The modern Progressives’ soteriology would consign the vast bulk of human individuals to its own hell of alienation. In order to attain self-actualization, one must go through a lengthy process of soul-searching with vague and subjective measures of success that involves whatever stands in for active will. For only pennies a day, you can make a difference in the world by contributing to the Malthusian disaster that is Africa! You can lord your (white) privileged dollars over the skinny necks of those Africans, coming to them as Messiah to advance your ideological imperialism by creating societies in your own image. No independence and self-determination for Africans, they must learn their place as eternal charity case under the crushing heel of Progress; don’t incentivize them to construct their own societies, their own economies, infrastructures, education, and so on. Give them a few dollars here and there so they are led to look on the White as a benevolent god, letting manna fall from the Heaven of the First World.

The lie of the Protestant Formation is that one’s faith and religion is a matter between no one but himself and God. “Here I stand, I can do no other” is not a synthesis of the Christian tradition in the 16^th century, but a complete rejection. There is a continuity between society and religion, and the necessity of rejecting the public practice of Christianity by Protestantism saw the rise of the Enlightenment. After all, if one presumes the individual capable of navigating that most intimate relationship between himself and God merely by an honest investigation of Scriptures, it follows he is equally capable of lesser things such as participating in the formation and maintenance of society. But these are empirical considerations. Are individuals actually capable of maneuvering themselves through society, or are they only able to succeed by following the lead of their community and its traditions?

Understanding from basic principles the construction of one’s society is at least an incredibly difficult affair, and would require a world class education in disciplines as disparate as economics, sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy. It is probably impossible for a human being to individually understand from first principles how society works. His knowledge is incomplete. In that incompleteness of knowledge, he is best assisted by tradition, for tradition acts as a kind of cultural experience, with those traditions persisting that have proved adaptive through the generations and those norms which were not dying out with their progenitors.  This tradition is a kind of publicly available and socially distributed knowledge. No one of wisdom feigns to tell the programmer how to do his work, or the CEO of a multinational Fortune 500 company, or a plumber, or anyone with demonstrated expertise in a field outside our own lived experience. It is in these cases that we trust them to act with beneficence as according the social norms we have put in place to help facilitate interpersonal exchange and communication.

It is from this place of limited understanding that the individual proceeds in coming to understand himself and his own self-actualization. If we allow the technician his place for his mastery of a technical art, then so far as we understand the pursuit of self-actualization to be subject to a regularity of art, it follows there will be certain individuals who are better placed to direct us towards self-actualization; the achievement of a peace with ourselves and our world, or at least as much as this is possible. The curing of human existence, one’s spiritual path, however one wants to describe the problem of existential unease. People seek a purpose, a narrative that puts their existence into perspective. Those individuals historically responsible for directing us to this pursuit were our priests, our shamans, our gurus, our imams, and so on, who’s in-depth studying of the Sacred Writ and the ostensible practicing of those principles avails them of a privileged knowledge that helps them to direct our lives in a way that is both satisfying and salvific.

Such individuals still exist, but given the prohibition of public religion, those who promote an ideal of living which only makes sense as a public religion must put on a posture of moral, rather than theological, enlightenment. This moral posturing occurs within the context of social knowledge and its implied soteriological principles, of which the most obvious is Progress and its historical dialecticism. One demonstrates his clerical bona fides not by the promotion of the Church and its millennia long traditions, but by participating in the dialectic so that it may be known he stands on the right side of history. Progress is, in short, a religion, complete with a soteriology, eschatology, ethical system, and sacraments.

This privileged position of self-actualization, the Brahmin bodhisattva, is only available to a select few. Contrary to its ostensible universalism, self-actualization is only possible provided one has, essentially, enough money to pursue those life-defining pursuits such as travel, fine food, and a requisite freeing from the burdens of manual labor.  In other words, salvation is only available to the Brahmins. This imposes a kind of guilt; because of the intractable problem of inequality, their proposed religion of self-actualization through the script of academic achievement and creative employment is terribly Calvinist. The saints will persevere, but there was only ever a limited atonement. Contrast this to the katholikos of Christianity, in which all men, free and slave, Jew and non-Jew, Roman and non-Roman, could find salvation as they were. Instead, the Brahmin religion of Progress is a religion only for wealthy, privileged elites, with the rest having no offer of salvation. The Brahmin religion at once alienates all non-Brahmins, and so incites a racial self-hatred at the horrendousness of a world as will which denies to the Other the potential of eudaimonia for failing to be sufficiently Brahmin-like.