Sunset of Empires?
One of my first posts on the new Substack site, entitled “Royals, Reich or Wrong”. posited that world events were the result of royal families attempting to revive ancient empires. I followed it up in a mind-bending discussion with Joseph P. Farrell on “Princes, Persons & Power”. I began fleshing out my thesis in my book “Paper Golem: Corporate Personhood and the Legal Fiction” (currently working on expanded 2nd Edition).
My developing thesis has been that the ancient royal houses, primarily in Europe but worldwide in scope, are using corporations and NGOs as cut-outs to steer world events to the point of collapse, for the purpose of destroying self-rule, eliminating the Enlightenment innovations, and resurrecting the monarchies and empires of yore.
To appreciate how this is playing out, we need to go beyond the bird’s eye view of Global Bumbledickery, and get up into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) so we can see the Really Big Picture. It’s hard to appreciate a tapestry when you are standing close enough to see the stitches.
If you squint just so at global events, you might perceive something interesting. We have a war in the Ukraine (meaning “borderlands”), which is an ancient touch-point between East and West. We have war in the Levant, which is an ancient battleground between East and West. And we have disturbances in the Force in the Far East, as Japan, India and China slowly and quiety polarize.
We might also perceive twitchings in the corposes of the Aztec, Inca, Tolmec, and Maya empires, but that’s for another column.
Let’s begin with the Ukraine. If you’ve been paying attention to the details, this war is not about territory, culture, or just plain idiocy. Rather, it’s the revival of the ancient conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire. This brings into play the Russian, Ottoman and Persian Empires, which we will come to shortly.
After the fall of the Classical Roman Empire, it split into the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires, with Rome and the Vatican ruling the former, and Constatinople and the Hagia Sophia rulling the latter. Note that I equate the ruling city with its primary temple, since both capitals were theocracies at heart.
The East-West schism was driven by linguistic differences (Latin and Greek) at a superficial level, but more profoundly, it was caused by Pope Boniface VIII and his Unam Sanctam papal bull in AD 1302. The schism had been brewing for centuries over the concepts of Filioque and Original Sin, but Boniface’s declaration of Rome’s supremacy and papal infallibility drove a stake through the heart.
Unam Sanctam laid claim to the entire world, and everything above and below it, which launched the Age of Discovery and ultimately the wave of European colonialism. When you lay claim to a piece of land, after all, the first thing you do is survey and occupy it. Needless to say, this didn’t sit well with Byzantium.
Augustine’s views on Original Sin have formed the basis for all of Western philosophy and history. His presumption that, due to Adam’s sin, humans are born corrupt and must be perfected is the underlying predicate for Western political and legal frameworks.
In contrast, Orthodoxy sees humans as born in a state of perfection and corrupted by their environment, which leads to a fundamentally different view of the world.
These views are incompatible at the root level. Western law seeks to control the individual, while Eastern law seeks to control the environment.
The concept of Filioque states that God the Father is eternal. His love for His Creation manifests as God the Son, and their love for each other creates God the Spirit. In essence, this is polytheism, since the Father creates the other two. In Orthodoxy, there is one eternal God in three co-equal and co-existing aspects, or monotheism.
If you combine Filioque with Augustinian Original Sin, you find that Human Nature is corrupt and humans are inherently immoral, and must be forcefully guided to Salvation. Thus, we arrive at the concept of Collectivism, and oppressive governments and legal systems that assume guilt from birth.
At this point, one can appreciate just how radical the Enlightenment thinking was, and why Western governance required Divinely Ordained monarchs to guide us corrupt, vile little creatures to Salvation.
Now, when you see headlines of Ukrainian “authorities” expelling Russian Orthodox clergy and destroying Orthodox churches, it makes a bit more sense, right? The fact that Western monarchies were subservient to the Vatican also clarifies the psychopathic obscession with destroying Russia, and the incessant cheerleading for the Ukraine coming from Western-controlled media.
It also explains why the Western powers would fall on their own swords to arm and fund the Ukraine, seemingly against all self-interests and to the point of economic collapse — they are following orders from the Vatican. From our perch in LEO, all the military and financial largess heaped on the Ukraine might be seen as the Vatican taxing its subjects to support its war.
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