In a recent paper published on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), authors Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson assign the familiar characters of Revelation to the prevailing mindsets of the modern world. The Beast is “civilisation and its leaders, the colour of earth and blood . . . a living Tower of Babel, the arrogant state/king and its vassals, hellbent on total subordination,”—it is the leviathan or the totalitarian state. The Whore is licentiousness, “freedom of anonymity,” “the dissociation of sex from the constraints and guides of tradition,” and “the dissolution of constraint that accompanies atomized individuality.”

It seems that society is divided into the Hobbesian ideology of the Beast and the Lockeian and Rousseauian ideology of the Whore or even a perverse mixture of the two with the Whore riding on the back of the Beast as in Revelation. Pageau and Peterson see this as the state using licentiousness to tempt people into its absolute control.

Ultimately, the Beast kills the whore: “the totalising state promises freedom, but kills even desire, let alone its satiation.” We saw it “when the Anarchism of the French Revolution transmutes into centralised Napoleonic empire,” when “the hedonism of Weimar is transformed into the totalitarian Reich,” and most recently when the free West devolved into a technocratic authoritarianism during the COVID pandemic.

It is a bleak picture.

Thankfully, there is an alternative to the tragedy of the Beast and the Whore. The authors explain that Revelation portrays another picture of civilization: the New Jerusalem, embodied by Christ. It is “a city of peace, descending from Heaven, aligned toward the greatest good, God Himself.”

Pageau and Peterson write that the answer to individualism-crushing totalitarianism is the principle that Pope Leo XIII developed in Rerum Novarum: subsidiarity. They explain, “In a properly structured subsidiary system, the individual voluntarily adopts responsibility for his or her conduct and caretaking, but the couple has its domain and duty, as does the family, the neighbourhood, the corporate enterprise, the city, and the state. The more encompassing levels are restricted in their domain of purview to those actions and directions of attention that cannot be taken up by lower and more proximal levels of the hierarchical structure.”

Subsidiarity is the golden mean between anarchy and totalitarianism. It is the perfect balance of the individual and the community and the only system that ensures individual rights while providing for the common good.

According to their website, ARC is an “international community with a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish.” They, like many people today, understand the dire threat of totalitarianism that we face as a civilization and are trying to come up with a solution. But it is hubris to imagine we can do it ourselves. As Pageau wrote in his newsletter about the aforementioned paper, saving civilization is not possible without God. “Without deliberate attention to the transcendent origin of all things, we can at best turn the clock back a few decades, but the chaos in which we are placed today is the fruit of Enlightenment Humanism, not a simple deviation from that,” he wrote.

The solution to our existential crisis lies not in changes to the political structure, but in conversion of our collective soul. Razing the Earthly City won’t save us. We must raise the New Jerusalem.