Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

by Rod Dreher

totalitarianism is a state in which nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society’s ruling ideology.

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.6

Today, loneliness is widely recognized by scientists as a critical social and even medical problem.

It is no coincidence that millennials and members of Generation Z register much higher rates of loneliness than older Americans, as well as significantly greater support for socialism. It’s as if they aspire to a politics that can replace the community they wish they had.

Sooner or later, loneliness and isolation are bound to have political effects.

Civic trust is another bond that holds society together.

According to Gallup, Americans’ confidence in their institutions—political, media, religious, legal, medical, corporate—is at historic lows across the board.

A loss of faith in democratic politics is a sign of a deeper and broader instability.

As radical individualism has become more pervasive in our consumerist-driven culture, people have ceased to look outside themselves for authoritative sources of meaning. This is the fulfillment of modern liberalism’s goal: to free the individual from any unchosen obligations.

transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution.

“The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic,”

detailing how the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one’s desires and to exercise one’s will.

In 2019, The New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, launched the “1619 Project,” a massive attempt to “reframe” (the Times’s word) American history by displacing the 1776 Declaration of Independence as the traditional founding of the United States, replacing it with the year the first African slaves arrived in North America.15

Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is.

“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

For all users of social media—including the nearly three quarters of US adults who use Facebook and the 22 percent who use Twitter—reinforcement of prior political beliefs is built into the system. We are being conditioned to accept as true whatever feels right to us.

They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent with itself.

What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Totalitarianism’s most dedicated servants are often idealists, at least at first.

totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

President Donald Trump is a rule-breaker in many ways. He once said, “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy.”

Loyalty to an ideology over expertise is no less disturbing than loyalty to a personality. This is at the root of “cancel culture,” in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.

Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters.

At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field.

in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction.

Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded.

In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.” This is a serious mistake.

Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts.

Like the early Bolsheviks, SJWs are radically alienated from society. They too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to the exploited.

Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness. This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within universities, where they can indoctrinate in spiteful ideology those who will be going out to work in society’s institutions.

SJWs believe that science is on their side, even when their clai...

For example, transgender activists insist that their radical beliefs are scientifically sound; scientists and physicians who disagree are driven out of thei...

Social justice cultists are utopians who believe that the ideal of Progress requires smashing all the old forms for...

Unlike their Bolshevik predecessors, they don’t want to seize the means of economic production but rather th...

They believe that after humanity is freed from the chains that bind us—whiteness, patriarchy, marriage, the gender binary, and so on—we will experience ...

Finally, unlike the Bolsheviks, who wanted to destroy and replace the institutions of Russian society, our social justice warriors adopt a later Marxist strategy for bringing about social change: marching through the institutions of bourgeois society, conquering them, and using them to transform the world. For example, when the LGBT cause was adop...

Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about our own country’s stability.

Ours is also an intensely sensual age, one that emphasizes sensate experiences over spiritual and rational ideals.

The internet has acculturated at least one generation to pornography, far exceeding anything that those who overturned Russia’s censorship law in 1905 could have envisioned.

What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

We cannot understand the hypnotic allure of left-wing totalitarianism or figure out how best to resist its advocates unless we grasp its most dedicated advocates as cultists devoted to the Myth of Progress.

What Russia’s young artists, intellectuals, and cultural elite hoped for and expected was the end of autocracy, class division, and religion, and the advent of a world of liberalism, equality, and secularism. What they got instead was dictatorship, gulags, and the extermination of free speech and expression.

Communists had sold their ideology to gullible optimists as the fullest version of the thing every modern person wanted: Progress.

Believers in the Myth of Progress hold that the present is better than the past, and that the future will inevitably be better than the present.

This myth is a powerful tool in the hands of would-be totalitarians.

It provides a transcendent source of legitimacy for their actions, and frames opposition as backward and ignorant. Understanding how communists manipulated the Myth of Progress is important to grasp...

Today, totalitarianism amounts to strict, forced regimentation of the Grand March toward Progress. It is the method by which true believers in Progress aim to keep all of society moving forward toward utopia in lockstep, both in their outward actions and in their innermost thoughts.

The most ardent suburban Republican is as much a believer in the Myth of Progress as the most ideologically rigid faculty Trotskyist.

“[F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity.”4