Category: Ideas

In the last post in this series, we contrasted the German romanticism of Spengler with the Christian existentialism of Dostoevsky. We’ll continue to use this opposition in this post since these two thinkers give us a way to elucidate another of the main themes in existentialism which is the contrast between Necessity and Faith.

The doctrine of Necessity is tied up in philosophical ideas around eternal truths that go back to the ancient Greeks. Spengler, following Nietzsche, actually made a very similar critique of Necessity as Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. We can use Kierkegaard’s formulation as a summary. He said, what lay behind the doctrine of Necessity was resignation, fear and coercion.

We don’t need to worry about the philosophical arguments that led Kierkegaard to this conclusion because we have all just lived through exactly what he was talking about. At a psychological level, corona was driven by a combination of resignation, fear and coercion.

Of course, anybody with a basic understanding of how empirical science works knew that this was a lie. Science was hijacked during corona just as it has been hijacked in general in our culture. It has been hijacked in just the way needed to turn it into the doctrine of Necessity i.e. to make it be able to deliver old-fashioned laws: thou shalt take the vaccine which is safe and effective.    

It was these laws and this Necessity that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky railed against in the domain of philosophy. Part of what made their job difficult was because Necessity enjoys a good reputation. As we saw during corona, people are drawn to the aura of authority which Necessity gives. This is true not just in times of crisis.

Within the philosophical tradition, Necessity is tied up with the question of eternal and absolute truths. Ever since the Greeks, what was “true” had to be whatever was true for all time irrespective of finite and transient conditions. It also had to be true for everybody and therefore any element of truth related to specific persons or groups had to be ruled out and called subjective.

Spengler provides his own argument against Necessity at the beginning of the second volume of Decline of the West. Following Nietzsche, he contrasts the eternal, timeless truths of Necessity with life. Life is always in a state of becoming and so the desire for eternal truths can be seen as an escape from the fear of life and death (note that this was literally true in relation to corona).

The aim of thought is called “truth”, and truths are “established” – i.e., brought out of the living impalpability of the light-world into the form of concepts and assigned permanently to places in a system, which means a kind of intellectual space. Truths are absolute and eternal – i.e., they have nothing more to do with life.

Nietzsche had diagnosed the doctrine of Necessity as “decadence”. For him, consciousness is built on top of instinct. In fact, consciousness is largely driven by the deeper structure of instinct. This is very similar to Jung’s ideas around the Unconscious. The escape into eternal truths is an escape from instinct. But this escape can never be achieved and this is why Necessity has always been a lie, according to Nietzsche.

Following this line of thought, Spengler contrasts the philosopher from the man-of-action who operates via instinct:

The active man who does and will and fights, daily measuring himself against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant. The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths.

In Nietzsche and Spengler, the “truths” of Necessity, which are so beguiling to humans beings, are no longer the highest good. In fact, those truths are damaging because they turn us away from the business of living.

The will-to-system is a will to kill something living, to “establish”, stabilise, stiffen it, to bind it in the train of logic. The intellect has conquered when it has completed the business of making rigid.

Although the language is very different, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky would have broadly agreed with this critique. But although their diagnosis was the same, their remedy was very different. For existentialism, the remedy is Faith. For Spengler and Nietzsche, the remedy was physiological. What was required was a “stronger” type of person who would have no need of the deceptions of eternal truths but would operate on instinct and intuition.

It’s no small irony that both Spengler and Nietzsche were sickly men who died young. Were they projecting their own physiological inadequacies into their thinking? Nietzsche was self-aware enough to realise this. In fact, his philosophy explicitly admits it. Every philosophy is a self-confession on the part of the philosopher, he said. This idea grounds much of the irony in Nietzsche’s later works, in particular his quasi-autobiography Ecce Homo which contains chapter headings like Why I am so Wise and Why I am a Destiny.

There isn’t much irony in Spengler, however. He was deadly serious. In Spengler, history belongs to destiny, fate and “blood”. You don’t reason about it, you “feel” it. This new history would not pretend to objectivity. It was “strong” enough to dispense with the hypocrisy of the philosophers of the past who had not been honest with themselves. Thus, the Spenglerian position was not against the coercion of Necessity. On the contrary, it embraced coercion.

Spengler sums it up in the inimitable style of German romanticism at the very end of the first volume of Decline of the West:

For us…whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture at this moment of its development…our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him.

Meet the new Necessity, same as the old Necessity. In this short paragraph we see the resignation, fear and coercion that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky had railed against on full display. All Spengler had done was swap the coercion of intellect for the coercion of instinct.

We also see the rejection of the individual. For Spengler, only collectives have destiny and fate. The individual is either part of the collective destiny or they are nothing at all and may be ground into the dirt. (It is on this point that Spengler most clearly diverges from Nietzsche).

As I have noted several times in this series already, existentialism is concerned with the individual and places the subjective above the objective whether the objective is in the form of eternal philosophical truths or the collective instinctual movements of a herd of people. Thus, although Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky diagnosed the same problem as Spengler, their solution was very different because it was concerned with the problem of Necessity as it affects the individual. Their solution was Faith. Rather than go into detail about what they said, I’d like to take an alternative and less obvious route.

One the things that Spengler’s reliance on “instinct” and “blood” is supposed to achieve is the overcoming of scepticism. This is not scepticism for scepticism’s sake. It is scepticism rooted in the Problem of Induction. Yet again, this is where Toynbee is a useful foil for Spengler because Toynbee knew that the Problem of Induction applies just as much to comparative history as to any other field of knowledge and simply appealing to instinct doesn’t get you off the hook.

A common example given for this is the chicken who learns by inductive reasoning that the farmer is the provider of food. For hundreds of days in a row, the farmer kindly feeds the chicken. The empirical evidence available to the chicken supports the conclusion that the farmer is their friend all the way up until the day where the farmer decides it’s time for a Sunday roast. Hypotheses are inductively proven by evidence until they are not.

Note that this dovetails quite nicely into the question of cognitive dissonance we discussed in the last post. Having your (usually unstated) hypothesis proven wrong by empirical evidence is a leading cause of cognitive dissonance.

In relation to the cycles of history, the Problem of Induction is magnified because comparative history is intrinsically complex and it’s not obvious what the basic categories are. In addition, we have a limited number of civilisations that we can study, we lack reliable data about those civilisations, and what data we do have is incomplete and shows variation. The Problem of Induction is valid even for simple and repeatable scientific findings. It is much more of a problem in an inherently complex domain like history.

In relation to civilisation, there is also the problem that what we call civilisation is a new arrival on the scene. In the broader scope of human history, civilisation arrived only yesterday. What’s more, it is not a universal. On the basis of empiricism, we might even treat civilisation as the anomaly and not the rule. Far from being grounded in fate and destiny, we might say civilisation is just a temporary aberration.

The Problem of Induction tells us that we should be sceptical about any generalisations we draw about comparative history. Toynbee acknowledged this while Spengler brushes it aside in the name of a Necessity grounded in instinct. I don’t think it’s an accident that Toynbee raises Christianity at the end of his Study of History because, perhaps counterintuitively, Christianity has more to do with scientific empiricism than it does with Necessity.

The Christianity I am talking about is not the doctrines of the Church. As I have already noted, the Church in Europe was the carrier of both the Classical and the Magian traditions inherited from Rome. It has been an enthusiastic exponent of the doctrine of Necessity for pretty much all of its history.

