Resistance is Futile: You Will Be Assimilated Into the Community

The State of the Church and the Need for Biblical Discernment

It's time for another edition of Fighting for the Faith. Friday, May 11, 2012. Quick thank you to all of you wishing me happy birthday today. Yes, I am now 44. Thank you for tuning in. You're listening to Fighting for the Faith.

My name is Chris Roseborough. I am your servant in Jesus Christ, and this is the program that dishes up a daily dose of biblical discernment. The goal of which, help you think biblically, help you think critically, and help you compare what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God.

No shortage of crazy things being said and done out there by people whose minds don't seem to be held captive by God's Word. Now, that's not a good thing in the Christian church. We expect that type of stuff, well, from nonbelievers, people outside of the church.

But it becomes a real problem when the people doing that are, well, pastors. They shouldn't be doing that. Pastors are supposed to be qualified to be in the pulpit, and if they're not qualified or if they're off doing their own thing, that disqualifies them.

You think about the Olympics coming up. I've got to tell you, over the years I have been a big fan of the Olympics. I like watching the Olympics, so I'm looking forward to the Olympics, the Summer Olympics in London this year.

And when you go to Olympic competition and you watch the track and field event, there are people who end up being disqualified for different reasons. Maybe they've been taking performance-enhancing drugs, or they're disqualified right there on the line because they've left the starting block early too many times.

There's all kinds of things that could get somebody disqualified. Well, pastors who are not bound by the Word of God, who will not abide by what it says for the pastoral office, and teach things that are contrary to God's Word, they're not qualified to be Christian pastors.

The job of the Christian church in those situations is to, well, not tolerate them, but disqualify them and put somebody qualified in their place. Well, that doesn't seem to be happening at all lately, so we've got a big problem in that there's a lot of guys running around who shouldn't be in the pulpit saying things from, well, the stage that they shouldn't be saying.

So, we do the discernment work and do the comparative work. Now, what we're going to do on today's edition of Fighting for the Faith, I'm just going to go ahead and steer in this direction so you know what's going to be happening today.

We were able to get audio last night from the event at the Worldview Boot Camp held at Harbor Shores Church up there in Cicero, Indiana. It was a great event. I'm very thankful for everybody who turned out.

And those of you who came to hear me speak last night, thank you for coming, and thank you for supporting Pirate Christian Radio. And what we're going to do tonight is we're going to play the audio from that lecture.

Now, that being the case, I'm going to make a special request. I don't normally make requests like this on the program, but I'm going to make a request. And that is that before you listen to this edition of Fighting for the Faith, go to our website, fightingforthefaith .com, and look for the post from May 10, 2012.

The headline reads, Resistance is Futile. Now, don't be confused by the one that's going to be posted for May 11, where it's going to have the full title, Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated into the community.

That will be the name for tonight's episode of Fighting for the Faith. But go to the one from the day before. From May 10, it says, Resistance is Futile. And there I've posted a link to my PowerPoint slides.

And I think it will help you to be able to look at them while you're listening to me deliver the lecture. I think that will help. And so you need to do that. So head on over to fightingforthefaith .com and click.

I've put a link for the PowerPoint slides. I've also put links to different resources. And the idea is this, is that what I'm going to be saying or what I said in the lecture last night, I understand is going to be and is controversial.

However, I am not saying this for the sake of controversy. And I'm not saying anything in this lecture, and I haven't said anything in this lecture, to tarnish the name of somebody by lying or slandering.

That's not what I've done. Instead, I have spent years researching this subject and carefully, carefully assembling the basically primary source materials on this. And so think of it this way. I've provided free downloads of information that you can get.

I've also linked to books that you can follow up on. So the idea is think of it this way. I'm presenting to you the answer to a problem. But if you've been in a high school algebra class, then you know that many high school algebra teachers, it's not enough for them that you turn in your homework with all of the answers in the correct boxes or whatever.

They actually want to see your work. And so because I am not an ideologue, I am not. This is not about me being an ideologue. You can't challenge or question me. Instead, what I'm going to basically do is say this, is that I want you, if you don't believe what I'm saying, or you have any doubts that I'm correctly seeing what I'm seeing, that I'm pointing you to the resources that helped me get to the conclusions that I've come to.

And so I'm providing for you my work. These are the resources that help me understand and frame this issue in this way. And I am making those available for you. Some of them are free. Some of them require you to purchase them if you want to purchase them.

