“I Wanted More”: A Selection from An Excess Of Love

The following selection comes from my recently released memoir, An Excess Of Love. The book concerns my 12 years teaching at a traditional Catholic school in Connecticut, the long scandalization and strangulation that sect worked on my affection, and why, if one must be idealistic, they must never waste their energies on middle class people. In my own bibulous and pissy way, the story is in fact optimistic; for, when one sloughs off half lovers and hobbyists, one finds out what the Holy Spirit can do with one’s vocation. You may purchase the book HERE.

What I saw in traditional Catholicism, and what I would see with my coming work at St. Esau’s school, was a system which could give secular modernity a run for its money. That is still my conclusion. Nothing in my beliefs changed with the failure of St. Esau’s high school. What drove me from traditional Catholicism, what I am trying to convey in this paper, is how I came to the realization that religious conservatives are too puny to establish their principles in society.

Always have I seen one enemy and one alone, secularism. I still believe the only system which is brawny enough to scotch secularism, at least in the West, is Catholicism. Unfortunately, it is the work of this essay to show how the mighty system of Catholicism is lodged in socio-economic strata which will never be able to establish it as a social reality. This is to say as long as Catholicism is strongest among the middle class there will be no Christendom.

Mission & Sacrifice

We will not dawdle on the history or legal irregularities of the Society Of St. Pius 501(c)3. Others have done this better than I can. It is not our focus here anyway. To grasp the doggedness of the St. Esau’s Project we must look at something more important. We must look at the SSPD’s sense of mission.

The founder of the Society was Archbishop Marcel Proust. He was a missionary in Africa for most of his career. This missionary spirit infused all of the clerics I came across in the SSPD. If one only understands the group from Internet apologetics and the sometimes lame and erratic laymen who frequent their chapels and glory in their pretended affiliation with the Society – for the Society are only the vowed religious and their hirelings – one will miss the fuel which fires the actual SSPD. That fuel is the missionary spirit.

There was additionally a spirit of sacrifice which greatly appealed to me. Everything could be united and supercharged by uniting it with Christ on the cross. No privation was too small to go unnoticed by heaven; no work too obscure but that it could contribute to the salvation of the world. This deeply jived with my total war mentality. Everything for the cause, and the cause was the salvation of everything.

Here were people – I thought – who were bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. They were more pacific than I, I suppose. What I called total war they termed the Little Way. Tomayto-tomahto. Adduced to witness this idea in history were the thousands of martyrs they read out each morning at Prime. And sure, wasn’t auld Jesus the only god worth a sin and a prayer and a beheading.

Diamonds for Souls

Because of my experiences at ‘Round Abouts Danbury, and their coreligionists farther afield, I do not believe traditional Catholics take themselves seriously. No matter how much my creed and praxis matched theirs, I eventually could no longer tarry with them when my final patience was exhausted. When those people take themselves seriously others will take them seriously. It is the work of this essay to explain how I arrived at this conclusion.

Still and all, I do not hesitate to mention that I met a handful of extraordinary people over my 12 years in Tradville, at the school, on pilgrimages, at camps. Wallahi, had I not seen these people I would not believe such men could exist! They were like people out of the books. For a rare few of them Christianity, too, was like a physical thing.

How taken aback I was my first Good Friday to see people emotionally overcome with the theme of the day. I remember one woman composed but forlorn enough to excuse herself from the ceremony. There was one cleric who walked the Camino so intently his toenails fell off afterwards. I saw people turned out by their families for their religious principles. I saw people turn out great addictions with the power of faith. I bloody the noses of not a few broads in this book; by God, though, didn’t I see some of them hold their family together with a will. When all of warm and massaging Postmodernity nibbled on their ears and said, “Divorce, divorce,” they roared back with Cathal Brugha, “I shall not!”

And for those divorced, as the Freemason attorneys reckon such things, I saw traditional Catholics take up their station with lonely Cato in Carthage; I saw these walking wounded from The World embrace singularity and continence in loyalty to their vows when their own married partners went the way of all flesh. The world stares in awe at these last ones. For while their matrimonial loyalty was strange to the world, these everlasting Penelopes were also written off as damaged goods by their haughty coreligionists.

Circumstances provided the pressure, Allahu alam, doctrine and narrative gave the matter, to forge diamonds of their souls. For all the overweening mediocrity I would discover, there were a few good skins at ‘Round Abouts Danbury.

First Contact

When I was young and I was in my day, I first found myself on St. Ignatius’ feast 2005 at the complex which would consume the next 12 years of my energy. I’d have been in the guts of my seventeenth year then. I was greeted by one of their priests, Fr. Habakkuk. He was a rotund man both holy and jolly. Often the genuine version of the former will naturally produce the latter characteristic. As I would find out with nearly every traditional cleric and religious I would come across, he was a man very much a credit to his vocation.

When I rolled in he and an old timer were putting an air conditioner into a window frame. He had the old guy, The Bull McCabe, guide me about the property. Bull McCabe was finishing up a years’ long project of soldering the stained glass windows. They were salvaged from a closed church, which could care less for them, and placed into this new temple. In a nutshell this was traditionalism: salvaging the patrimony of the past for the grateful. The Bull is long dead now but his window panes are as snug as ever. I was eventually taken by him to the office where I was given pamphlets concerning the SSPD by the kindly blue haired secretary.

On my way home I stopped at the Danbury Mall food court. Eating what I still remember was an excellent turkey grinder, I read through the packets and savored the memory of their hospitality.

In Retrospect

It must be understood that the SSPD(c)3 in 2005 was a different creature than it is today. This fundamentally had to do with the second generation of priests – those men ordained by Marcel Proust following their 1988 schism – being in their prime. As with all such ideological groups, this second generation had much of the fire in the belly which motivated their parents to embark on the protestant path before them.

What happened during my temporal footprint is that this second generation would be replaced by younger clerics who had no interaction with the actual Catholic Church nor the spirit that fired their traditional grandsirs. They and their parents were brought up in a traditional Catholicism which was already up and running.

Likewise with the laity. When I was involved with traditionalism we were seeing the third generation of people come up. These were the grandchildren of people who had seceded from Catholicism – or kept the faith when everyone apostatized, as you like. In any case, these ones were the generation I was to teach. I can tell you this rising cohort did not have anything like the grasp of Vatican II-related topics I understood, I who had read myself into the movement at 15. As they say, the first generation builds, the second coasts, the third wrecks the work. This is all of history, sacred and profane. Rinse and repeat.

In line with this, as the years wore on the SSPD would embark on a program of professionalization which would ensconce these dynamics. Pagan, Christian, or Jew, religious or secular, every group that has ever been must inevitably confront a scenario in their growth where they must soften their edges – or water things down, as you like – if they are to grow. Come to think of it, this is something all major languages have done as well. Religion is a group’s soul language, so perhaps we have stumbled on a big principle here. Anyway, during my footprint at ‘Round Abouts Danbury this necessary softening was happening.

All that was a ways off. That summer of 2005 I threw my energy into traditional Catholicism. In short order I began attending their liturgies, going on retreats, and entering into the rhythm of their parish life. A pivotal point would come the following summer of 2006. At that time I attended a pilgrimage which my new church organized. About a year later I was invited to teach at their school.

When the Saints Go Marching In

Before I explain the circumstances which hailed me into the school of St. Corporate Whore Church for the next decade, a word on that summer pilgrimage. This was the incarnation of everything I had hoped for, and more than I had hoped for, about traditionalism. The event went like this.

I worked in those days at a notable fast food chain specializing in roast beef sandwiches. In the best capitalist fashion of doing the most with the least, the night before my holy journey I was up late closing the store. We were understaffed. Circumstances at that time required me to walk some miles home afterwards at midnight. I did not have a car. Indeed I needed to bum a ride to the pilgrimage the next day. I had arranged a lift sight unseen with a man and his wife who would be important in my entry into St. Esau’s a year later. The man’s name was Van Dyke, the wife’s name was Mrs. Van Dyke.

Anyhow, about my fatigue. I worked late into the night the evening before the pilgrimage and walked home afterwards. I awoke early to meet Van Dyke and his wife for the three hour journey from Danbury to the shrine in Upstate New York, the pilgrimage start point. I began the subsequent 10-mile trek under moderate sleep deprivation and fatigue. I only ground down from there. There is something to be said for sleep deprivation. I suppose that’s why religions often use it. It puts one into a different state of mind.

In this triptych – the penny pinching, the fatigue, the determination to press on nevertheless – was the next decade of my life. Here too was the thing which explained the day and the decade: the beauty of that journey.

Labbaik Allahumma Labbaik

At that time the Auriesville Pilgrimage was held around Midsummer. School was just out, the baby priests were making their rounds of first blessings, and the liturgical fireworks finale of Pentecost-Trinity-Corpus Christi-Sacred Heart was fast approaching.

If memory serves, in fact, the Saturday of this pilgrimage was the Vigil Of Pentecost that year. Following the pilgrimage things got to be very quiet on the grounds of St. Corporate Whore’s, and at all Society chapels; so on top of everything there was the consciousness that people would only see each other sporadically over the next few months.

Thus for Northeast trads, regardless of age, the Auriesville pilgrimage was like both the first day of school and the last day of school at once, and the gate of heaven besides. They wanted to make the most of their time together. All of this combined with the natural exuberance of early summer to imbue the day with a fine energy for one so new “to tradition,” as the parlance was.

When we arrived it was the pissing down of rain. Van Dyke left me to my own devices, so I began wandering around. I haven’t the slightest recollection of how this came about, but I ended up in the back of a U-Hall van assisting some young men move equipment around. That year the head of the SSPD, Bishop Bernard Mallard was at Auriesville. This meant that attendance was much bigger than it normally would have been. He was going to preach from the back of the van this rainy morning, and we were getting that set up.

I spent the first half of the pilgrimage with the work crew. The foreman that day was a man who lived in the Retreat House, The Gaffer. I got to know him some in the years ahead and we’d come to get on like a house on fire. On our way to the lunch site, leap-frogging ahead of the pilgrimage, the lunch crew stopped at a gas station for some snacks on The Gaffer. I would find out in after years that this was a yearly ritual, his buying goodies for the lads. I’ve never forgotten this paltry kindness of his, and I don’t think all the guys who cycled through the U-Hall truck over the years ever have either.

Well, after the opening sermon, the step off, and the lunch set up, I walked the second stretch of the pilgrimage.

The weather had broken and a beautiful afternoon presented itself. The rail trail we were using was steaming. The procession went on for several miles. At the front of it teenage boys traded with their fathers in carrying a life-sized cross. Though hollow, that bastard weighed a lot. In time I came to find that traditionalist women loved denim skirts and sneakers for casual wear. As the lot of us were doffing our slickers, or our trash bags if we didn’t have proper coats, the beors took off their shoes. In women of a certain age the braids and bare feet and scapulars is a fetching look.

Yes, it was a pretty sight altogether: the steam and asphalt and the kids, and everyone jabbering out the Rosary and holy songs. A great quote of Brendan Behan’s comes to mind apropos to the mood that afternoon. He says, “I always get grateful and pious in good weather and this was the kind of day you’d know that Christ died for you. A bloody good job that I wasn’t born in the South of France or Miami Beach, or I’d be so grateful and holy for the sunshine that St. Paul of the Cross would be only trotting after me, skull, crossbones and all.”

I remember the sun and humidity and mosquitoes as big as a brick that afternoon. What I remember most is one young mother that day. She was with child. Herself was easy on the eyes which is how I suppose she got to be a mother in the first place. Now there were provisions made for the elderly and the knackered by way of a fleet of golf carts which patrolled the length of the march. She hailed one cart from behind me. As the trolly came trundling by I thought she looked as beautiful and delicate as a butterfly.

I briefly met that couple years later in Syracuse. The Butterfly was with child once again. Our plans that morning were scuppered by her having morning sickness. Her husband, slightly embarrassed by her digestive faux pas, was most generous in joining me for breakfast sandwiches and coffee after holy Mass. I learned after that a job offer eventually sucked the family into the wiles of Ohio and forever out of the East Coast orbit. It’s funny how people come in and out of your life. So it goes.

The last stretch of the hike was up a hill which people dubbed Purgatory Mountain, a la Dante. Some of the religious and the high schoolers from somewhere or other formed ranks on either side. As the balance of the procession hauled its way up the hillock they sang the Litany Of The Saints. It sure felt like Purgatory after 10 miles, or five in my case. At the High Mass which concluded the pilgrimage I nearly fell asleep – standing – during the Creed. I was terribly tired. The sense of completing the pilgrimage was a fine sensation, as the maid said to the soldier.

The Parting Glass

I should never forget that final scene as I prepared to return with my ride to Connecticut. The Shrine was on top of a hill whose head was flat. I’ve never had a problem reconciling the gospel accounts of the Sermon On The Mount vs. the Sermon On The Plain, because this Shrine was located on a plain which sat atop a mount. Because of the tension between the SSPD and the actual Catholic Church, the shrine authorities in fact limited our encampment to a neighboring field and parking lot. It was on the gift store side of the property, and, whatever the canonical status of the trads, their money was good in the store. In God we trust; all others pay cash.

What a scene we had the sultry sun-sinking evening! How the clerics rejoiced in their vocations; yes, how the packs of boys saw each priest a hero as they blessed and shrived and preached the day through; how the women rejoiced in their families; yes, how for one day in common – and women do all things in common – their arrayed minivans and strollers were trophies of defiance towards a sterile modernity which sneered at their fertility; how the children danced to folk music which had struck up from somewhere or other; how the fathers rejoiced in another year of being able to pay for those families. There is something in a pilgrimage completed, and a school year done, which briefly approximates for a man the paying off of a mortgage.

Blessing this bless’d scene were hundreds of sandwiches delivered on platters by the cutest children you ever saw, and plenty of chips and beer besides. It was all paid for by a man as kind as he was anonymous. You’ll remember that Bishop Mallard was at this thing, so all the stops were out for that big man with a big hat. The lot of us blessed the unknown mensch as we downed his drink and ate his food. That lot of us were, indeed, a lot of us, and a very hungry bunch we were after hiking ten miles in the summer sun and singing ourselves through a High Mass.

Since my fourteenth year I have said the breviary. There are many things in this book which must strike you, kind reader, as strange about me. This sentence is the only place where I join you. Yes, I have said the Office since I was 14. What a queer thing to do for one so young. Well, on that holy, hilly pilgrimage plateau I remembered that auld canticle of Jeremiah’s: “Shouting, they shall mount the heights of Zion, they shall come streaming to the Lord’s blessings; The grain, the wine, the oil, the sheep and the oxen; They themselves shall be like watered gardens, never again shall they languish. Then the virgins shall make merry and dance, and young men and old as well.”

By inches the day would come that I would snicker at those clerics as primadonnas, those children as disappointments for cluelessly joining as adults a ruling class bureaucracy fundamentally at war with their nominal Christianity, and those fathers as simps who could not control their wives any sooner than their deracinated society from which this pilgrimage was such a welcome relief.

What of those glowing mammies? Those traditional Catholic mothers, so young and holy and alive on that New York plateau in June of 2006, would in time earn my blackest and immortal opprobrium. All this was in the future, though. With the summer sun westerning as I flopped into Van Dyke’s car to go back home, surfeited on subs and very tired, I saw Catholicism lived. I wanted more.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

The Four Reformers

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), the famed Scottish writer, in his leisure hours also turned out some remarkablle fables. One of them, The Four Reformers, speaks to our own era rather precisely. It is difficult to say when it was written, but likely before 1888. His fables were collected and published postumously, in 1896.

IX. The Four Reformers

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

Featured: Four Men at a Cafe, by Yiannis Tsaroychis; painted in 1927.

From the American Dream to the American Nightmare

Higher education has transitioned from a focus on affirmative action (AA) to a focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). How did this come about and what does it mean?

In the minds of their advocates, both AA and DEI are aspirational public policies focused on rectifying “underrepresentation” in the workforce of groups historically subject to inequalities in education and in the workforce. The former policy (AA) was initiated in 1965 and focused on improving equality of access (opportunity). It was subject to lengthy and controversial legal litigation over the use of quotas. By 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court held that “States may choose to prohibit the consideration of racial preferences in governmental decisions.” (DEI) is a later version and continuation of (AA). It arose from several sources including Higher Education and Immigration Law. It is seemingly focused on training of current employees in the workplace, but job applicants are required to subscribe and committed to achieving some version of equality of outcome.

The following account traces the long and circuitous route by which these policies came about. My account of this transition has three interrelated elements: the intellectual origin, the institutional context or evolution of higher education in America, and finally the larger political context. It is important to keep in mind that these controversial policies originated within and were welcomed by the academy, and these policies remain aspirational in the sense that they have no firm legal standing either in legislation or in the U.S. Supreme Court. My contention is that (AA) and (DEI) seek to replace the American Dream of a meritocracy with the Nightmare of egalitarianism.

Part I: Intellectual Origin

The modern context of egalitarianism originated with the success of Newtonian physics and its ability not only to explain and predict natural phenomena but to give us control over them. As Bacon and especially Descartes expressed it, it helped to make us the “masters and possessors of nature.”

Inspired by Newton, the French philosophes developed the idea of the social sciences. Specifically, they sought not only to explain and to predict social phenomena but to gain control over the social world. They proposed to pursue a social technology as a reflection of their Enlightenment Project. Such mastery was not only intended to achieve power but to bring about a social utopia.

(Isaiah Berlin characterizes the Project as follows: “…there were certain beliefs that were more or less common to the entire party of progress and civilization, and this is what makes it proper to speak of it as a single movement. These were, in effect, the conviction that the world, or nature, was a single whole, subject to a single set of laws, in principle discoverable by the intelligence of man; that the laws which governed inanimate nature were in principle the same as those which governed plants, animals and sentient beings; that man was capable of improvement; that there existed certain objectively recognizable human goals which all men, rightly so described, sought after, namely, happiness, knowledge, justice, liberty, and what was somewhat vaguely described but well understood as virtue; that these goals were common to all men as such, were not unattainable, nor incompatible, and that human misery, vice and folly were mainly due to ignorance either of what these goals consisted in or of the means of attaining them—ignorance due in turn to insufficient knowledge of the laws of nature… Consequently, the discovery of general laws that governed human behaviour, their clear and logical integration into scientific systems—of psychology, sociology, economics, political science and the like (though they did not use these names)—and the determination of their proper place in the great corpus of knowledge that covered all discoverable facts, would, by replacing the chaotic amalgam of guesswork, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy and ‘interested error’ that hitherto did service as human knowledge and human wisdom (and of which by far the chief protector and instigator was the church), create a new, sane, rational, happy, just and self-perpetuating human society, which, having arrived at the peak of attainable perfection, would preserve itself against all hostile influences, save perhaps those of nature” (The Magus of the North, pp. 27-28).

