The Age Of The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was anything except enlightening.
While our own time period (modernity) calls it the “Age of the Enlightenment”, my hope is that future generations will rename it to something more factual. Perhaps they will choose to call it the Dark Ages, as the modern era so erroneously calls the Christendom era. That would not only be justice, but wholly accurate.
The Enlightenment ushered in the modern era: modernity. When we moved from Christendom to our current clown world. It is so because the Enlightenment’s ideology and mindset directly led to what we are dealing with today. It reproduced and assumed total control.
We still live under this mindset to this day. It is an awkward combination of materialism, secularism, and rationalism.
The beasts of modernity define it as such:
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global influences and effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
The Enlightenment was preceded by the Scientific Revolution and the work of Francis Bacon, John Locke, among others. Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment to the publication of René Descartes’ Discourse on the Method in 1637, featuring his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. European historians traditionally date its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the 1789 outbreak of the French Revolution. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.
Many of the nice-sounding words listed above are the degenerations we are facing today:
- The worship of “progress” led to progressivism.
- The focus on human happiness (material goals) instead of spiritual goals led to the excessive greed and cultural decay. Our heritage, Christendom and Greco-Roman, was the exact opposite.
- Toleration led to our nations being invaded by foreigners and our culture being destroyed from the inside.
- The “pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and evidence” was true throughout all eras, with the exception that the Enlightenment mindset starts with the material, but the other with the spirit (discussed later in this article).
- The Enlightenment “natural law” is a complete perversion of true human nature.
- Constitutional government being claimed is an outright lie, having its origin in the Greco-Roman/Christendom eras.
- The separation of church and state led to state secularism and scientism being the dominant faith. They just replaced the word church with an inversion.
The Enlightenment took the traditions and learned knowledge from our ancestors and tossed it out completely. They then removed anything spiritual and began the inevitable train-crash of tolerance. They then attempted to replace all of this with fragile human rationalism.
All you have to do is look around in the modern West and see how well that panned out. It has failed completely.
It should be a dead giveaway that our modern elites refer to this era as “enlightenment”, meaning: “Having advanced knowledge and spiritual insight, overcoming tradition and dogma“. They lie about everything else, so it would be wise for an astute observer to recognize the lie inherent in our naming of this time period.
The Enlightenment is largely the brain-child behind secular materialism. Both pieces of that phrase are important:
- Secular
- Materialism
Out of the Enlightenment rose the rejection of the foundational myths of Western Civilization, along with its faith in itself and its religions. This was “replaced” with secular universalist morality, which is idiotic.
I spoke a bit about secularism in these articles: Cultural Disease: Living Exegesis Instead Of Eisegesis and The Rise of Secularism (a very old article from 2017).
But through this rejection of the spirit, the Enlightenment thinkers also came to the necessity of the focus on materialism, which is a complete rejection of anything spiritual, instead focusing on the material. This trend is what led to scientism, which is the cult worship of science as a faith.
To not repeat what I have said before, read this article for my incursion into materialism: Materialism Is Not Enough. In short, materialism is fundamentally wrong, because it cannot account for intuition and the spirit. Likewise, it starts from the physical and ends with the physical, instead of the correct rendering, which is to start with the spiritual to uncover more about the physical.
This foundational change in how the world was viewed between the eras is what created everything we are dealing with today. It was a rejection of the ever-growing knowledge of tradition in favor of stumbling in the dark, directly into a firepit.
Instead of starting from the Spirit and using rationalism to understand the known world (God creates all things, but using an ordered system), we instead switched to starting from the material and outright rejecting the spiritual (The only thing that exists is matter and how we view it in our current age). This is an incorrect starting point for any discussion, philosophical or material.
And nearly all of our people—right wing or left, are still trapped in the Enlightenment mindset. Very few are able to escape it fully, myself included. It is truly everywhere.
But if we truly want to defeat this age and the issues facing us, we have to overcome the mindset and the era that allowed it. Which means unequivocally rejecting the Enlightenment mindset, which is the modernity mindset.
We cannot continue to remain in the realm of only materialism and expect our condition to improve. Even if we win in a conventional sense, this degenerative mindset will still be the thorns, waiting to choke us of oxygen as soon as even a single error is made, which is inevitable.
To reject the modern world is to reject the foundational precepts it is founded upon. Those precepts began with the Enlightenment.
Break free. Not just physically, but mentally and spiritually.
Read Next: The Cost Of The Intelligentsia
If you enjoyed this article, bookmark the website and check back often for new content. New articles most weekdays.
You can also keep up with my writing by joining my monthly newsletter.
Help fight the censorship – Share this article!