A TV series titled Hoarders documents the confusion and chaos generated by a mania for indiscriminately collecting anything and everything.  

One particularly shocking episode depicts a hoarder who had a collection of what she said was her mother’s excrement sloshing around in plastic bottles.  She herself defecated in a bucket, emptying her excretions into the back yard.  The toilet was too clogged to flush.

When shocked interventionists asked her about the revolting smell in her house, she serenely attributed the stench to mold and dust, saying she did not notice any odor.  As if the malodorous bottle collection was not horrifying enough, she admitted she had eaten food contaminated with feces over a period of twelve years.  She even confessed, before being made to leave her plaguey abode, that she longed for one last contaminated meal.

The problems stemming from her hoarding had become so extensive that the house had to be demolished.  It had become a danger to public health.

Any sane person can only regard the woman’s disturbed mental state with a mixture of revulsion and pity.  It is a terrible thing to see a human being reduced to such a condition.

The woman suffered mental and spiritual collapse because of a dearth of organizing principles for her life and her household.  She had no ontology of value, no concept that some things are worth more than other things.  If a Rembrandt were in her house, it had no more worth than her excrement, which she valued more than anything.  That was what she paid the most assiduous and constant attention.

Because she had no fixed value system, she had no reference points by which she made rational sense of life and the world.  Everything was subjective.

Her condition and the resultant demolition of her house serve as examples for peoples and nations whose deranged pseudo-intellectuals, priests, and apparatchiks have been force-feeding them ideological excrement and calling it beneficial.

America and the West in general have been afflicted for generations by a hoarder mentality, a false ontology and epistemology that perpetrate the notion that every idea and every impulse is as legitimate as the next.  The ideological hoarders have heads stuffed with huge and diverse collections of ideas, but they offer no way to sort them out in order of importance or value. 

The result is that peoples who have been fed an ideological all-you-can-eat buffet are sickened almost to death.

The recipe for what is essentially nihilism begins with a large helping of the idea of “Equality” defined as the elimination of any differentiation.  “Equality” has replaced the former Jewish and Christian organizing principles, and it has been used to destroy even the idea of any organizing principle, no matter how ancient or supra-civilizational it is.

The effects of intellectual, mental, and psychological disorientation due to a radically revised idea of equality are clearly seen everywhere, be it the arts, academic institutions, or politics.

But as politics and governments are the most powerful influencers, perhaps an example of the madness afflicting governments of Western nations is pertinent.

The West has seen the destruction of marriage, and now even the destruction of the human being as male or female, promoted as progress, both in the name of equality.

Constant disestablishment of norms recognized by nearly every civilization, all in the name of “equality,” is an attempt to create civilizational sanctification achieved by ceaseless flagellation deemed necessitated by a radicalized definition of “equality.”  But the endless punishment of a given culture’s norms only leads to wounding and hardened scarification of the individual’s and society’s conscience, their innate sense of moral order.  The never-ending revolution in the name of “equality,” the constant wounding and amputation of foundational principles only leads to sickness and to the great equalizer of death, be it individual or collective.

To put it another way, what was true of the woman who no longer had any discernment of an organizing principle that would have brought her life into order is true of any nation whose institutions and government are infiltrated by those committed to what is essentially nihilism.  Just as the toilet was clogged and the chief mechanism for disposing of excrement paralyzed, even so any entity that lacks foundational organizing principles for establishing and maintaining order eventually will collapse. 

The good news is that there is a remedy for anarchy and nihilism.  It is possible to return to orderly thinking.  It was not so very long ago that the West’s organizing principles included the concept of differentiation between good and evil.  There was recognition that a disturbance of and rebellion against the divine and natural order was folly of the highest order — that any nation who willfully rebelled against those laws would sicken and die.

In his article “The Tao in America,” Joseph Rigney succinctly points out (emphasis added) that “the culture war in the present generation is fundamentally about what C. S. Lewis called the Tao. ...

The Tao is C. S. Lewis’s term for the objective rational and moral order embedded in the cosmos and in human nature. ... For those within the Tao, when our thoughts correspond to reality, we speak of truth. When our emotions and wills correspond to reality, we speak of goodness. These are objective categories, the source of all value judgments, and universally binding; ‘Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike.’ The Tao binds and restrains all men, from commoners to kings, from citizens to rulers.

Rigney states that traditionally, America has embraced the Christian idea of the Tao.  American society has been shaped by ideas such as man and woman made in the image of God and the equal standing of every human being before divine Law.  He adds, “This is the fundamental cultural conflict in our times.  The Tao or Chaos. The Tao or Absurdity.”

For the time being, “Absurdity” appears to have the upper hand.  Dechristianization proceeds apace, with nihilism being promoted disguised as “equality.”

For example, a Jacobin fanaticism for egalitarianism, which redefines equality as the elimination of all differentiations, including between the sexes, has been promoted by the trans cult.  Its doctrines are now promoted by the American government — most notably by current presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who urges the use of taxpayer monies to perform in the name of “gender equality” and “gender-affirming care” the drugging and mutilation of illegal aliens.  Most heartbreakingly, many recipients of this “care” are mere children.

That such intellectual and spiritual excrement is recommended as beneficial for America’s children is particularly revolting, as the physical damage is irreversible.  But perhaps worse is the now widely taught belief that our children’s identity is entirely subjective, based only on feeling and not on their objective material embodiment as boys or girls.

The person or civilization that indiscriminately dines on intellectual, moral, and spiritual excrement becomes insane.

Restoration of sanity involves the re-establishment of the Jewish and Christian heritage America once embraced.  That foundation must be the top priority of the reformers who are confronting the poisoning of our culture.

Because many, if not most churches are partially paralyzed by absorbing or ignoring the waves of the current ideological rip tide, it appears that reform efforts will be most effective when the current Leviathan is targeted — namely, the government of the United States.

Granted, the task is the equivalent of Hercules cleansing the Augean stables.  The efforts will involve heroic exertions as the refuse is cleared out.

But in the long run, determination to confront the rot will prevent the entire house from being demolished.

Fay Voshell holds a M. Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology.  Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.

Image: Eugene Zemlyanskiy via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.