Thus, the intellectual origins lie specifically in the French version of the Enlightenment Project. The Enlightenment Project was the attempt to define, explain, and control the human predicament through science and technology. This project originated among the French philosophes during the eighteenth century, among whom the most influential were Diderot, d’Alembert, La Mettrie, Condillac, Helvetius, d’Holbach, Turgot, and Condorcet. The philosophes were inspired by Bacon’s vision of the liberating power of science, Hobbes’ materialism, Newton’s physics, and Locke’s empiricist epistemology. The Project was epitomized in the nineteenth century by Comte and in the twentieth century by positivism. Denying the Christian concept of sin but still choosing to play God, these philosophes initiated the modern hubristic search for a secular utopia. What the Enlightenment project did was to change our idea of what knowledge is and what it is for.

The legacy of the French Enlightenment persisted throughout the nineteenth century in the works of Comte and Marx. Voegelin maintains that this is a form of Gnosticism, the Christian heretical attempt to achieve heaven on earth. “In the Gnostic speculation of scientism this particular variant reached its extreme when the positivist perfector of science replaced the era of Christ by the era of Comte. Scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western Society; and the immanentist pride in science is so strong that even the special sciences have each left a distinguishable sediment in the variants of salvation through physics, economics, sociology, biology, and psychology” (Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, p. 127).

Egalitarianism is based upon a False Analogy to Physical Sciences

Our first claim is that affirmative action and DEI are policies based on the contention that there are such things as social sciences (Social studies, or the attempt to study and to understand the human/social world is not committed to the assumption that understanding means prediction and control. Nobel laureate Hayek’s understanding of economics and the market economy explicitly precludes prediction and control)—and specifically social technology able to explain, predict, and control social phenomena. The agents of this policy are deeply embedded in the social science programs of the modern university.

As we shall see, the most influential variants of this policy are Marxist in origin. Karl Marx believed not only that he had found an explanation of the social world but that he could predict its future evolution and identified the working class as the agents of reform through violent revolution. All of Marx’s predictions turned out to be false, so Marxist theory had to be revised. (It is worth noting in this context the modification introduced by Lenin, namely “colonialism,” the exploitation of non-western countries for their raw materials and low cost of labor. This alleged “exploitation” indirectly helped workers in the developed world to enjoy a higher standard of living and therefore not revolt. The same kind of argument can be read back into the domestic economy). The important relevant revision was provided by Antonio Gramsci in his doctrine of the “long march” through the institutions, specifically a revolutionary party needed the working-class to develop organic intellectuals who articulated an alternative hegemonic ideology critical of the status quo. Gramsci maintained that the agent of change was not the working class but the class of intellectuals and that the latter would bring about a peaceful revolution through the gradual take over of the major institutions in society like the university.

A. Hidden Structure Fallacy

Two features of “social” science allegedly analogous to physical science are worth noting. Modern physics does not explain phenomena (e.g. color) by reference to what is directly observable. On the contrary, modern physical science explains what is observable by reference to an initially hidden substructure, not visible to the naked eye (e.g. microbes, molecules, quarks, etc.). Subsequent experimentation gives us access to this initially hidden substructure by means of sophisticated equipment.

In an attempt to replicate this feature of physical science, the alleged “social” sciences explain the surface by reference to an initially hidden substructure (Marxist economics, Freud’s ego, id, etc., choices made behind Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”). So, today, for example, we are told that there is such a thing as “institutional racism.” However, there is a disconnect here. Instead of a hidden substructure that later gets verified or observed, the social sciences present a cornucopia of rival theories with no way to choose among them (libertarian, liberal, socialist, Marxist, Feminist, Critical Theory. Etc.).

To make matters worse, if one social scientist disagrees with another both can dismiss the other by claiming that the rival is a victim of a hidden bias. There is thus an infinite regress of hidden structures: your account, my account, your account of why my account is wrong because it reflects a hidden structure, my account of the hidden structure that explains why you cannot overcome your account (e.g. why “white” people who have not suffered “discrimination” cannot understand “black” people but “black” people can somehow understand and explain “white” people; likewise, “white” people can understand that “black” people suffer from the mental disorder of racial paranoia, etc.). This not only brings civil discourse to an end but it also gives enormous rhetorical advantages or power over the debate. The only social technology produced to date is the power to control debate.

B. No Replication by other Scientists

There is one final twist to the argument. A number of philosophers of science (e.g. Kuhn, Feyerabend, even Wittgenstein) have pointed out, rightly, that a theory in physical science is deemed “true” or in some sense viable if the theory meets the criteria (tests) agreed upon by the community of physical scientists. In short, intellectual acceptability depends upon a prior professional social consensus. Even Hayek pointed out that physical science rests upon assumptions that science cannot establish. Armed with this insight (anticipated by Vico in the 18th century and even to be found in Gramsci), social scientists contend that agreement amongst the community of “social” scientists is sufficient to establish the validity of a hidden structure account about the social world.

The foregoing analogy does not work. To begin with, physical scientists do not merely have conversations but engage in replicable experiments that do identify something “out there” independent of us. Moreover, the physical sciences have allowed us to extend human life, conquer diseases, engage in space exploration, etc. whereas, the “social” technologists to date have wrecked economies, engaged in needless wars, promoted social unrest, and provoked destabilizing mass migrations.

C. Concepts are not Things

In the “social” sciences, we meet only concepts and not things. Microbes and molecules are real; “systemic racism” remains a linguistic expression. There is also the question of who are the authoritative members of the community of social sciences (e.g. tenured members of the Harvard sociology department?). This may begin to explain why the contemporary university seeks to silence dissent and to discredit if not prevent certain kinds of research. Worse yet, the purveyors of this view need to appeal to a grand social consensus outside of their disciplines in order to identify their specific disciplines. Either they deny, for political reasons, that a valid social consensus exists (NO GRAND NARRATIVE) or they invoke an infinite regress. In practice, what this amounts to is that you only speak with others who already agree with you and shun, dismiss, or silence those who do not.

D. IAT Test: An Example of Unreliable Pseudo-Science

Let me give an example of pseudo-social-science. The implicit-association test (IAT) is intended to detect subconscious associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. Its best-known application is the assessment of implicit stereotypes such as associations between racial categories and stereotypes about members of those groups, e.g., associations involving racial groups, gender, sexuality, age, and predictions of the test taker. The IAT was introduced in 1998 and has been used as an assessment in implicit bias trainings (e.g. in diversity training) designed to reduce unconscious bias and discriminatory behavior.

IAT is the subject of significant debate regarding its validity, reliability, and usefulness in assessing implicit bias. Arkes and Tetlock offer “three objections to the inferential leap from the comparative RT (Reaction Time) of different associations to the attribution of implicit prejudice: (a) The data may reflect shared cultural stereotypes rather than personal animus, (b) the affective negativity attributed to participants may be due to cognitions and emotions that are not necessarily prejudiced, and (c) the patterns of judgment deemed to be indicative of prejudice pass tests deemed to be diagnostic of rational behavior.” (In press: H.R. Arkes, “The Rationality, Interpretation, and Overselling of Tests of Implicit Cognition,” in J.A. Krosnick, T.H. Stark, & A.L. Scott, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Implicit Bias and Racism (Chapter 11, pp. 319-330). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Part II. Institutional Context: Evolution of Higher Education in the U.S.

Historically the modern American university emerged in the 19th century from a variety of sources: religious affiliation, local communities, and private benefactors. From the beginning the university consisted of factions with competing paradigms. The oldest paradigm, the Ivory Tower so to speak, originated in the small liberal arts college with a religious (usually Puritan) affiliation and famously romanticized by Newman. The purpose of liberal education was to preserve, critique, and to transmit our cultural inheritance. In seeking to subordinate itself to the outside world, the university would only compromise itself and become an instrument for commercial or political exploitation.

A teacher is one who initiates a student into a cultural inheritance. The inheritance only comes alive when exhibited in the living embodiment of an instructor. The teacher exhibits academic virtues by consistently and coherently organizing intellectual judgments and inviting the learner to share in that process. Teaching was successful when students learned how to construct a self-understanding inclusive of the inheritance, a particular way of ordering or appropriating the inheritance, and to do so in a way that leads to the acquisition of an intellectual personality of their own.

A second paradigm is the German research model of the university with its emphasis on the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, the graduate school and the training of professionals. In this model, knowledge cannot be in the service of special interest groups because knowledge knows no political boundaries. Although non-political, the spectacular success of this model in science and technology eventually encouraged government subvention.

The third paradigm is utilitarian, wherein the university is seen as an institution for solving various and sundry social problems. In this model, the university exists as a means to social ends defined externally to the university itself (e.g. an A&M).

Looked at from our contemporary perspective, it is now clear that Newman’s moral model of the university has evaporated or has been marginalized; the research model has been corrupted and coopted; the notion of the college graduate as a civil servant has evolved into the notion of a special class which aims to run society. It is the politicized utilitarian model that has triumphed.

At first glance it is clear that institutions that were supposed to be the locus of higher education have become entwined with and encompass an enormous range of social, economic, and cultural activities. In the process, they have become big businesses with vested interests. In attempting to encompass all of these activities, institutions of higher education have abandoned learning. In so doing, such institutions have evolved into fraudulent enterprises. This is not to say that everything that occurs within institutions of higher education is fraudulent; nor is it to say that this outcome was planned or even foreseeable. It is to say that institutions of higher education have evolved, and in the course of that evolution factors internal to and external to the institution, intellectual and non-intellectual, have contributed to the rise of a Tower of Babel, meaning that the experts can no longer communicate with each other and have no clear common purpose. Symptomatic of this problem is a lack of consensus on the meaning of concepts like “learning,” “higher education,” “university;” no one seems to know what “teaching” is as opposed to “instructing” or how to evaluate it; no one seems to know the difference between “research” and “scholarship.” We have, in short, lost all sense of purpose. The fraud consists in maintaining that all of the activities that occur within present institutions of higher education are legitimate, consistent with each other and capable of forming a coherent whole under the rubric of the pious rhetoric that appears in mission statements and commencement addresses.

Although seemingly serving these external interests, universities have become a home for the adversary culture, for all those groups that are hostile to the very activities the university seeks to encompass. What are we to make of this contradiction? Schumpeter has observed that most modern intellectuals (including clergy and media people) are generally at odds with the representatives of the business community even though academics are dependent upon commerce for their own existence and comfort. Part of this opposition is reflected in the firm commitment of the academic world to socialism even when it has been repeatedly shown that centrally planned economies woefully and of necessity underperform free market economies. Schumpeter attributes this opposition to jealously on the part of academics who resent the fact that the leadership of modern culture emerges from the business community instead of the academy. Here we have a clue as to what has happened, namely, something was transformed in the evolution of the university from a medieval to a modern institution.

Higher education is the initiation into an inheritance, and it was from the beginning institutionalized in universities. As medieval institutions, universities saw themselves as the elite defining institutions of the culture, as superior to and independent of the state, as playing both a Socratic role with respect to the culture as a whole and a potentially adversarial role with respect to individual institutions such as the state. The source of our difficulties lies in the conflict between these roles, the conflict between the Socratic initiation into the inheritance and the adversarial relation between a self-defined elitist institution and the rest of the culture.

As Western Civilization evolved the content of the inheritance evolved. Unfortunately, certain historically contingent aspects of the medieval world became mistakenly identified with the content. Given the late medieval context, academics believed in a collective, holistic, and hierarchical common good, a good to which the good of individuals was subordinate, a good that encompassed both the church and the state. Intellectuals, in short, see themselves as the high priests of the collective good The university as agent of the church not only articulated that good but enlisted the subordinate state to promote the conditions necessary to achieve that good.

The modern world is not the medieval world. There are two elements in the medieval view that are at odds with modern culture. The most distinctive institutions of modern culture are individual rights, the rule of law, a republican form of government, and a market economy. First, modern culture is post-Reformation and therefore does not believe in a holistic common good. There is, instead, the individual good rooted, at least initially, in the relationship of individuals to God. There is no holistic common good over which academics may preside, only a cultural inheritance. Universities, however, may still perform the functions of providing a context for learning and maintaining a Socratic role vis-a-vis the rest of the culture. Second, there is no one institution, and therefore no one group, that authoritatively articulates the cultural inheritance. Without a collective good, intellectuals in the modern world are merely trained communicators who might be spokespersons for a particular interest group. Schumpeter’s observations and diagnosis are not only accurate, but we can explain the situation further by reference to the medieval origins of Institutions of Higher Education. The now mythological holistic common good is the metaphysical phantom behind central planning.

The Enlightenment Project allowed academics to reassert the cultural hegemony of the university. College graduates were no longer mere civil servants but definers and implementers of the good. The good was understood as the medieval cosmic order now accessed by physical and social science. Since media people are trained by the academics, they too become advocates of the project. It should come as no surprise that the press is no longer Socratic but adversarial.
How did this happen?

The internal transformation begins with how the Puritan Ivory Tower underwent a remarkable secularization. Inspired by 19th-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau (environmentalist, author of “Civil Disobedience,” and whose support of John Brown turned abolitionism into a civil religion), these “heretical” Puritans (now a sect of Presbyterians) surrendered the concept of “original sin” and replaced it with a moral universalism in which it was assumed that all people were naturally good and corrupted only by their environment. As Santayana allegedly remarked, “Thoreau was impervious to the evidence of evil.” What began as WASP Hegemony evolved first into Wilsonian (President of Princeton University became President of the U.S.) Progressivism that assimilated all Americans in the 1920s but by the 1960s had evolved into liberal-egalitarian idealism applicable to the entire multicultural world. This view is expressed in a speech given by Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger to the American Historical Association (1942) titled “What Then is The American, This New Man?” Schlesinger declared that: “The American character … is bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish.” In his 1989 essay, The End of History, Francis Fukuyama argued that American liberal democracy and modern technology had produced the final form of political association. Henceforth, all societies would, in time, inevitably take on the form of liberal democracy.

What will probably strike some readers as an aside or a remarkable coincidence, worth noting is that the 16th century English theologian Richard Hooker’s critical portrait of Puritan methodology in his Ecclesiastical Polity aptly catches what has become today “Woke” methodology in higher education and its attendant “witch hunt.” Puritans exhibited a Millenarian vision of spiritual redemption through worldly reform; severe criticism of social evils and the conduct of the upper classes; they are virtue signalers; experience themselves as the elect and distinguish themselves from the damned; concentrate popular ill-will against the establishment; recommend a new form of government as the “sovereign remedy of all evils;” turn a blind eye to any part of our intellectual inheritance that is incompatible with their doctrine; anyone who uses tabooed instruments of critique will be socially boycotted and defamed; there is a special role for women: emotionally more accessible, tactically well placed to influence husbands, children, friends, more inclined to than men to serve as spies/”commissars” concerning the state of affections in their circle, and more liberal in financial aid; they are impermeable to argument and have their answers well drilled – beyond shaking by argument; sacred documents had to be carefully chosen and the interpretation standardized; propaganda is a form of political action not a search for truth; where they control the means of communication, all theoretical argument is prohibited (Voegelin, pp.135-144).

Going back to the medieval origin of universities focused on educating the clergy, the faculty had always viewed itself as the moral and intellectual elite. The Puritan roots of higher education in the U.S. always had as its aim the notion of the college graduate as part of a special class which aims to run society. Heretofore, it had been assumed that knowledge cannot be in the service of special interest groups because knowledge knows no political boundaries. In the 1960s, the secularization of Puritanism came to mean that colleges promoted a specific political agenda, namely liberal-egalitarian idealism associated with transcendentalism or humanism. That agenda emerged from the so-called “social” sciences.

The alleged “social” sciences, acting as a kind of “fifth column” starting in the 1960s, achieved intellectual hegemony over the entire university curriculum. The humanities were social-scientized under the aegis of “deconstruction” seeking the hidden structure meaning of texts so that Shakespeare, for example, was now read not as someone who had important insights into the human condition but perhaps as a racist or homophobe. Here is a typical itinerary that reflects a forced interdisciplinarity: the student registers in a philosophy department; instead of the Truth for which she was searching all that she is offered is tiresome analysis; bored, she changes disciplines and ends up writing a thesis entitled “The Phenomenology of Moby Dick” or “How Class Struggle is related to Paternalism.” Following all this, she will be hired in a department of literature, or social sciences, or psychology and will satisfy in turn the disappointed philosophical aspirations of a new generation.

“Deconstruction” became the origin of the view that there are multiple but no authoritative narratives or grand theory. (According to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the postmodern condition rejects universalizing theories. Lyotard argues that we have outgrown our needs for metanarratives that bring together social practices. Any narratives we tell to justify a single set of norms are inherently unjust. Little narratives have now become the appropriate way for explaining social transformations and political problems. This is easily translatable as a rejection of Huntington’s “creed” and the promotion of multiculturalism). By a not so strange coincidence with Rousseau’s elusive “general will,” the substitute for an authoritative narrative was whatever the majority, or those who spoke in the name of the majority, voted for or agreed to. As we shall see, this had important implications for immigration policy.

The American Historical Association (the national professional organization for academic historians), issued a statement supporting the removal of Confederate monuments from the public square because the 1861-1865 War was about slavery. American historians and legal scholars acting now in a post-modern idiom for whom the “realities of race and slavery” stain and color nearly all events in antebellum history, just as Marxists stained and confounded everything they touched from an obsession with class struggle, will ignore or dismiss constitutional claims about the right of secession and by an act of will confer “factual” status on the official doctrine that the War was about slavery. And since most academic historians subscribe to that thesis, it is presented as something determined by “experts.”

In philosophy, John Rawls (winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award) was a barometer of the direction of academic thinking. In his youth, Rawls was influenced by Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question, criticizing the idea that inequality in ability justifies the distribution of wealth in society. G. A. Cohen, used Rawls’s writings to inaugurate Analytical Marxism in the 1980s, and the same can be said of Habermas and the Frankfort School. In the Law of Peoples (1999) Rawls embraces a form of multiculturalism)—eschewed and replaced even the historical account of our norms by articulating the method of “reflective equilibrium” to undercover the alleged “hidden” structure of our moral intuitions. Rawls’s theorized, in a series of articles written between 1957 and 1963 and a book in 1971, that justice meant “fairness” which really meant equal basic liberties, “fair” equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur.

