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A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.”

St. Antony the Great

Last weekend, I read an article. It was at the same time really good and not good enough.

I’ll explain myself but first I’ll separate the article into three parts. The first part of the piece attempts to describe a seismic shift in societal organization. He describes it as acceptance of a “reality,” separate from reality. Part two identifies the perpetrators of this new “reality” as, essentially, a cult. The last part suggests how to deal with the cultists.

Like some many articles of this sort, it tantalizes the reader with the promise of a plan for action. What can WE do to confront this great thing that threatens us. The actual prescription is rather non-specific and offers no prognosis as to whether something, anything might work. That leaves me, and maybe you as well, unsatisfied.

As I thought about it, the first part also leaves me unsatisfied. The author describes how a “new normal” has replaced the ideological-driven movements that threatened us in past generations with a simple and global “reality.” This new, world-wide homogeneity is the result and consequence of global capitalism and worldwide trade. It lacks, he explains, the ideology of its totalitarian predecessors because it has no ideology to compete with. It just is and therefore its ideology, such as it is, is “reality” – which in this case means whatever the system says it means.

The middle block made the most sense; the most impact. It makes the connection between a totalitarian system and cultist beliefs. He explains “that is what totalitarianism is … a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” The evidence is available to each of us in our day-to-day interactions. The Covidians, as he calls them in the article’s title, respond to challenges to their belief system in the same way a cultist will fight someone who tries to bring them back to normal society. Only, normal society is fast disappearing.

The examples that follow are quite convincing. What is less convincing is the advice. Deal with these people “as if they were talking about “Xenu,” “body thetans,” “Helter Skelter,” or any other cultoid nonsense, because that it is exactly what it is.” Yet, as he points out, when “we” deal with a run-of-the-mill cult, “we” are society at large – the vast majority of the populace that has not fallen under its spell. In the case of the Covidians, it is “everybody” who is following the nonsense and there is no “outside” (his word) to take a cultist for deprogramming. So while what he advises is a good start, it is not a good answer.

Another way to look at this is dispassionately and objectively. Maybe by simply studying and learning we’ll gain understanding of what this “cult” is all about and with that knowledge may come action. So IS this a strange new thing? What is the nature of a movement that creates its own reality and then attempts, by force, to get everyone else to adopt that reality? Our writer does not actually say that this is new or different. I’m pretty sure that it is neither. In fact, this sounds to me like like the behavior of fundamentalist religious movements throughout history.

In other words, what we are seeing is just a form of religion*. What is new this time around is how it is global in its reach and nearly ubiquitous in its adoption. It also has an advantage of not relating to God or any of the other trappings of worship so, like Caesar’s coin, it can coexist with most major religions. And while there may be no heaven and hell, there remains salvation and perdition and the struggle of each of us, as individuals, to choose between them. However, when in making that choice, we make it for the collective. At risk is not just our own immortal soul but the future of all living things (and maybe the inanimate world as well). Even one polluter or one unvaccinated among us will damn the efforts of billions of faithful.

Even this is not a new thing. In the Soviet Union, while striving for atheism, the Party made use of the trappings of the Orthodox tradition where it could. Chinese communism is infused with Confucianism and 1000s of years of their oriental belief system. Hitler used quasi-religious symbolism to shore up his support through an appeal to pre-Christian German traditions. So this is neither new nor novel but rather a proven and effective technique. It may also be the baseline. Look at history as a vast swamp of tyranny and superstition punctuated by the occasion golden age of the civilized and it may indeed seem that we are due a Great Reset.

So, put into these terms, what we may be seeing is the end of the Enlightenment. I would have found this an impossible proposition just a few short years ago but now?

For my entire life, the core values of the Enlightenment seemed universal; individual rights, fundamental freedoms, and Republicanism**. Of course, different emphases were adopted by the various factions in the culture wars but our basic values were not in question. It is very recently that I began hearing that, actually, freedom of speech isn’t necessarily a virtue; or that individual rights are selfish and we must subvert ourselves to the good of the collective. Not that these ideas are unique – collectivists and forced-conformity have long attempted to subjugate the individual. What is different now is that we’re more obvious in our abandoning of these self-evident truths. Re-read the first sentence of this paragraph? Doesn’t that signal to you that I’m going to take a particular side politically and culturally? Would phrases like “individual rights” and “freedom” be considered “right wing” even twenty years ago, much less fifty years ago?

In addition, this helps to explain the holdouts against this new new world order. A quasi-religion is bound to take the most flak when challenging actual religion. Further, the more strict that established religion is, the more resilient it will be. I think we all understand that fundamentalist Islam is not going to find itself woke any time soon. Resistance to the mask mandates in the U.S. are pinned primarily on the evangelical Christians of small-town (read Trump) America. However, it is also the Black and Hispanic communities, who tend to be more religious than urban (read anti-Trump) whites. In Europe, we see traditional Catholic redoubts like Poland leading the resistance.

Personally, I find the explanation of a cult of secular religion to be much more useful than the idea of redefining reality (or “reality”). At the same time, it is much of a muchness. Isn’t the essence of religion – any religion – that it defines a reality above and beyond the reality which we perceive with our senses? Isn’t it also the nature of cult religions that this “extra” reality, the tenets to be accepted on faith, tend to be more otherworldly in step with the strictness of the cult? In other words, it’s not that I disagree with the article as much as I’d like to make the concept more useful to me.

Because that’s the rub.

If we accept that the majority of our friends and neighbors have lost their grip on reality and are now in thrall to a massive, global cult, what will we do about it? While, indeed, the first step is to know what we’re dealing with, it remains as only the first step.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com

*I don’t want to start a fight about something I’m not trying to say. I’m not trying to be anti-religion nor equate mainstream religions to a cult. The Church triumphant can benefit man absent the Church visible; the institution of organized religion. If I’m trying to conclude something, its that religion minus divinity is most likely going to be evil.

**In the European sense of the word, as in the opposite of Monarchy. I’m not deliberately trying to get into the distinctions between a Constitutional Republic and a Democracy, although I do want to point out that the former was universally valid and generally considered all-of-a-piece with the latter.