Part III: From the Death Culture to the Great Collision of Our Era

And beyond!

Part I, Part II

Recapping what we’ve discussed so far: my What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory argues at two levels:

(1) Philosophy should identify, clarify, and evaluate worldviews as a condition of making a difference in civilization; and

(2) What results when we do that is the discovery that the past 300 years of intellectual history can be understood in terms of what I call the Real Great Replacement: the Christian worldview that guided the rise of Western civilization and for a time underwrote the rise of modern science was replaced by a worldview of materialism.  

The former viewed the world as both intelligible and morally meaningful. It gave human lives a larger context. The latter sees the world as intelligible, but removes the transcendent moral structure. It thus casts humanity adrift, morally speaking. We’re on our own, and if the contemporary scene is any guide, we’re not doing especially well.

Cultural Marxism is now the prevailing form of materialism, giving rise to the death culture (women killing their unborn children; neoliberalism underwriting complete indifference in economic terms, leaving us atomized and immiserated in a marketplace subject to elite manipulations).

The death culture is very powerful. Its power isn’t political but social and cultural. No thinking person believes that a single U.S. Supreme Court decision (e.g., the one overturning Roe) is going to change this.  

Materialism’s Enlightenment architects and defenders did not intend this result; I am confident of this. With God out of the picture (“I have no need of that hypothesis”), modern ethicists attempted to create secular moral philosophies (e.g., those of Hume based on sentiment; Kant’s categorical imperative; Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism; others to come including Rand’s rationalist ethical egoism). I discuss these in Ch. 3 of What Should Philosophy Do? and outline their weaknesses.

The point is, all have failed in practice, even if all still have defenders.

Back in the late 1800s Nietzsche prophesied an “advent of nihilism” and called for a “revaluation of all values.” He called for a frank recognition of the human predicament and challenged secularists to invent a morality suitable for life in the universe as materialism envisioned it.

As he saw this, such a morality could only emphasize human strength and domination over a world completely indifferent to human interests.

Whether anyone likes it or not, that is where we have arrived: domination over as much of the planet as possible. Not by “humanity” generally, but by a very few: a globalist superelite that envisions itself as most fit to rule over populations of increasingly controlled sheep, made dependent because the resources they need to sustain themselves can be controlled and the information that reaches them is controlled. “The masses” find themselves immersed in a “matrix” of propaganda consisting of official narratives.

Modernity and the Collapse of the Real Great Replacement.

The twentieth century, I submit, is a testimony to the Real Great Replacement’s overall failure.

It is true that material prosperity increased by leaps and bounds as technology got increasingly powerful. Plenty of other things got better during the past couple of centuries. With better understanding of diseases, how they originate, how transmitted, and cured or at least controlled, epidemiology and other health sciences helped lengthen the human life span. Sanitation was improved as part of this effort. That was an enormous leap forward.

All of that was before we built the first computers and then discovered miniaturization. Now, the computing power in the smartphone sitting on my nightstand as I type this exceeds that of the Saturn V rockets that sent men into space in the late 1960s. Efforts to lift millions of people out of poverty did what they were intended to do, and for a while entire populations were making enormous gains. (In China, they still are!)  

But in terms of “reasons for living,” one might call them, we’ve floundered.

Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning (orig. 1946 and easily one of the most important books of the twentieth century) showed dramatically that even in the Nazi death camps, people were more likely to survive if their mindset connected them to something outside of and higher than themselves.

Maslow had already offered his hierarchy of human needs and postulated “self-actualization” as the highest goal for a human being in a universe made of “matter.”

But to what purpose? Frankl, and others to come, would make it plain that self is not enough.

Existentialism had raised its ugly head in denial of any purpose that transcended personal choice, which in principle could be anything because “existence precedes essence” (as Sartre put it). Sartre eventually opted for his own brand of Marxism, and in so doing, basically destroyed his whole philosophy.

Camus proposed that the real problem of philosophy was suicide (in his The Myth of Sisyphus 1942). He did not advise suicide, of course, but living “authentically”: acknowledging life’s fundamental absurdity while consciously choosing to enjoy the passing show. His character Meursault, in L’Etranger (also 1942), commits a meaningless murder and faces execution at the hands of a justice system predicated on the idea that moral values are not mere human inventions.  

In the 1950s the Beats, knowingly or not, took up Camus’s suggestion — just enjoy the passing show. They adopted a nomadic lifestyle of travel and ingesting recreational drugs. Then, in the 1960s, came the Hippies. With LSD, they took recreational chemistry to the next level. The Truth is inside your head!

