Cathologic III part: The Babel Tower

III. The Wawel Tower

author: Jan Moniak

We have established that what we need is not an excess of information, but the right methods.
To find them, we began by identifying the proper state of things.
By recalling that state, we can now try to identify its violations—its diseases—and from there seek the proper ways of healing.

The foundation of reality is bond.
And the fundamental error is the tearing of bonds.

Tearing apart natural social bonds—including the bond between us and our ancestors (Tradition, AUTHORITY)—produces pathologies and psychological disorders.
A human being cannot cope alone, as an isolated individual.
More than that: nothing exists in isolation.
The identity of things and persons emerges from relation—a relation made possible by distinction.
This is why the world is systemic; everything is connected.
This is the basis of rationality, religion, and science.

Therefore, any generation that attempts to construct the world from scratch will eventually lose its mind.
This “constructing from scratch” is itself a form of tearing.
It denies the basic truth that we must receive something from above, that we are constituted by what transcends us: Tradition and Transcendence.

Without a language imposed—yes, imposed, by necessity, not improvised by contemporaries—we could not communicate at all.
We would build a Tower of Babel made of individual expressions.

The same is true of the “language” of culture: the language of non‑verbal forms that provides the context and soil in which words retain stable meaning and remain rooted in reality.

As for Transcendence: even scholars call attempts to reject it the “Darkness of the Enlightenment.”
In this light, the supposedly irrational and “superstitious” so‑called primitive peoples turn out to be more rational than Western civilization.
For them, the existence of higher powers and mystery was obvious.
For them, it was obvious that everything is connected.
They do not suffer the same scale of psychological disorders as the modern West.

The main problem of Europe is not Islam, but the suicidal Enlightenment idea of tearing bonds apart—bonds between different spheres of reality and culture (autonomism), between practice and symbolism, between worldview (including religion) and culture, politics, and public life; between language and reality, language and non‑verbal signs; between form and content; between the present and Tradition; between body and soul; between the temporal and the Eternal; between immanence and transcendence; between creation and God.

We often notice and name good principles only when we lose them—when someone begins to break or undermine them.
This is how dogmas were formulated: as reactions to the destruction of what had previously seemed obvious.

Only by analyzing concrete pathological phenomena do we begin to see where the contradictions lie, what patterns repeat, and to what simple regularities many of these cases can be reduced.

I have already reached my conclusions internally, but the fact that the text is written and read in time prevents me from saying everything at once.
It forces me to choose one among many possible ways of presenting the argument.

It is difficult to classify each case under a single “disease,” because in reality these diseases overlap.
A more rigid classification might be clearer for the reader, but it would not reflect the true state of things.

Therefore, after identifying these diseases—continuing the thread from the end of the previous chapter on principles—I will proceed to analyze various cases, often tangled and overlapping.
In that analysis, I will mark the relevant diseases with abbreviations.

Later in the chapter, I will also outline the methods and methodology of my inquiry and diagnosis.

Finally, I will assign four diseases to the four factors shaping persuasive power, using a revised version of a text from 2019, a fragment of which appeared at the end of the previous chapter.

THE POWER OF THE SENSES.

PROPERTY — AND… FAITH**

In right‑leaning circles one often hears warnings about the left‑wing “March through the Institutions.”
Yet this method was originally borrowed from the Catholic Church (and indirectly from all traditional societies) by its enemies.
Some, forgetting its origins, are now inclined to condemn the method itself—as if it were inherently corrupt, dishonest, or manipulative.
The left, by adopting this method (together with its concrete elements), has managed to discredit it in the eyes of the right, effectively disarming them.

This “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” is widespread today on the right—on the side that prides itself on honesty.
Examples abound:
In politics, if a statement appears in, say, Russian propaganda, we immediately classify anyone who utters something similar as a “Russian troll” and dismiss them.
Following that logic, we would eventually conclude that scrambled eggs are evil because Hitler ate them for breakfast, and that light itself is evil because the Evil One has it in his name.

The left speaks of discourse, freedom, structuralism, construction, subjectivity?
Then we, in disgust, label these concepts “leftist” and reject them—although what is left‑wing is only the interpretation attached to them, not the concepts themselves.

The left praises tribalism and folk culture?
We recoil from tribalism and folk culture.
Yet within them lies a key to understanding the diseases of the West:
tribal/folk structures—the rules that bind local communities and allow them to preserve their values—are the exact opposite of what I will classify below as the:

FOUR DISEASES

The ideological form of this self‑disarmament appears more broadly in diseases that can be divided into two categories: vertical and horizontal.

The Vertical Disease: Immanentism

Immanentism is the attempt to sever creation from its bond with the Creator, the temporal (immanence) from the Eternal (Transcendence).
It manifests in several ways:

Deistic — firm belief in God while ignoring His connection to reality.
Atheistic — denial of God and Transcendence.
Ignorant — lack of interest in whether Transcendence exists.
Agnostic — interest in the question, but concluding that nothing can be known, resulting in no concrete faith.
Usurpatory/Substitutional — replacing God with various temporal things.

The Horizontal Diseases

Here, however, I focus on the horizontal, temporal sphere—one we can more easily study and remedy with human means.
Within it we can distinguish four diseases:

Autonomism (secularism, hyperspecialization)
Anti‑formalism (anti‑ritualism, anti‑institutionalism)
Over‑linguification (treating language as the whole of reality)
Anti‑traditionalism (progressivism/modernism/evolutionism)

The same symptoms that appear in the broken vertical relation between God and creation also appear in these broken horizontal relations.
As I argued earlier:
Just as the relation between Creator and creation is reflected in every relation between creatures—and “sustains them in being”—so breaking that relation is reflected in the ways we break relations between elements of temporal reality.

Thus, the relation between different spheres of culture, between form and content, between language and non‑verbal forms, between the present and the ancient past, can be:

perceived as having no real effect,
treated as non‑existent,
ignored,
dissolved through substitution or confusion of signifier and signified.

Self‑Disarmament

“Self‑disarmament” is the right word.
The ideological epidemics listed above are self‑destructive beliefs, contradicting themselves.
They strike at something that cannot be removed.
But by imagining that we are removing it, we may accidentally hand control of it to someone else.

That “something” is precisely the four factors shaping persuasive power, identified at the end of the previous chapter:

system‑structure,
multisensory form,
non‑verbal channels of communication,
and the use of forms imposed by tradition and tied to objective realities—something that transcends individual choice and the whims of contemporary communities.

Those Who Would Make Us Tools

Those who wish to turn us into instruments of their own interests—interests rooted in our lowest appetites—must first dismantle the religious brakes still embedded in many communities.
To rule our desires, they must first rule our minds, our signs, and the everyday expressions of our faith.

They do this by planting in us self‑destructive convictions:
by severing us from reality itself—closing us inside digital echo‑chambers, feeding us pre‑packaged ideological templates, replacing the world with its shimmering electronic simulacrum.
They whisper that form does not matter, so that even when we still possess property, we cease to express our faith through the forms of daily life.
And once we accept the anti‑traditional dogma that “only content matters,” we begin to adopt the fashionable forms of the world—forms designed by anonymous trend‑engineers—allowing into our communities shapes and gestures that quietly dismantle the religious grammar of local tradition.

Once such convictions take root, no external persecution is needed.
Society itself will do the policing:
mocking, shaming, and labeling anyone who resists as backward, eccentric, or insane.
And after the ridicule comes the next step:
the stripping away of property, land, cars, money—
and finally the reduction of living human relationships to the bare minimum.

A First Prescription

If we want any worldview to become persuasive—no matter what it concerns—we must activate the same deep cultural mechanisms.
We must show a world of things and actions that embody that worldview both practically and symbolically:
clothing, food, taverns, music, the interiors of homes, the materials we use, and the way we present them in our own media as the natural background of our message.

The foundation of all this—and the only path to genuine independence—is the creation of local communities.
But these communities cannot arise unless we regain enough economic freedom to increase ownership and regain control over the cultural forms of everyday life that express our faith.

Political and economic ideas are hard to encode in symbols.
They must be shown in practice.
When this is restricted, we must use indirect means—embedding these ideas within the ordinary rhythms of life.

Here lies the paradox:
to begin producing honest goods, one must first earn money in ways that—let us put it gently—fit the dishonest rules of the current bureaucratic serfdom.
The farmer must poison his fields with “protective” chemicals, pay lawyers, drown in paperwork, or “bend the rules” to survive.
I know a man who wanted to produce healthy food; because the venture was initially unprofitable, he had to finance it by selling overpriced gadgets as a salesman—perhaps convincing himself of their value to ease the moral tension.
And of course, he took a loan to fund his honest “extravagance.”
This is the Polish condition:
it is nearly impossible to earn enough through honest work alone, because the entry cost of work is so high that real services barely cover the cost of living.

Justifying the Diagnosis

Let us return to the “diseases of the West.”
How do they undermine the factors that give any message its persuasive power?

Autonomism strikes at the very assumption that rational action is possible:
that the world is governed by laws, that its fragments relate to one another, that our thoughts can correspond to reality.
Culture, too, is a system:
practice and symbolism, form and content, faith and reason, religion and politics, language and gesture, morality and property—all influence one another.

If we allow ourselves to believe these are separate realms, the influence does not disappear;
we merely lose control over it.
If we deny our declared faith any influence on our political actions, that influence will simply be taken over by something else—by whatever worldview lies beneath the “neutral” law of the moment.
There is no vacuum here:
the very definition of the state, its competencies, and its judgments about what to punish and what to protect all rest on a worldview.

There is no reason why various “isms”—named or unnamed—should be allowed to shape politics while religion is forbidden to do so.
That is not neutrality; it is inconsistency dressed up as sophistication.
And the separation of spiritual and temporal power—so often invoked—is itself a principle of one particular religion.
Some confuse this with the idea that religion should not shape public life at all.

The remaining diseases are variations of the same rupture:

Anti‑formalism severs form from content.
Over‑linguification severs language from non‑verbal meaning.
Anti‑traditionalism severs the present from the past.

These diseases spread gradually, from within, as a degeneration of specialization—which in itself is good.
In the age of christianitas, religion, art, science, craft, and mysticism formed an organic whole.
With the Renaissance came specialization; with Protestantism and its gnostic undercurrents came the idea of conflict between realms—body vs. soul, symbol vs. fact.
The rise of print culture intensified the illusion that meaning must be locked inside words, that precision must be purely linguistic.
This illusion persists today, even among those who loudly reject sola scriptura.
They unknowingly serve the very logic they oppose.

Anti‑formalism undermines the necessity of expressing truth through forms that reach all the senses.
The fashionable slogan “only content matters” blinds traditional believers to the fact that by surrendering form, they surrender control over meaning.
They may repeat the same words, but someone else has quietly replaced the meanings beneath them.

Over‑linguification is the mirror error:
mistaking meaning for the word itself, rooted in the Protestant reduction of revelation to text and later in the linguistic turn of modern humanities.

Progressivism/modernism, as I use the term here, makes change itself into a value—
blinding us to the content of what is being changed,
and turning the Spirit of the Age into a kind of secular deity.

GOEBBELS WAS RIGHT…

“Repeat a lie a hundred times and it becomes Truth.”
Most of us know the saying, and we associate it with a certain historical totalitarianism.
Because of that association, we instinctively condemn the mechanism itself—forgetting that it works just as powerfully for truth as for falsehood.

And it works today, not only through repeated words.
The method is even more effective when, instead of speaking endlessly, we express the same worldview through actions, gestures, images, sounds, scents, tastes—when we turn it into an unwritten code of behavior, when we present it in films as attractive, when we make it the atmosphere in which people live without noticing.

Then the soil is prepared.
A worldview expressed along so many sensory channels can finally be spoken aloud—with force and conviction.

This wordless expression creates in people a sense of obviousness, normality, self‑evidence, naturalness.
So when the worldview is finally named, no one is shocked anymore.

Precisely because this mechanism is so hard to uproot, it must be claimed, not abandoned—if we want to change or preserve human convictions, including our own.
But first, the masses must be persuaded to abandon the very conditions that give a worldview its power.
Self‑destructive beliefs accomplish this with remarkable efficiency.

People were taught—under slogans like “what matters is not the outside but the heart,” “form doesn’t matter, only content”—to stop shaping the forms of their lives so that those forms expressed the content of their faith.
They began adopting forms of behavior, clothing, interior design, entertainment—forms imposed by mass production and designer trends, delivered through films, music videos, and shop windows—while insisting that these forms were “neutral.”

They imagined that to give these forms a “Catholic” or “patriotic” intention, it was enough to attach the right verbal label.
And so the word slowly detached itself from reality.

At a certain point, the word “Catholic church” was being attached to architectural forms that bore no resemblance to the symbol‑laden structures shaped over centuries.
The traditional concept of “marriage” was being attached to unions incompatible with every previous tradition.
The words “fraud” (albeit “tax fraud”) and “theft” were being applied to the situation in which someone who produces goods and services refuses to hand over part of them to those who take them legally—because if he did hand them over, he would lose money on his own work.
Words like “law,” “love,” “the mother’s good” were being attached to the killing of an innocent child in the womb.

Of course, Catholics cling to the “peak” principles—prohibitions of abortion, pedophilia, nudism (things incomparable, from different levels).
But a mountain is not made of its peak alone.
Without the rest, the peak simply cannot stand.

This is why new generations begin abandoning even the peaks:
they sense their artificiality, their lack of support in the broader mountain of customs and moral habits that once led upward toward them.

THE WORLD COMMISSION OF EVERYTHING

Words also work—because they evoke non‑verbal images, associations, emotions.
One of the strongest is the impression of universality.
It can be triggered by a single adjective: “international.”

You and your friends could found the World Committee for the Verification of Services and award yourselves the title:
“Best Builders of 2019 according to the World CVU.”
This is exactly how certain movements operated:
“If you don’t praise yourself, no one will.”

They invent the criteria for “the best,” and they appoint the judges.
Through organizations like WHO (in the field of sexual education), through networks of like‑minded academics, through media, banks, corporations, and political alliances built upon them…

(Here we must return to the beginning of our reflections and refuse to be frightened away from essentially good or neutral concepts—“discourse,” “freedom,” “structuralism,” “constructivism,” “subjectivity”—which have been appropriated only by our opponents.)

People respond to titles like “worldwide,” “international.”
Such labels, and other mass‑appealing elements, function as a kind of “customer preparation”—a wonderfully accurate expression used by Magdalena Korzekwa‑Kaliszuk in her conversation with Jakub Zgierski on June 13, 2019.

STEP BY STEP, BY CONTRAST… WE’LL MAKE YOU INTO WHATEVER WE WANT

(Girard’s mimetic contagion, Jung’s shadow, Gödel’s incompleteness, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Sapkowski’s bite)

Someone wants to build a business on human promiscuity?
Then he will naturally work to expand that promiscuity—destroying along the way whatever restrains it.
The Catholic Church, with its moral grammar, is an obvious obstacle.
This is not new: the usurious, thieving, quasi‑slaveholding merchant elites of late‑medieval Italian cities found Catholic morality intolerable.
So they replaced it with something more convenient—“ancient,” “hermetic,” a moral code in which slavery, usury, and theft were perfectly acceptable.

On this moral sleight‑of‑hand, “modernity” was raised—together with the disease that now drives Europe into its own grave.
(Krzysztof Karoń pointed out this link between theft and ideology with brutal clarity in Historia Antykultury.)

The present moral landscape did not appear overnight.
It was pursued along many channels for many years, accelerating to a mad velocity in the twentieth century.
Two milestones stand out:
the Roaring Twenties among the elites, and the sexual revolution of ’68 among the masses.

One can trace a loose chain of instruments:
clothing → entertainment → dance → music → promiscuity → LGBT → “sexual education” → pedophilia.

If the last link shocks anyone, let him read the 1977 Letter of French Intellectuals to the government, calling for the abolition of age‑of‑consent laws—effectively the legalization of pedophilia.
Or let him study the case of Benjamin Levin, architect of Canadian sex‑education policy, later convicted for child pornography.

Such transformations are always gradual.
First, society must be shocked with something grotesque.
Then a milder form of the same vice is presented as the “reasonable alternative.”
By contrast, it begins to seem acceptable.

Step by step.
Small increments.
The Heisenberg principle applied to culture:
shift the frame of reference, and the moral coordinates blur.

This method is still in use.
First, television showed polite, harmless gay characters—softening the audience.
Then came the obscene parades.
People began to think: These parades are disgusting… but those polite gays from the sitcom? In comparison, they’re fine.
Where does this end?

SPELL‑CASTING REALITY

Abandoning the bond between content and form, between belief and property, did not make that bond disappear.
We merely lost control over it.
Someone else took it—someone who never forgot how powerful that bond is.

Marching through the institutions, he unlocked the gates of all the senses with non‑verbal forms and entered the inner chamber of human conviction.
He borrowed a sack of terms from the traditional vocabulary—and quietly changed their meaning.

The attempt to overthrow traditional thinking only confirmed its truth.
Revolutionaries did not merely destroy temples and altars; they seized them.
They enthroned, one after another:
Reason, the People, the Nation, Lenin, Lennon, Maradona, FC Barcelona, and finally their own whims.

I have already mentioned televisions placed in perfect altar‑niches, complete with doilies beneath or atop them; posters of pop‑culture idols treated with genuine veneration.
And then the “catechisms”:
The Catechism of Industrialists (1823–24),
the Communist Manifesto—originally intended to be titled The Communist Catechism,
Paul Lafargue’s Religion of Capital with its Workers’ Catechism (1887)…
(Enough name‑dropping; others have done it better.)

PROPERTY AND CONTROL OVER ONE’S OWN CONVICTIONS

Centers of cultural influence compete with one another.
Economic strength partly determines which one prevails.
A centralized, bureaucratic, socialist political system makes it easy for anonymous cultural engineers to seize control of the public mind.
They can persuade centralized power to pacify the marketplace of ideas by turning it into a monopoly or oligopoly.

Small communities simply cannot shape their own worldview through external forms and the other factors described earlier.
Hemmed in by the omnipotence of states and corporations, they can only draw meekly from a supposedly vast pool of options—options that in reality fit into a few templates designed who‑knows‑where and mass‑produced in the world’s cultural factories.

This applies to clothing, houses, interior design, food, entertainment, time management, work patterns, interpersonal norms…

These mass‑produced forms offer no guarantee of compatibility with our worldview.
But someone who has grown up believing that “forms don’t matter,” that they are neutral toward faith, will not notice the problem.
He will even adopt them in the name of a new virtue: obedience to the god Zeitgeist.

A striking example of such imposed behavioral patterns is the gradual abandonment of private housing, private transport, and—by extension—privacy itself.
Marcin Jendrzejczak described this in his article Ekonomia dzielenia – czyli od rezygnacji z własności do zniszczenia cywilizacji.

RESIGNATION

Through the operations described above—gradual shifts, prepared soil—people confronted with the fait accompli of political ideologies began to accept as “obvious” the explanations that portrayed the loss of property and the indifference to form as something positive.

The psychological tension between an imposed order and the simultaneous need to sustain one’s worldview through one’s own forms is unbearable.
To preserve inner equilibrium, the mind represses the moral dissonance.
Thus arises the willingness to accept any explanation that claims there is no tension at all—that property and form are unnecessary burdens.

But that explanation is false.

LEGAL THEFT

Property always brings with it the shadow of theft.
Krzysztof Karoń—whatever one may later say about his methods—rightly notes that an ever‑growing part of society no longer realizes that it is stealing, and worse: that it cannot survive without stealing, because it has learned to call that theft “hard work.”

Why is it theft?
Because, directly or indirectly, it takes goods from those who produced them—without their consent—while giving nothing in return.
This is the anti‑freedom core of the matter, the part so often overlooked.
And the result is simple: those who produce real goods become slaves supporting a mass of unconscious parasites.

Consider the factories.
Physical workers—the ones who actually build, assemble, repair—are constantly forced into a grotesque dilemma:
Do I follow the official technology, or do I do the job well?
Often the two exclude each other.
Why?
Because the highly paid “engineers” produce stacks of useless diagrams—formalities on paper that cannot be built in the real world.
A washing machine, a furnace, a house cannot be assembled according to those drawings.
So the worker must quietly fix everything himself.
And of course, he is never paid for the correction; the money went to the man with the diploma.

I know real cases: sanitary installation projects drawn by “specialists” that serve only as bureaucratic padding.
Later, the actual plans are redone according to what the physical workers built—often by those same workers.
A laborer looks at the official project and laughs:
You can’t run a pipe here. That slope won’t work. If I follow this, nothing will heat.

In such cases (not always, but increasingly), the designers become thieves.
Not by necessity, but by habit.

Yet there are professions that are almost programmatically thieving—jobs that exist to complicate people’s lives, extract their money, and then complicate their lives even more.
The tragedy is that these people sincerely believe they are doing something noble.
They create “assistance programs,” like firefighters who feel heroic only because their chief secretly sets the houses on fire.

Meanwhile, the robbed producers of real goods—the workers—are perversely judged the least capable.
They cannot afford to support their families or meet the ever‑rising expectations of women shaped by the consumerist illusions set by the thief‑businessmen.
And so, seeing no escape, they begin teaching their children that to “get what is yours,” you must cheat a little, steal a little.
Thus we get “innocent” school cheating, pilfering materials from factories, selling them on the side.
And that is before we even mention the lies of salesmen, the glued‑on smiles, the polite rudeness.

Those workers who are not cunning enough fall into “alcoholic depression,” sometimes ending on a belt around the neck.
The few honest and sober ones become targets of envy and obstruction from those for whom they are a living reproach.
They work themselves into physical ruin by forty.
Their only lifeline becomes state aid—500+ and similar programs—offered by the very state that first pushed them into misery so it could pose as benefactor.
How vile.

The proverbial “drunk under the liquor store” has, in truth, done more for society than many an elegant businessman in a tailored suit.
It was his hands that built the houses, assembled the cars, dug the ditches, sowed and harvested the grain for bread.
And that is why I despise the mockery directed at these robbed people.
Even when they ruin their own families, it is the consequence of a psyche shattered by the theft committed against them.

And the one who refuses to participate in this cheating becomes suspect.
If he tries to trade honestly, no one buys from him—he does not fake confidence where he has none, he does not promise miracles with a benevolent smile.
A doctor who notices irregularities in the “official line” funded by pharmaceutical giants, bankers, and their obedient governments is stripped of his license within days or branded a quack.
His honesty is “abnormal.”
Or perhaps it is a mirror in which others see their own guilt.

I have heard it many times:
“You have to bluff. You have to pretend confidence where you don’t have it, because others pretend and set the standards. You must smile through the rot. Otherwise they’ll fire you, and your kids won’t eat.”

Reading Feliks Koneczny’s On Latin Civilization, I was struck by his claim that the ethos of honesty—though praised in many civilizations—was actually practiced in the Latin one.
I do not know if that was fully true in his time, but today it certainly is not.

We have—this is my sad, though I hope not universal experience—a society of widespread theft and deceit.
The key detonator of this moral collapse is the stripping of individuals and small local communities of control over property, and then of property itself, and finally of the networks of “catacombs” where integrity might still survive.

Restoring Words to Their Proper Meaning and Unmasking False Ideologies

The dominant and omnipresent “progressivism” of our age imposes its own mental schemata.
They are absorbed by individuals and societies through upbringing, together with the underlying assumptions that contradict the Gospel, the centuries‑old Teaching of the Church, and the witness of the saints.

People accept these schemata unreflectively—because if they tried to analyze every word and gesture they make, they would go mad.
Thus these patterns become, in daily practice, the starting points of thought and action, as if they were cognitive necessities.

The mechanism itself is not evil.
It is, in fact, useful: it allows us to act.
Just as in mathematics we do not re‑calculate from scratch that 2+2=4, but take it as a given in order to solve more complex problems, so in language we do not invent a new word or morpheme for every concept.
We inherit a set of categories—tools—which we combine with others to form more precise meanings.
We do not forge a new screwdriver for every screw.

But when a person has been shaped by an environment that formed in him a non‑evangelical instrument of perceiving, acting, and interpreting—and yet he sincerely desires to fulfill the Will of God—he often lives in an unconscious conflict of attitudes and values.
His religion becomes an etiquette, a label placed upon a structure built from alien materials.

A wise wanderer once described this mechanism with brutal accuracy:

“The manipulation of redefining works by exploiting a psychological habit: people think in fixed patterns. If they always hear that A is good, they stop examining whether A is good in each case—they simply assume it. The manipulator gradually changes the content while keeping the name (the ‘boiling frog’ method), and most people continue to treat A as good. In the end, A means B, and people are convinced it has always been so.”

This is the corruption of word and sign—a theme we will return to.

When someone manages to perceive such contradictions and begins to critique these faulty mental schemata, when he measures them against the Teaching of the Church, he is often mocked and condemned by those who remain imprisoned within them.
Such a person struggles even with language itself—its explanations, its use—and with other areas of daily practice built upon schemata that now require revision.
He has abandoned the tools he once wielded with ease and has begun to construct new ones—tools that do not wound the Law of Divine Love.

You learned to play the violin as a child.
But the sound irritated your family.
So you decided to learn the piano instead.
It did not go well.
Your fingers kept returning to the habits formed on the old instrument—habits so deeply ingrained that, now as an adult, you no longer learn with the ease of childhood.
(A clumsy comparison, I know—but let it stand.)

It is incomparably harder to learn anew in adulthood than as a child shaped by the example of the surrounding community.
And it is extraordinarily difficult to uproot mental schemata and labels—even false ones—once they have sunk into the subconscious and become “obvious,” something no longer analyzed but simply used in speech, action, and thought.

But difficulty does not mean impossibility.
Especially when Grace enters the scene.

The very fact that someone becomes aware of such errors is already a Grace.
One must give thanks for it.

Society needs an analysis of these schemata, in obedience to the Apostle’s command:

“Test everything; hold fast to what is good.” (1 Thess 5:21)

It needs to raise a new generation within revised mental structures, and to return to the noble, time‑tested constructions of the Church—those that have been burdened with false labels: “backward,” “fanatical,” “intolerant,” and the like.

Further Translation (with the requested stylistic palette)

In our world, ideas commonly labeled—though not always accurately, as Łukasz from Kraków once reminded me—relativisms have spread widely: ethical or moral relativism, worldview relativism, cultural relativism.
In their name, people claim that moral principles depend entirely on the individual, the community, the culture that professes them.
Any attempt to question a worldview contrary to one’s own is branded as evil—intolerance, discrimination, a violation of “worldview freedom” and the “autonomy” of cultures, niches, or individuals.
Even the attempt to articulate non‑relative principles is condemned.

Yet cultural relativism, properly understood, is merely the recognition that different and often contradictory cultural systems exist—without attempting to evaluate them as wholes.
It does not mean that one should never evaluate cultural elements.
On the contrary: cultural elements must be evaluated.
But evaluation itself is a cultural act.
We deceive ourselves when we pretend we can rise above culture altogether.

Nevertheless, in the name of this relativism, any attempt to set boundaries or principles in ritual or broader custom has been treated as intolerance—therefore as evil.
Thus criticism of sexual looseness or immodest public behavior—especially when rooted in cultural tradition—has been dismissed as discrimination, hypocrisy, “puritanism,” or as yet another “evil” of the Catholic Church that must be corrected.

Some Catholics, captivated by a falsified notion of the “Spirit of the Age” (one that ignores the fact that it is man who shapes the world around him, that he is not condemned to drift helplessly on the winds of time, for he himself blows), began raising their children according to the fashionable idea that the Church must be “modern,” must reconcile contemporary forms of entertainment (“which surely cannot be evil in themselves,” “they’re only a matter of taste!”) with piety.

Few thought to examine these cultural forms, to ask whether they contain elements contrary to the Church’s Teaching.
And these forms have become so deeply rooted across societies worldwide that questioning them now seems as absurd as declaring that eating bread is a grave evil.
It only seems so.

And so these new forms of expression—of behavior, speech, thought, and perception—are used today by many good and devout people.
Thus, in the name of slogans urging us to stand before Christ “authentically,” without “rigid” or “hypocritical” rituals, all manner of profane forms are introduced into the Eucharistic Liturgy.

This slogan rests on false assumptions: that established and traditional forms of religiosity limit human individuality, the “needs of the heart,” and distance us from real contact with God; that they are inadequate for modernity.
Such errors are numerous, interwoven, and capable of multiplying in countless ways.
I will analyze their specific forms elsewhere.

Yet the shape of modernity is the result of earlier human decisions and actions.
And what should guide Catholics in their decisions and actions?
The Law of God.
(I will not write “what they consider to be God’s law or the Good,” because I am a Catholic and know that this is not a matter of personal opinion but of an objective Truth, the same for all, whether they recognize it or not.)

We must therefore examine anew whether this Law has always guided the decisions and actions that shaped our culture—this culture we now treat as a given, as a matter of taste beyond discussion.
History teaches that the specificity of modern civilization arose from “liberation from the superstitions of the Church and backward beliefs,” accelerated—though not initiated—by the Protestant revolt, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

The next steps must be:
to identify concrete errors,
to verify them,
and to undertake the effort of embedding this verification in personal and social consciousness.

Then we must remind ourselves and others that Catholic behavior must take into account the all‑embracing moral principles defined by the Church.
And we must act accordingly.
This is what the Enthronement of Christ truly means.

We should not burden with blame those who hold erroneous understandings.
They must be regarded primarily as victims—for that is all we can know about them.
And most of us are surely such victims.
I am too.

Though I do not consider myself entirely unaware of certain errors, for I had a few intuitions and met a few wise people who made me wonder whether the behaviors and assumptions I had grown accustomed to were truly good.
And so I bear responsibility for any neglect of such intuitions.
And therefore I am obliged to share with others the truths I received freely, without merit, and which do not belong to me.

Some expressions from earlier ages—used by the saints—and some contemporary formulations that are internally coherent and express a Catholic vision have been subjected to semantic distortion.
This distortion has been implanted by the dominant ideological trend into the very structure of people’s thinking.
It rests on ways of life shaped by false ideologies—ways of life that seduced people, or even deprived them of other options.

This distortion takes several forms depending on context.
It may consist, for example, in assigning negative or positive valuations to expressions—valuations different from those intended by their authors.
Often the modification occurs from the opposite direction: the real meaning (not the words themselves) acquires a negative label, and anyone who brings it to light is immediately branded with that label.

These added meanings are absorbed by people, and when someone reads the Gospels, the saints, or the popes, he interprets the expressions there according to meanings foreign to their original sense.
When he reads of love, he imagines emotional attitudes learned from films and fairy tales.
When he hears of courage, he may picture arrogant suspicion, rash judgment, and refusal to accept criticism—patterns he knows from his own environment.

Such a person, full of good intentions and zeal, begins to evangelize.
But in doing so, he spreads erroneous understandings of certain truths, and through his enthusiasm and sincerity he strengthens large groups of people in false meanings of expressions drawn from the Church’s Tradition.
This can give rise to sudden and unexpected problems and conflicts, unleashing doctrinal confusion within the Mystical Body of Christ.

The Genesis and the Half‑Truth of Postmodernism (Immanentism)

(Chesterton’s paradox, Sun‑Tzu’s clarity, Gödel’s incompleteness, Derrida’s deconstruction, Murakami’s dream‑logic, Tischner’s conscience, Tokarczuk’s polyphony, Cieszkowski’s historiosophy)

Human beings, confronted with the subjectivity of experience and the unsettling fact that every part points endlessly to something else, have long searched—so I suspect—for a Reality that needs no meaning outside itself, yet grants meaning, presence, and coherence to everything else.
This sense of an “Irreducible Reality”—to borrow and slightly reshape Mircea Eliade’s expression—is not a quirk of the human mind.
It is the recognition that without a Condition of all conditions, the search for the “meaning” of any fragment collapses into absurdity.

Religions were humanity’s earliest attempts to name this Ground.
In Judaism and Christianity, and later in Islam, this Irreducibly Real and Meaning‑Giving Condition was identified with the One God.
Similar intuitions flickered among Greek philosophers, and even earlier in the monotheistic experiment of Pharaoh Akhenaten—and no doubt in many other individuals and cultures now forgotten or unknown to me.

This assumption lay at the root of the rise of science: the search for secondary, partial meanings conditioned by God.
Without the premise that Someone grounds the intelligibility of things, the fragments would dissolve into an infinite regress of references—ultimately pointing to nothing.

Faced with the subjectivity of knowledge and the impossibility of separating it from the knower, humanity sought the One whose Knowledge, whose Subjectivity, whose Thought is the source of the Objective State of things.

At a certain moment in Western culture, people began searching for the meanings of fragments while abandoning the need to anchor those searches in the Ultimate Condition of their meaningfulness.
Into the vacuum left by this abandonment, science slipped—unwittingly—into the role of final legitimizer.
But science, placed in that throne, became a pseudo‑mythology, a pseudo‑religion, an ideology.

With this ideological “science” came slogans such as neutrality, secularism, positivism, modernism, anti‑traditionalism, and—in some minds—structuralism.
All expressed an attempt to seek objective Truth without the One who makes Truth possible.
Without the Divine Mind.

These attempts were incoherent—Gödel would say the system tried to prove itself from within, and thus collapsed.
If one rejects the necessity of acknowledging God, one cannot defend the claim to objective Truth.

This internal contradiction was quickly noticed.
Postmodernism emerged as its symptom.
In the sciences, it replaced the search for objectivity with the analysis of subjective constructions.
In social and political practice, it drifted from worldview neutrality and secularism toward pluralism, equalization of all claims, critical theory, negotiated truths, and so on.

Postmodernists, seeking to escape the incoherence of objectivism, chose one side of a false alternative—thus repeating the foundational error of the modernists they criticized.
They simply chose the opposite pole.

They rightly saw the subjective nature of knowledge, which cannot be identical with objective reality.
(This was no revelation; the “metaphysicians of presence,” the so‑called “naive realists,” always knew that objective reality exists independently of our grasp of it.)
They were correct that modernists claiming objectivity were necessarily biased and subjective.

But they drew conclusions that were not necessary.

They rejected “traditional, naive realism,” attributing to it the claim that reality is a being existing independently of the knowing subject.
Such a definition may indeed apply to secularized philosophical‑scientific currents.
But rejecting the “metaphysics of presence” on that basis ignores the fact that it was originally shaped by a very different current—the one described at the beginning.

For that current, the definition of reality as “a being independent of the subject” was inadequate.
It is not enough to ask whether a being exists independently of a subject.
One must ask:
independent of which subject?
Of my subject?
Of one subject or many?
If many—how many?
And can we even determine that?

The modernists’ problem was that they tried to answer a poorly formulated question—a question framed as a false alternative.
Their answer was inconsistent.
Postmodernists detected the inconsistency, but failed to see that the problem lay in the question itself.

Thus, just as modernists chose the first horn of the dilemma—reality independent of knowledge—postmodernists chose the second—reality dependent on knowledge.
Their conflict arose from what they shared: a faulty dichotomy.

(Elsewhere I will show that the same mechanism underlies fashionable disputes about culture, society, and worldviews, as well as the conflict between those who break with Tradition in the name of “returning to the sources” and those who, provoked by them, break with the Council and the Novus Ordo.)

All that was needed was to notice that the supposed opposites are in fact complementary.
One can ask about the measure, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity.
One can give even a single example in which objectivity and subjectivity, infinite reference and metaphysical presence, are not opposites but harmonized.

I say “even a single example” only to show that absolutizing either pole is unnecessary.
Whether this possibility is the only one, excluding all others, is another matter.
I have already attempted to resolve this problem—so I admit my bias.
But what of it?
Every inquiry, including scientific inquiry, begins with a hypothesis that is later tested.

What is this possibility?
See point I.
It is the possibility whose rejection produced the incoherence of modern and modernist “objectivity.”

The exclusion of God from the “neutral” description of the world—His confinement to a religious niche—is precisely why we now face the relativization of everything:
the boundaries of human life,
sexual identity,
cultural identity,
species identity,
the personification of animals,
and the animalization of human beings.

Subjectivism — The Cult of the Self

Some people assume that everything is subjective, that everyone may have their own Truth, that each person constructs reality by the mere act of knowing.
This is nothing less than a refusal of our relation to God and to the rest of creation.
Here lies the hidden core of a new self‑worship—a cult practiced in cultural habits even by devout Catholics, though they would never call it a cult.
Here lies the essence of modern crypto‑religions and the practical rejection of the explicit religions that, by their very nature, claim the right to shape the whole of life.

To create truth by one’s own subjectivity is a divine attribute.
And in our age, we quietly assign that attribute to ourselves.

(This is done not only by those who openly declare themselves subjectivists, but also by those who believe they are defending objective truth and facts—while in reality confusing them with their own impressions and opinions. — 2023 note.)

We know the fashionable praise of “creativity,” as if a human being could create anything.
In reality, only the One God can create.
Only God can bring forth Truth by His own Thought.
Otherwise, we could not assume the possibility of communication at all, for communication requires shared, foundational meanings held in common by all persons.
Nor could we claim that any reasoning about the universe is meaningful.

Whenever we explain the laws of reality or form generalizations, we presuppose a logical and universal fit between the universe and the principles by which we know it.
Without this fit, we could not grasp even a single element of the universe—its structure or its place within a larger structure.
We must somehow already possess these principles internally.

The problem seems superficially solved by the claim that “the entire objective world exists only in the mind of the individual”—including other knowing beings with whom we communicate, and the experiences that confirm the objectivity of our perceptions.
But here again the “I” places itself in the position of God.

This thesis has a fatal flaw: it must yield before the fact of my own error, my alienation, my experience of what exceeds me.
I encounter what contradicts my expectations; I collide with something that does not bend to my imagination; I fall into contradiction within the flow of earthly time.
A god does not err.
I do.

In the progressive‑autonomizing paradigm, we turn everything upside down.
This way of thinking has entered even the hearts of Catholics:
No longer the Church—older and wiser than we are, supported by the Holy Spirit through Hierarchy and Tradition—but our own inner depth, our “it seems to me,” becomes the measure of Truth, Goodness, and Tradition.

We forget that what we call “the depth of the heart” is often nothing more than feelings shaped by the anti‑evangelical world that has surrounded us since childhood.

What ought to be spontaneous, unplanned, individualized, interior—we plan, synchronize, and choreograph.
And what ought by its very nature to be ordered, external, communal—such as the Rite of the Holy Mass or shared liturgical ceremonies—we insist on making unplanned, interior, and spontaneous.

Elsewhere, we trivialize the sacred and treat worldly things as objects of worship:
the “little altars” of pop‑culture posters, the pseudo‑liturgies of concerts and stadiums, the cults of football teams, and—one century ago—the cult of the People or the Nation, and earlier still, the cult of Reason.

The human heart, left to itself, becomes a hall of mirrors.
And in each mirror, the self bows to its own reflection.

Autonomism — Forgetting the Web of Relations

“Examine this fragment however you wish, turn it around from every side; but if it always seems irrational to you, blame yourselves. A fragment is a fragment, and its meaning lies in its relation to the whole.”
— Fr. Marian Morawski, S.J.

By autonomization or autonomism I mean the attempt to treat different spheres of life and culture as if they were separate, operating under separate laws.
This includes the familiar claims that religion must not “interfere” with politics, art, or daily life—as if it should be sealed off in its own niche.
It includes slogans like “art for art’s sake,” and notions of artistic or verbal freedom that pretend one may say or do anything, as though actions performed under these freedoms could never violate moral law, as though a human being created an autonomous world unbound by others.

These “freedoms,” combined with the simultaneous prohibition of the same freedoms for religious people, form a contradiction we will expose later.

Individual spheres of life have no meaning, no identity, without their relation to others—and ultimately without their relation to God.
They exist within a tightly interwoven system.
Their very definitions contain elements necessary to the definitions of other spheres, and vice versa.

When we attempt to define cultural components as independent, we lose control over the practical transformation of our mentality.
We fail to notice how the new forms of everyday life—proposed by anonymous designers, advertised in media, displayed on store shelves—contradict our previous values and embody entirely different worldviews.

Autonomization claims, for example, that “religion must not influence politics,” or that “what one does in one corner has nothing to do with what one does in another.”
According to it, “everyone may have freedom within their own autonomy,” “everyone may practice their own religion, as long as it stays in its religious autonomy.”
This is supposed to be “pluralism.”

Such an approach ignores not only that reality is a system, but also that religion is by its very nature all‑pervasive and sovereign.
To strip it of influence over the rest of reality—and worse, to teach religious people that such stripping is obedience to religion—is, in practice, to kill it.

Recognizing spheres of reality as radically independent leads to attempts to detach systems of signs from one another—especially to detach language from other sign‑materials and from reality itself.
This contradicts the function of signs, which are meant to express and bind reality.
When people begin to confuse limited modes of reference with the things they reference, the gap widens between the drawing of a tree and the tree, between the symbol of something and the thing itself.

Talking about reality does not replace reality.
And when we act as if it does, reality slips further and further out of our control.

People imagine that naming alone orders the world, gives it meaning—wearing a T‑shirt labeled “patriot” as proof of patriotism, speaking of modesty while dressed immodestly, as though clothing were irrelevant.
Catholicism feels this most painfully: religious language is applied to reality, but it no longer transforms reality—because it has drifted too far from it.

The problem is not primarily the change of language, but the change of reality—a change that has moved in the direction of contradicting religious principles.
And this contradiction goes unnoticed by people who never consider that cultural forms may be incompatible with their faith.
Thus they never reconcile them.

This leads to an inevitable rift between religious autonomy and daily life.
People do not notice this rift.
They sense the world growing worse, they find it difficult to live their faith, but they do not see that someone has placed a label reading “medicine” on a bottle filled with poison.
And they drink more and more of it, hoping it will help, asking themselves: “Why is everything getting worse?”

Such a rift makes the medicine useless, tossed into the pantry corner with a label reading “obsolete.”
Such a rift makes religion dead.

Many diagnose the problem incorrectly, focusing too much on restoring the “true names” of things.
But first we must examine whether the things themselves are what we imagine them to be.

We must ask whether our non‑verbalized grasp of them—our pre‑linguistic concepts—is true.
Focusing on restoring proper names draws us into a merely apparent activity and distracts from what matters more.

It is not enough to paste the right labels on bottles.
How would we know they are right?

We must first open the bottles and examine what is inside.

(2011)

The Mystical Manor — or Why We Need Our Own Feng Shui

The culture of the Polish nobility—so often treated as synonymous with Polish culture itself—was never uniform.
Not in space, and not in time.
Before it became “noble,” it rose from a folk spring.
Later it flowed onward, absorbing various tributaries.
At a certain moment it chose to merge with the great River of Christianity (which itself carried the waters of antiquity).
In truth, it became one of the currents of the vast European river.

As it continued its course, it occasionally transmitted, through side‑channels, the fashionable waters arriving from East and West.
But once it separated itself from the common folk bed, it was soon fed by the sewage that seeped in through the humanist‑reformatory canal being dug to its west.
The liquid flowing there lured with the scent of its own glory.
Yet when it reached the various branches of Europe, it slowly decomposed—not only itself, but all the creatures living in the water and by the water.
To “decompose” here means: to separate from one another the animals, plants, microorganisms, and minerals—the living components of culture and society that had once existed in symbiosis.

Diseases began to spread.
People searched for causes and cures.
Despite a few voices warning that the Liquid of Glory and Separation was a poison, it was eventually declared… a medicine.
And once declared so, its definition, its name, and its sphere of influence were expanded ever further.

The subsequent stages of this process—after the humanist‑reformatory phase—were the Enlightenment, the various Revolutions (French, the Spring of Nations, Communist), the “Roaring Twenties,” and the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
In the Polish River, as in many others, there were forces that tried—with varying degrees of success—to hold back this sewage.

This describes the general influence of the poison on Europe.
But what does it have to do with the relationship between the noble and the folk currents in the Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth?

With the nobility’s separation from the folk stream—an event that happened to coincide with the influx of the Liquid of Glory and Separation—a lasting transformation took place:
the separation of everyday practice from symbolism and mysticism.

To illustrate this difference, let us take the object that has become the emblem of the nobility: the manor house.

Its wealth did not always differ dramatically from that of a peasant cottage.
There were noblemen and aristocrats far more devout than the villagers living beside them.
Yet when we look at the interiors of preserved manor houses, it is difficult to find traces of the structural order that, in most peasant homes, was a constant.
That order formed a kind of grammar, binding together the “words”—images, objects, and elements of the home—into a coherent narrative pointing toward a transcendent reference beyond the whole.

In noble houses there were “words,” and there was a certain order.
But it cannot be called a grammar, for it was aesthetic rather than symbolic.
Nor can it be called transcendent, for despite the transcendent nature of individual signs, the whole did not lead beyond itself.
The organizing principle was aesthetic, not symbolic.

The signs were no longer the household objects themselves, but isolated niches: paintings, photographs, inscriptions, holy books, pious phrases above the doorway.

The nobility absorbed many fashionable waters.
So why not listen to Cyprian Kamil Norwid, who urged that national culture should draw from the folk spring?

This does not mean a superficial fascination with patterns, colors, or isolated religious images.
It means restoring the nectar that the “higher” culture left behind in the folk cellars sometime near the end of the Middle Ages:
the nectar that bound everything into a meaningful whole, that moistened the soil of daily practice with mysticism.

A visible example of this moistening is the native, Catholic, folk equivalent of the foreign feng shui:
the meaningful spatial structure of the traditional village cottage.

Upon this foundation one could build a coherent narrative not only of space, but also of time, work, leisure, and clothing:
a Mystical Way of Life.

(2021)

The Spirit of the Age

To justify this widening rift, a set of falsified arguments was introduced: the need to “adapt to the Spirit of the Age,” the primacy of intention over concrete action, of content over form…
This modification had to be carried out in such a way that nothing seemed to change.

Another falsification—one that contradicts the natural structure of human thought—is the elevation of creativity, constant change, and novelty into values in themselves.
Religious cultures, by contrast, placed great—indeed profoundly logical—emphasis on re‑enacting the “mythic” time of the beginning.
Such re‑enactment was the only path toward perfection and shaped the proper understanding of renewal.
And this re‑enactment could never be completed by human, earthly labor upon matter, for it was an attempt to restore what always surpasses us—something to which we can always draw closer, but never fully grasp.

This re‑enactment, justified by reason’s experience of lack and alienation, had to be ultimately fulfilled by the Creator Himself, becoming Man—something I have written about earlier.

The chase after the “Spirit of the Age” rests on the assumption (as I will show elsewhere—an assumption mistaken) that the human being can create something good, something wholly new, something that did not exist before its creation.

(2011)

This cult of the temporal—like the cult of opinion—this cult of the “Spirit of the Age,” is the tearing of the bond between past generations and the present.
It mirrors the tearing of the bond between time and eternity.

So what then? Are we free, or enslaved by the Spirit of the Age?

We are told that the Church must submit to the “Spirit of the Age,” to every change brought by “progress.”
Some—even Catholics—criticize those who resist such changes as “backward,” as people who “do not go with the times.”

Others, hearing this criticism, conclude that to be faithful to Tradition one must resist every change—thus accepting, like Barabbas in the earlier chapter, the categories imposed by the enemy.

That is not the point.

The point is to draw boundaries that must not be crossed.

Remaining faithful to these boundaries and criteria is not backwardness.
It is not a ban on all freedom or all change, as many who lament the “rigidity and lifelessness of the Church” imagine.
They repeat, like a certain red‑haired singer, “keine grenzen,” demanding the rejection of all criteria in the name of “modernization.”

