John C. Wright's Journal

A reader with the binary yet cardological name of The Deuce writes:

The philosophical abolition of man in the name of mechanistic reductionism, is I think THE central, fundamental issue driving the decline of what was once western Christendom into alienation, debauchery, misery, and now absolute gibbering delusional insanity (and soon, unless the evil is turned back, abject subjugation beneath absolute tyranny, and finally nonexistence).

It’s the central demonic doctrine from which every other ill  flows.

My comment: I agree in part, but would also list seven issues as being demonic.

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To recover the Church and the world requires the truth. Nothing else will save us.

All other institutions on earth are earthly. Only the Church is immortal, eternal, divine, and aims at something beyond the walls of the world. The Church can be, and has been corrupted, and her spirit is slain. But only the Church knows the secret of returning from the dead. She has done so before. No worldly power can say the same.

We can put no faith in the promises of worldly powers, first, because they are faithless, second, because they are worldly, and finally, because they are powerless.

They are powerless because worldly things are inevitably corrupt, and corruption cannot cure corruption: the leprous doctor cannot cure you of leprosy, because you will contract it from him. All hope in the worldly powers is vanity, because these powers, being worldly, have no love in them, and, without love, there is no beauty, no virtue, no truth.

This sad, benighted enemy has infiltrated the Church, and is dousing her lamps.

We live in the era of the silent congregation. The world has made the Church worldly. We, the faithful, we faithlessly stood by, quite silently, and silently let that happen.

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After long delay, my pen resumes the Everestian task of outlining the strategy of the Last Crusade, to retake the soul of the West, and reignite the lamps of civilization.

We turn now to the question of how to redeem the ivory towers and airy salons of the intellectuals from the poisonous spiderwebs of pride and folly that have snared, cocooned, and paralyzed the mental life of Christendom.

The popular culture currently sees Caesar, that is, worldly political power, as the savior for all life’s ills. Nonetheless, the deepest battle of the Last Crusade is not in politics, but in the intellectual world, who have no power but the pen.

This is the battle of ideas.

The reason why I call it the deepest battle is because, like the roots of a tree, the corruption of the intellect serves as a foundation for all the other corruption the Last Crusade must fight, in art, in politics, in economics, and so on. If the roots are infected, no health of branch or bough, flower or fruit will long endure.

I also call it deep, because, like a buried war-bunker, the chambers and salons and ivory towers of the intellectual class are an underworld hidden from the sight of the common man.

It is also an underworld in the sense of being a criminal enterprise, namely, a fraud.

And it is an underworld in a final sense as well: in the center of the chambers of the intellect sits the fallen archangel of pride enthroned, as in the realm of hell.

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We turn to the question of how to undo the corruption afflicting Universities, the scholarly and scientific world, and education both higher and lower, in general, which is gathered under the heading of the Academy.

Of the several battles in the Last Crusade, this is the least difficult to accomplish and the most difficult to wage, and that for two reasons.

It is easy to accomplish once a sufficiently devoted majority convinces the consensus that the current political, economic, and cultural institutions supporting the educational establishment have achieved the direct opposite of the intended result, namely, educating the youth.

It is difficult to wage, because nothing directly can be done other than to bring public attention and alumni influence to bear on the question.

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We turn to the question of how to undo the corruption afflicting Wall Street, Big Tech, and the Corporate Culture in general, which is gathered under the general heading of the Marketplace.

Of the several battles in the Last Crusade, this is the least difficult to wage and the most difficult to accomplish, and that for two reasons. It is also, of all battles, the one where we are most likely to betray ourselves, and sabotage ourselves.

The battle for the marketplace is not difficult to wage, because, despite all appearances, those who gain wealth from the free market are the servants, not the masters, of their customers. To be specific, they are servants of the customer’s will, as expressed by their customer’s money.

All we need do to bring them to heel is to express our displeasure by withholding our patronage. They must do as bid, or go broke, when patronage dollars will flow toward merchants less displeasing to the general will of the patrons.

The two reasons why withholding our patronage is difficult are, first, oft we cannot, and second, oft it is futile when we do.

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In prior columns, we looked at strategies for the reclamation of the Enemy’s seats of subversive power, namely, in the press and in the popular entertainment. The enemy position is strong to the point of overwhelming.

To recapitulate: One of the few weaknesses is that, in order to be subversive, the Enemy must act in a tacit, indirect, and deceptive way, never revealing their true purposes, hence, our opposition can be open, and can operate swiftly.

It requires no great strategy for the rich on our side to buy news houses that publish no news, or for the poor to boycott popular entertainment that is unpopular and does not entertain. Cutting the other sources of revenue, however, requires legal changes, and dwindling their number of supporters requires a change to the schools and to the culture in general.

So much for subversive power.

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We continue the exploration of strategies to undo the ongoing corruption of civilization. Here, we will look at how to reclaim popular entertainment.

There are three basic means to corrupt an institution.

The least effective means is coercion. It is usually reserved as a final step, to solidify informal power gained by other means.

Before coercion is persuasion, which, in this case, is more rightly called temptation. This is when whatever the evil policy being espoused is openly endorsed, and is promoted on the basis of  positive incentives, that is, on the basis of being reasonable, or inevitable, practical, rewarding, or lucrative.

Rhetoric, bribery, peer pressure, and so on fall under this means. Such things are used only when the corruption is accepted as a legitimate option, and can be discussed openly.

