One of the weirder aspects of the Cult of Modern Liberalism is the mysticism that underlies so much of it. It’s subtle, but pervasive. You see it here in this bizarre op-ed written by the president of the University of Maryland.
In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 20, a young man was murdered on the University of Maryland College Park campus, a senseless and unprovoked act. Richard Collins III, a student at Bowie State University, had just been commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Army and was within days of his graduation. A promising life was ended all too soon, leaving families and communities to mourn.
The suspect is a UMD student. The state’s attorney of Prince George’s County is overseeing the investigation and prosecution of the suspect, supported by the county police, the UMD Police Department and the FBI. They will examine whether racial hatred was a motive, given the suspect’s association with an online white supremacist group; the victim was black.
National polls show that most Americans believe that expressions of hate are increasing and going mainstream. Sadly, such incidents have affected our campus before.
The point of the op-ed is virtue signalling. This guy is a hard thumping Prog, which is the only way someone can become the president of a university these days. Our colleges and universities are indoctrination centers for the Cult. Practical education is not on the priority list. So much so that students may actually get dumber as they go through their undergraduate training. A guy like Wallace Loh has spent his life proving he is completely given over to the one true faith. He does that by writing op-ed pieces like the one above.
That’s easy to see, but what gets lost in all of this is creepy voodoo that supports the whole thing. The good professor is warning us about “hate” as he believes that could have been the reason for the murder. In this context, he is claiming that “hate” has agency and exists outside of human beings. Replace the word “hate” with “the devil” and you have someone from Colonial New England demanding the witch be burned in order to rid the community of the evil spirit causing people to sin.
The professor is not a random nut-job with goofy ideas in his head. The Prog media is littered with references to evil spirits and dark practices. Racism used to mean acting against someone based on their race. Today, racism is a mystical force that undermines the efforts of the good-thinkers. Just look at his concluding paragraph.
These are fraught times on our campus, across the nation and around the world. It is on all of us to stand up and fight racism, extremism and hate. They are cancers in our body politic.
Prog mysticism is so pervasive that no one bothers to notice the use of words like “extremism” anymore. We just accept that it means whatever is currently vexing the Progs. No one bothers to explain what it means, because it is not really a thing. It is the cause of an emotional state in the same way a demon causes the little girl to vomit pea soup and spin her head around. It is so mysterious, that no one ever says how they will fight it, just that it is their holy mission to fight it.
There’s a tendency to assign logical motivations to the Progs. This piece in the American Conservative where I spotted the Loh op-ed does exactly that. It just assumes the good professor is using this tragedy as an excuse to crack down on dissent, as if any exists on the college campus. The headline even accepts the Prog mysticism about “:hate” being a lesser demon that walks among us, looking for a suitable host. The reality is, the Cult of Modern Liberalism is a mystery cult now. It is a religion.
The other day, Al Gore claimed he was told by God to fight global warming, and make a billion dollars doing it. It is tempting to write it off as a cynical ploy, but all the facts in support of his claim have been there for a while. Climate change is an apocalyptic nature cult. Al Gore had a nervous breakdown during, or soon after, the 2000 election and came back from it believing he was a prophet sent to redeem mankind. He’s not the first guy to snap and develop a messiah complex. He’s now the Ezekiel of climate change.
Human beings are believing machines. It is not inaccurate to say we are designed for the task. In fact, ancient people just assumed that humans were created to worship the gods. It seemed obvious to them. Our modern rulers may have abandoned the old gods, but they still have a desire to believe. They still have a need to think their lives have purpose and their exalted status is for a reason. Even though Christianity may have died out in the ruling classes, they still need a religion, one that provides them authority to rule.
What’s happened over the last few generations is the civic religion of American Liberalism has evolved into an esoteric and syncretic adaptation of Biblical mysticism. They have the old concepts, just re-purposed to exclude explicit references to the supernatural. Instead of God, they have the right side of history. Instead of the devil, they have a collection of evil forces like extremism and hate. They may not know who sent them on the mission, but they know they were sent to fight racism, extremism and hate.
Hate is fossilized anger, formed by years of suppression. We only hate people we knew and once loved who failed to live up to our expectations, but tend to transfer this larger than life rage to surrogate entities. It is perhaps the shiniest tool in Alinsky’s toolbox.
The blind devotion to this god of the mullahs of marx will lead to their destruction and that of their academic institutions, as the collection plates go dry.