The new tyranny

Among its main contributors, L'Osservatore Romano, the newspaper of the Holy See, has a famous convert. He is the Spanish and former non-believer writer Juan Manuel de Prada, whose latest book collects the combative articles that he has been writing in recent years in defense of Catholicism and against the subtle and pervasive deception—the “progressive Matrix,” in Prada’s own words—which is at work in the mainstream European culture.

Entitled La nueva tiranía. El sentido común frente al Mátrix progre, the book went through five edition in just five months. Last October 2, L'Osservatore Romano translated and reprinted (on paper) the preface to his book, and now Sandro Magister has had the excellent idea of republishing it on his website. Undoubtedly a must read, in my view.

Here is an excerpt :

“How can one talk about a ‘new tyranny’ when never before have men enjoyed so much freedom and so many rights?” It’s a question the reader unfamiliar with the subject might well ask. The classical tyrannies, in effect, were characterized by the fact that they stifled freedom and denied rights. Men were aware of this usurpation because, deprived of something that belonged to them by nature, they felt diminished.

The new tyranny of which we are speaking, instead, exalts man to the point of adoration, giving him the opportunity to turn his interests and desires into freedoms and rights, which however are no longer inherent in him by nature, but become the “gracious concessions” of a power that legally ratifies them. And so, turned into a child who contemplates his own whims as these are maximized and satisfied, the man of our time is more than ever the hostage of the assertions of power that guarantee him the enjoyment of all-encompassing liberty and constantly expanding rights. In the classical tyrannies, the subject at least still had the consolation of knowing that he was oppressed by a power that was violating his nature; but those who are subjected to this new tyranny have no consolation other than the protection of the same power that has lifted them up to the altar of adoration. And so without even realizing it man has become a tool in the hands of those who tend to him with painstaking care, as ants tend to aphids before feeding on them.

In exchange for these “gracious concessions,” man accepts a hegemonic view of the world that is imposed on him and turns him into an object of social engineering. Let’s call this hegemonic view the "progressive Matrix": a mirage, a grand illusion or trompe-l’oeil that is accepted with a gregarious spirit. Those who dare to question the trompe-l’oeil are immediately the target of anathemas, they are considered reprobates or blasphemers, enemies of the worship of man. The progressive Matrix used by the left has also been assimilated by the right, which has declined to join the battle where the confrontation with the adversary would be dynamic and exciting: on the level of principles. In its capitulation, the right limits itself to introducing insignificant variations on the working of the grand machine, but does not dare to use its gears. It’s like plowing without oxen.

The progressive Matrix has thus become a sort of Messianic faith; it has instituted a new order, it has imposed unassailable cultural principles, it has established a new anthropology that, while promising ultimate liberation to man, holds nothing for him but future suicide. And standing against this new order is only the religious order, which restores to man his true nature and offers him a correct view of the world that undermines the foundations of the trompe-l’oeil on which the new tyranny is based, dispelling its falsehoods. A vision that power makes a great effort in combating, since the religious order is the only bulwark to be destroyed before its triumph is complete.