Opposition to the Vietnam War, which came to a head late in that decade, was again not predicated on any such assumption. None of those who originated opposition to that war truly believed that we’d somehow invented, culturally, the idea that wars of choice, fought ultimately for corporate interests, were immoral.

The 1970s with their tribulations passed, and the 1980s brought us “morning in America.” “Yuppies” embraced the worship of money, which is what the corporate elites had wanted all along. Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism was catching on. What this system actually delivered, in the name of “free markets,” was a redistribution of wealth upwards. We moved slowly into an economic order in which people were atomized and immiserated as their wages failed to keep up with the rising cost of living. As a new millennium arrived, money turned out to be a tin god even as the various subcultures materialism had established tightened their grip on the human condition.  

We’d gotten, instead of Utopia, the death culture. Life is cheap, so if it’s inconvenient, abort it.  

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, so eat or be eaten!

Are we not better than dogs, or just higher up on the food chain?  

Libertarian moralists (taking their cue from Ayn Rand) went back to basics and argued for barring the initiation of physical force from all human interactions, that this was the key to morality in a world made of “matter.”  

It sounded good at first — very good, in fact. (I went this direction myself at one time.) 

Until one asks, quietly and philosophically, What justifies it?

As a person, I’m more than happy to live a life that refrains from initiating force against others. I would use force only in pre-emptive strike fashion to protect myself or loved ones from clearly anticipated and obvious danger to mind and body. Otherwise I am content to leave others alone (though if I learn they are, e.g., sacrificing babies over firepits, I might be inclined to question that!).

But (following Hume who argues similarly in his Treatise which “fell stillborn from the press”) as a philosopher I want to know the justification for my decision to live a certain way, leaving others alone if they are not bothering me or mine.

This is in light of two huge problems. (1) There may or may not be a penalty for breaking this moral rule on a small and personal scale. It depends entirely on what those around me do, i.e., social sanction. If they do nothing, moral rulebreakers skate. (2) Social sanction tends to be ineffective against psychopaths who are often intelligent and ten steps ahead of the sanctioners. And they might have resources to employ that make social sanction ineffective on any terms, especially if they can control narratives. In particular are those superelite globalists whom I keep mentioning — for whom materialism, knowingly or not, has offered an open door to dominate the world because they can.

Because of technology they have means previous elites couldn’t even dream of, enabling them to control food, energy, housing, education, mass media, and most recently, technology platforms themselves. Indeed, even though there is more enlightenment on this matter today than in decades past (thanks to Captain Covid!), huge numbers of people remain in the dark about globalism, and a large coterie of well-paid writers and often highly intelligent scholars are still well-trained to brand all such references as “conspiracy theories” (the phrase weaponized very effectively by the CIA back in the 1960s). The intent of this particular narrative is to keep things that way.

Thus the ultimate collision on which the world is converging.

The Ultimate Collision.

Some see cultural issues as mere distractions. They have a point, but it is not the one they think it is. Issues such as abortion are valid on their own terms. But they shouldn’t remove our attention from the Ultimate Collision, I will call it. Two incompatible worldviews have built and driven modern Western civilization — Christianity and materialism. This includes its cultural conflicts. Because the two prescribe different values, justify different lifestyles, and offer contrasting definitions of familiar terms like freedom and responsibility, we are in the midst of a worsening clash between those of us who want to be free to live and organize their communities as they see fit if they are not harming people, versus those who don’t want this. At least, not for us peasants.

The bulk of the former see freedom and responsibility as circumscribed by a moral view of the universe with a transcendent source. They latter believe their technocratic “expertise” confers on them knowledge of what’s best for everyone, including us ignorant peasants. They are willing to become Platonist philosopher kings and impose the fruits of their “expertise” and knowledge of The Truth by force if necessary. They would rather rely on propaganda and narrative control and gain the peasants’ “voluntary” cooperation, but this is hardly an absolute!

Most of the former would argue that they are better off believing they answer to a transcendent God, even if they cannot prove He exists. They thus see themselves as divinely created, and with a purpose, so that “existence does not precede essence.” They see the world — the universe — and themselves as creations with moral significance. They welcome “that hypothesis” which LaPlace did not need.

The latter, once they obtain power, recognize no fundamental proscriptions against harming anyone who gets in their way. Arguably they have harmed or killed in their bids to obtain more power. For all the technological progress the human race has made, the century of the Real Great Replacement has seen the slaughter not of mere millions but tens of millions who either resisted or simply did not fit some totalitarian psychopath’s plan for Heaven on Earth.

Is there such an entity as a nefarious ruling class of would-be philosopher kings with global reach and global-scale ambitions, a psychopathic superelite (a term I’ve often used to distinguish these folks from visible and sometimes better-intentioned national elites)?