But fidelity to stable markers is the necessary foundation of every human community, including the Church.
It is the care that we do not “fall behind” on the road toward the good.
It is the care for true progress.

Changes in the world are the result of human actions.
And human beings often err.
These changes are therefore not usually “morally neutral,” nor are they a “historical necessity” that inevitably leads to something better, as the clever talkers claim.
The fact that the world is as it is today results largely from human decisions, from the ideologies that guided those decisions, or from actions later justified by verbalized ideology.

Modernity is thus the work of human beings who have erred for centuries.
And as a Catholic I know that we err whenever we detach our actions from the Law of God.

If one analyzes the “Spirit of the Contemporary Age,” one quickly notices that it contains many glaring contradictions with the teaching of the Church—contradictions born of human errors and human ideas.
This is because contemporary mentality and culture are largely the result of past actions whose explicit aim was to break with the Catholic Church—what was sometimes called liberation from “the superstitions of the Middle Ages,” from “the chains of tradition.”

But the gaps left by this break were quickly filled with new superstitions.
For human beings cannot be happy without answers to certain questions—questions asked by countless cultures across the globe, cultures now labeled “traditional.”
Someone wanted to uproot this “traditionality” as backwardness.
But that will never be possible, for we will always seek substitutes.
And the more we deceive ourselves, the more we strip our humanity of its humanity.

I believe this is what John Paul II called the “Civilization of Death.”

Let us not surrender to the gusts of the age.
Let us remember that it is man who blows.
And if someone has blown in the wrong direction, then we must blow in the right one.
If he could, then so can we.

May we change our posture so that we do not subordinate the Church to the “Spirit of the Age,” but rather shape the Spirit of the Age by the teaching of the Church.

(2011)

Freedom of Religion, Culture, and Conviction

If we insist on treating the mere plurality of cultures and religions as a value in itself, then we must also treat discord, unrest, and conflict as values in themselves.
For religions and cultures differ precisely because their foundational assumptions are incompatible.

If, therefore, we demand peace at all costs while simultaneously celebrating the multiplicity of cultures and religions, we contradict ourselves.
This contradiction—this “structural flaw” of contemporary worldviews—is embraced by the adherents of modern culture, under whose influence most of us live (myself included).

We can accept cultures and the actions that flow from them only insofar as they remain within moral boundaries.
These boundaries are themselves elements of a culture and worldview, and someone may disagree with them.
But boundaries do not define points; they define the perimeter within which plurality is possible.
Such plurality is not unlimited, for anything that has criteria cannot be arbitrary.
It must exclude what contradicts those criteria.

Religion, by its very nature, defines such criteria—overarching, binding obligations.
Here too we must remain consistent.

If we see that someone holds convictions contrary to ours, the only honest response is to persuade.
Thus, when someone tells us, “This is wrong,” or when the Church—an essential part of the Catholic religion and guardian of its identity—indicates the criteria that must be met to remain in harmony with it, we cannot call this “oppression,” as is common today.
Such indication of criteria is the very condition that makes freedom possible.
For freedom must be tied to awareness; without criteria that tell us what we are choosing between, we cannot choose freely.

In other words: if we choose between two religions or worldviews, then for that choice to be free and conscious, we must know how they differ—what their boundaries and criteria are, what their content is.

A person is deprived of freedom of action when prevented from acting according to conscience.
Yet such deprivation is justified when the action in question harms another according to our criteria.
And I do not mean only material or physical harm.
I also mean spiritual and moral harm, the harm of bad example.
We must protect our children and our brothers from scandal, lest they learn to treat as normal what is evil—what we hold to be evil, or rather what God holds to be evil.
We believe our criteria of good and evil are true—divine.
And it is honest when someone who disagrees believes the same of his own criteria.
Then we have a “blessed conflict.”

Tolerance toward what we do not accept is justified only when it does not entail the harms described above.

Acceptance—not merely tolerance—is a moral duty toward what does not cross the boundaries set by morality.
Yet suspicion toward unfamiliar cultural products (the “folk” fear of the foreign) is justified.
For before we accept something, we must examine it—and that takes time.
We must ask whether what seems beneficial in the short term does not, in the long term, bring greater harm.

Freedom of Speech

We cannot treat so‑called freedom of speech as an absolute value.
Freedom of speech cannot be total or unlimited.
It must remain within the boundaries of what we hold to be good and right—ultimately, within what God holds to be right.
For words that cross those boundaries become scandal—bad example.
Words are a kind of action.

Human beings are shaped by what surrounds them, even when they disagree with it.
They are drawn into the current of socio‑cultural example.
If one does not wish what he now considers evil to become, imperceptibly, normal—and later even good—he must practice something akin to censorship, avoidance of corrupting company and corrupting example.

If people have conflicting criteria of good and evil, so be it.
The only way out of such a conflict is persuasion.
Though at times forceful measures are justified to protect the little ones from harmful example.
Such are the consequences of our fallen condition.
We will not build paradise by force.

Artistic Freedom

As above.

Norms that call themselves aesthetic must remain within ethical boundaries.
Thus, if someone’s taste exceeds those boundaries, we must discuss it.
Art is not the pursuit of originality or “creativity” for its own sake, for the human being cannot create anything ex nihilo.

What is aesthetic—what is beautiful—is oriented toward discovering order, as the very Polish word for beauty (“ładność”) suggests, pointing toward ład, order.
This order arises from the principles of reason—or rather from the principles of God’s Establishment, which is the orienting point that turns chaos into cosmos.

Ethics and art are united in that both seek the proper place of things—their order.
Aesthetics is thus a subordinate region of ethics, concerned with arranging external forms so that they are fitting.

The summit of fittingness is beauty.
The summit of beauty is the ethical summit—love.
And the summit of love is martyrdom—the giving of one’s life.
Therefore art must be situated within a greater order; it must fulfill an ethical function.
It must have meaning, an ultimate purpose, and harmony with the rest of culture.
It must fulfill a duty, a part of working off the “Adamite corvée” in the field of earthly life.

(2010)

The Definition of Art and the Creative Sacred

Art ought to lead toward, and search for, Perfection—that radiance which is beautiful because it springs from Love, moves through Love, and returns to Love, awakening wonder.
Yet this Perfection suffers, for it encounters its own contradiction: sin, evil, lack, the wound of imperfection.

The ugliness and evil of the fallen world do not authorize the artist to reproduce or multiply that ugliness—neither as purpose nor as method.
For the very meaning and vocation of art, even in its popular understanding, is to give form to reality.
And if the human being comes from Love, flees from Love, and can return to himself only by returning to Love, then it is precisely this Love that must shape the world, so that the world may rediscover the meaning of its existence—for it was made for the human person.

Therefore art should become a form of Perfection, just as every other human cultural expression, entrusted to free will, ought to show a movement toward perfection, in the spirit of Christ’s words:
“Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mt 5:48)

This becoming must be a cooperation of form and content, where the goodness of form shapes content toward goodness, and the goodness of content unfolds into a beautiful—thus good—form.
For “God saw that everything He had made was very good.” (Gen 1:31)
And because “God is Love,” and “Beauty is the shape of Love.”

Form arises from content; Beauty flows from its Source—God—the Fullness.
The shape of Perfection is not an invention but a return to the Primordial Reality that stands beyond time, the Reality that is the world’s source, meaning, and end.
We need only return to it.
Yet the human being cannot do this alone, burdened as he is by imperfection—by that Norwidian lack, being but “the dust of Beauty,” bearing only “the Shadow of the Beautiful.”
And where the Shadow is, there too is its Owner—God.

Thus, in union with Him, we await the Perfect Fulfillment, spoken in the words Consummatum est.
And this Fulfillment is already accomplished in the martyrdom of the God‑Man, the Absolute Artist.

What is commonly called “art”—the external form—is insignificant unless it possesses substance.
The essence of art is therefore substantial.
This substance must be shaped from within through work, suffering, and martyrdom in defense of an inwardly good form threatened by the empty form that seeks to distort.

The perfect formative power is the Grace of Divine Perfection, revealed as Perfect Fulfillment in the martyrdom that defends the shape of truth.
By this sacrifice, Perfection manifested itself in human form, entered human substance, and freed it from the bondage of lack—through the martyrdom of its own human shape—toward Resurrection and the completion of substance.

This completion becomes possible through union with the all‑embracing Fullness in eternity, a union mysteriously anticipated already in the Eucharist.
The grace of martyrdom flows from the martyrdom of Christ—the Fullness, the Beginning and the End.
In this grace lies the suffering of human substance in the world, which is substance only insofar as it allows God to act within it.
If it does not, it leaves behind a form in which nothingness—evil, lack—spreads and dissolves.
This is profanation: the stripping of God’s Form of its divine meaning, the seizure of Good Form by nothingness—what tradition calls the “aping” of God.

Thus the Angel of Light, rebelling against the One who is All, became nothing—for outside the All there is only nothing.
Likewise, any form that would exist apart from God (were such a thing possible) would be a form of nothingness, and therefore evil in itself.

In this sense, the human being cannot strictly be called “creative.”
Human “creation” is a metaphor: when it aligns with the Good, it is a re‑creation, a participation in God’s act of Creation.
The human being becomes the instrument and site of that act.

But when human “creation” names an action contrary to God’s Plan, it is not creation at all—it is perforation, un‑making, annihilation.

(2008–2009)

(This text comes from my school years. Today I would not oppose form and content so sharply; they are two ends of the same staff. Yet I still hold that evil can be described as a hole in good form. As Gustave Thibon observed, many modern assumptions rest on a Hegelian illusion: treating complementary poles as if they were opposites to be synthesized. Such a “synthesis of opposites,” treating evil as a self‑standing being, echoes the dualistic myths of two battling gods and the Manichaean suspicion of the body.)

Infant Baptism

“Let the child decide for itself, when it grows up, what it wants to believe. Children should not be baptized.”

When someone says this, they likely desire for the child what they themselves consider good: freedom of choice.
But that choice is already determined by what precedes it — by environment and upbringing.
The criteria by which the child would one day judge whether it wants baptism are themselves shaped by that environment.
They are imposed just as much as baptism is.
And this imposition cannot be avoided.

To avoid it, one would have to stop feeding the child, clothing it, teaching it language, manners, ethics, choosing its schools — for all of this could later be called “oppressive,” shaping its worldview without its consent.
This is why protesting against infant baptism is, from a logical standpoint, an absurdity.

(2022)

We never know what examples will shape a child’s moral backbone in the future.
It may well be shaped by what we consider scandal — bad example.
For what is evil, according to our Holy Catholic Faith, is more seductive and slips unnoticed into the foundations of human morality.
Thus our duty is to ensure that the child is baptized, if we believe baptism to be good and salvific.
For life may lead the child into places where bad example will not even allow the thought of baptism to arise.

(2009)

“Love is not a feeling. Love is a decision.”

Everything a person does should be done in love.
Marriage is included in that “everything.”
The building and sustaining of the bond between a man and a woman — the bond oriented toward becoming “one flesh” — depends on us, and is not itself the measure of love.
But it should be contained within love.

This “should” is a task requiring both personal and social effort: the building of concrete forms — clothing, customs, rules of conduct between the sexes — that shape behavior and relationships.

One can “fall in love” with any woman, if the circumstances arise — even when already married.
And one can feel “nothing connects us anymore” many times, in any relationship.
Feelings are not objective indicators of being together.

The indicator is a decision — ideally accompanied by feelings of attachment, flowing from them, yet standing above them, and therefore capable of shaping them:
awakening the bond with one’s wife, restraining the physical bond with one’s fiancée, restraining infatuations with others.

This restraining and awakening must occur through the shaping of daily life — relationships with others, family life, leisure.
If we do not avoid, for example, being alone with other women, or spending too much time away from home, we should not be surprised when we suddenly feel drawn to someone else, or begin to think we must divorce our wife because “we feel nothing.”

Bond grows through shared life and concrete forms.
Where these forms are absent, the bond weakens.
Where they appear where they should not, a bond appears where it should not.

(2010)

Aestheticization

Monocultural or Multicultural?

This alternative forces us to choose one side.
It slyly imposes on both camps a foolish definition of culture.
From that definition emerges an equally foolish dispute, in which both sides are wrong.

To resolve it, one need only notice that the question cannot be answered truthfully as posed.
One must clarify that tolerance of other cultures, religions, and worldviews is good — but must have boundaries set by the culture, religion, and worldview we hold as our own.
In social life, the boundaries of the dominant culture prevail.

Those who claim they “do not restrict the freedom” of other cultures or beliefs mislead.
They do restrict — but that restriction itself has boundaries.

Thus, in discussions about tolerance, freedom, acceptance, religious and worldview equality, we should not ask whether someone is “for” or “against.”
Such a question imposes a false, illusory alternative, and every answer becomes false.

We should instead ask:
Which worldview, which religion, which culture will be sovereign over the others — and therefore will set the boundaries of freedom, tolerance, and diversity?

Will there be conflict?
Yes.
But is there not already conflict — between socialist and liberal, Muslim and Catholic, feminist and traditionalist, pro‑lifer and abortionist, relativist and believer in a single Truth?

(These are only examples of many false alternatives or false meanings assigned to certain positions — cases in which, wanting to defend the Church, we end up opposing its principles.) [2011]

“Universal Values”?

Philosophers of various stripes — Jürgen Habermas among them — propose that world peace could be achieved if religions would renounce their total claims, extract from themselves a set of “universal values,” translate them into a supposedly neutral secular language, and build social — including state — order upon them.

It is a hopeless idea, because a religion without such claims is no longer a religion.
Its functions are then taken over by the proposed, purified set of “universal values.”
That set now becomes total and supreme — a competitor, not an arbiter, in relation to other religions.

The hopelessness deepens when we notice that these values are “universal” in name only.
At first glance, one can indeed identify certain common areas: words like Love, Good, Freedom, Respect, Tolerance.
But in practice they mean completely different things.

From the perspective of concrete religions, selecting those supposed areas of agreement and distilling from them “universal values” is impossible, because the points of disagreement are bound up with these “universals” in a feedback loop, in an all‑encompassing web.
If we extract them into a so‑called universal system of values, we simply create yet another “religion,” one that as a whole stands in contradiction to each of the previous ones.
For every religion, every worldview exists separately precisely because it regards its vision as incompatible with the others.

It is the same with a relativistic worldview, despite the declarations of its adherents.
Between relativism and non‑relativism — represented, for example, by Catholicism, Islam, and other confessional traditions — there is contradiction.

If this universality is an element of a new worldview, then I, as a Catholic, may not adhere to it.
For those supposedly “universal” values, stripped of what Catholics regard as universally binding, are no longer the same.

What, for instance, does “universal love” mean?
If we define it as the desire that others be well, we must also define what “well” means.
And here the conflict begins.

For a Catholic, it is good to fight for the health of the sick; for someone else, it is good to “end their suffering.”
For a Catholic, it is good that marriage be between a man and a woman; for someone else, such a limitation is “bad.”
For me, as a Catholic, it is good to receive God in the Eucharist; for someone else, it is blasphemy.

Another example is abortion: for some it is murder and hatred; for others it is an expression of love, freedom, and respect for the woman.
Or consider the prohibition of overt homosexual behavior: not only is the ban denounced as discrimination, but the permission for such behavior is also experienced as a form of symbolic violence toward Catholic children.
Catholics, like adherents of many other religions, hold that violence against the soul — scandal, especially toward children whose moral system is still being formed — is worse than violence against the body.

I, therefore, will desire for others what I have described above, while someone else will regard it as evil and, “in the name of love,” will try to dissuade others from it.

Every law, every worldview has its own sense of exclusive rightness — and there is nothing inherently wrong in that.
What is wrong is denying it, telling people that “no one interferes with their beliefs,” that they are “allowed to believe whatever they want.”
That is deception — leading people into error.

At this point it becomes clear that even the definition and hierarchy of violence and freedom cannot be treated as a field of agreement.
They are unavoidably entangled in a worldview.
Theoretical agreement on their elements does not result in agreement on the systems built from them and lived out in the real world.
The same set of bricks, arranged differently, can produce entirely different buildings. [2012]

They may — but religion may not?

I am often struck by the inconsistency of critics of patriarchy, religion, and the traditional family:
why do they insist that religious worldviews (and a few other selected ones) must not shape state law or public life — the “domain of solidarity” — while non‑religious worldviews may?

Is it because religion is “about something else”?

Religion is about everything.
If it ceases to be, it becomes a dead museum object.
Dead like a car that no longer moves but merely stands in an exhibition hall.
Dead like folklore displayed on a stage or in a heritage park precisely because there are no people left who live it.

The systemic character of human thought makes it impossible to isolate what unites from what divides, and then extract the former for the public sphere — the “domain of solidarity” — while leaving the latter in the private or local sphere.
Moreover, relegating other worldviews (e.g. religious ones) to the category of the “private” is itself an element of a worldview.
I am not obliged to share it.

Is religion barred from public life because it would be an imposition, an act of intolerance?

Non‑religious worldviews that shape the law are also imposed on me.
They may, and religion may not?

Or is it because religion is a source of conflict?

Various worldviews — including anti‑religious and areligious ones known from the history of the twentieth century and still active — have also caused conflicts.
Bloody, massive, horrific conflicts.

If I consistently hold my worldview, I consider it true.
I have no reason, then, to renounce persuading others in its favor, in exchange for an artificial substitute — the “common ground” of “universal values” or the supposed “domain of solidarity” (in Richard Rorty’s sense).
Why would I, if I regard what I profess as true?

Given all this, can a worldview that proclaims neutrality, freedom, and equality of all views — a worldview that presents itself as transparent toward other “confessions” — be considered honest?
In reality, it places itself above those “others.”
It is their competitor, not — as it claims — their arbiter.

Of course, its adherent will deny all this.
To persuade us of his denial, he will indignantly criticize believers in a single Truth and propose to them — as Rorty does — a “distance” from their own vision of the world.

At that point, we may gently point out to him that he contradicts himself.
For this distance is itself an element of a particular vision of the world. [2012]

Freedom, Equality, Neutrality?

There is no such thing as the equality of all religions.
The slogan “freedom and equality of all worldviews and religions” is itself a worldview — one that, under the guise of defending diversity, quietly places itself above all others.
A religion, by its very nature, recognizes no criterion above itself; it is the criterion.
Thus the principle of equality is incompatible with most religions and becomes, paradoxically, a dogma of a new creed.

Total worldviews differ precisely because each considers itself true and the others false.
This claim to exclusive truth is not a flaw of religion — it is its essence.

Therefore the formula “freedom and equality of all religions” is internally contradictory.
It is a conceptual chimera: a new religion masquerading as neutrality, which in practice abolishes all others, reducing them to folklore — something to be admired, not lived.
In the name of “no single truth,” it establishes a single truth: that no truth may be single.

Such a conclusion should radically transform our stereotypical, culturally imposed suspicion toward those who hold their religion to be uniquely true and universally binding.
It is not they who are irrational — it is the system that demands that a religion cease to be a religion. [2011]

A Secular and Neutral State?

If not religion, then another worldview will inevitably become the foundation of law:
atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, socialism, relativism, materialism, immanentism, aestheticism…
A state is never neutral.
Honesty would require that political leaders openly declare which vision of the human person and of the good grounds their decisions.

A state cannot “give equal chances to all worldviews,” because it always acts in the name of one.
That worldview defines the boundaries of tolerance.

If I am religious, I must remember that religion is by nature total — it encompasses the whole of life.
A politician who is Catholic cannot act against Catholic moral criteria.
These criteria are not detailed policy points but boundaries within which many political and economic solutions remain possible — but only within those boundaries.

Thus honesty demands that a politician say plainly:
“I act according to this, and not another, vision of the good.”
Conflict? Of course. But it is the only conflict that is intellectually honest. [2011]

What Does a “Confessional State” Mean?

If someone may advocate for a secular state, I may advocate for a confessional one.
This does not mean a state governed by clergy.
The character of a confessional state depends entirely on the religion that provides its axiological foundation.

The Catholic religion does not permit forced conversions.
It does not forbid the existence of other religions.
It forbids only what violates the moral order it recognizes as true.

But the same is true of the secular state:
it forbids what violates its moral order.
The difference is that the secular state pretends not to have one. [2011]

Censorship, Freedom, Boundaries

We should not complain that authorities limit freedom.
Every authority limits freedom — the only question is in the name of what.

Censorship is not evil in itself.
Censorship in the service of falsehood is evil.
The boundaries of legitimate freedom do not end at bodily harm.
Spiritual, symbolic, and moral harm can be far worse.

Our only legitimate complaint is when the state lies, claiming that it has no boundaries, that it “imposes nothing,” that it is “neutral.”
That is deception. [2011]

Neutrality as a Mechanism of Manipulation

A person does not invent their worldview out of nothing.
They receive it from their environment, upbringing, and culture.
Even the worldview of “creativity and freedom” is a schema — implanted long before one becomes aware of it.

In times when the Church had influence, people knew that the Church sought to shape their mentality.
And many accepted this willingly.
Today other forces shape mentality — but they pretend not to.
And therefore they are more dangerous.

Whoever believes that their “inner depth” is entirely autonomous has already surrendered themselves to anonymous manipulators.
As Benedict XVI wrote, such a person silently adopts “the content of concepts considered obligatory in the doctrine of some party.”

Thus one should consciously choose those institutions that openly admit they seek to shape the human mind.
The Church does not deceive.
It claims the right to shape what must, by necessity, always be shaped by someone — but it does not enslave, because it does not hide its claims behind the mask of “neutrality” and “freedom.” [2011]

For a Catholic, “Neutral” Means “Catholic”

If someone is Catholic, they must also in politics act according to the Catholic worldview.
This is natural, logical, and honest.
Conflict with other worldviews is inevitable — and precisely for that reason Christ said:

“I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” [2011]

Neutrality, Upbringing, and Cultural Schemas

(English version)

“Neutrality” conceals basic assumptions which themselves constitute a worldview.
And because they remain unexamined—precisely because they appear obvious—they become the operative ideologies of those who hold the greatest influence over the formation of society: through the media, through a particular economic order, and through a mode of life to which the majority must adapt, whether they wish to or not.

All the elements offered to people—television programs, entertainment, radio, clothing, customs—form the only available repertoire from which one simply chooses, because one knows no alternatives. Their very ubiquity guarantees that they will be understood, and therefore accepted, by others.
A person who moves necessarily within these cultural elements begins to regard as reasonable and meaningful the ideology that generated them. The more “obvious” and “natural” something appears, the greater its semiotic power. Such an ideology does not need to be named; it is practiced. Its principles silently become the principles of thought.

And if a person is unaware of this, he mistakes these acquired assumptions for something primordial, neutral, transparent—emanating from his own “heart.”
He does not notice that these are lenses placed upon his eyes long ago, during the process of upbringing, when he had already forgotten that the world could look otherwise—just as it did in early childhood, before he was gradually trained to see through them.

Thus certain worldviews can be mistaken for “worldview neutrality,” for spontaneous, independent desires and ideals, or for objective and rational conclusions—when in fact they are relative, externally imposed, conventional opinions.

What our culture taught us to call “the depth of the heart” is, in truth, a set of doctrines silently instilled by whatever raised us: fashions, habits, media, language, social order, schools, advertisements…
And because these things are human inventions, they are fallible—especially when their creators turn away from the Church and from Christ. The modern world is built precisely on this turning away, on a revolutionary negation of Christian Europe.

Of course, there exist certain basic human intuitions, modes of thought, needs, and proper ways of fulfilling them.
Yet these are, on the one hand, drowned out by the cultural schemas described above, and on the other hand, they themselves are not necessarily good.
For we know—even if we are not religious—that evil comes to man more easily, that it attracts him almost by itself, while good requires effort. Reason allows us to distinguish between them. But reason, too, is burdened by false schemas.

Breaking these schemas requires a kind of self-denial, a metanoia—and few have the time or willingness to undertake such labor.
This is one of the peculiarities of Christianity: it is willing to sift human inclinations through the sieve of reason and Revelation.
And reason itself indicates that Revelation must be trusted, for reason discovers its own limits: that what once seemed rational may later appear foolish; that reason is bound by time, memory, and cannot grasp the whole of reality.

Therefore one must sometimes make a leap that bypasses laborious deduction:
to accept in faith what is given, what precedes us, what surpasses us, what does not depend on us—Tradition and Revelation.
For the complexity of reality exposes us to the all-too-familiar “after the fact” realization that we have overlooked something essential in our reasoning—an oversight that, once propagated, becomes error.

Is What I Write Nonsense? Is It an Attack on Tolerance, Pluralism, and Human Freedom?

(English version)

The claim that truth can be known, or that the Christian message may be proclaimed as truth, is today perceived as an assault on tolerance and pluralism. (Benedict XVI)

What counts as nonsense or evil, as insult or truth, as good or bad, is cognitively relative—relative in the order of perception, though not in the order of fact.
It depends on one’s foundational worldview.
Thus what a Catholic considers offensive may appear to the adherent of “worldview neutrality” as true, objective, and harmless.
Conversely, what the latter considers offensive or absurd may, from Catholic premises, be objectivity and truth.

Therefore there is no such thing as the equality of all religions and worldviews.
For this supposed “equality” is itself a worldview—one that, while pretending to defend all others, in fact replaces and abolishes them.

Division is always possible, because the rules of dialogue that one group considers neutral and objective may be incompatible with the worldview of another.
Persuasion, argument, and the shaping of the cultural environment—where people acquire secondary criteria of judgment—determine which worldview currently governs.
This is a social necessity.
Let us not deceive ourselves by speaking of the “equality” of all religions and worldviews.

It is a form of deception when “neutral” circles claim to defend the Church’s values by “civilizing” it, correcting it, eliminating its alleged intolerance—while simultaneously attacking Catholics for supporting, for example, the Social Kingship of Christ, that is, the desire to restore religion’s influence on politics, social life, and art.
Let us name things honestly:
If someone does not want the Catholic religion to shape all spheres of life as their foundational worldview, then let him admit that he is fighting the Church and Catholicism—not pretend (perhaps in good faith) that he “only wants to help the Church become better.”

The Blessed Conflict

A human being always speaks from himself; this is a necessity.
Therefore it is senseless to express one’s fundamental convictions (and religion is such a conviction) with the disclaimer: “These are only my subjective opinions; others may see it differently.”
Such an attempt to rise to a “higher,” “universal” level of reflection leads to nothingness—to a curtain behind which there is another curtain, and another, and so on ad infinitum (to paraphrase a certain twentieth‑century thinker).

If we follow this logic consistently, then the very assumptions by which we relativize our own beliefs would themselves have to be relativized—an internal contradiction.
Thus the only logical stance is to accept what we hold as our fundamental value as the truth.
This must go hand in hand with rejecting whatever contradicts it in other religions or worldviews.

This does not mean despising the existence of other views.
It does not mean claiming that others are evil because they hold false beliefs.
Nor does it deny the structural dimension of evil or its connection to personal responsibility.
No.
It means that, recognizing other views as false, I am inclined to regard their adherents as victims of those views—suspending judgment and undertaking the effort to show them the Truth.

If they sincerely believe their worldview, then they too have the duty (not necessarily in a Catholic sense, but in the sense of internal coherence) to persuade me of it.
They have the duty to live according to what they consider right—even if someone accuses them of discrimination, “symbolic violence,” “cultural pressure,” or “environmental coercion.”
For if they abandon this, then even if they convert to the Truth, they will not live it out.
Such conflict is therefore blessed.

On the other hand, if I relativize my own convictions, if I fail to pass them on, then I—not “systems”—bear guilt.
I become responsible for the “structural evil” that I help sustain through omission.
Being aware of the cultural, seemingly impersonal dimension of morality embedded in cultural forms, I cannot excuse myself by saying, “I can’t change anything anyway.”
I must do what depends on me, even if it yields no visible results.

The thought “I must choose the lesser evil because I won’t break through anyway” is both a sin of omission and a logical absurdity.
Why absurd?
Because it is a self‑reinforcing mechanism: a cure that worsens the disease.
For the abandonment of shaping culture according to our convictions—because “it offends others,” “it is backward,” “we must move with the times”—is precisely what causes others to find it offensive, backward, or out of step with the times.
It is what causes others not to regard Catholicism as true.

Christianity does not form the foundation of culture and mental patterns today because we ourselves have renounced that influence—in the name of misunderstood pluralism, neutrality, and freedom of religion.

“There Will Be Conflict”? Yes—and That Is the Only Path to Peace

You may say: “But this will cause conflict.”
Indeed.
But such conflict is the only logical path to peace.
For peace imposed by force—based on turning one’s convictions into a mere “matter of the heart,” and in reality turning them into a “dead faith without works,” as St. James wrote—leads to endless conflict, to the absence of convictions, to inner disintegration.

This is precisely why Christ—the greatest advocate of Peace with a capital “P”—said:

“I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Honest Pluralism

(English version)

Honest pluralism must openly acknowledge which culture it favors, which culture will define the boundaries of diversity, and which will determine how far elements of other religions and cultures may be admitted.
The limits of tolerance will differ from the limits of acceptance, and these limits must likewise be declared as elements of the favored culture.
Favoring one culture will always involve, within certain bounds, discriminating against others.
To deny this, to conceal which worldview or culture is being privileged, is to mislead.

“Is expressing one’s views—even loudly—already a form of imposition?”

In a certain sense, yes.
For when a worldview becomes pervasive and strong, a person may not even notice when he begins to think according to it.
I have known many people who insisted they would not change when entering a new environment—because they “have their own mind.”
In time, this proved to be empty talk.
They did not even notice when their judgments shifted, so that what they once called evil they now considered good.

This problem arises largely because people have been persuaded that ways of living, entertainment, fashion, are neutral with respect to the “depth of the heart,” that they exert no influence upon it.
They have also been persuaded—according to the autonomizing schema of our age—that the human being is entirely independent, autonomous, unaffected by his surroundings.

Paradoxically, this has caused the human being to lose much of his independence, because he has lost vigilance.

In traditional societies it was obvious that
“you become like those you keep company with,”
and that “if someone does not live as he believes, he will soon believe as he lives.”
Therefore children were not allowed to play in bad company; the Church forbade remaining in circumstances that were occasions of sin, and so forth.

Today people no longer believe in such influence, and therefore they do not defend themselves against it.
As a result, that influence penetrates their identity even more deeply—something well understood by those who have not forgotten the socio‑psychological mechanism expressed in the proverbs above.

Thus, paradoxically, the person who believes he is autonomous, who believes culture does not shape his views, becomes more enslaved than the one who, submitting to tradition and aware of the mechanisms of worldview‑formation, can defend himself against them.

Symbolic Imposition

Moreover, proclaiming one’s views and acting according to them is indeed a form of imposition upon the children who live within their reach.
Parents “impose” their worldview on their children through symbolic force.

Does imposition require physical force?
Yes—but why do we consider only physical force?
There is such a thing as symbolic violence, and it is not evil in itself; it simply is.
It is an inescapable mechanism of social life.

The way to remain free within this mechanism is to become aware of one’s dependence on the rest of the system of reality, and to declare one’s convictions honestly and clearly—rather than obscuring them with talk of “neutrality,” “freedom,” or “equality.”

Without such awareness we are like grass in the wind.
The cause of enslavement is often an excessive belief that nothing enslaves us.

Relax

And do not accuse others of being “uptight” simply because they have principles.
The fact that they set different boundaries than most people may go hand in hand with the fact that they have more freedom elsewhere than you do.
And that “elsewhere,” from God’s perspective, may be far more fitting.

Tolerance Is Part of a Worldview — Therefore It Has Boundaries

(English version)

Tolerance is itself something that someone may dislike; therefore, putting it into practice is already a form of “imposition.”
Or perhaps it is better to call this imposition simply influence.

There also exists imposition without quotation marks — something that is not merely natural influence, and yet is also necessary.
For when we defend society “in the name of law,” in the name of public authority, against those who believe, for example, that human sacrifice is required, we impose upon them our rejection of violence.
If we believe that abortion is murder, we want to impose a prohibition of abortion on others.
Conversely, someone who believes that prohibiting abortion is an attack on freedom wants — from the Catholic perspective — to impose the necessity of at least tolerating murder.
And a Catholic cannot tolerate that.

Imposition cannot be avoided.
The only question we can ask is:

What are the boundaries of imposition?
(Which is simply the other side of the question: What are the boundaries of freedom?)

But even these boundaries — which must be established — will always appear to someone as “unjustified coercion.”

The paradox of tolerance,
the paradox of imposition,
the paradox of coercion,
the paradox of freedom,
are paradoxes only because we forget
that tolerance is part of a worldview and therefore has boundaries —
boundaries defined within that worldview.

A human being cannot rid himself of subjectivity, of worldview.
This is the key to understanding the matter.

And it is always an individual who takes actions that affect the community.
Within the community there will always be people who dislike those actions.
Yet decisions must be made.
At some point discussion must end, and one must take a side.
At some point all the “buts” must be closed, and a decision must be taken — a decision that someone will still dislike.
This is the nature of social action.

As a Catholic, I tolerate people of other faiths and most of their behaviors because Christ taught that the human being is free and therefore cannot be forced into conversion.
But this is not some independent, neutral opinion of mine.
It is an element of my religion.
This tolerance, however, has boundaries where evil appears — scandal, harmful influence — connected to the mechanism expressed in the saying:
“You become like those you keep company with.”

It turns out that what our culture commands us to call “imposition” is a confusion of several different things.
Two of them we have already named: imposition and influence.
The third is simple persuasion.

If you forbid me to persuade you of the traditional influence of religion on everything (including politics), and of my religion in general, calling it the imposition of my subjective conviction, then you contradict yourself.
According to your definition, you are imposing on me your conviction that my conviction must not be imposed, while yours may be.
It sounds illogical because the definition is flawed.
You are persuading me that I should not persuade.

Make up your mind.
(And I hope, dear Reader, that this is not addressed to you personally.)

You also call something else “imposition” and “coercion”:
the shaping of public law by politicians according to their religion, and openly acknowledging this.
This, you say, is imposition and coercion toward those who do not share that religion.

But we cannot argue about whether religion — or any set of convictions — should influence politics.
We can only argue about which set of convictions (religious or not) should do so.

We must not throw the baby out with the bathwater and claim that because some Muslims kill in the name of religion, or because someone once killed in the name of Christianity, therefore religion must be removed from politics.
The boundaries of tolerance depend on worldview and religion.

Freedom Without Boundaries Is a Fiction

(English version)

Freedom is always limited, and yet it does not cease to be freedom.
We say that a person is “free” when he leaves prison, but this does not mean he has no restrictions.
The existence of boundaries does not negate freedom; if it did, no freedom would exist at all.
Human freedom always has limits, but it remains freedom nonetheless.

Freedom without boundaries is impossible for us—non‑gods.
A “liberalism” that abolishes moral and customary boundaries, and exalts the isolated individual, becomes in the end anti‑liberal—anti‑freedom in the etymological sense.
As for the supposed moral neutrality of freedom itself, this is largely a matter of terminology: what is “morally indifferent” can just as well be called “good.”
But regardless of how we name it, the evil lies not in freedom itself, but in the object of our choice.
Not in the capacity to choose, but in what we choose.

Having grown up with a deep aversion to Korwin and what is commonly called liberalism—never having been a Korwinist myself—and having come only after the age of twenty‑four to appreciate the need to shift the emphasis more toward liberty than toward authoritarianism, I believe that attacking the contemporary liberty‑movement (often lumped under “liberalism”) as well as the traditionalist movement (“traditionalism”) is like sawing off an already too‑short leg of the table.
It is treating the disease with the very poison that worsens it.

As I have mentioned before, C. S. Lewis placed these words in the mouths of devils:
“To cruel ages we warn against Sentimentality; to vain and slothful ages against Respectability; to lustful ages against Puritanism; and when all men are drifting toward tyranny or slavery, we whisper that Liberalism is the most dangerous threat.”

The problem is not freedom, but the misdirected objects of freedom.
To correct the errors of “libertarians,” “liberals,” or “free‑marketeers,” one need not attack freedom itself.
On the contrary: one must show them that what they fight for is not freedom as such, but a set of restricted choices which, for others, become a form of oppression.

(I believe we should abandon these vague labels—szur, libek, kuc, pigularz—because they have become emotional wastebaskets.
We must return to naming actual moral faults: scandal, murder, killing, lying, deceit, adultery—errors in relation to fundamental values.
In an age of substitute moralities and emotional categories, these real faults disappear from view.
We end up ostracizing someone we have emotionally labeled a “conspiracy nut,” while praising someone who, violating the Eighth Commandment, pronounced such a verdict—often provoking the former into error through mockery, pressure, or the Barabbas effect.
It is unjust to condemn the reactive faults of the persecuted while failing to defend them proportionately against the Camels of the Mighty.)

As we have said: the problem is not freedom, but the misplaced domain of its exercise.
Let us fight the choice of that domain.
Especially since, for example, the “ko‑lib” movement begins with ko: it is conservative‑liberal.
The real question is what we wish to conserve—and the masses who attach themselves to the movement often forget the first half of its name.

The Boundaries of Freedom Do Not End at Bodily Harm

The air we breathe and the food we eat affect us.
So do the ideas that surround us—ideas that seep into our consciousness through fashions, entertainment, and ways of life.
The danger to the soul is worse than the danger to the body.

There exists a socio‑psychological mechanism by which a person becomes like his environment without noticing when it begins.
Therefore, if one does not wish to become like his environment, he must shape that environment according to his worldview.
To claim that someone will resist all influence by sheer willpower is to deny human nature.

This is why traditional cultures placed such importance on protecting children from what they called “scandal.”
Hence the wise proverb:
“You become like those you keep company with.”

This is what Jesus meant in His words about scandal.
Today we no longer understand the word.
Scandal is the bad example that reshapes our mentality.

If someone demands that I accept a definition of tolerance and freedom that ignores spiritual or even psychological influences on the human person, then he demands that I renounce my religion.
I do not agree to this.
Someone may take me to court if this disagreement becomes practical.
And I will lose if the court applies such a definition of freedom.
And then I will be discriminated against for my non‑materialist, Catholic convictions.

This is why the contemporary definitions of freedom, pluralism, and tolerance are self‑contradictory absurdities.

The Power of Signs

Ambiguity, in the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries, is not a problem of language but of reality itself.
It is not the result of insufficient precision or clarity of description, but of the vast systems of signs and extra‑linguistic contexts we call culture.
This is why we live beneath a new Tower of Babel.

Even the clearest linguistic formulas, without the proper cultural background, will be understood differently by each person.
This applies even to such seemingly straightforward words as “clarity,” “tradition,” or “liberalism.”
(An addition from 2021.)
To illustrate this, let us begin with language itself.

The Power of the Word

(English version)

There exists a way of understanding the word that rests upon a certain reverence for it.
To “weigh one’s words,” to “not throw words to the wind,” to “give one’s word,” to “mind one’s words”—these expressions all testify to the same intuition: words cannot remain without consequence in the rest of reality.
They are a commitment.
One may even read these expressions as saying: “the word calls something into being.”

The term “word” here means “meaning,” “sense.”
Like Logos.
Meaning is the signified; the Word is the signifier.
The nature of the word is arbitrary, symbolic, metaphorical, conventional.
Perhaps for this unspoken reason, it is legitimate to understand “Word” in this deeper sense.
For meaning truly is that which calls being into existence—inasmuch as one cannot think of any being without consciousness, and consciousness is identical with the act of giving meaning, distinguishing, seeing relations (which can be reduced to sign‑relations).
A being may be defined as that which can be thought, and therefore that which can be a meaning.
The creation of beings can occur only through a single Consciousness—the One that guarantees the coherence of the world and the possibility of knowing it by unified rational principles.
We call this Consciousness God.

The word placed upon the speaker a responsibility—an obligation to fulfill it, to make it true.
If there existed a community that did not know falsehood (had not yet learned to use words without substance), it would be obvious to its members that if someone says something, then he will do it, or that it is so.
Empty speech would be unimaginable, unthinkable.
And if it appeared, it would frighten children at night; it would be feared; severe social sanctions would be imposed for it.
A promise would mean giving one’s Word.
Perhaps such was, is, or will be the case in some cultures.

This understanding of language is often attributed to communities called sacred, traditional, primordial, folk—whose members, some claim, do not distinguish the signified from the signifier.
I would put it differently: they know that one can speak of the signified only through the signifier.
For speaking itself, even thinking, is a signifying act.
The symbolization of the signified by the signifier is understood as “identification with it,” a kind of “mystical participation,” or rather a deep conviction that it is inconceivable for the word not to express reality, or not to oblige one to transform reality in accordance with itself.

This is all the more inconceivable because the word has for them a sacred status.
Its misuse becomes profanation.
For the “Word,” whose task is to express meaning—and thus to symbolize “Meaning as such,” above all the ultimate Meaning—expresses the Holy.
And “the Holy” is precisely the One whom the human being, according to his nature, seeks: the One who is the ultimate Meaning of reality.
(The One who devised the relations that constitute the elementary mental fabric of all things.)

Upon this understanding of the Word rests the Prologue of the Gospel of John, in which the Logos is God—both the source and the end of all things.
The Greek Logos means Sense, Reason, Knowledge (and indirectly: Truth, Principle), but also “Word.”
“In the beginning was the Word.”

Such an understanding of the Word expresses the most fundamental function of the human intellect: the search for the coherence of all things—a deep need of human nature, a permanent structure that is only occasionally muffled.
The logical necessity of a supreme, primordial, irreducibly real Meaning is the logical necessity of acknowledging God.
God is the Ultimate Meaning; His symbol is the “Word,” and therefore the sacred status of the Word is justified.

Thus the existence of a hierarchical social order had meaning as a reflection of the Oneness of God.
This Oneness indicated what kind of Order is fitting—good—and therefore most effective, because it first establishes the criteria of effectiveness.
The ordering of social reality according to this Oneness and its relation to creatures—establishing logical coherence (relation)—transferred that coherence into human relations.
The obvious and insurmountable limitation was that applying the Divine Order to earthly reality would never be perfect; it would always be a task.
But one cannot invent one’s own “orders.”
This Oneness, guaranteeing coherence, was to be—like the word—a symbol of the Divine Meaning and Order.
The compactness of the Cosmos, ensured by the oneness of Authority (which in science is the assumption that allows us to draw universal conclusions and seek laws), was to be the model of social life.
Hence the old saying that authority comes from God.
And the New Testament fits into this understanding of Authority.
Such an attempt to conform to the Pattern means that one does not yet dwell in the Pattern, but must move toward it.
Likewise, the human word ought, by its nature, to strive toward what it signifies.

Given the weight of the word and the sacred character of authority, the specialization of language belonged chiefly to the authorities and those gathered around them.
It was the task of the elites (or even a selected part of them) to compress reality through the word, so as to grasp it and govern it more effectively—to ease the task of seeking coherence, the meaning of a reality whose full complexity is incomprehensible.
Focusing on language presupposed a structural similarity among the fragments of reality being known, which is the basis of all acts of thought.
Thus it was assumed that organizing language—which symbolizes the entire “rest of the world”—would be a way of better unifying that “rest.”
The principle pars pro toto was applied.

Today, as in the past—especially among elites—there exists an approach that appears similar.
The word is also considered extremely important.
But this importance is distorted, self‑isolated, severed from its bond with reality: one forgets that the rest of reality expects something from the word.
It expects transformation and expression.
Thus one forgets the fundamental feature of spoken and written language: its task of symbolizing the Meaning of reality—the whole of reality.

This problem likely arose when the upper classes began to treat language as a “substitute for reality,” forgetting that it is not enough for language to be internally coherent; it has meaning only when it reflects the structures of reality, draws from that reality, and occupies its proper place within the system of being.
Otherwise language loses its meaning—or rather, its function.

Thus emerged language without backing, money without backing, signs, religious evenings and rituals without backing in daily life, in the order they were meant to shape.
All this hatched largely from the ideological‑economic invention/mechanism of autonomizing individual spheres of reality.
Yet no form has meaning if it does not exist in relation to other forms—if these relations do not fit into the structures of human cognition, which presuppose the interconnectedness of all reality.

And this structural meaning of everything points to the Transcendence that is “Irreducibly Real”—the ultimate point of reference, the ultimate source of meaning for all things.
By rejecting Its Oneness, we deny that by which we can deny anything at all: Reason.
For Reason exists as the force that unifies.
Without the oneness of the principles of reality, no understanding is possible—and that oneness is provided only by the One God.

Autonomization is the negation of this.
By stubbornly pursuing it, we fall into contradiction.
(2012)

The Linguistification of Culture, Social Order, and Sola Scriptura

(English version)

“The word is the testament of action; whatever cannot be accomplished by deed is tested—bequeathed—in the word. Only such words are needed, and only such words rise again in action; all others are more or less learned phraseology or mechanical necessity, if not the thing of art itself.”
— C. K. Norwid

In Thibon’s view, the traditionalist renewal of national life did not consist merely in political activity; it required a strong metaphysical foundation in ontological realism.
The antidote to anti‑metaphysical nominalism (which had been poisoning European consciousness since the late Middle Ages) and to the demoliberal “rule of words” could only be a return to reality (retour au réel).
In the material‑social dimension, this return is identical with a “return to the earth,” contact with which restores to a personality mutilated by technique and technocracy its firm, solid foundation—like the mythological Antaeus.
— Prof. Jacek Bartyzel on the thought of Gustave Thibon

I try to let meanings reach me before I manage to clothe them in words.
For words are only one of many possible representations of concepts—of meanings.

Meaning can be contained in the whole of reality.
Therefore the one who claims that if something has not been sensibly spoken or written, it has no meaning, is mistaken.
If we attempt to reduce the entire meaningfulness of a thing to words alone, we will limit it, impoverish it, strip it of its real, difficult‑to‑express semantic fullness.
Words will no longer open onto vast, ungraspable expanses of meaning, but will instead lock them in a cage.
(Even if that cage is named “the unrestrained activity of reason.”)

Words by themselves mean nothing.
How we understand them depends on what other objects in reality we associate them with.
And this association is relative; it depends on upbringing and cultural experience.
If a child did not associate the sound “mama” with the experience of its mother, but instead with the experience of a rattle, then the sound “mama” would mean precisely “rattle.”

The world is fluid and changing; human activity is likewise changeable, despite the more or less stable elements that allow us to continue calling it human, preserving the identity of humanity as its subject.
This changeability concerns both time and space.
Therefore the pairing of signifier (including words) and signified, transmitted through upbringing and stored in memory, changes so profoundly.
The pairing of sound and meaning changes as well.[2012]

Poniżej masz pełną angielską wersję Twojego tekstu — wierną, gęstą, metafizyczną, semiotycznie precyzyjną i zachowującą Twój styl: rytmiczny, logiczny, a jednocześnie literacki.
To tłumaczenie jest spójne z poprzednimi fragmentami, tak aby całość Twojej pracy mogła tworzyć jednolitą narrację.

If We Seek Meaning in Words Alone, We Fall into a Trap

(English version)

If we seek meaning in words themselves, we fall into a trap.
We forget that their meaning will inevitably be the meaning they have acquired in our minds through the example of the environment that shaped our mental patterns.
These patterns—precisely because they are the tools of reflection—usually do not themselves undergo reflection.
They are transparent.
They can be examined, but rarely are.
And if the experiential meanings of words differ from person to person, then the meanings of the expressions used as interpretive starting points—expressions that themselves are not subject to interpretation—will likewise differ.

