Deathworks

A Self-Deprecating Preamble

Carl S Truman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is one of the most insightful explorations of Western culture since the Protestant Reformation, and the most important book of the last century for understanding the idolization of the self. Indeed, one cannot grasp the slip of Western culture without the tapestry of the philosophical, historical, and religious threads he weaves in this book.

I have never read it.

I did purchase it, however, and after my wife read it first, she promptly gave it away to a friend to “borrow”. We all know what that means. Instead, I read one of the books Truman frequently cites in the footnotes, entitled My Life Among The Deathworks, by Philip Reiff. That book I did read, cover to cover, including all the footnotes written in a font so tiny as to make a near-sighted gnat squint. And when all was said and done, I understood about sixteen percent of it.

Truly, it was a dizzying read. He invents words, offers obscure references, and tosses intellectual puzzle pieces onto a table without bothering to assemble them, or more accurately, deconstructs thoughts to their constituent parts so you can do the work yourself. My brain was like a fat donkey mounted by a Kentucky Derby jockey. The end result was a page-by-page reminder of my triple-digit SAT score.

My frustration was somewhat assuaged when the person writing the forward said that Reiff intentionally made the book obscure. Whatever, man. He was old, and it was his last book; I think he was tired of explaining things to people.

Self-deprecation aside, I am glad I read it, and of the sliver I did understand, it provided important pieces to fill in the dark parts of the narrative puzzle of modern America. So here is my sixteen percent book report. All quotations are from Reiff, unless otherwise stated. As a fair warning, this may seem somewhat scattered, since my brain started absorbing the spirit of Reiff like a cube of gelatinous tofu, taking on the flavor of the sauce it sat in. It will be a smattering of Reiff’s thoughts and my reflections and interpretations of them. So if you are confused or lost or if it feels scattered, know that it is the same way I felt.

Introduction

What Reiff does well is to name modern culture’s identity, what it wants, and how it means to go about getting it. He knows the battle over culture is exactly that, a fight (a lesson our Christian leaders need to learn fifteen minutes ago). He knows what the fight is over, what it looks like to win and lose, and he understands the indelible link between culture and politics.

“Culture is upstream from politics,” as the late Andrew Breitbart observed. Whatever your political bent is, this is not only true but a reality we all bank on – especially the most aggressive of the culture warriors. Why else would we see the streets filled with angry protestors marching against what they perceive as political oppression if they do not intend to change it through their cultural actions? In a democratic republic, where authorities are voted upon by the people, the people in office are a reflection of the cultural preferences of the populace.

But culture is not the headwaters. Just as politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from religion. Actions are always backed by beliefs, and the most important actions cascade from the untouchable, unmoving principles of our axioms. Pro-lifers attempt to augment the cultural swell to elect legislators who will ban abortion, for example, and they do this because of an axiomatic belief in the sanctity of life.

Culture is the middle ground between the ethereal realm of philosophical and religious presuppositions and the hard concrete of politics.

“Culture is the form of fighting before the firing starts.

“Culture is the continuation of war by other – normative- means.”

The reason Reiff sees this topic as important is because of his first quote above. If things are not settled on cultural and ideological grounds, then the fight is taken to the next level of physical violence. One culture must disarm competing cultures, and if successful, armed force can be deterred. This did not happen in bloody conflicts like the Civil War or the Arab Spring. When it comes to culture, the town really is too small for two thrones.

One of the things culture does, Reiff says, is take the sacred beliefs of that world and give them legs in the form of social orders. This is not an unfamiliar concept – faith flows from our fingertips. We will act out in the world our beliefs of what is true, and this is evident in our personal lives, all the way up to the collective consciousness of a nation. Culture is world creation. And so, one step higher up from culture, and informing it, is the collective religious beliefs of the masses. Christian beliefs yield Christian cultures that sprout Christian politics. Muslim beliefs yield Muslim cultures that sprout Muslim politics. Irreligious or godless cultures, same. Marriage between man and woman, protection of personal property, etc, are examples of belief-backed social orders.

