Love Has Waxed Cold
“And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” (Matthew 24:10-13)
Our age is that spoken of by the Christ. Normal human relationships are fading into non-existence, and perverse views of the other are becoming the norm. In a piece by Anton Cebalo for The Guardian, statistic proof was given for what many have known intuitively. Listing a few notable ones,
-In 1999, according to Gallup, 70% of Americans reported belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque; by 2020 – two decades after Putnam’s book – it was already down to 47%.
-Rather than bowling alone, Americans are instead browsing alone – over seven hours daily, on average, with the number rising every year. As of 2021, 31% of Americans claimed to be online “almost constantly”.
-The past few decades have recorded a steep decline in people’s reported number of friends. The number of Americans who claim to have “no close friends at all” across all age groups now stands at around 12%, according to the Survey Center on American Life. By comparison, only 2% of Americans said they had no close friends in 2003, according to Gallup. Friendlessness is more common for men, but it is nonetheless affecting everyone.
-When polling exclusively American millennials, a pre-pandemic 2019 YouGov poll found that 22% have “zero friends” and 30% “no best friends”. For those born between 1997 and 2012 (Generation Z), there has been no widespread, credible study done yet on this question – but if you’re adjacent to internet spaces, you already intuitively grasp that these same online catalysts are deepening for the next generation.1
People, in short, are having fewer friends. Anecdotally, I was meeting a best friend for dinner at our favorite dive bar. As we lit up some cigars, I looked around and realized that we were the only people in a relatively busy bar who were under forty. One of the bar tenders was in her thirties, but as far as customers, we were significantly younger than the average. Maybe it was the bar, the night, but that experience matches up with what I have hear from millennials and gen z: we do not have friendships like previous generations. Even rarer than friendships is going out regularly on the weekends, or travel.
When searching for substitute relationships, which according to this article, is mostly online, the ersatz are often perverse. Sexual substitutes bounce between pick up artists (PUAs), and MGTOW (men going there own way), who describe women as inherently manipulative, and should either be avoided at all costs, or used as temporary sexual thrills, and, on the other hand, Only Fans models use their physical beauty to control, and financially exploit, men. On the intellectual plain, the topics of politics, religion, and philosophy, are rarely seen as a long journey towards truth, but, on the contrary, become intellectual weapons to be used in a war against people we, a-priori, dislike. What capital “T” truth is, does not matter, but facts, like bullets in an intellectual war, do. The entire point of my previous article on Father Seraphim Rose and the Old Calendar was precisely to de-weaponize Father Seraphim’s personal letters. What is common behind both sexual and intellectual ersatz found online is that behind both is the lust for domination. Body and mind are this to be possessed, to be won over in a battle of manipulation, rhetorical device, and psychological espionage.2
Inside every man is the desire for self-transcendence, for self-divinization, yet the two paths that make this possible are incompatible. One path, which is opened up once love has waxed cold, is for man to extend his will as far as possible, dominating nature, and his fellow man. For as much as I love The Blacklist, Raymond Reddington, for as lovable as he is, presents a perfect model for this path. By acquiring a hand in every possible business, and disposing of anyone who gets in his way, Reddington becomes a god. Reddington is seemingly all-powerful, all-knowing, and can, and often does, decides the fate of his fellow men. The opposite path, the path of faith, is through self-emptying, the denial of one’s own will, and in so doing, inviting Christ to live in me, so that “nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20), and having the Eternal Logos dwelling in me, I partake, by grace, what God has by nature, as the apostle Peter writes, “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Peter 1:4).3
Drawing a strict arrow of causality would be difficult, and maybe unhelpful. If we do not have regular human interaction, and if what is available online is perverted, then it would follow that since the interaction we have is perverted, then we will ourselves, through prolonged exposure, become perverted. At the same time, if we try and extend our will through the lust for domination, or if this was the mode of interaction of the previous generation(s), then, since people are subjects, and not objects, it would not be surprising that a society subjected to such attempts at domination would become increasingly isolationist in an attempt to escape objectification. Both arrows can occur at the same time. Whatever way the arrow points, there exists an internal battle in every soul for how he will satisfy his need for self-transcendence, and thus interact with his fellow man.
Physical necessities frequently blind those who are able to perceive this problem, as the right clearly demonstrates. As politics becomes more war like—for we are no longer fighting over the application of the public rules (politics as normal), but fighting over what the rules should be (the stuff of war)—even those who dislike the increasing viscousness (electoral interference, demographic displacement, assassinations, lawfare, and deplatforming) eventually acquiesce, according to the logic you can find even on this blog: so long as the right renders itself defenseless by adhering to the rules of civil discourse, it will always lose to the left who plays by the rules of warfare and espionage.4 Even those who believe in the reality of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, come to reason that if they do not treat politics as an arena whereby they impose their will on society, by force if necessary, then an infanticidal, genocidal, communist left will take the country by storm, and righteousness will die out. However this tight this reasoning may be, it is an expression of the first path to divinization. Taking aside the necessary conditions for political survival, it is impossible to heal a society of its lust for domination, and worship of the will, through political means, for politics, in the sense it is practiced today, is indistinguishable from such lust and worship.
