Resisting the Spirit of the Age

So here I go again, debating Orthodox monks. Nuts, right? You’d think I’d learn after the exhausting undertaking of challenging Hieromonk Gabriel of Holy Cross Monastery in West Virginia.

Actually, that turned out to be quite the fruitful rhetorical effort. The essay garnered some much-needed dialog, got me a shout-out and a share from “verbal swordplay” veteran Ilana Mercer, and might even be translated into Russian per the inspiration of a friend.

But honestly, there’s really nothing more important than resisting the fashions of globalism, especially when it comes to Church matters. So in that vein, I am once again taking on a priest, and this time, and an even more beloved and influential one, Abbot Tryphon of All-Merciful Savior Monastery in Vashon Island, Washington.

The West coast monk first triggered my anti-leftist senses in early October when he wrote “The Homosexual Person.” Here was my comment to his social-justice essay which basically lays the responsibility of LBGT at the feet of a “judgmental” society that “fosters hatred and rejection,” not at the feet of individual sinners.

But it wasn’t until the monk’s recent essay about the perils of “global warming” that I decided to put forth my own Dissident Mama commentary. I mean, why on earth is a person who purports to be against globalism actively calling for globalist interventions to largely government-created problems?

So, I shared his post on my blogger Facebook page and wrote, “The only religion Abbot Tryphon is pushing here with his ‘climate change’ nonsense is anti-human globalism. All hail the solar panel and the carbon tax! Uh, no thanks, Father.”

The ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) monk actually replied to my post via his secular name, and then he and I then had a small, but telling exchange.

You can see that the priest sometimes operates by using straw-man fallacies. Just like he casually undergirds the “systemic racism” myth by implying that “inequality” is ultimately the fault of those on the political right (thus, we cannot really blame the the covetous, greedy, power-hungry BLM terrorists and their occult ideology), or when he sets forth the narrative that it’s conservatives who cause LGBT to needlessly suffer, Abbot Tryphon misses the mark pinpointing both the cause and cure of our mass consumerism and gluttony problems.

Although he gives a hat tip to their spiritual aspects, Abbot Tryphon either doesn’t get or doesn’t want to admit that our purposefully materialist society is the creation of centralized government. It’s the therapeutic-managerial state, along with their apparatchiks in the borg (legacy media, academia, banking, Silicon Valley, and corporate Murica), that is enriched and empowered by elevating trash and tearing down tradition.

Therefore, the abbot’s remedy to double-down on the cabal that spawned our disposable, dead culture in the first place is lunacy and must be called out. This is why he and his eco-followers claim that people who don’t agree with their obvious political statements are Christians whose faith is “problematic.” This pretense to silence dissent is not free-thinking nor is it nice. It’s dishonest.

Abbot Tryphon, who was physically attacked by a crazed lefty back in April 2019 and at a gas station of all places, says the “evidence is clear” and that the “vast majority of scientists” believe anthropogenic global warming is fact and is caused specifically by “overuse of fossil fuels.” Any intellectually honest person knows that there absolutely is a scientific debate to be had since there is no consensus. Just check out Harris-Mann Climatology and Real Climate Science, or listen to Dr. Judith Curry‘s story and review her and her colleagues’ work for yourself.

I also find it odd that the monk’s bold pronouncements are transmitted via a computer, which is made of heavy metals and minerals usually mined in Third World countries. Its manufacturing process requires toxic chemicals and fossil fuels, emits hazardous gases, and consumes large amounts of water. Green might be deemed “sustainable,” but that doesn’t mean it actually is, nor is it reliable. Scientism doesn’t trump reality.

And that brings me to the ethical implications of Abbot Tryphon’s statement. I touched on this in some of my above response to him, that advocating for governments to “act NOW” against the “‘abundance and prosperity’ theologies” will have long-lasting and deadly implications for the masses, hitting especially hard the poor. Alex Epstein lays out the human exploitation and horrifying “unseen hopes” innate in a global green movement, so I do urge everyone to read “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.”

Enacting Abbot Tryphon’s environmental prescriptions without considering the catastrophic consequences of such radical regulatory changes would require the embrace of immediacy – a hallmark of the very drive-through consumerism he critiques. Instant gratification too is an “addiction” that feeds into the materialist mindset. Think Willy Wonka’s Veruca Salt: “Don’t care how, I want it now!” High-time preference is truly one of America’s falsest of gods.

Pragmatically, we lay people live out here in the secular world and drive to work. Who do you think builds your churches and supports your cloistered monasteries? We do. Who do you think is being fruitful and multiplying and bringing up children in the faith to sustain and grow the Church? We do, and we have to drive to the store for food and clothing, and sometimes to the woods for nature’s solitude. We must also drive to church, which for many of us includes long-distance trips several times a week or more, depending on the Liturgical calendar.

The ROCOR mission I attend is an hour from my home. Even before Wu-flu mania, my family and I had to trek 40 minutes to get to the only English-speaking parish in our area. If you limit my access to fossil fuels, you not only control things like my thermostat and my travel, you control if and when we receive the Eucharist. If you limit carbon, you limit my ability to provide for and feed my family, both food-wise and spiritually. You limit life and fellowship.

If you limit my children’s animal-based protein, you endanger their physical health, increase the likelihood of the further emasculation of straight men, embolden Big Ag and normalize the genetically modified garbage they push, threaten the livelihood of the small livestock farmer, and even increase the likelihood of cattle extinction … all of which fosters globalism.

This is why “Bureaucrats hate the quintessential American culture of family farms,” notes agrarian entrepreneur Josiah Cantrall. “Simply put, people who think for themselves, work hard, and don’t live off the government. Farming is part of our identity. It is our way of life, our heritage, our patriotism, and the foundation of our generational values. Farming is the essence of our loyalty to our families and our God – and there is nothing more sacred than that. That’s why unelected liberal elites don’t want farm kids working on farms.”

