Social Matter

Psychology and its chemically-altered friend, psychiatry, are relatively recent inventions. These scientific fields have taken the place of the religious functions that were occupied by non-state entities in the pre-modern time, addressing the life difficulties of ordinary people using secular personnel.

States ordain and employ many of these secular priests, although those priests tend not to obey a strict orthodoxy. Whereas churches once monopolized functions such as charity, marital counseling, and the guidance of wayward children in the past, all of those functions have been subsumed by the state through it’s various psych- functions. Rather than identifying themselves based on their place or characteristics within society, many young people enjoy identifying themselves and others in terms of the most fashionable psychological disorders as defined by the state’s priests.

What disorders are fashionable is as dependent on Pfizer’s latest marketing initiative as it is on the latest raft of problems identified by education consultants and bureaucrats.

This isn’t a particularly unique insight, as historians have written about the continual conflict between secular authority and religious authority for a rather long time. European history in particular is largely the history of conflict between those poles. Given that the trend in European cultures since even before the Reformation has been for secular power to subsume more and more religious functions, it makes some sense that this has happened. When people have a problem in their lives, especially in the urban centers of power, they go to a shrink and not to a priest. Further, a judge can and does often command counsel by a state-ordained priest and not a religiously-ordained one as a ‘soft’ sentence.

Machiavelli’s perspective on the proper relationship of religion to the state was that the former ought to be an implement of the latter. Today, we learn to count the state religion as a ‘science,’ because we often conflate ‘science’ with things that are not actually science because that practice has accumulated so much credibility since the industrial revolution. In the US, a state religion would also be illegal, whereas a religious order that claims to be a branch of medicine slips in through a loophole.

Unlike most other state religions, at the heart of the theology of the mind is a sense of the divine mystery of the unconscious mind, plus some belief in the capacity of drug companies to balance the mysterious humours of the brain with the close cooperation of doctors. This is a religion with strictures and methods that change every several years or so, often radically, with entire categories of theology inverting themselves in periods less than three decades long.

What is interesting is that, while virtually no one believes in God as an active force in the world with the same fervor as the typical 16th century man, belief in the theories of the psychologists (or at least a particular branch of psychological heresy, of which there are countless) comes natural to the modern educated man. To claim otherwise, at least in an urban setting, is to attract more negative attention than claiming atheism would.

Unlike most other political religious systems, psychology puts the individual at the center of worship. Past religion concerned itself with the glorification and appeasement of the gods, or at least that of a particular man-god. The modern religion wants you — yes, you! — to be happy, for some value of happy, whatever happy really means.

In this religion, it’s not accurate to say that there is right or wrong. There is sick and healthy. When we want to say that a person is bad, we say that they suffer from a fashionable disorder of some kind. If they say something that offends our sensibilities, rather than saying that they are evil or possessed by the devil or doing the devil’s works, we diagnose them from a distance as we would imagine a respectable doctor would. A man is not ‘bad.’ He suffers from a ‘personality disorder,’ which is in turn theorized to derive from an imbalance in his humours. We know it to be so without even taking a biopsy, because we know it to be true (and we appear smarter when we speak in the psycho-medical vocabulary rather than the ‘out-dated’ vocabulary of divine religion), even if by playing doctor ourselves we undermine the authority of doctors.

The high ideals of secular humanism tend to be interpreted in tawdry ways by ordinary people. A complex, delicate theology imagined by a scholar in a controlled environment will be interpreted in a base, self-serving way on the dirty streets. A complicated theory about why pleasure-seeking is not inherently bad gets interpreted as ‘if it feels good, do it,’ and is then promulgated through pop music to be applied towards some personal devastation by a derelict who lacks the sophistication to understand its original intended meaning.

As a state religion, it’s not clear that the West’s social workers are doing its masters all that many favors. The state needs its people to be subordinate to it in order to maintain itself. A state religion that commands people to have no higher loyalty than to themselves runs at cross-purposes to itself. It can only appeal directly to self-interest, which is a very odd situation for any state to be in, and not one that bodes well for its future cohesion.

