Liberalism: The ‘god’ that failed
‘To put it simplistically, God had to let us see rock bottom, in a way. This is a foretaste of Hell, basically. Hell is isolation, manipulation, statism, gaslighting. You just got a taste of this.'
The Taking of Christ — Caravaggio
The Second-Worst Crime in History
‘The vaccine is the sacrament of modern science, freedom, progressivism . . . If I take the shot, it means I’ve given complete faith in the system, which represents rejection of the old theocratic medievalism.’
This week, I talk to Dr Thaddeus Kozinski, about his latest book, Covid-19 and the War Against Reality, which is perhaps the first to get to the core of the issue: the precise nature of the ‘spiritual war’ that has been talked about now for five years. When, in that time, we have heard people speak of what has been happening as a ‘spiritual war’, it has not always been clear what this means. In this book we find the answer: it is ultimately a war declared by men against God — and therefore, ultimately, a war declared by man upon himself.
Dr Kozinski sees it as arising fundamentally from a betrayal by post-Enlightenment humanity of the absolute nature of reality, an undoing of the inheritance of Christendom, and a self-inflicted act of self-destruction by humanity upon itself. In this book, he proffers the proposition that what occurred in the spring of 2020 was the culmination of a process whereby man, having abandoned and abolished the idea of absolute truth and goodness, went all out to do evil. The chief instrument of this crime was an ideology, beguilingly titled ‘liberalism’, which promised freedom, equality and other good-sounding things, but only as part of a confidence trick aimed at their elimination, along with all other goodness. These events, he outlines, are the culmination of Biblical prophecies and warnings, and are therefore to be seen as the inevitable outcome of man’s rejection of God. What is happening to the world now is, accordingly, being permitted by God as a means of restoring His authority over Creation. These hard truths, however unpalatable, are vital to the future salvation of man, in this world as much as the next.
The origin of mankind’s fatal error is that liberalism — which Dr Kozinski places at the centre of this crime, the second worst in all history, exceeded in wickedness only by the murder of Jesus — sought to become an idolatrous religion, commandeering concepts and ownership of ‘The Good’, thus leading mankind into perdition. Men imagined themselves gods, which they could never be, and so unfolded the inevitabile earthly Hell in which Western civilisation now finds itself. Covid-19, as Kosinski describes things, was the culmination of a pestilence of contrabrand liberalism, snuck into the centre of the city. This crime (sin) against humanity was conducted as an assault not only on human beings, but against God, the Creator of all things. It had its origin in Hell and it has made a hell of human existence for the past five years and counting.
This goes back a long way. The central critique of this book is directed chiefly at America and errors made by its Founding Fathers in formulating the understandings which were to act as the bedrock of liberty. But, because of American cultural hegemony, Kozinski’s thesis applies, with appropriate modifications, everywhere. The chief error made way back then resided in laying down a weak relationship between spirit and State, i.e. a denial of the particular veracity of Catholic teaching. Humanity imagined that, in side-stepping ‘sectarian’ formulations, it was creating something ‘neutral’, but in reality, in ‘liberalism’ it was creating a religion without God, indeed based in a rejection of God and His replacement by the moral blackmail of the modern world’s Omnipotent Victims. This ‘religion’, camouflaged as ‘freedom’ is what has enslaved the world in the manner we woke up to — if not immediately to its meaning — one fine morning on the spring of 2020, locked into our homes by the people we had elected as stewards of our freedoms. In the formulating of their guiding philosophies, by rejecting — precisely — Catholicism, our nations had laid the foundations of totalitarianism, and precisely because, in so doing, they had rejected Christ, on Whom our civilisation, our species, our very being, were ineluctably dependent, the guardian and guide of all authority, truth, law, science and the humanly directed good in reality. Without Christ, nothing remained but undiluted power, camouflaged by an inverted parody of Christendom — the dominions of the WEF — ‘The Few’ written backwards. And Christ’s own Church led the plunge into this abyss.
This is a book of thoughts that might well help to restore the world to balance. Thaddeus Kozinski is a teacher who turns your thinking upside down, destroys the order of your thoughts and insists that there is a better way of putting them together. What he deals with here, fundamentally, is the hard problem of evil, which he tells us is not a problem but a mystery. His laboratory sample ‘mystery’, the plandemic of 2020, is one many of us have pondered for five years, and Dr Kozinski shows us that our understandings have been tentative, preliminary, partial. We need to go deeper into things, he plausibly insists, to go to the centre of all meanings, to where the truth about this, and everything, resides.
This is a book for both the faithful and the faithless, for it speaks to the part of each of us that is eternal, even if in spite of ourselves. Thaddeus Kozinski is a Catholic, but we should not allow that to be more than a fact that stands to aid our understanding, not as the basis to decide that, being otherwise, this book is not for us. Dr Kozinski is also a Platonist who understands that these concepts can, even if incompletely, be functionally conveyed in a ‘secular’ language speaking of truth and goodness.
In the language of Christianity, Kozinski has laid bare the truth about the ‘pandemic’ and what it has meant for the soul, mind and body of man. Among the things he is saying is that the beliefs we have unthinkingly acquired in the course of a few decades, and placed at the centre of our ‘reality’, have made this moment of horror inevitable. What we were calling ‘liberalism’ had nothing to do with freedom but with its antithesis. Our main foe, he says, is ideology, because it creates a false ‘reality’, which, accelerated by technology and bureaucracy, results in an ungodly world — in secular terms ‘a world without good’, which means ‘without God’ — the same thing. This counterfeit, he says, began in the minds of philosophers and ended up for the masses being indistinguishable from the real.
This book, written in large part in the language of the Christian faith, is therefore one for every human being capable of approaching it with an open mind and heart, for it describes the true nature of the waylaying of humanity on foot of its own hubris and self-obsession, and sets out what we need to do to redeem our race and set the world to rights in the sight of its Creator, which is to say in harmony with its own actual reality.
But Covid-19 and the War on Reality also proffers a choice of two languages which, in all that matters, amount to the same thing. Kozinski speaks of these questions bilingually — in the languages of Catholicism and Platonism, two ostensibly different tongues converging on the same idea: the Good exists and we have ceased to be it.
It is vital to observe that the fact that Kosinski is an unapologetic Christian might put some people off his work and thought; but this would be their mistake, for what they would unwittingly be objecting to is a positive prescription couched in words derived from the deepest, oldest, most abiding understandings of the nature of man and reality — in favour of more recent words couched in spontaneous, rootless and sometimes diabolical formulations by minds directed ultimately at wickedness.
When Kozinski proposes as the beginnings of a solution what he calls ‘existential Christianity’, he is not denying the reality of God, but acknowledging the facts of the linguistic trap man has painted himself into: man is not God but he has abolished God, and so has been persuaded to foolishly ‘replace’ God, even in his own total inadequacy. Only in seeing this, can we perceive the error that led us down the totalitarian road, and grasp the formula by which to find our way back home.
Thus, even ‘more important’ than the ‘God’ idea is the idea that we are ‘not God’. A constructed amnesia concerning this obvious reality lies at the heart of the new totalitarianism. For this reason alone (there are others), we need to begin the reconstruction of reality by acknowledging the throne that has been left empty by our rejection of God, without Whom we are cast into a profound loneliness, camouflaged with words like ‘progress', ‘compassion', ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’, ‘equality’ and ‘secularism’.
[Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski teaches philosophy and humanities at Memoria College and John Adams Academy. His most recent books included Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos, and Words, Concepts, Reality: Aristotelian Logic for Teenagers. He writes regularly at childrenbewareofidols.substack.com]
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