The Christianity I am talking about is the Faith of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. One format this takes is the idea that anything is possible for God. This is part of an old debate from scholasticism about whether God himself is bound by the logic, reason and the laws of nature or whether he can act outside those laws. If we take this debate in a more abstract and symbolic fashion, we can interpret it as a variation on the Problem of Induction.

We humans are just a bunch of neotenous chimps who fell out of the trees. What right do we have to claim that we could ever discover the eternal “laws of nature” whether through intellect or through instinct? By positing a God “above” intellect, we are implying that there is a higher power than intellect and, by extension, that intellect can be wrong. This should be an obvious fact and yet what Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky realised was that the doctrine of Necessity has a hypnotic attraction to humans. We desire certainty and we will invent whatever doctrines are necessary to give us the illusion of certainty. Faith is the opposite of certainty. Faith is possibility and freedom.

Of particular interest, given the first post in this series, is the author’s assertion that the spiritual is experienced as Nothingness by the intellect.

Leave aside this everywhere and everything, in exchange for this nowhere and this nothing. Never mind at all if your senses have no understanding of this nothing;…this nothing can be better felt than seen; it is most obscure and dark to those who have been looking at it only a very short while.

It’s precisely because we are so attached to reason and logic (Necessity) that the journey to the spiritual is traumatic. We must renounce our usual methods of understanding and that feels like Nothingness. This is the reason that Kierkegaard stated that fear is tied up with the idea of Necessity. The rational and logical feels safe to us in comparison with the seeming darkness of the spiritual.

For Kierkegaard, the resignation to Necessity, whether by intellect or Spenglerian instinct, is driven by the fear of Nothingness. The coercion associated with Necessity has the same origin because those who are fearful are liable to lash out. The Christian mystical tradition acknowledges that fear is part of the process of connecting with the spiritual domain and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing even states that many give up on the exercise because of the discomfort it causes.

The existence of a spiritual domain which supersedes the intellect therefore allows for a similar recognition of the limited powers of the intellect as does the Problem of Induction. This is normally seen in a negative light. If we cannot predict the future based on past experience, that means that we cannot stop destructive or harmful events from happening.

That’s the negative side. The positive side is that can also expect to be pleasantly surprised by new experiences that we cannot foresee. Faith acknowledges both of these outcomes. Yes, there will be times when we are blindsided by events to our detriment. But there can also be magic moments of bliss and ecstasy. What Dostoevsky implies in The Brothers Karamazov is that you cannot have one without the other. To be open to possibility is to experience the bad as well as the good. The only way we can encounter the magic moments is to retain our childlike sense of faith.

All of this is consonant with the light-hearted, sceptical and empirical approach to life which is, in my opinion, what “real science” is founded upon. This is the spirit of science when one does not deny the Problem of Induction and does not demand certainty via eternal laws or animal instinct. Nietzsche summed it up best: scepticism implies faith.

All posts in this series:
Christian Existentialism Part 1: The Confrontation with Nothingness
Christian Existentialism Part 2: The Worship of Idols
Christian Existentialism Part 3: Necessity vs Faith
Christian Existentialism Part 4: The Boiling Point of Water
Christian Existentialism Part 5: From Luther to Feynman
Christian Existentialism Part 6: The Rise of the Irrational

Existentialism implies a focus on the individual and the primacy of subjective over objective truths. Both of these are unusual traits not just in a philosophical sense but in the broader sense that human nature seems hardwired for the opposite. Obedience to the collective and its objective truths is the norm, which makes sense since human beings are herd animals by nature.

It’s not a surprise, therefore, to find that existentialists tends to live on the outer fringe of society and are usually at odds with the zeitgeist of their time. Often this involves a dramatic break early in their life. Thus, Nietzsche broke with Wagner. Kierkegaard broke off his marriage. Luther broke with the Church of his day. Dostoevsky and Shestov broke with the Russian society of their time. It’s not hard to see why Christianity leads naturally into existentialism since Jesus was at odds with the society of his time, so much so that they put him to death.

For this reason, existentialism can seem to be a depressing body of thought that focuses on despair, darkness and death. A more modern concept which we can add to that list is cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance manifests in the brain in almost the same way as physical pain. Just as we try to avoid physical pain, we are incentivised to try and alleviate the pain of cognitive dissonance. One way to do that would be to change our mental models to accommodate the new information that is causing the discomfort. But that takes time and energy. So, people look to a variety of other strategies. One of the most common is to shoot the messenger. Another is scapegoating. That’s why one of the main tasks of the mainstream media is to character assassinate anybody who represents a threat to the status quo.

Existentialism implies a willingness to deal with cognitive dissonance and this is perhaps why most of the existentialists had gone through some traumatic experience that changed their life. Having overcome the extreme cognitive dissonance of a life-threatening episode, the everyday pains of life like annoying people or being an outsider seem to pale into insignificance.

Avoidance of cognitive dissonance is hardwired into our cognition. Another way to say that is that we have a built-in conservatism. Having constructed our mental models of the world, we are loathe to change them. But most of our mental models come from the society around us. We are unconsciously influenced by others and it takes a good hard dose of cognitive dissonance to break the illusion.

Let me give an account from my experience which is worth telling in this case because it will let us explore a couple of the main themes of existentialism. It involves one the most influential thinkers in that realm, the Russian writer, Dostoevsky. The story also includes another thinker I have written about extensively on this blog: the German historian, Oswald Spengler. It’s the story of Christian existentialism versus German romanticism.

When I was reading Spengler’s Decline of the West for the second time, I had the experience that many readers of Spengler have of getting caught in his spell. I use the word spell here deliberately. Spengler’s monumental work of history shows us a new way of looking at the world and our own place in it. He re-enchants our world by giving it a new and dramatic historical perspective that is especially alluring for those of us living in the disenchanted world of modern industrial capitalism.

Part of the reason this works is because Spengler had enchanted himself; the best salesman is the one who believes their own sales pitch. It’s for this reason that the British historian, Toynbee, is such a useful foil for Spengler because he explores many of the same themes but without getting carried away in flights of fancy. This makes Toynbee’s work more methodical and categorical, although admittedly less exciting.

The problem with encyclopaedic works of scholarship which make reference to countless different data points is that we the reader don’t have the time or the inclination to verify them for ourselves. Spengler is particularly bad in this respect since he presents numerous conclusions without providing any reasoning as to how he got there. Because these conclusions are tied up into a larger story that is exciting, the grand arcs of history, we are apt to go along without questioning.

It wasn’t until a couple of hundred pages into the first volume of Decline of the West that I experienced the cognitive dissonance that snapped me out of my dogmatic slumber and made me start to question Spengler more critically. Prior to that, I was unable to criticise the book because I had no point of reference to do so. If Spengler says that the use of a particular technique in ancient Middle Eastern architecture is symbolic of the Magian world feeling, I had no grounds to disagree because I had never seen the buildings myself and don’t know enough about architecture to form an opinion either way.

I may not know anything about ancient Middle Eastern architecture, but I do know a thing or two about Dostoevsky. He’s been one of my favourite writers ever since I stumbled across a copy of Memoirs from the House of the Dead in my local library when I was a teenager. Dostoevsky is one of my favourite writers and The Brothers Karamazov is my favourite Dostoevsky novel. So, when Spengler made reference to The Brothers Karamazov on page 195 of his history, I experienced an acute case of cognitive dissonance.

