By 2026, we have drifted so far into unreality that there exist sentences which sound warm, until you know what they cover.
As when the newly elected mayor of New York - unchallenged by the media - can declare that "we will replace the cold, harsh individualism with the warmth of collectivism", everyone who has read even a little history ought to feel more than winter's cold run down their spine.
Because let's get something straight.
It was not the "warmth" of collectivism that built Western civilisation.
It was responsibility, property rights, freedom, duty, and the dignity of the individual.
What today is scornfully referred to as rugged individualism created science, prosperity, the rule of law, charity - and the most humane societies the world has known. Not in theory but in practice.
And the so-called warmth of collectivism?
It cost approximately 100 million people their lives in the 20th century. Without polemic or exaggeration but as a historically accounted estimate.
If one therefore allows oneself to be seduced by the soft words, the pleasant smile - and the peculiar union of mocking godless Marxism and belief in Allah - then it is worth remembering who formulated collectivism's basic principles -
"The individual is nothing. The collective is everything."
- Joseph Stalin
"The interests of the individual must be subordinated to those of the collective."
- Mao Zedong
"Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."
- Benito Mussolini
These are not random quotations.
But declarations of programme.
This is the ideological core of what today is wrapped in words like community, care, and the modern platitude about "social justice".
Socialism is not the opposite of communism. It is communism before it obtains power's full apparatus.
One may believe it is the path to the future. One may believe it holds the promise of a better and more just society for the greatest number.
But one ought to be cautious about imagining that the force contained in this ideology can be tamed and kept in check. Because history shows something else, to such a degree that we have not seen it function anywhere it has been allowed to unfold fully.
And precisely therefore the question reaches beyond party politics and the ideological fashions of the times.
Not only for the devout. But for anyone who believes in the foundation of Western civilisation.
Because if you grew up here. If you were baptised, confirmed, have sung hymns, celebrated Christmas and Easter, buried your dead in silence and lit candles in darkness - then you already live in an order shaped by the biblical understanding of man.
One can call oneself culturally Christian. One can be doubting. One can even be secular. But one cannot honestly claim that the social order we live in does not have its roots here.
The entire Old Testament presupposes personal responsibility and private property rights. Not as ideology, but as life order.
Already in the Ten Commandments it is explicitly established -
You shall not covet your neighbour's house. You shall not covet your neighbour's wife, his servant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey - or anything that belongs to your neighbour.
Do read it again if you have forgotten it - because it is not abstract theology.
It is the moral foundation beneath the society you grew up in.
It is the reason your life, your body, your home and your responsibility do not belong to the state.
It is among humanity's most basic and ancient insights.
Therefore it is also not coincidental that nearly all communist regimes have been declaredly atheistic - and that religious faith in many cases has been suppressed, actively persecuted and punished.
Because when God is removed, there exists no authority above the state. And when nothing stands above the state, the state occupies that place.
And then it begins to act accordingly.
Therefore the question is not whether everyone from Christians to cultural Christians to secular voices ought to "meddle in politics".
The question is who shapes society if they do not.
Because one thing is historically certain -
If people who believe in man's inherent dignity, responsibility and limitation do not think their worldview into society and governance, then people without such boundaries do so instead.
And history shows rather unambiguously that they have never had Man's best interests at heart.
❤️🔥🪽
