The Religion of Empire

“To become a unit with nothing to believe in, not even one’s own humanity; to have nothing to be loyal or faithful to; to be a nonentity without family, nation or faith is to become a slave.  

The new globalist world order would make slaves of us all as surely as communism sought to make all enslaved laborers for the almighty state, fit only to serve a cabal of superiors.”

A now disillusioned Russia has experienced the results of a secular globalist vision first hand. Those who lived through some or most of the years from 1918 to 1989 know that the ideals of the universal communist brotherhood of mankind looked and felt like in reality.

Chroniclers of real history such as Alexandre Solzhenitsyn leave no doubt as to the violence required to enact a Marxist utopian vision alien to the Russian soul. Millions died. But the perfect communist man was never born.

So it is not a surprise that some Russians who lived through the attempts to establish a new world order recognize a variant of the communist ideal of a classless society–and repudiate it. The fact is that the supposedly new “World Order” envisioned by such leaders as Barak Obama and Angela Merkel, among others, is merely a mutant version of the universal brotherhood alluringly promised by the communist leaders of Russia’s past.

Once again, there has arisen a beatific vision of a globalist, secular world order that is the antithesis yet imitator of the vision of the Kingdom of God represented by the Church universal; a vision articulated by St. Augustine in his City of God. The apostles and early church fathers articulated the vision of the transcendent Kingdom of God revealed and ruled by Christ.

The beatific vision of the City of God, including the vision of the Russian Orthodox Church, is to be replaced by a “new” universal, but secularist world order; an order in which human beings’ allegiance is to a global City of Men ruled by elite priests who act as gods for the masses. Preachers of the globalist vision present an ersatz kingdom that is the opposite of the City of God.

Like the Christian vision of the universal Kingdom of God, the religion of secular globalism claims universality, but it is actually an earthly minded substitute for the Church universal. The Christian vision sees the Church universal as God’s holy kingdom, a kingdom that transcends and informs all earthly rule. The religion of globalism sees an earthly, utopian world order in which all men pay allegiance to elite priests who rule over a World City without national borders.

Sometimes the substitute beatific vision is expressed in terms of a “global village,” a mystical and conveniently vague entity that takes the place of the family of God. The globalists’ family of humanity is to be without distinction of country, tribe or religious creed. The ideal human being is seen as detached from country and faith. He is exiled from everything that gives his life meaning in order he become an abstraction, a tabula rasa on which a new program might be written by those who are superior.

The universal citizen of the new secularist world order does not know yet what he will be. But rest assured he will be told by those who know better than he, much as the peoples of Stalinist USSR, Mao Tse Tung’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia were told what the perfect communist human being would look and act like.

And, as Russians discovered over some seven decades, the world citizen adrift in a sea without horizons would come to know this much: Anything to which he has been or is attached must be and would be demolished. The secularist vision required and requires complete destruction of the old; including nations, institutions, faith and even historical memory itself. Hence, for instance, the constant and relentless attacks on the Christian Church as well as on the reality and concept of nation and the human being. Devotion to faith, family, nation was and is not only suspect, but considered positively injurious to “progress” of the new World Order.

The ideology of globalism involves stripping humanity of its former and unique status as beings created in imago dei and the substitution of the idea of humanity as genderless units.

As Eric Hoffer, author of the prescient book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements wrote:

“To ripen a person for self-sacrifice he must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctiveness. He must cease to be George, Hans, Ivan, or Tadao—a human atom with an existence bounded by birth and death. The most drastic way to achieve this end is by assimilation of the individual into a collective body. The fully assimilated individual does not see himself and others as human beings…To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.

“The effacement of individual separateness must be thorough. In every act, however trivial, the individual must by some ritual associate himself with the congregation, the tribe, the party, etcetera. His joys and sorrows, his pride and confidence must spring form the fortunes and capacities of the group rather than from his individual prospects and abilities. Above all, he must never feel alone. (Must always be watched by the group.) The individual is absorbed into the collective.”

Globalists embrace what Hoffer recognized as an “unbounded contempt for history.” The erasure of history inevitably means attacking the past and established institutions possessing history; institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church. Only the future matters. The present is busy with wreckage of what exists, even if what presently exists has a thousand year or more heritage.

That is because for globalists, the present is a shadow and illusion–merely a “passageway to the glorious future.” It is a meagre “way station on the road to Utopia…The radical and the reactionary loathe the present.”

Therefore, the present is treated ruthlessly, including the present bodily form of the human. Both must be mercilessly scourged in order something new is created; something perfectly fitted for the new vision. Flagellation of the soul almost to the point of extinction is a requirement in order the new man is born.

As Hoffer writes, “The radical has a passionate faith in the infinite perfectibility of human nature. He believes that by changing man’s environment and by perfecting a technique of soul forming, a society can be wrought that is wholly new and unprecedented.”

Ultimately the new beatific vision for humankind means embracing the Hegelian concept of a collective consciousness, a “Geist” that is a single “mind” common to all men. What is that vision? As philosopher R.C. Solomon noted, “The entre sweep of [Hegel’s]‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ is away from the ‘disharmonious’ conception of men as individuals to the ‘absolute’ conception of all men as one. In the ‘phenomenology’ we are concerned with the inadequacy of the conceptions of one’s self as an individual in opposition to others…and in opposition to God.”

For Hegel, Solomon goes on to say, this opposition is resolved by a conception of one’s self as a member of a family or community. Absolute consciousness (salvation) is recognition of one’s self as universal spirit. “The concept of ‘Geist’ is the hallmark of a theory of self-identity—a theory in which I am something other than a person.” [Italics added.]

The transgender movement, for example, is the spear point of a philosophy in which humanity is something other than people as previously understood for thousands of years. It is a proselytizing movement on behalf of Hegel’s idea of the world geist. As such, it is not a civil rights movement, but a direct attempt to denature humanity; that is, to smash the ancient concept of humanity as made imago dei. It is an attempt to radically transform humanity itself, replace Judeo/Christian concept of the human being with a de-gendered, robotic and malleable unit—a non-person who is merely part of the universal world soul.

But to be a unit detached from nation, faith and even one’s individual humanity is to be nobody. It is to be a drifter in a sea of nothingness.

To become a unit with nothing to believe in, not even one’s own humanity; to have nothing to be loyal or faithful to; to be a nonentity without family, nation or faith is be become a slave. The new globalist world order would make slaves of us all as surely as communism sought to make all enslaved laborers for the almighty state, fit only to serve a cabal of superiors.

As previously mentioned, in the above respects, the new world vision is nothing new. It is merely the revival of the rationales behind all empires, ancient and modern. Whether the vision of Hellenization dreamed of by Alexander the Great; whether the vision of eternal Rome ruled by demi-god Caesars; whether the vision of a Thousand Year Reich ruled by a noble race; whether the vision of a global communist international brotherhood in which the common man was to reign– the actualization of the imperial, earthly vision of man is always the same. Human beings are regarded as units to be ruled by powerful others. Human beings are enslaved.

Against those visions and the present day globalist vision stands the Christian beatific vision of the New Jerusalem, a view in which the entire human race, men and women, are transformed by the realities of the transcendent Kingdom of God, putting the beatific vision of a holy City of God to work here on earth.

Which vision will prevail will depend on the retrieval of the idea of the human being as created imago dei; and along with that, the revival of the unique stories and heritages of nations; particularly, the revival of the idea of nations as under the sovereign rule of a loving God who created all of us.

Reprinted from Russia Insider.

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