It has always befuddled me that men can go their entire lives constantly fretting over questions such as “will my team win this weekend?”, “How am ever going to sort through all of these Netflix options and pick a show?”, “How quickly can I get the latest iphone?”, “How do I position myself for the most entertaining weekend possible?”, “Will I be able to give enough and the correct material gifts to my family on Christmas so that they won't express significant disappointment?” etc… and literally never wonder things like, “What is man’s purpose?”, “What are the moral imperatives all men share qua being human persons created by God?”, “What formal cause explains the origins of the universe?”, “What are the most efficient ways to refute moral relativism?”, “What are the daily practices and habits I must grow in with my family to give us the best chance of all going to heaven?”

 

     I could tailor the first set of questions many different ways to match the worldly distractions that have been relevant to different peoples in various times and always keep the later questions the same in order to make my point: God created the universe, He created the human nature you share with every human person from all time, and we all share moral imperatives based upon our human nature coming from the being we owe our very selves to as His creatures. And the later questions should be the universal questions we obsessively ask ourselves and figure out together from one generation to the next. And if we don’t do that, well, we will inevitably find ourselves unfulfilled as individuals and caught completely unawares as a society in great peril.

 

     The present article is part one of a three part series on the great peril we are facing right now that too few people are talking about. Heck, many are literally clueless about it and look at you sideways if you even bring it up. The subject I wish to discuss is Trans-humanism and it’s threat both to the Church and to all of mankind.

 

      To begin the first part, I need to talk about where we begin. By this I mean both literally where we all come from (an infinitely good Creator who designed in us a universal human nature that informs universal moral norms) and the traditional way scholars thought of human nature, moral imperatives, and reality itself.

 

     In Introduction to Christianity, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger characterized the Ancient to Scholastic understanding of truth as follows: traditionally, to know whether something was true, it simply had to be real. It needed to have being. St. Thomas would say a thing must have essence and substance (not necessarily material) to be real. And true statements cannot be made about things that are not real. The Latin mantra for this concept, according to Ratzinger, is “Verum est ens” or “Being is truth”. Thus, Rocks are hard. “It’s sometimes good to do evil” is a contradiction of terms and is therefore false. Man is the rational animal created by God with universal moral norms that can be read out of his nature. Oh, and here’s an easy one that even the child in Kindergarten Cop got right, “boys have penises and girls have vaginas” (more on trans-genderism later). It seems all too simple, but the concept really has been practically lost by Academia.

 

     Ratzinger goes on to characterize the epistemological switch ushered in by DeCartes and other Renaissance thinkers with the following Latin phrase: Verum quia factum. In essence, this era took the first step in challenging the idea that truth is as simple as reality and being. The secular humanists concluded that the only things we can be totally certain of are the things made... by man.

 

     The consequences indeed brought forth a “Novus Ordo Seculorum”. And along with its democracy, skepticism, co-existence, deism, solipsism, “We the People” religious congregations, and the rest of the side-effects that come with such an uncertainty about the fullness of truth. But hey, as long as there is relative “peace” and prosperity, who cares about who’s actually right about the things man did not create?

 

     But despite the temptation for the secular humanist to at that moment wholly replace God with the only thing that he could be certain of (man and his wonderful creations) he still wasn’t quite ready to do so. A quick look at our own Declaration of Independence demonstrates such, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Old habits die hard. And even Thomas Aquinas and natural law theory were alive and well in the university 250 years ago. Verum est ens not only had breath, but our social contract still hinged upon it. And our founding fathers were not narcissists who would dare advance a framework that did not recognize our universal human rights as coming from a being higher than all of us. After all, they adored man and knew that his splendor and his rights must be recognized as God given in order to protect him from evil men.

 

     It was the modern age that brought forth the totalitarianism, the fascism, and the new desire man had to dominate his brother. But unlike the Ancient method, attaining this dominance would be done in a more refined, sophisticated, altruistic, and academically justifiable sort of way. Along with the new machines, the Darwinism, arms races, and colonization came a new epistemological maxim: verum quia faciendum. When a few Atheists learned how to control modern wealth, read a few books about eugenics, and learned that our world’s “salvation” could be found in radios, accelerated travel, and medicines, the truth was no longer what was “made” it was now what is “make-able” or what is “controllable”. The Communists have most aggressively applied verum quia faciendum into modern governance and have failed miserably in doing so.

 

     The practical problem with Communism lies in its expectation that man act against his human nature for “his own good”. When you believe Verum est ens, you recognize the absurdity immediately. It is part of one’s human nature to seek his own self-improvement. In doing so, he will naturally acquire some capital and property. When the proletariat man resists orders to give up goods natural to him as a human person, the Communist Party makes him conform. The Party further believes that when this man is “too stupid” to understand that the “illusion” of God is only maintained by capitalists to keep the peasants working hard for their “pie in the sky” reward some day in heaven, then his natural human desire to worship God must be forced out of him. If he is to worship anything, the Party will tell him (through lies and propaganda of course) what he will desire to worship. He will become the new “Soviet-man” who learns to love and sacrifice for the collective and for the Party. He shall appreciate happiness in this new normal soon enough! The Party knows and makes what is good for him!

 

     The fall of the Berlin wall disillusioned a lot of subscribers to Verum quia faciendum. They found out that a society does not flourish, nor does it die easy when narcissists try to lie them and murder them into resenting and acting against their own human nature. Which is why today’s narcissist plays a whole new ball game. Since the Globalist knows that he cannot get man to act against his own nature he seeks to do something totally different: change human nature itself. And this is the ultimate mission of the current day trans-humanist…

 

Part 2 will cover the newest epistemological paradigm, the current situation, a more in depth understanding of what trans-humanism is, who the trans-humanists are, and what they hope to accomplish. Don’t miss it.

 

God bless,

 

Gadfly