Before persuasion is subversion. Persuasion is only feasible when the evil is in the open, and is being presented as a reasonable alternative to the good. Before that point, when the evil cannot be named, deception, propaganda, and misdirection are the tactically sound means to move society closer to the brink. Confusion, indifference, and spiritual deadness is a necessary component of subversion.

The proper strategy to retake lost ground is to replace coercion with rule of law; to replace rhetoric with reason and temptations with incentives to virtue; and to uplift and glorify our ideals and institutions rather than demean them.

The same three strategies apply to retaking the Cinema, which is one of the most insidious, far-reaching, indirect and effective strongholds dominated by the Enemy.

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The Last Crusade begins this day. Our task is to retake possession of Western Civilization. We have identified their seven strongholds and three centers of power. The task now is to discuss strategy. Let us start with a discussion of the Press.

The battle is unequal. The forces of corruption need only to rot, to degenerate, and to destroy. Sea wave after sea wave can undermine the tallest cliff.

The enemy forces are greatly aided by the sins that beset any group of men, no matter how goodwilled and upright. Envy, for example, will always bestow the ideas of socialism an extra magnetism and allure those ideas do not by right possesses; likewise, lust grants undue glamor to the tawdry deceptions of sexual liberation.

The various sins need not dominate the majority for the corruption to take hold. They need only be present.

These sins need only befog the sight of the watchman, relax the nerve of discipline, make his swordblows soft and slow. An atmosphere of moral uncertainty, where every opinion is right, no one is wrong, and good and evil are a matter of personal taste, is all that is needed in order for the progress of the disintegration of society to advance another infinitesimal increment.

Nor is there any easy answer, any safe way to wage this war, nor any earthly hope of victory.

Every hand is against us, every word scorns and opposes us, including the whisper of our own sinful hearts.

Our hope is in heaven, or does not exist at all.

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I have neglected the Last Crusade of late. The times call me to take up the pen, for it now seems the battle is upon us. The Last Crusade is on.

Here, I mean only to answer through what folly we have been lured to the brink of destruction, and where the main seats of power of the enemy loom. In future columns, which shall the culmination and conclusion of these articles, I will say what overall strategy may be best suited for the long siege to reclaim our legacy. Christendom will rise again.

Our society is deeply corrupt, beyond any human power to cure.

The balm of sweet reason has lured some of the undecided into the camp of the last crusade, the last stand of Western civilization against barbarians without the gate and quislings within. But the quislings themselves have lost of gift of speech, and the barbarians, with scorn, reject it.

The time for talk ended when the arsonists and rioters were aided and abetted by elected officials of the Democrat party. The enemy has entirely corrupted that party: any virtue or dignity they once possessed is long gone. They can no longer be reasoned with; they will no longer abide by the outcome of elections. Armed force alone will cow them.

They are tools and fools of the foe, but they are not the foe. They are our brethren, children of the same loving creator as are we all.

Who is the foe?

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To be Leftist is to lie, and to live a lie.

Falsehood is the core principle and the sole principle of their political philosophy.

Leftism is, and always has been, an attempt to return to the practices of ancient system of hierarchic privilege for the elite in the name of completing, perfecting or purifying the revolutionary abolition of that ancient system of elitism which took place in 1776, and ushered in the modern world.

The central lie of their philosophy is that the French and Russian revolutions were continuations and improvements upon the incomplete American revolution, rather than the direct opposite.

For this reason, they call themselves by all manner of false names, liberal, progressive, and radical, when they are not.

They are wolves who, once wolves became an endangered species, fooled the unwary shepherd by donning the skin of their victims. They preach tyranny in the name of freedom, elitism in the name of equality, injustice in the name of social justice, seek an abolition of all rule of law, all moral restraint, all courtesy, civility and decency, in the name of liberation, tolerance, and utopia.

It is all lies.

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I have not done a Last Crusade column in quite some time, and I have four or five more topics to cover before I gather the columns together in a book format. (I had a publisher express interest, but he suffered fiscal setbacks, so the project is up in the air.)

As sort of a make-believe guest appearance, however, I’d like to post a link to a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, which touches on more than one topic the Last Crusade was called into being to confront.

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We have been treated this week to one of the most appalling and cynical displays of pure, malign, mocking evil recent memory records. In the wake of an atrocity too raw and new to repeat, when the bodies of the slain are not yet cold, and the enemy had trotted out children, and with fake tears in eyes and vile cusswords on lips, placed those children in positions of groveling on the steps of the halls of power, begging for chains and fetters.

Perhaps, to the casual eye, the vision looks like students, whose peers have just been murdered at random, begging to be protected. Look more deeply.

Listen with care to what they say. Listen with more care to what they do not say.

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Al Franken has resigned from the Senate. On the one hand, he stole the election, and is a weasel, and the world is a better place without him in any position of power. On the other hand, what he is accused of doing is stealing a kiss from a pretty girl, and snapping a photo where he pretends to grope her. This hardly rises to the same level as the rape allegations leveled against Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton or Harvey Weinstein.

In terms of the Culture War, the current inquisition into sexual misbehavior is a weakness in the enemy position that friendly forces should and could exploit if we are quick, singleminded, and clever, but, by the same token, the enemy counter-offensive will and must push back at the same position, and seek to further entrench the counter-culture.

The friendly position is that the Sexual Revolution has failed. The Revolution held out a false promise; it succeeded based on a false alliance, which is now breaking down; but the Sexual Revolution was an intellectually bankrupt and indefensible position to begin with, based as it was on two patently false assumptions.

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