Clashing values of social orders in culture belie higher, cosmic religious conflicts. To help us identify the conflict more clearly, Reiff begins by dividing human history into three meta-cultural pillars aptly named the First, Second, and Third Worlds.

Reiff’s Three Worlds

The First World is the world of Fate. This was the world of the ancient pagans. Lives were controlled by the fates -fickle humors of capricious gods- and not by men and women themselves. Behavior was controlled by taboos – forbidden things that must not be transgressed. Wild gods and their whims made for irregular moral behavior, and so the best any heathen could do was avoid transgressing the taboos, which were ultimately arbitrary, and feed the gods with fire sacrifices to bribe them for good fortune. Don’t try to make sense of them, just do it. Taboos, according to Freud, are swallowed down into the psyche where they become repressed desires in modern man, the source of all that beastial rutting around in the id, that manifests in more socially acceptable ways, or not.

First World gave way to the Second World, the world of Faith. Here, Reiff locates us currently, where Western civilization is guided by the moral will of God expressed in His inspired word, the Bible. This objective, transcendent truth Reiff calls the Sacred Order. The Sacred Order gives rise to social orders, which is another way of saying culture is downstream of religion. Transcendent truth has legs. Since Man is made in God’s image, this divine connection shapes our moral values and laws. Murder is prohibited because man was made in the image of God. We do not lie because God does not lie. Morality is the extension of God’s immutable nature.

Seeing as the Second World was made in the image of its creative Creator, then we too are meant to create. Architecture and art flourish alongside the church. Beautiful art, poetry, music, and architecture are examples of the artist reaching up to the heavens and trying to capture a bit of the heavenly light and bring it down to a dim world. High periods of artistic life in the history of humanity flourished as the Second World grew over the First.

Lifewardness is the direction of the Second World. The creation mandate was to be fruitful and multiply. When Christianity came on the scene, the sanctity of life was pulled from the gutter where it had been tossed. Infanticide was condemned, fidelity praised, and the honor of the image of God was extended to the paupers and lepers and leperous paupers. Even death was sanctified and repackaged as sleep; believers would awake to eternal life at the end of time, and were bedded down in cemeteries, Greek for “sleeping places.”

This Second World championed by Christian faith has influenced the world in incalculable ways. History, over the past 2000 years, could be described as the Christian faith completely terraforming the lives of humanity in every avenue of life, from economics to medicine to sanctity of life to governance of the State. It has infused the world with meaning. When you clap for the pokey fat kid in last place of the cross country race, this is Second World faith in action.

We are currently on the precipice of plummeting into the Third World, the world of Fiction. This world is defined, not by any new contribution, but by the thrumming obsession to dismantle Second World social orders by fouling the headwaters of its Sacred Orders. The end result is the dissolution of any and all Second World boundaries. All potentialities are equally possible without God, limited only by the brave new fictions of human imagination. Reiff uses the expression “primacy of possibility” to express the idea that when God is not supreme, then what takes prime place of importance is the possibilities of whatever man wants to become. More on this below.

Fiction presides over this Third World because modern science has shown the joke for what it is. We are all star-stuff. We live in an absurd universe where sentient beings are compelled to look for meaning in a universe where none exists. Since there is no transcendent purpose, we are all free to write our own little fictions. Each life is an autobiographical exercise in creative writing with ourselves as the protagonist. It is all theatrics.

Since the Third World inhabitants are the bastard children of nature, red in tooth and claw, then all power structures that have any clout are usurped by the strongest. Philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Marx are the prophets of this new world. The people in power make the rules, not by any transcendent idea of the Good, but merely to benefit themselves and to stack the deck in such a way as to retain their power. Their stick is bigger than yours. The really clever ones could retain their power while making the little guy think the structure was his idea. Or to use Reiff’s words, “Third worlds hold there is no truth, only rhetorics of self-interest.” This is Marx in a sentence, if we substitute with “$elf-interest.”

