Saw this Tweet today from God, commenting on the situation in the US (yes, he has a Twitter account, like the Pope). God’s Tweet immediately reminded me of the words of one of my favourite philosophers and observers of the human condition, the Romanian existential thinker E. M. Cioran (1911-95). Though Cioran wrote these words some 50 years ago, they are just as true today:

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism.

The New Gods (1968), reissued by Chicago University Press in 2003

What a truly brilliant and original insight, and it is borne out by history as well as the present. If anyone is unsure of what this means for the current constitutional crisis in the US — and the dictatorships of Putin, Erdogan, Xi*, Kim Jong-Un, Dutarte, and Bolsanaro, inter alia — then check out this very interesting video:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2020/11/trumps-spiritual-adviser-claims-angels-from-africa-will-save-election-for-trump/

*The Communist Party of China is, like North Korea, a monotheistic construct. There is one leader, one belief system. For many years, the CIA World Factbook listed North Korea as the fifth or sixth largest religion in the world, even though the country is, technically, without religion.

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