But the idea is this. Take a look for yourself. Check my work. And ask yourself the question, have I correctly understood this problem? And the answer that I put forward. If not, then send me an email and lay out your case.

Where did I go wrong? Where did I miss the point? Now I personally don't think I have missed the point here. But I understand that what I say in this lecture is extremely controversial. Again, it's not for the sake of controversy.

I have no desire to lie or slander or to basically demonize somebody in their position. Instead, I've taken great pains to carefully lay this all out in a way that is faithful to what they have said. And I say they because there's many people I'm talking about here.

So with that in mind, we are going to dive into the program proper. Again, you can grab the resources right off the Fighting for the Faith website and follow along PowerPoint-wise. It will help you. I must apologize.

The lecture is complicated. It is complicated. If you were to think what advanced level this is, is this high school level, college level? Well, it's not either of those. This is like graduate level, a graduate level lecture.

I apologize. That's just how it is. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to make it any simpler than I've made it in this presentation. So the name of the lecture is Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated into the community.

The Seeker-Driven Church as a Counter-Enlightenment Movement

And with that, here's my lecture from last night. Here we go. I was asked to speak tonight on the state of the church in 2012. Usually heads of state give topics like that. Here's the thing. In the last 25 years, we've seen tectonic changes in the church.

And so many of them make no biblical sense, like none whatsoever. Worse, they don't make any rational sense either. My question is, what are they thinking? Mega church pastors in the Seeker Driven Movement berate Christians for coming to church with the expectation to be fed the word of God.

You're going to actually see that for yourself tonight. These same pastors claim that their churches exist for non-believers and the people who are not there. Does that make any sense to you at all? Okay.

These same pastors are aggressively anti-doctrinal. It's not that they're a-doctrinal. They're actually anti-doctrinal. I'll explain. And they claim that their churches are communities of small groups.

I challenge you, when you get home tonight, go onto Google and do a search. Type in the words, community of small groups. You will find almost 50 ,000 hits on that search, all of them churches. Community of small groups.

Strange language. We'll talk about that. What else are they thinking? Well, they're openly pushing for unity in the visible church with men who are word of faith heretics and are modalists, or worse. They are recognizing, they're reorganizing churches so that they are community resource distribution centers rather than places where sound biblical doctrine is taught and proclaimed.

Their leaders have zero accountability to the people in the congregation, but the people are accountable to the leaders for accomplishing the visions that they cast. We've had to learn a whole new set of terms.

I remember when I had to learn how to order coffee at Starbucks. It was quite an ordeal. I had to learn a whole new language. I'd like a tall mocha latte cold, no whip. You have to learn this entire language, right?

Well, there's a whole new set of terms that have been brought into the church. One of the terms is vision casting. What is that? Why hasn't the church been talking about vision casting for 2 ,000 years?

You'd think if it was in the Bible, we'd all be doing it, right? Well, we've had to learn this whole new term, vision casting. Hopefully, I'll get an opportunity to talk a little bit about this. So, questions come to mind like, what is this?

Where did it come from? You know, these are good questions. What is its nature? Now, if I can make an allusion to, in fact, I'm going to quote from a movie that not a lot of Christians quote from, Silence of the Lambs.

If you remember, it was the Academy Award winner that year. Why, I don't know. It's just like not my favorite movie ever. But compelling, interesting storyline, to say the least. And Hannibal Lecter is a convicted serial killer.

And Jodie Foster's character, Clarice, comes to visit him in prison because she's working on a case. And she thinks that he might be able to help her profile, psychologically profile this killer so that they can figure out who he is.

And so she brings this case file into the prison and sits outside of Hannibal Lecter's cell. And Lecter says to her, everything you need to find him is there in those pages. And Clarice, Jodie Foster's character, says, well then, tell me how.

Lecter, in his bizarre, creepy kind of way, says, first principles, Clarice, simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask, what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man that you seek?

Clarice answers, well, he kills women. Lecter, no, that is incidental. What is the first thing he does? What need does he serve by killing? Clarice says, well, anger, social acceptance, sexual frustrations.

Lecter says, no, he covets. That is his nature. Now, that is an illustration that we need to grasp onto here, because what I intend to do tonight is answer the question, what is the nature of the seeker-driven and purpose-driven movement?

We've seen what it does, but what it does doesn't tell us what it is. And what it is must be grasped if we are to mount a solid defense, biblically, against what this thing is. And what this thing is is frightening.

