Poverty and Grace

Neo-monasticism and lucrative salvation

If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame.

If they be led by virtue, and uniformity to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.
— Analects, 1:3:1,2

This morning it occurred to me again that what we have seen in the past forty-fifty years was not the failure of the Left but its extermination behind façades maintained solely for the illusion that there was one still. I kept saying this is Fabianism.

However, most often Fabianism is understood as the gradual penetration of the Establishment by the Left. In fact, it has always meant the opposite: the Establishment’s penetration and absorption of the Left. That was certainly evident in the US version, Pwogism (Progressivism).

The result became clear no later than in 2016 where Left was recognised as the hallmark of unadulterated fascism.

Perhaps the first historical version of this was Mussolini himself. He began his political career as a “left wing” politician (and British agent) before emerging as the titular head of Italian fascism.

The neo-conservatives were the Fabian equivalent in the “right” wing. New York City, rather than the South or Midwest, became the fountainhead of reaction in the 1980s.

In both cases we are talking about intellectual thugs and gangsters who, through terror and conspiracy, seized control of education and research, now more aptly called indoctrination and repression.

At the top they converge again in virtually pure nihilism after having rendered much if not all of the political spectrum vacuous and useless as channels for political expression.

The recent cant claiming a fundamental conflict between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” ought not to be dismissed so quickly. It is not a mere replacement for Samuel Huntington’s slogan, “clash of civilizations?”

“Democracy” is the defining condition of Fabianism. Like certain animal parasites it needs a specific host. Fabianism, as a conspiratorial manipulation of liberal democratic institutions, relies on mass politics for its nutritional base.

Fabian opposition to “authoritarianism” is best understood as an attack on any effective barrier to parasitic infestation by those whose power is exercised through malignant “mass democracy“.

Fabianism needs the ideology of the “self” and “narcissism” to drive mass organisations in ways that serve the Establishment. A sales campaign is a component of the whole crusade mechanism. The individual selfish soul or gene is sanctified in the personalized illusions to be satisfied by purchase of products or performance of compliant acts. This “democracy” in consumption supports the belief that democracy is an inner belief and not a material process with external results. One knows one is a “democrat“ by what one has ingested, not by the world in which one lives. If in doubt there are “hormonal therapies“ to stabilize the consumer’s identity.

The similarity to principles and practices of Christian dogma is not accidental. Elections are sacramental not material. The true election reveals the Christ through dispensation of grace. An election is only manifest when consecrated — the function and act of the clergy (prelacy in collegiate and secret congregation).

All this is utterly opposed to what Hegel called “Sittlichkeit” — ethical forms which define the permissible and proper behaviour of everyone — not just parasitic “victims” — in a social formation. Public ethics and morals (also found in Confucian thinking) constrain the powerful and the weak. They can also be publicly modified. However, this modification comes through overt social consensus and not private evasion, elevated by sacrament.

Thus the range of tolerance is also public, as when Putin told Oliver Stone that his duty to Russia meant protecting families as the means of continuing the population of Russia. This did not mean forbidding private homosexuality. However, it forbade treating it as equal to the right of procreating families.

In a Western “democracy” it is forbidden to protect human reproduction and family structures because these are “exodermic,” hard shells. They constrain the psychological manipulation upon which Christian crusades rely. The Christian traditionalist in the West, also known as fundamentalist, is faced with this doctrinal contradiction, namely the antagonism of the Latin church to every kind of natural family. That doctrine has been preserved despite the Reformation.

The cult structure in “democracy” protects the ruling oligarchy and its wealth (like sacerdotal celibacy — a rule of the Latin rite): the charitable foundation has replaced the dynastic family for this purpose. Hence inherited wealth is less obvious. All these notorious “giving pacts” are just transubstantiation monetized. The democratic prelate (billionaire) acquires the “grace” of the fictive citizen by a gesture of “poverty” surrendering his wealth to an ecclesiastical institution whose clergy take vows to pray for his soul in tax exempt manner for eternity. Natural children can sin, constituting a financial risk to immortality. The foundation can and must fire anyone who violates his sacred vows to protect and multiply the endowment.

Thus the charitable foundation, successor to the endowed monastery, promotes the democratic faith and is fully protected from the masses and material democratic claims. Its wealth is devoted to spiritual democracy and prayer for the salvation of the founder.

Here it should be noted that successive revolutions dissolved monasteries. This act has always been attacked in history textbooks as a renunciation of charitable and good works. Unfortunately in the “democracies” the dissolution and secularisation of the monasteries was incomplete: the wealth was merely transferred to new owners. Even worse the treasury (meaning the ordinary taxpayer) was forced to compensate this loss by the Church while a secular form of monastic economy was established.

Today it is very difficult to attack dynastic structures because their formal powers have, in fact, been radically curtailed. No amount of genealogical analysis will convince anyone that a few intermarried families rule the West as they did under pre-1789 monarchies. In that sense there has been a democratisation of the West and it appears irreversible — especially since natural procreation, marriage and other instruments are now abhorrent to the ruling oligarchy.

However, with the new piety of the visibly wealthy and the ancient piety of the secretly rich, the monastic system has been redesigned to protect more than mere wealth. The charitable foundation as a perpetual entity, endowed by their founders with inalienable wealth, is governed by the spirit that amassed such wealth in the first place. Like the monastic orders of the past, the abbots rule absolutely. As they are obliged to protect and expand the endowment they and the monks they hire must continue the founder‘s rapacious and parasitic spirit in their daily devotion. Ora et labora.

Together with the great international “funds” they continue the tradition of one holy church through which only salvation may be attained. It makes no difference whether the prelate is named Bill, George, Larry, Jacob, Nathaniel, Francis, or Carlos. The power these men exercise derives from the corporations they command but is perpetuated and protected through their monastic misanthropy.

Any new revolution will have to complete the dissolution repeatedly attempted in the past. It will have to transcend the illusions of merely spiritual democracy and struggle with the perpetual labour of material democracy — where there is no salvation beyond mortal life itself.

T.P. Wilkinson, Dr. rer. pol. writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..