Or is this nothing but conspiratorialism? Let’s scuttle some confusions!

It’s Not a ‘Conspiracy’!

(1) Many, many authors either directly involved with, or sympathetic to, the goals of global consolidation of power in the hands of a few have written not just articles but books outlining what they are doing or at least hoping for, why they are doing it, and where they believe the world is going. The best known just from the past hundred years include H.G. Wells, Carroll Quigley, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller Sr., and most recently, Klaus Schwab.

I trust it is clear: all were/are well-enough positioned to know what they were/are talking about.

It is true that some conspiratorialists go overboard, e.g., finding in Schwab’s two books Covid-19: The Great Reset (2020) and The Great Narrative: For a Better Future (2021) a depopulation program that isn’t there.

My point is a modest one. Taken on its own terms, the superelite has not been hiding.

Thus (2): technically there is no “conspiracy”!

A conspiracy, by definition, is hidden from you. One of its first tasks is to convince everyone on the outside that there is no conspiracy.

But this is out in the open!

It is hardly the fault of so-called conspiratorialists that most of the public is unaware of this because they are more interested in sports and Kim Kardashian! Even those who follow mainstream pundits aren’t going to find books by the above figures reviewed in The New York Times or discussed on CNN.

If you want this kind of information, you’re going to have to seek it out, because it’s not going to come to you!    

Globalists rely on the fact that most people for whatever reason won’t seek it out, as well as the fact that due to the controlled corporate media, most information about current events is bound up within an immense propaganda network to convince those not distracted by daily issues that to the extent something called globalism really exists, it is a benevolent development representing a natural evolution toward a global civilization.

No one can deny that during the period since the Second World War we’ve seen a slow but noticeable migration of power from the national level into international organizations—NGOs—many of them loose satellites of the UN: the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO, and so on, more recently joined by the WTO. Trade agreements from the first GATT in the 1940s down through NAFTA in the early 1990s and GATT II have ensured greater consolidations of wealth and power at the top, into the hands of a ruling class no sensible person still denies exists.

Not that there has been complete transparency!

Jesse Ventura (host of the television program Conspiracy Theory) found this out when he and his team were turned back from HAARP, in Alaska, a clear implication that force would be used if they refused to leave. Similarly, those who approach Nevada’s Area 51 on the ground will also find themselves in danger of being fired upon. Fanciful stories circulate about both facilities: that the first is (among other things) a powerful weather-manipulation operation, and that the second conceals efforts by the U.S. military to reverse-engineer spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin, perhaps recovered from Roswell, NM, as well as corpses of extraterrestrials themselves!

The bottom line: no one out here in the hinterlands knows the true purpose of these top-secret military operations — or if these are just the ones we know about.

If their intent is benevolent, then why the absolute secrecy? Why the threats? Please, don’t someone tell me their purpose is to keep “our” military secrets out of the hands of the Chinese and the Russians, who have clandestine efforts and networks of their own able to find out what they want to find out.

Frankly, I do not think the present-day architects of the planned global order would be as open as they have been about the things they’ve been open about if they did not see themselves as benign in some sense of the term — and see their efforts as unstoppable. In that case, figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Putin (probably) are mere speedbumps on the road to “global governance,” to be pushed out of the way with rigged elections, incessant lawfare, and fomented wars.   

Another objection to be fielded: if this nefarious group of would-be philosopher kings really exists, wouldn’t there be immense disagreement between its members on how to go about accomplishing such huge goals?

I’m sure they do disagree on specifics; this is human nature. Some disagreement among them is probably fortunate, because otherwise they might have fulfilled their goals by now!

But they do have by-invitation-only confabs (annual Bilderberg meetings, World Economic Forum summits at Davos) to discuss and work out their differences privately as much as possible, as well as to find out who is on board with the program and who isn’t.  

They don’t have to agree on every detail to agree on broader goals. They don’t need complete consensus to be able to move forward. They have the money, they have a level of technological prowess that only recently made global domination even possible, and they have a de facto “moral” code, which is essentially that of Nietzsche’s Übermenschen. It boils down to might makes right (i.e., our might makes our goals right). “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

Their “moral” code advocates this for everybody, but there’s an inconvenient detail: we peasants have to feed ourselves first. We have to keep a roof over our heads, the lights turned on, etc.

