The Progressive principle of “self” that binds soul to body and establishes the person’s orientation towards “self-esteem” would be, according to my previous nomenclature, “faith^Progressive” as a species of “faith^Christian”.

The fact that Peters could not identify the “unfaith” of the public Progressive Movement (which, by 1994, dominated politics in California) underscores several important points.

First, his treatment of sin, in Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society, was limited to a narrow definition of “radical evil” as “an individual’s conscious awareness of intent and form in the harming of others”.

Second, this narrowness was a consequence of his focus on Satanism as the “dark magic” complement to the “light magic” of the New Age Movement (which has been a popular topic since the 1970s and was the subject of a prior book).

Third, the Progressive Movement’s denial that it was a “religion” constituted an effective deterrent (maybe, provided a convenient excuse) against examining sovereign policies as “evil” or “sin”.  After all, Progressive Institutions have produced more systematic harm than any of the criminals that Peters mentioned.  In fact, in 2012, they are just getting started.

Simply put, the Public Cult of Progressivism that grew alongside the private cults of the New Age Movement was simply “invisible” by definition.

Fourth, if Peters had examined the Public Cult of Progressivism as “religion”, he would have been in deep trouble.

“Regulatory capture” entails infiltrating and controlling sovereign (or “state”) institutions.  In 1994, Progressives were well on their way in the State of California, especially in the legislature, the various media, and in education.

If Peters had extended his treatment to the Public Cult, he would have injured someone’s “self-esteem”.  Then, the lemmings would have had an excuse to eat him alive.

Ironically, the parallel described in the previous blog is exactly what Christians see in Progressives, a “relentless pursuit of self-esteem” that produces air-head ideologues who are convinced that “their worlds reference actuality” and consequently, “do not know any different”.

College graduates are lemmings.  They are trained to “progress” in one direction, like a heard of rodents running to the sea – the sea of “entitlements” – the sea of debt.

Christians proudly wear the label “we know different”.

But now, perhaps, they are learning to fear the lemmings.

Criticism of the lemmings causes mob action.  The critic has dared to violate a lemming’s “self-esteem”.  Eat her alive!

Ann Coulter is an expert on this.

Progressive cryptotheology asserts that the principle binding soul to body is – let us consider Becker here – “self”.

In parallel, the Progressive’s xiety (what they had, could have had, or pretended to have) must be “self-esteem”.

If this is so, then the Progressive anxiety would be the fear of the loss of self esteem.

There is a certain beauty in deduction, is there not?

The secular parallel to the cryptotheological assertion that “self-esteem is the one thing that we cannot lose” is nothing less than the pursuit of “the sense of not knowing any different” that permeated the world of our ancestors.  This was the world that humans evolved in.  Is it also our destiny?

Once Progressives achieve Total Self-Esteem, then “the things that words refer to” will become real and we all will not know any different.  We will also be bureaucratic zombies under mind control.  But that is a topic for another blog.

Ironically, the secular parallel mentioned in the last blog is precisely what Progressives see in Christians; a stupidity that takes the Bible literally and a reliance on “sanctifying grace” that amounts to “not knowing any different”.  Christians are simpletons.  They do not know any different.

Progressives take Science literally.  They wear the label “we know different”.

But, with their pursuit of sovereign power in order to control and regulate the simpletons, with their hope of implementing an order based on their mythical unifying vision of what once controlled the impersonal structures of institutions, with their demand that a state of exception override all fragmentation of society (that is inherent in unconstrained complexity), they betray their longing.

Progressives long to return to the world before speech-alone talk.  They long for the days when words referred to things and we did not know any different.

Christian anxiety is real because we have already lost our xiety, a divine gift that parallels God’s creative acts of making our souls.

An Archaeology of the Fall proposes an evolutionary perspective for this loss:  A transition from hand-speech to speech-alone talk potentiated not only the emergence of Civilization (unconstrained complexity) but a permanent disorientation, because the semiotic indexality or referentiality that imbued hand-speech was replaced by the semiotic symbolic ordering or social construction that imbues speech-alone talk.