“First impressions count” goes the saying. What happens in life is that we put people, places, ideas into certain mental boxes and once a person or an idea is in a box we really don’t like to change it. Cognitive dissonance is what forces us to make that change. It occurs when we learn something new that makes us question the mental box we’ve put someone or some idea into. Spengler had captivated me with a new idea and presented a couple of hundred pages of what seemed like good analysis in support of it. I had placed Spengler in the “interesting thinker/possibly a genius” box.

Once we have put somebody in a box, we tend to overlook all kinds of “warning signs” that they don’t belong there. This is another basic fact of life. We’ve all had friends, romantic partners, family members or business associates who we thought were on our side. We put them in the “good guys” box. Then something happens that breaks up the relationship and we see the person in a whole new light. All the warning signs become obvious in hindsight and we marvel at how we could have been so blind that we ever thought they were on the same page as us.

The incident that caused my re-evaluation of Spengler came when he talks of the “immeasurable difference” between the Faustian the Russian souls. In support of this immeasurable difference, he references The Brothers Karamazov as follows:

“That All are responsible for all – the “it” for the it in this boundlessly extended plain – is the metaphysical fundament of all Dostoevsky’s creation. That is why Ivan Karamazov must name himself murderer although another had done the murder.”

For those who haven’t read the novel, Ivan Karamazov is the middle brother. The father, Fyodor Karamazov, is murdered in mysterious circumstances. The second half of the novel deals with the subsequent events as the eldest brother, Dmitri, is charged with the crime. In the process, Ivan comes to realise that he is responsible for the murder indirectly. Spengler attributes Ivan’s feeling of guilt to the metaphysical fundament of brotherhood that he posits is a central component of a hypothetically emerging “Russian soul”.

This is a preposterous claim. It glosses over some of the most dramatic parts of the novel including Smerdyakov (the murderer) directly confronting Ivan, blackmailing and manipulating him, and Ivan’s subsequent descent into madness. Ivan feels himself to be responsible for the murder because Smerdyakov tells him that directly and Ivan knows it is true in his own heart. Spengler ignores the basic facts of the novel and somehow finds evidence of brotherhood in murder and blackmail.

But even if we want to give Spengler the benefit of the doubt and be more abstract and symbolic in our analysis, his explanation still makes no sense. If there really is a Russian soul that requires the brothers to take responsibility for a murderer, Ivan is the least likely character to represent such a soul. Dostoevsky deliberately paints Ivan as the brother who has been infected with the latest ideas from Paris and Berlin. Not only is Ivan not symbolic of the Russian soul, he is symbolic of the exact threat to the Russian soul which Dostoevsky saw in the modern ideas of atheism, nihilism, socialism etc. Spengler’s analysis is not just a little bit wrong, it’s 100%, exactly wrong; the opposite of the truth.

When you become a connoisseur of cognitive dissonance, you learn that there are degrees of dissonance. Most of the time in life, we disagree about little things and those disagreements are easily glossed over because we assume we are still on the same page about the important things. The ultimate in cognitive dissonance is when somebody or something is exactly wrong. It’s very rare to be exactly wrong and it’s a sign that something fundamental is at stake.

Cognitive dissonance forces us to re-evaluate our understanding. If Spengler got it so wrong in relation to Dostoevsky, a subject I happen to know something about, how can I trust anything he says about subjects that I don’t know anything about like ancient Middle Eastern architecture? The answer is that I can’t. But until the cognitive dissonance forced a re-evaluation, I was happy to go along with his analysis passively accepting its truth.

Not blindly trusting people based on a presumed “authority” is one of the key themes in existentialist thought. We are hardwired for blind trust and we are always slipping back into the dogmatic slumber that blind trust engenders. Cognitive dissonance wakes us from our sleep and forces us to pay attention. More symbolically, every case of cognitive dissonance is a death and resurrection. Our old view of the world dies and a new one is born. Again, we see the influence of Christianity on existentialism.

The fact that Spengler was 100% wrong about Ivan Karamazov is a sign that something fundamental is at stake. And indeed there is. There is a bitter irony at play in Spengler’s error.

Ivan Karamazov is the brilliant but unknown scholar who has ingenious ideas based on the intellectual fashions of Western Europe at that time – atheism, materialism, socialism and nihilism. When he wrote the first volume of Decline of the West, Spengler was a brilliant but unknown scholar pursuing ingenious ideas based on the fashionable intellectual trends of the time – atheism, materialism and nihilism. In other words, Spengler is exactly the kind of person Dostoevsky was warning about when he wrote the character of Ivan Karamazov!

Just as Spengler can captivate us with his ingenious ideas, so Ivan Karamazov captivates his half-brother, Smerdyakov, with his ideas. Ivan is later made to realise that he is indirectly responsible for the murder of his father precisely because Smerdyakov took Ivan’s ideas to heart, including the notion that if God is dead, anything is permissible (even murder). Not only that, Ivan missed all the warning signs that Smerdyakov gave him because he was not paying attention. He was off with the fairies in the abstract fields of Reason and not focusing on the “real” world around him.

The character of Ivan Karamazov is a brilliant portrait of the dangers of disconnected Reason. It was written at a time when the real effects of disconnected Reason had not yet manifested. But the 20^th century would prove Dostoevsky right. The technocrats of the Politburo with their decision-by-committee caused the deaths of millions of people because they were disconnected from reality on the ground just as Ivan Karamazov was disconnected from the world around him and failed to stop the murder of his father.

But there is a second meaning to the tragedy of Ivan Karamazov that is directly relevant to Spengler. Smerdyakov is filled with hatred and resentment. He uses Ivan’s idea as an intellectual cover to commit an atrocity. And that’s exactly what later happened to Spengler. The Nazis were filled with hatred and resentment. And, just like Smerdyakov, they latched on to Spengler’s ideas and used them for intellectual cover to commit their atrocities. As if to highlight the correspondence, Smerdyakov commits suicide in the novel just as Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis did in 1945.

This is the bitter irony of Spengler’s misunderstanding of the meaning of Ivan Karamazov. Spengler might have seen his own soul in the character of Ivan. Instead, he saw only the Russian soul. Dostoevsky had placed the warning right before his eyes and Spengler missed it. He inserted an “immeasurable distance” between himself and the one character who was almost identical to him.

Spengler was reading with his brain, not with his heart. Disconnected Reason will project onto the world whatever it wants. It will find things that are not even there. By contrast, reading with the heart is about empathy and connection. The Brothers Karamazov needs to be read with tears in your eyes. The fact that it can be read that way shows not the “immeasurable distance” between us but rather our shared humanity.

That leads to the final irony. Spengler was actually right. The Brothers Karamazov does contain a vision of brotherhood. If Spengler wanted to find that vision, he should have turned to the very last pages of the book where Alyosha gathers the young boys after the funeral of their friend. The brotherhood Dostoevsky had in mind is not based around a shared culture or a Russian soul. It is not based around Nietzschean amor fati (love of fate). It is based on love itself. Dostoevsky was presenting a variation on Christian mysticism – the idea that God is Love.

Spengler could never have seen that because he was too busy worshipping his own god: the great god of History. Spengler gave his god all the properties that Dostoevsky warned against: materialism, atheism, fatalism. Spengler’s god led to despair on a grand scale. It still does. It is the god of Necessity. We’ll explore that concept more in a future post in this series.