Big government delights in the dependent, unhealthy, identity-less “global citizen” who unquestionably obeys the collective. This is why we don’t need more reliance on the environment-wrecking, family-smashing, soul-crushing Leviathan, but waaaaaaay less.

I’m no materialist. In fact, I see industrial-capitalism as an evil imposition of Yankee domination, but I’m also no socialist. I’m a proponent of getting back to a more localist, distributist, agrarian way of living, but without all the starvation and poverty that environmental emotivism would produce. I think if Abbot Tryphon truly opened his mind, he would see that we share many views of what Christian stewardship means in practice on a personal level. I think he’d also benefit immensely from reading “I’ll Take My Stand.”

What we need to break the consumerist, rationalist chains inherent in globalism is more subsidiarity, more regional sovereignty, more political autonomy, more personal responsibility, and yes, a lot more repentance. Centralized mass democracy is our sickness, not fossil fuels.

Fr. Seraphim Rose forewarns us of the manipulation of globalism veiled as “feel good” spirituality in his 1975 book “Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future.” You can see hints of it today when Kamala Harris blathers on about “equity” or Tom Hanks addresses college grads as the “chosen ones.”

In modern puritanical-progressive parlance, it’s known as the Great Reset, which is being called a “conspiracy theory” by the New York Times, even though the Gray Lady featured an article about the devilish design in April. More recently, Time Magazine dedicated an issue to it. Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, excitedly announced her participation in the “Great Reset Dialogue.” And Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau touted covid as an opportunity to “accelerate” the “reset.”

Check out the aptly named book “COVID-19: The Great Reset” by Klaus Schwab, who is World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman. Or just listen to Schwab in his own sinister words.

Or watch WEF’s dystopian video on how not “great” the reset will actually be.

And what is the prime vehicle for moving globalism down the wide path? Why, protecting the environment, of course. Sustainable development. Smart growth. Smashing both food sovereignty and national sovereignty. And ironfisted control of both population and movement. How can one flee the tyranny if his car is a relic, gasoline is “history,” and the entire planet is participating in what UN assistant secretary general Robert Muller predicted in 1995 would become the “first global, cosmic, and universal civilization”? Eco-hysteria is part of the package deal.

“World leaders’ ‘Great Reset’ plan for global economy is the Green New Deal on steroids,” explains Justin Haskins of the Heartland Institute. This type of centralized domination by the “Davos Man” (as Ben Sixsmith of The Spectator calls these new-age leaders) will establish what I call neo-Marxism.

They call it “stakeholder capitalism,” but it’s really universal socialism – an earth-swallowing corporate feudalism with banking elites and technocratic social engineers at the top, and the rest of us “happy,” atomized underlings below. But what exactly is supposed to fulfill the statist serfs in this novel, yet anciently evil paradigm?

Is it God? Nope, Christianity is a superstition of backwoods yahoos. Is it family? Nope, that’s for rubes; we’ve got the global village. Is it pride in your work? Nope, you’ve got your UBI, instead of thata antiquated notions o f work ethic. Is it your home? Nope, better get cozy in your government-mandated coffin apartment since private property has been abolished.

Is it living off the land? Nope, enjoy your pre-packaged Impossible Burger. Is it culture? Nope, “Nationhood as we know it will be obsolete,” as US Deputy Secretary of State and a chief architect of the American-led Balkans invasion Strobe Talbott candidly admitted in 1992. Turns out, all this erasing of history is by design. Who da thunk?

Is it simple human interaction? Nope, because “driving to a distant family gathering for the weekend’” will become less acceptable since “the WhatsApp family group is not as fun but … it’s safer, cheaper and greener,” Schwab wrote in his terrifying tome. Upright global citizens gotta build up their carbon credits to get social credits, right?

“Buying a sex doll would be safer, cheaper, and greener than getting married,” notes Sixsmith. “That doesn’t mean it is a good idea.” None of this is a good idea for flourishing – human, environmental, or otherwise.

The dirty little secret is that reset success will be gauged specifically by an increase in goods and services. This mass materialism will distract us from our fake “unity in blankness,” as Fr. Seraphim Rose described the new-age deception. Thus, the very consumerism that Abbot Tryphon bemoans will become the your communion, sustainability and safety directives will be your liturgy, and the Davos Man will be your high priest. In CEOs we trust.

It’ll be “scientific world humanism, global in extent” as evolutionary biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley (and brother to “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley) called the goals in UNESCO’s 1946 reset statement. In other words, totalitarian nihilism wrapped in recycled packaging. It’ll be “environmentally friendly” and it’s been the plan for a long time.

And it’s been tried before. Just ask the New Soviet Man, who was “completely transformed, free of all Russia’s supposed backwardness and shaped and directed by the state’s leaders at the top.” The idea was to engineer a norm-breaking, pliable populace working toward the “selfless collective … irrespective of the country’s cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, creating a single Soviet people.” All other hierarchies, especially the one with our Lord and Savior on high, is to become a thing of the past.

Just as the Georgian monk Elder Gabriel Urgebadze, who doused a portrait of Vladimir Lenin with kerosene and set it ablaze in the Tbilisi center square, we Christians must too resist this spirit of the age and combat the rallying cries of the comrades in green, even when they happen to be our fellow Christians or clergy.

Abbot Tryphon says, “We don’t have time to sit around and debate this,” but I say there’s no better time to challenge du jour virtue-signaling before it becomes defacto dystopia. Veritas vincit.

Article originally published November 27, 2020, at DissidentMama.net.