Tweet [1]
… is from page 123 of the 2009 edition of the incomparable H.L. Mencken’s 1926 volume, Notes on Democracy [2]:
Democracy provides the machinery that Puritanism needs for the quick and ruthless execution of its preposterous inventions.
DBx: So true.
Of course, the specific superstitions, terrors, and lusts of puritanism in the 2020s differ from those of puritanism in the 1620s and even the 1920s. And today’s high pastors of the puritan faith boast not degrees in divinity but, instead, MDs, JDs, and PhDs. But puritanism’s basic character is unchanged. Ditto for its pastors’ conceits. Today’s puritans, like yesterday’s, believe that ordinary human beings are corrupted sinners who pose unspeakable harm to each other unless firmly bridled and muzzled by stern ’tho saintly elders.
The puritan elders of 2020 have frightened the flock into the belief that they – the flock – are all sinners infected by a Satanic force named “Covid-19,” and that the only salvation from this evil spirit is unquestioning obedience to the elders’ harsh but God-ordained commands. (It is an insignificant detail that in 2020 “God” has been renamed “Science.”)
Sure, such obedience results in the abandonment of all joy, spontaneity, pleasure for the sake of pleasure, beauty for the sake of beauty, and natural human engagement and commerce. But if we don’t obey, our destination is as certain as it is terrible: Covid hell – an unspeakably painful and gruesome place in which everyone of all ages is sure to perish in agony. Avoidance of this pulmonary inferno is worth any price paid over any length of time – or so our elders thunder from their pulpits.
Obey, ye sinners, lest ye suffer justly at the hands of an angry God!