Or maybe it is National Socialism dressed up with a cross. Someone was posting about 'Deutches Requiem' by Borges that apparently saw the Nazis as the destroyers of the moral worldview of Judaism (and Christianity). And this is honestly what I see in Vance. I do not see someone even remotely influenced by current Catholic teaching. He seems to know nothing about it, has not embraced even parts of it, and has hopped to something that is a reaction to current Catholic teaching, a kind of aristo-catholicism as stated here. Maybe Vermuele is also influenced by the same thing, as is Bannon. They would like to destroy the church as it currently exists, which is an (obviously very flawed) international institution that now has many doctrines which have come to embrace radical egalitarianism rejecting nationalism, racism, ethnocentrism, (but not sexism--so not very egalitarian!) and also a preferential option for the poor. This is not even about 'conservatives' vs. 'liberals' since both Benedict and John Paul II were both critics of capitalism, and did not reject some of the key fundamentals of Vatican II. So we'll have to see how that goes over time. Francis was in a very fractured situation, trying to do battle with these forces which desperately wanted him gone or dead.
And for what? It's all crazy but they do make money off of it.
One thing that is nuts about this period is that you have these large populations of people who believe none of these ideologies. These ideologies are arcane and bananas. You can rule over them by grabbing the coercive power--but can you change their entire perspective to mirror the ideologies you want? You can mobilize them to support leaders who will destroy the world to push the ideologies--they can get control over institutions, etc. But now the question is whether they can shift the thinking of all these people into the direction they want things to go. Or maybe confuse people so intensely that they cannot access the things they believe about equality or human dignity or human rights or freedom, muddy the waters until these ideas are forgotten. Can you destroy the enlightenment itself? That seems a tall order. At most, they can simply throw the world into such chaos that there is no means to make these ideas real. That seems possible I suppose. If anything about historical materialism is true--do our material foundations dovetail with these anti-humanist perspectives? I would say no--they don't. Our material conditions have not changed so much that the value of the individual seems irrelevant and we will look with ardor upon a small bunch of would-be aristocrats to lead us. The would-be aristocrats aren't organizing our world in any way that makes them *necessary*. They are more unnecessary than ever, in fact, as far as I can tell. They are more like a criminal gang on top of what is necessary. So there's an open question whether that's sufficient for any lasting social changes on the structural level. It works in some societies like Russia because they fell into a gangland war, the gang-lords were able to grab control. Will it work in all societies in a lasting way? I guess we'll see.
Or maybe it is National Socialism dressed up with a cross. Someone was posting about 'Deutches Requiem' by Borges that apparently saw the Nazis as the destroyers of the moral worldview of Judaism (and Christianity). And this is honestly what I see in Vance. I do not see someone even remotely influenced by current Catholic teaching. He seems to know nothing about it, has not embraced even parts of it, and has hopped to something that is a reaction to current Catholic teaching, a kind of aristo-catholicism as stated here. Maybe Vermuele is also influenced by the same thing, as is Bannon. They would like to destroy the church as it currently exists, which is an (obviously very flawed) international institution that now has many doctrines which have come to embrace radical egalitarianism rejecting nationalism, racism, ethnocentrism, (but not sexism--so not very egalitarian!) and also a preferential option for the poor. This is not even about 'conservatives' vs. 'liberals' since both Benedict and John Paul II were both critics of capitalism, and did not reject some of the key fundamentals of Vatican II. So we'll have to see how that goes over time. Francis was in a very fractured situation, trying to do battle with these forces which desperately wanted him gone or dead.
And for what? It's all crazy but they do make money off of it.
One thing that is nuts about this period is that you have these large populations of people who believe none of these ideologies. These ideologies are arcane and bananas. You can rule over them by grabbing the coercive power--but can you change their entire perspective to mirror the ideologies you want? You can mobilize them to support leaders who will destroy the world to push the ideologies--they can get control over institutions, etc. But now the question is whether they can shift the thinking of all these people into the direction they want things to go. Or maybe confuse people so intensely that they cannot access the things they believe about equality or human dignity or human rights or freedom, muddy the waters until these ideas are forgotten. Can you destroy the enlightenment itself? That seems a tall order. At most, they can simply throw the world into such chaos that there is no means to make these ideas real. That seems possible I suppose. If anything about historical materialism is true--do our material foundations dovetail with these anti-humanist perspectives? I would say no--they don't. Our material conditions have not changed so much that the value of the individual seems irrelevant and we will look with ardor upon a small bunch of would-be aristocrats to lead us. The would-be aristocrats aren't organizing our world in any way that makes them *necessary*. They are more unnecessary than ever, in fact, as far as I can tell. They are more like a criminal gang on top of what is necessary. So there's an open question whether that's sufficient for any lasting social changes on the structural level. It works in some societies like Russia because they fell into a gangland war, the gang-lords were able to grab control. Will it work in all societies in a lasting way? I guess we'll see.