Facing the Beast, page 6
The bottom line, though, is that this infection of the soul, this abandonment of modern civilization’s most cherished postwar ideals—this edifice of evil was too massive, too quickly erected, to complex, and too elegant, to assign only to human awfulness and inventiveness. This sudden dropping of post-Enlightenment norms of critical thinking, this dilution of even parents’ sense of protectiveness over the bodies and futures of their helpless children, this acceptance of a world in which people can’t gather to worship; these structures themselves that had built up this demonic world in less than two years and imposed it on everyone else, these heads of state and heads of the American Medical Association and heads of school boards and these teachers; these heads of unions and these national leaders and the state-level leaders and the town hall level functionaries, all the way down to the men or women who disinvited a relative from Thanksgiving due to social pressure, because of a medical status which was no one’s business and which affected no one—this edifice of evil was too massive, too quickly erected, too complex, and too elegant, to assign only to human awfulness and inventiveness.
Months before, I had asked a renowned medical freedom activist how he stayed strong in his mission as his name was besmirched, and as he faced career attacks and social ostracism. He replied with Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”10
I had thought of that response often in the intervening time. It made more and more sense to me.
I confessed, at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and that thus it was not something I should mention in public.
I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties, and I had concluded that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself—that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.
I felt all around us, in the majestic nature of the evil encompassing us, the presence of “principalities and powers”—awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw anti-human outcomes being consistently generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech, and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit down, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.
I have seen bad politics all my life, and this drama unfolding around us went beyond bad politics, which is silly and manageable and not that scary. This—was metaphysically scary. In contrast to hapless human mismanagement, this darkness had the tinge of the elemental evil that underlay and gave such hideous beauty to the theatrics of Nazism; it was the same nasty glamour that surrounded Leni Riefenstahl films.
In short, I don’t think humans are smart or powerful enough to have come up with this horror all alone.
So I told the group in the woods that the very impressiveness of evil all around was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force—that of a God. It was a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.
And that is a huge leap for me to take, as a classical Liberal writer in a postwar world; to say these things out loud.
Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk about spiritual matters—at least not in public. We are supposed to be shy about referencing God Himself and certainly are not supposed to talk about evil, or the forces of darkness.
As a Jew I come from a tradition in which hell (or gehenom) is not the Miltonic hell of the later Western imagination, but rather a quieter, interim spiritual place. “The Satan” exists in our literature (in Job for example), but this is not the Catholic or the Miltonic Satan, that rock star, but a figure more modestly known to us as “the accuser.”
We who are Jews, though, do have a history and literature that lets us talk about spiritual battles between the forces of God and negative forces that debase, that profane, that seek to ensnare our souls. We have seen this drama before, and not that long ago; about eighty years ago.
Other faith traditions also have ways to discuss and understand the spiritual battle taking place through humans, and through human leaders, here on earth.
It was not always the case that Western intellectuals were supposed to keep quiet in public about spiritual fears and questions. Indeed, in the West, poets and musicians, dramatists and essayists and philosophers, talked about God, and even about evil, for millennia. These contesting powers were seen as being at the core of their understanding of the world and as forming the basis of their art and of their intellectual missions. This was true right through the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the twentieth, a period when some of our greatest intellectuals—from Charles Darwin to Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung—wrestled often and in public with questions of how the divine, or its counterpart, manifested in the subjects they examined.
It was not until after World War Two and then after the rise of Existentialism—the glorification of a worldview in which the true intellectual showed his or her mettle by facing up to the absence of God and to our essential aloneness—that smart people were expected to shut up in public about God.
So, it’s not wacky or eccentric, if you know history, for intellectuals to talk in public about God, and even about God’s adversary, and to worry about the fate of human souls. Mind and soul are not in fact at odds; and the body is not in fact at odds with either of these. And this acceptance of our three-part, integrated nature is part of our Western heritage. This is a truth that was only recently obscured or forgotten; this memory of our integrity as human beings has been, only for the last seventy years or so, under attack.
So I am going to start talking about God, when I need to do so, and about my spiritual questions in this dark time. Because I have always told my readers the truth of what I felt and saw. This may be why they have come with me on a journey now of almost forty years, and why they keep seeking me out, though I have in the last couple of years—after I wrote a book that described how nineteenth-century pandemics were exploited by the British State to take away everyone’s liberty—been pulped, deplatformed, canceled, recanceled, deplatformed again, and called insane, by dozens of the same news outlets that had commissioned me steadily for decades.
