Ever since
the West made Augustinianism its theological foundation, with its roots in
Plotinus’s conception of God as an absolutely simple, impersonal Monad from
which all of reality emanates, there has been an ongoing destruction of the
human person, his dissolving into a formless, faceless, nameless mass. While there are times when individualism
rises up strongly, this is only a temporary stage in the dialectic that ends
once again in the reemergence of the impersonal essence from which everything
is supposed to have begun.
Two events
illustrate these truths about the West.
The first is very recent, from Las Vegas, Nevada, where a proposal
allowing business corporations to form and govern towns is being discussed. Dr Joseph Farrell explains the significance of this
vis-à-vis the West and its conception of man:
. .
.
Nevada bill would allow tech
companies to create governments
Note
this:
Planned legislation to establish new
business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form
separate local governments.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a
plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s
economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday.
The zones would permit companies with large
areas of land to form governments carrying
the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school
districts and courts and provide government services. (Boldface
emphasis added)
Needless
to say, this prompts all sorts of ideas to swirl around in my head, none
of them too good. Note firstly that there is a certain ineluctable logic here,
one that, surprisingly, has taken a rather long time to arrive at, but
which - if examined from the standpoint of elucidating the basic steps along
the development of that logic - should come as no surprise. It would go
something like this. Step one: in our system of government, individual persons
are sovereign, and possess by nature certain rights that are not granted and
therefore cannot be circumscribed by governments. Step two: as such, persons
have the right to ban together and form, reform, or dissolve, governments, as
laid out in this country's Declaration of Independence. Step three: somewhere
along the way, corporations became persons in law. This step was actually first
undertaken in the middle ages for reasons we needn't get into here. So step
four - elaborated in Nevada's recent attempt to woo corporations to that state
- should come as no surprise, for if corporations are persons in law, then they
have the same rights to form, reform, or dissolve governments as any other
group of persons.
. . . Whether or not the measure succeeds in
Nevada is, at this stage, a moot point. The important point is that at long
last we have arrived at the fourth step in that logic that has been under way
for centuries in the West. It is the ultimate fruit of a step taken long long
ago, i.e., to view an individual person as part of a great collective called
the corporate person, in this case, the corporate, "federal" person
called Adam, and his inheritance as being one of moral culpability by dint the
inheritance of a fallen, "sinful nature" or "sin nature."
(And for those inclined to throw bible verses at me, don't waste your time.
There's a great deal of difference between "eph ho pantes hemarton"
and Jerome's mistranslation "en quo omnes peccaverunt." And if you
don't know what I'm talking about, go do some homework.)
And
that recalls a statement of St. Photios the Great, famous Patriarch of
Constantinople in the 9th century, whom I paraphrase: to say that there is a
sin of nature is a heresy. . . .
This is the
stage of man losing his unique individual characteristics - i.e., a number of
men being merged into a single faceless bureaucratic corporate ‘person’ - and
being collapsed back into the formless essence from whence he sprang.
Another
instance of the same process may be seen in the Roman Catholic devotion to what
they call the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a novel form of worship that developed in the 17th
century. The Orthodox Church rejects this
devotion. Fr Michael Pomazansky
writes,
. . .
The rest is
at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/distortion-man-post-schism-west .
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!