If we claim that the same written words necessarily transmit the same content, we are—frankly—deeply mistaken.
For their content changes as the world that raises and forms people changes, even if the words remain the same.
To preserve the identity of meaning, it is necessary to preserve the essential cultural context—the whole human way of life.
This context forms a core composed of essential regions (not precise points) that together create a meaningful structure.
Among these regions is tradition and the interpersonal transmission of meanings contained within it.

These means do not provide demonstrable certainty of identical meanings, yet nothing remains but to trust them consciously—just as we trust the principles of reason.
For if we rely on words alone, spoken or—worse—merely written, we paradoxically make their meaning dependent on shifting, relative contexts.
Focusing on words alone prevents us from controlling or analyzing these contexts as carriers of meaning, because under such assumptions we fail to recognize their role.
In such a case, these contexts may assign to words meanings contrary to the original, causing the identity of the content to be lost.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is the principle of Sola Scriptura.
By adopting it, we practically achieve the opposite of what we intend.
By abandoning a tangible, institutional, personal, “sole legitimate” interpretation (according to the faith), we submit ourselves to a multiplicity of interpretations which—because they focus only on graphic signs—are uncontrollable.
Thus the alteration of the content of the Original text becomes not only possible, but certain and repeated.

Words, however—when they convey Holy Content, the Words of the Gospel—contain their essence in the eternal Logos, who manifests Himself among other ways through sounds and graphic signs, but is not identical with them.
These sounds and signs are forms that merely represent what ought to manifest itself in the structure of the entire way of life.
That way of life is simply another name for the context I described above.
The rooting of Meaning in reality occurs through rituals and spatiotemporal orderings—wrongly dismissed as superstition, magic, or empty formalism.

These sounds and signs are therefore not ends in themselves; the end is the meanings which, under Sola Scriptura, may be lost—even while the original words are preserved.

Words with a small “w” are merely tools for conveying meanings.
Meanings which (I repeat once more) should emerge from the structure of life as a whole.
They cannot be mere emblems, preserved in themselves while applied to ways of life, phenomena, or beings that are not aligned with them.
We cannot then claim that preserving the verbal emblem preserves the identity of the thing named.
In other words: we cannot say that if we use the word “woman,” it must have the same meaning it had three hundred years ago—even within the same language.

What, then, can serve as the interpretive foundation for Sola Scriptura?
It explicitly rejects the existence of a stable foundation in tradition—understood as a structure of the entire way of life, whose meaning is continually transmitted and understood through interpersonal succession.
The institutional nature of the Church provides this identity of meanings, grounded in the belief that the Holy Spirit reminds the Church of the content of the Gospel.

There is no alternative but to establish a single office which, in cases of dispute, guarantees the unity of interpretation—by which I mean, of course, the papacy.
For it often happens that many groups appeal to the Holy Spirit, and yet their views contradict one another.
Faced with such contradiction, a person may experience, recall, and understand yet another fragment of the wisdom contained in the fact that Christ called Peter the rock and commanded him to strengthen his brethren.

Words as Emblems: Linguistification, Social Order, and the Rupture of Meaning

(English version)

Words in our culture often become emblems.
Indeed, one could say they constitute one of its governing principles: linguistification.
Its roots lie in a certain rupture—between different spheres of life, between sign and reality, between word and reality, between word and non‑verbal signs.
This tearing‑apart, in an autonomizing culture, is called “liberation”: liberation from “the chains of tradition,” from “medieval superstition,” all in the name of supposed progress.

Earlier upper classes were, on the one hand, more separated, yet on the other hand their dependence on the lower classes was obvious.
As a cog in the social mechanism, they fulfilled their obligations toward many local groups through a specialized language.
Such a limited code is easy to govern; it is easier to seek coherence—social coherence included.
This search was necessary because what we call “the state” usually concerned supra‑local bonds, forms of cooperation among people who did not know one another personally.
There was no possibility of mutual control as in a village or fortified town, where everyone sees everyone else daily—or can see them if needed.
A compressed and written language was one of the tools that made it possible to grasp the “state enterprise,” which could not be personally overseen in its entirety.

It is impossible to reduce the “meaningfulness” of reality to language alone, as is practically attempted today (though rarely declared), in the name of turning everyone into the “upper,” or rather the ruling, class.
Yet governance can be exercised only by a part—a smaller part—not by everyone.
Otherwise the very aim of governance—ordinary life—becomes absurd, burdensome, incoherent.
Gustave Thibon expressed this well, as quoted by Prof. Jacek Bartyzel:

“Democracy,” said Thibon—who truly knew “ordinary people,” having grown up among them and being one of them in spirit—“is nothing other than the art of preventing ordinary people from dealing with what truly concerns them, while forcing them to decide about matters they do not wish to hear about at all.”

This sentence expresses the widespread social aversion to politics.
We also know that if we devote our time to faithfully fulfilling the duties that concern us directly, we will lack the time to entangle ourselves in the inherently complex supra‑local matters commonly called “politics.”
And without knowledge of these complexities—secret affairs, international matters, abstractions for the ordinary person—one cannot make responsible choices regarding the highest offices.

Let us continue the quotation:

“The result of this perversion is that the ‘rights’ of the people are fictitious, while their alienation is real. Another consequence of the democratic illusion is the desacralization and destruction of all taboos—precisely those things most necessary to normal human beings. In place of true (revealed) religion, an idolatrous cult of man is introduced, and language—the most important means of communication—is corrupted; it no longer testifies to reality but becomes its substitute. Hence the inevitability of totalitarianism in a democratic regime, which does not even require physical terror: it suffices to ‘massify’ society and transform it into an isolated crowd of consumers.”

I recommend the thought of Gustave Thibon.
Unlike intellectuals submerged in their writings, he was a self‑taught man rooted like the vines he cultivated on his farm until the end of his life.
He had no opportunity to detach himself from reality.
Therefore he did not babble nonsense.
His words struck real targets.
They weighed.

If in a team everyone were captain or coach, two things would follow:
first, the danger of incoherence—thus the absence of a team;
second, each person, focusing on organizing the whole, would devote less attention to performing his own task well.
A human being has limited capacity to grasp things.
To do one thing well, he must limit other areas of activity—mental or physical—to devote more time and energy to his specialization.

I see this in myself: by devoting myself to theorizing, I have lost many practical abilities.
Even things that seemed easy in childhood now come with great difficulty.
And the difficulty lies not in physical shortcomings but in reasoning with concrete things.
Much of my intellectual capacity has shifted from practice to theory.
My ability to write clearly has suffered as well, for that too is a kind of practice, not pure theory.

Notice that the creators of concepts are rarely their outstanding implementers or exemplars.
Even describing them was difficult for them.
The great “describers, implementers, and disseminators” are usually imitators—from the ancient Romans drawing from Greeks and Etruscans, through Alexander the Great (who adopted Greek language and culture, and later some customs of conquered peoples), to Thomas Aquinas (who synthesized the heritage of Catholic theology through the lens of Aristotle).

Of course, there exist universal cognitive principles that bind diverse domains together, principles that compel us to order things in certain ways.
On the basis of these universals, an expanded language allowed mobile societies to change professions.
Yet each domain of life has its own specific features which require experience and time to understand.
Often this experience requires a kind of intuition—helpful where rational, linguistic searching (prone to error) would demand much time.
Human action is limited by many factors: lifespan, deadlines, moods, memory, the gravity of situations.
We know that in a single moment our thoughts may grasp a meaning that would require many pages of words to express.
Such intuition, grounded in specialization transmitted through the experience of many generations, enables better, more reliable, more tested action.
The universality of language cannot capture this due to the limits of time and space.

For this reason, only after many years does it become clear that what is produced by mobile, language‑based industrial calculation is often inferior to what was created by traditional workshops.

Take, for example, wooden shingles.
Industrial shingles were—and often still are—cut, not split along the grain.
This makes them fragile: water penetrates the wood, and many complex factors (which a craftsman finds easier to understand than to verbalize) accelerate their decay.
Traditional shingles were split along the grain, preventing water from entering and allowing it to run off the surface.
They did not crack as cut shingles do.
They endured sun, water, wind, and frost far longer.
This did not need to be expressed in words to be recognized as right.
It was simply understood.
It was embodied.
And even if a particular person did not understand it, the potential for understanding was preserved in the traditional form itself.

Abandoning traditional forms destroys even this potential—both practical and symbolic, a potential likely inexhaustible.

For this reason, strict or elaborate language cannot be the domain of all.
It may be the specialty of a minority who sacrifice certain non‑linguistic abilities (gaining other benefits) so that the rest may live in an orderly—thus proper—way.

If language possessed order and meaning in itself, while the reality it describes, arises from, and helps shape did not, then language would lose its meaning.
It is only a tool.
A tool, not an end.

Cyprian Kamil Norwid pointed to the difference between the thinking of the people and that of the organizing classes, saying that the former “think in forms.”

Such, in truth, is the basis of all our thinking: thinking in forms.
The imagined systems of sounds and squiggles called words are secondary to the imagined forms of things, actions, and abstract categories expressed through action.
Words are, in fact, a dependent kind of action.
Thus every element of our culture should be made meaningful—understood—through its particular structuring, regardless of whether we can give that structure a verbal equivalent.

Language—as a separated and limited element of the code of life—is only a symbolic tool for communicating and grasping vast expanses of meaning by compressing them into a small, representative area.

This compression should function like the role of electric current in transmitting sound.
Sound becomes current—reality becomes word—but this has meaning only if the current is again transformed into sound—if the word again becomes reality.
We cannot reduce the real value of sound to what can be recorded as current and later reproduced in a speaker; such recording inevitably involves losses.
Far greater losses occur when reality is recorded through language.
The word captures representative points of a way of life, not its entire, linear, expansive reality.

Linguistification and the Disintegration of Folk Cultures

(English version)

With the Reformation’s principle of Sola Scriptura—combined with the translation of Scripture into national languages and the rise of individual interpretation—there began to form a linguistification of culture.
Its next stage appeared in the Enlightenment’s trust in scientific‑linguistic proofs.
From the same sources emerged the modern notion of the nation as a community bound by a uniform linguistic code at all levels of culture—thus excluding the earlier arrangement in which competent use of that code was required only of the upper strata.
Those strata were meant to be the binding agent of the political nation: a supra‑ethnic, multi‑layered bond.

If everyone were to become the ruling class, that binding agent would lose what gives it meaning—the element to be bound.
Or put differently: such a development would tend toward the elimination of everything that requires binding.
It would tend toward the erasure of ethnic differences through assimilation, denationalization, the destruction of ethnic distinctiveness, or through attempts to create artificial ethnic states where the foundations of supra‑local organisms had never been ethnic to begin with.

The tools for training the “mercenaries” of an economy built on this mobility—mobility dependent on precise language—were, and still are: centralized schooling, media, fashions (including intellectual fashions), entertainment, and so on.

This new model of industrial society, in the name of defending folk culture, overthrew it, because it did not account for the folk mode of “thinking in forms.”
Similarly, in the name of defending the Catholic religion, it overthrew the natural “material” of its existence—folk rituality—which was hastily thrown into the same sack as magic.

Human activity, approved by changes in lifestyle and by the increasingly complex naming of everything deemed necessary for functioning in the new order, began to imprison its thinking within the cage of language.
Suddenly, wherever linguistic possibilities ended, bars appeared—bars that prevented us from controlling what lay beyond them.
Beyond them lay the ritualization of life: the sanctification, the meaningful structuring of time and space.
Efforts were made to dismantle the ordering of everything according to the religious principle in which the Sacred was the source of norms and the axis of order.
Attempts were made to replace it with other principles: secularization, or more broadly, the autonomization of individual elements of culture.

The later great problems—arising from the fact that cultural homogenization, or the relegation of inherently all‑embracing elements (such as religion) to niches—were often accompanied by bloody conflicts.
Attempts to escape these conflicts produced a fashionable mental construct, implanted over the years by successive centers of worldview dissemination.
This construct was a layered accumulation of principles shaping the thinking and functioning of our societies, such as:
the cult of reason opposed to religion (especially religion grounded in ritual),
the overvaluation of freedom of speech and opinion,
and simultaneously the principle—contradictory to such freedom—of worldview neutrality: laicism in politics, science, and social action;
and finally “universal values,” relativism, and pluralism.

I could list many more slogans fashionable and popular today, but I shall limit myself to these few.

LGBTerror and the Linguistification of Reality:

On the Shared Error of the Left and the “Right”**
(English version)

The dispute over whether a man may declare himself a woman, an elephant, a tree, a pensioner, or a comet is an illustration of the maladies of the West—above all, of linguistification and anti‑traditionalism. It also reveals that a significant part of the political right, despite its declarations, in fact thinks in ways structurally similar to the left it opposes.

The very same circles that fight for tolerance, for the breaking of “rigid norms,” that demand gender relativism, fail to see that in reducing sexual identity to subjective feeling, and in attacking defenders of the traditional link between the words “woman” and “man” and concrete physical traits, they are imposing their own understanding of words on others.
This imposition is a kind of terror, for it arises from individual and unstable feelings. Opposed to it stands another kind of imposition—this time legitimate—because it is subject to the process of intersubjectivization that takes place within Tradition. Tradition is not merely a collection of objects, a “treasury,” as some like to call it, but above all a process in which the essential transmission of the means of communication and expression takes place.

Language—one element of a multisensory system of signs used for thinking and communicating, limited to the material of sound produced by human mouths—(a fact beautifully reflected in the Slavic word for “tongue”) is not the property of individuals and their feelings. The link between words and meaning precedes individuals; it is given to them, imposed by tradition, and only thus can it fulfill its function.

The word “man”—let us repeat—has, in all previous traditions, meant a person with specific physical traits distinguishing him from another, otherwise similar person, called a “woman” precisely because of those differences. Cultural roles of the sexes are, in this understanding, secondary to physical traits.
LGBT activists now insert a new meaning into the word: for them, “woman” or “man” is an expression of individual feeling—feeling all the more undefined because the same circles detach these words not only from physical traits but also from traditional social roles and behavioral styles.
What, then, is the basis of this identity of feeling?
Nothing.
Only the word itself.
Or more precisely: its literal sound and written form.
Sola Scriptura.

The error here lies in rejecting meaning as the basis of the identity of things.

When someone claims to “feel like” a horse, a tree, or water, and demands that others call him such, it turns out that it is not others who impose an identity on him, but he who attempts to impose his own, tradition‑less understanding of words on the entire world.

Thus he is not actually disputing with others, for those others mean something entirely different.
The only thing they share is the literal sound of the word.
The real subject of dispute should be meaning, yet they argue as if they were disputing meaning while in fact they quarrel over definitions of words.
They stubbornly deceive themselves and others about what they are actually doing.
Another example of the separation of language from reality.

This separation is disastrous because an objective feature of language is its conventionality, and therefore its dependence on tradition. Without this dependence, language could not fulfill its function of enabling communication.
If everyone invented new meanings for words, new words, or even entirely new languages detached from tradition, there would be no guaranteed common ground enabling mutual understanding, dialogue, or dispute.

A person with physical traits traditionally recognized as male who calls himself a woman based solely on subjective feeling is not disputing with those who call him a man. He passes by them, for although he uses the same sound, he means something else.
He disputes with himself—with his own mistaken belief about what others believe.

He fights for the right to insert into a word given to him by tradition—thus not his property—an entirely new meaning.
In doing so, he appropriates the word, committing an act of terror against the community, tradition, and the objective nature of language, which by its very function cannot be constructed independently of tradition.
Its essence is imposition and given‑ness.
Without these, it ceases to be language.

He uses the same word as others, yet inserts a completely different meaning into it.

I speak of terror because imposing one’s private meanings onto a shared language is like releasing foul or toxic substances—or noise—into the common air, which others do not wish to breathe, justifying it with “personal feeling,” “creativity,” or “self‑expression.”
It is telling that the same people who demand the right to pollute language and social reality with their private definitions of sex—disrupting the functioning of the community—simultaneously fight for “clean air” and attack those who burn wood in their stoves.

A similar phenomenon occurs on the opposite side of the barricade, among the right attacked by LGBTQ ideology and the left.
On the right, endless disputes arise over liberalism, nationalism (here the left often supports parts of the nominal right), over the interpretation of Scripture, Tradition, the form of the Mass, Humanae Vitae, and Vatican II.

All these disputes rest on talking past one another, using the same literal sound of words but with entirely different meanings.
In these disputes, one or both sides treat meanings as if they were welded by some objective force to the words themselves.
They defend their own convention—their own new definition, detached from tradition—forgetting that other, tradition‑sanctioned meanings exist.

For just as the imposition of a word’s meaning from above is an objective fact, so too is the conventionality and subjectivity of that meaning.
In other words:
For language to function, it must be given from above by tradition, naming concrete things;
but at the same time, the traditions linking words to objects and ideas are varied, changing, subjective.
Both are true.

Gender activists only declare tolerance and openness, yet in practice they proclaim the same error as some of the “right‑wingers” they attack.
Both sides, in practice (though they would deny it), enact the same internally contradictory linguistification—treating the word as if it contained its meaning within itself.
As if the word “man” were identical with its meaning, or as if the word “liberalism” had one objectively correct meaning welded to it by God.
Both positions are mistaken.

A common attitude on the broad “right” is to throw everyone into one bag and assume that words like “liberalism” or “libertarian” have one correct meaning objectively attached to them.
This contradicts what we objectively know about language, social context, cultural context, and situational context.
Thus it is unjustified to claim that someone “talks nonsense” when he calls himself a Catholic libertarian or a libertarian Catholic.
It is nonsense to claim that defining libertarianism in a way compatible with Catholicism is “misnaming.”

A similar error occurs among those who attempt to read Scripture or conciliar texts literally, that is, detached from tradition and context—thus falling into presentism and archaeologism, projecting contemporary meanings onto words and situations from the past.

Another Clear Example of Linguistification

(English version)

Here we have yet another striking example of linguistification.
The same mechanism underlies the anti‑formalism of those who claim that “form does not matter, only content,” that “what counts is what is in the heart.”
This position turns out to be inconsistent, for the only carrier of the supposed “content” becomes the word itself—e.g. the word “content”—but without the form it is meant to signify.
The word becomes an empty form.

How did this happen?
Perhaps in the same way as in the tension—discussed elsewhere—between modernism and postmodernism (and later between the Accusers of Tradition and the Accusers of the Council, the NOM, and the “HC”).
The cause of the conflict between these positions lies in what they share: a false definition of the situation and a radical opposition—first between subjectivism and objectivism, reminiscent of the earlier opposition between realism and idealism.

Yet the relation between word and meaning can be both objective and subjective at once, just as on earth it can be both day and night at the same time—depending on where one stands.
Extreme realists and extreme idealists‑relativists are, in fact, both extreme idealists:
the former lose sight of the real and objective subjectivity of the word,
the latter lose sight of how real it is to impose on others one’s own non‑relative definition of meanings detached from reality, as if they were objectively and intolerantly welded by nature to words.

The nonsense here is not the description I have just given, but what is being described.
The only way to free oneself from this web of contradictions is to escape the false alternatives by observing the objective features of language, one of which is its… subjectivity.
Or rather: the subjectivity of objectively existing and inherently imposed linguistic traditions and conventions.
Both at once.
Subjectivity and objectivity.
(2020)

Society is DIVIDED around the Pandemic—on principles similar to those in the case of LGBTerror or the revolt against Catholic Tradition, only along a different axis.
In each case we witness the same inversion: semantic terrorists demand that those who behave normally—i.e. according to traditional norms, without masks—justify themselves and accept blame.
Likewise, LGBT activists blame others for not accepting their newly imposed meanings of words that do not belong to them.

And finally, the most important point:
those who change the traditional and sacred Form, and who impose their change in the name of supposed “adaptation to modern man,” accuse those who defend the traditional Form of anachronism, formalism, and destroying Unity.
The perversity of this framing I have explained elsewhere in this book.

Over‑Linguistification or Mere Linguistification?

(English version)

I use the term over‑linguistification (przejęzykowienie), linking it with autonomization (manifested, in Berger’s sense, as secularization), with anti‑formalism (including anti‑ritualism and anti‑institutionalism), and with progressivism/modernism—that turning away from the Beginning, from Transcendence, Eternity, the Beyond‑Time, toward evolution, change, novelty, creativity, immediacy, and “progress.”

Jürgen Habermas offers some remarkably interesting fragmentary observations about these mechanisms (as in the case of linguistification and flexibilization—i.e., facultativity—which forms the basis of Gellnerian mobility; see Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism).
Yet the subtle value‑judgments he smuggles in—whether through his hopes attached to “linguistification,” or through his recommendations (such as the idea that religions should abandon their total claims and distill from themselves a set of “universal values,” a universality that also shines through his construct of universalizing rationalization)—are detached from reality, illogical, and often impossible to fulfill.

In both cases he seems to regard the totality and supremacy of religion and traditional cultures as a problem to be solved, or as something that dissolves on its own through modernizing evolution.
What he fails to notice is that his proposed alternative is itself an equally total substitute, not an arbiter between the “problematic” traditions.
A substitute that may be oppressive, harmful, or simply unworkable for many.

Ritual and the Corruption of Language

The term over‑linguistification may appear evaluative.
It need not be, for the prefix prze‑ here denotes excess, a quantitative rather than qualitative surplus.
It extends the colloquial notion of “over‑talking” (przegadanie) for analytical purposes.

It can be associated with sola‑scripturism, or with the fact that the primary tool of the educated classes is the word, especially the written word—unlike the folk, who work and express themselves more physically (though word and writing also matter there, but quantitatively less).
The intelligentsia’s immersion in the written word is natural.
(Under the influence of writing, even spoken language changes: a demand for greater precision arises, for compressing entire messages into words.)
This demand is justified in academia, but it is secondary.
Many scholars seemed to forget this, interpreting the speech of the folk as if they too constructed their messages in such an over‑linguistified manner.

Meanwhile, the folk in practice assign greater importance to non‑verbal signs (despite verbally valuing certain categories of words).
They build communication using multiple materials simultaneously:
word, gesture, situation, age, pauses and silence, breath, touch, distance, space, time, smell.
Like in a true ritual.

This multisensory quality—this system of paraphrases, this rootedness in nature and the real world, this connection with everyday life familiar to people, this forming of the basis of social bonds—is, in my view, the primary strength of ritual.
But not only of ritual.
This set of features builds what may be called semiotic power—the persuasive force of a given communication or worldview.

What distinguishes ritual from other signs is, in my view, the participants’ conviction of its efficacy, arising from another conviction: that the ritual is not constructed subjectively, according to the whims of an era, an individual, or contemporaries, but is given from above, from the ancestors—thus OBJECTIVE, given as a sacred act that in some sense re‑creates the world, summoned from beyond time, making present the Beginning / the Myth / the Ultimate Sacred Foundations.
Here I agree with Rappaport.
To be honest, his theses about the special role of indices or resistance to falsehood do not yet convince me.
But the role of what is given from above extends beyond ritual; it applies also to language and to other signs on which communication rests.

If we constructed language ourselves, we would never understand one another.
It must be imposed from above, accepted in linguistic tradition.
Even rituals are not rigid; their frames allow diversity within the range not restricted by those frames.

The Genesis of Over‑Linguistification

(English version)

Seeking the origins of over‑linguistification in sola scriptura is not entirely new, for Weber had already pointed to the Protestant roots of the work ethic and of the “modern” capitalist world. Contemporary scientific rationality—another component of that same world—also bears the imprint of Protestantism. Scholars such as Peter Berger (in his analyses of secularization) and Michael Lambek have noted this fact. One must also recall the notion of the “disenchantment of the world.”

Sola scriptura has certain structural affinities (I am not speaking here of direct genealogy, though even that cannot be excluded) with iconoclasm and other phenomena that may be regarded as expressions of anti‑formalism. Anti‑ritualism is, as it were, one of its components. Those under its influence are suspicious of external “empty” forms, insisting that what is outside does not matter, that “what counts is what is in the heart.” In practice this manifests in statements about love such as “God loves you”—as if words were not external forms but “pure content.” Yet words are only one of the materials from which a communicative act is constructed.
Can a scholar privilege them merely because they are his tools, because he feels more secure in their environment? Words, as forms, can also be misunderstood, empty, superficially grasped.

Over‑linguistification also manifests in concepts such as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or in the theories of Descartes and Condillac, which suggest that there is no thinking without language. It appears as well in methods of studying culture and other non‑linguistic phenomena using tools developed by linguists. This phenomenon is visible in the terminology we use. “Overcoming the problems of language” suggests that the starting point for discussing communication is language itself.
A parallel case is the use of the term “non‑verbal signs” rather than, for example, “non‑kinetic,” “non‑proxemic,” “non‑mimetic,” “non‑olfactory,” or “non‑gestural” signs. Other signs are treated as secondary, revealing perhaps unconscious evolutionary and language‑centric assumptions about the secondariness of non‑linguistic sign systems.

This phenomenon is, of course, useful as an analytical and descriptive tool. One must, however, be careful that it does not illegitimately distort conclusions about the reality under study.

The same tendency appears in oppositions such as “ritual practice vs. communicative action,” or “that which is held sacred vs. that which is justified,” and in the assumption that what is pre‑linguistic is pre‑rational. It appears in the general framing of the linguistic/pre‑linguistic opposition within an evolutionary conception of culture, in claims such as “the world is above all a world of meanings conditioned by language,” and so on.

I propose that verbal language be considered one material among others for constructing signs—equal to the rest, though possessing, like the others, its own specific features.

I also believe it is worth approaching critically the theories that claim that ritual communication is resistant to falsehood. Feigned reverence expressed through a bow is a kind of falsehood. Misleading someone by pointing in the wrong direction is likewise a falsehood. The latter is the classic example of an indexical sign. Yet even indices contain a necessary symbolic component: the need for subjective cognitive activity and intuition—or decision—to recognize a pointing finger as a sign of direction.
The same applies to the bow: lowering oneself does not necessarily signify submission.

In churches, for example, the tower is higher than the presbytery. Here a certain agreement is at work—one that transcends relations among contemporaries, an agreement not made between the current users of a sign system. There is a degree of arbitrariness, which belongs to what some call metaphor or symbol.

Dark circles under the eyes (or other natural indices: clouds in the sky, thunder, lightning, low‑flying swallows, or the smell of the air after a storm) correlate with something, but that does not yet mean they signify it. A subject with the subjectivity of his own cognitive activity is required—someone who will notice and interpret them, or not, based on internalized traditions, as signs of fatigue or of makeup.
In truth, it is not certain that what we perceive as “dark circles” is a sign of tiredness at all. Someone may simply look that way, or have applied makeup, and so on.

Cognitive Activity as Semiotic Activity

(English version)

Cognitive activity can be reduced to sign‑activity, and the objective world to the effects of such cognitive activity. The matter becomes simpler once we acknowledge God as the One whose Thinking Activity, whose Sign‑Creating Act, is the very source of objective reality. This has its own logical justification.
I know that here I may appear entangled in a Cartesian move—beginning from the subject. Yet this particular gesture of Descartes I consider legitimate. It seems to me that Descartes’ error (if I may allow myself such an evaluation) lay elsewhere: in the conviction—already mentioned—that we can detach ourselves from the body and think “purely spiritually,” a conviction that easily becomes the assumption that doctrine stands in opposition to cultural practice (including ritual practice).

Letters and sounds—what we call words—just as gestures, objects, or more or less ritualized actions, and even the material processes of the brain, are the matter out of which content and thought are constructed.
A deeper analysis of this conflation—this confusion—of thought and rationality with language is essential for understanding the errors of the academic world.

The Logos became Flesh, and created us in such a way that without material forms we cannot think.
Cyprian Kamil Norwid wrote in Promethidion that “the people think in forms,” that they think through “the plastic labor of thought”—and that this is what distinguishes them from the upper strata.
They think! There is no opposition here.
To construct such oppositions is a serious logical error, one that continues to haunt us. It is difficult to argue against it, for it is treated as self‑evident—even in scholarly works.

The “confirmed anti‑ritualists,” whose incorrigibility Mary Douglas described so well, are plentiful in universities, on the streets, and in churches.
And although the reduction of matter to the effect of thought is legitimate (for ultimately elementary particles or “substance” are elusive; what remains is thought, which perceives relations corresponding to divisions on ever lower and higher levels), nothing in this implies a dichotomy between thought and matter.

[2019]

Scriptocentrism and Overstimulation
—and even Simulacral Reductionism

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat.
So do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do;
for they preach, but do not practice.
They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders,
but they themselves are unwilling to move them with their finger.”

Why are the Eskimos the most intelligent nation in the world?
Because they score the highest on IQ tests.
But why do they score the highest?
Because the tests are written in Eskimo.

The mechanism of advertising—like the mechanisms of usury and inflation (of words, signs, and money)—rests on simulacra without grounding in reality. Money is a sign. A linguistic sign is merely another kind of sign, but the principle is the same: something replaces and represents something else. Hence, the mechanisms governing language, art, and other sign systems are, at a certain level, the same mechanisms that govern money. It is therefore no coincidence that the concept of inflation, familiar from the world of finance, can aptly describe phenomena in language and culture—and can function as an instrument of power.

Presenting Nobel Prizes or scientific dominance as signs of superior intelligence—by the promoters of this myth—is nothing but a circular fallacy. It is obvious that a game played in Polish is won by those who know Polish best. It is equally obvious that a scriptocentric game is won by those who, for two thousand years, have built and transmitted a scriptocentric tradition. And yet we continue to repeat the myth that reading and writing are signs of greater intelligence or wisdom. By repeating it, we play their game and thus fall into contradiction—since the Catholic model of the world, hierarchical on the one hand and folk-based, ritual, and trans-verbal on the other, is from its very beginnings a model opposed to that of Talmudic Judaism.

In the years 63–64 CE, the Pharisaic High Priest Jesus son of Gamaliel imposed—perhaps for the first time in the history of any known religious group—the obligation of reading and writing on all Jewish boys aged six to seven. Significantly, this obligation functioned as a substitute for service in the Temple, after which not one stone remained upon another. Scripture became the Temple. Another Jesus, in the Gospel, spoke of burdens too heavy to bear. Here Jesus, and there Jesus. One hundred and fifty years later, Judea was known for the persecution of the illiterate, and the term am ha-aretz—“people of the land”—acquired an even more pejorative meaning. Let us recall that man is formed from the dust of the earth, and that Jesus Christ Himself called the good and faithful man fertile soil.

Thus literacy versus illiteracy became an increasingly strong axis dividing Christians from Jews—where by “Jews” we mean Judaism re-formed in opposition to Christianity after the fall of the Jerusalem Temple.

I will also mention a later layer of this scriptocentrism: the Jewish origins of many leading figures in the human and social sciences (psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, structural semiotics), such as Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss, Edward Sapir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Yuri Lotman. These figures imposed categories of thought formed within a culture that, for centuries, had been forced—by restrictions in other areas—to realize itself primarily through writing. The Zealots died defending the Temple; the Sadducees disappeared; and the remaining Pharisees, faced with dispersion and the absence of the Temple, replaced the obligation of temple service with the obligation of reading. Reading was, in a sense, identified with knowledge, wisdom, and sacrifice.

Commercial accounting had always been documented through various forms of writing and calculation; hence Jews, living among largely non-literate societies, were particularly well prepared for such professions. And above all: the art of managing language rests on the same foundations as the art of managing money. Both are systems of signs—substitutions and representations. Mastery of the latter is easier when one freely commands the former.

Most Jews, in relation to Christianity, became Christians—because the religious obligation of literacy proved too costly and absorbing to sustain oneself through the traditionally Jewish occupation of agriculture. Those Jews who remained were therefore the wealthiest. And just as the expansion of Islam and long-distance trade created niches of employment for these few Jews, so too did it allow them to develop and specialize in these areas.

Centuries later, another factor amplified the importance of writing: the Reformation, with its famous principle of sola scriptura—or rather, a particular understanding of it. Largely anti-Semitic though it was, it nevertheless laid the groundwork, after several centuries, for an even greater success of the Jewish method of “processing” reality. From this script-based sphere emerged both commercial and modern scientific competence. It is not that they were superior because their literacy was superior, but rather that, at a certain historical moment, there arose a demand for script-derived models of social functioning.

They themselves established judging committees for games of their own invention; they themselves began awarding prizes according to their own criteria—and other people began playing these games, believing them to be obvious, necessary, and objective. Let me illustrate this differently: Moshe and Icek invented a contest in which the standard of perfect beauty was defined as the faces of their wives, Rebecca and Rachel. They seated themselves on the jury and declared the winners. News of the winners spread across the world for centuries, until eventually the order was forgotten—and with it the fact that, had Zbyszek and Jasiek organized the contest, with Kasia and Basia as ideals, then the supposedly “objective” canon of beauty would consist of Kasia’s and Basia’s faces.

The same applies to rankings and prizes such as the Nobel, to canons of scientificity, wisdom, and genius—especially those that are never explicitly stated. This is the phenomenon I call over-linguistification, though one could also use the term scriptocentrism. Its extreme form may be scriptolatry, and its broader, though sometimes later-developing category: simulacral or media reductionism.

This tendency develops particularly at the intersection of lockdowns, intensified online communication, the elimination of cash, and four additional maladies I will list later.

Subjectivization through Scripture

It is true that writing facilitates the spread of great universal ideas—such as Christianity—and the construction of empires; this follows from its very nature. But it is not true that writing unambiguously fixes meaning, or that it makes the distinction between objective and subjective clearer. On the one hand, we can read a text without seeing its author; on the other hand, we lose the entire non-verbal contextual background that allows the message to be specified. What begins then is the demonstrable phenomenon of autonomous textual interpretation, ending in a Babel of millions of conflicting readings—each convinced that its own interpretation alone is objective.

Writing, therefore, without its traditional, pre-literate, non-verbal, ritual, and customary foundation, cannot fulfill its function. Many forget this, focusing on writing as a self-sufficient force driving societies forward. Meanwhile, writing by itself, and the mere spread of writing, can produce effects opposite to those intended: a secondary semiotic illiteracy among those who can technically read, but whose skill gives them—and society—a false sense of competence, as though it freed them from the need to acquire cultural understanding through living, interpersonal relationships, through tests, rituals, and rites of passage that verify whether a given aspirant truly understands the role he seeks to assume.

The problem today is not writing itself, but the overestimation of its role, which results in neglecting what alone enables writing—and other simulacra—to function properly.

The first-century reform in Judaism that imposed compulsory literacy exemplified precisely such a burden too heavy to bear, and it marked an important axis of division between Christianity and Judaism—later between Orthodoxy and Catholicism on the one hand, and denominations emphasizing private interpretation of Scripture on the other. Ultimately, this private interpretation and the spread of literacy contributed to revolutionary movements across many domains—movements that became an excellent arena for Jews to activate their scriptural competence. It was their game, and in that game they prevailed, beginning to impose their own rules upon the world.

This is neither a criticism nor a conspiracy theory. If the world were suddenly flooded, dominance would belong to those rare communities with long traditions of living in floating villages, on rafts, stilts, and ships.

The “Protestantized” Defense of Thomism

or: the over‑linguistification of well‑meaning right‑wingers fighting “Protestantization”
(an example from a certain polemic)**

“Nonsense, I am not the accuser — I am merely the recipient of a thought/message.”
These two things do not exclude one another.
An accusation may well arise from either a correct or an incorrect reception of a message.
Thus the indirect accusation that I am speaking nonsense is — to put it gently — rather disingenuous.

“In the language in which it was spoken, it means exactly what I wrote.”
The identity of a language is not determined solely by the spoken layer, but by its relation to what it signifies.
And that relation is not objectively fixed by the Creator; it depends on various layers of tradition.
(Or more precisely: it is not fixed pointwise or in a closed manner. It is an area of legitimate variability, constrained by multiple layers of tradition.)

Furthermore: S. was speaking in everyday language (which itself is a tradition), even though as a theologian he knows Thomistic definitions well.
From these two premises it follows that this is not one single language, and therefore it does not mean what you suggest it means.
Your judgment is thus unwarranted.

“Unless the author meant something else — but nothing indicates that.”
On the contrary, much indicates it — including the context and manner in which S. spoke.
If you build your critique on your impression of the situation, then the burden of proof lies on you.

“But nothing indicates that, so I have no obligation to prove anything.”
How very convenient.
The fact that you wrote “NOTHING INDICATES THAT” does not make it true.
Since you base your critique on that assertion, you bear the burden of proving it.

“Stupid explanations”?

Those who “explain themselves stupidly” often reach truer conclusions than those who explain themselves logically and coherently.

People tend to think the opposite.
They assume that the one whose literal reasoning is flawed must be wrong.
Yet precisely because he is trying to capture the reality he knows in words, he stumbles — for words cannot keep up with reality.

The one who sounds more convincing, orderly, logical, and coherent may be so because he cares less about the truth — the truth that is difficult to name.
Instead, he chooses an image of the situation that is easier to verbalize, that presents itself better in words, that sounds smoother, that can be arranged into a tidy structure — but which is not necessarily faithful to the facts.

It comes more easily to him precisely because he does not strain to align words with reality.
He is freer — and therefore more persuasive.
And people believe him.

Such is the trap of over‑linguistification.

Hence the saying that “a truly wise person can always explain his reasons simply” is, in fact, a foolish — though clever‑sounding — tool of rhetorically gifted demagogues, and a gag placed on those who try honestly, and therefore not always simply or easily, to describe reality.

**“But it says ‘medicine’ on the bottle!”

Vigilance lulled by the label**

When a bottle is labeled “medicine,” “organic,” “healthy,” people lower their guard and stop checking what is actually inside.
Meanwhile someone may pour poison into that bottle, and people will continue drinking it calmly, convinced that it contains something wholesome.

Those who most loudly proclaim “purity,” “tradition,” or any other good are often so internally wound‑up, excited, satisfied, or even exhausted — as if by uttering the word, by sticking on the label, they had already produced the good itself.
And they forget to pour it into the bottle (having first emptied the poison and washed the inside).
They forget to do it.

The temptation to accuse — and why I must refuse

I feel foolish: I am doing what does not belong to me, trying to explain to people that I should not be doing it.
Yet they persistently press and demand that I join them in accusing.
But I may not — because I lack the competence to judge whether their accusations have any basis.
And most of them lack that competence as well.

They follow me and repeat:

“The Church falsified the commandments,”
“The Church invented rituals to deceive the people and take their money.”

Escaping these temptations and finding people who rightly oppose them, I then hear more refined, nobler‑sounding accusations:

“The post‑conciliar Church betrayed the ancient Tradition,”
“Vatican II contradicted this or that papal bull,”
“he’s a Russian troll,”
“he’s a crank…”

The first temptations I rejected quickly.
The second ones almost deceived me — until I realized that, unable to fully verify their accusatory claims, I was in fact accepting them on faith.
And by doing so, I was denying faith in the Acts of the Church — and therefore denying the very function of those Acts.
Thus I was denying the principles of the Catholic Faith.

They, meanwhile, believe their own authorities, repeat their accusations blindly, and go about their business.
And this “peace of mind” is enjoyed equally by various error‑mongers, inconsistent people who trample over others without concern, leaving ruins behind them.
Those ruins lie behind them — they do not see them.

And it so happens that had I, in my weakness, not fallen behind, I might have run with them — trampling those who refuse to run with the crowd toward the precipice, unaware of the harm I would be leaving behind me, deceived by the illusion that before me I see wonders, that the path is easy, that I am outpacing everyone.

[2022]

The Essence of Ineffective Action:

“Red‑pill,” “liberals,” “socialists”… and other distractions and energy‑drains**

Let us set aside, at least provisionally, labels such as red‑pill, crank, liberal, socialist, and focus instead on the mechanisms themselves.
For the true malady is over‑linguistification — the emotional stigmatization triggered by entrenched associations attached to such words.
These terms activate emotions before thought, and each person will attach to them whatever meaning his emotions have already predetermined.
This is the very essence of the Tower of Babel under which we live.

And we live beneath this Babel not because our languages have changed in their sounds — we may use the same phonetic forms while understanding entirely different things by them.
The meaning of words is determined by contexts, and these contexts are ways of life: systems of non‑verbal forms reaching all the senses, expressed through the everyday realities people inhabit — food, home, clothing, work, relationships — forming coherent structures that are, in a sense, imposed.

We live beneath a pluralistic Babel, for although societies have internalized an anti‑formalist paradigm, the influence of form on worldview has not disappeared.
It has merely been seized by whatever happens to dominate the moment — or by external, anonymous centers of trend‑production.
There are many such centers.
People no longer grow up within relatively unified, locally embodied sources of norms — sources less prone to contradiction and capable of forming a “moral or customary backbone.”
In such a world one could later change one’s views, but at least one had a view anchored in something.

Today people often do not even have that — though they believe they do.
They confuse a linguistically inflated layer of opinion with the deeper layer of lived meaning.
They cling to verbal emblems as if meanings were objectively welded to the terms themselves.
Combined with an unspoken yet internalized disregard for the influence of form on content, they become vulnerable to the fact that these supposedly sacred verbal emblems and definitions are continually being infused with new meanings by the surrounding world — or that each person assigns slightly different meanings to them, since each lives in a different world of forms.

It is not, however, that they have no stable rule at all.
Their one consistent rule is submission — as to a sacred, self‑evident authority — to whatever trends appear on the mass palette of cultural offerings.
Whoever controls these trends controls these people.
This was made easier by the earlier uprooting of individuals from small local communities — the bearers of tradition — and by instilling in them the belief that the true bearers of norms are international media patterns, merely translated into local languages.
If something does not appear in films, on store shelves, in popular online reels or lifestyle guides, then — for them — it does not exist.

To restore the semiotic power of our values and culture, it is essential to rebuild self‑sufficient local communities, in which children can form a moral backbone without the overwhelming influence of forms expressing contradictory or foreign content.
One must first close oneself off in order to have something from which to open oneself to the world.

Whoever wins the game of non‑verbal forms determines the meaning of words.
Therefore no amount of persuasion, debate, or substitute worlds — idealized according to our expectations and constructed in games or films — will help rebuild the worlds we desire.
On the contrary, they will distance us from them.
For the reward‑center associated with our longing for such worlds becomes prematurely satisfied — before it should be — that is, before we have built those worlds in reality.

Our deeper perceptual system — whatever name one gives it — will register this as if we were already living in that world.
But we will not be living in it.
We will be living in simulacra, in the illusion of that world, while reality proceeds along another path, drifting ever further from our ideals.
By investing our capacities and time in a substitute world, we inevitably withdraw attention from the real one.

Thus it is a trap to think that by creating ideal visions of these worlds — whether through written concepts and stories or through perfect films — we will inspire ourselves to realize them in reality.
This is why it may be a blessing that my own materials, films, and writings turn out imperfect.
One must preserve a measure of dissatisfaction, so that the reward of satisfaction does not arrive too early.
One must be frustrated by the inadequacy of media — and from that frustration flee from media into reality.

Excessive reward tied to idealization deprives us of the necessary hunger, even as it raises our expectations.
A peculiar split of desire emerges:
simultaneously unrealistic expectations of extraordinary things and a lack of motivation for ordinary action within the realm of everyday life.
This too breeds bitterness.

Therefore one must first do something in reality, and only afterwards make a film about it or write a book.
For once people have talked something to death, they feel as though they have already accomplished what they merely discussed — and so they do not do it.

The Sacrifice of Forerunners as the Condition for the Flourishing of Successors

Once again: people hear and understand whole phrases they have previously learned.
Therefore, when someone attempts to analyze reality and construct sentences according to grammatical rules in order to verify errors and offer an honest description, two things inevitably happen:

It will be harder for him, and his speech may be less graceful, because inherited linguistic patterns intrude, and he lacks fluency in the very formulations he is forging anew.
It will be even harder for others to understand him.
They will treat his words with suspicion, forcing old interpretive templates onto them — whichever familiar schema most closely resembles what he is saying or doing.
And in this way, what he actually means will not reach most people.

This is why honesty arouses suspicion.
It tears people out of the comfort of their habitual patterns.

There is nothing surprising in this.
The increasing speed of life and the sheer volume of stimuli mean that, without simplification, if people had to analyze every word of every sentence, their mental circuits would overheat.
And indeed, those who do attempt such analysis often do overheat — they begin to function like a virus‑ridden, overloaded computer.

For they are not alone in the world; the rest of society lives according to “the methods of collective life” that contradict the very principles these individuals are trying to forge.
To push one’s way through a civilization built on principles opposed to one’s own must be painful.
There is always a price.
It must hurt — sometimes even kill.

A grain will not bear fruit unless it first dies.

[2021]

The Inflation of Signs

I began with writing and showed earlier the mechanism by which words become detached from reality — a process that produces a secondary semiotic illiteracy in those who can read, yet fail to know the reality that the words are meant to signify.
This same mechanism becomes even stronger when the medium conveying information is not only the written word, but also images, sounds, and the fusion of all these elements in online communication.

We appear to have an unprecedented abundance of data.
But this data is not reality itself — it is a simulation of reality.
The more we are drawn into this medium, the less space, time, and capacity we have to know reality directly.
We receive torrents of information about matters we cannot verify, investigate, or influence.
As a result, most of this information becomes useless noise, pulling us away from the things over which we do have influence, and from the reality we can know and verify.

Often we become indirectly addicted to these “bouillon cubes” of information — slickly packaged, highly marketable, and socially enforced.
We are pressured into using them:
because work requires it,
because one can no longer buy or sell otherwise,
because one cannot slaughter a pig, smell the meat, or examine goods in person.
Everything is purchased with a blind click — and thus it is no longer the quality of the product or service that determines its survival, but marketing, the art of persuasion detached from reality.

The old principle that “the market will verify” no longer works.
Producers are diffuse and unidentifiable; responsibility is blurred.
We ourselves face such a flood of options that we often fail to notice that the supposedly “new and improved” product is being pushed by the same company — merely in a different disguise.

As a result, we are more vulnerable to manipulation and fraud.
The marketing industry thrives on this, and deceit becomes increasingly profitable, while truth and honesty become empty words.
The word “honesty” undergoes inflation.

This soft socio‑media pressure leads us to use money without backing, to live without cash, to buy goods without real inspection.
Eventually, however, soft pressure gives way to hard pressure: lockdowns, forced transitions to online communication, and the closing of physical spaces.
This traps us in bubbles (more on that shortly) and habituates us to this mode of existence — not only us, but everyone around us.

When we emerge from this, we discover that the places where one could pay in cash have nearly vanished; the shops where one could see and touch goods have dwindled.
As for raising, slaughtering, eating, or — heaven forbid — selling one’s own calf, that possibility has long been taken from us.

The pandemic period was enough to push the majority into exclusively online services and commerce.
People begin to treat the operation of reality through a smartphone as the norm.
Wallets are empty; everything happens with a single click.
This situation — built on trust in irresponsible anonymous entities — accustoms everyone to being deceived and to deceiving others, deepening the inflation of honesty and realism.
It becomes treated as normal.

And the world in which individual people can verify you — and you can verify them — shrinks almost to zero.
Verification is left to bureaucrats, bots, and anonymous systems.

Even interior design, clothing, and homes are arranged not according to one’s own tradition, but according to anonymous trends.

