The panorama presented here would be incomplete were we to fail to mention an internal transformation in the Third Revolution. It is the Fourth Revolution that is being born of it.

It is being born, yes, in the manner of a matricidal refinement. When the Second Revolution was born, it refined,⁸⁸ overcame, and dealt a mortal blow to the First Revolution. The same occurred when, by an analogous process, the Third Revolution sprang from the second.

Everything indicates that the Third Revolution has now arrived at the moment, at once culminating and fatal, when it generates the Fourth Revolution and thus exposes itself to being killed by it.

In the clash between the Third Revolution and the Counter-Revolution, will there be time for the process that generates the Fourth Revolution to develop entirely? Will the latter effectively open a new stage in the history of the Revolution? Or will it be simply an abortive phenomenon, which will rise up and disappear without having a major influence in the clash between the Third Revolution and the Counter-Revolution? The greater or lesser space to be reserved for the Fourth Revolution in these hurried and summary notes would depend on the answer to this question - an answer that only the future can give completely.

Since what is uncertain should not be treated as if it had the importance of what is certain, we will devote a very limited space to what seems to be the Fourth Revolution.

1. The Fourth Revolution Foretold By The Authors Of The Third Revolution
As is well known, neither Marx nor the generality of his most notorious followers (whether orthodox or heterodox) considered the dictatorship of the proletariat to be the final phase of the revolutionary process. This dictatorship is, according to them, nothing but the most refined, dynamic aspect of the universal Revolution. And, in the evolutionist mythology inherent to the thinking of Marx and his followers, just as evolution will develop to infinity over the centuries, so also the Revolution will be endless. From the First Revolution, two other revolutions have already been born. The third, in its turn, will generate another. And so on...

It is impossible to predict within the Marxist perspective what the Twentieth or Fiftieth Revolution would be like. However, it is possible to predict what the Fourth Revolution will be like. This prediction has already been made by the Marxists themselves.

This revolution will necessarily be the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a result of a new crisis. Pressured by this crisis, the hypertrophic state will be victim of its own hypertrophy. And it will disappear, giving rise to a scientistic and cooperationist state of things in which - so the communists say - man will have attained a heretofore inconceivable degree of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

2. The Fourth Revolution And Tribalism: An Eventuality?
How shall this come to pass? We cannot but wonder if the tribal society dreamed of by today´s structuralist currents provides the answer to this question. Structuralism sees in tribal life an illusory synthesis between the height of individual liberty and of consentaneous collectivism, in which the latter ends up devouring liberty. In this collectivism, the various "I´s" or the individual persons, with their intelligence, will, and sensibility, and consequently with their characteristic and conflictual ways of being, merge and dissolve in the collective personality of the tribe, which generates one thought, one will, and one style of being intensely common to all.

Of course, the road to this tribal state of things must pass through the extinction of the old standards of individual reflection, volition, and sensibility. These will be gradually replaced by forms of thought, deliberation, and sensibility that are increasingly collective. It is, therefore, principally in this field that the transformation must take place.

In what manner? In tribes, the cohesion among the members is assured mainly by a way of thinking and feeling common to all, from which result common habits and a common will. Individual reason is reduced to almost nothing, in other words, to the first and most elementary movements that this atrophied state permits. "Savage thought,"⁸⁹ the thought that does not think and is turned only to what is concrete - such is the price of the tribal collectivist fusion. It belongs to the witch doctor to maintain, on a mystical level, this collective psychic life by means of totemic cults charged with confused "messages" but rich in the ignes fatui or even fulgurations emanating from the mysterious world of transpsychology or parapsychology. By acquiring these "riches," man would compensate for the atrophy of reason.

Reason - formerly hypertrophied by free interpretation of the Scriptures, Cartesianism, and other causes, divinized by the French Revolution, used to the point of the most unabashed abuse in every communist school of thought - would now be atrophied and enslaved by transpsychological and parapsychological totemism.

