RealitiesAre Greater Than Ideas, by James Kalb

By James Kalb, Catholic World Report, November 1, 2023

James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism(ISI Books, 2008), Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013), and, most recently, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church (Angelico Press, 2023).

God is not a means. He is the goal. When we forget that, our faith no longer does anything for us.

How the world works usually matters more than what we’re trying to accomplish.

We see that in politics, with democracy as an obvious example. It wants the people to rule. But the people can’t possibly rule, certainly not in an immensely complex global society dominated by huge organizations with worldwide interests. How can they collectively know enough or find enough unity to make coherent decisions and see them through?

So they don’t. Even so, claims of democracy justify what’s done, so how things really work becomes disconnected from how they are said to work. What is called “democratic politics” thus becomes a matter of manipulating opinion and procedures. Our rulers rely on popular consent, but they can almost always secure it for their goals because the people are fragmented and individually powerless, and governing elites do their best to control the choices on offer and how they are presented. …

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