All posts in this series:
Christian Existentialism Part 1: The Confrontation with Nothingness
Christian Existentialism Part 2: The Worship of Idols
Christian Existentialism Part 3: Necessity vs Faith
Christian Existentialism Part 4: The Boiling Point of Water
Christian Existentialism Part 5: From Luther to Feynman
Christian Existentialism Part 6: The Rise of the Irrational

Long-term readers would know that I have a habit of starting a series of posts and trying to figure out what I want to say as I go. Well, here’s another just like that. But in this case I am extra-justified in following this strategy since we’re going to be talking about Christian Existentialism, a body of thought which has always set itself against the systematisers of philosophy – the Aristotles, the Kants and the Hegels; the ones who like to create neat little systems that explain everything. Existentialism, by contrast, embraces the messiness inherent in reality.

I’m calling it Christian Existentialism since the main thinkers we’ll be looking at are all from the Christian tradition, even the ones who railed against Christianity. The main names we’ll be referencing are Luther, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Shestov and Nietzsche. I include Carl Jung and the Australian author Patrick White in this list too even though they probably didn’t think of themselves as existentialists.

What all these thinkers have in common is that they experienced a momentous event in their life that changed everything. Dostoevsky has perhaps the most memorable story of the group. He was sent to Siberia and sentenced to death by hanging. They led him out onto the platform, put the rope around his neck, then pardoned him at the last minute. Dostoevsky had been convinced he was going to die. Every moment after that was a blessing, even the ones spent in a prison camp.

Kierkegaard’s turning point was less dramatic and more psychological. He seems to have had some kind of nervous breakdown that led to him breaking up with the woman he loved, Regina Olsen. Nietzsche’s turning point was his break with Wagner. Shestov lived through the Russian Revolution and eventually had to leave Russia as a result. We all know of Luther’s 95 theses getting nailed to the church door. Jung had a series of psychological episodes prior to WW1 which led him to believe he was going mad and represented a turning point in his life and his psychology.

Dramatic events like this can, and often have, been viewed within a religious context. For example, a while ago I was reading the story of a French priest in the early 19^th century who found himself in a life and death situation. Despairing for his life, he prayed to the Virgin Mary to intervene on his behalf. He survived and came to believe that the Virgin had saved him. After that, he started a religious sect in her name.

Existentialists tend not to seek recourse in the institutions of religion or society in general. In fact, existentialism rejects the authority of those institutions. Hence, existentialism implies individuality and subjectivity. According to the existentialist, the “truth” of our experiences is always fundamentally subjective and personal. Attempts to form general truths are always falsifications. These falsifications are highly alluring. Since Adam and Eve, man has been tempted away from the fruit of the Tree of Life and towards the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Kierkegaard noted that existentialism begins with despair. Most people try at all costs to avoid despair. Kierkegaard’s book The Sickness Unto Death is a kind of catalogue of all the means people employ to avoid facing despair. We seem to be hardwired to avoid despair and so it is only people who are forced to confront death and madness, the Dostoevskys and the Jungs, who are able to advocate for the existentialist point of view.

Since we’re talking about the subject, it seems fitting that I should relate an account of an experience I had which fits the existentialist mold. At age 16, I began having a series of psychological “episodes”. At that time, I hadn’t heard of Jung, Kierkegaard or existentialism in general. But even if I had, I doubt I would have connected the dots between my episodes and the existentialist philosophy. In fact, it’s only in the past few years that I’ve made the connection, a process which began with my readings of Jung.

An important point of context in my story is that there is a history of schizophrenia in my family. For me, the idea that I might have been going crazy was not an abstract notion but a real possibility. This is also the main reason why I did not raise the issue with my family as that would have almost certainly resulted in a trip to the psychiatrist’s office and being pumped full of whatever drug was fashionable at the time. I was very keen to avoid that and so I suffered in silence. My life may have worked out very differently if I had turned to the “wonders of modern medicine”.

How can I describe the experience of my episodes? They lasted about 30 seconds each. They always occurred when I was in bed falling asleep. There would be a sudden feeling of “falling” accompanied with what I can only call “terror”. But the nature of this falling and this terror were completely disembodied. That is, there was no physical sensation at all. Whatever was going on, it was entirely psychological (or maybe we should say spiritual) in nature.

The closest experiences to these episodes I have had in “real life” are the shock response and the fight or flight response. Anybody who’s had either of these knows that they are triggered automatically and subconsciously. Physiologically, the body releases adrenalin and this acts to shut down the pain receptors. That’s why people who have just been in a bad traffic accident can often get up a walk even though they have broken bones. They are in shock and are not feeling pain. A similar thing occurs with the fight or flight response. You are not acting consciously. Rather, the conscious experience is of being swept up in a force that comes from within.

My episodes were similar to shock and fight or flight in that they were involuntary and seemed driven by an internal force I didn’t consciously understand. The big difference is that there was no cause in the external environment. Some external thing always triggers the shock and the fight or flight response and you know what that thing is. But there was no trigger for my episodes. I was just lying in bed and then suddenly I had this non-physiological feeling of “falling” accompanied by an extreme fear. The fear was simultaneous with the experience. I wasn’t scared because I thought I was falling. I knew I wasn’t falling. The fear had no object.

Just as there was no cause in the immediate environment which triggered the episodes, neither was there anything going on in my life which was obviously to blame. I had a stable and loving family life. I was a healthy and active 16 year old who played sports and mucked around with friends. Yes, I was bored out of my brain at school, but that’s not unusual.

Similarly, the episodes did not cause any effects. I suffered no other physiological or psychological problems as a result of the episodes. Anybody viewing my external behaviour would have noticed no difference and assumed nothing was happening.

Because of all this, I wasn’t able to give any meaning to the episodes. It never occurred to me to pray to the Virgin Mary. I hadn’t yet heard of Jung or Kierkegaard. I wasn’t able to talk to my parents about it for fear of the schizophrenia link and I certainly wasn’t going to raise the matter with my friends since that would only result in the endless teasing that 16-year-old boys give each other. I suffered in silence.

Even though I am writing in a calm fashion here, I should stress that these episodes were terrifying. But how do you describe a terror that has no cause and no object? What does it mean to be terrified of nothing? Dostoevsky was terrified because he thought he was about to be hanged. Kierkegaard was terrified because his life had been destroyed due to his own internal demons. I was terrified about nothing. Literally nothing.

Jung had also thought he was going crazy because he too had a series of terrifying psychic episodes that had no obvious cause or meaning. But Jung had worked as a psychiatrist for many years. He knew a thing or two about the subject.

“If you take a step toward your soul, you will at first miss the meaning. You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.”

In my episodes, I had the feeling of falling. Jung uses similar metaphors in the Red Book: the spirit of the depths, sinking into meaningless and disorder. What Jung came to believe was that the confrontation with the spirit of the depths is the discovery of the soul.

“Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost of my soul.”

The Red Book is Jung’s account of his discovery of his soul.

Although I could certainly appreciate Jung’s concept of the spirit of the depths, I realised that his ideas around the soul didn’t work for me. Jungian psychology hinges heavily on the appearance of symbols in dreams and imagination. I remember most of my dreams, yet I can’t recall having had a single dream involving a Biblical figure or a sacred animal such as a lion or a snake. Neither have I ever had experience with ghosts, spirits or similar phenomena. I don’t have any problem believing that such things can exist. It’s just that I’ve never experienced them. So, while Jung gave me the impetus to start to make sense of my episodes, the psychiatric approach didn’t resonate with me.

