The idea that the nature of the world can be grasped fully via pure reason, as many modern scientists believe, always makes me ponder how those who seriously hold this view are not in some way deluding themselves—and everyone else.
To my mind, the belief that the world can be fully understood and explained with mere words, numbers and symbols is burdened from the start by extreme prejudice. For a start, take mathematics. If math needs to be juggled in order to remain consistent with a basic assumption, and the problem persists after X number of corrections are made—the assumption must then be changed, begging a crucial question. How is such ‘groping’ or ‘guessing’ smarter than doing so in any other discipline aimed at discovering the true nature of things?
Is this not simply rationalizing to the nth degree?
The role of science in providing handles upon reality rendering the world less mysterious, less troublesome, and more productive of a better life is not at issue here. Rather, it is the leap required to reach an understanding of reality per se. Which is why we must not allow science or other strictly rational disciplines to become our ‘faith’ regarding truth. It is not so much that we must restrict rationality; but rather to recognize that deeper, more inspired paths to knowledge have well served giants of intellect deserving of our trust.
The pursuit of ultimate knowledge of the world along a path of strict rationality is bound to become a trip to a terminal dead-end; the usual destination of circular reasoning that rationalists are prone to embark upon. The prime example being Rene Descartes Cognito Ergo Sum—‘I think therefore I am’. It was the incomparable Socrates who confessed that he knew nothing except the fact of his own ignorance. In the spirit of such an honourable and ancient appraisal, the necessary leap must be to a faith in God, taken by millions who have found this more enlightening than any other guide to reality.
It has ever been clear to minds of surpassing intelligence that reality resists bagging with the human mind. The impossibility of grasping it with words and symbols has led many to both see and sense the connection of reality to the Mind of our Creator. The truly smart have been aware of the necessity to align any take on reality with being human, which gives voice to justifiable dissent from purely rational takes on reality.
It is presumptive to claim that important discoveries about the world made by the likes of Aristotle, Aquinas, Shakespeare or a host of other towering intellects throughout history are less ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘valid’ or ‘intelligent’ than any posited by thinkers of modern or post- modern times.
It boils downs to this: every take on reality is couched in bias. The challenge for serious thinkers is to find the best one; best that is in terms of covering what is most important about human beings. The one that encompasses the most about what is essential to human beings gravitates toward God, our Creator. It is impossible for any human being to find a better, more natural take on reality; and it need surprise no one that when it comes down to things of great significance in our lives—love, hate, loyalty, treachery, romance, beauty, and truth, etc.—morally decadent leaders remain silent and spout dismissive rhetoric to hide their embarrassment. When was the last time that you heard people like Trudeau, Biden, Harris, Macron, Starmer, and their ilk speak of God? Of the transcendent? Of powers and knowledge existing beyond the temporal world?
This does not imply that poets, artists, philosophers, theologians, and other non-scientific specialists reaching for enlightenment about the world are in a better position to grasp reality; rather, they are animated in some measure by an awareness of human shortcomings in scaling such heights. Compare this attitude with the one held by individuals who believe or act as though human knowledge is limitless—an unverifiable assertion granting the power hungry a blank cheque to take charge of everything, including our very lives. Missing from the calculations of strict rationalists is the part of reality denoting an inherent weakness in mankind for differentiating between Good and Evil. Christian theology identifies it as our ‘original sin’; but this immanent human failure to recognize and countenance evil grants prelates of power the false authority to possess us. It also keeps the door of reality locked, denying our access to the fullness of life for every man, woman, and child.
If the passing grade for knowing reality is that it can be expressed mathematically and verified scientifically, then here is where we must exit the discussion. There is little to be added to that confining position. Seventy plus decades of attention to reality have taught us that such a monolithic position regarding the actual nature of the world cannot stand alone in explaining—let alone grasping—its fully reality.
Judging from the troubling signs and alarms infesting our present times, it appears that most of our current leaders have lost their way. They are fighting reality rather than joining it in their pursuit of progress; which is really just another way of saying that they are committing the very same sin which caused the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden, and which has been perpetuated in every human epoch: they seek to become the new gods among us.
