Commenter Ingemar made an excellent and thought-provoking point in the recent post on how the One Ring was destroyed with the aid of divine providence, by a sequence of plans - each of which was worse than the previous one in terms of 'collateral damage'.
My understanding of Western history is that we embraced materialism (aka. positivism, reductionism, scientism)* as our underlying philosophy from the late 1700s particularly - and since then we have seen various Plans (B, C, D etc) offered to solve and destroy this way of thinking.
I call these Romanticism, which has come in waves - each of which failed by eschewing Christianity (and also being rejected by Christians) - instead dissipating into just-more-materialism: radical leftist politics and/or progressively extending the sexual revolution.
So, my assumption is that materialism - like the One Ring, which it so much resembles - needed to be destroyed...
Yet not by by reversion to an earlier phase, not by tradition (since history is linear); but by being superseded by further (and divinely forseen and ordained) development.
Plans were sequentially offered to The West by providence, which wove these into on-going creation - however, each successive Plan depended absolutely on human agency to acknowledge, accept, adopt - and consciously creatively participate-in - that Plan (or else it would not happen).
(This is a vital point: The early Plans could not and should not be 'imposed' on Men. All early Plans required Men to be consciously aware of them, required voluntary and active cooperation. This was desired by God, and also entailed by the nature of Man.)
What happened was that the first phase of Romanticism (late 1700s, early 1800s) could be termed Plan A, and that was the best plan - which would supersede materialism with the greatest benefits and the least disadvantages.
Plan A was refused and distorted; and further Plans were offered over the next couple of centuries - but each with greater collateral damage than the previous one, because the best possibility had been refused and therefore damage and sin had accumulated - more and more as time went by.
Meanwhile, materialism continued to grow, with less and less opposition - into the modern form of anti-Christian, spirit-excluding, leftist bureaucracy. This consists of many national and specialised social systems (government, law, churches, education, science, health services, police, military etc) which are all linked into a single hierarchical and cross-linked System.
These 'functional' sub-systems (and The System as a whole) are vitally supported by a vast Public Relations and propaganda bureaucracy: the mass and social media.
And so we come to the recent totalitarian+ takeover by The System.
We have now run-out of Plans, used-up all our good options; and providence is left with Plan X, the Plan of last resort - which is that The West be permitted to express all the contradictions and self-destructive aspects of materialism that have, until now, been moderated and restrained by providence.
The need to destroy the evil of The System is now so urgent and vital that it overwhelms any large scale Romanticism - and will proceed regardless of collateral damage.
With the corruption of all institutions, and their incorporation into The System henceforth, the true Christian spirit will be carried by individuals (and small loving groups of individuals) or not at all.
It turns-out that we had misunderstood the old prophecies as believing that God would impose pestilence, natural disasters, and wars as a punishment - whereas it is in fact our response to these phenomena that will destroy our civilisation by pulling it down on our own heads - and destroy it very completely.
Most of what is Good will perish with the evil; this being the unavoidable price of destroying the evil and generation after generation of rejecting better Plans. Instead, we and our ancestors have progressively embraced materialism more and more thoroughly - more and more rapidly and coercively; and The West are well advanced to imposing materialism upon the whole world.
We have therefore forced the hand of the Creator; who has allowed us to adopt Plan X; and will allow it to unfold by it own inexorable internal logic over the coming months.
But, unlike Plans A, B, C etc - Plan X is happening despite most men being unaware of it.
Plan X is, indeed, the direct consequence of our refusal to be aware of, or to cooperate with, divine providence; an outcome of our denial of both the reality and Goodness of God. Our wholesale inversion of true values.
As a civilization, we have chosen, cumulatively, to be passive and blind. Therefore our self-made fate will happen to us without our comprehension or consent.
And because it happens-to-us, we will lack that courage which derives from the active pursuit of Good.
*+Note on materialism and totalitarianism. It might be asked whether these are necessarily evil? Might they simply be merely 'philosophy' and 'politics' - hence orthogonal (nothing necessarily to do with) Christianity? My answer is that The System is demonic (led by actual demon spirits, those willingly possessed by demons, and by the slaves of demons) therefore it is intrinsically evil in its objectives and motivations. Further, the dominant demonic evil of modernity is of the 'Ahrimanic' type: which works via materialism and totalitarianism - by bureaucracy and the mass media. Therefore, any totalitarian materialist takeover is in practice necessarily evil.
