The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads Ryszard Legutko's 'Demon in Democracy' Part 10 - The Finale

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

49 MinutesPG-13Pete concludes the reading of a book that greatly influenced him, "The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies" by Ryszard Legutko.The Demon in DemocracyPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. Great to see you back at Spexavers. Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals.

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support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the finale of my reading of Rizard Lagut goes the demon in democracy. This is part 10. And I want to remind you that Thomas and I watch movies and review them and comment on them. And the latest we did was the 1935 Lenny Riefenstahl classic. Try them for the Will. If you go to freeman Beyond the Wall.com forward slash movies,

you can see where there is a link that you can get it, and you can also subscribe to our at least once a month movie reviews for the year. All right, let us start and get into this and finish this up. This is Chapter 5. It's called Religion, and we're on Part 5. Hostility to Christianity in modern liberal democracies raises a question of how religion should manage itself in public life. The simplest answer, close to what some Protestant movements embodied, is that religious life and political life should be separated. Religion is essentially a private matter, a family matter, and sometimes a community matter, but definitely not a state matter.

There are quite a lot of people today who are public figures, professionals, politicians, and it is rarely that we know what religion, if any, they profess, and even if we knew this would be a relevant in the assessment of their public performance. Such a strict separation of the religious and the public realms is very much in tune with today's ideology of modernity. And it is all the more convincing that it confirms the assumption, considered obvious, but in fact doubtful, that the freedom of religion is guaranteed in Western democracies and that Christians being denied a public presence should have no reason to complain. This strategy, let us call it conciliatory, should be distinguished from another one.

Let's call it capitulatory. The difference between the first and the second is at the beginning of one degree, but ultimately one of essence. The aim of the conciliatory Christian has been to avoid conflicts with the liberal Democrats and to adapt themselves to the existing system, which they thought, let me start that again. aim of the conciliatory Christians has been to avoid conflicts with the liberal Democrats and to adapt themselves to the existing system, which they thought sufficiently spacious and friendly

to include Christianity together with other religions. The aim of the Christians who have capitulated is to be admitted to the liberal Democratic club, and in order to do it, they are willing to accept any terms and concessions, convinced that remaining outside the club or being refused entrance, would bring infamy on them. One can, of course, defend both strategies. Conciliation and capitulation, and the standard argument of defense is the following. An enormous part of the activities of churches and an enormous area of religion have nothing to do with politics, socialism, liberal democracy, or anything related. Religion and churches are about God, souls, and salvation. Therefore, because we live in a civil society governed by

the rule of law, waging big political battles against it is not only meaningless from the perspective of religion, but pulls the churches away from the primary mission, which is out of evangelization. They always care so much about the purity of the church once the church starts, once a public face is put on. Isn't that interesting? It's like, well, no, no, you can't, the church can't stay pure if it touches the state, it will become dirty. something it'll go wrong. No doubt the basic objectives of Christianity

remain outside politics and it is these objectives that the churches and the faithful should pursue. But this otherwise obvious statement fails to address one crucial fact, the growing infiltration of liberal democracy into religion. Liberal democracy, like socialism,

has an overwhelming tendency to politicize and ideologize, ideologize social life in all its aspects, including those that were once considered private. Hence, it is difficult for religions to find a place in a society where it would be free from the pressure

from liberal democratic orthodoxy and where it would not risk a conflict with its commasars. Even the issues generally thought to be remote from politics become censured by the punctilious scrutiny of those who watch over ideological purity. To give an example, the Vatican Declaration, Dominus Aeus, sparked anger in many groups,

many among secular and even atheists than Protestant, more among secular and even atheists than Protestant and Orthodox, and the direct cause was the following sentence. Quote, therefore, there exists a single church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter, and by the bishops and communion with him. Chapter 4, Clause 17. Those who protested claim to defend the non-Catholics who presumably could not, in light of the declaration, achieve salvation, and thereby had their eschatological status unfairly diminished in relation to the Catholics. So instead of just saying, well, you can't say that, you're just, you're saying you're the only way. It's like, no, no, look what you're doing to the

