Not only is there always a state religion, but there is always a king of some sort, a father of the country. Likewise there is always a class of priests and judges, always a class of warrior nobles, always a class of merchants, always monastics and hermits, a market, a language, families, patriarchs, prophets, sex roles, etc. These things are built into man. They can be suppressed for a while, or injured, but not permanently eliminated from the constitution of human society. You can’t get rid of them, any more than you can get rid of the pancreas or the spleen. The functions they mediate must be mediated, and one way or another they will be mediated.

Language for example will insist on telling the truth about things no matter how much you try to prevent it doing so, because that is its function: to convey accurate information. The truth must be spoken, or it’s no good saying anything. So you can’t make true statements impermissible, or impossible, and still have a society. Free speech then about everything except what is holy is a practical forecondition of society as such. The truth cannot be gainsayed; not for long; not for more than a few minutes, really. This is why our PC commissars must keep inventing new euphemisms for that which must not be noticed but is nevertheless always, willy nilly, noticed. E.g., “youth.” No one is ever fooled by such nice circumlocutions, not for a moment. The language itself, by its very nature, shreds them to rags almost the instant they are fabricated; for they cannot work even as circumlocutions unless everyone knows quite well just what it is that they would like to indicate without mentioning.

Likewise, unless most people suddenly change their minds about what is good and desirable, a black market will spring up if you make the matter thereof illegal, or otherwise make it inconvenient for buyers and sellers to find each other and reach agreements. Exchange must happen, or society can’t. No deals, no agreements, no societies, no shares, no sharing, no companies, no companionship. Exchange is how we arrange to break bread together, and operates within and among all social organisms, even within families. Forbid or prevent it, and you prevent social intercourse as such, by preventing honest speech: language is the means by which we negotiate with each other about what is to be done; so Mercury is god both of language and of markets and their merchants, his namesakes.

Again, people need and want men who are moral authorities, wise about the true relations of the world to its ultimate source, end, and context, and thus its meaning, to guide their thinking, and correct their policies, and mediate their reconciliations with reality when they have erred and wounded. So they will have them, even when priesthood is ostensibly illegal. There will then always be priests of some sort: literally, presbyters, elders, men old in sapience if not in years thanks to their long study at the pinnacles of thought and experience. Nor can society do without sages and holy men, who can run schools where the young learn how things really work, and so how men ought to behave, and who can maintain the daily round of prayer and chanting that must never cease if the world is not to come undone.

A people without sages, without seers or prophets – the genuine article, mind, not some ersatz huckster peddling mumbo jumbo and farming a coterie of followers – is witless indeed, and lost, and not long for this earth. So there are always sages, in societies that are not dying, or in the bits of them that still live. They might not be officially recognized, of course. But everyone in the neighborhood knows the local sagamore, and the local wise woman.

What then also would we do without poets and musicians, comedians and fools? Or eccentrics, loners, wags, odd ducks, black sheep? Think of Newton, or Spinoza, ill-fit for society, yet indispensable for their quirks.

Similar considerations can be adduced for fathers and mothers, technicians, craftsmen, and engineers, builders and masons, scribes and lawyers, doctors and nurses, merchants, brokers, and traders, and market makers. And soldiers, of course: grunts, cops, condottieri, dukes, earls, fell hard practical men, of good character or bad.

Nature abhors a dearth of any such sorts of people, for their characteristic operations are each needful if society is to work as it should.

Almost by definition, projects of social reform propose to deform or delete one or another social function, or its functionaries, so that it doesn’t work properly any more. But society is a dynamic and homeostatic system, that needs – and, so, wants – all its natural functions working right. When it is pushed on, it responds accordingly, to restore its natural and proper balance, in just the way that the body diseased or wounded coordinates all its activities toward healing. E.g., the more that the feminist establishment insists that women and men are basically the same, and that women should be just like men, the more women dress to emphasize their sexual differences from men. Immodest fashion is the compensation of the female sex for the feminist deformation of their wonted, natural and proper political role.

Just as you can’t mock God, can’t argue with truth, can’t fool Mother Nature, so you can’t succeed at being inhuman.