This essay goes on about
The counterfeit culture of 20th century Liberalism
The cultural power and meaning of “therapy”
The impact of consumerism on identity
The attempt to replace religion with a secular “common faith”
The crisis in the Catholic Church
…and its transition into another “ideological bureaucracy”
RESOLVING AN IMAGINED CRISIS
At the end of the Second World War, a new theory was invented to counter an anticipated wave of antisemitism.
That wave never arrived. The antidote did. Called “conflict resolution”, it was a novel psychological idea whose adoption would transform western culture.
This took place amidst the postwar rise of Liberal secular humanism, noted by Irving Kristol here.
The concept of “conflict resolution” itself led to a liberal defence mechanism- which diagnosed disagreement with the state religion as derangement.
This is a post about how the war for your mind escalated with the postwar promotion of the panacea of “therapy” - a talking cure for the conflict between liberal utopianism and the reality of experience.
Therapeutic education was the result of this reaction to an imagined backlash. It has created a backlash against itself, which we recognise in the general disenchantment driving populism.
I examined the development of “therapeutic education” and the cultural impact of “conflict resolution” in this post:
As we shall see, the war continued after 1945. It was said by the mentalists to be continued in the minds of the critics of the liberal idea and its creed of universal sameness versus difference.
The concept of “conflict resolution” is so pervasive it is invisible.
Like the therapy culture it birthed, it is indivisible from the dominant ideology. It is in fact a sort of defence mechanism for the side effects of the medicine1 of Utopia.
To put it simply, telling people to believe in things which aren’t real is likely to lead with a disagreement with reality.
THE CRISIS IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
17 years after the Second World War, the Catholic Church was modernised by changes introduced following the Second Vatican Council of 1962.
These changes included the administration and treatment of the sacraments, the liturgy of the Mass, and the Lord’s Prayer.
People in favour of these changes say there is no change made. That this represents a symbolic continuity. The same authorities closed the Church to the faithful under lockdown, denying them access to the sacraments.
The attachment to the Mass is seen by modernists as a sentimental attachment to the Latin in which it has been said since around the 5th Century AD.
CULTURE AND ANARCHY BY DESIGN
The “sweetness and light” of the 19th century Liberal humanist Matthew Arnold was one inspiration for the counterfeit culture of the 20th century.
In his “Culture and Anarchy”, Arnold said that the benefits of Christianity should be retained, without Christ.
To continue Christianity without Christ required a substitute for Him. This could be provided by poetry, said Arnold.
There are two objections to this idea. One is to do with God, one isn’t.
The first is that you cannot replace the Divine with ditties.
The second is that these two things are not the same, regardless of whether you believe in God (or poetry).
This is the reason so many causes and consumer aspirations are infused with religious fervour. This process has retarded human knowledge, as argument is now taken as aggression against a totem which cannot be challenged without provoking outrage.
This outrage is itself now a sign of being on the right side of history. Madness in both senses of the word is a cardinal virtue of the counterfeit culture.
A COUNTERFEIT CULTURE
We are obliged under Liberal Utopianism to believe that things which are not the same are not different. That the substitute is a fair swap.
Supermarket “food” is like this. So is the “news”.
So too is much of our revised history and culture.
And so, by design, our religious belief.
RELIGION WITHOUT GOD
It is seen as a lazy trope to point out that progress worship or liberation worship is a secular cult, like state worship2 or market worship3.
Yet the authors of the 20th century liberalism which is now expiring expressly believed that a “common faith” should be created for popular consumption4.
People like Walter Lippmann and John Dewey designed liberal democracy to produce a “common will” amongst the populations of the West. This they called “Public opinion”.
This process, called by Lippmann “the manufacture of consent”, saw industrial techniques inherited from Fordism and made possible through mass communication applied to the “problem” of the public.
What was the problem? It was a question of whether power would follow public opinion - or public opinion follow power.
Liberal democracy was designed to realise the latter.
RADICALISED BY REALITY
This is the reason you are sold ideas which contradict reality. It is inconvenient to power that you, the public, should base your opinions on your own experience.
To do so and to voice them is to be called a conspiracy theorist, to be guilty of hate speech, to be irrational, to be an extremist.
What is happening today is that people are being radicalised by misinformation.
