The Creature From the Barack Lagoon & the Tyranny of the Disordered

The problem with the left in general and Obama in particular is that they violate the fundamental purpose of politics, which is to nurture order for the purpose of liberal (in the true sense of the word) goods that can never be found in politics.

But for a liberal flatlander with no awareness of, or grounding in, the Transcendent, politics itself becomes the highest good. And again, this is why it is so difficult to do battle with these people, because for them, politics is everything. It is their religion, so all of their religious energy is channelled into it, not unlike a sexual pervert who focuses his libido on shoes, or on a cosmic cult leader with light emanating from his butt.

But for the normal person who just wants to enjoy the higher goods that political order makes possible, it's a little like having to learn how to survive long periods in the dark or under water, where these people dwell all the time. Folks who live in the Light don't want to have to go down there into that fetid swamp and do battle with deformed entities that have adapted to those conditions and are able to comfortably live there without light or oxygen. We can't stay down there that long -- which explains the doggedness of Obama-Pelosi-Reid. They actually like it down there. They have evolved "backward," so to speak, from walking on dry land to crawling beneath the dark waters.

Some people can stay down there and fight with liberals under their home rock, and God bless 'em. Conservatives need aggressive political warriors like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and all the rest -- people who seem to relish taking it to the left on their own terms. I don't think that they should be the intellectual source of conservatism, any more than the military should be the intellectual center of the nation. But without the military to keep the order, there would be no intellect, for the same reason that you can't study Torah on an empty stomach.

The aggressive healthcare takeover by the left represents a triumph of the forces of disorder over order. Thus, when Obama immaturely taunts us about the prospects for repeal and says "nah nah nah, I dare you!," he's really acting as the swamp creature that he is, daring us to descend down where he and his fellow thugs dart around in the shadows. In its own way, it's like Osama in his hellish mountain hideout telling us, "you want me? Come and get me!" The last thing he's going to do is come out into the light and fight like a man.

Now, just as a central purpose of religion is to order the soul, the central purpose of politics is to order the collective. But again, not for its own sake, but for the possibility of higher things (which ultimately revert back to the order of the soul). Thus, a government of disordered souls who only increase political disorder is actually a real evil, and should be recognized as such.

After all, this is why Obama's fellow traveler, the nakedly evil Castro, is so proud of him at this moment -- although he will reserve full approval until Obama can ram through some equally disordered authoritarian legislation under the pretext of "climate change"; and surely, yesterday's humiliation of our most important ally in the Middle East goes toward appeasing the enemies of global order and cementing the Obama administraton's reputation as a surrender cult.

Speaking of disordered souls governing the ordered, wouldn't it be nice if Obama could begin ordering his own soul by, for example, quitting smoking, before trying to micromanage ours? My life is already ordered, thank you. I don't need the extra "order" imposed by the state. In fact, if you know your chaos theory, you know that imposing top down control over a spontaneous, non-linear system is guaranteed to generate disorder. The left just has no understanding whatsoever of the infinitely complex dynamics of non-linear systems.

Democrats truly are the anti-science party, in that they ignore any advances in scientific metaphysics beyond the mechanistic rationalism of the late 19th century. Thus their idiotic treatment of everything from genetics to public policy to economics as a static or linear system. To put it another way, they are never surprised by the inevitable unintended consequences of their misbegotten policies, because they never, ever recognize them to begin with, for the day you can do that, you are cured of your liberalism.

But liberals just aren't intellectually curious enough to wonder why the things most heavily subsidized by government are the most expensive. Not once in this entire "healthcare debate" did I hear one of them explaining why medical care is "too expensive." But if price is not reflecting economic reality, there are reasons. You don't remedy a market distortion by institutionalizing it. After leaving here, I urge you to read Doctor Zero's Parable of the Satellite Dish. As I've said before, that guy is brilliant.

The above preliminary reflections were provoked by reading James Schall's The Order of Things. The book includes chapters on the order of the Godhead, the cosmos, the soul, the mind, and other dimensions, but given the world-historical events of the past week, I jumped ahead to chapter five, The Order of the Polity.

