rEVOLution

Regarding the tumultuous 2020, there are some who are able to acknowledge the deeper roots of discontent in society – the underlying causes of division, angst, and anger.  This is not to discount the purposefully created agitation – certainly driven by the press and the many political agendas for which the press plays merely a public relations role.

But this manipulation by the press and its political clients can only work if there is a lever in society waiting to be pulled.  It only works because the cracks exist.  Society cannot be fragmented unless there are defects to exploit.

What are some of these roots of discontent?  It all certainly starts with central banking, and this exploded nationally in 2008.  What the people saw, fully exposed like never before, was a system designed to protect the connected and wealthy; a system that inherently disfavored the rest of us.

Trillions in bailouts – from both the federal government and the Fed.  Bankers saved despite making trillions in counterfeit loans – counterfeit due both to the fiat credit offered and counterfeit because the borrowers were unqualified in the first place.  Bonuses paid and stock values rising when making these loans, and further bonuses paid and stock values rising when being bailed out of these actions.

Next comes the drug war.  A pretext for every kind of intervention, search, invasion, and taking by the state.  The United States has the largest population of people incarcerated on the planet, and (if memory serves) something like half of these are in for non-violent offenses – primarily drug related.

Families torn apart, search and seizure, infinite additional cause for negative interaction between police and the people.  All designed to tear the fabric of society apart.

This issue cannot be separated from the militarism abroad.  An adventurous foreign policy – violent and ruthless – transfers its weaponry, hardware, skills and tactics to the home front.  But it is even worse: ethically, what’s the difference? 

A society that accepts – even worships – militarism and torture abroad cannot at the same time deplore it at home.  Many want to believe it is two different things, but the actor in each case is the same.  And the effect on our conscious selves of the foreign interventions dissolves any means by which to hold firm against a similar condition at home. 

We grow numb to all of it.  We decry the death of one man in Minnesota as an attempt to salve our wounds of supporting the millions of murders overseas.

Deeper in our conscience lies abortion.  Murder on a very grand scale, against the most vulnerable and most defenseless of society.  A society that sacrifices unborn infants for a better future.  No, child sacrifice has not left this earth.

No one wants to admit the damage this causes to society, but how can it not be a permanent scar?  Those who have gone through this trauma suffer one of two fates – either a permanent condition bordering on depression, or a permanent callousness.  Or some combination of the two, at neither extreme.  And this, not just for the mother, but all those around her – certainly to include the father.

Next: we live in a fact-free world.  The level of cognitive dissonance has reached unimaginable levels – both on the discussion around the corona and on the discussion of race relations (whatever that means) in American society.  The internal turmoil brought on by the prayerful desire to believe the story despite what our own “lying” eyes tell us can result in nothing other than societal suicide.

Finally, a sense of self and a sense of community.  This is manifest today in the debate on immigration.  Is there a culture and society worth protecting and defending?  Should it mean something to be a resident, and, ultimately, a citizen?  If the answer is no to these questions, society is lost.

Now, only the first and to some degree the second of these on the list above is being somewhat discussed as sources underlying the current turmoil in society.  Certainly, the Wall Street bailouts and a financial system designed to enrich the connected and exploit the rest is identified as such.  The drug war is only starting to be discussed in light of the question of policing. 

The rest I say are also underlying our condition, but I have not seen these discussed in the context of today’s turmoil.  Yet these are there, in varying degrees in the collective conscience of society.  The state of being human makes these internal conflicts unavoidable – and makes living a life as a human being rather difficult.

What does all of this have to do with rEVOLution?  That label was born in Ron Paul’s presidential campaign twelve years ago.  Ron Paul ran on all of these issues in 2008 and again in 2012.  I recall telling relatives and friends that he offered the last hope for holding the society together. 

Not that I think things would be fundamentally different today had he won.  Paul himself said that just electing him would not be enough.  Senators, congressmen, the marriage of the bureaucratic apparatus and big business – these all offered powerful counterforces to what anyone elected to the presidency might hope to accomplish.

His was a message of LOVE in the best sense.  Yet his biggest boos came from audiences of so-called Christians – primarily aghast at his views on the military.  His biggest cheers came on college campuses – the same ones used as weapons against civil society.

What is interesting is that four years ago Donald Trump ran on many of these same points – I don’t believe he made a point of the drug war, and I am sure he didn’t make a point on abortion.  But central banking, militarism, our fact-free world, and immigration – these were all central to his message and his popularity.

Trump was no Ron Paul.  He certainly did not have Paul’s principled grounding, but he had a bluster that Paul does not have – Paul is too much of a gentleman.  But in this age of 140 (more recently, 280) characters, Trump was the master.

The two have something else in common: of course, being republicans, they had all the democrats against them.  They also had most of the republicans against them and most, if not all, of the bureaucratic state against them as well.

And this last point is telling.  Look at the list again: central banking, the drug war, military adventurism, abortion, a fact-free world, sense of self and community.  I can make a very sound natural law argument in support of the position Ron Paul took on every one of these issues.  This suggests that the tact taken by society and our political (and many Christian) leaders on these same issues is directly counter to sound natural law.

The run of Ron Paul (and, later, of Donald Trump) fully exposed that the supposed left-right divide we are supposedly offered in politics is nonsense.  Over the last weeks, I have begun formulating a view that the divide – the actual divide in society – is one of natural law.  There are those who accept it and desire it – on both the left and right of our superficial political spectrum.  There are many who reject it – on both sides of the same false political divide.

We are seeing that natural law cannot be long ignored or abused.  We are seeing it in our society today.  God – or for you atheists out there, our human nature – cannot long be mocked, ridiculed, or ignored, without pushing back.  Violently, if necessary.

Conclusion

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart:

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

We are five-hundred years past the Renaissance, and three hundred (or so) years past the Enlightenment.  In the late 1800s – after the Franco-Prussian War and before World War One – the West enjoyed – for a brief forty-year period – the best fruits of Enlightenment thinking.  That’s it.  Forty years.

Progressivism: the scientistic man, freed from any higher force above him was set free on the world, giving us communism, fascism, modern democracy, central banking, two world wars.

No higher law.  No God.  No natural law.  What is the result?  Truthfully, we have lived through it since 1914.  What we are living through today is the last breaths of a dying carcass.

We look back on the God of the Old Testament (I know, He is the same God – allow me a shortcut) and exclaim: how can he be so cruel – even genocidal?  We have the nerve to ask such questions given the man-made genocides of our time.

This is where we are today.

Epilogue

And this is why the sin of the Christian churches (not Christianity, but many of its most prominent churches) will be counted as the greatest.