Apocalypse of the Modern Mind
By Daniel Joseph Polikoff
Portal Books, 2025
NEW RELEASE OCTOBER 14, 2025
Apocalypse of the Modern Mind is the second volume of Daniel Polikoff’s Reset or Renaissance series. The first (Two Roads: An American Scholar’s Covid Chronicle) tells us what really happened during Covid. This compelling sequel tells us—not only how—but why.
The democratic impulse that emerged with such dramatic effect (first in America and later in Europe) grew out of a rich soil of ideas revolving around the most profound and far-reaching concerns: the status of divine and natural law and the relationship of the one to the other; the respective provinces of reason and of faith; the nature and destiny of humanity. It is in reviewing and recollecting that rich intellectual history that we can gain insight into the principles underlying the philosophy of democracy and (more generally) the truly liberal impulse that engendered modernity. It is that order of comprehension, as well, that enables vision of the counterfeit side of that precious coin: the deformation of liberal and democratic ideals implicit in the nefarious “dialectic of enlightenment” and its frightening consequence: the technocratic authoritarianism so dramatically displayed in the Covid era.
Polikoff is concerned here not only with the dark shadows that creep in under the door of our enlightened modernity, but with radical solutions to the problems thus posed: solutions suggested by those bearers of a renewed Romantic or Transcendentalist idea of what enlightenment really means.
A visionary and morally courageous response to the crisis of the Covid era . . .
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In Apocalypse of the Modern Mind, Daniel Polikoff breaks ranks with the “liberal” consensus, critiquing its unquestioning compliance with the prevailing narrative and fervent disavowal of contrary viewpoints. He exposes the “perversion of logic” and “nightmarish betrayal” that transformed “liberalism into left-wing authoritarianism and democracy into autocracy.”
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Addressing the dual legacy (both emancipatory and oppressive) of the Enlightenment, Polikoff details the insidious threat posed by technocracy and the globalist Great Reset agenda. He sketches, too, the historical foundation of an alternative to the materialistic worldview of secular society, heralding the recovery of Emersonian transcendentalism and a principled liberal democracy as the basis of what could be a new sort of Renaissance. At once a brilliant diagnosis of the perils of our time and a sweeping philosophical and historical survey that seeks to reconnect us with the spiritual roots of Western culture, Apocalypse is a superb achievement.
—KEIRON LE GRICE, author of The Archetypal Cosmos
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History, they say, is written by the winners. I would argue that history is best written by witnesses, those who chronicle the triumphs and horrors of an age with unflinching honesty. In Apocalypse of the Modern Mind, Daniel Polikoff takes on the mantle of recording angel as he limns this battle of truth versus propaganda, the integrity of the human person versus the ghastly spectre of transhumanism, and true enlightenment versus the dark shadows cast by "spiritual wickedness in high places." His is a voice of thunder. Come and hear.
—MICHAEL MARTIN, author of Sophia in Exile