A Nation Ruled by Cathars

C.A. Skeet has an article over at PJ Media, commenting on the UK's totalitarian turn.

What caught my eye in particular was this comment:

"The dictatorial drive being pursued by the British ruling class doesn't fall neatly into a category that Hannah Arendt would recognize as totalitarian. This is because none of the typical totalitarian movements (communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and Islamism) are suicidal in nature. Meaning, each of these movements attempts to use the state to strengthen the ideology, or to use the ideology to strengthen the state."

What seems to be happening in Britain, as well as the West in general, is the emergence of modern Cathari. This was a medieval, Gnostic sect that typically frowned on reproduction. Humanity, as part of the physical world, was seen as an abomination.

Per Wikipedia (I know, not always a reliable source, but useful here):

Followers were known as Cathars or Albigensians, (after the French city Albi where the movement first took hold), but referred to themselves as Good Christians. They famously believed that there were not one, but two Gods—the good God of Heaven and the evil god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4). According to tradition, Cathars believed that the good God was the God of the New Testament faith and creator of the spiritual realm; many Cathars identified the evil god as Satan, the master of the physical world. The Cathars believed that human souls were the sexless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god. They thought these souls were destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the "consolamentum," a form of baptism performed when death is imminent. At that moment, they believed they would return to the good God as "Cathar Perfect." Catharism was initially taught by ascetic leaders who set few guidelines, leading some Catharist practices and beliefs to vary by region and over time.

Although our current Western totalitarians are seeking utopia-like socialists of the past, where they differ is that past totalitarians wanted to build a physical utopia in this world, starting with their own societies. Our current crop of totalitarians, like the Cathars, instead seek a utopia of self-negation; Western Civilization is evil for failing to achieve socialist utopia, so should therefore be destroyed for this fundamental moral corruption.

Our modern totalitarians seem suicidal...because they are. Civilizational suicide is the whole point. They may couch it in rhetoric about "social justice" and this or that do-gooder policy, but ultimately they seek to cleanse the world of their own civilization's existence.