(The qualification “fair” opens the Pandora’s box that leads ultimately from equality of opportunity to equality of result. See below on Hume’s discussion of “fair.” Notice as well the difference between a society which maximizes benefits for all and one which is focused on maximizing benefits for the least well off. The former defines itself in terms of its “most” successful while the latter defines itself in terms of its ‘least’ successful).

Rawls’ sympathizers and critics pointed out that he had not gone far enough. Even in a system of perfect equality of opportunity there would be some inequality of result. The children of super-achievers would have gained privileges that the children of others did not. Such inequality and the resulting resentment was, as Marxists argued, the root of all other social problems. It is at this point that cultural Marxists hijacked the liberal-egalitarian agenda in the academic world.

(Just as Hooker had in the sixteenth century exposed the logic of Puritan Gnosticism, David Hume had in the 18th century in the Enquiry Concerning Morals exposed the logic of inequality. First, there is no consensus on what is a fair distribution; second, you cannot in advance assign resources to who will make the best use of them because this is not something anyone can know in advance {refutes central planning}; third, if in the beginning you give everyone equal resources this will be followed by interactions that will lead to a new inequality of result; finally, all of this will require an all-powerful central authority to maintain the ongoing equality).

An important transition had occurred. Rather than demanding that Americans live up to their norms, it had now been revealed that those norms, the entire history behind them was inherently evil and exploitative. If so, then against that standard Western Civilization was a fraudulent form of exploitation. What followed was a scholarship of endless denigration of Western achievement. Not even the physical sciences could resist. Western physical science had, unbeknownst, all this time operated within a flawed set of moral foundations. Something, later, like Covid became a social/political/ideological problem and not a medical problem.

This intellectual voyage provided an opening for Frankfort School cultural Marxists like Marcuse. Rawls had to be supplemented by Dworkin who in turn gave way to critical race theory. Pre-law students usually majored in political science (subtly conceptualizing law into applied politics) and when they arrived at Law Schools were introduced to the U.S. Constitution as a document written by white males who had owned slaves. Social technologists turned law schools into preparing graduates to be federal bureaucrats, activist judges, and regulatory agents.

To recruit more like-minded faculty for Gramsci’s “Long March through the Institutions,” a succinct mission statement coined by Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s, whole new disciplines of inequality grievance studies were introduced. John Ellis (2020), in his book, The Breakdown of Higher Education, shows how Antonio Gramsci inspired Marxists and Students for a Democratic Society, the latter publishing in 1962 the Port Huron Statement. In that document, Students for a Democratic Society “decided . . . their only choice was to “wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy…(and) consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power” (Ellis, pp. 48-52). They went on to use universities to convert young people to their ideology. Radicals patiently built their numbers until they had achieved a 5-to-1 left-right faculty ratio by the turn of the century (2000). That dominance allowed radicals to control most new faculty appointments, and the left-right ratio accelerated dramatically, reaching about 12 to 1 by 2016. The affected institutions include law schools and business schools. The best discussion of Marxism in higher education is American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas, by Dario Fernandez-Morera (1996).

Part III: Political Background

As we shall see the political context was both a cause and an effect of the growth of affirmative action and its transition to DEI.

The utilitarian conception of the university understood as serving an external political agenda was facilitated by federal funding. In an important sense, there is hardly any longer a totally private institution of higher learning. The external sociological origin of this triumph lies in the commercial exploitation of the university’s research resources, in the political appropriation of the university’s scientific research capacity commencing with the Cold War, and in the vast expansion of the number of people accepted into the institution during the 1960s. It’s always about the 1960s.

In the immediate post WWII period, both major political parties, Democrats and Republicans, shared different but overlapping narratives. Both supported what I shall call the “American Dream,” namely the view that through hard work and merit (talent) any American could become economically successful. It was always understood that a meritocracy meant inequality of result, but this was accepted on the grounds that all were then better off (“a rising tide raises all boats”). Republicans wanted to protect this Dream for those who already had achieved it and for their posterity; and Democrats wanted to extend it to those (unionized workers) who felt that they had been unfairly excluded.

Heretofore, Blacks, when allowed to vote, had, for historical reasons, supported the Republican Party going back to Lincoln and Reconstruction. All of that was about to change. The 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court outlawing segregated schooling and the 1964 Civil Rights Act protecting voting rights, among other things, convinced Black leaders that their path to the American Dream was paved by increasing the power of the Federal Government, the favored tactic of the Democratic Party. What Democrats discovered was that their power base was no longer with the working class but with groups who perceived themselves as previously excluded (i.e., “victims”). Post WWII economic growth had already lifted many members of the working class into a share of the American Dream, and this led to a steadily increasing movement away from the Democratic Party (e.g., “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s and many Trump supporters in 2016). These changes did not go unnoticed by cultural Marxists who had already perceived that the great revolution would not be accomplished through the working class. In due course, the cultural Marxists would take control both of the Democratic Party and even the leadership of the Black community. By 1991, the NAACP had, according to Andrew Young, achieved its civil rights goals. But it was losing members, revenue, and influence, so a new direction had to be taken. Blacks formed an alliance with other groups who perceived themselves as victims.

Two other interrelated political phenomena are worth noting, namely multiculturalism and immigration. Prior to the 1960s, immigration rules favored Europeans from north-western Europe (U.K. and Scandinavia). In addition, immigrants had been encouraged/required to assimilate to the dominant culture. The dominant culture was, according to Huntington, Anglo-Protestant. The dominant culture encompassed a specific set of norms or “creed” (individual liberty, rule of law, equality before the law, limited government, and market economy).

Elsewhere, it has been argued that those norms, including the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial and technological economy, had empowered Western Europeans, in general, to colonize (dominate) the globe, allowed Britain to create a global empire in the 19th century on which “the sun never sets,” enabled the U.S. to “win” the Cold War against the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, and ultimately become the world’s superpower. “English” is now the world’s universal second language (certainly the major language of commerce, politics, and academe). Assuming this to be the case, success within the U.S. (and economic success as a “developing” “country”) depended upon already possessing or mastering those cultural norms.

Within U.S. politics, Democrats characterized good government as democratization understood as majority rule; Republicans characterized it as limited government or a Republic with a Constitutional legal system that protected individual rights. Post WW II and in response to the Cold War, both major parties promoted decolonialization (self-rule) and democratization, as opposed to Soviet centralization of all power, in international affairs.

The counter-narrative, i.e. the cultural Marxist narrative, is that the success of north-western Europeans and their heirs (Anglo-American world) was the product of the denigration and exploitation of the “non-white” colonized world. The remedy was not revolution (original Soviet Marxist theory) but democratization and multi-culturalism. Multiculturalism is not just about the wide availability of ethnic restaurants but “is about the proper terms of the relationship between different cultural communities.” This is understood to mean that the standards by which the communities resolve their differences, “the principles of justice must not come from only one of the cultures but must come through an open and equal dialogue between them” (Parekh, p. 13).

This has two major immediate implications. Domestically, it means that politics is now about negotiation among different “cultural” groups wherein each group’s culture enjoys equal dignity and respect. The older notions of success and meritocracy through competition are to be discarded as remnants of bias. “Cultural appropriation” occurs when a member of a majority group assimilates a cultural element of a minority group without due regard for its original meaning and thereby implies the subordination and disrespect of the minority culture.

The Democratic Party embraced this view in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The latter act removed “de facto discrimination” against Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans and other non-North-Western European groups.

“Discrimination” simply means making fine distinctions. This is usually a good thing. “Discrimination’ has taken on a largely negative connotation when associated with irrelevant or counterproductive criteria. Several waves of immigrants had been successfully integrated into the creed of Anglo-Protestant culture largely because of assimilation policies. It was now assumed by an ignorant public without any serious discussion or debate that anyone coming to America would fit in simply by osmosis. We were told that America was a “land of immigrants,” something that is impossible. You can only immigrate into a country that already has a culture; and the U.S. already had an Anglo-Protestant culture because of its English settlers. The original settlers were not immigrants but settlers. Of course, if one claims that the misnamed “Native American” tribes were a country, then the English settlers were just another immigrant group. What was overlooked was the deliberate intention of cultural Marxists to welcome those who might resist assimilation to the creed. It all depends on one’s “narrative.”

The Immigration Act of 1990 rescinded the provision discriminating against members of the LGBT+ community. It also introduced for the first time a “Diversity Immigrant Visa” to be determined by the Attorney General to rectify imbalances. “Diversity” has the clear meaning here of referring to cultures or countries. In essence, this transferred authority to deal with immigration issues from the judiciary to the unelected civil service (staffed largely by university trained attorneys). This Act also clarified but extended “family reunification” immigration visas to immediate family members. For immigration purposes, immediate family is defined as one’s spouse, parents, or unmarried children below age 21. Demographically this increases the percentage of the population that is not derived from north-west Europe.

With regard to immigration, it means that all cultures are to be equally respected (= given equal weight). Hence, there is to be no favoritism for north-west (i.e. “white”) Europeans. This reflects the replacement of what Huntington (2005) had called the “creed” by the norms of cultural Marxism (instead of transforming the earth you must repair the damage of climate change, instead of a free market economy you advocate a managed global economy where the difference between crony capitalism and socialism disappears, instead of limited national government you espouse unlimited leadership by the UN, instead of the rule of law you advocate rule through law, and finally, you are defined by membership in a group).

(As Michael Oakeshott put it, “The emergence of this disposition to be an individual is the preeminent event in modern European history… there were some people, by circumstance or by temperament, less ready than others to respond… the familiar anonymity of communal life was replaced by a personal identity which was burdensome… it bred envy, jealousy and resentment… (it developed) a new morality… not of ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination,’ but of ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’… not… the ‘love of others’ or ‘charity’ or… ‘benevolence’… but… the love of ‘the community’…(the anti-individual or mass man, i.e., those attracted to identity politics) remains an unmistakably derivative character… helpless, parasitic and able to survive only in opposition to individuality.” See also “Pathology of Identity Politics”).

The alarm bells were beginning to ring. As Schlesinger pointed out:

There remains however a crucial difference between the Western Tradition and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes…to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry and expression…that continent is also…the unique source—of those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law,… These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.

From Affirmative Action to DEI

The undefined expression “affirmative action” began innocuously enough in executive orders issued by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It soon began to take on a variety of evolving meanings.

Definition 1 (open-search): Affirmative action consists of those policies designed to advertise all openings as widely as possible and to monitor appointments and promotions processes in order to insure that the process is open, nondiscriminatory, and promotes excellence. (As we shall shortly see, this was clearly the intention and extent of the original legislation).

Definition 2 (punitive): Affirmative action consists of any policy, private or public, ordered by the court to redress proven cases of individual discrimination. The remedy may involve a specific numerical objective, but the numerical objective is limited to a specific time and place.

Definition 3 (backward-compensation): Affirmative action covers any policy designed to redress alleged cases of discrimination against a group by placing members of the group in the positions they would have allegedly held if the alleged discrimination had not taken place. This is a contrary-to-fact conditional: it claims to identify what would happen if something else had not happened. (This was exactly what the original legislation was designed to prevent by adding 703 (h) and 703 (j)—see below).

Definition 4 (backward-compensation): Affirmative action covers any policy designed to redress alleged cases of discrimination against a group by placing members of the group in the positions they would have allegedly held if the alleged discrimination had not taken place. This is a contrary-to-fact conditional: it claims to identify what would happen if something else had not happened.

Definition 5 (forward-preferential): Affirmative action designates any policy in social planning, without any causal claim of what would have been, designed to produce a democratic and diverse society in which all power, resources, rewards, etc. will reflect the percentage of the population of the officially designated groups. Instead of equality of opportunity we shall endorse equality of result. The Hidden Agenda.

Legislative History

It is useful to cite the legislative record concerning these definitions. As then Senator Hubert H. Humphrey put it, “Title VII does not require an employer to achieve any sort of racial balance in his work force by giving preferential treatment to any individual or group.” Senator Harrison Williams noted that Title VII “specifically prohibits the Attorney General or any agency of the government, from requiring employment to be on the basis of racial or religious quotas. Under this provision an employer with only white employees could continue to have only the best qualified persons even if they were all white.” Senator Joseph Clark stated, “Quotas are themselves discriminatory.” If anyone still has any doubts, then recall the words of Representative Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the congressman responsible for introducing the legislation:

It is likewise not true that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would have power to rectify existing “racial or religious imbalance” in employment by requiring the hiring of certain people without regard to their qualifications simply because they are of a given race or religion. Only actual discrimination could be stopped.

Original Legislation

Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unequivocally outlaw compensation or preference (see definitions 3 and 4 below). Two provisions spell this out:

703 (h) it shall not be unlawful employment practice… for an employer to give and act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

703 (j) Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer… to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number of percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex or national origin employed by any employer.

As we all have come to understand, what a law means depends upon how unelected federal bureaucrats choose to understand it. The labor department had its own definition: Definition 3 (backward-compensation); see above.

Court History

In the pivotal Alan Bakke case (1978), Justice Powell, in the plurality opinion, specifically attacked and rejected the backward-looking argument for compensation (definition 3). “…But for this discrimination by society at large, Bakke “would have failed to qualify for admission” because Negro applicants…would have made better scores. Not one word in the record supports this conclusion. (italics added)… (it) offers no standards for courts to use in applying such a presumption of causation to other racial or ethnic classifications….”

Although Powell urged “strict scrutiny” to be applied to affirmative action programs, in a second opinion he suggested that schools might take race, as one factor, into account in order to achieve a “diverse” student body. Powell did not clarify what he meant by “diversity.” Powell did not link “diversity” to cultures or ethnicity, and he could not link it to egalitarian outcomes because that would have contradicted his official opinion.

Mercifully, the latest Supreme Court decision has ended the waffling and reasserted the primacy of meritocracy.

It is now almost 60 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It has been 60 years during which the university as an institution has been thoroughly taken over by cultural Marxists; during which every institution in the U.S. (civil service, military, medicine, sports, entertainment, etc.) has bent over backwards to root out any vestige of discrimination; during which even the business community has adopted or at least paid lip service to the “woke” agenda; during which we have seen that the top household income positions are held by Indians (India), Taiwanese, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Lebanese, Iranian, Turkish, and Nigerians as opposed to whites. Nevertheless, the household incomes of Blacks (as a whole) and Hispanics (as a whole) continue to lag. Rather than question the original diagnosis for this lag, cultural Marxists have doubled down on outlawed policies of compensation and preference by changing the names.

(Hundreds of thousands of Blacks and Hispanics have achieved economic, social, and professional success. There are several plausible hypotheses about why some prosper and others fail to do so. These alternative explanations and possible alternative policies are dismissed without discussion because they do not fit the cultural Marxist narrative).

Federal Bureaucracy at Work: From Affirmative Action to DEI

Institutions of higher education, seized upon the term “diversity” and linked it to what we have identified as the fourth definition and justification of affirmative action. Borrowing from the Immigration Act of 1990, “diversity” was linked to multi-culturalism (see the online definitions from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and Cambridge dictionary) and the assumption that federal bureaucrats could engage in post-hoc rectification. (For examples of how Federal bureaucracies misrepresent legal decisions see N. Capaldi, “Twisting the Law,” in Policy Review, Spring (1980), pp. 39-58).

“Diversity” and “Inclusion” were specifically derived/defined from immigration law. Immigration law, going back to the 1920s attempt at assimilation had focused on domestic nation retention/maintenance; but specifically the debate surrounding the 1965 ACT, was focused on future nation building. Coupled with America’s foreign policy in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and The End of History conception of remaking the world in our own image, it was a short step to imagining a world homogeneous in all respects. Therefore, the U.S. had to “look” like the UN. Nation building applied to or was retroactively imposed upon the the U.S. “Globalization” came to mean much more than doing business internationally.

The key point of conflict was “equality.” Either the world would aim for a meritocracy (Huntington’s Anglo-Protestant core) with its inevitable version of inequality of outcome or the world would aim for something vaguely egalitarian (cultural Marxism). Hence, the concept of “equity.” Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity is different for it recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact (additional?) resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. The term “equity” refers to fairness and justice and is distinguished from equality: Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances. The process is ongoing, requiring us to identify and overcome intentional and unintentional barriers arising from bias or systemic structures. In such a world, meritocracy becomes a form of unintentional systemic bias (racism?).

Inclusion means the practice or policy of including and integrating all people and groups in activities, organizations, political processes, etc., especially those who are disadvantaged, have suffered discrimination, or are living with “disabilities.”

It is worth noting that people with disabilities surely are victims (perhaps of the “genetic lottery” in some cases), but they are not usually victims of social or institutional policies or arrangements as is alleged in the case of other (racial, ethnic, etc.) groups. However, they are likely to be economically disadvantaged and therefore beneficiaries and supporters of proposed democratic party policies of the redistribution of wealth and positions of power.

All of this sounds like a way of improving productivity by adjusting distribution. It slides easily into equality of result. But there is something even more ominous. To achieve the foregoing noble ends, a new class of administrators needs to be created. The concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion must apply to them, i.e., the members of government bureaucracies and the leaders of every private institution have to mirror the general population. This becomes a sort of bizarre version of what Tocqueville warned us were the dangers of a “democratic” culture. Recall here, as well, Hume’s warning that a specially empowered class is required to maintain the egalitarian structure. To conclude, Bertrand de Jouvenel said it best. Redistribution strives to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, but all that we have ever accomplished is to transfer power from the individual to the state. The new world of DEI focuses on distribution not production, on equality and not individual excellence, on specially identifiable groups and not autonomous individuals. Nevertheless, the leaders or spokespersons of the groups will enjoy power, prestige, and perks not available to the rest of the group. The end product is neither a classless society nor an egalitarian one. Some are always more equal than others.

Keep in mind that universities, largely influenced by the social science faculty, had already been practicing some forms of affirmative action in the post WWII era and had since then openly welcomed and promoted it. Moreover, the demographics of university personnel has consciously strived to reflect an international demeanor.

The business world soon followed suit. In order to obtain some specific government contracts, private companies had to submit to the Department of Labor not only a bid but an affirmative action plan and show “good faith” in implementing it. The easiest way to “show” good faith is to adopt hiring quotas. It became part of the overhead of conducting a business. Moreover, in order to avoid being harassed, sued and absorbing enormous legal costs by a government agency, even if you are innocent and committed to the most rigorous meritocracy, is to adopt a quota hiring policy. Always remember, the “long march” through the institutions is designed to achieve revolutionary results by gaining control of institutions and government bureaucracies whose employees were all educated in institutions of higher education run by cultural Marxists and their allies and fellow travelers.

