Bondage of the Will

Today, at the American Thinker, Fay Voshell has an excellent piece entitled The Triumph Of the Will Reborn. She notes that the original movie, The Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl captured what was truly wrong with the NAZI movement, and therefore led to its downfall:

Riefenstahl's genius was not limited to technologically advanced camera work and exciting new photographic angles. Her brilliant cinematography, accompanied by heroically themed music, captured the hypnotic power of Nazi ideology, including its messianic hope that one man could, by the mere power of his will, completely re-order German society and, through it, re-order the entire world.

This is where so many get everything all wrong. They believe that because we can choose what to have for breakfast, what to wear to work, what route to take, and so on, that somehow our will can conquer anything. But while we have all the free will in the world to hang ourselves, we do not have the free will to get us into Heaven. No work can be so great to make us righteous in God's eyes. For even if we lived perfectly, and nobody does, we would only be meeting basic expectations.  This is why one man can not, by his will, restructure even his own life, let alone a whole nation or the world, into Utopia.

William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, was later to comment on the intoxicating effect Nazi rallies had on the masses. He wrote that "every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired word from on high. Man's – or at least the German's – critical faculty is swept away at such moments, and every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself." Hitler himself declared that the Nazi Party "will be unchangeable in its doctrine, hard as steel in its organization, supple and adaptable in its tactics. In its entity, however, it will be like a religious order[.]"

In Martin Luther's On Bondage of the Will, he explains it in theological terms. Too bad that Hitler was not a Christian, and especially not a Lutheran. for then he would have understood that it is only through the Saving Grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, that man can be reconciled to God, and it is only through Him that our works have any merit whatsoever.

But now, the fatal idea has been reborn with the fantastical idea that each individual can somehow reorder society to their own fantasies.  A person can be of the opposite sex, if desired, and all society must recognize that fact, and even celebrate it:

It is sadder to recognize the ideology that supported the Third Reich. Namely, the deeply flawed and essentially falsely religious idea that the power of the unfettered human will can restructure reality continues in the West, albeit in new forms.

The fact is that the belief in the triumph of the human will to power continues to be reformulated in today's identity politics. It exhibits itself in the belief that any human being can identify one's essential being as one wishes and in the idea that society must then be restructured to suit the perception and the will of the self-identified. To put it another way, fascistic messianism has been rerouted to individuals, including mere children, who supposedly have an infallible inner divine light that gives the right to identify the self and to reorder society to conform to one's chosen identity.

That such a pathology migrated to our shores and now is expressed by the American left, now hopefully in its death throes, is a testament to the so-called intellectual flaccidity in academia, including many of the nation's seminaries. Too often, orthodox theology concerning mankind as created imago Dei has been sidelined as a specialty with no particular relevance to modernity other than to fight old battles of the past, engage trivialities of the present, or provide a justificatory framework for new "progressive" ideals of modernism and postmodernism.

The new fascistic messianism now available to the masses repudiates both nature and revelation in order to embrace the lies of the ideologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, relying on fantasies that have been proved disastrous over and over again in all their multitudinous forms, be they the fantasy of the perfect Aryan or the perfect communist. The rebirth of the pernicious idea that any human being can redefine being and force the complete restructuring of society in order to reinforce the fantasies conjured in his brain at any given moment is disastrous.

The idea that man can reorder society, and in fact reality itself by sheer force of will is a lie, and lies lead to violence. As an example, let us take the global cooling/global warming/global climate change hoax. In the 1970s, experts told us if we didn't change our ways, we were going to drive the environment into another ice age. That didn't work. Then the decided to attempt a new tact, called global warming. Taking the kernal of truth that the earth did indeed warm a little during the period of rapid industrialization, coupled with a still improving stand of living for most Americans, they posited that the earth was warming because of our "destruction" of our planet and our environment. To a scientifically illiterate public, it made a sort of sense. But then actual scientists began exposing the lie. At first the warmists resorted to Alinsky style tactics such as ridiculing the opposing scientists. But as the evidence against global warming accumulated, and the evidence of their lies became more public, the resorted to the idea of prosecuting what they called "deniers" and putting these people in jail. Now I am not aware of Anthony Watts doing anything but publishing the truth and showing these hoaxers for the liars and fraudsters that they are, but they want to use violence (for that is what force is) to shut him and anyone like him up.

And there is the fatal flaw in the thinking that man can change reality by his own will.  Sooner or later one will encounter someone who insists on shouting the truth, who won't be shut up by Alinsky tactics and who continues to shout the truth.  Then the only thing one can do to maintain the illusion is to use force.  In the 20th Century, untold numbers were killed to maintain the illusions.  Maybe instead it is high time we rediscover:

That is because the sum of Truth resides not in the will of man, but in the mind and heart of God the Savior, who alone can free the individual from the tyranny of Self.