ROTS at the heart of America

Gerard Van der Leun describes the Religion of the Self that has become the core of American politics.

The Religion of the Self does not rest upon selfless service but upon ego, even as the ego calls upon selflessness in others to boost it to power. Today's Religion of the Self spends a good many cycles advocating that others should serve its endless causes; that others should obey its endless requirements; that others should recite only its approved catechism. Above all it demands that others should reach for their wallets to pay for it all.

The Religion of the Self elects candidates to high office that promise equality and deliver obscenity. The Religion of the Self is composed of many millions of believers whose primary aim is their own glory at someone else's expense. It is little wonder that the high priests of the Religion of the Self are today known as "celebrities," and that the highest state sought by members of this religion is to be, themselves, "celebrated."

A poet, who was taken for many decades to be one of their seers, but who has recently revealed he merely used them for his own,deeper purposes, once wrote of them:

"But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody...."

And they agreed as long as it was clear that the somebody they were to serve was always going to be the Self.

The Religion of the Self teaches, as its first and last precept, that there is nothing in this world greater than the self and -- beyond this world, out beyond even the unimaginable edges of the universe -- there is... well... nothing at all;

"purposeless matter hovering in the dark."

Which calls to mind of of the essays on the Sense of Events Reading List. It's called, "Christ and Nothing," by David B. Hart.

And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

Read them both.