The number of well indoctrinated cultural Marxists is further increased and embedded (another “fifth column”) even in the business world by requiring or expecting companies to hire affirmative action officers and diversity training specialists. Diversity training is any program designed to “facilitate positive intergroup interaction, reduce prejudice and discrimination, and generally teach individuals who are different from others how to work together effectively” (“The Impact of Method”).

The Race Issue(s):

Hierarchy: Every society and every social entity has an elite who get privileges. There is no way to avoid a hierarchy. Even egalitarians themselves need, and insist upon, an elite to maintain the proposed equality.

The important question is whether the hierarchy has Functionality. What makes a hierarchy functional or dysfunctional? Answer: if the hierarchy serves to maximize the interests of all relevant parties. Traditionally, Anglo-American societies has aspired to achieve meritocracy because the pursuit of excellence benefits everyone. It benefits everyone because outstanding individuals create things (entrepreneurs, technology, medicine, sports, arts, etc.) that benefit everyone and actually create more opportunities for everyone. American Blacks as individuals have many examples (hundreds of thousands) of being part of the elite—success stories. This refutes every claim that the history of slavery and ‘Jim Crow’ necessarily hold people back.

The Black elites are not mathematically analogous to White elites. However, there is no reason to believe that any talent is proportional to a group’s size. History seems to confirm this. The greatest obstacles to more Black success are fatalism, the assumption that individuals are not responsible for their decisions, poor family structure, poor education policies and teacher union activism, previous government programs of welfare and affirmative action, the greed and corruption of some Black political and cultural elites, misguided liberal political and social theories and policies.

At the same time, a large percentage of American Blacks are dysfunctional (illegitimacy, unemployment, literacy, numeracy, imprisoned, etc.). THIS IS A FACT! Apologists automatically assume that (a) everyone is born ‘good’ and corrupted only by their environment (same way they presume that gun deaths are caused by guns not by people), (b) claim America is inherently racist or anti-Black achievement, (c) that the solution requires non-Blacks to make unending concessions (now its reparations), and (d) just in case equality of outcome is still not possible in a meritocratic society, then meritocracy has to be surrendered, OR replaced by egalitarianism and we as individuals are all to be conceptualized by group membership (class, race, culture, whatever). This is the hidden agenda of cultural Marxists.

Many Americans have believed, even before 1776, that Blacks (sub-Sahara African origin) as a group would never fit into American society. Even as late as Lincoln, Americans considered the policy of repatriating or emigrating Blacks to another less challenging environment (originally, e.g., Liberia). Affirmative action and DEI policies in a “woke” environment are beginning to exhaust the public’s patience and trust. It is time to consider that this may be the only viable alternative. Other countries are also beginning to learn that mass migrations often bring people from other cultures and subcultures that reject or resist assimilation.

Summary

The seamless transition from affirmative action to DEI reflected a series of public policies that challenged the Anglo-Protestant norms of America’s original settlers (liberty) and set in motion the current conflict with the norms of cultural Marxists (equality). That conflict originated in institutions of Higher Education with the domination of the social sciences by the utopian vision of a social technology. It was aided and abetted in institutions founded by Puritans under the influence of Transcendentalist millenarianism. The conflict spread beyond the universities when cultural Marxists gained control of the Democratic Party.

Nicholas Capaldi is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University, New Orleans.

Featured: Dante and Virgil in Hell, by Filippo Napoletano; painted ca. 1619-1620.

Deciphering the Russian Code

Russia is in dire need of an ideology capable of fighting the enemy on the invisible battlefield.

Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union and with it the communist ideology. The ideologues of victorious liberalism—Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais—built a country that resembled an ugly caricature of the victorious Western civilization.

Russia ceased to be a civilization, ceased to be a country; the Russian people ceased to be a people, and a frenzied liberal broom swept across the once great expanse between three oceans, sweeping away everything associated with Russian uniqueness.

Now that Yeltsin’s Russia is facing a war in Ukraine and liberal ideology is gone along with its ideologues, Russia, robbed, exhausted, deceived, devoid of ideological meanings, is fighting the giant behemoth of the West, which, in addition to the space constellations of Ilon Musk and long-range Himars, has a powerful ideology, tested over the centuries, rooted in the mysterious depths of European metaphysics.

Russia, in dire need of shells and tanks, reserve battalions and divisions, is in dire need of an ideology capable of fighting the enemy on the invisible battlefield, in empires of ideological meanings.

And today a hunt for meanings has been announced in Russia. A lot of political scientists, political technologists, philosophers are looking for meanings. They look for them underfoot, find them, carry them to their laboratories, glue them together with something sticky that is secreted from their political science glands. They take their products to the Kremlin, offering to write history textbooks on the basis of these products, to build a new Russian state, to create public organizations, political movements, new symbols, new songs, a new Russian man capable of winning the battle for history.

But the products fall apart on the approach to the Spasskaya Tower. The sticky secretion of political scientists dries up, and the lumps of meanings found underfoot disintegrate—ideology does not stick together.

Meanings are not obtained in brainstorming sessions of political scientists, nor in discussion clubs of politicians. Meanings are obtained by the revelations of individual God-revealed people, who suddenly open the gates to those heavenly spheres where meanings dwell. Meanings are the inhabitants of high azure spaces, which the religious consciousness of thinkers reaches. Meanings are like nuggets stored in the depths of heaven.

The deep content of Russian civilization, changing its external forms, dressed from century to century in various vestments and robes, remained unchanged in its innermost essence. It was a dream of ideal existence, divine harmony, creating a just kingdom, where there is no violence, oppression, darkness, trampling of the weak by the strong, the rich by the poor. Where the most terrible injustice that haunts the human race is defeated—death is defeated.

The image of this kingdom has moved from pagan fairy tales to Orthodox Christianity, to the fantasies of cosmists, to the mysteries of poets and musicians, to the political declarations of Narodovites and Communists. This image even now lives as a dream in the depths of the people’s feeling, not allowing the people to disappear, encouraging them to fight and build, guiding them to perfection.

The Russian Dream of a just state is a precious treasure of the Russian World, which is conceived by the Creator as a repository of this marvelous idea.

To the achievement of this ideal, to the building of this marvelous kingdom, the Russian codes are the steps up which the nation rises, overcoming terrible difficulties, bitterness, fires and defeats, each time rising from the ashes, and with its charred, burnt hands continuing to build this marvelous edifice.

Russian codes are the meanings, the keyboard on which a great ruler creates a symphony of nation and state—Russian and Tatar, Chechen and Khanty. Great rulers, such as Vladimir the Holy, Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible, Peter the Great, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, owned this keyboard, led Russia from great upheavals to greatness.

These codes are thousands. Such codes are Pushkin, Stalingrad, Baikal, Peresvet… “There was a birch tree in the field.”

But among these thousands of codes there are seven, without which it is impossible to build a sunny Russian state.

There is the code of exaction—the continuous striving for this state, begging for it, calling it out among the rubble of history.

There is the code of sacred labor, which is used not only to obtain daily bread, but also to build the state itself, and to obtain the Kingdom of Heaven, “which is given by works.”

There is the code of resurrection, which allows Russia to rise again after terrible historical defeats, and strive for the ideal bequeathed to it.

There is the code of the Russian miracle, which saves Russia when, it would seem, there is no salvation, and the abyss embraces the country and the people. Russia sinks into the dark depths of Lake Svetloyar to suddenly in the sparkle of the divine miracle to surface again from unknown waters, with its golden domes, marvelous palaces and churches to rise to greatness.

There is the code for a common cause, transforming the nation into a gigantic labor-artel, a vast invincible battalion. And the entrance to this ideal kingdom, to this heavenly Jerusalem, will be realized by all the people—both those who are still living on earth, and those who have already passed away, and those who have not yet been born.

There is the code of defense consciousness, when people defend their dream, their ideal, making colossal sacrifices for its preservation. Russia, defending its ideals, takes on all the darkness of the world, turning it into light. God entrusted Russia to defend this divine ideal, washing it with tears and blood.

There is the code of Russia—the soul of the world. For Russia invites to the historical campaign all kinds of people, wishes spiritual victory not only to itself, but also to all mankind, opens to each person of the Earth a gate to this delightful Russian garden.

The intimate knowledge of Russian codes is the essence of acquiring meanings. Obtained codes must be saved from the enemy.

The enemy, admitted to the storehouse of Russian meanings, destroys them, cuts off people from the sky, expels them from history. All conquerors coming to the Russian land strove for this. Demons of perestroika aspired to it. This is what today’s enemies are striving for, trying to reach with their long-range drones, their high-speed missiles, not just to reach the Kremlin chambers, but also to hit the repository of Russian meanings.

The Izborsky Club gathers into its spiritual brotherhood people with illuminated consciousness, clairvoyants to whom meanings are revealed. It is a school of spiritual knowledge, where the teachers are Russian clairvoyants, be it pagan skomorokhi or Dostoevsky, Seraphim of Sarov or Joseph Stalin.

The forum of the Russian Dream movement has just taken place. It was held in the Grebnevo estate near Moscow, where many confessors of this precious Russian faith came from all over Russia. They shared discoveries, fraternized, and gifted each other with their spiritual discoveries. There were singers, warriors wounded in the Donbass, philosophers and politicians.

At night, on a huge glade, they lit a fire, which blazed, sending countless golden sparks into the sky, and each of them was a prayer, a demand, a hope for the Russian miracle and for the Russian victory.

Sparks, mined by fiery, loving and fearless hearts open to the light.

The confessors of the Russian Dream, the discoverers of Russian meanings pay a huge price for their discoveries. Darya Dugina, her majestic father Alexander Dugin, the brilliant Russian writer Zakhar Prilepin. And now—Alexander Borodai, the hero of Donbass, has been hit by a Ukrainian tank. Wounded, he lies in a Donetsk hospital.

Sasha, get up soon from your bed, Russian meanings are waiting for you.

Alexander Prokhanov, a doyen of Russian letters, is a member of the secretariat of the Writers Union of the Russian Federation and has written more than 30 novels and many short story collections. He also edits the influentail weekly newspaper, Zavtra. This article comes through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.

Featured: Evening Bells, by Isaac Levitan; painted in 1892.

Open Up to Wonder

Blanche Streb is a mother, essayist and columnist, who holds a doctorate in pharmacy. She has just written a remarkable book, Grâce à l’émerveillement (Because of Wonder) which invites us to rediscover our sense of wonder that can allow us to embrace life with enthusiasm, as we marvel at the mystery of being. Through the kind courtesy of La Nef, we are happy to bring you an excerpt.

The times we live in are fascinating and worrying. More and more technology, more and more speed, more and more so-called rights, more and more material goods. And yet… ever less time, ever less meaning, ever less hope. So much so that all around us, and within us, temptations to flee the present are multiplying—by becoming dizzy in the hustle and bustle or in front of our screens, by taking pride in our illusions of mastery and possession, by hardening ourselves in jadedness, by dozing off in the drone of what’s the point.

And then, one day, we come to realize that the misdeeds we deplore are first and foremost causes to be combated, rather than effects to be lamented. And we feel an inner act of resistance emerging. No! cries out our whole being. I don’t want to sink into indifference. I don’t want to miss out on my life. I don’t want to give in to swan-songs or those of sirens, I don’t want this ordeal to take everything with it. I’m here, alive. And I want to live fully, here and now.

In this world thirsting for meaning and hope, there is an eternal science of life to be (re)discovered today, a sovereign antidote to the disenchantment and cynicism that plague our times—Grace and the power of wonder. This intuition that precedes us, we all have already perceived its presence and active force in the corners of our lives. For this is a science reserved neither for the wise nor the learned, neither for children, nor for the spoiled-of-life. On the contrary, it is the inspiration of inspirations that wishes to pass through each and every one of us, whatever our gifts or what we do, in the brightness as well as in the discretion, in the small things and small nothings of everyday love.

Wonder is an innate disposition of the human heart. Some are richly endowed. Others are meagerly endowed. Some people, because they have lived through a profoundly “transforming” experience or even come close to the end, rediscover this science of life. It’s as if the nearness of death gives rise to an urgency to live. As if consenting to the end were in fact consenting to everything that needs to be lived.

Wonder seizes us, in the banality as in the extraordinary of our lives, and plants a seed of enthusiasm that delicately deflects our trajectory, breathing new life into us, giving a different consistency, substance and depth to what surrounds us, lives within us and around us. Wonder is not a simple, silly or childish emotion. It’s not an escape from the real world, but a doorway to the essential. It is lived in a sharpened awareness, capable of seeing beauty where it is, but also the goodness of acts and people, courage, fortitude. It doesn’t erase hardship or make the ordinary wonderful, but allows us to see the marvelous in the ordinary, the new in the familiar, the possible in the existing. It keeps our eyes from losing the grace to open up to the world each time as if for the first time. This gift of wonder enables us to see beyond what we see, beyond nature and its laws, to glimpse that the world is not limited to the visible, and that reality is vaster than we think. Through it, we gain access to another kind of Knowledge, far higher than the one lurking in our wherewithal—and to an encounter with the Other. This gift of wonder can be summed up in four words—do not be indifferent. And more than anything else, it’s up to us to open the door to it, to choose to live it, to cultivate it.

At the end of this month, the Church celebrates Pentecost. The coming of the One promised to us from all eternity. The One who strengthens and comforts us. He nurtures in us the spiritual flair that clears our path and helps us discern between what to seek and what to flee, what to love and what to hate. Where we must think big—for nothing is impossible for God—and where we must remain small—for we are neither perfect nor all-powerful. I deeply believe that many of the evils of our time would vanish if only our disposition served His gifts. In them lies what can heal so many wounds and think of ways to guard against them. These are not easy times. The moral and spiritual crisis we are going through is real and profound. It leads to so many lies, illusions, irresponsibility and absurdities. “This era demands of us a spiritual conflagration,” wrote Solzhenitsyn in 1978 in his famous Harvard speech.

Nothing counts more than human faculties and virtues, to steer our soul. Wonder is one of them. A powerful faculty. It gets us off the couch, out of our egos. We don’t marvel at ourselves, or only through a Grace we feel has passed through us, but for which we know we were neither the source nor the completion. Yes, let us dare to say to Grace—Come, enter my home! It’s at work, it’s (working) on us. These small steps of God in our lives can only make us more confident and “hopeful,”

There are so many aspirations that seek their way into the depths of our clogged souls—the desire for the good, the beautiful, the worthy; to be more, better, happier; to serve, to progress. Let’s set them aglow. Let’s turn them over to God. It’s going to be contagious.

Featured: Morgen im Riesengebirge (Morning in the Riesengebirge), by Caspar David Friedrich; painted ca. 1810-1811.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Charles Dudley Warner (1829—1900) was a widely read American essayist and novelist. He was a friend of Mark Twain, with whom he collaborated in writing the novel, The Gilded Age: The Take of Today.

His essay, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” was published in the Century Magazine (December 1900), and deserves to be read in our own age.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Perhaps the most curious and interesting phrase ever put into a public document is “the pursuit of happiness.” It is declared to be an inalienable right. It cannot be sold. It cannot be given away. It is doubtful if it could be left by will.

The right of every man to be six feet high, and of every woman to be five feet four, was regarded as self-evident until women asserted their undoubted right to be six feet high also, when some confusion was introduced into the interpretation of this rhetorical fragment of the eighteenth century.

But the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness has never been questioned since it was proclaimed as a new gospel for the New World. The American people accepted it with enthusiasm, as if it had been the discovery of a gold-prospector, and started out in the pursuit as if the devil were after them.

If the proclamation had been that happiness is a common right of the race, alienable or otherwise, that all men are or may be happy, history and tradition might have interfered to raise a doubt whether even the new form of government could so change the ethical condition. But the right to make a pursuit of happiness, given in a fundamental bill of rights, had quite a different aspect. Men had been engaged in many pursuits, most of them disastrous, some of them highly commendable. A sect in Galilee had set up the pursuit of righteousness as the only or the highest object of man’s immortal powers. The rewards of it, however, were not always immediate. Here was a political sanction of a pursuit that everybody acknowledged to be of a good thing.

Given a heart-aching longing in every human being for happiness, here was high warrant for going in pursuit of it. And the curious effect of this ‘mot d’ordre’ was that the pursuit arrested the attention as the most essential, and the happiness was postponed, almost invariably, to some future season, when leisure or plethora, that is, relaxation or gorged desire, should induce that physical and moral glow which is commonly accepted as happiness. This glow of well-being is sometimes called contentment, but contentment was not in the programme. If it came at all, it was only to come after strenuous pursuit, that being the inalienable right.

People, to be sure, have different conceptions of happiness, but whatever they are, it is the custom, almost universal, to postpone the thing itself. This, of course, is specially true in our American system, where we have a chartered right to the thing itself. Other nations who have no such right may take it out in occasional driblets, odd moments that come, no doubt, to men and races who have no privilege of voting, or to such favored places as New York city, whose government is always the same, however they vote.

We are all authorized to pursue happiness, and we do as a general thing make a pursuit of it. Instead of simply being happy in the condition where we are, getting the sweets of life in human intercourse, hour by hour, as the bees take honey from every flower that opens in the summer air, finding happiness in the well-filled and orderly mind, in the sane and enlightened spirit, in the self that has become what the self should be, we say that tomorrow, next year, in ten or twenty or thirty years, when we have arrived at certain coveted possessions or situation, we will be happy. Some philosophers dignify this postponement with the name of hope.

Sometimes wandering in a primeval forest, in all the witchery of the woods, besought by the kindliest solicitations of nature, wild flowers in the trail, the call of the squirrel, the flutter of birds, the great world-music of the wind in the pine-tops, the flecks of sunlight on the brown carpet and on the rough bark of immemorial trees, I find myself unconsciously postponing my enjoyment until I shall reach a hoped-for open place of full sun and boundless prospect.

The analogy cannot be pushed, for it is the common experience that these open spots in life, where leisure and space and contentment await us, are usually grown up with thickets, fuller of obstacles, to say nothing of labors and duties and difficulties, than any part of the weary path we have trod.

Why add the pursuit of happiness to our other inalienable worries? Perhaps there is something wrong in ourselves when we hear the complaint so often that men are pursued by disaster instead of being pursued by happiness.