In ancient Egypt, pharaohs were considered gods. Egyptians believed that when a pharaoh died, he would continue to lead them from beyond. This partially explains why they had such ornate tombs. Beginning 2,600 years ago, Japanese emperors were similarly thought of as deities, a practice that continued until the close of WWII, when the emperor was called upon to explain to his subjects that he was actually mortal.
In the Roman Empire, although emperors were not considered gods while living, most were deified upon death. However, during their lives, they were thought to have supernaturally endowed authority, so that certain bloodlines were divine. Julius Caesar, for example, claimed to be a descendant of Venus, goddess of love.
Later, through much of European history, monarchs were often thought to be divinely inspired. There existed a concept known as the Divine Right of Kings, suggesting that monarchs were anointed by God and ruled by His grace. As such, they need not answer to anyone on this earthly plane—whether the Pope, parliament, nobles, or otherwise. Of course, ruling via God’s grace did not always protect kings from earthly peril. Assassinations, wars between two simultaneously divine rulers turned enemies, or your run of the mill rebellion all happened regularly—but being king was still nice work if you could get it.
As regal and majestic as all of this may sound, ‘divine’ rule was actually nothing more than a tool to help establish legitimacy and maintain power for the ruling elites. Who could be a more powerful ally in demonstrating that an individual or group should have more power than any God or gods?
Using armies and weapons to keep subjects from questioning authority or revolting could be expensive at times. It was cheaper to do so through or with the assistance of religion. If men could be convinced that their king was acting on behalf of God, then the threshold of acceptable abuse would be much higher than if the king were a mere President or a Prime Minister.
I have always wondered why the West’s richest people, particularly tech and finance types, lean to the left. How could someone who benefits so extraordinarily by our capitalist system support ideas anathema to its very existence?
The things they support generally include bigger government, higher taxes, limitations upon free speech, religious freedom and the right to bear arms, among other basic constitutional rights.
The most prevalent cancerous idea our ruling elites embrace is big government. Many corporations see increasing regulations as a means to limit their competition. By supporting minimum wage hikes or increased regulations or mandates, large companies—controlled mostly by billionaires—can and do use the government to impose costs that cripple small competitors. Meanwhile, they possess the vast resources needed to easily comply. As the Roman Emperor Tacitus once famously said:
These same elites, particularly those in tech and on Wall Street, have little connection to the real world that most of us inhabit. From farms to restaurants to retail stores to truck drivers, the elites are minimally affected in their remote offices and relatively low regulatory environments when bureaucracies issue new restrictions to small business owners. While stock markets may be heavily regulated in terms of advertising and fiduciary duties, actual trading is relatively unregulated compared to the red tape that blue-collar industries face.
When it comes to higher taxes, this is mostly a red herring for modern moguls. Many of the wealthiest elites call for higher income taxes because they do not pay them. That is because most do not receive much of a taxable salary. Their liquidity comes from stock sales or dividends, typically taxed at a lower rate. Even if capital gains taxes were increased, they would find opaque tax avoidance schemes reducing their taxes to zero or less—options that are rarely available to most millionaires, never mind Ma and Pa average.
Free speech is another aspect of our culture that elites dislike. Leftists of all income ranges favour censorship. Violence is a favoured tactic on college campuses that were once bastions of free speech. The elites do not dirty their own hands with violence, of course. Modern barons like George Soros act through their control over social and traditional media or via the DIE tactics of mega firms like Blackrock and Vanguard.
Lastly, there is the right to keep and bear arms. While many elites push gun control and defunding of police, they rarely have to live with the consequences of such dangerous policies. They have armed bodyguards and homes in gated communities with security systems. Their calls for gun restrictions thus never put them or their families in danger—even as they increase the risks to law-abiding citizens who need firearms for protection, for safe streets, and the police to patrol them.
Taking all of this together makes one think of the nobles of old Europe. They often thought of themselves as superior to kings, and only by accident of birth or treachery were not monarchs themselves. Frequently, financially strapped rulers were in their debt and thus permitted them great licence within the realm.
So too is it with today’s billionaire class. From Gates to Hoffman, Zuckerberg, Sandburg, Powell, Soros, Buffet, Omidyar, Bloomberg, and so many others, these leftists see themselves as kings or queens; or at least, high nobles, unaccountable to anyone or anything. They use their tremendous wealth to push for policies that do not affect them but which harm the common folk.
