Sunday, February 21, 2010

The One Cosmos Cult: Controlling Minds Since 2005

For today's Sunday morning repast, I decided to see what was cooking in the Cosmosphere three years ago. This one caught my attention. It has to do with the ins & outs of how I operate my cult to keep you people under my thumb.

Which I may need to reimagineer, since the cult has only grown smaller in the interim. Have I made mistakes? No, that's impossible. I was just so busy getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of me that I think I lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the Raccoon nation about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values. I realize this makes no sense, but that's what Petey put into the blogoprompter.

Perhaps I need to create more of a mystique around myself. I'll have Dupree work on that. Or maybe increase the annual dues, since people devalue what they get for free. Yeah, that's it. New policy: as of today, the initiation fee is increased from $1.50 to $1.75.

As a perceptive troll observed yesterday, "What we see in this post is a drift towards a 'cult' mentality. All cults require a dire threat from the outside in order to create an 'us against them' atmosphere. Without the external threat, a sufficient level of internal cohesion cannot be created.

D'oh! I hate it when trolls find out the truth about the Transdimensional Order of the Friendly Sons & Daughters of the Cosmic Raccoons.

But what took this genius so long to figure it out? Without an external threat, how can Dear Leader be expected to maintain internal cohesion and cult discipline -- as the left does by villifying George Bush and promulgating apocalyptic fantasies of global cooling.... er, nuclear winter.... ahh, global warming.... umm, climate change?

As you are about to see, I've been playing up this dire existential threat in order to create a "Coon-against-the-world" siege mentality ever since my very first post on October 5, 2005 (which we celebrate as "Metacosmic Coonday"). In what follows, I'll go through that post paragraph by paragraph and demonstrate how the left really is such a boon, I mean existential threat, to our sacred fundraising efforts on behalf of the cult:

1) "I don't think it's healthy to orient your life around politics 24/7, as does the secular left, for which politics (including radical environmentalism) is their substitute religion. Politics must aim at something that isn't politics, otherwise what's the point? Politics just becomes a cognitive system to articulate your existential unhappiness. Again, this is what leftists do -- everything for them is politicized."

This is axiomatic. In a famous remark that reflects one of the defining characteristics of modern conservatism, Eric Voegelin noted that the very basis of the leftist project is to "immamentize the eschaton," which, in plain language, means to horizontalize the vertical. Just as the Roman Empire collapsed partly as a result of "horizontal barbarians," leftism represents a kind of vertical barbarism for which nothing transcending the immediate senses is ontologically real.

Thus, for example, all truth is relative, free will is attenuated through the cult of victimology, envy (perhaps the greatest enemy of spiritual fulfillment) is promoted as a defining virtue, and transcendent moral obligations are reduced to an arbitrary cultural agreement.

Leftism is defined by an externalizing consciousness that locates the reason for unhappiness or failure outside the self. Conversely, one of the greatest gifts of a proper spiritual education is that it teaches one to locate the reasons for one's unhappiness within. Every leftist politician arrives with the perverse gospel that, "it's not your fault! You are a victim! Don't be responsible for your life! Liberty is a pernicious illusion anyway! Transfer your power to me, and I will rescue you!"

2) "One of the general purposes of this blog is to try to look at politics in a new way -- to place the day-to-day struggle of politics in a much wider historical, evolutionary, and even cosmic context. History is trying to get somewhere, and it is our job to help it get there. However, that 'somewhere' does not lie within the horizontal field of politics, but beyond it. Thus, politics must not only be grounded in something that isn't politics, but aim at something that isn't politics either."

Here again, it goes without saying that this is a kind of talk that is unknown -- because unknowable -- on the left. Their project always involves the diminution of spiritual freedom in order to attain a purely worldly goal that third parties -- horizontal leftist elites -- deem worthwhile. Thus, a few days ago, Hillary Clinton promised that if she is president, she will confiscate the profits of legal corporations at the barrel of a gun and use them in the way she sees fit. Likewise, she will no doubt attempt to take health care out of our hands, and appropriate a substantial portion of the economy through government rationed healthcare.