Protestants and the Orthodox by saying that. Why the atheists were so indignant about the fact that they would not achieve salvation in which they do not believe in God, through God, whose existence they denied, can be explained only as a case of total subjugation of the mind by politics and ideology. They did not see salvation as a theological problem, but as the Catholic Church's political instrument, cleverly camouflaged by theological rhetoric to justify her domination over other groups and other religious and non-religious groups. In addition, the sentence in question offended their egalitarian sensibility. Salvation like anything, people desire that is

not required as a human right and distributed equally, must have appeared to them to be ideologically suspect. The church is bound to get into permanent conflicts with liberal democracy and matters of morality, which this system has appropriated and subjected to the power of legislative bodies in the courts. Today it is the legislators and the judges who decide what is and is not permitted, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil in matters of life and death. Until recently, the family ethics was to a large degree shaped and with good results by the Christians who continued and developed the teachings of the classical thinkers. But during the last decades, this ethics was taken away from them and incorporated into

the liberal democratic mechanism. dozens of legal decisions were taken directly affecting family and even sexual life, and those decisions blatantly diverging from Christian teachings, for example, about abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, became law. Christians were forced to accept the humiliating subordination to a law they thought immoral, but whose disobedience is penalized. Quite often, the grounds for these decisions have strong anti-Christian overtones. Christian arguments are dismissed as merely religious,

with the implication that as such they are irrational, parochial, anachronistic, and unrepresentative. In many countries, the conscience clauses protecting Christians were either scrapped or made invalid by the courts. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items

all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design.

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Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Great to see you back at Spegg Savers. Okay. Could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-L-S?

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Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. There is virtually no area in which the influence of Christianity has not been challenged. Everything that Christianity imbued with its, with its spirit, legacy and wisdom, education, morality, sensibility, human conduct, even diet, the liberal democratic order puts a question and in many cases eliminated. Sunday has become a day off from work, not a holy day. Organized actions have been taking place so far successfully to lift the ban still existing in a few regions in Europe on public

disco events on Good Friday. Ash Wednesday is no longer honored and the Christmas season has become a commercial paradise, while Christmas Eve with friends over a beer is more and more encouraged as something chic. The laws and mindsets have been reconstructed in such a way that no custom or rule having its root in Christianity can withstand the onslaught of liberal democracy. If the old communists live long enough to see the world of today, they would be devastated by the contrast between how little they themselves have managed to achieve in their anti-religious war and how successful the liberal Democrats have been. All the objectives the communists set for themselves in which they pursued with savage brutality were achieved by the liberal Democrats who, almost without any effort

and simply by allowing people to drift along with the flow of modernity, succeeded in converting churches into museums, restaurants, and public buildings, secularizing entire societies, making secularism the militant ideology, pushing religion to the sidelines, pressing the clergy into docility and inspiring powerful mass culture with a strong anti-religious bias in which a priest must be either a liberal challenging the church or a disgusting villain. Is not, one may wonder, this non-religious and anti-religious reality of today's Western world very close to the vision of the future without religion that communists were so excited about and which despite the millions of human lives sacrifice on the altar of progress failed to materialize?

The triumph of anti-Christianity seems to favor the conciliatory strategy. A lot of Christian communities overpowered by the march at time gave up any idea of head-on confrontation with liberal democracy or even any energetic defense policy. Those that capitulated unconditionally had to perform theological acrobatics to justify their position, and in so doing, agreed to suppress any formative ambitions of their own and remain silent when before their eyes the Christian practices and ideas were being destroyed. After making some timid gestures of resistance at the beginning, they soon agreed to recognize so-called homosexual marriage to condone abortion or even to tolerate euthanasia.

The ubiquity of liberal democratic rights and ethical permissiveness may have generated in a lot of Christians such a feeling of resignation that any vigorous resistance must have seemed to them futile. The only option left for Christians to maintain some respectability in a new world was to join the great progressive camp so that occasionally they would have an opportunity to smuggle in something that could pass for a religious message. You can see this on Twitter. You can see this all the time. This is what like Woe and Corey from Stonequire fight against all the time. These quote unquote Christians, most of the especially the evangelicals and a lot of a lot of Catholics and even some

