Cynicism, Sincerity, and Illusions of Reality

A cynical man is never a sophisticated man and therefore can know nothing of the divine plane. Or, to be perfectly accurate, a cynical man is always a sophisticated man in the original sense of the term, for somehow the meaning of this word has been turned upside down. It is related to such pejoratives as "sophism," "sophist, and "sophistry," which involve the fallacious use of reason for deceitful ends. According to Webster's, "sophisticated" connotes such things as not being in a natural, pure, or original state; adulterated; deprived of genuineness or native or original simplicity; and worldly-wise.

Likewise, "sophistication" has to do with the use of sophistry; making impure or weak; and lastly, the process of becoming cultured, knowledgeable, or disillusioned. One reason sophisticated people cannot know God is that they have become disillusioned, precisely. Illusion in its healthy and functional sense is what makes us human, and a person we call "disillusioned" is usually a sadly disappointed person -- someone whose childhood illusions -- which are so vital to one's psychological health later on -- were not supported by an empathic environment.

For example, my primary task as a parent at this early developmental stage is not to disillusion my child -- which would be an unimaginable cruelty -- but to nourish and prolong his illusions, for it is only in the space of his illusions -- what the brilliant psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott called the "transitional space" -- that such quintessentially human things such as love, hope, trust, creativity, and imagination will come into being. The transitional space is also the space where religion takes place, so to prematurely foreclose it -- to disillusion your child -- is to create a machine or monster or at the very least a world-weary sophisticate who will get a perverse kick out of doing the same thing to others, i.e., "disillusioning" them.

A disillusioned (and therefore disillusioning) mind parasite is often the unconscious motivation behind the militant, obligatiory atheist. (I call an "obligatory" atheist someone who does not know God because they cannot know God.) It is also the motivation behind much contemporary art, which aims at "authenticity" as a poor substitute for transcendence. A bestial "naturalism" or "realism" are all that is left to the artistically inclined person who has lost all contact with the sufficient reason for art's existence, which is to render the transcendent present to our sensibilities. Thus, properly speaking, there is nothing ontologically real about "realism," which is always sub-realism from the human point of view, hardly distinguishable from frank pornography -- which is ironically called "adult entertainment" when its appeal (to the extent that it becomes a substitute reality) lies specifically in a failure to achieve adult psychosexual maturity.

Thus, to pick a name at random, one may think that, say, Bill Maher, is a highly "sophisticated" man, when in fact he is obviously quite sophisticated. Cynical, worldly-wise, disillusioned, etc. He may or may not be "intelligent" in the narrow and morally and developmentally neutral sense of the term, but I can assure you that if you were to be cornered into a conversation with him, you would immediately become uncomfortably aware of the "narrowness" of his soul horizons -- or shall we say the "thinness" of his being. For depth of being is not only the measure of soul, but soul is the very measure of depth in the Cosmos.

Or put it this way: there is nothing intrinsically deep in the world, there are only deep souls who make it so. Animals do not experience cosmic depth, only surfaces. And quite obviously, "depth" is a thing entirely apart from mere intelligence. The presence of depth is one of the first clues of the awakened mind as it journeys back to God, who is obviously the ultimate source of the depth. There can be no depth without God, if for no other reason that there can be no interior without God, "the interior of interiority," so to speak.

Let's take William Shakespeare and, say, Steven Pinker or Noam Chomsky. Here are two statements that are equally accurate: "William Shakespeare was an expert in language," and "Noam Chomsky is an expert in language." Obviously this is an absurd comparison, because next to Shakespeare, Chomsky is a frivolous ass and a silly retard -- full of sound and fury but signifying tenure.

Here is the difference, my fellow Coons: what Chomsky knows -- or thinks he knows -- of language may be explicitly specified. He can write it down and put it in one of the sophisticated books he writes for his sophisticated audiences -- and which are used to abuse and poison children for the rest of their lives by making them disillusioned and sophisticated, just like he is -- which is the whole point of the tedious exercise. (Yes, I realize that he used to write "scientific" books, but I believe his simplistic approach to language fosters his paranoid approach to politics.)

No writer is more popular than Chomsky on the campuses of liberal academia, which is a tragic statement if you consider the purpose of education to be the perfection of the soul. This type of perverse education is soul-killing, and once the mind is infected with it, it may never recover. We can see it in the morbid, death-infused writing of the two bloggers who were hired by the transparently sophisticated shyster lawyer, John Edwards. (Speaking of whom, the reason why an uncorrupted soul experiences such palpable toxicity upon hearing a John Edwards or Hillary Clinton speak is due to their utter lack of sincerity and innocence, more on which below.)

Unlike Chomsky, the protean Shakespeare could never, ever, pen a treatise in which he explicitly articulated the nature and extent of his unfathomable linguistic expertise. In fact, if he could do so, he would not be Shakespeare, for it would mean that his depthless creativity could be limited and contained by some mechanical set of rules. Rather, his expertise was simply "lived" but could never be specified. It was literally inexhaustible, in the same sense that the perfect circle will always elude the explicit equation of pi, no matter how many billions of decimal places it is extended.

