Purity

The other day we picked up Tristan from school. We ran into his teacher, and stopped to chat. Off in the distance, we were surprised to see Tristan kneeling down to pray, right out in the open.

Later we asked if he wanted to tell us what he had been praying about. He said, "I was just thanking God for loaning us the world."

We never put him up to these outbursts of spirit. Rather, they just come out spontaneously.

"Pride" is not the word for the feeling it evokes; if anything, it is humbling -- to know that one has been profoundly touched by the real presence of the sacred in all its naked innocence and purity. It pierces the heart like few other things.

False Slack and the Tyranny of Relativism

Don't ask me. I don't know what the deal is. I suppose I'll continue geistposting so long as Bob goes through whatever little phase he's going through. Probably just one of those periodic dry spells when he threatens to quit blogging and then everybody -- yeah, all three of you -- begs him not to and he feels oh so special.

About Bob's reverence for slack, the question often comes up: why would he playgiarize with a concept from a so-called "pretend religion" and expect anyone to take him seriously as an original cosmedian? He's not stupid. Can't he just invent his own crap, like L. Ron Hubbard or Reverend Wright?

Plus, there is already a real Bob. Isn't it a little misleading -- or confusing at best -- for a man calling himself "Bob" to be preaching the gospel of slack? Why hasn't he been sued?

Is there a better word for slack than slack? I don't know, let's consult the thesaurus. Various related words are: rest, repose, take it easy, lighten one's load, recline, slow down, knock off, take time out, suspend operations, take a leave of absence, take off one's shoes, unbuckle one's belt, relax, call it a day; also, most significantly, sabbatical, weekend, Sunday, Christmas.

So is there a laughtier concept that encapsulates these disparate terms? The SlackMeister has not found one.

I suppose one could say "heaven" or "paradise," but these have certain connotations that do not quite capture and convey our meaning; they are either too full or too empty of specific content. One might say there is not sufficient slack in those terms. We need a little more elasticity, a smidgen more growing room.

A reader once accused or flattered Bob by calling him a "Christian SubGenius." Is there any truth to this? And if so, does this represent some heretical new development, or is it just the same old orthoparadox with a space age twist?

Well, why don't we consult the Pope? He ought to be able to adjudicate this matter. If slack is intrinsic to Christianity, he'll surely tell us.

Let's start with his first principle: that "at the origin of all reality is loving intelligence." I ask you: what could be more slackful than loving intelligence? Certainly not hateful stupidity, or entering paradise would be as easy as attending a Democratic convention.

The alternative view is that the world is woven of chance and necessity. If this is the case, then there is -- and can be -- no slack. For what is necessity but the complete absence of slack? A machine has no slack, no freedom, no will.

But it is not just materialism that would deny our slack, for so too do most other religions. If the Absolute is completely transcendent, this means that it does not interact with man.

We begin with the idea that slack is real, and that it is man's birthright. The converse position is that slack is an unreal illusion. We might think we have it, but that's just a tenured monkey babbling on about his stupid relatives. Even I can do that.

As the Pope affirms, anyone who embraces Marxism in any form -- and contemporary "progressivism" is one of them -- "not only accepts a philosophy, a vision of the origin and meaning of existence, but also and especially adopts a practical program."

This much is obvious. But on an even more deeply superficial level -- one might call it "anti-principial" -- this "philosophy" is not rooted in the Word (i.e., Reason, or that Loving Intelligence just mentioned), but the deed: it "does not presuppose a 'truth' but rather creates one." "Truth" becomes merely a fig leaf over that Nietzschean willy thing, which, excised from Truth, reduces to power. Thus,

"The redemption of mankind, to this way of thinking, occurs through politics and economics, in which the form of the future is determined." The middling relativities of the left never stop preaching slack, even while holding a philosophy (either explicit or implicit, it doesn't matter) that renders it null and void.

Man is of course a political being -- not to mention economic, biological, and social -- but he cannot be reduced to any or all of these categories. If so reduced, he becomes a mere object, so there is no longer a foundation for his dignity, morality, or epistemological strivings.

