Gangster Society, Gangster State, Gangster Church
The Angelus, May-June 2021
If human happiness were dependent purely upon accuracy in predicting the future I ought to feel truly dizzy with success. Looking back at what I have said and written over the fifty two years of my college and academic career, it seems to me that literally everything that I thought would logically happen as a result of the embrace of the so-called “modern” world view--- the one espoused by the anti-Christian, naturalist, Enlightenment--- has indeed proven to have been totally validated.“Good sense was still there. But it remained hidden out of the fear of common sense.”
(Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed)
But happiness is not so narrowly ensured, and rather than exulting in my intellectual victory, I am utterly miserable dealing with a reality that I foolishly dreamed would not fully emerge until after my death. Still, at least I can console myself with the knowledge that feeling wretched proves my continued possession of some “good sense”. For who in his right mind would want to live in a lawless, Gangster Society, tyrannized over by a lawless, Gangster State? And yet it is precisely that which is the all too logical conclusion of a brain-dead “modernity” that brutally cows into silence those who suggest that its supposedly obvious, unquestionable “common sense” appreciation of nature be subject to the slightest critique.
Anyone familiar with my book, Removing the Blindfold (Angelus Press, 2013) will recall that I learned of the logic of modernity while at university from my reading of nineteenth century Catholic counterrevolutionary thinkers, especially two of the Jesuit founders of the then orthodox Roman journal, La Civiltà Cattolica: Frs. Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793-1862) and Matteo Liberatore (1810-1892). I would feel obliged to ask your forgiveness for once again bringing up the arguments of these two men if I were not struck, now more than ever before, by their unsurpassable clarity in identifying the nature of the “common sense” sickness that has terrorized into the underground the good sense of critical minds, as well as their profound prescience regarding the criminal character of this inevitably suicidal poison.
Their clarity and prescience were founded upon an understanding of the meaning of history as a basic two-sided conflict, the battle lines formed by a Catholic-Socratic army on the one side, at war with the naturalist Enlightenment and their anti-philosophical Sophist predecessors on the other. The religious and philosophical “good sense” army was shown by these Civiltà thinkers to perceive grave problems and insufficiencies in individuals and the societies that shape them, the cure for which required humble acceptance of a corrective knowledge and “medicine”. This correction culminated in the supernatural Revelation and Grace of the Christians, which in turn provided the strength seriously to believe in and act on the value of the natural Reason taught by the Socratics as well. Naturalist Enlightenment and Sophist enemies of the Catholic-Socratic Army were identified by their rejection of any need for such corrective knowledge and medicine as a totally artificial and offensive interference with the obvious “common sense” data offered by our natural senses and feelings. Such an outlook was elaborated through an “independence principle” commanding individuals and societies to forge their own “free” pathway through life, liberated from the obstructive rational and religious wrenches thrown into the otherwise supposedly smoothly functioning machine of nature.
From the standpoint of Christian and Socratic “good sense”, the “free men” operating by means of the “common sense independence principle”, along with the “free societies” created by them, which confirm them in their “liberty”, do nothing more than make a conscious commitment to blind ignorance and sinful insufficiencies as though they were unquestionable blessings. They therefore leave themselves no tools other than their passion-shaped wills to judge what they should and should not bother to learn and then do with both the natural world around them as well as with one another. Hence, rather than just failing to see their mistakes, they actually revel in and intensify them, sinking lower and lower as they try to deal “naturally” with the challenges of an earthly life that the humble man grasps as being badly scarred by sin. Turning their hearts and minds away from the civilization built under Christian and Socratic auspices, they step by step “unlearn all being, deny all the laws of logic, and bury themselves in the night of complete ignorance in order to reach the height of perfect liberty”. (Taparelli, “Libertà ed ordine”, La Civiltà Cattolica, i, 2 (1850), 632; Liberatore, “Concetto storico del secolo ultimo”, i, 6 (1851), 521.
Starting with the words “I am free” and their newly found spirit of independence, men began to believe in the infallibility of whatever seemed natural to them, and then to call “nature” everything that is sickness and weakness; to want sickness and weakness to be encouraged instead of healed; to suppose that encouraging weakness makes men healthier and happy; to conclude, finally, that human nature {conceived of as sickness and weakness} possesses the means to render man and society blissful on earth, and this without faith, grace, authority, or supernatural community…since “nature” gives us the feeling that it must be so. (Taparelli, “Ordini rappresentativi”, La Civiltà Cattolica, i, 6 (1851), 497-498.)
