The last few years have seen a series of bizarre crazes amplified and virally transmitted by mass media.
From the lockdown regime to the war in Ukraine, through the apotheosis of Saint George Floyd to the climate cult and the transgender trend, millions of people have been mobilised into factions of intense and irrational belief.
All of them are extremely destructive. None of them make sense. Yet those who invested themselves in these causes, however momentarily, did so with a sort of religious fanaticism which sees unbelievers persecuted for unbelief.
How could this happen?
POLITICAL HERESY
In the previous essay I explained that in 1919 Walter Lippmann advanced the concept of “political heresy”.
This would become part of the technique by which the new international system of liberal democracy would rule its subjects - by the process of the “manufacture of consent” through the methods of propaganda or public relations designed by Lippmann himself.
Lippman was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations - effectively the steering committee for a system with global ambitions, marketed as liberal democracy. Lippmann said that the “Basic problem of democracy” was that since it required that all could vote, then each would vote according to his or her own point of view.
Lippmann’s solution was to create the public mind, providing the images and emotions, slogans and beliefs which would make up the popular imagination of what was, what is, and what ought to be.
I explained in “The God That Failed Twice” how the liberal system was introduced after World War One, only to collapse in almost every nation in which it was installed.
After the Second World War, it would return, with lessons learned and technique refined, to produce a system of mass belief.
By the digital age, this would result in the periodic frenzies transmitted through the media which are informally known as “The Current Thing”.
There is a method behind all this madness. A century ago a blueprint was written for the intentional replacement of the worship of Christ with the political beliefs of the liberal elite.
For a hundred years, an increasingly refined technique has been used to sell you a god - any god but God Himself.
This is how they made you believe in the make-belief system of liberal democracy.
TOWARDS A COMMON FAITH
We are used to hearing that there is a new normal now -with new norms.
We know from the example of Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays how these norms were normalised. Yet this technique does not explain why these norms are so abnormal.
The reason there is nothing normal at all about these new norms is that they are designed to replace what we used to take for granted - namely God, family, country, consensus reality and the natural order itself.
This man-made change of the climate of opinion represents the effort to replace Christianity with a godless religion composed of political beliefs. These beliefs are those useful to the ruling elite, and it is for this reason our world is often ruptured by the upsurge of some feverish craze whose political permissions include the persecution of anyone who prefers to remain sane.
Though this sounds outlandish, this was the aim of the architects of the new liberal system.
Another co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations was John Dewey, the American pragmatist who believed that the coordination of mass education, and public information through the news, was vital to maintain democracy.
He said civil society and schooling must be reconstructed to serve the purpose of liberal democracy.
Dewey took the making of mass belief seriously.
His collection of essays “A Common Faith” provides a blueprint for a global state religion absent Christ.
This book is composed of a series of lectures Dewey gave between 1933 and 1934 at Yale.
What was the goal of the Common Faith Dewey presented in them? According to this 1934 review in the Journal of Philosophy:
“The central argument, as those who are acquainted with Professor Dewey’s philosophy might expect, is designed to show that religion should be detached from its supernatural associations within organized historical institutions, and widened, on the basis of its function in experience, so as to cover all devotion to ideal ends inclusive enough to integrate a whole self and arouse emotional support.”
The attachment of emotion to symbols and to slogans is the basic method of the mass production of belief - as pioneered by the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays.
Bernays said propaganda was simply applied psychoanalysis. Propaganda was the title of his 1928 book.
The same technique was called Public Relations by Lippmann in his 1922 book of that name. Today we know it as marketing.
We have lived in an advertisement for over a century, and one of the messages of this rule by media is to sell you a god.
This is the means of creating a Godless State Religion. This is the reason you see people fanatically committed to self destructive causes, inspired by a religious zeal to destroy the nations, our industry, the family, our entire way of life.
To destroy the belief in the real presence of Christ, and in Him.
Today we see Churches and Church leaders promoting open borders, replacement migration, the depopulationist cult of climate change - under the rainbow banner of LGBTQ+ rights.
Today, we see another Weimar emerge from the controlled demolition of our Christian civilisation.
The technique of make belief has suborned the institutions of Church and State to transmit a political religion as the basis of our mass culture.
THE BIRTH OF THE LIBERAL IDOLS
Before the First World War the liberal democratic system did not exist. Its political religion was inspired by over a century of liberal ideas, reaching back to the French Revolution and beyond.
The Jacobins of revolutionary France recognised the power of religion for political purposes and for the maintenance of social cohesion under a new regime.
There were early attempts to retain the Catholic Churches, but to remove Christ and institute the worship of Reason instead.
Of course, the cult of Reason led directly to the Terror of the guillotine and the drownings at Nantes.
