The Will to Defeat Modern Evil

Added: 2026-06-07

[00:00:01]Hey, how you doing? This is R.J. So, I've said many a times here on this channel that what the channel is about is the traditional idea of a hero and how that plays out both in story and in real life. And I've talked about each of those things at length within the videos of this channel. But one thing I haven't touched too much on during my videos is the connection between those two things.

[00:00:29]the connection between the hero on the page and the hero in real life. So that's what I'm going to do today to talk about loosely and fairly abstractly in some ways why there is a destruction of your favorite characters, your favorite heroes in movies, television, books, every which way that they can destroy them. they want to destroy them and how it is meant to destroy within you that heroic spirit you need to survive and thrive. That is to say, in other words, to be in your virtue. So, let's start here. Over the last year or so, I have reread The Lord of the Rings, books I have not touched since I was probably about 13 years old. after I finish those and what I'm currently reading in part are the detective stories of GK Chesterton known as the adventures of Father Brown. And funny enough, as I was thinking about both of those authors and how each of them are basing their stories upon moral precepts, which again was what I was doing over the last week, one of my younger acquaintances came over to my house, grabbed a random unmarked cassette tape, and yes, I still use cassette tapes. You threw it in to the tape player and what started to play but the night on Bald Mountain. What's the name of the composer? It's Russian so it's hard to pronounce. Something like Mosourski. And since my old cassette player is one of those ones where it automatically turns the cassette from one side to the other and will just continually play in a loop. I just let the music play in a loop over and over and over again. And he's an interesting composer because he seems to deal with subject matter that are very far from each other. He deals with subject matter like children at play, children in the nursery, but also put out heavy compositions dealing with death and demons. And that's what most people would say The Night on Bald Mountain is about. It's about a Russians sourced mythology of demons and witches and evil coming down from a mountain into the valleys of where people live. And thinking about that juxtaposition of ideas and themes which this composer used to write many of his pieces. It brought me back to thinking about Tolken and how that juxtaposition is there within Lord of the Rings within the simple goodness of the Shire as opposed to the horrors that descend from Mount Doom, the evil itself, but also the evil creatures that it inspires to come down and pillage what is good, simple, and just. And when I added Chesterton into the mix, it wasn't so much Chesterton's stories that speak about the connection of these things, but his more philosophical musings, if you want to call them that, especially because one of his quotes, which is usually misqued, has been making the rounds once again.

[00:03:39]And I will give you that quote here, which is from his short article, The Red Angel. That being said, I'm going to splice a few things together, even though it is a very short article and I'm going to use a little bit more modern language. He uses the word boogie, but what he really means is boogeyman. So, I'm going to substitute that. So, the quote goes something like this. Fairy tales are not responsible for producing in children fear or any of the shapes of fear. Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly. that is in the child already because it is in the world already.

[00:04:17]Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of the boogeyman. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possibility of defeating the boogeyman. The baby has known the dragons intimately ever since he had an imagination. What fairy tales provide for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. And a few lines more, he says, "But the point of the story and the point of the reader feelings is not that these things are frightening, but the far more striking fact that the hero was not frightened at them." And then a few more lines down, he says, "At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus, Roland, Sidgard, and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes, you are not making the child rational. You are only leaving him to fight the devils alone. Now, Chesterton picks up this train of thought in other articles he's written and specifically in one chapter of his book, Orthodoxy, where he talks about how adults should actually return to the basic philosophy of the fairy tale. And in part that this should be done because the modern world will try to erase from your mind the concepts of the hero of the angel of heaven while trying desperately to instill in your mind the continued existence of the villain of the devil and of hell. Now let me stop there for just a second and give to you a more concrete example or series of examples of what I'm talking about and what Chesterton is talking about. Many of these examples will be familiar to the people who have listened to my channel for any length of time, but for those who are newer to my content, they may be a little bit shocking. First off, I'll answer the question that some people put to me in the comments every once in a while. Why do I concentrate on simple silly things like comic books, like superheroes, like mythology, and fairy tales? Well, this is why Chesterton's idea of returning to the simplicity, the simple philosophy of the fairy tale hero is partly why.

