The Utopian Virus
Editors’ note: As we witness the Marxist revolution currently transpiring in America, a vital question confronts us: from where do the yearnings that motivate groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa come from? Why is this belief-system so attractive and alluring? What allows it to gain so much power and influence? And why does it cause so much mayhem, destruction and death?
These are, without doubt, some of the most pertinent questions of our time. Frontpage Editors have therefore deemed it vital to run, below, an excerpt from Jamie Glazov’s book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us. The excerpt is the second chapter, titled The Utopian Virus; it explores the roots and ingredients of the progressive believer’s political faith – and reveals why it is so diabolically murderous in its earthly incarnations. Don’t miss this essay.
It was the first lie, told by the father of all lies—and he came in the form of a serpent. It was the lie that would spawn the utopian virus: “You can be God.”
One of the most powerful portrayals of Lucifer’s seduction and destruction of Eve is found in John Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost, where Milton depicts the Serpent’s shrewd temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. We see the Serpent’s message of death camouflaged by the promise of life—as Eve is told that she can gain immortality and infinite knowledge and become godlike. The Serpent deceptively charms Eve and convinces her that he is acting in her best interests, while he is, of course, seeking her destruction. Taking the bait, Eve buys the lie. [1]
And so came the Fall. And with the Fall came the poisonous utopian virus that entered humans—inoculated into them by Lucifer himself. [2] The Fall enabled the utopian virus to root itself deeply into the DNA of man, engendering in him the passionate desire to become godlike. Humans were now tainted with the instinct to anoint themselves as social redeemers capable of engineering human “equality” and constructing a perfect world. It was the lie that Lucifer had intoxicated himself with—in his own quest to become like God and/or to replace God. It was a quest that led to his own fall, after which he zealously devoted his energy to passing down his formula for eternal damnation to humankind.
Lucifer desires to be God, but he cannot be God. While he grasps this eternal truth on some levels, he cannot accept it. This admixture of pride and denial sparks within him an inextinguishable rage and hatred and, in turn, the desire to pervert and destroy all of God’s creation. Part of this rebellious and destructive agenda involves Lucifer’s effort to infect humans with the virus that he had inoculated himself with—a virus that materialized from his own narcissism and pride. It was the utopian virus.
By succeeding in inoculating Eve with the virus, Lucifer had succeeded in infecting all of humankind with it. And, with the Fall, came humans’ yearning to become gods themselves.
And so the Left was born.
While the utopian virus affects all of humankind generally, not every individual succumbs to it. There are, clearly, human beings who are capable of disabling the virus to large degrees within themselves, by means of such qualities as humility, the earnest pursuit of knowledge and truth, the discernment of imperfectability and hierarchy in the human condition, and an abiding faith in the Creator. The virus is also neutralized by the courage to endure slander and persecution for standing up for the truth—and by a rejection of the notion that humans can become autonomous from God. The virus is severely weakened, also, in humans who accept the limits of the possible and recognize that they cannot, on their own, make themselves perfectly equal and build a perfect planet. [3]
The humans who neutralize the utopian virus within themselves are individuals who can, generally, be categorized as “conservatives.” They gauge and accept the limits of the human condition. They grasp that they cannot become gods—nor do they want to become gods. They also accept the reality of hierarchy in God’s creation. And while conservatives can obviously be atheists, many are clearly and understandably religious people who want to be servants of God. They embrace the reality that redemption comes from above, rather than from the work of human hands.
Humans’ rejection of the utopian virus is, in many respects, the road less traveled. It takes effort and bravery to fight it off. The easier path is to succumb to the virus’s temptations, which feed the ego with false hopes and fairy tales. And this is precisely why the Left has such an advantage in the culture war, just as Lucifer had against Eve in the Garden. In the propaganda war, the utopian virus’s lie is ever so alluring and attractive.
