Welcome to 'Progress'?!
The Tragic Cycle of the 'Progressive' Delusion
The Early Evolution of Post-Truth Culture
Some Early Forays into Post-Truth Mechanisms and the Hijacking of the Judeo-Christian Western Soul
The Cancel Culture Cult of Robespierre and the French Revolution – Are we Here Again?
“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.” — Laurens van der Post
The following very, very brief synopsis is a mere introduction to yet another culture episode and demographic of cancel culture tyranny. Whilst we will use the term theosophical here (clearly pre-emptively) we can definitely pick it’s to be soon defined mechanism at work. You will get just a teaser on how this Christ, and His Kingdom denying lens, attempts to craft not merely a substitute - rather a shocking, antithetical and gratuitously wicked effigy of the best practice that is the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness.
When ‘man’ is in charge, regardless of their purported affiliations to secular or religious ideologies, (and the humble servant posture of the One True King is not central) then we have ‘new cultures’ attempting to remove broken or failing ones without the Author of Life governing the process and crafting the new.
The nightmare and burgeoning insanity of the French Revolution must never be glossed over. The level of political and metaphysical masturbation, and the barbarity it spawned should be a starch reminder of what can happen – and arguably what we are seeing happen – when the ‘revolutionary’ mob, demanding their rights, their way, seek to take charge.
Core Posture of the Revolution
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Republican Deism, not Christianity or Atheism. Robespierre believed in a Supreme Being who guarantees moral order and in the immortality of the soul. The Revolution needed both to be more than a power struggle. An ‘all seeing eye’ that would keep the masses in check so that the ‘state’ wouldn’t have to be so vigilant in ensuring all citizens complied to their new social and political dictates.
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Rousseau was his Scripture. The “civil religion” in The Social Contract and the Savoyard Vicar’s creed supplied the blueprint: a minimal, public faith that binds citizens.
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Virtue was the Engine. His most famous formula joined virtue and terror: terror as “an emanation of virtue.” Cruelty became a sacred duty and justice a moral absolute.
- He Saw Himself as a Secular Prophet or High Priest Figure. At the Festival of the Supreme Being (8 June 1794) he walked at the head of the procession as the Convention’s president.
What he Borrowed from Christianity
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Providence and judgement. A watching God who consoles the oppressed and terrifies tyrants.
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Immortal souls and a moral afterlife. The 7 May 1794 decree formally declared both.
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Liturgy and ritual. Processions, hymns, altars, incense-like pageantry, and mass communal worship, designed by the painter David.
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Sacred calendar. Civic festivals dedicated to Truth, Justice, Liberty and so on, with the décadi standing in for Sunday.
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Martyrs and saints. Marat, Le Peletier, and the child heroes Bara and Viala were canonised as republican martyrs.
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Sacred texts and catechism. The Declaration of Rights served as scripture, with civic instruction as the catechism.
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Moral vocabulary. Sin became “vice” and “corruption,” conversion became “regeneration”, and the faithful became “the people”.
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The Catholic formation behind it. His schooling was clerical and Catholic, and the habits of mind never left him.
What he tried to Swap Out
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Priestly hierarchy and papal authority, replaced by the state and the Convention.
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Revealed dogma, meaning the Trinity, Christ’s divinity, miracles and original sin, replaced by natural religion accessible to reason.
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Church as mediator. The Nation became the sacred community, and worship was redirected to the Republic.
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Original sin was swapped for a belief in human goodness corrupted by tyranny.
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The new faith had no clergy of its own. The state itself became the vehicle of the sacred.
Why he Despised Atheism
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Atheism as aristocratic. He denounced it in late 1793 as an elitist, aristocratic creed, the philosophy of the comfortable.
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Morality needs a sanction. Without a God who sees and judges, he feared virtue would collapse into self-interest.
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Voltaire’s logic, taken seriously. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, because the people need that belief.
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Political prudence. Forced dechristianisation (the Cult of Reason, church closures, Hébert and Chaumette) alienated the peasantry and fed counter-revolution, especially in the Vendée.
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Factional weapon. Attacking “atheist” extremists let him paint the Hébertists as enemies of the Republic and consolidate his own power.
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Symbolic climax. At the festival, an effigy of Atheism was burned to reveal a statue of Wisdom, which emerged blackened by smoke.
The Irony and Downfall
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Reception was sinister. Many onlookers muttered that he wanted to be master and God both.
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The Law of 22 Prairial followed two days later and accelerated the Terror, so the festival of virtue led straight into peak bloodshed.
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Rivals mocked the cult, notably through the Catherine Théot “Mother of God” affair.