Orthodox are nothing more than liberals nothing more and you know as somebody who remembers when like the Presbyterian Church America PCA was like heavily right-wing I mean no anymore Southern Baptist Convention gone and it's you may find an end a dependent Baptist church out there that's doing something and there are that you know there is a rising of traditionalism in the Catholic Church with people looking for Catholic masses and wanting their parishes to do do them looking for Latin masses and wanting their parishes to do the Latin Mass again but for the most part it seems like most people have given up and they've actually taken the stance that if you are against this madame,

the way they're doing things now, then you're a heretic, then you are, you're a Nazi. I mean, they've just literally become leftists. But this conciliatory attitude on the part of Christians is certainly wrong if it is motivated by the conviction that the current hostility to religion is a result of a misunderstanding, social contingencies, unfortunate errors committed by the Christians, or some minor ailments of modern society. The truth is that all these phenomena, as well as other anti-Christian developments are the genuine consequences of the spirit of modernity on which the liberal democracy was founded. Modernity and anti-Christianity cannot be separated because they stem from the same root

and since the beginning have been intertwined. There is nothing and has never been anything in this branch of the European tradition that would make it favorably predisposed to Christianity. The waves of hostility appeared and disappeared, ranging from outward aggression to indifference mixed with contempt, but never did the tide turn into an open and sincere sympathy. There have been several Christian authors of liberal persuasion who tried to find common elements between Christianity and liberalism, which occasionally produced interesting theoretical insights, but generally the inexorable tendency to liberalize and democratize the world that we have witnessed over the last centuries always supported the forces of anti-Christianity.

Therefore, whoever advocates a conciliatory strategy today fails or refuses to see the conditions in which Christians have been living. It is utterly mistaken to take the position that many do, namely that the church should take over some liberal democratic ingredients, open up to modern ideas and preferences, and then, after having modernized yourself, managed to overcome hostility and reach people with Christian teachings. One can see why this plan has gained considerable popularity, but whatever its merits, it cannot succeed. During the Second Vatican Council in the years that followed it, some Christians chose a similar path to be in tune, at least externally, with the liberal democratic sensibilities, so that the enmity would become less acute and the anti-Christian trend be reversed. The idea of agornamento was far from self-evident, and a lot of contradictory theories and

strategies were put into it. But the long-term effects, whether intended or not, were quite clear. Their church architecture became community-centered rather than monarchical. Liturgy was simplified so as not to be too absorbing to a modern man who has less and less time for religion. Latin and comprehensible and unpleasantly elitist was replaced with the vernacular languages that everybody could understand. The priests seemed to behave during the mass, like leaders and commanders, and turned versus populum, to make an impression of being an equal among equals. I will just say to you, Stormy and I have talked about this. What do you think that Latin, there is power in Latin.

There's a metaphysical power in Latin. And by getting rid of Latin, it takes power away. Notice where they still keep Latin, where Latin is still alive, in the law, in the legal world. They have power over you. If you want to look and see who has power in the world now, look and see who's using Latin, still using Latin. Think about that. All these changes, however, did not blunt the anti-Christian prejudices that the liberal

democratic spirit had been feeding on, nor did they entice more people to enter the church to strengthen the already decimated army of the faithful. The good things that were expected to happen did not happen. They did not, let me say it again, because they could not. An aversion to Christianity runs so deep in the culture of modernity that no blandishment or fawning on the part of the church can change it. Going too far along this road actually threatens the very essence of Christianity. Since the Second Vatican Council, the tendency to obsequiousness has been increasing rather than diminishing. Also in Poland, despite the fact that liberal Democrats

never made any conciliatory gestures and their demands, paradoxically, became more peremptory. The Catholic Church, it must be clearly emphasized, is more aware of the danger than other Christian communities. However, the priests and the bishops who have been subjected to tremendous pressure, especially in Western Europe and America, to ingratiate with the liberal democratic orthodoxy, and this pressure has sometimes been quite effective. The Vatican ruled by John Paul II and Benedict XVIth was outspoken in its fidelity to the fundamental teachings of the church, but it is difficult to predict in which direction their successors will go. Well, many fear that the next generation of Cardinals may be more willing to compromise, especially as the fringe groups of

the clergy loudly declare their readiness to flow with the liberal democratic current. This may lure them into falling again, only deeper this time into the same erroneous belief that an affable demeanor will silence the enemies of Christianity and propel the new hosts of the faithful to a liberalized and democratized church. best news I heard is that in surveys done in the past five years new priests that are getting ordained are much more

