The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. . . . it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.
--Alasdair MacIntyre
For the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find about the truth but also become unable to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language.
--Josef Pieper
Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And so do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.
--St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
Freedom isn’t Free
In his book, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too,” Stanley Fish writes:
“Free speech” is just the name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance; and we give our preferred verbal behaviors that name when we can, when we have the power to do so, because in the rhetoric of American life, the label “free speech” is the one you want your favorites to wear. Free speech, in short, is not an independent value but a political prize, and if that prize has been captured by a politics opposed to yours, it can no longer be invoked in the ways that further your purposes, for it is not an obstacle to those purposes.
Soon after the Charlie Hebdo false-flag of 2015, the world witnessed a march in Paris, and no ordinary one, for it was the largest in French history, including 1.3 million people and forty world leaders. The ostensible purpose of the march was to mourn the seventeen people who were murdered, to show public solidarity with them, and to embolden and encourage all of us who must now risk our very lives in the exercise of our “free speech.” Nous sommes tous Charlie Hebdo maintenant.
However, soon after the march, the people of Paris witnessed, and supported en masse, it seems, a massive government crackdown on free speech. Any public utterance that did not fall perfectly in line with both the official narrative of the actual event, and its authorized meaning, met with the force of the state. Radical Muslim terrorists murdered twelve employees of a newspaper because of the content of that newspaper. Violence employed against the free use of speech will not be tolerated in France. Any criticism of Charlie Hebdo, the War on Terror, or the apparent de facto immunity of only Zionist beliefs and causes from all censure, and any hesitations regarding the new French status quo of surveillance, suspicion, and censorship indicates animosity toward free speech and thus solidarity with the terrorists. And so, included in the hundreds of other “vicious and dangerous enemies of free speech” that were arrested was an eight-year old French Muslim boy, who was detained and questioned by the police due to the dangerous content of his speech.
In short, the most obvious consequence of the Charlie Hebdo murders was not the extension of the franchise of free speech, but its radical circumscription; indeed, what we saw was an unprecedented escalation of government surveillance and the overt legal suppression of free speech. Daniel Spaulding from Soul of the East reports, however, that such came not out of the blue:
Over the past several decades, France has prosecuted numerous individuals for engaging in state-designated “hate speech.” The French novelist and gadfly Michel Houellebecq, depicted in a satirical cartoon on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the same day of the terrorist attack, was at one time tried, and later acquitted, for making remarks derogatory toward Islam. And a mere few days after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was arrested on the dubious charge of “glorifying terrorism” after decrying his previous persecutions at the hands of the French authorities for alleged “anti-Semitic” comments. If convicted he could spend several years in prison.
It seems, in this case at least, that Fish is right—free speech is actually a mask for power.
There was an unmistakable Orwellian cast to the whole Hebdo event, suggesting the existence of an esoteric agenda underneath the exoteric one. If Fish is correct, and free speech is just the name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance, “we,” in the case of the Hebdo event, was the French-Anglo-American-Israeli-European ruling classes, comprised of government, intelligence, technology, military, finance, academia, media, and entertainment. Their “substantive agenda”? There can be no doubt that the organizers of the “Je Suis Charlie Hebdo” campaign and march, the budding surveillance industry, the bureaucratic drafters of France’s de facto Patriot Act, the South Park-esque cartoonists of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, and every person wearing a Je-Suis-Charlie t-shirt (in spirit at least, if not on body) had an underlying agenda, and that “free speech for all” was not it.
When a narrative emerges whose explanation for a massively violent event and concomitant crisis becomes official and authoritative, and which includes, without empirical evidence or investigative inquiry, the assignation of innocence and exceptionalism to the victims, and utter depravity and terrifying power to the designated criminals; when dissent from this narrative is socially sanctioned, even to the extent of legal prosecution; when it spawns behavior in contradiction with itself (such as committing terror in the name of eradicating it, and punishing free speech in the name of protecting it); when the narrative is immediately supported, echoed, and policed by the vast majority of the ruling classes, including both the mainstream left and right, and when it successfully unites and synthesizes the otherwise warring factions of the populous—liberals with neoconservatives, libertarians with statists, humanists with Nietzscheans, theists with atheists; when rational scrutiny and frank discussion of the event and narrative is forbidden; and when its recitation, particularly its harrowing portrayal of the demonic villains it to which it assigns all blame for both the increasing domestic strife among citizens and the perpetual manichean war against the newest “enemy,” instills and evokes primordial fear and religious awe in the populous; when an event possesses all of these attributes, or even just a few, we know we are dealing with no ordinary crisis, but rater with something mysterious that strikes at the very heart of the collective consciousness. What we are dealing with, in a word, is the sacred.
