As infants in school; we sometimes used to make a gang by the simple expedient of going around the playground and asking other boys if they wanted to be in our gang. Most would say yes, simply because they wanted to be inside the new gang; not outside.
The standard threat to some other boy who displeased was to say 'I'm going to get a gang on you'. Typically nothing was done; but the idea was that the threatener would form a gang against the threatened. It could be done, quite easily, because plenty of kids could be found to go along with it - on the side of any random kid who asked, and against any other random kid... at least for a while.
And a great deal of adult life depends upon the innate desire to join gangs and to avoid being ganged-up-on. This is the primary social basis of tribal society and probably of our ancestors.
Yet this gang-forming propensity is very weak among modern Westerners. In a sense, we want to be gang members a lot more than we want actually to be In a gang. We want protection and a share in the power of a gang; but will not, we cannot accept the necessary group standards of behaviour, leadership, loyalty.
The key thing is 'cannot'. Modern Man just-is an individualist. He cannot form groups.
This is just a fact - but the problem is that he is a weak individualist. He is enough of an individualist not be be able to form groups, even when he wants to. But he is not enough of an individualist to take responsibility for his beliefs, for his thinking.
Indeed, modern Man does not take his individuality seriously enough to find out what it is. He accepts what he is told about his real nature, his true self. He expects to find his real true self outside himself, in the culture! So nearly everybody simply goes-along-with making a choice of self, a selection from prevalent mainstream notions of how 'we' are - all of which happen to be false, incoherent, and demotivating.
In effect: Modern culture gives us a finite, approved, checklist of characteristics; and we are invited to tick-off which apply. The uniqueness of that selection is supposed to be our individuality. The checklist's limitation is what makes us 'belong'.
Genuine individuality of thinking is a glorious and optimistic thing; but the individualism of the large majority of modern Men is a pathetic and grovelling sham; with most of the disadvantages of group membership and very few of the advantages.
If modern man is regarded as being stuck in spiritual adolescence; then we can see that the problem of adolescence is that it is a transitional state between child and adulthood. When what should be a transition becomes permanent, then we get our situation.
The adolescent is individualist enough to be rebellious against parents and tradition; but groupish-enough that he is slavishly conformist to the fashion driven whims of peers - and these adolescent fashions are imposed top-down and with an exploitative and corrupting agenda. That is the permanent state of modern Man.
In sum the adolescent is primarily negative: knowing what he does not want, but unsure and labile; changeable about what he does want. And that is precisely the nature of the mainstream, modern, secular, Leftist socio-politics. It is essentially negative, defined by what it opposes (here and now) - but without any stable or coherent notion of what it wants and aims-for in the future.
It is understandable that the solution for the self-destructiveness of modern Man is seen in a restoration of traditional forms of groupishness - ie. individual conformity to churches. Traditional groupishness is vastly superior to the arrested-half-rebellion of modernity. If that was the choice, the choice would be straightforward.
But it is not the choice. It is not possible. Once adolescence has been reached we cannot return to spiritual childhood, not genuinely nor honestly. Childhood is not an option. Our actual choice is between arrested adolescence and growing up.
In spiritual Christian, and cultural, terms: we began as individuals subordinated and loyal to the group-church of our environment. We entered a semi-individualist adolescent phase of rejecting the church; and ideologically self-subordinating to the partial, expedient individualism of a rebellious teen gang mentality. We need to continue through adolescence, and out the other side, to become fully individual.
As spiritually grown-up individuals, we may choose to work with traditional groups, with churches - but the relationship is then conscious, voluntary, and contingent upon the behaviour of the church. Since we have become adult individuals, we no longer regard loyalty to the church as the primary value.
Much of the desire for a strong church; and to be in a church, of a church - is an unrealistic and impossible yearning for that lost playground security of being 'in a gang'; and not having the gang set against you. Modern Man finds he is not, and cannot be, truly in a gang; yet the fact scares him - it scares him at an existential level, a pervasive and intolerable angst - from which he escapes into distraction and intoxication and Not Thinking.
Having a developed sense of self-consciousness - being rooted in this; we cannot help but evaluate and judge the 'external' church against our personal standards. Internal standards, personal intuition, is the only evidence we will accept - yet modernity undercuts all personal intuition as arbitrary, epiphenomenal, self-deceptive, lacking any objective validity.
This is why we need, more than anything else perhaps, to understand how and when intuition has objective validity; to develop confidence in genuine intuition - as being a form of direct knowledge of the divine: the divine within that makes us Sons of God, and the divine without: the Holy Ghost, which is the living Jesus Christ.