what we would say conservative more let's say traditional but hostility will not subside and the new host of the faithful will not show up because the mechanism of de-Christianization has its own dynamics that the concessions of the Christians strengthen rather than weaken

if the Vatican Council if the Vatican Council progresses were to be presented with what the liberal Democrats of today demand the church should do, they would be shattered. An unceasing relentless offensive to appropriate the entirety of our existence has made us complacently amenable to things that are otherwise outrageous. In order for the church to be praised or even to be spared, the heaviest blows, it is no longer enough to make the sacral architecture less hierarchical and more democratic, or have the priests face the faithful during the Mass or to consider the abolition of celibacy. Nowadays, one must go further, prohibit the condemnation of anything other than what the liberal democratic orthodoxy mandates to condemn and decree to praise everything that the orthodoxy mandates to praise. Today, the Christian's devotion, or rather surrender, to liberal democracy, is measured by

their enthusiastic support of the claims of homosexual activists and by the acceptance of what the feminists call women's reproductive rights. One shudders at the thought that will be expected of the Christians in a few years' time. Well, we're here, buddy. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs.

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Terms and conditions apply Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland Great to see you back at Spegg Savers Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep, D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-L-S.

Deals! Oh, right. Yes, our Black Friday deals are eye-catching, but the letter charts over here. Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals, like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details.

All this explains by the representatives of so-called open Catholicism do a disservice to the cause of Christian religion. Their relationship with liberal democracy is reminiscent of the dialogue of their older colleagues conducted with Mark. Open Catholics effusively eulogized the political system and its ideology, categorically distanced themselves from closed and non-liberal Catholics, apparently in the hope that while cooperating creatively with the system, they will have an opportunity to put a few droplets of Catholicism into the liberal democratic vessels. Their interlocutors welcome the commitment to liberal democracy with satisfaction and emphatically approve of the great divide between the good Catholics and the bad Catholics, but are never tired of repeating that the divide should be deeper

and should result in a sort of cordon centenere around the bad breed. They make it clear, however, that although the initiative of the few progressive dissidents is not negligible, Christianity itself is of little worth, and whatever is of value in it, it is better expressed and more forcefully implemented by liberal democracy. Not surprisingly, the open Catholics who decide to play this game have not gained much, but instead have been subjected to an endless series of humiliations to which they have grown so accustomed that they treat them as the natural order of things. With each new move against Christianity, be it in vitro fertilization, so-called reproductive rights,

or a rehabilitation of a new sexual disorder, they are the first to defend it, cheerfully arguing that, in fact, nothing harmful has happened, that it is the Catholic fundamentalists who are the, guilty parties and that are after the liberal Democrats give the world a new push forward, things are in much better shape than before. Cardinal Wazinski, being under enormous pressure, was yielding to communists, but finally said nonpossimus. Looking at the open Catholics, it is hard to imagine that they would be better to utter such

words, let alone think about them, no matter how far liberal democracy pushes its anti-Christian campaign. One should rather think of the Open Catholics as a group of cheerleaders with funny pom-pom similar to those that one can see at Games in America encouraging their favorites to fight for progress. The sad spectacle of what is most misleadingly called dialogue shows, as it did in the case of Christians conversing with the Marxists several decades ago, a dramatic asymmetry, both in power and ideology, between the two sides. In terms of power, the liberal Democrats have, practically, a moment. monopoly. They control the legislation, directly or indirectly influenced court rulings, and have a powerful hold on public opinion. The Catholics are on the far margin. The most they can do is to beg favors from the rulers of today's world, provided those rulers happen to be in a good mood,

but do not participate in its formation. They can only supplicate, and their supplications must not be expressed in their own language, but in the language of those who hold power. They ask for acceptance of Catholicism, not as Catholics, but as a group whose creed does not threaten liberal democracy, and can even, once they present their case with a sufficient skill and credibility, be considered as supportive of it. While submitting these supplications, they are occasionally graded well by the powers that be, but no matter how these good grades increase their self-esteem, they usually lose sight of the essence of the general conflict. They mistake the favors bestowed on them every now and then with the actual position of Christianity in the world. They do not understand that the relationship between the two is inversely proportional, that the more favors are granted to the open Catholics, the weaker the position of Catholicism or of Christianity in general becomes. I believe Poland is something like 90% Catholic. Don't quote me on that, but I think it was the last time I look.

