Liberalism Versus Transcendent Reality

Abstract: Liberalism emerged in the seventeen hundreds and rebelled against transcendent (sacred) worldviews with the values of liberty and equality. This worldview shift effects the perspectives of most twenty-first century human beings. Marxism was a liberal reaction against liberal capitalism, and it never escaped liberalism's materialistic implications. Fascism was an attempted counter revolution against liberalism, but it failed and accelerated liberal world domination. The twenty-first century presents an opportunity for Christians, and other transcendents, to overthrow liberalism if they work to undermine core liberal values and spread Christianity to the susceptible, especially in the old Second World, in anticipation of a possible crisis in the liberal world order. 

Almost everything in the liberal mind, and most twenty-first century minds are liberal, is defined by reactions against two historical events: the Crusades and Hitler. [1] The Crusades are perceived as the defining moral failure of religion. They are thought to discredit Christianity, especially political Christianity, as a worldview and institution. Anti-Hitler is the foundation of the "post-war consensus" that has dominated most of the planet since the nineteen-forties and all of the planet since the nineteen-nineties (the "end of history"). [2] Hitler is literally Satan within the liberal worldview. In a reality stripped of sin, Hitler became the symbol of a new kind of evil that threatened the liberal order and its moral system of liberty and equality. If Hitler was right, or mostly right, the liberal order falls apart. If the Crusades were right, or mostly right, the liberal order falls apart. The Crusades and Hitler have become archetypal evil that cannot be defended without committing heresy against the liberal church (in the same way that one can't defend Satan without becoming a heretic to the Christian church). If a contemporary human being signals affinity with either the Crusades or Hitler within public conversation then the liberal inquisition is let loose to burn the heretic with social ostracization and economic sanctions.

The average agnostic or religiously apathetic person, whether they attend church or not, believes historical Christianity, especially in its political form, has been discredited because the Crusades happened. Of course, the Crusades occurred a millennia ago and never discredited historical Christianity until recently. Why did it take seven hundred to a thousand years for people to finally realize the implications of an ancient event they're almost totally removed from in every way? Why are the Crusades so critical to modern twenty-first century man when almost no one who was directly impacted by the events in Western Europe or the Middle East felt historical Christianity had been discredited by what was happening around them? It's not that the Crusades themselves were somehow objectively bad, but that the filter has changed through which they've been viewed. The worldview that produced and affirmed the Crusades for almost a millennium was replaced, and the new filter renders them in a negative light. Of course, no one who uses photo editing software believes filters make images more accurate representations of the originals. Generally, applying a new moral filter over ancient events tends to distort reality.

LIBERALISM

What was the new filter and when did modern man begin using it? The answers: liberalism and 1789 (more specifically the fake-enlightenment that surrounded that date). Liberalism emerged as a philosophy in the seventeen-hundreds and was championed by the deistic, agnostic, and atheistic philosophers who believed humans could and should reach heaven via the construction of a new tower of human reason. They began the construction of this new tower with the creation of many humanistic innovations like human rights, the social contract, tabula rasa, and the radical criticism of ancient pillars of human society found in the Christian Church and hierarchical government. A new religion was invented to celebrate man and place him above all gods and so-called gods. The culmination of the fake-enlightenment was the overthrow of the ancient established order in France during the Revolution of 1789 in which the Church and monarchy was brutally destroyed and replaced with the Cult of Reason, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the attempted erasure of the Christian calendar in favor of restarting the year count at 1792. Mass bloodshed ensued, the infamous Reign of Terror, and general chaos. Liberalism's total domination was delayed by the forces of reality that stopped it from being fully implemented, but the Napoleonic Empire emerged and nevertheless spread its ideas across Europe. Coincidentally, or not, technological innovation began changing the nature of reality and what was possible. Slowly, over the course of the following two centuries, technology allowed for liberalism's ideas, once impractical, to be implemented and enforced.

