Don’t Be Demoralized

By this point, even the most oblivious have started to notice that our elites’ ever more irrational dictates aren’t meant to help anyone. Instead, cruel farces like Drag Queen Story Hour, mandatory intersectionality indoctrination, and Zimbabwe-style land transfers are humiliation rituals intended to demoralize the occupied nations.

It’s only natural to feel a surge of anger when this hideous truth dawns on you. Dwelling on wrath and anxiety, however, is exactly what the enemy wants.

The command for Christians not to fear occurs more than any other divine precept in Scripture. That proscription doesn’t require a Vulcan-like suppression of emotion. Human passions naturally move us toward material goods and away from temporal evils. What the Bible is warning against is letting your passions run wild to the point of overriding reason. This injunction extends to the other passions like sorrow, anger, and even love.

Man is a rational creature. In the natural order, all human emotion should be subject to right reason. Thus, consequent passion–emotion occurring after the intellect has evaluated the emotional stimulus and judged it licit–is perfectly moral. It’s antecedent passion–a knee-jerk emotional response unexamined and ungoverned by reason–that can actually cloud the intellect, override the will, and lead us to sin.

That’s not to say that the imperfect human intellect can’t knowingly consent to illicit emotion, but that’s unambiguously immoral. Getting carried away with snap emotional reactions is a far bigger and more common problem.

Ultimately, the main reason to rid oneself of antecedent passion is that it obscures man’s vision of God. That means a saint has no antecedent emotion. Zero.

Again, the saints aren’t Vulcans. What they have is consequent passion governed by right reason, which means that their emotions are perfectly proportional and fitting to their causes. They are also far more intense than the passions of dopamine junkies who soon become jaded from running on the hedonic treadmill.

No matter the political situation, self-mastery remains the key to personal tranquility and fulfillment. The philosophers agreed that the good life lay in perfecting virtue. By the same token, the Death Cult’s humiliation rituals only work on those who are still beset with antecedent passion. The advanced disciple of the spiritual life knows that he deserves to be humiliated for his sins and doesn’t let his pride kindle to uncontrolled anger. At the same time, he knows that man has great dignity by virtue of his creation in God’s image, so he feels righteous indignation corresponding to the offense.

What offense would that be? Since man images God, an act which deliberately seeks to demean human dignity sins not only against one’s neighbor, but against God. This goes doubly for those whom God has marked with the name Christians. The Death Cult violates the Second Commandment by putting to shame the people Christ has anointed prophet, priest, and king.

How does one break free from antecedent passion? The Scholastics likened it to a slender thread that we have the strength to break easily, yet most choose not to. A necessary step toward mastering our emotions is making a firm resolution to exercise mental discipline.

Thankfully, we’re not on our own. Many times in Scripture, Jesus Christ promised to grant us peace. The interior peace of mastering our passions is part of what He promised. As with any attempt to grow in the spiritual life, turning to Christ must come first.

Master your emotions, and no one can trouble you.

Let reason govern you, and even the worst misrule can’t touch your dignity.

Trust in Jesus Christ, and He will hand you the victory, regardless of human and demonic princes’ schemes.

For a more thorough treatment of Christian detachment, watch this video by the inestimable Fr. Chad Ripperger:

Goes beyond analysis into action