So, you know, and considering they were they were under communism too, this is a great study to see just exactly how. And I think anyone who's a Protestant, anyone who can see it, Orthodox can see it in churches. And a lot of the churches. That's why a lot of people have to be, we got to find a good church. And how many times I get contacted by people and say, can you point me to a church where they're not? going to talk about Israel? Part six. One can look at Christianity in the modern world, and in Europe in particular, from the vantage point of an insider or an outsider. The first is a Christian to whom the presence of religion in the modern world is vitally important. He interprets, and with good reason,

the war against Christianity is a process through which the West has been moving away from religion in the proper sense of the word towards some form of civil religion, the type that Rousseau wrote about, supplemented with a few new ingredients. He fears that this new creed will turn into an idolatry of the existing system and its ideology, the creed according to which the ultimate criterion of being good Christian will be the enthusiasm with which one welcomes the progress of liberal democracy in politics and ideology, and the readiness with which one gives Christian legitimacy to the new acts of capitulation. Any Christian in America knows, what this is.

I don't care what your... What church you go to. These fears, alas, are not unfounded. For instance, it has become a common practice that papal teachings as well as other fundamental documents of Christianity are being assessed in light of the liberal democratic ideology, as if this was the highest tribunal

whose verdicts to Catholics must humbly respect. A case and point is the reception of the centissimus enous John Paul II's important encyclical, which has been praised or criticized from exactly the same perspective, which is its attitude to democracy. Some praised the Pope for having spoken up in favor of democracy and of the free market, while others rebuked them for having been sufficiently committed to democracy and the market, not sufficiently committed to democracy and the market economy. The former praised him as a good Democrat, while the latter undermined his democratic and free market credibility. That such an evaluation of the Pope's words is seriously flawed as

beyond the comprehension of modern men. Fewer and fewer people take seriously the notion that there may be some other criteria of assessment, not necessarily liberal democratic and more important than these, and that perhaps it is in the light of, as well as in the humble respect of the criteria that the liberal Democrats should look critically at their own presuppositions and at the political system. they have been thoughtlessly defending. All Christians who believe that the liberal democratic ideology is like an ordinary coat, no different from any other, that they can put on to be able to move around more easily and comfortably,

but inside which they will still remain the same Christians, make a mistake, and a double one to boot. The first mistake is a wrong choice of strategy. The liberal democracy ideology uses, no matter that it does so fraudulently, the rhetoric of multiculturalism, which is supposed to give justice to the, the existence of different cultures, which, precisely because they are different, are said to contribute to the richness and diversity of society. But if this were true, then Christians should compete with others for a visible presence and for influence. After all, that is what

the coexistence of different groups in a liberal democracy should amount to. And in order to be a successful competitor, they should act as an energetic and full-blooded group strongly committed to their cause, openly determined to imprint their mark on the world. The opposite, strategy, obliterating the boundaries, diluting their message in liberal jargon, cajoling the idols of modernity, paying homage to today's superstitions, self-effacing their identity, condemns Christians to a sad defeat with no dignity and no progeny. The second mistake is to ignore the fact that liberal democratic ideology has long since ceased to be open, if it ever was, and has entered a stage of rigid dogmatization.

The more conquest it makes, the less the victors are willing to show clemency to anyone outside the winning forces. The Christians who put on humble faces and declare their readiness to seek a common ground of action for a better world stand no chance to survive, regardless of how far in their self-repeudiation they go. Sooner or later, they will have to sign an unconditional surrender and to join the system with no opt-out and no conscious clauses, or in the events of sudden declaration of non-possumous, they will be instantly degraded to the position of a contemptible enemy of liberal democracy. So far nothing indicates that the regime will lose its ideological momentum. But the fate of Christianity in a liberal democracy can only be viewed from an external non-Christian perspective. Those who are not Christians, and as sometimes

happens, do not like Christianity, can feel schadenfreude looking at the problems this religion encounters in the modern world, particularly a disturbing rapidity of secularization. However, such a reaction is short-sighted. Christianity is not just a religion, but a vital spiritual element of Western identity, something that allowed Europe to maintain a strong sense of community, linking the ancient with the modern, and absorbing into it itself a variety of intellectual inspirations. By rejecting Christianity after having marginalized the classical heritage, and indeed the entire West not only slides into cultural aridity, a process noticeable for some time,

but also falls under the smothering monopoly of one ideology whose uniformity is being cleverly concealed by the deafening rhetoric of diversity that has been pouring into people's minds at all occasions and in all contexts. You catch them in the corner of your eye, distinctive by design, they move you, even before you drive.

