Thursday, September 21, 2017

Diabolical Division and Satan's Blender

It's desk clearing time. I've got books and notes everywhere, and I need to reduce the chaos to some kind of mere disorder. At the very least, the notes will be in one convenient place. And who knows, they may even cohere into a post. In any event, I wouldn't expect much.

The notes aren't always very helpful. Rather, they are often ideas for ideas that I am presumably supposed to enflesh at a later now. This one is typical: it says "Diabolos -- lies & division & truths at wrong level & blending of hierarchy."

Thanks for the tip! But what could it mean? Obviously it has something to do with the etymology of diabolical, and etymology is useful because it can highlight the experience-near reason for why we have a word to begin with. Obviously, ongoing use of the word can take us rather far afield from the original meaning.

Let's consult the dictionary. Not the little one, but the doorstop. From the Greek, diabolos, among other linguistic variations, connoting slanderer, discredit, throw across. Dia is related to dis, which connotes apart, to pieces, and division. Dis then sends us to dys, with connotations including doubt, bad, and difficult.

Where does this leave us? Correct: to Dems. Consider the the left's strategy, which is always founded upon five types of speech: slander, libel, incitement, sedition, and treason. This is what they throw at Trump every day, all day. Racism didn't stick. Anti-Semitism looks pretty stupid in light of the UN smackdown. So now we're back to Russia and treason. It will never end.

The lies of the left are obvious, as is the division, AKA multiculturalism and identity politics. What about truths at the wrong level and the blending of hierarchy? These two go together, because one way to wreck a hierarchy is to apply the truth of one level to a level where it isn't appropriate -- for example, conflating scientific and metaphysical truth.

The left never stops engaging in the latter, which is why they can accuse us of being unscientific when we are being metaphysical, or metaphysical (or better, "politicized" or ideological) when we are being scientific.

For example, when we say that a baby human being is a human being, we are not being political but scientific. No, that's an insult to science. We're just being logical and common freaking sensical, or even prescientific: what you have to be in order to even begin science.

Or, it turns out that different human groups have different average IQs. That's just the way it is. Likewise, it turns out that none of the models cobbled together by global warming activists has proved able to accurately predict the future (and more embarrassingly, the past). There's a name for that in science: wrong. They are the ones who elevate global warming to a metaphysic (AKA religion), in that it is literally unfalsifiable.

To back up a bit, that is precisely what metaphysics involves: the most general concepts about reality (or being) that by definition cannot not be true (for example, the principle of noncontradiction). As such, all events, experiences, and knowledge will be in conformity with it. If they aren't, then your metaphysic is wrong, and you need to go back to the drawing board, probably for the first time. It's the difference between things that cannot not be and things that just can't be.

Now, truth is hierarchical, or better, symphonic (throwing time into the mix). Reality is a concordance (or harmolodic, to borrow a term from Ornette Coleman) of chordal structure and melodic elaboration and variation, or verticality and horizontality: archetype and exemplar; form and substance; essence and existence -- the ultimate pattern of which is found in Father/Son, Creator/Creation, Beyond Being/Being, Being/Existence, etc. (IMO).

What about the diabolical blending of the left? Let us count the ways! Man and woman, legal and illegal, immigration and invasion, their right and our obligation, law and whim, truth and power, journalism and propaganda, education and indoctrination, college and infant daycare, art and excrement... They relativize the Absolute and absolutize their particular relativism.

In fact, here's another note: nature abhors a metaphysical vacuum. Which is itself a metaphysical truth! Deny it and you will inevitably end up with an unexamined and probably stupid metaphysic. Or more likely, a... what is the opposite of meta-?

Says here there isn't really one, but he recommends mesa-. So, mesapneumic, or something. I'm not going to read the paper, but it seems to me that it is analogous to the distinction between transcendent and immanent (speaking of necessary truths of being, which is "bilocal," so to speak; or local and nonlocal).

