Carl Schmitt - Criticism of the Rules Based Order and its 'Values'

 "The validity of values is based on settings.  Who is it now who sets the values here?  In Max Weber we find the clearest and to that extent the most honest answers to this question.  According to him it is the human individual, who in full, pure subjective freedom of decisions sets values.  In this way it avoids the absolute value freedom of scientific positivism and sets its free, that is: subjective worldview against scientific positivism.  The purely subjective freedom of value-setting, however, leads to an eternal battle of values and of worldviews, a war of all against all, an eternal bellum omnium contra omnes, in comparison to which the old bellum omnium contra omnes and even the murderous natural condition of the state philosophy of Thomas Hobbes are veritable idylls.  The old gods step out of their graves and battle their old battle further, but disenchanted and - as we must add today - with new means of battle, which are no longer weapons but execrable means of annihilation and procedures of extermination, gruesome products of value-free science and of the industry and technology that they serve.  What for some is the devil, here for some becomes God.  "And thus it proceeds through all orders of life...and namely for all time."  With such gripping expressions of Max Weber one could fill many pages.  It is always values that stoke the battle and keep enmity awake.  That the old gods have become disenchanted and become merely valid values makes the battle ghostly and the fighters dubiously self-righteous.  That is the nightmarish impression that Max Weber's depictions leaves in its wake..."

 

Carl Schmitt, The Tyranny of Values, pp. 29-30; Telos Press, NY, 2018.

Clement of Alexandria - Against the Heathen (Kairos?)

 'Well, now, let us say in addition, what inhuman demons, and hostile to the human race, your gods were, not only delighting in the insa...