Fydor Dostoevsky encountered a similar problem in pre-revolutionary Russia, and wrote his The Idiot in response to such coldness in Russian society. Following the reforms of Tsar Alexander the Second, and the emergence of bourgeois society, Prince Myshkin, who is representative of old, land based, Russia, and the Orthodox tradition, comes into contact with a society chiefly concerned with wealth, status, and sexual conquest. Like a time-traveler from the past, the holy fool is unable to comprehend the inverted values of bourgeois Russia, and is often ridiculed by those around him. Being unconcerned with wealth, status, or sexual conquest, however, Myshkin is untouchable, for by simple, child-like, humility, the attacks of his tormentors are rendered powerless, and his lived example, and not by any rebuke, or moralizing, mind you, is powerful enough to challenge the fallen society. Dostoevsky thought that only a clearly opposite example, one with Christ-like humility and self-emptying, would be enough to wake his contemporaries out of their lustful slumber. Russian society got worse, as the history books show, but the impact of The Idiot on those that read it is often described as life changing. Reading the works of Dostoevsky, and those of his caliber, show us what normal human relationships are like, and give us the ability to orientate our lives towards something truly Good. An orientation without which we would be like rats in a pitch-black maze.
Looking to the lives of the saints is another way of acquiring normal human relations, for the saints, who have perfect union with Christ, have union with perfect Humanity, the humanity that we were all made to live out. “A man dominated by self-love will soon be dominated by all the passions, sins, and temptations. One-by-one they will find a home in him. The solution is modeled for us by the saints—that is, living for Christ and not ourselves. Only then do we become real people. We learn real theology from being in the presence of a saint who is a clear icon of Christ before us. St. John of Damascus speaks of the saints as full of grace, which does not depart at death, and thus we have relics, and icons and such spiritual “artifacts.” God rests in His saints. We can come to understand Who God is and who we are through the saints who are aflame with love for God. They remind us that something never ceases or passes away. God cannot hate, and God cannot get angry. God is only loving; and unless we reach a state of only loving, God will be Hell for us. Metropolitan Hierotheos says that contact with the saints reveals the hurt child within us. But how can we experience the saints? It’s not enough just to ask their intercessions. To have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with a saint we must already imitate him in some way—to have contrition and a feeling of disillusionment in our own ability to accomplish spiritual tasks. Humility is the beginning of a true sense of reality—that is, that we have long way to go to reach God.”5
More often than not, the saints struggled with sins much greater than our own, and out of their humility, and ascetic struggle, they were able to overcome their vices, and reach the heights of glory, becoming an icon of Christ. To read the lives of the saints, especially those saints who share our vocation, be it student, teacher, child, parent, single, married, martyr, or soldier, to pray to them each day, and establish a relationship with them by imitating them, this is another way to restore normal human relationships.
No matter the political necessities of the day, we cannot fix the breakdown of human relationships through political means, or any political movement. Further, as human relationships continue to break down, the political situation will continue to worsen, as each generation becomes more and more enslaved to their own lust for domination. Without a proper education in what it means to be human, how humans are supposed to relate to each other, and with the kind of “education” found on the internet, where most social interactions are happening, reinforcing the idea that one’s will is his god, then it should be no surprise that our society becomes dominated by impulse. Olavo de Carvalho describes the consequences for school students rather powerfully, “Being unable to rationally articulate things, he must follow what is left, and this will be the first impulse that comes. So you create a generation of stupid, impulsive, violent young people so that we notice being a teacher in an elementary or high school is a personal risk. Remember that case, when some guys set fire to the teacher’s hair? And the local Department of Education forbid punishing them. ‘You are preventing them from learning and must leave the poor fellas.’ Now there was this girl that ran to help the teacher, putting out the fire. She had to leave the school, because the students wanted to beat her. The only person who got punished was her, who did something good.”6
What is needed is an education in being human. More than any political battle, and there are many that are noble, and need to be fought, we must become human again. Reading the works of Dostoevsky, and other great 19th century authors, as well as the lives of the saints, can provide us with a humane education, and education whose result must be us living human lives, forming healthy, normal, relationships. If one Prince Myshkin was not enough, maybe a Prince Myshkin in every circle would save our society’s soul.
Guardian News and Media. (2023, January 2). Is America suffering a “social recession”? | Anton Cebalo. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/02/america-social-recession-less-friends-sex-mental-health
PUAs and Only Fans streamers both consciously try to decode the opposite sex’s psychological structures, and proclivities, for the sole purpose of exploiting perceived weaknesses.
Structured in accordance with, and some direct quotes from, Johnson, M. R. (2019, February 10). Fyodor Dostoevsky Complete lecture series - Matt Raphael Johnson. YouTube.
Adapted phrasing from Christopher Cantwell speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC. BitChute. (n.d.). https://www.bitchute.com/video/FUK7dQA7CbTV/
Young, A. (n.d.). Fr. Alexey Young. what is holiness? orthodox spirituality, part 1. OrthoChristian.Com. https://orthochristian.com/94624.html
YouTube. (2020, July 7). Olavo de Carvalho - the deliberate destruction of education - english subtitles. YouTube.