We all believe in happiness as something desirable and attainable, and I take it that this is the underlying desire when we speak of the pursuit of wealth, the pursuit of learning, the pursuit of power in office or in influence, that is, that we shall come into happiness when the objects last named are attained. No amount of failure seems to lessen this belief. It is matter of experience that wealth and learning and power are as likely to bring unhappiness as happiness, and yet this constant lesson of experience makes not the least impression upon human conduct. I suppose that the reason of this unheeding of experience is that every person born into the world is the only one exactly of that kind that ever was or ever will be created, so that he thinks he may be exempt from the general rules. At any rate, he goes at the pursuit of happiness in exactly the old way, as if it were an original undertaking. Perhaps the most melancholy spectacle offered to us in our short sojourn in this pilgrimage, where the roads are so dusty and the caravansaries so ill provided, is the credulity of this pursuit. Mind, I am not objecting to the pursuit of wealth, or of learning, or of power, they are all explainable, if not justifiable,—but to the blindness that does not perceive their futility as a means of attaining the end sought, which is happiness, an end that can only be compassed by the right adjustment of each soul to this and to any coming state of existence. For whether the great scholar who is stuffed with knowledge is happier than the great money-getter who is gorged with riches, or the wily politician who is a Warwick in his realm, depends entirely upon what sort of a man this pursuit has made him. There is a kind of fallacy current nowadays that a very rich man, no matter by what unscrupulous means he has gathered an undue proportion of the world into his possession, can be happy if he can turn round and make a generous and lavish distribution of it for worthy purposes. If he has preserved a remnant of conscience, this distribution may give him much satisfaction, and justly increase his good opinion of his own deserts; but the fallacy is in leaving out of account the sort of man he has become in this sort of pursuit. Has he escaped that hardening of the nature, that drying up of the sweet springs of sympathy, which usually attend a long-continued selfish undertaking? Has either he or the great politician or the great scholar cultivated the real sources of enjoyment?

The pursuit of happiness! It is not strange that men call it an illusion. But I am well satisfied that it is not the thing itself, but the pursuit, that is an illusion. Instead of thinking of the pursuit, why not fix our thoughts upon the moments, the hours, perhaps the days, of this divine peace, this merriment of body and mind, that can be repeated and perhaps indefinitely extended by the simplest of all means, namely, a disposition to make the best of whatever comes to us? Perhaps the Latin poet was right in saying that no man can count himself happy while in this life, that is, in a continuous state of happiness; but as there is for the soul no time save the conscious moment called “now,” it is quite possible to make that “now” a happy state of existence. The point I make is that we should not habitually postpone that season of happiness to the future.

No one, I trust, wishes to cloud the dreams of youth, or to dispel by excess of light what are called the illusions of hope. But why should the boy be nurtured in the current notion that he is to be really happy only when he has finished school, when he has got a business or profession by which money can be made, when he has come to manhood? The girl also dreams that for her happiness lies ahead, in that springtime when she is crossing the line of womanhood—all the poets make much of this—when she is married and learns the supreme lesson how to rule by obeying. It is only when the girl and the boy look back upon the years of adolescence that they realize how happy they might have been then if they had only known they were happy, and did not need to go in pursuit of happiness.

The pitiful part of this inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness is, however, that most men interpret it to mean the pursuit of wealth, and strive for that always, postponing being happy until they get a fortune, and if they are lucky in that, find at the end that the happiness has somehow eluded them, that; in short, they have not cultivated that in themselves that alone can bring happiness. More than that, they have lost the power of the enjoyment of the essential pleasures of life. I think that the woman in the Scriptures who out of her poverty put her mite into the contribution-box got more happiness out of that driblet of generosity and self-sacrifice than some men in our day have experienced in founding a university.

And how fares it with the intellectual man? To be a selfish miner of learning, for self-gratification only, is no nobler in reality than to be a miser of money. And even when the scholar is lavish of his knowledge in helping an ignorant world, he may find that if he has made his studies as a pursuit of happiness he has missed his object. Much knowledge increases the possibility of enjoyment, but also the possibility of sorrow. If intellectual pursuits contribute to an enlightened and altogether admirable character, then indeed has the student found the inner springs of happiness. Otherwise one cannot say that the wise man is happier than the ignorant man.

In fine, and in spite of the political injunction, we need to consider that happiness is an inner condition, not to be raced after. And what an advance in our situation it would be if we could get it into our heads here in this land of inalienable rights that the world would turn round just the same if we stood still and waited for the daily coming of our Lord!

Featured: Fröhliche Sangesrunde mit einer Donaulandschaft (Merry Round of Singing, with Danube Landscape), by Rudolf Alfred Höger; painted ca. 1930.

“Why Ballet?” Questions from Iran

This very interesting exchange between an Iranian, Esfandiar, and Julie Cronshaw on the topic of ballet, points to the importance and necessity of the arts to properly cultivate the ground of culture so that it may yield good fruit.

Julie Cronshaw is a graduate of the Royal Ballet School’s Teacher’s Training Course and has danced professionally in ballet companies in Germany, the United States and Russia. Currently, she is the Artistic Director of the Highgate Ballet School in England. She gained her Cecchetti Teaching Diploma in 2009 and Fellowship (the highest teaching award given by the ISTD) in 2010. Julie guest teaches regularly in Paris. She is a founding member of the Auguste Vestris Society, a non-profit, Paris-based teaching organization which is dedicated to promoting classical ballet, particularly the work of great ballet masters such as Enrico Cecchetti and August Bournonville.

Esfandiar (Es): Hello Miss Cronshaw. This is Esfandiar here in Turkey but I am from Iran. My friends in the Lebanon have told me about your film Ballet’s Secret Code, on the teacher Enrico Cecchetti, and that now it has 460,000 views after two years on YT.

We have no ballet in Iran since 1979 but I like it. I feel happy when I see the people dancing to that beautiful music and I would like to do it too. Also, the Russian people here always talk about ballet and their favourite dancers. I read about it, I have learnt names for steps and watched many films. These are my questions to you about Enrico Cecchetti.

Julie Cronshaw (JC): First of all, thank you for taking the time to write to me.

It has been quite a surprise, to follow the rise in audience figures of Ballet’s Secret Code, since its release in January 2021. The project evolved from a ‘light-bulb’ moment which distilled the Method of Cecchetti’s Days of the Week into a few simple principles, and which I felt needed to be shared. When the project was finally finished I could say to anyone who asked: if you want to know, it’s on film and the information is freely available to all.

What has been even more of a surprise is to receive and read the hundreds of interesting comments and questions from across the world. There have been some lively debates on aspects of ballet as an art form and how the principles relate not only to other kinds of dance and sports, but also to society in general.

Es: What is the difference between what they teach in Russia today, and Cecchetti ? Is Cecchetti too old-timer for stage-dancing now?

JC: To be honest, the only ballet classes in Russia that I have seen recently are on the internet and the last time I watched a Russian ballet company live in London was when the Bolshoi Ballet visited a few years ago. Their dancers are so superb technically and artistically, and the love, reverence and understanding they have for the art form is palpable, I don’t wish to criticise…that would be petty and small-minded of me! Cecchetti -and a decade or two before him, August Bournonville- were not wrong when they said that the light of Terpsichore would shine again in Russia when it had dimmed in Europe.

Still as we say here, ‘A Cat may look at a King’ and when I watch a Russian ballet class sometimes it is interesting to see how the dancer’s anatomy is pushed far beyond what I believe to be aesthetically and morally acceptable. This is a personal observation! I state it clearly on the documentary, a dancer’s body is their instrument, don’t trash it! Do you not wince in empathic pain when you watch unnecessary contortion and the extreme stretching? This is in their classes and onstage as much as it is in so many other companies and schools around the world.

Also I notice the ‘international style’ combinations one sees in so many ballet classes everywhere (Jean-Guillaume Bart of the Paris Opera refers to them as ‘McDonalds’ ballet’) are creeping into some of their company classes too.

When I danced briefly in Russia in 1994, the company classes were full of ballet steps I recognised from my Cecchetti ballet training and had not otherwise seen for a while – I was living in the USA at the time and not studying Cecchetti Method. The Vaganova style is different but the principles are the same, exactly as they were back then, as far as I experienced for the short time I was there in that company.

The Russian dancers are otherwise so fabulous and they deliver what an audience expects these days, which would be a short answer to the second part of your question: is Cecchetti too much of an old-timer for today’s stage dancing? I fear “Yes, at the present time”. This could all change and hopefully for the better, because we can all see how the Western world is descending into a very dark place at a very fast pace.

Artists have always reflected the society around them and this includes its moral, cultural, philosophical and spiritual aspects. Whether one likes or loathes what a choreographer puts onstage, it usually reflects some of these aspects in his creations. I discovered just how prescient a well-known contemporary choreographer is, when I gave a presentation on ballet, ballet training and the arts in the summer of 2021 and showed an excerpt on video. I’m not sure if the piece was intended to be for or against trans-humanism and the war on women, but it was quite frightening and some of the audience asked me to switch off the video as it made them feel sick.

If one can be optimistic about the future of humanity then there is a place for Cecchetti’s Method in the ballet companies of that world. Cecchetti’s training is moral, as well as anatomically sound, and of great artistic merit. The old laws of England tell us: Be honest, do no harm and cause no loss. Cecchetti would surely agree.

Es: I do a lot of sports, but I would one day like to try ballet. I see that the Italian man in your film does not have today’s special ballet physique. But he can do the steps. The ballerina is quite old and can still do all the steps. You are quite old and can do the steps, too. So, is it necessary to be young and have special ballet physique to dance Cecchetti correctly?

JC: How does one define “old”!? When you watch those of us with maturity who can dance those Cecchetti combinations, we do not feel “old” because the enchaînements (step combinations) do not require us to push our muscles, ligaments and joints beyond their limits. We enjoy and appreciate the sophistication of these wonderful combinations, where younger dancers cannot, yet. And we do not need to compete with the ballet-gymnast who can kick up their legs for effect when we are instead, whether consciously or not, exploring the geometric shapes and Platonic forms within an adage set to a Beethoven sonata. There is of course a minimal necessary technical requirement and a very high bar is set for some of the combinations, but this is classical ballet and an art form to be studied for years, decades, not just a jog around the gym.

It is recommended that if one wishes to become a competent practitioner of anything, better to start when one is young – but Cecchetti Method does not preclude beginners who are adults or dancers with less than perfect physique. As it is a Method based on the efficient mechanical actions of the human body in motion, it can be taught to anyone who is willing and reasonably able to learn it.

Es: I notice that Cecchetti seems very decent, I think it’s the word, compared to today’s ballet. There seem to be more steps to the music, difficult, fast steps; it is less exhibitionist, less putting the body on show. In the Middle East, we don’t like it when private things are shown in public. Cecchetti could be more popular in the Middle East because of decency. Do you think?

JC: Cecchetti lived and worked at a time when people were more modestly clothed and classical ballets favoured elaborate costumes, a story, and step combinations.

As the 20th century wore on, what became “acceptable” in society (or rather, it has been proposed, what has been thrust upon us by influential people intent on pushing their own agenda) also became acceptable on the stage. As I mentioned above, artists reflect what is going on around them, so ballet styles have changed too. Of course you can argue, times have to change, but one should always strive for better in any age, or leave that which is good and true to serve as a baseline from which to begin to explore the new.

The classical ballet can so clearly express the most noble expressions of humanity in form and movement and yes, simply through steps! It’s a language.

We have now reached a point here in the West where we are scraping the bottom of the barrel culturally and morally, and it’s in the arts as well. There is a profound disgust that many of us feel when we are subjected to the unmentionably vile ugliness of modern art. As spectators we must distance ourselves from it or we will suffer emotional and spiritual abuse, which causes us long term psychological damage and leads to societal moral decline and degradation.

Es: I study physics. You write on your Website The Cecchetti Connection that Cecchetti knew about the physical principles that he put into each day of class for one week. Why is that important? Instead of just thinking up nice moves to keep students happy?

JC: Without standing upon the basic physical principles of movement that correspond to natural law, dancers would, almost literally, not have a leg to stand upon.

The beauty of Cecchetti’s Days of the Week is that each day concentrates both the dancer’s body AND mind on a specific set of steps with similar movement qualities, and builds upon their complexity and variety as the dancer’s competency and artistry develops. As a result, the dancer’s competency and artistry also develop through the repetition and increase in complexity of the original basic step of the day—and the following week this step returns to provide the theme for that day’s class.

Just as the ballet class is structured with a barre and centre work, Cecchetti took the structure and development of basic movement principles one by one, and taught them in their most obvious order, across six days of the week. They begin on Monday with the notion of aplomb and progress to the Saturday class of bouncing allegro.

It’s a very disciplined and highly organised method of working that constantly scales up the dancer’s capacity to improve technique and movement possibilities. Just kicking up the legs, doing multiple turns and throwing oneself across the floor with a few fancy circus tricks is not only hazardous, but also eventually stagnates the mind and will have the opposite effect on any thinking dancer whose level of artistry would otherwise grow with maturity, even as their pliancy and strength starts to decline.

Es: You are a Fellow of the Imperial Society of Dancing, Cecchetti branch. Someone told me that it is harder than getting a PhD, so many years of study and theory, and you have to dance all the steps well too. How did you learn all the things that you know about Cecchetti ? Who are the teachers who were your guides?

JC: I could not comment on a comparison of the difficulties of becoming a Fellow in the Cecchetti Method with the challenges of attaining a PhD! When one has danced classical ballet all one’s life, and then teaches, at some point it becomes either an obvious or natural progression to study in depth the Method learned for so many years.

I am thankful to all my many ballet teachers for sharing their years of experience, knowledge and wisdom. I was not Cecchetti-trained as a child, and when I lived in the USA I was a professional dancer, working with my former husband, whose career was with American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet.

As a student at the Royal Ballet School, I studied with the internationally-renowned Cecchetti teacher Richard Glasstone and then trained on and off with him over many years.

Roger Tully has been the most profoundly influential ballet teacher I have ever worked with, and he taught a completely different style of ballet class, but always stated the principles.

It was because of his teaching that I put two and two together and realised the underlying principles behind Cecchetti’s Days of the Week. In 2007, I was lucky enough to be asked to join the Société Auguste Vestris, a not-for-profit teaching society in Paris, whose founder is a woman of exceptional intellectual and practical capabilities, Katharine Kanter. The extraordinary people that Katharine knows from around the world and has brought together—either to become part of the society or to give presentations and workshops—has stimulated a quest for knowledge, and for certain it sparked off a latent intellectual predisposition that sent me down the path I’ve been on ever since!

Thanks to Katharine, a series of lucky happenstances, useful contacts and the financial support from the AV Society, I was able to persuade two dancers to take part in the film and find the spaces and the time to rehearse them. Then the film itself gradually came together! I read all I could find on Cecchetti and his contemporaries. His life story often provides a background context when I am occasionally asked to write an article for a Cecchetti or other dance journal.

Es: I have watched many films from the 50s and 60s. For example, Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes in The Swan Lake, 1960. The music is very fast, faster than today. But she can do all the steps in time, very fast “inside” turns and very fast backbend, or else tilting sideways or forwards on one leg off-balance. She was old then, 40, but she doesn’t seem worried. Her muscles are pretty; she doesn’t look athletic. Today, the girls look like sportswomen with big muscles, they are tense and push the steps hard. Why is that? Is ballet a sport?

JC: Margot Fonteyn was not only an artist of the highest level but also a very special human being, according to the anecdotes of those who knew and worked with her. The artist reflects their state of being and doing through their art. Dancers today are not educated to think and act either inside or outside of the studio, in the way that Fonteyn did.

During the decades that Fonteyn was a prima ballerina, Cecchetti Method was still being taught extensively in London, for example at the Royal Ballet School even though the Founder and Director of the Royal Ballet company at that time, Dame Ninette de Valois, was already looking around internationally for teachers and dancers to enhance the technical level of the company, its prestige and global appeal. The style of the Royal Ballet, exemplified by the choreography of Frederick Ashton, showed intricate footwork, lyrical lines and fluid port de bras. It developed as a combination of the teaching of the first and second generation of Cecchetti trained dancers, Ballets Russes emigres, and other independent ballet teachers from around the world.

This style of dancing depended upon step choreography and gestures to convey a story or sometimes an abstract idea. It was the way things were done in those days, and it wasn’t the fashion to dance onstage in one’s underwear. Nor to kick the legs up and perform ballet tricks for sensational effect. This is maybe why dancers today push so hard and have the big muscles and dance like it’s a sport: the training encourages effect and show, not so much anymore the crystallisation into form of an idea or ideal from the realm of the imagination, and projected through the highly contrived – and perfectly suited for it- environment of the theatre stage.

As a side note, one cannot say that dancers from those mid 20th century decades could not do the tricks, like the fouettés and so on, of course they could, but there was another aesthetic that took precedence over the effects. Technique was used as a means to an end not its end. Ballet is an art not a sport.

Es: I have also watched the Russian ballet films from the 50s and 60s. I enjoy to see the girls like Svetlana Efremova or Gabriela Komleva. Other girls are good too. They could do anything, jump high, criss-cross very fast with the feet, also doing very hard steps on their toe-tips. They seem better than the girls today, stronger, telling about the music, and also, making it look easy. Why is that?

JC: They are fabulous yes aren’t they? The technique taught in those days was more likely focused on step combinations and different kinds of steps rather than stretching and effects, as I’ve tried to explain in replying to your previous question! When one takes up more time in class stretching at the barre, obsessing over the height of an arabesque, hitting those numbers for pirouettes and wondering how one is going to look wearing not much more than a leotard or shorts that evening onstage, it must surely change one’s approach to training!

I have a theory that the rampant narcissism in society and especially in the ballet, is in no small part, brought about by the ongoing unpleasant cultural changes being forced upon us at all levels, the abusive, un-education system, the horrendous global situation, political lawlessness and the pervading sense of uncertainty in the world that dancers pick up upon because they are artists and reflect that which is around them.

Es: I have watched films with American men dancing classical ballet now. Their leg muscles seem bulged up, especially the quadriceps, and they seem to put the weight to their toes. I am a sportsman and I don’t put the weight on my toes. The American men are thin but they look heavy. Why is that?

JC: The body is a heavy and solid object! When one puts weight over the toes the direction of force is directed downwards and the effort required to shift it is more than when the weight is distributed about the central axis – and where the musculature in the torso can be more efficiently directed.