3) "This is not an abstract, impractical or esoteric notion. The ultimate purpose of politics should be to preserve the radical spiritual revolution of the American founders, so that humans may evolve inwardly and upwardly -- not toward a manifest destiny but an unmanifest deustiny."

This one almost goes without saying. The left does not value spiritual liberty but horizontal equality. Once you recognize this distinction, you will see how it animates nearly every one of their domestic policies. To the extent that they value freedom at all, it is only the shadow version of true liberty represented by license -- which is generally much closer to vice than it is to liberty. Just as our freedom to know is only meaningful if we use it to conform ourselves to truth, our liberty is only meaningful if we use it to conform to virtue.

4) "For example, when we say that politics must be grounded in something that isn't politics, we are simply reflecting the philosophy at the heart of the American revolution, that the sacred rights of mankind, as expressed by Alexander Hamilton, are written in human nature 'by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased by mortal power.' In short, human beings possess a 'spiritual blueprint' that is antecedent to politics, and which it is the task of politics to protect, preserve and nurture."

Here again, this idea is entirely foreign to leftism, which is a wholly materialistic philosophy. For them, the purpose of politics is hardly to preserve and protect our liberty, but to impose ideological conformity and to diminish freedom through government intervention. There is probably no place less intellectually -- let alone, vertically -- free than liberal academia, which eliminates dissent through political correctness and speech codes. As Dennis Prager says, "the larger the state, the smaller the citizen."

5) "The founders, who were steeped in Judeo-Christian metaphysics, did not believe in mere license, which comes down to meaningless freedom on the horizontal plane. Rather, they believed that horizontal history had a beginning and was guided by a purpose, and that only through the unfolding of human liberty could that 'vertical' purpose be achieved. Our founders were progressive to the core, but unlike our contemporary reactionary and anti-evolutionary leftists, they measured progress in relation to permanent standards that lay outside time -- metaphorically speaking, an eschatological 'Kingdom of God,' or 'city on a hill,' drawing us toward it. Without this nonlocal telos, the cosmos can really have no frontiers, only edges.

A ubiquitous project of the left is to deny and undermine our unique Judeo-Christian heritage. As I have said before, they are callously destroying the vertical habitat in which the Raccoon -- and any other higher mammal -- actually lives.

6) "Liberty -- understood in its spiritual sense -- was the key idea of the founders. This cannot be overemphasized. According to Michael Novak, liberty was understood as the 'axis of the universe,' and history as 'the drama of human liberty.' Thomas Jefferson wrote that 'the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.' It was for this reason that Jefferson's original idea for the design of the seal of the United States was Moses leading the children of Israel out of the death-cult of Egypt, out of the horizontal wasteland of spiritual bondage, into the open circle of a higher life. America was quite consciously conceived as an opportunity to 're-launch' mankind after such an initial 100,000 years or so of disappointment, underachievement, and spiritual stagnation."

The left believes there is nothing special or exceptional about the United States -- unless it is exceptionally bad, as famous leftists such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Michael Moore never tire of telling us. Just the other day, John Kerry mentioned at an international conference that the United States is a pariah among nations. I give him credit for his honesty, as all lefists believe this, but, just like Yasser Arafat, never reveal their true feelings to the wrong audience.

7) "Although it may sound slightly heretical, without human liberty, the Creator is helpless (in a manner of speaking) to act in the horizontal (since his primary activity is vertical). This does not diminish the Creator but exalts him, for a moment's reflection reveals that an intimation of our spiritual freedom absolutely belies any mere material explanation found within the horizontal confines of history. For ours is an inwardly mobile cosmos, and as the philosopher of science Stanley Jaki writes, our free will brings us 'face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in midair unless suspended [vertically] from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator."

Again, true freedom can only involve aligning our will with the Creator, otherwise there can be no such thing as liberty -- just as there can be no such thing as knowledge unless it involves aligning ourselves with Truth.

8) "Tip O’Neill is evidently responsible for the cliché that 'All politics is local.' The greater truth is that all politics is nonlocal, meaning that outward political organization rests on a more fundamental, 'inner' ground that interacts with a hierarchy of perennial and timeless values. Arguments about the surface structure of mundane political organization really have to do with whose nonlocal values will prevail, and the local system that will be established in order to achieve those nonlocal values."

