Pharmacological Salvation

Secular Sacraments of the Earthly Life

Suffice to say things feel well off the mark, no?

I mean, if you’re reading this, you probably have a gut feeling that things have been running on fumes for some time. Depending on what kind of person you are, you probably have some tool in your mind, some heuristic that tells you when things really started going off the rails. It’s generational, to say the least. Just as there is now this strange influx of 90s and 00s Nostalgia, just as there was for the 1980s, and just as there was in the 1980s an affinity for the 1950s. You might even have a root cause, a singular event or decision that threw the timeline off to where now the die is cast and history rolled a natural 1 instead of that 20 you were hoping for.

We have our idea how the mechanical causality of certain ideas, events, beliefs or changes in teachings and governance has radically altered the way the world that we live in. There has always been debate or discussion as to how things change, Traditionalist Catholics will blame the Reformation, Pagans like to blame Christianity, Libertarians the Federal Reserve, the list goes on and on. What we are seeing in the West, however, at its cultural imperial centers here in the country once known as the United States of America is a radical transformation. The West is Secular save for a some Christian redoubts and bulwarks, and in this era of Post-Christianity, you can find its secularism taking the scraps of what it had cast aside still adheres to that Old Time Religion.

An atheist in Iran is most likely a Muslim Atheist. Just as it here in the Christian West, an American Atheist is most likely a Protestant Christian Atheist. Those things are hard to break from in terms of the cognitive molding that sets the camera in frame for your entire worldview. Yes it can evolve, but what you were raised in still sets the cause for how you look at the world even as you take in new information. Even in the new atheist days of the 2000s, arguments about moral sensibilities not coming from religion were still fundamentally religious, even more recently with some atheist twitter accounts saying that the Code of Hammurabi had no references to a deity, only to be quickly proven wrong.

I say all this because in these times it feels so easy to say “Ah yes, this ‘woke’ thing going on is like a religion.” Others might even pull a Schmitt reference and state “political theology” (You might want to pay attention to those fellas) and yes, you should quick to acknowledge that they’re right. All nations, all kingdoms, all forms of vast swaths of imperium have claimed to work under some kind of religious impetus that gave righteous claims to their right to rule. The Mandate of Heaven to the Divine Right of Kings, we’ve seen it all.

Now, in a time without God, Chesterton once again stands by with evergreen take. “When man abolishes God, government becomes God.” You can see why almost everyone in the weird space of internet I occupy references him, regardless of denomination or practice.

Yet if you abolish the Christian God (and the secular state has tried their best to kill him) you get a Government with a Christian Veneer that has become the new one. One wherein its sacraments are not done to participate in the world salvation, but rather earthly, personal ones of selfishness and pride. Child sacrifice is back in vogue, and when that has been relatively phased out, not so much by cultural practice or return to the faith, but instead by the pharmacological advances made in the process of the pill. One of which has fundamentally changed our ability to view relationships, sex, and family formation. From once a time it was courtship and arrangements made in the best interest of the child and family, to now one of dating, hooking up, to where now it is preferred for life long alterations to one’s body neurochemistry in the name of liberation (secular/material salvation) rather than what has been proven to show the path to happiness.

But this isn’t just a rant or long winded trad-rant on the horrors bestowed upon the West with regards to the pill. Knowland Knows had a great talk on the subject of the pill that you should watch, here. There are other issues at hand that are seen in these secular sacraments that give even more credence to the timeless words of St. Anthony the Great, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.”

The Material Offers Comfort to those without soul, without vitalism, without spirit, without God.

“Depressed? Let’s get you running on something that will change your neurochemistry, make it harder to slag off the weight, and may fuck with your sensations of arousal and love but here ya go!”

Before I go any further, I certainly know that SSRIs do work for some, but like many drugs in the United States and other Western Countries, I also know that like painkillers they are certainly over-prescribed. And like the pill, whose consequences took decades to really begin to see happen, I think we’re beginning to see with widespread SSRI and other antidepressant usage.

I’m pretty sure this correlates with something here politically, no?

And of course, with the current progressive machinations, especially with regards to an expanded form of intersectionality to meet all needs of the progressive ideology, whether that be the environment, feminism, lgbtbbq or anti-racism, it all fits within this hierarchy. And secular salvation is found front and center through that anti-racist lens. Environmentalism competes with it, but both fall under the wider progressive eschatological umbrella, from police shootings to climate catastrophe. With race being so front and center, and less behind the scenes of other pet issues within this framework, we see the basic question to pose to ourselves as is posed even in their own bourgeoisie publications like that of the New Yorker and such.

“What is the positive progressive role model for men?”

I mean, I recall the New Yorker making a slight joke (but of course irony repeated enough times is eventually taken seriously) wherein that they basically took the most emasculated male stereotypes of progressive men imaginable saying he wasn’t toxic, but I mean we’re at that point, no? Between the changing hormonal, physiological and physical changes in men at the west (where we’re falling into a forced pink pill fantasy) aren’t they getting that? Or must it go further, where the rapid rise of Autism means that they’re perfect targets for reassignment of their sex, or the affirmation of the gender as it’s known. At that point I don’t think there really is one, especially for the demonized, original sin laden “straight cis white male.” I mean why not convert? Go all out, with enby, bi, trans, the world is your fucking oyster, and they will give you the medical needs to fulfill that life. Weed, speed, and any means for you to pop it in and do the deed.

And if you think I am being so callous, or that I think that this so easy to graft from my long held position that this is a bastardized form of Christianity onto the West, then you best believe I do it is that easy to make these comparisons. Had the West been Pagan, we’d be getting Pagan Progressivism, or Mithraic Progressivism had they won. Ideological rot, when the abolition of the sacrosanct and the traditional bonds that hold a society together is tossed out in the name of liberating the self to the material conditions that it wrought upon itself then this is what you get.

We can continue to dull the psychic pain of our material conditions, unleashed by the opening of pandora’s box, the fall of man, the prodigal son leaving the father, but we may have to just be the glorious redoubts of sanity waiting for these people to come back to.

It doesn’t have to be like this.