Seven Demonic Doctrines
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.
1. Utopianism — the belief that man can and will evolve to perfection, improving social conditions until all sources of sin are cured, and New Jerusalem descends, not from heaven, but from the hands of our elite. Rosseau helped establish this heresy in hearts of modernity.
This is the sin of pride, for it makes man into god, the creator of Eden.
2. Socialism — the belief that the poor will not be with us always, even unto the end of the age, if we rob the rich. Marx is the heresiarch here.
This is envy.
3. Big Brotherliness — the belief that eliminating bad words will eliminate bad thoughts which will eliminate bad deeds. All that is needed is control of thought, which means, totalitarian police state.
Any police state requires the Two Minute Hate in some form, either Jews or Capitalists or Whites or some other communal enemy to act as scapegoat.
This is the sin of wrath in its purest form: hate for hate’s sake, not due to any injury.
4. Secularism — the belief that ideology can replace religion, and that men are merely hairless apes in trousers. Darwin takes the lion’s share of the blame for popularizing this heresy.
Despite that the word oft is used to mean laziness, indifference to divine things is sloth.
5. Materialism — the belief that the material wellbeing of others, food and housing, health and safety, and environmental cleanliness trumps all other considerations, tramples any rights, excuses any excess. John Steward Mill did more to promote this heresy than any one pen.
Seeking no good above those gold can get is greed.
6. Relativism — the belief that indifference toward the spiritual wellbeing of others is a virtue, granting them license to every vice, on the grounds that morality cannot be legislated. Hume, Hobbes, and the whole mass of Enlightenment thinkers may share the blame here.
If no higher spiritual values exist, floundering in fleshly pleasure is the highest virtue. This is gluttony.
7. Hedonism — the belief that the mere existence of any appetite, even the most intemperate, abominable, or perverted, is a sufficient ground to sanctify it. This dates back to Epicurus.
Another name is lust.
Odd as this sounds, the aesthetic theory that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and therefore ugliness is just as beautiful as beauty, takes shape from the sin of lust.
Consider: lust uses the beauty of women for selfish pleasure, that is, pornographically. Whereas love is selfless, for sublime beauty raptures oneself from oneself, and is akin to adoration of the divine.
The nude of the classical statue is not meant to arouse the lust, but to awaken love of beauty. Whereas the nude displayed for prurient stimulation, in order to appeal to increasingly jaded tastes, leaks into increasingly fetishistic and distorted images, and grows ever more nasty and more ugly.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
