“One never knows,” “it could be,” “everything’s possible,” and “keep an open mind” are battle cries. This type of thinking, part of the New Age mindset, has become the intellectual norm for a surprising number of people. Though completely broken with reality, it isn’t seen as fantasy but rather a form of enlightenment, and those who refuse to enter into the morass of this type of thinking are seen as akin to “flat-earthers.”
In 1967 John Lennon recorded the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which includes the refrain “nothing is real.” It gave expression to a new type of personal thinking. Why should you let reality interfere? The song was a hit. He was on to something; people prefer the comfort of their feelings rather than the truth. Part of this is accepting the feelings of others—you accept that I believe in an underground race of aliens, and I accept that you believe in Chakras and the Third Eye. This thinking is very friendly, no one gets ruffled. To argue against these ideas brands one as anti-social, unimaginative and closed-minded.
And if arguing against Lizard People can lead to ostracism, suggesting other forms of immutable reality leads to violence. Consider such topics as male and female as the only two genders or abortion as the killing of an unborn child and you’ll quickly see how reality leads into dangerous territory.
The modern origins of this thinking lay not in Lennon’s LSD use in the mid-1960s but in a much older source: the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, in reaction to abuses in the Catholic Church at the time, taught that revelation was a personal matter. There should be no fixed dogma, no universally applicable reading of the Bible; this was better left to each person’s interpretive capacities rather than to priests. On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his “Ninety-Five Theses” to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. And, in doing so, the doors were flung wide open to the eventual individual interpretation of everything, including what’s real and what isn’t. Like Lennon, Luther understood something about human nature—if you give people a good excuse to do what they want to do rather than conform to some external command, even if it’s the truth, success is guaranteed.
The line of thought that began with the idea that one’s relationship to God should be the expression of individual feeling slowly expanded until it finally found its full secular expression in the writings of Friedrich Nietschze and his theory of “The Will to Power.” Everything must be the expression of individual feeling; this is the only law worthy of a fully human person. No more kneeling before altars, no more recognizing any force superior to oneself and one’s opinions—except when it comes to things like fighting a lion barehanded, leaping into an corrosive acid bath, or swimming during a hurricane.
Man’s desire to remake reality after his own image is the most powerful force in the world. The guiding principle of humanity is if it can be done, do it. One cries the magic word “Progress!” and all is justified. Often this takes on ludicrous proportions, reminding one of Abbie Hoffman’s 1968 book Revolution for the Hell of It. Is it good? Does it have any redeeming value? Questions like that aren’t fun, they spoil the party. Besides, who defines “good” and what constitutes “value”? It’s new, who cares if it’s true!
For years, the only bulwark against the onslaught of the reign of individual feeling was the Catholic Church, the unchanging rock established by Jesus Christ to last to the end of time. But for years, it’s been under attack by the force of human feeling. This is the cause of the conflict between traditionalist Catholics and those who follow Vatican II, the Novus Ordo. Pope John XXIII used the Italian expression aggiornamento (“bringing up to date”) to explain the new reforms. It’s worldly, modifiable Catholicism, meant to let “fresh air in.” And though designed to align itself with the modern world, it’s nothing more than the restatement of the oldest desire of the human heart to not serve, but command.