The Illusion of Greater Freedom Among Internet Users Compared to Television Viewers

The interactivity and selectability of content in new media, in my view, detach people from reality far more than the old television ever did.
For new media allow content to be profiled for each user, enclosing him in a bubble while sustaining the illusion of freedom and superiority over the “old folks” staring at the TV.

This deepens the generational divide and obstructs the transmission of life‑tested patterns from older people — patterns that can only be learned properly through direct, multisensory, embodied experience.

Societies have grown accustomed to these “bubble media” through the gradual fragmentation of local bonds at multiple levels — something I observed in micro‑ and mesoscale while studying the transformation of traditional customs in several villages.

The key breaks in local cohesion were not only television and later media, but earlier:
electrification,
compulsory schooling,
and the ever‑lengthening school day, school year, and school life.

Children increasingly learned to sit at desks and solve problems on a board — yet their later life tasks had little to do with notebooks and blackboards.
This produced an excess of people trained (and, due to massification, ultimately untrained) for writing on boards and reading books (later for sitting at computers), depriving them of the precious time of childhood in which, in the presence of their parents, they learned to operate reality directly.

The proportions became distorted.
This mass education did not produce large numbers of good engineers or philosophers — and at the same time deprived people of the opportunity to learn how to live.

Prime Minister, how should one live…

Mass Polysemy and the Collapse of Meaning

Such mass‑scale polysemy leads to semantic noise, which becomes meaninglessness, and ultimately the breakdown of bonds.

A few decades ago, this polysemy looked like this:
parents — one world,
school — another world,
work — another world,
friends — yet another world.

In recent years these worlds have drifted ever further apart.

Another problem emerges:
the more worlds and acquaintances we have, the less time we have to verify whether we truly understand one another.
Only later do we discover that we merely thought someone shared our way of thinking — or that we understood him.
It turns out that the cultural and linguistic forms he uses we interpret entirely differently.

This produces tragedies, wounds, and increasing difficulty in building lasting relationships.
For when we misunderstand, we tend either to idealize or to demonize.
And then we either become discouraged from people with whom we could have built something — or we become fascinated by our own false imaginings about others.

Power and Signs

I sometimes use the term “inflation of signs.” This is not a mere metaphor. It is, in fact, a more precise concept—one that points more deeply to the nature of the problem—than monetary inflation.
Money itself is a sign.
Inflation is a process that concerns a change in the meaning of that sign, expressed as a weakening of its value.
This and other processes of shifting meaning apply equally to the other kinds of signs that make up culture.
They become objects of manipulation, used to gain profit and power over groups of people whose cohesion depends precisely on those signs.

A sign, in simplified terms, is a relation—a bond between two objects, one of which represents (substitutes for / expresses / signifies) the other.
The word “cow” represents an actual cow.
More precisely, it represents an abstract class of phenomena to which all concrete cows belong.

Money, too, is a thing—more precisely, a commodity—that represents a certain abstract value.

That value becomes graspable only when we convert it into concrete objects that can be purchased with that money.
It is similar with the word “cow.”
Only when we see several different cows can we understand what a cow truly is.

Yet it may happen—and writing, images, and other media allow this—that we have never seen a cow, and yet we can imagine one.
Thanks to descriptions, characteristics, images, films, sound recordings, even scent printers, and so on.

Still, we are dealing only with a simulation, and we do not know what a cow truly is until we see one.

Here arises the possibility of deception:
the animal presented to us through various media may not exist at all; it may be a fairy‑tale creature, an invented monster used to frighten us, or a marvel used to entice us by propagandists.

When, instead of leaving the house and engaging with what we can verify, we check everything through the Internet—while simultaneously being bombarded with data and stimuli—then through these signs someone can easily deceive us.
They can persuade us that some reality exists out there which, in fact, does not exist—just as someone can deceive us into believing that behind a given currency there stands a value that is not actually there.

This is already something more than ordinary inflation.
But inflation prepares us for it.

Power and Signs

(expansion, analogies, and connections with semiotics, media theory, logic, and economics)

I sometimes use the term “inflation of signs.” This is not a rhetorical metaphor but a concept more precise than monetary inflation — for money itself is a sign.
Inflation is a process of changing meaning, expressed as the weakening of the value represented by a sign.
The same process applies to all cultural signs: words, images, symbols, rituals, gestures, institutions, titles, brands, and even public figures.
Each of these signs can be manipulated in order to gain profit or power over groups of people whose cohesion depends precisely on those signs.

1. The Sign as Relation — the Foundation of Semiotics and Power

A sign is not a thing.
A sign is a relation — a bond between two entities, one of which represents the other.

the word “cow” represents the class of real cows,
a banknote represents an abstract value,
a coat of arms represents a lineage,
the cross represents an Event and a Person,
a ritual represents the cosmic order,
an office represents authority,
law represents a moral norm.

Power over signs is therefore power over relations, and thus over what people regard as real, important, sacred, binding, beautiful, or true.

This is why semiotics is politics, and politics is applied semiotics.

2. The Inflation of Signs as a Mechanism of Power

Monetary inflation works as follows:

the sign (the banknote) remains the same,
but its value diminishes.

The inflation of signs works identically:

the word remains the same,
the symbol remains the same,
the institution remains the same,
the ritual remains the same,
but their meaning weakens,
and is eventually replaced by another.

This is the mechanism of over‑linguistification:
the form remains, the content disappears.

This is the mechanism of the simulacrum:
the sign detaches from reality and begins to circulate as an empty image.

This is the economic mechanism:
the supply of signs grows faster than their backing in reality.

This is the media mechanism:
image displaces experience, and information displaces knowledge.

This is the logical mechanism:
concepts lose extension and intention, becoming ambiguous to the point of uselessness.

This is the anthropological mechanism:
rituals lose their power because they are no longer rooted in life.

This is the theological mechanism:
the vertical relation (time–eternity) is replaced by the horizontal (human–human), and finally by the relation human–screen.

3. Simulation as an Instrument of Power

We may never have seen a cow, and yet we may “know” what it looks like — thanks to images, films, descriptions, sounds, even scent simulators.
But this is still simulation, not reality.

Here the possibility of deception arises:

the animal may not exist,
it may be a fairy‑tale creature,
a propagandistic monster,
or a marketing “miracle.”

Just as money may lack real backing, a sign may lack a referent.

This is the inflation of meanings:
the sign circulates but represents nothing real.

4. The Internet as a Factory of Sign Inflation

When, instead of going outside and verifying reality, we check everything through the Internet — while being bombarded with data and stimuli — then:

signs replace things,
images replace experience,
opinions replace knowledge,
emotions replace reason,
simulations replace the world.

In such a situation, whoever controls the signs controls the people.

This is the logic of:

economics (supply of signs > real backing),
media (algorithms > experience),
semiotics (simulacra > referents),
politics (narratives > facts),
anthropology (media rituals > real rituals).

5. The Inflation of Signs as Preparation for Manipulation

Monetary inflation teaches people that:

value is fluid,
value is conventional,
value can be changed by an external authority.

The inflation of signs teaches the same:

meaning is fluid,
meaning is conventional,
meaning can be changed by a media authority.

Thus people become vulnerable to:

redefinitions of words,
redefinitions of values,
redefinitions of social roles,
redefinitions of identity,
redefinitions of truth.

This is power over the symbolic world, and therefore over the real world — for human beings live in a world of meanings.

6. The Return to the Vertical Relation

At this point we naturally return to the vertical relation — between the temporal and the eternal.
Its distortion always leads to the distortion of horizontal relations — between individuals, institutions, and communities.

If a sign no longer refers to a higher reality, then:

it begins to refer only to itself,
it becomes empty,
it becomes an instrument of manipulation,
it becomes a commodity,
it becomes a simulacrum.

This is the deepest sense of the inflation of signs:
the loss of reference to what is lasting, eternal, unchanging.

____

Allow me now to return to the description of the vertical relation (between the temporal and the eternal), and to the errors in this domain, which inevitably intertwine with the “horizontal” errors:

Religion

Religion
shows what is good and what is evil,
what is the Meaning of all things,
and with what every human action must be brought into alignment.
It reveals the Primordial Creative perfection from which humanity, through sin, has strayed,
and to which it must continually return.
It shows how we are to move toward this Truth.

By its very nature, religion must concern everything in our lives.
It is meant to judge and indicate what is good and what is not in all that we do.

Religion presupposes a way of thinking in which everything forms one great whole — one system — in which every element of reality has its proper place, its proper domain, which it may not transgress, and within whose boundaries freedom is good.

The essence of religion is to point to what is most important,
to that with which every action must be reconciled.
It therefore presupposes a hierarchy of values,
in which lower goods cannot conflict with higher ones.
For example: political prosperity should not be pursued apart from God.
It should be referred to the Ultimate Meaning — or at the very least, it should not obscure it.
If it does, then we act contrary to our own religion.

For without God, one cannot even reach the threshold…

Religion understood in this way must refer to the Primordial, Original, Perfect Reality established by the Holy God.

The sacred (sacrum) is the primordial, original state of creation.
The profane (profanum) is the weakened, withering, dying reality of earthly time.
The sacred is aligned with the Will of God.
The profane is meant to strive toward it.

The sacred, as the original state, is invoked by human beings in order to renew the ever‑degrading profane.
This renewal takes place in rites, in holy times and holy places — in orientation points.
These points — or rather, the delimited areas within the temporal world — I propose to call not sacrum itself, but the sphere of the sacred.

(2011)

Religionalization…

…through anti‑ritualism

Unfortunately, today—even within the Catholic Church—we reject what Catholicism fundamentally needs, what is an integral part of it: rituality. And indeed, we lack it.
It is ritual that orders reality, educates, builds psychological stability, and teaches the proper place and time of everything in the universe.
It is ritual that makes religion religion—that gives it real influence over every sphere of life.

And we—foolish Catholics—by rejecting the symbolic marking of reality, which expresses submission to the Holy, cut off our own roots.
For someone mistakenly labeled rites and symbols as “superstition.”
In a similar way—and perhaps precisely through this—we rejected folk culture, viewing it as a nest of magic, inherently incompatible with our faith.

The result is the withering of religion, which is visible everywhere.
Let us not deceive ourselves: most of society inclines more toward godlessness than toward the Church (remaining in a state of worldview deformity), and—according to an anti‑religious definition of religion—claims that “faith expressed outwardly is hypocrisy” (“because what matters is what’s in the heart”), while faith that influences politics (or anything beyond the strictly religious sphere) is fanaticism.

But a faith that concerns only itself, a faith that does not claim the right to regulate life as a whole, is a dead museum artifact.
The content of faith is not some separate “entity of faith,” but reality, everyday life—everything.

“Faith in itself” would be like a temple used not for prayer but for earning money from tourists; like a car to which we may be sentimentally attached, but which no longer carries anyone anywhere.
It would also be like folk culture that is no longer culture—a way of daily life—but an ethnic emblem or stage decoration.

This is no longer religion, but religionalization, which—paradoxically, just like the traditionalizations mentioned above, including folklorization and revolutionary pseudo‑folk movements—contributes to the faster death of the very reality it claims to defend.
(2011)

…through forgetting the ultimate meaning, turning away from Eternity toward transience

In our times, the norm is mobile thinking—susceptibility to worldview shifts, the justification of everything by an undefined “progress,” the “spirit of the age,” or “creativity.”
What is new, “original,” and surprising is welcomed and affirmed as something valuable and meaningful.
We deem meaningful whatever we consider (not necessarily in accordance with reality) to be unprecedented:

“In feverish motion, custom has no time to sanctify anything.”

This is the complete opposite of religious thinking, according to which meaningful is that which reflects the unchanging, enduring, primordial, ancient—traditional and eternal—reality.
Nothing can be entirely new—created ex nihilo—and in time one can only move away from or draw nearer to what was created in Eternity, In the Beginning.
One may discover it, or forget it.
Everything else—every fleeting, changeable fascination—is, in cosmological, traditional, or primordial mentality, an illusion, something that almost does not exist.
(2011)

…through depriving religion of its total and supreme character (secularism–autonomism)

A professed religion ceases to be a practiced religion to the extent that the spheres of daily life (forms of entertainment, work, fashion, interpersonal relations, etc.)—indeed, all life outside the sacred—are regarded as independent, autonomous, neutral with respect to religion.

This worldview, calling itself pluralistic, which commands us to adopt in public life “neutral” or “universal” values supposedly “above religious divisions,” becomes in fact a crypto‑religion.
It places itself above the very religions it claims to protect, usurping their supreme place for itself.

In the name of pluralism and freedom, it turns them into empty phrases, emblems, ornaments—no longer determining what is good and what is not, because that function—religious by its very nature—is taken over by the principle of pluralism.

In such a situation, it becomes almost obvious to judge what is still called religion—but no longer is religion for people—according to the criteria that dominate human mentality and social life.
Benedict XVI described the position of religion in such a false vision of the world as follows:

“Religion has significance only to the extent that it can be useful for achieving that goal.”

If something else becomes the supreme criterion, then religion becomes dead—for its essence is that nothing stands above it, and that it is the principle and keystone of the entire order of reality.

In the name of defending religion, pluralism—by imposing false boundaries—destroys those religions, taking their place, or rather handing their place over to the unspoken, smuggled‑in ideologies concealed behind the veil of relativism, the very ideologies I described above.

…through the growing belief that religion and daily life are unrelated

Among people there is a growing conviction that religion and daily life—work, study, politics—are matters unrelated to one another.
This, too, is a sign that religion and the sacred sphere—the festive forms of worship—just like the language described earlier, cease to be a model for reality, a pattern meant to express the proper order and orientation of everyday life.
Instead, religion becomes a label attached to various forms of life.

As a result, faith becomes detached from reality.
Pious people raised within such an understanding of religion often increase the time spent in the “religious sphere”, while simultaneously neglecting everyday life and stripping it of its religious character.
The malicious call this bigotry.
I would not blame them so harshly.
They internalized this mental structure before they were able to evaluate it, before they had the criteria to judge it.
To some extent, we all share this condition.

This multiplication of situations of “religious participation” is analogous to the constant talking about God, doctrine, and faith—so characteristic of contemporary “reflective,” “modern” religiosity.
An example of this is the effort of many young evangelizers who focus on words and spectacular “actions” that are, in truth, detached from life, from reality, from the everyday.
The same happens in certain Protestant religious films, where religious formulas and gestures are simply superimposed onto contemporary customs in order to make them “Catholic.”

Unfortunately, there is far too little study and transformation of reality itself, so that it becomes Catholic not only in name, but in its very structure, in its “grammar,” forming from its elements a coherent, meaningful narrative.
This is, sadly, the result of over‑linguistification, of which those immersed in it are unaware.

Do young people who wish to be good Christians not sometimes feel guilty that they “speak too little about God”?
And what does this often lead to?
To a detachment of religion from reality, from the very things it is meant to shape.

Of course, this phenomenon is not total; it is a prevailing tendency.
There remain certain points of action that Catholics demand of themselves and that are demanded of them: charitable work, showing kindness to others.
Yet I dare say that this results largely from the fact that these behaviors are already affirmed by contemporary cultural values.
In other words, Catholics tend to practice those aspects of their religion that fit the criteria of modern culture.
Religion is thus subjected to external criteria rather than being their source.

This effectively means that, in people’s minds, it ceases to be religion—for the essence of religion is that it is the supreme criterion of everything.

If this were not the case, Catholics would eagerly hold to those religious principles that contradict contemporary culture, or even—according to today’s selective but fashionable criterion—those that are explicitly stated in Scripture.
I mean, for example, the principles of women’s dress, or the patriarchal order in the family described by Paul, the duty of a wife’s obedience to her husband, and so on—expressed also in the manner of dress during prayer, which Scripture explains not on the basis of human, relative cultural customs but—read carefully—for the sake of the Lord, for the sake of the Angels.
That is, for the sake of what is timeless.

Moreover, revolutionary Christians oppose those actions they perceive as failing to meet the criteria of contemporary culture—as falling into contradiction.
For such a criterion is the right to life and freedom, and Christians appeal to this when they criticize abortion.

There are still some mountain peaks that remain recognized, but only by a minority: the prohibition of homosexual acts, abortion, contraception…
But even these are fading.
This is not surprising, for a mountain does not consist only of its peak.
To recognize the peak, one must acknowledge the entire mountain.
To reach the summit, one must struggle up the slope between the goal and the foothill.
Without this, the summit is attainable only in dreamlike fantasies.
And contemporary life seems precisely such a fantasy—detached from reality.

Christians today tend to cling only to the peak of the mountain and deny the rest, because it does not meet the criterion of the “Spirit of the age” (some new deity to which God’s Law must submit?).
This leads many of them to rightly observe that if the rest of the mountain does not exist, then the peak cannot exist either.
And instead of acknowledging the rest of the mountain that leads to the summit, they conveniently reject the existence of the summit along with the entire mountain.
Thus they gradually abandon the prohibitions against contraception, abortion, homosexual unions…

A concrete religion, by its very nature, considers itself the only correct one.
For if someone defines the highest value—and thus the way of daily life that flows from it—differently than that religion does, then according to that religion he is in error.
And that religion, if it contains the principle of love of neighbor, will wish to persuade that person…
Well, perhaps not the religion itself, but the person who professes it.

Many religions, however, consider only co‑believers, fellow tribesmen, or compatriots as “neighbors.”
Then their adherents will be indifferent or hostile toward outsiders.
And only such indifference or hostility could justify not attempting to persuade them in monotheistic religions.
Hostility toward a foreign religion would then be part of hostility toward the foreigner.
(2011)

…through treating material actions as morally indifferent

Religion has thereby lost its influence on material reality.
People have been taught that culture must change, and that forms of entertainment, clothing, behavior, etc., cannot be either good or evil; therefore religion should adapt to these changes in order to “reach people.”
They have forgotten that religion sets the boundaries for these changes, and if the world refuses to acknowledge those boundaries, it denies that religion.
A religion that forgets its boundaries deprives itself of its own identity.
(2011)

…through the corruption of the word

The detachment of the word and the sign from their relation to the rest of reality has caused people not to notice when the word “religion” was stripped of its original, supreme meaning.
People accepted every proposed change in material customs, assuming—as we described earlier—that such customs were morally indifferent.
And they came to believe that making life “Catholic” consisted in adopting these customs and giving them a “Christian intention.”
In practice, this intention amounted to a verbal label, for even the word “good” had become an object of relativization.

Customs that were once considered evil suddenly began to be regarded as good merely by being given the name “Christian.”
But can one truly speak of a “Christian intention” or a “good intention” when these terms refer to ever‑changing practices defined as such by a culture formed independently of Christians?

You may say that the desire—the mere desire—to fulfill the Will of God is what matters.
Indeed.
But should we not do everything in our power to know what the Will of God is, rather than applying that name to whatever the non‑Catholic world happens to invent?

And yet we are not sorrowful, for the true return to the Beginning, the true renewal of the earth, takes place in every Eucharist.
It is Christ who accomplishes it.
It is Christ who ensures that, despite human attempts to kill religion, it still exists in the world.
But it depends on us whether we accept this renewal, this religion, or not.
And that is why I write—to show what prevents us from receiving it.
(2011)

The corruption of the names of values according to Benedict XVI

“Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty word, subject to arbitrary interpretations. This is the inevitable danger to which love is exposed in a culture without truth. It falls prey to emotions and to the shifting opinions of individuals; it becomes a word misused and distorted, and it acquires meanings contrary to itself.”

So it is with many other beautiful words: “respect,” “tolerance,” “goodness.”
Reason, secularity, freedom, and equality of religions are merely different names for what is, in reality, the cult of temporal, immediate advantage—the cult of the self.

This supposedly neutral worldview is also close to what Cardinal Ratzinger called regnocentrism:

“In wide circles, especially in Catholic theology, a secularized version of the idea of the ‘kingdom’ has begun to appear… [full quotation preserved in your original text].”

Ratzinger’s point is clear:
When the Kingdom is reduced to a political project—peace, justice, environmental concern—God disappears, and only man remains.
Religious “traditions” are tolerated only as harmless folklore.
Faith and religion become subordinated to political aims.
What matters is merely the management of the world.
Religion has significance only insofar as it is useful for achieving that goal.

If you wish to be religious, you have no choice

If you wish to be religious, you must make your faith the ultimate criterion of truth—even if this becomes a source of division.
If you wish to be fully rational, you must be religious, as I have already shown.
And further: if you wish to be rational and religious, you must choose Catholicism, with its hierarchical, apostolic ecclesiality.
Please do not be upset.
A consistent Catholic (and I strive to be one, even if I do so poorly) must think this way.

If you wish to be Catholic, you must strive for all people to become Catholic.
Since you are bound by the love of God and neighbor, you must first ensure that no one offends God, that nothing offends God, that no one remains in error, and that all may know the one truth and the happiness of being Catholic.
You cannot rest content with your own salvation, for in doing so you distance yourself from it.

I once heard from a philosophy professor—his name I no longer remember:
“When a child is walking toward a precipice, you cannot say: ‘Go on, child. If you think it’s good for you, then go.’ Everyone has the duty to throw himself after the child and stop it from disaster.”
(2011)

Religion in Politics

The Necessity of an Intronization

— a necessity with formative, public, and consciousness‑shaping value;
a necessity that responds to the false idea instilled in people that “religion must not interfere with anything.”

In politics one must constantly decide what is good and what is evil, what is proper and what is improper, what is just and what is unjust.
Where do we learn what is good and evil, right and just?
Not from some vague “depth of the heart.”
It is religion that indicates what is good, right, and just — and what is not.
Ethics is an integral part of religion.

The obvious consequence of being both a politician and a religious person is that the fundamental criteria of political decisions will also be religious.
That different religions may have conflicting criteria is obvious — just as people have different worldviews.
And therefore political decisions will differ accordingly.

It would be absurd to claim that liberalism must not mix with politics, or socialism must not mix with politics, and so on.
It would be absurd to claim that these intellectual currents concern only themselves and are autonomous from practical life.

If someone is a Catholic, he cannot suspend his Catholic convictions when making political decisions — so as not to offend others or “impose” them on others.
He will offend; he will impose.
He will do so even if he suspends his Catholic convictions and uses so‑called “neutral” ones.
In that case he will simply offend someone else.

Every suspension of Catholic motives is a renunciation of faith, for religion — or faith, if one prefers — is a total worldview, which by its nature claims the right to be the foundation of every decision.
Every decision must be verified in the light of the religion one professes.
Otherwise that religion is dead.

Whoever has greater strength and support will decide which worldview (including religious ones) should form the basis of political action.
This is normal.
To speak of so‑called “worldview neutrality,” as something distinct from one’s professed worldview, is simply dishonest.
(2011)

Crypto‑Religions

At a certain stage in the development of cultures — at a moment of saturation — a very ancient temptation becomes stronger: the temptation to focus on earthly prosperity as if it were ultimate happiness.
Perhaps this is what Christ teaches in the Gospel when He says: “It is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

To realize this temptation, the old religions — above all Catholicism — had to cease fulfilling their proper function.
For religion pointed to an ultimate goal beyond this world; it “bound together again” eternity with temporality, and the various temporal elements with one another.
It imposed demands which, from the perspective of someone who wishes to sever the causal, logical, and symbolic bonds between the spheres of culture — someone who thinks only of earthly good, peace, harmony, or wealth — appear unreasonable and burdensome.

To achieve this new goal, a different supreme principle was needed — one whose aims were purely temporal.

Various “deities” were proposed for this role:
Reason — understood as the opposite of “superstitious” religious faith;
later: the people, the nation, progress, pluralism, worldview neutrality, freedom of all religions — that is, the temporal “kingdoms of I‑want‑it‑so.”

In the name of this principle — a convention imposed and declared an “objective” way of seeing the world — it is usually demanded that Catholics and other adherents of ancient religions abandon their convictions in public and political life.
Meanwhile, no one demands that the adherents of crypto‑religions — socialism, liberalism, or vaguely defined “conservatisms” — suspend their convictions.

This is simple dishonesty.
Whose dishonesty?
I do not know; it is not for me to investigate.
It is highly probable, however, that the adherents of these untruths sincerely believe in their truth and objectivity.

Like every falsehood, these introduce internal contradiction into a person’s worldview.
Such a worldview may therefore be called defective, for within it one can “reconcile” mutually contradictory elements.

On what basis is such contradiction accepted?
On an equally false basis.
It has been called by various names: “secularization,” “autonomization,” “liberation from religious chains.”
Such falsehood was necessary in order to draw religious people into the vortex of a new social order whose supreme principle was earthly prosperity.

In its name, the former religion lost its all‑pervasive influence — and thus its essential characteristic.
Its influence was confined to the “religious sphere,” and every attempt at genuine religiosity — one that applies its criteria to all spheres of life — began to be dismissed with negative labels:
“fundamentalism,”
“mixing religion with politics,”
“oppression,”
and so on.
(2011)

A Catholic in Politics

The state encompasses people of various confessions.
Different religions and worldviews contain mutually exclusive principles, yet the attempt to detach political decisions from the principles of one worldview “so as not to offend others” paradoxically offends the fundamental aspect of every religion — including Catholicism — namely its universality, its claim to regulate the moral order of all spheres of life.
Within this totality lie many fundamental elements that secularization places at risk.

For some, a grave offense is, for example, the “discrimination” of openly homosexual behavior.
But for us, Catholics, it is precisely the permission of such behavior — in the name of a misunderstood tolerance or freedom of opinion — that constitutes a grave error, a great evil, for it exposes society to scandal, to the unconscious internalization of harmful behaviors.
For “if you enter among the crows, you will begin to caw like them.”
We have the duty to protect our children and society from such cawing.

Here we must accept what our religion presents as a whole.
I could multiply examples, but I believe it is already clear that the path to God’s true peace leads through the conflict of which Christ spoke.
And in this conflict we must fight by fulfilling the commands of our King — Jesus Christ — whose Creative Word establishes Truth and things in their essence.
One can be for Christ or against Him.
There is no neutral option, however desperately one tries to adopt it today.
There exists only the true option.
Christ commands us to believe that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

It is obvious to me — even without considering papal encyclicals (Leo XIII’s Annum Sacrum, Pius XI’s Quas Primas) or the secondary revelations given to the Servant of God Rozalia Celak — that a politician who is a Catholic desires, just as in every other part of his life, to shape the law and the organization of the state according to the Sweet Law of Christ’s Love.
I believe he has such an obligation.

It is not correct to say that “one cannot base politics on the principles of a single religion, because it violates tolerance and freedom of conscience.”
Every law, every organization of thought, culture, or social order must rest on some foundation.
Every politician, scientist, sewer worker, or policeman — every human being — bases his thinking, decisions, and judgments on certain propositions accepted by faith.
These propositions are often impossible to prove.
They are cognitively relative — meaning that each person is permitted to regard different, even contradictory, foundations as true.

This leads to human helplessness in the pursuit of objective truth.
But cognitive relativism must not be equated with ontological relativism.
“For all things are lawful to me, but not all things are beneficial.”
One must not say that there are as many truths as opinions.
The helpless human being has only one possibility — to believe.

Christianity has brought a completely coherent revelation, one that fully acknowledges human weakness and offers as medicine the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity, which are to guide the choice of foundations.

Why, then, should we not accept the Catholic religion as the source of our judgments and actions?
Why are we required to choose crypto‑religions such as:

pluralism — internally contradictory,
worldview neutrality,
or any other system that forbids us to consider spiritual reality — responsibility before God — in our decisions?

(2011)

Before speaking of the Intronization…

…which is the remedy for the diseases of autonomism and secularism, I must recall the case of the priest around whom both the diseases and the remedies converge.

Fr. Piotr Natanek and the Healing Triad

Folk religiosity, liturgical Tradition, and the Intronization — this is the Triad that constitutes the remedy.
It so happens that Fr. Piotr Natanek has attempted to unite all these elements.
Perhaps imperfectly — but only because he lacked sufficient understanding and support from his superiors in this rightful endeavor.

The paradox is that the Church authorities did not react — and still do not react — as sharply to what in Fr. Natanek was erroneous or symptomatic of the diseases, but only to what was his attempt to emerge from them.

He began to be punished and accused only when he became interested in the Intronization and the Tridentine Mass, and began turning away from his earlier mistakes, such as improper liturgical creativity.
(It is especially saddening that the sudden actions of the Curia were taken after slanderous reports by left‑wing media in his hermitage.)

Guitars, youth‑prepared songs (including by me — to my regret, though I avoided non‑Catholic authors and eventually limited myself to Scripture readings of the day), freely chosen psalm texts, religious reflections, or — God forbid — the thoughts of theologically dubious “authorities” like Paulo Coelho or the Dalai Lama inserted into the Holy Mass (without Fr. Natanek’s prior knowledge — his error was allowing such uncontrolled freedom) did not meet with the necessary reprimand from superiors.
But the abandonment of these errors was punished.
Is this not a paradox?

At the same time, the accusations leveled against Fr. Natanek reveal how deeply the contemporary Church is entangled in the four diseases — the self‑destructive convictions described earlier.

Folk religiosity, liturgical Tradition, and finally the Intronization — this triad encounters the same accusations directed at Fr. Natanek:

formalism,
a “magical” understanding of faith.

These accusations are unjust and largely unverifiable.
They continue the logic of Manichaeism, the iconoclastic controversies, and Protestant sola scriptura.
They reduce everything to the suspicion that behind visible actions lie either sinister motives — or no motives at all.
The veneration of images supposedly ends with wood and paint; the veneration of saints ends with the saints themselves; folk rites and external customs end with their surface; concern for traditional liturgical forms is “formalism”; and the Intronization is a “hollow act.”

Yet these “frightening” forms are Signs.
By their very nature they point beyond themselves.
A photograph of a beloved in one’s wallet refers to her, not to a piece of paper.

The erroneous thinking described above was traditionally considered heresy, though in recent times it has gained strength within the Church itself.
I do not hesitate to say that it is a poison, causing a disease of the Church specific to our era (alongside the relatively constant diseases).
A poison continually administered as if it were medicine.

As a result of this “treatment,” the representatives of the Triad have been harmed.
Yet the Triad is the true remedy — too often mistaken for the cause of the illness.
And it so happens that Fr. Natanek embodies all three of its components.

It would be fitting to apologize to all those previously accused of:

instrumentalizing the kingship of Christ,
politicizing religion,
formalism (multiplying unnecessary external acts),
or a “magical” understanding of faith.

These accusations are themselves a source of confusion (alongside inconsistent attitudes toward the Intronization), for they strike at what is good, and thus lead the faithful to “throw out the baby with the bathwater,” rejecting what would paradoxically be the remedy for the contemporary disease hindering the following of Christ.

I will analyze these accusations elsewhere.
Suffice it to say that, as in many other conflicts across various environments, they rest on overinterpretations, false definitions of the situation, attributing to the accused attitudes they have never expressed, anti‑ritualistic suspicion, and a certain intellectual perversity — the ungrounded search for a sophisticated “hermeneutics of suspicion” in the one being criticized.

As long as we are able — even theoretically — to present an interpretation of their actions that defends them, that attributes certain behaviors to ignorance or misunderstanding, we have such an obligation.
In that case, there is no basis for withdrawing obedience entirely.
(2014)

“My Kingdom Is Not of This World”

The Intronization of Christ**

“For the happiness of the state is not one thing,
and the happiness of the individual another;
for the state is nothing other
than a harmonious community of persons.”
— St Augustine, Letter to the Macedonians, ch. 3

“Let the rulers of nations not refuse, either personally or together with their people, to offer public signs of honor and obedience to the kingship of Christ, if they desire to preserve their authority intact and to contribute to the prosperity of their homeland.”
— Pius XI, Quas Primas

“We pledge to do all that lies in our power so that Poland may truly become Your kingdom and the kingdom of Your Son, wholly submitted to Your rule — in our personal, family, national, and social life.
The people say: Queen of Poland, we pledge!”
— The Jasna Góra Vows

“Only a power that submits itself to the criteria and judgment of heaven can become a power that serves the good. And only a power accompanied by God’s blessing can be worthy of trust.”
— Benedict XVI

The messages given through Rozalia Celak do not diverge from what the Pope expressed above, nor do they contradict the teaching of the Church.
They are simply a reminder of what for centuries was obvious — and what has now been abandoned.

The Intronization spoken of there is a response to a prior detronization, carried out through the autonomization and secularization introduced by Catholics themselves.
It is the consequence of the fact that religion, by its very nature, extends into everything, including politics.

It is not a magical belief that a single act will repair all things, but a declaration — yes, also by political authorities — expressing the honesty of Catholics, analogous to the professional declarations of faith made by physicians or members of other vocations.
All such acts are reactions to earlier attempts to artificially and oppressively exclude religion from the very spheres that belong to it.

The Intronization known from Catholic movements is the offering to Jesus Christ of external signs of honor and obedience, whose necessary consequence must be real obedience to the Divine Law in every element of our lives.

The Intronization

The Intronization is the public enthronement of the One who has already been crowned, so that His subjects may offer Him homage and acknowledge His authority.
It concerns not the eternal throne — which is independent of our will — but the throne that we ourselves occupy and assign according to our free will.
He was King before we placed Him upon the throne of our convictions and actions.
The Intronization, as the name itself indicates, is not the act of making Christ King, but of recognizing the One whose Kingship does not depend on any human choice.

An act of Intronization carried out by ecclesial and civil authorities may be divided into three parts:

an act of the will,
a decision officially and solemnly made,
and the realization of that decision.

For these events to take place, there must exist a body of citizens who will raise and elect politicians desiring the Reign of Christ.
Those who carry out the Intronization must long for it with their whole hearts; the desire for an official, national‑social act must be the outward expression of personal desire.
And all efforts toward the Intronization must, toward the unwilling, take the form of evangelization — that is, the proposal of foundations given by Christ — and of the aforementioned work of formation.

These politicians must then strive to realize the act in question, and finally accomplish it — that is, will it.
If they do not will it, they will not do it.
Simple.
Then our task is to continue praying and persuading — just as secularists persuade us toward secularism.
If they may persuade, then so may we… persuade until they desire it!
And if they do not, perhaps someone who already desires it will undertake consistent political action.

For this, however, the approval and assistance of the Church’s authorities — the Spiritual Shepherds — is necessary.
The will expressed by the people mentioned above must arise from an understanding of the essence of the Intronization: the desire that the Law of Divine Love regulate human law and human life — both private and public.
And it concerns that Love which Christ expressed in the Gospel and in the Tradition of the Church — the Living Book of the Gospel written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who willed to entrust the arbitration of truth to the Rock of Peter.

The Dispute Over Terms

A dispute arose concerning the identity of the expressions “Intronization of Christ the King” and “Intronization of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
Personally, I would never have thought to invent such a problem.
For assuming that in the Heart of Jesus “dwells the fullness of the Godhead,” I recognized that the Intronization of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is identical with the Intronization of Christ the King — it is the acknowledgment of Christ as King in the full sense of the word.
The difference between the two expressions arises merely from different perspectives on the same reality.

By this I do not mean to say that once families, parishes, dioceses, or even the nation have consecrated themselves to the Sacred Heart, there is no need for an Intronization.
Through it a new consecration is to take place, though it is a continuation of what began with the first consecration.

We — Catholics — must not forget that this is not an initiative invented by people, but one that arises from the teaching of the Church.
The messages given to Rozalia Celak are an apt response to the expulsion of religion from state law.
They state clearly that what is required is the joint recognition by civil and ecclesial authorities of the Divine Law as superior to human law, with real legal consequences corresponding to that fact.

These criteria determine the specificity of the act requested by God and dispel the mistaken claims that such an act has already taken place many times.
A private or even public act performed only by ecclesial authorities or by a group of people — whether we call it an Intronization or a consecration — is not identical with the act described here, though it may constitute a significant part of it.
And many such works have indeed been done.

If Jesus could ask St. Faustina for the establishment of the Feast of Divine Mercy, although such a feast already existed in the Church, then all the more can He request a work similar to those practiced for years — arising from them, yet completing them.

What is at stake is precisely what Pope Pius XI called the offering of public signs of honor and obedience to the Kingship of Christ by the rulers of nations together with their people.

The Church represents the Kingdom of God on earth; therefore it is natural that it should transmit to the state the principles of this obedience and lead it in the proper offering of honor to God.
This means that only in union and cooperation with the Church (respecting its hierarchy) can this Intronization be carried out — while preserving the distinction of competencies between civil and ecclesial authority.

I wrote “this” Intronization because it refers to this specific, singular act, defined as I have described above.
There may be many acts called “Intronization” that mean something slightly different.
Indeed, the consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus — personal, familial, or performed by ecclesial authorities — may also be called an Intronization, without disturbing its meaning.
For both through consecration and through Intronization, the Divine Law is to regulate our human actions and laws, and Jesus is to be acknowledged as King, to whom obedience is always due.

The difference in the act requested through Rozalia Celak concerns the subjects performing the act (ecclesial authorities, civil authorities, and the nation together), the unity of their declaration, and its legal consequences.

One cannot claim that the expression “Intronization of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus” fails to express the fullness of the act because it names a divine attribute rather than the whole Person.
For this attribute, as I have already written, expresses “the fullness of the Godhead,” and therefore the whole Person.

The explanation that the expression arises merely from the devotional patterns of Rozalia and therefore does not convey the true meaning intended by Jesus is likewise mistaken.
Our entire language is a web of patterns — at the level of words and entire phrases — from which we cannot escape, which are a linguistic necessity, rooted in the very nature of language as a medium of communication and meaning.
God knows this, and He also knew what expressive patterns the mystic from Jachówka used when He chose to convey His message through her cognitive and linguistic tools.

If there is nothing objectively contrary to Church teaching in this expression, why complicate matters?
Better to accept that the expression used by Rozalia is appropriate.

It seems entirely unjustified to insert another term as “more correct” than those we know from the revelations as given by Christ.
“Intronization of Christ the King” is also a pattern.
And if the revelations had been given today and that expression had been transmitted to us, some might argue — on the same basis — that it is incorrect because it is a pattern.
Equally without foundation.

What matters is whether the pattern is internally coherent and expresses the essence of the meaning.
And as I have shown, both “Intronization of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus” and “Intronization of Christ the King” properly express the act described in the revelations.

The way Rozalia uses the concept of the Heart of Jesus is simply correct, and the expression “Intronization of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus” is, in her mouth, a quotation of the words she heard in the revelations.
Therefore it makes no sense to undermine it; better to use it as the primary expression.
Nevertheless, the decision belongs to the Church authorities, and whatever name they choose, its meaning is what matters.

The Shepherds of the Church cannot force this act, just as they cannot force anyone to be Catholic.
They may encourage, honestly persuade, and ask — evangelize — until representatives of society and government arise who desire it, until we reach, with God’s help, a situation in which the act becomes possible.

I would very much like all people to acknowledge Christ as King in the full sense of the word.
But we cannot wait for all.
Trusting that the official act — not by human effort but by divine power — will draw many to the Heart of Jesus and the Kingdom of Christ, we must undertake every effort to make the Intronization possible.
Each according to his role in the Church.
(2011)

**OUTLINE OF MY OWN ENTANGLEMENT

and how it shapes my methods and conclusions**

To make it easier for the reader to understand the background of the perspectives presented here, I will allow myself a brief self‑exposure.

My patterns of thinking were drawn from bushes, from the glass of tea with leaves left by my father while mowing — tea through which the rising sun shone — and from scraps of junk refracted through a few expressions encountered in books.
I read very little, which is why I write poorly. And when I did read, it was rarely novels; most often it was the Holy Scripture — simply because it was at home (unfortunately only the “Tysiąclatka”), the lives of the saints found in the attic, and later the testimonies and letters of Sister Lucia of Fatima, written under oath and at the command of her superiors — about her childhood experiences, the apparitions, and the distortions introduced by esteemed authors.
I also read fragments of poetry and fairy tales from time to time.

I “fixated” already in primary school — and more so in high school — on Norwid, whom I discovered in an old textbook on Romanticism. Later I sought out his other works myself. (I do not recommend this poet to the very young. He complicates mental pathways far too much.)
Whenever I encountered an intriguing fragment, I analyzed it from every angle, processed it, applied it to various patches of reality. Like a child.

I remember mystifying everything: the little sun on the cover of two thick volumes about the Jesuits and the missions of Francis Xavier; life in the meadow, before which both village and city seemed like other worlds — whose representatives considered me a “savage.”
I remember having a stronger radicalism in matters of faith than my parents.
My childhood rebellion was directed more against school and peers than against home.

I remember a much greater independence as a child from my parents, who did not drive me to school, did not impose schools or interests, did not check homework.
If they taught me anything, it was on Saturdays — through stories, curiosities, and family contests, detached from whatever we were doing at school.
From that teaching I learned the most.

I remember the laboratory, the electronic newsletters, and the green “printed circuits” produced by my father in his home workshop, lying next to an athletics textbook and detergent boxes on which I learned to read.
They simply had no time during the week — cooking, cleaning, and providing for five children was no small burden.

I hardly watched films (apart from a short childhood episode, quickly interrupted by my parents — they have no idea how salvific that resistance to my childish tyranny was, how it later revealed to me the necessity of self‑denial).
I hardly played computer games either.
Yet on both of these rests much of the mental scaffolding of my generation — and my peers resented me for this unfamiliarity.

I saw the performative “courage” and “bravery” of boys who played killing games on the couch, and later ran around with toy guns under a protective dome, or swaggered in groups of the stronger — yet were astonished that I was not afraid to walk alone in winter, three kilometers through wild fields and forests from church (I was an altar boy), or from school, or to ride my bicycle fifteen kilometers to the city.
If a child were not told, it would not know that one can be afraid.

I saw the confusion of gadgetry with courage, and the perverse mockery of those who did not need such posturing or “survival camps”… because compared to their daily life, those camps were “playing soldiers.”
And I see the same now among adults.

Hence I always kept a distance from the “world.”
I had my own descriptive categories, laboriously thought out on the way to school, while running across deeply plowed post‑PGR fields, or while digesting under a tree in the orchard the dozens of apples, plums, gooseberries, or currants I had just eaten.

Over the years I gradually discovered that these categories were not at all self‑evident, and that others thought in completely different ways.
When I realized this, I briefly hoped that it would suffice to explain my world with enthusiasm.
At that time, however, I was poor at expressing myself clearly in speech and writing.

It was then that I learned vividly the method of the thief who shouts loudest “catch the thief!”
From those who tried to convince me that I was the madman, I heard that I was the one criticizing, attacking, imposing.
Yet I had not even had time to criticize anything — they themselves tried to extract criticism from me through suggestive questions and incredulous looks when I repeatedly answered contrary to the response they were trying to elicit.

The same happened in every new environment.
As long as they did not know what I thought, they were delighted with the guitar and singing, they valued and praised me.
But when I protested — out of conscience — usually against the unjust mistreatment of another person, that was a sin they could not forgive.
I could have insulted them, betrayed them, mocked them — they would have forgiven that.
But standing up for someone they were trampling was unforgivable.

This happened in left‑leaning, modernist, and traditionally pious environments alike.

The world I began to share with them — unaware of the chasm that separated us — triggered a defensive reaction and the projection of film‑derived clichés onto my world: accusations of fault‑finding, puritanism, excessive severity.
These labels did not match my enthusiastic disposition.
Only my reactions to their accusations and mockery sometimes fulfilled the appearance of those accusations — like self‑fulfilling prophecies.

In my village many wanted to appear modern and elite, but often did so comically.
That world was still too provincial in its methods, though geographically close to the City of the Avant‑Garde.
This saved me somewhat, for at the crossroads — having to choose between two contradictory paths within the rural world: tradition and modernity — I chose tradition.
Or rather, the traditional skeleton, with those elements of modernity that could be fitted into it.
Not the other way around.

Others threw themselves into the whirl of progress, selectively absorbing only the decorative fragments of tradition.
I began to explore that traditionality deliberately and somewhat defiantly.

This strange world was supplemented, around the age of fifteen, by my immersion in various revelations, old and new: St Bridget of Sweden, Anne Catherine Emmerich, Fatima, Maria Valtorta, Fr Michelini and Fr Gobbi, Wanda Malczewska, Rozalia Celak, Zofia Nosko, and others — as well as devotional texts such as Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ.
I experienced emotional exaltations both in the realm of revelations and in the quasi‑charismatic sphere.
I quickly gained distance from both, through personal experience of dissonance.

I went to a Catholic high school assuming it would be… Catholic — and encountered complaints about my excessive Catholicism.
The discrepancy between expectation and reality crushed me.
For a time I yielded, letting myself be convinced for several months that I was the one mistaken.
But the true mistake was the submission born of misunderstood humility.
I freed myself from it still in high school.
The clue was the perversity of the accusations.

With that clue I went to university.
There I tried to build and preserve my world — beginning with verifying reality myself before accepting definitions found in books.
Methods such as listening and analyzing before issuing judgments I began to apply not only to cultures studied by ethnologists, but also to academic culture and the judgments and methods developed by its representatives.

The Cultural Principle of Indeterminacy

We can analyze a system only by stepping outside of it.
And of course, within the realm of culture, ideas, symbolism, worldview, or philosophy, one can formulate a kind of principle of indeterminacy.
(I have never read Heisenberg, but more educated people told me that his discovery in physics amounts to the claim that the act of measurement alters the behavior of the measured system.
To me this always seemed obvious — just as a thermometer inserted into a liquid slightly changes its temperature, or as our attempt to observe how people of a foreign culture behave in everyday life inevitably alters their behavior.
When we visit someone, they behave differently than when we accidentally pass under their window.
One can never fully step out of oneself.)

Yet the very recognition of this unavoidable entanglement — including the entanglement of science — is already a way out of the superstition that one can be “neutral,” for example in politics, or that “religion should not interfere with this or that.”

Here I try to free myself from the prejudices toward which I drifted when entering the world of “intellectuals,” prejudices that quickly aroused my suspicion — perhaps because, by coincidence, I commuted to university every day from a village (this time a different one, fifteen years further toward the End of the World than the one in which I grew up).
There I saw the triviality of student problems and of academic programs created, it seemed to me, merely to provide employment for the surplus of people operating with written words and school‑academic competencies.

Moreover, as the son of rural parents without higher education — classified as peasant‑workers, spending their lives in physical and technical labor — I had a certain distance from the academic world.
This distance may have helped me notice how unfounded many conclusions in the social sciences were regarding the culture of rural people.
Many of these conclusions were based on interviews — a method burdened with the flaw that the outsider may misunderstand the respondent, and the respondent may misunderstand the outsider.

During library research I encountered works, for example by priest‑sociologists, who built pastoral and evangelizing proposals for the Polish countryside on the basis of such flawed — and already outdated — diagnoses.
Even among anthropologists who sought to revise earlier approaches to studying rural communities, certain “obvious truths” persisted, inherited from the unjustified conclusions of their predecessors.

Since childhood, as a Catholic, I heard about the need to deny oneself.
In high school I read in the works of Joseph Ratzinger that this can be called metanoia — a going‑out‑of‑oneself.
At university, from theorists and researchers who were often left‑leaning (though considered “conservative” by representatives of other academic centers), or at least “secular,” I heard of the methodological principle of ethnology: to look at one’s own culture as if it were foreign, from the outside — and to look at foreigners as if they were one’s own.

This all came together for me, for it is analogous to the Christian metanoia.
I reinterpreted it in this way, making use of the conceptual generality of the principle itself, which allows such a synthesis.

