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“A totalitarianism of a new nature, much more progressive, much more capable of an absolute domination that past models, including Stalin and Hitler, could not manage, today declares itself quite openly:the technocatric super party”…
— Augusto del Noce
“The goal of every form oftotalitarianismmust necessarily beworld domination”…
— Augusto del Noce
Soteriology
/sə(ʊ)ˌtɪərɪˈɒlədʒi/
the study of the doctrine of salvation
Eschatology
/ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/
the final destiny of the soul and of humankind
Immanent Anthropomorphic Salvation
An erroneous vision of human redemption and transcendence through the self-deification of man, where salvation is no longer sought from a divine or transcendent source, but rather through the emergence of a superior human
20th Century Italian Philosopher August del Noce [LINK] argued that modern secular ideologies (e.g. marxism, positivism, liberal technocracy [LINK]) are not morally or metaphysically neutral, but are inverted forms [LINK] of religious eschatology [LINK].
“I am tempted to propose the following definition oftotalitarianism: aregime that persecutes those who love truth”…
— Augusto del Doce
[LINK]
They promise a form of immanent salvation [LINK] (e.g. utopia, progress, emancipation, transhumanism [LINK]) through a Primacy of Human Consciousness [LINK] (e.g. Cartesianism [LINK] - Modern Gnosticism [LINK]) and Primacy of Man (e.g. Marxism [LINK]) while denying the transcendent source of truth and order [LINK].
The Anthropomorphism of Christian Theology, Philosophy and Metaphysics [LINK].
Or as outlined in Hypostasis - The Christian Trinity and Platonism’s Three Fundamental Realities [LINK], the denial of Plato’s Realm of the Forms - eternal, immutable, and perfect realities - that ground all sensible things. [LINK]
A denial of the metaphysical and transcendent - God, the form of the Good, the form of Truth, the form of Beauty and the form of Justice. The convergence of the ancient Trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Necessary Being of God. [LINK]
“To put it in the terms ofSt. Thomas Aquinas: Anunjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law”…
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Secular regimes, particularly Western Civilisation post-1968, shifted their focus from the notion of salvation from the divine to the political transformation of society into the new field of redemption.
“What istotalitarianism, if not theundue absolutisation of politics?”…
— Augusto del Noce
This results in
Technocratic & Scientific Management replacing moral deliberation;
Therapeutic culture replacing spiritual formation; and
Utopian ideology replacing religious salvation.
[LINK ] - Podcast - please also read - an ex-UK Prime Minister’s perspective - Britain is a failed State. [LINK]
Progressive Marxist [LINK], Stalinist [LINK], and Maoist [LINK] ideological and political techniques of manipulation — Dialectical and Historical Materialism that combines Idealism with Materialism with Praxis — becomes the modus operandi for societal and cultural transformation [LINK].
The Labour of the Negative, a Hegelian Dialectical Progressivism and Nietzschean Post-Truth Will to Power [LINK].
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A Soft Revolution - Context: Episode 2: The Soft Revolution [LINK]
New Totalitarianism
“Soft totalitarianism is infinitely more seriousin its results than hard totalitarianism.Dissent is made impossible, not in physical ways, butin pedagogical ways.It is in its transposition from “physical” to “moral” that totalitarianism reaches its pure form”…
— Augusto del Noce
By claiming to liberate man through secular means, Modernity overrides the eternal hope of the soul [LINK], dismissed by the ego [LINK], Cartesian Rationalism [LINK] ( a Cult of Reason [LINK] - Temples of Reason [LINK]) and Nietzschean Will to Power [LINK] of temporal Man.
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Thus, secularism becomes a political theology—a new soteriology [LINK] without God, and a new totalitarianism without a dictator.
“It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what ifvictory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical societywhich has come to dominate our lives?”…
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
Augusto Del Noce’s concept of New Totalitarianism is a more subversive, subtle, non-violent form of social and cultural control, not through brute force or overt political repression (as in 20th-century fascism or communism), but through technocratic rationalism [LINK], consumerism, materialism [LINK], and cultural nihilism [LINK].