[00:06:38]Because it is that connection between the hero in the story and the real life heroes that stand beside you or that you can be that is so important. And the other side, the side that tries to destroy the idea of hero, angel, and heaven in your mind, but leave open and fully bear in your face the ideas of villains, demons, hell. They know this extremely well. They know that connection, and that is the connection they want to so desperately break. The first example would be from about nine years ago where the person in operational control of Marvel comics went on a interview openly talking about how comic books and you have to remember this is the height of the MCU. the comic books and superheroes were the new mythology and how the people controlling the stories around those superheroes should use those superheroes in a psychological way to in her words quote push positive ideas. And she goes on to describe those positive ideas as progressive political ideas. And a few years later, when some of her projects were coming to fruition, she was doing interviews with another vice president of animation at Disney where they had a joint project. And they described how when they did test screenings of these kinds of stories to an audience of purely girls, by the way, they felt that their job was done when those children could parrot back to them the progressive talking points that were inserted into the story. In another venue, she gave a talk where this woman, this childless woman, unmarried woman, talked about how mothers should take their little boys and set them down in front of her television shows that she was championing and tell those little boys, "This is what you like whether you like it or not." Another example would be I think it was the SA West BookCon that I covered probably seven years ago or so where you had panel after panel after panel of discussing inserting progressive ideology into children's picture books. One very specifically was titled that, where the panelists were all in agreement when one woman listed off an armslength list of progressive talking points that should be inserted into children's picture books. and then went on to give a quote from an older children's author who talked about how when you write a children's book, you should do your best to ensure that when that child is under their blankets with a flashlight, reading a book, reading your book, it should be as if you are sitting right there whispering in their ear these progressive talking points.

[00:09:37]And the whole panel obviously agreed to that sentiment. There was another podcast that I covered which came straight out of marvel.com where they talked about creating new and engaging horror stories specifically to be printed. And once again, this panel of unmarried women centered their discussion around one of them telling a story wherein she was describing how her nieces, her young nieces, would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, horrified, afraid because of climate change, and how they should harness that kind of fear that in their estimation everyone should have in order to write truly horrific horror stories.

[00:10:21]Personally, I think the horror of the entire thing was the fact that these children, again, preschool age children were so indoctrinated by their mother and possibly by their father, but he was never mentioned that they would wake up in the middle of the night in terror of climate change. This is the kind of thing Chesterton is talking about. He goes on to talk about how the people who wish to kill the idea of the hero, the angel of heaven, they want to lock you in a prison. and not just any prison, but a dungeon. And then get you used to the idea of wanting to be in the dungeon by telling you just how large it is, just how many corridors there are for you to explore. How there are a countless number of corridors dimly lit by torches for you to go down with the unspoken idea that that's all the light you will ever see. And then he goes on to compare that with the idea that is presented to modern people of the fact that the corridors of space are almost infinite and you will be guided through the vast darkness of space by the infantessimal light of suns perched on a wall every once in a while like torches in a dungeon. But at the same time, while selling the idea of the fascination with this near infinite darkness and all its wonders, to very specifically discount anything as wonderful as the simple concept of free will. Or in other words, if you simply live in a universe of strings and levers, of atoms colliding with atoms, and there is nothing else, no other fantastical existence than you are governed by physics, and you have no free will. That is the underlying message of trapping you in this prison, of keeping you from seeing any true light. Because free will is the domain of the hero. Because as I will add, the virtue that makes a hero a hero is the free choice of making good and prudent decisions under the light of truth. Is the free choice of justly giving to each man what is due. Is the free choice of taking courage and the steadfastness of fortitude and setting it against those who would oppose virtue. And it is the free choice of imposing upon yourself the dictates of temperance so that you can continue to be virtuous. And that last one, that last one is very important today because what the world tries to teach you openly or covertly is the idea that imposing upon yourself rules and standards. And indeed, rules and standards and laws and boundaries are in themselves evil. If you do that, you're a fascist. You're a Nazi. Quite literally, this is what they think because they say as part of their ideology that well the Nazis and the fascists, well, they were all about rules. They were all about standards.

[00:13:35]They were all about boundaries. And so, if they believed in those things, then those things must be evil. And this is not some abstract concept. 30 years ago, the German government was exploring this very simple and erroneous idea. It was their government sanctioned attempt to stamp out all forms of fascism that led them to surrendering children to the most predatory and evil people that you could imagine. And their government documents give the exact reason why. The reason was to make sure these children had no standard of rules to live by from the very earliest years of their life because that would ensure that they would never grow up to be fascists. It was the destruction of rules themselves that would in their minds ensure this and thus led them to abandon children to the demons and dragons of this world.

[00:14:39]But again for my own part I would say the reason this ideological capture has gone so far. The reason why it has destroyed your favorite hero. The reason why death comes for franchise after franchise after franchise of things you loved as children. The reason why Marvel is pushing horror stories based upon climate change. The reason why they want to indoctrinate your children into heroes that only push progressive ideas.

[00:15:07]The reason why story book writers of children's books want to whisper in their ear is to tell them that angels do not exist, that heaven does not exist, that heroes do not exist. Because, as Chesterton quite rightly pointed out, this will abandon them to the dragons and the demons. This will ensure they have no idea that evil can be defeated.

[00:15:32]That they have no way to choose to be heroic. That they are mere puppets of strings and levers in this vast darkness. And if they want to in any way simply mitigate their pain, they must submit themselves to those that hold the keys of this dungeon.

[00:15:55]All right, I'll leave it there. If I've given you anything new to think about, hit like. Hit the shield in the lower right hand corner of your screen to subscribe and leave me a comment. Tell me what you think about any and all of this. I'll see you all later. Bye.