By Steven Yates
November 18, 2023
What happened?
There was an off-year election last week. So-called abortion rights were on the ballot in Ohio; a legal right to abortion got added to Ohio’s state constitution. There were governors’ races in Kentucky (the Democrat won) and Mississippi (the Republican won). The General Assembly in Virginia was up for grabs and Democrats won out. Abortion was a factor there as well.
To listen to the pundits, the defeats were a complete surprise for Republicans.
I wasn’t surprised at all.
I’ve been advising people since Dobbs (which reversed Roe v. Wade) that no Supreme Court decision, or law passed, or policy enacted, would reverse the death culture.
Death culture? Any culture which regards human life as expendable because it has become inconvenient, or an unwanted expense. Perhaps: any culture that sees a human being as some kind of societal construct, instead of having a complete set of human DNA (the biological criterion). The expendability of human lives will follow easily.
I’ve emphasized from the get-go what numerous writers have stated in various ways: political economy is downstream from culture. I then add: culture, in turn, is downstream from worldview. What does this mean, exactly?
It means that worldview considerations dominate, identified and acknowledged as such or not. Your worldview tells you — even if you’re not conscious of having one — what is true or real, who we are and how we came to be, what is of value in life, and how we ought to live, including how we should treat our fellow humans.
Answers to these questions are embodied in our lives, our institutions, and today, in voting patterns.
Traditionally, philosophy was the enterprise concerned with such matters, but with rare exceptions, academic philosophers dropped this ball long ago.
Some of us have tried to pick it up again.
Materialism.
Cutting to the chase: materialism is the dominant worldview in the West. Another term you could use for it is naturalism. It became dominant gradually, displacing Christendom — marginalizing it in such a way that (1) Christian traditions, holidays, and practices such as churchgoing remain, but their capacity to influence the body politic is minimal; (2) many churches got corrupted by pop culture (consider the places where you’re unsure if you’re at a church service or a rock concert); finally (3): attempts to reverse the decline in godly influence are denounced as efforts to establish a theocracy. Christians who actually achieve stature in public life, such as our new House Speaker Mike Johnson, face a wall of distrust.
Materialism (or naturalism) says that nothing exists except this world. There’s no “god.” There’s nothing special about humanity. We’re animals like other animals, differing only in complexity, having emerged from a process that did not “have us in mind.” There’s no soul and no afterlife: no Heaven and no Hell.
The nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to fully recognize the implications of removing God from our world picture. Everything God’s existence gave meaning to falls with Him.
Materialism, if worked out consistently, discards over 2,000 years of Western ethics, which was Christian at its foundations, pulling in Aristotle and the Stoics at key points. Nietzsche’s term for the consequences of this Real Great Replacement was the advent of nihilism. Nihil is Latin for nothing. It means belief in nothing. Nietzsche advocated filling this nothingness with a new ethic: of strength, health, prowess, bravery in the face of material reality’s indifference to whether we live or die. He called this a “revaluation of all values.” The one who best embodies this new ethic will be the Übermensch (“overman” or “superman”), as opposed to “last men” who flee the new order in favor of continuing their mundane lives of servitude to the old (today he’d call them “bitter clingers,” I suppose).
Nietzsche was wrong in one fundamental respect. When we abandon God, we don’t believe in nothing. We believe in anything. Different populations substituted surrogates for God: the state (a big one, for Marxists and also for neocons), money and massive accumulations of wealth (a big one for capitalists), pleasure (think of the sexualizing of modern culture), happiness, self-actualization (Maslow), Reason (cap-R; think Ayn Rand), a few more.
None have worked, and we’ve floundered — and moved inexorably toward technology-based soft tyranny.
What does all this have to do with the past few election debacles?
Behind the abortion issue.
Behind the argument over abortion is an argument about the nature of human life and its intrinsic value. Is human life to be defined genuinely scientifically — that is, biologically, as a complete set of human DNA? Then, does every human being thus understood have intrinsic value, having been created in God’s image. Or not?
