It is held as a truism for some in the purported “Right” that liberty and order are a zero-sum game and that the “Common Good” must restrict liberty to ensure society serves “higher interests”. This is ultimately a Left-wing view, as James Lindsay points out.
The model of the “common good” that everyone is discussing now, coming from the “New Right” (Woke Right), is ultimately neo-Integralist. This model is also what ESG is and also DEI, just with a different guiding theology. Communism (per Marx) too.
In short, Integralism holds that man has temporal (real world, political) ends handled by civil government and spiritual ends handled by the church or ecclesia. It goes on to say that man’s spiritual ends are higher and more important than his temporal (practical) ends, so the state has a duty to order man’s temporal (practical, political) affairs such that he fulfill his ultimate spiritual ends. The Church or ecclesia has the keys and model for those spiritual ends and therefore has to be INTEGRATED into the state apparatus (hence the name “Integralism”) in order to make sure the state forces people toward their spiritual ends correctly.
As a part of this program, the “common good” is invoked as justification under the theory that if the society is not serving man’s highest spiritual ends, then it is also failing to order man’s life in a way that produces the true common good. That is, if there is misalignment between the temporal (political, practical, economic) order and the spiritual (ultimate) order, then the common good will not be maximized and might not even be achieved.
The theory holds that liberalism itself, which is its primary enemy, allows too much individual liberty, which is like a slow dissolving acid of the societal bonds and ordering necessary to produce the common good in society and thus to order life toward man’s highest spiritual ends. It might also allow people the freedom to reject, doubt, or question those highest spiritual ends or the Ecclesial Authority and its state apparatus that seeks to implement it, or even just its methods.
John Adams answered this idiocy in 1765, by the way, explaining that the freedom to question such authorities and to gather knowledge about their real doings, motivations, foundations, etc., is the highest and most important of all freedoms and the literal reason America was peopled (and to be founded) in the first place. That is, Adams is clear that America was founded to be an ANTI-INTEGRALIST experiment from its pre-revolutionary, indeed earliest Colonial, days, even though it made the mistakes (all ended by 1833) of establishmentarianism in many of the states.
Further:
(Of course, Integralism didn’t come about formally for another century after John Adams wrote this, but no finer refutation of Integralism has probably ever been produced than Adams’s 1765 “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” which was a significant basis for our Revolution and the American Experiment.)
To point: let’s not believe the Integralists and their low-church “Christian Nationalist” buddies when they try to make out that America would be better served by Integralism.
Back to point, that is, Integralism is a program that is designed to re-integrate the church and the state as a rejection of liberalism and also, sort of, Communism. The rejection is far more of liberalism than of Communism when you understand what is really going on here.
(No doubt, Pope Leo XIII thought he was rejecting Communism, but he was actually setting up the same structure and replacing the power base with Catholicism instead of Marxism, but it’s the same program serving a different model, which is fungible once you have the program installed.)
All you have to do to get to Communism from here, or ESG/DEI and the WEF and Mondialist world-control vision we’re all rejecting, is to swap out the religion at the center. Take out the high-church Catholic vision (or its low-resolution low-church “Christian Nationalist” cousin) of a Christian faith of some sort controlling the state and ordering our lives “for the common good” and, even more alarmingly, “for fulfilling man’s highest ends,” and you have it.
Obviously, the Christian visions (and there are many) hold that man’s highest end is to achieve admission to Heaven by Jesus Christ. Catholics and Protestants, and the many varieties of Protestants, do not actually agree on how this is to be done and, in European proto-Integralist systems (church-feudal state fusions) basically killed one another by the hundreds of thousands for centuries, leading to the establishment of America on religious liberty explicitly. That’s a problem, but it’s not the point. The point is that the religion of the “common-good” people is some unexamined form of Christianity with the common good oriented around Christian morality and the ultimate end to use the state to force people to behave in a way that increases the likelihood that they go to Heaven. (While they fight over how that is to be done and that getting it wrong is damnation and Hell, therefore this is really important).
