Detransitioning with De Maistre
How to recover from the lies of the Revolution
To restore our civilisation we must recognise that for a century the minds of our people have been captured and directed by a constantly refined political technique designed to do just that.
If we are to do better than the virtues of vice and the political economy of national suicide, we must learn to think outside the pseudo reality framed by the mass manufacture of meaning.
This is the reason I am writing today about Joseph de Maistre, whose transformation from revolutionary believer to the most devastating critic of the religion of Man provides an outstanding example to us all of how to detransition from the political religion of evil.
This should take you eight minutes to read.
CONTENTS
Introduction - Why you should read Joseph De Maistre
Countering the Permanent Revolution
De Maistre’s Study on Sovereignty - a brief glimpse
Why Rousseau Matters
Revolutionary Progress - A Cult of Lies
INTRODUCTION - WHY YOU SHOULD READ DE MAISTRE
De Maistre’s personal detransition from the cult of revolt to the defence of civilisation was by turns hilarious, shocking and truly inspirational. His Study on Sovereignty is an argument against the nonsense cult of revolution.
It will introduce you to a body of work which is a complete and comprehensive rejection of the secular religion of The Enlightenment, whose deranged superstitions are presented as the liberation of Man from all restraints by means of his worship as a god in the making. This is called “Reason”.
We are ruled by its fables, which include only what serves the revolutionary purpose, and excludes all wisdom to the contrary. To talk about De Maistre is to remember the truth of the limits of Man has never been forgotten, and to understand De Maistre is to realise that a system whose revolt denies these limits is bound to lead us all into disaster.
This long-dead French jurist is not only startling in his continued explanatory power, but he can speak to the madness of our times, that silent siren of “the trilling wire in the blood”, which shapes our dreams and prompts desire towards the end of us all beneath a monument of ruin called Progress.
REASON AS A CULT
The Revolutionaries in France instituted a formal Cult of Reason which they installed in certain Catholic Churches - most famously in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris in 1793, which was renamed The Temple of Reason.
A woman was worshipped as the Goddess of Reason, and a little Greek temple was made to represent “Philosophy”, which was put on the top of a model magic mountain placed in the Cathedral.
A “flame of truth” burned on the altar, and the congregation of sang hymns to “Liberty”, celebrating their liberation from sanity. The Deist Robespierre denounced these “ridiculous farces” and replaced them after only 5 months with his own: The Cult of the Supreme Being. That lasted two months.
All such cults were banned by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. The open attempt to make a Religion of Man was a spectacle so obviously ridiculous even the revolutionaries cringed at the sight of it.
This is the reason the same humanist cult is submerged in talk of rights, equality, justice and liberation beyond the boundaries of sanity and morality today.
THE STUDY ON SOVEREIGNTY
This is the name of one of De Maistre’s works on the nature of Nations, the Divine origins of sovereignty which demonstrates that the revolutionary theory and practice is crime against God and Man.
The Study on Sovereignty is a rejection of the ideals and practice of the French Revolution. It shows why De Maistre rejected it, and explains why a man who initially supported the Revolution came to condemn it.
In The Study De Maistre argues four main points.
That sovereignty - and therefore authority - is Divine in origin
That the Enlightenment idea of sovereignty - such as that expressed in Rousseau, is false. This means De Maistre argues that “popular sovereignty” - that of “the people” - is a fiction
That Nations exist, they are peoples not legal fictions, and these peoples (being Nations) have distinct National Character. This means for De Maistre that each Nation requires a specific political constitution according to its nature - and that no one form of government is universally valid
Finally, De Maistre says the constitutive power of Nations is not constructed but founded - by a Founder, who is sovereign. The Nation is not a pocket watch put together to tick through progress in time as the revolutionaries past and present would have us believe.
I bring this extract to you to encourage you to read it yourself. De Maistre’s writings are astonishing for their blunt statement of the facts of Man’s folly and his limitations, which include his inability to recognise them in himself and those of the crazed fantasies which inspire his revolting actions.
The basic argument is that revolutionaries reject the basis of reality and do not accept that the nature of man is limited for all time and is changeless.
If you read this book with our times in mind it becomes obvious how the worship of a false idol of Man has produced the murder of meaning and mandatory madness we inhabit today.
Here is the opening of the sixth part of De Maistre’s Study on Sovereignty, which was written between 1794–1795. This work is an often amusing vivisection of the rotten corpus of Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose legacy is the lifeblood of all revolutionaries.
You can read it free of charge here.
The copy I used above was this one, from Imperium Press:
Why does this matter?
Rousseau promoted the basic revolutionary concept which makes necessary the replacement of everything with The Revolution.
He said it was the way we live - our civilisation - which makes men bad and unhappy. He said that Man was basically good, born free, chained by custom and religion into bondage. He spoke of Liberation, and the Liberty he championed recognised no limits to human potential. Man could save himself, he said, if only he believed as Rousseau and the revolutionaries he inspired believe.
These beliefs, mass produced by our mass media, all promote the destruction of our entire civilisation as a virtue made necessary by the cause of human emancipation.
This is the reason our system reshapes our lives, inside and outside of us all, with a power of make belief which makes us believe that national suicide, nihilism and moral degeneracy are Good and Just, and that the lies of the Regime which rules us into annihilation are True.