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Thermidor (27 July 1794). He fell within seven weeks of the festival, and his sacred republic died with him.
(For full and further historical insights go to The Rest Is History Podcast)
Socialism : Communism by any Other Name?
Malcolm Muggeridge went to the Soviet Union hoping to encounter the future. Instead, he discovered how a promised future could be used to conceal a terrible present. His awakening was not merely a rejection of communism: it was a confrontation with the mechanisms by which political power, intellectual prestige and professional journalism could collaborate in the displacement of truth.
“Post-truth” a term that will not be ‘officially’ recognised by Oxford until 2016 (a term defined as; “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”) was a spell being conjured and well and truly in play a century earlier. It is a retrospective description here, not Muggeridge’s own terminology. Yet his experiences in the early 1930s illuminate a recognisable pattern: evidence loses its authority when it threatens an emotionally compelling political narrative. The regime supplies the story; sympathetic intellectuals lend it respectability; journalists, operating under pressure or pursuing their own interests, transmit it to distant audiences. The resulting deception need not depend on everyone knowingly lying. It can also emerge through selective observation, euphemism, professional accommodation and the refusal to reconsider cherished beliefs
From socialist expectation to Soviet disillusionment
Muggeridge’s original sympathy with the Soviet experiment is essential to understanding his subsequent opposition. He approached communism from a socialist background, attracted to its promise of an alternative to the poverty and inequality of capitalist society. The Morning Post, introducing his 1933 account, described him as having gone to Russia an enthusiastic communist and returned entirely disillusioned. That contemporary description establishes the direction of his sympathies, although it should not be mistaken for evidence of formal Communist Party membership
His encounter with Stalinist rule exposed the distance between emancipatory language and coercive practice. The state that purported to govern for the workers maintained a privileged ruling apparatus while imposing deprivation and repression on the population. His reporting attacked not simply the failure to deliver prosperity but the falsification of the regime’s moral identity: domination presented as liberation, and suffering presented as the necessary passage towards a better society
Crucially, Muggeridge did not initially frame this discovery as an abandonment of concern for working people. Near the conclusion of his June 1933 article, he declared that he retained “the deepest sympathy with, and admiration for, the working-class movement.” His hostility to the Soviet government arose, he argued, because it was profoundly reactionary and because association with it would damage that movement (Muggeridge, 1933, “Wilful Blindness?” section). His awakening therefore involved a distinction between a humane aspiration and a political regime claiming exclusive ownership of it.
The first mechanism: making reality inaccessible
Propaganda succeeds more readily when competing evidence is difficult to obtain. Soviet control of foreign reporting extended beyond the censorship of completed articles. Correspondents depended on official communications and a state-controlled press; access to officials was restricted; contact with ordinary citizens could expose those citizens to danger; visas and travel permissions could be used to discipline reporters (Vessey, 2023).
These arrangements shaped what journalists could know before they shaped what journalists could publish. Official information became the readily available material from which foreign news was assembled. Independent investigation required greater effort and risk, while proximity to influential officials could be mistaken for proximity to the truth.
The famine of 1932–33 made these constraints especially consequential. Travel restrictions helped prevent foreign correspondents from observing conditions outside Moscow. Muggeridge was among the exceptions who travelled into famine-affected regions; other exceptions included Gareth Jones and Ralph Barnes. His importance should therefore be recognised without repeating the inaccurate suggestion that he was the only Western journalist to investigate the catastrophe
The mechanism was straightforward: restrict observation, control the sources, and then present the resulting informational dependence as authoritative knowledge.
The second mechanism: intellectual prestige legitimises deception
Muggeridge’s anger extended beyond Soviet officials to the Western visitors who endorsed their claims. In “How World Is Deceived,” he described scientists accepting implausible statistics, pacifists admiring military displays, economists anticipating profitable commerce, and literary figures celebrating a supposedly new civilisation. These were his polemical characterisations, but their organising accusation was clear: distinguished people applied one standard to societies they criticised and another to the regime they wished to admire.
His explanation was psychological as well as political. Finding their aspirations apparently endorsed by a government with immense power could intoxicate intellectuals. Admitting that the practical application of those aspirations had produced disaster would threaten both their convictions and their self-image.
This is where the “hijacking” of the Western soul becomes a useful metaphor. The object being captured was not simply political opinion but moral attention. Compassion for workers and hostility to exploitation could be redirected towards defending a state that oppressed the very people it claimed to emancipate. The victims became less visible than the historical project.