A. The Fourth Revolution and the Preternatural
"Omnes dii gentium daemonia" ("All of the gods of the gentiles are devils"), say the Scriptures.⁹⁰ In this structuralist perspective, in which magic is presented as a form of knowledge, to what degree may a Catholic perceive the deceitful flashes, the canticle (at once sinister and attractive, soothing and delirious, atheistic and fetishistically credulous) with which, from the bottom of the abysses where he lies eternally, the Prince of Darkness attracts those who have denied Jesus Christ and His Church?

This is a question that theologians can and should discuss. We mean the real theologians, that is, the few who still believe in the existence of the devil and hell, especially the few among these few who have the courage to face the scorn and persecution of the mass media and to speak out.

B. Structuralism and Pre-tribal Tendencies
To the extent that one sees the structuralist movement as a more or less exact (but, in any event, precursory) figure of the Fourth Revolution, one must view certain phenomena generalized over the last decade or two as preparing and driving the structuralist impetus.

Thus, the overthrow of the traditions of dress in the West, increasingly eroded by nudism, obviously tends toward the appearance and consolidation of habits that will tolerate, at most, the cincture of feathers worn by certain tribes, substituted, where the cold demands it, with coverings somewhat like those used by the Laplanders.

The rapid disappearance of the rules of courtesy can only end up in the absolute simplicity (to use only this qualifier) of tribal manners.

The growing dislike for anything that is reasoned, structured, and systematized, can only lead, in its last paroxysms, to the perpetual and fanciful vagabondage of jungle life, alternating, likewise, with the instinctive and almost mechanical performance of some activities absolutely indispensable to life.

The aversion to intellectual effort, notably to abstraction, theorization, and doctrinal thought, can only induce, ultimately, a hypertrophy of the senses and of the imagination, resulting in the "civilization of the image," about which Paul VI felt duty?bound to warn mankind.⁹¹

Also symptomatic are the ever more frequent idyllic eulogies of a cultural revolution that will generate a postindustrial society, still ill-defined but whose first specimen would be - some say is - Chinese communism.

C. An Unpretentious Contribution
We know full well that panoramic views - always vast and summary - lend themselves to many objections.

Necessarily abbreviated due to the constrictions of the present chapter, our overview is but an unpretentious contribution to the studious reflections of people gifted with that daring and unique finesse of observation and analysis which, in all epochs, enables some men to foresee tomorrow.

D. The Opposition of the Banal
Others, instead of using foresight, will simply do what banal and timid souls have been doing throughout the centuries. Smiling, they will term such transformations impossible. Why? Because they clash with their mental habits; these transformations violate common sense, and for banal men, history normally follows the path of common sense. So, in face of these perspectives, they will incredulously and optimistically smile, just as Leo X smiled about the trivial "quarrel of friars," which was all he saw in the nascent First Revolution. Or they will smile like the "Fenelonian" Louis XVI smiled when he saw the first ferments of the Second Revolution in splendid palace salons, lulled at times by the silvery sound of the harpsichord, or glittering discreetly in bucolic ambiences and scenes like his wife´s Hameau. His smile was no different from that of many high - and some of the highest - dignitaries of the Church and of Western temporal society before the manipulations of smiling post-Stalinist communism or the upheavals announcing the Fourth Revolution.

If one day the Third or Fourth Revolution, aided by ecumenical progressivism in the spiritual realm, takes over the temporal life of humanity, it will be due more to the carelessness and collaboration of these smiling optimistic prophets of common sense than to all the fury of the revolutionary hosts and their propaganda.

Opposition From the Prophets of Common Sense

These are strange prophets indeed, since their prophecies invariably amount to affirmation that nothing will happen.

Eventually their various forms of optimism conflicted so flagrantly with the post-1976 facts that, to retain them, their adepts adopted the fallacious and totally hypothetical hope that the recent events in Eastern Europe will lead to the definitive disappearance of communism and therefore of the revolutionary process it spearheaded until recently.⁹²

E. Ecclesiastical Tribalism and Pentecostalism
Obviously, it is not only the temporal realm that the Fourth Revolution wants to reduce to tribalism. It wants to do the same with the spiritual realm. How this is to be done can already be clearly seen in the currents of theologians and canonists who intend to transform the noble, bone-like rigidity of the ecclesiastical structure - as Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted it and twenty centuries of religious life molded it - into a cartilaginous, soft, and amorphous texture of dioceses and parishes without territories and of religious groups in which the firm canonical authority is gradually replaced by the ascendancy of Pentecostalist "prophets," the counterparts of the structuralist-tribalist witch doctors. Eventually, these prophets will be indistinguishable from witch doctors. The same goes for the progressivist-Pentecostalist parish or diocese, which will take on the appearances of the cell-tribe of structuralism.

