Time to compare and contrast. A state that is legitimate gains its authority from God, who appoints the magistrates (see Rom 15). When a state excludes the divine then it loses the mantle of heaven. Literally. And there are consequences.

The authorities cannot regulate what is in the minds of men. The Soviets tried and failed. The Gramscian extension of Stalinism will fail as well, but it may be more violent.

A state that rejects ecclesial authority throws off the mantle of the Mandate of Heaven and forthrightly proclaims its utter profanity; it thereby guts its own secular authority. It effectually declares that its rule is grounded *only* in coercive power, and is otherwise meaningless – ergo, tyrannical (no matter how high sounding its stated intentions). So it ruins patriotism, vitiates patrimonial tradition, and stokes resentment and rebellion.

Many cults and false religions will also appoint their rulers in a religious feast. The Roman patricians were both priests and consuls. But that matters not: what matters is if God appoints them.

The trouble is that the enlightenment thinkers rejected this.

Living in a culture saturated with vulgar freedomism, you may develop a jaundiced view of the whole project of liberation inaugurated by Descartes and Locke. If you then revisit those thinkers, I think your irritation prepares you to see things you would otherwise miss. You are bringing a prejudice with you, but sometimes a prejudice sharpens your vision. Sensitivity to the present, and giving credit to your own human reactions to it, can bring a new urgency to the history of philosophy. What stands out for me, and for other writers I have learned from, is that the assertions those enlighteners make about how the mind works, and about the nature of the human being, are intimately tied to their political project to liberate us from the authority of kings and priests. In other words, it is epistemology with an axe to grind, polemical at its very root. Yet this original argumentative setting has been forgotten. This is important, because Enlightenment anthropology continues to inform wide swaths of the human sciences, including cognitive science, despite that discipline’s ritualized, superficial ridicule of Descartes. We need to be more self-aware about the polemical origins of the human sciences, because those old battles bear little resemblance to the ones we need to fight. In particular, it is very difficult to make sense of the experience of attending to something in the world when everything located beyond the boundary of your skull is regarded as a potential source of unfreedom. This is, precisely, the premise behind Kant’s ideal of autonomy: The will must not be “conditioned” by anything external to it. Today we get our Kant from children’s television, and from the corporate messaging of Silicon Valley.

We are left with a society where all must be free, so none are. Where the regulation of thought is more oppressive than it was during the Habsburg empire. This cannot go on. And what cannot go on, will stop.