The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply.

Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is. regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear.

From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. Great to see you back at Spegg Savers. Okay.

Could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right. Yes, our Black Friday deals are I catching, but the letter charts over here.

Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals. Like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. Christianity is the last great force that offers a viable.

alternative to the tediousness of liberal democratic anthropology. In this respect, it is closer to the classical rather than the modern view of human nature. With Christianity being driven out of the main track, the liberal democratic man, unchallenged and totally secure in his rule, will become a soul master of today's imagination epictically determining the boundaries of human nature and at the very outset disavowing everything that dares to reach beyond his narrow perspective. The only thing will be capable of doing is occasional, albeit capricious generosity in tolerating some form of dissidents at the far peripheries of his empire. Without a strong competitor, the liberal democratic man will reign over human aspirations like a tyrant. There will appear no one who would

dare or be ready in compliance with the existing rules to call his reign into question. The rules that exist do not permit such extravagant acts and a supposition that there might be other rules has long since been discarded as absurd. One can, of course, imagine that the liberal democratic monopoly will eventually begin to crack in the new centrifugal forces from causes yet unfathomed will be set in motion. Common sense and experience tell us that it is not possible for people to be lulled by one ideology forever

and to have their emotions and thoughts organized always and in the same way. The war against the Christian heritage, however, may have this unpleasant consequence. when the renewal comes, it will start from a much lower level than the one reached previously by European culture through Christianity. Liberal Democratic man, in order to shake out his habits, superstitions, prejudices, dogmas, self-mistification, hypocrisy, and many other faults, inborn as well as those acquired through a prolonged period of monopolistic rule, will have before him a much harder road than did the previous rulers of the human imagination. He is more stubborn, more narrow-minded, and clearly less willing to learn from others.

The rediscovery of the revelation, after denigrating that part of human nature that allowed its prior acceptance, will require new stimuli and a new surge of spiritual energy of which we cannot, in the time of growing secularization, say anything definite or even whether they will be at all possible. That is the meat of the text. We are going to move on to the conclusion. conclusion. One can look at the affinities between communism and liberal democracy

from both a narrow and a wider perspective. The narrower point of view may lead us to a sad conclusion that the modern Western world never really understood the communist experience quite correctly, and if it did, it never took seriously the lessons that followed from it. When looked at, more broadly, the examination of those affinities

may give grounds for a conclusion more daring, namely that the two regimes stem from the same root, or more precisely from the same, not particularly good, inclination of modern man, persistently revealing itself under different political circumstances. This is assuredly not the only disquieting inclination that modern man has given into, bearing in mind the bloody history of Europe and America in the last centuries. But the story of the relationship between communism and liberal democracy is of particular importance, as it is about the systems that were hailed and sincerely believed to be the greatest

hopes of mankind. The story is thus not only about politics, but also indirectly about the aspirations and dreams of modern man. This book argued that the modern man who was the inspiring force of the two political systems was a mediocrity, not by nature, but so to speak, by design. And from the beginning was expected to be indifferent to great moral challenges and unaware of the danger of a moral fall. Such was, more or less, the picture that the early modern thinkers created, mostly in opposition to the classical and Christian views of human nature, which, within a few centuries, managed to overcome virtually all of its competitors. Both regimes imagined man as a creature of common qualities, whose commonness made him perceive the world through his own narrow vision,

and was therefore naturally inclined to reduce art ideas and education, contrary to the old view, which had attributed them an elevating power, to his own dimensions. I cannot refrain from making a personal note. The Poles could see the communist man in his full splendor during the early stages of communism when, after having arrived on the Soviet tanks, he was enforcing the construction of the new regime in a society that had already been decimated and terrorized by the German occupation. A homo novice, uneducated, vulgar, primitive, having nothing but contemporary tradition for the Polish imponderables, for history, culture, and anything subtle, genteel, elegant, beautiful, or spiritual, he was carrying out the destruction of social classes. The landed gentry, the middle class, the peasantry, the aristocracy, and even the working class whose interest he pretended to impersonate.