The falsehood at the heart of the utopian virus serves as the cornerstone of Marxist philosophy that, in turn, constitutes the foundation of the “progressive” movement. The virus pushes people to try to build the Tower of Babel, convincing them that they can and should build it. In perpetually trying to construct the Tower in our world, leftists are clearly those who have turned their back on God and who seek to make themselves into gods and build their own paradises. German Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand explains this phenomenon in his book, The New Tower of Babel: Modern Man’s Flight from God:
The mark of the present crisis is man’s attempt to free himself from his condition as a created being, to deny his metaphysical situation, and to disengage himself from all bonds with anything greater than himself. Modern man is attempting to build a new Tower of Babel. [4]
At the root of this impulse to turn away from God, Hildebrand notes, is “the denial of man’s condition as creature.” In this belief system, man rejects the notion that he is a created being and a servant of God. Instead, man claims sovereignty, intoxicating himself with the illusion of complete and godlike self-sufficiency. He follows this delusion with the next step: believing that humans are on the road of unlimited and inevitable progress. This progress, in his view, will lead to paradise on earth—a paradise that, he believes, humans themselves can and will create with their own powers. [5]
The individual who clings to these fairy tales is labeled by this work as the believer. [6] The believer does not accept that his capacities are limited by the Fall in Eden (regardless of whether he believes that the Fall occurred). The key is that, as author David Horowitz has explained, he believes that he can return there on his own. [7]
Thus, believers appoint themselves as social redeemers. They seek to create human equality and sameness. They believe that they can change human nature and achieve their own redemption without God. And because they delude themselves into thinking that they do not need God for salvation, and that they are gods themselves, they are infested with pathological narcissism and self-adoration. This toxic disposition is well crystallized by the profound quotation that author Dietrich Heinrich Kerler puts into the mouth of the believer: “Even if it could be proven by mathematics that God exists, I do not want him to exist, because he would set limits to my greatness.” [8]
The believer’s obsession with his own imagined greatness and power to redeem the earth is interlinked, as already noted, with a tremendous rage and hatred. Passed down to man from Lucifer, this ferocious anger is focused on the human condition—and on the imperfection and hierarchy that is inherent in it. The believer, like Lucifer, is outraged at what he sees when looking at himself and humankind. Consumed with the pretension to equality, and yet constantly confronting the impossibility of building the Tower, the believer is engulfed by a torrent of rage and misery. Author Fr. Livio Fanzaga explains,
Satan knows that God is God and that he is just a creature. He is conscious of it, but he does not accept it. He would like to be in the place of a Creator. This not being possible, he emits from his being an inextinguishable hatred. [9]
While Lucifer knows he cannot be God but at the same time is unable to accept it, so too the believer recognizes deep inside that he cannot be God and that humans cannot all be equal and the same. But he is unable—indeed, unwilling—to accept these realities. Thus, he appoints himself as a god and insists on pursuing the effort to build an earthly paradise—alongside other believers who have appointed themselves deities as well.
This is what the Left is all about. And in this context, we are able to grasp why there is so much hatred in the heart of the Left and why, while progressives camouflage their agenda with a smokescreen of humanitarianism that allegedly wishes to foster equality and social justice, their engineering experiments invariably spawn mass murder and carnage. Hildebrand notes,
The man who wants to be an absolute master, who renounces obedience to God, who believes himself able to create by his own forces a state of harmony without Christ, makes of this world a Hell, enslaves himself, and ends in a radical antipersonalism.[10]
The believer makes of this world a hell, indeed. And he makes of himself a slave absolutely. He also creates mass experiments in which millions are enslaved and suffer atrocious pain.
The believer’s venture is ridden with catastrophe and destruction because it attempts to make humans into something they cannot be. The Marxist enterprise, by necessity, engenders killing machines and economic devastation in all of its physical manifestations. The very socialist idea itself is a call for murder. This is why the first murder in human history was itself a direct result of the utopian virus. Indeed, it can be argued that Cain’s killing of Abel was, in its very essence, the first communist revolution. In the treatise on Christian hermeticism, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, the author gauges that Cain’s murder of Abel was the “world’s first revolution,” since it was inspired by “the pretension to equality or, if one prefers, the negation of hierarchy.” [11]
Cain’s murder of Abel is a reminder of why terror is a mandatory component of the utopian virus’ earthly incarnations. The attempt to engineer a classless order and to compel human equality necessitates terror. Once believers see themselves as gods, they hold themselves as the arbiters who get to decide which humans are the anointed and which are the damned. And since the old earth must, by necessity, be destroyed in order to build the perfect world upon its ashes, the blood of the humans who stand in the way of this process must be shed, and the self-appointed redeemers are the ones who have to decide who they are. In other words, as David Horowitz has noted, salvation on earth, orchestrated by human beings alone, by necessity “requires the damnation of those who do not want to be saved.” [12] Horowitz makes a crucial observation about the believers in this context:
They cannot live with themselves or the fault in creation, and therefore are at war with both. Because they are miserable themselves they cannot abide the happiness of others. To escape their suffering they seek judgement on all, the rectification that will take them home. If they do not believe in a God, they summon others to act as gods. If they believe in God, they do not trust His justice but arrange their own. In either case, the consequences of their passion is the same catastrophe. This is because the devil they hate is in themselves and their sword of vengeance is wielded by inhabitants of the very hell they wish to escape. [13]
We begin to discern, then, why every utopian enterprise to build heaven on earth ends in hell. The utopian virus inevitably spawns a murderous and suicidal quest. This is because the assumption that humanity is malleable and can be reshaped is fundamentally flawed. The feat is unachievable. The new human being, the Soviet man, that the believer seeks to construct, does not exist and cannot exist because man is, by nature, a woefully imperfect creature. Consequently, since what the believer is trying to achieve is impossible, the believer ends up being consumed with self-hatred, because he ultimately rejects man for what, and who, he is. The believer rejects himself and, consequently, a death wish ensues.
