This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
Recently, I sat in an airport terminal on my way to Toronto, and looking around I noticed multiple advertisement posters for divorce lawyers. “There is no shame in improving your situation,” one read. Next to it an ad for a Bahamas hotel showed a woman with two children laughing and running through the sand. No husband in sight. “Is this really what’s normal?” I wondered. Vacation is supposed to be an escape from life, but it is interesting how reality can hit you as you sightsee in far-off lands. You observe lifestyles and cultures which you have carefully fenced away from your personal life. Sometimes this is pleasant–sometimes shocking. The benches in my gate were divided into individual chairs by large metal armrests–clearly designed for people traveling alone. I noticed sitting near me a young adult woman holding a small dog. “Comfort animals” are popular these days. She started talking to the dog in a soft, comforting voice. “It can be so scary in a loud and strange place, can’t it? Don’t worry, mommy’s here!” As if she were talking to a child. As my family walked around Toronto, people looked at us like we were aliens from another planet. A married couple with children? Eating at a restaurant? Walking down a street? It’s 2019, how is this still a thing?? Don’t get me wrong, they were very nice people and we had a great time, but healthy family relationships and even just romantic couples seem to be rare there. The difficult thing for me was coming home after the vacation and seeing this same kind of thing in my home town, where I thought nuclear family was standard. I started to see the unpleasant reality of our society’s situation. Most people are lonely and sad.
Started After World War 1 – Post-war World War 1 disillusionment grabbed the optimism of America’s Great Awakening, gathered it up in a ball, and totally destroyed it. It turned an entire generation of Americans against America’s founding ideals. Republicanism and democracy had supposed to been the shining city on a hill which would revolutionize the entire world, but instead the war gave us human suffering and industrial slaughter. This 20th century “lost generation” turned to Marxist alternatives and began America’s long road to diminishment and decline. This was something Joseph Smith correctly prophesied. He said the world wars would start with an American Civil War caused by slavery, and that it would lead to endless strife after that until all nations are ended: “And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place. For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States, and the Southern States will call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain, as it is called, and they shall also call upon other nations, in order to defend themselves against other nations; and then war shall be poured out upon all nations… And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn; and with famine, and plague, and earthquake, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also, shall the inhabitants of the earth be made to feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations.” (D&C 84
Historians agree that the civil war led to global war. The federal tariffs that had caused tension in 1832 around the time of Joseph Smith’s prophecy was the very issue Southern diplomats used to seek for European involvement, because after all, Europe certainly wanted free trade with southern states rather than tariffs. Slavery aside, the international European corporations and wealthy elites of Europe were very interested in the free trade of cotton. This put Europe’s governments at odds with the common European folk who reviled slavery. America’s ambassador to France remarked on the common people’s embrace of North American ideals, “I had no idea that Mr. Lincoln had such a hold upon the heart of the young gentlemen of France.” As time went on, the polarizing moral arguments of the North and South greatly served as a catalyst for the division of populism versus aristocracy. The old-style monarchies and controlling powers realized they were being undermined by the “republican experiment” that began in America, and every eye was carefully observing the American civil war to see if that experiment would last. Hence, the line in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Could a government really be maintained by a free, self-government populace? This was on everybody’s lips in Europe. If the American experiment failed, that must mean self-governance was a failure. Napoleon III pursued a “Catholic Empire” across the globe and installed the Hapsburg archduke Maximilian as Mexico’s ruler. The Confederates turned their sights for alliance from Britain to Napoleon III to become part of his “Latin race” block. Thus, the war now integrated the Catholic vs. Protestant conflict. The South wanted to preserve England’s gentlmany aristocracy while the North pursued a radical liberal republicanism. This division line led to World War I.
After World War 2 came a long stretch of peace. Oh, America’s wars abroad continued just as Joseph Smith had prophesied, but they were nothing like the mass slaughter of the world wars. America then experienced periods of intermittent optimism and recession. Yet somehow along this road of relative peace a growing vein of depression set in, and today widespread depression is glaringly obvious to all. Today’s generation is paying higher prices, earning less, living in worse conditions, less likely to find love, and less successful at raising families. Even in Utah, depression is skyrocketing. Despite the peace we enjoy, cultural rot and social oppression flourishes, and most folks don’t have any idea how to deal with it.
Complexities Of Corporate Modern Life – The sheer complexity and inhuman coldness of life takes its toll. Originally, our pilgrim ancestors who came to this continent lived on the land they owned, grew their own food, and life was simple. Laborious but simple. But then the factories came and men started to work away from home for a boss they didn’t know. Men started doing business with people they didn’t know, handling abstract pieces of cash rather than bartering, building their boss’s wealth. Their wives took on the bulk of domestic responsibilities at home and started to become overwhelmed. Today, corporations wield more control than ever, hiring and firing without a care, manipulating federal policies to boost their labor pool, sticking their workers in cubicles as if they were animals, some even offering to pay to freeze women’s eggs so they will devote more time to the company.