This miserable philosophy prides itself in "demystifiying" the world, but it is really a remystification, for it can provide no rational explanation of our humanness.

Rather, after so much random shuffling, man just "happened." This is what they call an "explanation." But to reduce man to material and efficient causes is to preclude understanding, since it excludes the very domain in need of explanation, i.e., the Explainer. One might say that materialism is the embalming fluid of the left.

Another first principle of Christianity is that the Absolute is person. Being that we are in its image, our own personhood is rooted in this principle.

Thus, "Where there is no uniqueness of persons, the inviolable dignity of each individual person has no foundation, either." "[H]owever one may try to spin or turn it," this "ultimately deprives moral values of their grounding." Therefore, "all that is left is traffic rules for human behavior, which can be discarded or maintained according to their usefulness."

The tyranny of relativism has been sold to the masses by dressing it up as freedom. Once purchased, the citizen finds out too late that he has mortgaged his soul to a system that cannot create slack, but only parasitize existing slack.

For leftism has not created a single thing in this world. Getting something done requires lots of cash, technical inventions, and power. With the all-powerful state, these dangerous mediocrities can get their barbarous hands on all three.

Meanwhile, in the real world of vertical flow, give us this day our daily slack:

(photo courtesy mizz e)

Looking for Slack in All the Wrong Places

In Bob's mysterious absence, we shall continue our exploration of the origins and development of slack.

Yes, we realize most of you don't care about this subject, but perhaps you don't realize that we don't care that you don't care. For if we did care, it would diminish the very slack we are trying to cultivate and maintain.

Or, to put it another way, we care very much about you and your slack, but slack is often at odds with one's own perceived self-interest. Slack is no respecter of persons, at least in the anonymous sense. Slack is, however, a great respecter of individuals, and in many ways one could say that individualism is slack lived.

What I mean is that if you are not yourself -- if you are living a lie in one form or another -- then you have no slack. Where 1 cannot be 1 self, 1 is a kind of zero, or Ø.

Therefore, the first rule of slack is to become who you are, or at least to stop pretending to be what you are not.

Sadly, many people are so immersed and invested in the Lie, that there is no turning back. Not surprisingly, such a person is heavily defended, so it is difficult to penetrate his dense farcefield and storm his hidden slacktuary.

If your home is not a peaceful and loving I-land of slack in an Øcean of general slacklessness, then you're probably not going to find it. Yes, your religion is here to deliver you from slacklessness, but for most people, family is the field in which this becomes most operative and apparent.

Naturally, the ingression of slack affects other areas -- e.g., intellect, creativity, and social relationships -- but there is a good reason why family is so central to Judaism and Christianity -- why marriage is a sacrament, why children are a gift, and why the family in general is a laboratory of trinitarian Love.

Some form of monasticism also works -- either exterior or interior -- but to the extent that we are drawn down into the world drama, we will probably lose ourselves.

Don Colacho has many perceptive aphorisms along these lines, for example -- and this is a big one -- Few people do not need circumstances to complicate their souls a little.

It should all be so simple: man woman, hungry eat, tired sleep, mind learn, spirit truth, freedom play. But truly, most people cannot handle the simplicity. Complexity inevitably creeps in, which then requires a constant output of slack in order to maintain. Complexity is the way of anti-Slack; conversely, unity, or communion, is slack's seal and crown.

In the end you will lose, because Death is the most dreadful form of slack removal awaiting you at the end of all the complications. Death is so simple! He cuts you down to size, whoever you are, and renders you as simple as a date on a headstone.

If Death is simple, so too must be its "adversary." This occurred to me yesterday while reading a passage by then Cardinal Ratzinger. For the Christian, Jesus has transformed death itself into the ultimate slack, freeing us from its icy grip. Therefore, there is no need to construct elaborate psychic defenses against it. Life is no longer a project of death denial.

Freud had a saying about the purpose of psychoanalytic therapy: where id was, there ego shall be.