He gave the Communist Party his will and his soul, and in return the party provided him with the formidable, instruments of power as well as with what seemed to him the complete knowledge of the world. He did his job with a ruthlessness unmitigated by any prohibitions. Polish society underwent a profound and largely a reversible process of the destruction of culture. Life became boorish. Social norms lost their force, and ugliness replaced beauty. One had an impression that the country fell into the hands of the barbarians. Later on, the communist man acquired some polishing, which did not touch his essence, but the damage could not be undone. The spectacular manifestation of Soviet Barthbrism, for which in a Polish

language, had a lot of colorful expressions, was not a local phenomenon, but occurred in all the countries that came under a communist rule. When the communist order stabilized and the Soviet-type thugs retired or were pushed aside, there came a new generation of communist, no less vulgar than their predecessors, but definitely not so brutal. presumably because of a fairly long period of peace. They expressed their desires in the communist newspeak that delineated the boundaries of their imagination and mental possibilities. Their lack of cultivation did not prevent them

from having mastered a remarkable dexterity and moving within the intricate mechanisms of the communist bureaucracy, which was allotting privileges, benefits, property, and power. The second time we encountered a new wave of barbarism was immediately after the fall of communism. naive people thought that after the disappearance of the old regime, a substantial part of the social fabric that it had destroyed would be restored and that freely elected governments in a liberated society would make an attempt to do so, or at least that the opening of the free space would boost,

as it did during the first solidarity period, 1980-1981, human energy to pursue the noble goals the old regime had debased. But whoever expected this was disappointed. Instead, we witnessed an invasion by another tribe of new men, boisterous and savage. The areas of freedom created by the crumbling of the old order became almost immediately occupied by the people coming, as it seemed, out of nowhere in such great numbers that their victory was practically a blitzkrieg. Their strikingly loudish manners and coarse language did not have their origin in communism, but as many found astonishing, in the patterns or rather anti-patterns that developed in Western liberal democracies. Of course, the new order was different and had different mechanisms, but despite the

differences, it was directed against the social forms, type of conduct, norms, and practices to which the old order had been also hostile. Life underwent further vulgarization. The few practices and social norms that survived the previous invasion were subject to attacks by the new forces of barbarism. The ugliness of communist Poland did not disappear, and beauty was as much a rarity as it had been before. The new barbarians could hardly be called Bolsheviks or Soviet thugs, but there was something in their attitude that led them led to seeking similarities with their predecessors. Their vulgarity was, so to speak, of the second order as opposed to that which had been seen in communist Poland and which had been something primordial about, which had had something primordial about it.

What happened in the liberal democracy did not result from the absence of culture and there was nothing natural about it, nor did it come from outside of the realm of civilization. In that, it differed from the vulgarity of the communists, who, before they captured power in Poland, had lived in environments practically unaffected by Polish culture. Having been long exposed to the Soviet influence, they felt an intense, instinctive antipathy toward the West as such, not knowing exactly what it was, and in particular for all forms of civilized conduct and propriety, which they thought both decadent and perfidious. The new barbarians of the liberal democracy, on the other hand, were products of the West,

which at a certain stage of its history turned against its own culture. The respect for its achievements was gone, replaced by contempt, the rules of civility and propriety derided. To put it simply, the vulgarity of the communist system was pre-cultural, while that of liberal democracy is post-cultural. In both systems, man compensated for his common, with the image of a large well-functioning system, communism in one case and liberal democracy and the other, which, through the pursuits of collective goals, equality for all, peace, prosperity,

etc., released them from a necessity to aspire to the ideals that from the perspective of the political system might look redundant. It is therefore hardly surprising that just as communism or socialism was the favorite word of the communist man, democracy has been such a word for the liberal liberal democratic man. The former liked to say, but in communism, because in socialism and such like, and the argument of communism was always the ultimate argument and by definition irrefutable. The latter loves saying always would do piety mixed with a touch of audacity, but in democracy, and because of democracy, and the argument of democracy, refutes all others. the number and frequency of the words

communism or socialism and communist or socialist in the Ancian regime are equal to the number and frequency of the words democracy and democratic in the new regime. The eagerness to use these words as trumps what not thought

by the users to be a symptom of intellectual and moral capitulation, but rather and quite sincerely, a manifestation of independence, courage, assertiveness, and autonomy. To a mediocre man, an organic assimilation with the system was the easiest way to develop a conviction of being exceptional. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design.

