Just Say Yes to Drags

(For those of you who missed the '60s or didn't see Austin Powers, a drag is a boring or tiresome person.)

There is a rabbinical saying that those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind. I thought of this upon hearing how Muslim terrorists have been downgraded to human-mediated disaster facilitators (or whatever inane language they've come up with), whereas peaceful folks like us are just plain old domestic terrorists, without the suracloaking.

And when I say "people like us," we clearly fit the profile: we are not pleased with Obama's ceding of U.S. power and sovereignty to foreign powers, the expansion of government, his position on immigration, the infringement on our civil liberties, etc. As usual, the left is being inconsistent, because if the people fighting us in Iraq are the equivalent of our founding fathers, and they're not terrorists, then neither are we.

Anyway, back to The Truth of the World, which has nothing -- nothing whatsoever -- to do with Obama or with the left.

Speaking of which. Why is it not possible to coonvert trolls through argumentation? Because that is what they crave. Because they are the "substance of nothing," the troll feels a sort of counterfeit "heft" when his nothing collides with the substance of truth. It's like those giant particle accelerators, which mostly consist of vast stretches of subatomic space. Until the particle strikes against something, it doesn't properly exist.

In turn, you can see why the left is fundamentally narcissistic, as it primarily revolves around the "no" rather than the "yes." For those of you with children, you will have noticed that they first begin to define themselves and internalize boundaries with the "no!" They're too young to know what they are, but at least they can control what they're not with the "no." It's the earliest form of self-definition.

Most of us "move on." But the leftist remains in that stage, which is why, like mtraven, he prides himself on being someone who "questions authority," which again elevates reactionary adolescent rebellion to a lifetime project.

For the secret of life is to utter an enthusiastic yes! to authority, i.e., the authority of absolute truth, or the authority of the Constitution, or the authority of people who are more wise and elevated than we are. Obviously this cannot be an unqualified yes, for that can only be reserved for God. But there is no question that saying yes to genuine authority is a key that unlocks many doors.

Of course, I spent much of my life saying "no" to various legitimate authorities in a way that can now be seen as ludicrously self-flattering. (I even had the bumper sticker, "question authority.") Again, the existential "no" is a very powerful thing. Not for nothing is the last word of Ulysses a symbolic and multidimensional "yes" by Molly Bloom: and yes I said yes I will Yes...

Alert readers will have noticed the reference to this on p. 265 of the Coonifesto, where it is written, A Divine Child, a godsend, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' yes.

Obviously, "bloomin'" refers to Molly Bloom, but it also refers to flowers, which never fail to open up and say "yes" to the central sun. Likewise, in hindsight, I see my almost-too-late decision to have a child as the ultimate "yes" to existence. On the one hand, a child is a godsend; but the child is also "God's end," in more ways than one. After all, God wants us to be fruitful and multiply. But also, there is something "ultimate" in a child, so he can truly feel like "God's end." As you know, being with your child often feels like "heaven" (not to minimize the times that it feels like hell).

I could say more, but we're getting sidetracked. Let us just say that life truly begins when we say yes to God, the final authority. If that makes me an authoritarian, then I'm a so be it cosmonaught.

As HvB was saying, it is quite difficult to convert the errant person by simply pointing out his errors, for this only triggers the defensiveness, the "no," that lends him his false being. Think of a-theists. They define themselves by their opposition to God. Without God, what would they be? The "hole" at the center of their being would be exposed, so they would merely be a-holes.

Notice that Jesus rarely argued. Rather, he only offered. "Here it is. Take it or leave it." Thus, HvB says that the errant person is only "cured of his ways" by truly seeing the ideal, and then feeling repentance for his failure to live up to it. You might say that repentance is the measure of the gap between what we are and who we need to be. Which is why we never stop repenting, for we can never be God. And this, of course, is why no one repents more than the saint.

