This essay was written and is being used by permission. Father Ignacio Kotsakis, pictured above (not a pseudonym), is the author of the treatise you are about to read–:
Begin transcript:
“I am a cold war baby and for what it’s worth the Soviet Union used to be an altogether appropriate and useful reflection of our collective imaginations; kinda made you wipe your nose on the curtains more carefully, so to speak…. Some may say, that it’s still the case, that nothing has changed, but they would have to prove it and show me these are not simply more opiated promises. From my vantage point as an abbot, this country and most of its western approaches have become much more socially and religiously conservative; and I don’t mean it compared to the sixties, or in response to its excesses. It is not, as they meekly proclaim, the other arc of the pendulum’s swing, a spasmodic twitch, a reappraising of the consequences.
I won’t use the current administration to bolster my pieces, since so many have already made very good cases against these new century national polices, but simply put, these times are not, as they pretend to claim, a counterpoint to an overly liberal society; but a long standing need which man seems to indulge in, and often recklessly; to approach reason and humanists from an irrationally privileged and entitled need to dominate our fellow bedmates.
In the case of the United States, this was brought on by race and the perceived abuse of the concessions the majority felt they had made in good faith . Loosing some of their hard fought cultural, economic and political prizes reduced them to these great seething and consumptive masses. Law abidingly, they relented, because it had thankfully been civically ingrained, but they only did so because they intuitively sensed that the anger and hatred, of their formerly enslaved roommates, needed to be peaceably moderated. The possible consequences of these continued inequities might just be too eminently catastrophic and brutish, to be confused for more of the same. The rapid growth and economic prosperity of the 50s and 60s were about to be wiped clean, concessions had to be made, but not without consequences. Legions sat bitterly and passively waiting for a lovable and popular Moses, to deliver them from the compromises they felt they had been forced to make. And It came, ever so cleverly disguised as an enlightened sheep, in economically lupine clothes; but best of all it was sincere, self convinced and soothingly reassuring to these fatherless masses.
The political shift began to swing from a society where the individual pretended to be prized and adulate for questioning the state, to elevating him for his ability to beat it, cash it and love it. In short order, opportunists, gurus and self anointed abbots began the oft mentioned and inevitable process of ridiculing the very ideas, they had espoused with such evangelistic and vigorous zeal. They began to espouse commercial incentivistic as a better and more patriotic way. From idealism to embracing “The Prince” in less than 30 days. Injecting religiosity into the brand, to transform it into a new form of political thinking, I might venture to name: “National Social Narcissism”.
A political ideology based on speculatory enthusiasm, religious persuasions, self evasion; and on the religiously implicit acceptance, of an eminently pliable and disinterested populace; geographically gated and isolated, and continuously marinated in a mildly anxious chemical haze, masquerading as change.”