The Philosophical Nuremberg: The Trial of Absolutism

The courtroom of humanity is open again. No smoke, no swords, only the clear light of reason. The defendant is not a person or a faith, but a habit of thought older than history—the belief that truth can be owned. This is the trial of absolutism, that ancient reflex which demands submission in exchange for certainty, which begins with a command and ends with a graveyard.

It began in the desert, where scarcity taught obedience. A man heard a voice ordering him to sacrifice his child, and instead of questioning the voice, he called it God. From that obedience grew the first monopoly on truth. The Hebrew command “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” created the template for every future empire of the mind. One truth, one ruler, one tribe. All who disagreed were outsiders—the condemned needed to make the chosen feel chosen.

Then came the perfection of control: eternal punishment. Isaiah warned that sinners’ “fire shall not be quenched,” Revelation promised that “the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever,” and the Qurʾān declared that those who reject the signs of God will have their skins burned and replaced “that they may taste the punishment” (4:56). For the first time, fear itself became infinite. Doubt was criminalized beyond death. The imagination of hell was humanity’s first concept of total surveillance.

When theology acquired empire, revelation became law. Deuteronomy commanded, “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth,” and Mark declared, “He that believeth not shall be damned.” Each text converted difference into danger. The same grammar reappears wherever the many are forced to become one. It is the grammar of conquest. From the deserts of Canaan to the libraries of Alexandria, the rule was constant: knowledge threatens monopoly; therefore knowledge must burn.

Absolutism survives by changing its name. When the Enlightenment dethroned God, the structure of command looked for a new throne and found it in ideology. The twentieth century became theology without heaven. Hitler called it race; Stalin called it class. Both preached one infallible truth, both promised paradise, both built hells. The line from “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” to “The Party is always right” is straight. Different nouns, identical syntax.

The court of Reason reviews the evidence. In every age, absolutism divides the world into the saved and the condemned. It requires heresy to prove its holiness. Its miracles are obedience; its sacraments are fear. It breeds the same hierarchy again and again: the high priest becomes commissar, the revelation becomes manifesto, the tithe becomes tax. Beneath the vocabulary, the equation is constant—faith equals control.

Dialectical Materialism testifies that ideas mirror material struggle. The desert’s scarcity produced divine monopoly; industrial scarcity produced ideological monopoly. When resources multiply, power reinvents scarcity as purity. Logical Empiricism supplies the cross-examination: a claim that forbids testing is not knowledge but authority. “God wills it,” “History demands it,” “The Market knows best”—all are unverified decrees dressed as inevitability.

The victims testify next. Socrates, Bruno, Hypatia, Galileo, Spinoza—their only crime was to ask how do you know? Every age of dogma kills that question first. The deserts had their martyrs; the modern world has its prisons, its silences, its self-censorship. Absolutism always begins by sanctifying truth and ends by outlawing curiosity.

The faithful are not the villains of this story. They are its casualties. From the pulpit to the party cell, they were told that obedience was virtue and doubt betrayal. They inherited fear the way children inherit debt. The real beneficiaries were always the elites who administered redemption—the priesthoods of belief and ideology alike. Fear became their currency; guilt their tax. As long as people felt unworthy, the hierarchy stayed solvent.

The prosecution’s case closes with the record of civilization itself. Every breakthrough in knowledge came from rebellion against command. When minds were free to test rather than kneel, medicine replaced miracle, astronomy replaced astrology, democracy replaced divine right. Progress is the autobiography of heresy.

Now Reason delivers its verdict. Absolutism—religious, political, or economic—is guilty of crimes against the mind. Its sentence is demystification. Its scriptures are returned to literature; its leaders to history; its doctrines to debate. Their truths must stand or fall by evidence. No text is infallible, no authority beyond question. The penalty is not destruction but daylight.

But the court grants mercy. Humanity itself is acquitted. The instinct for meaning was never the crime; the crime was the monopoly on meaning. Believers are freed from compulsory belief, skeptics from inherited guilt. The age of command yields to the age of comprehension.

The new covenant is written not on stone but in method: every claim must be testable, every life autonomous, every mind sacred because it can question. Ethics arises from empathy, not decree. Doubt is the beginning of integrity. Compassion is the last law.

The judge—Reason itself—rises. “Having heard the witnesses of history,” it declares, “the Court sentences absolutism to exposure. Its weapon was fear; its defeat is understanding. Let every revelation submit to experiment, every ideology to evidence, every miracle to replication or retirement.” The gavel falls. The hall of humanity exhales.

Outside, light enters the ruins. The same hands that once built altars now build observatories. The same longing that once prayed now studies. The gods remain as metaphors, the revolutions as lessons, the doctrines as poetry—but none again as masters. The deserts that birthed monopoly give way to gardens of inquiry. Humanity, for the first time, belongs to itself.

The verdict stands. Truth is not a possession but a pursuit. The age of fear is over. The age of understanding has begun.