They are ultracrepidarians: assuming that since they are brilliant in one area of commerce, that they are somehow expertly qualified to coerce the rest of us into living as they direct. Invariably, such direction involves governments creating more regulations burdening everyday people, with little or no benefit to them. The climate tax is a prime example. It raises the cost of just about everything, especially for those who cannot afford it, while giving the Uber wealthy the opportunity to make fortunes speculating on the carbon credit futures market. From green energy to DIE butchering of confused teenagers, these members of the WEF globalist cabal care far more about virtue signalling than for actually solving real problems that never impact elites.
The mantra “rules for thee but not for me”is nowhere plainer than in the annual migration of private jets to descend upon Davos, Switzerland each year to hear Klaus Schwab demand that we eat bugs and embrace the “sharing economy”.
These paragons of green virtue expend more CO2 in one trip than a family of four does in an entire year, but it is justified since they are saving us all from disaster. The fact that these ideas are all based upon lies and cause evisceration of individual freedom while accruing more control for elites is of no consequence to our modern-day nobility.
The fact that they spit upon the free exchange of ideas, limited government, and free markets that are core to freedom and prosperity—including theirs—is also inconsequential. In their minds, they created companies that help people search for friends or buy trinkets, making them the richest humans in history. That is sufficient proof of the irrational conclusion that they have been chosen to lead us. What is worse, they do not seem to realize or care that this distorted view of reality is not only evil—it paves the Marxist road to hell.
Did you know that Karl Marx shaped his seminal economic thesis Das Kapital around the contours of Dante’s dark and disturbing 13th century treatise Inferno?
In 2020, Marx’s spectre roamed the streets of the U.S. and Canada, in the form of riots and unrest across over 500 cities. Lockdowns laid bare issues of race and injustice, unleashing a new version of class struggle familiar from the writings of Marx. Modern convulsions still bear unmistakable marks of his influence and discontent.
In a world marked by ideological conflicts of the 20th century, we might wonder if Dante Alighieri, the revered medieval Italian poet, would have cast Karl Marx into one of his infernal rings. Dante’s Divine Comedy navigates the realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, to capture the essence of human virtue and vice. Would Marx, who quoted directly from Dante’s work, be condemned for the chaos he inspired?
Karl Marx (1818-83), the philosopher, economist and revolutionary, is often interpreted through the lens of political ideology. In his book, Marx’s Inferno, Willam Clare Roberts suggests that Das Kapital should instead be treated as a work full of tropes, metaphors, and allusions reflecting deep intuitions. He approaches the Marxist opus as a complex text that, much like Dante’s Inferno, maps out the descent of a corrupt system—capitalism—into its own demise.
To his credit, Marx wielded a scalpel to injustices within 19th century society. He meticulously dissected the evils of capitalism under the guise of religion. His critique was warranted. He identified and exposed the rampant exploitation and dehumanization intrinsic to laissez-faire capitalism. However, his solutions lacked temper and foresight; veering instead toward a self-destructive Utopianism.
Dante (1265-1321) is known as the ‘father’ of the Italian language. He created an allegory which transformed the classical world into Christendom, reborn during the Renaissance. In The Divine Comedy, Virgil guides Dante on a journey, with Thomas Aquinas providing an architectural framework for a new universe. This was quite different from Georg Hegel’s dialectics, which would come to profoundly influence Marx.
Dante begins his poem with the confession of being lost:
“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.”
Marx uses capital or money as his guide. Professors and scholars often divine Marxist intentions as rooted in noble causes such as freedom, human dignity, and equality; but his words were never designed to encourage contemplation. They were rather meant to incite. These words are the epitaph to his gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London, England, and have ironically marked millions of graves all over the world.
There is an undeniable dark side to Marx’s influence upon history. In the name of science, Marx—unlike Prometheus of Greek myth—envisions a secular hell devoid of faith, human aspirations, or goodwill. He unwittingly summons powers of envy and wrath to transform history into a cult of paranoid dualities: the bourgeoisie versus proletariat; man vs woman; black vs white—binary thinking in the name of scientific dialectic.
