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Whatever have been from its beginning – and still are – the faults of the organisation known as T.F.P. (Tradition, Family, Property), it is a pleasure to say that it is doing some good work in the United States today. In a regular circular letter (available from tfp@tfp.org) it presents brief essays often on three important points for the understanding of how the Catholic Faith needs to function in today’s demonic world. The essays are not too deep for ordinary readers to understand, but neither are they shallow. They may not be infallible, but they are thoughtful and full of good sense, and they often address important problems in today’s Church and world. Here for example is a summary of Four Characteristics of the Liberal Mind that are Destroying Society, from the American T.F.P. Letter of one month ago:—

The fragmented and polarised state of society today is proof that something has gone terribly wrong. Conservatives often blame the breakdown on liberal activists at work in politics and in the media, but the liberals’ dissolvent activity comes from a whole liberal mindset, spread far and wide. Almost everybody today accepts the principles of classic liberalism, enshrined in the American Constitution but moderated at that time by America’s Christian heritage. With that heritage now being largely repudiated, the full dissolvency of liberal principles is today becoming evident, as it was not evident before. In order to see where our chaos is coming from, let us look at four characteristics of the liberal mindset.

1 The liberal mind is always moving away from objective truth. Wanting to appear more compassionate and kind than the “heartless conservatives,” by means of half-truths they slide into error which they did not at first embrace. For instance liberals may well oppose crime in principle, but they promote it in practice by going soft on criminals, because of supposed injustices that criminals may have suffered.

2 To replace unpleasant and impersonal objective truth, the liberal mind is always looking for pleasing subjective opinions, or personal judgments, to confirm them in their own way of thinking and acting. A classic example comes from a Supreme Court decision of 1992, justifying abortion: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of the meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

3 The liberal mind is always wrongly defining freedom as the right to do whatever one wants to do. By this definition, sheer whims and fantasy can ultimately take over. Liberals will then call in doubt whatever contradicts their whims, but never what confirms them.

4 The liberal mind is always disliking rules and laws, which it feels as being automatically restrictive. In reality, law consists of reasonable precepts put forward by any society’s competent authority as being essential to that society’s common good. But liberals will resent even rules of clothing or grammar if these are felt to be too restrictive! Thus to replace the real God of Justice and the Ten Commandments, they fabricate their own god, a god above all of compassion, a god of ten Recommendations.

In brief, all four characteristics are centred on the self. According to liberalism, each person determines for himself what are true and false, right and wrong. Here is where society is breaking down.

For indeed liberalism as such cannot create a social order, or a society, but only a social breakdown. If it has survived until now, that is only by the solid Christian order which it inherited, and of which it is the dissolution. Liberals depend on what they destroy, and destroy what they depend on. In 2018 they are pushing ever closer to chaos. Liberalism is intrinsically anti-social. No society can be made out of anti-social members. Liberalism can only make people more and more isolated, lonely and frustrated. It can only make human life turn more and more into a series of clashes between sacrosanct individuals.

Kyrie eleison.