Third World residents do not create. They cannot because all the motivations for creation in the Second World – meaning, beauty, truth, goodness- are seen as the selfish demiurge through which that World maintained control. This means there can be no Lifewardness, only its opposite, Deathwardness. It cannot create like the Second, and therefore it cannot grow to overtake it as the Lifeward garden of the Second grew over the barren First. In the void, there is only death, to quote Lord Sauron.

Once life as creative destruction is realized, the highest life is lived through the taking of life.

Third World Characteristics

God is dead is the birth cry of the Third World. The modus operandi of the Third World is to demonstrate that nothing is true. This proves to be a tall order, as it involves toppling the foundation stones of logic, truth, moral reasoning, and the meaning of language. Facing down these bastions also necessitates using them to some extent. So in order for the Third World to destroy the Second World, it must stand on the Second World foundation and borrow its tools to jackhammer the concrete.

At a July Fourth celebration in the park back in 2022, an amoebic puddle of feminists protesting the overturning of Roe oozed their way through the crowds of families. Once the parasitic band dispersed, two lone feminists, with a beta male tag-along, stood amongst the families holding their signs. I sauntered up to challenge them. To my claim that humans are made in the image of God, they bloviated about the separation of church and state, guffawing at the idea that God should come into the conversation at all. When I asked where they got the idea that abortion was a ‘right’, as they had been claiming, they cited the Declaration of Independence. Pressing further, I asked them to please recite the phrase containing rights. Omitted from their recitation was the clause, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” In the Second World, God given image is destroyed with the legal precedence of God given rights.

This precisely illustrates the disdain toward Second World Lifewardness (ie, derision toward colloquial, feminine “womb”, as opposed to clinical, aseptic “uterus”) along with the need to use Second World social orders to destroy Sacred Orders. Sworn hatred for the Sacred Order is their blood pact.

Third World is wombless. It cannot create positive goods, nor can it build or produce any values of its own, only destroy. It is “anti-culture”, and the prime feature of its anti-culture is its anti-natalism; it hates life, and this is evidenced by its hating birth. Second World claims Jesus of Nazareth declared, “My life for yours”. Third World anti-natalism yawps to the unborn, “Your life for mine.”

Hatred of hierarchy is another charming Third World trait, for hierarchy literally means “sacred order”. This means, among other things, that inherited moral constraints or social structures (family, marriage, traditional sex roles, gender, etc) are read as social constructions that have no real weight beyond what is ascribed to them by those in power and whoever the powerful can hypnotize. The Third World presumes to peek behind the curtain and see that the alleged Sacred Order is really just a row of well-heeled white gentlemen pulling levers. “Our third world is one vast grievance procedure against our highest authority.” 

Graffitied on the side of a Florence bridge is the phrase “It is forbidden to forbid”. This is the only interdiction in the Third World; the only ban is banning. And, “Where it is forbidden to forbid, there is the primacy of possibility.”

Presiding over the Third World as the ultimate authority is the ‘Primacy of possibility’. Once it has freed itself from the Sacred Order of the Second World (by swapping a killed God for materialism), the social order that was built on it is revealed to be a ruse. The Sacred no longer has primacy; it is no longer the most important, no longer provides meaning. What is now the most important is the possibilities of what man can make out of himself, the fiction he can write about his own life. Without God, all things are possible, because there no longer exist boundaries of normalcy. Exploring the possibilities of what one can become is of prime importance.

The experience of a Third World resident is to live in the fire of passionate possibility, embodying Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential mantra “existence precedes essence”. Each person must define humanity by the exercise of free choice made in a moral vacuum, unhindered by external moral claims. As such, the prohibitions of the Second World are replaced by “endlessly contestable and infinitely changeable rules.” The rules are infinitely changeable because one of the bulwarks eliminated from the Second culture by the Third was any kind of stopping mechanism. This is why when marriage between a man and woman was cracked with the 2015 Obergefell decision, the sexual destruction didn’t stop with homosexual “marriage”, but has continued to careen into gender befuddlement, pronoun dysfunction, massacreing of juvenile bodies, and is heading the right way toward pedophilia. Brakes are a Second World invention. Definitionally, they must be removed.

