Coming Soon, Soft Totalitarianism   

   Western Christians may soon experience what Jews have long been facing around the world. If governments impose secularism, we will need a manual for spiritual survival. 

   Sociologist Rod Dreher published in 2020, Live Not by Lies. Views will summarize a summary today and - the lessons - on Friday. 

   Soft totalitarianism, he writes, exploits modern man's preference for pleasure over principles. The public will not oppose the state, he says, because it will be satisfied by self-indulgent comforts. Social critic James Poulos calls this the "Pink Police State," as people surrender political rights for guaranteed personal pleasure. 

   The state will use surveillance technology, welcomed by consumers for lifestyle convenience and public health. Big Brother's Big Data already monitors our private life via apps, credit cards and smart devices. 

   Dreher says the cultural revolution that overtook the West defines the core of soft totalitarianism. In 1996 he wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic - "the death of God in the West has given birth to a new civilization devoted to liberating the individual." 

   "Religious Man," he said, who believed in transcendent principles that ordered life around communal purposes, had "given way to Psychological Man." The latter "believes there is no transcendent (beyond normal; other worldly) order and that life's purpose is to find one's own way. Man, no longer a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, is a tourist travelling according to his self-designed itinerary." 

More radical than communism 

   This revolution is more radical than the Bolsheviks in 1917. They may have been godless, but they believed in an order, in which individuals subordinated their desires to a higher cause. By the 1960s men were seeking a civilization without a binding transcendent order. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was predicted that communism could not withstand the Western cultural revolution -one that set the individual free to pursue pleasure. 

Tomorrow: Part 2