The pervert, the fanatic and the idiot

In these times, man will be forced to think in religious terms. Not in the sense of a religion that encloses; we are already almost engulfed by matter. But in the sense of a religion that allows us to think about transcendence, the symbolic world. What our ancestors have always done but to which the reign of the quantifiable has made us more and more alien. It is telling that the new — and ultimate? — totalitarianism has as its emblem the cross of Christ. Our contemporaries don’t think about it anymore, but it is indeed the one that is posted on ambulances and pharmacies. The mark of the Antichrist is to present himself as the Messiah. « For many will come under my name, saying: I am the Christ. And they shall deceive many, » Matthew (24:5). We have spoken here, under the seal of humor, of an Antichrist whose name is Emmanuel⁽¹⁾ but whose name, strangely enough, if you replace the CR in the center of his name with an MM, you get « Mammon ». It is himself who prophesied most seriously of all, on April 17, 2020, in the Financial Times (Financial Time, a symbol again): « I believe that our generation must know that the Beast of the Event is here, it is coming, whether it is terrorism, this great pandemic or other shocks. We have to fight it when it arrives with what is deeply unexpected, relentless. » Rushing to the head of state’s defense, a « fact-checker » agent, suddenly as broad-minded as he can be quick to see « conspiracy » everywhere, explains the same approach: « We understand then that the « beast of the event » is above all a rhetorical figure as the head of state, lover of literary, religious or intellectual references, is fond of them. He uses this expression to suggest the unprecedented scope of the current period […] This « beast of an event », a phrase that Emmanuel Macron did indeed utter, is therefore in reality the metaphor of a historical moment with profound consequences⁽²⁾.  »

Besides, to divert attention, isn’t the very nature of the « Beast » to be clever enough to announce its own return? This Beast « rhetorical figure », is it not the trinity of the great narcissistic pervert, the fanatic and the idiot, Messrs. Macron, Véran and Castex, who are merging to drag us into their nightmare? For of course, the authoritarianism of the management of the virus cannot be dissociated from the general collapse into liberal-libertarianism.

In short, the Christ cross symbolizes the human condition. The latter is born of otherness. It is the crosspiece of the horizontal crossing that of the vertical. It is the suffering but victorious Christ at its center. The Cross symbolizes all other alterities: the masculine and the feminine, the subjective and the objective, life and death, the I and the We, time and space etc.⁽³⁾. Man is caught between the tensions that tear the world apart. It is in search of a precarious and never definitive balance. All evils arise from too much or too little. Man must avoid these two pitfalls. That he denies the mother, and there he is, tipping over to the archaic father: the tyrant, the killer brute. That he forgets the father, and he sinks in full regression towards the archaic mother: the consoling and encompassing figure until the suffocation of subject. That’s exactly where we are. The totalitarianism of the archaic mother is all the more perverse as it is presented under a smiling and consoling mask, whereas the warnings against the violent propensity of the tyrant father are hammered everywhere. It is natural for liberal capitalism to want to destroy the figure of a father whose role is to separate the child from the mother. And this shift to Big Mama is all the more powerful because the man still imagines himself in the old-fashioned patriarchal society.

The archaic mother is the absolutized nature: mater, materia, matter and matrix. She is The Master of the Earth by Robert Hugh Benson⁽⁴⁾. Mammon is only semantically confused with Mama. It is the society of care . It has also logically become an ideology whose emblem of the flagship association is just as logically a circle, a bubble. The Kommandantur of this totalitarianism is the hospital. The nice hospital is so much more reassuring than the nasty police or army. Can evil be nothing more than a resurgence of « reaction » as the mass media preach? But the Devil is by definition a seducer who knows how to change his mask. The hospital, a peril against which Charles Péguy already warned modern men a century ago: « Their ideal, if it is permitted to speak thus, is a State ideal, a State hospital ideal, an immense final and mortuary house, without worries, without thought, without race⁽⁵⁾.  » It is only natural that in a world reduced to the physiological, « health » is the last to make sense. It thus becomes a religion. The Islamic mask, nikab, vector of division — its acceptance expresses for some the tolerance while for others it acts the submission of women — becomes the obligation for all. The leveling is done by the bottom in the name of the Sanitary. To paraphrase the theologian Jacques Ellul: 

« It is not medicine that enslaves us but the sacred transferred to medicine⁽⁶⁾ ».