First of all, let me say that Father Schall is a beacon of Light. As I mentioned in a comment, this is about as concise a treatment of the intersection of Catholicism and Raccoonism as one could imagine. It's still somewhat on the exoteric side, which is fine. In that regard, it serves as a fine complement to MOTT which exhaustively deals with the esoteric side. Together they are like night and day, or symmetrical and asymmetrical logic, or conscious and supra-conscious, flesh and spirit, etc. (Not that there is no spirit in the exoteric -- hardly! -- only that it has a different inflection and speaks to different personalities with distinct needs.)

One of the problems I've noticed with liberals is that they are literally unable to recognize (capital T) Truth -- by which I mean higher truths that are "seen" by the intellect, not merely arrived at through the mechanics of logic. For example, in his chapter on the order of the polity, Schall shows us a great many intrinsic truths to which the purified mind can only assent, in the same way the body assents to gravity or any other law of physics.

But this is the whole point about the infallible truth of metaphysics: to understand it is to believe it, because it's a matter of recollection of things that cannot not be. Looked at this way, "political science" -- which has become one more academic joke -- actually is a kind of very exact science, for its principles are universal. (One is reminded of Blake's comment to the effect that truth cannot be told so as to be understood and not believed.)

To cite an obvious example, when the Founders said that all men are created equal, this is a metaphysical truth that can be discovered by natural reason; being true, it is therefore universal. For by definition there is no truth that isn't universal -- one more reason why the left is so confused, since they elevate the absurdity (for it is an empty set) of "non-universal truth," e.g., multiculturalism, moral relativism, and historicism, to the highest intellectual attainment. It is difficult to think of a more direct method to poison and destroy an intellect at the roots. No wonder they're so addicted to this intellectual crack.

Similarly, another fundamental lie of the left is that man is not ordered to a transcendent plane that is both his source and destiny. Again, either you see this or you don't, but you will rarely see a human being who isn't ordered to something that transcends (or subtends) himself, even though he lies to himself about it. A man who is only a man isn't a man at all.

The good polity is ordered around the common good; but if one eliminates the highest good up front, then ipso facto one cannot have a good political order. Take, for example, the Soviet Union. Even leaving aside the more obvious pathologies, the whole monstrosity was ordered around the idea that matter is all, and that man has no transcendent destiny.

Therefore, the first step of any kind of socialism is to quite literally kill man in order to justify everything that is done to him subsequently. For remember, man spans all the degrees of being: matter, life, mind and spirit, with the first three converging upon the fourth. Eliminate the fourth and you have destroyed man's very purpose -- no different, say, than trying to grow palm trees in alaska or pine trees at the equator. Destroy man's soul-habitat, and you are well on the way to controlling him through his petty desires and animal appetites, since those are the only things left.

A key point is that political force is only legitimate when there is a lack of proper order: "it is to be legitimately used only in the name of ordered reason." And what is ordered reason?

Well, let's take the example of the government takeover of our healthcare. The violence it authorizes to force us to comply with its dictates is fundamentally illegitimate, for at no time were its proponents able to sucessfully make an appeal to our reason through persuasion. To the contrary, no one denies that Obama, Reid and Pelosi straight-up lost that argument by a wide margin (and on a bipartisan basis, I might add). Thus, they had to rely upon raw force -- including bribes and threats to the unpersuaded -- to impose their will on a recalcitrant public. This is the very definition of bad governance.

And as mentioned above, the imposition of top-down control on a spontaneous order will inevitably generate chaos. Thus we see so much anger breaking out among the unwilling victims of Obama's audacious power grab. But since liberals control the media, they are trying to spin this as a case of the victims being the aggressors! It's like in hockey, where the ref only sees the retaliation, not the instigator.

But James Taranto eviscerates this disgustingly self-serving narrative, since the anger is hardly an example of "fascism" but a reaction to it: "Kristallnacht was a nationwide pogrom carried out under the direction of a totalitarian state. It is in no way 'parallel' to small-scale acts of vandalism spurred by impotent rage against the party in power" (emphasis mine).

But projection of aggression is what the left does. Take away their hate, and there's not much left of the left.

Yes, all I ask is that the left give us the same understanding and respect they extend to Islamic terrorists. For any hope of peace, they must understand the root causes of our anger! I don't know about you, but for me it's the left occupying my sacred land.

To be continued.....