In Part One of this series, I introduced the idea of using the French Revolution-era concept of Estates-General to cut through the “fog of war” in order to understand the chaos in which we all now find ourselves in our media and legal environment.
In fact, the chaos is a necessary result of the fact that the first and second “Estates” of the Estates-General political model require chaos, because of who they are and what they do in the third decade of the Twenty-First Century.
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To make crystal clear the nature of these three “Estates” we should revisit an idea introduced by one Bishop Adalbaron of Laon– the idea of those who pray. Bishop Adalberon had written a poem in which he described three orders of society: (in Latin) Oratores, Bellatores, Laboratores – those who pray, fight, and work.
To see through the chaos of our time, if we return to that vision, which is much more than just poetry, we arrive at what was later called the First Estate, “those who pray.”
Today, those “Oratores” have been replaced by those who preach, and the preaching takes place now, not in the ecclesiastical pulpits of churches, synagogues, or mosques, but in the lecture hall pulpits in the universities. Even more recently, those lecture hall pulpits have been replaced by the wireless pulpits of the Woke media, where the Word of Wokeness is preached to all the villagers of our Global Village.
The preaching goes on, but what happened to prayer? Historically, in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other world religions, prayer was a message to God, spoken out loud, or uttered silently, giving thanks and asking for relief from suffering.
Today, when a Woke preacher asks for diversity, equity, and the rest of the alphabet soup, the message might be uttered in speech, or in print, or in diagrams, but it is a message to what Karl Marx called the “masses,” the entire population; who, the prayer beseeches, must bring about the “posthuman” Garden of Eden of Wokeness.
Technically, therefore, that message could be called a prayer, but what is more obvious is that it is definitely preaching.
And “Those who Preach” are the universities, who have always had their roots in religion.
But where and how does chaos come into the picture?
What the universities are preaching now is not a clear picture of a world to come when humans end their life and go on to the next one, be it heaven, purgatory, or hell. It is about posthumans who go nowhere; heaven will come to them.
And how will this happen?
That’s where the chaos begins.
“Those who pray” of yesteryear imagined a heavenly afterlife, such as that depicted by Fra Angelico:
Those who preach in the universities really have no idea of what their posthuman utopia will look like. They repeat their pieties, which sound like prayer but are actually only seqences of letters of the English alphabet, and their utterances are chaotic.
They have to be chaotic, because they actually have no inkling of what their heaven on earth is going to be like.
Social justice? Check. Sustainability in the face of “Climate Change?” Check. Inclusion of the marginalized? Check. Posthumanism wherein men are women and women are an outmoded idea from Western Civilization? Check. And what does that all look like?
Duh…
Chaos.
So much (for today) about Those Who Preach, the universities.
What about Those Who Fight, in the French historical terminology, the Second Estate?
In the third decade of the Twenty-First Century, the fighting is mostly done by spies, also known as the “Intelligence Community.” True, there is also kinetic war going on, especially in places like Ukraine.
But even the kinetic war is mostly the product of spies. Take, for example, the blowing up of the Russia-Germany Nordstream pipeline. Who did that?
Duh…
Chaos.
Or the mysterious destruction of a well-functioning dam in that part of Ukraine under secure control of the Russian Federation? Who did that?
Duh…
Chaos.
Although vestiges are present of the old-style kinetic wars of the first half of the Twentieth Century, for the most part, Those Who Fight do so now only by creating more fog of war than previous wars have ever known; by creating–
Duh…
Chaos.
The First and Second Estates of the Estates-General nowadays must create chaos, because that’s who they are, and that’s how they operate.
Now, what about the Third Estate, the Laboratores. (In Latin, “laboratores” doesn’t mean “Laboratories” such as the Wuhan Virology Lab. Those are Second Estate, and those are, once again… duh… chaos.)
In Latin, Laboratores means “laborers.” Working stiffs.
Like who?
Like the guy who most likely brought you your latest Amazon package.
Like the guys who are ripping up and repairing the streets because Joe Biden and pals want us to Build Back Better.
Like the women (yes, women still exist) who cut your hair and the hair of my woman friend; the women who are still tending to the folks in the hospital who are recovering from what’s left of Covid, and even the women who are phoning you with unwanted sales pitches because you haven’t blocked their messages yet. And there are lots of other men and women, working women and working men. Elites? No.
Laboratores.
The Third Estate.
The Deplorables.
Yes, Hillary despised them, that very same Hillary who committed all kinds of violations of the Espionage Act, but has not yet been locked up.
So what about the Third Estate? If you keep reading this series you will hear much more about them.
But first I must ask the question, “What about the corporations?” Where do they fit into the French Revolutionary model?
And another question: “What about college students?” Which Estate do they fall into.
Hang in there… answers coming soon.