Contact (1997)

Generally speaking, cinematic science fiction goes one of two ways. Either it goes after big ideas and weighty philosophical questions or it goes after CGI mayhem and hot chicks in body suits. Sometimes it succeeds at both, but more often than not, a science fiction film falls into one of these two camps. Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 adaptation of the famous Carl Sagan novel, Contact, is unequivocally a Big Ideas sci-fi film which manages to pack a lot of meaty content into a popcorn blockbuster presentation. Though it does boast its own spin on the legendary Stargate scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey in the final act, the film is propelled almost exclusively by solid performances and a fairly robust dramatic clash between the forces of scientific materialism and religious belief. No Hollywood sci-fi film comes without an agenda or esoteric symbolism and the various ways it smuggles in its messaging is especially sly. Contact is somewhat more charitable about theism and the entire realm of metaphysics than you’ll find in just about anything secular these days, but ultimately, it is itself a work of scientistic hermetic theology. More specifically, Contact is a very clever piece of propaganda which promotes the theosophical ideas of HP Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, UNESCO, and the Lucis Trust. Virtually every component of the NWO global agenda can be found in this movie.

Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, we’ve been taught that there is an irreconcilable schism between science and faith. In both the cinematic and literary form, the modern science fiction tradition is replete with stories which dramatize this conflict. With very few exceptions, the forces of scientific progress are in perpetual struggle against the forces of religious belief. The scientists are always portrayed as infinitely resourceful master technicians who are likeable, quick witted and can kick your ass if the story demands it. By contrast, the faithful are authoritarian dolts and mean spirited tight asses. Or as The Omega Man and The Chronicles of Riddick demonstrate, they are embodied as fanatical, vampiric cultists whose sole motivations are enslavement, conversion or conquest. In Contact’s case, the religious characters include a suicide bomber, a status seeking bureaucrat, a vacuous Catholic priest, and a cross between Jeff Spicoli and Joel Osteen. In other words, yet another mostly uncharitable Hollywood portrait of religious people. Since many of the prime movers of the sci-fi genre were themselves globalist technocrats, it makes sense that we’d eventually get a film which reconciles these seemingly opposing forces into an alchemical union to grease the wheels for the dystopian hellscape glorious global techno-utopia that awaits us.

On the surface, Contact presents itself as a sophisticated science fiction story which believably posits the possibility of contact with a higher extraterrestrial intelligence. Though Steven Spielberg has given us two different versions of the benign alien visitation in E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact is following in the footsteps of the loftier speculations of Arthur C. Clarke. Instead of a kid friendly vision of Crowleyan entities you find in Spielberg, you get to watch the whole world build a dimensional portal which does real science-y shit like “folding spacetime” but is really just the most expensive VR machine ever built.

Every character represents an archetypal ideal, and the heroine of the film, Ellie Arroway, is modeled after Hypatia, the Alexandrian martyr for science. For those who remember Cosmos, Sagan lavished mountains of praise on Hypatia in the series despite having no substantial record of achievement in the history of scientific thought. This choice makes sense when viewed through a gnostic lens because she represents the illuminated Sophia. Eleanor is Greek for “shining light” and Arroway is a play on Voltaire’s last name, Arouet. Her nickname is “Sparks” to signify the fact that she possesses Luciferian flame. Right away, Sagan is signaling a connection to gnosticism, Freemasonry, and by extension, the Hermetic roots of modern science. Played with heartfelt vigor by Jodie Foster, Ellie is a paragon of determination, grit, tenderness and the passionate thirst for discovery. She is the fearless seeker who is willing to persist in her quest for extraterrestrial life despite constant rejection and doubt from all corners. She remains steadfast in her convictions when facing the ridicule of the vapid, self-aggrandizing and conniving David Drumlin. She is also the radical empiricist who demands proof of God’s existence when probing the faith of Matthew McConaughey’s Palmer Joss.

This brings us to one of the film’s clever sleights of hand. Ellie is essentially a female version of David Hume or John Locke. In the wake of her second greatest tragedy, all her Catholic priest could offer was a few perfunctory words about how it was “God’s plan”. Pfft. Piss off, religion! She doesn’t believe in God because she needs empirical proof! Not mealy mouthed platitudes! Checkmate, conservatards! Bet you never heard THAT ONE before! Of course, this is by now an insufferably tiresome cliché. Materialism and empiricism is the bread and butter of the entire New Atheist community. For them, there is no valid knowledge outside the peer reviewed science or what can be observed in the realm of sense perception. But what the film doesn’t want you to notice is that this premise is in and of itself an article of faith! To Zemeckis’ credit, he makes this point explicit when Ellie is called upon to provide evidence that she actually did traverse the galaxy. There is no empirical evidence for the claim that all knowledge claims must be subject to empirical evidence. Furthermore, Ellie embodies a set of virtues. She is a heroic archetype. She’s tough. She’s conscientious. She’s honest. She’s principled. She’s loyal. She spends the bulk of the film asking people to believe in her quest for extraterrestrial life. The natural world has nothing to say about prescriptive ethics, duty, honor, integrity or morality. To ground an entire worldview in nothing more than a posture of skepticism and an unquestioned belief in the scientific method leads to either to nihilism or the substitution of politics for religious faith. Humans build and strengthen the architecture of morality through storytelling. We must ultimately subordinate ourselves to a hierarchy of authority which starts with the family and reaches its pinnacle in the nation state. Because we’re imperfect, we crave stories which simultaneously speak to our flawed nature yet appeal to our highest aspirations. The progressive worldview mostly rejects metaphysics. Subsequently, virtue must be smuggled through occult archetypes and esoteric metaphysics and Sagan has very skillfully achieved that in Ellie.

It is also noteworthy that Ellie is initially presented as a child with a dead mother. She eventually loses her father too, and this marks her as yet another Hollywood portrait of a child without parents whose life choices are informed in part to fulfill a longing borne of a prematurely severed connection and in part to insulate herself from the emotional vacuum at the core of her being. It’s little surprise that when she has her encounter with the “alien” species, it appears to her in the form that she would find most comforting: her father. Her life quest is wrapped in the rhetoric of scientific inquiry, but it reads as a sort of spiritual calling. The liberal democratic imperium needs atomized individuals pursuing life ambitions that advance scientific or material progress in one way or another. Preferably, it’s a pursuit untethered from family ties and religious tradition. This is entirely consistent with the professed agenda behind the mythology of extraterrestrial life as Arthur C. Clarke is on record stating in Brenda Denzler’s book, The Lure of the Edge.

Look Heres Arthur c Clarke and NASA and brookings institute admitting the alien psy op is to destroy xianity pic.twitter.com/jjlTpfFShF

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) September 17, 2016

Her counterpart, Palmer Joss, presents a clever subversion of expectations. Just as we saw in the relationship between Mulder and Scully in the X-Files, Contact reverses standard male and female attributes. Despite the numerous studies which demonstrate a higher degree of empathy and social skills in women, Sagan wrote Ellie as the hard bitten scientific realist consumed with a need for evidence. By contrast, Matthew McConaughey’s Palmer Joss is the believer. Granted, he’s an earthy crunchy academic theologian who’s influential enough to be anointed the spiritual advisor to the POTUS. His real world analogues are establishment cucks like Rick Warren and Tony Campolo. He represents a form of toothless Christianity that’s been opportunistically coopted by the establishment to help politicize the churches and lend moral authority to political agendas. Once again to Zemeckis’ credit, Joss lands a solid blow against the edifice of Ellie’s scientific materialism when he asks for proof that she loved her father. It’s the only cinematic moment of which I’m aware when a secular rationalist is left speechless by a theist.

Contact isn’t just an apologia for scientific materialism, but a work of occult theology. When Ellie presents the decryption primer to the Security Council, she insists that the civilization who sent the message had benign intentions because it was presented in the language of science and mathematics. Unlike the dumb religious retards who follow divine revelation, the machine plans were proof of a species who had harnessed the power of science to evolve beyond their primitive tendencies toward self-destruction. Here, Sagan and Zemeckis presume that unchecked technological progress all by itself is a virtue that will elevate and unite humanity. It’s exactly the kind of belief that’s promoted by UNESCO, the UN and their theological subsidiary, the Lucis Trust. They are trafficking occult teleology. As Palmer Joss rightfully pointed out as she made her pitch, what she received was a message emanating from a “booming voice from the sky”. Sagan substitutes three dimensional engineering schematics embedded in a digital black cube of Saturn for the Ten Commandments. She wants people to believe that the construction of the machine will only edify the human race. What atheists like Sagan conveniently ignore is the simple fact that fetishizing the scientific method doesn’t capture the imagination. What does animate human spirit is the possibility that our man made ambitions might unite the world and eventually bring us into contact with a higher intelligence.

Of course, this also means that we must also deify the corporate aristocracy behind the democratic imperium. As industrial mogul, S.R. Hadden, John Hurt is the Randian übermensch who funds Ellie’s ambitions, decrypts the extraterrestrial blueprints, and subcontracts with Japanese company to build a second machine. Without rich industrialists to bankroll these moonshot ideas, we will never achieve our globalist utopia, proles. Though he is portrayed as a sympathetic character, he is another spin on a Nimrod archetype. Zemeckis wants you to see him as a benevolent old coot but as his name suggests, he is a representation of the Assyrian despot, Esarhaddon. He is more accurately seen as a David Rockefeller or George Soros. He is among the wealthy capitalists who fund NGOs, populate academia with cultural Marxists, finance every conceivable fifth column organization and function as a de facto shadow government. Throughout the film, Hadden communicates to Ellie using the most sophisticated technology and possesses more intelligence about her than you would think a private citizen can access. When James Woods’ hardass conservative proposes the possibility that Hadden has perpetrated a hoax on the entire globe, your sympathies are already with Ellie, and by extension, Hadden. Tough shit, you dumb Alex Jones loving conspiratards. George Soros did nothing wrong. So shut it.

What’s most stunning about Contact is the degree to which it blurs the line between fiction and reality. Actual footage of Bill Clinton commenting on the Mars meteorite discovery in which he stresses the importance of ascertaining “facts” has been seamlessly inserted. Actual CNN anchors are “acting” as CNN anchors throughout the film commenting on a fictitious machine which opens wormholes. A news highlight discusses a fake group of religious fanatics committing mass suicide, and it just happens to mirror the actual mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult just a few months before the film’s release. I guess it’s just a lucky coincidence that all these things happened in time for Contact’s release. All of which begs a key question. If “real” news outlets like CNN and real politicians who present themselves as the arbiters of truth are willingly inserting themselves into a fake story about a contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence, why shouldn’t we assume that the “reality” they’re presenting isn’t every bit as synthetic as Contact itself?

While I disagree with his interpretation, Germain Lussier points out the ubiquity of telecommunications devices in the film. The fact that our contact with one another is now being heavily mediated, refracted and distorted through electronic media suggests this was subtle predictive programming. The internet may have brought the whole world together in ways that were unimaginable to previous generations, but the degree to which it has been a salutary force is debatable at best and detrimental at worst. I suggest that this film is tipping us to the possibility that the space program is ultimately about building and enhancing global panopticism.

Speaking of fictitious machines, Contact is basing its technological speculations on special relativity, but if we actually think about how the machine was supposed to work, it doesn’t add up. Resembling the classical model of the atom we learned in grade school, the machine was comprised of several interlocking steel rings. Presumably, with enough acceleration, the rings would convert to mass and tear the fabric of spacetime. Not to get all Neil deGrasse Tyson, but there is no known material that could withstand that kind of energy let alone an energy source to power it. But this came from the mind of Carl Sagan. A scientific mind, right? I don’t mind leaps of imagination, but when you’re presenting a speculative machine that’s linked to a very specific theoretical model that is itself unproven and unobserved, how is this different from theistic belief? Isn’t it interesting that the IMDB trivia page indicates that Carl Sagan wanted to ensure the “science” was correct and the word is bracketed in quotation marks? Isn’t it interesting that this very same visual idea was recycled in Event Horizon and instead of uniting us with benign entities, the machine in that film opened a portal to hell? Why should we presume that a dimensional portal will bring us into contact with benevolent beings as Ellie so fervently insists?

After recovering from her VR journey to the center of the galaxy, Ellie finds herself in the position of having to defend the veracity of her experience before an incredulous government oversight committee lead by a relentless James Woods. Without evidence, Ellie is forced to ask the country to believe that she traversed light years and encountered a simulacrum of her father. You should also believe that an Einstein-Rosen Bridge is legitimate science despite the complete absence of empirical evidence. Is it any wonder that Anita Sarkeesian and Christine Blasey Ford were able to weaponize #BelieveWomen so easily? The cool and dispassionate pursuit of the facts doesn’t hold when religious icons are being violated.

Ellie’s vision amounts to her burning bush moment. In that brief encounter, she was filled with a revelation of the preciousness of life that was so profound, she felt compelled to spread the Gospel of Intergalactic Gnosis with the world. As she descends the Capitol building stairs/Mt. Sinai, she passes through the pillars of Boaz and Jachin, and we behold the throngs of New World Israelites gathered together to pay homage to our gnostic savior. Having crossed the abyss on the Kabbalistic tree of life, she has reconciled the sky and the earth and attained Enlightenment. Joss’ profession of solidarity with Ellie doesn’t just signify a romantic happy ending, it’s the alchemical synthesis of science with divinity just as HP Blavatsky taught in her writings. No longer do we have to cling to the divisive notion that science is at war with faith. Scientism is an article of faith, but now, we can make common cause with religious people as long as they’re promoting a One World State God and don’t get carried away with any of that Jesus shit.

As shows like Netflix’s Maniac demonstrate, Hollywood is pushing the public closer to the idea that pharmacologically enhanced VR is going to provide people with the transcendent experience unavailable in our mundane existence. Even pop culture figures like Tom Delonge are going to great lengths to mainstream the existence of UFOs. Burning Man already has a cosmic temple to prep us for the new Cosmic AI God. Grimes has already written the first transhuman cyberpunk pop anthem. Science fiction films which posit the possibility of alien intelligence are a key component of this agenda. And Ellie Arroway was certainly among the most indelible characters of the modern era to illuminate the path.

Blink-182: Deep State Front Organization?

If you’ve read David McGowan’s expose of the Laurel Canyon scene, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, you wouldn’t be unreasonable to have some lingering skepticism and doubt. After all, it can’t be that everyone in the music industry is CIA/military shill, right? Probably not everyone, but when the exact pattern of connections McGowan uncovers in Weird Scenes repeats itself in 2018, cosmic coincidence seems less and less tenable.

I’d always found blink-182 repugnant and detestable. They perfectly embodied the post-Green Day mall punk vibe in all its hollow boorishness. They affected a posture of snot nosed, frat boy rebellion, but it always rang even more false and contrived than their contemporaries. To my ears, their songs were grating and stupid. As it turns out, my disdain is justified beyond all aesthetic considerations. It appears that blink-182 are a deep state front agency. Allow me to explain.

I ran across this piece in Consequence of Sound, and it piqued my interest right away. Everything about this story fit the Laurel Canyon pattern perfectly. What on earth is a clown like Mark Hoppus doing giving military advice to actual military personnel on a major operation? How was he granted permission to participate in the mission to locate Saddam Hussein? Who authorized his involvement in the first place? Where did he learn this skill? Musicians are clever people, but that’s some awfully specialized knowledge.

I did a little digging, and lo and behold, Mark Hoppus’ father, Tex, is a former military guy who designed MISSILES AND BOMBS. Well, no biggie, right? Blink-182 is his act of punk rebellion, right? I don’t know about you, but taking part in a major military operation and bragging about it on Twitter doesn’t exactly sound like an anti-establishment move to me.

Big deal though, right? Not so fast. If McGowan is right and celebrity pop culture is an extension of state propaganda and an ongoing psychological operation, then Hoppus’ admission is basically a rock n’ roll Argo moment. He’s making the global military imperium look cool, man! This is everything punk rock supposedly stood against! Besides, people pay way more attention to pop culture and celebrities than politicians. And remember when the music world #RESISTANCE was actually mobilized against the Iraq War? Like rockers were back in the day? Yet here’s Hoppus racking up likes on Twitter for being an American hero.

https://twitter.com/markhoppus/status/1011755149541298176?s=19

But it gets better.

Former guitarist, Tom DeLonge, hasn’t just gone on to explore new musical horizons, he fancies himself some kind of ufologist. However, this isn’t some idle teenage hobby that he’s managed to turn into a pop culture success. He’s got MAJOR military-industrial/intelligence muscle behind this endeavor.

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A post shared by Tom DeLonge (@tomdelonge)

So what are DeLonge and his deep state coterie up to? Based on what I read on the website at To The Stars Academy, it’s a synergistic amalgam of AI, big data, really heavy duty science-y shit that’s way above our heads and infotainment. Or something. But it’s loaded with fancy sounding buzzwords like Human Ultra-Experience Database, Engineering Space-Time Metrics, Brain-Computer Interface, and Telepathy! Telepathy, man! This is basically real life X-Men! So you know it’s gonna be awesome, bro!

We believe there are transformative discoveries within our reach that will revolutionize the human experience, but they can only be accomplished through the unrestricted support of breakthrough research, discovery and innovation.

Whoa. That’s some deep shit, Tom.

So, do you guys party with Seth Green?

But how deep is his association with John Podesta? Or Seth Green? It’s not very punk to endorse government secrecy, Tom. If the purpose of this project is to develop something “without the restrictions of government priorities”, what could be exposed that would cause you to be so concerned, Tom? Is this connected to the secret space program? His Instagram post indicates that it’s an opportunity to “change the way we view ourselves”. Given that kind of rhetoric, there can be little doubt that it is part of an extended psychological operation designed usher in a globalist technocracy.

Look Heres Arthur c Clarke and NASA and brookings institute admitting the alien psy op is to destroy xianity pic.twitter.com/jjlTpfFShF

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) September 17, 2016

If it’s just another attempt to leverage DeLonge’s pop cred to attract private money and publicity for some project that’s too hot for the black budget, he’s certainly succeeding in getting media attention in all the right places. Whatever it is he’s up to, he is pretty circumspect about the details.

And that kind of secrecy is what one would expect from a practitioner of the Craft.

But DeLonge left the band. What about the new guy, Matt Skiba? Well, I don’t think he is a radical departure from DeLonge in terms of his overall allegiances.

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A post shared by Skiba, Matthew T. (@matttskiba)

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A post shared by Skiba, Matthew T. (@matttskiba)

While he was a member of blink-182, DeLonge was singing about the existence of extraterrestrial life. Supposedly, this fascination drove a wedge between him and Hoppus. He claims he had to be secretive about his connections to the government. Yeah, right, Tom. I suspect that the more likely explanation is that their handlers have decided that making their connections to the military-intelligence complex public will make them more convincing than when they were just frat boy mall punk brats.

Nicholas Hagger: The Secret Founding of America

It’s important to study history, but it’s perhaps even more important to know through which lens history is being viewed. Facts matter, but historical accounts are always filtered through a set of ideological biases. No account of history is going to be completely neutral. Establishment historians will generally emphasize the significance of events as they relate to their political beliefs. Libertarians and other historical revisionists are also analyzing history through the lens of fidelity to or deviance from their own ideological orthodoxies. What most conventional readings of American history overlook is the role of secret societies, specifically Freemasonry, in the formation of the American republic. This perspective alone makes Nicholas Hagger’s Secret Founding of America an especially fascinating and essential read.

Though secret societies and occult traditions have been around for centuries, this aspect of history is generally overlooked. Likely the result of intensive cultural conditioning, these topics are generally regarded as the province of conspiracy theorists. A term which was deployed by our own state sanctioned secret society, the CIA, in order to diffuse selfsame criticism in the wake of the JFK assassination.

Hagger argues that Freemasonry was a revolutionary ideology that sought to build Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in America. Since it was a secret society from the beginning, it served as a sort of para-espionage, proto-intelligence organization. Revolutionary ideas could be discussed beyond the view of authority.

English Freemasonry then, was an occult and philosophical idea, an order whose members guarded the secret knowledge of the ages and which drew in Intellectuals dedicated to liberalism and civil and religious freedom. (89)

Hagger builds a surprisingly taut narrative which begins with America’s original colonists and brings us to present day. He contrasts the original “planting fathers” with the Founding Fathers who actually drafted the core documents on which the American republic was built. Where the planting fathers of the original American settlements in Plymouth, Jamestown and St. Augustine sought to build theocratic states from Christian traditions, the Founding Fathers were working from a distinctly secular and Masonic template which prioritized deistic, Enlightenment liberty and religious pluralism over orthodoxy.

Hagger’s account of the rise of the American religious right is brief, but persuasive. American colonists were children of European christendom, but diverse in belief. The entire “religious right” as we know it today comprised a coalition of Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans and evangelical Calivinists who collectively sought to reverse the trend towards rationalism and secularism. Given that these denominations were Protestant schismatics from the start, the mass proliferation of garish megachurches and their collective devolution into carnival barker hucksters makes more sense. As a consequence of another movement influenced by CIA infiltration, ecumenism, these churches have largely been coopted by the globalist establishment. This goes a long way toward explaining the bland progressive unanimity of the entire spectrum of Protestant denominations, syncretistic New Age faiths and post-Vatican II Catholicism Lite that now permeates the culture. Hagger’s account undermines any conservative claim that America is a Christian nation. Masonic with a Christian veneer, yes. Christian? No.

The hidden hand of Freemasonry can be found moving every significant geopolitical event from the French Revolution to the American Civil War and up to the major events of the 20th and 21st centuries. All of the foundational documents upon which the nation was built from the Articles of Confederation up to the Constitution itself bore the influence of Masonry. The christening of nation itself was an oath made on a Masonic bible by our very first Freemason president, George Washington. There’s a ton of juicy stuff in this book, particularly the details around the origins of the Civil War, and I doubt any of it makes it into today’s history classes. The presence of Freemasonry continues to be felt through numerous SPECTRE-like tentacles which extend into supranational entities like the EU and UN as well as private foundations, NGOs, and sub-Masonic organizations such as Bilderberg and the CFR.

America is indeed a unique nation in world history in that it’s a nation built from a collection of abstract principles decoupled from any specific religious beliefs while simultaneously projecting a veneer of Christianity. Herein lies the great triumph of American republicanism, and by extension, Freemasonry itself. American Masonic ideals have essentially supplanted the role of religion. Within the template of classical liberalism you have the appearance of a radically divergent left wing and right wing, but each ideology runs on top of the same operating system. Both sides are revolutionary ideologies. Both comprise two sides of a Masonic dialectic which seeks to transmute two opposing ideological poles of base matter into an ascended, alchemical synthesis. The kicker is that the Masonic agenda was never limited to America. It was always about building a global government.

This New Atlantis would be a paradise in which men would follow reason, and work for a universal world republic that would replicate the Utopian conditions of America throughout the known world. Secret knowledge would be passed on from generation to generation in the Freemasons’ Temple, a recreation of the Temple of Solomon in which Solomon became the wisest of rulers. (87)

As Hagger correctly observes, “it is easier to unify the world if it is divided into two camps” (197). The power of this dialectic simply cannot be gainsaid. What better way to engineer global domination than to present scientific materialism, evolutionary pragmatism, democratic capitalism and radical egalitarianism as the highest human aspirations? Simply pit the two sides against one another, paint all attempts at metaphysics, traditionalism and objectivity as relics of a bygone age, ensure that the banking/military complex continues to flood the culture with degeneracy, and you have a completely pliable, compliant and atomized population who simply don’t know any other way nor are they interested in questioning the existing paradigm. Ensure that each side has a radical wing so that you can have an incubation chamber for fringe ideas that you want to eventually mainstream. Since all discourse is mediated through the social media panopticon, you can police the boundaries of acceptable discourse and any deviation from the popular orthodoxy will be regarded as beneath contempt. Welcome to the global Masonic Atlanticist Nutopia, proles!

Given that Hagger builds such a damning case against the Freemasonic agenda to build a global government, his conclusion is surprising. He doesn’t object to the idea of a global government, but merely hopes it can be built on Christian values. Maybe that’s how he managed to get a publisher for this book at the end of the day. Regardless, The Secret Founding of America is an important read for anyone who wants to understand America’s true history and spiritual essence.

National Treasure and The Masonic States of America

I was dismissive of Disney’s National Treasure when it was released in 2004. It seemed like a more sedate remix of The Da Vinci Code for a Disney audience, and neither the premise nor Nic Cage’s cinematic charms were enough to make me care. Art hits you in different ways at different times in your life, and I doubt I would have been attuned to the significance of National Treasure’s subtext at that time. Time passes and perspectives change. National Treasure is exactly what I sensed it would be and succeeds as a light espionage/action mystery thriller. But there’s a lot going at the symbolic level that’s very explicit and warrants a deeper examination. Because this was a Disney production aimed at a young audience, I suggest this movie’s pro-Freemasonry message is kind of a big deal from a cultural programming perspective.

I’ve been paying more attention to the architecture of morality and the ways in which it interacts with the belief apparatus. This has led me to examine the sturdiness of the underpinnings of the Enlightenment and American republicanism. Despite being largely perceived as a turn towards secularism and scientism, one of the hidden hands behind these revolutions is in fact an occulted spirituality of another kind: Freemasonry. Though “occult” broadly refers to esoteric spirituality of every kind, it also means “hidden”, and in the case of Freemasonry, it is certainly applicable. The fact that this film is linking Freemasonry to America’s foundations is intentional and borne out by history. While there’s certainly dramatic license taken in the details, the underlying truths are noteworthy all by themselves.

National Treasure is basically a variation on Raiders of the Lost Ark with overt references to Freemasonry instead of encrypted ones. As Benjamin Gates, Nic Cage is a adventurer/historian who’s dedicated his life to unraveling a mystery that was revealed to him by his Mason grandfather, John Adams Gates. As the elder patriarch, Christopher Plummer spins a fantastic tale of the Knights Templar and the untold riches they kept hidden from the Muslims and the British. The Knights managed to conceal the treasure in America, but the map is encoded in disparate objects and letters that are only decrypted by initiates of Masonic mysteries. Fast forward to the present, and Ben Gates’s quest has taken him to the arctic regions of the globe to unravel the mysterious message he uncovered that fateful day. Once the object is discovered, it unlocks another clue which points them towards a hidden map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. Sean Bean’s Ian Howe gets greedy and the race to acquire the Declaration is on. Accompanied by trusty sidekick, Riley Poole and sexy museum curator, Abigail Chase, our heroes scramble to outsmart the dastardly Howe and his goons.

While the conspiracy community is awash in theories over hidden Masonic messaging in entertainment and the Illuminati conspiracy it conceals, National Treasure is one film that isn’t hiding its symbols or their connections to Masonry. They’re front and center. The controversy is whether these symbols are benign or malevolent, and the conclusion you reach will depend completely on your moral, ideological and spiritual frame of reference. National Treasure clearly wants you to see them as benign. Not only that, it wants you to equate Freemasonry with the Founding Fathers and American values themselves. This isn’t far off the mark, either.

American republicanism is seen as the fulfillment of the Enlightenment consensus enshrined in the formation of a new nation. For the first time in history, religious morality was mostly decoupled from the state, and compulsory religious practice was expunged from the law. Religious pluralism, secular reason, the scientific outlook, radical egalitarianism and democratic cosmopolitanism would be canonized as the gods of a new civic religion. This collection of presuppositions formed the basis of what we now simply identify as the pillars of classical liberalism. Depending on your point of view, it’s a set of ideas you want to see conserved for posterity, consumed in a brand new revolutionary conflagration or rejected as a Gnostic heresy.

How does Freemasonry have anything to do with classical liberalism?

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/EuOpiDiIFK

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/gLR1Q8qsM8

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/zBJIfv1zuS

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/IiYxvY6OQ1

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/D6D132dmJO

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/4pWLYDIjOP

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

While I recognize this isn’t a popular thesis amongst the woke intelligentsia, I’m inclined to believe that the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the underlying ideals of American republicanism are Masonic in nature. Freemasonry doesn’t officially call itself a religion but it asks its initiates to accept the existence of a Supreme Being. Not unlike the deism for which Thomas Paine advocated in The Age of Reason. A single, infinitely mysterious, divine monad which unites all religions, creeds and races and can never be fully understood by the human mind. Though his status as a Mason is unconfirmed, older editions of Paine’s Age of Reason even featured an essay on the origins of Freemasonry. Most people don’t self-identify as deists or take the same view towards spirituality that Paine did, but his worldview prevailed. The deistic universalism for which he advocated can now be found in the Christian ecumenical movement, New Age spirituality, Buddhist hipsters, and the various manifestations of UN-affiliated, syncretistic Blavatsky lite which also includes Freemasonry. This spiritual mindset came bundled with all of the presuppositions that accompany classical liberalism. Paine’s deism was repackaged and continues to be sold as a perpetually revolutionary set of American ideals with new labels like “liberty”, “democracy”, “equality” and perhaps most importantly, #TOLERANCE . These lofty ideals mask the Promethean promise of a very seductive spiritual truth: apotheosis of the individual.

The fact that these words occlude their Masonic origins is consistent with its nature as as a secret society and a “peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols”. Throughout the film, Ben Gates has to decode various ciphers, messages, and hidden cryptograms. While this makes for lots of intrigue for the viewers, this is a bit of revelation of the method. Masonic symbols are hidden in plain sight and embedded in every corner of the culture, but invisible to the profane masses due to their ubiquity. Whether they’re used in corporate logos, rock band album art, or the infamous All Seeing Eye that adorns our Federal Reserve Notes, these symbols are imbued with meaning and work at the subconscious level.

Because humans are wired for belief, the question merely becomes one of the awareness of the belief mechanism and the direction in which its pointed. If you are atheist, agnostic, an occultist or subscribe to any non-Orthodox Christian or Islamic faith, the mysticism of Freemasonry is probably no big deal. From an Orthodox Christian or traditional Catholic perspective, this is probably seen as another example of pop culture trafficking a Luciferian doctrine packaged as family entertainment. Freemasonry, or Gnosticism, was challenged as heresy first by Saint Irenaeus and much later by Pope Leo XIII.

However, herein lies the film’s and Freemasonry’s great sleight of hand. Conservatives proclaim the belief that America was a Christian nation while progressives generally claim that it is secular and pluralistic society in which American propositions supersede proper religion. I suggest that the progressives are fundamentally correct. Conservatives may grouse about the erasure of quasi-Christian norms and traditions in the public square, but the ideals of American republicanism were departures from traditional Christian theology in the first place. The Christianity that took root in the early colonies was mostly Puritanism which in turn gave rise to increasingly atomized denominations. Add in Roman Catholics, Baptists, Unitarian Universalists, atheists and a dozen different versions of Protestantism and the idea of a unified Christian body politic becomes an increasingly untenable proposition. Subsequently, progressives are constantly able to capitalize on a fractured conservative constituency by painting themselves as the pious majority and their opponents as callow hypocrites. Perhaps America’s true national religion is the Cult of the Individual smuggled into the psyche through veiled Masonic euphemisms and symbols. Perhaps Freemasonry’s great triumph was that it swapped out religious orthodoxy in favor of a doctrine of radical individualism divorced from ethnicity, history or an abiding national identity. 231 years after the ratification of the Constitution, Disney decides the time is ripe to canonize Freemasonry with a family friendly action movie which blurs reality and fiction sufficiently well that the public likely remains anesthetized to the possibility that they’re unwitting vessels for a spiritual worldview that goes unquestioned.

Most people would shrug this off under the presumption that there’s nothing to question in classical liberalism. It gave birth to America, so what’s the problem? That’s a reasonable question, but I’m dubious on where the classical liberal framework is leading us. While those who claim a stake in the so called “intellectual dark web” are attempting to tend the breached walls of classical liberalism in order to forestall the continued advance of neo-Marxist identity politics, the #EQUALITY goalposts move further and further into the Twilight Zone of pure insanity. Classical liberalism has begotten postmodern identity politics. Classical liberalism has created a marketplace for Marxist academics, feminist hacks, despotic technocrats, racial demagogues and globalist sociopaths like George Soros who engineer social unrest, capitalize on the chaos, and then fund the fifth column organizations who work to unravel society even further. It’s the freedom to accept a marketplace for depravity, degeneracy and perpetual revolution. It’s the freedom to be mocked and demonized for even suggesting that there are traditions that are worth conserving. Progressives like to see themselves as uniquely empathetic and attuned to the suffering of the underdog, but somehow, this empathy can only be realized through neverending political protest, language policing, and exerting absolute dominion over the cultural dialogue. The subsequent result of this worldview has been an atomized population, moral relativism, postmodern subjectivism, and the radical quantification, automation and commodification of life itself. We’re at a point where the simple desire to marry someone of your own race is considered a shudder inducing rallying cry of “white supremacy”.

Paul Revere. Grand Master Freemason.

By the film’s conclusion, Gates uncovers an enormous treasure of what appears to be Egyptian artifacts and relics. The film ties Freemasonry back to its pagan and polytheistic Egyptian roots. Since these artifacts were of incalculable value to civilization, both Gates and the Freemasons come out looking like heroes and stewards of ancient mysteries that would have been destroyed in different hands. Regardless of how much dramatic license is taken in the details, the mere fact that our very first president, George Washington, was himself a Freemason lends weight to the myth. America’s list of known Freemasons who’ve occupied the Oval Office, worked in powerful federal agencies or scaled the heights of pop culture success lends even more gravitas to the claim of Freemasonry’s widespread influence in American life and thought. When Harvey Keitel’s Agent Sadusky flashes his Masonic ring, we are to understand that the Brotherhood extends to the highest echelons of power throughout the nation to this day. Naturally, Gates is exonerated from criminal charges because his higher service to mankind is recognized by the Brotherhood. Besides, laws are only for the peasants anyway.

Ben Franklin. Freemason.

As is often the case with Hollywood films, the fictitious veneer often masks a reality. The film propelled the heroes through the National Archives, Independence Hall and culminated in a church in lower Manhattan. Gates had to uncover secrets from historical documents and objects hidden within the buildings. Three years ago, when the Massachusetts State House politicians hosted a ceremony to unearth the time capsule buried by Paul Revere 220 years ago, the Freemasons were the ones who were entrusted with the task. Just like the film, the contents were passed to the Museum of Fine Arts staff. Not exactly a roomful of Egyptian artifacts and relics, but of significant historical value nonetheless.

In a manner that was very similar to the film, Freemasons are present at the unearthing of a significant piece of American history and their connection to our national heritage is cemented into to minds of the public. Freemasons are woven into the fabric of American leadership, history and ideas in ways that, prior to this film, go mostly unrecognized. On the surface, it seems pretty benign and even downright noble. That’s certainly what Disney wants you to think. But Disney is in business of manufacturing symbols that create new realities. You could say it’s a kind of magic. They say Disney is “the most magical place on earth.” Something tells me their fascination with magic makes them natural allies with Freemasonry. I’m just not sure it’s as benign as they want you to think.

Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason

The period of European history known as The Enlightenment was the period in which many of the hallowed values that define classical liberalism were canonized. Among these values were constitutionalism, freedom of speech, and most importantly, separation of church and state. Thomas Paine remains one of the most celebrated exponents of liberal thought. Capping off a trifecta of canonical liberal texts which included Common Sense and Rights of Man, The Age of Reason represents Paine’s defense of freedom of conscience in matters of faith. More specifically, this book is a rejection of religious institutions and an attack on the historicity of the Bible, divine revelation and miracles. Paine is explicit about his belief in God and is affirming deism, but the arguments he sets forth are scarcely different from those we hear from contemporary religious skeptics. It is, in effect, a work of proto-atheism. It’s a very short hop from Paine’s presumed skepticism and mind numbing pedantry to Dawkins and Hitchens.

Published in three parts in 1794, 1795 and 1807, The Age of Reason rattled a few cages due to the perceived proximity to French Jacobinism. Like Voltaire, Paine’s writing was a sort of intellectual punk rock of its day. Despite this reputation for being a work of heresy, it is an exceedingly tedious and tendentious treatise. The Age of Reason, both the book and the broader Enlightenment consensus are perhaps slightly overrated. Common Sense might have helped build a consensus for the American Revolution, but Paine wasn’t necessarily held in high esteem by some of the Founders. This book opens a window of insight on why this might be so. The elevation of reason as the principle method by which we obtain knowledge and derive universal principles has arguably laid a foundation for moral relativism and a purely materialistic view of the world.

I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Thomas Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine. – John Adams on Thomas Paine

Perhaps more significantly, it also appears to be a stepping stone on the pathway to scientism. He openly asserts that the study of natural philosophy, mathematics and mechanical science is the “true theology”. This conflation of moral virtue with the pursuit of scientific discovery is essentially an article of faith for progressives and atheists alike. The laws of the natural world are discovered. How the human mind chooses to apply these discoveries is up for grabs. This pursuit may be moral and ethical, but it may be completely malevolent. The methods by which data is gathered may be ethical or they may be cherry picked in order to confirm a bias or a preconceived conclusion. Whether it’s the first time such criticisms and claims have been committed to print I cannot say, but The Age of Reason cements a perception of antagonism between science and faith that persists to this day.

The first section is essentially the entire blueprint for modern atheism with one key difference: Paine actually believes in God. This difference is crucial, but every criticism he levels at Christian belief can be found in the rhetorical bedrock of every modern atheist and agnostic from Harris to Tyson. His contention is that the biblical teachings of belief in miracles, resurrection, the Holy Trinity and young earth creationism have engendered an antipathy towards science and paved a path for superstition over reason. He claims that this proliferation of superstitious belief has bred an open hostility to scientific advancement; a claim which is not borne out by recent polling of the scientific community. The absence of any specific examples does not lend credibility to the claim, but this omission didn’t seem to prevent the perception from spreading.

But this, the supporters or partizans of the Christian system, as if dreading the result, incessantly opposed, and not only rejected the sciences, but persecuted the professors.

In the subsequent section, Paine proceeds to dissect the first six books of the Old Testament in painstaking detail. He lays out a trove of information which he claims falsifies the historicity of the books. It’s rather tedious stuff. When he finally gets to discussing his fondness for the Book of Job, it becomes apparent that perhaps his interpretation of the remaining texts is uncharitable and narrow. He explains why it is a text he holds in high esteem because of the lessons it imparts on human suffering and the striving towards contentment. More importantly, he is perhaps missing the fact that the Bible is not necessarily designed to impart historical knowledge, but that it represents hundreds of years of mankind striving to rise above its animal nature and reach for some ideal of divine perfection.

The one argument that sets this book apart from atheist orthodoxy is Paine’s unequivocal belief in the connection between deistic faith and the objective existence of moral truth. This also appears to be a point of agreement between Kant and Paine since Kant argued that you needed an a priori cognitive structure through which to process sense data.

In the final section, he takes a sledgehammer to the New Testament by claiming that “Christianity only produces atheists and fanatics”, but history has proven this contention false. Worst of all, his view of the French Revolution seems deeply ahistorical. He contends that the intolerance of the Church had transferred into the realm of politics which is the exact opposite of reality. It was, in fact, secular fanaticism which culminated in the establishment of a violent, state sponsored secular religion known as the Cult of Reason. The magnitude of Jacobin violence meted out to the Church and the Christian faith during The Reign of Terror is staggering.

Paine’s criticisms sound scarcely different from the generic attacks on “religion” that one would find on an atheist meme or a Bill Maher rant. Ironically, Paine considers the New Testament itself as a work of atheism. I’m not sure how much value the Bible has for the individual reading it in order to find historical or chronological error and contradiction. The Bible was apparently written over a span of approximately 1500 years. The individuals who wrote the scriptures and the process of collecting these works is indeed a subject worthy of scrutiny. However, I suggest that these concerns are secondary to the larger significance to human moral psychology. If one were to take a charitable view, the Bible could be viewed as a collection of works which reveals man striving for metaphysical transcendence. They are designed to reveal man struggling to articulate things beyond what his mind can know or obtain solely through the accumulation of sense data. It is meant to form the bedrock through which knowledge is assimilated so that the works of man would express the divine ideal. Paine’s exercise feels like a wrong turn.

While I can certainly appreciate that this work was transgressive in its day and probably helped pave the way for a multiplicity of views on faith both benign and malevolent, I’m strongly inclined to think that perhaps it planted the seed of destruction for Reason itself. The human capacity for reason and the discipline of logic are high level functions of the human mind. These abilities are cultivated and are certainly not evenly distributed throughout the population. The human capacity for morality, which is itself a form of faith, supersedes any concern for logic or reason. When it comes to perceptions of moral imperatives, reason is often utterly ineffectual as a mode of persuasion. The compulsion to confirm existing biases and affirm tribal alliances nullifies the possibility of reasoned debate or analysis. Moreover, the progressive Left has essentially hijacked scientific reasoning and used it as a substitute for ideological moralizing in a manner similar to Paine, but less explicit. Humanity is clearly wired for faith of some kind. If this capacity isn’t funneled into some kind of theism or, at minimum, belief in transcendent moral absolutes, it tends to be transferred to the secular equivalent of Ultimate Authority: the State. To what extent does the capacity for reason even enter the dialogue when morality has been ceded to the secular priesthood? As current events attest, not much, if at all.

The Age of Reason offers very little that’s meaningful or relevant to the world today. The distinctions between science and morality have been steamrolled and the floodgates of atheism have been opened since its publication. I’d argue there’s nothing in the Christian faith or the Bible that hasn’t been picked apart a thousand times. The Christian faith has already endured every criticism that can be made, and it still ended up producing the freest and most prosperous societies on earth. So free in fact, that the tools of Reason have been deployed to undermine the theological foundations of the West just as Nietzsche feared. The battle for Western civilization in which we’re currently engaged has precipitated a reappraisal and reaffirmation of the ideas at its core. Paine was correct to assert the existence of moral truth, but his dismissal of the broader metaphysical significance of scripture was perhaps a bit cavalier and hubristic. If any faith could use some more of Thomas Paine’s questioning spirit in 2017, it’s Islam.

Voltaire: Candide

François-Marie Arouet, better known to the world as Voltaire, was an author, philosopher, and provocateur extraordinaire. Rooted in a fervent belief in freedom of thought, he repeatedly broached subjects deemed forbidden by authority, and became the living embodiment of secular Enlightenment values. Candide was the novella that earned him his eternal infamy. The scorn he directed at the Catholic Church would scarcely raise an eyebrow today, but other aspects of the novel would arguably be just as, if not more scandalous now if he attempted to publish it today. In addition to its brutal depictions of rape and violence, Candide is a vicious satire of Leibniz’ philosophy of optimism. It’s filled to the brim with barbed criticisms of religious leaders, military culture and government officials, but delivered under the breezy veneer of a simple romantic adventure.

With Candide, Voltaire set out to skewer what he perceived to be the false piety and facile moralizing of the institutions and authorities of his day. He was one of the original trolls of Western civilization who canonized a spirit of irreverence that’s found throughout the ages in the works of Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Lenny Bruce, and presently, Milo Yiannopolous. Though Milo is routinely compared to Voltaire, I believe this comparison to be only partially true. Voltaire’s provocations are analogous to Milo’s in the sense that he offended prevailing sensitivities, but the targets of his ridicule, specifically his barbs directed at Jesuits and Christianity, feel like Maheresque precursors of the now shopworn clichés of atheists and the Left.

Though superficially a bildungsroman, the ultimate object of Voltaire’s ridicule was Leibniz’ Theodicy which was expressed through Candide’s mentor, Pangloss. “This is the best of all possible worlds,” Pangloss tells Candide from the luxurious confines of Castle Thunder-ten-tronckh in the kingdom of Westphalia. After being banished from the castle for getting a little too hot and heavy with the Duke’s niece, Cunégonde, Candide is beset by one misfortune after another as he traverses through Europe and the New World. Candide finds the naïvete of his wordview repeatedly challenged as he tries to reconcile the message of his mentor with the cruel reality of life outside castle walls.

Though he was a professed deist, the religious dogma, fanaticism, and hypocrisy of Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all sent to Voltaire’s literary guillotine throughout the book. Candide leaves no religious cow un-slaughtered.

Candide translates to “optimism”, and above all else, Voltaire sought to poke Leibniz’ vision of optimism squarely in the eye. Voltaire saw this philosophy as hopelessly naïve and an inadequate lens through which to view the horror and depravity of the world. One can certainly appreciate that this work was deeply transgressive in its day, but Voltaire’s critique feels like little more than a petty gripe rooted in a failure to grasp the essence of Leibniz’ message. Of course the world is filled with depravity, suffering and hardship. These phenomena exist because they test the faithful. Rather than being an excuse to engage in self-deception through recitations of vacant aphorisms, I suspect Leibniz promoted this philosophy as a way of embracing the totality of life, good and bad. It’s far more challenging to find reasons to be hopeful about humanity when you’ve seen it at its worst. Can you find a reason to be hopeful after your home has been devastated by an earthquake? Can you find forgiveness and happiness after you’ve been brutally violated? Voltaire eventually resolves this conflict with a very modest aphorism of his own, but he seems to view this philosophy as something shallow, enervating and mind numbing rather than being a lens through which to view even the worst human suffering.

Voltaire is particularly scathing in his treatment of the Jesuits. Upon arrival in South America, Candide and his manservant, Cacambo, avoid being served as the main course in a tribal cannibal feast after calmly explaining to them that neither was, in fact, a Jesuit and that he had just impaled his Jesuit brother. On these grounds alone, Candide and Cacambo are spared this gruesome fate. It’s droll gallows humor, and he’s obviously having a bit of rude fun at the expense of the numerous Jesuit missionaries who ventured to South America in the 17th and 18th centuries, but he also appears to hold that appeals to reason are universal regardless of cultural or language differences. This strikes me as proto-SJW Kumbaya fantasy.

Voltaire’s view of Islam was largely negative, and the one aspect of the story that would most assuredly arouse a shitstorm of scandal to this day would be his portrayal of the Muslims. Candide is eventually reunited with Cunégonde only to discover that she was raped and maimed at the hands of the Bulgars. But just when you think it can’t get any worse, their new companion, the illegitimate daughter The Princess of Palestrina and Pope Urban X, tells her tale of woe. Known only as the old woman, she recounts a blood curdling tale of her rape by a “loathsome Negro”, and her mother’s brutal murder at the hands of the Muslims. Since Islam and the effects of Muslim immigration remain a political third rail, this aspect of the book would easily arouse controversy today if anyone in any academic setting were actually reading it.

But that’s not the only thing that would draw the ire of the contemporary Thought Police. His treatment of Don Isaachar has drawn accusations of antisemitism and that most ghastly of contemporary ThoughtCrimes: RACISM. Don Isaachar is one of Cunégonde’s early captors, and is portrayed as greedy and immoral. I don’t find it particularly antisemitic since it’s not out of the question that Jews like Don Isaachar existed. Voltaire is an equal opportunity offender and he is just as harsh on the Catholic Inquisitor and the Muslims. Besides, like every other manufactured outrage, it doesn’t make sense to judge yesterday’s art against today’s warped standards of Social Justice propriety.

Candide’s arrival in the fabled land of Eldorado certainly suggests that Voltaire was sympathetic towards socialist thought and had utopian notions of his own around how society could look if Enlightenment ideals could be expressed in his ideal monarchy. The citizens of Eldorado have an advanced economy with a dedicated scientific class, public institutions, housing, and art. They have access to precious stones and metals, but they are unmotivated by the accumulation of wealth and give them freely to Candide. In this respect, one detects the unmistakable seeds of proto-progressive economics, scientism and other related doctrines of social reform.

When Candide finally meets the one man who allegedly “has it all”, Signor Pococurante, Voltaire uses it as another opportunity to make fun of another coddled elitist, but it also betrays a certain cynicism towards the philosophical and cultural legacy of the West which now pervades the modern Left. Candide is dumbstruck as Signor Pococurante dispenses one blistering criticism after another towards every art form and philosophical work of importance. Voltaire wants to tear away at what he perceived as a false veil of deference towards these allegedly Great Works, but like his treatment of Leibniz, it feels slightly misplaced. Signor Pococurante sounds like a jaded hipster or academic progressive who listens to NPR, acquired a liberal arts degree, and has very specific, and mostly negative opinions about everything in the cultural sphere. One could take all of Signor Pococurante’s snide remarks, drop in a couple references to bell hooks, Howard Zinn and Judith Butler, and he’d sound just like a garden variety, Tumblr ready, Social Justice Warrior preparing for a career writing for Vox. This cynicism towards the cultural legacy of the West is now the norm. Within the cloistered halls of academia, so-called “educators” openly cultivate an active hostility towards Western thought as the font of all human opression.

Just like the numerous contemporary atheist critics of Christianity who’ve fancied themselves the torchbearers of Voltaire’s flame, Voltaire was a moralist at heart and his literary jabs were designed to expose the hypocrisy of those who claimed to be arbiters of morality. Whether taking shots at the sexual indiscretions of Catholic clergy, the brutality of the Inquisitors or the Jesuits who do not practice the teachings of Christ they preach, Candide rightfully inferred that the ordained guardians of morality should live by the standards they imposed on the laity.

Society needs people like Voltaire in order to shock people out of complacent obedience and expose social taboos to sunlight. Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the Islamic world needs its own Voltaire in order to ignite a reformation within the Islamic faith. Institutional power, whether state, religious or academic, rarely lives up to its responsibility to uphold the truth or live by the standards it imposes on the public. Yet, people crave the truth, and above all else, crave both a sense of moral certitude and to see hypocrisy exposed. Since the truth often dies within the walls of power, the responsibility to stand up for the truth always redounds to the individual. Humorists and satirists like Voltaire have often been the catalysts of change that puncture the seal of propriety that the self-appointed arbiters of morality have so assiduously tightened.

