Highlight: The Totalitarian Impulse

The Mask of Totalitarianism Has Been Torn Off

We've seen in the last couple of years, and I think it was Jeff mentioning it earlier, that the mask has really been torn off. Some people have sort of said, well, you know, look at the changes over the last two years.

Actually, what's really happened is that what's been there all along for a number of decades has been truly exposed in the last two years, that we actually have now a pagan totalitarian view of government.

And totalitarianism, which conjures up images of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, and people say, oh no, how can Sleepy Joe be an expression of totalitarianism or Trudeau or whatever? It's because we're actually misunderstanding the meaning of totalitarianism.

The Totalitarian Impulse and the Tower of Babel

The totalitarian impulse, which of course ultimately goes back to the Tower of Babel, but it's there in the foundation of Western philosophy and Plato and Aristotle, essentially sees the state as the totalizing, organizing principle for all of society.

So the state can tell you about when you're going to have an abortion and how many children you're going to have, and it's going to control the economy. And it's going to be ruled over by an elite, the philosopher kings the Greeks used to talk about, who are the only ones who are really able to rule this kingdom.

Remember we talked about the, if you don't have the kingdom of God, you don't destroy the need for a kingdom, you just transfer the idea. And so utopianism, totalitarianism is the kingdom of man basically, and what it does is it treats all the other aspects of society, the family, the church, businesses, the economy, associations and so forth, as though they are in a parts-to-whole relationship with the state.

So the state sees itself as the all-encompassing, totalizing idea that subsumes everything else and treats even the individual as though we are merely parts of the greater whole. Whereas in fact the true parts of the state, take the federal government in the United States for example, the parts of the state are the U .S. states in Canada provinces, and then different municipalities.

These are the, it's a territory, so these are the true parts of the state. Just because a church or a family or a business resides in a given territory doesn't make it a part of the state. And so what we've seen I think in this last couple of years is a tearing off of the mask, the smiling face of totalitarianism, where we actually, the state is treating all these other aspects of society, all these other institutions, all these other spheres as though they are lesser parts of itself.

Usurping the Lordship of Christ

And thereby usurping the role of God, of the Lord Jesus Christ, and then denying the right of the family or the church to obey the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, which is Jesus Christ. So this I think is what we're fundamentally up against.

And it's why over this last couple of years there seems to have been an acceleration.

Because it's just exposed what's really there. Yeah. That's one of the things that you highlight too in your discussion of utopianism, how the kingdom of man, because of the inescapable nature of the religious nature of all things, will actually acquire or irrigate to itself the attributes of God.

The Humanistic State Imitating the Attributes of God

So love, unity, justice, wrath, all of those things are part and parcel to the humanistic state. And it'll actually take those attributes because the image of God, it's inescapable, we can't avoid it, but it actually assumes those things for itself.

And when it does that, things become terrifying.