“How in the world are we still wasting our time waiting and watching for every new detail of each latest Trauma Event psyop as it drops on schedule, engineered to maximize attention, amplify fear, and confirm obviously false motives while advancing obviously deleterious agendas?” – Chris Paul, Badlands Media

Plato gave us the image long ago. Men chained in a cave, staring at shadows on the wall, mistaking them for reality. But our condition today goes well beyond the metaphorical. We are not merely trapped watching the shadows. We depend on them. We organize our lives around them. We defend them. We fall in love with them. And we scorn anyone who dares try to drag us toward the light.

It gives “man cave” a completely different identity.

Worse still, according to one Dr Douglas Haugen, ancient occult rituals have now been digitized, scaled, and automated to pull us deeper into the cave. What once required temples, initiations, and spells is now delivered through screens, algorithms, and narrative scripting specifically meant to alter our emotional state. The explosion of the electronic screen is not accidental. It is ritualized perception management. It is magick modernized, “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will,” in the words of the infamous Aleister Crowley. That definition did not disappear just because we think we are too advanced for such primitivism. It has simply migrated into media, psychology, narrative, and technology. And it works precisely because it bypasses reason and targets desire.

The popes have warned about that as well.

So with all of that doomsday introduction established, I present in Isaian fashion another invitation to the sacramental Christian life. It’s Isaian because it’s Advent. If it were Lent, it might be more Jeremianic.

Nothing written here should make us bitter or suspicious of those with good intentions out there–not necessarily. On the contrary, it should make us charitable, patient, and steadfast in prayer, and in the fasting found in the Bible, a fasting this space has called for many times in recent years despite America’s ongoing refusal to practice it. We are even given an opportunity for this discipline in the Ember Days this week–a long-held teaching rooted in the life and words of Christ, quietly discarded at some point as the true Faith melted away.

How about this Advent, leading into Christmas, we begin with Ninive and Jonas? A little humility. A little repentance.

We are told, endlessly, that what we really need is truth. That if the right facts were revealed, everything would change. This is a lie. The mob that cried out for Barabbas had the Truth standing in front of them. Peter knew the Truth intimately. Yet both chose belonging over fidelity when the pressure hit.

The real danger is not ignorance. It is cowardice.

We are told by Maslow that the great human need is belonging and self-esteem, that fulfillment flows upward from safety to love to self-actualization. But this hierarchy is false. It is man-centered, not Christ-centered. It trains us to believe that meaning is found in fitting in rather than standing firm. And it ensures that when truth becomes costly, we abandon it.

The levels at issue here are the third and fourth tiers–belonging, esteem, self-realization. These are precisely where the pressure is applied. Step out of line, and you risk exile. Lose your reputation. Lose your platform. Lose your friends. So we stay in the cave. We convince ourselves we’ll be braver later.

Courage, however, is not improvised. It doesn’t work with a snap of a finger.

It is a muscle. It takes time to build. It is formed through small acts of discipline, silence, prayer, fasting, and obedience long before the crisis arrives. We deceive ourselves when we say, “Someone will tell me the truth when it really matters, and I’ll change then.” That is not how souls work. That is not how Peter’s soul worked.

There were people in that mob that loved and followed Christ who yelled, “Crucify him!”

At the heart of all this is the ontological war over reality itself. Modernism is not merely theological error. It is a metaphysical revolt. It denies that truth is external, objective, and binding. Instead, it elevates feeling as the final arbiter.

It is the source and summit of “all religions are a path to God.”

William James articulated this perfectly in The Varieties of Religious Experience, when he defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Not truth. Not doctrine. Not revelation.

Experience. Variety. Subjectivity.

This is Modernism–the same Modernism we’ve been waging war against for almost two months now.

This is the religion of the cabal–faith without a fixed object, meat without a skeleton, spirituality without a King, a system perfectly suited to bring about a god of their and our own making–one who demands affirmation rather than obedience, one who replaces Christ.

This is why everything now funnels toward therapy, self-help, self-realization. The telos of life is no longer truth, repentance, or sanctification, but self-expression and emotional equilibrium. Christ becomes optional–until he becomes illegal. The Cross becomes offensive or banal. Suffering becomes meaningless.

And that is precisely how the ground is prepared for the acceptance of antichrist.

For when the Holy Ghost truly moves, he bears witness not to personalities and platforms, not to fireworks and fool’s gold, but to Christ and that rugged cross. Christ is celebrated–the crucified Christ in whom St Paul glories–typically amid solemnity, silence, and a gaze toward the East from whence he shall return.

If we remain dependent on the shadows, if we continue mistaking consensus for truth and belonging for virtue, we should not be surprised when we find ourselves once again in the crowd, shouting for Barabbas, or warming ourselves by the fire, denying Christ for the third time.

Most of us are absolutely kidding ourselves if we think we are ready for the return of the King.

Please consider these things. I say them in charity and genuine concern. May we beseech his divine mercy now before the time for judgment comes. There is a memetic energy sweeping the world, whether it be with trauma event psyops or false church teachings, and if we are not careful, it may carry us to a place where Christ is no longer waiting for us at all–not because he moved, but because we never trained ourselves to follow him out of the cave.

FURTHER READING

No Court, No King: St Raphael, Right Order, & the Rot of the Modern House