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They are incapable of stopping; stopping is not in their character; standing still is defeat; slowing down is not acceptable; going backward results in an existential crisis.
Even if they destroy all – including themselves – they can’t stop.
Revolutionaries - true revolutionaries - are aggressive, ruthless, and generally seize the main chance, as William Henry Drayton did when he saw that stump-speaking was getting him nowhere. But defenders of the status quo tend toward caution and legalisms and inaction until it is too late.
― John Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas
There are two parts in this above quote; I will take each in turn. But first, some context. For this, I will offer three examples, but there are dozens:
Gender: It began simply enough. Free love, no strings attached. It has moved through gay marriage, countless genders, self-identification, changes every day. We will soon enough see legitimization of sex with children and marriage between humans and animals (yes, I believe this is already happening outside of official recognition, but I am thinking of when we will have a box to check on our tax return). After these changes, my mind cannot fathom what comes next; but it will be something.
Russia: Not really Russia so much as NATO. Even to risk nuclear war, the move east will not be stopped. It cannot be stopped – not to say it is impossible, as the United States, with one word, could end this confrontation. But it cannot be stopped, “cannot” to be understood via the precise meaning of “the devil made me do it.”
Abortion: The apoplexy that followed the leaked ruling. The ruling does not make abortion illegal; it merely returns the issue to the states – where it will remain legal in the majority of cases. But going backwards is losing – even more so, it is not possible.
In all cases, we have a universalizing system – global, no boundaries, no borders, no discrimination. All will be equally yoked.
Ephesians 6: 12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
I have written extensively on the application of this verse to our time, most thoroughly, perhaps, here. Suffice it to say, these principalities work through human actors. We need not pretend that they have our good at heart; we need not pretend that they work for anyone other than Satan.
In any case, to the first part of the opening quote. Why the rush? Why is there no going backward? Why are these revolutionaries so ruthless and aggressive?
Revelation 12: 12 Therefore, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”
I know the time might not feel short according to our understanding. But time works differently for Him who is outside of time. Time, being part of the creation, is not meaningful to the Creator. But to Satan, “his time is short” is a meaningful statement, a warning driving him to urgency. He understands what time means to God, what time is for God.
(Taken from) Ephesians 2: 2 …the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience…
His followers – the sons of disobedience, real human beings living among us – cannot stop, they cannot go backwards, they cannot slow down. Their time is short.
They are relentless:
Luke 11: 24 “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ 25 And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order. 26 Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first.”
The unclean spirit doesn’t rest, it doesn’t quit. When it finds something clean, it multiplies its power and resolve.
Against this, we have the “defenders of the status quo,” as noted by Buchanan. How do these act?
Matthew 10: 11 And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. 12 As you enter the house, greet it. 13 And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. 14 And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. 15 Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.
Shake the dust off your feet. Leave. Live and let live. You go your way, I’ll go mine.
I understand this approach, this desire. In many ways, and like many of you, this is how I live – even in the face of the revolutionaries who I know will not stop – they are incapable of stopping or slowing down.
Conclusion
But I can’t live like this forever. I won’t be given this luxury by the revolutionaries. Neither will you. They will not stop until everything you value – your family, your possessions, your way of life – is destroyed. This, of course, includes their desire to remove any reference of Christianity from public life – and, eventually, private life. They will not stop.
So, eventually, there will come time for a decision, a choice, an action. On the struggle for Christians of if, when, and how to fight, I can only offer a few earlier explorations on this topic (here, here, and here).
The answer may not be clear, and certainly it may not be one with which you agree, but for me it boils down to prioritizing my neighbor (including my family) over my enemy when it comes to my love having to choose between them.
"The unnatural separation of "sex" from "fruitfulness" was a perversion analogous to thinking of property only in the sense of money, in the sense of something which is immediately consumed, enjoyed, and expended; something which gives momentary pleasure and disappears" [G K Chesterton]
ReplyDeleteI think it also includes political action. I know that is a taboo statement in libertarian circles. But we need to vote, run for office, attend local government meetings if possible.
