Our Secular Priests
1st May 2025
ZMan cuts to the chase.
A recurring feature of human society is the class of people who set themselves apart from the rest of society to function as the keepers of public morality. They usually set themselves apart through self-denial, which is a way of showing themselves to be purer than the rest of the lot. It is thought that the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, for example, is a way to set the Jewish people apart from the rest of the people by abstaining from what was considered a dirty animal.
This is why every religion has both dietary laws and prohibitions on certain types of common behavior. It may be that these only apply to the holy men, as was common in the pre-Christian world. They can also be standards against which people measure themselves, as in the Christian world. The ancient shaman was someone expected to sublimate his urges as a sign of his purity. Christians, of course, have many rules that are guides for adhering to Christian ethics.
In the post-Christian age, the priestly class follows a similar pattern. The people we call the managerial elite and their performative proxies in the media have many ways of demonstrating their purity. In fact, we have the phrase “purity spiral” to describe when a group of these people engage in a competition in which they try to prove they are the purest of the bunch. Many of the moral panics over the last decades have been the result of purity spirals that spun out of control.
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We see the same thing in this age. Public figures kneeling in front of the cameras, allegedly in solidarity with the blacks, was no different than the ancients sacrificing a bull to the gods. When they forced their employees to kneel, it was another way of signaling their virtue to each other and the rest of us. The Covid panic, in many respects, was nothing more than a purity spiral among the managerial elite. It is why it had so many outward symbols of obedience to the god of Covid.