We saw this with IXXI, with the Plandemic, with the Ukrainsane, and now with the Israeli-Gaza genocide-ok.
The Sacred (Secular) State
Secular modernity is neither secular nor modern. Of course, we no longer live under the medieval sacral regimes of throne and altar or post-Reformation confessional monarchies. And modernity, with all the obvious novelty that that word entails—the rise of science and technology, radically new kinds of political and economic institutions, widespread democracy, and unprecedented religious pluralism—is certainly a genuine historical phenomenon. However, these features are not what are primarily signified by the words “secular” and “modern,” especially when uttered by its progressive and enlightened devotees. The popular connotation of these terms includes a “just-so” story of the genealogy of modernity that indicates its divine-like character: Only in secular modernity has man finally achieved his liberation from oppression and ignorance, from superstition, magic, tyranny, and priestcraft, from the dark forces of fanatical belief and sectarianism. Man achieved this liberation through the secularization of society, which was effected primarily by the separation of religion from political order, church from state. Ever-increasing religious and ideological pluralism, as the concomitant to social secularization, ensued as soon as men were set free to exercise freely their reason and act on their consciences. When Christendom was finally broken up in the wake of the sixteenth-century Reformation, religiously intolerant, confessional, monarchical states emerged, but these evolved quite quickly into the secular, tolerant, pluralistic, democratic states we have today. In short, secular modernity is what happened when the archaic, violence-inducing sacred lost its public, political hegemony and influence, as was relegated to the sub-political, private sphere of men’s fancies and hearts where it belongs. The only sacred to be permitted in the public square and authorized to employ legal and political power in its name will be the sacred right of the individual to self-determination, to freedom of thought, action, speech, and religion.
The rise of secular society after the sixteenth and seventeenth-century “wars of religion” (to see why this phrase must be put in quotes, see the pioneering revisionist work of William T. Cavanaugh) was rendered possible only by the removal of “religion” (an entirely new creation of the modern state, as Cavanaugh has shown, being unprecedented in its depoliticized and privatized form) from all positions of political significance and power, as all people were ready and willing to accept after decades of incessant bloodshed over religion. Sequestered, depoliticized, and privatized, religion could no longer cause war, divisiveness, and oppression, and the newly liberated, autonomous, politically secular individual could thrive. In the religiously tolerant, secular, pluralistic liberal democracy governed by the rights of men, not God, the sacred would still have its place and influence, but now it would coexist with competing sacreds in the same city, perhaps in the same heart of the individual, proliferating and dwelling together precisely because none will be permitted to obtain societal, cultural, and political power, let alone a monopoly on power.
Prescinding from the ideological accuracy of this narrative, it can be said with certainty that in modernity man attempted, for the first time in human history, to construct a political order not based upon the religious sacred. While not denying the possibility of an external, cosmic, and transcendent reference point for society, a power higher and more authoritative than man’s will, modern man decided to close the question, as it were, by substituting secular “values” for religious dogma. Did this project succeed? Can such a project ever succeed? And if so, what woul1d success look like? The philosopher Thomas Molnar frames the question well:
Must the political order be derived from a cosmic model (or, at any rate, from an external, transcendent reference point), or are there valid and effective substitutes? Can unaided humanity, through the mobilization of its faculties, create a sacred, or at least a myth, powerful enough to convey a model? If the answer to these questions is no, we must ask then: Can a community exist without the sacred component, by the mere power of rational decisions and intellectual discourse?
Charlie Hebdo and IXXI, as well as Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing, the Aurora shooting, the ISIS beheadings, the Sydney chocolate-shop shooting, and the plethora of post IXXI crisis-events constituting the ongoing episodes in the “War on Terror”, most recently the “War on Viruses”, and now the “War on antisemitism.” What the continual irruption and increasing proliferation of violent, crisis-making events bearing the sacred features I described above (unimpeachable narratives, an ethos of fear and awe, the sudden unification of factions, etc.) indicates is that the phenomena of the sacred is as publicly present, influential, and authoritative in secular modernity as it ever was in the ancient “religious” world. The answer to Molnar’s question seems to be no. A community cannot exist without a sacred component, and when the traditional sacred of monotheism was rejected in modernity, the shrine did not remain empty.
