Without fully recognizing it, the Founding Fathers had a strong sense of the emotional plague that is endemic in human beings, and they did everything in their power to prevent it from organizing and destroying this country.
This sense of evil was based on the healthier character structure of the people in those times. Their authoritarian character structure allowed them to recognize the importance of separating secular and religious authority as a safeguard against tyranny. But then, as a result of the breakdown of the old authoritarian order into anti-authoritarianism around the 60s, the plague organized itself and infested every area of social life.
This was accompanied by the dissolution of the authoritarian family, of a decrease in people’s muscular armor and an increase in their ocular armor. The contactless masses became secularized and so did their latent tendency for mysticism. Instead of having faith in the afterlife, people now demanded heaven on earth. Freedom peddling politicians on the left appeared and supplied disillusioned followers of the church with the political illusion that they wanted.
This was the time of the marked shift of the social mainstream to the left of political center and the decline in the census of faithful church goers. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the church leaders of all denominations had no other option than to embrace the policies that the leftist ideologues in America were peddling.
Together with the personal idealistic tendencies of Pope Francis, the operation of the emotional plague through socio-economic factors is the real reason that the Catholic Church on the political right is currently cozying up to Barack Obama, a political activist on the far left. For the first time in America’s history, a pontiff addressed members of the joint session of Congress and sermonized, among other things, about what they should do about the environment, about income inequality and that they should learn how to get along with each other.
This collusion of church and state is one more step in the globalization of the emotional plague as the ideologies and the moralities of the far left and the far right merge into one.
Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 