This is Kierkegaard’s take as well, which becomes clear throughout the whole of Either/Or; while the first part is concerned with what can make the great sinner, the second is concerned more with what can make the saint. One constant refrain in Kierkegaard is the disdain of the crowd, because within the crowd there is neither room for vice or virtue, only reduction to the animal nature of mankind. Despite his popularity among liberal Protestants and Anabaptists in the United States, Kierkegaard is a profoundly conservative, even reactionary thinker.

This division can be accurately described I think, in the Tradition vs. Modernity dichotomy. It is not that Traditional man was virtuous and wonderful. He wasn’t. He was a sinner as much as all others, but we can see in him some want for better, some reference to the Divine standard he was held to. Modern man shows no such thing. He is self-contained. His sins are often petty and indeed ‘wretched’, the kind that Traditional man would have had little trouble resisting. Traditional man struggled with the sins of a higher order, wrestling with his wicked nature and the great obligations upon him, questions over of life and death, judgment and mercy, courage and cowardice. Modern man essentially submits to everything. He can’t even resist the slightest temptation because he is the product of a low level cult-of-the-self.

To put it simply, we can just say that man today is… pathetic.

And why not? Why doesn’t man just crawl in the mud like a worm? Since the onset of the Kali Yuga, he has denied all things transcendent, and certainly thrown off the authority that its earthly representatives once had over his life. In denying this, he has no standards but those below himself. This probably explains why he worships and fetishizes the Dalit class: the foreigner, the deviant, the lazy. You see, man has developed a rather ingenious shrine. By being in awe of that which is below him, the only sins he can commit are to be ‘elitist’ or ‘racist’ or to fail in recognition of his own ‘white privilege’. What other sins could there possibly be when your god is the earthworm?

A sorry state indeed.

But we’re faced with a memeplex with a great deal more machinery at its disposal. I’ll allow that the machinery itself is just as soul-crushing as it always was, and you’re right to observe that the suggestion that somehow society has evolved in a way as to make God’s eternal commandments “obsolete” is insupportable, but surely the intensity of the corrupting influence our generation faces is uniquely fierce, no?

I think that that corruption could be enervated, and the communities where tradition and Virtue thrive could be strengthened, with a Mechanism of equal magnitude and far wiser design that takes all this … waste, this listless ennui, and turns it into something that could save our culture.

Sadly, so far, there seems to be little interest in moving beyond the theorizing. Dare I suggest that the virtuous here are not immune to ressentiment. I’m considering going full Tesla and just publishing my idea on YouTube: if an NRx’er picks it up, maybe some thread of what we care about will be rescued, and if the Cathedral turns it into the next iteration of Tumblr, well, you won’t be able to say I didn’t try. But it will take computer programming skills and a few months (from what I’ve been told based on my sketches and the Use Case) to make this a reality past my ideation phase; perhaps it was too much to expect that that was present somewhere in the NRx’o’sphere. *shrug* I appreciate how very busy everyone is. Ho hum, oh well. If anyone cares to hear me out, I’m happy to make contact on your terms.

Remember as Christians, we are capable of seeing things in two aspects simultaneously (the sacramental view of reality), as they appear in the spiritual world and as they exist in the earthly world.