Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
When teaching us how to discern false prophets from true, Our Lord Jesus Christ taught us to “Judge the tree by its fruits.” In our next two newsletters and in more detail in an article soon to be posted on the Kolbe website, we will examine the rotten fruits of the popular philosophy which holds that competition is the engine of creativity and progress, a philosophy that has gone hand in hand with evolutionism, but which has also been embraced by some “conservative” thinkers who believe that competition is a key to building character and fostering a strong economy. We will see that there is no sound scientific basis for the idea that competition is the engine of creativity and progress and that the fruits of this philosophy have been extremely negative for society. On the contrary, we will see how scientific advances have illuminated God’s divine design of cooperation throughout the biosphere, how a magnificent Catholic culture in the Middle Ages flourished through cooperation, and that a sound Catholic economy and society should be based on cooperation, and not on competition among its members.
“Survival of the Fittest”
One of the many tragedies of modern times is the way that some conservative Catholics have followed their separated brethren into error by associating laissez-faire capitalism with traditional Christian morality. In this newsletter we will see how this error went hand in hand with the widespread acceptance of the molecules-to-man evolutionary hypothesis within Catholic academia, even as many Catholic intellectuals and Church leaders used the same evolutionary pseudo-science to justify their embrace of liberation theology, sexual perversion, and other serious deviations from traditional Catholic doctrine in faith and morals, first and foremost in regard to the supernatural creation of all things at the beginning of time.
The biological conjectures of Charles Darwin were welcomed by many contemporary philosophers who believed that “struggle for existence” in the economic and social sphere, as in nature, led to social and economic progress. Philosopher Herbert Spencer actually originated the phrase “survival of fittest,” and according to one author:
In 1884 [Spencer] argued, for instance, that people who were unemployable or burdens on society should be allowed to die rather than be made objects of help and charity. To do this, apparently, would weed out unfit individuals and strengthen the race. It was a horrible philosophy that could be used to justify the worst impulses of human beings.
In his excellent study of the negative impact of Darwinian evolution on the economic elite of the Western world, Dr. Jerry Bergman demonstrates how men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller used the “survival of the fittest” philosophy to justify ruthless contempt for the rights of workers and business competitors:
The robber barons’ lack of concern for the social welfare of the community, and even their companies’ own workers, ruined millions of lives. Injuries on the job due to unsafe working conditions were a major cause of death and permanent injury for decades during this period. The yearly total of such deaths, injury and illness in the USA around 1900 has been estimated at around a million workers.
Conditions such as unguarded motor belt drives and power shafts on machines were the norm, and routinely caused the loss of fingers, hands and even whole limbs. For the workers, loss of body parts was almost an inevitable result of a lifetime of factory or industrial employment. Surveys of workers revealed that over half sustained serious injuries, ranging from loss of appendages to loss of vision or hearing, during their work career. In some vocations, virtually every worker suffered injury. For example, almost all workers who manufactured stiff-brimmed hats suffered from mercury poisoning, and almost all workers who painted radium dials sooner or later were stricken by cancer.
Even when the employers were fully aware of the dangers their workers faced, most did little or nothing to improve the conditions of their factory. Many steel mill foundry workers worked 12 hour shifts in 47°C heat for $1.25 a day. President Harrison said in 1892 that the average American worker was subject to danger every bit as great as soldiers in war. Upton Sinclair immortalized the atrocious conditions for workers in the meat packing industry in his now classic book The Jungle, first published in 1906. The Jungle was widely considered a major catalyst in changing labour laws, and eventually was translated into 17 languages and sold millions of copies. This book so moved Theodore Roosevelt that he worked tirelessly to reform business avarice. The result included the passage of a stream of important labour laws, as well as the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Human lives were considered so expendable by many capitalists that hundreds needlessly died laying railroad track alone. They died from poor living conditions provided by the railroad, from the heat and cold, from disease, and from Indian attacks. An excellent example of this exploitation occurred when J.P. Morgan purchased 5,000 defective rifles for $3.50 each and sold them to the army for $22.00 each. The defect caused the rifle to occasionally shoot off the thumbs of its users. The victims sued, and a federal judge upheld the sale as legal and appropriate. In this case, as was common then, the courts usually sided with the robber barons.
Many judges were schooled in Darwinism and, as they often also accepted the survival-of-the-fittest ideology, they concluded that the lives of common men and women were worth little. As one employer noted when asked to build roof protection for his workers, ‘Men are cheaper than shingles’. The ruthlessness of the capitalists was so extreme that eventually governments the world over passed hundreds of laws against these common practices. Laws against monopolies are only one example of a result of the corruption common during this era of American history.
“All is Well since All Grows Better”
Dr. Bergman documents how men like Andrew Carnegie who had been raised as Christians abandoned Christianity to embrace evolution-based utopianism:
Andrew Carnegie, in his day reported to be the richest man in the world and the undisputed leader of the steel industry, also once professed a belief in Christianity, but abandoned it for Darwinism and became a close friend of the famous social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. He evidently was introduced to Darwinism by a group of ‘free and enlightened thinkers … seeking a new “religion of humanity”’ that met in the home of a New York University professor. Carnegie stated in his autobiography that when he and several of his friends came to doubt the teachings of the Bible,
… including the supernatural element, and indeed the whole scheme of salvation through vicarious atonement and all the fabric built upon it, I came fortunately upon Darwin’s and Spencer’s works … . I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. “All is well since all grows better” became my [laissez-faire] motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection . . .
John D. Rockefeller reportedly once stated that the ‘growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest … the working out of a law of nature …’. The Rockefellers, while maintaining a Christian front, fully embraced evolution and dismissed Genesis as mythology. When a philanthropist pledged $10,000 to help found a university to be named after William Jennings Bryan, John D. Rockefeller Jr retaliated the very same day with a $1,000,000 donation to the openly anti-creationist University of Chicago Divinity School.
It is no coincidence that the same men who championed the “survival of the fittest” and who took pride in putting their competitors out of business also financed the communist revolution in Russia in 1917. In fulfillment of Our Lady of Fatima’s warnings, the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. To all appearances, the leader of the October Revolution was Vladmir Lenin whom the German government had conspired to send back into Russia during the First Word War to destabilize the Russian government and to weaken its military resolve. But Lenin was also heavily financed by international financiers with strong ties to the occult and to international freemasonry. One of the most important of Lenin’s financial backers was the Englishman Alfred Lord Milner, a 33rd degree Mason, and a member of a secret society whose goal was to establish a New World Order with an elite government. A magazine published by Milner’s society after October 1917 called the Bolshevik Revolution a great event, which had liberated the people by getting rid of the Russian monarchy. This accorded well with Freemasonry’s agenda to destroy the Catholic Church and to replace Christian monarchies with secular democracies, prior to consolidating political power in the hands of an elite governing body of a New World Order. In their view, the outdated sentimentality of Christianity with its dedication to serving the weak and the poor needed to give way to an economic and political system that would help society to “evolve” to perfection under the guidance of an elite capable of managing the economic and social life of the whole world with scientific precision.
Milner was not the only international financier with occult connections who supported Lenin. According to Professor Antony Sutton, State Department files revealed that a member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank, William Boyce Thompson, gave Lenin $1,000,000. Thompson was represented in Russia by a man named Robins who had so much influence over Lenin that he could literally order Lenin about. Robins also represented billionaire J.P. Morgan, author of the famous saying “millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do,” and Colonel Edward Mandel House, an unelected advisor to President Woodrow Wilson, who dominated Wilson throughout his presidency and who influenced the president and other world leaders not to resist the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The support of men like Milner, Thompson, House and Morgan for the communist revolution in Russia may help to explain why more than twenty times as much food, clothing, and medical supplies was sent from the United States to the Bolsheviks as was sent to support the White Army in its efforts to overthrow the communists. It may also help to explain why British and American financiers cut off all aid to the leaders of the White Army when they were about to defeat the Bolsheviks.
It is ironic that one of the voices of economic sanity in Russia leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution was the Russian anarchist author Kropotkin whose book Fields, Factories and Workshops offered many well-documented examples of the benefits of economic cooperation rather than competition. Commenting on the thriving market for Danish butter at the beginning of the twentieth century he wrote:
Everyone knows that it is now Danish butter which rules the prices in the London market, and that this butter is of a high quality, which can only be attained in co-operative creameries with cold storage and certain uniform methods in producing butter. But it is not generally known that the Siberian butter, which is now imported in immense quantities into this country, is also a creation of the Danish co-operators. When they began to export their butter in large quantities, they used to import butter for their own use from the southern parts, of the West Siberian provinces of Tobolsk and Tomsk, which are covered with prairies very similar to those of Winnipeg in Canada. At the outset this butter was of a most inferior quality, as it was made by every peasant household separately. The Danes began therefore to teach co-operation to the Russian peasants, and they were rapidly understood by the intelligent population of this fertile region. The co-operative creameries began to spread with an astounding rapidity, without us knowing for some time wherefrom came this interesting movement. At the present time a steamer loaded with Siberian butter leaves every week one of the Baltic ports and brings to London many thousands of casks of Siberian butter.
Had the international financiers who funded the Bolshevik Revolution allowed Russia to develop without outside interference, there is every reason to believe that she would have continued to develop economically, as She had been doing rapidly under the guidance of Count Sergei Witte before the outbreak of the First World War. It was primarily the German military leadership that sought to widen the scope and intensity of the First World War, forcing Russia to waste enormous economic and human resources in a fruitless conflict with Germany. In the words of one German general on the eve of World War I:
War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow . . . Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.
As we shall see in our next newsletter, there was no basis in biology for this nonsense, and yet the war to end all wars and the “worse one” already predicted by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917 might never have taken place had not the pseudo-science of evolution gained ascendancy in the minds of the military elite of the western world by the dawn of the twentieth century.
Through the prayers of Our Lady of Fatima, may the Holy Ghost deliver us from all evil and error and lead us all into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Thanks to the generosity of narrator Michael Warner and of Steve Cunningham, the director of Sensus Fidelium, our book Loved, Lost and Found is being recorded and posted in audio format chapter by chapter on the Sensus Fidelium Youtube channel. You can listen to the first three chapters at this link.
P.P.S. We are almost a quarter of the way to our Give, Send, Go fundraiser goal, which we hope to achieve by the grace of God by the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. December 8, 2025, will mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation in the Jubilee Year 2000. If you have not donated to the Give, Send, Go, please go to the website at this link and make a donation as soon as possible.