What leftist would ever say such a thing? Since a leftist is by definition a metaphysical yahoo, his only recourse is to ridicule that which he does not understand.

*****

So that pretty much lays out the basis of our little cult in my very first post. The question is, do we really have an enemy -- i.e., is the left really opposed to the Raccoon platform -- or are we pretty much "on the same page" as our fellow Americans, with only minor quibbling at the margins?

I do not personally adhere to this sanguine view of our differences. I will speak only for myself. When you talk about the differences between me and a typical leftist, you might as well be talking about different species. The left, of course, is obsessed with trivial racial differences, but the differences between me and a white leftist are infinitely greater than any differences based on race, class or gender.

A Raccoon is a member of the same race as anyone who shares his values. Therefore, Tom Sowell and I are members of the same race, just as Margaret Thatcher and I are members of the same gender. On the other hand, the girlish John Edwards and I are the opposite sex, and Al Sharpton is from another planet altogether. "Race" hardly defines our differences in any meaningful manner, and yet, the racist left believes that it is All Important.

There is a reason why leftism is an ideology that appeals to victims, losers, misfits, the envious, the unhappy, the self-defeating, the educated-beyond-their intelligence, and the addle-brained young. It is not that leftism creates the demand. Rather, these people demand an ideology to cater to their various pathologies and deficits. In other words, it is a demand-side politics that arises from certain unfortunate but ubiquitous trends in human nature. However, once the ideology is created, then its central task becomes the creation of more lost souls who demand the ideology of leftism. Here again, this is one of the keys to understanding most any leftist policy, which fosters dependency, envy, narcissistic entitlement, and victimization.

So which is the real cult?

26 comments:

walt said...

An additional $0.25?
Well, I suppose the Raccoons, rich in Spirit, must pay their fare share....

You referenced:
"...transcendent moral obligations are reduced to an arbitrary cultural agreement."

Oooh, that word 'obligation' doth make the small self squirm, being such a free agent, and all.

But wait! Perhaps your cult should simply become, well ... more modern?

From the link:
"I recently met a young woman who was just back from a month long Costa Rican vacation. She said that she had gone in part to connect with her spiritual self, to shed the moral strictures of her youth and to find her place of peace as an adult. In her mind at least, it had been a successful trip. She was a new woman, spiritually awakened."

Thanks for the post, Bob!

Magnus Itland said...

"All cults require a dire threat from outside" indeed... but the real threat is always from inside.

Leftism is not limited to a particular political party. Each time you blame someone else for the result of your own choices - even choices you did not know you had until it was too late - you are a Leftist.

Thus it is written: "The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool inclines to the left." Ecclesiastes 10:2.

The outward part is that some people in this age are barefacedly shameless about this behavior. To the morally sound onlooker, these are like the toddler who earnestly insists that someone else peed in his pants.

Retriever said...

Good post, as always.

Particularly like this:

"To the extent that they value freedom at all, it is only the shadow version of true liberty represented by license -- which is generally much closer to vice than it is to liberty. Just as our freedom to know is only meaningful if we use it to conform ourselves to truth, our liberty is only meaningful if we use it to conform to virtue."

Reminds me a bit of a quote from Jonathan Edwards on how true freedom consists in conforming our will to the will of God (have, of course, lost the link).

I just lurk because you write well, and it motivates me to read new stuff.

Susannah said...

That was the bit that really jumped out at me as well, Retriever. But it's all good! Magnus, that's one of my favorite verses to pull on left-leaning friends. :) I liked your last analogy, there.

PeterBoston said...

Cast even in its best light leftism of every variety is based on the belief that the rest-of-us must be regulated, legislated or taxed into compliance. Lift the idealist's hood, however, and the engine always bears the Some Pigs Are More Equal Than Others brand.

Coons are always at a disadvantage because of the Christian dictum that another person's behavior should be changed only by persuasion. The left has no rules.

Anonymous said...

Well I hate to spoil your little love-fest but this post is a persuasive load of hogwash.

Yes, everything sounds quite plausible, until you get to the "girlish John Edwards" part.

