Cultural Marxism: From show trials to no trials
If the property is the proverbial nine points of the law, it is not surprising that Marxism, its frontal attack on property having stalled out (NB: ideology aside, we all like our “stuff”) would have eventually gotten around to launching a second front against law itself. The total annihilation of law never succeeded with Communism Classic (Stalin’s version), since the Soviet state needed a judicial apparatus to highlight its superiority to “bourgeois law” …not to mention providing a half-way house on the way to the Gulag. The nightmare of totalitarianism having been quietly put aside, if not entirely exorcised, we have emerged into the glaring, and presumably lawful, the light of the Global Village. Or have we?
Today, the legal “reforms” of the (allegedly) defunct Soviet state are held to be little more than antiquarian curiosities. However, this does not mean that “bourgeois law” a.k.a., classic legal principles of the Civil and Common law, have triumphed throughout the world. Rather, the struggle against law has gone underground, or rather above ground and hidden in plain sight. It dares not risk exposing itself, and therefore avoids clear opposition to the institution which makes civilization possible: Objective Law. Since it eschews both thesis and antithesis, running for the dense cover of ambiguity, it must be tracked like a beast…by locating and examining its spores. We know not what it is, but like W. B. Yeats, we can at least pose the question…
And what rough beast, its hour come at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
But at least we have a track, where the beast has digested large swaths of civilization’s foliage and left us a species-specific excrement where form has been neatly reduced to matter. If we can track the down the spoor-dropper, perhaps it can be slain. Or perhaps not. But at least we may come to know who, or what, our adversary is.
Antinomianism
We must pick up the beast’s trail in the foothills of religion, and especially false religion. The journeyman tracker will think that we have found the beast itself, and with a gleeful cry of “Antinomianism! Antinomianism!” presume that they have him treed, when in fact it is just a spoor, albeit very a significant find. Actually, the beast has moved on to an entirely different part of the forest, since the “true” false region of today is not a religion at all, but science, or rather scientism.
However there are enough who still believe in ersatz-Christianity to cloud the contemporary scene with a subtle contempt for law. This is an Oedipal Christianity in which the God of Law is slain by the Son of Love, a doctrine preached by a vague figure named Jesus something or other. Scientifically this is supposed to be Yeshua ben Yosef, but it really doesn’t matter, since this ersatz-Christianity has been purified of all but universal truths which all good natured people ought to be able to agree to. Among these is that law is mean and should be dispensed with in favor of good will.
Yeats was assuming that the reader of his poem knew that he was talking about the “Antichrist.” However, if we get too hung up on the idea of the Antichrist being an ugly, brutal, beast then we are likely to be deceived. Granted, there are many cults which like to dress up in spandex costumes, going about sporting horns and tridents. They may even enjoy frightening middle-class people on Halloween and sundry sabbaths with their clownish antics. But this is all an exercise in misdirection. Such cultists may be “anti-Christs” but not the final beast who arrives at the end of history. The real threat to our spiritual well-being doesn’t come from avowed nihilists who dance around impersonating a cartoon Satan.
The real threat comes when the world-system (what the Bible calls the “Aeon”) proceeds to abolish law in favor of a “higher morality.” In today’s virtue-signaling pseudo-saints we see a harbinger of the real Antichrist. The real Antichrist will not look evil or demonic, in fact the real Antichrist will try to resemble Christ to whatever extent that might be possible. After all, Christ did transpose law-abiding to a higher abiding in Him. Call that a “higher morality” if you will. However the “higher morality” of the Antichrist will not be based on fear of the Creator, but fear of the creatures. Specifically, it will involve fear of the Human collective, a fear that will initially manifest itself as virtue-signaling, but in fact will rest upon appeasement of human (and ultimately demonic) lusts.
Having broken through the firewall of law (whether we choose to call such formal restraints law, culture, morality, ethics, or whatever) the direct confluence of collective human lusts and fears will create a Democracy of Desire. Initially such a state of affairs may not seem ugly to behold. It may even appear to be morally beautiful.
A beautiful beast.
Reprinted from Pico Ultraorientalis.
