A Matter of Life and Death

By Wayne Allensworth

A socio-economic-political system and its enforcement structures set priorities, and those priorities reveal what that system values most of all. The indispensable Steve Sailer, writing on the latest disease scare, monkeypox (“Monkeypox: The New AIDS”), notes that the Centers for Disease Control seem more worried about “stigmatizing” homosexuals than acting to prevent the spread of this ugly disease, which in America and Europe is practically exclusively afflicting homosexual males.

There’s a reason for that. “Gay men,” writes Sailer, “despite their depiction in the Narrative as oppressed and marginalized, tend to spend a lot of money to travel to vast circuit parties to have sex with numerous male strangers.” And anti-HIV drugs have “brought back 1970s attitudes toward industrial-scale gay promiscuity.” It appears that gay orgies are spreading the monkeypox, just as bathhouse style serial sexual encounters spread AIDS back in the 1980s.

True to the 1980s AIDS precedent, the dominant globalist-leftist nexus, through its bureaucratic and media arms, is attempting to convince us that gay promiscuity has nothing to do with the spread of the disease. The CDC, for instance, is far more concerned with protecting gays from being criticized for their reckless sexual behavior than it is with combatting monkeypox. It would make sense to warn gays to curb their self-destructive behavior, to state plainly that there is a serious price to pay for their depraved sex orgies, but the powers-that-be find that unthinkable, as “there is nothing more hateful than causing gays to feel shame over their depravities.”

On 12 July, the CDC released a document entitled “Reducing Stigma in Communications and Community Engagement.” What the commissars at the CDC apparently had in mind was signaling media fellow travelers to mislead the public by pretending that the monkeypox threatens all of us equally.

The document instructs its propagandists to avoid “marginalizing groups who may be at increased risk” in order to prevent “stigmatizing” such groups. The next step is to “emphasize that anyone can get monkeypox and promote it as a public health concern for all.” The furthest the CDC was prepared to go was to advise gays to think about “reducing your number of partners,” and to have sex with their clothes on, so as to decrease exposure to the rash. The document’s authors tell the target audience “We want you to have fun.”

Fun? A sane and psychologically stable observer might say that serial anal sex with dozens of anonymous “partners” might be more accurately described as disgusting, soul destroying, dehumanizing, and desensitizing. But maybe self-destructive desensitization, and not “fun,” is the real point.

We must keep three things in mind. First, that the worldview behind a celebration of depraved sexual license is based on an ideology of victimhood. Second, that resentment is the food that feeds that ideology. And third, that nihilism is the engine driving the destruction of traditional sexual mores.

Whatever form it has taken in modern historical times, be it Jacobinism, Bolshevism, post-modernism, or the globalist-leftist alliance, the spirit of Luciferian rebellion has been present since Eden, whispering unrealizable temptations into our all-too-ready-to-listen ears. The image of God is stamped into our intellect, realized in our consciousness. That spark of divinity may manifest itself in humanity’s capacity for creative beauty, or as a twisted urge for destructive nihilism. The anti-rational, visceral anger that typifies the hard left is far more profound, and runs far deeper, than political, economic, and social theorizing. Existential rage–destruction for its own sake, a rejection of the world and its Maker–is at the heart of the great rebellion.

Lucifer is the light bearer, a fallen angel of intellect and spirit. He is also that within us that makes a cardinal decision, sometimes intermittently, sometimes once and for all, that it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven. That is what is meant by Biblical condemnations of pride.

We shall be as gods, but only reluctant followers of the way, the truth and the life, that can take us to spiritual heights, but at the price of bearing our cross. We don’t want to take that burden up. We resist surrendering to Christ’s easy yoke. We don’t wish to accept the paradox of affirming life by not clinging to it, that “leap of faith” attributed to Kierkegaard.

We may fancy ourselves as victims of God, of Fate, of an unjust universal order that denies us all that Satan promised Christ when He was tempted in the desert. Resentment of our condition can fuel a general resentment of all of our being, of all that would bind us, restricting opportunities to slake our thirst for absolute, unbounded expression of our own will.

That resentment, that dejection, can be understandable. Life is tragic and hard. We may grow angry at a world that seems bent on our destruction. But Luciferian pride and resentment are the way to dusty death, to emptiness and the void.

What the left, and now globalism, promises is unbounded freedom, no burdens, the right and power and opportunity to define ourselves free of any limits. In contrast, the traditionalist right offers freedom within constraints, that paradoxical discovery of fulfillment by walking through the straight gate on the narrow path.

The culture of resentment offers a heady combination of satisfying self-pity and existential rage. Victim status, bolstered by support from the powers-that-be in our society, is a powerful narcotic, and the thirst for revenge is provided a ready opportunity to lord it over others.

The left targeted sexual morality as a key point of its attack on the society and, indeed, the world it resents, for good reason. The human sex drive is powerful, elemental, even chaotic and destructive if unchecked. In order to channel it toward a constructive role in building and maintaining civilization, it must be constrained. Breaking down those constraints has gone a long way toward the left’s goal of deconstructing civilization and establishing its reign in an earthly Hell, as we numb ourselves in a world without meaning through unchecked sexual saturnalia, or, in some cases, the homicidal, and suicidal, rage of the mass shooter.

It is no accident, as Stalin might have said, that a seething, nihilistic anti-humanism has found a home in today’s postmodern forms of radicalism. Consider, for example, the radical environmentalist’s disdain for a destructive humanity that has polluted the planet. In this view, the world would be better off without us. In the 1960s, Susan Sontag called the white race a “cancer” on the planet. It appears that raging leftists not only hate the white race but life itself. Their self-affirmation is achieved by acts of destruction: I destroy, therefore I am.

If humanity is the plague the radical anti-humanists claim it is, as Jordan Peterson wrote in his magisterial Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, then “the person who eradicates it is a hero,” a “planetary savior.” While he is at it, “a real messiah might follow through with his rigorous logic, and eliminate himself as well,” thus demonstrating a thorough commitment to annihilation.

It’s no surprise that leftists are anti-natal, that abortion is a sacrament in their anti-religion, or that homosexual relations are viewed as superior to those of “breeders.” Babies increase humanity’s “carbon footprint,” and, anyway, they are only another burden on us, hindering our Lucifer’s progress from sexual liberation to transsexualism to a transhuman future. Lurking beneath the left’s ideological facade is a despairing howl into the void: “I didn’t ask to be born!”

None of us did. Even a loving parent may sometimes wonder, “Was it worth it?” Was the life given, the fleeting moments of joy, worth the pain, the anxiety, and the knowledge of certain death, not just for ourselves, but for them, the children? The nihilist view of life is MacBeth’s tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But what else is there? What could a universe without us possibly signify or mean? If we embrace life, with all its sorrows, we take up the cross, walk through that straight gate, along that narrow path, accepting that nature is red in tooth and claw, that humanity contains both godliness and the Luciferian impulse. In that struggle we can achieve our victories, illuminated and clarified by our defeats.

Being is better than not being.

Having children means sharing in God’s creation. Extending the gift of life to our children means rejecting the evil and murderous view of humanity as worthless, of life as meaningless. We embrace the suffering God, who, through the Incarnation, shared all the pain and doubt humans experience. He was, and is, with us. That is our hope.

Our battle is not primarily political, but is a deeply existential, spiritual struggle with nihilism, against the rejection of God and of life itself.

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.