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Aware of the disorientating nature [a bureaucratic life] demands, Havel gave the practical advice to "live within the truth." I take this to mean, in part, to practice good without evaluation, knowing it to be good.

But how does an agnostic know that something is "good," such that he can "live within it?"

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

This, above all else. And this is precisely what the Machiavellian, Gramscian Left has worked so hard to strip from our culture and from our inner selves.

And is it not those same Marxist materialists who deem us no better, and in many cases, less than than things, animals or machines? And was it not O'Brien who promised Winston that their aim was to hollow out human beings and fill them with themselves?

We have now gone sufficiently far enough down the road to totalitarianism that there is only one way to stop them. Only one way.

But how does an agnostic know that something is "good," such that he can "live within it?"

For some, what is good can be known as an experience of pneumatic consciousness. Putting epistemological pressure on that experience will increase the risk of aperzeptionsverweigerung, the disease of aversion that Dr. Voegelin was quick to sniff out.