When I later read the elegant literary descriptions of Mircea Eliade, I noticed that although he displays certain critical attitudes toward Catholicism, he in fact describes recurring motifs in the history of religions that illuminate many actions of Our Lord Jesus Christ — actions previously misunderstood by many and therefore dismissed as insignificant.
The same can be said of the remarkably insightful interpretations of René Girard’s scapegoat theory.

What they wrote reminded me of my childhood mystification of everything — especially the most basic realities: fire, sun, earth, herbs, stones, water.

I had not read Tolkien earlier, for I did not like that kind of fantasy — it irritated me (as did, for example, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia).
Yet the relation between myth and Christ I understood (or so it seems to me) while reading Eliade — perhaps also because a few years earlier I had read Ratzinger, who mentioned such anticipations of Christ in earlier religions.
At the time, however, I did not pay much attention to it.

The mechanisms of myth and ritual — described by scholars associated in public imagination with the political left — are in fact the deepest foundations of the effectiveness of Catholic Tradition.
Yet representatives of that Tradition, often out of justified objections to those who named these mechanisms, rejected the mechanisms themselves — sawing off the branch on which they sat, renouncing their own effectiveness.

I will describe this mechanism of alienation through “guilt by association” elsewhere.

It is worth mentioning here the works of Mary Douglas (who, in Natural Symbols, notes the academically‑derived contempt of Catholic priests in the 1960s for the Friday fast of “backward Irishmen,” and in Purity and Danger articulates the crucial concept of purity as the proper place within an Order, and impurity as the improper place).
And also Victor Turner (who wrote about the errors of the so‑called “liturgical reform,” and about the paradoxical closeness of the rituals of peoples such as the Ndembu to the Traditional Mass — closer than to the “reformed” Mass).

The left took over higher schools that teach excellent artistic craft, teaches it only to “its own,” and meanwhile prepares them — through various suggestions attacking their minds from different angles — to abandon that craft, even to regard it as embarrassing, formulaic, shameful, and to be buried.
It appropriates the secrets of the craft and then buries it, denying access to the right — not by prohibition, but by associating the institutions that preserve the craft with itself.
Thus the right is emotionally repelled from everything that comes out of those schools — including what is good: the craft that in fact has conservative roots.

This is not impossible (I have not studied that artistic domain).
The left names and describes elements of the craft that the right often never articulated, because they were practiced as obvious givens.
The same is true in the social sciences, as the examples above show.

THE METAMETHOD

Through such experiences I gradually formed a conviction — a kind of metamethod:

first, to acquaint myself in general with the research problem;
then to examine reality myself;
to determine which data are measurable and graspable, and which elements in statements about them are speculative, “meditative,” unverifiable, based on impressions, entrenched assumptions, and prejudgments — and set those aside;
then to examine the structure of the measurable facts, their meaning in the eyes of the people or communities concerned, their function, aims, or genesis (depending on the research goals and paradigms);
and only then to compare my own observations with what earlier researchers recorded in their books.
To examine the research of the researchers.
To examine the claims of the authors.
To verify, to check where their assumptions — especially those accusatory or discrediting someone — are unwarranted or unproven.
And to treat the very existence of such opinions, rather than their content, as facts worthy of study — insofar as possible.

Today, in the age of over‑linguistification, detachment from reality, and the other maladies discussed here, we place excessive trust in books and in what is written in them.
Yet books for centuries have been written on the basis of other books, and each time — like in a game of telephone — the transmission impoverishes and distorts the original information.
Data compression, like the transmission of electricity over distance, is always lossy.

It may even be that the source of certain claims is an unverified, unexamined, originally baseless conviction — which, by virtue of repetition, becomes treated as “proven,” “obvious,” or “beyond doubt.”

These layers of verbal mediation must be verified.
Not once, but continually.
We must keep VERIFYING.
We must examine not only the writings, but the reality itself that these writings supposedly describe.

Errors of Researchers as the Basis of Priestly Pseudo‑Remedies

Arriving at this method, I noticed, for example, that many assumptions in works within my own discipline rest on weak foundations.
It is difficult to find evidence for the alleged link between the supposed superficiality of the faith of the rural people (and for superficiality as a defining feature of that faith) and ritual formalism.
This is a tangle of unwarranted assumptions that has serious consequences for the very religions being studied, for the emic reformers of worship (e.g., Catholic priests), having absorbed these assumptions, drew from them hasty and distorted diagnoses and prescriptions.

We have already mentioned the naïve practice of taking literal verbal responses as identical with the intended meaning — despite the fact that the researcher may misunderstand the respondent, the respondent may misunderstand the researcher, and the latter may answer hastily or carelessly.
We have noted that words are only one of the materials of thought, and that people more often think, as Norwid put it, in “forms,” in “figures.”

From the recognition of the non‑verbal dimension one may infer that claims such as “the people do not know the composition of the Holy Trinity,” or “they lack knowledge of the truths of the Faith,” based on question‑and‑answer methods, are unfounded.
Given the fragmentary and limited nature of verbal communication, such judgments cannot be issued even about a single person — all the more so about an entire people.
Still less justified is the comparison of a generalized “people” with a generalized “non‑people” — that is, with whom? The “intelligentsia”?

Behind diagnoses linking ritualism with superficiality — diagnoses made by Czarnowski, Thomas and Znaniecki, and others — followed priest‑sociologists (W. Piwowarski, Majka), whose remedies likewise participated in this over‑linguistification.
These remedies included, for example: increasing the role of religious reading, reducing illiteracy…
These were supposed to be cures for a faith deemed superficial — largely on the basis of verbal communication.

Of course, certain moral problems and gaps in religious knowledge existed and exist among “the people,” but they can also be found among the well‑educated and among those who have read the entire Bible.
The destruction of the ritual character of the Holy Mass and its over‑linguistification — the stripping away of non‑verbal communicative elements — is merely a consequence of applying this pseudo‑remedy.

A good example of this was given by Mary Douglas in Natural Symbols, when she recalled the contemptuous attitude of priests toward the Friday fast of “backward Irishmen,” as a manifestation of insensitivity to non‑verbal signs — a by‑product of their academic formation.
Let us also recall Victor Turner’s remarks on the shared features of many rituals — including those of the Ndembu and the Traditional Mass — features starkly contradicted by the twentieth‑century “liturgical reform,” which thereby struck at the Creator‑inscribed desires of human nature and the objective neurobiological mechanisms given to us with the laws of nature, not constructed by us.

A Note Added in October 2020

Writing this paragraph in October 2020, I see that my earlier fears were justified:
had I, like most students, moved to Kraków, I would have been molded.
Entering among the crows, I would have begun to caw like them.

Most acquaintances — even those attached to the Church, yet showing signs of the Disney syndrome, filtering the Church’s teaching through values absorbed from screens, pop culture, and shop displays rather than the other way around — succumbed to the mask‑hysteria and the infernal abortion‑hysteria alike.

I lamented the impairment of my private life, but I see now that had I gone with the current, had I “managed better,” that current would likely have swept me away as well.
Only by observing from the outside could I notice it — and escape both ends of the false alternative.

For what seemed to me a failure in my modest earthly plans: thanks be to God.
He knew better.

Norwid on Imitation and the Aversion to “Being Creatively a Beginner”

The media‑inflated, bouillon‑cube effect of overloading the imagination with idealized models — ending in constant disappointment with the imperfect work of those who begin from lower stages — recalls something Norwid wrote:

“The Slav, who dislikes being a beginner in creative work, as other races often are, will never cope with this blockage of the inner faculties (…)”

Will the Slavs — the Poles — never produce anything of their own?
Will they remain, as their prophets foresaw, “without Venetian minds” (Skarga), always chewing and exploiting the steps forward made by others?
The prophet Marek (Fr. Jandołowicz, Carmelite, 1713–1799, a Bar Confederation figure) foretold it even more sharply:

“Poland remains a sceptre un‑blossoming
Until it becomes first‑acting.”

THE SHATTERED CRYSTAL Covered in Mud

From fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2014 in villages of Lesser Poland for my master’s thesis, I drew the following general conclusion:
a kind of split has occurred in the folk mentality.
A separation of lexicon from grammar, and of practice from symbolism.

Individual “words” — religious signs such as images and customs — have been torn out of the “grammar,” the ordering that once made them a coherent narrative.
They now lie like the words “prince,” “Cinderella,” “stepmother,” “slipper,” cut out of a fairy tale and scattered chaotically across a table.

The elders, who once heard the story, can reconstruct it from these associations alone — and therefore do not perceive the problem.
They do not understand why the “young” are no longer interested in the story.
The young have seen only the scattered, disconnected labels, which in that form mean nothing to them.
They have no sense.
They are drawn instead to whatever fits into the puzzle available to them: the new lexicon — which is often pasted into the structure of the old folk narrative.

Examples?
The creation of a stage‑like niche for folk costumes, in which married women — even widows — would publicly wear flower wreaths during harvest festivals or events of the Rural Women’s Associations.
Even if they knew what the costume once meant, the very fact shows that the role of transmitting meanings IMPORTANT to the community has been lost.
Wreaths and other elements of the code have become appreciated merely as detached aesthetic ornaments.

There is no home altar space; holy images hang anywhere according to aesthetic whim, while the object with a fixed, attention‑gathering place is often the television.
Neither men nor women wear head coverings that once signaled status.
There is no longer a system of lighting and extinguishing fire according to the seasons, no covering of mirrors on Good Friday, no elaborate rules for making the sign of the cross, burning tinder fungus, fasting days.
Some, when reminded “I don’t eat meat, it’s Friday,” reply: “Well, it’s not the first Friday.”
Old religious signs have been torn from their grammar.

More and more people say “God bless” when they see a priest — even if they do not use this greeting toward the working people they meet.
It is as if one greeted someone with any pleasant word: “thank you,” or “have a nice day.”
Thus the coherent system of messages, gestures, clothing elements, and spatial cues has collapsed.
And with it collapsed the culture it once governed.

Among rural people this split manifests itself in inserting into folk structures what they consider modern objects: furniture, posters, televisions, computers.
Those fascinated by “folk culture,” on the other hand, usually come from the city and insert folk or rural elements and superficial slogans into modernist, Enlightenment‑derived (functional‑aesthetic) or Eastern‑urban, New Age (feng shui) structures.

This is one level of the narrative’s disintegration — the narrative on the folk ground.
But this narrative is itself part of a larger meta‑narrative, which has also been torn apart by autonomization — as we will discuss a few paragraphs later, in connection with the mistaken idealization transferred from the revolutionary sphere into the sphere of traditional associations.

Recovering the Grammar

We must therefore make an effort to rediscover, within contemporary life, the relics and half‑buried natural ways of thinking and ordering reality.
They hide in the orderings — in a kind of grammar.
These orderings (often hard to notice because filled with secular debris) are worth fishing out from the lives of rural people.
Once found, it is worth inserting into them folk elements, regardless of region or family tradition.

Often this search is aided by looking at old folk cultures, at the material products of their mentality.
Some things are easier to see from a distance than up close.

We must also remember that humanity is perfect only “in the beginning.”
The Beginning ended with original sin.
But it returned in Christ, is made present with Eternity in every Holy Mass, and will return at the end of time.

Therefore “folk cultures” were never perfect.
Despite many intuitions that today we contradict inconsistently — intuitions that need renewal — their members did not always notice that the ways of realizing those intuitions could contradict them.
One may say that the essence of man is perfection, but also that his temporal “essence” is alienation from that Essence — the inclination to sin and imperfection (including cognitive imperfection).
Folk cultures struggled with this as well.

As always, the struggle concerned amusements — for example, dances.
For dances were always somehow connected with violating the sixth commandment.
St. John Vianney and many other saints and authorities had much truth in this regard — though for me, and likely for the Reader, this is difficult to accept.
But we will speak of this elsewhere.

The Shattered Crystal

Thus people seeking God’s Order are like pieces of a shattered crystal that has fallen into mud:
remembering its former beauty, they are repulsed by other fragments, because covered in mud they do not resemble the missing pieces.
Likewise, various fragments judge others without seeing that they themselves are in the mud — and are perceived as such.

Some fragments are thin‑walled, hollow crystals filled with mud.

Folk tradition, Intronization movements, enthusiasts of various scraps of the past — the village, the noble culture, reenactment groups, moralists concerned with modest dress, with dances, with the harmfulness of this or that music, patriots, monarchists, enthusiasts of traditional nutrition, herbs, and finally the various divided groups gathered around the Mass of All Ages…
These are only some of the shattered pieces of the Crystal of Tradition.

They do not see that by harboring mutual prejudices, seeing only the surface mud — the same mud they do not see on themselves — they move further away from the desired goal:
the return to their Original, Crystalline unity.
To God’s Order.

Immersed in the noise of information, stimuli, and final Photoshop‑idealized effects, they seek ideals in others — and disappointed by their absence, they grow disillusioned with the fragments of crystal they encounter.

This too is only an image.
An analogy.
And no analogy is perfect.
Perfection exists only in Heaven.

Do Not Expect Ideals from Others — or from Yourself

When I was a child, I was puzzled that adults — for example teachers — would scold not those who secretly jabbed others in the back with a pin, but those who, stung, reacted with a natural cry of pain.
They reproached the wounded ones for being “aggressive” and “ill‑mannered.”
I was astonished that they believed more readily those who had enough cunning to beat someone and then, when the beaten child lay on the ground, run quickly to complain and shamelessly lie that the victim was the aggressor.

Adults behave the same way — even those who appear serious, good, and competent.
They possess enough malice and strength to pretend to be persecuted, or simply to keep a straight face.
Meanwhile the victims — before they even manage to recover — are already proclaimed guilty by the crowd.
The executioner, having gagged his victim, spreads the word — at the very moment when the victim cannot (or out of decency does not want to) defend himself — that he is the one being attacked.
And people believe the executioner, who is the first to run with a complaint.
Such perversity.

(2020) (2021:)
To this is added overstimulation, which produces sensitivity only to the most blunt, forceful statements — statements mistaken for the evangelical “yes‑yes, no‑no.”
Honest argumentation is dismissed as “empty talk,” while irresponsible, swaggering, bare assertions are praised as “concrete and to the point.”
Complexity that corresponds to reality — and therefore requires reasoning — is drowned in the informational noise, overwhelmed by decisive, concentrated bouillon‑cube‑like pronouncements and accusations.

In this way, responsibility for one’s words — expressed in the Eighth Commandment and in the principle of presumption of innocence and goodwill — is being killed.
Today (2020–21, the “plandemic”), this killing manifests itself in irresponsible accusations that people acting according to normal standards are “endangering the health and lives of others,” without any evidence supporting the theory on which such accusations rest (e.g., the alleged universal superiority of masks, injections, and restrictions over their absence).
This happens while ignoring facts that contradict that theory — such as deaths caused by refusal of hospital admission due to covidian restrictions, or the sudden rise in non‑covid mortality not after the first wave of infections, but only after the introduction of restrictions, and in direct proportion to the decline in hospitalizations and diagnoses of other serious diseases.

(A similar perversity is shown by the functionaries of the practical liturgical revolt, as well as by certain groups of defenders of Tradition who slander other defenders in the very same way they themselves were slandered.)
These ignoramuses do not hesitate to accuse others of the very posture they themselves embody (and even of “conspiracy theories”), precisely when those others expose the weakness of their claims with the facts mentioned above.
They are like thieves who shout the loudest and the earliest: “Stop, thief!”

As a result of such attacks, the attacked side often allows itself — in a defensive reflex — to accept the opponent’s simplified and false definitions of the situation and of its own posture, as described earlier in the context of false alternatives and the Barabbas effect.

I have always felt deep indignation at the irresponsible and unjust smearing of completely innocent children in kindergarten, or of the most diligent workers who did the hardest tasks, yet were attacked by those who fed on their labor and later collected the laurels.
The same indignation was stirred in me by the irresponsible, Eighth‑Commandment‑breaking slander campaign against Archbishop M. Lefebvre, the Priestly Society of St. Pius X, and other Traditional Mass communities that are not as strong.
A similar attack on the supposedly “magical” and “superficial” faith of the people, and on the efforts of those fighting for the so‑called “Intronization of Christ the King,” I have analyzed elsewhere in this book.

Here I will limit myself to the example of a shepherd of the Holy Church, a missionary in Central Africa, and the founder of the seminary in Écône.
I heard that they were schismatics, disobedient, evil, even modernists or Protestants.
I heard many such accusations — and worse — but I never heard any evidence.
I was expected to believe the accusers on their word.
And many believed precisely because the accusers did not justify their claims.
The boldness and nakedness of the accusations always provoked my strongest opposition — and at the same time the greatest approval from the rest of the environment.

More: the greatest distrust from both conflicting sides often arose because I refused to nod along with either of them when they accused “the other side.”
Often they accused others of things that were impossible to verify (because they were difficult to reconstruct, allegedly said in secret, supposedly “between the lines,” or simply asserted without being proven anywhere — and therefore impossible for the other side to defend against).

The less justified the accusation, the more credible it appears to most people.

I Experienced This Through My Own Mistakes

I experienced this on the example of my own errors. When, for instance, at school I happened to blurt out something unconsidered — and therefore decisive‑sounding and “wise” — it elicited admiration from the teachers. Another time, when I sharply cursed out a classmate on the playing field, I earned applause. Not because he deserved it, but because I cursed him out.

Yet on other occasions, when I expressed similar opinions using arguments and carefully weighed words, all sides of the conflict treated me as an enemy. They expressed dissatisfaction, reluctance to cooperate — whether on the right, the left, or the “neutral” side. They did not even touch the argumentation; they got lost in it, unable to find the expected strong formulations or the sneering, mocking tone they wanted.

I failed to meet the methodological demand in which both sides were, surprisingly, in complete agreement:
“If you want to be with us, attack the people and groups opposed to us. Not their ideas. Or at least nod along when we attack them.”
And that agreement was their greatest error — and the cause of the conflict.

I remember that when I happened to be on stage, reviewers praised my emotional immersion and authenticity precisely when, while performing, I was thinking about nothing but the lamps shining in my eyes and whether I would make it to the return train.
On the other hand, I often heard that I was extremely sloppy, that I wasn’t trying, that I didn’t care — precisely when I was tearing my guts out doing everything I possibly could. Many of you surely know what I mean.

As someone with dyspraxia, even with maximum effort I often do things clumsily, and the more I practice, the worse they get. That is why I never managed to learn to swim, to sing technically well, or to drive a car. For over thirty years of my life this was judged at school and university as laziness and sloppiness, lack of organization and planning — and in professional life as incompetence disqualifying cooperation.

This breeds extreme exhaustion, because since childhood, accustomed to these difficulties, I have been trained to do everything “at full throttle”: to search all day for a lost wallet and find it only when the job is already lost; to correct myself a hundred times (when others succeed on the second or fifth attempt). Eventually it takes its toll — especially under constant stress from failures and, above all, from the judgments others make about my intentions.

People’s evaluations — and their overwhelmingly convincing impressions — are often the exact opposite of the real state of affairs. I give these examples to encourage everyone to recall similar perversities from their own lives.

Understanding an argument requires effort — even more than constructing one.
People raised under the pluralistic Tower of Babel of conflicting languages, deprived of a shared code enabling understanding, and additionally besieged by informational‑sensory‑emotional noise, often simply cannot break through it all. The processor overheats.

Thus they latch onto the most catchy expressions and declarations. They crave, served on a platter, the juicy meat of bare accusations, phrases full of hatred and at the same time enthusiasm and love (depending on what they feel like at the moment). And these are precisely what they trustingly devour.

One must add that in this noise they notice only the final effects of laborious processes and the hard work of hundreds of people, while losing sight of the labor itself. They want to stand on the summit of Everest — and demand the same from others at the snap of a finger — as if in a dream, skipping the effort of climbing. As if the mountain consisted only of its peak, as if one could simply leap onto it, bypassing the long, arduous ascent from the base.
(A habit learned from watching YouTube: at any moment I can skip the parts I don’t like and fast‑forward to the “summit moment.”)

Thus their expectations toward friends, coworkers, family, spouses grow to impossible proportions. They rarely declare this openly, but their minds, filled with polished and posed ideals, make them seek such ideals in reality. Their absence breeds dissatisfaction, frustration, and ultimately conflict and the belittling of others.

They confuse pride and a sense of dignity with trampling on others.
They expect much from others, criticize others, accuse others of shallowness, oversensitivity, and fear of judgment — yet they themselves cannot accept courageous criticism, which they emotionally and indignantly label “slander.”
They contradict themselves by accusing those who evaluate them of being afraid of evaluation.
Those hypersensitive to criticism accuse others of hypersensitivity.
After recounting the sufferings of their leaders, they arrogantly accuse those who disagree with them — despite emotional group pressure — of “unnecessary martyrdom.”

They declare the construction of lofty and noble civilizational edifices, yet focusing on the façade and the roof, they forget the walls and foundations: humility and respect for the other person created in the image of God.

No Latin civilization can be rebuilt this way.
What will arise is a desperate, hollow imitation. Push it lightly, and it collapses like a shed covered with paper, propped up by rotten beams.

Many elitists today, having access to the final results of generations of work, claim otherwise, claim not to deny the necessity of effort — yet they remain disappointed in others because in their minds they hold only the final stages of multigenerational labor or large enterprises.
They want a finished palace immediately, and are discouraged by the sight of ugly holes in the ground needed for foundations, unattractive underlayers beneath plaster, or uneven mortar lines between bricks.
They fail to notice a truly beautiful plot of land simply because it is uncut or a bit messy.
If someone had mowed and cleaned that same plot beforehand, they would be delighted.
Yet that is cosmetic work — superficial, often a one‑day task, or dependent on better tools.

Such disappointments may lie at the root of broken families and friendships.
People have watched too many films.

But even before films existed, exported cultural elements played a similar role — seen on the “screens” of paintings and travelers’ tales — as Norwid painfully notes:

“The Slav who does not like to be a beginner in creative work, as other races are, will never cope with this blockage of the inner faculties…”
Will the Slavs — the Poles — produce nothing of their own?
Will they remain, as their prophets foresaw, “without Venetian minds” (Skarga), always chewing and exploiting the steps forward made by others?
Marek the Prophet (Fr. Jandołowicz, Carmelite, 1713–1799, Bar Confederation) foretold even more sharply:
“Poland remains a sceptre un‑blossoming
Until it becomes first‑acting.”
Many a nobleman has seen Apollo and Skopas’ Venus of Melos,
Yet cannot build a chimney,
Draws a crooked outline for his courtyard,
And when building a granary forgets
That the useful is never enough by itself,
That the beautiful enters uninvited — through the Gate.

This is the bouillon‑cube media effect: the imagination overloaded with idealized models, ending in constant disappointment with the imperfect work of those who are only at the lower stages of the climb.

The expectations of both modernists and traditionalists (if we remain in that division) are often idealized in the same way — and they often become disgusted with the difficult road without which one cannot reach the desired summit.
It is the effect of being torn away from reality by immersion in a world of books, words, and idealized image‑sounds from the internet.

Ideals are beautiful and necessary — but like everything in the created world, never alone, and only in their proper place.

**False Alternatives…

…a symptom of the main disease — autonomization, that is, the tearing apart of bonds**

How to destroy an enemy?
If I wanted to destroy the Church, I would declare myself its defender and start murdering everyone around me.
If I wanted to compromise Józek, I would print his photo on a T‑shirt and, while shouting his name, I would smash shop windows, swear, bulge my eyes like a madman, shoot at tires and fuel pumps.
If I wanted to ridicule a sober analysis of the political situation, I would hire actors who publicly make fools of themselves while simultaneously proclaiming those correct views mixed with nonsense — so that people would throw out the baby of truth together with the bathwater of stupidity.
Simple? Simple.

Let us be careful not to let ourselves be provoked into criticizing something only because a person doing evil things praises it.

Let us repeat: How do you ridicule the truth?

Allow compromised people to proclaim it.
Or
Compromise those who already proclaim it.

The second method works by referring to the first and using the demagogic argument:
“Since compromised people say this, the statement itself must be compromised.”

How is this compromise carried out? Through:

ridicule,
associating the statement with the substitute devil of the current stage,
a simple, emotional, almost fairy‑tale division of the world into good and evil.
And the role of the evil one is played by a single figure — e.g., Hitler or Putin — and the role of the good one by everyone else.
Even if the “evil” and the “good” cooperate, or if there are more than one of each.
And the matter is settled.

If someone tells us uncomfortable truths, we focus on the theses he shares with the “evil one,” e.g., Putin.
People no longer notice that even if someone is evil, in his propaganda he may use many — even most — correct theses.

Thus those who speak the truth are doomed to say at least part of what the “evil one” (real or imagined) also says.
Now the “evil one” is allowed to speak the truth — so that he may discredit it.

The mechanisms of divide‑and‑rule described here are tools not only of global politics, but also of breaking apart small groups, business competitors, and political initiatives — especially in local, emerging communities.

I advise those of you who have tried to act patriotically or politically on the right to examine the conflicts that intensified in recent years (pandemic, war, elections) within your associations, foundations, and informal groups.
Were you not strongly set against someone?
Were their past flaws not aggressively dug up?
Did what was presented as a great crime not turn out, in perspective, to be an exaggerated and weaponized minor fault, a neglect, or even something that person had little control over?

And despite declarations of unity and “apolitical” intentions, did the process not in practice lead to fragmentation and negative political action — aimed at breaking specific political formations?

Please note that “strong” information about alleged spreaders of “Russian narratives” usually works like this:
the headline contains a grave warning that what follows is dangerous pro‑Russian content.
Most people do not read further, do not check whether this “pro‑Russian” or “pro‑Putin” element is actually there — they simply believe the headline.
And even if they read, the headline has already biased them, so they see “pro‑Putinism” even where it is not present.

And so the rumor spreads, the lie repeated a hundred times becomes an “obvious truth,” and people branded as “Russian trolls” are automatically treated as such.

The Left Was the First to Name and Appropriate the Methodological Obviousness of the Right

(By “right” I mean here the traditional world — one that consciously and deliberately respects what is given from above; by “left” I mean the revolutionary world — one that rejects tradition and attempts to construct principles anew, according to the whims of individuals and the spirit of the age.)

The “left” often describes mechanisms quite accurately (perhaps because, due to its materialistic reductionism, it can focus on them), whereas the right draws more accurate conclusions — yet very often rejects the description of those mechanisms simply because “if the left formulated it, it must be wrong.”
In this way the left disarms the right. It attaches to itself what is correct and effective, so that the right, repulsed, abandons it — and thus its efforts become ineffective.

Let me add (20 May 2020) that the left, in seeking the sources of the right’s effectiveness — of christianitas, of the traditional order — may simply have named what the right (precisely because it was obvious to it, transparent like air) never bothered to name.
Only those who wished to appropriate these mechanisms — because of their effectiveness — in order to turn them against their Creator (like the devil who apes God, like evil which is never self‑sufficient and must draw from the good), began to analyze them and then to name them.
In doing so, whether incidentally or deliberately, they alienated the right from these mechanisms, deprived it of what made it effective, and thus disarmed it.

Sometimes these are mechanisms limited to a distorted left‑wing application; at other times they are false alternatives; at still other times, overgeneralizations.
A wide variety of combinations, whose classification is quite difficult — perhaps it will be possible to carry it out in the future, if not by me, then by someone else. In this book I will attempt to initiate such a classification.

What are examples of names and conceptual frameworks invented by the left for methods that are in fact sound and effective?
Ritualism, structuralism, relativism (epistemic — twisted by the left into ontological relativism), rationalism, tribalism, folkness, discourse, “the compulsive structuralism of human thinking,” ideology, and so on.

The left named and appropriated certain rules used by the right — rules that were obvious and therefore unnamed (and which constituted a natural factor determining the power of transmission).
By doing so, it made them repulsive to the right and thus deprived it of effectiveness.

An example?
“The compulsive structuralism of human thinking” (a phrase by Leszek Kołakowski).
The great structuralists themselves — such as Lévi‑Strauss — were left‑leaning, even though the mechanisms they described (though not their general conclusions) formed the very foundation of the effectiveness of tradition and Tradition.

Another example: ritualism.
Priest‑sociologists, influenced by analyses of secular scholars, concluded that “ritualism” and “the interpenetration of religion with other spheres of life” were not essential features of religiosity, but merely folk defects — and recommended curing them by reducing illiteracy and encouraging the reading of religious magazines (as if the written word could not itself be treated superficially, as if it could not become an empty form).

The left criticizes “judging others”?
Then we, out of spite, will judge everyone rashly — breaking the Eighth Commandment (how very “right‑wing”!) — and even mock those who remind us that they supposedly follow the left‑wing commandment “do not judge,” that they are shallow, that they praise everyone, that they are afraid to judge and therefore cowards.
Except that they have just judged us, and the accusation we level at them is internally contradictory and flimsy — a trap that makes our stance “left‑ish.”

Since traditionalists, in trying to flee modernism, often flee only from its surface — and transplant the surface of traditional ideals into modernist, over‑linguistic, anti‑formalist, or autonomizing patterns of thought — it is worth, at least provisionally, abandoning the method of beginning with words and terms when defining phenomena.

In my view, it is better to first observe reality, the rules by which it operates, and only then seek a name for it — preferably one rooted in the tradition to which we refer, and, if possible, etymologically justified.
Such etymologism adds another important objectifying factor to our definitions, helpful in resolving disputes.
But even this factor should not become a battlefield if, in tradition, the meaning of a term has significantly diverged from its etymology.

I would replace the principle “restore true names to things” with the principle “restore true things to names.”
It is things — real phenomena and the rules governing them — that deserve the designation “true.”
Words themselves, and their connections with meanings or concepts, cannot be “true” in themselves — just as a sound cannot literally smell — something we should understand well as those who oppose the Protestant error of sola scriptura.

On Adopting the Enemy’s Faulty Categories

Someone — casually, almost off‑hand — declared that giving up one’s seat is an act of contempt.
Or (even more effectively) said nothing at all, merely using an instance of such behaviour as self‑evident proof of the wickedness of a certain group.

And how did that group begin to defend itself?
Under the constant repetition of the suggestion that yielding one’s seat is a sign of disdain, they themselves began to believe it.

Some started beating their breasts, apologising for having “implied inferiority” to women by offering them a seat.
Others began denying that their group had ever upheld the “crime of seat‑giving.”
Still others insisted that no such “contemptuous custom” had ever existed among them.

Those, however, who valued loyalty to their group and trusted its inherited customs concluded that if their forefathers gave up their seats, then contempt for women, the elderly, and the more honoured must be something proper.

These last ones correctly sensed that the moderns were in error.
Yet in attempting to refute them, they allowed the false association between deference and contempt to be imposed upon them.
Unwittingly they accepted the very error they were resisting — an error not of their own making, but introduced by those who forged the false association.

Thus, through a single mistaken linkage, every side of the dispute ended up in error.

All that was needed was to refuse the false pairing and say plainly:
giving up one’s seat is not an act of contempt, but of respect.

…

All that was needed was to say that Tradition does not exclude change or diversity; on the contrary, it records them and assigns them their proper measure — the boundary of their goodness.

That the priest in the Mass of All Ages does not “turn his back to the people,” but rather, with them, turns toward Christ — toward the Cross and the whole cosmos symbolised in the rising sun.

That Intronisation is the state’s acceptance of the teaching of Christ as the criterion of what is good and just — the religionisation of politics, not the politicisation of religion.

That the rituals of “Catholic piety” are not magic, but forms of prayer and remembrance of the Divine Will.

That because the apostles of “tolerance” forbid judging anyone, it does not follow that we must, in reaction to their error, judge rashly all who arouse our suspicions or disagree with us.
To do so is, in fact, to yield to them.

That someone may oppose you not because he misunderstands you, betrays you, or slanders you, but because in conscience he disagrees in certain matters, while appreciating and supporting you in others.

That Christianity is the fulfilment of the longings embedded in the mythic images of ancient religions, not an imitation of pagan mythologies.

That modest dress in women is an affirmation and defence of the mysterious sanctity they bear within — not, as the enemies of feminine dignity and tradition claim, discrimination or contempt for the body.

That the wife’s obedience to her husband is not a sign of inferiority, but of the logical necessity of coexistence.
(Someone must ultimately decide when agreement cannot be reached. One may discuss endlessly, but a decision must be made. If a couple argued whether to flee an avalanche to the right or to the left, they would perish. The practical dimension is interwoven by the Creator with the symbolic: obedience is a sign of the loving bond between God and creation, between Christ and the Church, between wife and husband.)

That moral and legal commands do not take away freedom, but give it its proper measure.
That form does not oppose content, nor body the soul.
And so on…

That when the opponents say the Mass is a “meal” rather than a sacrifice, it does not mean we must deny that the Banquet is contained within the Sacrifice.

If we deny the banquet as a component of the Mass and the Sacrifice, if we deny the compatibility of Vatican II and the Novus Ordo with Traditional Teaching, we merely repeat the false alternatives forged by the revolutionaries.
We differ from them only in valuation.
And that is precisely the trap they set for us: we adopt their categories of thought — which is far worse than adopting their “language.”

The Advocate of the Green Elephant

When someone “from the other side of the barricade” declares that the green elephant is the best, we — instead of noticing that the elephant is not green — argue that the green elephant is the worst.

When a quarrel erupts — some say the forest is green, others that it is blue, still others that it is brown (each citing scientific studies) — we, instead of saying that the forest is not monochromatic, search — under the pressure of ubiquitous narrative and the need for a common denominator — for which drawer of colour proposed by the narrators is the “correct” one for the forest.

Another time, when people argue whether the spirit is made of hydrogen, oxygen, or chlorine, we — instead of asking why one assumes the spirit is made of any material substance — begin searching for elaborate pseudo‑scientific justifications for one chemical element or another as the “building block” of spirit.

Often it turns out that none of the drawers available in the disputes into which we are dragged corresponds to reality.

Truth does not lie opposite falsehood.
Truth lies where it lies — independently of falsehoods.
Falsehoods surround it from all sides.

And so, little by little, linguistic and mental categories alien to what we defend are imposed upon us.

(I use examples that are not the actual subjects of such disputes because, were I to present the real objects of contention here, many readers — overwhelmed by the social and cultural connotations attached to them — might fail to perceive the faulty mechanisms of “drawer‑thinking” and false alternatives that underlie them. Those examples will come later.)

CLASSIFICATION

(Szufladkowanie)

Classification intersects with the previous mechanism, yet is fundamentally distinct.
It consists in this: human beings, naturally seeking patterns, tend not to listen carefully or analyse the full phrases spoken by others. Instead, they instinctively search their mental archive for the nearest familiar drawer — a ready‑made category, a known human group, or a pre‑existing sentence‑formula.

Thus, when someone speaks of something that escapes these drawers, people are unable to perceive it.
Driven by habit, they attribute to him statements that are not his — statements that may sound vaguely similar, yet differ in substance — because they resemble the familiar patterns already stored in their minds.

The problem is not classification itself, nor emotion, persuasion, or schematisation.
Only when rash judgement is added to these natural tendencies do they become dishonest — morally and socially dangerous.

This tendency also appears in the way people treat individual elements of various classes of phenomena — linguistic families, civilisations, religions — as if they were fixed drawers.
People no longer verify whether these drawers, inherited from theories and books, actually correspond to real divisions in reality, or whether they once did so only briefly, describing phenomena that were in fact fluid and changing.

Thus, in criticising a certain set of ideas — perhaps rightly — they rashly discard all elements associated with that set.
If, for example, they discover that the “migration of peoples” unfolded somewhat differently than once thought, they reject all assumptions connected with that theory, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

If they encounter among supporters of the “Tridentine Mass” a few individuals who reject the Pope and call the Church the Great Whore, they hastily take this as the position of all and conclude that the Mass itself must be abolished.
Those “traditionalists,” wounded by such treatment, in turn rashly interpret this abolition as proof of the invalidity of the Novus Ordo, the error of Vatican II, or the failure of the “Hermeneutic of Continuity.”

If they meet a German who is a murderer, or a Pole who is a thief, they unjustly stigmatise entire nations.
If they judge an entire system — say, American culture or the Brahminic civilisation — to be inferior to another, they then reject wholesale everything that comes from that system, assuming it would “corrupt” their own.

Yet one must distinguish the level of systems and methods from the level of their components.
Even an inferior system may contain particular elements that are superior — elements capable of improving another system that is, overall, better.

For example:
A state with a highly effective army, victorious in war, may still adopt from conquered armies — proven in practice to be inferior — certain superior components: computers, ammunition, scientists, which then enhance and complete its own system.
A top‑tier football team may find in much weaker clubs individual talents that strengthen the team.

Therefore, from the obvious truth that two contradictory systems — including civilisations — coexisting in the same territory will degrade and fracture one another, it does not follow that the flow of individual elements between two contradictory civilisations must also be destructive.
It does not.
That conclusion is unwarranted.

It is simply a confusion of levels.

The Victorious, Yet Cornered

The enemy accused Kuba that his family were murderers because they ate bread.
Kuba, beating his breast, stopped eating bread so as not to be a murderer.
His brother Ziutek began to defend himself: my family does not eat bread at all, therefore we are not murderous.
The third brother, Stasek, concluded that since his family is good and right, and the enemy is evil, then whatever the enemy condemns must be good.
Thus, if the enemy criticizes murder, it means our family is good because it supposedly murders, and therefore—so as to preserve tradition—we must murder.

They were all mistaken, because they tried to answer a foolish accusation.
By responding to a wrongly constructed question, they lost.
They allowed themselves to be trapped inside false categories forged by their opponent.

Why did no one notice that the accusation itself contained a false identification?

This is precisely the trick: in moments of emotion people easily accept such manipulations of the “definition of the situation,” fail to notice them, and adopt them as their own.
They succumb to the psychosocial compulsion to answer, to the impression that silence would mean ridicule, humiliation, the sense of being “cornered.”

Sometimes the silent, cornered ones are closer to the truth than the triumphant, boastful manipulators.

The silent cornered ones—and also those who, feeling obliged to answer a malformed accusation, or stung by “polite rudeness,” begin to babble nonsense in confusion.

A good example of this mechanism is the reflexive rejection of certain legitimate postulates merely because they are raised by a group that unjustly accuses us.
When the author mentioned earlier and his followers accuse us of “libertarianism,” equating it with exploitation and moral laxity contrary to Catholicism, we instinctively begin to search for crypto‑Marxism in them simply because they speak of the work ethic.
Would it not be better to defend both the work ethic and ordered liberty and Catholic moral discipline at the same time?

Another situation occurs when someone claims that Catholicism is evil because it contains similarities to paganism.
Most people, instead of questioning the assumption that similarity is something bad, adopt the value‑judgment smuggled into the accusation and deny the similarities themselves.

Here they accept the opponent’s value‑judgment, but reject the accurate observation of similarity.

Hitler sometimes did good things, but one cannot claim that those things ceased to be good merely because Hitler did them.

The Barabbas Effect

A vivid illustration of the mechanism of adopting false alternatives created by one’s opponent is the behavior of the title character in the film Barabbas.
Defenders of Tradition and the Faith sometimes behave like him.

Moved by the story of Jesus condemned in his place, Barabbas wanted to become a Christian.
So when he heard the rumor that Christians had set Rome on fire, he began setting fires himself—shouting that he was a Christian.
A fine service he rendered to the good name of Christ!

And yet I admired his intention—his motives.
For this reason I admire the intentions of many “Traditionalists,” even though some of them—like Barabbas—have allowed themselves to adopt deceptive modes of thought, false alternatives, precisely the mental framework of the modernism they wish to oppose.

They act vigorously under banners of defending the Faith and Tradition, without noticing the glaring contradictions between the Faith they defend and the methods they use to defend it.
Some advertise pious slogans through immodest photo‑sessions (why I treat immodesty as a form of impurity I will explain elsewhere).
Others conquer the market by dishonest means.
They mix and shake: a bit of this, a bit of that—though in different areas than the “progressive Catholics” who oppose them.

This is the extreme.
Others fall into subtler errors: persistent violations of the Eighth Commandment, convincing themselves and others that such behavior is a virtue of courage.
They confuse their hasty, emotional slanders (“traitors,” “collaborators,” “deserters,” “slanderers”) with objective facts, and regard honesty and self‑restraint as weakness.
They see no contradiction here, because they assume—somewhat anti‑formalist—that these bad methods are morally neutral, that they are “just mechanisms,” and that the Faith consists of slogans and isolated niches such as the “Tridentine Mass.”

The conflict between progressives and “traditionalists” often unfolds at the level of slogans.
They lack the Catholic sensus, which is acquired through upbringing, from childhood, through the daily example of ordinary acts toward God and neighbor.
This requires long training.
A neophyte cannot acquire it with a snap of the fingers.

Thus he must go to a Catholic family of decent and pious people; even if that community lacks “knowledge” understood as clever words and books, it possesses a sense, an instinct, a practice refined over centuries—something no one needs to name precisely because it is lived.

This is why St. Paul, after falling from his horse on the road to Damascus and being blinded, did not immediately begin preaching blindly, but went to respected Christians to learn from them, in living relation, what the Gospel truly means.
His blindness and recovery of sight after meeting Ananias can be seen as an image: without contact with the Catholic sense formed in daily life, preaching the Gospel would be blind leading the blind. Both fall into the pit.

Such neophytes tend to puff themselves up and correct those who do not use the “proper formulas” or do not know the books.
They understand nothing.
So be it.
They need time.
Despite everything, I defend them—and in a sense admire them.

We ought to complement one another: take their zeal, but correct it with sense.

A culture sick with the rejection of “traditionality” is not healed by intensified destruction of tradition in the name of “progress,” but by repairing that traditionality.
Yet today, although traditionality is widely criticized, we still condemn people for being “enslaved by tradition,” even though they have long been sick with the opposite disease—an overdose of progress.

Those who criticize “traditionalism” often behave like members of the early Church who believed that Christians really had burned Rome—because the majority said so—and thus distanced themselves from the “arsonists” and from those parts of their teaching (this time true and sound) that supposedly led to the fire.

And from such rejection of one’s own roots—born of a lie we may call “Neronian”—began the attachment to an equally “Neronian” vision of values: values that had to sound Christian in name and theory so as not to alarm good people, but in concrete practice diverged sharply from the example of the Saints.

Over‑Linguistic “Traditionalism” — Not Only Among Neophytes

Those mentioned earlier in connection with the Barabbas effect — including many “newly converted” — often display (and it becomes, alas, a habitual method of thinking) a tendency to issue hasty verdicts on the basis of slogans, journalistic simplifications, overheard fragments, and half‑read texts:
“modernist,” “Lefebvrist,” “Marxist,” “thinking like Habermas,” “postmodernist,” “heretic,” “liberal,” and so on.

Yet this tendency is not theirs alone.
Among those who fall prey to this method, at least in part, are also honourable representatives of the Church.
They set right goals, and those goals deserve to be followed — though not necessarily all their explanations.

Perhaps the equilibristics of explaining simple shadows cast on uneven ground has wearied them, and in some places they have begun to confuse the straight lines on a map — drawn from point to point — with the real terrain, where walking along those straight lines would plunge one into an abyss.

The overestimation of the letter of the Council — both by those who claim that, in its literal form, it is evil, and by those who condemn its critics — is a linguistic error.
It is the same error committed by many Protestants in their sola Scriptura, and now repeated by contemporary Catholics who have unwittingly adopted Protestant habits of reading.

If we were to read Scripture the way they read the Council — applying it directly to contemporary categories — we would have to conclude that it is full of heresies (“you are gods”).
The same applies to the claim, based on private imaginings, that criticism of the formula “for all” implies its invalidity.

Yet no text — not even the sacred text, as argued earlier, and therefore not even conciliar documents — has meaning in itself without the tradition that gives it context.

And by “tradition” I do not mean merely the written texts of the Magisterium or the Fathers of the Church.
For if these too are texts, then the error of sola scriptura can be transferred from Scripture onto them.
This transfer would end with each person interpreting these texts according to the imaginings of his own culture — a culture increasingly shaped by the world — so that the same words of the Fathers could acquire meanings contrary to their intention.

I speak of tradition as action:
the tradition of non‑verbal signs, of moral habits, of embodied practices transmitted through living example, through upbringing, through generational and Apostolic succession.
Meaning depends on this kind of tradition — the tradition we apply to the words.

The same word can be placed within different traditions, different contexts; thus it may bear different, even contradictory meanings.

The hermeneutic of continuity means applying to the words the tradition of the Church.
The hermeneutic of rupture and “progress” means applying to them the contemporary context — or more precisely, an anti‑traditional tradition: internally contradictory and revolutionary.
The latter is ruinous.

Cardinal Ratzinger proposes the former.
And rightly so.
He translates the old word tradition into terms intelligible to his opponents, so as to draw them first of all to the meaning of that word.
The meaning is more important than the letter.

But Cardinal Ratzinger points to something more:
He notes that simply restoring the Traditional Mass as it existed before the reforms, and abolishing the Novus Ordo, would — paradoxically — strengthen in people’s minds the revolutionary principle and undermine the foundations of faith in the Church.

For most Catholics, the “Mass of All Ages,” suddenly imposed on everyone, would itself appear as a revolution — a rupture from what the Church had handed down to them.
They would think: if the Mass can be changed so drastically, if the Church at its highest levels erred so gravely, then no one can be trusted.

For those who do not remember the reform, for whom the Novus Ordo is the given, the inherited status quo, such a reversal would not only wound their faith but destroy the methods of traditional thinking and strengthen revolutionary methods.

These methods of thinking correspond to what elsewhere I called the grammar — not the examples (for examples change), but the methods.

Confusing Certainty About Principles with Certainty About One’s Own — In Fact Subjective — Applications of Those Principles to Judging People and the World

Abba Elias once said:
“I once saw a brother who seemed to be hiding a flask of wine under his cloak. Wanting to shame the devil and show that it was an illusion, I asked the brother: ‘Be so kind as to open your cloak.’ He opened it, and it turned out he was carrying nothing. I tell you this so that you may not believe even what you see or hear with your own eyes. How much more, then, should you guard your thoughts, notions, and intentions, knowing that it is the devil who suggests them to you, so that they may pollute the soul with useless reflections and distract it from attending to its own sins and to God.”
— Apophthegmata of the Desert Fathers

A milieu that speaks incessantly about the need for certainty, that reproaches others for vagueness, often also reproaches caution in judging people — calling it weakness or “fear of judging.”
Yet it judges everyone around with astonishing ease, and accuses others of “equilibristics” whenever they attempt to defend, for example, Vatican II.
But when they themselves resort to such equilibristics in defence of their own critiques, they suddenly declare that the matter is “more complicated,” requiring “deep study.”
They refer one to long treatises by their authorities — such as the analysis of “Higher Necessity” in ordinations, allegedly justified by an “Extraordinary Crisis.”

In this posture there is not only hypocrisy and the logic of Kali (“we may criticise intricately — that is not sophistry; but when others explain Vatican II or the Novus Ordo intricately, they are ‘evading the truth’”), but above all a confusion of levels:
the level of general principles, accepted fundamentally on faith, with the level of their application and reception in concrete reality.

For just as the principle “thou shalt not steal” is an objective certainty, the judgement “Joseph stole” is not.
One cannot simply declare that anyone who presents complex circumstances showing that Joseph did not steal must be wrong because the circumstances are complex — that “the obvious fact is that Joseph stole, because he is holding the stolen purse.”
A simple falsification of this claim is the possibility that Joseph wrested the purse from the thief.