Kierkegaard said that existential philosophy begins with despair. But this despair is not necessarily in opposition to knowledge or law. In fact, knowledge and law are built on despair. What lies behind knowledge and law is hubris and hubris is a response, a coping mechanism, a way to avoid the confrontation with despair. Jung also made reference to hubris (pride):

“The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgement. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.”

The two primary streams that run through modern European civilisation are the Greeks and the Jews; Athens and Jerusalem; the Classical and the Magian. The tradition of philosophy, science and knowledge comes to us via Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. This is the “joy of explaining and ordering things”, of making sense of the world.

Science and philosophy have been opposed to the tradition of revelation, faith and “freedom” that comes from the Bible. The tension between these two has been a constant in modern European thought since the beginning. That is why existentialism can properly be called Christian Existentialism even in thinkers like Jung and Nietzsche who no longer used Christian concepts.

Jung invokes this distinction in his quote above. He had followed the “Greek” path; the materialism that was popular in the second half of the 19^th century. But the spirit of the depths took away the joy he had in materialism and science, the “ideals of this time”. Jung had ended up in despair, the starting point of existential philosophy.

I don’t know if Jung had ever read Luther, but Luther’s beliefs about faith are very Jungian. Consider this quote:

“The gospel leads beyond…the light of law, into the darkness of faith, where there is no room for reason or law.”

Here again we contrast the light of law, reason and science against the darkness of faith. This matches Jung’s idea that we find the soul not above in the light but below in the darkness. If that sounds unpleasant, that’s because it is. Faith begins in despair. Faith is not easy. Following the law, doing what you are told, trusting the experts, that is what is easy.

What our modern atheists won’t tell you is that the Christian Church was the conduit for the light of reason and science in early modern European history. It carried both traditions – Athens and Jerusalem. The battle between the two was waged inside its walls. Luther’s break with the Church came when he believed the Church had chosen Athens over Jerusalem. It had become the lawgiver, the light of reason.

Luther made it his job to remind everybody that faith was born in the darkness, not in the light. One of his central doctrines is sola fide – justification by faith alone. The Church could no longer declare a sinner to be righteous either through payment or through works. Faith would redeem. But faith is a subjective experience. It requires one to delve into the darkness and that can only be done alone.  

For Kierkegaard, “darkness” is a metaphor for Nothingness. The fear of the dark is the fear of Nothingness. Fear is to Nothingness what warmth is to the sun or wetness is to water:

“If we ask what the object of fear is, there will be only one answer: Nothingness. Nothingness and fear accompany each other.”

Darkness, nothingness and despair, these are the starting points of existential philosophy, not the end points. Existential philosophy does not offer conclusions, it opens up possibility. But possibility can seem like chaos. It can seem like the ground under your feet is giving way.

So, it was Luther and Kierkegaard who finally gave me the answer to what I had gone through during my episodes when I was 16. Kierkegaard describes it thus:

“Psychologically speaking, the Fall always takes place in a swoon.”

That is an exact description of what I had experienced. The “swoon” is the feeling of falling. The fear is the primal spiritual fear of Nothingness. The Fall has been associated with other concepts like sin and guilt. But the Fall was also the first experience of fear and therefore Nothingness.

These considerations led Kierkegaard to a radical idea that he could not fully accept. All history, philosophy and knowledge, all civilisation is born out of fear. They are the temptations of the snake who wants us to give up our freedom. We enchain ourselves spiritually and mentally before we ever enchain ourselves physically. Faith then becomes the antidote; the way to conquer fear and regain freedom. But faith can only be won by facing fear directly.

All of this is directly relevant to the world we live in now. In case you hadn’t noticed, our society is having its own confrontation with madness right now. So, it’s a fitting time to talk about these ideas. Madness and despair occur when the rational mind reaches the end of its tether. This may lead us to insanity and barbarism. But the existential philosophy offers another possibility: despair is the necessary stage on the path to faith and freedom.

All posts in this series:
Christian Existentialism Part 1: The Confrontation with Nothingness
Christian Existentialism Part 2: The Worship of Idols
Christian Existentialism Part 3: Necessity vs Faith
Christian Existentialism Part 4: The Boiling Point of Water
Christian Existentialism Part 5: From Luther to Feynman
Christian Existentialism Part 6: The Rise of the Irrational

It’s coming up to the two-year anniversary of the publication of my book The Devouring Mother: The Collective Unconscious in the Time of Corona. As I mentioned in a recent post, the corona hysteria might be done, but the delirium is far from over and the Devouring Mother archetype is, if anything, becoming even clearer as the dominant archetype of our time. I noticed recently that Jordan Peterson has started mentioning the Devouring Mother in reference to gender surgeries and the concept seems to be gaining some traction in the wider culture as a result.

Long-time readers will know I have been continuing to try and sort through the issues raised by my initial Devouring Mother concept, which was inspired by Jung’s Essay on Wotan. I was guided in that initial analysis by my studies of archetypes as tools in writing and analysing narrative fiction. Because our culture requires us to separate “the real world” from the “fictional” world of art, it probably would never have occurred to me to make the jump from one to the other if not for Jung’s essay and I was as surprised as anybody how well the archetypes worked as a tool for sociological study. But there were a couple of differences between my Devouring Mother analysis and Jung’s Wotan analysis that seemed important and which I have been working through since then.

Perhaps the main difference is that Jung posited Wotan as a geographically-specific archetype. Wotan was activated in Germany because of Germany’s location in central Europe, the home of the archetype. By contrast, the Devouring Mother and the Orphan are universal archetypes based in the relation between mother and child. They are not geographically-specific. This was not a problem in relation to corona since that was a global event. But WW2 was also a global event. So, there was a discrepancy between mine and Jung’s analyses in this respect.

This discrepancy was heightened when I realised how well the Devouring Mother accounted for the current state of global politics. Post-war global politics has been shaped in obvious reaction to WW2 and specifically to the appearance of the Tyrannical Father archetype in the form of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin etc. This seemed too coincidental to be ignored and led to me to try and sketch out how the Devouring Mother fitted into the larger historical context.

Meanwhile, I realised that I needed to pay more attention to the Orphan. I had focused on the Orphan’s relation to the Devouring Mother in my initial analysis. But considering the Orphan archetype on its own terms opened up a new avenue of exploration that led me back to Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey. Every Hero is an Orphan. Every Hero’s Journey is the journey out of “orphanhood” and into “adulthood”.

More specifically, though, the Orphan is the archetype which sits between childhood and adulthood and this is where the anthropological and sociological element becomes important. The Orphan maps to the rites of passage we all must go through on our journey to adulthood which includes the biological changes of puberty and the social changes associated with becoming fully-grown members of our culture.

Of particular importance is the fact that the “initiation” of the Orphan cannot be done by the parents. It must be done by one or more Elders. This is one of the things Campbell had discovered in his analysis of the Hero’s Journey. It is hardwired into the stories we tell about the Orphan and is also present in the anthropological literature around rites of passage.

The Elder must facilitate the transition of the Orphan into adulthood. The parents can only be a hindrance because their job is to provide the unconditional love of the family home and it is exactly that comfortable, cosy environment which the Orphan must leave and face the wider world. In the modern world, schoolteachers have become a kind of proxy Elder. But the school system was never designed to be a proper rite of passage and so this leaves the underlying need unfulfilled.

