From the Upper Paleolithic to Socrates to Luther to Hegel, the “Western mind” has been centrally about emancipation. We broke from the Garden and became sapiens: the thing that knows it knows. Metaphor. Language. Fear of death. Then we broke the Church. Broke the kings. Took surnames — no longer “of the lord” or “of the faith,” but of a house, a trade. Portable. Free agents.
Luther freed the individual from Rome. The individual could read. The individual had a name. And then someone said: I will create a country to instantiate this whole thing.
That country is America.
Not freedom from. Freedom as. Christ as stance. The freedom project made nation.
“Europe” followed us — as they always do — bringing with them slaves, the state, the corporation, bureaucracy, Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor.
And then we demanded more. Emancipation from God. From nature. From the body. Now it’s infinite genders. Upload my mind. State-sponsored suicide. Liberation upon liberation — each one costing us, emptying us.
But this is a stance, not a discovery. The emancipation project feels like progress because we’re inside it. It accumulated anomalies — dying families, boys who can’t meet girls, economies that punish children — until the paradigm cracked. We are not in decline. We are in paradigm crisis. What comes next will be incommensurable with the old — untranslatable. That’s why younger people don’t understand America. They’re already inside the new paradigm, unable to see the old. Stuck to their screens.
We exposed the scapegoat but lost the sacred container. Mimetic violence now runs free — cancel culture, political purges, ritual humiliation — without the blood sacrifice that once discharged it. America secularized Christ’s revelation: the victim is innocent. But we kept the pattern without the frame.
The EU responds with method. Procedure. Compliance. Harmonization. But method-worship is its own tyranny. There is no single method for knowledge, for society, for meaning. Brussels governs a model of Europe, not Europe itself. Their system is unfalsifiable — closed to revision, unable to learn from its mistakes. The closed society.
We live inside a Hilbert space of meaning and its derivatives — an epistemological infinity. Describing it this way is just another mode of grading. But the model doesn’t replace the being. The map doesn’t replace the country. The menu doesn’t replace the food. The second-order derivative should not be confused with the rolling of the hills — or with the experience of rolling down.
America is different. Not innocent — we killed to take this land. Not clean — racism, violence, self-obsession. The delusion that wealth is collecting more coins than your neighbor. But correctable. A stance that knows it’s a stance. America’s pluralism — messy, contradictory — is epistemologically healthier than Brussels’ harmonization. Better barbarism than bureaucracy.
America works because America doesn’t pretend to know what America is. It gives you freedom — the ability to change. Openness. Revision. Against method. The refusal to mistake models for reality.
And where is Christ? Where is the Church?
America is the Church. Talk shows are confession. Commerce is tithing. Football is bloodless sacrifice. The Civil War: blood sacrifice. The Revolution, every war — Christian renewal through blood. WWI. WWII. The pattern holds.
Then God stopped speaking.
Fear of the void is just the echo of the void. Another trajectory in the Hilbert space of hunger, fear, and desire. You can’t escape meaning by pointing to fear — fear is already inside the system. The void is an idea. Fear is an idea. You can’t get underneath meaning by naming what drives it.
Yes, we live inside structures. The democratic project isn’t freedom from structure — it’s the freedom to change it. The freedom to worship God as I please doesn’t mean I don’t live with others. It means I can renegotiate the terms. That’s the difference between tyranny and democracy: not the absence of power, but the possibility of revision.
You can’t go back to the Garden. If to leave was sin, to return is no less sacrilegious.
Now we enter a new era. The Western period is ending. Something else is beginning. We are living inside it right now.
This is what the young do not understand. They see sins. They do not see the project. Being human. Being Western. Being American. Each one instantiates the last. Each one carries the weight of meaning-making forward.
America’s project is not escape. Not will. Not “I do what I want.” It is freedom for — for worship, for meaning, for the hard work of consecration inside finitude. We judge not by metaphysical truth but by whether it works — for families, for community, for meaning.
You, “Europeans,” say you are atheists, but you worship the same devils you always have. Did you think we’d stop opposing it?
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