Until the seventeen-hundreds, every society was held together by sacred principles. The worldview around which society operated was justified by appealing to transcendent forces. [3] In Europe, the worldview that supported every aspect of human society was Christianity. The morality enforced by and on the population was Christian morality. The history of the world was Christian history. Art, music, and work were considered worship to God. The king and lords ruled because God gave them divine right. In China, Heaven (天) controlled the fate of civilization, gave the mandate of heaven to a dynasty it considered fit to rule, and caused natural disasters. [4] The fates of families and their histories were tied to deified ancestors who were given ritualized devotion. A person's entire matrix of obligations and identity were defined within this web of transcendent forces. It wasn't possible to challenge the status quo through rebellion because it was tantamount to overthrowing the first principles of reality. The only way to change was to convert to a new transcendent worldview system (religion). Conversion was a rare, often unavailable, exit from the system into which a person was born. The result of this transcendent worldview was social stability and a continuity of human existence that's almost unimaginable to a twenty-first century individual.

Liberalism both destroyed and replaced the ancient and universal system of societies grounded in integrated transcendent worldviews. Liberty destroyed it, and equality has produced a bad replacement. Liberty is effectively social entropy. If a person is liberated from social obligation, and free to become a self-defined individual, then the raw material of social cohesion and human society is destroyed. If people don't integrate themselves into the social system and worldview into which they were born then they weaken that system by pulling resources, specifically human capital, away from it. The correlation between this process of liberating a human being, in the liberal understanding of liberty, and the liberation of material pieces via entropy is fairly obvious. If a shed is built out of wood boards and left alone for centuries the wood boards are "liberated" from the shed as they fall apart and eventually break up until even the components of the boards are liberated into soil matter and molecules. If the shed is a civilization, the boards are the nations, and the soil particles are individuals then we can begin to visualize the process that's been unleashed by liberalism's concept of liberty. Nationalism is entropy acting on a civilization, and individualism is entropy acting on the nation and family. The details of this comparison could easily be contested from numerous angles, but the general idea is fairly evident. Certainly, some forms of entropic social disintegration have occurred before liberalism, and they have taken many historical forms, but these were regarded as what they were and not celebrated, accelerated, and formulated into a worldview that consciously worships the social death process. The disintegration of the Roman Empire was not regarded as the triumph of human reason as the death of Western Christendom and every other transcendent worldview has been, and that's probably because the decline and fall of Rome was not simultaneous with the rise of its replacement. This is why the "miracle of technology" is important, it allows for the rise of anti-civilization constructed around liberty/entropy, when the process of liberty would have formerly led to obvious negative consequences. One recent example of this is the disintegration of the connection between marriage, sex, and fertility made possible by technological advancements in birth control. Similar examples could be found in every sphere of twenty-first century life.

EQUALITY

Equality, the second-tier value of liberalism, was necessary for the deconstruction of the old transcendent worldviews and the liberation of man. If men are equal then hierarchy and authority should be disregarded. If the only reason I'm a member of society is because I agreed to a social contract between myself and that society then the office of hereditary monarch is absurd. Why should the king be able to claim authority over me, a free man with rights, merely because he was born into a particular family? Worse still, why should he be able to claim God gave him the power to violate my rights? The king is absurd when viewed through a liberal filter, but when viewed through the filter of historical Christianity, or any other transcendent worldview, the king is necessary for social welfare and the enforcement of God's justice. In China, periods of fracture, disunity, and civil war in which no emperor could unite the civilization were marked by tragic mourning on the part of the people and philosophers alike because they longed for the social unity of a stable monarch. When Rome began to fall and the city was sacked by barbarians St Augustine wrote The City of God in an attempt to diffuse some of the confusion and panic suffered by Christians and pagans who felt their society destabilizing. Similar confusion and panic resulted as the Byzantine Empire and its very integrated religious and governmental system collapsed in the fourteen-hundreds. The West is haunted by the memory of Rome and the civilizational paradigm it came to represent (especially after it incorporated Christianity post-Constantine). The Holy Roman Emperor, the Czar ("Cesar") in Russia, and the Byzantines have all modeled themselves on the transcendent worldview of ancient Rome. 