Let me explain. I said it was going to be complicated. I have to use a timeline. So I'm going to put on my historian hat. I only have a minor in history, so if I fail at this, please understand, it's not because I didn't try.

We're all familiar with 1776, the year of the American Revolution. Well, the American Revolution went on, and then with some other notable wars. World War I, World War II, the present day is up there.

We all know the events that occurred on those dates. But the question is, what were the thoughts behind those events? Well, we could talk about the Enlightenment. And if you've been to college, you've probably had to take a class or two talking about the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

And you've probably heard of guys like Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and others, right? Well, we can't discuss the American Revolution apart from an understanding of the philosophical ideas that were in the water, if you were, in the milieu of everyone's conversations at the local pub, okay?

But here's the thing about philosophy. It's kind of an unwritten rule, and here's how it goes. One era has its philosophy, and the next generation that comes along, their job is to undo or to debunk the philosophy of the guys who taught them in college.

It's a time-honored tradition, okay? Well, that being the case, the Enlightenment gave birth to the counter-Enlightenment. And this is the thing that should keep you up at night. Because the counter-Enlightenment worldview is what's at the beating heart of the seeker-driven movement.

I'll continue to explain. In the Enlightenment, basic ideas, okay? When we talk about epistemology, how you know what you know what you know, okay? Well, when it comes to the Enlightenment, they had some ideas regarding truth.

Truth is, well, it's objective. It's outside of the subject. For instance, if I wanted to figure out what 2 plus 2 equals, I don't go traipsing into my heart and do a psychological, in-depth thing with my counselor to figure out what 2 plus 2 is so that I can feel it, right?

I look outside of myself and I learn that 2 and 2 equals 4. So, truth is objective and it's outside of the subject. That means that truth is knowable by the subject and that truth is transcended. It applies to all subjects alike, okay?

For instance, 2 plus 2 equals 4 for me as well as for you. 2 plus 2 is 4 in China. I don't know if you knew that, but it's true, okay? That's the idea behind transcendence, okay? So, the basic idea is that there's a correspondence theory when it comes to truth.

You correspond to it. It's outside of you. It's objective, it's knowable, and it's transcendent. And the idea is that any sane, rational person would align their mind to correspond to a proper understanding of truth.

Well, this makes things possible like iPads and Wi-Fi networks and mocha lattes, okay? But along with the Enlightenment, there was a lot of talk about individual, the individual having inherent axiomatic rights.

Keep in mind that at the time the Enlightenment occurred, politically, Europe was controlled by monarchs. And there were these arguments put forward that basically humanity had to obey their monarchs, okay?

Well, this led to a revolt of sorts. And John Locke is to be kind of considered one of the major philosophical thinkers behind the American Revolution. Let me read this. I apologize. It's not the easiest way to give a presentation, but you've got to get this.

Locke said that, well, actually, Locke is among the most influential political philosophers of the Enlightenment. In the two treatises of government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch.

He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property. They have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society. Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property.

Since government exists by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and to promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments.

Now, we're all Americans, and we go, well, yeah, duh, right? Isn't that what our Declaration of Independence stated? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.

Right? So, the idea is that you exist as an individual, and you as an individual have inherent rights. So, the rights of the individual, today's average American assumes this idea. I mean, of course, everyone believes this.

It's self-evident, right? And this is where the battle is being fought today. You don't even realize it. Those who believe in the rights of the individual are actually losing this battle because they don't even realize what's going on.

You don't get it. You don't understand that this is a debatable topic and that there's a whole host of people out there who actually believe, as a worldview, that you as an individual do not exist. And the pastors of the churches in some local places actually hold to this as well.

We'll talk about that. So, certain churches are belligerents in this battle, and they're not fighting for your individual rights. Quite the contrary. So, let's talk about the counter-enlightenment now.

We've talked about the enlightenment. By the way, it's really tough teaching an entire philosophical concept in just a few minutes. So, this is a flight over the battlefield, okay? Counter-enlightenment.

Truth is subjective, experienced, or felt. It's imminent. It's not transcendent. It's imminent. It's here and now. But more importantly, the individual does not exist. The community is the organic, living thing, not the individual.

So, therefore, truth—see if this sounds familiar to any of you. Truth is experienced in conversation within community. If any of you have ever run into somebody who is a follower of the emergent church movement, this language should sound eerily familiar to you.