Del Noce argues that Modernity reduces the essence of Human Being in Modern Societies to biological, psychological, and economic functions (akin to a Hedeiggerian Standing Reserve (Bestand) [LINK] ) and in doing so, denies any transcendent or metaphysical dimension of the human person.
“The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought, whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas themodern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility— based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men — is in danger whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion”…
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Whereas older totalitarianisms imposed ideological truths, the new totalitarianism eliminates the very idea of truth [LINK] and seeks a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.
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“According to Del Noce, the telltale sign of totalitarianism, which he had observed firsthand as a young man in the 1930s and 40s, is the “negation of the universality of reason, so that any form of opposition to established power”…
… In other words,totalitarian systems monopolise power by affirming that rationality itself is political.
They claim that their ideological narrative coincides with rational discourse and thereby exclude a priori all forms of criticism”…
— Carlo Lancellotti
It results in the dawn of a Post-Truth era [LINK], a Simulacra [LINK] and a Post-Truth Education [LINK] [LINK] [LINK].
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“Uniquely,humans can create imaginary symbolic realities, producing a common bias, the ‘nominalist fallacy’ when mere words are mistaken for reality. Entire verbal edifices such as psychoanalysis orMarxismhave falsely claimed scientific status without sound empirical basis, as the philosopher Karl Popper showed”…
— Tribal delusion in academia: the treason of the intellectuals?[ LINK ]
A Modern [LINK] and Post-Modern [LINK] [LINK] new Dark Age [LINK] [LINK].
[LINK] - Is Europe engaging in civilisational suicide?
Moral and religious claims are reinterpreted as irrational, subjective, or regressive.
[LINK]
This leads to a regime in which moral authority is undermined, but conformity to relativism is socially enforced [LINK].
“Since this early beginning, every revolution has depended on widespread dissimulation of information to the masses in the form of carefully crafted “managed truths.”We know that propaganda played a vital role not only in our own American revolt but also in the French Revolution, the Revolution of 1848, the rise of National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, as well as in modern communist revolutions.One of the central aspects of mass propaganda is “the lie,” which is always shrouded with a modicum of truth, however small.Jean Francois Revel tells us, “All the authors who have described this immersion in falsehood – Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev – all have insisted that falsehood is not simply an additive but an organic component of totalitarianism, a protective carapace without which it could not survive”…
— Managed Truth: The great danger to our Republic
[LINK]
The new totalitarianism, rather than reverting to State violence, works through mass culture, education, media, and bureaucracy [LINK].
“How were such a small number of intellectuals able to wrest control of the British government?It was done through a system of gradualism that involved attracting and utilizing university professors, playwrights, writers, social dignitaries, and politicians who shared these visions.Special efforts were made to recruit the young, who are always visionary.Their most powerful weapon was in controlling the “truth” and the dissimulation of controlled information, that is, managed truth”…
— Managed Truth: The great danger to our Republic
It subtly moulds thought and behaviour by stigmatising dissent and promoting a scientific, progressive, or liberal worldview as the only legitimate one [LINK].
“Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges.
Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however,a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons—maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, butthe country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era”…
— World Split Apart: Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address Harvard University 8 June , 1978
[LINK]
Del Noce saw this as a form of spiritual despotism that destroys inner freedom under the guise of individual liberation.
[LINK]
The Paradox of Western Liberalism
“Totalitarianismandsecularismareinseparable”…
— Augusto del Noce
Del Noce’s critique targets the paradox of modern Western liberalism: in rejecting metaphysics and religion, liberal societies claim to be neutral, yet they create a nihilistic order [LINK] in which meaning, tradition, and authority collapse [LINK], making people more vulnerable to manipulation by mass culture and technocratic elites [LINK].