What he meant by this is that our psychic world expands as the personal conscious mind colonizes and transforms more of the impersonal and unconscious "it" within (id is German for it). In other words, in each of us is the I and the It, in a dialectical process of gradual transformation.

As you watch your child grow, you can see more of his It becoming I. But most people, as they mature, have to leave a lot of unresolved It behind, only to be unwillingly dealt with later in the strangest and most inconvenient places! For example, residual It from one's relations with parents may haunt a marriage.

Look at a couple of recent examples, the political actor and the socialist predator. Both were waylaid and overtaken by their It.

When the It is roaming free, it always feels like slack. But it is false slack unless it is unified with, and personalized in, the higher self. Look at the fine mess Strauss-Kahn's It has gotten him into! His false slack has been abruptly foreclosed, and all of his power cannot retrieve it.

Such complicated lives those two must have been leading. For a secret life is a complicated life.

We all have a public life, a private life, and a secret life. The public life is our persona with which we negotiate the Conspiracy and get through the day. Our private life is where we are free to be ourselves without reserve.

However, the more of one's private self can be expressed in public, the more content we will be. In other words, you don't want your public life to be too much at odds with your private life. To take the first example that comes to mind, if you are the type of person who cherishes truth, it would be quite painful to be a trial lawyer.

Likewise, the more of our secret life we can get into our private life, the more fulfilled we will be. This is where true intimacy arises -- where there are no secrets, and each can give him- or herself to the other without reserve.

We have all felt this vast realm of slack at one time or another. For example, when we first fall in love, one of the reasons why it is so blissful is because of this expansive feeling of intimacy: of two private selves in communion.

But what happens? The It! It is commonly the case that, to paraphrase Freud, people have a hard time loving the person they desire and desiring the person they love. These two are split apart into an I of love and an It of desire. The goal, of course, is their union and marriage.

This is why most relationships do not just passively "die." Rather, they are actively killed. There is a chilling book about this subject, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time.

Many partners unconsciously seek security over intimacy, and accomplish this by covertly undermining the intimacy, which drains the relationship of passion. The relationship feels "dead," which then makes it easy to imagine that the passion is elsewhere. Rinse and repeat.

This "is not intrinsic to the nature of love itself but is a degradation, a defense against the vulnerability inherent in romantic love" (Mitchell).

Of note, the secret life isn't really so secret unless one is oblivious to its absent-presence. It is always picked up on in one way or another, especially by children -- who won't know what to call it -- resulting in the internalization of the family It.

"The parents' secrets are often a palpable presence in the household, even if, sometimes especially if, they remain unarticulated" (ibid). The secret It-self can become "alluring, forbidden, and mysterious." It is imbued with temptation, which holds out a promise to the It that is always broken.

Life and intimacy are always dangerous and unsettling, which is why most people draw back from the abyss of love and look for slack in all the wrong places.

Is Freedom Built into the Cosmos?

Yesterday Bob made an oblique reference to the origins of Slack, but was he serious? Sometimes it's hard to tell whether he's pulling our leg or merely joking. In his characteristically authoritative -- some would say pompous -- way, he wrote that

"Being is the Slack in existence; Life is the Slack in matter; Psyche is the Slack in the biosphere; and Pneuma, or Spirit, is the Slack in Psyche."

In response to such a fascinnoying gnostrum, the napoleonic reader may find himself thinking: like anyone could know that!

This word "slack" -- often capitalized -- seems to come up frequently in Bob's daily dose of diaryhea entries, but to my knowledge, he's never actually exspelled out what he's talking about. Rather, he seems to assume that we all grasp it already, or that perhaps the context renders it less murky. Or maybe he's just deepaking the chopra.

I am here to explain it all out for you, for while no one has ever seen the "face of slack," I did once steal a glimpse of its backside, so I think I know a thing or two about a thing or two.

In fact, this is where we must begin our discussion, with "things" and with "twoness."

It is not immediately evident why either should exist. Why should the cosmos be anything other than One? Well, as it so happens, it is one. This is proved by our unconscious use of the word "cosmos," which assumes a prior or transcendent oneness behind or above all phenomena. Clearly, to say "cosmos" is to say "one." We always know that any this and any that are related on some level.

