Dr. Charlton probed this pertinent question earlier this week over at his Notions blog and arrived at a rather somber conclusion:
But people remain self-blinded to even explicitly stated evil, such as the Agenda 2030 or Great Reset... We are at a point when those with the greatest power and of evil intent, can publish detailed evil plans... and the masses will refuse to take them seriously.
What are the mass motivations behind such willfully self-destructive mass attitudes?
In the end, I am forced to admit that the only plausible explanation is that people desire their own destruction; that evil finds a gullible audience among the masses exactly because the masses have taken the side of evil - and in an ultimate sense, want for themselves what their evil leaders want to do to them.
In a post from 2020, I speculated that a Hanlon's Razor ethos has displaced modern people's capacity to perceive and acknowledge the existence of supernatural evil. Granted, the propensity to "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" does not offer a definitive or comprehensive answer to Dr. Charlton's question, but I sense that it does help to at least partially explain why people remain self-blinded to evil:
Modern people often employ Hanlon's Razor when criticizing or lambasting their elected political officials. Malice is rarely addressed, at least through officially-sanctioned channels, and nearly all seemingly malevolent actions and decisions are peremptorily written off as stupidity or incompetence.
But there is more to it than that. Much more. Meandering speculations about Hanlon's Razor aside, I sense modern people do not recognize Ahrimanic evil as evil for the simple reason that most sincerely view bureaucracy as a force for good. Modern people know bureaucracies - organizations, committees, political bodies, corporate boards, etc. - are crammed with flawed, fleshy yin-yangs who are often tempted to commit 'bad deeds', but they do not believe that this makes the forms of bureaucracy evil in of themselves (for example, think of those who steadfastly defend abstractions like democracy).
The only notion of heaven most modern Westerners are willing to consider is a temporal one. Contemporary bureaucratic structures, policies, and frameworks are the only means through which this temporal heaven can be established. What does this temporal heaven, this-worldly utopia comprise? A greener planet. Universal basic income. Increased international cooperation leading to eventual one-world governance. And so forth. Any threat to this vision of material heaven must be dealt with swiftly and severely, and it must be dealt with swiftly and severely exclusively through bureaucratic means.
Modern people do not recognize Ahrimanic evil as evil because they wholeheartedly believe that Ahriman is a force for good. The rejection of God and Divine Creation leaves no other option. Heaven on earth will not build itself. Such a goal requires an intricate network of plans, committees, management, data, laws, rules, regulations and everything else Ahriman comprises. And any perception of malice in this great project will be attributed to stupidity and incompetence. After all, how could those who strive to build heaven on earth possibly possess 'real' malice or be 'really' evil?
Well, if one rejects all belief in supernatural evil, then those who strive to help build heaven on earth can't really be malicious at all. At worst, they are stupid. Or incompetent. Or both.
But evil? To most modern people, the very notion is incomprehensible.
The observations above address the willful self-blinding and the decision to side with evil (which is not really evil, but good) to some degree but do little to explain the desire for self-destruction so prevalent among modern people.
With this in mind, Dr. Charlton’s post about the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge evil raises an even more pressing and pertinent question:
Why do modern people desire their own self-destruction?
As with willful blindness to or willing siding with obvious evil, I believe the answers lie in the spiritual/metaphysical.
Simply put, like the leaders/System they embrace and follow, modern people are ultimately motivated by evil, not good.
That may seem like a blanket statement, and in many ways, it is. Nevertheless, I believe the core of this blanket statement is true; and I will attempt to explore some aspects of it in my own clumsy way in future posts.