But it's not new. Let me continue. Counter-enlightenment philosophers. Just a note. Immanuel Kant, who gave us the epistemology here. The idea of how you know what you know. Immanuel Kant, during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, was a Lutheran pietist.

Nothing good comes from Lutheran pietism. I just want to let you know that, and I'm a Lutheran. I'm a confessional Lutheran. I'm not a Lutheran pietist. Bad things happen with Lutheran pietism. And, unfortunately, we've unleashed some pretty nasty viruses on the church.

So, I apologize for that. But Kant, rather than manning up and facing the Enlightenment head-on, retreated into pure subjectivity. And he came up with an epistemological concept that the truth out here, in the objective realm, is not knowable.

It's not knowable. You can't know it. Okay? Truth is only something that happens in this little space inside of your head. It's experienced. It's not objective. It's subjective. Okay? Real quick, if you want to kind of understand what that's about, two movies to watch, The Matrix or The Truman Show.

Okay? If you're familiar with those movies, that's Immanuel Kant's epistemology in a nutshell. Okay? You don't know what reality is and what isn't. Okay? Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We'll talk about him a little bit more in a minute.

He's one of the foundational thinkers behind the idea that the individual doesn't exist. Hegel gave them a way of understanding how truth is synthetic. Truth exists in thesis and antithesis and then synthesizes into a new thesis and then a new antithesis arises.

And so, there's no such thing as transcendent truth. Truth is always synthetic at a time and point within a particular conversation. Friedrich Nietzsche. His important work here is The Antichrist. This was an angry and crazy man.

And the idea that he brings to the table is that morals are determined by communities. And he hated the morals of the Jewish community because their morals were crafted in slavery. So, he constantly referred to the morals of the Judeo-Christian religion as slave morality.

That prohibits a community, remember the community is the organic living thing, from being able to experience greatness. Kierkegaard, existentialist. Schopenhauer builds off of Kant. Martin Heidegger.

Another existentialist who's also credited with giving us language deconstruction. And then you'll notice the postmoderns, Michel Foucault, Léotard, Derrida. I can also put in others, but you get the point.

I understand this is complicated. Work with me here. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Let me read to you about him. He taught us that whatever human existence there is, whatever freedom, rights, and duties the individual has, whatever meaning there is in the individual life, all is determined by society according to society's objective need of survival.

The individual, in other words, is not autonomous. He is determined by society. He is free only in matters that do not matter. He has rights only because society concedes them. He has a will only if he wills what society needs.

His life has meaning only insofar as it relates to the social meaning and as it fulfills itself in fulfilling the objective goal of society. There is, in short, no human existence. There is only social existence.

There is no individual. There is only the citizen. By the way, it's Rousseau's philosophy, which I think is the reason why the French Revolution went the way it did. There's no individual. You don't exist.

You don't have any rights. Society gives them to you. Society is the thing that lives. Now, this is important. Depending on the worldview you have, there are political systems that naturally work then with your worldview.

If you were to think of a worldview like this, okay? Y 'all own laptop computers or home PCs or whatever, right? Some of you are Windows users. Some of you are Apple users. Now, I happen to run Macintosh.

I am an Apple guy. But it's important to note that I'm capable of running Windows on my Macintosh. It feels like an abomination. I just want to let you know that. Okay? It's important to say this. However, I can do it.

I can wipe the hard drive or I can run something called Boot Camp and then turn my laptop over to Microsoft and wouldn't you know it, weird things happen on my laptop computer. Worldviews are like operating systems.

Okay? So the idea is that if you have a particular worldview, it processes information a particular way and it creates a particular user experience. So when you think of the enlightenment worldview, think of it as an operating system.

When you run your brain on it, automatically it moves towards particular political systems. But if you run your mind off of a counter-enlightenment worldview, okay? And it's not just enough to say that they don't believe in the individual.

It is inherently anti-rational on purpose. Okay? Then all information that comes to you is translated and mutated into something that you can't understand unless you can figure out how to run that operating system in your brain.

And it hurts. Let me tell you that. Okay? Political systems. So philosophical worldviews determine political systems. If you are a follower of enlightenment rationalism, the natural tendency is to head towards liberal democracy.

Our government, constitutional government in the United States, is a liberal democracy based upon an enlightenment worldview. Okay? The truth is noble. You can correspond to it. The individual has inherent rights.

Now, this is important. This is going to be somewhat controversial. With this, you have to keep in mind that communism must be understood as a rationalist reaction against the inequalities of capitalism.