The “free” man looks into a perversion of his true character— passionate, willful, and undisciplined. He looks into a mirror that reflects a lower animal without wisdom; and from the distorted image he sees, he extrapolates a theory of nature and strikes out on the road of “progress”. In doing so, he must call evil good, encourage more evil when he does not achieve the particular wicked goal that he has attempted to reach, and constantly reject all medicines that might cure his sickness. He must relentlessly move from blindness to blindness, “curing” his lack of sight by tightening the bonds that hold the blindfold on him and prevent him from seeing his true state. (Removing the Blindfold, p. 82).
Hence, incapable of even providing a definition of the word “liberty” itself---lest that explanatory effort bind some overwhelmingly passionate future whim that “nature” imposes upon him--- the “free man” has no standard by which to justify his actions others than his pure will to power. In short, he becomes a gangster who must oppress the people and the world around him to give practical meaning to his freedom. A society filled with such “free men” must become a Gangster Society, with the people ruling over this sewer destined necessarily to create a Gangster State to ensure the triumph of their will.
Will those rulers be a democratic majority of any given population? No. The vast majority of men have always been held back from imposing their own potentially passionate gangster will because of an inertia that chiefly comes from their preoccupation with the daily struggle for survival. What really has counted historically since the Enlightenment is the work of a strong willed criminal elite, which, in its stubborn commitment to the “business as usual”, “natural” ignorance of the modern vision has battered the average man into a lethal obedience to its arbitrary and ultimately suicidal passions.
This stronger willed criminal elite is two pronged in character. The one prong is composed of the true believers in the positive value of the “independence principle” and the natural wonders to be achieved by complete submission to its call for freedom from knowledge and correction of sinful human failings. Since that vision is based on “an inevitable struggle against the nature of man and of things; “a lie denied solemnly by nature in all the pages of creation” “a war of Titans against the Creator”; “an insane war against God, wherein the mortal cannot hope to triumph, but, rather, is certain to be defeated” (Taparelli, “Preliminari all’esame critico”, i, 4, 1851, 29; “Miss Cunningham in Toscana”, ii, 4, 1853, 258; “La mosca cieca”, iii, 5, 1857, 17.) it cannot help but make its proponents criminally insane. And it has done so in a myriad of forms over the past few centuries, as ideological madmen, their psyches focused upon whatever pet intellectual passion they have freely embraced, have sought to transform men and societies according to their either totally perverse or all too narrow tunnel-vision whims. The second prong is that of the criminal pure and simple, composed as it is of self-interested, cynical materialists able to capitalize on modern “freedom” to get whatever it is they want---destroying their own lives as well as those of the people they oppress in ways too numerous to mention since the time of the Garden of Eden.
There is no love lost between the criminally insane and just plain criminal gangster elements. Still, they need one another to survive and come to reflect each other’s sins as they fall to their inevitable doom. Criminally insane ideologues require the brutal help of the ordinary criminal to take over the state and society and force the generally inert mass of men to accept their recipes for doom, themselves becoming even more unscrupulous than the “professional” brigands they cultivate in the process. Meanwhile, self-interested, cynical villains, who pride themselves on being hardheaded and practical, are totally dependent on the Enlightenment theorists of the “independence principle” and modern “freedom” for their chance to pillage respectably without anybody questioning their “common sense” natural actions. As much as they might not have wanted to do so, they therefore end up forced to live in the ideological nuthouse their mad allies drag them into constructing, where even their rather basic human vices become more and more impossible to enjoy.
Given what is ultimately a universal battle between the forces that want man and society ruled by either knowledge or passionate will, the Civiltà editors believed that the final product of the work of this two pronged elite, if victorious, would be a worldwide, self-destructive mish-mosh. On the one hand, there would be a global society guided by totalitarian, state sponsored projects deemed to be the obvious dictates of nature as freely expounded by criminally insane minds. On the other, this society and state would simultaneously be the toy of gangster money-grubbers and pleasure seekers who both drag the madmen’s dreams into the gutter in which they generally operate, while also themselves becoming dehumanized due to the influence of their allies’ brutal, ideological inanities. Both visions and vices would grow ever more stupid and ever more boring, in exactly the same way everywhere, with all good sense ground into the dirt, and no one imagining that things could possibly be different. The Civiltà editors’ contemporary and friend, the French journalist Louis Veuillot (1813-1883), called this global, vulgar, gangster-run, vicious nuthouse and true-liberty destroying entity the “Empire of the World”.