As for consumers, the world is just as cold. Products are cheap and designed to break in two years. Warranties are useless because the corporations don’t honor them. Advertising gets us hooked on their products from an early age, most of which we don’t even need. Corporations are out to make money and gain power, and we are all just means to that end. We spend hours on the phone just to pay some utility bill because government regulations make independent living too impracticable. It’s no wonder that so many people are homeless; it takes immense effort to just rent an apartment much less own a home. Few can handle it.
Most folks waste their time and effort away on video games and trash television because of the inhuman complexity and difficultly of it all. Romance is a thing of the past, as people pursue quick hookups with dating apps, and only the top 5% of attractive people get any attention anyway. Romance and relationships have become a commercial commodity in control of the corporate-government, just like everything else. Most people turn to porn. Food is sugary and fake. Medical care is losing quality fast. We travel every couple months to another city for another job. We live our entire lives in heavy debt–effectively slavery. Prescription and recreational drugs keep people in a constant state of numbness to keep from going crazy. We have become machines, our emotions pulled by the strings of others, our thoughts and behavior prescribed by corporate algorithms, and any dissenting thought is swiftly punished through public shaming. We were not meant to be machines. This kind of lifestyle was not meant for us. This is why we are depressed.
Culture Wars – Is this even truly an age of world peace? A constant state of wars abroad keeps the global economy robust and develops new technologies for the government to increase its control. But there is also a cultural cold war going on at home here in America, which we don’t think of as “war,” but which is just as destructive as a military battle. Big oligarchical powers war for greater control through news media propaganda, governmental influence, educational control, and popular culture. Generally, it is socialistic, secular ideology warring against traditional, religious ideas. Something traditional conservatives in the religious community must start to understand is that big corporations are against them. The big corporations close the door on open market principles to consolidate power among themselves, and this is even more true socially than economically. They seek to influence and control generators of social thought and behavior in order to promote their pool of employee and consumer resources. Something traditional liberals need to understand is talk of taxing the rich and reigning in corporations by big politicians is just lip service, because regulations only ever end up stifling small business and the middle class. You will never see the government raise taxes on the richest 1%, never. Social Marxism is obviously bad for business and the free market, but it is good for the top 10% of global corporations because they gain exclusive power. Traditional Christian gospel promotes a larger middle class which offers competition to these top corporations, and that’s why they hate it. The gospel promotes liberating ideals for workers and consumers which hinder their control. The Christian gospel treats people as humans rather than machines, and so it is better for healthy living, at the sacrifice of economic hegemony–and this often results in poor economic performance, as seen in southern states like Mississippi. Socialists often mock southern states for their relatively poor economies. But the gospel is not necessarily detrimental to the economy, as evidenced by Utah. Healthy Christian ideology is the reason why Utah consistently enjoys the most robust economic growth in the country. The purer we get to true Christian gospel, the more industrious people are, but then with wealth people become greedy and get taken in by the lofty promises of corporate Socialist ideology. Utah is on its way to becoming just another American city full of skyscrapers and zombie workers.
The twist is that Marxism was invented through mainstream Christianity itself. Apostate Christians established the very ideology which killed our happy traditional American life. Catholic scholar Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio established social justice based on Neoplatonic principles of equality and relativism, and it was quickly adopted by the nascent Communist movement of his time. Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio was a Jesuit scholar who attended the same Jesuit school as Karl Marx, the founder of Communism. In 1923, Pope Pius XI made social justice “part and parcel of Catholic social doctrine.” It is shocking to read through Catholic literature and see social justice treated like some empyrean commandment given to Adam, to see the Vatican pay tribute to Fidel Castro and other Marxists who enforced social justice. But it shouldn’t be surprising, because social justice as a formal doctrine started with the Catholic church (specifically Jesuits) under Pope Pius XI.
