Magical Thinking

“In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest politician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.”    Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios

When a man ceases to believe in God, observed Chesterton, he becomes capable of believing in anything.   It looks like we may now have reached the “anything” stage of human history.

Having “shaken off” belief in God, people are not becoming more rational, they’re becoming more gullible. They believe that babies in the womb aren’t really human beings, that same-sex “marriage” is the equivalent of real marriage, that there are roughly 52 varieties of gender, that boys can become girls, and vice versa.  In general, they believe that wishing makes it so.

Many ideas possessed by the gullible are pre-scientific and even anti-scientific.  Science is solidly on the side of those who say that babies are babies, and that boys cannot become girls, yet when science comes into conflict with today’s magical beliefs it is rejected out of hand. For many, the ultimate source of truth is not reason, or science, or God, but feelings.

It was belief in God who created a rational and ordered universe that provided the main impetus for scientific study centuries ago. Christian and Jewish scholars thought it worthwhile to study the nature of things because the nature of things was considered to be rational and discoverable. Thus, the scientific revolution was a product of the Judeo-Christian world.

But suddenly all bets are off. For many, belief in the imperial self has supplanted belief in God and a rational world. The wants and desires of the individual self are paramount. If your 12-year-old daughter decides she’s a boy, you’d better go along with her desires because the reigning doctrine holds that her gender is a matter to be decided solely by her and her doctor.

Of course, the imperial self is not really imperial at all. Now that God is considered dispensable, the state has become the ultimate authority. As a result, the wishes of the individual are only considered legitimate if they coincide with the wishes of the state.  So what we really have is not simply a regression to magical thinking, but a merging of the primitive impulse with the modern totalitarian state.

The new primitives don’t know enough history to realize that they live in an increasingly unfree society. Moreover, as long as they get their daily dose of sex and “soma” (marijuana, fentanyl, etc.), they don’t really care. However, there still remains a sizable number of Christians, Jews, and other believers in Natural Law who can see that the new normal is actually quite abnormal. Unless they spill the beans, the lies about the facts of life will be made mandatory. Everyone must be forced to believe. And liberal progressives and their allies will move to crush those who don’t comply.

The rapid ascendancy of Islam in recent times is itself evidence of social regression.  Because it borrows from Christianity and Judaism, Islam is an advance over most primitive religions, but in comparison to Christianity it is a decidedly primitive faith.   A society that elevates Islam over Christianity is a society that is taking a step back in time, yet that is the direction in which large parts of the West are headed.

Churches in Europe are largely empty, but mosques are full. Many cultural observers predict that Islam will be the dominant religion in Europe well before mid-century. The ultimate irony of rejecting the Christian God is that you may end up with the god of Muhammad in His place.

“The fall of humanity was the fall from the actual to the symbolic. Language abstracts us from the real world; keeping us from direct, intuitive perception. Words, like the ego, are merely guides. Don’t mistake them for the real thing. Pull aside the filthy curtains of the social. Language makes an enigma of simple existence; it obscures the true nature of reality and of yourself.”   Tony Vigorito

Source:  The New Primitives by William Kilpatrick, Crisis Magazine

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *