Our culture’s moral center is an antipode

The video, directly below, is the finale to a series of lectures on the history of unbelief from medieval to modern times. It strikes me as quite good — good enough that I just ordered the lecturer’s book on the subject. (I also cued up the audio version in Scribd.)

Alec Ryrie’s novel argument in this lecture is that the modern humanist consensus is not based on any of the major arguments or strains of intellectual atheism, but, instead, on the replacement of Jesus Christ as the center of our civilization’s moral universe WITH HITLER . . . as the Devil. What unifies most parties and certainly most citizens today is actually the Argumentum ad Hitlerium. The humanistic consensus, in Christian, non-Christian, and anti-Christian forms, is derived by inverting Hitlerism Popularly Understood. Hence our obsessive focus on one type of vice — racism, sexism, and other x-isms that intellectually congeal around the in-group/out-group antagonism — to the exclusion of other vices or any coherent set of virtues.

And this allows me to understand why I am so at variance with our general culture.

For I definitely did not derive and hone my normative thought via inverting Adolf Diabolos!

I find this devil-inversion method witless, and today’s cultic focus on this new Devil as sub-intellectual.

The reason for the former is that the method allows people to be manipulated by ideological propagandists and Deep State psy-op masters. The reason for the latter is that Hitler Popularly Understood is a hothouse flower, carefully cutivated and not enough of the real thing.

Hitler is in many ways far worse than his image, because the bulk of his ideas are now so mainstream. The welfare state itself was one of his crowning achievements, and it was an outrage, and quite integral to his designs. Yet many of the nutters who today think they oppose Adolf Diabolos in every possible way actually promote many of his key programs, and their commitment to these programs corrupts their politics generally. Sure, sure; I know, I know: They pick and choose — just as did the American military when it rescued thousands of Nazi scientists and engineers under Operation Paperclip and organized the post-war Deep State as this strange and quite dangerous echo of the Third Reich’s hidden core.

So now we have Boris Johnson and Joe Biden openly planning to regulate speech in a totalitarian fashion, and most people do not see this as the culmination of Hitlerism. I do.

And don’t, for it is also the culmination of the love of leftist socialism.

I am just not into setting up binaries and normative inversions. For I think we Hyperboreans must be mindful of the Law of Nemesis.

Which is in truth the real, animating spirit that is bringing an end to this age of the humanist consensus.

And Ryrie is surely right to prophesy that the current consensus will not last. And yes, I think it is in the process of collapsing right now, in a spectacular way.

twv