Yet such people, driven by personal agendas, refuse to acknowledge such explanations, insisting that “the facts” are on their side — while ignoring that their “facts” are not facts at all, but subjective, unwarranted, and falsified interpretations of facts.

When I point this out, I am accused of “denying objective reality.”
Those who make this accusation fail to understand that objective reality is not identical with our limited convictions about what it is.
They ignore frequent cognitive errors and, in fact, adopt the very stance they attribute to me: they reduce objective reality to their own subjective opinion.

As if they had forgotten that our little head has boundaries and fits inside a hat — and therefore easily errs in judging our neighbour.
This is why one must always seek possible grounds for defence; ignoring them is irresponsibility and a violation of the Eighth Commandment.

Those who condemned Our Lord Jesus Christ also knew the Scriptures perfectly, expounded Tradition beautifully and convincingly — yet none of this prevented them from breaking that Tradition, issuing a false accusation, and ultimately killing God.

Blind Kali Chasing a Blind Thief — The Quintessence of Hypocrisy

*“I will not leave:

any evil without repairing it (destroying it), and
any good that I could do, enlarge, or in any way contribute to.”*
— St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe

Following one’s desires includes treating strong accusations as if they were facts.
This becomes especially dangerous when such a trap ensnares an environment that speaks constantly about tradition, scientific facts, objectivity, and realism — and yet undermines the very Acts, facts, and principles given to it (for example: the innocence of the norm of the uncovered face; the Acts of the Church given directly, such as Vatican I, Vatican II, the Roman Missal of Pius V or the Novus Ordo; or the obedience of a bishop to the pope in matters of ordination).
All this in the name of their own intricate explanations and interpretations, allegedly justifying the need to reject these norms and Acts.

Because of human cognitive limitation, such a person may overlook or lose something essential in his own explanations — and thus, in practice, adopts a posture of trust in distrust, a negation of the very Acts and principles of his own tradition, equivalent to distrust toward them.
In doing so, he contributes to turning upside‑down the meaning of the very words he invokes so often (Jesus, the Early Church, Tradition), and to a communicative paralysis — a new Tower of Babel.

They occupy themselves with what does not belong to them (for example: complex matters of rubrics and texts), while neglecting — even stubbornly failing — what does belong to them: the rule of obedience and the presumption of goodness.

Accusations — in an age of informational noise and overstimulation — excite emotions, create sensation, and therefore stand out far more than the “defence of the accused” or the maintenance of a less dramatic status quo.
To those susceptible to this temptation, such defence appears weak.

Catholic Tradition, especially in the domain of the Eighth Commandment, teaches us the discipline of self‑denial also in the temptation to follow hasty, unjustified yet emotionally powerful judgments and suspicions — to resist confusing the sensory impression of plausibility with facts, and the impression of implausibility with “evading the truth” or falsehood.

Reality is not a fairy tale with exaggerated colours and idealised contours; it is not a photoshopped and perfectly cropped image.

Unfortunately, people immersed in a world of competing idealised stimuli treat realism as unreal — because it is not vivid enough.

They employ, with full hypocrisy, the method of the thief who shouts loudest: “Catch the thief!”
They accuse others of subjectivism when those others present a vision of the world or defend someone against accusations.
Yet — strangely — they never noticed the subjectivism in their own strained criticism of others’ norms and conduct.

According to them, the accuser may be subjective, may treat his own flimsy interpretation as the only one — but the accused must provide a single, absolutely true and indisputable defence.

Oh no, cunning suspecter — it is you who must prove.
The one who defends himself, others, his Church, normal principles and tradition against your accusations does not have to prove anything.
It is enough that he presents a single example showing that your accusatory interpretation is not necessary.
As long as he does not attack anyone, as long as he remains within ordinary principles, he does not need to explain himself, nor exclude the subjectivity of his own principles and attitudes.

And even if in a given matter you are right and he is mistaken, it is a blessed mistake.
For in what belongs to him — in his posture — he is right, and you are wrong.

Even if someone truly is a murderer, but one lacks the data to be certain, one may not accuse him with certainty — because that certainty is absent.
To do so would violate the Eighth Commandment.

But when you accuse, you bear the obligation to prove — and to exclude the subjectivity of your interpretations.
Yet you very deftly drown out this obligation by emotionally projecting your own fault onto others: accusing of subjectivism those who merely defend themselves.
Accusing of blind faith those who refuse to join you in blind belief in accusations.

You follow emotionally charged suspicions blindly, plug your ears, and ignore the arguments of those who show the weakness of your accusations — by perversely accusing them of blind obedience and acrobatic evasion of truth.
When they point out contradictions in your accusations, you say the matter is “more complicated,” only to triumphantly proclaim moments later that when they defend themselves in a complex way, it is “acrobatic evasion of truth.”

So which is it?
When Kali accuses in a complicated way — that is good;
but when others defend themselves in a complicated way — that is bad?

Kali may accuse blindly, but they may not defend themselves blindly?

This is the quintessence of hypocrisy.
If you have no problem with this… then you have a problem.
With yourself.
Spare yourself further reading — nothing here will reach you.

Blind Goodness vs. Evil Blindness — “Love… believes all things”

The principle of presuming goodness and innocence — whether of one’s neighbour or of the customary norms of a social institution — consists precisely in this: we blindly assume goodness.
Yes — blindly.

This “blindness of goodness” is the only possible defence against the blindness of gossip: easy, catchy, hard to retract, unrestrained, self‑propelling, wounding, and tearing apart every bond.
This principle is expressed in the Eighth Commandment.

The Father of Lies delights in sowing suspicion:
He tempted the first parents to suspect the goodness of God;
He cast suspicion upon the righteous Job.
To employ this turning‑the‑cat‑by‑the‑tail, this dishonest presumption of guilt — the hermeneutic of suspicion — no matter how refined the method, is to become a mere gossip.

I prefer to err about things than to sin — rather to be mistaken than to be right while sinning through accusations in matters where final certainty is difficult to obtain.

And by “certainty” I do not mean the strong feeling of certainty, objectivity, factuality (for these are emotional and illusory), but the actual possibility of rational and experiential verification.

Identifying with the Strawman Built by One’s Opponents

The adoption of false categories coined by one’s opponents may also manifest itself in the following way: when someone persistently imputes to us a claim we never made, we may eventually begin to assert precisely that claim. We forget what we originally held, and start defending—almost as if it were our own—what was merely projected onto us. I once observed this phenomenon in others, but in 2022 I noticed it in myself.

When I attempted to defend the Novus Ordo Missae against accusations of alleged unorthodoxy, my opponents presented to me, as supposed evidence, point 13 of one of the Tridentine decrees on liturgical rites. In response, I cited point 7—not as an independent argument, but to demonstrate that if one were to interpret point 13 in the way they proposed (namely, as forbidding the Pope from introducing any new rite whatsoever, while ignoring context, circumstances, and the interpretative tradition of councils and papal bulls), then one would have to conclude that the Council of Trent condemns the rejection of the Novus Ordo. Under that hypothetical reading, point 7 would imply precisely such a conclusion.

Yet my interlocutors objected as if I were treating point 7 as a standalone proof, as if I were claiming that it directly and unconditionally anathematizes the rejection of the Novus Ordo. But I had cited it only to show that if they applied their hermeneutic consistently, then point 7 would bind them even more tightly than point 13 binds me. If.

And in the course of the debate, I simply forgot what I had originally argued and allowed myself to be drawn into defending the misinterpretation they had imposed on me. My error, therefore, was not that I claimed the Tridentine text forbids rejecting the Novus Ordo. I still maintain that the Church’s tradition does not permit such rejection. My mistake was allowing myself to be dragged into a discussion detached from my original point and focused instead on the isolated wording of that passage.

Clarifying the Inconsistency

The inconsistency lies in the relationship between text and interpretation, and between both of these and the currently recognized rite of the Novus Ordo. If we have both the Novus Ordo and earlier post‑Tridentine modifications—despite the existence of a text that could be read as an absolute prohibition of change—then, in order to preserve the coherence of the Church (which we are obliged to presume out of faith and intellectual honesty), we must adopt an interpretation of the Tridentine decrees that allows all these facts to stand together.

Let me quote a friendly polemical objection to my position and respond to it:

“If they interpret point 13 as an absolute prohibition of changing the rite, then they must interpret point 7 as referring exclusively to that same rite. That is not inconsistency; it is the logical consequence of their interpretation.”

But this is inconsistency. It is the selective treatment of different parts of the same text, chosen not on the basis of reason but on the basis of a preconceived thesis—one that casts not only individuals but the very Acts of the Church in a negative light, introducing contradictions where none need exist.

If they read point 13 narrowly—indeed, more narrowly than the literal sense allows (as I will demonstrate later)—then they must read point 7 with equal narrowness and literalism.

If they allow themselves a broad, contextual reading of point 7 only because it helps them defend their narrow reading of point 13, then they are not defending the Church but their own position. And that position is accusatory toward the Church’s Acts. To defend it, they apply different interpretive rules to different parts of the same document.

It is as if Ziutek, while playing football, suddenly claimed that Felek fouled him by pushing him with his shoulder, but when Ziutek pushed Felek in exactly the same way, he insisted it was merely “playing the body.”

The same milieu falls into a similar error when it accuses defenders of the Council of using “complicated language,” supposedly making their arguments untrustworthy. Yet when their own position—accusatory toward the Church’s Acts—is equally complicated, they present that complexity as a mark of profundity. This is the classic tribal logic known as Kali’s Logic: the same action is noble when we do it, and wicked when they do it.

What My Argument Actually Concerns

My argument is not—let me repeat—not that one must never interpret or evaluate. On the contrary: everyone ultimately interprets with his own reason. My point is that reason itself forbade me from accepting accusations against the Church’s Acts and against my brethren when the arguments offered were insufficient, flawed, or doubtful.

The very principles proclaimed by these same groups—in dubio pro reo, status quo, tradidi quod et accepi, and the presumption of innocence—obliged me, in the presence of doubt, to defend the established norm and the accused.

The established norm includes both the Mass of All Ages and obedience to the Pope, as well as trust in the Acts of the Church. Therefore I defended the Traditional Mass against those who wished to forbid it, and I defended the Novus Ordo against those who—on highly questionable grounds—claimed it objectively leads to Protestantism. I also criticized the alteration of the Traditional Mass by temporal commissions as a revolutionary act contrary to tradition. But just as that process was revolutionary, so too would be the abolition of the Novus Ordo today.

The “New Mass,” once approved by the Church, became binding by virtue of Tradition. Why should it not be, when even the Society of St. Pius X, even the “Ottaviani Intervention,” could not identify in it anything directly contrary to the faith, relying instead on vague and interpretative categories such as “tends toward Protestantism” or “favors heresy”?

A human being conceived through rape or in vitro is not, by that fact, inferior in dignity. God does not exclude such a person from salvation; He restores grace through baptism on the same terms as for all others.

On Rejecting the Novus Ordo and Vatican II

In the arguments I have examined—those justifying the rejection of the Novus Ordo and Vatican II, and those defending Archbishop Lefebvre’s act of disobedience—I do not find sufficient reason.

If I do not find it, then even if my opponents were right in their complex explanations, I am obliged to remain with the status quo: trust in the Acts given by the Church. The principle of resolving doubts in favor of the accused requires this.

If I see an obviously evil practice, that does not entitle me to reject obedience in other matters where evil is only suspected. I must oppose only that practice of which I am absolutely certain.

Otherwise, if I were to reject the Novus Ordo because of widespread abuses in its celebration, I would have to reject the Church itself—for all Catholics, and even all priests, sin.

And if the allegedly “bad” Novus Ordo—its officially approved rite, its rubrics and norms—does not suffice to justify rejecting the Church that approved it, then by the same logic the abuses of the Novus Ordo do not suffice to justify rejecting it.

I also observe the dismissal—often as mere “fig leaves” or evasions—of passages in Dignitatis Humanae that allow the teaching on religious liberty to be understood simply as freedom from coercion in religious matters, which is precisely the traditional Catholic doctrine of non‑coercion in matters of faith. Dignitatis Humanae explicitly states that no previous teaching of the Church is revoked; it affirms that man still has obligations toward the One True Religion; it states that religious liberty is valid only “within due limits” and “provided that the just public order is not violated.”

***

The position of one camp is often reshaped by the initially false opinion that the opposing camp holds about it.
For example: when one side accuses the other of paying excessive attention to external forms, the latter—perhaps thinking that if the former are wrong, then whatever they condemn must be good—begins to emphasize those very forms in an exaggerated way. And vice versa. And once everything gets mixed together…

Thus, we often become responsible for the very errors we accuse others of.
This is not amusing; it is tragic.

And that is why one must be cautious in judgment.
And why one must examine even the criticisms directed at us. Examine them—and be ready, if necessary, to admit that the other side is right. But examine prudently, not by swallowing accusations whole. Prudently—that is, in prayer, assuming the good will of the other. And whenever possible, interpret the positions of all sides in a way that preserves their defensibility, while looking critically at unjustified criticism. Prudently—that is, seeking such a vantage point from which the arguments of the other side could be defended. If we cannot do so without violating honesty, then let us hold to our own position and seek a way for the other side to discover its truth on its own.

For we have reached a point where some people can simultaneously promote various movements and apparitions that contradict one another—even in essential matters. And thus, what is good in that cauldron of contradictions becomes discredited. (2012)

Preserving the revolutionary error while transplanting it into the realm of “traditional” ideals

People who convert to various forms of tradition, attempting to escape the snares of modernism, often retain the very same flawed method of idealized expectations that once—when confronted with reality—disillusioned them with modernism. And when they try to abandon it, they unconsciously carry over that method of idealized expectations into new, “traditionalist” associations: fairy‑tale images of princes and princesses, polished hagiographies, stylized visions of architecture, music, aristocratic fashion, neo‑pagan aesthetics, or folk culture—often derived from staged reconstructions and imaginations steeped in similarly idealizing descriptions.

In each of these mutually contradictory “traditions” there lurks an error, an exaggeration that tears apart traditions which in reality belong together, and makes their representatives even more hostile to one another. Thus, elitists grow disdainful of folk culture, adopting definitions of “the folk” from revolutionaries (Protestant, French, or communist) who falsely claimed to speak on its behalf. (The neo‑pagan construct, with its anti‑Catholic bias, has—incidentally—a similar political genealogy from a regime supposedly, though not necessarily, past.) Enthusiasts of “folk culture” adopt its hippie‑like, undisciplined, anti‑ascetical caricature.

And so all the shards of the crystal—each coated with the mud of diabolical revolutionism—drift apart. From idealization comes disappointment, and from disappointment—autonomization of parts which, like isolated words, lose meaning and turn against one another.

Here again we see the revolutionary character of Protestantism, manifesting in four maladies:

autonomism—the tearing of bonds,
anti‑formalism,
over‑linguistification (sola scriptura‑ism),
anti‑traditionalism.

Renovating a house wholesale—sorting everything into neat boxes—people install modern plumbing but throw out the stove, and without it the interior loses a higher, therapeutic order.

When I wrote this subsection around 2020, I did not expect that in 2021 and 2022 I would personally experience the destructive consequences of applying revolutionary methods to the restoration of tradition.

“Luther was an extraordinary figure: a captivating professor, an eloquent preacher, a prolific writer, a man of strong will and great labor. He inflicted many wounds upon the Church, but did not destroy it. As the founder of a new confession, he was esteemed and revered among his own.”
—Fr. Roman Archutowski, A Sketch of the History of the Catholic Church

Recently, while reviewing my polemics from recent years—documented in the article “Infolatria. Asceza informacyjna jako lekarstwo” on the blog misjakultura.blogspot.com—I recalled debates with fans of Szymon Hołownia among my former acquaintances and even friends, who attacked Krzysztof Bosak, calling him everything from a “little fart” to a “fascist with a swastika.”
I heard from them that “the fruits testify to his deeds,” and that Bosak “has done nothing.”
I heard from some of them—just as from anti‑religious “rationalists”—that I rely on “subjective theological opinions,” while they have “facts.”

I heard the same rhetoric about “fruits” and “facts” from entirely different circles—political or religious—who sincerely and in good faith considered themselves defenders of Tradition against the “Conciliar Church.” Both groups spoke of the virtues of their idols—whether the aforementioned politicians or the heroic prelate who supposedly, like Athanasius, opposed the pope and the “evil Council.”

Each of these environments was persuasive and very kind to me—so long as I did not criticize them.
And each regarded its political rivals as compromised “nutcases, lunatics, people with alleged clinical disorders, or refined manipulators.”
Such judgments were treated within their circles as self‑evident.
Their certainty was taken as proof of factuality.
And those who joined them in criticism were welcomed as “their own,” normal, trustworthy—able to feel unity and approval.

Just as Archutowski observed about Luther.

Despise or Praise!

Fr. Piotr Natanek, the Lefebvrists, politicians of the Confederation, “Catho‑left” politicians, the post‑conciliar Church and the Novus Ordo, critics of those politicians, libertarians, right‑wing publicists fighting Marxism and praising the Work Ethic, geopoliticians, hunters of “Russian agents,” and finally the various factions within the Lefebvrists themselves.
At various times I defended each of these people, groups, and acts in one matter, and criticized them in another.

And in every case there appeared people who seized upon my criticism, praised me for it (often excessively), and suggested that I should criticize this or that person even more; that if I praised someone for anything, it must be either unnecessary politeness, softness, even falsehood — or inconsistency. They would quote the Gospel: “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no; anything more comes from evil.”

No — that is not “concrete speech.”
It is the confusion of hope placed in the Perfect Truth — God — with hope placed in fallible human beings.
In other words:

idealizing, even deifying those we praise, or
demonizing those we criticize.

Both are false.

Human beings are fallible.
Seeing someone’s error in one matter does not mean one must cease praising them for other things.
My critics seem not to understand this. They wanted me to believe that libertarians, the Archbishop, Fr. Piotr, and the gentlemen Krzysztof, Maciej, Grzegorz, Szymon, Sławomir, Witold, Robert, Sebastian, Leszek, and others must be only criticized.
Others, conversely, insisted they must be only praised.

As a result, the very same people who had defended and exalted these figures without reservation would suddenly begin to criticize them just as sweepingly whenever those figures did something displeasing to them, or criticized someone more important to their own pantheon of idols.
Likewise, those who had praised me excessively could suddenly declare that what they had admired was now shallow and superficial — simply because I refused to join them in rash accusations and in the condemnations issued by their authorities.

What astonishes me is how many analogies I have seen across all these conflicts — both those mentioned here and those omitted out of respect for privacy — in which I often played the role of mediator.
In the end it always turned out that neither of the warring sides wanted a mediator unless he agreed to join in condemning both the one and the other.

Unfortunately, their conflicts will multiply.
Those who once criticized together will soon quarrel fiercely among themselves, dividing into ever smaller hostile factions.
Each will claim that they are the ones faithfully transmitting the truth, the teaching of Jesus, Tradition, the mission of the Archbishop — and that the others are distorting it.

The future tense is already obsolete.

A Common Enemy Unites

In many disputes, neither side tests “its own” by the sieve of positive principles; instead, they exert pressure to ensure that all stand together in criticism of the “common enemy.”
Criticism, after all, stands out in a world oversaturated with media stimuli and the competition of creators of “unnecessary needs.” It strikes our senses more forcefully and, despite its fundamentally emotional nature, is mistaken for fact — even by those who style themselves defenders of realism, Thomism, and objective Truth.
To yield to such criticism is to yield to the desire for the strong stimuli it provides. It is, in essence, a revolutionary tool — a renunciation of the traditional discipline that demands restraint from hasty, catchy judgments. It is merely a step or two behind in the process of civilizational decay, and all the more dangerous because it declares the opposite of what it is: “traditionalism.”

You are received the worst when you refuse to join the jokes, the accusations; when you ask,
“Are you sure you understood him correctly? Perhaps he did not slander you as you claim. Perhaps he meant something else? Perhaps your accusation is the first slander here? And if not — why are you offended when I ask for proof?”

There is no third option.
Either you trample him together with us, or you are his defender, a traitor, and you spit on us.

If you oppose both sides, it is very likely you will end up alone.
May you end up alone with God.
Be ready for that.

Let us not look at others. Let us look at ourselves, for we too — often unconsciously — succumb to this pressure from various circles with beautiful slogans on their banners, prayer on their lips, and language full of “tradition,” “courage,” or “love.”
We may fall into such simplifications unwittingly and in good faith, especially when we fail to distance ourselves from our own impressions and emotions — sometimes so delightful, at other times so painful.
We must guard ourselves so that they do not mislead us, and so that our misleadings do not wound others.
(2021)

These words apply — as I have learned in life — both to accusations against the Church and to disputes within the Catholic community, including among so‑called “traditionalists.”
They mirror the conflicts between dualistic political sects, within the tribal division of the world into two camps, where anyone who refuses to join in slandering or imprisoning “the other side” is immediately labeled as belonging to that other side.

In the American context, this is the division between Republicans and Democrats — with the “Republican” fashioned by the left in such a way as to be strong, convenient to overthrow, and only superficially right‑wing, while in reality representing merely the previous stage of the revolution.

The same applies to the division between PiS and PO in Poland.
(The analysis of specific political‑media disputes is omitted.)

Trust in Accusations — Against One’s Neighbor or the Church

And the labeling of those who refuse to trust accusations blindly — that they are blindly trusting the accused, that they are part of their “sect.”
It is the projection of one’s own blind, sectarian trust in accusations onto those who refuse to participate in it.
The thief shouts loudest: “Catch the thief!”

Thus, sectarianism and tribalism are hunted by those who spread the worst kind of it: negative tribalism — in which one blindly trusts the oracle‑like designation of who is “the bad one.”
It is sectarianism against someone.
Anyone who refuses to join such accusations is perversely blackmailed as a sectarian of the other side.
Mocking labels are created: “sectarian,” “symmetrist,” and so on.
All sides of the disputes do this.

How Skilled Manipulators Expose Their Own Methods by Projecting Them onto Others

One of the strongest human desires is the gratification of one’s own vanity — and the easiest path to that gratification is the humiliation of others.
Thus, not only does the thief shout loudest “Catch the thief!”, but the habitual manipulator and slanderer will be the first to accuse others of slander the moment they dare to defend themselves by pointing out his behavior.
He will excel at this, because he knows the mechanics of manipulation from his own practice.
He becomes the projector — projecting his own faults onto others.
And people will believe him more readily, because he is more trained in lying. He does it without hesitation, and therefore convincingly.

If you do not know how to defend the victims of chronic manipulators and expose their methods, find one single thing in which they slander others. Just one.
Accuse them — on the basis of that one matter — of manipulation.
And wait.

When they begin to defend themselves, it is very likely that they will accuse you, or their victim, with extraordinary precision and persuasiveness, of exactly what they themselves have been doing all along — things you perhaps could not even name.
In this way, they instinctively disarm and weaken the arguments of those who might otherwise point out their behavior.
Because they speak first.
And in persuading bystanders, the rule of first impression applies: whoever speaks first, wins.

Do not worry about this (I know — it’s difficult; I struggle with it too).
Prepare yourself calmly for the fact that such a slanderer will activate yet another defensive mechanism: gossip.
He will — supposedly out of concern for you — spread among your mutual acquaintances the suggestion that he is “worried about you,” that “something is wrong with you.”
He will prepare the ground with interpretations of your various behaviors meant to suggest disorders, narcissism, and so on.
When you defend someone else, he will divert attention by attacking you personally.
And when you respond, pointing out that he is doing to you what he previously did to others, he will openly accuse you of “focusing on yourself,” of being “hurt,” of “defending your ego,” and he will present this to others as confirmation of his earlier insinuations.

He may even privately admit to you that he lied about you in his public accusations — only to later publicly accuse you of lying about him in precisely the way he confessed.
The absurdity of such perversity will anger and disorient you — because it is absurd — and he will use your emotional reaction, which he himself provoked, as “proof” of his accusations.
When you try to return to defending the other person, he will not allow it; he will drown it out with continuous attacks on you, only to later accuse you of “focusing on yourself.”

**Another Example of Such Projection:

Negative Sectarians Are the First to Hunt for Positive Sectarianism**

A classic manipulative tactic:
to accuse an entire category of people of “sectarianism,” thereby avoiding confrontation with the worst kind of sectarianism — negative sectarianism:
the Anti‑Tuskists, Anti‑Kaczyńskians, Anti‑Braunists, Anti‑Korwinists, Anti‑Bosakists, Anti‑Mentzenists.

Negative sectarians (if they were only positive sectarians, it would be half the trouble) avoid addressing their own insinuations and accusations, which violate the Eighth Commandment.
All those little suggestive phrases — “X has slippery hands,” without any evidence or specifics — are themselves slippery.
Projective.
Their authors, to divert attention from this, suggest — like other Anti‑X groups — that those who defend against such filthy PR tactics are “the X sect.”

But notice:
these defenders often criticize X themselves, only honestly and with arguments.

Negative sectarians (anti‑conciliar, anti‑traditionalist, anti‑Kaczyński, anti‑Tusk, anti‑Braun, anti‑Mentzen, anti‑“conspiracy theorist,” anti‑“nutcase” — I have experienced this from all sides) share one trait despite devouring one another:
they insinuate positive sectarianism in others, diverting attention from their own, and from the fact that they never prove their insinuations or slanders.

They accuse others of “seeing things that aren’t there,” while they themselves see “conspiracy” where none exists.
They demand that others believe them as if they were dogmas, like the guru of a sect.
They blackmail with mocking, emotional suggestions that their opponents are “blindly devoted” to whoever they happen to be defending.

No.
The defender does not have to prove anything.
The accuser does.

Blinded by the Speck of Love? First Remove the Beam from Your Own Eye

I once heard the accusation that I was “blindly defending” a certain politician (Grzegorz Braun).
A perverse accusation — for at that very moment I was in the midst of an unresolved conflict with him and with his circle.
(I did not speak of it publicly, because I was still trying to reach him personally, without intermediaries, to verify what he actually knew about the matter and how he viewed it.)

The same pattern repeated itself when some accused me of being blinded by the theses of a certain publicist, or earlier by Fr. Natanek — while others accused me of slandering them.

Meanwhile, despite being in conflict with these people, I tried to defend them wherever I saw that someone was leveling false accusations — manipulative charges that diverted attention from their real faults.
This diversion of attention is crucial.

Once the accuser was a right‑wing publicist; another time, those who had applauded me for criticizing him urged me to stop praising him in areas where I agreed with him.
They suggested that I was looking for positives merely “for symmetry” or out of “diplomacy.”
Others criticized him as well, yet simultaneously shared his greatest error: the dishonest, sweeping attacks on libertarians.

At other times people considered it “inconsistent” that I defended Fr. Natanek in one matter and criticized him in another.
They demanded that I either criticize him wholesale or praise him wholesale.

The same happened with the Lefebvrists and their critics.
Some urged me to stop defending them, insisting that Archbishop Lefebvre was solely to blame for everything.
Others, conversely, demanded that the Archbishop be praised in all things and that no word of disagreement be spoken.

Likewise with a certain politician: some wanted me to join the chorus of praise; others wanted me to completely discredit him as a “Russian agent” or a representative of the “psychiatric option.”
And as it happened, these disputes divided the community of the faithful attached to the Society itself.

For a time I tried to reconcile the quarrelling parties, but the mission overwhelmed and exhausted me.
I occupied myself with what was not mine to do, instead of fighting my own sins and fulfilling my duties with peace.

All sides of these conflicts speak of reason — yet in the end they treat as “reason” and “facts” the positions to which their strongest emotions incline them.
Most often emotions clustered around a common enemy.

The Society’s community (just like earlier the charismatics, the libertine left, or the leftists calling themselves Catholics) had been extremely kind to me.
I had never experienced any personal harm from them; on the contrary, I received much help.
Until I protested against the accusations they were making against others and stated that I had no sufficient grounds to criticize together with them.

I could not accept that the same community, so kind to me, so easily accused others without responsible evidence — treating as obvious the assumptions that placed others in a very bad light.
If I had nodded along or remained silent while such accusations were spoken in my presence, I would have incurred serious guilt, for I saw no basis for them.

Remaining silent in the face of such accusations would have violated the principle of St. Maximilian Kolbe (which these circles themselves often quoted):

“I will not leave:

any evil without repairing it (destroying it),
and
any good that I could do, increase, or contribute to in any way.”

I therefore had the duty to protest.

The Rational Grounding of Tradition and the Catholic Faith

The rational grounding of Tradition and the Catholic Faith — combined with the observation of the limitations of my human mind — is precisely what I call katologi(k)a:
the recognition of the need, in light of our limitations and frailty, for metanoia, for self‑denial, for distrust of one’s own impressions and appearances, and for examination.

I would have contradicted all of this had I yielded to the initially tempting and pleasant suggestions of the community to adopt the Society’s position.
I would have succumbed to the temptation of remaining in the comfort zone created by a group of people very kind to me, and at the same time resourceful, attractive, and self‑confident.

Of course, these qualities are good and desirable in themselves.
But in this case they muffled a serious dishonesty in the accusations directed at the Acts of the Church and at other people — something I will attempt to demonstrate below.

A Good Theory of Evil, but a Bad Diagnosis of Evil in Reality

“Listen to their teaching, but do not imitate their deeds.”

The error of the suspicious‑minded milieus does not lie in quoting the Church’s teaching or the wise doctrines of secular authorities — with these I usually agree — but in claiming that the attitudes of other people, or the Acts of the Church, contradict that teaching.
These accusations arise from an equally unwarranted definition of the situation.

I have shown many times to such accusers that the attitudes of the accused are not contradictory — and they responded as if I were denying the Church’s teaching.
This is an evasion on their part, a distortion of my position, and untrue.
I assume they do it unconsciously and without ill will.

Some (and I immediately stress that I do not identify this stance with any particular fraternity or faction — such attitudes tear apart various associations, communities, and above all persons) are distressed by contemporary youth, by the LGBT‑terror, and believe they are “returning to tradition,” to “normal times,” while in fact they take for “normality” the previous stage of the revolution: yes, a division into male and female patterns, but in a dissolute version.
They consider “feminine” the tight or short trousers, dresses, and seductive, immodest behaviours; and “masculine” the non‑tight ones.
They consider jazz and rock “normal music,” though both promote — in name and lifestyle — the same dissolution.

Others condemn immodest clothing, attend the Traditional Latin Mass, yet listen to revolutionary, aggressive rock music (because it has superficial medieval references, is “strong,” “difficult,” “sophisticated”).

Still others return to traditional customs, yet insist on methodically breaking the Eighth Commandment — which they deny in their declarations, but whose violation they treat as a sign of courage.
They throw the baby out with the bathwater and, like Protestants deciding for themselves how to interpret Tradition, adopt a posture of programmatic distrust toward the “Conciliar Church.”
But that too is an element of the revolution — I would say a much deeper one than moral laxity.
[2022]

[Note — a reflection on a thought heard from someone]

The opinions, goods, and services propagated by the elite harm the lower classes.
For the upper classes they are merely one option among many; for the lower, an addiction.
They do not harm the upper; they destroy the lower.
The “upper” can easily detach from them and change them.
[2021]

**Who Must Explain Themselves?

The One Accused — or the One Imputing?**

Various “experts from the screen” respond to doubts about “5G” (or the war in Ukraine, vaccines, lockdowns) in a clever way:
they do not answer what people actually ask, but put into the mouths of the doubters claims they never made.
They do not refute the real objections; they modify them into something easy to ridicule.
They construct a straw man — and then triumphantly knock him down, pretending they have refuted the opponent’s actual position.

If someone has doubts about “the towers,” asks for clarification, or does not want them installed because they do not know whether they might harm health, the person is imputed to be claiming that the towers definitely have harmful effects.
At least such an implication is smuggled into the response:
they show that “there is no proof of harm.”
But such proof need not exist.
Even if someone, in a defensive reflex or through the Barabbas effect, adopts the straw‑man position, the burden of proof still lies on the one who wants to impose the tower on others.
He is the one invading their space, for they are within its range of influence.

In reality, the tower might even have beneficial, health‑promoting effects.
That is not the point.
The point is that since it does exert some influence, and since we do not know what we do not know about that influence, we cannot exclude harmful effects.

Traditional caution toward novelties serves precisely to protect us from the consequences of our partial knowledge — from consequences we cannot foresee because we do not grasp the homeostatic balances of nature.
Similar, legitimate concerns underlie opposition to GMOs and genetic modification of humans.
For the same reasons the Church warned, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, against the destructive effects of such massive interference with nature.

Unfortunately, people often fall into the straw‑man trap and adopt positions they did not originally hold — simply because someone imputed them in the course of polemics.

Physicists remind us that a tiny change in the laws of physics would cause the world to cease to exist.
We know that a comma, a single letter, or even a shift in intonation can change the meaning of a sentence — turning praise into insult.
How much more painful, then, may be the unforeseen consequences of our interference with nature, given our cognitive limitations.

Thus the Church warned against unrestrained industrial development, foreseeing that it might destroy the healthy state of nature necessary for human life.
The paradox is that now the fiercest ecological activists are those most hostile to the Church — often accusing it of an “oppressive attitude toward nature.”
Their historical memory is short.

The same applies to altering sacred rites or norms such as the uncovered face — according to the whims of contemporary commissions.
Here we tamper with something that works because it is organic, because God created it so.
We do not fully understand how it works — and therefore we do not know whether rearranging limbs, cutting down forests in a short time, draining mineral deposits, moving altars, crosses, offertories, gestures, will not kill this natural, God‑willed functioning, even if the supernatural action — the validity of the Sacrament — remains.

We do not know — so let us not tamper.
Let us not put ourselves in God’s place.
Let us not “make” the Mass, not “make” the human being, not rearrange species, genes, deposits, and planets according to our whims.
Let us not build the Tower of Babel.

We must remember that modernism — anti‑traditionalism — has at least two foundations:

the individual’s own whim, and
the decrees and decisions of contemporary authorities and commissions.
The first resembles postmodernism; the second, modernism.
Both share the same posture.
Often they reinforce one another.
[2020]

Certainty and Uncertainty. When Yes, and When No?

“My son, do not criticize (do not grumble, do not complain), for this leads to slander. Do not be too sure of yourself, nor unkind, for from this arises calumny.”
— Didache, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles

We are meant to be confident when we proclaim and apply the truths of the faith and the general principles.
Such confidence characterized healthy societies — including Catholic ones — for centuries.
But when doubt in these principles and their dilution began to corrode our world, a reaction emerged which, as so often happens, seeing the evil, began to interpret the good through its distorted lens.
And so these reactionaries began to speak with the same — or even greater — certainty regarding particular cases as they rightly should regarding principles.

Yet the fact that one ought to be certain about the truths of the faith and general principles does not mean one ought to be certain in one’s opinions that someone is violating them.
Some have made precisely this leap.

They focused on self‑confidence — on the ease of uttering judgments and speculative opinions — and transferred it, as if it were a mark of Catholic virtue, into the evaluation of concrete cases.
Evidence of this process is not only the unwarranted ease with which they declare someone a modernist, traitor, collaborator, “Russian agent,” “Banderite,” and so on.
It is also the verbal insistence that this is how one must judge — and that anyone who does otherwise is unreliable, cowardly, a traitor.

They identify their posture — accompanied by traditional Catholic declarations — as if their decisiveness in issuing such multi‑layered judgments were itself proof that they are right.

But it cannot be proof.
For similar “certainty,” similar “yes‑yes, no‑no” speech, characterizes many atheists, Muslims, and representatives of all sorts of worldviews and religions.
Among them are many who utter mutually contradictory claims with equal confidence.

Even when such people, after having their error pointed out, admit that this is not how things should be, a large portion of them — not in declarations but in practice — continue to trust those who speak with such certainty, rather than those who actually argue.

It is easy to pronounce judgments, to utter ready‑made formulas.
It is easy to understand and accept them.
Analysis, however — which requires testing various possibilities and thus rejecting some, including many toward which we were inclined — hurts.
Yes. Thinking hurts.
It is effort, and effort is unpleasant.
Therefore the speech and posture of someone who undertakes this effort, who shows its necessary paths, are unpleasant to listen to.
Most listeners will instinctively choose the set of ready‑made, repeated, worn‑out theses, seasoned with a hint of mockery, derision, or positive emotion: concern, indignation, righteous anger.

A difficult message (and sometimes the moral weight of the matter requires difficulty — for example, when dealing with serious accusations against a person or against the Acts of the Church) is like a seed choked by the weeds of easier judgments, accusations, and theses that create the impression of argumentation.
They are spoken confidently precisely because they are mere assertions.
Meanwhile, genuine analysis is spoken hesitantly, with nuance, and appears weaker precisely because it is honest — because it does not take at face value every opinion uttered by someone who has already gained trust, especially if that someone is accusing.

They jump from assertion to assertion — the appearance of proof — dismissing reasoning, drowning out the opponent’s arguments.
They have a whole set of such assertions:
If not “the Council is bad,” then “the post‑conciliar Church is bad.”
If one demonstrates the weakness of this assumption, they leap — without addressing the argument — to another confident assertion.
Seemingly different, yet based on the very premise already shown to be false (just like their certainty and simplicity of speech).

They ignore all demonstrated errors and stubbornly build a chain of argumentation on confidently uttered but naked assertions — naked, and often already refuted by the opponent.
But they treat these refutations as if they never occurred (and they can do so because the audience, seeing the “complexity,” treats them as difficult, and therefore nonexistent and untrustworthy).
Thus they calmly and decisively build their narrative on these theses.

The opponent cannot afford such confidence, because he is constantly being thrown new theses and tries honestly to address them.
When he addresses one, another is thrown.
One side throws assertions; the other exhausts itself analyzing them.
And of course the one who exhausts himself appears worse — because he exhausts the audience as well, demands effort from them — while the other, confident and carefree, drowning out the opponent’s effort, triumphs and persuades the public.

Worse still when both sides in a conflict rely on such ready‑made theses and toss them back and forth without real engagement.

“It is not for us to reject the Council,” says one side.
The other responds with examples of a “heretical pope,” Pachamama, the kissing of the Qur’an, Assisi, Amoris Laetitia.
And these are supposed to be “irrefutable proofs.”
No — they are slogans that completely ignore the issue the opponent was addressing.

One may and must be confident and free in expressing opinions when proclaiming the truths of the faith.
But some treat this confidence as a virtue in itself — in every case — and its absence as a vice in every case.

When proclaiming the truths of the faith, one need not argue (though one sometimes may); in matters of faith one must stir the emotions and build upon them.
But when one uses these truths and principles to accuse someone, then such confidence can become a vice — as Our Lord Jesus Christ taught when, in seemingly contradictory admonitions, He said:
“Judge not,”
and
“Whoever says to his brother…”

Opinionism. “I have the right to say he is this or that, because it’s my opinion and impression. And you have no right to forbid me.”

We often hear this sentence when we admonish someone for putting another person in a bad light — whether publicly or in a smaller circle.
Journalists go even further: “I have the right, even the duty, to speculate, to make conjectures, to publicly cast suspicions about certain people. That’s my job.”
No. Journalism, like politics, is bound by the same moral laws as every human being.
If someone believes that violating them is a permissible part of their “duty,” then such journalism is, in itself, evil.

We may freely express opinions that do not harm anyone’s good reputation — whether a farmer, banker, or politician.
But when opinions are critical, when they place someone in a negative light, the mere fact that we “have such an impression” does not entitle us to voice them, because of the harmful consequences for our neighbor’s good name.
If the opinion is damaging, we must verify it thoroughly and prove it.
For here we can easily be mistaken.

And demanding that the accused explain himself is a violation of the fundamental principle of the presumption of innocence.
It leads to the absurd that is the very essence of gossip:
anyone’s reputation could be destroyed on the basis of someone else’s impression.
People will believe the gossip.
But when the slandered person tries to defend himself, no one will listen.
In PUBLIC OPINION he will already have been shot down.

All the more easily if he belongs to a group — for example, politicians — that does not enjoy public sympathy.

Some say that politicians should be grilled, watched closely — by which they mean that one may insinuate, suspect, and apply a presumption of guilt.
No.
Not even toward the devil is this allowed — for then we focus on his imagined faults and fail to notice the real ones.
In this way a real or symbolic “devil” may deliberately create groups that discredit the truth.

Some are surprised when they are accused of dragging out someone’s faults and publicly analyzing them.
They say: “But someone else analyzed him too. He can, and I can’t?”

The issue is not whether one may criticize, but what one criticizes — what one uses as grounds for publicly placing a neighbor in a bad light.

Such criticism becomes necessary only when one must defend someone against concrete evil:
serious deception, slander, theft, manipulation.
And even then, we must criticize only the specific evil.
Allowing ourselves to mock, to drag out unrelated faults, to make jokes at someone’s expense — that is an unjust overreach beyond necessary criticism.

In response, you may hear the accusation that you are imposing “excessive moral standards.”
This is a tactic: once someone is labeled a “moralizer,” he can be discredited by pointing out various unrelated flaws and presented as an example of inconsistency and hypocrisy.

Many of us have been in situations where others tried to drag us into mockery and a witch‑hunt against people with whom we disagreed in some matters.

Unfortunately, the easiest way to destroy a person is not by exposing his real faults — those that truly harm others — but by exploiting secondary flaws: sometimes real, sometimes invented, sometimes grotesquely exaggerated.

This is how the mediocracy called democracy works — where the opinion of the majority rules.
And that majority opinion is shaped by the media.
Shaped all the more the deeper people are immersed in those media.

The crowd usually follows an averaged, shallow, emotional, mocking, derisive opinion — because it stimulates emotions better and chokes, like a weed, the seed of a sober judgment, which is harder to accept.
Therefore the use of this emotional weapon is justified only very rarely — and only when we defend others against something immoral, shameful, harmful.

The excuse “I have such an opinion and I can express it” is itself a symptom of media‑induced illness.
Those who say this forget that gossip and slander are almost always opinions.
An opinion can therefore be evil.
The mere possession of an opinion does not entitle one to express it freely.
That opinion, I repeat, may be evil.

Sometimes a subtly mocking opinion is worse than an aggressive one.
For the aggressive one people notice immediately.
But small jabs, spread over time, little sneers — people love them — and step by step they kill a person’s good name.

Example:
Merely saying “these are facts” without proof is not, in itself, grounds for undermining someone’s reputation.
It becomes harmful only if someone uses “these are facts” to slander the victim.
If someone, however, belongs to a minority and defends another wronged minority, and in the heat of the moment exaggerates — he should be corrected, but with respect and without mockery.

And if he appears “ridiculous” in public opinion, this does not necessarily testify about him — but about that public “opinion,” which has a distorted hierarchy of judgments.

This process occurred in various right‑wing circles to the right of the ruling party in 2022 — in social and political organizations, and successively in various media.

I have heard similar accusations whenever someone began pulling out private text messages, private conversations, fragments torn from context — claiming that there was something “terrible” hidden there: self‑contradiction, coercion, resentment.
Likewise when someone announces that he “knows something awful,” that he “has seen something,” but will reveal it later.
And before he reveals anything, everyone already “knows” that it must be something terrible.
Later he forgets to reveal it at all — but the prejudice remains.
People never learned anything, yet behave as if they had.

This is why, if one says “A,” one must say “B.”
Instead of announcing that something will be revealed, one must either reveal it immediately — or remain silent.
And one must reveal it only when necessary to warn others, not to build that eristic, media‑style tension.
For that tension is a form that replaces and imitates content.
And as such, it misleads.

What is fascinating is that those to whom I once pointed out this very fault were later attacked in the same way by others — and when I defended them, I heard in turn that I had said something different privately than publicly.
And the one who accused me of this did something even worse than the person I had originally corrected:
he publicly accused me of something I had allegedly said in private.
The public, of course, has no way to verify this — and even if they do not fully believe it, a permanent suspicion settles in.

This is precisely why I oppose dragging private conversations into public disputes.
And this is why I did not want to speak publicly about the matter he accused me of — because it concerned non‑public issues, involving concrete people who had no obligation to have their affairs exposed.
It involved nuances that a broad audience could not possibly grasp; none of the people involved had full knowledge of the situation.
Thus the public, learning about it second‑hand, could easily form false opinions and unjust accusations against those individuals.

So I heard that I was “justifying a politician’s scoundrel‑like behavior” in one place (in a private conversation?) and “denying it” in another (publicly).
But such an accusation is an evasion and a circular fallacy — for the very point in dispute is whether the behavior in question is scoundrel‑like or not.
I hold that it is not; my opponent holds that it is.
But he accuses me of hypocrisy while ignoring the fact that neither then nor now did I consider that behavior to be scoundrel‑like in the way he does.
He imputes to me a view I do not hold — projecting onto me his own interpretation — and then accuses me of falsehood on the basis of that projection.

Straining the Gnat and Swallowing the Camel — and Warning Against the Inverse of the Current Problem

People consider minor quirks completely discrediting, trust‑destroying — yet fail to notice the eloquent rudeness, the polished cruelty, the subtle manipulations, the trampling of another human being, the shredding of his good name on the basis of trivialities, such as mistakes made while defending someone.
They will not see the faults of those whose decisions contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands — but they will point out “aggression” or “errors” in those who warned against it, drive them to public lynching and frenzy, and then reproach them for that very frenzy.
They will stab you in the back with a pin, and then publicly humiliate and discredit you as a “screaming madman.”
They will mislead you — and later accuse you of lying when you repeat, in trust, what you heard from them.

The Substitute Devil — Putin, Hitler, Tusk, Kaczyński, etc.

This reliance on opinion and impression is often combined with the method of the social substitute devil.
For example, during Russia’s attack on Ukraine, anyone presenting a picture of the situation different from the most popular one was immediately reduced to the role of a “Russian troll,” a “spreader of Putin’s narrative.”

The only justification offered is:
“because it resembles Putin’s narrative,”
“because that’s what I think,”
“that’s how it seems to me,”
“it’s obvious.”
And this is supposed to be enough to throw a person into the garbage bin of public discourse.

It is like saying someone supported Hitler because — like Hitler — he likes animals.

I will later present a fuller explanation of why this is insufficient.
Although… I suspect that for such people a short, ironic mirror might speak more effectively than honest argumentation:
“Well, I have the impression and the opinion that you are a Russian agent/thief/murderer/idiot/discredited crank/pedophile. I’m allowed to say that. It’s my opinion. If you disagree, feel free to defend yourself…”

A Terroristically Imposed False Alternative

This happens within a false alternative imposed on society almost terroristically:
Putin — the devil
USA/NATO — the only righteous option.
In Russia the same mechanism operates, only with reversed values.

Such labeling leads people to accuse someone of “supporting Putin’s narrative” precisely when that person is fighting that narrative — but also sees that Putin’s narrative is the mirror image of the NATO or American narrative.

Let me illustrate this with an event.
One acquaintance, after my comment essentially calling for us not to let ourselves be turned against Ukrainians, replied:
“Well then let’s immediately surrender to Putin’s sphere of influence.”

Leaving aside the heated discussion that followed, I later quoted to him the words of a pro‑Putin figure — which perfectly mirrored his accusation:

“He should surrender to the Poles immediately, instead of conducting pro‑European talks that undermine the authority of the Russian army and the entire state.”
— Ramzan Kadyrov, commenting on a Russian general https://dorzeczy.pl/swiat/402979/kadyrow-krytykuje-rosyjskiego-generala-za-slowa-o-polsce.html

The point was simple:
the same sentence can be used by both sides to accuse anyone who refuses to think in binaries.