In short, Third culture is the negation of everything in the Second World life except transgression. It is a culture of death because death is the ultimate transgression of life. It hates life; it cannot create, because creation is life. It can only destroy, or, as Reiff says beautifully, it is “only creative in its destructions.” These creative destructions the Third World uses to subvert and erase the Second are Reiff’s “Deathworks”.

Deathworks

Deathworks are “all-out assaults on something vital to the established culture.” These assaults are intentional acts of cynicism and mockery towards a Second culture ideal. Author Carl Truman describes them as “the act of using the sacred symbols of a previous era in order to subvert, and then destroy, their original significance and purpose.” These can be artistic installments or cultural trajectories to catechize a culture into a new way of being. The Piss Christ, see image above, is an example of a Deathwork, taking the sacred image of the crucifix and submerging it into the artist’s urine.

The rainbow symbolizes God’s promise never again to flood the earth with water to destroy all life. It has done so for millennia. Now it has been ripped out of the context of the Second World promise and used as a symbol to glorify the very kinds of things that prompted the Flood in the first place. It is a Deathwork.

The end game of Deathworks is the negation of the human. Today, “The source of art is rebellion”, rebellion against Second World sacrality. Deathworks are a battle against the throbbing heart of the Sacred Order – the Imago Deo; they are the biting knife that cuts out the beating heart of meaning from Man. Identities, fixed and sacred, are replaced by forever interchangeable roles.

Deathworks are the dogma of the Third culture, which is why abortion is seen as a positive good, a sacrament, a holy and needful thing. “In third world culture, Deathworks are milestones on the road to culture that does not imagine itself on any road to truth.” Culture and truth are not the same. Who cares about the truth? Truth is part of the old order that is passing away. It must be aborted. The point of Third World art is to void Second World truth.

Girl bosses proliferating in Hollywood cinema are so many deathworks because they upend the view of women God revealed in his word, to be lovers of husbands and children, to lead a life of hospitality, and the beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. In its place, waifish women (in tremendous stretches of the laws of physics) defeat a dozen henchmen, each weighing the better part of a polar bear, without so much as their hair frizzing. In the most recent Disney flop Snow White, the lead actress cut out her own knees commenting that Snow White is “not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” This subversion is a deathwork.

We find an analogy for the Third World’s vacuous aims in the movie The NeverEnding Story. Threatening to destroy the beautiful, curious populations and living landscapes of Fantasia is the Nothing. It is not a thing, not a cloud, not a malevolent spirit – just nothing. The Nothing’s servant is a wolfish beast called Gmork, who is sent to ensure the destruction of the hero questing to save Fantasia. The Nothing has no plan, no constructive blueprints, no proposals to erect a mini-mall when Fantasia is demolished. Just like the Nothing, Third World Deathworks that are meant to destroy the Imago Dei. Any sound or image or smell of life it consumes without digesting. It is a zombie.

Scourges are the Nothing’s Gmork. “Third world scourges are killers…to destroy the [perceived] injustices of the world.” Government schools and higher education are scourge factories. “Schools that teach self-esteem therapy are preparatory schools for scourges who will have nothing but an ideology of anger and hatred, to exact on Second World barriers that stand in the way of their becoming.” Government education infected by Third World thought tediously matures scourge grubs like so many bees feeding royal jelly to grow a generation of queens.

“The Third World successor to the sacred messenger (ie: a prophet) is the artist, who knows he has nothing to say but the clever mystifications of the transgressive nothing.” The artist transgresses Beauty to drown truth in a sea of irony.

Reiff identifies for us an example of an intentional Deathwork in art, the Piss Christ.

“What third culture people mean by a creative act is the act of de-creation. In the second world we fuse the highest and most sacred event in history, the cross, with the highest authority. In the third world we find whatever is holiest and best and fuse it with refuse.