The "Demonarchization" of the Ecclesiastical Authorities

In this historical/conjectural perspective, certain modifications in themselves alien to this process could be seen as steps in a transition between the pre-Conciliar status quo and the extreme opposite indicated here.

An example of this would be the trend toward a collegiality viewed as (1) the only acceptable means for exercising power inside the Church and (2) an expression of a "demonarchization" of ecclesiastical authority, whose different levels would become ipso facto much more conditioned by the levels immediately below them.

All this taken to its last consequences could tend toward the stable and universal establishment of popular suffrage inside the Church - not that on occasion she did not use it to fill certain hierarchical offices. In keeping with the dream of the advocates of tribalism, it could eventually result in an indefensible dependence of the whole hierarchy on the laity, as supposedly the only voice of God. Of God? Or of some witch doctor, whether a Pentecostalist guru or a sorcerer, who feeds his "mystical revelation" to a tribalistic laity? Would it be by obeying this laity that the Church hierarchy would fulfill its mission of obeying the will of God Himself?

3. The Duty of The Counter-Revolutionaries In Face Of The Aborning Fourth Revolution
When innumerable facts grouped in a reasonable way suggest hypotheses like this one on the beginning of the Fourth Revolution, what can the counter-revolutionary still do?

In the light of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, it behooves him, first of all, to emphasize the preponderant role that the Revolution in the tendencies⁹³ has in the generative process of this Fourth Revolution and in the world resulting from it. He should prepare to fight, not only alerting men against this preponderance of the tendencies, which is becoming the rule today even though fundamentally subversive of good human order, but also using all legitimate and appropriate means in the tendential field to combat this same revolution in the tendencies. The counter-revolutionaty should also observe, analyze, and foresee the new steps of the process in order to erect as soon as possible every obstacle against the supreme form of tendential revolution and of revolutionary psychological warfare: the aborning Fourth Revolution.

If the Fourth Revolution has time to develop before the Third Revolution attempts its big adventure, the fight against it might call for another chapter of Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Such a chapter, all by itself might take up as much space as that devoted to the three previous revolutions. Why? Because processes of decadence tend to complicate everything almost infinitely. This is why each phase of the Revolution is more complex than the preceding one and obliges the Counter-Revolution to make efforts that are likewise more detailed and complex.

* * *

With these perspectives on the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution and on the future of the work that must be done in face of both, we end these considerations.

Uncertain, like everyone, about tomorrow, we prayerfully raise our eyes to the lofty throne of Mary, Queen of the Universe, while addressing her in a paraphrase of the Psalmist´s words to Our Lord:

Ad te levavi oculos meos, qui habitas in coelis. Ecce sicut oculi servorum in manibus dominorum suorum, sicut oculi ancillae in manibus dominae suae; ita oculi nostri ad Dominam Matrem nostram donec misereatur nostri. (Unto thee I lift up my eyes, unto thee, who dwellest in the heavens. See how the eyes of servants are fixed on the hands of their masters, the eyes of a handmaid on the hand of her mistress! So our eyes are fixed on Our Lady and Mother, waiting for her to have mercy on us.)⁹⁴

Yes, we turn our eyes to Our Lady of Fatima, requesting of her the contrition that will obtain for us the great pardons, the strength to wage the great battles, and the abnegation to be detached in the great victories that will bring the establishing of her Reign. We desire these victories with our whole heart, even if to reach them, the Church and the human race must undergo the apocalyptic - but how just, regenerating, and merciful - chastisements she predicted in 1917 at the Cova da Iria.

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Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira