PopeWatch: Libertarianism as Anti-Christ

Over the years PopeWatch has often found the analyses of Sandro Magister regarding the Vatican to be useful.  Unfortunately Covid seems to have driven Magister barking mad:

The analysis of Professor Pietro De Marco published on this page is absolutely not to be missed, for those who would like to understand how deep a theoretical and practical abyss those Catholics fall into who rebel against the vaccination requirements imposed – according to them – by a global biotechnocratic dictatorship.

They are protesting in the name of freedom. But they do not see that in reality they are consigning themselves body and soul to “a lovable libertarian dictator” who “grants, indeed legitimizes, all private freedoms” and thereby dissolves the Christian conception of politics, of the state, ultimately of man.

That the question of the human and the post-human is capital for the Church today is a theme that Settimo Cielo has raised several times, most recently with a contribution from Professor Sergio Belardinelli.

But now De Marco does more. He identifies in today’s anthropological revolution the Antichrist against whom the Church and politics should act as a brake and protection, according to the warning of St. Paul in the second letter to the Thessalonians.

With too many Catholics, however, especially in the traditionalist area, who, while convinced that they are fighting the good fight, are actually playing the enemy’s game.

De Marco’s turn.

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HOW TO DISTINGUISH AMONG APOCALYPTIC DIAGNOSES

by Pietro De Marco

The diagnosis of the present ideological juncture is difficult but, frankly stated, the anti-state apocalypticism that has been growing for months among traditionalist Catholic minorities, as among the theorists of biopolitical alienation, is the result of an enormous tactical error, due to a true error of discernment. The freedoms demanded in paranoid fashion (or delusional, as among those who consider as Nazi experimentation the system of antiviral treatment and prevention), are themselves the error; in fact these too express that intolerance of all discipline, and finally for authority, which belongs to the libertarian “great disruption.”

A critical revision of the history of modern freedoms would highlight, on the one hand, how the lever of freedoms and rights in the hands of a “public opinion” is in itself enormously powerful in destabilizing all political order and, on the other hand, how fragile this liberal lever is, almost powerless, in establishing values ​​but also authority as the foundation of the subsequent order.

This fragility raises the whole question of sovereignty: this is in fact technically and dramatically defined on the very threshold of the exceptional suspension of certain rights of freedom. And as a result it raises the question of political theology, in the strictly Schmittian sense according to which the whole imperative “munus” (or protection of political unity) is with secularization (or with the crisis of Christianity in the modern age) placed in the hands of jurists.

If sole or at least ultimate authority, in the late modernity of rights, is assigned not by contingent abuse but by necessity to constitutional laws and courts, this can only act by undermining the policies and dissolving the societies that incorporate authority and insofar as they incorporate it.

The looming problem – I maintain this against all neo-Orwellian apocalypticism  – is therefore not that of the alleged technological, psychological, biopolitical and similar dictatorships, whose possible excesses and errors are all too easily diagnosed and that, in the case of the measures of world governments, are provided for by the constitutions. In short, they are rational decisions intrinsic to politics.

The apocalyptic trend is rather that of uncontrolled libertarian hypertrophy (I should say: liberal). A fearful horizon of mutation therefore emerges from the anti-authoritarian matrix typical of the revolutionary age, from its always good and persuasive appearances, as if it were exempt from sin. Much more than the “égalité” and the “fraternité” that are only regulating principles, the “liberté” today seems to be a saving reality within everyone’s reach.

The prediction that best conforms to the current tendencies of the masses of individuals who want to be “liberated” from the cultural norm remains that which sees future generations engaged in the voluntary manipulation of themselves, of their own anthropological consistency, for eudaemonistic outcomes of well-being: each one living a finiteness without pain, that is, without ultimate ends, without past and future. This in private; collectively then working, in the same eudaemonistic perspective, for the salvation (without human purpose) of “Mother Earth”; not of “creation,” because this presupposes God the creator, excluded from this horizon.

Certainly it can happen that some visionary overflowing utopianly favors this universal metamorphosis towards a humanity without relational aggression or goals, without mental or intellectual self-transcendence,  thinking of the universal and active peace of the anthill. An ancient diagnosis and metaphor.

But the most insidious transformative lever of this deformed hope is not, I repeat, the diffuse health that so frightens some minds. The mutation feeds on the combined myth of the post-human and the dissolution of the differences that bind, the anthropological differences between man and woman, between parents and children and, fundamental for man, that between God and man. The result will be not free beings but fungible human beings who have nothing in particular to want or defend; as under a “veil of ignorance” but with no need for the virtuous morality of the veil. “Égalité” and “fraternité” without “liberté,” since this is precisely the catastrophic development of the libertarian race.

If this is the goal it is good to be aware of it, but in the face of its effects, the pandemic and vaccination remedies are just an ordinary accident of history. If it is not the goal, then one should know that the apocalyptic version prevalent in this pandemic season, the one that is crying out over oppressed freedoms, is on the wrong path of the anti-political. Not understanding it is suicidal, as we will see in the post-Covid era. Yet another form of libertarian delirium sees in the contingent world “dictator,” which in reality is a timid exercise of politics and the state, an iron chancellor, just as its opponents gather in the squares without danger, as if in celebration, in a game that distracts the “enlightened” from more demanding and difficult pursuits.

Go here to read the rest.  Time to recall that Italy is the home of Fascism and that Europe, compared to the US, is a forelock society where far too many people think that good government consists of the “unwashed masses” obeying their “betters”.  To look at the world and think that Libertarianism is the chief problem is so bizarre that only an intellectual could come up with that proposition.  To identify Libertarianism as the Anti-Christ is so appallingly wrong that it almost requires a whole new category of wrongness.  That this over the top attack is inspired by the resistance of people to take a new vaccine, rushed into production, with unknown long term possible effects and aimed at an illness with a very low mortality rate, has darkly comedic aspects worthy of the Marquis de Sade as interpreted by a collaboration of the Marx Brothers and the CDC.