I’ve counted them all up: the teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle, is already ours. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer by saying that he’s more developed than his victims and couldn’t help killing to get money, is already ours. Schoolboys who kill a peasant just to see how it feels, are ours. Jurors who acquit criminals right and left, are ours. The prosecutor who trembles in court for fear of being insufficiently liberal is ours, ours. Administrators, writers—oh, a lot of them, an awful lot of them are ours, and they don’t know it themselves!
—Dostoevsky, Demons
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This book aims to provide nothing less than a full-throated defense of moral and political sanity against the latest eruptions of ideological mendacity in our time. Its thesis is simple enough, but it needs the full resources of applied political philosophy to explain with adequate clarity and depth. The thesis? That the “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.
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