Mark Hackard

August 17, 2009

In a column on the violent farce of attempting to impose modernity on Afghanistan, Justin Raimondo shares a rather sharp insight on contemporary Western society:

?As long as they?re allowed to fornicate freely, Westerners will believe they?re free and won?t so much mind being slaves.?

Doing away with morality is often accompanied by unhealthy political and economic centralization.  Morality here should be understood not simply as custom or empty bourgeois moralism, but the actual relation of man to laws of a divine nature. 

The population is encouraged by society?s elites to give free rein to its passions, a phenomenon driven as much by the will to transgression as by profit motives. The resulting chaos and breakdown in all spheres of life have a ready solution from the managerial class- more government power, which in our age translates to the allocation of further influence and revenue to the financial industry. This model is promoted abroad, from the entire array of multilateral institutions to global democratic revolution, if only to delay the inevitable. The elaborate charade will continue a while longer until it implodes from its own numerous contradictions. 

The corrosive elements unleashed by the deification of individual desire, all in the name of liberty, make men slaves, first to their passions, and then to exterior forces like creditors and the state. In such a way the dialectic passes quickly from personal liberation to collective enslavement. 

Some will cry for reason, as if its application will save man from himself. Yet reason alone cannot be a reliable guide to man in life- the rule of the passions, in all of its distorted manifestations, in secular society is sure evidence of this. In any fair duel between reason and the passions, the passions are sure to win out. Reason divorced from faith is the road to absurdity.  Only in the revelation of the transcendent, in communion with higher Reason, can we find the meaning and order that presently elude us.