Should this be surprising? The great and spacious building of Satan has always taken a counterfeit form of the Christian temple. The cathedral of apostate philosophies turns people toward the destructive lifestyle which thrives today. The cathedral today is not as much the church edifices of Catholic Europe, but the soaring skyscrapers of metal and glass where today’s schemes are cooked up. Christianity itself used to be the shell for corporate control in the Dark Ages, and we are still trying to find the appropriate space for religion. But the good news is that nowadays it is becoming a lot clearer, as all Christianity–and Latter-day Saints more than anyone–are targeted by the cathedral; the division is obvious. Many folks understand that the irradication of religion is responsible for many of our social ills, as we can’t survive without a social structure and the replacement “progressive” social structure is much less appealing, yet we can’t help mingling Socialistic ideology with Christianity. This is why we get feel-good “inclusive” churches at corner strip-malls. We just can’t tear ourselves away from the corporate ideology. We struggle to bring ourselves to embrace classic Christian principles for fear of returning to the dark old times of witch trails and inquisitions. Within our own church, corporate propaganda masters very cleverly hold polygamy over the heads of Latter-day Saints to make us afraid to embrace the old “orthodox” gospel of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. Their news media propaganda outlets frequently remind us that the church is taking wonderful liberal steps toward equality and social justice, and we need to get on board with social justice too. It takes a large amount of self-confidence and faith to embrace classic Christian principles–and not do so blindly as some conservative Latter-day Saint groups unfortunately do and become apostate as a result. If we step out of the manufactured confusion, however, it is really not so difficult to adopt classic principles appropriately for modern circumstances, and we even have modern prophets and apostates to help us do it. These modern prophets are our most important asset.
But despite modern prophets and our authority to receive the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost, doubt and apostasy thrive in the church–as evidenced by “Mormon Twitter”–because we are not immune from the ills of popular culture and big corporate influence. We don’t have the deserts of Utah to keep them out anymore. We don’t have an untamed western wilderness to flee to. We have to deal with the same issues every other American has to deal with. We are just as human as the next person and just as likely to be taken in by the enticings of worldly ideologies. In fact, it can be worse for us because of an expectation of perfection.
“Nothing tends more to cement the hearts of Christians than praying together. Never do they love one another so well as when they witness the outpouring of each other’s hearts in prayer.”
(Charles Finney 1792 – 1875)
Individualism In America – Unhealthy individualism and isolation in our society, I think, drives us to become more individualistic in the church as well. When the church removed an hour from Sunday church service, we were told this hour was to be used as a family to study the gospel. The church pulling out of the Boy Scouts, I suspect, had something to do with this trend toward family and individual based study as well. Young generations are suspicious of organized religion and community worship. People want to keep their relationship with God between them and God. I see this to some degree in myself as well, as private study and prayer has led to amazing breakthroughs for me. And yet, other breakthroughs for me could only happen at church and required group worship. Sometimes we need to pray as a group, partake of ordinances such as the sacrament as a group, and be instructed as a group. Spiritual energy can spread and spark testimonies in others as we worship in groups. Younger generations will develop testimonies through group activities, just as previous generations have done, and I think they deep down inside crave community gathering.
We all today have partitioned ourselves in spiritual cubicles with our own private workstations, and this is comforting to those who are socially awkward. But nobody wants to be stuck in a cubicle their whole lives. How do we develop community and keep our private refuges? The trick is to not be strangers at church and not fall into the inhuman culture of anonymity that pervades popular culture. Church needs to be different. We deeply want to meet and know these people at church, like our ancient ancestors who farmed the fields alone day after day but held close relationships to everyone in their village.
Today, community is not physical proximity because of the internet and communication technology that connects people across the globe. Space is different. So the trite advice “meet your neighbors and speak up at church” is not good enough anymore. Latter-day Saints go on social media and internet groups like anyone else, and the challenge of community-building is just as applicable. It’s hard to be yourself and feel like you know someone over the internet. I don’t think there is really a solution to this, and the discord swelling throughout “Mormon Twitter” will continue, and this is why the church emphasizes family, I believe. Unless something major changes with social media, it will not contribute much to community building nor assuage feelings of loneliness, and I believe this is a major reason for depression today. Don’t look for the internet as a solution.
How can we reconcile the culture of individualism with the need for community? Look to the temple. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has gone to great efforts to construct temples for just this purpose. Holiness in the temple is confined through careful design of spaces. Design of time and space with barriers and connections provide function to places, and this allows space to become sacred. This design is something each person must do for their own lives–daily schedules, weekly schedules, life goals, home arrangements, dress, etc. I think a lot of people feel lost because they haven’t taken control of their life situations. Jordan Peterson famously told people to start by “cleaning your room.” Well, it’s got to start somewhere, but my advice is to start with your most sacred space, your own Holy of Holies. Your most intimate relationship to God. Where is that space in your home, your schedule, your life pursuits, your online communication, and your social interactions? How can you sequester that space to make it sacred? From there, spread further spaces around it to design the functions of everything else in your life.
