Stop Trying to Fix Things

We can only make matters worse

"Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

G. K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy . E-Bookarama. Kindle Edition.

Chesterton’s observation—accurate as a plumb bob—came well over 100 years when the world still had lunatic asylums. The western nations banned such institutions 50 years ago, sending the insane into the streets to live in filthy cardboard box and self-medicating. We call that “humanitarianism.”

Nonetheless, Chesterton was right. Believing in oneself is a mental disorder, though there’s no chemical or structural test for the condition because the disease is not physical. Belief in oneself is neither illogical or unfounded. The self-confident simply accept what they are told: “you are perfect just as you are. You are strong, confident, and good. Your instincts are right on. Whatever you want is what’s best for you and for others.”

These satisfying affirmations come not from the self, but from others, though they feel like self-awakenings rather than outside input. That’s because these affirmations come from pure spirit beings commonly called “demons.” They are everywhere.

Watch:

“It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams a reassurance that whatever you’re doing . . . it’s okay. You are okay.”

Were Don Draper real, he would have thus defined advertising almost 60 years ago, about the time Vatican II was wrapping up. Though his character and his lines are fiction, the world then began a relentless march of self-affirmation. It began telling itself, “whatever we’re doing . . . it’s okay.”

Even the Catholic Church bought into this manipulation. Good and evil were redefined. Good became whatever we wanted and evil was anything that stood in our way. Tender-hearted women wanted to feel happy but they couldn’t feel happy knowing the mentally were confined to dreary institutions—so the courts and legislatures set the lunatics free.

The lunatics, of course, were way ahead of the rest of us. As Chesterton rightly pointed out, they’d believed in themselves—in the virtue of their pursuits—long before the rest of us. And when, over the course of the next 60 years, “I’m okay” became a mantra, the lunatics, being experts in self-confidence, became the natural leaders.

What we are seeing today in the United States, in schools, on university campuses, in the US military, in Congress, and everywhere else is the consequence of opening the asylums and putting the lunatics in charge of institutions. It’s why we affirm the lunatic’s belief that he is a woman unjustly cast in a man’s body. It’s why Derek Chauvin will spend his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit—a crime his prosecutors, judge, and jurors knew beyond the shadow of a doubt he did not commit. Because to propound the truth in the case would be to deny someone’s delusion. Our justice system, too, is now a billboard screaming, “whatever you believe, we believe, too.”

The only reason so many of us now see this insanity is because, eventually, delusions conflict and the affirmers lack the nimbleness of mind to affirm both lies with equal conviction. We affirm the delusion that Putin’s Russia is the greatest evil in the history of man, then Hamas removes a living baby from its mother’s womb, beheads the baby while the mother watches before raping and beheading the mother. The president of the United States tells us that a military invasion of Ukraine according to the accepted laws of warfare is the moral equivalent of paragliding into a party in the park to rape, torture, and murder the partiers.

We now see the cracks.

And what do we do about these cracks?

We either take matters into our own hands, believing in ourselves, or we demand “somebody” do something about it, believing in the lunatics. We never stop to ask, “how can a people who got themselves into this mess get ourselves out of it?”

The answer is, we can’t. Just as the writer cannot spot his own typos, humanity cannot see its own limitations. But for 60 years, we’ve convinced ourselves we can because we’ve convinced ourselves that whatever we’re doing, it’s okay.

More precisely, we have allowed others to convince us that whatever we’re doing is okay, and that we can fix all our problems ourselves. Or a government agency will fix them for us.

We never stop to realize that our problems came from listening to and believing the happy affirmations of spirits. If we did, we would realize our only option is to listen to better spirits, that everything we think of comes from the demons we’ve allowed to assert control over our minds.

Have you ever really watched an hour glass? If you have, you noticed an interesting phenomenon: the sand does not drop at a stead rate, but speeds up at a constant rate. The final 100 grains drop two to four times faster than the first 100. The weight of the sand above the bottom grains exerts both downward and outward pressure on the neck of the glass. The more weight above, the slower the release through that chokepoint. As the weight above decreases, the sand drops faster. (The same is true for the amount of work one tries to accomplish, which is why smart people strictly limit their work in progress. They reduce the weight above the neck.)

Doesn’t it seem now that things are moving faster than ever? That the world is falling apart at sickeningly accelerating pace? That tomorrow could be more different from today than yesterday was to 33 A.D.?

Why is that?

Perhaps disorder is not increasing, but the world is being reordered. It’s being reordered from a Godly system to a demonic system. The narrow tube through which our institutions and people must pass to get from the Godly to Satanic was once bound by the imbalance between the two chambers. As more people and institutions passed through, the weight above decreased and the rate of passage increased.

In other words, we are experiencing reduced resistance to evil.

Some, like the members of the Synod on Synodality currently underway in Rome, gleefully slide down the glass funnel to the “liberating” sphincter beneath. But you and I feel like we’re in a canoe without a paddle approaching Niagara Falls. We are being sucked along, faster and faster. Panic sets in. Our horizon shortens. We stare at the point, ever closer, where the river disappears into the abyss.

And we try to handle it ourselves.

Too late.

It was always too late, but now it’s obviously too late for home remedies.

Our only hope is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. The laws of physics which will drag our bodies down the face of the fall with constant acceleration until reaching terminal velocity before being shattered and crushed by the impact of a sudden stop as it crashes into the turbulent pool of water beneath can be suspended, but only by He who made those laws in the first place. Man cannot suspend the laws of physics, but he can suspend is faith in them. He can choose to listen to other spirits who will tell him, “whatever happens to you, accept it as from the Lord.”

At that moment—when we accept whatever happens as coming from the Lord—fear stops. Our horizon becomes infinite. The roar of the falls fades. Our sense of self diminishes, replaced by a vision of home.

The solution to every problem facing the world today, then, is to stop thinking and listen to the angels. And never believe in yourself.