Endless Theocracy

Because there's nothing new under the sun...

The Theocratic Cycle always begins with a liberating ideology…

Turns out that all great social movements, even the most deist and secular, are born in faith and resolve in theocracy. This should come as little or no surprise because we are — at our most essential — religious creatures, hardwired for wonderment and the mystic exploration of human nature and the universe around us. Consequently, each evolutionary social cycle seeks to liberate us from the religious shackles of the past, but ultimately seeks to enslave us by the time it matures and runs its course.

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Each new theocratic era follows the same basic sequence: First comes a liberating ideology (or technology) that replaces the existing theocracy. Over time the liberating ideology is institutionalized, and gives rise to a new theocratic regime with new canon and a new class of high priests. Finally comes theocratic tyranny marked by institutional corruption, illiberal incoherence, and chaos: what happens when the prevailing narrative and institutions of the new theocratic regime — religious or secular — are pushed to extreme and begin to break down.

The theocratic cycle exemplifies the cyclic nature inherent in Marshall McLuhan’s Law of Reverse – what happens when complex systems, pushed to extreme, begin to turn against their teleological intent, and start pushing back. Consider, for instance, the great liberation movements of the 1960s…

• The Free Speech Movement to promote academic free speech and freedom of thought resolved in the 21st century as diversity of everything except free speech and thought, not only in academia, but in just about every American institution, public and private. All of it state-sanctioned.

• A mere three generations was all it took for the non-violent civil rights movement to resolve outside the inner cities in endless anti-racist dogma and universally mandated systemic racism across all major American institutions, public and private alike. Within the inner cities it resolved in generational poverty and nihilism via the systematic destruction of black families, systemic racism and institutional segregation in corrupt public school systems, genocidal abortion numbers in the tens of millions, and horrific black-on-black violence — a tragic form of cultural suicide. All of it state-sanctioned.

• The feminism and gay rights movements resolved six decades later in more than sixty million abortions, a commercial and political war against science, the tyranny of the trans mob, the destruction of the nuclear family, the attempted abortion of biological sex, the hysterectomy of Title IX civil rights for girls and women, the social castration of boys and men, and the legalized sexual and medical abuse of school children in public schools and private healthcare. All of it state-sanctioned.

• Three generations after the first Earth Day, the Earth First movement also resolved in a commercial and political war of nihilism and despair against science and children, not to mention a global class war against the 98 percent of the world’s population who can’t afford solar panels or electric cars but are forced nevertheless to pay artificially inflated prices for otherwise cheap energy — all imposed by imperialist ESG/SDG policies that oppress poor and middle-class people of all colors worldwide. All of it state-sanctioned.

• The antiwar movement resolved in perpetual war and nation-building industries, so normalized in our social narrative that corporate and social media now engage in absurdly casual discussions — straight out of Dr. Strangelove — about nuclear options in regional conflicts as a way to defend democracy (and as alternatives to any peace negotiations that might otherwise threaten the bottom line). All of it, of course, state-sanctioned…

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Incoherence, it seems, is the penultimate stage of all revealed truths. Incoherence is what ensues when we trespass the limits of what we can know by any standard: religious, scientific, empirical or otherwise. No amount of religion or reason or science or technology can avoid it. Indeed, the harder we try to avoid it, the more metrics we devise to observe and measure it, the more precautions we deploy to defer its arrival, the quicker it shows up on our doorstep like a distant relative looking for a handout.

When all systemic moderation breaks down, the chaos of incoherence, like addiction, becomes our chemical destiny, both as individuals and as societies. Assuming we survive it, however, the same chaos of incoherence — again, like addiction — can lead us back full circle to our ultimate destination, back to the universal lessons and healing agents of traditional religious doctrine and addiction recovery: wonder, humility, and gratitude.

Regardless of whether or not we have the presence of heart and mind to accept these lessons and healing agents when they present themselves, the theocratic cycle begins anew, with a new ideology and — eventually — a new caste of high priests. So not surprisingly, the secular theocratic excess and incoherence of today seems to be following the same path to chaotic ruin as the religious theocratic excess and incoherence of yesterday. Human civilization, it seems, is an endless cycle of theocracies come and gone, built one atop the other like ancient tels.