Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jeffrey A Tucker
“What happened to progress? It’s been replaced. The new path is flagellantism: in politics, culture, economics, and everywhere. The flagellants were a medieval movement of public penitents that roamed from town to town in garbs of woe, flogging themselves and begging as penance for pestilence and war. They were infused with a fiery, apocalyptic, and millenarian passion that they could see terrible moral realities to which others were blinded. The theory was that plagues were being visited upon the earth by God as punishment for sin. The answer was contribution, sorrow, and acts of penance as a means of appeasement, in order to make the bad times go away.” (11/12/23)
https://brownstone.org/articles/flagellantism-is-the-new-political-ritual/