The chief architect of the Terror, Maximilien Robespierre, attempted to replace Catholicism with the Cult of the Supreme Being - a masonic conceit whose aim was also to direct the religious impulse away from Christ and into the hands of the would-be masters of the hearts and minds of men.
In the next century, the English liberal Matthew Arnold would develop this idea in his book Culture and Anarchy.
Arnold said that the world was becoming more democratic - and with the entry of universal suffrage anarchy would be the result of giving the vote to everyone, unless order was secured by some unifying principle.
This principle he called culture, and broadly speaking Matthew Arnold said that it could be produced intentionally for this purpose by promoting and supplying high culture in place of the Divine.
Homo Liberalis could be shaped into a sense of common purpose by the judicious use of poetry and classical music, inspiring him to find spiritual purpose in the new egalitarian order through the works of man - and not God.
Arnold’s ideas remained influential well into the mid-20th century - when the process of propaganda would be further refined in the liberal system by the mobilisation of all forms of cultural production to manufacture mass belief.
Instead of poetry and classical music, we got rap, televised sports and Taylor Swift.
The High Culture of the liberal system is found in those political beliefs which aimed to be bigger than God.
SELLING THE STATE RELIGION
The basic concept of a political religion was again refined in the early years of the century after Matthew Arnold, with John Dewey proposing that the buildings and ceremonies, costumes and customs of Christianity should be retained - but that the supernatural presence of Christ at its centre should be replaced by the worship of political beliefs.
Through the use of public relations the popular mind could be shaped in a way that would direct the subjects of democracy to invest their intense hunger for meaning in the political agenda of the ruling elite. Once God is subtracted from life, Man is starved of significance.
His life no longer makes sense, and he is stricken by the absurdity of his condition of being born to die between two oblivions.
By means of “applied psychoanalysis” man’s appetite for identity and transcendence can be satisified, said the liberals, by the packaging of liberal politics as the higher spiritual purpose of mankind.
PERSECUTING THE SANE
This is the reason these viral cults of feverish zealotry seize the minds of millions in hypnotic cycles of mass hysteria.
They are not only partnered with the State - they are the means of the production of belief in itself. One obvious example of how this process persecutes the sane is the production of worldwide hatred of the unvaccinated by state propaganda under the lockdown regime.
The above study, conducted in 21 countries, found that the hatred of the unvaccinated exceeded that of all other forms of designated prejudice - and that it moved in one direction only: the persecution of the prudent by the zealots of the state religion:
“…discriminatory attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals is as high or higher than discriminatory attitudes directed towards other common and diverse targets of prejudice including immigrants, drug-addicts and ex-convicts.
At the same time, the results demonstrate that prejudice is mostly one-sided.”
NOWHERE MAN
The liberal system intended to replace everything with itself. It is a total system, seeking to reform man within and without, and everything around him. All that was, is and will be is to be recast in the liberal image. It is the attempt to replace reality with a permanent illusion of utopia, which means an ideal state that does not exist.
This is why our architecture is that of an international nowhereland, and why placeless nowhere men are found as examples of the ideal citizen of a world without roots, in which the human connection to the divine is being intentionally severed.
As these roots are cut off, so all the essential qualities of life are replaced by desires directed towards the grand designs of the managers of mankind - made wondrous by the words and pictures which infuse them with godlike allure.
Under these terms and conditions there is no reality but that of the manufactured consensus.
This is how we come to live in a world in which the value of human life is replaced by price, and the meaning of human life is resituated in a sort of perpetual bargain hunt.
Yet it is we who are the quarry, and it is for nothing that we strive, as the bargains we are hunting are fool’s bargains, and the price of their pursuit is everything. In the end, the liberal system promises liberty and delivers annihilation.
This is what it means when they sell you a god.
I do apologise for having been away on Monday - and have been rather busy with the campaign to stop the criminal sale of children.
It is possible to mitigate evil, it is realistic to make change in the cause of the Common Good. Part of this purpose is public information which helps us better to understand the State we are in, as this shows we do not have to live like this.
Thank you for this fine selection Frank. It should never be forgotten, of course, that CFR is code for the Money Power who early on captured fractional reserve banking as their mechanism for control and enslavement of the masses. Walter Lippmann and other "tribal" members were the ones hired as the prison guards to make sure no one got loose.
Excellent analysis of what the hell is going on in the Western world.
It's hilarious to me that that Arnold and others thought high art would be a substitute for God. Cue Orwell's "some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them" quote.
We know we've won when Pollack, Twombly, and Rothko works are removed from art museums. Or at least taken from prominent positions and used to adorn corridors leading to the restrooms.