AGAINST EQUALITY
The insane cult of the masquerade which rules us
This is an essay about the false god of Equality. I argue that the worship of false idols of the Revolution such as Equality are the inevitable result of a system of make belief which is hostile to reality.
That system is the Liberal system which has ruled us into a hell on earth, and ruled sanity and the mention of reality out of the question.
I begin with a mention of a play by a notorious pervert and criminal, whose immoral story functions as a fable for our times.
THE MORAL OF A DEGENERATE STORY
We live in degenerate times, and it so is often degenerate art which best holds the mirror up to life today. I have said this about De Sade, and will explain what I mean about his example later.
Today I will open with some words about another immoralist, whose work illustrates the debased human condition secured in the Liberal Revolution.
The criminal and homosexualist Jean Genet was lauded as a Saint by those who admire the Revolution and its aim of destroying all that was.
In 1956 Genet wrote a play called The Balcony. It is about power and performance.
Described as “one of the masterpieces of our times” by Martin Esslin, the play is set in a brothel, which is a microcosm of the state outside1.
The clients go there to dress up as powerful public figures. One character in the play is got up as the Chief of Police, another as the Bishop, a third as The General.
A revolution takes place outside and these three imposters present themselves to the public, from the balcony of the bordello. They are acclaimed as the real leaders of church, state and the army, and order is restored.
RULE BY FAKERY
Today we are ruled and schooled by imposters. They are costumed as our leaders and guardians, but they are in fact mere actors fronting a sordid business - just as in Genet’s play.
The State we are in is not just a performance. It is one which is served by the making of belief, and this involves the subtraction of the memory of what was.
When there is no past but the idea of it presented by the present, there is nothing to which to compare the performers and their performance. The play becomes reality, the spectacle all there is, all there ever was, all there could be. This is how disorder masquerades as order, imposture as reality, and it is how the memory of civilisation is extinguished and recalled.
We are at this point now, and the forced forgetting is becoming obvious. Nothing is real in this regime. Its money is debt, its elections change nothing, its religions of Church and State are advertisements for itself and its policies amount to a weapon of mass destruction. The police do not catch criminals, the army does not defend the borders, the church does not teach the religion of Christ but that of the so-called Liberal State.
We are living through the moral of a degenerate story. We are ruled by costumed depravities whose revolution has presented them as our legitimate leaders.
If we remember how they were put there, and why, the spell of the spectacle is broken, and all we see is a bunch of crooks in makeup.
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UTOPIA - PROJECT ANTI-REALITY
In the political technique of the 20th century the extinction of memory is crucial to the security of the revolutionary power which is itself a performance.
It is called liberal democracy but it is in fact neither.
The Liberals believed in the rights of the individual in terms of personal liberty and property. This means we are to be free to say and act and live as we wish, provided we are harmless to others in doing so.
Harm has been redefined to include words some people dislike. Laws are made against disliking some people. Rather than defend the liberal right of the individual, liberal democracies limit the freedom of speech and action to permitted spheres.
This is inevitable, of course, as Man is not good enough to be free of restraint, his Liberal liberation imprisoning him in the snare of his desires2.
To to see evidence of this you must only look at the liberties he takes when he considers himself liberated from all meaningful morality.
Why do liberals believe theirs is the best of all possible worlds?
LIBERAL CHAUVINISM - A FATAL VANITY
The liberal system claims to be supreme because it tolerates all other systems and ideas, and is therefore an enlightened sort of perpetual equation, always including in itself the best of all possible factors.
This was the opinion of Sir Isaiah Berlin, the greatest champion of the liberal idea in the 20th century. He called this “value pluralism”, meaning we have in the liberal idea the understanding that values are not changeless and objectively good but are in fact a matter of perspective, and so the wisest system is the one which entertains them all.
On the other hand he identified a second type of liberalism. This is the rule by an elite which decides what is liberal and therefore best for everyone else - the ruled.
He called this despotism, meaning the rule of rulers who cannot be removed by political means. He was right about the second model, as this is what we have.
This ruling elite is not being removed by its pantomime elections. It is being expelled by reality. It is a fraudulent business model secured by false promises, made to the public to make the public believe in them.
We are ruled by bad actors who have all been found out.
The enemy which has defeated them is real. It is the real world degraded by their vanity and insanity, which is an invincible argument against even the most alluring of advertisements.
A Revolution Against Reality
The warnings about the liberal system were made before it was fully established. People with an interest in ideas could see where the spirit of Matthew Arnold was going to take the world - into chaos.
