All men are primitives, and unless something else intervenes, all societies remain primitive. With us, Christianity intervened. Christianity was the event that brought the new circumstances that changed everything. But Christianity is a faith. We are free to receive it or not. It has forced nothing on us. We have not left primitivism entirely behind. We are not angels. All our old instincts are still with us. We merely look forward to what is not yet in our possession or in our control, and it is this looking forward that makes the open society, the society which we call ‘modern’.
So you moderns have two gods – the Self and the State. You have the god of extreme individualism and the god of extreme Collectivism. Either you have Freedom but no community, or you have community but no freedom. I don’t worship either of these myself. I was baptised into the one community in which freedom and continuing personal identity are established. I recommend it to you. Save yourself. Flee from idols
Now, again, as ever, the West is faced by the society by the society that is an inverse copy of it. It is faced by the cult and society that promotes community over freedom, and indeed which has no room for freedom at all. It is opposed to freedom, and regards freedom as a mistake. Freedom is an error. The demand for freedom is the one pathology which the cult is committed to eradicating. The eradication of freedom. The collective is supreme, the individual is nothing. This cult and society has both borrowed from Christianity and Judaism, and stood Christianity and Judaism on their head. It has who have stood out against Christianity, and made themselves an evil, and who have not been able to move forwards towards a more open society, but have remained primitives, who have not been part of the this success, who took no part in the building of the modern world and are unable to find any significant place in the modern economy. They represent a long howl of envy, of impotence and fury. They have shut themselves out of the modern world. They remain – and insist on remaining – in this closed, primitive economy, in which there is no forgiveness and no opportunity to receive what is new or open – unless it breaks in from outside.
