May
30
The Gathering Storm
“Can it happen here? Of course it can.” — Rod Dreher, socio-political commentator, author, editor
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but there is a lot of scary stuff goin’ on out there. Our government “leadership” and the many ideological influencers they are in league with (e.g., academia, media, ‘progressive’ corporations and organizations, etc.) are steadily, forcefully pushing the U.S. (and other “free states”) further Leftward into soft totalitarianism. What’s happening big-picture-wise and what can we expect? In his best-selling book, Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher lays it out, along with what non-Leftists — and Christians in particular — can and should do. He finishes “Part One: Understanding Soft Totalitarianism” with the following helpful summary:
“In the West today, we are living under decadent, pre-totalitarian conditions. Social atomization, widespread loneliness, the rise of ideology, widespread loss of faith in institutions, and other factors leave society vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation to which both Russia and Germany succumbed in the previous century.
Furthermore, intellectual, cultural, academic, and corporate elites are under the sway of a left-wing political cult built around social justice. It is a militantly illiberal ideology that shares alarming commonalities with Bolshevism, including dividing humanity between the Good and the Evil. This pseudoreligion appears to meet a need for meaning and moral purpose in a post-Christian society and seeks to build a just society by demonizing, excluding, and even persecuting all who resist its harsh dogmas.
Finally Big Business’s embrace and promotion of progressive social values and the emergence of ‘surveillance capitalism’ — the sales-directed mining of individual data gathered by electronic devices — is preparing the West to accept a version of China’s social credit system. We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.
This is the brave new world of the twenty-first century. Christian dissidents will be unable to mount an effective resistance if their eyes aren’t open to and focused on the nature and methods of social justice ideology and the ways in which data harvesting and manipulation can and will be used by woke capitalists and social justice ideologues in institutional authority to impose control.
It is coming, and it is coming fast. How should we resist it? That is the subject of the second half of this book.”
As I write this, I have not yet read “Part 2: How to Live in Truth”. When I do, I might post a taste of it here; but don’t depend on me doing so to get some answers. Get the book! I wouldn’t exactly call it a “pleasant” read, given the seriousness of the topic. But, Dreher is a good writer, and this is a very important topic. Do it!
