The Beast Consuming Civilization

Some years ago, I read a book titled The Sense of Being Stared At by Rupert Sheldrake. The title hints at one of the phenomena he describes within. Humans, like all mammals, have an innate sense when someone is looking...

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Some years ago, I read a book titled The Sense of Being Stared At by Rupert Sheldrake. The title hints at one of the phenomena he describes within. Humans, like all mammals, have an innate sense when someone is looking at them even when turned away from the looker. In the animal kingdom, this sense is critical for survival. Prey animals and even predators must have a well-developed radar system to detect threats that could be in the bushes or lurking under the water, hiding, wanting to eat them. Those with less honed awareness end up as some creature’s lunch.

Humans have this skill, too. Who hasn’t felt watched? The feeling is so compelling that it’s natural to turn around and have the unnerving experience of meeting the eyes of the person staring at them. Soldiers who are particularly good with this sense tend to be the ones others follow. The hyper-vigilant guy keeps his brothers alive.

I bring all this up because I’ve been contemplating the unease everyone I know is telling me they feel. People are deeply unsettled. Something feels off and wrong. The list of the things so obviously weird and backward is long. We’ll get to them in a minute. It wasn’t until I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s most recent essay in The Free Press, though, that I connected the unease to a proposed psychological cause. She writes:

For me it is all captured in the earliest memories of my youth: statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprung up across Mogadishu, flanked by a trio of dark seraphim: Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This particular communist experiment plunged Somalia into bloodshed, mass starvation, and a 20-year period of suffocating tyranny. I recall my grandmother and mother smuggling food into our house. I also remember the whispering: we felt the state was omnipresent. It could hear everything.

My father was thrown into prison. His friends—those other pioneers in pursuit of a democracy modeled on America—were either jailed like him or, in many cases, executed. [Emphasis added.]

Hirsi Ali expresses a vague unease, one she recognizes from her home of origin, Somalia, as it succumbed to the influence of Russian communists. Once stable ground became shifting sands. What used to be able to be laughed about openly, talked about freely, expressed unselfconsciously was now whispered furtively in one’s own home. The sense of being watched, that hair-on-the-neck-raising feeling of prey being observed, was now part of life. Hirsi Ali felt it in Somalia and now feels it in America.

In Somalia, the state, corporations, friends, and family didn’t have the ability to “spy” continuously on someone — it just felt that way. In the West in 2024, they do. If Americans feel a sense of unease, if they feel they’re being stared at, if they feel as though they’re being hunted, that they’re someone’s prey, it’s because that’s true. They are.

Someone is on the other side of that phone, TV, computer, surveillance camera, search engine, social media platform, Ring doorbell camera, watching, listening, judging, gathering information, and waiting to use this knowledge either against people or for their own predatory interests. This observance is omnipresent. It is far bigger than the state, more powerful than Russian communists could ever imagine a few decades ago, and more invasive.

This accumulated data has made a 3-dimensional image of every person and that image can be used in ways that the individual cannot control. That image is bought and sold, manipulated and edited, and distributed. Modern Westerners are like gazelles surrounded by hyenas. Circled and caught, it’s just a question of when the attack comes.

Now, citizens are complicit with vast stealing operations (reparation), drug use, and human trafficking associated with porn, prostitution, pedophilia (libertinism), murder and terror (recompense), etc. They, along with corrupt politicians and unequal justice before the law puts the law-abiding granny in prison for singing at an abortion clinic and welcomes illegal criminal aliens into America and then excuses their rapes of children.

It’s not just the criminals who hold sway. They’re being helped by citizens defending the indefensible. Together, this ever-changing beast destroys.

In trying to understand this thing, Hirsi Ali describes being like a blind man touching part of an elephant for the first time, not understanding the whole of the animal; not grasping the magnitude of the animal. I think it’s impossible to fully grasp because it’s not an elephant all all. It’s not even a tiger. Both animals have a definitive shape and form. They have preferred prey and styles of grazing or hunting. This modern beast is without form and made of eyes that see all and ears that hear all. There is no escaping it. How can one not feel uneasy and exhausted when one is continuously being watched by predators?

So what unites those seeking to destroy civilization?

The answer is awkward to say in this secular age but it’s the truth. The uniting thread, the one that binds them all together, is disobedience to God. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said that his country was in a spiritual war and that that war had to be won first before the war against the gangs could be won. El Salvador has transformed far more quickly than most could imagine, but first, the beast made up of gangs of evil people and their associates, had to be dealt with.

America’s beast does not look like El Salvador’s beast but the spirit of disobedience is the same.

The spirit of disobedience hates the good structures that form the foundation of and protect the function of a moral civilization. The beast aims at self (male or female), marriage, family, church, the rule of law, and governance. It defiles by using media to deliver evil messages of murder, hate, resentment, revenge, and lust. It discourages and dismays through threats of violence and actual violence.

As Bukele says, one needs to have peace and freedom to live, to move freely, to speak, to have civilization. One cannot do that with fear and conflict and crime and war.

The thread of all of these movements is anti-civilization. It’s against any form of authority except their own.

When Hirsi Ali describes the subversion of institutions and the process by which it happened, she’s describing stories of many individuals, broken and angry, who plant their seeds in the fertile ideological soil of resentment and rebellion. Ultimately, as the great Bishop Fulton Sheen notes in his book Peace of Soul, the world turns to war. War is an outer manifestation of the conflicted spirit within.

The Apostle Paul emphasized that we fight not against flesh and blood but against principalities and spirits. Bukele said that the transformation of El Salvador was a miracle that happened through prayer. He knew who his enemy was and who could fight for him, first. Once that happened, winning against the human enemies of civilization became inevitable.

In Ephesians 2, Paul says,

And you were dead in your offenses and sins, in which you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all previously lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the rest.

Separate from acknowledging a Higher Power and authority in one’s life, a person who seeks salvation in the flesh ends up very angry. The high of the empty sex, the crime, the violence ends. Reality crashes back in. Disobedience creates disorder. Wrath creates violence and crime. Lust damages the one consumed by it and the ones he consumes to satiate himself. All of it is driven by the prince of the power of the air who infects those in his grips with an evil, selfish spirit.

That’s why political solutions can be put forward but if there isn’t a spiritual reckoning and a culture-wide one at that, and if the leaders are not God-fearing and praying men and women, any solution will be temporary and superficial. The beast must be dismantled spiritually first, and then must be changed one individual at a time — usually one changed and whole person, or one imprisoned and broken person at a time.

It’s impossible to understand the beast because it’s ever-changing. Its spirit, though, is always the same. Where there is lust and wrath, there will be ugliness and disorder and lies, and yes, subversion and ultimately, murder and war.

The West is under attack. The spirit is Satanic. To save civilization, the answer is prayer. [2 Chronicles 7:14] The answer is obedience to God.

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