The old imperial model of unity embraced by transcendent social worlds has been declared preposterous by liberalism's claim that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." To liberalism, the king and all authority figures and aristocracy are just annoying/evil obstacles along an individual's pursuit of self-defined happiness via liberty. Even God is reduced to a deistic "creator" who is distant and uninvolved. If all men are created equal then all men are sovereign, and if all men are sovereign then all men are free and liberated from obligation, and if men have no obligations then society falls apart as entropy accelerates. Society is a kind of family and family is held together by obligations. If obligations are gone then marriages either end in divorce or never form at all, and "as the family goes so goes society."

MARXISM

What is the opposite of total individual liberty? The deconstruction of society should be opposed by a system of society, and one might even call this system socialism. [5]  Most people regard Marxism as an ideology opposed to liberalism, but it's more accurate to call it a denomination of liberalism. [6] Marxism is to liberalism as Calvinism is to Western Christianity. It's a reaction to the results of liberalism. This reaction takes on a specifically economic character because liberalism deconstructs transcendent order and leaves society empty of all but materialistic meaning. In liberalism, the "separation of church and state" means all social matters must be discussed on the material plane of existence. In practical application this usually results in economism (the idea that economics is the center of society). Economy is measured by money; a liberal economy is referred to as "capitalist" because capital is another word for money. So, when a society is defined by economic materialism and liberated it results in capitalist society. Everyone is pursuing happiness in the form of money, and because society has no transcendent morality then unrestrained greed is the logical result (although most liberal economies have not yet been taken to their logical extreme by most people, unfortunately for Ayn Rand). Morality evaporates as the liberal worldview consolidates control of society because people are social by nature, and they begin building their identities within a materialistic world. Marxism, then, arises as an increasingly capitalistic society perceives the resulting inequality produced by the free flow of liberated capital towards those sociopathic capitalists who exploit their society in pursuit of happiness in the form of extreme wealth. Marxism doubles down on liberty and equality by seeking to de-liberate money for the benefit of society. So Marxism is not a repudiation of liberalism, but an attempt to secure liberalism's values by building society around the restriction of money. Capitalistic authority/hierarchy produced by unequal wealth redistribution is deconstructed and opposed by Marxism for the sake of equality, but not the reconstruction of a transcendent social order.

Marxism is not rebellion against liberalism. It's a false opposition that's actually a kind of extreme liberalism attempting to remedy a result of liberalism that could have undermined it by destroying equality via the unequal distribution of money towards a new sociopathic elite. Marxism's opposition status has helped it siphon off and neutralize a lot of true opposition to liberalism's core values. Those who might have gathered to overthrow liberalism at its core have instead settled for fighting liberalism's effects by defending its core (liberty and equality). This is what happened with much of the "undeveloped" world. The advance of liberal capitalism and resulting destruction or perceived exploitation of various countries, like China, who still embraced the older conception of society by the encroaching liberal powers from the West. Faced with embracing the liberal West's domination or uniting with a socialist coalition that promised some preservation of autonomy and sovereignty, the Second World turned to Marxism. In effect, however, the Second World was importing a toxic variation of the liberalism that led back to the same materialistic result. It's not shocking to see formally Marxist China collapse so quickly into the most exploitative forms of capitalism, after being primed for decades with one form of liberalism it's not so difficult to switch to another. The Russians were holding a Marxist coalition together for a long time, but with the Soviet Union's collapse that coalition has been destroyed as a viable alternative and only liberal capitalism is now left to dominate. Modern China is not creating an alternative social order, much less world order, but rather an order stripped of all the restraints on the consequences of liberating money and those who sociopathically pursue it. China is taking liberated materialism to its logical end. [7] Perhaps man has lost control of liberty and replaced the human aristocracy, held in the West to the standard of Christ's imperial rule (however badly), with the tyranny of money; and Mammon doesn't care about you, your rights, or morality. Money doesn't care about anything but its own proliferation. Unchecked money is a virus feeding on its host and murdering society via those infected with the love of it (or those possessed by it). Technology is only neutral if its controlled by nothing, but that's never the case. Technology serves money in modern capitalistic society, and it innovates with the intent to maximize profits for those who serve Mammon.

