 G'day, May 40 here. So I'm rereading a classic of religious sociology, religion in secular society by a sociologist of religion, Brian Ronald Wilson, who's a working-class bloke from Leeds, who ended up at Oxford University. So I'm rereading his book. It's just so good. And he talks about in Hinduism, there you have a religious ethic that provides a complete legitimation of social status, right? So it's structured in reverence for the priestly class and for the Hindu class structure, where you have the untouchables at the bottom, the priestly class at the top. So Christianity has never legitimated the current ruling order to the extent that Hinduism has. So Christianity has always been able to accommodate new and diverse and revolutionary social movements. And there's always been a kernel of rebellion within the Christian religion, right? You read the Bible and you pick up this revolutionary order. So I was raised to Seventh-day Adventists and Seventh-day Adventists came out of the Methodists, who came out of the Puritans, essentially the nonconformists, all right? So nonconformist Christianity means those branches of Protestant Christianity that are not Church of England, that are not CIV, that are not Anglican. So I was raised by a nonconformist family in a nonconformist community, the Seventh-day Adventists one. So G'day Argonne, how you doing, right? So you had the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, then you had the rise of Calvin. And Calvinism though would only ever appeal to an elite who were able to deal that there was essentially nothing that people could do and your heavenly salvation was essentially determined ahead of time. That was never going to be a mass appeal movement. So Methodism appealed to the masses, not just to an elect merchant class. So John Wesley emphasized that all men had the chance for eternal salvation. So this emphasis better suited the new mass society and it facilitated the socialization of a large workforce, you know, far better than the very aristocratic theology of Calvinism, which emphasized how few people could be saved. So the doctrine of assurance of salvation by John Wesley and the Methodists were excellent psychological weapons for the working classes. So we live in an age where people are desperate for emotional reassurance, all right? And so John Wesley's doctrine that all men can be saved and all you have to do is believe this, okay? Very appealing for people who want emotional reassurance. My father was a great preacher of the Christian gospel and he said he would, you know, emphasize that if, like John Wesley, if you believe in this, then you can have assurance of your eternal life and thousands and thousands of people had their lives transformed because they now got the emotional reassurance that they'd been looking for all their lives. Now for some of them, as life went on, the emotional reassurance that they got from belief in their heavenly salvation started to diminish. Okay, so then out of the Methodist church came Adventists. So these were even lower class than the Methodists, all right? And they arose in an expectation of a whole new world that would come about when Jesus would return to earth in 1844. So the people who joined the Adventist movement were not the aristocrats. They were not the middle class by and large. They were not even the most successful members of the working class. They were generally speaking the more desperate members of society. So what kind of people are desperate for revolutionary change? Like think about the alt-right. Almost everyone on the alt-right is desperate for revolutionary change because almost all those who are desperate for revolutionary change are pretty unhappy and in fairly desperate circumstances, right? If you're happy with your life, you don't want revolutionary change. I am happy with my life. I do not want revolutionary change. Like things are pretty good in Fortyville, right? I just had a nice two-month vacation in Australia. I'm back, you know, walking the sunny, clean, wide streets of Beverly Hills. Like life is good for me. I don't want a revolution. You say you want a revolution? Count me out. Okay. But the people who formed the early Adventists, they were desperate, right? Like the people who formed the early Communists and the people who formed the Nazi party, right? These are the people who brought about the French Revolution. These are desperate people in desperate times, in desperate circumstances, ready to do desperate things. So the early Adventists, for example, they saw all their belongings in the assurance that Jesus was coming back, you know, on Yom Kippur, October 1844. And when they didn't happen, they were quite disturbed. All right. So revolutionary movements like the Seventh-day Adventists, like the alt-right, like the Communists, like N. T. for like Black Lives Matter, generally speaking, come out of intense emotions awakened by desperation, right? So the people who committed to the early Adventist church and people who commit to the alt-right and the Communism, they're much more likely to be high school dropouts than to be dentists, okay? So dentists and doctors and lawyers and attorneys and entrepreneurs, they have too much to lose to join some revolutionary movement. So the early Adventists didn't have much capacity for sustained Christian commitment, just like members of the alt-right, you know, they didn't have much capacity for sustained political commitment, right? They may spend hours a day on podcasts, but they don't actually do anything that makes changes in the real world. And in fact, to the extent that they do anything, they precipitate such a backlash that they do far more harm to their cause than good. So yeah, the early Adventists felt impelled by their diet circumstances, right? They lived in a situation of social and economic deprivation like most of the alt-right. When I would interact with members of the alt-right, they were frequently earning $11 an hour and were drunk every night, okay? This is going to bring about a situation of social, emotional, personal and economic deprivation. So the intensity of their feelings could sustain a march into Adventism for this, you know, new messianic era, but could not bring about a social movement which would mount a program to sustain social action just like the alt-right, right? The alt-right can march in Charlottesville, but can the alt-right create a social movement that mounts a program to sustain social action? No, because the raw material, the people behind the Adventists and the alt-right were people by and large in desperate straits incapable of compromising with reality, of compromising with this world to achieve their ends. And with the early Adventists and with the alt-right today, what you have basically is an utter rejection of reality, an utter rejection of the prevailing social order. Now there's great emotional intensity behind the early Adventists and behind many of these, you know, revolutionary movements, right? They have a deeply felt desire to alter conditions. They have an urgency of hope. They demand solutions. They have an intensity of emotional disturbance that for Adventists they could only express in religious terms, for the alt-right, they can only express in racial, political, cultural terms, right? It's akin to, you know, Africans praying for healing, for sufferers, or some of the more fanatical Adventist movements in the Middle Ages. But in wider society, in the world around us, people are increasingly shifting from emotional attempts to control the environment, from religious attempts to faith-based attempts to control the world around us to rational techniques, rational procedures, right? Most people have come to recognize the value of controlled, disciplined regulation of emotional response, right? Kind of the very opposite of the alt-right, very opposite of the Adventist movement. And so, Adventism is like a three generation movement. Like the first generation jumps in, converts, becomes fire-breathing, distinctive. The second generation gets an education, goes to university, becomes much more liberal and easygoing. Third generation leaves. Rune, I'm a pro, a pleb, a forklift driver. Good on you, mate. Sold to the earth, right? So compared to intense emotions, controlled disciplined regulation of emotional response is much more effective. And then the disciplined acquisition of ordered instrumental methods for controlling nature and society, even more effective than emotional outbursts. So, the early Adventist movements were ecstatic emotional outbursts. You know, reinterpreting Christianity in primitive terms. And there was a little demand for fulfillment of biblical promises. So the traditionalist fire-breathing brand of Adventism around me when I was growing up, it's like, you know, Jesus is coming back and the interpret, you know, various texts in the book of Daniel, and this represents Turkey, and this represents, say, the modern state of Israel, and this represents Soviet Union, and there's the little big horn of Daniel, this and that, all right? And it's not sustainable. Eliot says, I think the Superbowl is coming down to the chiefs versus the rams with the chiefs prevailing. That's a thoughtful and provocative insight. Now, movements based on dire circumstances and desperate emotions don't tend to be terribly effective at shifting society. So if every member of the alt-right disappeared from the world tonight, the world would not be much affected. Just like if every seventh-day Adventist disappeared from the world tonight, with the exception of the healthcare industry, some parts of the healthcare industry, the world would not be much affected. So movements that come out of desperate emotions, you know, demanding literal fulfillment of biblical promises don't tend to sustain themselves very effectively and don't tend to have much influence over the world, because they're too pure, too desperate to compromise with reality, to accept reality, and to, you know, deal with people and deal with the world as it is. Back soon.