Nor, for that matter, will there ever be a "Theory of Everything" which the cosmologists quixotically seek -- at least not in any mathematical form. There is already an adequate theory of everything -- in the sense of being adequate to the Real -- but it is embodied in the symbology of religious metaphysics, not in any mathematical equation. No scientific finding can ever undermine primordial Truth, to say the least. DNA does not contain the secret of life, but life contains the secret of DNA.

It is the same with music. No amount of learning the rules of musical composition could ever contain or be superior to Bach's non-explicit mastery of music. A work of art is not beautiful because it is artistic but artistic because it is beautiful. Otherwise, how would we know it is beautiful?

The scientific rationalist believes that something is true because it is logical, but it is the reverse: something is logical because it is true. Naturally, what is true of one transcendental is true of the other two: for example, something is not virtuous merely because it is legal. This is another one of the fallacies at the heart of contemporary -- which is to say, sophisticated -- liberalism, in that it reduces morality to legality and in so doing strips man of his moral soul.

What is virtuous for the uncorrupted soul can no more be specified in manmade law than the rules for beautiful art can be specified by a pointy-headed academic. But this is what the left always does -- displacing the reality of the soul with coercive rules and laws. In so doing, its cure for mankind eventually kills the patient -- political correctness, "tolerance," moral and cultural relativism -- these are all death to the intellect and to the soul.

One is reminded of the boneheaded Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote that affirmative action would be necessary so long as racism existed, when the opposite is true: racism will exist so long as affirmative action exists, for racism is not against the law, it is against the soul, and since liberalism is ipso facto against the soul, it cannot help but foster a climate of racism -- just as feminist ideology has hardly increased harmony and understanding between the sexes but caused great damage to proper coonjugal relations. Few things are more pathetic than a cluelessly sophisticated feminist such as Maureen Dowd, whom a proper man wouldn't touch with a barge pole {shudder}.

Now, quite obviously, God cannot be reduced to man's categories, so the whole idea of an "academic theology" is absurd. A true theologian -- and this sense of the term is preserved by both Orthodox Christianity and by Vedanta -- is not someone who "knows" God but who does God, whether in word or deed. One could no more explicitly specify the theology of a Schuon, or a von Balthasar, or an Eckhart than one could specify with explicit rules the music of Beethoven.

In the case of Beethoven, or even a Thelonious Monk, the music always transcends the rules, and the same is true of the great theologian. Naturally this does not mean that dogma is unnecessary -- any more than Beethoven could do without a piano or the rules of music. But pianos are for playing, not for "figuring out." A piano tuner with perfect pitch is not an artist, any more than Noam Chomsky -- whose vulgar manner of expression is always so coarse and ugly -- is a language expert.

One thing the modern sophisticate never wishes anyone to believe of him is that he is naive. This is the horror of horrors, much worse than merely being wrong. He never wants the wool pulled over his eyes, so to speak. He is happy to be wrong so long as he is not naive -- which, of course, is a form of pride, which always excludes knowledge of God. The proudly cynical and disillusioned man won't be taken in, especially by religion. His cynicism will make certain of that. Thus, he thinks that he is a tough-minded cynic because he knows God does not exist, when God does not exist for him because of his pathetic cynicism.

The opposite of cynicism is sincerity. A cynic is never actually sincere. Rather, his bluntness is just a caricature of sincerity -- again, a Bill Maher comes to mind. Sincerity, as Schuon has written, is "the fundamental quality of goodness." Leftists especially hated Ronald Reagan, not just because of his beliefs but because of his obvious sincerity. In fact, they hate President Bush for the same reason.

It is fascinating to me that the vast majority of leftists who criticize President Bush on the grounds of his so-called lack of intelligence are not nearly as intelligent as he is -- yes, especially you two longtime middle-brow trolls. Don't think I don't see you. As noted in a recent American Thinker piece, "George W. Bush's SAT score of 1206 has been widely reported. The SAT score (if taken prior to 1995) can be used to estimate IQ, to compare to the general population, and to compare to occupational averages and popular figures in history. Using such estimates, President Bush's IQ is between 125 and 130 which ranks him as more intelligent than over 95% of the population, more intelligent than most college professors and medical doctors, and similar to Abraham Lincoln, Rousseau and Thackeray (comparative IQs of 128)."

Yes Coons, it is his sincerity they hate. But if you are in revolt against God, how could you not hate sincerity? You must become disillusioned, so that you too can become as sophisticated as Noam Chomsky, or John Edwards, or Bill Clinton, or Bill Maher.

The horror.

*****

Speaking of the soul-corrupted Edwards bloggers, Iowahawk has gotten ahold of one of their resumes:

CAREER OBJECTIVE

"Seeking challenging, fast-paced thought leadership position in major Western industrial phallocracy. I have experience in a number of positions, including chapters 1-6 of the Kama Sutra, and an established record of speaking angry truth to theocratic power through edgy PostModern Riot Grrrrl punk feminism, which I am happy to disavow at your request....

EXPERIENCE

"A2/01/2007-2/13/2007: Blog Master, Edwards For President, Raleigh NC. Managed campaign website for top Democratic presidential candidate. Crafted strategic economic and military position papers, spearheaded outreach programs to progressive online community, led cross-functional archive-erasing teams, coordinated crisis management program, achieved follow-through on apology plan, renegotiated labor contracts, spell-checked resignation letter, successfully avoided pregnancy. Reason for leaving: international theocratic christofascist conspiracy."