But why should "things" -- this and that -- exist? While animal perception can apprehend boundaries of various kinds, are these boundaries really real? Or are they just superimposed upon phenomena?

For example, is there really a difference between an animal and its environment? For all we know, the flower could be an external organ of the bee. In our minds we separate them, but the one couldn't survive without the other.

In the book Laws of Form, G. Spencer-Brown (SB) explicates an indicative calculus with which to think about such fundamentals. We will not pretend to understand the calculus, so we'll just assume the letters add up. We are more interested in his conclusions, which are true regardless.

In the book, SB attempts to bring together "the investigations of the inner structure of our knowledge of the universe" with "investigations of its outer structure." As we all know, these two weren't divided until Kant, and the tenured haven't been able to put them back together ever since. In truth they were never separate -- for again, nature knows no such rigid boundaries -- but it's nice to be able to prove it.

SB affirms that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. For example "the skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside." Thus, inside and outside coarise with the drawing of a boundary.

This leads to the somewhat eery conclusion that prior to the appearance of life, the physical cosmos not only had no inside, but no outside either.

Frankly, this is not something we can imagine; or, we can only imagine it, as if consciousness were there prior to 4 billion years ago, when life emerged.

(At this point we are speaking only of consciousness associated with biological life, not in terms of a transcendent or meta-cosmic intelligence; for surely, prior to the emergence of life the cosmic lights were on, even if nobody was home.)

SB goes on to say that this primordial severance is always present in our own experience; indeed, "experience" would not be possible in its absence, for there would be no distinction between experience and the thing experienced -- like a person in a coma, who (we are told) is having no experience.

Now, a line is also a form of closure. In drawing a distinction, it creates boundaries around two things, thus "enclosing" them, so to speak. And "Once a distinction is drawn, the spaces, states, or contents on each side of the boundary, being distinct, can be indicated."

This is obvious in the case of lower planes of existence, say, the perception of a "rock." In order to see the rock, we must separate it from its surroundings. (Note also that a professional geologist will look at a rock in an entirely different way than we do, seeing all sorts of interesting things.)

But this is also true of higher and more subtle planes and modes, for example, the distinction between conscious and unconscious minds, or between God and man. To even think about God, one must first draw a line between man and God, the one and the many, time and eternity, essence and existence. But this line is not as unambiguous as the distinct line between, say, journalism and MSNBC.

So to think about God, we must draw a line. But as it so happens, God himself is responsible for "lines as such," with the result that we can draw the line anywhere we choose, but the mere fact that we have drawn one reveals another kind of line, i.e., the clearobscure boundary between Spirt and matter, or intelligence and intelligibility, or form and substance, or knower and known, etc. This mysterious line is everything, at least in potential.

As Bob wrote in the book, Life as such -- which marks the distinction between the great outdoors and the grand inside -- is "a luminous fissure" that suddenly appears "in this heretofore dark, impenetrable circle." It is "the unimaginable opening of a window on the world."

This is what is meant by the statement "Life is the Slack in matter." Perhaps slack is better grasped by thinking of its antonyms, which would include such things as necessity, predetermination, compulsion, inevitability, etc. On the human plane we recognize it as "fate," or perhaps just the "human condition," i.e., those conditions that give us little or no wiggle room. No wiggle room = no slack.

Animals surely have more slack than inanimate objects, but they still float very close to the surface of matter. Not until the emergence of mind -- i.e., the mental space occupied and colonized by humans -- is there this new dimension that seems to exist at a right angle to matter and life.

Here is where the true freedom exists (at least in potential) and could only exist. At the other end, one must wonder about a man who uses his God-given slack to try to prove it doesn't exist -- e.g., people who do not "believe" in free will. Which of course they are free to believe.

Let's consider two extremes, beginning with a wealthy man who is so driven by a compulsion to acquire more stuff, that he actually has no slack. Conversely, think of a man in prison who has an experience of the divine freedom. Though behind bars, he has infinitely more slack than the rich man. Examples of each are too numerous to mention.