This perverse theocratic system takes a form that is all the darker, more fanatical, more fundamentalist, because it is not identified as such. Our environment populated by people parading with surgical masks raised to the apple of their eyes resembles a hospital universe. A new litany invades the public and private space. One Australian policy advocate recently wrote: « Australia has made a choice to put health first, to preserve lives, to let doctors play a role in decisions that are public health. They have put the collective before the individual, science before politics ». Out of fear, cowardice, mediocrity and childishness, the citizen abandons his duty to the institution. He is the perfect totalitarian subject described by Hannah Arendt. Horror is made of nice people but mostly obedient. Those who put childish trust in authority, in the « specialists », and who at the same time lecture the refractory, before designating them as scapegoats. These « do-gooders » are willing to trade their freedom for a comfortable hotel room after being « case contacts ». And even without: 13 million French people would like this winter new confinements and firewalls. Worse: a majority would even be in favor of confining non-vaccinated people⁽⁷⁾. The mass is populated by bastards, cowards, informers and collabos who would, if they could, lynch the resisters. Over the past two years, we have seen how these emotionally driven characters quickly turn into evil slanderers. Antonin Artaud remarked that « the action of the theater, like that of the plague, is beneficial, because it pushes men to see themselves as they are, it makes the mask fall off, it discovers the lie, the spinelessness, the baseness, the tartuffery⁽⁸⁾ « . Refusing to give up his place, the old chick, full and afraid, is ready to sacrifice the youth to continue to stuff himself in his cocoon: 

« For several years we have been witnessing a form of plebiscite, even a sacredness of domestic comfort.

explains the journalist Vincent Cocquebert, author of the book La Civilisation du cocon (Arkhê)⁽⁹⁾ ». The mass media, who have all dropped their masks, encourage him in his baseness. In 1973, well before the tipping over into digital huddle, the philosopher Gustave Thibon already felt this collapse of the spirit coming: « And let’s imagine in what state of frightful panic modern man would be plunged, so quick to be moved by the slightest misstep of science or when the slightest epidemic appears — a vague flu that arrives from the depths of Asia and that, in the end, only kills people who are close to dying anyway, because they are old enough or weak enough to die — well, if there were an epidemic, like the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which killed 35 million people, about a third of the population, I don’t think our contemporaries would be able to resist it… those who were spared the plague would still die — of terror⁽¹⁰⁾!  »

The meaningless world is mostly in metaphysical panic in the face of death. Following the formula, trading a little security, very temporary, for freedom: they will lose both. In all probability, convinced of being the irreducible enemy of « all fascisms », this Frenchman living in Australia quoted above reveals the very matrix of the totalitarian process: the abandonment of freedom for the benefit of science. In the 20th century it was Nazism and its racial eugenics, Communism and its scientific socialism, and Fascism and its futuristic manifesto, in the 21st it is liberalism and its fruit covidism. In all the cases it is the same reductionism; the man is reduced to the physiological: it is not any more but nature and culture⁽¹¹⁾.

In the name of Progress, the freedom that specifies it is sent back to the « world before ». Discerning good from evil, true from false, ugly from beautiful, is « reactive ».  » The brain is a computer made of flesh, » says the mad doctor Laurent Alexandre, beloved of the mass media. The modern man is « Homo deus », a worldwide best seller whose author, Yuval Noah Harari, is received with all the honors by the heads of liberal states, including of course Emmanuel Macron. Such a proposal would have been conceived as the ultimate sacrilege by the ancient man. It is now the norm. It is in phase with this new great narrative that we have for president the one who has not surpassed but accomplished the Oedipus. Result described by psychology: the golem man, i.e. an unfinished subject who has not accomplished his individuation. All his energy is freed up to use his cognitive power. Thus it stuns the quidam and seduces the imbecile. But despite this almost perfect figure to embody the start-up nation, the flood of bad news he was in charge of announcing may now make him a worn-out candidate. Above all, notwithstanding his almost ideal qualities for the system, if he is not a father, he retains the major defect of being a male: the one who indicates, to men as to women, the path of detachment, of absence, and at the end, of death. In this sense, the candidate Valérie Pécresse has many assets to succeed him. First of all, she is his ideological clone. Second, that she is a covidist with an even more totalitarian promise than her perhaps predecessor makes her a champion. She stated that she was considering confining the non-vaccinated. The system has heard it. In a few weeks, she has gone from being an unlikely contender to a favorite. Above all, she is a woman. A progressive icon, New Zealand’s leader has turned her country into a police health dictatorship. Could a man have gone that far, that hard?

