits of SSRIs? More research is needed.
But I noticed a couple of articles blaming “nihilism.” Nihilism? That means Nietzsche, and I have been a Nietzsche-aholic ever since I caught a North London luvvie calling Nietzsche “the Nazis’ favorite intellectual.”
As I wrote a while back,
Nietzsche argued that for moderns, God had Died, and this meant a brutal process of decadence -- the dying off of the old order -- followed by nihilism, the terror of the eternal recurrence, as in the movie Groundhog Day, and finally the birth of a new god with the revaluation of all values.
Do you not see, dear liberal friends, that we are in a period of “nihilism” because your old gods are dead, and you killed them, one Blank Slate at a time, and the new gods are still awaiting an Übermensch to summon them out of the vasty deep.
I may sound like I am being trite here, but really, I am deadly serious. I believe in Nicholas Wade’s idea that
No society has existed without what we would call religion.
That quote comes from The Faith Instinct in which Wade tells how, in hunter-gatherer societies, religion played a vital role in reducing the need for force.
What? You mean that religion reduces the need for politics? So what happens when you combine politics and secular religion? I wonder.
Today, all across the world, the liberal gods -- of equality, of the welfare state, of anti-racism, of climate change, of helpless victims, of administrative government and experts -- are dead. They are dead because they were false gods all along, merely puppets dressed up as gods that liberals invented to give themselves political and moral power. And now liberals are reduced to yelling “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
So now, per Fritzi, we are in a period of decadence, the dying off of the old order, and the nihilism and eternal recurrence of living the same day over and over again, just like Phil in Groundhog Day. Next up is the revaluation of all values and the appearance of the Übermensch, or, for you Joseph Campbell followers, the Sacrificial Hero. You tell me. Was Phil the weatherman an Übermensch, a Sacrificial Hero, or just a Mensch that helped little old ladies change a tire?
Oh no! Could it be that Don the TV Star is our Übermensch, appearing out of nowhere to run for President in 2016? And then descend into the underworld of lawfare, just like the heroes in the great myths, in order to travel the Hero’s Journey through death and rebirth and, through God’s Grace, to return to the land of the living to Make America Great Again?
I don’t think our liberal friends thought about what would happen if Trump actually survived his journey through the underworld of lawfare, because, in my experience, Margaret, our liberal friends are not that smart.
For instance, is it possible that by contesting everything Trump does in federal court our liberal friends will prod the Supreme Court into destroying the legal basis of the administrative state and its underground river of jobs and grants and status for educated liberals? And if all those educated liberal twentysomething Mamdani voters in New York City can’t look forward, one fine day, to jobs and grants and status, what would the robin do then, poor thing?
What will the new world look like, when we wake up one morning at 6:00 with Andie MacDowell in the bed with us? Is it possible to have a world with less government and more voluntary social cooperation, where people work together because we are good people and not because a politician is prodding us to fight the enemy or a priest is guilt-tripping us into being good?
Time will tell.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: AT via Magic Studio