My son was asking me about how humans get destroyed yesterday. He’s worked out that it is not physical pain: we can withstand that, but thought it was dignity. I thought of Solzhenitsyn, who commented that you need to account yourself dead, and not let them give you hope.
For hope will destroy you. Hope will make you please them. Hope will make you compromise. At times when compromise should not happen. For this world hates us, and it is getting worse.
When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.” … To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.
“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”
The current elite will fall, and it is our job to help regardless of what they do. But not to expect them to like us: we should be thankful, instead, that it is merely in Wisconsin that we are being raided, and in the hell hole of ISIS that we are being killed.
Instead, we need to look to Christ, for he went through more than we ever will be forced to.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.
But we need to note the last few verses. We must remain steadfast. We show that we have been saved by remaining with the Gospel, and not heading to whatever the new thing the elite want: to whatever apostasy is being recycled this year.
And this causes problems for post modern man: for they have thrown away the toolkit one needs to survive. They neither acknowledge truth, nor understand logic, nor read the conclusions of those who gladly went to the stake and the wheel: for they are politically incorrect. Instead they have but shame and anger as guides.
Their blindfold is firmly on, and they are so fragile they need trigger warnings. And, as such, they will fail.
But Christ will remain. And all truth, all beauty, all that is right, and all that is noble are things worthy of medication and study. I think, therefore, that true scholarship will also remain. But the managers, those who think everything is power and politics and want to go full Stalinist, will fade.
And it is our duty, however, costly it is, not to be them or be like them.