Aware of the inherent flaws in our nature, Dante shared his journey not only through Hell, but also through Purgatory and ultimately—Paradise. He acknowledged human passions and injustices, yet forged a path of transformation. In contrast, Marx externalized blame onto ‘the others’, dismissing the individual outside the collective who seeks a course of redemption.
Marxist critique of societal wrongs left a void to be filled by ideologies burning through societies, without providing a path for genuine progress, thereby unleashing a deadly idea pathogen into the worst regimes of the bloody 20th century.
A century and a half later, the lie of Marxist science is made manifest in the aftermath of two world wars, the failed Soviet experiment, and a rising China. Marx emerged as a secular prophet claiming that faith is an ‘opiate of the masses’. He transmuted human community into a political battleground in pursuit of a Utopia that never materialized. Dante warned those entering Hell to
“Abandon every hope, who enter here.”
Though he offered a poignant critique of societal wrongs, Marx lacked insight into the soul’s journey through rebirth. His tribal struggle seems more a projection of his personal life as failed philosopher who preached an absolutist vendetta—born under the storm clouds of the Industrial Revolution that would tragically spawn sociopaths like Stalin & Mao.
In Das Kapital, Marx’s adaptation of Dante’s Inferno is subtle yet telling. Dante encourages individuals to follow their own path, away from the maddening crowd. Marx’s version calls upon followers to adhere to his self-righteous dogma. This shift from Dante to Marx also traverses the journey from personal enlightenment to collective upheaval.
In terms of personal encounters and scholarly musings, Marx often wrote with a vitriolic passion against his opponents. The National Zeitung publicly showcased his intense disdain. Marx collected letters and affidavits to support his contentions with an almost fiendish cunning. He brimmed with extensive quotations from literary titans such as Shakespeare, Virgil, Schiller, Byron, and Dante to fortify his polemics and lay his ideological adversaries to rest.
From Germany to London, his social gatherings were filled with discussions of politics in which he would entertain his company with humour and zeal, riding donkeys and affirming his rustic skills:
“After the meal they produced the Sunday papers they had bought on the road, and now began the reading and discussing of politics”
This scene clearly paints Marx as a revolutionary, envying the life of the English gentleman.
His Critique of Political Economy was later perceived by many as a monumental book. Students in communist nations pored over it as though it revealed how to solve the world’s miseries. Yet Das Kapital was far from being a textbook. It was rather a slow-moving, cumbersome work resembling a heavy clogged mill wheel straining to grind capitalism into dust.
Moreover, Marx’s academic rigour often made his works densely inaccessible, wherein he intertwined Hegel, St. Jerome, and Dante. He tended to obscure matters rather than to clarify them, a trait now characteristic of leftist writings. The reader who does not know Dante by heart may swiftly gloss over the quotation from the Paradiso, underscoring how Marxist intellectual allusions often complicate his arguments rather elucidating them.
One of the most harrowing criticisms of Marxist regimes comes from Richard Wurmbrand, who endured state torment under communism. In Tortured for Christ, he writes:
“All the Biblical descriptions of hell and the pains of Dante’s Inferno are nothing compared to the tortures in Communist prisons.”
Marx’s ideological rigidity was evident during his struggles with censorship, which is ironically one of the key weapons of modern leftists. Anecdotes of his interactions with censors, such as the bewildered official demanding late night proofs from Marx, illustrate both his defiance and his wit:
“The proofs!” Bellowed the censor.
“Aren’t any!” Marx yelled in reply.
Dante’s allegorical Hell serves as a spiritual warning, whereas the Marxist ideological legacy has led to a virtual hell on earth. His misreadings of human nature stand in stark contrast to Dante’s timeless lessons: true progress requires not just material change, but also spiritual insight. As we reflect upon the past, it is crucial to harmonize justice, virtue, and knowledge so as not to repeat the worst crimes of human history.
Dante’s final vision:
“The love that moves the sun and the other stars”
This symbolizes harmony with ourselves and others; a harmony of divine love. The purging of corrosive fears and passions to flourish as individuals and in society. Conversely, Marx left a legacy of alienation, of conflict, and of suspicion along with an unfinished promise of utopia that is today being fashioned into an atheistic, dystopian nightmare.