But unless another knower bears witness to the real you, it can be difficult to know of its existence in any positive sense. Rather, it will again manifest in the form of "present absences" or "absent presences," i.e., ghostly symptoms of soul illness.

I was discussing this with an acquaintance just yesterday, a fellow psychologist whom I did not know was a secret conservative -- which you must be if you are to maintain harmonious relations with the kooky world of psychology. Once we realized that we were on the same page, we were free to discuss the collective madness of the left.

I made the point that the structure of a political perversion is really no different than the structure of a sexual one. For example, I remember a patient who had a lifetime shoe fetish. I won't bore you or gross you out with the details, but the point is that he had a sex drive, just like anyone else, except that it had become focused on a dysfunctional end: shoes instead of.

Now, we all have a "spiritual drive." That much is certain. But just like the sex drive, it can be derailed from its true end -- which can only be God -- and focused on other things. This, I believe, is perhaps the "universal key" that opens all forms of leftism, which are otherwise so impenetrable to reason.

To cite the most obvious example, look at the wave of messianic energy Obama rode in on. Does any truly religious person see him as anything more than a cipher for the projection of the misplaced spiritual energy of the left?

I didn't think so.

Think of your own experience, when you "broke through" to your real being, to the ground -- were "born again" in spirit, bobtized, or however you wish to characterize it. Wasn't it a bit like this: "He will observe with amazement that the one thing that he never would have dared believe is possible: the annihilation of the reality that should not be through creative knowledge" (HvB).

In other words, it's not so much a case of saying "no" to the false self, but saying "yes" to the true self that is "eternally known" by God, but also potentially by certain deputized I-amissaries in the herebelow. For someone else to see, know, and love the real you is critical. Truly, we can only be "loved into being." This then gives one the strength to scorn what has no right to exist within oneself.

Here you go. The authoritative HvB even says so: "He will accustom himself, when he falls back into his old errors, to realize that at bottom he is living an already obsolete, no longer real reality."

Right? Right. The old patterns just won't give you the same "thrill," now that you've seen through them. Furthermore, to touch truth is to suddenly be given a grave responsibility: the responsibility to be, specifically, to be what God intended. HvB: "He is not only to know what is but also what should be and, through knowledge, to secure validity and reality for it."

In other words, you must now begin the process of aligning your life around your highest aspiration, for you know in your heart that anything less than this is a kind of waste, or dissipation, of your life. Therefore, you will now be followed by a kind of guilt when you fail to meet your cosmic responsibility. You can never go back to the "blissful ignorance" of the average man.

To live as the average man is to live as effect rather than cause. This is why it so easily leads to the mechanical "no" rather than the living "yes." If you are just a machine with no divine center, then you are indeed determined by race, by class, by gender, by whatever other bogus limitation the left can come up with, and for which they will sell you the "cure." When they talk about "root causes," they're really talking about what they think makes the human machine tick, or the human tick a machine.

But for the Raccoon, the root cause is above, not below; again, the universe is a tree of life, with its nonlocal roots aloft, its local branches below. Do you see the profound difference it makes as to where you find your roots?

For another baleful consequence follows from the left's planting its roots below. Man must transcend, or he is not a man. Every man knows in his heart that something is wrong, something from which we must "escape" (or inscape). Now, if the upper reaches are sealed off, what do you suppose happens?

That is correct. Man will attempt to transcend himself in the darkness and ignorance of the "below," the subconscious world of animal instinct, of ungoverned desire, of moral impulses detached from God, etc. Art moves from the ideal-real to the sub-real; religion goes from worship of God to worship of the ego or the earth (or worse); "science" goes from the unveiling of being to the worship of facts; politics goes from liberty directed toward the good to collectivism enforced by the state. Etc. Put it all together, and you end up with our postmodern stone soup, which surely cannot nourish the soul.

But you can't just tell these soup nazis to stop eating. Rather, you have to somehow get them to try yours. But again, for those of you with small children, you know how difficult it can be to get them to try a new food.