Millions of women (and plenty of men) have made their choice. They’ve sided with the materialists. They don’t even know it, because philosophical education is now so impoverished. They speak in euphemisms such as “women’s reproductive rights” and invoke “choice,” often as casually if they were talking about where to have dinner, not a decision to violently end an innocent and completely defenseless human life.
This is what is electing Democrats in 2020s America!
No Supreme Court decision is going to change this. It can’t be changed by fiat.
It can’t be changed in the way some Christians want to do, by challenging Democrat victories and outlawing abortion.
That’ll just invite more pushback.
How do you change a culture from one of death to one of life?
One thing we can be sure of. It can’t be done by force.
Not even brute force can change a society’s worldview, if its adherents psychologically dig in their heels.
The Soviet Communists spent 70 years trying to eradicate Christianity. Russia today, with Orthodoxy, is one of the most Christian nations in the world. A reason, I strongly suspect, that the country is so violently hated in our secularist Establishment.
Chinese Communists have continued suppressing all but a watered down, state-approved “Christianity.” The real thing stubbornly remains the fastest growing faith in China.
Make no mistake about it: cultural Marxism / Maoism in the West is at war with Christianity — not “capitalism” which it uses shamelessly as it can. Cultural Marxism is a form of materialism, its foot soldiers too poorly educated to recognize the fact. (I consider anyone who can’t define a woman or who believes one sex can be changed into another to be poorly educated.)
This doesn’t leave them politically ineffective. They’ve been very effective.
How Worldview Replacement Happens. Eugenics.
It might be instructive to examine how the great change from Christendom to materialism was accomplished in the West. The change wasn’t just intellectual, but also organizational and propagandistic.
For example, “Darwin’s bulldog” (Thomas Henry Huxley, father of Sir Julian and Aldous) sold Darwin’s theory to the scientific community: vigorously persuaded scientists to embrace it, to incorporate it into their very conception of science.
This embrace had little to do with actual scientific or empirical evidence, which was skimpy at best and nonexistent at worst. We had no evidence whatsoever that life could come from nonlife naturalistically. This gave Darwin himself sleepless nights.
But as physicist Max Planck observed:
“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Whether he’s talking about truth or not, Planck was onto something.
More recently, philosopher and historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn destroyed the idea that the replacement of one theory in physics by a later theory is a matter of evidence-based logical argumentation (in his landmark tract The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962]).
Worldviews, we can be assured, are “laxer” intellectually than theories in physics!
Materialism, finally, offered liberation from the behavioral and policy strictures Christianity imposed on society — especially on its leadership.
Eugenics was one result. This is the idea that superior races should rule, that it would improve the human “stock” if inferior races are not allowed to breed. If troublesome enough, inferiors can simply be exterminated.
“Discredited” when the Nazis made use of this evil notion, I would argue that eugenics has come back.
No one dares call it that, of course.
The idea that there are just too damn many people in the world is a prevailing one in GloboCorp — the globalist predators, the power elites, the Great Resetters, architects of the “fourth industrial revolution,” call them what you will.
It’s true: there are too many people to control technocratically.
So force them to take poorly tested “vaccines” for a lab-made virus? So they begin to die from a range of conditions, some almost immediately, others over a long enough period of time to supply plausible deniability?
If that’s not eugenics, wielded primarily against the elderly and other “useless eaters,” then pray tell, what is?!
Materialism was furthered indirectly by people whose only interests were money and power, as when the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled efforts to understand how “the masses” could be more easily incentivized, made into better consumers, obedient to political authority, and so on.
Government (“public”) schools were key. The Rockefellers created endeavors such as the General Education Board (1903), then bankrolled John Dewey’s Progressive Education which held that the role of education in a “changing world” is socialization, i.e., mental conformity, not critical, independent thinking.
Finally were decisions, many of them by the Supreme Court, to remove Christianity from government schools on spurious First Amendment grounds.
In other words, the process by which materialism replacing Christianity in America wasn’t fundamentally intellectual. It wasn’t logic-based; it wasn’t evidence-based. It was a matter of money and policy. The perpetrators got away with it!
That militates against the idea that we should expect to dislodge its grip with intellectual arguments.