Galatians 2:28 says ‘Christ in you”. Remade in the form of the Piss Christ we may now read, “Christ is in you, so you are piss.” Heaven and earth meet in the spirits of the redeemed, in the heart where Christ resides. There, man becomes truly Man, for he has been restored to nearness to God. The Piss Christ severs heaven and earth. Heaven is blown away like dandelion fluff, and the drub of souls hitting the hard earth sounds a thunderous applause in the artist’s transgressive ears.

A family member of mine describes himself as gender-queer, gay, and performs drag. When I asked him what is the purpose of drag, he said it is because gender is a playground; it is fluid. Gender, an invention of the Second World, is mocked through the Deathwork of drag. In the Third World, the freedom to be shameless is a right.

“The future of a culture so conscious of itself depends precisely upon this alienation from the sacred orders of which they were once expressions.” The prodigal son must sell his birthright for cash before he can spend his Father’s capital in sensual appetite and slaking libidinous craving.

“The human, in the third culture, becomes … an artist, a mad artist who is given an empty canvas, fills it with the likeness of panic and emptiness, and declares it his masterpiece.”

Third World Consequences

In a sense, Third World victory is impossible, yielding a highly volatile and changeable social structure where one is unable to locate oneself. When the feminists of yesterday are cancelled by the next generation because they do not applaud a man being named Woman Of The Year, this is an example of Third World instability and fractiousness. J.K. Rowling was edgy when she backfilled Dumbledore’s character as gay. She was then cancelled a year later by those to her Left for not endorsing the trans agenda. Eating everything to your right is a rule that prognosticates loneliness.

“Deathworks do not imply death merely. Deathworks imply the priority of the second death (spiritual).” Destroy the spirit and the flesh is resistless. Crosshairs of the Third World cannon are aimed at the dignity of civilization, namely, the Image of God. If it can destroy human dignity and connection to the Sacred, the fight over social order is won without a fight.

To the extent that any Sacred Order is allowed to persist, it is “only for purposes of lowering everything within it.” Church buildings are allowed so they can be repurposed as music venues. Third World lays its deathworks in institutions as the cuckoo bird surreptitiously lays its eggs in the nests of other birds to hatch and raise cuckoo chicks as their own. When matured, the deathworks will evict any semblance of the Second World vestiges and zombify the institution.

Conclusion

In Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman, where the infamous death of God is portended, the Madman warns that because of this, we have become unchained from the Sun and will be continually drifting backward, forward, and in all directions. He concludes that we shall have to become gods ourselves to seem worthy of the divine murder. Earlier in his writings, Nietzsche notes, “The greatest danger that has always hovered over humanity …is the eruption of madness.” To Nietzsche, madness meant “the eruption of arbitrariness” and “the joy of human unreason”, both symptoms observable in the disease of Third World Deathworks.

The uniqueness of the struggle today is that the Third World sees all Second World constraints are fictitious – all equally true, equally false. Social reality, then, disconnected from the transcendent, is reduced to a struggle for power, in which the most persuasive symbol wins. It assumes no transcendence; all truth claims are froth and spittle motivated by base desires.

Third World means to consume. It cannot be ignored or debated or pacified. The cultural battle must be won before the firing starts. Second World Christians mistake Third World intentions, believing it can be reasoned with. It cannot. Reason is from the Sacred Order and must therefore be destroyed. Modern evangelicals think our current transgressive culture can be parlayed with or invited to coffee for a good-faith conversation. It cannot. The town is not big enough for the two. God does not bunk with idols, and the Third World idol will not permit God – the only point of agreement between the two worlds. Any moral ground conceded by the Second World will become territory of the Third. “Value neutrality amounts to taking the Third World side…There is no neutral ground to be found in this or any other world.”

The solution is the proclamation of an unsullied, uncompromising, muscular gospel that flowers in creative acts of culture and maintains the truth publicly. We need to train ourselves to see the Deathworks wherever the virus erupts, and remove our kids from the scourge-factory schools. Christians must create. To the transgressive and arbitrary kitsch of art, we must create enduring beauty that redeems. To the Third World scavengers, we must provide an insistent and fatherly ‘no’. In response to the deathward, antenatalism, we must respond with giant families. Nihilism is flimsy and withers at the sound of children’s laughter.