Marxist ideas are still rational. They're not anti-rational. Okay? So that's something you have to keep in mind. Counter-enlightenment irrationalism, if this is your worldview, there is a name for the type of government that you will push towards.

And it is a name that we have got to start using again, and we need to start using it right in its historical context. And that word is fascism. Now, here's the problem. That is the ultimate F word. As soon as you use that word, apparently all argument stops because it's the ultimate epithet.

It's the ultimate insult. Okay? What is a fascist? Well, if I were to ask most of you, you'd say, well, a fascist is a racist. You ask somebody who's a liberal in the United States who a fascist is, they'd say it's a conservative.

You ask a conservative who a fascist is, they'd say it's a liberal. And none of them actually know what it is. And this is not good. This is not good at all. If I can use an example from Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, it's like forgetting who Sauron was and how dangerous those rings are.

Okay? We have got to get back to understanding what this is. And I'm not saying was. Is. Okay? Now, funny enough, fascists like always using this term. They always refer to themselves as the third way.

You hear people talking like that? Because they're the third way between capitalism and communism. When you hear people talk like that, that's a tip-off as to what their worldview is. Okay. Now, when was the last time somebody quoted Benito Mussolini in a church?

Okay. I get to do that. Let me read to you from Mussolini. By the way, this is available as one of the free downloads from the resources I've made available. Download it and read Mussolini. If anyone's going to tell you what fascism is, the fascists will tell you.

Right? Okay? Let's go to primary sources. Primary source. Benito Mussolini. Would anyone here contest the fact that Benito Mussolini was a fascist? Nope. Good. All right. Here's what he says. This is kind of Yoda-speak.

Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception is for the state. It is for the individual only insofar as he coincides with the state. Universal consciousness and will of man in his historic existence.

It is opposed to the classic liberalism, that would be liberal democracy, which arose out of the need of reaction against absolutism and had accomplished its mission in history when the state itself had become transformed in the popular will and consciousness.

Liberalism denied the state in the interest of the particular individual. Fascism reaffirms the state as the only true expression of the individual. That last sentence is key. Because keep in mind, fascism does believe in an individual, but the individual is the community, not its atomistic little pieces.

Giovanni Gentile, another Italian fascist philosopher. In the definition of fascism, the first point to grasp is the comprehensive, or as fascists say, the totalitarian scope of its doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political organization and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and feeling of the nation.

Is fascism therefore anti-intellectual? As has been so often charged, it is eminently anti-intellectual. That is, if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice, fascism is hostile to all utopian systems, which are destined never to face the test of reality.

It is hostile to all science and all philosophy, which remains matters of mere fancy or intelligence. It is not that fascism denies value to culture, to the higher intellectual pursuits by which thought is invigorated as a source of action.

Yeah. You think fascism is anti-intellectual? This guy did, and he was a fascist. By virtue of its repugnance for intellectualism, fascism prefers not to waste time constructing abstract theories about itself.

But when we say that it is not a system or a doctrine, we must not conclude that it's a blind praxis or a purely instinctive method. If by a system or philosophy we mean a living thought, a principle of universal character, daily revealing its inner fertility and significance, then fascism is a perfect system with a solidly established foundation, with a rigorous logic in its development, and all who feel the truth...

Notice the words. All who feel the truth and the vitality of the principle work day by day for its development. It denies the existence of the individual, and it is rabidly anti-intellectual. Fascism is about emoting, about living, about being, not thinking.

It's about action. That's the reason why we see the dictators going... You know, when they're talking, right? It's all about inspiring and whipping people up, whipping them into a frenzy to stop thinking and to be, to exist and to feel, right?

Now, that is called der Glasenmensch, the glass man. During the Nazi era, that was put together by a physician as an art exhibit, and the whole idea behind it was this. That was an icon of the Volk, the Volkermeinschaft, the community.

The community, you can see all of its little parts make up the whole. That wasn't an individual human being. That was an icon of the living thing. The living thing is not you, not me. The living thing is we, okay?

The glass man, der Glasenmensch, okay? Now, when Hitler came to power, those of you who know history, everyone was wondering, what would Hitler do? I mean, we'd never seen a fascist government in Germany.

Nobody knew what they would do, because you try to nail down a fascist, what are you guys going to do? They didn't have a set of doctrines and political actions that they had thought. They didn't know what they were going to do.

They would figure it out, because they would feel it, and then move forward. Well, when Hitler came to power, the thing that he spent a lot of time doing in the first couple of years was having these huge outdoor rallies, okay?

