Esse Quam Videri

Esse Quam Videri (i.e. to be, rather than to seem) is the motto of North Carolina and, ironically, a number of institutions of higher learning.

This is a new Latin phrase for me, but it has given me much food for thought. I remember an executive vice president of a company for which I used to work saying: “It’s not what is. It’s what it appears to be” and thinking even then (some thirty-odd years ago) how at odds such a credo was with everything I’d been taught by my father. It was Alfred von Schlieffen who coined the apothegm, “Great achievements, small display: more reality than appearance” and Moltke who had said that “Only the capable succeed.” These were at the core of the German and Christian work ethic in the roots of my upbringing.

In 180-degree opposition, the anti-philosophy of “seeming” is evidenced in the Yankee Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s theory that law is experience, not logic. Inauthentic existence is at the end of this fuse, where, as Dostoyevsky rightly observed, “everything’s permissible” and every anti-Christian assertion has equal validity.

It should be self-evident that society can’t function in the absence of an absolute standard to which all are at least tacitly consenting. Patrick Henry had observed that “Good faith is essential to the happiness of mankind” and “That its want stops all human intercourse.” When the entails of a moral relativism in which each individual is only doing what’s right in his own eyes reaches its terminus, the hitherto behind-the-scenes chosen tribe and their father, along with their traitorous allies, can then come forward to assume the mantle over a mankind that has become cultureless, and openly reveal themselves and their mission:

“Our mission consists in promulgating the new law and in creating a God; that is to say in purifying the idea of God and realizing it when the time shall come. We shall purify that idea by identifying it with the nation of Israel, which has become its own Messiah. In these ideas we find our New Testament in which we reconcile kings and prophets.”

Otto Kahn, quotation from the Comte de Saint-Aulaire in Geneve contre la Paix Libraire Plan, Paris, 1936

For any who may be crying foul at the Otto Kahn quote, consider what one of their own lackeys wrote in 1920 before he later went on their payroll:

“It may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.”

Winston Churchill, Zionism vs. Bolshevism, 1920

Is there really a conspiracy? Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Consider Genesis 3:5 and its origin: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” In other words, forget about God’s Law. You can, out of your own experience, decide what’s right and wrong. Or, as Aleister Crowley and his followers would put it more succinctly: “Do as thou wilt.”

Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences, with which all our readers should become familiar, describes so well the moral vacuum created when there’s a denial of anything transcending human experience:

“If physical nature is the totality and if man is of nature, it is impossible to think of him as suffering from constitutional evil; his defections must now be attributed to his simple ignorance or to some kind of social deprivation. … There is no term proper to describe the condition in which he is now left unless it be “abysmality.” He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise himself. His life is practice without theory. As problems crowd upon him, he deepens confusion by meeting them with ad hoc policies. He struggles with the paradox that total immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems of matter. … Here [also follows] the assault upon definition: if words no longer correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words.”

It’s small wonder that our society has become rife with posturing “seemers” who can be held to no accountability for their words or actions. The two qualities that now seem most to be valued for promotion and preferment are a feigned courage and audacity in pandering to the vagaries of the masses, while maintaining an obsequious conformity to the politically correct will of the elite who are answering to the money power.

Christians, it’s time for all of us who “name the name” of Christ to repent and return to the Word who is Christ — the TRUE vine. Read John Chapter 15 again with the agency of the Holy Spirit revealing how God the Father is the husbandman who will prune, (for increased fruit-bearing), those who are truly in that vine, but will cut off any dead branches who prove to be only “seemers.” We should pray that God will make all of us to be, in truth, what we seem and profess to be. If our enemies hate us for it, we’ll know by their hatred and show ourselves to be His true disciples, while it will be to them a token of their perdition – Phil. 1:28.

Esse Quam Videri

-By German Confederate