Muggeridge understood that such misrepresentation had consequences beyond intellectual embarrassment. Admirers’ articles and lectures could encourage economically distressed foreigners to move to the Soviet Union with their families. For them, disillusionment was not merely the revision of an opinion; it could become a crisis of livelihood, citizenship and escape.
The third mechanism: journalism learns to censor itself
Muggeridge’s criticism of his own profession was particularly severe. In the preface to Winter in Moscow, he described Soviet coverage as “a joke,” supplied by correspondents rendered docile, correspondents whose relationships with the dictatorship put its words into their mouths, or correspondents compelled to exercise discretion (Muggeridge, 1934, as cited in Vessey, 2023, p. 210).
Yet the historical explanation requires more than a division between courageous truth-tellers and dishonest collaborators. Vessey’s (2023) study of Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons shows how ideological sympathy, financial interests, professional security and censorship interacted. Some correspondents consciously accommodated the regime; others gradually adjusted their reporting until restraint became habitual.
Self-censorship was especially effective because it reduced the need for overt intervention. Reporters learned which formulations would pass, which stories would create trouble and which investigations were unlikely to be rewarded. Unpleasant realities could be softened through ambiguous phrasing, omitted altogether or embedded in accounts that preserved the appearance of Soviet progress.
The central professional failure was therefore not always the invention of facts. It was the progressive surrender of independent judgement. A journalist could retain the language and outward procedures of reporting while allowing the authority being investigated to determine the boundaries of the account.
Winter in Moscow: satire exposes the machinery
Published in 1934, Winter in Moscow transformed Muggeridge’s experiences into a satire of Soviet power, foreign correspondents and political fellow travellers. Its fictional form allowed him to dramatise the relationships between careerism, ideological enthusiasm and moral evasion, although its scenes must not be treated as documentary transcripts.
Walter Duranty appears through the character Jefferson, whose acceptance of human sacrifice is encapsulated in the familiar justification that an omelette requires broken eggs. The metaphor reveals a dangerous conversion: actual people become disposable material in an allegedly necessary historical process. Once this premise is accepted, evidence of suffering need not discredit the project. It can instead be presented as confirmation that the project is advancing .
Muggeridge’s satire also denied his opponents on the political right an unrestricted claim to honesty. The novel’s prefatory criticism, reproduced by Vessey, condemns misleading reporting rather than merely the political affiliation of those producing it. His broader contemporary account similarly makes truthfulness—not partisan usefulness—the stated justification for his intervention: “I have written these articles because I believe them to be true”.
From the righteous cause to the manufactured world
The later reflections reproduced in the supplied transcript extend this early experience into a wider criticism of institutional dishonesty. The passage contrasting truth with justice is best understood not as hostility to justice itself, but as suspicion of what happens when a claim to justice becomes permission to deceive.
The catalogue of politicians, priests, professors, journalists, microphones and cameras identifies a common responsibility. Each institution or profession possesses the power to mediate reality for others. Each can abuse that power by substituting what is persuasive, convenient or ideologically desirable for what can honestly be established.
The anecdote about Ignazio Silone and a Comintern meeting sharpens that distinction. In the supplied account, a newcomer objects that a proposed statement would be untrue, provoking collective laughter. As a remembered anecdote rather than independently verified meeting minutes, it should be handled cautiously. Its rhetorical significance nevertheless lies in the replacement of one question by another: not “Is it true?” but “Will it serve our purposes?”
The transcript’s final passage makes the criticism more searching still. Muggeridge asks how to escape the “fantasy and fraud,” remove his own theatrical costume and makeup, and silence the apparatus of the studio. The critic recognises himself as a participant in the manufactured world. His problem is not simply how to expose other people’s deception, but how to resist becoming another performer within it.
The enduring warning
Muggeridge’s early Soviet experience offers a warning about the alliance of moral certainty and concentrated power. A cause does not become truthful because its objectives sound humane. An intellectual does not become reliable because of distinction or eloquence. A report does not become independent because its author has access to important people.
At the same time, his experience should not justify blanket distrust of journalism or scholarship. The historical lesson is more demanding: examine how information is obtained, what pressures shape its presentation, which evidence is excluded and whether an institution permits correction. Vessey’s reconstruction strengthens this lesson by explaining the constraints that Muggeridge’s satire sometimes flattened into moral caricature.
The “hijacking of Western soul,” in this reading, occurs when the commitment to human dignity is made subordinate to the defence of a political narrative. Muggeridge’s awakening began when the suffering before him could no longer be reconciled with the story he had wanted to believe. Its lasting force lies in the demand that no promised future, righteous cause or professional reputation be allowed to place inconvenient reality beyond examination.