An objection might be raised here. Even if it was mistaken in its attempt to desacralize politics and power, did not secular modernity bring us the freedom of religion, the rule of law, civil equality, and representative government, that is, beneficial institutions and practices unheard of in the pre-modern world for which we should be grateful? We can say with certainty that modern liberal democracy, insofar as it has provided the political and legal and cultural and social space for the free exercise of reason and conscience, and has helped men to flourish physically through its scientific, technological, and medical advances is a considerably good thing. But the price it was willing to pay for all its secular advances was the dethronement of the traditional sacred from its rightful place at the heart of society, culture, and politics, and the cost of the payment was an exorbitant one—“What profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his very soul.”
Sacred Nihilism
The sacred in a nutshell is what is considered absolutely good, around which and in pursuit of which men order their lives. Insofar as secular liberalism denies that such a good even exists, or, if it admits its existence, denies that it can or should have any public authority in civilized society, it is delusional and hypocritical. Alasdair MacIntyre writes:
Initially, the liberal claim was to provide a political, legal, and economic framework in which assent to one and the same set of rationally justifiable principles would enable those who espouse widely different and incompatible conceptions of the good life for human beings to live together peaceably within the same society. Every individual is to be equally free to propose and to live by whatever theory or tradition he or she may adhere to, unless that conception of the good involves reshaping the life of the rest of the community in accordance with it. . . . And this qualification of course entails not only that liberal individualism does indeed have its own broad conception of the good, which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and culturally wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in so doing its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is severely limited.
Since secular liberal culture is, according to MacIntyre, founded upon a particular conception of the good, and we can say sacred for our purposes, namely, the sacral good of the privatization and desacralization of all claims to truth, and a particular doctrine of truth, the irreducible plurality of conceptions of the good/sacred; and since the publicly authoritative rhetoric of liberal culture denies having any substantive sacred conceptions of its own, what liberalism amounts to is an established, schizophrenic, and intolerant belief/practice—an established sacred—but one that indoctrinates citizens into disbelieving in its very existence as such. Just as the puppeteers in Plato’s Cave must ensure that the shadows they cast on the wall in front of the shackled slaves are never seen by them as shadows, else the cave be identified as a cave and the prisoners break their chains in revolt, the “secular” state must never be exposed for what it really is, a sacred power, exercising hegemony over all competing sacreds, which it privatizes and thereby neuters. It’s own sacred dogmas become unimpeachable, unquestionable, and uncontestable, and it judges all in accord with these dogmas, and executes its judgments through its terrible liturgical violence and ritual scapegoating.
All political orders require a mechanism for engendering and preserving unity, and the sacred has always been the source and engine of this unity. It is no different in our day. The Charlie Hebdo murders, though horrific and tragic, were exploited, and perhaps even orchestrated, both politically and spiritually to achieve, through a kind of psychological and spiritual sorcery, a unified group-mind in the French people and in the West at large. At the shrine of Charlie Hebdo, “free speech” became God, one with no numinous core, no divine identity, and no supernatural content. But it was a cunning oracle, commanding toleration of only the blasphemy and ridicule of precisely those competing sacreds it attempted to vanquish, the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob and the personages of Mohammad and Christ. The desacralization, profanation, and degradation of Christianity and Islam is, since Charlie Hebdo, the official translation of “free speech.”
IXXI and the Satanic Sacred
Although Charlie Hebdo is in the competition, IXXI was the initiating exemplar of secular modernity’s sacred, followed by even more elaborate liturgies with a distinct resemblance to traditional sacred mythology, ritual, and sacrament. Sheldon Wolin writes:
The mythology created around September 11 was predominantly Christian in its themes. The day was converted into the political equivalent of a holy day of crucifixion, of martyrdom, that fulfilled multiple functions: as the basis of a political theology, as a communion around a mystical body of a bellicose republic, as a warning against political apostasy, as a sanctification of the nation’s leader, transforming him from a powerful officeholder of questionable legitimacy into an instrument of redemption, and at the same time exhorting the congregants to a wartime militancy, demanding of them uncritical loyalty and support, summoning them as participants in a sacrament of unity and in a crusade to “rid the world of evil.
