The previous post ended with the question -
Who are we?
That question we in the West have had an answer to for the last 400 years.
Our answer has been -
"Let us refrain from answering it."
Let me explain.
Notice how we talk about our own society today. We don't talk about what a Human Being is. We talk about data, about risks, about sustainability, about behavioural design. We talk about systems, about rules, about regulation. We talk about everything that can be measured. And only rarely about what is.
This is not an accident. It is an architecture, and it was drawn deliberately, in a very specific historical situation, by people who believed they had a real answer to a real problem. And they did.
In the 1500s and 1600s, Europe exploded in religious wars. The Thirty Years' War. France's religious wars. England under Puritans and Royalists. The Protestant-Catholic split could not be resolved by theological debate alone. It was fought with weapons, for decades, until the blood ran knee-deep.
When the dust of war settled, Europe was left with one fundamental question -
How do we live together when we fundamentally disagree about the deepest things?
Hobbes answered in one place. Locke in another. Spinoza in a third. But beneath the disagreements lay a common new arrangement that has shaped everything since.
"The deepest" - the question of God, of what Man is, of what it's really all about - was moved into the private sphere. The public sphere was arranged solely on what could be agreed upon, measured, administered. Religion became private. Law became neutral. And the State became administrator.
This was the tacit move that was agreed upon, which from this point in history has shaped our politics, our law, our schools, our administration, our entire understanding of what a society is.
First as an agreed silence about the deepest.
Later as denial that there even IS a deepest.
This is the technocratic order. It doesn't speak about God. It speaks about data. It doesn't see Man. It sees a user, a citizen, a resource, a client, a goal and a metric. It doesn't rest in an understanding of humanity - it rests in procedures.
Where the theocratic Order derives its right from a holy text, the technocratic derives its right from the numbers, from the statistics, from expert consensus, from the rulebook. It doesn't argue about the truth about Man. It simply claims that the truth about Man lies outside its area of competence.
The technocratic order doesn't see itself as an order. It experiences itself as if it "merely administers." It believes in its own neutrality. But in the very act of parking the question of what Man is, it has already answered it.
It says - Man is that which cannot be defined. Only measured. Only controlled. Only optimised. Only regulated and behavioural-designed.
This is not the absence of an understanding of humanity. It is a specific understanding of humanity that simply doesn't articulate itself as such.
And it worked.
For 300 years the move worked, more or less. It solved what it was created to solve. The West didn't break out in religious war again. Catholic and Protestant didn't kill each other over God. We had peace about precisely that which had made the blood spray in the 1500s and 1600s. On the internal religious split, it held. We had institutions that bore. Courts that judged. Administrations that administered. Universities that sought. The move we had found seemed to have solved the unsolvable problem from the 1500s.
But we haven't been honest about why it worked.
It worked because everyone still walked around with an unspoken Christian-Western understanding of Man at the bottom. It was there. It just wasn't mentioned anymore. It lay under the language, under the laws, under the habits, under the very way we understood each other. The technocratic surface functioned because it lay on top of a living foundation. Move and foundation held each other up, even though one pretended not to need the other.
This is what is breaking down in our time.
For two reasons operating simultaneously.
The first - the foundation has gone into dissolution from the inside. The unspoken Christian-Western understanding of Man - as created, as holy, as FREE, as responsible, as equal before God and therefore equal before the law - is no longer unspoken. It's no longer understood. It's just... gone.
You can see it when a society can no longer agree on what a child is, what a border is, what a woman is, what a human life weighs. We no longer have a living foundation under the technocratic surface. We have a void. And when you place a technocratic building - or liberal politics - on top of a void, it stands for a moment. And then collapses.
The second - in the same period, another travelling Order has arrived from outside, which refuses to park the question of Man. It wants to talk about it, and it has a finished, clear, coherent answer. It speaks about what a Human Being is, what is right and wrong, who owes whom what, which God one bows to.
The technocratic order, which has practised for 400 years saying "the deepest belongs to the private", has no words to answer with when the deepest suddenly claims the public.
And there the technocratic movement stands suddenly exposed as what it has always been.
Not neutral administration.
Its own Order.
An Order without depth. An Order that, in attempting to avoid conflict about what Man is, has settled the question by letting it disappear. And which now lacks precisely what an Order must be able to do to be an Order - to say what it stands for, what it won't tolerate, what it is that makes it worth defending.
This is what makes it useless as an answer now.
For it doesn't know.
We don't know.
The technocratic order cannot debate sharia, for it has abolished the very language to do so. It can talk about "religious freedom" and "equality" and "democratic values" - but they are all empty terms if there isn't a living understanding of what Man is behind them. And that understanding is no longer there. It has eaten its own root.
It can administer.
But it cannot answer.
This is the West's useless answer.
And that's why we now stand with the question we thought we had escaped having to ask.
Who are we?
This is not a question a ministry can answer. This is not a question a consultant report can calculate its way to. This is not a question that can be parked as private. This is not a question that can be left to political decision-makers who have themselves forgotten it.
This is the question a people must be able to answer if it wants to survive as a people. And we have at the present point in the story about us practised for 400 years at not asking it.
Now it stands and waits.
And it becomes more and more urgent for every day we wait to find an answer.
And when the answer comes, it won't be able to be found within the space we have delimited for ourselves to search in. It won't be able to be derived from data. It won't be able to be agreed upon in a parliament. It won't be able to be argued forth by experts.
For a human being cannot define itself by looking at itself. A people cannot justify itself from itself. An order cannot rest on itself.
Every "who are we" hangs on a "what are we set in relation to". Every "we" hangs on something that lies above "we". This is not a religious claim. It is a structural one.
We can no longer pretend we don't know this.
The metaphysical dimension - the one we for 400 years have left to the private and thereby to oblivion - is the only one from which the answer has ever been able to come. This is not a choice we make. It is a condition we have forgotten.
And we must dare to stand by it again.
If we want to preserve what is ours - and have strength enough to stand against what is trying to take it and subject it - regardless of whether the threat comes from within or from without.
❤️🔥🪽