Compiled by Disciplesplanet
References
Muggeridge, M. (1933, June 8). Russia revealed IV: How world is deceived: Art of gulling our intelligentsia. The Morning Post. https://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/muggeridge_morning_post_4.htm
Vessey, D. (2023). First-hand accounts? Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons as Moscow correspondents in the 1930s. Journalism Studies, 24(2), 209–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2022.2150876
(And No, the irony and hypocrisy of the individual below presenting is not lost on us. The content is exceptional, and arguably this is the exception that ‘proves the rule’ he is so passionately defending, whilst demonstrating in private his clear insight into it - groan)
Cancel Culture Overview
It's Not New - But More Prolific
"If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready-made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism."
T. S. Eliot 1939
Answering The Cosmic Skeptic
William Lane Craig on Alex O'Conner
Watch the measured response to criticisms and controversies. William Lane Craig Responds to Alex O'Connor's Criticism of Wes Huff
Sacrificing Truth and Even Fact, on the Altar of Idenitity
Sacrificing Sanity on the Altar of Stupidity
Manufactured & Faux Narratives in Academia: Enlightened Progress or Simply Metaphysical Masturbation?
Academic Hoaxers - Blatant Fabrication
Values Clarification & The New 'trinity' - Diversity, Equity & Inclusion?
Who are the real Thugs in our Culture?
I will fight for 'free speech' as long as it validates the carefully manipulated and manufactured consensus! In fact I will defend to the death the 'free' speech that contributes to the manufacturing of that specious consensus which is little more than a market shaped and aggressive minority influenced 'group think'.
I continue to be fascinated by the deafening public silence of average 'Joe' (and for the P.C captives 'Josephines') in regard to the inconsistencies of the relativist and P.C positions. As you will see in the You Tube excerpt below, nobody and we do mean NOBODY in the real world lives out the P.C. foundational tenet that one culture is no worse than any other. The so called 'academics' that spew forth the toxic propaganda that all our problems are the result of white, hetero-normative Judeo-Christian influence don't believe a word of it, as every day they choose and prefer that which has been created by the very culture they decry.
In a remarkable, if not brazen work 'The Victory of Reason' by Professor Rodney Stark we see a landmark modern sociological investigation into the origin and success of the First World West. The following excerpt is from the conclusion of this work…
However, will we not only acknowledge this reality, but take it into account? The answer, at least on the surface of the now ‘cancel-culture’ assaulted 'public square' is NO! Yet, in private conversations across homes, pubs, sporting clubs and communities such dominance has no sway. People became reasonably adept at playing the 'social game', but in reality hold no such credibility for PC. "Tolerance" for polite talk is seemingly high, but tacit disapproval is growing. However, without clear frameworks in which to think, a worldview that is holistic, sustainable and collectively held, people have difficulty articulating the sense of disapproval of what is clearly unworkable, yet still so well promoted in the 'market place.' Once people begin to think rationally and reasonably, abandon Theo-phobic tendencies and move away from egoist individualism, they will inevitably discover there is a worldview that stands alone.... but will we discover this liberty? In the following excerpt from 'Disappointed with Liberalism" Clive Hamilton gives us reasons why this discovery may be slower than it should be…
Political Correctness & Conservatism
A secular philosopher – and flawed human – that moved from Left-wing ideology to Conservatism in the height of the 1960’s ‘cultural awakening’. Arguably the philosophical ‘father’ of the neo-conservative movement.’
“Only someone raised in the anglosphere could believe, as I believed in the aftermath of 1968, that the political alternative to revolutionary socialism is conservatism…A visit to Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1979 awoke me to the fraud that had been committed in socialisms’ name, and I feld an immediate obligation to do something about it.”
“Political correctness exhorts us to be as ‘inclusive’ as we can, to discriminate neither in thought, word nor deed against ethnic, sexual, religious or behavioural minorities. And in order to be inclusive we are encouraged to denigrate what is felt to be most especially ours. The Director-General of the BBC recently condemned his organization and its programmes as obnoxiously white and middle-class. Academics sneer at the curriculum established by ‘Dead White European Males’. A British race-relations charity has condemned the affirmation of a ‘British’ national identity as racist. All such abusive utterances express the code of political correctness. For although they involve the deliberate condemnation of people on grounds of class, race, sex or colour, the purpose is not to exclude the Other but to condemn Ourselves. The gentle advocacy of inclusion masks the far from gentle desire to exclude the old excluder: in other words, to repudiate the cultural inheritance that defines us.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative
Interview with Sir Roger Scruton: How to be a Conservative
Article: What’s the Point of Education?
Article: The Virtue of Irrelevance