@ThinkingFaith end/ Populist escalation isn’t just institutional strain; it’s a crisis of desire. A polity habituated to scapegoating cannot self-redeem by technique. The Paraclete universalizes that unveiling in history. A reconciliatory mimesis interrupts, rather than “wins,” escalation.
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The Gospel alternative to scapegoating and political violence Tweet: Girard went further. Scapegoating isn't just a social reflex; it is the blind consecration of violence through collective (often religious) denial—the counterfeit holiness hiding evil: the false sacred. That's the fundamental lie the Gospels unmask: evil wears a halo. 1 John 3:8 Quote tweet: 2/ The scapegoat mechanism works because it obscures this fundamental matrix of being. In that concealment, no logic of justice appears more unified or self-justified—and no desire more blind to its own hostility—than the sanctioned violence of the false sacred cloaked as true. 1/ Evil's perverse capacity lies in its powers to camouflage the 'false sacred' as true - as something like common sense, justice or wisdom (2 Cor. 11:14). Whether in forms conscious or unconscious, secular or religious, “The ability to disguise sin defines Anti-Christ." (Illich) ‘The final enigma of history is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is to be overcome.’ [Quotation from Reinhold Niebhur’s The Nature of Destiny and Man: II Human Destiny] [“The ways of history do not lead directly upwards to the Kingdom of God, they pass by way of the final unveiling of the anti-Christ who conceals himself under] the last mask to be stripped away - the mask of what is good and what is Christian.” - Von Balthasar
Open original document@MassimoFaggioli @commonwealmag Sanity keeps the minutes; fascism writes the outcomes. The mimetic lock-in of this theo-authoritarian complex admits no defeat within its runaway cultic logic—hence its air of inevitability. It cannot be argued down: only interrupted by truth disclosed at scale. Apocalypsis.
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Tweet: @nick_routledge and @alon_mizrahi 4/ Sure, the U.S. defines a fulminant apex of this derangement vortex, but the fever is epistemic, virulent, networked, global and, clearly, fast-metastasizing. No nation or culture can—or will—extract itself from such an epochal, totalized psychosis, in isolation. Here we are, then, upon the threshold of a transcultural, transnational, religio-political complex of fascist universalism and its demonic perversion of an authentic, planetary yearning offering us the only way out of our 'war of all against all', rightly called salvation. Image one: Agreed and, frankly, a worldwide contagion: Jihadists, Zionists, Hindutvavadis, 969ers, Crusaders, they're all at it. And whilst we're not the only only ones suffering from this plague, nor are we the only ones God welcomes. This, hardly news to planetary prophetology, of course. Quote Tweet: Clearly, the supercharged universality of this phenomenon - pat, predictable, cookie-cutter dialectics of ethnonationalism, purity and exclusion, span a dizzying array of languages, cultures and borders, just now - powerfully affirms its common, transcultural, archetypal origins. Image two: 1/ Hence the fundamental nature, role and promise of the political liberator, savior or Great Emancipator, here to revision the bodies, minds and souls of men in a bastardized, religio-nationalist image of the messianic hopes of our times. The transcendent function, perverted. Quote Tweet: In other words, the bastard appeal of such ethno-nationalist analogs is universally paradigmatic. How then, to effectively address the immense planetary forces encouraging the emergence and powerful enchantment of such personalities and their platforms? Quote tweet: Hardly news, even as the illuminating recognition that no one culture, creed, philosophy, religion, nation or otherwise can save us, inevitably requires a planetary reckoning with an inclusive eschatology. We're saved, finally, by the beauty and brilliance of our togetherness. Quote tweet: Thanks for your series of responses, Alastair; a beautiful reminder. Stateside, we're confronted by own particular flavor of deep vexation, even though its fundamental causes and effects are, of course, as in the UK, planetary and shared. Perhaps, ultimately, a solution is, too?
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