I am not a follower of Rudolf Steiner. I am too much of a dark rationalist to fully embrace his anthroposophical theory. But in these logically anti-dialectical times — denying the Other in his otherness is an expression of the unification of the world — one will never remember that the truth, wherever it comes from, remains the truth: as Saint Clement of Alexandria wrote, even to the Devil « it happens to speak truths » and « We must not foolishly condemn words in advance because of the one who utters them⁽¹²⁾ « . I really think that Rudolf Steiner was a visionary when he said a century ago: 

"In the past, at the Council of Constantinople, the spirit was eliminated, they instituted a dogma: the man is made only of a soul and a body, and to speak about the spirit became a heresy. One will aspire in another form to eliminate the soul, the life of the soul. And that time will come, in the not too distant future, when people will say: to speak of mind and soul is pathological; only people who speak only of the body are healthy. It is considered a pathological symptom when a human being develops in such a way that he/she comes to believe that there is a spirit and a soul. These people will be considered as sick, and we will find, be sure, the remedy that will act on this evil. In the past, the spirit (faith in an individual spiritual principle) was eliminated. The soul will be eliminated by means of a medicine. Starting from a "healthy view of things", a vaccine will be found by means of which the organism will be treated from early youth as much as possible, if possible from birth itself, so that the body does not come to think that there is a soul and a spirit. The two currents, the two conceptions of the world will be radically opposed. [...] One will reflect on how to elaborate concepts and representations that are commensurate with the true reality, the reality of soul and spirit. The others, the successors of the present materialists, will look for the vaccine that will make the bodies "healthy", that is to say, constituted in such a way that they will no longer speak of that "nonsense" that is the soul and the spirit, but, because they are "healthy", they will speak of the mechanical and chemical forces that, starting from the cosmic nebula, have constituted the planets and the sun. This result will be obtained by manipulating the bodies. Materialist doctors will be entrusted with the task of ridding humanity of souls(13). "

I specify that I read this text in a symbolic way, as the agent of Le Monde will defend me. I don’t think that a vaccine can materially remove the soul from the body. On the other hand, I believe that the current vaccination process is part of this desire. Having said that, I observe that a century later Pope Francis affirms the opposite: « To be vaccinated is an act of love » (Rome, August 18, 2021). The Bishops of France will follow. Jacques Ellul, always, questioned this : « It is a singular paradox: while the message of Christ is fundamentally subversive (…) Christianity has itself been subverted to the point of becoming the exact opposite of its original impulse, that is to say, a social order, a guarantee for political and economic powers, a conservative morality… The Church prides itself on having been a force of resistance to communist reductionism. Shouldn’t it be at the forefront of resisting « health » reductionism? « Everyone demands that progress put an end to the suffering of the body, maintain the freshness of youth as long as possible, and extend life to infinity. No old age, no pain, no death. Forgetting that such a disgust for the art of suffering is the very negation of the human condition⁽¹⁴⁾.  » recalled the dissident priest Ivan Illich. But isn’t it the very role of the Church to dare to say this? Above all, one perceives well in the papal injunction to the injection, the coming of the « perverse religion »; that which consists in saying: « Do this, it is God who orders it to you. Or the instrumentalization of the spiritual for the purposes of submission.

It is well known: it is rare that vice does not mask itself with virtue. These clerics imagine, as always, that by collaborating with the secular power they will attract its good graces. It is, however, the metaphysical destiny of the Church to be destroyed, from the outside as well as from the inside. The world reduced to the physiological can only annihilate it. Refusing to accompany him in his death is the real betrayal.

Constantin Mirabel