In fact, some of his critics said, Hitler came to power, and the first thing he did was put on a flag-waving ceremony and parade, okay? And so, you look at the early years of Hitler, you'll always see him.

He'll be a speck in a car, waving his hand or doing this, and he's surrounded by all of these people. I always had these panoramic shots like this, because that is the thing that existed. That was the individual, the Volk, the community, right?

Now, if you hold on to this worldview that that is the living organism, the organic community, then there are certain things that begin to happen in your mind regarding morals. Let me take a second here and digress.

The Nazi eugenics program, which led eventually to the Holocaust, what was the moral idea behind it? Because at the Nuremberg trials, when they put those doctors on trials, those doctors didn't believe for a second what they were doing was wrong.

They actually thought what they were doing was right, that it was moral and good. I mean, how do you take a society, one of the most advanced civilizations at that time, Germany was an outlier as far as its medical practices, its scientific discoveries, and the things that it was doing in mechanization and industrialization.

It was a world-class society. How do you take a group of people like this and turn them into mass murderers? You have to convince them that what they're doing is good. So here's the idea. That's the individual, right?

The community is the living thing. So we have to protect the living organism. Well, we can't have useless feeders eating our resources and not producing anything productive for the health of the community.

So that would mean that we can kill people who are mentally disabled, elderly, infirmed, sick. And see, here's the idea. Those Jews, they were responsible for giving us transcendent slave morality that's kept us back from greatness.

Those Jews are a bunch of illnesses, and we need to get rid of them so that we can be healthy. Right. Well, the community is the living thing, right? We've got to stay healthy. We don't want to be sick.

We don't want people feeding off of us and not producing. As soon as you deny the rights of the individual, the Holocaust becomes moral. You see it? And that's what happened. So here's the question. What does this have to do with the church?

This is a great history lesson. Thanks, Chris. 20th century was really icky. All right. Well, it actually has everything to do with the church. Let's go back here. You'll notice the big red dot between World War I and World War II.

We have to go back in history a little bit. In the height of the conversation, the philosophical discussion that was taking place in continental Europe between World War I and World War II, and keep in mind, with the defeat of Germany in World War I, there was a lot of people trying to figure out what went wrong.

And all of a sudden, the fascist philosophers were making sense. It's the fault of liberal democracy. All of these individuals kept us from uniting, and they're responsible for making us lose the war, right?

That's the conversation that's going on. Well, in the middle of that conversation, in a magical land known as Austria, in a place called Vienna, there was a young lad, and his name was Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker grew up in a well-connected family in Vienna during the years between World War I and World War II.

Jack Beattie, in his biography of Drucker, notes that Drucker's father hosted a dinner party every Monday night, and that the weekly guests included economists, musicians, civil servants, international lawyers.

Aside from this, Drucker was also the habitu of a salon presided over by one of the Drucker's closest friends, where he listened to and interacted with leading playwrights, authors, philosophers, and culture critics of the era.

Drucker grew up hearing, conversing, and interacting directly with Europe's intellectual elite and their counter-Enlightenment ideas. He grew up right in the thick of it, and he bought it hook, line, and sinker.

This had a profound impact on the formation of his worldview. Here's a direct quote from one of his books called The End of Economic Man, written on the eve of World War II. Capitalism has proved to be a false god because it leads inevitably to class war among rigid, defined classes.

Socialism, this would be Marxism, has been proved to be false because it has been demonstrated it cannot abolish these classes. The class society of the capitalist reality is irreconcilable with the capitalist ideology, which therefore ceases to make sense.

The Marxist class war, on the other hand, while it recognizes and explains the actual reality, ceases to have any meaning because it leads nowhere. Both creeds and orders fail because their concept of the automatic consequences of the exercise of economic freedom by the individual is false.

Does he sound like somebody that would like to have a beer with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison? No, he wasn't. Another quote. This is from his essay entitled The Unfashionable Kierkegaard. It is one of the links that I put up on the resources at fightingforthefaith .com.

You need to download it and read it, and I apologize. It takes about 10 readings before you start to get it. It's really complicated. I apologize. Here's the important part. Drucker said this. This is what he believed.

Existence in time is existence as a citizen in this world. Who does that sound like? Rousseau. That's Rousseau. In time we eat and drink and sleep, fight for conquest or for our lives, raise children in society, succeed or fail, but in time we also die.