Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ said, “I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Indeed, our Lord said He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Holy Prophet Moses, to whom Christ had revealed the Ten Commandments and His name “He Who is” and much else, had written much earlier, as recorded in Deuteronomy 30:15-16: “Behold, I have set before thee this day life and death, good and evil. If thou wilt hearken to the commands of the Lord thy God, which I command thee this day, to love the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to keep his ordinances, and his judgments; then ye shall live, and shall be many in number, and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all the land into which thou goest to inherit it.”

Today our country struggles with global plague, civil unrest, paralyzing social division, economic depression, forest fires, tropical storms–and now even the threat of a reported meteorite hit to earth this fall around the time of the presidential election!

But Christians receive the grace of finding identity in Him, the source of our personhood, not in an essentialized or objectified identity based on race, ethnicity, class, culture, or sex, essentializing our self-willed fallen human passions and will to power. For millennia this good news has been the source of true freedom, which as the Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher S.L. Frank notes, is voluntary service to universal truth, in the Person of Jesus Christ: Loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbor as ourself.

St. Jonah of Hankou, who trudged across the Gobi Desert fleeing the atheist Communist scourge, to be of service to those in need in China in the 1920s, and who reposed in Christ helping a sufferer from typhoid fever, only to give solace and healing in a vision that same night to a crippled boy, wrote: “Podvig [ascetic spiritual struggle for God] is living for others.”

But how often today we are caught up with death rather than living, with death in the world of materialism and objectifying self-will, with a will to power in the world of our passions, rather than death to that world.

The Soviet dissident and Orthodox Christian Igor Shafarevich wrote a classic book The Socialist Phenomenon, recently reprinted, which details throughout history the death-wish inherent in chiliasm, the heresy that Archbishop Averky also detailed in commentary on the Revelation of Jesus Christ to St. John the Theologian. Chiliasm is the heresy of utopianism, seeking that which is not sustainable for fallen human nature, a perfect objectified world. Instead, efforts to establish such a world destroy the very justice and peace that those working for it claim to seek. It ends in a power trip for a few controlling the many. In the twentieth century, it left tens of millions dead and many more lives maimed.

Such is the world into which we seem to be heading in a new form of technologically controlled culture based in consumerism, according to the new book Live not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Orthodox writer Rod Dreher, whose title draws on a famous phrase by Shafarevich’s friend and fellow dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The “soft totalitarianism” of cultural Marxism in Western consumer capitalism and intellectual ideologies today — Antiracism, Antifa, Green New Deal movements; sexual revolutions of polyparenting, polyamory, and the neocolonial hegemony of secular-Eurocentric sexual anthropology — would erase true personhood in Christ, in the name of self-will. (Cultural Marxism is a shorthand term, used by some of its advocates to detail socialism that engages with cultural struggle, rather than Classical Marxism’s focus on economic class struggle.) But in doing so it paradoxically erases individuality in nihilistic “group think,” as Shafarevich’s history details.

This extends to young people being isolated from faith, biblical tradition, family, and even physical reality in “virtual” lives, as in the case of the Orthodox Christian boy James Younger in Texas, whose fate is now being played out in secular judicial, educational, and medical-psychological bureaucracies, in an effort to turn him into a girl. Real cosmological difference in the dignity of each person (as detailed by the Russian Orthodox Church in her statements on human dignity and the basis of the social concept) disappears in the consumerist trend toward virtual lives, with burgeoning group-sex and other practices that remove true individual love and family ties, as the sexual revolution moves in tandem with movements to establish atheistic culture. Such virtual lives (disembodied by separating the soul and the body and treating the latter as an isolated object or tool) also are more easily controlled by the perfection of high-tech “surveillance capitalism” and the “surveillance state” in today’s West.

Velikoretsky Procession of the Cross in Russia, an annual tradition that draws thousands today, after decades of attempted Communist suppression.

Basing identity in disembodied individual autonomy and self-will, essentializing the passions of fallen human nature outside a reasoned groundedness in larger realities, involves ultimately the erasure of traditions of faith and family and community. Such erasure is all in accord with cultural Marxism. The latter seeks to overturn hierarchy and patriarchy and authority. But in the process it erases the mystery taught in Orthodox Christianity of sobornost. The latter, meaning spiritual unity, involves living at the intersection of mystical hierarchy and conciliarity, which shapes authentic human personhood in Christ. Sobornost in Christ heals the deepest epidemic we face, of loneliness and isolation, which the philosopher Hannah Arendt correctly identified — together with the social, cultural, and physical terror accelerating in the world today — as foundational to totalitarianism. The sexual and cultural and economic anarchy at the heart of “woke consumerism” is only the stepping stone to attempted total oppression and conditioning of humanity. Paradoxically this movement operates in the name of the sovereign individual but ends in enforced homogeneous ideology, as the Old Anglican scholar C.S. Lewis foresaw in his classic 1943 book The Abolition of Man. Lord have mercy.