I believe this is what Jesus was driving at with his wise cracks about the challenge of the wealthy person to enter the kingdom of slack on earth. It can be done, of course, but it is often the case that the attributes responsible for the acquisition of great wealth are precisely those that exile him from the slack he supposedly craves.

Only when such a person slows down and attempts to enjoy the slack, do they realize too late that they have lived a mirthless life of grim slacklessness. They were not truly free to do what they did, but were compelled to do so. It is a tragedy to realize this too late.

Unless you are like C. Montgomery Burns, who, believing his life was at an end, whispered, "I only wish I'd spent more time at the office."

I will conclude this episode with a passage by SB: the physicist is "made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.

"Thus he cannot escape the fact that the world as we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.

"This is indeed amazing.

"Not so much in view of what it sees, although this can appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

"But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state that is seen....

"In this sense..., the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us."

This interior expansion, or bigger bang, is where the slack is. Please also note that if we could prove all of this with the inevitability of ironyclad logic, it would only prove that our slack is an illusion. Likewise, if we could logically prove the existence of God, he couldn't exist (nor could we).

Where is the Slack?

Alongside your normal, everyday life, there is another life: one in which you have SLACK.... Slack, in its cosmic sense, is that which remains when all that is not Slack is taken away. But Slack is a trickster. It is unknowable, ineffable, unsearchable, incomprehensible... hidden in revelation. --Book of the SubGenius

Where is the true Slack, and how do we acquire it? And does it have anything to do with politics? People hate it when I bring politics into our endless discussion of the Cosmic Religion, but only the people who disagree with me.

Since I believe these people -- usually unwittingly, for their intentions are good and they know not WTF they do -- embrace a pneumapolitical philosophy that erodes our collective Slack, this must mean I am on the right track.

Or is it just a coincidence that the assouls aflame who disagree with us also happen to be after our Slack? That they think there is only so much Slack in the world, and that a slackless person can acquire it by taking another man's?

In the ultimate sense, we would agree that politics cannot affect our Slack, for the Slack that can be named is not the true Slack. As we have been taught from childhood, there is the City of Man and the Siddhi of Slack, and it is an intrinsic heresy to ever believe we could forge the ladder from the crookward and dissonant timbre of mankind.

Nevertheless, it is the perennial duty of the Raccoon -- so long as he draws breath from vertical respiration -- to try, even though he knows the task is impossible. Even the great Slackbringer Moses did not come in for a promised landing, but perished in the desert bewilderness between slavery and slackery. Light this be a listen to a soul with ears to hearafter and eyes to henceforth!

A review of various scriptures of the world is instructive. Lao-tzu reminds us that only The unnamable is ultimately real, meaning that the moment we speak of it we begin to mislead if not lead -- as if we are qualified to do so! And yet, how can we not speak of Slack and still call ourselves men?

This is, of course, the orthoparadox at the heart of it all. Somehow we must maintain an abiding complementarity between the Name and the Nameless, i.e., God and O, in order to avoid what we call the heartbreak of saturation. The moment "God = What (or Who) we think God is," God is functionally dead.

With that unqualification in mind, Lao-tze doesn't shrink from discussing the relationship between politics and Slack. For example,

When the Master governs, the people / are hardly aware that he exists. / Next best is the leader who is loved. / Next, the one who is feared. / The worst is the one who is despised.

Or, If you want to be a great leader.... / Stop trying to control, for the more laws and prohibitions you enact, the less virtuous the people will be. The best way to foster rebellion is to make trivialities against the law. Such an approach makes the people depressed and crafty.

Indeed, Governing a large country / is like frying a small fish. / You spoil it with too much poking.

Clearly, this is not the recipe for an intrusive and activist state. To the contrary, it is in accord with the enduring -- barely -- American principle of That government is best which governs least; which is to say, the least that is compatible with the preservation and maintenance of Slack.

We are not anarchists, for "unbound liberty" is a contradiction in terms. Anarchy is just the other side of central planarchy, and both end in Øligarchy, or the pissing reign of antiSlack down our back. We believe in a slacktivist government rooted in ordered liberty.