A man who boinks multiple females and impregnates at least one of them? Girlish? What planet are you from?

And where are your examples of leftist evil? You spout generalities up the wazoo but there's nothing substantial there.

That's what they call red herrings and hot air in show business.

You've got to better than that, Senator, or your filibuster is over.

Gagdad Bob said...

Anon:

I don't expect you understand this. It's for the benefit of others.

John Edwards is obviously not a man in the proper sense of the term. "Virtue" comes from the same root as "virile," and both connote manhood -- which is an achievement, not a biological given.

So, what is John Edwards? Yes, he is "male," but what arrested him on the path from merely biological maleness to post-biological manhood?

It is a female spirit in a man's psyche, which has to do with shunning verticality -- which orients one to God the Father -- and replacing it with the horizontal orientation to Eve (and all she symbolizes, eg., gaia, oceanic loss of boundaries, the pleasure principle, maya, etc.). Such a man has no interior center, but tries to find it outside in Woman. A spiritually normal woman senses this, and is repelled by such a weak and impulsive man.

Politics comes quite naturally to such a man, since the populace becomes the "woman" that he seduces (and seduces him). Obama is the same way, as was Clinton. Adult men overwhelmingly rejected Obama in the '08 election, since he's so clearly not one of us.

Anonymous said...

Oddly, your explanation re Edwards did make sense. I capish.

Edwards is what I call a wanker, but I suppose "girlish" could apply as you describe it.

Now what about the rest of your nebulous vapors about the lefties? Can you firm that up? Where's the beef? Can you show us the money?

Yer fan, MR. Magoo.

JWM said...

Well, anon- How about you explain to us what it is about increasing governmental intrusion and control of our individual lives that you find appealing? Let's take a few micro-items- small intrusions on our daily lives, and liberties- some laws, and regulations that delight the "liberal":
Do you need big brother to force you to fasten your seatbelt, and put on your safety helmet? Do you think it's a fine thing that a restaurant or bar owner cannot decide for himself whether or not to allow smoking on the premises? Is it a great idea to shut down agriculture in California's central valley because some environmentalist fears a possible threat to a guppy-sized fish? Should students of marginal academic ability be given preferential treatment for university admission because of the color of their skin? These are rhetorical questions. No answer needed, thanks.

JWM

Van Harvey said...

"As you are about to see, I've been playing up this dire existential threat in order to create a "Coon-against-the-world" siege mentality ever since my very first post on October 5, 2005 (which we celebrate as "Metacosmic Coonday")."

Yeah... see... they are out there and out to get us... but we don't mind... not One bit! Right ma'? Top o' the world to ya ma!

Anonymous said...

JWM-- I get where you're coming from.

But, the seat-belt, anti-smoking, and agriculture/guppy rules I approve of and would vote for. The affirmative action thing I approve of too.

In my country we have similar rules.

Isn't there something with a little more meat on it in your arsenal? A restriction of foodstuffs or weapons?

Some kind of compulsory military service?

Some kind of corruption, graft, favor-grubbing, environmental toxic fiasco?

These are the kinds of things which negatively impact life span/quality of life and it is these we search for in a critique of a governmental system.

I can sense your outrage regarding the intrusions you mentioned, but these lesser civility and safety regs don't meet the level of harm needed to prosecute a political climate or regime.

Van Harvey said...

(those in the gno, don't need no stinking soundtrack)

Van Harvey said...

aninnymouse... see the comments at the end of thursday's OC post, or the end of mine linked there, regarding silent spring. If that's not evil enough for you, then you are too evil to bother with.

JWM said...

anon:
That you would approve of any of the things I mentioned says it all. Enjoy your risk -free world.

JWM

Anonymous said...

Your government is a good strong socialist one, activily interveneing in public health and safety issues.

What you don't want is a unregulated capitalist quagminre like you find in some of the former Soviet republics.

These do not pass enough regulations on public health issues like air quality, smoking within public places, transportation safety, immunizations, control of tuberculosis, and abatement of drug use and alcoholism.

Officials take money from pollution spewing industries raking in money and not sharing it with the workers, largely because unions don't work there.

The level of violence on the streets is apalling. Most murders are not solved, and many are not investigated, unless the police force recieves an adequate bribe.

