The Uprising of the Soul: On Barbarians in the Halls of Academia and the Courage to Be the Light

When loving the enemy requires you to fight the idea that enslaves him. A call to the spiritual struggle against hypocrisy and the culture of disorder.

May the Peace 🙏🏼 be upon you

Charlie Kirk was assassinated yesterday. With a sniper's bullet to the neck, while in a dialogue with students.

Let that sentence echo for a moment.

Bonum certamen certavi, cursum consummavi, fidem servavi. "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." (Second Letter of St. Paul to Timothy, Chapter 4, Verse 7)

Not the sentence itself, but your reaction to it. There was the initial shock, of course. But, be brutally honest with yourself: Was there surprise? Or did a bitter knot form in the depths of your soul, the terrible realization that this was not an isolated act of madness, but the next, horrifyingly logical step in a spiral of hatred that has become the soundtrack of our time?

The bullet was not for a man. It was for the very idea that the Truth can be spoken aloud.

This is not a text about politics. It is about the anatomy of a hatred that has learned to dress itself in the robes of virtue. And it is about our responsibility in the face of it. In my last testimony, I diagnosed the disease. Today, I want to speak of the cure—which is not a sweet medicine, but a summons to the fight.

Many of you wrote to me, anguished: "How do we fight? How can we love the enemy who wants to annihilate us?" And here lies the wisdom that our Faith offers us, a wisdom that the modern mind, sentimental and cowardly, cannot comprehend. To love your enemy, as Christ teaches us, is not an invitation to capitulation. It is not to allow ourselves to be destroyed, to allow the lie to prevail. To love the soul of the sinner who is held captive by a nefarious ideology requires, out of charity, that we combat the idea that imprisons him with all the force of our intellect and our courage. The struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the Evil that instrumentalizes them. And in this fight, the order is clear:

Fight always, surrender never.

But what is this fight? Where is the arena?

The arena is everywhere the lie attempts to impose itself as truth. And, tragically, one of the most decisive battlefields today is our universities. What should be the temple of knowledge, of the pursuit of Truth, of the discovery of the universals, has become, in too many cases, a dungeon of indoctrination.

Look at what happened to the lawyer Jeffrey Chiquini at the Federal University of Paraná in my country, Brazil. A man invited for a debate, for the exercise of dialectics, who was harassed, assaulted, and held hostage by a mob of barbarians who call themselves "students." I ask you: how can one be a student who does not seek understanding? How can one be a student who answers an argument with a scream, and reason with brute force? What is study, if not the path to an ascesis, the journey of the soul that, through intellectual discipline, seeks enlightenment? Those were not students. They were indoctrinated militants, the living proof of the success of that project of deconstruction I saw being born in the 90s.

And what do we do in the face of this?

For too long, we, the people of good will, those who still believe in order, in truth, and in common sense, have remained silent. We retreated to the safety of our homes and our circles, believing that the absurd would defeat itself. We thought: "This is so deceitful, so illogical, that only the unhinged could possibly believe it."

It was a tragic error. We underestimated the power of the repeated and organized lie. We forgot Plato's Allegory of the Cave. We forgot that there are entire generations who were born and raised in chains, looking at shadows projected on a wall and believing with all their heart that this is reality. They are not evil, for the most part. They are imprisoned. And it is our duty, those of us who by Divine grace have glimpsed the light of the real world, to help them break free.

But this requires action. It requires that we rise up.It is necessary to rise up against the hypocrisy of a false tolerance that is, in truth, a mask for the hatred of all that is good, beautiful, and true.

It is necessary to rise up against the corrupt mentality that permeates our culture, from the grand schemes in our capitals to the small, daily compromises with dishonesty. Against the idea that "what is public belongs to no one," or the egoism of "every man for himself."

It is necessary to rise up and occupy the spaces we have abandoned. The executive chairs, the boards of directors, the commissions, the university professorships, the student unions, the trade unions. Society was taken by assault because we, out of a false and immoral "pacifism," allowed it. Neutrality, in this scenario, does not exist. Silence is complicity.

This is not about answering hatred with hatred. It is about answering the lie with the Truth spoken aloud. About answering manipulation by exposing it with clarity. About answering aggression by denouncing it with courage. About answering disorder with the testimony of an ordered life.

This is the true fight. It is not a war of annihilation, but an uprising of the Truth. A cultural and spiritual reconquest that begins in the only place over which we have true control: ourselves. It begins in the decision to forge our own character, to discipline our own intellect, to order our own soul according to the North Star that does not fail.

And, from there, to act. Each in his own sphere, in his own vocation. The entrepreneur, by creating a culture of virtue and excellence. The professor, by teaching how to think, not what to think. The father and mother, by forming strong children with an unshakeable moral compass. The citizen, by holding power accountable and not abstaining from the public debate.

This is my testimony and my summons. The night may seem dark, but it is precisely in the darkness that the smallest of lights shines most intensely. Let us be that light. The disorder we see out there is merely the mirror of what we have allowed to grow in here. Standing before that mirror today, what is the first lie you will commit to stop tolerating within yourself?

In this battle for the soul of our civilization, neutrality is an illusion. Silence is a vote. On which side is your inaction fighting?

I will see you in the arena of life.

Onward to the SUMMIT ☁️♱

Marcio Almeida

[www.marcioalmeida.co]