Ex Cathedra

Recently I've begun using the term "The Cathedral" in posts, so I thought I'd take a brief moment to actually talk about what I mean when I say that.

On the face of it, its generally a term borrowed from the manosphere, and if you are familiar with it from there you won't have too much confusion with my use, though I do believe the concept is much older than its current incarnation.

Using the term, The Cathedral, is nothing more than putting form to the formless, and face to the faceless.  Currently our society is beset by a vast array of destructive impulses and bad ideas that collectively appear to operate with a directed will.  This is illusory, there are no smoky rooms, no cackling villains that can be fought directly, but the phenomenon remains.  Enough people in enough positions have acted to subvert and destroy the old order with similar enough outlooks for the new that they and their disciples simply seem to act in concert, where in truth it is merely a shared worldview.

It can be, however, rather difficult to name, to oppose something as nebulous as a 'shared worldview', and so in the finest traditions of humanity, it has been given a name.

The Manosphere uses The Cathedral to represent the forces of Feminism, the Female Imperative and Solipsism and the misandrist forces of the PC police.  I expand my definition to include the entire statist, progressive, post-modern nihilist culture, which includes the manospherian definition by default.

But this cannot be stressed enough: There is no organization, no collection of individuals that can be recognized as 'The Cathedral'. People only act in service to the Cathedral from moment to moment, and no one, not even the most fervent adherent to its tenants, is safe from destruction at its hands.  John Edwards was a useful, powerful agent of the Cathedral, but he was destroyed utterly by it when a more useful tool came along.

We could say no one escapes its grasp, that any one of us might find ourselves being used by it, but in reality there are those who side with it, consciously or not, and those who oppose it, consciously or not.  The no-man's land between the two camps is treacherous and littered with the wreckage of those who deviated from Orthodoxy as well as those simply destroyed as an example to others.