Breaking The Anarchist Hold On Society, Culture and Religion

At Coram Fratribus Intellexi, the site of His Excellency Erik Varden, Bishop of Trondheim, there is a reminder that challenges the powers that be. Despite popular attitudes and policies and powerful movements aiming to stifle conscientious objectors who resist the dehumanizing spirit of the age, there is indeed a better way.

17 April 2026

‘Without [a] demanding educational effort, passive adaptation to dominant paradigms will be mistaken for competence, and the loss of freedom for progress. This is all the more true in light of the spread of artificial intelligence systems, which increasingly shape and permeate our mentality and social environments. Like every great historical transformation, this too calls not only for technical competence, but also for a humanistic formation capable of making visible the logic behind economics, embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons! Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded.  It “groans and suffers” (cf. Rom 8:22), just as each one of us does.’ From Pope Leo’s life-giving discourse pronounced at the Catholic University of Central Africa this afternoon.

Pope Leo XIV has weighed in about the need to refine critical thinking to challenge and correct what is published as fact but is more a propaganda of debased opinion(s).

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J0eHC0-9bw

Some will resist the challenge and double-down on identity and power politics that marginalize free speech. Others, people of goodwill, will listen and affirm. Still others may hesitate though, upon considering the reasonability of the need for enhanced critical thinking and humane behaviour, come around to become agents of constructive change.

Thomas Sowell is one of the best critical thinkers of our time, reminding us that avoiding critical thought can lead to serious negative consequences.

1. It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. 
2. When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
3. It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
4. Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.
5. Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
6. Socialism has a record of failure so blatant that only an ‘intellectual’ could ignore or evade it.
7. The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
8. You’ll never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

George Orwell once said, “If people can’t write well, they can’t think well, and if they can’t think well, someone else will do the thinking for them.” The last 20 years have proven disastrous for many societies. Canada is the epitome of woke virtue (relativistic values). Issues like declining rational discourse, rising mental health struggles, aggressive assisted suicide policies, limits on free speech, failing socialistic economic policies, and other challenges have made life far more complicated for many.

For a better society, people would do well to remember the following:

1. Reality is not that which is imagined by a disturbed and distracted mind. Reality is that which is. Only the honest mind oriented to truth can hope to discover it.
2. Opinions are uncertain. Beliefs can be certain or uncertain. Facts are certain.
3. Do not accept statements such as "I feel that... (this is so)." Gently but firmly insist that conversations be founded upon reason. Acknowledge the truth.
4. When people view the world through the lens of their feelings, there is little if any room for authentic dialogue and reasoned debate.
5. Using feelings as a norm robs discussions of any real objective perspective making.

In the Catholic Church, we still have people who behave like the Faith is that which they must invent day to day, moment to moment. That thinking extends to theology, the sacraments and worship, and social teaching. If we are to recover from the hangover of the delirious 1960s and the anarchic first decades of the this new millennium, we must marginalize idiotic thinking not by force but by superior knowledge and authentic moral conviction.

The 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio by Pope Saint John Paul II asserts

that reason alone, while capable of producing systematic knowledge, cannot fully grasp ultimate truth. Philosophy and human intellect allow rigorous inquiry and the development of coherent knowledge, but reason must be oriented toward transcendent truth to avoid becoming self-limiting or purely pragmatic (WP). Faith, on the other hand, provides access to divine revelation, offering truths that surpass natural reason yet do not contradict it (Catholic.org). Together, they guide humans toward a fuller understanding of existence, morality, and the purpose of life.