NB: The Catholics in this know exactly what they want to implement and are tolerating the Protestants as useful idiots to their cause. It is only unexamined in the big-picture, which the Catholic Integralists are laughing at because they’re using these people.
Communism has a different soteriology but is roughly the same Integralist project. ESG/DEI (WEF) is the same.
The religion in Communism is Communism. It is achieved by building and actualizing (in the Hegelian sense) socialism. The common good is achieved by ordering man to his ultimate end, which is to live in a Communist Utopia according to his true socialist nature. The Socialist “semi-state” (as Lenin had it) is ultimately a low-tech Integralist program for this religion. The state exists to (brutally) order man to his highest spiritual end (Communism) and to achieve the common good (socialism) in the meantime.
The ESG/DEI (WEF) religion is basically a derivative form of this same program that is heavily influenced by Mondialist globalism, which is like a weird fusion of European (not American) liberalism with Neo-Marxism. It’s “Our Democracy” and George Soros’s “Open Society.” It’s religious imperative is “Sustainability and Inclusion,” which have deep Soviet roots in addition to their own Progressive pedigrees.
Man’s highest end is to live in a “Sustainable and Inclusive” global open society, and the common good is achieved by living that way (or forcing people to live that way). That’s regardless of whether we interpret Sustainability and Inclusion under a Mondialist vision (Soros, e.g.) or a Neo-Marxist one (Marcuse, Mao, Marx in his more spiritualist ideas). The state is set up through an expansive corporatist public-private partnership designed to order man’s temporal affairs toward achieving the common good (as such) and achieving his ultimate spiritual end, which is to live in a fully open society globally that has been stripped of all forms of “oppression” and “injustice.”
What I’m saying is that these are all the same exact program with a different guiding theology.
Same Integralism, different religion to force everyone into:
1) Woke Right: some kind of neo-Catholic Christianity that’s maybe kind of ecumenical and maybe not
2) Communism: Communism by way of socialism
3) ESG/DEI (WEF): Sustainability and Inclusion
All three have the same ultimate structure: man has practical, political, and economic concerns that have to be ordered by coercive state power to his “higher” “spiritual” ends as determined by the guiding theology.
All three will work the same way: establishing something that works like a social credit system in some level of technological sophistication to determine participation in society according to your support for the system and its claims on the “common good” and “man’s higher purposes and spiritual ends.”
All three can be switched from one to another once any one of them is installed. This is a fact of all systems of broad social control. Once you have the control mechanism (Integralism) in place, you can swap out the theology at need and force everyone to reorder their lives to that vision ASAP, with carrots and really big sticks.
They’re all the same program, mutatis mutandis.
Again, America was peopled and founded explicitly to reject exactly this program, which our founders saw to be the bane and catastrophe of Europe from which they fled, risking everything. It doesn’t matter which Eurotrash theology is plugged into the mechanism; this is fundamentally ANTI-American.
No one objects to the common good across society. People differ on how much state and church (or their fusion) control is to be used to achieve it. The American answer is little or none beyond providing for the general safety and generating a secure pro-business environment for the people to do their activities in. The Integralist answers, no matter the form, is a lot to maximal to total (totalitarian).
Adams wrote in that 1765 essay that as man became more educated and knowledgeable (“intelligent”) after the Reformation specifically, he started to realize and be able to articulate why the tyrannies of the “canon and feudal law” (Integralism) were inappropriate and unbearable to him, and also to understand how tyrannical and corrupt such systems are in practice. Thus, they lost their force in large part, but not enough to stop their evils, leading men to flee to the New World to establish a new system of both church and civil governance that would soundly reject them (reject Integralism).
We are now being besought and actually cornered into
Integralism of a variety of theological dispositions, and the truly American psyche is rejecting it. The only problem, as Adams saw, is the lack of clarity and understanding necessary to reject these things as they present themselves to enslave us now in all their myriad and new forms.Reject all Integralism.
God Bless the U.S.A.
For these people, it’s all about the secular world being shaped as they desire it to be.
