The worship of political figures, and that of ideological and historical myths such as the world wars, is a symptom of the disordered infusion of the religious impulse into things other than God.
The Liberal Idea is one, being a cult designed by salesmen in the century between the last twenties and these ones. It will not survive the decade.
Our world is animated by beliefs hostile to reality. The expression of these beliefs brings chaos and murder, both freelance and state sponsored.
To defend them is to attack anyone who doubts the merits of replacing everywhere with nowhere - the real world territory with the map to Utopia.
This is the reason that contrary evidence about these myths does not add to the believer’s stock of knowledge but is greeted with hostility.
The reason for the belief is to have something to believe in. This belief will be defended from the truth at all costs.
This is idolatry in its modern form.
Leaderism is a form of idolatry. Political figures are not saviours. It is an extension of leisure-lifestyle culture, which is a replacement for doing things and a recipe for viewing them instead.
If you would like to know more about this liberal-heretical notion, see here:
World war worship is a cult of historical fan fiction. Like most disordered attachments it has a lot to do with the infusion of spiritual meaning into things other than God.
Whether you believe in God or not, it is hard to deny that there is a common tendency to attach intense personal feeling to symbols. Each side has its current thing, and the current is most electrifying when it is touched by doubt.
It is important to be dubious about promises of an earthly paradise.
Men are flawed and so are the things they make and do. This is mere common sense. Infused with a promise that answers the profound spiritual hunger in a forest of fakes, the electric dreams of modern idolatry have an obvious appeal.
The commandment against it was made for good reason, and its relevance to modern life is perhaps more pronounced than in former times.
This is because our mass culture generates reverence for anyone and anything famous. The branding is intended to be impressed on and into you.
When it becomes a part of your identity you have begun to base your idea of yourself on a totem.
This is why it is taboo to insult the object with remarks about its nature. It has become in the believer a thing supernatural, beyond proof.
When I say this is an age of maximum superstition, this is what I am talking about.
If you mention the sun might be related to the temperature of the earth, climate cultists go mad
If you point out their sponsors, fans of politicians go mad
If you notice the world wars created this horrible system, world war two worshippers go mad
and if you call people who believe the television “television believers” - they call you mad, and do so rather angrily
This is brand loyalty, and offending the brand is to offend the branded. People believe these things because they are not true. Why? Because they make themselves feel better.
They believe in these things in the same way they believe in films or television dramas. They know it is not real, but they cannot enjoy themselves if they do not forget this.
Modern life is intended to be the performance of a lone actor for their own entertainment. Nothing more. Do not alert the actor to the empty auditorium. Do not remind them of the stage and the script and the costume.
This is simply not done. In a degraded age, it is the height of bad manners to deprive the sick of their poison, to rob the enchanted of their illusions.
Let people just enjoy things.
Yet there is so little joy.
Brands - political figures, historical myths, the Grand Narratives of the 20th century - are all the same. A pair of shoes does not just cover your feet. They say something about you.
The more the brand says, the less you do, in fact.
This is the same for opinions produced in the supermarketplace of ideas. You identify with them at first, then as them.
At some point, most people have “transitioned” in this way: they have escaped themselves into a fabricated identity manufactured for this purpose.
You can of course be a sports fan, buy a car or read some news without any of this happening.
What tends to happen - as these things are promoted in a way to make it happen - is that the policy or product is absorbed into the self in the same way that thoughts inhabit the mind. By sheer familiarity - repetition in advertising and in the advertised habits of others - these things come to seem familiar. Like family.
Like they are your own.
What is happening here is some part of your identity is colonised by a product.
You infuse these things with qualities they do not have. It is disappointing to find out your fancy shoes are made in the same Chinese sweatshop as all the others. Or your phone. And so on. Why?
Because the idea is dispelled by reality. This idea is what sells you the premium product at a premium price. You get to belong. To be one of those people.
Therapy is sold in the same way as anything else. It produces dependence by postponing satisfaction indefinitely. So you keep going back for more.
Whether you believe in God or not, it is hard to deny the infusion of religious fervour into the quest for satisfaction. Whether by purchase power, the parroting of policy slogans, whether by a unilateral declaration of war on the world and a lifelong career of grievance, the result is dependence on the promise of desire and the delivery of disenchantment.
The product is emptiness, whose hollow hunger is often filled with a nameless rage.
Some people go on to exhort or enact atrocities. Rage has no object - only targets. It can only destroy. Defacing works of art, toppling statues, erasing place names, national identities and cultures, and undertaking deliberate atrocities at street or state level are all forms of revenge - on reality.
These are the wages of the sin of idolatry. Our leaders avenge themselves on the world outside the liberal order because it did not or will never submit to their ambition of global dominance.
Downstream of this is the political violence of radical Islamism and of the left, the riots, the vandalism, the stabbings, the burning of churches, the smashing of windows, the threats and assaults legal and criminal on anyone who tries to begin to speak for the reality-based community. We inhabit, as a result, a culture of crime. The normal has been marginalised by the normalisation of the marginal.
Liberal and Salafist jihad are not undertaken to defend or spread the beauty of their creed. The aim is not only the propaganda of the deed. These are a means to an end. Yours.
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Great stuff, Frank. It is all idol worship, and obviously so once you've seen it.
Western society worships a golden calf and they'll throw you in jail for pointing out the gilding or the horns.
Dude how do you produce so much writing? If it's drugs I want to know what they are.