It is time to start talking about spiritual combat again. Because I think that that is what we are in, and the forces of darkness are so big that we need help.
What is the object of this spiritual battle?
It seems to be for nothing short of the human soul.
One side seems to be wrestling for the human soul by targeting the human body that houses it; a body made in God’s likeness; the temple of God.
I am not confident. I don’t have enough faith. Truth is, I am scared to death. I just don’t think humans alone can solve this one or win this one on their own.
I do think we need to call—as John Milton did, as William Shakespeare did, as Emily Dickinson did—on help from elsewhere; on what could be called angels and archangels, if you will; on higher powers, whatever they may be; on better principalities, on whatever intercessors may hear us, on Divine Providence—whatever you want to call whomever it is you can hope for and imagine. As I often say, I’ll take any faith tradition. I’ll talk to God in any language. I don’t think forms matter. I think intention is everything.
I can’t say for sure that God and God’s helpers exist; I can’t. Who can?
But I do think we are at an unheard-of moment in human history—globally—in which I personally believe we have no other choice but to ask for assistance from beings—or from a Being—better armed to fight true darkness than we ourselves are alone. We’ll find out if they exist, if He or She exists, perhaps, if we ask for God’s help.
At least that’s my hope.
Which I guess is a kind of prayer.
CHAPTER FIVE
Thinking Like a Tyrant
We can’t fully understand where we were, and potentially still are, in this thicket of unknowing, unless we are willing to face the nature and sources of this evil.
Something that is slowing down many people from fully grasping what is upon us, is that they are making mistakes in their reasoning about events, because they are engaged, naturally enough, in what intelligence analysts call “mirror imaging.” That is, because most of us are decent people with basic compassion at our cores, and are not sociopaths or psychopaths, we tend to “mirror image” in assuming that others are also driven by basic human motivations such as empathy, altruism, and kindness—or even just by the notion that other human beings are also deserving of life, self-determination, and dignity. How can such brutality be imposed on us? How could others be at the helm of such vicious policies?
But this assumption, that those who influence events and make certain key decisions are “like us”—is a fatal error.
* * *
To understand how a brutal tyranny could be enacted upon us in lockstep globally, by many otherwise familiar and formerly benign-seeming Western leaders and philanthropists and investors—men and women we thought we knew—we must begin to “think like a tyrant.”
I am not talking about anything arcane or occult. I am not talking about a QAnon fantasy of a few elites running the world.
I am talking, rather, about the global elites whom I know and among whom I have lived for forty years, and about events that I have witnessed.
I am talking about what the German-Jewish philosopher of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”:
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.1
To understand the global lockstep of tyranny (at one point, I would have said, “toward tyranny”), we have to understand that certain subcultures, certain leaders, and certain ideologies simply don’t have these core values at heart; and we must face the fact that these monsters are not just Nazis long dead, or members of the CCP far away, taking out their brutality on their own distant, silenced populations. Some monsters are very near to us; some are wearing lovely suits and chatting away about their kids, or about their renovation hurdles, at dinner parties; and some kinds of monstrosity and sociopathy are actively cultivated by the norms and networks that are all around us, albeit half hidden at elite levels, and systematized and accepted at very high levels.
One source of the kind of global cruelty we observed so acutely in the medical fascism of the pandemic derives from a postwar stratum of power. I’ll explain.
Paradoxically, metanational organizations such as the European Union and the United Nations, agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and global corporate and investment communities, founded after the carnage of the Second World War, served to create a class of global elite policymakers, nonprofit leaders, and bureaucrats who are able to engage in cruel and oppressive policymaking precisely because they are no longer part of the communities whose lives are affected by what they have done.
These metanational organizations purported to foster a more peaceful, cooperative world—one that would blunt enmity between historical adversaries (such as France and Germany). Most made the case that this metanational organizational structure would far more greatly benefit ordinary men and women in the street than did the poor, battered, dysfunctional nation-state, with its rotten history and its bloody impulses.
The first half of the twentieth century, with its two catastrophic World Wars, seemed indeed to reveal to the world the dark side of nationalism and the tragic limits of the nation-state; the period seemed like a textbook lesson in how decision-making at the level of nation-states led inexorably to bloodshed and to racist, cruel jingoisms.
The problem, though, as it turned out, is that you can’t have accountability to citizens or a real democracy if you do not have a democratic nation-state. Another problem is that it spawned a class of distant, unaccountable deciders.