Healthy Social Influence – The problem with Marxist ideology and popular secular lifestyles is that they fail to provide this sacred order in your life. Why would they? People are just resources to them and resources are there to be exploited. They care about two things: production and consumption. We are only as useful as the labor we provide to produce and the money we contribute to consume. Individualism is useful to them if it prevents people from straying from their ideology, if it keeps religion from pulling people away. Ultimately, individualism is bad for them because it leads to tribalism, and tribalism undercuts any single hegemony from holding power, as we see with the case of the Tower of Babel. We in the church expect based on certain prophecies about end times that tribalism is what’s going to happen, however. I think most of us are surprised it isn’t worse than it’s gotten. It is truly a mercy of God that this country is as unified as it is, considering people’s behavior. But to me recent church policy changes signal greater individualism ahead, and that will mean greater tribalism, and that will mean the church community will take on more responsibilities which previously were within the realm of national society. Things like education, entertainment, music, art… and who knows what else in the near future.
The church’s increased role will come as a great relief as popular culture becomes more unbearable under corporate control. The corporate masters of popular society will ramp up their attacks on us because our gospel opposes their bottom line, and I fear the comforts and peaceful lifestyles will be uprooted as violence and persecution against us will spread. The new media will look the other way, the government will fail to apply justice, and corporations will implicitly fuel greater persecution, endangering our safety and livelihoods. It will feel like the end of Lord of the Rings when the warfare the hobbits experienced will land in their home town and uproot their home lives. As warfare becomes a way of life for us, the first challenge will be to avoid the kind of disillusionment experienced by World War 1’s lost generation. We can’t get jaded. Things are going to get ugly and we are going to witness some real attrocities, as the early Saints did. We can learn from the legacy and virtues of these pioneer Saints in order to keep our faith and never give up. The second challenge for us will be what we’ve been struggling with for decades: how to return to the simple life in the midst of chaotic modern life. How do we run business with strangers? How do we run a household with everyone split apart? How do we find community? We can only do the best we can. Maybe we should start up again with the community gardens the church ran in the 70’s? Make more church musicals? Try to start a family business. As the church takes greater control of economic and social community, this should open up opportunities for healthier living, but that’s talking about the long term. This change will probably happen slowly, and we need to adapt right now to avoid depression in our lives. We need to take bold measures to cut off evil influence of modern society, keep Babylon out of our lives, and circle the wagons around our homes. Canceling Netflix is just scratching the surface of what we need to do. Pull yourself out of our socialistic cycle of production and consumption so you don’t need to rely on it any longer. Here is popular culture’s cycle of influence on the individual versus the gospel:
Instead of producing for the good of society, you need to produce for the good of God. Instead of hoisting equality and social justice as the ideology of the future, understand the doctrine of repentance and atonement. Consecrate everything you produce and consume, your incomings and outgoings to God instead of to society. Consecration is the answer, and the temple is the physical space to center our lives around to make it happen. The temple directs our incomings and outgoings to the Lord.
This kind of faith requires active doing instead of passive receiving, which is how most people are. To become a dutiful worker in our business-friendly modern environment, we are programmed from an early age in public school to follow orders and stay inside the cubicle. Atheists like to portray Christians as sheep who just blindly follow the commandments, and don’t use any imagination or innovation. But actually the opposite is true. Following the commandments of God, looking to the prophet, and exercising power of the priesthood requires independent, creative thinking, and faith requires exploration beyond the bounds of what we have been given–because God is invisible and irreconcilable unless we give up our attitude of passivity. Religion is fundamentally the exploration of the unknown, and those who claim to be atheists are afraid of the unknown. We must develop personal testimonies and godly powers of spiritual creation to truly have faith and interact with the unknown reality of nature. Either that or fake it. And some do. But overwhelmingly, we are those who are discontent with the dismal neon cosmopolitan landscape of our cities and the machine-like grind of modern living. Unlike humanistic atheists, we are the bold who bravely leap into the unknown universe to discover truth beyond what can be seen. We do not throw up our hands in hopelessness or ever give in, because we are so sure that there is a much greater destiny in store for us, and we will do anything it takes to realize it. This is not the easy road, and it requires a total reversal of attitude to become spiritually assertive. It’s like pulling the cord from an iron lung. But once we take this road and realize our glorious nature as children of God we can’t help but change. Repentance becomes a rewarding change rather than a painful punishment, and we welcome it to improve our lives every day. The abstract aspects of a Savior and Good Shepherd become a personal relationship that touches us to the core. Once we stop complaining that “the church didn’t teach me this or that“, “the church didn’t do this for me“, or “the Bishop made this mistake,” and we take full responsibility for our own eternal welfare, and decide we will do whatever it takes, only then will fortitude prepare our hearts for this relationship with Christ. And then our souls will rise above the smoggy depression of modern life.