The would-be philosopher kings understand that by controlling international finance, food supply chains, energy, medicine and public health, and the bulk of the infrastructure that supports all this — they can bring entire populations to heel. They also understand that if their minions, especially in education and mass media, believe their goals to be benevolent, a natural consequence of human evolution, most of those in general populations will go along with it all and accept, e.g., central bank digital currencies and vaccine passports. Doubters and dissidents, who are the minority in any event, can then be further marginalized, demonized, neutered, and if necessary imprisoned or even killed if they don’t shut up.

It helps if an environment exists in which we are discouraged from trusting common sense and the evidence of our own eyes and ears. I believe this is what transgenderism is about, encouraging the biologically ludicrous notion that boys can change (or be changed) into girls and vice versa, while demonizing those who insist that “there are four lights!”

We should have learned all this from the period that began in March 2020 and ended—  

Has it really ended, or are we just waiting for the next shoe to drop?

I think this a fair summary of where we are in 2023, however papered over with talk of “blue states” versus “red states,” Democrats (who have become the status quo) versus Republicans (faced with an internecine civil war between MAGA and their old Establishment), or “left” versus “right.”

The fact that the former in each of the above pairings appears to have a better understanding of how power operates in the world than the latter does not bode well for the immediate future!

Verdicts and Conclusions.

There are those — including perchance one or two of my valued subscribers — who will still complain that when all is said and done, nothing I’ve said here refutes materialism as a worldview. They will continue to rely on it, or rely on specifications of it such as evolutionary psychology, despite my efforts. They will assume it captures The Truth even if we are missing specifics here and there.

At the very least, does it not capture more of The Truth than any supernaturalist faith did?

There is more to be said on the subject; that much is true. Because only so much can be crammed into a single essay — even one in three parts! Sadly, despite the length of these, we’ve only scratched the surface!

I will therefore start this conclusion section by stating that the most interesting and persuasive objections to materialism have nothing to do with anyone’s theology. One does not need to mention Christianity’s God to grasp their force. What Should Philosophy Do? examines several such objections and reaches the conclusion (Chapter 5) that materialism does not meet challenges it establishes for itself, regarding the origin of the universe, of life, and of the nature of conscious self-awareness. Nor can it make sense of the process of rational justification itself.

Again: there is not space here to go into each of these in detail.

They’re in the book!

Suffice it to say, what academia and media have done — surprise, surprise! — is produce a huge propaganda machine (thousands of books, journal articles, conferences, podcasts with celebrity scientists, etc.) papering over the fact that whatever the specifics, the fundamental questions remain unanswered and may be unanswerable in empirical terms. The latter require observation at some level and not simply theorizing and extrapolation.

Dominant paradigms are difficult to dislodge, especially when worldviews are at stake. Those who insist on drawing attention to the fact that the answers we have fail, e.g., using anomalous data to dispute them, often find themselves ostracized and their careers basically ended. (Example: Halton Arp, a “steady stater” instead of a big bang cosmologist, who claimed he’d refuted the idea that the infamous red shift observed in many stellar objects indicates motion away from us at a velocity proportional to the degree of the shift. He claimed to have observed, among other things, red-shifted and non-red-shifted objects that seemed to exist side by side in deep space, sharing nebulae or interstellar debris. This would be impossible if one was moving away from us and the other not. Since big bang cosmology relies fundamentally on this red shift, if the red shift goes out the window, so does big bang cosmology; and if that goes, we eventually have to face the fact that after all the decades of effort and billions of dollars thrown at the problem, we still ultimately have no idea, based just on empirical science, how old the universe is.)

Turning to the issue of how life is supposed to have originated on the Earth by exclusively naturalistic means, suffice it to say, theories have grown increasingly bizarre in recent years, with a few astronomers suggesting in all seriousness that space aliens might have seeded the planet intentionally or accidentally when they visited our planet billions of years ago.

I hope it is obvious that such notions are no more testable scientifically than anything a Christian theologian postulates about God! The only reason for calling them scientific at all is the fact that the people producing them are credentialed scientists, members of the scientific “big club.”

Nor is there space to wade deeply into the “hard problem of consciousness” and other issues for materialism in the philosophy of mind. So I will simply say: that and other problems remain, have been discussed and debated by competent inquirers, and are unresolved in ways that favor materialism even plausibly, much less decisively.

David Chalmers and several others who have worked in this domain have toyed with panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of all systems and therefore an essential component of the world order itself.

One should also view the “banned TED talk” from Rupert Sheldrake, noted critic of materialism and its dominance.

Concluding, therefore: there is room for the kind of conversation that encourages identification, clarification, and evaluation of worldviews — and solid grounds for preventing a single worldview from dominating all intellectual discussion when it can neither solve its own problems and has arguably done a lot of damage in the societies it has overtaken.  

You may obtain What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory here or here.