When the legs do more work proportionately to that of the torso it becomes obvious that the muscles in the legs will develop disproportionately to the muscles in the torso.

Es: Does Cecchetti have special steps, special training, for men ? Do the feet have to be pointing outwards as much as in modern ballet which is 180°?

JC: There are lovely combinations for the male dancer including long, sustained adages, some choreographed and complex others using simple repetition of movements and poses in the basic directions of the body. There are slow adagio pirouettes (turns) and fast, virtuosity pirouettes, for which the Maestro was renowned in his dancing years, and all sorts of jumps, not just the big leaps across the stage but bouncing combinations (in the style of Bournonville), petite and grande batterie (criss-crossing the legs in beats close to, or farther off the floor)) and unusual, off-balance combinations that wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary class!

No, the feet do not have to be turned out to 180 degrees, and Cecchetti’s 5th position doesn’t over- cross, which helps to keep the legs turned out at the thigh and facilitates speed.

Es: I saw your “Tips for a Ballet Teacher.” You talk about renversé (bending strongly and turning upon oneself, either towards (en dedans) or away (en-dehors) from the standing leg). I don’t understand how you can hold off-balance like that while moving downwards or turning. You don’t fall down. Is it special muscles you use? Or is it the move that helps you?

JC: It’s the momentum of the turn generated by the torso, the correct carriage and use of the head as it’s heavy, and the coordination of the legs and arms, all of which are vital for carrying the momentum of the renversé and enabling the recovery, especially if it’s into a position of extension en l’air (the gesture leg is fully stretched and held in the air), as in renversé en dedans.

Es: I saw that Lebanese teenagers have sent you a video of a ballet they made up, to honour Cecchetti, after they watched your film. Please tell about that.

JC: The YouTube video made by this couple (who were young but not teenagers, if I recall!) was made during one of the Covid lockdowns. They rehearsed and produced a pas de deux in the summer heat, in a ruined building which was little more than a shell, and the piece they created, was very simply and honestly done, sincere and very artistic. I was contacted through the Ballet’s Secret Code e-mail address and sent the link. It reminded me of what Roger Tully used to say in class sometimes, and it would be said not in irony, but as a high compliment:

“It could almost be dancing!”

Featured: Anna Pavlova in the Ballet Sylphyde, by Valentin Serov; painted in 1909.

The World Economic Forum is a Dangerous Religious Cult

For more than 30 years, Mikko Paunio has studied the new-old nature pantheism that was born in the UN framework, with its partners the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum. This religion has largely replaced Christianity in Western countries. Nature pantheism specifically draws from the “wisdom” of theosophy, which is based on the esotericism and occultism of the world’s most famous con artist, Madame Blavatsky, who claimed to have discovered the “lost truth” that unites world religions.

Many Christians around the world have been worried about the rise of nature pantheism for decades and have harshly criticized church fathers who have stumbled into the new religion, such as the Pope. As an agnostic and a former long-term social democrat, Mr. Paunio finds myself in allegiance with these Christians, because these Christians do not mix faith and reality like nature believers do.

This is the story of how the wacko Temple overlords of Davos (the WEF) took over the world and how the coming winter’s trials, arising from Europe’s green energy reality, and how the trials will trash these wackos’ Great Environment Narrative.

This article was originally given on October 1, 2022, as a commissioned presentation in Finnish, at Mediapolis Tampere, in a Symposium entitled, “Salattu valta”[“Occult Power”].

Esotericists Participate in Social Discussions Covertly, Lest their Hoax-Thinking be Revealed

In the mid-1980s, I did my doctoral dissertation on vaccination compliance and vaccination coverage in the MMR project. The MMR project eliminated measles, mumps and rubella from Finland. In the last part of my dissertation, we sent a letter to the parents of 70,000 unvaccinated children, in which we detailed the aforementioned diseases and their public health significance. Within a week, Helsingin Sanomat (Finland’s The Guardian) published a letter to the editor written by an unknown lady stating that the MMR vaccination is unnecessary, because recent studies have shown that tenderness towards children raises antibodies against these diseases. A few years later, I sat on the Helsinki Health Board as a social democrat politician with the husband of the woman in question, among others. Both he and his wife were esotericists and occultists and had adopted the cult of Rudolf Steiner i.e., Anthroposophy. Later I found out that the author of the letter has translated a large amount of German anthroposophical medical literature into Finnish, including crystal, zone, aroma, and other homeopathy-like therapies. In effect, the occultists have very well positioned themselves—not only in Finland but in the whole world—and that their influence is enormous, considering that in my dissertation I showed that their share of parents was only one tenth of one percent.

Occultists always operate surreptitiously, i.e., they rarely reveal in public their real beliefs, because the justifications for their policy recommendations are so irrational that it is better to be silent about them. However, they make mistakes in the public sphere from time to time, which eventually turns the public against them. Helsingin Sanomat’s readers never got to know the background and motives behind the letter.

The Thinking of Occultists is Based on Nonsense Dressed up as Science

The Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner, who died in 1926, saw a vision in one of his inner-space flights, and told about his vision in his 1910 lecture in Hamburg, “Natural and Accidental Illness in Relationship to Karma;” that it is favourable, in terms of an individual’s soul journey, that the body contracts measles during childhood. Due to the extremely high contagiousness of measles, it has had an even greater influence in reducing the size of the populations in the history of mankind than the more deadly smallpox, which was less contagious and occurred later and less frequently in life than measles. The aforementioned letter-writer’s whimsical beliefs and their background caught my attention, as a measles expert, and which led to a decades-long interest in the irrational thinking of occultists and the social dangers associated with it.

According to historian Anna Bramwell, a third of the Nazi inner circle were anthroposophists and that greenness was an essential part of the Nazi ideology (Figure 1). A representative figure of the Nazi faction, August Haussleiter, in the first party congress of the German Greens, was chosen to its first presidium. During the party conference in Offenbach in 1979 Haussleiter crafted the politically significant green operational theses (ecology, social, grassroot democracy, non-violence) , which the Finnish Greens copied into their own programs as such, as did other green parties around the world.

Figure 1. August Haussleiter (right), a representative of the Nazi faction, in the first meeting, in 1979, in Offenbach, of The Greens, became the chairman of the German Green Party along with Petra Kelly and Herbert Norman. Haussleiter wrote the politically significant green operational theses (ecology, social, grass root democracy, non-violence), which the Finnish Greens, along with other Green parties around the world, also copied into their programs as such. (From Mikko Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.

Anthroposophy is often promoted as being science, even though it is nonsense. In what follows, I will cover a lot of things, the essence of which is that ultimately global agendas based on esotericism and occultism or, more simply, the new nature pantheism, are nuts and therefore socially dangerous. Thus, for example, the policy demand of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, which it has imposed on itself i.e., carbon neutrality by 2030, is ultimately cruel and unethical, as I will show.

The Environmental Policies of the UN, the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum are Esoteric Nonsense

The justifications of the UN and the World Economic Forum’s anti-enlightenment global policies, aimed at subjugating people, are dressed in the form of science, even though they are based on esotericism and the occult and are therefore only the irrational thinking of fools. The central tenets of environment, i.e., climate change and loss of nature, have been credibly dressed in the form of science with the help of the mainstream media. However, the key actors of the World Economic Forum have made big mistakes over the past few years, which will ultimately compromise their pseudo-science narrative of doom and gloom.

Back in 1991, in my first book, Vihreä valhe [The Green Lie], I made the observation that a large part of the activists of the neo-Malthusian Green anti science movement were attracted to anthroposophy or the more original occult thought, i.e., theosophy. Member of the European Parliament and Vice President of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala (Green League) was, for example, the long-time editorial secretary of the theosophical magazine Ruusu Risti, and Pekka Haavisto (Green League) and Finland’s current foreign minister—who has admitted that he was fascinated by Rudolf Steiner’s The Gospel of St John, a work that has nothing to do—despite its name—with Christianity. Anthroposophy separated from Theosophy about 120 years ago, forming its own occultist sect.

Esoteric: Personal. Occult: Hidden or Secret

What is esotericism and occultism? Esoteric means personal, which was described by the singer Pekka Streng, who died young, in his song “Inside me, I found the gate” from 1970. Divinity is in man himself, which can be found through contemplation and meditation with inner-space flights. As an agnostic and as a secular person, I find myself on the same front with devout Christians, because these Christians don’t mix religion and reality like the WEF occultists do, and because I believe these wacko temple overlords are very dangerous folks.

The origin of the emerging nature pantheism, can be found in the esoteric fabrications of the world’s most famous deceiver ever, Madame Blavatsky, at the latter half of the 19th century, although esotericism has itself a long history dating back to the Kabbalah. Blavatsky lied that she had been to Tibet and had found the long-lost truth there with the help of local gurus. With the help of her truths, she held spiritualistic sessions for people who lost their loved ones, where they contacted the other side, or did masterful eye-rolling tricks, believing that she was capable of miracles. She was finally caught when a professional British magician named John Maskelyne exposed Madame’s tricks to the whole world in 1912 with his book The Fraud of Modern “Theosophy” Exposed: A Brief History of the Greatest Imposture Ever Perpetrated Under the Cloak of Religion. However, the hype sold and many Finnish artists were also in love with Madame Blavatsky, such as Akseli Gallen Kallela.

The Covert Influence of Esotericists

When I was a young medical researcher, I became one of the secretaries of the Prime Minister’s Energy Committee in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in Finland. I myself and the other secretaries had to read an endless handwritten stream-of-consciousness from a committee member called Pentti Malaska, professor of future studies at Turku University of Economics and Business. He was later revealed to have been an occultist. Malaska was also Finland’s Mr. Club of Rome, in the Finnish Chapter of the Club of Rome. In the early 1990s, Malaska had almost an unlimited access to Finnish mainstream media as an energy policy expert, and he was perhaps the most central player when the new 5th nuclear power plant crashed in 1993 in a parliamentary vote. All his handwritten antinuclear comments were nonsensical and useless to us secretaries when we wrote a report to support the conclusions of the Energy Committee released in 1988. The final report of the committee laid the foundations so that Finland decided to accelerate her nuclear program in 2002, despite heavy antinuclear campaigning by the Green League and its allies.

The Wacko Ideas of Well-Known Finnish Futurists

Pentti Malaska, who passed away in 2012, was the chairman of the World Future Research Association in the 1990s. He spoke in 1997 at the association’s Brisbane meeting in Australia. In his speech, he predicted, for example, the emergence of a non-carbon-based new machine Man and made a forecast that the Internet will become the revolutionizing quantum brain of global consciousness. In dressing this theosophical esotericism in new transhumanist patterns and clothes, Pentti Malaska’s fellow esotericist and self-professed economist Paul Wildman, who has been involved in the UN future research programs, further developed Malaska’s ideas by quoting Malaska on a transhumanist platform.

Figure 2. The UN and Finland’s future research is a sandbox for occult mystics. (Figure is from Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.

Wildman created four new machine-human categories for transhumanists which, according to Wildman, they come from outer space: 1) Etorgs, 2) Macrorgs, 3) MVorgs and 4) Psyorgs. Etorgs are lizard-like human-hostile extraterrestrial organisms known from Hollywood films, i.e., classic UFOs, Macrorgs are perhaps even galactic life entities according to the Gaia theory, which classifies the Earth as a living organism. MVorgs are apparently micro-life forms, born from bits of consciousness, and finally Psyorgs are angels, draculas and the like, born from the existence of non-material consciousness. Let us remember that Rudolf Steiner presented the true spiritual order of the world, which included angels, seraphim, cherubim, luciferic spirits, astral storms and etheric bodies.

The current dominant religion of Western industrialized countries, i.e., nature pantheism is based on esotericism and occultism, and has been promoted in the Club of Rome, the World Economic Forum and in the UN for decades.

Nature pantheism, which has become a political state religion in Western countries, has had a strong hold from the beginning, in the UN framework of sustainable development and its supporting partners, such as the World Economic Forum or the Club of Rome.

The movement that led to the current neo-Malthusian green dystopian development got a major kick-off by the Club of Rome with the famous 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, which predicted world destruction (Figure 3). The founder of the Club of Rome, the wealthy Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei, was an occultist and esotericist. For this reason, it is not at all surprising that esotericism has been rampant in the Finnish section of Club of Rome, whose many members have been awarded Aurelio Peccei medals.

Aurelio Peccei, Theosophist

Aurelio Peccei’s 1977 book, The Human Quality, reveals his worldview based on Theosophy and the discovery of the inner self, like the songwriter Pekka Streng. According to Peccei’s understanding, the crisis of humanity is related to man’s inability to understand his role in a changed world. We are neither psychologically nor functionally adapted to life in our new demanding role. According to Peccei, the Achilles heel of humanity is finding a place in a renewed world. For Peccei, the solution to global problems can be found inside man and not outside him. The change that takes place from within a benevolent, albeit destructively behaving person and the spiritualization of his human image, contains the keys to the solution.

Figure 3. The founder of the Club of Rome, an Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei, was a theosophist, who had stumbled upon Madame Blavatsky’s hoax. (From Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.

The new humanism was enough for Peccei, unlike his close collaborator, Ervin Laszlo, who in his careless enthusiasm for transhumanism got sidetracked and eventually had to found his own club. No worries, because this promoter of humbug was later chosen to become scientific advisor to the Director-General of the UN Educational and Scientific Organization, UNESCO. Peccei’s new humanism promoted the distribution of wealth from north to south, in the name of world peace. He also emphasized reducing the powers of states and transferring it to supranational bodies such as the UN. Peccei envisioned a new kind of governing system for the whole world and considered the sovereignty of states to be a big problem. He strongly believed that the surrounding reality forced a person’s inner change and salvation; but he believed that the inner change of a person would take decades before the masses would be taught to live as well-behaving citizens in the Global Empire of Man dreamed up by Peccei.

From the beginning, the World Economic Forum committed itself to promoting the neo-Malthusian environmental agenda as a partner of the United Nations, idealizing poverty and borrowing ideas from the Club of Rome.

Klaus Schwab, the current head of the World Economic Forum, founded his organization on the recommendation of Henry Kissinger, the economic Nobel laureate John Kenneth Galbraith and the real Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, in 1971, apparently partly relying on CIA grants already in the mid-1960s, according to investigative journalist John Vedmore in his recent long article, “Dr. Klaus Schwab or: How the CFR Taught Me to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The original purpose of the WEF was to secure US hegemony in Western Europe.

Early on, Klaus Schwab recruited the by far ever most influential unelected UN environment official, Maurice Strong, a wealthy, un-educated Canadian industrialist (1929–2015), to head the WEF foundation. Maurice Strong was THE central figure in pushing forward the sustainable development agenda since the UN’s first environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972 (Figure 4). He was also an inveterate occultist and esotericist.

Figure 4. The UN’s most influential unelected environment official Maurice Strong, who died in 2015, was appointed as director of the WEF Foundation early on. He was an inveterate occultist and esotericist. He acquired one million dollars from the UN food for oil program meant for the children of Iraq without consequences. (From Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.

Baca Grande: The Wizard’s Big Mistake

The actual slip-up happened in 1990, when a Canadian journalist named Daniel Wood got to spend a week at the home of Maurice Strong and his wife Hanne on the Baca Grande farm in the state of Colorado, USA. Wood wrote a long essay about the visit in the Canada West magazine, entitled, “The Wizard of Baca Grande.” It turned out that Strong and his wife had bought the Baca Grande farm in the southern part of the state of Colorado in 1978 and had built a nature pantheistic sanctuary of all the religions of the world, i.e., Theosophy, in this once one of the largest ranches in the USA. Wood describes what he saw: “All over the landscape there are signs of this latest utopian settlement: a sophisticated Catholic Carmelite monastery; A $175,000 solar-powered Hindu temple; a remarkable mustard-yellow hut; an underground Zen Buddhist center combined with organic gardens; a house containing crystals” used in therapy by anthroposophists, etc.

The most amazing things were revealed in the conversations held for a whole week. Like Peccei, Strong considered that the most important frontline in correcting development was the competition between the innermost of human beings’ and the cosmos. But that was just the warm-up. The article revealed that in the early days, when Strong was walking on Baca Grande with a journalist named Bill Moyers, they had seen a sage bush spontaneously flare up in front of them. This, according to Wood, was a divine omen to Strong that Baca Grande would have an important role in saving the planet. According to Wood, Strong also mischievously developed a game in his mind, in which he would use mercenaries to kidnap the participants of the Davos Economic Forum and hold them hostage and end the planet’s “consumption party.” He doesn’t have to do this anymore, because the top leaders of corporate life have decided—though forced by community SDG directives in the European Union—in their passion for responsibility to stop people’s consumption parties and join hands with the WEF in a joint world management project against the rest of us. Strong’s widow Hanne is a mysticist who imagines herself to be a born-again Indian. Maurice Strong used a middleman to acquire $1 million from money meant for Iraqi children and avoided prison, unlike his middleman.

Global Politics of the Day via Klaus Schwab’s 2016 Big Mistake

Well, now the table is set for a more day-specific discussion, but before that, we’ll glance to 2016, when Klaus Schwab made a really big mistake. In January 2016, he appeared in a television interview with RTS Suisse in Switzerland, where he openly revealed his crazy esoteric occultism.

Anyone can watch that interview with Klaus Schwab because it has been published by so many YouTube channels or on TikTok. In it, Klaus Schwab tells how the microchipping of humanity will begin in ten years. At the beginning of the interview, Schwab says that microchips are first placed in people’s clothes, then under the skin and in the brain, and finally with the help of microchips implanted in the brain, people can be connected to the digital world, i.e., the Internet. According to Schwab, this creates a fusion of the physical, digital and biological worlds.

The interviewer asked to understand Schwab’s thoughts that “we are without feelings naturally connected to the digital world like this?” Schwab replies: “Yes, you speak and say, I want to connect with everyone now.” He continued: “First, we have personalized bots, and I saw Mr. Zuckerberg predicting that by the end of this year we will have such a robot serving him as a butler.” Interviewer: “Like in Downton Abbey, will we have personal butlers and servants or slaves in the future?” Schwab: “Yes, but there is a difference. This AI-equipped servant learns and is thus your intellectual partner in addition to providing physical assistance.”

Everything that Schwab mentioned on Swiss TV in 2016 is simply unethical science fiction. No such technology exists, nor will it ever exist. It’s just a cranky old man’s cranky thinking based on inner-space flights and ideas derived from occult rituals.

