One thing we have been careful to always keep in mind over the preceding pages is the blindness that is the price to be paid in exchange for the prowess of applying to matters social a scientific method, carried by the implicit infallibility of its objectivist and intellectual claims. Our Lacanians also tell us that we are even relieved or happy to pay it. Surely, but be this as it may, the point is that the intellectual or objectivist understanding of major social phenomena has flawed and compromised our sense-making potential. Too much of the social world, including issues of origin, identity, certainty, love, is written in an affective grammar and vocabulary, not in an intellectual one. Religions, we have argued, do satisfy this exigency of overflowing meaning, since identification with its images and participation in ritual acts by themselves construct and maintain the sense of the world in accordance with a holy, not a conceptual sense. This is why, although our age is defined by declining religiosity in the sense of belief and far more, participation in scientific acts of observation and analysis of the world in terms of scientific epistemology, the stuff of particular religious ‘cultures’ – postulates and cosmological axioms embedded in images, rituals and formulaic imaginations – continue to be desired or repressed as objects of ‘blind’ trust or mistrust. We have already mentioned a number of legal cases regarding the presence of the cross in Italian schools, in which the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) trusts as a symbol of universal values, as opposed to minarets in Switzerland or the burqa in France, which the ECtHR sees as active symbols of a tribal religion. Critics see in these decisions the validation, or influence, of Carl Schmitt's claim, in The Concept of the Political that the unity of a people – in this case the people of ‘Europe’ – derives from a decision about friends and enemies based upon a presumed substantial sameness and equality between the members of a polity. As Hans Kelsen noted, however, tongue-in-cheek, it ‘is more than doubtful whether the members of a polity can identify any set of qualities, moral or otherwise, which univocally and uncontroversially defines them as a political unity’.