The combination of all these clues, the Orphan archetype and the historical context in which the Devouring Mother and the Orphan appeared in modern western history, finally came together when I went back and re-read Toynbee’s A Study of History. I realised that the Elder-Orphan and the Parent-Orphan dynamic sits at the heart of Toynbee’s model.

Per Toynbee, the driver of a civilisation is always the minority. These days, we call them the “elites”. In the ascending phase, the elites are a Creative Minority who solve the challenges the culture faces and drive it to new heights. In the descending phase, the elites turn into a Dominant Minority who can no longer solve the problems faced by society and try to make up for this increasing incompetence by becoming dictatorial and authoritarian in relation to the wider public (sound familiar?).

Put into archetypal terms, the Creative Minority are the Elder who successfully initiates the Orphans (the general public).

“The leader’s task is to make his fellows his followers; and the only means by which mankind in the mass can be set in motion towards a goal beyond itself is by enlisting the primitive and universal faculty of mimesis.”

When the culture tips into the declining phase, the Elder-Orphan relationship breaks down and is replaced by the Parent-Orphan dynamic. The Dominant Minority becomes the tyrannical parent ruling over Orphans who are no longer initiated properly.

“But when ‘the cake of custom’ is broken, the faculty of mimesis, hitherto directed backward towards elders or ancestors as incarnations of an unchanging social tradition, is reoriented towards creative personalities bent upon leading their fellows with them towards a promised land.”

Orphans who do not get initiated can either rebel and try to find their own pathway or get stuck with their parents. That is true at the microcosmic level and also at the macrocosmic. That is why the disintegration phase of a civilisation typically sees the rise of new social movements leading towards a promised land and the opposing force of a Tyrannical Father archetype trying to hold everything together.

But this is where the Faustian (European) civilisation has deviated from the normal path. There have been no shortage of would-be Tyrannical Fathers vying for the job: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco etc. But they were all defeated by the British-American empires. This has led to the inversion of the Tyrannical Father i.e. the Devouring Mother.

This inversion fits with the general pattern of Faustian culture being the opposite of the Classical. Spengler made this point repeatedly and yet he refused to generalise it because he was trying to decouple the Faustian from the Classical.

Here is a list of the primary inversions based on where we are now in Toynbee’s cycle i.e. the disintegration phase:

	Classical	Faustian
Universal State	Rome	Washington D.C.
Dominant Political Form	Military Dictatorship (Army)	Deep State (Bureaucracy)
Archetype of the Dominant Minority	Tyrannical Father	Devouring Mother
Archetype of the Proletariat	Orphan	Orphan
Exercise of Power	Exoteric	Esoteric

In one sense, therefore, what I had discovered with the Devouring Mother concept was identical to what Toynbee had already outlined. The Devouring Mother is the form of the Dominant Minority in Faustian civilisation. But this represents something that neither Toynbee nor Spengler predicted. Both expected a return of the Tyrannical Father, especially Spengler who gave it the name Caesarism, ironically referring back to the Classical world that he so wanted to decouple from.

In this way, the Devouring Mother is a natural extension of both Spengler and Toynbee’s theories with the benefit of having actually lived through the period in question and seen how history unfolded.

There is also an implied correspondence between the archetypal analysis and the historical. Because I wasn’t considering the historical perspective at the start, I was able to arrive at the archetypal conclusion independently. It’s only much later that I’ve realised that the Devouring Mother-Orphan fits into the historical cycle. This leads to the hypothesis that there is some kind of archetypal relation going on. The historical cycle is itself an archetype that manifests in the broader culture.

But perhaps this historical influence is itself an element of the Faustian. The Faustian has, far more than any other culture, been preoccupied with history. The Faustian has not sat passively back and waited for history to unfold. It has at least made an attempt to learn from history. It may well be that the reason the Faustian so reliably inverts the Classical is exactly because of our historical consciousness. Even now, we are terrified of the emergence of a Tyrannical Father because that’s what history tells us to be on the lookout for. Because of that, we are oblivious to the warning signs as the Devouring Mother becomes ever more voracious.

The Faustian’s obsession with history also raises the possibility of a meta-meaning of the Orphan. We may, in fact, say that the dominant archetype of the Faustian has always been the Orphan. The Faustian consistently needed to justify itself in relation to the Classical just like a child trying to impress its parents. The acquiescent Orphans of the Faustian revered the past. The rebellious Orphans, beginning with Luther, broke with the past. This dichotomy of reverence and rebelliousness even solidified in politics in the last couple of hundred years with the conservative-liberal distinction.

Viewed this way, Spengler’s work was a cry for the Faustian to finally “grow up” and become independent of the Classical. He was not alone in this. The theme was also present during the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant wrote that laziness and cowardice keeps us as “children”. The Enlightenment was supposed to make us “adults”.

A final meta-meaning for the Orphan is the fact that, because of the global reach of the Faustian civilisation, almost everybody in the world has been brought into its orbit. We are all members of the proletariat of the Faustian and therefore its Orphans. But we are Orphans in a culture which is itself an Orphan! That’s why I am calling it the Age of the Orphan. I’ll be exploring the ramifications of that in my upcoming book of the same name.

To balance out last week’s post about the political background to our current situation in the West, I thought it would be a good idea to look at the other side of the civilisational coin and talk about religion. Arguably, our current predicament is far more of a religious problem than a political one, although, as we saw last week, the two have always been intertwined in Faustian civilisation as they are in every society.

It’s precisely because we live at a time when the founding religion of Faustian civilisation, Christianity, is but a pale shadow of its former self that our understanding of spiritual matters is pretty much non-existent. Take the words “sacred” and “holy”. To the extent that we use these words at all, they mean something like “good” or even “nice”. The New Age crowd uses terms like “sacred masculinity” or “sacred femininity” and this mostly constitutes a laundry list of things which are good about each sex. The sacred feminine is nurturing and the sacred masculine is strong etc. The truth is that the sacred is almost the opposite of the good.

The word sacred comes from the Latin where it has a variety of meanings. One of them is “to make holy”. The word holy is related to the word whole and the word health. So, we can also say that sacred means “to make whole” and “to make healthy”. But this implies that the thing in question is not whole or not healthy. That leads to another implication: what is sacred may not be interfered with in a way that threatens its holiness, its wholeness, its health. If you do mess with the sacred, you can expect punishment. The sacred is, therefore, also powerful and dangerous. It must be respected.

All these various meanings are present in the Bible. But just as Christianity has now been watered down to the point where all the sacredness has gone out of it, so too we now think of Jesus as some kind of peace-loving hippie. Really? Consider this passage from Matthew 10:34-36:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”

Does that sound like a peace-loving hippie? Truth is, Jesus was dangerous. That’s why they had him killed. In doing so, they made him one of the most sacred figures in history.

We can get a better appreciation of the meaning of sacredness by sidestepping the millennia of cultural baggage inherited from Christianity and taking a wider, non-European view. This will also give us a useful point of comparison to better understand the revolution that Christianity brought.

Let’s start with an example that is completely foreign to us in our jet-setting world of global travel and tourism: the stranger. For most societies throughout history, strangers were sacred. Which is to say, strangers were dangerous. The arrival of a stranger at your home or in your village was a big deal.