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in many important aspects from the world that the communist man dreamed about, and that, despite the enormous collective effort, he could not build within the communist institutions. There are differences to be sure, but they are not so vast that they could be gratefully and unconditionally accepted by someone who has had first-hand experience with both systems and then moved from one to the other. It would not be, perhaps, inaccurate to say that the essence of the modern man's dream has come true, or, more modestly, that this process is still in progress. He has managed to divest himself in the moral obligations that made his life difficult and is apparently planning to get rid of those that still remain. The sad state of affairs, however, does not make him

despair. He is troubled neither by raging ideology that paralyzes his mind through stultifying stereotypes, nor by politicization, nor by the sterility of culture and the triumph of vulgarity. Even if he can notice all these regrettable developments and be sometimes annoyed by them, even if sometimes the thought passes through his mind that similar things happened in communism, he remains unperturbed and quickly convinces himself that replacing them with something else is impossible. And if it were possible, the results would be, for the reasons he does not bother to reflect upon, disastrous. So the liberal Democrats are quite right when they keep suggesting that the world has come to an end

and that if it should continue to exist in a satisfactory way, it must be developed in the same vein. Of course, it is highly unlikely that some new rights will be invented to make everything yet more moral, that the feminist ideology and its menace will prove to be even more absurd than before, that people who so profoundly worship their intellectual independence will once again surprise everyone by meekly adopting it all. We can imagine a literature that will speak increasingly about nothing and a diversity rhetoric even more raucous and more masking of the expanding uniformity. but all this will yet will be yet another scene in the same final chapter of a long story

that historically began in the early modern period but that had but that had its long Vorgashishth that word is wow Vorgasichste This chapter will include the fulfillment of what communism plan but what to the immeasurable regrets of its adherence failed namely man's integration with the regime and the regime with man Whether the future of human history will add some new chapters, we cannot say, but such a scenario seems upon the authority of common sense, likely, but the issue is not that new impulses, fashions, mood swings, major events, and other unpredictable factors will always emerge to affect the course of history and people's perceptions of it. The real change will come only when

the current view of man spends itself and is considered inadequate. Only then will other stories develop or be revived. The former as a result of new experiences, the latter as a result of reactivating the long-dormant areas of collective memory, allowing a different look at human fate and the dreams through which individuals and communities express their aspirations. This course of events surely cannot be ruled out, although today the mere fact of considering it provokes anger and mockery by those who lost the habit of even contemplating such playful of the human mind and feel a superstitious fear of leaving the secure territories of liberal democratic orthodoxy. But there exists yet another possibility. Perhaps the long story reaching

denouement in its last chapter that modernity divulged to us is not just one of the many stories that can be replaced by another, but a basic truth about modern men who, after many adventures, downfalls in a sense, exhalations and tribulations, after following many chimeras and surrendering to many temptations, finally arrived at the accurate recognition of who he is. If this indeed were the case, then further fundamental changes in human history would no longer be possible except changes for the worse. Such an eventuality would be, for some, a comforting testimony, that man finally learned how to live in a sustainable harmony with his nature, for all. Others, it will be a final confirmation that his mediocrity is inveterate.

That is it. Let me go back and look at something real quick. First, yep, 2016. This was published in 2016. First American edition. So this book was first published in Polish in 2012 under the title, Transatlantic. I do not know what that says, but I will translate it when I disconnect. Thank you for joining me for another book reading.

The next one will be something I think will gain a lot of interest, maybe even some widespread interest. So be on the lookout for the first episode dropping of the next book that I read. And no, I'm not going to tell you what it is. Take care, everyone. Thank you.