Here is a passage that no leftist wants his subjects to take to heart, for it puts the kibosh on their nefarious psychospiritual economy, which runs on envy:

Be content with what you have; / rejoice in the way things are. / When you realize there is nothing lacking, / the whole world belongs to you. And if you Try to make people happy, / you lay the groundwork for misery. Nevertheless, liberal economics is always green, which is to say, tinged with jealousy.

But the Tao Te Ching is not a sufficient guardian of our slack, for if it were, China wouldn't be the way it is.

Let's go back to the beginning, and ask ourselves, "how did the Slack get here?" Some religions (e.g., Taoism) maintain that it is older than God, while others (e.g., Islam) insist that it needs to be torn from the earth root and branch with hammer and tong.

Here is what we believe: Being is the Slack in existence; Life is the Slack in matter; Psyche is the Slack in the biosphere; and Pneuma, or Spirit, is the Slack in Psyche.

Furthermore, this is a mythsemantical equation for rejoycing, since the penultimate Slack spirals 'round and rejoins the primordial Slack of Being, which consecrates this thrilling holycoaster tide on the way from Alpha to Omega and backagain -- from riverrun to swerve of shore to bend of bay, in a commodious wakeus of recirculation to the sight of salvʘcean, where You finally meets I in an eternal embrace of Fatherson.

So relux and call it a deity.

"Bob" is.
"Bob" becomes.
"Bob" is not.
Nothing is; Nothing becomes; Nothing is not.
Thus: Nothing Is Everything.
Therefore: Everything is "Bob."
Abracadabra. --Book of the SubGenius

Liberalism and Ontological Closure

I don't reasonably have time to climb to Upper Tonga to procure a new post, but I do have sufficient slack to randomly select a previously cogitated one to bang into shape. It has a fair amount of new material, so please don't think you can just skip it:

Have you been keeping up with the debate about whether the conservative movement has descended into epistemic closure? Ironically, it's been a big topic of discussion in the impotently sealed world of the left, in such shriveled liberal organs as the Post, Times, and New Republic.

Another case of the liberal pot calling the kettle a "cooking receptacle of color."

PowerLine discusses the matter here, and after our laughter has subsided, there's not much left but to dismiss the liberal who imagines his ideology to be anything other than a dogmatic grid superimposed on the reality he rejects. For contemporary liberalism is the very essence not only of epistemic, but of ontological, closure -- a much more serious matter.

It is not just that the leftist lives in a closed intellectual world, but that he closes himself to whole worlds, i.e., the vertical world, or every ontologically real degree of being that transcends matter. A certain degree of "horizontal closure" is necessary for vertical openness, in the same way that self-control is a prerequisite of self-liberation.

Think of it: the liberal's whole world is just our bottom floor. The horror!

As we will proceed to explain, epistemic closure is really neither here nor there as compared to ontological closure.

As it so happens, our epistemic world can be relatively "closed," and still be quite effective for the exploration and colonization of higher worlds. This is for the same reason that our alphabet can be closed, and yet, still quite useful for coming up with sentences and words.

Indeed, if the alphabet weren't closed, we would have no stable means with which to build anything higher or deeper. This is one of the principle purposes of "dogma," which is there to close certain avenues of thought, so we can get on with the exploration. Only in extraordinary circumstances should they be reopened and renegotiated.

An example is the first sentence of our founding document, which affirms the transcendent source of our liberty and other natural rights. If I say that I am not open to renegotiating this dogmatic statement, does it make me epistemically closed? Very well then, I am closed. It is precisely such truths which the conservative wishes to conserve, and to which he must always remain open, for to close one door is to open anOther.

You will have noticed that the left, especially after 1968, succeeded in reopening and weakening virtually all of our founding principles and traditions. This is something they must do in order to replace them with their own beliefs and dogmas -- for example, the redefinition of marriage, the replacement of American culture with multiculturalism, the obsession with race over colorblindness, the pursuit of "criminal rights" over justice, etc.