It is the reason we see the Vatican now promoting a Rousseauian Religion of Man in place of that of Christ, and why our States demand we pay soaring taxes to destroy our civilisation.
REVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS - A CULT OF LIES
De Maistre shows the basic idea of the Revolution is a dangerous fantasy.
Man cannot transcend his limits by his own means. Progress is a fiction in the sense of inexorable moral uplift. Man’s nature does not change, and cannot be changed by believing it can be. To make all men enemies of civilisation in the cause of Liberty is to mobilise all humanity in a declaration of war - against God, and the Common Good which flows from the recognition of His sovereignty.
This means that all attempts to liberate Man by appeals to human progress are wicked, and will produce exactly the sort of universal damage we witness today in every dimension of our lives.
The disaster we call the new normal has been permitted by the supply of the false beliefs of the revolution as reality to the masses.
This is the mass production of popular consent for the weapon of mass destruction which calls itself Liberal Democracy. Its legitimacy is the popularisation of lies whose denial endangers your liberty. That is how we end up in the State we are in, where the mention of basic facts and the noticing of the obvious carry social, career and criminal penalties.
What the Revolution seeks to escape is reality, what it seeks to free us from is sanity and order and meaning, and what it supplies in place of all these is a living hell promoted by the promise of a paradise on earth1 from which, we are told, there is no escape.
This too is a lie, as the work and example of De Maistre shows.We do not have to live like this.
DETRANSITIONING WITH JOSEPH DE MAISTRE
De Maistre was a Freemason for twenty years of his life. He began to reject Masonry several years after the Revolution in 1789. He then completely repudiated it, seeing in its Illuminism the source of all the destructive terror of Revolution.
Initially he supported the Revolution, but again by 1792 had come to recognise it as evil - being a revolt against the natural order created by God.
De Maistre died a faithful Roman Catholic, concluding that the madness of Revolution was a sort of constant expiation for the sins of Mankind. He argued for the restoration of civilisation through the teachings of the Catholic Church.
If you would like to find out what a political economy inspired by those teachings looks like, see my series on the Catholic Social Teaching of Leo XIII.
In those teachings the Church condemns the false god of human equality, and states that any politics founded on such idols as equality and the liberation of Man from the true sense of his nature will result in violent national and international disorder and the total moral collapse of society.
If you seek to understand the ruins which surround us today, read Joseph De Maistre.
He will explain how the ruin of our lives became the landmarks in time of the spirit of revolution, and he shows you how to reclaim your mind - and your soul - from the Enemy of Mankind who inspires all revolts against the order and justice of God.
The power of Joseph De Maistre lies not only in his robust rejection of the genealogy of revolutionary ideas which have benighted us since the mass deception of The Enlightenment.
The personal example of Joseph De Maistre is that of a man who was also misguided and enchanted, and who by the fearless recognition of the truth about himself, mankind and the nature of reality managed to detransition from the trans-sane cult which has captured so many of our people today.
I shall bring you more counter-revolutionary ideas to help you and your future friends to detransition from the political economy of Satan which has captured our lives, and delivers us into evil.
If you would like to counter-Enlighten others, consider this:
If you would like to finance my fight to lose my liberty at the hands of its champions, you might consider this too:
See also Candide - Voltaire’s amusing satire of Rousseau and the revolutionary optimists. His Dr Pangloss insists amidst scenes of appalling human suffering that “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. Spoken like a true Liberal.
It makes me wonder how far back nefarious schemers, like those responsible for the continued erosion of Europe go. It would certainly appear centuries, if not millennia. There's nothing new under the sun.
Anyone that sells a reality absent of God is a charlatan. It's all a fantasy that vanishes under even the most basic of scrutiny. That's why the only response you'll get from the people who've adopted this "new normal" is name calling. They can't defend their position, because they've not been told anything other than people who disagree are the enemy.
It's been such a relief that over the last couple of years I've seen more and more people snapping out of the coma they were in and realising that their fantasy world is now a hellscape. I think the first step to ridding ourselves of these parasites is to identify them. Unfortunately for Brits our overlords believe that pointing out the issue, or indeed those responsible, is the worst crime imaginable.
I just finished a very good book which cites De Maistre a few times: Nihilism, written by Father Seraphim Rose in the early 1960's. Like De Maistre, Father Seraphim explains why we're living through such rampant evil and madness today. It was striking to me how accurately he predicted our current situation.
He describes four stages of Nihilism that developed and took hold in the West, not only among many intellectuals but also among the masses: Liberalism, Realism, Vitalism, and the Nihilism of Destruction. At heart they are all anti-God, anti-civilization and intent on destroying all of the "Old Order." He also describes the various "new ages" and "new men" that Nihilists promote, and how all of this ultimately leads to the Antichrist and Hell on earth.
Father Seraphim led a heroic life. He fell into falsehood as a young man and struggled with severe personal demons, but he returned to Christianity, and it appears that he overcame those demons. He also was impressively learned, and understood human nature. He wrote,
"It is impossible to extinguish the thirst for truth which God has implanted in man to lead them to Him, and which can only be satisfied in the acceptance of His Revelation."
Unfortunately, by denying God, perverting that thirst for truth and imposing new gods on us, Nihilism has led many of us down hellish paths.
Now I need to read De Maistre!