FASCISM

Where is the exit from liberalism if it is not to be found in Marxism? Hitler attempted to answer that question with fascism. He attempted to eradicate the idea of liberty and equality by spreading an ideology and worldview that brought the elements of society together instead of breaking them apart with liberty. The word "fascism" refers to the bundle of rods used as a symbol of authority in ancient Rome and represented strength through unity. Hitler sought to rebuild the German nation by rebuilding the ideas of transcendent unity, hierarchy, and economic reorientation towards the service of the nation. Individualism was replaced under Hitler with loyalty to the national volk (race).

Fascism was not a denomination of liberalism as Marxism was, and thus it had to be destroyed by the combined forces liberal capitalism and Marxism (the "Allied Powers"). There is much to criticize in Hitler's fascism, and few would claim it was a great solution to the question of an exit from liberalism. However, Hitler's program would have planted a transcendent bloc in the heart of Western Civilization that likely would have severely and permanently damaged liberal domination. The Second World would have turned to fascism rather than Marxism to secure their autonomy, and the world of the twenty-first century would not be careening towards universal liberalism. World War II was a war of survival for liberalism and ended as a war of consolidation, and thus Hitler became the Satan that was defeated in order to secure liberalism's triumph over evil. The liberal anti-civilization marches on.

The twenty-first century world is one in which liberalism is triumphant. Its core concepts of liberty and equality are regarded as doctrine in every corner of the globe and under almost every regime (even when they're trampled on). The last vestiges of the non-liberal world are found among the most "backward," abhorred, and impoverished regions of the Islamic world. The established powers in America and Europe are liberal, and the emerging powers of India and China are also liberal. Technology is advancing in ways that allow for individual liberty to expand in formerly unthinkable ways. Advancements in globalism and transportation have furthered the liberty of individuals to travel, live, and work anywhere they want. The same advancements have increased the liberty of money to travel and act outside government borders and regulations. Liberalism is expanding its influence on the global and individual level. The fact that a meme as radical and historically unprecedented as homosexual marriage has now affected almost every society on earth is a testament to how universal liberalism's reach has become. China was among the most consolidated, hierarchical, and traditional countries in history just a hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago. In the twenty-first century China has utterly transformed into a cutting-edge facilitator of agnostic technological materialism. China has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world and one of the fastest growing economies. Liberalism is in a strong position.

NEO SECOND WORLD COUNTER REVOLUTION

However, despite liberalism's present hegemonic position there are still good reasons to believe that the transcendent worldview is not only holding its own but possibly ready to launch a significant counter revolution. There is also reason to believe this counter revolution will favor the Christian worldview. Post-Soviet Russia has been moving toward the transcendent Christian worldview and its momentum is against liberal values. This is not surprising considering Russia was the center of the Second World coalition that attempted to resist liberal capitalist domination. Russia's old coalition, however, was in deep continuity with liberalism. It was also deeply flawed from an economic, cultural, and spiritual perspective and full of internal contradictions. It was never a true alternative. The very fact that a major power like Russia is moving towards becoming a true alternative to liberalism is significant because such a center has not existed for at least a century (except the brief period it took fascism to fail). The population of Russia equals the modern German and Italian populations, and although this isn't as significant as those two powers would have been if they had triumphed in the thirties and forties it's still a powerful step. Russia is also allying itself with other outposts of non-liberal sentiment like Iran and backing non-liberal leaders like Victor Orban in Hungary. If this new coalition continues to form and strengthen then a true alternative may arise with influence. A new Second World, reformed on a stronger foundation, will be built.