Many of my readers are former liberals who left the left precisely because of its narrow, closed, and dogmatic worldview, histrionically enforced by the femailed fist of political correctness.

But how and why is it this way? In order to understand its deep structure, we must begin at the very beginning, for if one's anthropology is wrong, then so too will one's political philosophy -- and everything else, for that matter -- be wrong.

If it is "true" that man is just another animal selected by the environment through random mutations, he is by definition epistemically closed, for he is limited by what his selfish genes constrain him to know (and we would have no real way of knowing otherwise).

On the other hand, if man is in the image of his Creator, this places no limit on what he may know, since he partakes of the very substance of the Absolute. He is by definition open to reality. Indeed, a CRITICAL POINT is that there can be no "reality" at all in the absence of God, only opinions that have no ultimate ground.

Schuon notes that true -- or traditional -- philosophy involves "knowledge of the stellar world and all that is situated above us." But this is precisely where knowledge shades off into wisdom, the latter having to do with immutable ideas and archetypes, i.e., our MetaCosmic Clueprint. It is "knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences derived from them."

This knowledge is both essential (i.e., partaking of Essence) and true, hence, liberating: it is the truth that sets one free, but only so long as one both knows it and lives in conformity with it (for the latter implies that truth has mingled with one's own substance; one does not merely "know" it but "undergo" and "become" it).

It is here that truth touches on intrinsic morality -- or where knowledge has its limits and its responsibilities. For all normal men know that truth may be defined as that which we must know and are obligated to defend. Only an already lost soul believes that truth doesn't exist or that it carries no moral obligation with it.

But for the secular leftist -- or any profane thinker -- there can be no philosophy as such, only various parodies of it, such scientism, rationalism, metaphysical Darwinism, existentialism, etc.

Since the world of transcendence is a priori closed to him, the profane thinker (or infertile egghead) is reduced to "reasoning" about phenomena, or secondary causes (i.e., diddling around ønanistically with his own organ of knowing). Thus, his philosophy becomes a frustrating dry dream that is simultaneously all wet.

Do you see the problem? Logic itself is a closed system -- for its conclusions arise necessarily from its premises -- but becomes doubly closed when one applies it only to the shifting empirical world of secondary causes.

Not only does the profane thinker try to reason in the absence of truth, but he seriously -- seriously! -- attempts to arrive at truth through reason, which no serious person would ever attempt to do.

Such individuals imagine "that the norm for the mind is reasoning pure and simple, in the absence not only of intellection but of indispensable objective data" (Schuon). Placing reason prior to Truth is to place man in front of reality, with disastrous consequences (e.g., the French Revolution and most every leftist revolution since).

Now, as a kind of compensatory mechanism, the secular thinker exchanges vertical openness toward the transcendent with a kind of faux horizontal freedom -- for nothing pleases the leftist more than to believe that he is a fearlessly "free thinker" who has thrown off the shackles of convention and tradition. He is the very opposite of those religious yahoos who believe in ontological realities transcending matter -- little things like truth, love, virtue, beauty, and Slack.

But how could freedom exist in any meaningful sense in the absence of truth? If there is no truth, then there is no freedom, only random or arbitrary movement. And if there is Truth, then by freedom the leftist merely means freedom from it. But you knew that already.

Again, the profane thinker is reduced to "observing causations in the outer world and drawing from his observations the conclusions that impose themselves on his sense of logic" (Schuon). But the leftist cannot exclude what his impoverished philosophy tries to deny, so he necessarily lives in a world of ghostly demonic presences that he projects into the conservative.

In other words, for the true leftist, the transcendent is collapsed into the immanent and located in the malevolent other, who becomes the essence of everything he denies in himself.

Only in this way could a doctrinaire leftist flatter himself by imagining that he lives in an epistemologically open world. Whereas a normal person vertically "brings his troubles to God," so to speak, the leftist projects them horizontally into demon teabaggers, anti-immigrant nazis, Obama-hating racists, and other malign figments of his ontologically closed imagination.