Knowledge has been successfully hijacked – because its purpose is no longer truth. We live in a world governed by a particular worldview that no longer sees truth as the foremost necessity to the good life.
This leaves only feelings which alone are truly authentic. In other words, opinions are far better than thought, and reason is merely another system of oppression. All previous pursuits of learning were therefore merely constructs contrived by dominant groups to sustain and extend their power over the oppressed.
Such is the post-truth world that we now inhabit, where reality can only be governed by human emotion, which apparently demands socio-political justice for the “historically” downtrodden and ignored.
This is often labeled as, “postmodernism,” but this is inaccurate. The hydra indeed has many heads.
In fact, it’s best to call it, The Grand-Conglomerate Ideology (GCI), whose texture is woven from divergent threads, namely, Marxism, relativism, feminism, eugenics, corporatism, Stalinism, Hiterlism, Protestantism, secularism, scientism, multiculturalism, atheism, postfoundationalism, naturalism, technologism, transhumanism, transgenderism, environmentalism, progressivism, and nihilism.
The tentacles of this beast reach into all facets of life. The very purpose of western society is now simply an extension of GCI. Nothing lies outside of it. Even our habit of mind no longer makes sense without GCI. Our society exists to justify it, and our politics and laws sustain it. All validations of human existence can now only exist in the purview of GCI.
People may content themselves with one or more threads of its latticework, but that it is merely the play of labels, for each thread leads to the same telos.
And what is that telos – what is the purpose, or chief end of GCI?
Very simply – annihilation, or what the Buddhists call nirvana. We have only to look at the “virtues” which are held up as laudatory – abortion, anti-genderism, anti-nationalism, antinatalism. Why are each of these an inherent good, when each of them also denies humanity its dignity?
But why annihilation? Why the deep loathing of humanity itself? Again, very simply because we have managed to relegate the transcendent into the realm of the ridiculous. In other words, when humanity denies God, it stops being human, and can no longer justify its own existence. Its ideal no longer becomes life (both physical and ghostly), but its very opposite – that is, death.
When we can no longer believe in a panoramic purpose for all of humanity, we veer into a purpose closer to hand – murder in all its manifestations. Why do all tyrants want to kill as many people as possible? Why the carnage of totalitarian states in the twentieth-century?
The spilling of blood is a very necessary element in humanity’s worship of itself. This is why human sacrifice was an essential component of paganism, for the pagan gods were simply extensions of humanity. It’s violence alone that makes us feel human when we no longer know how to look beyond ourselves. All this was once known as, “evil.”
Is this what Simone Weil meant when she called Aristotle “the bad tree that bore bad fruit?” Aristotle turned the human gaze inwards, and by doing so, he mechanized thought, made it a system. All of creation thus became an enclosed system, a self-contained micro-world functioning in an endless plethora of other systems.
But so what? And more importantly, what is to be done (to borrow a phrase form Nikolai Chernyshevsky)?
First question first – so what? In the words of Rémi Brague, “If God doesn’t exist, then why should humanity exist?” We may content ourselves with diversions like saving the planet, or seeking social justice and the like. But this is only delaying the more obvious question – what’s the point of being alive? Should the planet be saved and humanity destroyed?
These may appear to be stark queries, but they do point us to the very heart of our darkness – we no longer really believe that we should continue to exist, because we no longer believe that life has any true purpose. Everything else is a diversion until nirvana.
Second, what is to be done? But to really answer this question we have to accept that humanity actually has a purpose on this planet – and a life beyond it. Fighting the hydra requires far more than clever slogans; it requires that we return value to that which is moral.
Given our deep addiction to “-isms,” we have made ourselves morally bankrupt – in other words, we have made ourselves receptive to all kinds of foolishness, for though we might have displaced God as the giver of meaning, we have been unable to replace him with anything meaningful. None of the “’-isms” can assume the role of god, no matter how hard their valiant followers may try. Therein lies the various conflicts of our time.
As the thought of John Hare shows, humanity cannot be moral without God – it can certainly try (by seeking rights and justice), but it will fail because there is an unbridgeable gap between the human ability for goodness and the human duty to do the good.
Why be good? Ability and duty can only come together via God, in that morality must a purpose – not a reward, but a purpose. Here people often misunderstand God as some dispenser of rewards and punishment. That is a very childish view, though it does serve to advance one strand of GCI (atheism).
Given the omnipresent hydra, humanity must return to its root, which is God. But not any god – only the God of the Judeo-Christian faith. God has made us to live life through morality, and we should live this way because He has made us so. A life outside morality is not human at all – it’s not even bestial. It’s meaningless, for even beasts have meaning. Only man can give himself meaninglessness.
To continue with Hare, we must answer two important questions – Can we be good? And, why should we be good? Neither question can be answered without God.
To return to GCI, it’s now easy to see that it is an attempt to find a substitute for God, an all-inclusive transcendence which might provide some sort of God-less meaning to life.
However, humanity is incapable of providing justification for itself, let alone why it must be good. GCI quickly erodes into tyrannical tribalism, where baser desires of winning and subduing become foremost, because humanity cannot free itself from its condition to create truth. Humanity can only discover truth, not create it.
Likewise, humanity cannot create morality; it can only live within it, or outside it, because it’s one of the necessities of human existence like air and water.
The first step in breaking free from the grip of the hydra is to destroy the ground in which it’s rooted. Since the GCI is rooted in the education system, citizens needs to dismantle the entire education system which has now become nothing mora than an intricate mind-abuse system that destroys the minds of the young.
Parents need to stop sending their children into the maws of this Moloch. They need to stop sacrificing their children upon the high altar of GCI.
Instead, parents need to build independent schools, colleges, universities where their children may once again learn the richer form of human life – one rooted firmly in the morality guaranteed by the Judeo-Christian God.
In other words, parents alone have the ability to starve the monster of CGI to death. Otherwise, the beast will only grow more and more powerful, with each child that it devours. All of society needs to say – enough!