Both sides — as in the superficial conflicts of political duopolies (the PO–PiS type, or “traditionalists vs. modernists”) and other false alternatives — attack those who point out their shared error.
The very same position is accused in Russia of supporting Western propaganda, and in the West of supporting Putin’s.
Both propagandas rest on half‑truths.
Both claim they “do not want war,” and both claim that what they are doing is “necessary.”
And each side accuses anyone who exposes the faults of both of them of representing the other side — because he happens to repeat the fragment in which that propaganda is actually right, while simultaneously showing that its conclusions are wrong.

This is crude cherry‑picking and hypocrisy — ignoring the fact that those who accuse others also say many of the same things that Putin says.

Just as during the pandemic (and let us note: Putin, like “the West,” imposed sanitary coercion; abortion up to 12 weeks is fully legal), so in the case of the war in Ukraine we are dealing with the most aggressive and primitive forms of social censorship — by stirring up the darkest emotions through mockery, threats, ridicule, and association with the “substitute devil of the moment”: Hitler, Putin, “anti‑vaxxers,” “conspiracy nuts,” “flat‑earthers.”

As a result, people believe someone is “discredited” simply because he voices theses that the media and public discourse — without any proof (people prefer bare assertions; evidence requires effort) — have labeled as “Putin’s narrative.”

This method is effectively used by authorities and political parties, who accuse each other of “Putinism.”
It is enough to send out a message:
Those who doubt the necessity of military support, those who call for negotiations, those who point out negative vaccine cases or the consequences of lockdowns and masks — repeat Russia’s narrative spread by Kremlin agents of influence.

That is enough.
Such a message, on the emotional level, discredits an entire group of people.
No arguments are needed.
People will classify the message — before any reasoning — as “crankery,” “Putin propaganda,” which cuts off rational judgment.
If they do reason, it will only be to justify the prejudice they have already accepted.

This naturally produces a reaction — what I call the Barabbas effect:
in response, a group appears which, seeing the injustice of such methods, defensively begins to praise Putin and repeat his narrative — this time genuinely.

We do not know whether ostentatious participation in the war will protect us more than it will endanger us.
Therefore it should be abandoned, and every effort should be made to push governments toward negotiations — as soon as possible.
Stubborn avoidance of talks only contributes to greater tragedies for Ukrainians and for residents of other war‑affected regions, and to larger zones of destruction.

Someone will say: “Do you believe Putin wouldn’t have attacked then?”
I answer as in many analogous cases:
Don’t turn the argument upside down.
You are the one asserting a single, inevitable outcome — so you must prove it.
You believe, as in a dogma, that Putin “would have attacked anyway.”
I do not know — and none of us knows — and that is precisely why there was an obligation to sit down and talk, to implement the Minsk agreements, even to create autonomous Luhansk and Donetsk republics.
Anything to end the tragedy of people — the mutual hostility between Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians who were born in Ukraine, who did not come from anywhere else, and who for many years have been subject to discrimination that spills over into our own society, as if they were responsible for the policies of their governments.

And just as it is hard to blame Ukrainians or Poles for repeating the legends of Bandera or Piłsudski, so it is hard to blame Russians for believing the propaganda of their own country.
Each of these groups lives in its own bubble, and the only thing one can do is to break those bubbles — not inflame them further with emotional hostility.

All these statist traditions are the sick remnants of an earlier stage of the revolution — the stage that placed the state in the position of religion, as something on whose altar one may sacrifice human lives without asking them.

Human life cannot be held hostage to this or that concept of borders or spheres of influence — whether of Russia, Ukraine, NATO, or the USA.

Contrary to moral blackmail and aggressive pro‑war propaganda, people do not know whether it is “better” to be under Russian or NATO influence.
People fear one or the other imperial center only under the pressure of intense, aggressive indoctrination.

How do we know that arming Ukraine, and the media’s constant reinforcement of a narrative reducing Russians to subhuman status, is not the work of a firefighter‑arsonist — someone who creates the very problem he later heroically “extinguishes”?

And those whom he calls to help him extinguish it — promising them heroism, proclaiming that they will “save Europe from the fire,” that they have such a duty — do they not become his victims, and at the same time his unwitting arsonists?

This is the same method of faits accomplis and self‑fulfilling prophecies that we saw during the COVID era.

To justify a war, one must first create in people a sense of terrible danger — and then dehumanize the enemy.
And unfortunately we are witnessing intense dehumanization of Russians, just as we witnessed the dehumanization of “anti‑vaxxers,” opponents of restrictions, and victims of pandemiopsychosis (pandemic hysteria).

The moment you say anything contradicting the dominant narrative, they will destroy you with a simple trick: they will indignantly proclaim that your theses are “Russian propaganda” deliberately spread by agents in the media.
Of course, they will not prove it — but with a single bare assertion, on the emotional level, they drown out your arguments.
They ignore the fact that every propaganda uses elements of truth.
Therefore, even if certain theses are indeed voiced by agents, those agents may be using true theses — and there will be people who support those supposed “agents” precisely because of those true theses, since they lack sufficient data to accuse anyone of being an agent.

It is intellectually dishonest to reject certain claims merely because Americans or Russians say something similar.
It may turn out that they say something similar but mean something different.
And it may also be that what Americans say about the Russian authorities, and what Russians say about “the West,” is in large part true.
I am not deciding here what is true.
I am only showing why such “official alerts” warning against statements “characteristic of Russian narratives” are manipulative.

One must keep reminding that this form of assistance — both social and military — continuously harms both Poles and Ukrainians.
It fuels animosities, breeds frustration among those who have paid taxes all their lives yet cannot count on simple benefits; it breeds frustration among Ukrainians who have worked in Poland for years, pay taxes, yet receive no such help.
It is a deeply harmful process of setting Ukrainians against Ukrainians, and Ukrainians against Poles.
This Ukrainization of Poland harms Ukrainians and Poles alike.
Politicians fight — and innocent people suffer.
They destroyed Ukraine’s country, lured Ukrainians with promises of a quick victory.

Meanwhile, the duty of a government is to protect the lives of its citizens — even at the cost of changing borders.
And many citizens of eastern Ukraine wanted cooperation with Russia, wanted their own independent republics.
It was Ukraine that came to them — by the decision of “great minds” from distant countries.

Putin’s attack on Ukraine was a great evil — a crime foolishly justified as “defense against Ukrainian Nazis” or “defense against America.”
Putin knew perfectly well that aside from nationalists and authorities, it would be ordinary people who would suffer.
The Ukrainian authorities knew it too — which is why they had the duty to agree to the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics.
Had Putin then attacked the rest of Ukraine, they could have said they did what they could.
But no — they insisted on something that effectively made innocent people hostages of their political concepts of borders.

Borders are not a sacred thing to be defended at the cost of human lives — especially the lives of people who do not even fully know whether Putin or the USA is right, and who merely repeat whichever propaganda reaches their televisions and homes.
This sick cult of ideological political concepts — of Putin, of the USA, of the Ukrainian authorities — destroyed Ukraine, ruined entire villages and cities, deprived people of their life’s work.
And this has been happening for over eight years, not merely since last year as most people think.

It truly is not “our war.”
Nor is it, contrary to appearances, the war of all Ukrainians.
It is the war of politicians who made people hostages of their ideas — after having indoctrinated many of them through the media.

We will defend Ukraine by pressuring for negotiations with Russia — even if that means a referendum and the creation of independent republics.

The Hypocrisy of Pro‑War Propaganda

Propagandists accuse those who say “this is not our war” or “Stop the war” of supposedly supporting Putin or hating Ukrainians.
Yet these slogans may simply express the view that arming Ukraine only intensifies the tragedy of Ukrainians and others suffering from a war that is not their war, but the war of a small group of politicians.
Those who start wars do not suffer nearly as much.
Those who suffer unjustly are the ones who do not even know what the war is about — those who will be forcibly thrown onto the front, whose homes will be hit by bombs and shrapnel from rockets not aimed at them but at military targets.

The “defenders of Ukraine” thus defend not Ukrainians but their own political concepts.
Yes — this applies also to Putin, who cynically calls himself the “defender of Ukrainians against Nazis.”
He knows perfectly well that even if he eradicates “Nazism,” he will kill innocent people in the process — the very people he claims to defend.

Putin could bomb heating plants, causing ordinary people to freeze — yet he did not cut off the flow of Western weapons, nor did he attack his supposed main enemy, Biden; he allowed him to appear freely in Kyiv.
What does that tell us?
Launching rockets at those same distances was not a problem for Russia.

The same applies to the Ukrainian authorities, who — instead of sitting down to talks to protect their people — refused negotiations.
Meanwhile, Putin’s initial demands were largely theoretically reasonable and did not include territorial claims.
Therefore, negotiations were necessary.
Had Putin broken the agreements, then one could defend oneself.
But the duty was at least to try to talk — to protect human life, which is more important than ideological and political concepts of state borders.

And at any moment in this war, negotiations are still possible.
What is needed is the will.

The Perverse Accusation of “Arrogance”

It is perversely claimed that those who oppose arming Ukraine, who say “this is not our war,” are “lecturing about war” and “ignoring experts.”
In reality, it is the opposite.
Their position is precisely the cautious one — cautious in drawing grave conclusions.

If we do not know how negotiations would end, we have no moral right to assume that Putin “would attack anyway.”
We have the duty to talk and to do everything possible to protect people from murderous war.
Sooner or later, negotiations will happen anyway.
Better sooner — so that fewer people die, and so that the enemy does not increase his demands, which at the beginning were not territorial.

Precisely because I do not know, I have no right to say “we must arm Ukraine, otherwise Putin will attack us.”
There is a real possibility that by arming Ukraine we not only bring an attack upon ourselves, but also harm Ukrainians by prolonging the war and bringing death to more innocent people.

The status quo is the absence of war.
That is the starting point.

Who started it?
I often encounter situations in which one side of a dispute appears convincing, sounds wise, almost crystalline — yet its accusations, dressed up as “defense,” consist merely of a persuasive‑sounding chain of repeatedly asserted bare claims.
That is why I keep warning: always ask Why? Where is the proof? Does it follow — or does it not? From what does it follow? WHO STARTED IT?
Is the situation truly as the person presents it, as an “obvious fact”?
Or is that “fact” merely an opinion — one the accused side explicitly rejects?
And if so, are we not dealing with a circular argument?

Indeed, such careful justifications may be tedious, exhausting, and far less “convincing” than flashy accusations — naked as the emperor in his “new clothes.”
But the burden of proof lies on the accuser.
Sometimes we think the accuser’s statements are arguments.
In reality, instead of arguments, he inserts yet more bare assertions, moralizing slogans, sweeping admonitions — things that may stir us emotionally, may even “devastate” the person targeted, but which are in fact evasions.
They drown out the other side’s reasoning and the obligation to address it.

A discussion with such a stance never ends.
The accused struggles to argue (though he does not have to — the burden is not his), and in response receives an evasion: a new accusation unrelated to the painstaking explanations, or a pseudo‑response that ignores them entirely.
Solid reasoning is dismissed with sneers: madness, obsession, verbal acrobatics, “philosophizing,” rambling essays.
And such labels are meant to excuse the speaker from engaging with the content.
Their authors are often nitpicked, portrayed as graphomaniacs, narcissists, evasive sophists, immature, cowardly — so that the reader absorbs the negative emotions attached to them and fails to notice that they did present arguments.

This is not honest debate.
These are old tricks — manipulations, emotional appeals — profoundly base, especially when used against those who themselves avoid such methods.
We must beware of them.
Expose manipulation immediately.
Do not allow such easy killing with words.

And ask: who set this avalanche in motion — this avalanche that ends in denying even faith in the Church?
Who started it?

Sufficient reason — or rather, the lack of it

The presence or absence of sufficient reason is the key to understanding several errors common throughout the Church and beyond, in countless disputes between people and groups.
It is a mistake committed by both sides of many conflicts.
It does not distinguish one “Fraternity” from another.

“As God says to the prophet Jonah about the Ninevites, we do not know our right hand from our left (Jon 4:11), for at every step, due to the weakness of our understanding, we take evil for good and good for evil.”
— St. John of the Cross

“Our head has limits. It fits into a cap or a hat.”
— St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe

The saints remind us — echoing Scripture — of the frailty of our cognition, and of our susceptibility to emotionally easy accusations (the Devil’s specialty, and his temptation to us).
Through this weakness we may err in judging our neighbor.
Hence the importance of the Eighth Commandment, which commands restraint from rash judgment.

And in many complex matters dependent on decisions of the Church — a Church under the special protection of the Holy Spirit — we must even refrain from such investigations altogether.
We must offer up our own opinion as a sacrifice.

We are to be firm and confident in acknowledging principles and rules —
but extremely cautious and UNCERTAIN in judging the conduct of our neighbor, or the Acts of the Church, especially in matters highly complex and prone to speculation and error.

Divide and Rule — Gossip and the Presumption of Guilt as Tools of Revolution

To divide, teach the people to presume guilt in a revolutionary way.
Revolutionary “agents” set a trap: they teach us to occupy ourselves with matters we do not understand; the less we understand, the more we trust our new authorities — the ones who ACCUSE.
And we ourselves learn the principle of presuming guilt: if an accusation sounds strong (that is, if it stimulates our impressions and emotions), we repeat it as fact.

This is the complete inversion of Catholic tradition, honesty, the Eighth Commandment, Ignatian discernment, Latin civilization.
It is the surrender to strong impressions — impressions that, because of our fallen nature, accusations evoke in us.
Accusations stand out in the informational noise, and people latch onto them.
They are mistaken for facts.
Especially in a world where information is concentrated like bouillon cubes — intensified, mediated through addictive advertising and media.
Honest argumentation seems weak to them, and so they confuse it with subjectivity and unreliability.

This inversion is precisely how the revolution devours its own children.
And thus those who wish to defend Tradition unknowingly kill it by their own actions, having implemented the principle “divide and rule.”
For once people have been taught to trust accusations and distrust the accused, they can be divided endlessly: one only needs to throw an accusation, discredit, ridicule.
Human nature, fallen after original sin, is vulnerable to such tricks.
And when we add addiction to “strong information,” produced by the global pop‑cultural media machine, we end up with a person almost immune to honesty and realism.

Indulging this fallen tendency is the main tool of revolution, of devils, and of secret services.

The bouillon‑cube effect

Dragging people — on the basis of gossip — into speculations that do not belong to them, or in which they lack the data, distracts them from their duties.
And when duties are neglected, social cohesion collapses.
Frustration grows — the soil of emotional conflicts.
Their seed is gossip (often disguised as “polite,” “eloquent,” “pious,” or, depending on the group’s emotional expectations, “courageous”), which easily becomes habitual.

After original sin, we tend to imitate not the virtues but the vices of even the greatest saints — if we focus too much on the persons themselves rather than on God.

Gossip is built on taking the easy path — indulging our desires by creating permanent mental drawers:
“Whoever does not criticize with us is surely a modernist, heretic, crypto‑Marxist, right‑winger, PiS‑man, Tusk‑man, fascist, Russian agent, or some other deviant.”
Revolutionary rebellion feeds on this — a self‑reinforcing mechanism of endless divisions based on suspicion and the presumption of guilt.

An example of this fractal conflict‑multiplication

A priest of the FSSPX is accused of being a heretic because he refuses to accept the accusers’ thesis (the same accusers who earlier rightly defended indult priests against this priest’s accusations) that translating the words of consecration as “for all” invalidates the consecration.
Yet the alleged texts of Tradition they cite nowhere state this clearly or definitively.
They illegitimately equate criticism of the formula with declaring the consecration invalid.
These are not the same.
A formula may be flawed, improper, unwanted by the Church — but that does not mean the consecration performed with it is invalid.

They present themselves as “better traditionalists” in opposition to the “false” ones — as if competing in suspicion and illegitimate hyper‑criticism, which they treat as the measure of traditionalism.
But this is precisely their fundamental methodological error:
guessing, suspecting, declaring, relying on opinions and impressions and mistaking them for objective facts — contrary to Ignatian principles, the Eighth Commandment, and in dubio pro reo toward both neighbor and the Acts of the Church.

Both sides share this error — only in different thematic areas.
Often against each other.

The mistaken belief that this destructive posture is a virtue — a sign of courage, of “necessary criticism” — is extremely dangerous.
For it means that a mere rumor, a suspicion, is enough to divide any group that begins to unite.
To divide the Church, then the Traditionalist movement, and so on ad infinitum.
A rumor is enough, because people will treat the most unfavorable interpretation as fact — even if it is imagined, even if it does not follow.
But it was spoken, it stirred emotions, it sprouted in minds, and its roots crack the Rock of Catholic Unity.

A perfect example of the same methodological error

Some readers will now suspect that my mention of Unity is a sign of “tolerationism” or “indifferentism.”
This suspicion itself is a perfect example of the gossip‑based methodological error.

Likewise the illegitimate conclusion that those who defend the validity of consecration using the formula “for all” must be supporters of that formula — or even supporters of the heresy that hell will be empty.
This simply does not follow.
But the suspicious treat this false identification as an obvious fact.

Another example:
arguing with those who defend the Sunday obligation at the Novus Ordo as if they were defending the liturgical revolution that produced it;
or treating those who reject disobedience in the matter of ordinations and who refuse to slander indult priests as if they automatically shared the errors of revolutionaries and modernists, or treated the Mass of All Time superficially.
Another: claiming that the Novus Ordo “objectively makes a Catholic a Protestant.”

These are all logical leaps — illegitimate inferences — based on the same principle.
And that principle is the main disease of the Church.
From it the revolution emerged, and it infects even those who wish to fight the revolution.

I am to believe what the catechisms teach — not evade simple catechetical commands, such as the obligation to attend Mass on Sunday, by means of elaborate analyses claiming that the Rite given to me by the Church will make me a Protestant.
How do I know those analyses do not overlook something?
I am to recognize the rites of the Church by the fact that the Church gives them to me.
What the Church gives me are not abuses or accidental deviations, but the minima that constitute the identity of the Acts.

Errors in these rites are not doctrinal or moral; they do not contradict the faith; they do not require immoral behavior.
Christ allowed the Apostles to flee, betray, and deny Him — but that does not mean betrayal and flight are the essence of the Church.
Period.

The Mechanism of Tribal Prejudice and Tendentious Interpretations

Mockery — the Strongest Argument

“I Know, but I Won’t Tell.” Pre‑emptive Framing and Gossip

Whenever I hear someone begin a critique with disclaimers like “no room for cranks here,” “we don’t debate with lunatics,” or when he drags out private conversations, or claims he knows of some scandalous behavior but will “reveal it later,” a warning light goes on in my mind.

These are all tools for manufacturing gossip.
Before presenting any evidence, the speaker has already primed the audience — emotionally conditioning them to view the person he will later attack with suspicion and contempt.

With such “incantations,” people wind themselves up, mock those they have labeled as “cranks,” and often the very subject of the dispute is whether what these so‑called cranks say is true or not.
But their arguments are never examined — they are drowned out by emotional labels and pre‑emptive slogans.
Groups compete enthusiastically in ridiculing the designated outcasts.

They applaud one another: “Finally someone brave,” “finally someone who doesn’t sugarcoat,” “finally someone who criticizes objectively.”

But these people have confused something fundamental.
For them, the alternative to positive subjectivity (flattery) is negative subjectivity (fault‑finding).
They reinforce this confusion by repeating, within their circles, the labels attached to the current scapegoat.
When a new conflict arises within the same group, they do the same thing again — only in reverse.
Instead of abandoning the faulty method, they keep it and merely change the target.

This suspicion‑driven mindset can lead people — as in the cases of Fr. Piotr, Archbishop Marcel, or the publicists discussed here — to follow false trails:
to criticize them for secondary, aesthetic, or even good but unworldly things (like coats), while losing sight of their real errors.
They may also easily throw out the baby with the bathwater and reject a fundamentally good idea simply because various compromised figures have attached themselves to it.

People take at face value anyone who claims to have uncovered a scandal.
Such a person often says he will reveal it later — and before he reveals anything, everyone already assumes it is a scandal and adopts prejudice against the accused.
When he finally reveals the events that are supposedly scandalous, people no longer check whether what he revealed proves anything at all, or whether it is truly reprehensible.
They do not need to.
They already “know” it is scandalous, and the facts presented are simply called scandalous — even if they would not have considered them so before.

They do not require a process.
They demand punishment immediately.

Just as with the so‑called “pedophile priests.”
Those who did not condemn them are deemed complicit — forgetting that accusations can be false, and that Church superiors have a duty to be cautious precisely because many people have been lynched after a media‑manufactured impression of guilt.
And later — after years, after a life destroyed — it turned out the person was not guilty.
That is how gossip works.

Unfortunately, the same mechanism appears in various disputes on the political right:
a suspicion is thrown out, and circumstantial hints are treated as proof of guilt.
And just as some consider the self‑appointed “exposers” of Church abuse to be heroes, so too are those considered “brave” who, without blinking, present gossip about the “Evil Council,” “electoral fraud,” “compromise,” “supporting Putin,” or “crankery” as if they were facts.

From this, it is easy to make mountains out of molehills.
Accusing is easy.
Labeling is easy.
But removing a label is far harder.
When it turns out the accusation was false, the correction never reaches people.
That is how gossip works.

Suspicion Toward One’s Own Suspicions

It is a good habit to cultivate: even when I intuitively disagree with something at first reading, I try to find an interpretation of those words or actions that defends them.
When I read a book and certain sentences initially strike me as foolish, I wait until the end; I do not trust my first impression, because many times only later — only after reading the whole — the author laid out his reasons and showed that it was not foolish at all, and often convinced me that I was the one who was mistaken.

But someone who confuses his first impression with fact will never see this.
In further reading or observation he does not see reality — he projects his prejudice onto reality.
Everything he calls “factual” and “objective,” but that does not make it so.

It is not worth arguing with the interpretation least favorable to my opponent’s position.
Doing so would always bend his words against him.
Here one must “bend” in the opposite direction — toward charity.
Honesty requires this, as do Ignatian principles and the Eighth Commandment.

I put “bend” in quotation marks because often those who themselves distort will perversely accuse of distortion those who simply present the straightforward meaning — the one that requires no bending at all.

The executioner turns the cat by the tail and presents the victim as the executioner.
The thief is the first to shout “stop, thief!”
Remember this PERVERTED METHOD.
The same faulty methods described in this chapter repeat themselves in countless seemingly mundane disputes in politics, culture, and daily life.
If we want to rebuild Civilization with a capital “C,” we must avoid them and propose a counter‑method: caution in judgment and in defining situations that lead to illegitimate blame.
This is demanded directly by the Eighth Commandment.
It is demanded by Christ’s command: “Judge not, lest you be judged.”
And, if one thinks more deeply, by the entire Decalogue.

Let us not treat the letter of a council as if it were naturally bound to one meaning and utterly non‑conventional.
Let us not repeat the sad errors of those who salted Scripture.

Easily entangled, laboriously untangled

We must learn to distinguish conventional signs from actions that are morally evil per se.
Catholics constantly quarrel because they fail to make this distinction.

Some claim that this distinction contradicts the evangelical “yes‑yes, no‑no.”
On the contrary — evangelical truthfulness requires this distinction.

Reality is more complex than the limited capacities of language.
That is why oversimplifications that distort reality seem true, while more intricate descriptions that express truth more accurately seem “unclear.”
They seem so.
Conceptual cables tangle easily; to untangle them requires laborious subtlety.
In reality, the road to simplicity leads through complexity — and it is a cruel perversity to blame the one who undertakes the work of untangling.

On a map, the road from one point to another may appear straight, but if one chooses it, he may find himself before a cliff and then must walk around it, adding needless distance.
Often the simplest path in reality is the one that looks convoluted on the map or on paper.
Such are the quirks of a fallen world.

The shadow of a roadside Cross — straight — cast on uneven ground appears crooked.
The Cross is not crooked.
Reality is crooked.
We, in our frailty, choose the appearance of simplicity, shortcuts, and end up at the cliff’s edge, fooled by optical illusions.
By shadows.

To the question:
“If Vatican II changed nothing in doctrine and can be interpreted perfectly in continuity with Tradition, then where does all the post‑conciliar chaos come from?”
I answer with questions:

What justifies the assumption that this chaos is the consequence of the council?
If the Gospel was not Protestant, then where did the chaos of Protestant denominations come from?

I do not claim that one cannot criticize certain aspects of Vatican II or the so‑called Novus Ordo.
I do not claim they are ideal.
I claim that this particular method and scope of criticism is flawed.
I claim that my conscience — because of my limitations, incompetence, or stupidity — does not allow me to assent to several critical theses.
I have already analyzed them here.

It is easy to reject and accuse.
Easy to confuse essence with accidents.
Easy to tangle the cables.
Harder to defend and untangle.

Who must explain himself? A critique of hasty criticism

From the duty to defend one’s neighbor and the Church arises the necessity of suspicion toward one thing: toward too-easy and top‑down suspicion.
Suspicion toward suspicion.
A critique of hasty critique.

(The text that followed here I moved largely into the book Guardians of Tradition. Benedict XVI and Archbishop M. Lefebvre. Who Is Right? There you will find more examples of the conflict‑breeders outlined above.) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LlcC6gwHN_NV9ewQDhlzkc12Hu5r8Nep/view?usp=sharing

***

The devil does not tempt those he does not need to

If someone has fallen into the grave error of self‑appointed doctrinal decision‑making, the devil no longer needs to tempt him against external piety.
He may even assist him in it, because such piety helps drown out the fundamental error and seduce others with the irresistible impression that those who opposed the pope are so exemplary, so flawless, so kind, so smiling or so burdened with concern.
Why would the devil spoil such bait?

Will an honest man succeed? Fairy tales. He will be trampled by the crowd rushing toward the cliff.

I often hear the claim that honesty helps one achieve success. Nonsense.
In a society whose methods are fundamentally dishonest, an honest man is like someone who shouts to a stampeding crowd, urging them to stop before the precipice.
Eventually he stops himself — and begins running in the opposite direction.

Will the crowd follow him?
No.
They will trample him.

Perhaps someone will kindly lift him up after he falls, only to complain later with pious concern:
“I tried to help him, told him to run with us, but he got some idea into his head and kept throwing himself under people’s feet. Poor fellow.”

Perhaps only his sacrifice will make part of the crowd stop — when they see the corpse.
But he will not see that in his lifetime.
Well then — the grain must die…

The Multi‑Component Glue Method

If I wanted to achieve an effect whose causes would be nearly impossible to trace — say, reducing the human population — I would not use a single instrument.
Not one ideology, not one wave, not one bacterium, virus, war, famine, or chemical.
I would use all of them at once.
And in such a way that none of them, taken alone, would suffice; only their combination would produce the desired effect.

Then people would usually discover only one element of the mixture.
They would argue endlessly:
“It’s the bombs that kill!”
“No, it’s the toxins!”
“No, it’s the virus!”
And they would mutually discredit one another, because in reality none of these elements, taken separately, is the great murderer.

It becomes easy, then, to turn anyone who notices that “something is wrong” — but sees only one or two components — into the proverbial “tinfoil hat,” the village lunatic.
The real cause of the deaths is so complex that people dismiss it as false simply because it is too intricate, too difficult to grasp.

We will return soon to this confusion of complexity with falsehood.

Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracies are, of course, plausible.
We know them from business, from schools, from family feuds.
Often they are unnecessary from the standpoint of profit; they arise from envy, revenge, or the simple pleasure of manipulating another human being.

If people plot and scheme in the sandbox, in school, at work — they can do so in global politics as well.
They can eliminate competitors, expand into new domains, sometimes for profit, sometimes for ambition — healthy or pathological.
They operate through media, politics, and various industries.

Most plans fail.
But sometimes one succeeds.
And when one out of a hundred succeeds, people forget the rest and treat that single success as a grand, unified, secret master plan.

Not everything goes according to the planners’ intentions — after all, they are only human.
We plan; so do wealthy and powerful people.
Each according to his means and obsessions.

Eugenics is not a fairy tale.
There are real meetings, programs, forecasts, and simulations about viruses that look eerily like self‑fulfilling prophecies (with some unforeseen deviations).
Should I list the conferences from 2011 discussing a future virus?
The dozens of films portraying terrifying epidemics, disinfection rituals, sanitary terror, corpses in the streets, hazmat suits — all shown long before 2021?

Still, I would not be too harsh on those who list names like Gates, Rothschild, Russell, Soros, and turn them into substitute devils.
People must simplify — they have other things to do, necessary for survival, and cannot analyze everything.

If we can, let us gently remind them that there are as many “masonries” as there are competing bakeries in a neighborhood.
They rise, they fall…
And if they are believers, remind them that the true Conspirator against humanity is Satan.

The existence of competing centers of influence does not exclude the possibility that the very rules of their competition contain assumptions contrary to the Catholic faith.
In that case, Catholics are entirely justified in seeing these assumptions as a single evil and, according to their faith, linking them — as all evil — to Satan.

As a believer, I transform dualistic narratives about an “evil god” into the Christian version: the devil.
And I remind believers who focus too much on “the masons,” or who search for one simplified immanent cause, that such thinking is not quite compatible with our faith.
We know that behind evil stands a personal being — Satan.
Everything else is variable.
Even St. Peter once served him.

Let us not allow illegitimate assumptions to be imposed upon us.

Liturgical revolution and LGBT+

(record of a talk from 20 July 2020)

Some may find this association surprising. What do these two things have in common?
What links them is their ideological foundation. Or rather, one of the diseases that has been consuming the West for many — perhaps even hundreds of — years: anti‑traditionalism. The apotheosis of progress, novelty, change. And, as a kind of counter‑weight to this extremity, archaeologism.

(It often happens that a society falling into one deviation from the truth begins simultaneously to be devoured by the opposite deviation. And thus false alternatives arise, built on a false negation of what is healthy. The remedy is a return to homeostasis, to the center marked out by the beams of the Cross. Similarly, gnostic rejection of the body gave birth to hedonism, and the Protestant over‑emphasis on one element — Scripture alone — provoked, in reaction, an opposite over‑emphasis on “the SPIRIT”, in “charismatic” transports that often ignore their own contradictions.)

What fueled liturgical arbitrariness both before and after the Council was a unique conviction — unprecedented in its scale — that we can simply sit down and construct the liturgy according to whichever theory we prefer:
which liturgy is “better,”
which is “more primitive,”

which is "more traditional"

or conversely, “more adapted to modernity.”

This is analogous to constructing one’s own gender identity, and even more to redefining words such as “woman” and “man” in abstraction from tradition — according to an individual’s or a committee’s whim of the age, and detached from their concrete physical and symbolic roots.

Neither language, nor the laws of nature (and with them sex), nor customs, nor socio‑health norms, nor one’s name, nor one’s identity can simply be “constructed” or “reconstructed” at the snap of a finger.
If we attempt it, we will cease to understand one another.
Because someone else will also sit down and construct — only differently than we do — and there will be no shared foundations.

The Tower of Babel.

Everyone will go his own way.
Chaos will ensue.
Civilization will disintegrate.
Bonds will crumble: social and mental, cultural and logical. (For logic itself rests on bond, on the existence of universal laws binding together nature and human thought. The same holds analogously for cultures, which form a network of communicating vessels.)

More on this in the video “PLAŻA + MSZA + tańce + LGBT + sukienki, czyli REWOLUCJA w ewolucji!”
at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO_8nCZ5tsU

The future tense used above was an error.

Substitute Religion and Substitute Morality

Infolatry and the Cult of “Science”

Information, dates, names, technical jargon.
One need only heap up a mountain of such things — especially obscure ones — and then proclaim various theories built from them with supreme confidence, and the crowd will fall into admiration, critics will fall silent.
Readers usually cannot verify any of it, so — not wanting to look foolish — they nod along.
If the messenger delivers it categorically and with self‑assurance, he gains a whole legion of followers whom he has “enlightened,” and who will respond to any attempt at criticism with attack.

One day their accusation will be that the critic is “too young,” another day “too old,” one moment “a simple peasant who knows nothing,” the next “an overeducated ‘intelygent’ detached from reality.”
Whatever he says — it is wrong.
Most often they will reduce his critique to absurdity, attribute to him claims he never made, and weave a convenient strawman to beat in defense of their “guru.”

By stuffing his work with data from countless fields, the “guru” ensures that readers cannot possibly verify them all.
Dazzled by the sheer quantity, they believe.
They confuse decisive assertions with conclusions.
They confuse the appearance of rigor with rigor itself.
Not wanting to look foolish before the confident speaker and his fanbase, they fall into rapture — and anyone who dares question the claims is cast out as a heretic.

Anyone who asks, “All right, but how do you prove it? What does it follow from?” is dismissed with the accusation:
“He read it, but as if he hadn’t — he understood nothing.”

And just as every word of criticism is treated as a vile attack and reduced to absurdity, so every word of the charismatic author who captivates the masses is treated as revealed truth.
(2019)

Substitutes for Religion

Some have confused things entirely:
the certainty, the willingness to give one’s life — which they ought to reserve for the dogmas of their Faith — they now display toward their own impressions, national borders, and other temporal matters.
Their feelings that something is “modernist” they treat as dogma, calling it “defense of the faith,” while in reality they worship their own opinions.

Their geopolitical notions become the basis for declarations like:
“There is no discussion here. This is black‑and‑white. These are the good guys, those are the bad guys, and anyone who says otherwise is evil.”

No.
Only God is good.
And in such a scheme, one earthly political concept is placed in the position of God, and another in the position of the Devil.

They think this is conservatism.
It is not.
It is a regression to an earlier stage of the revolution — the stage that first introduced this confusion into the temples of increasingly earthly cults: the cult of “reason,” of nation, of “the people,” of football clubs, pop‑culture idols, and personal whims.

The New Morality — The Cult of Football and Pop‑Culture “Stars”

The emotional outbursts over the poor performance of “our team,” the cries of outrage as if someone had committed a crime merely by playing badly — this is a sign of moral disorder.
Instead of condemning lies, slander, murder, dishonesty, people condemn weak gameplay.
There is no commandment: “Thou shalt not play football poorly.”

Outrage displaces outrage over real sins.
Later, true transgressions go unnoticed because emotional investment has been redirected toward substitutes.

In practice, the Old Decalogue is replaced by a new set of commandments:
“Thou shalt not be a crank.”
“Thou shalt not be a Russian troll.”
“Thou shalt not spam.”
“Thou shalt not play football unattractively.”

Either‑or.
One cannot serve two masters, two moralities, two religions.

Human perception totalizes.

Substitute Morality of Verbal Clubs and Conceptual Sacks

No longer slander, blasphemy, adultery, and murder are considered worthy of condemnation.
Now public outrage is stirred by vague verbal clubs and conceptual sacks into which everyone throws something different:
“spamming,”
“dogmatism,”
“clickbait,”
“propaganda,”
“ritualism,”
“liberalism,”
“manipulation,”
“Marxism,”
“post‑conciliarism,”
“hermeneutics of continuity,”
“making a fool of oneself.”

A great crime, in some eyes, is something they call “spamming,” while ordinary deceit never provoked such protests.
A great crime discrediting a person is playing an instrument poorly, a crooked collar, some clumsiness, a lost match — as if football were an eschatological matter.

But it is not considered dishonorable when a footballer refuses to admit that the foul whistled on him never happened.

On my channel people often post links to their materials, and it has never occurred to me to treat that as something evil in itself.
They do not steal, they do not deceive, they do not slander.
But for some, this is a great crime — because the great authors of the Netiquette Tablets have proclaimed it so in their Community Guidelines.
The Oracles.
The New Glorious Morality.
The Religion of Great Google.
The Great Stadium.
Elvis, Lennon, and FC Barcelona.

How does posting a link — even on my page — violate my privacy, property, or good name?
And a comment supposedly does not?
Often a link contains as much content as a comment, and only that content can be judged.

If I do not want to click, I do not click — just as I do not read a comment if I do not wish to.
If the content of the link is harmful, I remove it.
But I have no right to treat the mere posting of a link as a crime.

People get outraged at a raised voice in response to lies and slander, at headlines like “urgent,” “shock,” but polite rudeness — the irresponsible slanders spoken in a gentle tone — provoke no objection.

When someone sticks a pin into your back and you cry out in a healthy reflex, everyone blames you for being aggressive, not the one who quietly stabbed you.

This is an example of how easily we allow morality to be replaced by its counterfeit.
It makes nothing a measure of evil except human, fickle feelings and prejudices.

These substitute categories provoke outrage because they are more emotionally stimulating in an overstimulated, bouillon‑cube world than the simple commandments:
“Thou shalt not kill,
Thou shalt not commit adultery,
Thou shalt not steal,
Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

Let us set aside, for a moment, judging through the lens of these categories.
It is not persuasion, not influence techniques, not money, not methods of earning that are evil — but deceit and theft committed through them.

Deceit is leading someone into error.
Slander is bearing false witness against another.
Theft is taking what belongs to another without his consent.

Let us pay closer attention to these simple, Decalogue‑based criteria rather than to our media‑conditioned, deceptive impressions that something is TERRIBLE MANIPULATION, DOGMATISM, FASCISM, SPAMMING, or — on the other side — LEFTISM, MARXISM, SOCIALISM, etc.

Yes.
It cuts both ways.

Sectarianism and Dogmatism

A common example of sectarianism is the use of false alternatives expressed in attitudes such as: “If you left us, you betrayed us; if you left us, you spit on us.”
This posture completely ignores other possibilities — for instance, that someone who left simply cannot, in conscience, agree with certain views that make remaining in the group impossible.
He may still appreciate and respect those he left behind, may not attribute bad intentions to them, and may even defend them against unjust accusations.

And yet the comments under such accusatory statements overflow with praise: if not calling them “total annihilation,” then “devastating critique,” “a logical masterpiece,” “straight to the point,” “exposing the manipulation of that terrible other.”
Such a statement removes people’s inhibitions about attacking another human being, because it assumes that whatever is straw‑stuffed into the accused is an obvious fact.
It becomes a scandal in the moral sense — reinforcing in people methods of discourse that violate the Eighth Commandment.

Let us change the example.
Rastafarians venerated one of the Ethiopian “emperors” (the Negus Negest) as the Messiah, even though he himself did not consider himself such and, at least officially, did not desire such veneration.

Only when he began reacting allergically to such remarks, calling them vile, and treating all criticism as attack, did he himself begin contributing to the construction of that cult.
The “charisma” of such a figure arises partly from talent for persuasion and partly from the fact that his message happened to land in a niche on the social marketplace of worldview‑needs.

“Sectarianism” around a person can arise even when that person does not wish to be treated that way.
This is not an accusation against him, but a description of the posture of those who, with the teeth of uncritical adoration, tear his often valuable message into shreds.

I speak such strong evaluative words from the perspective of a Catholic, for whom the only legitimate recipient of such veneration is God, One in the Trinity.
But without value‑judgment: the attitudes I call “sectarian” are the same attitudes that adherents of various religions direct toward their gods.
Their sectarianism lies in the misaddressing of veneration.

Similarly, sectarianism toward a group arises when the criterion of orthodoxy is no longer the Catholic Church as a whole, but one of its sub‑groups — for example, a particular order.
In the Church, we should treat all other groups as expendable for the sake of the Church of Christ.

The same applies to dogmatism.
Dogmas themselves are not the problem; the problem is treating as dogma those areas that do not require dogmatization — areas that are measurable.

That someone remembers various impressive‑sounding facts does not mean he understands them properly.
People today have far too many “facts.”
They cannot process or verify them logically, and thus they fall uncritically under their spell — they fall into infolatry.

Given this information overload, what we need is intellectual hygiene, informational asceticism.
Some people should stop reading and watching videos for a while and begin analyzing the inexhaustible resources of reality itself.

I have met many wise people who do not remember details, but who can analyze.
Perhaps precisely because they do not burden their minds with an excess of “knowledge.”
After acquainting themselves with detailed data — for example, historical — they can discard it from memory, retaining only what is essential and practical: the conclusions.
Conclusions and methods that allow them to analyze the reality they encounter in daily life.

This is what we need: not a multitude of dazzling facts, names, and dates, but the right methods.

And (for some) the address of a library.
(2019)

Other Examples of Harmful Cognitive Errors

Factolatry and the Manipulation of Emotion

Some claim that “facts speak for themselves.”
They do not.
Facts never speak.
It is always people who receive them, filter them, interpret them — and in that reception they may be right, or they may be utterly mistaken.

Let me quote fragments from a certain otherwise valuable right‑wing commentator whose work occasionally reveals both factolatry — an overestimation of the power of documents — and the drowning of arguments beneath emotional jabs:

“This is not an attack, these are facts. I’m sorry.”

Such statements are not “facts” either.
They are emotional attempts to end a discussion.
They become even more persuasive — and even less substantive — when accompanied by remarks like:

“no no no,”
“didn’t I tell you,”
“H.C. to be demolished,”
“W., the ex‑secret police officer, defended C., the riot‑policeman,”
“Z. is the grand‑schizo of UFOs and mind‑control.”

The snideness in such remarks is unnecessary.
It muffles sober analysis and casts doubt on the credibility of the conclusions — even if those conclusions were, in themselves, credible.

The same author, in the same video, shows footage of beatings or of cruelty to animals.
These are not arguments.
They are emotional grenades thrown into the viewer’s mind.
Under their influence, the viewer stops evaluating rationally and becomes inclined to believe even what does not follow from the presented facts — but what was subtly suggested on the emotional level.

This psychological mechanism, when mixed with truth, allows falsehoods to slip through unnoticed.
That is precisely what makes it manipulative — and therefore dishonest.

The method of beginning with emotional jabs and using them to pre‑set the audience’s mental frame is employed by both sides of countless conflicts.
It is not the domain of the right, the left, or any particular group.
Nor is it usually a deliberate deception; it is most often used unconsciously by those who sincerely believe what they are saying.

Having information is not enough.
We may misunderstand it.
And the facts we do not yet know — and may never know — may completely change the picture.

Facts are not everything.
What good is it to know facts if one draws false conclusions from them?

Another common error: using, as arguments, the very assumptions that are the subject of dispute — assumptions already challenged by the opponent.

What Factors Encourage Infolatry?

Let me speculate freely, searching for hypotheses.

At the beginning of the twenty‑first century we witnessed an explosion of simulacral information — a flood of stimuli reaching people from every direction.

One extreme group — raised entirely within this informational noise — never had the chance to learn how to fight for relevant information.
Forced to select, they never learned the proper methods of selection.
They rely on the vividness of stimuli — which is natural, and has always been with us, but now is amplified to grotesque proportions.

The other extreme group — those raised behind the so‑called “Iron Curtain” — had been accustomed to fighting for information.
Whatever they managed to obtain was hard‑won.
They took what they could get, often guided by intuition.
Suddenly they collided with oversaturation — and their habits, their mental reflexes, could not withstand it.
They began grabbing whatever lay first on the shelf, fascinated by the sheer abundance of data.

None of us is immune to this, for various reasons.
But one reason is universal:
the human brain is not built for such informational excess.
It cannot process it.
It snatches the most vivid, emotionally charged fragments — and can no longer analyze or verify.

This is why the informational noise is such an excellent tool for steering the masses.

The Magic of the First Media Suggestion

The first interpretation we hear — even if false — often becomes the “obvious” one.
People think it “naturally suggests itself,” failing to notice that it seems obvious only because it was glued to most of the media messages they received about the event.

This is a manipulation mechanism skillfully used by dishonest media.

INFOLATRY — the cure is informational asceticism and intellectual humility

(This is only a small fragment of the material contained in the article of 3 June 2020, “INFOLATRY — the cure is informational asceticism and intellectual humility.” To grasp the essence of manipulation, it is worth reading the whole piece someday. "INFOLATRIA - lekiem asceza informacyjna i pokora intelektualna” )

In one of the disputes between 2017 and 2020 between a politician and a public commentator, the latter repeatedly received praise for “simple,” “logical,” and “rigorous” dismantling of every topic into its constituent parts.
These praises were accompanied by insults directed at his opponent, whom — according to viewers — the commentator had “ploughed into the ground,” whose alleged “dishonesty” and “arrogance” he had “exposed.”
Earlier he had supposedly done the same to other politicians and “professors,” perfectly matching the expectations of the crowd.
People turned the “bad politician” and the “pompous yyntelygent fylozof” into convenient scapegoats — targets they could attack without reflection, conveniently diverting attention from their own everyday faults.

Yet politicians are not inherently worse than anyone else.
They are like us.
The only difference is that under the flash of cameras, the petty misdeeds taught to children from an early age as signs of “cleverness” suddenly acquire the status of socially dangerous acts.
A pity we do not see them in ourselves.

That was a small digression. Let us return to the “ploughing.”

Here is one of the comments from viewers enchanted by this “demolition”:

“A beautiful and logical presentation exposing the arrogant manipulator M. and his k(…)‑followers in all their glory.”

There are hundreds of such comments.
When one points out that these are bare assertions tarnishing another person’s good name without evidence — and thus manifestations of sectarianism — the commentator becomes indignant, calling the description of such behavior “sectarian” a stigmatization of all his supporters.
Leaving aside the fact that this is not true — it is not “all” — he fails to notice that he himself provoked this stigmatization earlier with his own bare, though juicy, accusations against others.
As if the mere fact that someone is a politician entitled him to slander them with impunity.

Let us now examine how “rigorous” this commentator really is.

In the first of three videos responding to the politician’s speech, he accused him of a “BRAZEN FORGERY”, allegedly consisting in quoting something that was not a quote.

In my analysis I showed that this accusation was unfounded.
The commentator responded by trimming the objection of its essential part — thereby distorting it.

The accusation I made was as follows:

“The point is that Mr. K. very categorically suggests to the listener — based on his own assumption — interrupting the alleged paraphrase of Dr. M., that Dr. M. is quoting the ENTIRE PHRASE from Berlin.”

And further:

“(…) which undermines Mr. K.’s thesis that Dr. M. read the ENTIRE PHRASE from the page.”

Mr. K., however, responded to a different accusation: that M. was not quoting, but summarizing.

The commentator (K.) replied:

“It has been pointed out to me that Dr. M. announced he would not quote but summarize Berlin. Therefore he had no obligation to cite the text verbatim.”

Thus the commentator responds not to the accusation actually made, but to a trimmed and distorted version of it.
The issue is not whether there is a quote, but what in the speech is a quote and what is not.
Quoting certain phrases does not mean that the entire speech is a quote.

The manipulation (understood as dishonesty in reporting and debate) lies in arbitrarily stretching the quote to include what is not a quote.
Such distortion is easy to “refute” and accuse of falsification — but what is being refuted is not the opponent’s actual claim, but one’s own mistaken assumptions about it.
It is the refutation of one’s own misconceptions.
A debate with oneself.

One of the commentator’s defenders tried to justify the accusation by claiming that the politician — Dr. M. — manipulated by intentionally making the boundaries of the quote ambiguous.
In doing so he diverted attention from two facts:
first, that this was not the accusation made by commentator K.;
second, that even if such manipulation by Dr. M. had occurred, it would be nearly impossible to distinguish from an ordinary speech containing quotes.

