“The winner is feeling rather smug with himself.”

Noyau: groups of individuals held together by mutual animosity, who could not survive had they no friends to hate.

Fowl Play

The Noyau

“one of evolution’s noisiest successes”

Another noisy success, the Zeitgeist Torquemada.

Riding a Zeitgeist takes no courage at all; you just “evolve” to the correct position and hang on, until you are delivered to the promised land, which changes to suit times and trends. Even a dead thing can be attached to it, and brought along. As Chesterton said, “A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
. . .
[D]on’t carry on about “the end of America” because that’s already pretty old, and you know, nations all tumble, eventually — we see it in history and we see it today. It seems to me conservatives and Republicans are touting a new “national/political savior” every week, but we’re pretty well past that. I honestly don’t even want to write about politics anymore, because it all seems like Distraction Theater to me; the real battle is going on in a different realm.

Don’t be afraid. Just be ready to deal with the onslaught of Zeitgeist Torquemadas about to advance and question whether you are a “good” person or a “bad” one, based entirely on how you think about this one issue. Be ready, too, to hear that, regardless as to whether you have grounded those thoughts upon natural law or scripture, your “real” motivation is simple bigotry:

If one retains the view that marriage is the institution that governs sexual complementarity and requires male and female then civil rights is the wrong framework and cries of bigotry are uninformed and scurrilous at best.

But they’re the cries people are most afraid of. “Bigot”, however incorrectly uttered, is the new card that will be played and overplayed. Don’t accept it; keep correcting the equation from “To Disagree” = “To Hate” into “To Disagree” = “Disagreement.”

It won’t work, but you know. You have to keep repeating it, for the sake of an even more basic freedom than religious conscience — one that will be threatened down the road: the freedom to be allowed your own thoughts and words, and to recognize things for the realities they are.

That freedom has always been loathsome to the enforcers of political correctness, in every age.

Who made Piers Morgan the Zeitgeist Torquemada?

These 2010 words of Cardinal Francis Eugene George are seeming less melodramatic in 2013:

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT) and to prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.