But fascism -- AKA the left -- involves, as the old gag goes, the violent rejection of transcendence. It reduces transcendence to immanence, or spirit to matter, which is precisely what Marx claimed to be doing. (Unlike contemporary leftists, he was at least honest about what he was up to.)

Damn, only two notes down, and we're out of time. We'll leave off with a third: paradise is enclosed in a wall of complementarities. Hell is their conflation.

11 comments:

julie said...

But fascism -- AKA the left -- involves, as the old gag goes, the violent rejection of transcendence. It reduces transcendence to immanence, or spirit to matter, which is precisely what Marx claimed to be doing.

Continuing with the study of Acts, Chapter 19, it is amazing how everything new is old again. In Ephesus, whole industries were devoted to rendering the transcendent immanent in the form of idol making. More Christians were buying fewer silver figurines of Artemis, putting a cramp on the silversmiths, and they were angry that Christians claimed a god made by human hands was no god at all. Instead of thinking of something else to make with their silver, the union leaders started a protest, complete with hours of chanting the same slogan over and over again. Most of the people protesting didn't even know why they were shouting. No word on whether the any of the Artemis devotees dressed up in vagina costumes, though.

Notably, a key difference back then was that Romans didn't tolerate riots. The crowd was told to disperse and take up any grievances within the legal system, or face consequences. I'm guessing the consequences back then were rather more severe than a show of being handcuffed at the scene and then released a couple of blocks away, because it sounds like the demonstration broke up pretty quickly after that.

Anonymous said...

A very focused and emphatic post. But does it reflect happenstance?

For instance, what does a typical conservative do that is different from a what a typical leftist does?

One may observe Americans sleep, eat, perform grooming and hygiene tasks, watch entertainment, read, do chores, perform paid work, have conjugal relations, communicate with family and friends, provide child or elder care, go to market to purchase goods and services, use medical services, walk, play sports, blog, use intoxicants, meditate, muse, or sit quietly. That covers most of what is seen.

Studies where the operator predict which individuals are leftist, and which are conservative, based on observation, have a success rate around 70%. Age, sex, length of hair, and contextual cues such as frequenting a Starbucks are the most helpful markers.

You're posts tend to be full of lurid contrasts between two ideological blocs, but I could use your take on why there seems to be broad conformity of action among these two blocs.

Anonymous said...

I'd rather not observe my fellow Americans performing grooming and hygiene tasks, thank you very much.

Dougman said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dougman said...

...there seems to be broad conformity of action among these two blocs.

Self interest maybe?

Anonymous said...

I'll advance a theory regarding the culture wars. They are necessary in order to normalize the center.

Neither left, nor right, finds pure expression in our culture. Rather, it is the center, a mass of citizens who operate in a system which is largely capitalist, but with some socialist features, that daily scribes the history of the United States as will be passed down to posterity.

This delicate centrist homeostasis exists largely because the extreme left, and right, define the boundaries of acceptability and act like rails under the a boxcar. No politician can be elected who seems to go too far to the right, or left of these rails. In this way our culture relaxes into a known center. It is very beneficial.

In cultures where extremism achieved primacy, rank disorder ensued (Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union).

The USA swerved a bit to the right during during the 1940's and 1950's, a bit to the left in the 1960's and 1970's, before settling into its present centrist configuration in the 1980's. And we've done, very, very well. Prepare for huge amounts of prosperity to plop into our laps as the 21st century wears on. 'Tis a good time to be here.

Joan of Argghh! said...

Sorry, but, this just in:

http://fox6now.com/2017/09/22/raccoon-jumps-on-moving-colorado-police-van-takes-a-ride/

Cousin Dupree said...

PAWS UP SLOW DOWN!

Joan of Argghh! said...

Coonmandeering.

Dougman said...

Was the Raccoon Lives Matter movement blocking the road?

Dougman said...
This comment has been removed by the author.

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