But why would he change places and climates? There will no longer be different places or climates, or any curiosity anywhere. Man will everywhere find the same moderate temperature, the same customs, the same administrative rules, and infallibly the same police taking the same care of him. Everywhere the same language will be spoken, the same bayadères will everywhere dance the same ballet. The old diversity will be a memory of the old liberty, an outrage to the new equality, a greater outrage to the bureaucracy, which would be suspected of not being able to establish uniformity everywhere. Their pride will not suffer that. Everything will be done in the image of the main city of the Empire and of the World. (L. Veuillot, Mélanges, VIII, 369)
Aristotle noted that those possessing the good sense that comes from humility and an openness to correction do not have to be medical men to know a quack from a real physician. You, dear readers of The Angelus, as the men and women of good Catholic sense that you are, do not have to be experts in socio-political studies to distinguish a Gangster Society and a Gangster State from legitimate ones. You do not have to be experts in the physical sciences to know that the supposedly obvious “common sense” of the Enlightenment regarding what is natural actually encourages the “perfection” of the flaws of nature, and that going down the pathway that their “independence principle” requires the “free man” to take puts us all precisely in the lawless gangsters’ socio-political hands.
Most importantly, you do not have to study in depth all the “expert” judgments shoved down your throats by the mainstream media concerning current events today to know that the Empire of the World is indeed upon us, with criminally insane quackery, cooperating together with criminally self-interested cynicism silencing even the slightest expression of good sense. Quacks like Dr. Fauci-Faustus and the transhumanist-posthumanist-eugenist-collectivist globalists of the World Economic Forum at their Davos Country Club rule the roost with the aid of a battery of more common criminals ranging from the movers and shakers of Big International Finance, Big Teach, and Big Pharma to petty hoodlums like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Andrew Cuomo, along with some half-breed ideological money-grubbers such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and the Corporate Communist Party of China. They are all working to make us ever more free, through a rejection of the laws of God and God’s natural Creation, reducing even the illicit pleasures that can be gained from their horrible worldwide dreams and materialist monopolies to men who think they are women and women who think they are men shooting up in lonely corners, social-distanced from one another while choking to death due to mouths muzzled by diapers and duck beaks. And, once again, you do not have to be legal experts to know that a new Nuremberg Tribunal needs to be constituted to bring these gangsters to trial for Crimes Against God’s Creation and all God’s children.
Not so fast, our criminal dictators and their Ministry of Propaganda will jump in to tell us! For who are we to judge the Desperado Society and State when the supreme earthly judge---in her all too human, but all too public media friendly manner---proclaims herself over and over again to be a Gangster Church, whose chief mission seems to be to bless the closing of the individual and social mind and soul to true knowledge and correction, divinizing personal passionate willfulness in their place.
When Francis was elected pope an Argentinian priest assured me that “if I tried to understand him I would lose my Reason”. He went on to complain that people would falsely identify him as a Marxist. “If they do”, he advised me, tell them: “yes, he is a Marxist---a Groucho Marxist”. He then went on to recite one of Groucho’s best film lines: “These are my principles. And if you don’t like them…I have others.” My friend’s lecture then ended with the warning that the newly elected pope’s foundation for his every changing principles was the need to ensure by whatever means possible the triumph of his personal will. In other words, he was the model modern gangster of the criminally insane variety. Still, he was doing nothing more than perfecting that “liberation” of the Church from the corrective wisdom and medicine of her Magisterium and Sacraments as part of a “nature friendly” union with ignorance, passion, and arbitrary willfulness that began in earnest in the 1960s. Job well done.
With every organ for the dissemination of obvious, “common sense”, natural wisdom in control of this alliance of Gangster Society, Gangster State, and Gangster Church, it is no wonder that those who still possess some good sense live in terror of saying and doing the wrong thing lest they be totally vaccinated out of existence. Amidst the rubble of the Empire of the World, it seems to me that we have two grounds for hope alone: divine intervention on the one hand, and the mutual assured destruction of the criminally insane and the just plain criminal on the natural level. Reading the signs of the times makes the first option seen more likely. Come Lord Jesus, Come!
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