It may seem odd to talk about the importance of metaphysics when we try to understand what has happened to our world. Metaphysics is the attempt to describe the nature of reality and our being in it. As we shall see, we cannot understand where and how we went wrong without some knowledge of what right might be.
This is the reason Pope Leo XIII began with a robust defence of Christian philosophy. This was in the first of his nine famous encyclicals, known collectively as the Catholic Social Teaching, and published by Etienne Gilson in a book called The Church Speaks to the Modern World.
Many people today would laugh at the idea. What could the fusty old Church have to say about the digital age into which we have been liberated by our clever inventions in machines and political technique?
Well, the Church has been around for a long time, and in that time it has become a treasure house of practical and spiritual wisdom. This combination of the understanding of the higher purpose and basic reality of human being is gives the Church its unparalleled explanatory and predictive power. It is right because it is true, and it does not only claim to be so.
The explanation given by the Catholic metaphysics is to my knowledge the closest match in description of the nature of being and reality ever achieved in human history.
It is inevitable that a system of beliefs with no basis in reality and no recognition of the limits and changeless nature of human being would produce the pandemonium we inhabit today.
THE FALSE GOD OF EQUALITY
The Catholic Social Teaching is more than what its title suggests. It is a framework for a political economy. meaning it lays out what the economy and our politics should be for, and how it should go about it. What should money and power do according to the Church?
They should be organised to best promote human flourishing. This is called the Common Good, and it recognises rights and duties between capital and labour, as well as between the ruler and the ruled.
In the first of these nine encyclicals Pope Leo XIII insisted that the correct understanding about human nature and the reality we inhabit is vital to the just management of human affairs.
He added later that the false god of equality, if insituted as a political principle, would produce national and international disorder and result in a total moral collapse of society.
This is because Men are not and never will be equal in their capabilities, in their self-command, in the possession of the faculties to recognise and respect beauty, truth and the Divine, in the customs of their tribes which are their cultures, in their capacity for virtue and to conceive of good and of evil, and of course in their categorisation of what is real, and just and true.
To the wicked man wisdom appears as folly, humility as weakness.
The mad cult of equality has extinguished the recognition of Evil. For these reasons as for others it was condemned by the Church before the Revolution.
So the old Church with its old ways warned about the novelty and idolatry which helped to sell the New System, and explained why it would produce the effects we can all see around us today.
How could it do this? Remember, the Catholic Social Teaching was first published in the 1860s - over a century and a half ago.
EXPLANATORY POWER AND TRUTH
The remarkable explanatory power of these old words is a testament to the sound foundations on which they rested.
If your foundations are true, then what you predict will result is also likely to share the same correspondence to reality as the description you made of it in the first place.
Explanatory power translates directly to predictive power.
This demonstrates the argument of Aeterni Patris nicely3. It says that the metaphysics of Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine give the closest possible correspondence in description to the nature of reality and being.
It says that this correct foundation is the basis of our judgement about who we are and what to do.
From this foundation the encyclicals go on to predict precisely what will happen under a system which replaces this all with make belief, made up to make people believe in this new system.
The results have been the same as were predicted. Today, people in the West argue about what a woman is. A woman got up as an Archbishop pretends not only to be an Archbishop but also a Christian spiritual leader. Gay men buying babies impersonate postpartum mothers in photographs.
Many politicians in the West defend the preposterous idea that paperwork and mimicry can make anyone Welsh or German or Irish.
Finally, the Market Worshippers conveniently ignore the fact that the numbers on their charts no longer correspond to the real cost of real things.
Our lives are directed and described by symbols which in fact contradict the reality they purport to represent. The price of everything is going up, whilst the value of everything rapidly declines. The shrinkflation of every dimension of our lives is marketed and managed by the sale of images attached to hopes and dreams and fond memories.
These are the brands that brand us on our way into the slaughterhouse.
THE DANGER OF FALSE EQUIVALENCE
Equality is dangerous, as it displaces difference with likeness, and this sleight of mind is presented as wisdom. It is folly.
When men forget the habit of noticing basic difference they can be taken for fools, and they are. One thing being unlike another is obvious, of course, until we attach consequences to the noticing of such things.
And so equality is revealed as a blunt instrument of a political power which says it despises the use of force to secure compliance.
Equality equalises sense with nonsense, fantasy with reality, fools with the wise, lies with the truth and madness with civilisation. The moral inversion of our times is another example, in which practically every vice is now virtuously defended, or even celebrated.
