Another.

“The emotion of Love is an act of 

personal identification with an 

external Other, when the awareness of that person is 

so overwhelming that any 

illusion of separation between 

The Two collapses. 

There is a reason why 

the biblical term for 

physical Love was 

‘To Know’ someone. 

As such it is distinctly different from the isolating Individualism so dominant in the rest of the century. What it is not, however, is 

an easily extendable organisational principle 

that can readily be applied 

to Society as a whole. 

Christianity had done its best 

to promote Love during the 

previous two centuries. 

The Church ordered 

its followers to Love, 

through commandments 

such as ‘Love Thy Neighbour’, 

as if this was reasonable 

or possible. 

But ordering people to Love 

was about as realistic 

as ordering people 

not to Love. 

Love just doesn’t work that way, 

and it doesn’t inspire confidence 

in The Church that it 

seemed to think it did. 

It is noticeable that the more individualistic strains of American Christianity, which bucked the global trend of declining congregations, put less emphasis on that faith’s original teachings about Love and Social Justice. 

The love culture of the hippies was brought low by the egofuelling cocaine culture of the 1970s and 80s. Attempts at describing a non-individualistic perspective were dismissed for being drug-induced, and therefore false. The hippies’ stumbling attempts to describe their new awareness had been too vague and insubstantial to survive these attacks and they were written off as embarrassing failures by the punks. Yet slowly, over the decades that followed, many of their ideas seeped into the cultural mainstream. 

One way to understand the Twentieth Century’s embrace of Individualism is to raise a child 

and wait until he or she 

becomes a teenager. 

A younger child accepts their place in The Family hierarchy, but as soon as they become a teenager their attention shrinks from the wider group and focuses on themselves. Every incident or conversation becomes filtered through the ever-present analysis of ‘What about Me?’ Even the most loving 

and caring child will exhibit thoughtlessness and self-obsession. The concerns of others become minor factors in their thinking, 

and attempts to highlight this 

are dismissed by the 

catch-all argument, 

‘It’s not fair.’

There is a neurological basis for this 

change. Neuroscientists report that adolescents are more self-aware and self-reflective than 

prepubescent children. 

Aleister Crowley may have been on to something when he declared that The Patriarchal Age was ending and that The ‘Third Æon’ 

we were entering would 

be The Age of 

The Crowned and 

Conquering Child.”