Another problem facing liberalism is Christianity’s explosion in non-western lands. Christianity is spreading rapidly in China and, if Korea is any indication, a third of the population could be Christian within a matter of decades. If the CCP falls, or China experiences some kind of cultural revolution, Christianity is poised to be the largest transcendent worldview in the world's largest nation. The post-Marxist societies of Eastern Europe are now also the most likely to reject the most recent liberal excesses. Mass immigration and homosexual marriage are generally rejected, LGBT propaganda has been criminalized in some areas. The re-emergence of Christianity has been underway in the post-communist bloc for at least a decade. One example is the increasingly powerful Poland that has rejected Islamic immigrants and formally rededicated itself a nation under Christ's kingship. The nations that have experienced liberalism in its Marxist form seem highly susceptible to returning to transcendent worldviews, and with Christianity spreading so wildly in so many places we could see a widespread collapse in liberalism that leads to the rapid emergence of a near universal Christian civilization.

TAKING ACTION

Of course, God works in mysterious ways, and any prediction suggesting a complete reversal of world order should be suspect. However, the likelihood or unlikelihood of the afore mentioned prediction does not affect the prescription much. The average Christian with little political or economic clout has only a handful of options at their disposal, but we should utilize them. Christians should be working to undermine the godless liberal worldview that's currently our world's greatest enemy, an enemy that specifically targets us and wishes to see our kingdom, Christ's kingdom, destroyed while simultaneously working to build and spread a transcendent Christian worldview to replace the liberal one we're destroying.

At home, in the West, Christians need to deconstruct the worldview that now dominates our societies. The West is not open to Christ, and its liberal immune system is built up against Christianity and non-liberal spirituality. Before Christianity can rise again from beneath this enemy it must deconstruct and destroy the core values of the liberal worldview. Liberty and equality must be undermined on the conceptual level, materialism and the fake-enlightenment must be exposed as foolishness. Money and economics must be decentralized from public life. This is not the Roman Empire of old that knew nothing about and cared little for the "Jewish cult" of Christ spreading steadily from Palestine. In those days, the church could "fly under the radar" and work silently to avoid being attacked. Today, we face an enemy that rose up from within, rotted out civilization, and knows us well. This is not an enemy that we can pacify. It is an enemy that wants to annihilate us. It is an anti-Christ. This type of enemy must be attacked and undermined as a heresy of our own religion.

Outside the West, specifically in the never Christianized lands of Asia, we must work to spread Christianity. Asia will be a player in the world's future, and we should make certain that much of Asia is ready to adopt the Christian worldview when the time is right. Hudson Taylor may one day be remembered as the most important missionary since St Paul. Globalization and its technological enablers have been incredible tools for liberalism, but they have also opened up opportunities for us to globalize Christianity in the meantime and build up our strength below the radar of capitalism's global invasion. The church sees unreached nations while liberal capitalism sees untapped markets. Christians should use every opportunity afforded us.

The opposition to liberalism should not be conservative. Attempting to preserve the world of the nineteen-fifties, eighteen-fifties, or seventeen-fifties isn't possible nor desirable. Christians, and all those who oppose liberalism, should not see ourselves as fighting to restore the past. The past was vulnerable to the formerly unknown liberal memes that successfully infiltrated and gutted our civilization. Contemporary resistance against liberalism should adopt a position of post-liberal transcendency. We should view ourselves as the counter revolutionary builders of a new Second World coalition. The new generation of resistance has been familiar with liberalism since birth, and we have seen its excess of vanity. We were born in the liberal anti-civilization, but let's pray we don't die in it. 

 

NOTES 

[1] Slavery could be added to this list for Americans or those deeply affected by American culture.

[2] Francis Fukayama’s The End of History & The Last Man: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

[3] I have chosen to use the word "transcendent" in this essay, but the term "spiritual" might also be used.

[4] This is "Tian" which in early Chinese characters is portrayed in human form (although "he" was later abstracted into a force).

[5] The word "communism" communicates the same meaning of community/society over capital.

[6] The word "Marxism" has been chosen to represent the anti-capitalistic ideology associated with socialism and communism. "Cultural Marxism" is a slightly different ideology that attempts to deconstruct homogeneous Western Christian society.

[7] It's doubtful China can reverse course or abandon some form of liberal materialism without destroying itself politically and economically. The CCP is a Marxist party whose legitimacy is built on atheistic materialism, and its government has doubled down on those values in the twenty-first century.