Klaus Schwab’s First Lieutenant Yuval Harari’s Big Mistakes, and His Science Façade Created by the WEF

Before I discuss the errors or slip-ups of Klaus Schwab’s top lieutenant, Yuval Harari, I will give an example of how the WEF deliberately created a fake natural science CV for Yuval Harari, who is actually a historian (Figure 5). The profile of globally super popular Yuval Harari, an Israeli thinker, can be found on the WEF website. In it, Harari’s natural science backdrops have been carefully crafted and displayed on the WEF website. He has been made to appear knowledgeable about the natural sciences by mentioning that he has written for the world’s leading natural science publication, Nature.

Figure 5. Yuval Harari is Klaus Schwab’s “first lieutenant” and a transhumanist and irresponsible science populist and storyteller, Figure according to critique directed at him in July 2022. Here he is giving a TED-X lecture in London, which has over nine million views, and counting on Youtube.

My surprise was great, because he actually has an article in Nature, which is titled, “Reboot for the AI revolution.” When writing to the science community, he does not tell the fantastic story he told in the spring of 2020 on the BBC’s Hard Talk and CBS’s 60-Minutes programs that the elite have microchipped people with vaccinations in order to get them under surveillance and under the control of mighty people. Of course, no such technology exists except in the wet-dreams of esotericists, or as they now call themselves, “transhumanists.” If Harari had written in Nature the same lines of thought as given in the aforementioned TV appearances, they would never have been published in Nature, and if they had been published, he would have received a tsunami of letters to the editor. Harari’s Nature article is just flat-out artificial intelligence hype, which everyone can get to know easily by Googling it. In his Nature article, he doesn’t get any closer to Schwab’s and his own fantastical ideas than this:

“So computers could come to solve problems and even analyze human emotions much better than humans, without ever developing emotions.”

In the fashionable WEF or TED-X seminars, to journalists and politicians and to the general public, and in the aforementioned TV programs, Harari delves into the nonsensical—that the scientific problems of microchipping by vaccinations to organize mass surveillance of citizens have been solved with the huge advances in science. When writing to the scientific community in Nature he does not come closer than this to his fantastic storytelling to politicians, journalists and the general public:

“The challenges posed by the integration of information technology and biotechnology in the 21st century are undoubtedly greater than the challenges posed by steam engines, railways, electricity and fossil fuels.”

In the last sentence of the essay, he then aligns with his master and his master’s ideas of doom and gloom:

“Given the enormous destructive power of our modern civilization, we cannot afford failed models, world wars and bloody revolutions. We have to do better this time.”

Klaus Schwab: It is Important to Connect People’s Brains with the internet

In many YouTube videos, Schwab’s comments on the EU Commission’s microchip initiative to Ursula von der Leyen at the WEF 2022 Davos meeting can be found. Schwab emphasized that it is important to create a connection between the human brain and the digital world.

I am not at all surprised that tens if not even hundreds of millions of people now believe that the elite are planning something sinister for the ordinary people who have, for example, refused Covid vaccinations for “reasonable” reasons. One also has to wonder that such recklessness insanity effectively has also infested mainstream media and the politicians in power.

Through Klaus Schwab’s Young Leaders program, the WEF has infiltrated Finland’s cabinet, as the current Prime Minister and Finance Minister are now students in the program (Figure 6).

Figure 6. The Prime Minister of Finland (left) and the Minister of Finance (right) of Finland as student at Klaus Schwab’s Young Leaders program. Photo: Finnish parliament website.

On February 1, 2022, prominent Scottish social media journalist James Melville tweeted with a photo: “So we invade governments,”

Here is Klaus Schwab, in 2017, discussing how the WEF has penetrated the governments of various countries with the help of its Young Leaders—such as Justin Trudeau.

As mentioned, both of Finland’s top young politicians have been selected to attend Klaus Schwab’s training: the World Economic Forum’s Young Leaders program. The length of the training program is five years, after which they are accepted as alumni in this elite group of influencers of WEF. According to Wikipedia, there are 800 WEFs Young Leaders around the world.

The Circular Economy: The Downfall of Modern Industrial Society

Real Clear Energy, a prominent American energy policy discussion outlet, approached me in August and asked me to write a story of Finland’s alleged circular economy miracle and what is meant by the concept of circular economy. With this article, I proved how the World Economic Forum used Finland’s Innovation Fund SITRA and at the time Vice-President of the EU Commission Jyrki Katainen to promote Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset project, both in the EU and worldwide.

In 2016, SITRA, which is subordinate to the Finnish Parliament, delivered a fabricated report on Finland’s circular economy miracle and created the current circular economy concept for the World Economic Forum, which is harmful to the environment, to human health and the economy. By exploiting this concept, the European Union Commission made presentations to the EU legislators, e.g., the green finance taxonomy regulation, Jyrki Katainen’s circular economy package and the massive Fit for 55 climate package, which is still mainly in the hands of EU legislators, and which ultimately will lead to Soviet-style five-year planning and the downfall of modern industrial society.

The 2016 Report of SITRA on Finland’s 21st Century Circular Economy Miracle was Fake News

For 20 years, I have written more than a hundred official evaluations and comments on EU Commission’s waste legislation initiatives and its implementation in an EU member state. I have witnessed from my vantage point the bankruptcy of Finland’s circular economy and green waste policy in the 21st century, and how the forces behind rational waste policy finally got their way and a comprehensive municipal and industrial solid waste incineration plant network was built in Finland similar to that in Denmark and Sweden. This network is currently operating at maximum capacity due to the energy shortages caused by the green policies aggravated by the war in Ukraine. All that remains of Finland’s circular economy are smoking ruins. However, it will has to be faked because of the binding but unenforceable utopian circular economy legislation inspired by Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.

How the Scenarios of the Globalists will Collapse in the Coming Winter

Thanks to the unconditional support given to them by the mainstream media, WEF’s insane global policies that are meant to impoverish us and aggravate environmental problems, have gained ground in all Western institutions, including protestant churches and the Catholic Church (Figure 7). For example, the Pope announced in his 2015 green Laudato Si encyclical that he had joined the crackpot temple overlords of WEF.

Figure 7. Eco-Pope Francis signed the green Laudato Si Encyclical in 2015. The Pope made a brilliant move to make himself an identity politician, which turned eyes from the Church’s horrific pedophile scandal and made him immune to scandals: “Brilliant idea, identity politician. No pedophile problems.” (From Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.

The war against energy production launched by the Club of Rome in 1972 will have its grim final show this winter. This owes to Vladimir Putin’s successful attempts to pay for anti-fossil fuel campaigns in Europe in the 2010s and after Joe Biden came to power also in the US. These prevented fossil energy investments. Just 15 years ago, Europe produced more natural gas than Russia. This winter, Europe is completely at the mercy of Russia, because defenseless Europe, took the decision to impose energy sanctions on Russia.

The aforementioned big mistakes of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari, combined with the political turmoil during the coming winter, will undermine the dominance of the crackpot temple overlords and their lackeys. Cold and hunger can make people see through the lies of the environment narrative that the current mainstream media brings home to us every day. The earth’s climate is not recklessly changing and we are not threatened by nature-loss.

The whole world has begun to wake up to the WEF’s scandals of which the mainstream media is still silent and about all the appalling stories—which tells us a lot.

TikTok has a bunch of selected video clips about Schwab’s dreams to microchip the brains of the rest of us and to connect us to the internet. Above Schwab’s microchip TikTok microchip quotes it reads “29.5M views” (it is 64.5 million, and counting).

As far as I know, Finland’s responsible media have not told the Finns that Schwab has bragged that he chooses young politicians to join the WEF in order to gain influence. Finland’s mainstream media have also not told that Klaus Schwab wants to microchip the brains of our people so that he can monitor, control and influence our mental movements.

No such microchip technology exists and the reason why Schwab tells such lies is because of his own esoteric and occult interests.

The 2022 Davos Meeting Discussed Taking Away People’s Cars and Forcing Them to Eat Bugs

Why doesn’t Helsingin Sanomat (Finland’s The Guardian) and Yleisradio (Finland’s BBC) report on Klaus Schwab’s irrational beliefs, but otherwise report comprehensively how climate change is being discussed at the World Economic Forum? In my opinion, this irrefutably proves that the mainstream media is tuned against us ordinary people. Last spring’s WEF meeting discussed how to take people’s cars away and how to force them to eat bugs. Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto (Green League) and Minister of Transport and Communications Timo Harakka (Social Democrat) represented the State of Finland at Davos.

The Mainstream Media is Against Us the People

Why has Helsingin Sanomat and Yleisradio been silent about Yuval Harari’s irresponsible and nonsensical talk of microchipping people with vaccinations, even though such microchips do not exist. They are just the wild wet-dreams of the esoteric occult sect, the transhumanists, rampant in the upper echelons of the World Economic Forum. Harari’s writings have recently been harshly criticized in Current Affairs in July this year with notably few if any follow-up stories. Harari’s ideas were described briefly as irresponsible scientific populism in the newspaper called Tekniikka ja Talous also in Finland.

We the people can get the evidence of the genuine WEF “secret” society of wacko Temple overlords easily with the click of a mouse and by googling. However, we are accused in mainstream media of being “conspiracy theorists” when we wonder about the weirdness of the WEF. In the summer, my brother and I bought t-shirts from the US, that read: “Give us new conspiracies, because the old ones have come true.” There is nothing secret in WEF’s “secret” alliance against us, the people than the fact that the mainstream western media wants to keep the WEF a secret from us ordinary people, which of course will never happen.

The WEF’s Cruel Human Experiment in Sri Lanka

I’m not surprised that hundreds of millions of people think the elite are planning something sinister for us and have thus refused Covid-19 vaccinations for “common sense” reasons. One also has to wonder that the strange WEF hype infects the mainstream media and the politicians in power.

A good friend of mine sent me a link to the 2016 Sri Lanka Economic Forum website. The economic forum in question was one of the regional forums of the World Economic Forum, where George Soros and other actors of the global economy planned the green inclusive sustainable development of Sri Lanka, which—as it turned out—was neither. The academic profile of the meeting was polished, e.g., by engaging Harvard University in the meeting and inviting climate change activist, money printing advocate and economic Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz to be the speaker. The inclusive vision of the meeting extended to 2023, when manna was supposed to rain from the sky in Sri Lanka and macroeconomic stability was supposed to prevail.

In 2019, newly elected Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa—whose political party is described as socially right-wing and economically left-wing—unveiled a grand “Green New Deal” and his vision for Sri Lanka. In many respects, it resembles the European Union’s Great Reset, i.e., the aforementioned community legislation enacted and still to be enacted, which the European Central Bank has supported by printing money. The Sri Lankan Disaster was ultimately caused by the policy directed through the UN and the WEF, which has aimed to steer countries towards meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development so-called SDG goals.

For several years, I have written essays and reports and given presentations in English about the destructiveness of these SDG policies, especially for the poorest countries, based on my work in the World Bank. Particularly destructive is the SDG6 policy, from which the letter H, for “hygiene,” has been dropped. Promoting hygiene, as was done in rich countries during the past century, made it possible to eradicate intergenerational under nutrition, which is a devastating public health problem in poor countries, and now affects 800 million people. Hygiene promotion does not suit those who believe in Malthusian ideas and nature pantheism, because it would require the extension of electricity and water supply to billions of poor people.

Sri Lanka’s Green Transition Reminiscent of the EU and US Green Transitions or Build Back Better Policies

The main cause of the massive disaster was the complete greening of Sri Lankan agriculture. At the beginning of March 2022, the catastrophic consequences of this greening were updated on the pages of Foreign Policy, i.e., four months before the final collapse. It appears from this article that in April 2021, Rajapaksa’s government implemented its green government program and banned the imports and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides nationwide and ordered the country’s two million farmers to switch to organic farming. The program was called “a vision of splendor and prosperity,” just as now in the EU we are being sold the Fit for 55 Climate Package and the absurd regulations of the circular economy with the promise of an open and brilliant future.

After seven months of absurdity, Rajapaksa’s government had to back down on the green agricultural policy, but permanent damage had already been caused to food security and Sri Lanka had to buy expensive rice from the world market, which contributed to the macroeconomic crisis. At the end of last June, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) visited the country. During the visit, future reforms were agreed upon, with which the collapsed macroeconomic stability will be restored with a loan granted by the IMF.
Yuval Harari’s “Useless People”

The catastrophic events in Sri Lanka and the involvement of the WEF in creating this cruel human experiment have made many people wonder, what the ultimate goals of the world’s power elite really are? Now many commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Yuval Harari has spoken and written a lot about useless people. Conspiracy theorists and devout Christians in the US have had an unfriendly eye for a long time on the mysterious Georgia Guidestones, built in 1980, with writing in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and Russian, as well as Babylonian, classical Greek, Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian. These writings were meant for the people after the end of the world, which was labelled as the future Age of Reason. The stone was destroyed by blowing it up last July. Its first wisdom read:

“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

We the People Need to Wake Up—and Fast!

I don’t come from a religious family, but from a family that has supported social democrats for three generations. After a long and varied consideration, I made the decision to join the Finns Party, because in recent years the far left thinking has become anti-democratic and finally has become so repulsive that I resigned from Finland’s Social Democratic Party in January 2021, after having paying membership fees since 1977. I have a long career as a skeptical researcher. Science is not a faith but fundamentally based on doubts and questions. I have come to the conclusion that democracies and nation states are threatened with destruction—if the citizens do not wake up to protest the supremacy of these insane temple overlords. I’m sure that next winter’s trials resulting from decades of green energy policies and the revelation of the stupidity of the WEF’s idiots to an ever-wider group of people, even by force with the help of social media, will lead to an awakening.

We the people, ordinary workers and entrepreneurs who love their country and family, must wake up to defend enlightenment, freedom and modern society. Only the pursuit of the good, starting from one’s own starting points, can displace these human experiments conducted from abroad. Finland, as a society in its own right and as historically dominated by other nations, is now a solid platform for some kind of crazy experiments, unless our decision makers are aware of the enormous dangers associated with them.

Mikko Paunio, MD, MHS is Adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki, Department of Public Health. This article comes from a presentation in Finnish in Tampere (Mediapolis), given on October 1, 2022, at a seminar called “Salattu valta” (“Occult power”) which was organized by Jäävuori (Iceberg). The title of the original presentation was, “WEF: nuoret johtajat ja Klaus Schwabin ohjailu” (“The Young Global Leaders and Klaus Schwab’s Steering”).

Who Did You Say was the Enemy?

First and foremost, the nation means sovereignty, for which its people will stand up and be counted.

Throughout History, France’s people have fought for her unity, independence, dignity, and for certain principles, legitimately upheld. That certainty rested upon an awareness that her destiny was interwoven between the government of the day, and the people. Never in her history had De Gaulle’s certaine idée de la France been cast overboard, even in the midst of frenzied partisan politics.

That interwoven sense of destiny is now frayed, given the citizenry’s current disregard for elections (I decline to entertain our politicians’ anecdotal excuses) and Frenchmen being notorious for their acute political conscience. In my view, rather than disinterest, what the no-show vote points to is distaste for the ruling class’ incompetence, along with a latent and intensifying hostility to the system, its policy and decisions. Add to the no-show vote those thronging the dissident, essentially right-wing, parties; and between the people and the ruling classes one sees a gulf looming.

A class of oligarchs, led by front-men of the Ecole nationale de l’Administration, has adopted lock-stock- and-barrel a web of foreign beliefs, spun through myriad societies and entities—all twanging away at that one, Unipolar, US string. A class whose collective brain is squatted upon by Anglo-American ideology, namely that a nation’s people are pawns in the game of international, US-run finance. That class has rushed to sign up for the EU and NATO, crony-clubs run out of Washington DC.

In the recondite mental-space that class inhabits, the citizen becomes a bleating consumer-sheep; national borders go up in puff of smoke—there will be no language heard but English, no armies formed save within NATO, no manufacture founded unless it feed US banks and interest-groups, no currency traded other than that of account, namely the US dollar (or some interim substitute), with the so-called Western World tugging its collective forelock before the Washington camarilla.

Amongst the phenomena attending this geopolitical nightmare—huge waves of immigration, designed to submerge protest in each nation; bring insecurity on every street to frighten the citizenry into submission; 24/7, wall-to-wall encouragement for the most abject, backward forms of behaviour; infantile methods of acculturation that void education of all content, vitiate Reason and free-will and erase Christianity as an approach to religious belief. The mass-media come amongst us not to inform but to indoctrinate, peddling disinformation and official untruths. History never happened, the family and decent mores went out with the horse-and-buggy… and so forth.

In a word, they wanted decadence, and they have got it in spades—the ruling class now in place has consciously chosen to dissolve France into some sort of barbarian magma, a vast seething sub-human cauldron, as Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Europe’s” éminence grise would have it. A magma to be push-me-pull-you’d by the US and its acolytes.

At the end of the day, mark my words, it is Man, and not France alone, in danger; Man in all his greatness as a thinking being. Should the nightmarish outlook described above prevail here and throughout Europe, it will take over the world, save for China and a few, doubtless Asian nations. Therefore, a French patriot who would defend his nation’s identity and the dignity of Man is a humanist, as I suggest in my latest book, Le patriotisme français est un humanisme (ED2A Publ.).

Throwing off the shackles of short-term thinking, allow me to recall a few amongst the more notorious US misdeeds with regard to France.
One’s first reaction is dismay, followed by dread, as one contemplates the authorities’ passivity before the advancing Hegemon. In theory, these leaders were elected to press France’s interests and her role in the world. I confess to mounting anger, as I observe our leaders complacently standing by, whilst the country falls prey to another, perfervidly nationalist state bent on conquest. Our leaders have allowed themselves to be dragged into hazardous adventures, solely to placate the xenophobia and hubris of Germany and the Anglo-Americans. Are these people collaborators? Is this treason?

No need to scroll too far back in history to find the US Hegemon lurking. From WWI on, when President Wilson caught up Theodore Roosevelt’s purported “peace” torch (thank Heavens for Clémenceau), the US resolve to rule the world has only stiffened. The end of the USSR was seen as a new and unlimited playing-field for the US, where limitless impertinence might prevail.

