Of course, we are dealing with an enemy here that I think is best described in the Bible with Ephesians 6:12 “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in the high places.” To my mind, if the apostle Paul and all he had gone through, one of the most valuable statements of any religion ever uttered is that one that climaxed under that statement. Because there is real evil in the world, it exists outside of our laws and order, outside of our nationalism, our families, and our industries. It runs deep in the human experience, and people behave differently when contemplating it. Then in some cases, it runs so deep that it is practically invisible to our eyes, but we can certainly see the intentions of evil and how it interacts with us. And with that in mind, fighting this level of evil can then be elusive.

But additionally, aside from this fine statement from the Bible, we have fantastic philosophers who have come along who provide additional information into the world around us; we are clear about what we observe in our modern political context, the vast evil behind the tech industry, behind global politics that intends bad things against us all. These are things that we used to deal with in religion under the various concepts of sacrifice, where the blood of a goat might have replaced the sins of our existence from the original sin in the Garden of Eden, which I would argue was originally in the United States, during a time long past. We know the Mormons knew of North America and migrated as a lost tribe of Israel to that homeland to escape the pending doom of Nebuchadnezzar. And we know that the sacrificial procedure at Solomon’s Temple was an east-to-west occurrence, to pay reverence to the original fall in Eden, to the mercy seat between the cherubim, which guarded the garden. Humans have been fighting this evil for a long time, and it’s upon us now. And there aren’t enough goats to appease it.

Probably my favorite philosopher in all history was Giambattista Vico, which I found stunningly that my philosophy classes in college found repulsive. Giambattista Vico has done some of the best work in human understanding of the rise and fall of civilizations, which I talk about a lot with the Vico Cycle. I was first exposed to Vico when reading the great James Joyce classic Finnegan’s Wake, which is structured entirely around the concepts of Giambattista Vico’s revolutionary work, New Science, published in 1744. Vico’s book would have certainly have been on the shelves of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and thought about when Adam Smith was writing his panicle book, The Wealth of Nations. Much of the trouble we see these days is this vast evil in the world attempting to put human thought back into a bottle so it’s easier to control. But by reading from the minds of people during this period of Vico and the creation of the United States of America during the same century, the long history of the human race and its purpose begins to become much clearer, even if the sentiment of the present looks to be an apocalypse altogether final and destructive. 

One of the big concepts explored in Vico’s New Science is that of the “The Three Boundaries of Human Reason,” the very foundations of all thoughtful enterprise. Because without human thought, can we actually reason that anything exists? For something to exist, we have to have a thought about it as human beings. Other animals of the world experience life as they are programmed at their DNA level. They don’t have an opinion on the matter one way or another. They may feel joy, pain, regret, and hunger. But they do not possess the ability to contemplate their role in such mechanisms as human beings do. And the prerequisites of all thought specific to the human race are divine providence, the moderation of passions through marriage, and the immortality of the human souls attested by burial. Under those three foundations of human thought and experience, we can shape the concept of society. So it should be of no surprise that when we observe society being attacked by unseen forces, but forces using members of the human race as avatars for their destruction, it is these concepts defined by Vico that they are attacking, the idea of something bigger than humans, God, the deliberate resistance to animal temptations, sexual, consumables, social acceptance—then the purpose of a soul merging into the afterlife. The hatching of the egg to become something useful in immortality. By attacking these experiences, the evil of existence seeks to control us to its own ends, and that is clearly the fight upon us now. When we say we must win the “fight,” we aren’t just talking about the conflict between political parties worldwide. We are talking about the merit of these foundations of human experience as Vico defined them and seeking a positive outcome for the human race, which those principalities of evil clearly don’t want.   

We saw this obvious tactic in the discussions of common core in public schools, where absurdities in math were supposed to be accepted. The lack of trust in facts would erode any concepts of “The Three Boundaries of Human Reason,” and sink human thought back into the grips of evil that permeates the universe. Such absurdities would then be part of the political dialogue of the trans movement, that a woman can decide that it is a man or a man or a woman based on their thoughtful assumption, not as their sexual roles intended for procreation and the furtherance of life. By destroying thought then, the mass sacrifice of the human race through abortion, trashed lives, misery, and physical suffering could then commence to the gods as it always did, the original concept of sacrifice as humans have always tried to stave off the effects of evil in the world, through the spilling of blood. Those that consume blood through sacrificial rituals obviously want the unrestricted flow of sacrifice to their existence. The last thing they want is a bunch of human beings who make up good countries dedicated to fighting evil and standing for righteousness to start thinking about other things, productive things. And not seeking the protection of the maleficent to shield them from harm from those principalities of doom which are more common than all the leaves on the trees that currently inhabit the earth or ever have before or after. The way to prevent such evil from achieving its goals is to protect those concepts in the human race, those “Three Boundaries of Human Reason.” To defeat those principalities of evil, as spoken about in Ephesians 6:12, the mechanism to do so is contained in Vico’s observations on the foundations of all human thought. To not achieve such a lofty height, then society moves through the Vico Cycle, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, then anarchy over and over again perpetually, with the only thing benefitting from human existence being the evil that feeds off it. But the rebellion against that sacrifice is the foundation of all existence, and despite our current observations, we have seen significant progress that is worth fighting for. 

Rich Hoffman