[LINK]
In contrast to classical totalitarianism, where authority was visible and repressive, in new totalitarianism, authority becomes invisible, embedded in structures of expertise, media consensus, and bureaucratic governance. [LINK]
“We have a very powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy, quangocracy, and judiciary, all of which have been captured by left-wing ideology and work only to ensure their own job security.The “impartial” civil service and “independent” bodies that were variously brought in to stop corruption and outsource decisions to experts have now become the masters, not the servants. Democracy is being undermined”…
— Liz Truss, ex UK Prime Minister
Refer - Britain is a failed State [LINK]
This creates a world where dissent is not criminalised, but pathologised—seen as irrational, backward, or even psychologically deviant.
[LINK]
“Marxismowes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that itis not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought”…
— Roger Scruton
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“It is a well-known fact that revolutions are not conducted from below by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by an aspiring elite. The French Revolution, for example, was the work of lawyers, professionals and minor nobility, impatient to enjoy political power in a society whose upper reaches were clogged up with functionless fat cats. The revolutionaries acted in the name of the people, announcing liberty, equality and fraternity. And they consciously identified themselves as an enlightened class, who had earned through their superior understanding the right to summon the people to their aid.Their slogans and doctrines did not merely legitimise their own resentment. They were calculated to conscript the resentment of others” …
— Roger Scruton
[LINK]
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Christian Metaphysics
“There is a commonly held view that the arrival of Modernism represented the liberation of Man.A liberation from the transcendent
including traditional moral values and religion (refer to Nietzsche).A liberation from the Human Condition
that was inherent within the Contingent Being of Man (refer to Artificial General Intelligence, Trans Humanism, Scientific Gnosticism (Scientism), Nietzschean Übermensch, Nietzschean Will to Power).A liberation from the intolerable conditions and suffering of the Material Realm through attaining a Consciousness - a Gnosis
(refer to Gnosticism including Modern Gnosticism, Trans Humanism, Geo-Bio-Genetic-Engineering, Cartesian Mechanical Machine World View, Heidegger’s Technology Enframing (Bestand - Standing Reserve), and Jacques Ellul’s Technology Society & System).A liberation from an independent objective Reality (refer to the Theology of Marxism
(i.e. a power-directed system of thought), Nietzsche’s Theory of Perspectivism, Saussurean Dyadic Semiotics, Jean Baudrillard’s Post-Modern Simulacra, Simulation and HyperReality).The material manifestation of this idea is ever-present in various Revolutions that have occurred across the World post the arrival of Modernity including inter alia the French, Russian, and Chinese variants.
Idealism & Materialism - Dialectical Materialism, Praxis, Reflexivity, Historical Materialism and a perpetual OODA Loop of man-made change and transformation.
A City of Man (Civitas Hominis) without a City of God (Civitate Dei).
Man as God”…
— The Complexity Void
The New Dark Age - The Perspectivism of Modernity & Post-Modernity and the Disintermediation of Reality through Semiotic Signs [ LINK ]
“For the Sophists the paradigm of knowledge is sensation: hence universal relativism.Platonismresponded to this position with an appeal tomathematical knowledge; from this example of knowledge we pass to thatknowledge of immaterial realities and therefore of metaphysics”…
— Augusto del Noce
“Plato was the philosophical founder of Europe”…
— Augusto del Noce
Del Noce believed that Christian metaphysical thought was the only effective resistance [LINK] to this new totalitarianism.
[LINK]
Without a transcendent foundation for truth and personhood [LINK], freedom becomes meaningless, and society drifts toward a passive, managed nihilism [LINK] that masquerades as liberation.
“The Founders established a Nation in which people were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by their government.President Trump is committed to reaffirming “America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty, including by directing“the executive branch to vigorously enforce the historic and robust protections for religious liberty enshrined in Federal law”…
— Memorandum, United States Office of Personnel Management 28 July 2025[LINK]
Hence, Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas can have catastrophic consequences [LINK ].
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Schism
"Triumph of the Franciscan Order" by Baciccio (1707) in the Basilica of Santi Apostoli in Rome, Italy” - Courtesy of Nick Castelli on Unsplash