The anthropological literature shows two predominant responses to the arrival of a stranger. The first is to either kill them, drive them away or run away yourself. This strategy allows you to avoid the danger.

The second option is far more nuanced and introduces the idea of sacred rites. Rites and ceremonies are ways of navigating through the danger posed by the sacred. The anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep, noted that sacred rites have a three-part structure: separation – transition – incorporation. The arrival of a stranger constitutes a separation from the normal world. The community is no longer in profane (normal) status but switches into sacred status. In order to get back to the profane, the community invokes sacred rites of transition and incorporation.

The goal is to get back to the profane (normality). But the rites do more than that. They incorporate the sacred. Remembering that the sacred is dangerous and powerful but also potentially impure and diseased, sacred rites have a protective function. But they also integrate the stranger at a physical, social, political and metaphysical level. This incorporation can take forms that those of us with a Christian heritage would find very strange; in particular, one of the more common rites of incorporation: sex.

Strangers are sacred and the sacred has power. When you incorporate a stranger into your community, you incorporate his power. The power can be material as in money or goods for trade. But there is also a metaphysical power; something like mana or chi. A stranger is assumed to have mana and the woman who sleeps with him incorporates that mana. That’s why the Chinese villagers were happy to have their young women sleep with travellers from Europe in Marco Polo’s day.

If all this sounds far-fetched, bear in mind that modern pick-up artists have recaptured the same dynamic. The one thing you cannot be as a pick-up artist is a “nice guy”. Nice guys do not have mana. Pick-up artists have rediscovered the sacred power of the stranger.

Sex as an incorporation rite can be used wherever such a rite makes sense. One such context is negotiation. In Australian aboriginal culture, when two tribes were carrying out a negotiation, women from one tribe would come to the place of negotiation with the men. Once the negotiation was finished, the men from that tribe would return to camp while the women would wait a short distance away from the negotiation area. The men from the other tribe would stay to discuss their decision. If they decided to go ahead with the deal, they would go and find the women and have sex with them. If there was no deal, they would return to their own camp.

We can see such practices at play in the modern world. Back when I worked at a lawyer’s office, one of our most interesting cases was a professional man who was suing his company for wrongful dismissal. His company asserted that he had behaved inappropriately on a business trip to Hong Kong by sleeping with a prostitute paid for by a client. His counterargument was that this was the way business was conducted there and therefore he had done what was necessary to close the deal.

Years later, I would experience something very similar myself on a trip to Chengdu where I inadvertently ended up in a private karaoke room full of high-end Chinese call-girls. But that’s a story best told after a few beers. (Don’t worry, I showed my repressed Catholic heritage and politely declined their services).

Sacred rites facilitate the navigation of situations which are dangerous or powerful. Prior to a negotiation, the relationship between the two parties is in a profane state; an equilibrium or stasis. That stasis is broken when one party changes the relationship by suggesting a new deal. At that point, both parties enter the sacred state which must be navigated to ensure a return to the profane. Failure to do so can lead to negative outcomes. The war in Ukraine is a reminder of that.

Although it would never occur to us with our secular mindset, a business deal is a sacred rite. A business lunch is a communal meal. A handshake is a rite of incorporation. A suit and tie is the sacred outfit worn for the occasion. In some parts of the world, it is natural to include a sex rite in a negotiation. There is nothing remarkable about this from an anthropological point of view. In fact, it’s arguable that nations with a Christian heritage are the weird ones with our strange views towards sex.

Of course, the anthropological literature is full of other practices that we would consider not just strange but horrendous. Bestiality, cannibalism and paedophilia have been practiced widely including in Ancient Greece and Rome. Given the obsession of Faustian culture with the Classical world, why were such things unknown? The answer is that they were airbrushed out of history by the Church. And here we come to the point: the influence of the Christian church on Faustian notions of sacredness.

I mentioned last week that the Christian Church largely created Faustian society beginning around the year 1000 A.D. We can now be more specific about one aspect of that dynamic. The Church created a shared zone of spiritual understanding. It defined the sacred rites and practices for the people under its influence. It did so by systematically repressing folk religions. Each region in Europe would have had their own versions of sacred rites defined by local custom. The Church got rid of all that and replaced it with the Church’s sacred rites.

The prevailing notion these days is that all this was achieved through violence and coercion. No doubt there was some of that. But there is a more fundamental reason why the Church was able to unite disparate communities in Europe and then later around the world.

In the 19^th century, European anthropologists and linguists had access to the global reach of European civilisation and were able to sift through the languages, customs and sacred rites from cultures all around the world. They realised that, while there was enormous variety, there was also what appeared to be universal elements of human language and culture. The argument between what is universal and what is not is still ongoing to this day.

Whatever the theory says, it is simply a fact that the Christian church had a number of sacred rites that are found across a wide variety of cultures. Baptism, the use of water in rites of purification and incorporation, is almost a universal of human culture. The Last Supper is an example of a communal feast; another universal. Jesus healing the sick is a universal sacred rite because sacredness is linked with disease and impurity. Jesus’ 40 days in the desert is a prime example of an initiation rite. It has direct equivalents in the Australian aboriginal walkabout and the Native American vision quest to take just two examples from unrelated cultures.

But perhaps what was most important about Christianity was that it brought in a level of abstraction. Let’s take one of the most important Christian rites – the Eucharist.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.” (John 6:53–55)

The people Jesus is addressing in this Bible passage take his words literally and think that Jesus is telling them to eat his body. But Jesus was speaking in a parable. His meaning would later be captured in the rite of the Eucharist where bread and the wine are ceremonially transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ and then consumed by members of the congregation.

When Christian missionaries arrived in Australia and began explaining the Christian rites to Australian aboriginals, the aboriginals recognised some of the rites as being similar to their own tradition. One of those rites was ritual cannibalism. Close family members would eat the flesh and drink the blood of the deceased. They did so for exactly the reason stated by Jesus in the quote above; namely, it was believed that the flesh contained power, spirit or “life”. It was sacred. Ritual cannibalism is an incorporation rite that aims to integrate the power of the sacred.

The Eucharist replaces ritual cannibalism with a symbol, an abstraction, that means the same thing. It is precisely because ritual cannibalism was practiced in a number of different cultures, not just Australian aboriginal culture, that such a rite could resonate. This is how the Christian message was able to spread in vastly different cultures from the one it originated in. It was also what allowed the church to unite the disparate peoples of Europe under a single religion and create the Faustian culture in the first place.

That unification began to break down with the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion. If Catholicism was already an abstraction away from localised rites, Protestantism went one step further and created what Kierkegaard later called the single individual before God. To a large extent, Protestantism removed the social nature of sacred rites. Everybody was now answerable directly to the most sacred being of all: God. But remember that sacredness is danger and power. Protestantism had left people alone to face what they believed to be the highest power in the world.

This is not a theory. It was a lived experience. Many protestant priests complained that members of their congregation came to them with crippling anxiety. Protestantism created what Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death (remember, sickness is one of the meanings of sacred). To live every moment of your life in front of God is a matter for saints. It means there is no let up. There is no transition into or out of the profane but just a never-ending (eternal) sacredness. While Catholicism retained the social element of sacred rites with a social hierarchy of spiritual expectation, Protestantism left people alone in the face of the sacred.