To illustrate: in 2010, Russia had ordered two Mistral class helicopter-carriers from France. With the ships already in the yards under construction, in 2014 the USA pressured President François Hollande to rescind the contract, on the specious pretext that the Crimea had been “annexed,” i.e., returned to the Russian fold, and that Russia was backing the threatened Russian majority in the Donbass area.
Another case in point: on 15th September 2021, Australia, at Washington’s instigation, unilaterally rescinded the contract for building 12 conventional submarines in France, then turned round and signed one with the USA and the UK for building nuclear submarines. A friendly attitude on the part of our allies, no doubt?

Or just very recently, the latest spot of intrigue cooked up by our German friends, in relation to the SCAF (Système de Combat Aérien Futur), originally a French programme with German and Spanish participation. All too readily, it became plain how keen were our German partners on technology transfer—and then we learnt they would be buying US F18s rather than the French Rafale. In a nutshell, to keep the EU on the straight and narrow, the USA’s key ally is Germany, which is why the USA holds no end of goodwill for Ursula von der Leyen (whose family, by the way, is more American than German).

By now, the French are quite alone in referring to the “Franco-German tandem,” one that Berlin has had shewn scant reluctance to crash. Put paid to the SCAF, put paid to the joint helicopter project (the Apache, rather than the Tigre), put paid to the joint patrol vessel; equip Europe’s armies with US materiel, obstruct French arms-exports—all stunts which the US has either incited underhandedly, or openly demanded. Not to speak of the attempt to destabilise French nuclear deterrence, by suggesting France share that, as well as her seat at the UN Security Council.

Pushing the boat ever-further out, Berlin now seeks to have qualified majority voting within the EU on security issues, rather than their remaining strictly a national matter. Should France consent, she will be dragged into wars willy-nilly, and watch her foreign policy and nuclear deterrence go down the drain.

The USA is behind these manoeuvres, which Germany will play along with as she intends to be its foremost partner. Matters have only got worse since France rejoined NATO in March 2009.

As for France enjoying an independent energy supply, the key is our nuclear reactors. But in order that US-German firms may invest and
dictate prices for most electrical energy sources, Germany has blithely helped sink EDF.

Lest we forget—the critical chunk of Alstom was sold to General Electric, thanks to the man who happens to be President of France. Alain Juillet testified thusly to the Parliamentary Defence Commission: “With this Alstom business, we’ve gone and sold to the USA the means to manufacture turbines for atomic submarines, which means that France can no longer build them without US permission.” That the USA preys on France’s high technology has become so glaringly obvious that the French government had to veto the Teledyne attempt to take over the defence optronics firm Photonis. Under pressure from public opinion, in 2019 an Act (loi Pacte) was adopted, to give the Economics Minister greater power to monitor foreign investment.

War is not the only area where US imperialism seeks to govern by its own rules. Set up by the Marrakesh Treaty en 1994, the WTO no longer suffices to serve that purpose, so extra-territoriality in law has become the latest Big Stick wielded by the USA.

Any foreign company trading worldwide may thus find itself on the receiving end of extra-territorial US laws, simply because somewhere, somehow, such firms necessarily have some kind of tie to the USA. The laws amount to a dictatorial system holding sway over players worldwide, no matter their country of origin. Competitors are weakened or crushed; over the past decade, billions of dollars in fines have come down upon French banks and firms, swelling the US Treasury, on the specious pretext that these firms had some tie to individuals or states which the USA considers “terrorist.”

As the USA controls liquidity flows, so can they mould minds. Whilst funds like Blackrock and Vanguard rule the economy, they also invest in the mass-media, 90% of which is held by 9 conglomerates, controlled in turn by the pension funds. Our screens are over-run with ghastly US films and videos—braying out from a cultural desert, let alone Halloween and English-language advertisements, trampling on an Act of Parliament (loi Toubon) meant to defend French.

There is method to all this madness: imposing a certain mindset, bringing all thought into line with Basic American, making an outcast of any non-conformist culture, and ensuring the US reign over Europe. The claim to manifest destiny, to self-evident intellectual superiority, was confirmed by the Monroe Doctrine and brandished by Zbignew Brzezinski, advisor to Presidents.

After WWII, the plot only thickens. On 28th May 1946, a France in dire straits had little option but to sign the Blum-Byrnes agreement, whereby she agreed to allow in, certain US products. One major French concession was that US films were no longer to be subject to quota, whilst France could henceforth reserve 4 weeks only out of 13 for French films. By the first semester of 1947, 340 US films had flooded in, with only 40 French shown! Thereafter, Hollywood would set about to retool the French mind, instill the American Way of Life and broadcast US propaganda.

When all is said and done—all is NOT said and done! I do not doubt but that France will overcome the onslaught of this erstwhile ally become a foe to nations and to civilisation tout court, a foe—pride cometh before a fall—who will most likely, and very shortly, taste defeat. By giving free rein to every manner of disorder, the USA has slammed the door on itself and turned away from the true Western world, whilst Russia, reborn, shews herself to be the leaven for renewal.

In the Ukraine, the ongoing conflict, eagerly sought by the USA, will doubtless prove the turning point. The USA, the EU and their NATO arm-bangle are likely heading straight for the wall, as the self-righteous obtusity of the USA beggars belief. Military academies in France (and I expect in the USA as well) teach us to coolly and objectively analyse an adversary top-down: weapons systems, environment, terrain, climate, men, officers whilst our initial operating orders take all these factors into account. One can only surmise that the USA’s overweening sense of superiority has so blinded its strategists, that it underestimates the adversary, having drawn no lessons from all the—lost—wars it has pursued since WWII. Leaving aside the fact that on no account can one truthfully say that the USA single-handedly won that War.

France has tangled herself into a conflict which in no way concerns her. There is no point in pretentiously waving the banner of liberty: the Ukrainian elite is utterly corrupt, the Ukrainians anything but unanimously hostile to their Russian brothers, whilst the territory is fast in the grip of British and American diplomatic and military power. President Macron has been sending the Ukraine equipment needed here by our own armed forces; he has led our country to lose huge investments in Russia, and our people to suffer on all fronts—economic, financial, energy. Meanwhile Francophone Africa looks to Moscow for safety, an outcome plainly due to France’s kowtowing to Washington. Should one care to analyse our waning influence and power in Africa, one will hear our African friends say things which should greatly disturb French leaders. No French patriot would have allowed such decadent, even perverse, influences to prevail in this country as they how do. Francophone Africa has taken note of our decadent state, and has decided to walk away—towards countries they recognise as dignified and respectable. Inevitably, the influence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation will continue to grow.

A sovereign France has at hand tools of greatness, into which feed her intellectual, scientific and economic wealth: nuclear weapons and deterrence, the overseas territories of the world’s second largest sea-power, her friendship with Africa within the wider French-speaking world, her seat at the Security Council, and the world’s second largest diplomatic network.

Meanwhile, our “friends” loot our technological potential, strive to cut us out of our role at the UN and to subject our nuclear power to NATO. They hold our language and civilisation in contempt, and impose upon us a lifestyle that flatly contradicts morality and French customs; they block our access to resources and to our habitual partners. Through twisted geopolitical manoeuvres, aided and abetted by the French ruling class who ply every trick in the rhetorician’s trade to blame Someone Else, they have plunged us into a dreadful economic crisis. What does one call such people?

Doubt not, but that Russia will win the war in the Ukraine. This is not wishful thinking, but a statement based on observation of facts. I DARE say that this will redound to France’s advantage, by breaking the chains of NATO and the EU. Totalitarian in their aims, dancing to the US piper’s tune, these two international bodies have revealed to all and sundry how false and how extremely dangerous they are. For the USA, this will prove the latest in a string of defeats.

Were France not in the grasp of petty, impulsive and ill-informed mannikins, she could seize the great occasions bearing down upon us to rise to her former heights. Russia is not our enemy!

Henri Roure is a retired general in the French Marines, educated at the prestigious École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr (ESM), and the École Supérieure de Guerre. He holds a doctorate in Political Science and has authored numerous books, including, Le patriotisme français est un humanisme (French patriotism is humanism), Un Dieu, une terre et des hommes (One God, one land and people), and Sauvons notre laïcité: La crise musulmane en France (Save our secularism: The Muslim crisis in France). [This article was translated from the French by Mendelssohn Moses).

Featured: “La France protège le drapeau national contre l’antipatriotisme” (France protecting the flag from anti-patriotism), poster from 1909.

The Most Dangerous Man for the West

“The most dangerous man in the world”—this is how the Russian philosopher and geopolitician Alexander Dugin is referred to by his American counterparts. This alone is enough for a decent person to pay the closest attention to Dugin’s ideas.

Dugin is the undoubted enemy of the civilizing West, in all its manifestations, from the simple—the geopolitical project of Western global domination (globalization), through the negation of the Western ideological project (liberalism), to the high philosophical level of justification of dehumanization (object-oriented ontology). Dugin contrasts the first with a multipolar world, the second with the Fourth Political Theory, the third with Tradition.

Based solely on the Schmittian formula for the definition of the political—friend-enemy—it is not difficult to find one’s place in relation to Dugin: those who are for the West, globalization, and dehumanization (the transformation of man into a posthuman being, from a subject into an object) are against Dugin. The rest of us are “for him!”

You might ask, why, in fact, do we need to identify ourselves precisely with Dugin? Very simply. Because it was Dugin who created the theoretical foundation for all post-Soviet patriotic thought, grounding each point of this alternative to the West worldview matrix in the deepest way possible, having worked out each thesis in detail.

Everything you wanted to know from the realm of thought, but were afraid to ask, is in Dugin. Even if you are a liberal, a globalist, and a supporter of transhumanism, you need, if you are a serious thinker of course, to find an antithesis to each of your theses (to prove them, such is the law of scientific thought). No problem—Dugin has it all.

Even at the very beginning of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, when only liberalism (then called democracy) was offered as the sole alternative to Sovietism (at the suggestion of the West), Dugin developed and offered for public discussion the ideology of the Third Way, an independent ideological model of the new Russia, alternative to both Sovietism (with Marxism at its core) and the ideology of the West (with liberalism at its core).

Dugin contrasted the West’s assertion that there is no alternative to its model of development based on Modernism—with Tradition, the negation of which has been the foundation of Modernism with materialism, progressivism and positivism at its core for the last three centuries.

Dugin responded to the assertion that there was no alternative to the dominance of time with the thesis of the inviolability of Eternity. When people began to accuse him of proposing a Third Way as an alternative to the first (liberalism) and second (Marxism) ways, Dugin pointed out that it was then nothing more than fascism (the third political theory). Thus, Dugin pointed out that we are talking in general about going beyond the Modern; that is, about the Fourth Political Theory, which is based on Eternity, Tradition, God—everything that the Modern, with its liberalism, Marxism and fascism, has fully denied.
In response to the West’s assertion of the “objectivity” and “inevitability” of globalization (the thesis that all “advanced” members of the Russian political class have repeated like a spell since the early 1990s), Dugin proposed a multipolar world theory, based on an assertion of geopolitical pluralism.

In fact, geopolitics at that time, by Soviet inertia, remained “a pseudoscience justifying bourgeois imperialist expansion.” It was Dugin who took and translated all the fundamental works of the classics of geopolitics—from Mackinder and Mahan to Schmitt and Haushofer, and in between all the other major authors—and summarized all the basic criteria of geopolitical science in his Fundamentals of Geopolitics, written in 1995-1996 and published in early 1997. It was then that a whole galaxy of Russian geopoliticians appeared, rewriting Dugin’s textbook with varying degrees of diligence and zeal; while before that book, there was not a single one.

Dugin responded to the West’s proclamation of the project of European integration and the creation of the European Union by declaring a Eurasian Union, which he had previously worked out on an ideological level from as early as the late 1980s. It was Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism that first substantiated the need to position post-Soviet Russia as the basis for a special, non-Western and non-Eastern Eurasian civilization, Russia-Eurasia.

Dugin responded to the West’s assertion about the benchmark of its historical path of development and the universality of the model of Western society, a Western civilization proper, to which there is no alternative, with 23 volumes of Noomakhia, describing in a first approximation, the types of civilizations, their depth, metaphysical, cultural and geopolitical validity, as an alternative to the emasculated, primitive and superficial civilization of the collective West.

There is not a single statement by Western ideologues, thinkers, and philosophers to which Dugin and his intellectual group have not provided a similarly substantiated, conceptually elaborate, and profound response. It is no exaggeration to say that Dugin has it all!

When people ask me what I read, I half-jokingly (or maybe half-seriously) answer that “I only read Dugin.” Not literally, not because there is nothing else to read, but because before approaching any question, topic, concept, or philosophical idea, one must first look at what Dugin has written about it. This is only because Dugin has already read and comprehended all of this, and has presented it in a capacious, paradigmatic, and concentrated manner, in accessible language, drawing attention to the most important, while not emphasizing the secondary, and summarizing it in meaningful conclusions.

In order to be convinced of this, it is enough to conduct a little experiment, which I think I have already mentioned somewhere: just type in any meaningful combination of concepts, an intellectual formula, or a concept in combination with the name Alexander Dugin into any search engine, and you will get a selection of links to texts in which these ideas, models, or concepts have already been conceptualized, stated, and framed.

This is how Dugin’s ideas came to dominate the intellectual field not only in today’s Russia, but also in the thinking environment of the rest of the world, including the West, where the thinking part of society represents an alternative camp to the liberals, globalists and transhumanists. It was precisely because Dugin triumphed, took the intellectual upper hand, and forced everyone to think paradigmatically and holistically, that he worked through the entire sphere of the Ideas in all of their manifestations. He has already reversed the course of history, if we take the sphere of thought. But it takes time to be convinced of this firsthand, for the Idea descends from the sphere of the philosophical, where it is contemplated as an ideal image by the inner sight, through the sphere of the scientific, into the expert, and then into the media community, from where it becomes the property of the masses; and how long it will descend there depends not on the philosopher, but on the quality of the media in which the idea lives, develops (if it develops), and is conceptualized.

This unpredictability of the quality of environments affects the accuracy of predictions. As Dugin himself notes, a philosopher, giving a forecast, is never wrong about what will happen, but is almost always wrong about when it will happen. Maybe that’s because he is focused on Eternity, disregarding time.

Everything Dugin has written, said, elaborated on an intellectual level, is unfolding, coming true, incarnating before our eyes. You don’t have to be a profound philosopher yourself in order to open his books, articles and interviews, to read, listen to, comprehend and understand that everything, everything Dugin wrote and talked about in the 1990s and 2000s, has either already been realized or is being realized before our eyes, at this very moment. And what has not yet been realized is sure to come true. I cannot say when.

This is exactly why Dugin is, for example, “Putin’s advisor,” which the West and the rest of the world are convinced of. I have had to answer this question more than once everywhere—in Iran, in Turkey, in conversations with intellectuals in Latin America, Europe, Asia or Africa. Everywhere where thought matters, they are convinced that it is Dugin who determines the main vectors of Putin’s policy. Simply because everything Putin implements has previously been written or said by Dugin. What can I say to this? I don’t dare argue.

This is why we live in Dugin’s time. And this is why he is the most dangerous man for the West. If only because Dugin destroyed all the myths, so carefully and meticulously created in the West, about the standard of the Western way of historical development and the development of Western thought, about the universality of Western civilization, about the no-alternative to, and objectivity of, globalization, about the advantages of liberalism, about the objectivity of man. Everything, in fact, that the West needed to dominate the world, humanity, to be the ruler over all.

At the same time, no one in the West could demonstrate his intellectual superiority over Dugin (who was invited to hundreds of intellectual discussions with Western ideologists and philosophers), to demonstrate the primacy and validity of Western intellectual thought in an open dialogue—neither Brzezinski, nor Fukuyama, nor Bernard Henry Levy (deified by the contemporary Western intellectual community).

In an open intellectual confrontation with Dugin, they look pathetic and unconvincing. In plain English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dugin leaves no stone unturned in Western liberal-globalist concepts, justifying his rightness at any level of discussion—from television broadcasts with one-second running time, to scientific audiences in hours-long debates.

This is where all the baseness and meanness of the West comes into play. Unable to defeat Dugin in an open debate, Western political technologists stoop to the level of meanness, dirty tricks, and petty sordidness. An entire section at the State Department has been working to discredit Dugin, ordering one discriminatory campaign after another for nearly a decade and a half. The array of political and technological methods used to smear Dugin does not lack originality or variety. What is the West most afraid of? Fascism (they have suffered from it there and created it themselves) and the occult (which is just scary in itself).
The next step is then easy—just identify Dugin with these two terrible phenomena. Fortunately (for them), the same method works here—type “fascism” and “occultism” into a search engine and—voila. Dugin has studied and described all of Western thought—from the Presocratics and Plato and Aristotle, through the fall into Scholasticism and Cartesianism, to New Age, Modern and Postmodern.

Naturally, this includes the twentieth century period, including such European phenomena as Fascism, National Socialism with its racial theory, occultism, and so on. By the same logic, you can accuse someone who writes about insects of being an insect. This is exactly how they operate—if Dugin wrote about fascism, then he is a fascist; and if he wrote about the occult, then he is an “occult fascist.”

In order to discredit Dugin, American political technologists hire a contractor, local subcontractors, and all kinds of State Department sub-suckers who for small pay endlessly have cutting & pasting unreadable hodge-podge for ten years, endlessly combining the words “Dugin,” “fascism” and “occultism” with all their derivatives. The results are very silly; but they are many; and it is then easy to refer to one another endlessly, portraying the “scientificity,” “thoroughness” and “validity” of each other’s libels. The calculation is the same—if you type “Alexander Dugin” into a search engine, with such an abundance of ordered filth, something containing “fascist” and “occultist” is sure to pop up, and the ordinary reader does not even follow the links, being satisfied with the headlines.

All of this, according to the Western clientele, was supposed to make Dugin “toxic,” as young people now say it, in order to even theoretically rule out a synthesis between the main politician of today’s world, Vladimir Putin, and the main intellectual. In a sense, as it turned out, they did achieve this. However, Dugin himself, with the dignity of a philosopher whose eyes are turned inward, contemplating an ideal image of thought, continued to remain silent on the matter, while Putin continued to implement the strategies described by Dugin, also ignoring the stink and untidy machinations of Western “partners.”

Desperate to change any one thing at all, the Western perpetrators decided on the nastiest meanness of all—murder. However, the prince of this world has someone to confront him. Russia has entered the final eschatological battle for the end of history. God and the devil came together in the final battle, and the field of battle, as Dugin himself says—the human soul, as well as the human mind. The wars of the mind. Noomachy. Dugin’s time. Endkampf.

Valery Korovin is a journalist and sociologist. This article appears courtesy of Zavtra.ru.