Even though the utopian experiment is a mythological delusion, the believer clings to it, and in his effort to bring it into practice, he not only must eliminate those standing in the way, but he must ultimately lose himself in the collective totalitarian whole that he simultaneously worships and seeks to create. The paradigm works in this way: The believer in the West rejects his own society, repudiating the values of democracy and individual freedom because they are anathema to him. And since he hates man for who and what he is, he also hates himself. He craves a fairy-tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is impossible. The believer, therefore, in rejecting who he is by nature, must also vanish in his quest as an individual.
In this light, we come to understand how and why the believer’s overriding impulse is to dissolve his own individual and unwanted self into a totalitarian whole. In this quest for self-extinction in service of the cause, the believer gains what he perceives to be a self-made form of immortality. This is precisely why the leftist historical record is replete with examples of human lives being sacrificed on the altar of utopian ideals. [14] Here, we find a mutated Christian imagery. In the leftist’s calculus, blood cleanses the world of its injustices and then redeems it—transforming it into a place where the believer will finally find a comfortable home. But the blood is not that of Jesus Christ; it is the blood of humans. [15] At this stage, we are reminded of George Orwell’s 1984:
Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. [16]
Writer Daniel Greenfield comments on this phenomenon:
The idealism of the Left is an inverted despair. Underneath its facade of optimism is always that darkness. Death is inevitable. It only has meaning in pursuit of totalitarian objectives. In that bleak world, subjugating and killing others for the greater good becomes the only available form of immortality. [17]
We begin to clearly see, therefore, what the Left’s alliance with America’s totalitarian adversaries is really all about. Believers are longing for a tyranny they can worship. Above and beyond rejecting God, trying to make oneself a god, and then striving zealously to create a perfect world, the leftist believer yearns to worship a secular tyrannical deity. As Hildebrand notes, “the man who turns away from God inevitably becomes the prey of an idol.” [18]
Thus, the pathological narrative of the fellow travelers of the twentieth century becomes a totally predictable and logical tale in the context of leftist philosophy. It is that long and bloodstained story of Western leftist intellectuals traveling to communist hells to worship at the altar of their imaginary earthly paradises—only to be devoured by the tyrannies they came to worship. These political pilgrims, ultimately, knew very well—whether consciously or subconsciously—the fate that awaited them. In rejecting their own free societies and their own inner natures, they sought to strip themselves of their own unwanted selves. Their political journey was and is the leftist odyssey of the desperate longing for self-extinction. [19]
By surrendering to the totality in which he can achieve self-extinction, the believer fulfills his greatest calling: martyrdom for the idea. And here, we encounter the central theme of this book: the believer actualizes his purpose by helping the adversarial totalitarian enemy conquer his host society. This is why the believer so fervently allies himself with Islamic supremacism and seeks to facilitate its conquest of the West.
The vision of jihadists destroying Western civilization titillates the believer, for it is only on the ruins of his host society that the new paradise he envisions can be erected. And while the jihadist is busy trying to build a sharia-based utopia, the believer seeks to build a complementary utopia rooted in the elimination of all class distinctions. However different these two utopias may be, in terms of their core values and objectives, doesn’t matter to the believer, because it is the destruction of the land of liberty and freedom (and therefore, by logical extension, of inequality and oppression) that serves as his overriding cause. Moreover, as explained above, the believer is well aware that, whether it is some sharia monstrosity or a Stalinist death camp that materializes in the nightmare he is enabling, it is all par for the course, since dissolving his individuality into the collective totalitarian whole is his top priority. He seeks to lose himself in the collective nirvana that the totalitarian enemy will bring. [20] This explains why leftists celebrated with such ecstasy when the 9/11 terrorists hit America; the ashes of Ground Zero represented the fertile soil on which they could begin to build their fairy-tale world—a world that would eventually, inevitably, consume them. [21]
The vital issue to stress here is that the fellow travelers of this modern era continue in their quests, and that their romance with communism has been replaced with their dalliance with Islamic supremacism. [22] This is the Unholy Alliance of our time. [23] In this new alliance, leftists no longer need to visit tyrannical hellholes as they did during the Cold War. The fellow travelers of today have taken power in the West and, because of that, they can now simply assist totalitarian monsters in infiltrating and destroying their own host societies. And, of course, the new fellow travelers know very well that they themselves will, ultimately, be devoured by these monsters, which will complete the last chapter of their journey in their political faith.