To paraphrase the Machiavellian perspective on religion, from the perspective of secular power, its purpose is to defray the cost of law enforcement, conscription, and tax collection: the three core functions of government. Another major issue of the mutations and fracture in our state cults is that no one person believes in the same thing as another person. Different aspects of the religion are concealed, obscured, inaccessible, vulgarized, or otherwise difficult to nail down. The divisions between popular left and right can also be seen in terms of religious schism. The right tends to ‘cling’ to its Christianity (Christian deism being the original common religion of the United States), whereas the left tends to embrace the new word of progress with greater fervor, discounting its Christian roots as outmoded.

The left goes farther in terms of ‘tolerance’ than Locke dared to, who argued in his ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’ that the common purpose of Christianity regardless of sect was towards the “to the regulating of men’s lives according to the rules of virtue and piety.”

Both sides studiously, legalistically discount the existence of a state religion, ignoring that no state in history has avoided having a religious basis, instead proclaiming that the modern nation-state is a unique historical construct.

To the extent that such a thing is possible, we have tested Locke’s argument, and although it seemed like a good idea at the time, the result has been the occult re-institution of a state religion that has often inverted what he would have called the Christian virtues. The attempt to bar religiously-motivated legislation did not really succeed, and has lead to much rhetorical confusion over the last few centuries. In the same way that the Puritans compelled their flock to attend public religious assemblies, so are children today compelled to attend democratic assemblies at school.

Indeed, Locke would not find the current ‘religious tolerance’ in the West to be to his liking:

You will say, by this rule, if some congregations should have a mind to sacrifice infants, or (as the primitive Christians were falsely accused) lustfully pollute themselves in promiscuous uncleanness, or practise any other such heinous enormities, is the magistrate obliged to tolerate them, because they are committed in a religious assembly? I answer: No. These things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God, or in any religious meeting.

Of course, the former Christian religious institutions that we call ‘universities’ have developed a reputation that is synonymous with ‘promiscuous uncleanness.’

This radical mutation goes farther than the Reformation dared to. A state that cheers on each new heresy is not a state that is likely to maintain its cohesion (and few honest observers of American politics would argue that the American state is becoming more coherent today). Religious toleration succeeded in stemming war between Protestants and Catholics on those grounds, but those wars instead gave way to enormous global wars over ideology.

The problem with a bureaucratic religion is that it will not concern itself with solving problems, but will instead concern itself with maintaining problems for it to pretend to solve. When the religion is not at least partly independent from the state, it bears some of its own costs, so it has a natural brake upon itself. The progressive religion, being tightly integrated into the state as it is, has no mechanism to keep it oriented to reality.

In practice, the inwardly-directed religious doctrine that has developed has made it more challenging to maintain covenants of any kind, especially familial. The state religion, in fact, actively encourages and subsidizes the dissolution of families. Unfortunately for the state, however, its ability to maintain its covenants rests upon the tendency of its subjects to honor their covenants to one another and to the state itself.

Which is why the state’s agents fret about ‘unfunded liabilities.’ It is tightly bound up with religious developments in a way that Americans tend to be unable and unwilling to acknowledge.

Because the state religion has become solipsistic, it has become subversive, self-dealing, and mis-coordinated to the material needs of the state. The actual needs of state are staid: it has bills to pay and must have funds to pay those bills, it has enemies to fight, diplomatic crises to resolve, and internal disorder to police. The state religion which is supposed to support the state itself promotes strains of thought and behavior that actively impede the achievement of all of those goals.

The chaos of multicultural democracy makes it so that, at all times, almost everyone is involved in committing sedition against the state, because the concept of the state is unclear, and continually shifting, as the state’s creed shifts on a daily basis. This must lead to dissolution and conflict.

religion