“Misinformation” is the term applied to you noticing reality and describing it accurately.
This is bad, because it results in public opinions which seek to direct political power.
Reality based public opinion is a danger to liberal democracy.
EVERYTHING IS THERAPY
You can probably work out for yourself now why practically everything is a form of therapy.
Shopping is retail therapy. Food is sometimes “comfort food”. Weekend breaks offer “pampering”.
Aggressive consumerism is eroding basic human decency in children5.
The replacement of human relations with online parasocial patterns, of human relations with consumer transactions, and of the benefits of family, friendship, kinship and nation with the company of hired strangers hostile to all the foregoing is part of the process of progress.
THE CHANGE AND THE NAME
Therapy does not change things in reality. It teaches us to call things different names. It can also teach us to treat different things as if they were the same.
This happens in political messaging too.
Bad things are called good things. Good things are said to be bad.
The names of things are applied equally to new and different things which have arisen to replace the genuine article.
Families, marriage, nationality, peace, security, and even the Catholic faith are all examples of the old labels being applied to new and different things.
Healthcare includes the intentional killing of the unborn and suicide.
QUESTIONING DIFFERENCE
People who question the labelling of new things with old names are in need of therapy.
This idea proceeds from the intellectual vanity which flows from the conviction that you are absolutely right, and anyone who disagrees with you must have something wrong with their minds.
Disagreement is therefore a “conflict”, in need of the resolution of therapy. Noticing that different things are not the same is a sign of mental disorder.
This means talking to you until you agree - at the expense of your time, money and independence of mind.
INSOLUBLE CONFLICT
This is the reason everything is therapy. Shopping, comfort food, pampering weekends, making memories, gender affirming care, abortion, suicide.
These healthcare options are consumer options are annihilation options.
Why is everything therapy? Everything else makes it necessary.
The liberal mass delusion creates insoluble conflict - between itself and the experience of reality in the deluded.
A delusion becomes a delusion by persisting in the face of reality, against the evidence. The tension which results produces the very sort of internal conflict which the postwar therapeutic movement first imagined.
Liberal mass consumerism has realised it.
The Liberal idea was said by its late 20th century champion Francis Fukuyama to be a combination of cheap consumer goods and elections.
Both are substitutes. They combine to create a counterfeit culture.
Consuming fake food, fake ideas and voting in a fake democracy makes people feel something is not right.
Since liberals cannot be wrong, the problem must be you.
And so to therapy.
THERAPY AS DEPENDENCE
Therapy is itself another addiction. It costs money and time. It transfers your dependence on one behaviour or system of ideas to its own.
I have never met a therapist who promises a cure.
Just as the point of the permanent wars is not to win, so the purpose of therapy is not to resolve the dependence which requires its application.
It is to replace the object of attachment with itself.
CONSUMED BY CONSUMERISM
This means that therapy is, like everything else in the century of sales, a product to be consumed. As a habit forms around it, consuming becomes a pattern.
Consumerism consumes the consumer. The more you identify with these products, whether they are health crazes or Current Things or cars, the less of you there is to disagree with anything except competing consumer choices.
If you complain of the limitations of the product line you are accused of a violation of the terms and conditions.
And so you need therapy.
AN ARGUMENT WITH REALITY
This is the conflict, therapy is the resolution. Under a utopian system anyone who is dissatisfied with its design for life must be disturbed, because what is being promised is perfection.
Fukuyama maintained that liberal consumerism was the perfection of a historical process which by some Hegelian telos had eliminated the competition6.
The resulting monopoly was heralded as the victory of freedom. Free markets. Free speech. The free exchange of opinion.
John Gray thinks this is untrue. By contrast, he says Liberals are blind to the obvious, and cannot accept that people are rejecting its ideas because they have failed to satisfy them. He says the biggest threat to freedom in the West is now - Liberalism itself.
Gray also said that the idea of progress in the moral sense is a myth, and that it is heresy to Liberals to point out that humanity en masse does not morally and spiritually and intellectually advance because the calendar flips over.
IS THIS AN INTERNET ARGUMENT?
Most arguments are about as valuable as internet arguments. Being largely a process of mutual insult these days, the legacy of counterfeit culture has replaced free inquiry with dogmatic indignation.
