Flight From Life (Flight From Knowledge and Life) (Remastered)

Modern life, Rushdoony argues, is marked by escapism—a flight from reality into dream-worlds—seen first in the arts and especially in the university, where many flee the demands of work, family, and Christian morality for a quasi-monastic, anti-Christian “aesthetic” order; but politics has become an even more dangerous refuge, because the political escapist tries to abolish reality by legislation and revolution rather than accept biblical personal responsibility and the need for heart-change. He uses Marxism as the clearest case: its utopian promises (citing the 1903 party manifesto’s lofty language about liberty, rights, and labor protections) produced the opposite—totalitarian terror—because Marxism denies original sin and therefore trusts concentrated power in supposedly perfectible man, treating illusion as inevitable “historical truth” and punishing citizens for “sabotage” while the state itself wrecks productivity. The same unreality, he says, infects academia and liberalism, and even non-Christian conservatisms, whenever they assume man’s basic goodness. Drawing on Dostoevsky’s warning that limitless freedom in radical schemes ends in limitless despotism, he describes the socialist dream as a bid to become gods: a small ruling elite with “unbounded power,” the masses reduced to herd-like equality through absolute submission, the destruction of family bonds and property desires, and the loss of individuality. The root of every such program is theological: a refusal of creaturehood—Satan’s temptation to “be as gods”—so apart from Christ men attempt to incarnate their fantasies into law and society, producing chaos; therefore every flight from reality is ultimately a flight from life, while true restoration comes only as man is re-centered under God in Jesus Christ, who returns him to dominion as man-under-God, not man-as-god. #Escapism #Reality #Rushdoony #BiblicalWorldview #OriginalSin #TotalDepravity #PersonalResponsibility #UniversityCulture #PoliticalReligion #Marxism #Utopianism #Totalitarianism #Revolution #Dictatorship #Dostoevsky #ThePossessed #Humanism #Statism #Family #Property #LibertyAndDespotism #Creaturehood #BeAsGods #ChristTheAnswer #Wisdom #Proverbs836 #KingPriestProphet #CulturalCritique