Protestantism had demanded of its followers something that most people were not ready to achieve. As a result, the Protestant message began to be watered down to make it palatable. It ended up morphing into bourgeois materialism. By Kierkegaard’s time, all the sacredness, all the power and all the danger had already gone out of Protestantism. Most people were just going through the motions. It was the beginning of the mass hypocrisy which is still with us to this day.

With Protestantism no longer sacred, people began looking elsewhere for meaning. The aforementioned bourgeois materialism was one such avenue. Another was nation-state politics. There was the rise of nationalism, communism and anarchism. Meanwhile, another -ism, industrial capitalism, radically altered and de-sacralised society.

When nationalism blew itself up (literally) in the world wars, we were left with capitalism and its stepchild “science and technology” as the sole remaining sacred forces of our society. Economists and experts became the high priests and we had a decades-long fossil-fuel driven party. The abstract, spiritual power of the sacred had been replaced by the entirely material power of machines.

The sacred is power. It is energy. It is dangerous. The negotiation of the sacred gives a rhythm to life as people navigate through the dangers involved. These dangers give meaning and excitement to life. A life without the sacred is boring and monotonous; a perfect description of post-war suburbia.

A life without the sacred, even in the presence of historically unprecedented material prosperity, also leads to anxiety. The sacred rites are a journey through danger. They are a mental test and to pass the test and come out the other side is to build character or, to say the same thing with different metaphysics, to incorporate the power of the sacred into yourself. Without such experiences, one is permanently anxious and permanently in need of reassurance that one is “safe”.

That’s where we are today. A society obsessed with “safety” because we have run out of sacred rites completely. We tried to fill the void left by the absence of sacred Christianity with the nation state, science and technology and economics. Corona represents the defeat of economics. The decision to lockdown, with the inevitable economic repercussions which we are only just beginning to see, were a changing of the guard. The economists have been turfed out of their sacramental role. Our Dominant Minority knows that they can no longer deliver economic growth and they are desperately trying to create new sacramental rites to replace the economic ones that have been the mainstay of the postwar years.

Where are they turning for those rites? One area is the medical profession. This is not that surprising when you think about it. Birth and death are the two most important sacred rites in any society. For most humans throughout history, birth and death occurred in the home or in a sacred place set aside for the purpose. In the modern West, we are born and we die almost exclusively in hospital. Ergo, the hospital has become the most sacred place in our society. This actually makes perfect sense because holiness and healthiness are both elements of the sacred and many sacred rites in pre-scientific societies are aimed at protection from illness.

The huge problem, of course, is that medical professionals are not trained in the sacred and don’t consider themselves to be doing sacred work. Nevertheless, we have increasingly come to rely on the medical industry as a proxy for the sacred. Medical spending in the post wars years has increased in inverse proportion to church attendance. That is not a coincidence.

This has two effects. Firstly, the medical industry is treating people who have nothing physically wrong with them but rather have a “spiritual” problem. Naturally, such treatments do not work because they are not addressing the underlying problem. Because any medical intervention has side effects, the cost of the side effects outweighs the benefits and the medical industry is becoming a net cause of illness rather than its cure.

Secondly, the increasing demand for medical services has massively increased the price; a price we can no longer afford and are running up huge debts to pay for. Without the necessary money, the medical system is increasingly failing to maintain even a basic standard of care and what should be the sacred rites of birth, death and illness are increasingly morphing into the kind of outright inhumanity that only an underfunded bureaucracy can produce.

We have looked everywhere for the sacred except the one place which can actually deliver it: religion. But what we are starting to see now is a reversion to pre-Christian forms of sacred rites; albeit in the guise of “science”, “medicine” and “progress” and this is where we re-connect to politics because these new “sacred rites” are being promulgated by the Dominant Minority; the global “elites”.

Consider the stories of Silicon Valley billionaires using blood transfusions from the young to “live forever”. This is nothing more than a high-tech version of drinking blood; a classic incorporation rite.

The gender surgeries and associated medications for young people fit clearly into the category of bodily mutilation rites that are almost a universal in the anthropological literature. Van Gennep says of this rite:

“The mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation…which automatically incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent.”

The trans craze has created new sacred groupings with associated mutilation practices consonant with initiation rites given to adolescents in many societies throughout history. The increasing number of vaccinations given to young people also fits into this category of sacred rites during childhood.

Another childhood rite is teaching about sex. Van Gennep notes that the arrival of the second set of teeth is the marker for the beginning of sex education in many cultures which would put the age of sex education at 7 years old. The recent craze in exposing young children to sexually explicit material fits this category as do moves by globalist bodies to reduce the age of consent which would revert back to non-European historical norms (the northern European paradigm is anthropologically unusual for the late age of both consent and marriage).

Here in Australia, we have the Welcome to Country ceremonies which refer back to the sacred rites performed on the traveller in non-European culture. We see similar concepts in New Zealand, Canada and the US with land acknowledgements.

Corona is, of course, the big one; possibly the first ever global sacrament. Before corona, each of was profane: pure, un-diseased, not dangerous. In the early days of 2020, we all became sacred: impure, diseased and dangerous. It didn’t matter that you had no symptoms. Having no symptoms just meant you were asymptomatic. Everybody was now sacred.

Having moved everybody into the sacred category, we needed a purification rite to get them back to the profane. That was the vaccine; your ticket back to “normality”.

Corona was a perfect example of the structure that Van Gennep identified. Every sacred rite of passage has three stages: separation, transition and incorporation. The lockdowns were the separation phase. The incorporation phase was the vaccines. In the transition phase, we were told we were entering a new normal and that is totally fitting because the whole point of a rite of passage is to transition out of an old world and into a new one.

The problem with every one of these new “sacred” rites is that they are not really intended to bring us back to the profane. On the contrary, they seem custom designed to keep us in an eternal sacred state. The never-ending new covid variants and the never-ending booster shots to go with them (the word “booster” implies energy and power and, therefore, sacredness).

This makes perfect sense when you consider that all this is driven by the Dominant Minority of Faustian culture. From the Dominant Minority’s point of view, the general public really is sacred; it is dangerous and impure. That is why all of these new rites have suddenly appeared in the wake of the Trump and Brexit votes which were markers of the power of the public. Ironically, this eternal “sacredness” that never lets up is just Protestantism re-packaged for the modern world.

Once again, the Faustian represents the inversion of the Classical. The Dominant Minority in Ancient Rome governed by pushing exoteric rites that no longer had any esoteric content. The esoteric was re-created from the Proletariat in the form of Christianity. In the modern West, it is the Proletariat who still believes in the exoteric institutions and morality of society while the Dominant Minority undermines those institutions esoterically. The Dominant Minority of Rome was trying to keep its population unified. The Dominant Minority of the West rules by divide and conquer.

What has changed in the last 30 years is that the esoteric activities of the Dominant Minority are no longer productive but destructive. That’s the sign that we are moving out of the Universal State and into what Toynbee called the Interregnum. According to Toynbee, we should now see a new religion arise from the Proletariat.

Both Toynbee and Spengler, and also Jung in a more roundabout way, predicted that it would be Christianity that would rise again to form that new religion. Although that seems incredibly unlikely looking at the current state of the church, I think they are right. Once the lights start going out and the internet is unavailable, people will have to turn somewhere for sacred guidance and, as much as we deny it, our culture is still predicated to an enormous extent on Christian assumptions. It won’t take much to rediscover those assumptions. It may very well be that the second coming of Christ really is at hand.