In place of a futile attempt at reasoned debate, a joke is often a better instrument of illustrating a point.
Jokes break the boundaries of the acceptable. What is defined as acceptable is defined by the powerful. The powerful are the influential.
This influence has not arisen by accident. Satan has the best wages - until the final reckoning of course.
If you are willing to defend the preposterous against the obvious, it is unlikely you will surrender to evidence or to reason.
ANATOMY OF AN INTERNET ARGUMENT
It is unwise, especially in an age of stimulus-saturation, to react to everything you see or hear or read.
A cafeteria consumption pattern is a fair strategy to retain your sanity. What’s your poison?
Mine is sciolism7.
I include my internet argument here as an object lesson in mental hygeine.
The point I am making here is a serious one. I use a ridiculous image because it is important to ridicule risible masquerades of reason.
The crisis in the Catholic Church is due to the substitution of Catholicism with a modern counterfeit8.
It is not a simple question of the attachment to the Latin language9. The argument above is a linguistic one. Use the old words for the new.
Then everything is the same.
The crisis in the Church is due to the inability to resolve the conflict between the new and the old. You might say, the novel and the traditional.
I would say, the Catholic and the Modern10.
This conflict cannot be resolved by the clever use of words: things remain things despite a change of name.
DISAGREEMENT AS MENTAL DISORDER
It is also important to highlight the de facto designation of disagreement on profoundly serious matters as a form of mental illness.
The new religion is not the same as the real religion. This is obvious if you compare their practices yourself, in reality.
When the remedy for the defence of Catholic doctrine is a non-Christian system of monetised mind control intended to extinguish it, the familiar whiff of sulphur issues from Satan’s window.
People think of the Soviet Union when they see dissidents labelled as mentally ill. Some Soviet dissidents were given insulin injections to drive them insane, thereby realising the State’s designation of their disagreement with it as a mental disorder.
The insulin of Liberalism is therapy11.
TOWARDS A COMMON FAITH
I think the social revolution of the 1960s also captured the Catholic Church. The modern idea, best illustrated in A Catechism of Modernism, inexorably leads to the orientation of all things towards the self.
The 20th century was the century of the self. I say this century refers to the hundred years between the 1920s and the 2020s.
In the middle of this century, the Catholic religion was replaced with a counterfeit of itself. This substitute is more open, more “welcoming” to the Rainbow People and to ideas and practices that Catholic teaching condemns.
It is more like a “common faith” than the Catholic faith.
The “common faith” proposed by Dewey was a mass religion minus God, as a form of collective therapy.
The “mass” is now said towards the people. It was formerly said towards God.
The modern Church now promotes modern liberal ideology. In this it is identical with other dual-purpose institutions.
NATO, state education, state healthcare and the state itself are “ideological bureaucracies”. They combine their named function (religious, military, educational etc) with the promotion of a liberal ideology with global ambitions.
PUBLIC OPINION IS REVOLTING
The 20th century was animated - ensouled - by myths created intentionally to satisfy the public hunger for meaning.
They have left the public starved. Revolutions happen when the bread of life is in short supply. At present, our liberal leaders are managing us all into two very serious situations, which may very well result in all-out war.
What is happening now is that the people are revolted by the reality that the consumer-liberals have created.
The products of liberalism have reached their expiry dates. We all now realise it would be unhealthy to continue to consume them12.
Therapy has always been intended to foster adjustment to a manufactured delusion. Accepting this delusion as reality is called sensible.
The appeal to reality is called extremism, and a sort of mental disorder.
Please help me get to the GULAG. As you can see, Frank Wrongthink has no need of insulin to persuade the authorities of his “mental disorder”.
Much of what we call medicine is simply the forced correspondence of symptoms to prescriptions. What is prescribed are the products of the pharmaceutical industry.
This word comes from the Greek, Pharmakos, meaning the ritual sacrifice (or exile) of a human victim - usually in times of disaster.
Much of modern medicine - of body and mind - makes victims of the casualties of progress. This is a lucrative business, and a dimension of mass consumerism partnered with propaganda. They seldom prescribe lifestyle changes.
Bertrand Russell said Communism led to a form of state worship in practice, noting the “phases” of state worship in Rousseau, Locke and of course Hegel. This can be found on page 19 of his 1945 History of Western Philosophy.