Voltaire was the court jester of his time who sought to answer ancient moral conundrums by poking fun at what he perceived to be the strictures and limitations of prevailing orthodoxy. Some of Candide still would arouse controversy today, but his overall posture of enlightened contempt towards the conservative attitudes and institutions of his time has become its own orthodoxy of progressive chic. The poles of entrenched thinking have reversed, and what was controversial in its day is blasé today. There’s nothing even remotely transgressive or edgy about ridiculing Christian morality, institutions or the broader legacy of Western philosophy in 2017. Milo draws comparisons to Voltaire today because today’s elites are, in many ways, the intellectual progeny of Voltaire himself. Whatever validity there was in Voltaire’s quest for a secular moral order in its day has devolved into the smug wisecracking of Bill Maher, the proto-neurofascism of Sam Harris, and a postmodern academic hegemony of absolutist relativism. All of whom are eagerly marching towards Gomorrah, but still doggedly cling to the delusion that Eldorado is the final destination.

While Candide may be showing its age, Voltaire’s spirit is evergreen because Puritanism knows no ideology, and people know who the busybodies are. Candide’s message of “tending one’s own garden” is a sufficiently universal ethical and moral principle, but the modern progressive intelligentsia have very specific ideas about what you can plant, how big it can be, and what pronouns you can use while tending it. Russell Brand, Bill Maher and John Oliver may imagine themselves to be the secular dragonslayers of hypocrisy who descend directly from Voltaire’s sacred order, but they’re actually the effete royalists who tacitly defend the new priesthood. Voltaire’s flame burns most brightly in the shitposting of Milo, the trolling of Steven Crowder, the savagery of Bearing and the meme magic of 4Chan. Candide is both of its time and timeless because there will always be priests, politicians, academics and self-appointed behavior cops and thought police who deserve to be exposed, and there’s no better weapon than satire and ridicule.

Thomas Paine: Common Sense

Just like the famous shot heard around the world from the battle of Lexington, Thomas Paine’s liberty treatise from 1776 opens with a fire of clarity and purpose. Trumpian pugilism notwithstanding, it is a rare commodity in today’s era of political obscurantism and postmodernist chicanery.

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

In four sentences, Paine draws a critical distinction that has been buried under years of political rhetoric and false morality. In the classical liberal formulation, the nation state exists only to punish violations of individual liberty and property. In the modern progressive mind, the nation state is the ultimate arbiter of virtue whose guns and prisons can somehow be repurposed to serve a seemingly endless list of moral imperatives. The ballot box can magically confer an ever expanding list of “rights” to any group claiming the mantle of oppression.

Thomas Paine embodies what is now referred to as classical liberalism. Since today’s liberals have perverted and collapsed this basic distinction beyond all recognition, Common Sense restores the word “liberal” to its true meaning.

In Common Sense, Paine makes an appeal to American colonists to secede from British rule and form a constitutionally limited State. It is, in many ways, the first #Brexit. It is equal parts polemic, Biblical history and political philosophy.

It’s easy to understand why this wouldn’t go down so well in today’s Age of Social Justice. Besides being the work of a white male, Common Sense’s primary object is anathema to the modern Left: liberty. In contrast to the childish romanticism of the modern Left’s conception of the federal State, Paine views government without the blinkers of progressive pablum. He sees it as at best, a necessary evil, and at worse, an engine of destruction.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

Paine even attempts an argument that has been all but abandoned by the modern Left: an appeal to economic common sense. Paine views the construction of a naval fleet as a unique opportunity for economic gain and common defense. Rather than being another screed of a tyrant reaching for imperial power, we hear a humble man making a rational appeal to economic logic in service of rallying the skills and resources of his countrymen in order to fulfill a single revolutionary objective.

No country on the globe is so happily situated, or so internally capable of raising a fleet as America. Tar, timber, iron, and cordage are her natural produce. We need go abroad for nothing. Whereas the Dutch, who make large profits by hiring out their ships of war to the Spaniards and Portuguese, are obliged to import most of the materials they use. We ought to view the building a fleet as an article of commerce, it being the natural manufactory of this country. It is the best money we can lay out. A navy when finished is worth more than it cost. And is that nice point in national policy, in which commerce and protection are united. Let us build; if we want them not, we can sell; and by that means replace our paper currency with ready gold and silver.

Paine even expresses a concern for fiscal prudence and the burden that profligate spending would place on future generations. The disdain he heaps on the politician who trades political favors for power is especially refreshing.

But to expend millions for the sake of getting a few vile acts repealed, and routing the present ministry only, is unworthy the charge, and is using posterity with the utmost cruelty; because it is leaving them the great work to do, and a debt upon their backs, from which they derive no advantage. Such a thought is unworthy a man of honor, and is the true characteristic of a narrow heart and a pedling politician.

Paine promoted a fervent belief in religious freedom, and the idea that it is the indispensable duty of government to protect this freedom.

As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself, I fully and conscientiously believe, that it is the will of the Almighty, that there should be diversity of religious opinions among us: It affords a larger field for our Christian kindness. Were we all of one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and on this liberal principle, I look on the various denominations among us, to be like children of the same family, differing only, in what is called, their Christian names.

It’s very easy to read this and use it as a bludgeon against contemporary pro-Trump/anti-Muslim sentiment, but I believe it’s important to remember that this sentiment came from an avowed deist, and specifically, one who was raised in the Christian tradition. Has any similar sentiment arisen anywhere in Islamic culture? Does Islam promote a diversity of religious opinion now or at any other point in history? To what extent is this belief of religious pluralism shared by contemporary Muslims? Will progressives hold Muslims to this standard when they profess intolerance towards non-belief in Islam? Paine may have been appealing to what people in Western society regard as universal principles, but it doesn’t follow that every culture will share these principles.

What’s especially refreshing about Common Sense is the absence of the stink of academia. That’s not to say that all academic thought is staid and stolid, but Paine’s prose burns with vigor because this is the work of a man who grasps the historical portent of the moment and knows that he has a winning argument.

At the center of Paine’s plea for liberty is an appeal to posterity, decency and yes, common sense. Though Paine is largely viewed as one of the founding fathers of modern liberalism, the contemporary Left has all but abandoned Paine style liberalism. Modern progressivism has traded the generosity of spirit and moral clarity of Paine for a shrill, condescending elitism which prioritizes identity politics and subservience to perceived institutional expertise over individual liberty. I doubt any progressive would concede the point, but you’re more likely to find the unifying message of Paine in an average Trump supporter sporting a MAGA hat than you will in a dyed hair collegiate gender studies major Berniecrat.

On these grounds I rest the matter. And as no offer hath yet been made to refute the doctrine contained in the former editions of this pamphlet, it is a negative proof, that either the doctrine cannot be refuted, or, that the party in favour of it are too numerous to be opposed.Wherefore, instead of gazing at each other with suspicious or doubtful curiosity; let each of us, hold out to his neighbour the hearty hand of friendship, and unite in drawing a line, which, like an act of oblivion shall bury in forgetfulness every former dissension. Let the names of Whig and Tory be extinct; and let none other be heard among us, than those of a good citizen, an open and resolute friend, and a virtuous supporter of the rights of mankind and of the FREE AND INDEPENDANT STATES OF AMERICA.