The difference between black and white is obvious, and not only in appearance. There are essential differences between people and peoples, and the recognition of this fact is the basis of sound judgment4. This is prohibited today, and so none of the problems of discord arising from the replacement of order with disorder can even be honestly described, making any civilised resolution impossible.
This is a shocking thing to say because it is obvious. If it does shock you, ask why the obvious is shocking to mention.
Whereof we cannot speak, the facts do not remain silent.
You cannot censor reality, you can only penalise people who point it out.
Today, reality is becoming so obvious that attempts to contain it by penalties and propaganda are insufficient. This means that a power secured by the policing and production of mass belief is in its terminal crisis. The war on reality is not yet over, but it has certainly been lost.
Now we shall count the cost, as the curtain comes down and the imposters leave the stage.
We can all see who is now standing on the balcony of the bordello, and we shall no longer accept the rule of vile imposters in costume, reading out a script before a backdrop of obscene corruption.
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I am travelling back up to Makerfield to campaign for Restore Britain.
I shall try to post on Monday if I can. Have a splendid weekend!
Thanks to people like Martin Esslin, our tragic drama tells a different story. To accept this is liberating - and funny - say the absurdists.
Martin Esslin wrote a book in 1961 called “The Theatre of the Absurd”.
In it, he defined the recognition of the absurdity of life as
The inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose.
Esslin, like his fellow revolutionaries, believed that human life has no essential meaning, and that all our virtues and noble ideas are simply illusions.
Esslin said this view of life was inspirational - and liberating.
In the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.
Compare his tragic vision with that of Shakespeare. To the nihilist, there is no order to be restored. In fact, to them the natural order is the problem.
To be liberated is therefore to annihilate order completely: morally, socially, universally, destroying our capacity to recognise difference and its significance.
This is the reason I find the example of the libertine of exceptional value. The lust of the Marquis de Sade for ever more extreme pleasures nullified him.
Man is exhausted in the pursuit of the horizon of desire and ends up feeling - and being - nothing. What liberties are taken in the name of freedom.
Aeterni Patris is the first of the nine encyclicals of the Catholic Social Teaching.
I wrote about it here.
God made the nations, which are tribes or peoples. If you object to their being created differently, take it up with Him and not with me.
Difference is not badness, it is simply not sameness. To refuse to recognise it is to oblige yourself and others to participate in the sort of lie which rots us all.
Interesting read, thanks Frank. I see this jarring clash between the oppressive push for equality a lot in the workplace. At a recent conference every guest speaker was a senior/very senior, well paid (six figures), white middle age woman who was ordered by the white, middle aged, well paid female organiser to tell a full auditorium of their trauma (many of whom couldn't recall any) but the pace was relentless and a 'i can't recall any' was dismissed as 'clearly too traumatic to remember'. When it was a British Asian man's turn to talk (again senior and no doubt had a few tales to tell) he was introduced with a cursory intro and a sneer and cut off after 5 mins - the messaging was clear, woman are oppressed victims and men are evil and deserve everything bad that happens to them. And this isn't a small business, it's a national org. The Equalities Act has been used to browbeat men into submission and shift promotion to gender and political biases rather than competence. I know many competent men and women, but only the women will thrive and achieve senior unless a man assumes the they/them mantle. Sad days, it's very very hard to fight against the fantasy those in power are forcing on us, and many skilled, competent people are being swept away to allow the less competent to prosper at the nation's expense. This is why our public institutions don't work, why our services are crumbling, why our politicians can't function and why ultimately the country we knew has gone, perhaps forever.
The real tragedy is your writing, your videos and the continued existence of banned books (history pre-liberal utopia) allows us to remember the things those in power almost got us to forget: what we were, what we achieved as we stare at the wreckage of what is.
Our current rulers, who relentlessly push equality, spend an awful lot of effort separating themselves from us.
I'm interested in Christopher Lasch's analysis of how 20th-century American elites began to despise their fellow Americans, and withdrew from reality. This has only gotten worse in recent decades. Lasch also described how, in America, a false debate developed among the chattering classes, between the "market worshippers" on one side and promoters of the deeply flawed welfare state on the other. Lately, the debates have opened up from that, thank goodness.
The American Founding Fathers had a very good understanding of reality, because they were firmly rooted in the Classics, Christianity, and experience. They were almost all Protestant, yet many of them would still agree with substantial parts of the Roman Catholic understanding of human nature.
Thank you for this essay. It has so much food for thought, and so much wisdom.