Vilfredo Pareto’s Mind and Society (Trattato di Sociologia generale, 1916) has much to say about the modern circus that ‘our democracy’ has become. He traces our trouble in part to a persistence by the French philosophes of the 18th century in ascribing “all human woe” to “error”. This unfortunate tendency, which in the 20th century was termed political ideology, even totalitarianism, Pareto sees as having become “the dogmas of the humanitarian religion, holiest of holies, of which our present-day ‘intellectuals’ form the priesthood.”

This “humanitarian religion”, as Pareto calls it, is what I term the PC Cult, or Wokism, of today. Pareto has no problem calling this a “cult”. Pareto: “People fail to notice that the worship of ‘Reason’, ‘Truth’, ‘Progress’, and other similar entities is, like all cults, to be classed with non-logical actions [meaning not grounded in experimental science]. It was born, it has flourished, and it continues to prosper, for the purpose of combating other cults, just as in Graeco-Roman society the oriental cults arose out of opposition to the polytheistic cult. . . Toward the end of the 18th c and the beginning of the 19th, one same [such] current of non-logical conduct finds its expression in the theism of the philosophes, the sentimental vagaries of Rousseau, the cult of ‘Reason’ [today’s Libertarians] and the ‘Supreme Being’ [Unitarians]. . . the religion of pacifism [Republicans], and other religions that still survive to our times.”

IOW, IMHO, every act, every thought in the minds of the holders of these variants must be Politically Correct, reflecting a moral and political Orthodoxy. The natural rights recognized by Locke et al are dispensed with as merely enabling ‘error’. I sum this up as Asian Despotism, most clearly illustrated by North Korea and mainland China under Xi and the kind of unitary priestly kings desired by many Shiis. Even the Catholic Church, with its top down structure, never enforced or even imagined establishing the kind of god-king-on-earth as Kim Jong Un or as envisioned by the Ayatollahs of Iran in their hoped-for Mahdi. But this is where Communism was headed under Stalin whom the ‘humanitarians’ avidly worshiped before the Soviet Union collapsed and this is where Wokism is headed today as it searches for the dictatorship of a long-awaited black-as-night militant Messiah and spurred on by the PC Cult’s ‘priesthood’ of black-worshiping, tenured Jewish professors in America’s Ivy League universities. The world still slouches toward a Jerusalem to be ruled by a god-king [or African Queen] Messiah who smites the enemies of international bankers and Mother Earth and requires worship and obedience from all.