What is to be done?
If Supreme Court rulings and political actions won’t work, and intellectual arguments won’t work, then what will?
This, I think, is one of the great dilemmas of our time!
Making matters worse: we anti-materialists don’t have any billionaires on our side that I know of. No, the Kochs aren’t interested in this, they’re neocons and therefore materialists who don’t know it, like many in well-heeled foundations, even those labeled “conservative.”
So we can’t expect anyone to bankroll us. At least, I stopped expecting that some time ago.
Our books aren’t going to gain a broad readership, because we’re not sexy or entertaining.
Roughly four years ago, a friend showed me a quotation that brought me up short. It came from architect, inventor, and systems thinker R. Buckminster Fuller:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
We need to build new models. They need to make the existing ones obsolete.
They need to undercut the dominance of central banks and other leviathan corporations, political classes, current educational structures, industrial food production, industrial medicine, etc.
I’ve since learned that such efforts are already underway in every one of these areas.
The situation is not as bad as it looks at first glance! There’s hope!
What we have to do is get the word out, in ways that will vary depending on what each of us can contribute. I’m a writer, so I write. Others make videos and movies because their skills lie in those areas. Homeschooling continues to surge. Private schools and even wholly independent universities are starting to appear (the most recent I know of is the University of Austin in Austin, Texas).
In another arena, others are establishing independent farms and building agrarian communities. Those who can grow food will be better positioned to survive the Great Taking when (not if) it occurs.
It won’t be easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is.
The road back to independence guided by a worldview that places God at the center, respects the divinely-ordered Creation, and sees persons as having intrinsic value won’t be easy.
Scare tactics work. It’s how the power elites were able to lock down most of the planet back in 2020, working through public health bureaucracies in every nation!
They used fear to force the mRNA shots on reluctant populations, including fear of unemployment.
This works both ways, however.
While the matter calls for a separate article, a second Trump presidency absolutely terrifies the Establishment and its punditry.
Trump will “end democracy” and establish authoritarian rule, says (well paid) pundit after pundit.
The other day, Hillary Clinton pontificated that Trump 2.0 would be “the end of our country as we know it.”
But if that means ending something circling the drain, its borders destroyed, its energy independence undermined, its middle class a thing of the past, the value of its currency gone, suffering from probably the worst mental health crisis in its history, and its only prospect a slow and painful integration into “global governance” as well as a reduced standard of living, wouldn’t that be a good thing?!
The rest of Hillary’s rant is projection.
The telos of materialism is totalitarianism. Because power — the capacity to control other people — is what will get the last word.
Look at China, where covid was hatched (bankrolled by Fauci and his henchmen).
Covid, in the West, was just a steppingstone.
I think that if we can make such points which are fully documented in books such as that of the Breggins, we might have something.*
A parallel economy has begun outside presently-dominant institutions. What I’ve seen of it is far healthier than the “above ground” economy the pundits routinely assess.
I’d like to see a revival of interest in philosophy alongside this parallel economy, especially the kind of philosophy that asks, and answers, “What’s a good life.” I’m happy to report: there’s significant interest out here in the hinterlands. Even YouTube has dozens of channels devoted to the subject. They get thousands of hits — not up there with celebrity and entertainment channels, obviously, but not nothing.
This might not stop the globalist predators. But it will continue to slow their progress to a crawl. Given that time is running out for them for various reasons — counter-elites (Trump is an example, and also Tucker Carlson) are not going anywhere, and their base of support grows by the day alongside those who are simply ignoring globalism as they tend their corner of the parallel economy. That might be enough!
*When attempting to access Dr. Breggin’s website my Google Chrome browser kept giving me 403 Forbidden. Online censorship, which barely existed before the Trump upset in 2016, will continue to be a challenge.
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Also, if the ideas discussed in this article seem important to you and you’d like to see them further developed, see my book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021), available here and here. My earlier book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) is available here.
While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, my novel of cosmic horror, The Shadow Over Sarnath, will be published this month. To learn more or to read a few fragments, feel free to shoot me an email: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.