Everything is hopelessly corrupt.

And you want to go to that system because?.....

Cannot you see how well you are doing under your controlled socialist system?

I'd move there if I could.

Anonymous said...

And furthermore minorities like some of the browner Kazakhs can't get work becouse of discrimination and there are no programs to mitigate that. It is a disgrace. They live like desperate rats on the outskirts of their stinking industrial hells.

Oh well they could go out on the steppe and graze like oxen I suppose...

Berkeley Mom said...

Well I for one am starting to see the light about "leftists." I didin't even know that's what I was or who I was in with.

In my world there is no questioning the "party line" that big business and big oil, combined with right wing politicians, are trying to take over via the military-industrial complex.

This post gives me insight into the weakness of the what I had been thinking. It's an eye opener.

JWM said...

Anon makes his point.
Years ago I worked in a Jr. High school as a swing shift janitor. I had one of the special ed. kids help me with the lunch area for a little class credit, and the occasional ice-cream sandwich. Big Dave wanted a pet dolphin. "Where would you keep a pet dolphin?" I asked him.
"I'd keep him in my bath tub." was Big Dave's reply.

"A dolphin wouldn't be happy in a bath tub, Dave. Dolphins need to swim in the open ocean."

"But", said Dave, "There's sharks in the ocean, and he could get hurt. I'd want to keep him safe so he'd love me."

(I'm not making this up)

JWM

Mizz E said...

Via Mises:
The Chemist's War
The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.

Van Harvey said...

"6) "Liberty -- understood in its spiritual sense -- was the key idea of the founders. This cannot be overemphasized. According to Michael Novak, liberty was understood as the 'axis of the universe,' and history as 'the drama of human liberty.' Thomas Jefferson wrote that 'the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.' It was for this reason that Jefferson's original idea for the design of the seal of the United States was Moses leading the children of Israel out of the death-cult of Egypt, out of the horizontal wasteland of spiritual bondage, into the open circle of a higher life. America was quite consciously conceived as an opportunity to 're-launch' mankind after such an initial 100,000 years or so of disappointment, underachievement, and spiritual stagnation.""

Yep.

Samuel Adams: A Life by Ira Stoll, I've only just started, but so far it's a keeper, this gives you a clue to what fired up the Idea that became America.

"In another essay, Adams observed, "There is no one thing which mankind are more passionately fond of, which they fight with more zeal for, which they possess with more anxious jealousy and fear of losing, than liberty." He called liberty "the choices gift that Heaven has lent to man."

Any poor fool who takes up the quest to prove that the Founders were atheistic or deist at best, as I was once foolish enough to attempt (many moons ago), has to come up against the person of Sam Adams, the man who more than anyone else ensured that the colonies would become America and awakened the colonists as to why they should choose to do so... and the dunderhead who attempts to say that Sam Adams felt that the Judeo/Christian portion of our Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture was the least important (and Adams was raised on Cicero's writings), is due for some sever psychic bruising.

walt said...

JWM-

Sharks?
Dolphins?
Now the sea level's not rising.

I think there's something kinda fishy goin' on:

"Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings."

JWM said...

Walt: That's because we elected O'Bummer. The sea levels stopped rising at his behest. Same with global warming- like Y2K, only scarier.

JWM

Rick said...

Cult..hmmm...

I dunno. Still sounds pretty good to me. Where do I put in the quarters?

Stephen Macdonald said...

Speaking of cults:

Raëlism is the religious, naturalist belief system promoted by the Raëlian Movement, an atheist UFO religion founded in 1970s which focuses on the social ideas of sexual self-determination, individualism, and humanitarianism in the spirit of sharing and responsibility, which, they claim, will bring a new age of wealth and peace guided by those with greater intelligence, as predicted by main religions.

Remove the UFO stuff and you have a dead-on definition of leftism.

wv: queda
(I swear this wv thing is SPOOKY sometimes)

Joan of Argghh! said...

Any cult that has beer as its sacred libation just can't be bad for you.

Just sayin'. . .

Unknown said...

More wv eerieness: counness

Maybe the goal of this cult is to achieve a state of counness?

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