James Allison, an eminent theologian of the work of Rene Girard, has given the most penetrating account of how the IXXI event established itself as the nexus of sacred power in America, and, it can be argued, in the West as a whole. It is worth quoting in full:
And immediately the old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. All over London I found that friends had stopped work, offices were closing down, everyone was glued to the screen. In short, there had appeared, suddenly, a holy day. Not what we mean by a holiday, a day of rest, but an older form of holiday, a being sucked out of our ordinary lives in order to participate in a sacred and sacrificial centre so kindly set up for us by the meaningless suicides. . . And immediately the sacrificial center began to generate the sort of reactions that sacrificial centers are supposed to generate: a feeling of unanimity and grief. Phrases began to appear to the effect that "We're all Americans now" -- a purely fictitious feeling for most of us. It was staggering to watch the togetherness build up around the sacred center, quickly consecrated as Ground Zero, a togetherness that would harden over the coming hours into flag waving, a huge upsurge in religious services and observance, religious leaders suddenly taken seriously, candles, shrines, prayers, all the accoutrements of the religion of death. And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel good, and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has deeply sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy's roots in sacrifice. One of the effects of the violent sacred around the sacrificial center is to make those present feel justified, feel morally good. A counterfactual goodness which suddenly takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences. And very quickly of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the militant goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their lives. And then there are those who are with us and those who are against us, the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly people were saying things like "to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip about celebrities' and politicians' sexual peccadillos. Now we have been summoned into thinking about the things that really matter." And beneath the militant goodness, suddenly permission to sack people, to leak out bad news and so on, things which could take advantage of the unanimity to avoid reasoned negotiation. . . . What I want to suggest is that most of us fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity. What I want to suggest is that this, this delight in being given meaning, is satanic.
Sound familiar?
All human beings “delight in being given meaning,” but the meaning giving to the masses through the Israeli psy-op, the Ukrainsane, the Plandemic, IXXI, and Charlie Hebdo events is a counterfeit one. In IXXI and the War on Terror that followed, the United States became the suffering and resurrected God, murdered, it would seem, by the forces of pure evil who “hate our freedoms,” but brought back to life by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et.al., and the righteousness of the American people. Our priest/warriors, with our support, inaugurated an endless “shock and awe” crusade against the world’s evil that “keeps us free,” but also separates the sheep from the goats, the saved from the damned—“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” The meaning of IXXI is its definitive, divine confirmation of “our” exceptional righteousness and the inexorable wickedness of the “other.” We had faith in this meaning before IXXI, but it was finally confirmed by the divine sign of demonic planes crashing into our tallest shrines. Bush was merely exercising his priestly role over this sacred faith and its attendant sacred violence that all past American presidents have been charged to protect and preserve:
For Marvin and Ingle, death in war—what is commonly called the “ultimate sacrifice” for the nation—is what periodically re-presents the sense of belonging upon which the imagined nation is built. Such death is then elaborately ceremonialized in liturgies involving the flag and other ritual objects. Indeed, it is the ritual itself that retrospectively classifies any particular act of violence as sacrifice. Ritual gesture and language are crucial for establishing meaning and public assent to the foundational story being told. The foundational story is one of both creation and salvation. At the ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994, for example, President Clinton remarked of the soldiers that died there both that “They gave us our world” and that “They saved the world.”
Charle Hebdo was a psychological-spiritual operation, regardless of the lack of consciousness of this by the patsies who carried it out, by which the French masses, already alienated from the true sources of meaning, truth, goodness, and beauty found in the beliefs and practices of traditional monotheism, and existentially ignorant of the philosophia perennis described and analyzed so trenchantly and beautifully by the twentieth-century sages Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Jean Borella, and Seyyed Nasr, were initiated into the satanic sacred, the worship of the empty shrine of nihilism. William Cavanaugh writes:
The public shrine has been emptied of any one particular God or creed, so that the government can never claim divine sanction and each person may be free to worship as she sees fit . . . . There is no single visible idol, no golden calf, to make the idolatry obvious . . . officially the shrine remains empty. . . . The empty shrine, however, threatens to make a deity not out of God but out of our freedom to worship God. Our freedom comes to occupy the empty shrine. Worship becomes worship of our collective self, and civil religion tends to marginalize the worship of the true God. Our freedom, finally, becomes the one thing we will die and kill for.
“You may confess on your lips any god you like, provided you are willing to kill for America.” And France in 2025 officially joined itself to America’s sacred War. Ukraine in 2022. Israel in 2023.