In short, the secular parallel to the sanctifying grace that preceded Eve and Adam, and was withdrawn as punishment for their transgression, was “the gift of referentiality or literalness” and “the gift of not knowing any different” that permeated the world of our ancestors.  This was the world that humans evolved in.  In this world, words referred to things.  And we did not know any different.

Christians discovered that the principle binding soul to body was God’s creative activity.

In parallel, the Christian’s xiety (what they have, could have had, or pretend to have) may be a divine gift.

If this is so, then Christian anxiety would be the fear of the loss of this gift.

There is a certain beauty in deduction, is there not?  The irony contained in the divine gift – the holy creative activity – binding soul to body – is that – already for us – the divine gift has been compromised.  This (not some human propensity to anxiety, rage and violence) is Original Sin.

From a theological point of view, the babe has a soul that is bound to her body through some principle.  Somehow, this parallels the way that I am bound to my anxiety through my xiety.

After its creation, the soul, in a way, has no life of its own but can have any life.  The potential of the soul is infinite.  At the end of the person’s life, the soul has a life of her own and can pretend to have another life (as ghost or as in “possession”), but it cannot “live the life it could have had”.  The potential of the soul has been realized.

This, I sense, matches Jung’s cryptotheological psychoanalytical term: “individuation”.  Individuation is the principle by which the soul fulfills its potential.

Like xiety, the “this individuating principle” exists in the realm of possibility, accounts for the actualities of human behavior, and is bound to the real.

For xiety, the Lebenswelt is real.  For the principle, the binding is real.

“The soul” and “the principle binding soul to body” are ancient formulations that led to philosophical controversy.   In fact, these formulations produced the first controversy that set (what later would be called) Christians on the path to articulating the Doctrine of Original Sin: What is this “principle, mechanism or whatever” that binds the soul to the body?

Today, we face a parallel question, what is the xiety that bind me to my anxiety?

Now, I will consider the implications of xiety.

When a babe is born into the world, she has both no xiety and an infinite amount of xiety.  She has no life of her own.  She could have any life.  This inner contradiction means that xiety exists in the world of possibility.

The babe has natural expectations.  She expects a Lebenswelt in which she will first bond to her mother, then have that bond modified while bonding to her father.  In a way, the Lebenswelt is the first xiety.   The need for the Lebenswelt is painfully actual and if these needs are not met, then the babe’s anxiety sets the stage for her becoming a psychopath.  A psychopath is person in complete faith^UnChristian that “all she has is herself”.

By framing this chapter in terms of “unfaith” and “lack of trust”, Peters avoided a multitude of sins.  What multitude?  It seems to me that most sins are not committed for lack of “faith”, but in a surplus of “faith” that is not Christian.

Perhaps I can depict this alternate faith as faith^UnChristian.

With that, I can turn Peters’ final formalism around.

“Faith^UnChristian” tells us what is “unacceptable”.  “Faith^UnChristian” makes xiety possible.  This gives rise to anxiety: The fear of the loss of one’s xiety, the life that one has, that one could have, or that one pretends to have; according to one’s faith^UnChristian.

Peters related an incident in his own life concerning “consuming rage”.  A neighborhood bully drove him over the edge.  The child Peters struck back.  This act was unacceptable to the moms in the neighborhood and he was forced to apologize, even though the bully had the injury coming to him.

What was the child Peters defending himself against?  His anxiety was the fear of the loss that this bully could impose.  Peters was protecting his xiety, the life that he could have had (if the bully never existed).

Peters told another story about a California boy who became an active homosexual then got outed by his own brother (and his brother’s friend).  He ended up confronting his brother’s friend, begging to get his old life back (perhaps, the life that he could have had but was compromised by his own sexual activity; or perhaps, the life that he pretended to have as if he were not sexually active).  His brother’s friend rebuffed him.  So he shot his brother’s friend with an Uzi.

After these and other stories, Peters served the blandishments of tired inevitability, concluding that anxiety and rage, along with the violence they generate, are part of the human condition.  He threw in the word “Original Sin” in order to spice up the dish.  If only we had faith (in Christ), then we might have the common sense not to give in to “consuming rage”.

With faith (in Christ), we could accept the unacceptable: the xiety of living in the shadow of a bully and the xiety of the label of “faggot” and the look of humiliation in the eyes of one’s father and mother.