As faulty and limited as the post-1848 modern secular parliamentary nation-state is, it is the most perfect form of government yet created, in its accountability to a set group of people—that is, to the citizenry of a constitutional democracy bounded by national borders. As Winston Churchill famously said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.
Metanational organizations rapidly created superstructures that made decisions above the heads of citizens of democratic nation-states. Quickly, the unelected deciders of the EU became more powerful than were the parliamentary leaders at the national level in Greece or Portugal or Spain. Quickly, citizens of various European countries lost the skills of understanding how their local and national levers of power worked; EU citizens were encouraged to leave it all to the bureaucrats at a level high above that of national parliaments.
But nationalism within a bounded nation-state, though it can surely be excessive or perverted to the dark side, also has constructive and protective aspects. Positive nationalism, within an accountable, constitutional nation-state, allows people to care about and act on their own futures; to be motivated by allegiance to their own families, communities, landscapes, histories, and cultures. And leaders must face their citizenry.
Seeing the positive aspect of nation-states does not in any way have to be a racist or an anti-immigrant position. America at its best, as a “melting pot,” welcomed people of all backgrounds and faiths as citizens. But then, American citizenship had responsibilities and rights.
By the same token, it is not necessarily racist to celebrate what is brightest about French culture and history, if one is French; to revel in Dutch holidays and cuisine and rituals, if one is Dutch; to celebrate the beautiful culture and unique history of Morocco, if one is Moroccan. If “French” or “Dutch” or “Moroccan” or “American” are defined as citizenship rather than as race, then the culture expands and welcomes the new; and what is “French” or “Dutch” or “Moroccan” or “American,” for that matter, evolves.
But a discourse was propagated—by global elites, who benefited from it—that shamed well-intended, anti-racist people, especially in the West, for being in the least bit proud of or loyal to their nation-state or national culture. And a discourse was propagated that shamed any right-on member of any nation-state, also in the West, for worrying about what might happen if there were any limits at all on national borders.
But just as you cannot have a constitutional democracy unless you have a discrete citizenry, of whatever background, race, or faith, who are initiated into that nation’s culture, language, history, rights, and responsibilities, so you cannot have a functioning, accountable parliamentary democracy if you have open borders and voting by noncitizens. Simply as a practical matter, you can’t. You have something nebulous, but it is no longer a representative democracy within a nation-state, and it absolutely dissolves the accountability of ever-more-distant leaders to the people.
The effort to hand over voting rights to a million noncitizens in New York in January 20222 seemed, superficially, like a right-on blow for “equity” and for anti-racism; but it is, as are fully open borders, a tyrant’s dream; as the effect is to dilute the power of citizens and the accountability of leaders to a discrete set of citizens, within the boundaries of a nation-state.
By the same token, the democratic nation-state is by necessity accountable to its people in a way that meta-national organizations simply are not. The people in a nation-state can vote out corrupt leaders. They can change course when it comes to bad policies. They can put corrupt leaders in prison, or in the case of the United States, they can execute leaders who have engaged in espionage or committed treason to the nation-state.
Their leaders must, in short, whether they wish to or not, see their own people and worry about their reactions. There is thus a natural limit on the levels of cruelty and oppression that an elected leader in a constitutional nation-state can get away with.
Not so with leaders in the world of metanational organizations and global nonprofits. Nothing need constrain their cruelty once they go bad. The same is true for economic global elites: on the economic level, too, global networks and alliances also left national allegiances and national accountability behind.
What happened, in the seventy-plus years since the end of the Second World War, is that an elite international class of technocrats, EU bureaucrats, global nonprofit leaders, and international investors has developed, in which allegiance to the relationships, programs, profits, and outcomes of that global class is more immediate and important to its members than are any of the relationships, allegiances, rights, property, and outrage of their fellow countrymen and women.
To these people, the nation-state—even one’s own nation-state of origin—is an artifact; a secondary, sentimental add-on. What really matters are other global elites in one’s social circle and business network, and the valuable relationships one can create with them. One’s “ordinary” countrymen and women recede and become theoretical. And the constant message one receives from one’s peers and from the elite metanational culture is that those “ordinary” men and women simply are not as smart or well-educated as one’s metanational peers, and so it would be a disaster to let them make their own decisions. One is saving them from their own fecklessness, ignorance, and shortsightedness, by deciding for them.