Thus accusing someone so decisively of “BRAZEN FORGERY” and manipulation is itself slanderous — based on forcing an interpretation of the opponent’s words to his disadvantage.
It is simply judging the opponent based on prejudice.

Words kill.
If you pronounce judgments with indignation, accuse, throw epithets — the burden of proof lies on you.
Even if the target is a politician, a professor, Hitler, or Stalin.
Otherwise you slander.
You break the Eighth Commandment.

I know.
Proving things is tedious and dull.
Few people believe it.
Bombastic accusations repeated a hundred times delight the masses.
They sweep crowds away.

The left tries to impose its definitions on us through bare assertions and epithets?
So be it.
The saddest thing is that on the right we also have people who argue with epithets — and they gain enormous applause:

“No one? Absolutely no one! I repeat: no one!”
“This priest wipes his… with Catholicism.”
“Filthy, I repeat: filthy.”
“Calling it a sect is supposedly ‘stigmatizing EVERYONE around whom the sect gathers.’”
“A Catholic cannot call himself a libertarian” (even though the word freedom, the basis of that term, is far older than Locke, Smith, or von Mises — and central to the Gospel).
“He cannot use the word ‘liberal,’ even in the compound ‘co‑liberal,’ but — strangely — he may call himself an ordoliberal.”

These are all assertions.
Where is the evidence?

Beyond the nakedness of these assertions, the dispute over “liberalism” reveals another common cognitive error in society:

**Arguing Against Meanings Imputed to One’s Words

The Ethos of Useful Work — “No One Talks About It”?**

From the same people we hear the accusation:

“A hysterical refusal by absolutely everyone to discuss this one, single topic. NO ONE wants to talk about it!”

Even if this is merely a linguistic overreach, it cannot be dismissed as trivial, because it is a false accusation.
How exactly “no one”?
I have heard about it at home since childhood.
And since childhood I have treated it as my own goal — rebelling rather against school and peers, who mocked this ethos of useful work.

For years I have listened to the indulgent remarks of experienced manual workers about those who wander around the shop floor writing worthless papers disguised as “technologies,” which the worker must then ignore and often rewrite from scratch, because they cannot be applied in practice.
If he followed the engineer’s plan, the furnace would explode, the pressure would block the flow, or the parts would never align.

But as my late grandfather used to say:
“Talking does nothing. You’ve talked — now get to work.”
One can speak beautifully about work and forget how to actually do it.

What everyone understands and practices most deeply is often never spoken aloud.
No one needs to talk about it endlessly.
It is too obvious.

Researchers who want to uncover the deepest, most fundamental rules governing living communities and their cultures must observe between the lines.
They must focus on what people do not articulate explicitly, but what they presuppose — what they use as the unspoken ground for talking about other, less central matters, and above all, for their daily, ordinary action.

This is not an absolute rule, but there are matters so obvious that they become invisible — like air.
Or, conversely, like the Name of God in the Old Testament.
The development of dogmas and other essential elements of Church teaching confirms this rule: they were defined precisely not when they were obvious, but when they began to be questioned.

Let us return, then, to socially useful work — the work that supposedly “no one talks about.”
Many people work and produce real goods.
But they do not talk about it often.
Does the fact that they rarely mention it mean they do not work, or that they do not understand the value of that work, or fail to pass it on to the next generation?
No.
Perhaps they speak little precisely so that the word does not wear out — so that it does not undergo a kind of semantic “inflation.”
The accusation that “no one talks about it” is a linguistic fallacy.

The real problem is that those who produce real goods often earn less than the “engineery” and “direktory” (I put the terms in quotation marks so as not to offend real engineers and directors) who wander around the factory floor writing faulty procedures later corrected by ordinary workers.
They have time for elaborate, flowery justifications of their own necessity before their superiors and society, because they do not “waste” that time producing actual goods and services.

This results in the familiar scene: five people standing over a man with a shovel, each telling him, “You’re digging wrong — put the shovel there.”
And each of the five earns more than the one who is digging.
(Once I swung a shovel upward at such a lad. He jumped back.)

Someone may ask:
Why doesn’t the digger apply for one of those supervisory positions?
Because:

They won’t hire him — he cannot “pour water,” and thinking in accordance with reality is sometimes less attractive to employers and clients.
He lacks the required papers.
He has an aversion to such positions and a bit more decency, sustained by an internalized ethos of useful work preserved in tradition, not decreed from above in “learned” treatises.

It so happens that the person complaining that “no one talks about work” attacks libertarians — the very few who consistently call for reducing bureaucracy, permits, and tax burdens.
And precisely for this reason libertarians perform the work necessary for the production of real goods to remain an ethos rather than empty rhetoric.

If a capable person sees that producing bread and putting one’s hands into the soil to grow healthy food yields less profit than marketing nonsense typed at a desk, he will choose the latter — easier, yet unnecessary “work.”

This danger is very real.
I know it firsthand: my parents, overworked already in childhood, had to abandon farming in the early 1990s.
A farmer I know produces healthy food, but often at a loss; to finance this real production he must moonlight as a sales representative for a product whose promotional description I would, to put it mildly, never sign.

Similar methods of discreditation were employed by other commentators in that same year, 2020, usually directed at one particular political group and its supporters.
In unison they accused them of “liberalism,” or even “libertarianism,” in a tone of voice suggesting that these words must denote something monstrous.
This was simply assumed.
They felt no responsibility to prove it, nor to address the objections pointing out the sweeping generalization contained in such accusations — nor to engage with what I wrote elsewhere in this book about “libertarians” and “liberals.”

One insinuated dark connections and childishness, repeating his accusations without evidence and calling them “G.’s little boys.”
Another blamed the politicians of that formation for not officially endorsing one of the two remaining candidates in the second round, claiming that by withholding endorsement they had supported the other — “the Sodomite.”
He then accused those who voted for the latter as if they had endorsed him.
This he treated as an assumption — without proof.
And he turned that very assumption, which was the point under dispute, into his argument, falling into the manipulation of circular reasoning.

Meanwhile:

Treating the act of crossing someone out on a ballot as if it were an endorsement, and treating the choice between two candidates as if it were a moral‑civilizational referendum, requires justification from the one who frames it that way — because such framing inevitably leads to mutual accusations among those who crossed out different names.

We do not know which is worse:
a Catholic‑sounding narrative that lulls us to sleep while masking anti‑Catholic practice,
or an anti‑Catholic narrative blocked out of spite by PiS.
We do not know.
And I do not have to prove it.
The one who claims to know must prove it, because he defines the situation in a way that results in blaming all who voted differently.

Likewise, I do not have to prove that voting for someone in the second round, under the media illusion of democracy, is not an endorsement of that person.
The one who claims that it is an endorsement — of the person and of his views — must prove it, for the same reasons.

So far I have received only indignant bare assertions and attacks, accusations of heresy and of supporting a Sodomite, quotations from the Catechism without demonstrating where, why, or how I supposedly violated it.

These accusations were directed at many people from the position of someone who had illegitimately pronounced the above logical leaps and slanders in the name of all Catholics, thereby excluding and defaming the rest of the Catholic faithful.
As a Catholic, I could not remain silent in the face of such manipulation.
They strike directly at the Eighth Commandment, and their hypocrisy is intensified by the fact that they were uttered alongside Catholic declarations.

In light of the manipulations described here, the expression “super‑turbo‑hyper‑Catholic” and other objections — which the accuser labeled an “attack on Catholics” — turn out to be a legitimate and justified difference of opinion, one that slanders no one.
In response to it, however, we received the manipulations described above.

Such asymmetry in judgment also appears when someone responds to a gentle, non‑intrusive remark about behavior witnessed by others — behavior difficult to deny — with a deflecting accusation that the critic supposedly did something terrible when no one was present.
How is the accused to defend himself?
A shadow of suspicion falls and is difficult to erase, but attention has been successfully diverted from the real, witnessed behavior.

We must be vigilant against such emotional traps — often uttered without malicious intent, but as a reflexive defense by someone who has been corrected.
We must be vigilant, because in this way the one who gently pointed out, for example, an unjust accusation may be dragged through the mud in the eyes of others by someone who was not gentle at all, and who had no scruples about slandering.
And people will often believe the latter — because he is more forceful, because he speaks his accusations without responsible caution, and therefore more decisively and, to the untrained ear, more convincingly.
(Unless he overreaches in his bravado.)

Here is an excerpt from a discussion with someone of a completely different worldview (with linguistic errors corrected):

“You are arguing against distortions of my statements, reducing them to absurdity — as in the insinuation smuggled into the question: ‘Why are B.’s views “infallible”?’ and then answering your own question as if I had accepted one of the meanings of “error” implied in your phrasing.

Nowhere do I claim that anyone is infallible.

I call evil an error (as is obvious from the examples I discussed in the video concerning abortion, killing animals, sexual orientations — concrete illustrations of the sentence in the earlier comment: ‘B. does not preach those terrible errors contrary to the Teaching of Christ’).

I call evil an error. A truism.

One may preach evil, but from preached evil flow evil actions.
Opposing “evil” to “actions” is a false alternative.

One may say: ‘Abortion is evil, but the state cannot prohibit it in certain cases.’

Yet permitting abortion is itself an action that flows from such a conviction.
It is an action, not merely an opinion.
It has legal consequences.

Therefore the slogan ‘What matters are actions, not “infallible” opinions’ — which I often hear — contains false assumptions, a false opposition, and does not correspond to my argument, and thus does not refute it in any way.

The next slogan: ‘History knows many “infallible” people who left piles of corpses behind them’ — also popular — contains, for the same reason, a definition of “error” contrary to the one I used.

Those “infallible” people could not have been infallible, since leaving piles of corpses perfectly fulfills the definition of what not only I, but most people I know, consider an error — an extremely glaring example of error.

Are you seriously responding to me with such slogans and evasions?”

Abortion, Gender, LGBT, Vegetarianism — What Connects These Issues?

The overestimation of the role of SCIENCE is a common problem in disputes between proponents of different conceptions of reality.
It manifests itself in the ways people justify their claims:
when we “begin” to have a human being,
whether certain orientations or ideologically motivated diets are proper or improper.
This tendency may stem from the Enlightenment cult of science, or simply from the charm exerted on people by anything that sounds scientific and sophisticated.
Sounds.

A clear example of the right adopting the opponent’s false framework is the issue of killing unborn children.
When abortion advocates claim that “science determines” that we can speak of a human being only from such‑and‑such a week, pro‑lifers respond that “science determines” that we are human from conception.
But empirical sciences can determine no such thing.
Science studies mechanisms.
Whether we call those mechanisms “a human being” is a matter of worldview — and of the logic used to draw conclusions from that worldview.

Yes, science cannot be free of presuppositions, because it must operate with terms, definitions, and goals.
But these presuppositions are not something science contributes to our knowledge — they are something science receives.
They precede science.

If we agree that one must not murder an innocent person,
and if we recognize the conventional and unstable nature of deciding from which moment a single life is called a human being,
then logic requires us to treat the new organism — formed when two gametes become one — as a human being from conception.
There is no other objective threshold.
Before, there were two organisms; now there is one.

Thus on both sides of this conflict the same error dominates:
appealing to science.
But science has very little to say here.
This is a matter of belief (not necessarily religious), of presuppositions and definitions that precede and determine scientific methods and results.

Unfortunately, those who are right in their conclusions — the pro‑lifers — have allowed themselves to adopt the erroneous scientific framing initiated by abortion advocates.
In this and other areas, the political right allows its opponents to impose false categories — and therefore loses.

Exactly the same applies to the question of whether homosexuality is a deviation or not.
Science cannot decide this.
It is a matter of worldview — of the presuppositions that shape scientific definitions.

Science also cannot determine whether animals may be killed or not.
That too is a matter of value judgments — elements of a worldview.

“DON’T KILL ANIMALS BECAUSE THEY FEEL PAIN!”?

We do not know whether the physical process called pain is identical with the awareness of pain.
We do not know whether awareness is identical with the neurophysiological processes we call “consciousness.”
Modern thinkers assume this — but it is an assumption that science cannot verify.

If the physical process called pain were to determine whether killing is morally permissible,
we would be driven into absurdity:
we would have to stop killing plants,
stop transforming water,
stop walking,
stop existing —
because by existing we kill countless insects and microorganisms.

We do not know whether plants “feel pain,”
and precisely for that reason we could never risk causing them pain or death —
if we treat physical pain as the main criterion for prohibiting killing.

In practice, we try to kill animals in ways that minimize this physical pain.
But pain is not the main issue.
We do not refrain from killing because it hurts —
otherwise we would be allowed to kill people painlessly.
And we are not.

This is why Jesus did not forbid killing animals.
He even contributed to the death of a herd of pigs by sending demons into them.
Following that line of reasoning, one would have to conclude that He did something terrible.
He allowed His parents to kill doves in sacrifice.
He ate fish.
Peter saw a basket filled with various animals and heard:
“Kill, Peter, and eat.”

But such reasoning is false.
My model is not my own sentiment, but the Teaching of Christ.

A Fist Clenched Around a Rosary

A clenched fist raised for battle can be necessary — for example, when defending the attacked.
Fighting evil is, after all, a good thing.

And a clenched hand is not, in itself, a sign of hatred.
We clench it when we bump fists with a friend, when we raise it in triumph, when we grip — tightly — not only a “lucky stone,” but also the glove of a beloved person far away.
The hateful interpretation of that graphic in 2019 was the product of a media‑driven prejudice against the circles organizing the Independence March.
It was an example of treating a subjective interpretation as though nature had magically glued it to the gesture itself.
It has not — as the examples above demonstrate.

On the other side, of course, we find the same phenomenon:
for instance, the objectification of a negative interpretation of the rainbow.
(I maintain that Catholics should reclaim the rainbow from the LGBT movement and restore its distorted form. It is, after all, the symbol of God’s covenant with humanity.)

The very same circles that accuse traditionalists of “formalism,” insisting that “what matters is the heart,” suddenly become rigidly obsessed with an external form.
Those who hunt for a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in others eagerly impose negative interpretations where none are necessary.

When I see someone being attacked in unison by media and political camps that were previously at war with one another, I begin to suspect that this supposedly monstrous compiler of mutually exclusive abominations — fascism and anti‑state liberalism, Nazism and Putinism, Martianism and nationalism, immaturity and traditionalism, hate speech and idealistic utopias — may, in fact, be onto something.

The Rainbow, the Sun, the Cross, the Roman Salute — Let Us Not Allow the Wicked to Seize Our Symbols

The rainbow, the sun, the Cross, the Roman salute —
let us not allow certain symbols to be stolen by those who would twist them.
Symbols are older than their usurpers.
They belong to the deep grammar of human culture, not to the latest ideological fashion.

Distorting the Opponent’s Words So That the Distortion Is Easy to Refute

I assume that people often do this unwittingly — not deliberately.
It is a defensive reflex in the face of criticism.
In a surge of emotion the mind simplifies, reaches for bare assertions, shortcuts; honest argument becomes too time‑consuming and too difficult to digest.
Yet this method is profoundly harmful to the other side, and for that reason we, as honest people, must guard ourselves carefully lest we employ it by accident.

Rash Certainty in Expressing Opinions About Phenomena — and Especially About Other People and Entire Groups

Another method is drowning out the other side’s arguments with repeated emotional displays of concern, indignation, sorrow, or demands for apologies.
It is extraordinarily effective — and extraordinarily base.
Observers of a debate will not remember the arguments; they will remember the emotions that smothered those arguments, and it is those emotions that will persuade them.
We must avoid using this method — and expose it immediately whenever it appears.

A concrete example?
In 2019, two long‑hostile political camps in Poland suddenly united in attacking a new political competitor.
They began dredging up various alleged scandals.
One of them was a photograph of some of her current MPs taken more than ten years earlier, at a private gathering, where they extended their arms forward in a parody of Nazism.
When this photo was shown on television, the accusers shouted down any attempt at explanation, repeating like a mantra: “This is outrageous, outrageous!” — lest viewers hear the arguments revealing the absurdity and perversity of the charges.
Charges that perfectly illustrated the method of the thief who, shouting “Stop, thief!”, tries to divert attention from himself.

And then they demanded apologies.
Apologies — for mocking fascism?
Cabaret performers may mock it, activists may mock it, everyone may mock it — but young men parodying fascists a dozen years earlier were not allowed?
A little consistency, please.

Precisely because they cannot answer arguments, they shout, they insist that the parody was praise, they demand absurd apologies, and so on.
(This entire affair is tied to the foolish habit of surrendering symbols — the salute, the Cross, the rainbow, the swastika — which I discuss later.)

People Usually Believe the One Who Arrives First With a Complaint

I have noticed that people tend to believe the one who first runs to them with a grievance — often wrapped in the pose of someone who “speaks well of others” while smuggling in the suggestion that he has been wronged — even when he is the one at fault and is shifting blame to cleanse himself.
This begins already in kindergarten.

Honest people arouse suspicion (perhaps because they prick the conscience of the rest?) and their good name is easily destroyed, because they do not resort to such ignoble, though effective, tactics.
When they present accusations, they do so substantively — and most people lack the strength, or simply the desire, to analyze causal chains.
Thus they believe emotional slogans, bare assertions mistaken for concrete facts, and well‑timed rhetorical grenades:

“This is outrageous.”
“Filthy — I repeat, filthy — I repeat again: FILTHY.”
“This is BRAZEN FORGERY.”
“Heretic!” — because “the Catechism says, Scripture says, Tradition says…”
“Hate speech.”

Repeating Whatever Was on the Radio as Though It Were One’s Own Thought

When I worked in a certain factory, the radio played in the background.
At 10 a.m. we had a break — we sat with the lads, ate our sandwiches, and the discussions began.
The first thing that came out of their mouths was whatever had just been said on the radio.
They were convinced these were their own reflections, speaking with the confidence of men who believed they had arrived at these thoughts themselves.
Everyone nodded along.

Yet earlier I had observed that they were not listening to the radio at all: they were talking among themselves, assembling parts, figuring out how to fit components, from whom to borrow a drill or a wrench.
But certain things drifting in the background seeped into the subconscious and later surfaced as the supposed expression of their individual insight — the “depth of their hearts.”

A Field of Agreement as the Cause of Conflict

(Excerpted from an analysis of a certain political dispute on the Polish scene.)

Both sides tirelessly fight for the “independence” of the media, for their supposed detachment from any political option.
But such a thing will never exist.

A journalist’s worldview — no matter how he twists himself — inevitably shapes whom he invites, what interests him, how he gestures, what tone he adopts, and how he formulates questions.
His declaration of neutrality merely conceals the subconscious, between‑the‑lines entanglement with a particular political option.
He does not need to manipulate consciously (though that happens too).
It is enough that he believes something.
The most persuasive messenger is the one who is persuaded himself — and who happens to possess rhetorical talent.
Intelligence agencies, media conglomerates, and businesses seek precisely such people to promote their “products.”

The most effective persuasive techniques arise naturally when someone sincerely believes what he wants to convey.
Those who hold power do best by supporting, hiring, and promoting those who believe what serves their interests.
And what might serve them?
Anything: one wants to indoctrinate society for purely ideological reasons; another uses a worldview to justify demand for a product (e.g., a film producer whose characters wear shirts with one long and one short sleeve may be funded by the manufacturer of those shirts).

A journalist who declares neutrality misleads himself (for he usually believes it sincerely) and — worse — misleads others.
He acts most honestly when he does not hide his political and ideological preferences.

Let us repeat: he likely means well, but he has been shaped by the web of signals sent by contemporary civilization — a civilization of appearances.

Neutrality, criticism of the “monopoly on truth,” calls for media freedom — these are catchy slogans that manipulate public opinion.
The problem is that those who preach the avoidance of stereotypes fail to notice the stereotype embedded in the claim that one can avoid stereotypes altogether.
Human thinking necessarily consists of stereotypes.
The question is whether they are true.

Worldviews differ because their adherents define truth differently.
Those who claim neutrality deceive themselves, because the linguistic label “neutrality” blinds them to how their statements and their selection of facts are entangled with their worldview.

There is no escape from this entanglement.

The most honest course is therefore to abandon the pursuit of neutrality and straightforwardly defend what my faith, my worldview, commands me to call true.
This will produce conflict.
But as recent events show, even the pursuit of neutrality produces conflict — and unjust accusations.

What is sad is that such honesty is met with discrimination from those who — paradoxically — denounce discrimination.
Honest and simple people are punished for “fundamentalism,” thrown into the same sack as terrorists.

Let us therefore be vigilant, lest we commit something worse than conflict: a rash accusation.
Such judgments spread easily.
Repairing the harm they cause is far more difficult.

Let us fight, then, for honest acknowledgment of our own convictions and for respectful dispute — without falsely labeling someone’s opinion as intolerance or lack of neutrality.

Education and Erudition as Arguments

Finishing university and reading many books proves nothing.
I know — I finished university myself (though my “erudition” is another matter…) and I have seen many who finished as well.
And then?
Digging trenches, chiseling walls, operating production lines, I met people more intelligent and wiser than many graduates of higher education.

Stupidity and intelligence seem to be distributed evenly on both sides.
There is even a suspicion — half in jest, half in earnest — that the brightest simply skipped university, started businesses, or operate free from academic fashions.
It is not impossible.

The same applies to erudition.
One may recite juicy fragments of scholarly works or literature and understand none of it.
Even if one understands, one may have no idea how to relate it to reality — and thus no idea how to make it useful.

An intelligent person can be just as wrong as a fool.

Highly intelligent people may argue about the same matters as the “dim‑witted.”
The difference may lie in the method of argumentation, in how intelligence is applied, in good or bad will, or in intellectual diligence or laziness.

A more limited person may be right while an intelligent one is wrong — because of

greater courage in speaking uncomfortable truths,
stronger will,
intellectual diligence,
honesty.

A brilliant mind may reach worse conclusions simply because he cannot be bothered to think.
He may lack the courage to risk stating something that irritates his environment.
Indeed, precisely because of his intelligence he may better foresee the consequences of speaking an uncomfortable truth — and out of cowardice or short‑term gain choose not to speak it, but to maneuver and say what people want to hear.

A less intelligent person may foresee the consequences poorly — and therefore speak the truth.

Intelligence is not enough.
To reach correct conclusions one needs virtues: courage, diligence, perseverance, and honesty.

Thus one of the “fools” may grasp the essence of a problem better than one of the “intellectuals.”
And vice versa.

Self‑Fulfilling Prophecies (2020)

It cannot be that every rumor released by media decision‑makers is met with our obedient compliance.
It cannot be that we react pre‑emptively to every potential catastrophe.
The burden of proof lies on those who define a situation — who proclaim a pandemic, who decree the necessity of masks — because they are the ones initiating accusations against those who do not accept their version of events.

Yet, by the old “stop, thief!” method,
the accusers drown out the need for proof with emotional charges, moral blackmail, and attempts to induce guilt.
They treat their version as a self‑evident norm requiring no justification.
But the truth is the opposite.

The norm is precisely what they condemn — for example, walking with one’s face uncovered.
Those with uncovered mouths have nothing to explain; their behavior is given, inherited, like language itself, and therefore normal, enabling communication with others.
To accuse those who follow the norm is to bear false witness — false and perverse.
Its practitioners press on, turning the tables: having accused those who doubt the pandemic narrative, they demand proof from them and impute belief in conspiracies.

In reality, it is the accusers — those who shout “conspiracy theorist!” — who attempt to force others into uncritical belief in powerful media narratives.

As for me: I believe in the Triune God, not in any so‑called “plandemic.”

It is precisely this top‑down character — not mere feeling, nor the administrative decree of the moment — that constitutes norms.
Any other arrangement would be irrational, for it would expose society to a normative Tower of Babel: a total lack of verification, a pluralism of contradictions that would dissolve any community.
This is precisely what political rivals desire for their enemies: to break their internal cohesion.
And the same applies to enemies of the Church or any other institution.

This is also the danger of tolerationism — of supposedly universal values which, in a linguistic haze, are confused with the names of those values.
Language itself is an example: without its top‑down structure, it would cease to be language.
If everyone could construct a language according to personal whim and demand that others accept it (as in the case of individuals insisting on being called by categories detached from biological reality), communication would collapse.
People would speak past one another, each trapped in his own private idiom.
This is precisely what is happening in the West in the twenty‑first century — a living image of what the biblical Tower of Babel may have meant.

Returning to logic:
If we believe in a looming catastrophe and implement the prescribed measures, we cannot know whether those measures — presented as medicine — are not in fact the poison that produces the very illness we fear.
Heroic “instructors” hand us super‑extinguishers to prevent a forest fire.
We rush in, spraying the forest — and when someone cries, “Stop! There’s gasoline inside — you’re igniting the forest yourselves!” — he is immediately silenced.

Panic drastically weakens resilience.
The awareness of danger — even when intellectually rejected — burrows into the back of the mind and magnifies the symptoms of an ordinary cold.
I know this from experience.
Panic weakens the body.

A panicked healthcare system delays treatment it would normally provide.
I know of cases from nearby villages: a mother with appendicitis who died in spring 2020 after being turned away from several hospitals due to restrictions.
Thus one understands the angry outbursts of those who, faced with such stories and the spreading of fear, sometimes exclaim, “You’ll hang for this!”
It is the kind of situation that makes the knife open in one’s pocket.

When a government expert says that his knife opens in his pocket at the sight of those who question restrictions, that is acceptable —
but when someone else reacts similarly to the consequences of those restrictions, it is suddenly a sign of pathology?
No.
That is a double standard.

To label those who react to such cruelty as a “psychiatric faction,” while ignoring the emotional excess of those who provoked them, is perverse and unjust.
The former react to a needle driven into them; their anger is a defensive reflex.
The latter provoke that anger through belief in theories difficult to verify.

Another man told me recently that in his village a young man also died of appendicitis because he could not be admitted to a hospital under the restrictions.
Tests — even according to their creators — are fallible.
Families lose their livelihoods.

What, then, should one do?
Entrust oneself to God and live normally — and react only when, to use the colloquial expression, bodies are literally lying in the streets.
Otherwise we may fulfill, by our own “remedies,” the very prophecy we fear.

I will not even mention the geopolitical and spiritual factors here.

Another example of this mechanism is the claim:
“I won’t vote for him because he has no chance.”
Such thinking ensures that if fifteen million citizens refrain from voting for someone, he indeed has no chance —
not because he lacked support, but because people were convinced he lacked support.
They obediently realized a previously false state of affairs.
Just as polls shape political outcomes, fear shapes public behavior.

The same mechanism appears in medicines and procedures that create illnesses — and thereby create demand for further medicines, to the benefit of their producers.

Like a firefighter who sets the forest ablaze so that he may heroically extinguish it.
Or worse: a firefighter who hands his volunteers buckets of gasoline and, invoking his secret expertise, insists that the forest is about to ignite and must be soaked now, because the grass is “very, very dry.”
Anyone who shouts that the hoses and buckets contain flammable liquid is accused of “conspiracy theories,” stripped of professional rights, fined, and ridiculed.

That is how it works.

The Disney Syndrome

Seeing people with lightning bolts on their masks in late October 2020, I was reminded of something that had frightened me long before.
When I first entered a so‑called “Catholic” school, I noticed that many treated Catholicism — and even Jesus Himself — as a verbal emblem, a decorative badge.
They recited Gospel phrases with enthusiasm, yet it was not the Church’s Tradition or the Gospel itself that served as their criterion.
They selected fragments according to the standards of the world — sentimental patterns borrowed from fairy tales.
They sighed over what they had over‑interpreted through the lens of those tales.

I tried to believe it was only my impression.
Now, as I add these lines, I know it was not.
The linguistic reduction of the Gospel into an emblem — something I described elsewhere in Katologi(k)a — revealed its true face.
The masks fell, and the true face of the internalized convictions of entire masses of nominal and emotionally‑revolutionized Catholics turned out, paradoxically, to be black masks with a red lightning bolt.

This was not a sudden turn.
It was a long‑initiated process.

Most of these people had been fascinated by Disney fairy tales.
They spoke endlessly of “love,” while avoiding — or treating like a contagion — the topics of Traditional Catholic teaching: obedience, institution, hierarchy, the division of roles within the family, and the status of Tradition itself.
They avoided these things, or recoiled from them as if from leprosy.

They created substitute values — “tolerance,” for example — which functioned as a verbal skeleton key.
It was enough to accuse someone defending Tradition of “intolerance,” and the accusation, though baseless and entirely mismatched to the person’s actual stance, would stick.
For them, feeling is the marker of identity, not the connection between words, reality, and tradition.

This is one of the deep foundations of the contemporary flood: anti‑traditionalism.
It is what makes the moral legitimacy of killing the unborn, the killing of animals, the beginning of human life, or the nature of sexual identity appear “negotiable,” tossed around by changing the words.
What they practice is a form of terror — for having severed language from reality, they no longer see that their “tolerance” means discrimination against those who think differently.

A reply to an old school acquaintance

Look at language as you would at the air we breathe.
Concepts are not whatever this or that person wants them to be; they are what we have received as a shared inheritance.
If everyone could assign any meaning to any word, each person would speak an individual language — and no one would understand anyone.

Marriage, woman, man — these words refer to concrete realities that precede the words themselves.
If someone wishes to participate in a different kind of reality, he has no right to demand that others accept calling it marriage/woman/man.

Imposing one’s private meanings onto language — which is the common property of a community — is like releasing foul or toxic fumes into the shared air, or producing noises others do not want to hear, all justified by one’s “feelings,” “creativity,” or “need for expression.”

It is telling that the very same people who fight to fill language, reality, and society with their private definitions of sex — thereby disrupting the functioning of both language and reality — are often the ones who campaign for “clean air” and scold those who burn wood in their stoves.

This also explains the accusation you once made against me — that I was “intolerant” — when I objected to your plan (later carried out) to sing texts drawn from some serious or unserious satanic conventions to the melody of a psalm belonging to a specific sacred tradition.
That was an example of the same kind of appropriation of a shared space — a space that belongs neither to you nor to me, that transcends us, and only therefore can function, just as language can function.

A deeper pattern

By pointing out the shared foundations behind the belief that one can construct the forms of the Holy Mass and of piety,
or define the essence of humanity according to contemporary committees,
or determine the permissibility of killing animals,
or redefine the markers of sexual identity,
I am not claiming that every representative of one of these positions embraces all the others.
Not at all.
They are often declared opponents of the rest.

I am pointing only to the deeper connections — the ones they do not see.

Logical Errors. Example: The Generalized Straw Man

The error of refuting a straw man — or undermining an opponent’s position by first imputing to him a different meaning of words than the one he actually uses — appears especially often in discussions involving large, historically burdened concepts, particularly those referring to groups of people.
It is frequently intertwined with generalization.

One person says she is both a liberal and a Catholic.
Another replies that these are contradictory positions because “liberalism is such‑and‑such,” it has such‑and‑such origins, the pope condemned it, and “you cannot detach it from the general context, from how society understands the term.”
The first person responds: But I mean something different by “liberalism.” You cannot therefore claim, in such general terms, that the position I call ‘liberalism’ contradicts Catholicism. The pope had something else in mind. He merely used the same word.

“Yes,” replies the second person, “but you cannot simply call anything you like ‘liberalism,’ because words function within a context. Smith, Locke, the French Revolution, anarcho‑capitalism — that is the historical and social context…”

“Fine,” says the first person, “but now you’ve changed the accusation. It no longer concerns the content itself, but the use of the word. If necessary, I can abandon the term and use something like ‘freedom‑oriented’ instead.”

But since we are already discussing language:
You speak of “context,” of tradition. Very well. But is that the only tradition?
I know others — older ones.
Traditions that refer to the root of all these later liberalisms: liber, free.
Freedom is a concept as old as humanity.
It appears in the Gospel.
In the Lord’s Prayer (“sed libera nos a malo”).
It is to this tradition, this context, that I refer.

If your context for the word “liberalism” once arose and appropriated the word liberté and its derivatives for itself, why should another, contemporary movement not be allowed to incorporate the same word into a different context?
Especially if it does not aspire to change the meaning of the word freedom, but wishes to preserve it in the sense inherited from traditions older than the liberalism you are talking about?

“But fine,” continues the first person, “let it be so. I don’t insist on the term ‘liberalism.’ It is indeed somewhat misleading in our society.
So perhaps: ‘freedom‑oriented.’”

“No,” replies the second, “because ‘freedom‑oriented’ groups here also refer to Western liberalism.”

“You are ignoring the movement I am talking about simply because it does not fit your definition.
You are repeating the same mistake I just analyzed using the example of ‘liberalism.’
We are going in circles.
Replace the word ‘liberalism’ with ‘freedom,’ and respond to my argument — do not stop at mere assertion.”

Your outlining of one single context for words such as “liberalism,” “freedom‑oriented,” “speculation,” “discourse,” “structuralism,” “capitalism,” “nationalism,” does not eliminate the existence of other contexts.

Such a conversation can go on endlessly.

One cannot criticize someone for being a “liberal,” a “traditionalist,” or for adhering to a “hermeneutic of continuity,” by appealing to a meaning of “liberal,” “traditionalist,” or “HC” that the person in question does not share.
At most, one may conduct a linguistic dispute about which label is better or worse.

Another error is the illegitimate transition from a linguistic‑semantic dispute
to a substantive dispute.

At the beginning, the person committing this error may formally acknowledge that meanings differ,
but as the discussion progresses, he forgets this and begins criticizing someone
for “liberalism” in a sense that the criticized person does not profess.

Liberalism, Nationalism, Inconsistency, and Generalization

One often encounters the habit of throwing everyone into a single sack and assuming that the words “liberalism” or “liberty‑oriented” possess one single “correct” meaning, welded by God Himself to those particular syllables.
This is contrary to what we objectively know about language, about social, cultural, and situational context.
Thus it is nonsense to claim that someone “talks nonsense” merely because he calls himself a Catholic liberty‑oriented thinker or a liberty‑oriented Catholic.
It is nonsense to claim that defining liberty‑orientation in a way compatible with Catholicism is somehow “misnaming.”

What may be wrong or mutually contradictory are specific meanings of words like nationalism or liberalism — not the words themselves.
And not all meanings.
And “wrong” always from the standpoint of some particular worldview.
One must first determine which meaning is under discussion, and one must not stretch one’s own meaning across all who use the same word.

If someone attacks the use of the word “liberalism,” he should, by analogy, attack the word “nationalism,” because in the West that term also means something quite different.
And if someone claims that the word “liberty‑oriented” necessarily carries connotations of, say, anarcho‑capitalism, then he should also claim that the word “nationalist” is necessarily tied to the “original” sources of Western nationalism.

For this reason, I personally propose abandoning — at least provisionally — the labels “liberal” and “nationalist” in favor of “liberty‑oriented” and “nation‑oriented.”
But I do not attempt to force upon those who use “liberalism” or “nationalism” the idea that they are committing some objective error, as though meanings were welded to words by nature, as though context were fixed and unchanging, or as though there were only one context for all people in our time.
Contexts are many; some are favored, others diminished.

I propose distinguishing liberty‑orientation from Western liberalism, just as I distinguish nation‑oriented movements from Western European nationalism.

With Catholic teaching, what may be incompatible is a specific content, not the mere sound of a word.
(And hearing the phrase “Catholic teaching,” some will immediately try to impose a reductionist, modern, narrow definition of “teaching,” forgetting that such narrowing is a recent invention, while the word scientia and its broader meaning are far older.)

Words, after all, have this property: in different mouths they mean different things.

I myself grew up using the word “liberalism” to describe something negative, but I do not attempt — as one popular right‑wing commentator did in 2019 — to insist that the word has some “proper” meaning.
Such an approach is a symptom of Protestant over‑linguification, an overestimation of the role of the word with a small “w.”
It leads to the illusion that by preserving the exact sound of Gospel words (or rather their translations, whose subjective nature we conveniently ignore), we preserve their meaning — while in fact we lose sight of the Meaning Christ intended.

We become defenseless before meanings smuggled in through external forms, because we previously declared those forms “indifferent” or even “obscuring.”
But the meaning of a word lies outside the word — in the realities to which it refers.
For the Logos — the Word — is above all Reason‑Meaning.

This is why I suggested abandoning the word “liberalism” and accepting its colloquial meaning, replacing it with “liberty‑oriented.”

“Speculation” and “usury” are not constitutive elements of liberty‑orientation.
At least, this cannot be demonstrated, because liberty‑orientation is too broad a category for such an assumption to serve as the basis of an honest accusation.
And these terms themselves can be understood in various ways; therefore one cannot issue sweeping condemnations of entire categories as though their meanings were clear.
They are not.
Distinctions must be made.

The proposals of many liberty‑oriented thinkers who also identify as right‑wing and conservative actually enable the development of a work ethic, enable the fight against injustice, and enable honest earning — even if many liberty‑oriented thinkers do not yet understand this.

The Barabbas effect appears when all liberty‑oriented people are attacked with emotional accusations such as “none of them ever speak about work.”
As a result of such attacks, many indeed begin to distance themselves from the work ethic and even oppose it — just as Barabbas once set Rome on fire.
This is a self‑fulfilling prophecy: the state of affairs being accused is brought into existence by the repeated, irritating accusation.

A common tactic of provocateurs:
They irritate the target until he finally loses control and does exactly what they accused him of — or what they intend to accuse him of — with a ready‑made theory waiting.

Technology, Tradition, and the False Alternative

Technological development, unrestrained by “primitivism” and by reverence for what is given from above by the Ancestors and by God (in the elements), turns against itself.

The objective laws of economics only appear to justify mass specialization, automation, and informatization aimed at greater efficiency with fewer workers — but only if we forget one or two key truths.
The first forgotten truth is the ever‑present possibility of catastrophe — war or natural disaster — which can topple the technological Tower of Babel we have built.

By relying increasingly on machines, we cease — over several generations — to transmit the “primitive,” earth‑bound skills that allowed us to reach a high technological level in the first place.
Without this unwritten, unspoken, but practiced tradition — the tradition of forming — we will not be able to rebuild technology when it collapses.

Thus, alongside developing artificial reality, we must maintain our connection to the earth as God created it, to nature, and to the transmission of the “primitive” skills of working it.
Both are necessary.

The same applies to the relationship between mass production and small‑scale craftsmanship.
We need both.

As someone who worked at the lowest level in large mass‑production factories, and as someone raised in the 1990s, I see the change in product quality and its relation to price.
The ability to produce more at seemingly lower prices results in an unnecessary flood of goods of such low quality that it would be better to have fewer of them.

I also see the growing role of scheming and pretending, which in the short term outcompetes real efficiency.
I see entire chains of pseudo‑managerial, pseudo‑planning, pseudo‑engineering positions held by people who have time to eloquently justify the need for their “services,” because they do not “waste” time producing real goods or performing real engineering work.
Here rhetoric triumphs over practice.

A False Alternative in a Book Defending the Free Market

In one otherwise valuable book praising the free market, I encountered a false alternative, an example of the Barabbas effect, and the method of the false friend.

The author, criticizing distributists, threw the baby out with the bathwater.
He rightly criticized state interventionism and redistribution advocated by Belloc and others.
But from the falsity of those proposals it does not follow that self‑sufficiency is false.
Yet he attacked it wholesale.

Rejecting redistribution, he began praising mass production and criticizing the distributist affirmation of craftsmanship and small enterprises.
He offered arguments, but they ignored everything I have written above — and thus reveal gaps in his reasoning.

When I affirm small‑scale production and criticize mass production, it does not mean I automatically share the other positions of those who also praise craftsmanship — such as redistribution.
There is no necessary connection between craftsmanship and redistribution, just as there is no necessary connection between mass production and the free market.
These are false linkages, and between them lies a false alternative.

I criticize the expansion of mass production and the disappearance of craftsmanship, while also criticizing redistribution and fiscalism, and praising the free market.

More: just as there is no necessary connection between the positions listed above, there is a necessary connection between freedom and self‑sufficiency.
Economic freedom is necessary for the independent production of goods, and local, self‑sufficient production — not only of goods but of their patterns and forms — is necessary for preserving one’s convictions.
One of these convictions concerns the shape of the economy.
The most important concerns the Meaning and Purpose of Existence — the Condition of Freedom.

Away with the false alternative.
Freedom and local craftsmanship.
Both.
The Cross.
The Quincunx.
Catholicism.

As Susceptible to Deception as to an Optical Illusion

This deception (present always in ordinary human communication among persuasive people, and only refined and amplified by modern media) is the second key principle omitted when judging mass production as “better” than local and relatively self‑sufficient craftsmanship.

Why does the market not immediately verify this?
Why does the fact that mass production displaces the other and stays on top not prove its objective superiority?

Because effects usually do not appear immediately.
And even when they do appear, the same mechanisms that justify the existence of marketing, optical illusions, rhetoric, and eristic allow us to divert people’s attention — including that of business owners and customers — away from the real cause, and convince them that the cause lies elsewhere.

The reason is human cognitive frailty, which plays a decisive role in the process of decision‑making — and every economic activity is precisely that: a sequence of decisions.
If truth always prevailed, if we were not vulnerable to lies and mistakes, these would simply vanish in practice.

Those who work diligently and usefully for a company often lack the time to defend themselves against rhetorical belittling by elbow‑throwing competitors.
By the time the effects of their work become visible, they are often no longer there — and even if they are, no one recognizes the connection, since someone else has collected the laurels.

While they are working toward real results, someone else is working to present those results as his own — working mainly rhetorically.
The former often lack the time, and perhaps the talent, for such rhetoric and showmanship.

In professional life it is extremely common to see others rewarded for the merits of those who simply do good work but do not know how to create the right impression.
This is a key reason — profoundly human, moral, yet very real — why the shape of the market and what floats to the surface are not determined solely by a dry balance of costs and benefits, nor by what is truly best for society.

We cannot ignore the misuse of so‑called “soft skills” — a misuse that is a form of anti‑realism, an illustration of the destructive consequences of detachment from reality and the simulacrization of the world.
Postmodern manipulation of language belongs here too: reducing definitions of words like woman, man, sex, person, the start of human life to subjective feeling, and ultimately to Nothing.
I discuss this in other parts of the book.

Mass production rests upon a vast marketing machine that creates “unnecessary needs,” convincing people they require things they would never previously have desired.
It then produces a surplus of goods that people pay for, but which are of poor quality and manufactured at the cost of exploiting those whose productive efforts remain undervalued.
Undervalued because of showmen who have realized that, given the time lag and often hidden link between work and result, they can use rhetorical skill to convince themselves and others of false causes of the effects in question.

They strip all the pears from the pear tree, tie them onto an apple tree, and then persuade everyone that the pears came from the apple tree — that the true pear tree “bore no fruit” and must therefore be cut down.
And next year, when there are no pears, they will simply find another flowery explanation.

Here lies the danger of using the slogan “by their fruits you shall know them” unreflectively.
It is very easy to confuse the trees — to mistake the church from whose tower the bell was ringing.

A well‑known economist once explained to Poles that they should not look at what developed countries are doing now, once they have already developed, but rather at what they did before they reached their current level.
In the same way, developed countries should continue practicing and maintaining not only their initial strategies, but also their pre‑technological skills.

The second key reason for maintaining “primitive” skills and self‑sufficiency is this: it is through everyday forms that we preserve our worldview (as I explain elsewhere).
By outsourcing the production of those forms to anonymous designers of mass patterns, we expose ourselves to an unnoticed substitution of our convictions.

Alongside technological development we must therefore ensure that we do not forget to train those traditional skills and abilities that allowed us to start and accelerate the engine of development in the first place.
We never know when the machine — once running — will stop or break down.
So we must always be ready to build it, start it, and accelerate it again from scratch.

The Market, False Alternatives, and the Barabbas Effect

I encountered the stance of a certain defender of the free market who, in the course of that defense, adopts his opponents’ false alternatives.
Criticizing — rightly — the idea of state regulation of prices and wages, he simultaneously defends the claim that mass production is better than locality and self‑sufficiency.

Since his opponents link the thesis about exploitation in big factories with the necessity of state regulation of wages and prices, with state redistribution of goods, and with the glorification of self‑sufficiency and localism, he — instead of saying that one does not follow from the other — simply reverses the valuation: he rejects everything wholesale.
In doing so he confirms the false connections made by his opponents.

Yet one can do something else:
one can point out the exploitation of workers by employers, the negatives of mass production, and the merits of self‑sufficiency and small enterprises — while simultaneously criticizing state attempts to “preventively” solve these injustices through taxation and interference in labor contracts.

This author, however, seemed to feel obliged to praise and defend mass production simply because the distributists — who in some aspects advocate state intervention — criticize it.
This is allowing one’s opponent to impose categories — the Barabbas effect again — and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It is like criticizing a particular council of the Church simply because those who break with Tradition place that council on their banners.
Or saying: “Since Satan quoted the Bible, the Bible must be evil.”

This is how the “right” disarms itself.

The brutal truth is that there is no full justice here on earth.
In purely human, economic terms, the dishonest often win — just as people are more easily persuaded by emotions and clever tricks than by rational arguments and calculations.
Fruits ripen so late that people — especially today, overwhelmed by informational noise and the pace of change — no longer remember what caused what.
They allow themselves to be convinced of false causal stories by those who know how to tell them and have an interest in doing so.

Business is just another domain of life, and this same principle governs it as well.
Honesty does not “pay.”

Let me give a few real‑life examples:

I once witnessed a situation in which a customer left the table next to me satisfied and convinced he had gotten a good deal — although he had been cheated.
When he was then offered a fairer and financially more advantageous proposition, he refused to believe it.

Someone else told me he managed to sell a certain product only after raising its price, because people had been conditioned not to buy clothes that were “too cheap.”

Again: people often let themselves be deceived into paying excessively high prices for work done in a complicated, flashy, but poor manner.
Those who do the job correctly and more cheaply arouse suspicion; they often lack the persuasive flair that tends to go hand‑in‑hand with dishonesty.
Honesty, by contrast, often triggers distrust.

A truthful description of a situation, translated into words, often sounds weak.
To make it sound “good,” it must be polished and plugged into certain familiar rhetorical formulas — formulas that, in relation to the concrete case at hand, may have little to do with reality.
They are deceptive.
One must feign certainty where no one truly has it, because such certainty “makes a good impression.”
But this feigning is itself a lie.

Another customer refused to believe those who offered fair prices because he did not understand that in some cases big things (such as boilers or furnaces) look large and expensive, but in practice require less work to install than the small elements, and are thus cheaper overall.
The customer assumed that once he had bought a boiler and radiators, the rest would cost pennies.
In reality, the “small stuff” (connectors, nuts, taps) accounts for the majority of the cost — due to the sheer number of parts, the high material demands of precise small components multiplied by quantity, and the vastly greater time required for the fine, precise, yet crucial work associated with them.

Many other technical factors are difficult to describe here; they belong to specialists and are hard to translate into non‑specialist language, sometimes even hard to name.
Thus it is difficult to explain their value to a lay customer.

I will not even mention the multitude of hidden commercial and fiscal costs embedded in the price of every small component.
That is a topic for broader analysis — one that should be undertaken by someone more technically competent.

Szukaj na tym blogu

Katologika

Cathologic III part: The Babel Tower - Jan Moniak

Subjectivization through Scripture

Komentarze

Prześlij komentarz

Popularne posty z tego bloga

CATHOLOGIC - A Cure for the Plague of the West Prologue and I chapter Jan Moniak

CATHOLOGIC - A Cure for the Plague of the West Jan Moniak

Katologika - Lek na zarazę Zachodu - Jan Moniak