IRONY AND TIN

On Incarnation, Managerial Power, and Why Certain Hats Are Suddenly in Fashion

CONVERSATIONS UNDER THE KNIFE

(December 19, 2025)

Mrs. Begonia Contretemp (opening, briskly):

Mrs. Begonia Contretemp:

One is told, rather insistently, that the world is run by a hidden elite—and that anyone inclined to notice such things should be politely fitted with a tinfoil hat and escorted out of the conversation. For clarity’s sake, let us sort the costumes. The Aluminati are what we currently call conspiracy theorists, caricatured as “tinfoil hat people.” They do not rule the world, and they are not a secret order. If scrutiny is due, it belongs instead to the self-styled Illuminati: the managerial elite who imagine history can be quietly administered, optimized, and kept free of myth. The Aluminati are merely accused of noticing patterns too vividly.

I’m joined today by John St. Evola, to talk about why power so often misunderstands the forms that eventually replace it.

Mrs. Begonia:

John, why does every age insist that one group secretly runs everything, while another group is ridiculed for suspecting it?

John St. Evola:

Because those are the two permanent temperaments of civilization. One believes the world is run by systems—finance, administration, logistics, expertise. The other believes the world is run by meaning—symbols, rituals, hidden narratives. Neither is sufficient on its own. History survives by forcing them to collide.

Mrs. Begonia:

You’re describing a dialectic.

John:

Christianity already supplied it. That’s what people miss.

Rome believed order descended from abstraction: law, hierarchy, marble, administration. Early Christians insisted meaning arrived through flesh—through story, sacrifice, incarnation. Rome called that irrational. History called it adaptive.

Mrs. Begonia:

And the divine, inconveniently, arrived as a baby.

John:

Yes. Christianity is founded, at least in part, on irony—not sarcasm, but reversal. Power arrives disguised as weakness. Authority declines to look impressive. God enters history through a human body born to humble parents. That’s not sentiment; it’s the operating principle.

Mrs. Begonia:

Philip K. Dick once put it bluntly: “The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum of our culture.” By this he meant that genuine revelation rarely arrives through prestige, refinement, or official channels. It appears first in the disregarded, the embarrassing, the low-status places—where no one is managing appearances and no institution is on guard. The sacred slips in where nobody is looking, precisely because power assumes nothing important could happen there.

John:

Because no one guards those places. Prestige has security. Revelation prefers the unmonitored. A manger is simply the ancient equivalent of the forgotten lot behind the strip mall. The numinous goes where management isn’t looking.

And it’s worth remembering that a manger is not a poetic abstraction but an animal feeding trough. The word comes from the Latin manducare—to chew, to eat—passing through Old French manger and Italian mangiare. The Incarnation does not arrive at what is exalted or impressive; it arrives where bodies are fed. That detail isn’t sentimental. It’s the theology.

Mrs. Begonia:

Which makes the Aluminati—our modern tinfoil caricatures—less mad than myth-sensitive.

John:

Often. They’re wrong in particulars, but right in instinct. They sense that power hides and that meaning leaks. Modern culture mocks them not only because they can be foolish, but because they refuse to accept a world explained entirely by flowcharts.

Mrs. Begonia:

Yet they never replace the elites.

John:

No. They’re absorbed. Which is how it always works.

Mrs. Begonia:

Then name the synthesis.

John:

Incarnation.

The Illuminati are the thesis: abstract control, systematized power, governance without myth.

The Aluminati are the antithesis: excessive suspicion, symbolic thinking, pattern recognition without structure.

The synthesis is incarnated power—authority that passes through story, symbol, ritual, and flesh in order to be believed.

Mrs. Begonia:

So the future belongs neither to shadowy administrators nor to people shouting about shadows—but to whoever learns how to translate control into meaning.

John:

Precisely. Levers don’t move unless people believe in the symbols attached to them. Power that refuses incarnation becomes brittle. Meaning that refuses structure dissolves into noise. History keeps producing hybrids whether anyone consents or not.

Mrs. Begonia:

Christianity again.

John:

Always. Christianity didn’t overthrow Rome by exposing it, and it didn’t defeat paganism by mocking it. It inhabited both. Law became theology. Myth became doctrine. Power learned humility; symbolism learned discipline.

Mrs. Begonia:

Which brings us north.

John:

It was the Irish missionaries—the so-called barbarian saints—who carried Christianity into the Germanic tribes. Not as a Roman export, but as a baptized folk religion. Warrior monks. Heroic saints. Local gods re-clothed as angels and dragons. Christianity did not erase European myth; it adopted it.

Mrs. Begonia:

Making it, in practice, a native European religion.

John:

By translation, not by blood. Christianity survives because it consents to incarnation—to being spoken in local grammar, sung in local melodies, worn by local heroes.

Mrs. Begonia:

Which suggests that the real struggle is not Illuminati versus Aluminati, but abstraction versus incarnation.

John:

And incarnation always wins—slowly, quietly, without issuing press releases.

(A pause.)

Mrs. Begonia:

There is, of course, an additional complication—one you’ve carefully avoided until now. The managerial classes you’ve described seem unusually exposed at the moment.

John:

Yes. Masks are useful until they aren’t. What we are witnessing—particularly in the long, uneven unspooling of revelations associated with the L’Affaire Epstein and its widening cultural perimeter—is not simply scandal. It is the vulnerability of abstraction.

Mrs. Begonia:

Meaning?

John:

Managerial power depends on distance: committees, processes, intermediaries, deniability, the shadows. It governs best when it is faceless. But when faces appear—when names, rooms, habits, and preferences become visible—the spell weakens. Authority that refused incarnation is forced into it anyway.

We saw a version of this when the modern Catholic Church was shaken not by doctrine but by the revelation of pedophile priests—an incarnational office suddenly exposed as inhabited by unacknowledged, disordered flesh. The damage came less from embodiment itself than from the long insistence that the body did not matter.

Mrs. Begonia:

So the Illuminati problem is not exposure, but embodiment.

John:

Exactly. They imagined themselves beyond flesh—beyond appetite, beyond consequence. History has a way of reintroducing the body, awkwardly and publicly, without consulting public relations.

Mrs. Begonia:

Which gives the Aluminati their moment—not because they were correct in every detail, but because they insisted that power has a private life.

John:

And private lives eventually become public stories. That is the great equalizer. The irony is almost Christian: those who refused humility are made visible, while those mocked for noticing patterns are told—suddenly—that they noticed something real, if only imperfectly.

Mrs. Begonia:

So the synthesis tightens.

John:

Yes. Power must incarnate whether it wishes to or not. The age of frictionless authority is ending—not through revolution, but through narrative. Through exposure. Through the ancient insistence that nothing abstract remains pure forever.

Mrs. Begonia:

A manger moment for management.

John:

History specializes in those.

Mrs. Begonia:

And irony, as ever, does the heavy lifting—quietly asking whether the joke is already reality wearing a name tag.

More Mrs Begonia Contretemp: HERE