Two Cities
Since IXXI, individual liberty—the authentic kind—has been vastly curtailed, and global violence exponentially increased. Wars are and rumors of war are incessant. Perhaps the next staged terror event might witness the final annihilation of our freedoms and the rise of a global police state, if we aren’t first nuked out of existence. So, what should we do—now? It would seem reasonable to make the priority the dismantling of the ruling powers, and the first step (towads a peaceful dismantling at least, if that’s still possible) would be to increase the true secularity and religious freedom of modern states, while severely restricting their scope and power over individuals. Such, it would seem, would help to preserve and extend citizens’ real freedoms of speech and worship, instead of the counterfeits that mask the imposition of the tyrannical agenda of the nihilistic and craven ruling classes whose marching orders emanate from the sacred sites of Tel Aviv, London, and Washington. In short, if our analysis is correct and modernity is merely the replacement of one violence-causing sacred for another—we used to have bloody crusades and wars for Christ and Mohammad, now we have them for democracy and freedom—it would seem reasonable for us to turn our efforts towards banishing any semblance of the sacred from the public square so as to separate it from all corrupting, political, coercive, and violence-making power. This would protect both the sacred from profanation and the state from idolatry. In other words, if Western governments are indeed the shrines and purveyors of satanic nothing-worship, then we need to strip them of all sacred authority.
While it cannot be denied that a more truly secular, less powerful, and more—much more!—decentralized government-military-financial-intelligence-media complex is the sine qua non of any solution, if we take the reality and power of the sacred as seriously as we should, we cannot be content it remain merely a private affair. God has, whether we recognize it or not, social, cultural, and political reign, and not just over our individual hearts, but over institutions and states, over men organized collectively for the common good and for His honor. He is the ultimate common good, and if He is relegated to the private sphere of idiosyncratic and irrational fancy, something else not so good always takes His place. Just as there is no such thing as free speech, there is no such thing as an empty shrine. Thus, we must work not only to dethrone the satanic sacred, the Abomination of Desolation, but also to replace it with the authentic sacred, the Living, Holy, All-powerful, All-knowing, All-just, All-merciful God, along with the Traditions that embody and transmit the ultimate realities of man’s existence, the transcendent origin, end, and meaning of things that cannot be grasped by human reason alone, and which cannot be fully rationalized or defined. Ultimate reality must be experienced through and in its incarnation in authentic religious traditions. It is in this sense that genuine sacred traditions are the eyes that allows desacralized men to see the spiritual, eternal, and transcendent meanings hidden in the physical, temporal, and mundane facts of everyday existence, to “delight in meaning” immersed in the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
But first things first. To dethrone the counterfeit, satanic sacred that has usurped the seat of earthly power, and with Bergoglio the seat of spiritual power, in much of the West, we first must repent of our own complicity in its rites and ceremonies. And we must unmask it, hiding right out in the open, to help those blinded to its existence and horrific nature by the unholy fear it engenders and commands, the tortuous psychological and spiritual deceptions it incessantly enacts, and its totalitarian control of public discourse. As Neil Kramer describes, “For the ordinary person, the primary power of Empire rests not in its might or cunning, but in its invisibility. People who are not mindful of its presence do not comprehend their conscious and spiritual incarceration.”
The City of God is founded on a love of God that leads its citizens to contempt for themselves, counting all earthly things as worthless. . . . Augustine argues that the temporal ought to be ordered to the eternal (Civ. Dei XIX,17), but that this ordering will never be achieved entirely harmoniously till the second coming of the Lord. For, there is a second city here on earth in addition to the city of God— the civitas terrena, the earthly city. This city is founded on a love of self to the contempt of God (Civ. Dei XIV,28). And these two cities are in conflict . . . The earthly city is always opposed to true religion. . . . Justice consists in giving each his own, thus no society is just that does not give God the worship due to Him.
The earthly city of man has always been opposed to true religion, to the true sacred, to the City of God, and this opposition has only increased since our so-called “secular age” first came into existence, with its hostility growing exponentially since IXXI. The modern, secular states of the West are not as modern and secular as they appear, and they are certainly not as tolerant, rationalist, religiously neutral, desacralized, enlightened, morally progressive, and non-violent as their priests claim. At the heart of every culture is always the sacred, and at the heart of our post-IXXI, pathocratic, imperial culture of death and deception is a terrible—but entirely vincible—sacred power in mortal conflict with the Logos, the only merciful, loving, and truly sacred Person who can protect, guide, and save those who are willing to recognize, adore, and trust in Him.
Checks and balances, or any other modern technology of power distribution and channeling, cannot stop scapegoating murder, which is at the heart of all cultures except that which is gospel converted: https://open.substack.com/pub/thaddeuskozinski/p/rene-girard-and-sacred-violence?r=24l7o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Professor, this is an absolute banger! I especially appreciate your citations to MacIntyre and Augustine (whose dim view on states is a lesson for today). I'm reminded of this famous T.S. Eliot quote:
“The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.” T.S. Eliot