He previously mentioned the concept in his 1938 book Power, where he said
“Ancient Rome had something of the doctrine of State-worship, but Christianity fought the Emperors and ultimately won.
Liberalism, in valuing the individual, is carrying on the Christian tradition; its opponents are reviving certain pre-Christian doctrines.
From the first, the idolators of the State have regarded education as the key to success.”
Therapeutic education promoted a species of state-worship in postwar Liberalism, with the rise of mass psychotherapy and its social and political application from the late 1960s and onwards.
Aside from the interesting question of how free markets can ever be, people like Ben Shapiro exhort a belief in them as a cure-all.
Dewey said in his 1934 essay “A Common Faith” that mankind should be given a non-supernatural religion to guide them through life.
Known as “Geist” or “the dialectic”, the Hegelian idea of history is that it has an impersonal purpose and therefore a direction. To Hegelians, this purpose is realised through the resolution of historical conflicts - resulting (to some) in a perfected state.
The Marxist Utopia of Communism is another example of this Godless religion, its Godless eschatology producing a sort of afterworld - a paradise on earth which never arrives.
“A pretentious attitude of scholarship; superficial knowledgeability.” This is a serious charge made in a mischievous manner. I hope to have backed it up here.
Given the obvious state of the modern church and the many abuses it routinely commits, with the endorsement of the Pope, I think the observable result of the project to transform it can fairly be called “Gay Modernism”. The supervision of most of the world’s Catholics by this sect is a tragedy, and not a mark of its validity.
The absence of the marks of the Catholic Church is a compelling argument against what can be called the “Conciliar-Synodal” Church, as explained here.
For the meaning and mission of “Modernism” see Pope St Pius’ X encyclical Pascendi Domini Gregis, transcribed in 1908 as “A Catechism on Modernism”.
Sohrab Ahmari is an Iranian Catholic who converted in 2016. His encouraging journey from atheism and Trotskyism to belief in God is documented in his book, “From Fire by Water” - which is notable for Ahmari’s “compelling…sincerity and humility”.
Ahmari is one leading “postliberal”, writing for Compact (which he co-founded) and for the Catholic Herald. My aim in including him in this way is to suggest the limitations of his outlook. A self-described “religious conservative”, I think some of his ideas are clearly circumscribed by the myths of the 20th century and cannot survive them.
This is not intended as a personal attack on him nor on the sincerity of his conversion. I think it is fair to make jokes. I do not know him. I think his idea as presented is specious and that is the reason I refer to him as a sciolist.
Please do not go online and bother him because of me. If you must disagree with him or with anyone on the internet, try do so in a reasonable (or even ridiculous) manner.
Avoid spite.
Frank, you talk about "unreality" and how the hallmark of "liberal democracy" IS unreality. I have a theory: WWII was a conflict based on unreality, and was fought to impose that unreality on the world.
At the close of WWI, there were no real monarchies left, and in their wake, instead of well order societies, imposed "egalitarian" models in the world. Many states in the West were struggling under the unreality of "egalitarianism", to the point where people began to notice things. They wanted order. They wanted a return to normalcy. They wanted a return to Christendom. People heard the message of certain parties, and saw an alternative to the unreality of "liberal democracy". In three states, that alternative gained control. In others, that alternative became dangerously influential.
I believe that communism is the logical conclusion to "liberal democracy"...which is why the liberal democrats in Europe and the US needed to crush the alternative. The end result is that anything that is not part of the liberal democrat perspective is seen as morally reprehensible. To accomplish this, liberal democracy needs to double and triple down on the unreality. The American colonies rebelled over a 2% tax. Now they consider themselves "free" to pay close to 40% in taxes.
My old man had a system of "conflict resolution" passed on from his father and his before . It usually involved someone getting thrown down some stairs . It's judgement was swift and final . Also from his forebears , a method of therapy called work , plenty of it and hard . Seemed to work as I remain in the Church with my people about me .
Im always at a loss when people who are yearning for some meaning and harken back to what their fathers and grandfathers had and refuse to see that it was exactly the beliefs , ways and conduct of those men that made it all possible . "If only I could have a nice safe neighborhood and tight community, but with fags and dusky hordes and no God" . You can have tacos (maybe kebabs for you Anglish) or no rape . But not both .