What caused the Hugh Hefner, born into a conservative Methodist family, to start a porn empire? What led Jews like Betty Friedan, Larry Lader, and Bernard Nathanson to promote abortion even though they knew of the horrors of the Holocaust? Why do Catholics like George Wiegel and Erik Prince reject Church teaching and support war?
The term that encapsulates this phenomenon is called alethophobia, a term meaning aversion to truth. Why are people averse to truth? It is because they choose vice over virtue. The seven deadly sins are all contained within alethophobia: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. By actively choosing vice over virtue, one’s identity is solidified as an alethophobist.
The opposite of the alethophobist is the philosopher. They are the lovers of wisdom, lovers of truth and goodness, which leads them to God. Henry David Thoreau observed,
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.[1]
Virtue is associated with truth and the good, sourced from God. Vice, on the contrary, is sin and privation of being. To follow truth is to be with God; to choose sin is to follow Satan. In 1 John it is written,
Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. Everyone who commits sin is a child of the devil; for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. Those who have been born of God do not sin, because God’s seed abides in them; they cannot sin, because they have been born of God. The children of God and the children of the devil are revealed in this way: all who do not do what is right are not from God, nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters.[2]
The alethophobist embraces sin, and refusing to reject vice makes Satan their father. Those who are of God do not seek to justify their misdeeds, instead confessing their sins. The alethophobist does no such thing, clinging to their vices while attacking those who do what is just. Since the just are virtuous, their display of truth is blinding to alethophobist, and thus the former become objects of scorn for the latter. Typically this was done in the form of killing, but in modern society the go-to method has been to “cancel” them. By harassing their employers, vandalizing their property, calling SWAT teams, they actively pursue practices that will hopefully lead to their deaths. They do not want the philosophers to live in the same world as them; even if the philosophers lived separately where they were not even seen by alethophists, this would not be sufficient. The mere existence of philosophers is an offense to the scorners of truth, an unacceptable situation. But if the philosophers cannot be killed, control is another option.
A Jewish legend of what is known as a Golem is related by Rabbi Abraham Skorka:
In Prague, a rabbi created a doll, an automaton that could defend the Jews against anti-Semitic attacks. He engraved the word emet—Hebrew for truth—on its forehead, put the Tetragrammaton in its mouth and ordered the Golem to serve him. A version of this legend says that one Friday, prior to the arrival of the Sabbath, the dummy was able to free itself and started destroying everything. The rabbi erased the first letter of the word on its forehead, which left it saying “met,” which means death, and he took the little paper out of its mouth, at which point it turned back into the clay that the rabbi had used to make it. It is an archetype of what happens when man cannot control what he creates with his intellect—when the product of his creation gets out of hand.[3]
Why was “truth” written on the forehead of the Golem and why couldn’t the Golem be controlled? The creation of the Golem was meant to be a creative act like God. Just as the story of Genesis has God creating man from the ground, so too in these stories of magicians do they create from clay.[4] The difference is that God makes man free, but the Golem is not free. Plastering “truth” on its forehead cannot control it forever, because slavery is not truth. This false sense of truth brings about death, for falsehood is an assault on being, and is intrinsically violent. This tales serves as an anachronistic metaphor for social engineering.
Social engineering is the means to make falsehoods appear as truth. Brand Blanshard complained of Catholic Americans who listened to their priests rather than politicians:
[T]he influence of the Catholic priest who states the Church’s attitude on any public question, regarding it as a moral issue is of vastly greater weight than that of a Protestant clergyman, who, treating it openly as political, expresses an opinion which he knows, however forcibly expressed, will be regarded as opinion only.[5]
To get Catholics to conform to Americanism, various methods were implemented to achieve this goal of eliminating the “hyphenated-American.” Mass immigration of black Southerners into ethnic Catholic neighborhoods was supported by the social engineers, particularly among select Jews and Quakers. Louis Wirth was a sociologist at the University of Chicago who organized this migration. Next came the fear of Catholic population growth, which was outstripping Protestants due to the former’s rejection of birth control. The sexual revolution solved that problem. Wilhelm Reich hated clergy, seeing them as an impediment to destructive forms of sexual activity. Alfred Kinsey was in agreement, as he himself was a sexual masochist, and had no qualms over sexual abusing children as part of his “scientific research.” Reich and Kinsey’s work gave the sexual revolution the ideological underpinnings it needed to succeed. The birth control control pill created by the Catholic John Rock and Jew Gregory Pincus, opening the floodgates of contraception by Cosmo Gordon Lang, the spread of filth and smut by pornographers like Reuben Sturman, Al Goldstein, and Larry Flynt, the working towards normalization of non-heterosexual lifestyles by Magnus Hirschfeld and Brenda Howard, the rise of feminism to destroy healthy families by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Judith Butler, and the abortion industry spearheaded by aforementioned Friedan, Nathanson and Lader, are just a few that have worked tirelessly to subvert the moral law in regards to sexuality.
Then there is the warfare state, which could not have been established without the inauguration of Christian Zionism by C. I. Scofield, and the warmongering neoconservative ideology developed by Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, and Henry Jackson.
Herbert Marcuse hated peace, and called for constant revolution until a Marxist utopia was achieved, advocating violence if it would bring about this end. Jacques Derrida deplored any sense of meaning, a position not even the depraved secular existentialists would take, the latter at least calling for individuals to create their own meaning. Milton Friedman had no love of neighbor, and thus promoted unregulated capitalism to exploit the week in the Libertarian form of social darwinism.
Figures like George Soros and Ethan Nadelmann have worked to decriminalize harmful drugs, which leads to lack of fulfillment, permanent adverse health effects, and death. Instead of lobbying the government to strive for the common good, they opt for implementing drug-related measures that will distract people from their depressing life conditions brought about from neoliberal policies.
All of these revolutionaries were alethophobists, and their targets of scorn were philosophers. In the end, true Catholic belief among American Catholics was significantly diminished. Protestantism was further fragmented, where a lack of authority allowed for all to be permitted. Judaism had no structure for upholding morals, the practice of pilpul preventing any coherent grasp of truth.
This does not mean there are no longer any genuine philosophers. They can be found by looking for those who “do not belong to the world,” and thus “the world has hated them.”[6] They are those who do not participate in the vanities of the world, do not see truth as a popularity contest, do not worship government, do not call for war, do not kill the innocent, do not abuse their bodies, do not scream for the toleration of all beliefs and practices. Rather, they only love what is from Heaven, they find truth in God, they worship God, they promote peace, they love their neighbors, they live healthily, and they plead for all to live morally.
“You will know them by their fruits…. [E]very good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.”[7] The philosopher is the good tree and the alethophobist the bad tree. By observing their actions, their identity may be known, and the words of Paul followed: “Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. For what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness?”[8] Therefore “be separate from them,”[9] and live in wisdom as a philosopher.
[1] Thoreau, Henry David. Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated) (p. 306). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
[2] 1 John 3:4-10.
[3] Bergoglio, Jorge Mario; Skorka, Abraham. On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century (p. 126). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[4] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/2016/11/28/the-soul-of-the-golem-is-truth/
[5] E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities, 15.
[6] John 17:14.
[7] Matthew 7:16-18.
[8] 2 Corinthians 6:14.
[9] 2 Corinthians 6:17.
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