ReplyDeleteI personally don't like protests. But I think counter protests against Leftist protests could be helpful in pushing back. I think even as much as physically pushing back.
What if a group of 20 Christians went to a drag queen story hour at a public library and demanded that it stop even to the point of physically removing the person from the premises? That violates the NAP. Things like this are ugly and would get tons of negative press. But I think it may be necessary to do things like this in order to turn the culture back around.
I'm open to criticisms of that approach, but while we sit in our living rooms sons of disobedience just can't stop pushing Left.
https://thecrosssectionrmb.blogspot.com/
Paul usefully observes that God himself has given up on those who are lost in their perverse ways. There really is no point in bothering to oppose them because there literally is nothing worse you could do to them that they aren't already doing to themselves. I used to tell people that the CIA really should hire the masochistic homosexuals because there isn't any torture a foreign government could come up with that they're not already paying for just to get their rocks off.
Delete@RMB I completely agree. I have a lot of Libertarian in my thinking and values but it doesn’t answer everything and it is definitely short on practical action in the face of encroaching evil. I think any kind of sociopolitical ideological purity is a mistake to even attempt. And if Antifa thugs are robbing you and raping your wife you don’t just hand them a Rothbard book and give a lecture about it later. I also don’t like this convenient pincer many conservatives find themselves in between the notion of private companies and government intervention. They are all the same thing now. Some organized intervention and even violence will be necessary at some point. To put it plainly, there are some Libertarians who are just intellectually snobby pussies.
DeleteRMB,
DeleteIt depends on who owns the library. Since the state "owns" it, the ethical waters are muddied.
But since your children are forced to go to public school (truancy laws, etc.), or you are forced to pay for it (and this may make it impossible to pay for an alternative), I think this sort of coercive action may be justified on the grounds of the NAP.
Society will probably not see it this way unfortunately.
The most tactical and immediate solution is to withdraw your kids from public school and have one parent home-school them. All conservatives should recognize the idea of public school as their enemy and advocate for its abolition or at least a true opting out of the current system where you no longer have to pay for it.
Homeschooling remains legal in all 50 states, to my understanding. In some states, the process is very simple, with little or no state oversight.
DeleteIt might be one of the most impactful decisions an individual can make, to home school.
This, exactly. Liberalism has no limiting principle. Liberals will not stop until somebody stops them.
ReplyDeleteAre you not simply illustrating the term "progressivism"? Everything you have said in this article is exemplary of a progressive mindset.
ReplyDeleteYes, probably. I have to explore in order to work things out. But I think one nuance is "progress toward what?", as a progressive will always shoot back: "what? You don't like progress?
DeleteTo know where the limits of sexual perversion are heading, one need look no further than what Hollywood has been pumping out over the last few decades. Necrophilia anyone?
ReplyDeleteElvis and Annabelle is about a guy working in a mortuary who decides to take pictures of the corpses. One image captures him kissing a corpse.
How about incest? August: Osage County take a rather cavalier stance by pointing out that using birth control solves the only real reproductive problems. Then there's Rumor Has It where Ms. Aniston along with the audience discovers that her romp in the sack with Kevin Costner may have been incestual. But what's the real problem? After all they're sexually attracted to each other.
Avatar and The Shape of Water both make subtle moves into bestiality.
As far as fighting goes, Christ himself points out that if his kingdom was of this world his servants would fight. The problem is that his kingdom is NOT of this world which kinda presents a problem for those of this fallen world who think they're supposed to fight demons using what? Conventional weapons? Hollow point bullets?
" Conventional weapons? Hollow point bullets? "
DeleteIf the demon is manifest in a body threatening me or those I love or other innocents and defenseless in clear self-defense? Yes.
Beyond this, prayer, speaking truth, speaking against falsities, being prepared to suffer for it.
