PART V:
In the practical order, the telltale signs of dialectical, materialist authoritarianism show forth in a false egalitarianism masking raw dictatorial power, and in a reductionist, anti-hierarchical, beauty-hating, disorder-loving deconstructionism that makes the material world a bleak, distopic miasma of almost pure ugliness. The practical order always follows upon the speculative. False theology, false philosophy, and pseudo-science bring forth ugly architecture, ugly music, ugly art, ugly people: Ugly intelligible forms ergo ugly material bodies.
[An intellectual corollary of this false egalitarianism is found in the novus ordo's diabolical "hermeneutic of continuity," recently given development in the vicious encyclical Summorum Pontificuм, which tries, unsuccessfully, to equate the bastard rite with the True Religion.]
Authoritarianism is the principle and formal cause of the intellectual, industrial, and artistic blight we now see everywhere in this darkened world. Low-quality, poorly crafted, fall-apart-after-the-second-use Chinese merchandise is the icon for it. This power cuм ineptitude - a malicious abuse of divinely constituted human authority - is the antithesis of the Catholic City. It engenders the poison we see in the Church and in all modern institutions, in varying degrees of deformation. The corruption and the poison have been unleashed by the permission of Almighty God, in punishment for our sins; and we do well to consider that we will find their mark everywhere - even inside our precious traditional movement. For, on the practical side of traditionalism, we find the mark of reductionist authoritarianism in a truly culpable lack of missionary activity.
Wherefore it occurs to me that authoritarianism can be defined as a toxic brew made from the coupling of raw power with the grossest ignorance (intellectual order) and ineptitude (practical order). The classical Russian Communist State gives the premier example. The raw power was so mind blowing that Our Lady had to come and warn about it. Mass murder and torture on a scale theretofore thought impossible. Grinding, jack-booted oppressive force unleashed throughout all levels of society, which yet had the agency power to bring about nothing more than a truly laughable tableau of industrial, architectural, economic, and administrative inefficiency/waste. I see in this example both authoritarianism as a principle or cause, and its effects: The cause being raw power dwelling in a subject devoid of knowledge, wisdom, understanding, prudence, and art; and the effect being monsters and bastards in all realms of human activity. Authoritarianism brings forth only a ridiculous parody of human endeavor, which clearly demonstrates the absolute vapidity of any act attempted to be taken independently of Jesus Christ and His Church.
Another example of authoritarianism in act is the entire novus ordo superstructure. Infidel men in the possession of raw power - illicitly obtained through the outright theft of ecclesiastical offices, and coupled with an outrageous and scandalous ignorance of even the most rudimentary tenets of the Catholic Faith - have engineered a worldwide debacle as tasteless, garish, unnatural, inefficient, useless, and aesthetically displeasing as it is heretical, schismatic, infidel, perverse, reprobate, and damning to souls.
A third example is in the making; and that is the SSPX, which is manifestly transforming itself into an authoritarianist behemoth and a reductionist gulag. Think about the ramifications for tomorrow’s priests – as possessing real Divine power, and yet without having received a truly Catholic seminary formation. It will be nothing else than raw power dwelling in subjects devoid of real doctrine, real faith, real virtue, real militancy, real wisdom, real knowledge, real prudence, real art.
Authoritarianism in an SSPX seminary would look like this: St. Thomas is not read directly, but only commented on. Vatican II docuмents and theologians will be studied with an eye to resolving them in favor of a ‘traditional’ interpretation (egalitarianism). Intellectual reductionism, delivered through ‘spiritual direction,’ will keep seminarians from traveling down the path that leads to a profound, vital, radical, supernatural faith in the inerrancy of Holy Writ and in the Patristic teaching on Creation. External-forum oriented Catholic militancy will be demoted and re-qualified as hyper-critical, ‘angry’ prophet-of-doom-ness; it will be discouraged and even punished; it will be replaced with notions of ‘piety’ and a ‘focus on the interior spiritual life of the soul.’ This would be a sure sign of a movement away from the essential objectivity of the Faith towards the perverted subjectivity of the heresy of modernism. Make no mistake: After the merger, and in its final state, the SSPX will be known only for an intellectual and aesthetic hobbling that will make even some liberals wince. Let the examples of the bi-ritual FSSP and Campos serve as the evidence for this proposition.