In light of these dark realities, it becomes evident what the true nature of the Left is and why, today, it is romancing the Jihadist Psychopath, who is the primary focus of our study. It also becomes transparent how and why the Left poses such a grievous threat when it is in power, since it shrewdly utilizes its influence to mold the thinking and circumstances in its own host society to aid and abet the Jihadist Psychopath’s encroachment on our territory.
We are now much closer to unveiling the full story of how the Jihadist Psychopath is conquering us with the help of the Left. But we still have a bit of groundwork to lay. Now that we have learned exactly what the Left is, it is essential that we show how the Left took power, and why it had such an easy time doing so. This will equip us to understand why believers are able to sow as much destruction as they do—and why they are able to so successfully operate as minions in service of the Jihadist Psychopath.
In our next chapter, we tell a very crucial tale—the tale of the utopian virus in power.
Notes:
[1] John Milton, Paradise Lost (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2005). For a profound discussion of the serpent’s strategy vis-à-vis Eve, see Dinesh D’Souza’s summary of his interview with Stanley Fish, one of the world’s leading John Milton scholars. Fish elaborates on how Lucifer is portrayed in Paradise Lost and in the Western tradition, explaining Lucifer’s strategy against God as well as his tactics and motives with Eve in the Garden. Dinesh D’Souza, America: Imagine a World Without Her (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2014), pp. 83–84.
[2] The term utopian virus is used in this work to depict man’s yearning to build utopia on earth, a yearning that presumes the perfectibility of human institutions and of the human race. The term is by no means original to this work. See, for instance, Joe White, “Engels, Owen and Utopianism” in Casey Harison (ed.), A New Social Question: Capitalism, Socialism, and Utopia (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), p. 192.
[3] While a large focus of this work is on the spiritual dimension of the human struggle against, as well as its embrace of, the utopian virus, there are, obviously, also many atheists who, as a result of their own keen insights and bravery, reject the virus.
[4] Dietrich von Hildebrand, The New Tower of Babel: Modern Man’s Flight from God (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1994), p. 10.
[5] Hildebrand, pp. 19–21 and 27.
[6] Scholars such as Eric Hoffer have described members of mass and utopian movements as “believers.” See Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper & Row, 1951). For a description of the believer in the context of the Marxist/leftist vision, see Chapter 1, “The Believer’s Diagnosis” in Jamie Glazov, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror (Los Angeles: WND, 2009), pp. 5–21.
[7] David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Dallas: Spence, 2003). Horowitz’s ideas and writings on this theme are capsulized in Jamie Glazov, “The Life and Work of David Horowitz,” Frontpagemag.com, November 13, 2015. http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260760/life-and-work-david-horowitz-jamie-glazov.
[8] Hildebrand, p. 21.
[9] Rev. Livio Fanzaga, The Deceiver: Our Daily Struggle with Satan (Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, 2000), p. 36.
[10] Hildebrand, p. 47.
[11] Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, translated by Robert Powell (TarcherPerigee: 2002), pp. 14–15.
[12] David Horowitz, The End of Time (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), p. 90.
[13] Ibid., pp. 105–106.
[14] For an extended discussion of the believer’s death wish, which emanates from his needs to rid himself of his own unwanted self and to dissolve his individuality into a collective totalitarian whole, see Jamie Glazov, “The Believer’s Diagnosis.”
[15] See Horowitz’s essay, “The Religious Roots of Radicalism” in The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future (New York: Free Press, 2000).
[16] George Orwell, 1984 (online copy: New York: Plume Printing, 1983), p. 234. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Authors/Part_Three_1984.html.
[17] Author’s interview with Daniel Greenfield, May 25, 2017.
[18] Hildebrand, p. 19.
[19] For a discussion of the fellow travelers and their death wish, see Glazov, United in Hate. For the two definitive masterpieces on the fellow travelers, see Paul Hollander’s books, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, & Cuba 1928–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) and Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[20] See Glazov, “The Believer’s Diagnosis.”
[21] To see how leftists celebrated 9/11, see Glazov, United in Hate, pp. xxvii–xxviii.
[22] Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate tells the story of how the fellow travelers have continued their romance with the totalitarian adversaries of America, replacing their former allegiance to communism with a newfound sympathy for Islamic jihad.
[23] As already referred to in our Introduction, the Unholy Alliance is the term this work uses to label the Left-Islamic supremacist alliance, a phenomenon documented by David Horowitz in his work, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004), and on his online database, DiscovertheNetworks.org. For more discussion and analysis on the Left’s romance with Islamic supremacism and how this romance is an extension of the Left’s alliance with communism during the Cold War, see Glazov, United in Hate.
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