Source: matthewehret.substack.com
[The following is a sequel to Sir Henry Kissinger: Midwife to New Babylon]
“We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.”
-Dr. Timothy Leary (recounting Aldous Huxley’s 1960 demand for a new world religion)
The study of history can be approached from a number of directions, and using a number of diverse assumptions… but not all of them are equal, and some are extremely destructive.
Some people believe that history is simply associating events onto a linear time line and then adding creative writing to explain away causes of those events. Others presume that history is divided by “ages” with the “causes” of each event explained away by the age in which they occur. Others presume that the events across ages are caused by a never-ending class struggle of rich vs poor while others presume no causality exists behind the events on a time line except for raw hunger, greed or stupidity.
Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that history is best understood as a living process shaped by 1) ideas of good and evil, 2) decisions to act according to those ideas whether right or wrong, and 3) the freedom to embrace error, corruption and lies which often wear the clothing of truth.
When those false ideas are permitted to shape the cultural standards of what is considered “normal” for too long, decay across all spectrums of life can be found.
The physical, mental and spiritual health of people slowly decays, as those creative discoveries needed to meet the challenges of nature fail to be made, and scarcity, hunger, wars, and ignorance grows like a cancer.
The tension caused by this decay, and the better expression of human nature animated by obedience to truth, morality and creative reason manifests in the form of periods of dense potential, comparable to ‘pregnant moments’ where systemic changes for good or evil become ripe.
As I wrote about in The Clash of the Two Americas volume one, the years following America’s Civil War (1861-1865) unleashed a brilliant example of what such a pregnant moment looked lik.
During this time, humanity was pulled by two very different paradigms.
On the one hand, an ancient system of hereditary power which aspired to enslave of the masses of the globe was breaking down.
This ancient system of exploitation and suppression overextended itself globally, and like its earlier incarnation in the Roman Empire, the British Empire was collapsing under its own internal contradictions.
The British Empire had expended vast energy and finances in manufacturing wars around the world to weaken and destroy all of her rivals. While these manipulations wrecked vast destruction onto Russia (during the Crimean War), India (suppressing vast rebellions), China (during two Opium Wars), and through London’s orchestration of the Civil War in America. Despite vast bloodletting, the world was quickly awakening to the evil of this empire and the false Christianity promoted under its banner.
On the other hand, the positive example of Abraham Lincoln’s USA, as a nation founded upon liberty, the consent of the governed and the notion of equal rights for all were spreading electrically across the world in the wake of the Civil War.
In Russia, Lincoln’s national system of political economy was transforming an agrarian serfdom into a modern industrial nation with the application of the protective tariff, productive credit and internal improvements like canals, railroads, electric power and schools. Czar Alexander II, Finance Minister Sergey Witte and the great scientist Dimitry Mendeleev spearheaded this reform.
In France, Germany, Italy and across Asia this system was spreading rapidly centered on the notion that scientific progress and technological improvements were caused by a divine spark of reason found in all people elevating humanity above the status of mere cattle, slaves or feudal serfs….