I'm not so sure about this. "The Devil knows his time is short" evokes the final judgment, and insofar as the final judgment will come about eventually, and "short" means only "finite", then fair enough. That's not how it works, though. Mentioning the approach of Judgment Day is one of the surest of ways of making the crazies come running out of the woodwork, demanding repentance or else. Historically, those haven't been the best of people. Once you stop worrying about the future, evil surely follows.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, if I've learned anything from the covid debacle (beyond how wrak-minded most people are), it's that this, too, shall pass. Whether it passes into a rebirth of Christian values, or death & decay, or something else entirely is still in flux and worth worrying about, but pass it will. Mankind is no stranger to debauchery, and even if ours goes beyond anything that came before (questionable, there's been some pretty bad stuff), who's to say there isn't something even worse still to come far in the future? In many ways, the efforts of today's civilization destroyers are quite clumsy, pathetic even.
They won't ever stop because they're satisfied, but they WILL stop because they've run short of self-destroying fools to do their work, or goods to sustain their spree. I think we're already seeing that happen.
Here are a few more reasons why revolutionaries won't stop in their political advances, and why conservatives don't fight back with equal vigor, apart from your excellent Biblical exegesis.
ReplyDeleteConservatives tend to have meaning in their lives, and if they are Christian, this meaning extends beyond death. They have wives (or husbands), they have children, they provide for their families, care for and raise up the kids, go to church, feel a strong connection to deceased relatives and ancestors. They are rooted in the past and they have branches that will extend into the future. This rootedness provides a sense of serenity, even in the face of a radical political advance. They have a generally low time preference.
Radicals do not have real meaning and have rejected their relatives and ancestors and the traditions they held, and so they try desperately to squeeze meaning out of political victories, but these are always hollow victories for them that yield no personal serenity to their souls, which are innately searching for the truth they continually reject. They have no real connection to their ancestors or the generation they bring up. They are rootless and have no branches that will remain connected to them when they die. They are tumbleweeds completely at the mercy of the prevailing winds of opinion they are subjected to. This rootlessness creates in them a permanent sense of unease and insecurity. They have a generally high time preference.
Now, you can have rootless people who still want liberty and rooted people who would readily yield more power to the state, but I think by and large, the above is generally true.
Also consider this:
"...one must bear in mind that only leftists produce movements, whereas, at best, the right can "organize" in a relatively hierarchic fashion. It has been well said by Spengler that the concept of the "party" in itself is leftish. Yet if movements and parties have no affinities for a genuinely rightist outlook, we must come to the conclusion that the principles of the right within the parliamentary-democratic framework can only prevail after a catastrophic default or collapse of leftism. The right cannot normally win by its own virtue, its truth, its values because it will never fascinate the masses. It will attract extraordinary and superior people but hardly ever the average man." - Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism
Excellent, ATL
DeleteWhen the status quo is a relentless "progressivism" and "self-destruction" to stop and return to a prior state of non-progressivism is the revolutionary act.
Delete---
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
― G.K. Chesterton
" Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing." -- Robert Conquest
ReplyDeleteChances are that even if they start out explicitly and constitutionally right-wing, they will drift leftward. Unless they are either extremely well-controlled and stay small OR die out first. It only takes a very small issue to create the first movement, after which it becomes easier and easier to allow the push.
Eventually, however, if they do not stop on their own accord, they will stop when the leftward movement has reached its maximum limit. Cosmic Dwarf referred to this above. A pendulum can only swing so far before it reverses direction. Unfortunately for societies, the end of leftism can be likened to an automobile hitting an immovable wall at high speed, destroying the auto and all its passengers, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. At that point, the system starts all over again from a more conservative, perhaps even extremely conservative, position and begins to move leftward. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Baby steps at first, then toddling, then running, then racing...
We've been here before and will be here again. Take care of yourselves.
"We've been here before and will be here again. Take care of yourselves. "
DeleteYes.