The Ten Commandments of Nihilism: Left, Bereft, and F'ed

Yesterday I made reference to the Ten Commandments of Nihilism, one of which is Thou shalt not judge. A commenter asked if I would post all ten commandments, which I will proceed to do.

You may remember that last summer I did a series of posts on the esoteric -- but very practical -- understanding of the biblical ten commandments, which not only form the basis of ethical behavior, but also encapsulate the essence of human wisdom and provide a concrete and universally applicable yoga, or "technology," so to speak, for a spiritual practice.

The first thing you must understand is that, just as the atheist is an implicit theist, the nihilist doesn't really believe nothing, but elevates nothing to the highest wisdom. In so doing, they overturn the order of the cosmos and horizontalize the vertical, paving the way for us to be left, bereft, and f'ed, just like they are (or will be, once they are officially conquered by Islam) in western Europe.

Since nothing is sacred to a nihilist -- literally -- one would think they would be pretty tough, pretty insensitive to insults. But somehow, the opposite is true. The list of lefitst sacred cowpies (Imus recently stepped in one) and iconmen (a couple of whom got him fired) is endless. Why is that?

Let us start with the axiom that the Absolute is necessarily both immanent and transcendent, meaning that it is both "in" the world and "beyond" it. The relative world -- i.e., maya -- may be thought of as the peripheral "radiance" from the nonlocally central sun of the Absolute.

As such, the relative necessarily and inevitably contains degrees of being, with the first and last degree known as “God.” But around these parts we just call it O, so as to avoid pretending that we understand it just because we have a word for it.

It is only possible for us to know the Good, the True, and the Beautiful because we can recognize and distinguish them in the light of the Absolute. For example, in the absence of the Absolute, there cannot actually be any truth, since truth is ipso facto true, and therefore absolute in its own way. In other words, the "relative absoluteness" of any truth is a reflection of O in the herebelow.

Now, the other day, a reader suggested that I become more "mystical," and "let Petey take over" in my writing. I don't think anyone would really like that, because those last two mystagogic paragraphs are an example of "how Petey talks." He's a bit pompous and inscrutible, and one can never know for certain whether he is "pulling my piñata," as he calls it. Sometimes he enjoys "testing" me, and will toss out some pearl of bogus Chopraesque windbaggery just to keep me on my toes.

The long and short of it is that he doesn't want me to just take dictation and pass it along, unlike his obsessive-compulsive friend, Gabriel, who insisted on absolute fidelity to his words. No; Petey wants me first of all to understand, and only then pass along my understanding to others.

But "understanding" is not something you can pass along from mind to mind, like an object (or even like a mental object, such as a mathematical equation or rule of reason). Rather, understanding -- as opposed to knowledge -- is something that must be facilitated in another, which is much more tricky. Anyone can "teach." Much more difficult to facilitate "understanding" of a suprasensible reality. But that is the only option, for if one attempts to "know" this reality in the usual way, one will only generate "minus k."

Anyway, let's break down some of Petey's lofty pneumababble and trancelight it into plain english. The ten commandments of nihilism are simply a reversal of the actual ten commandments, so that they represent the quintessence of cosmic stupidity and a detailed lesson on how not to live -- or how to shovel with both hands and how to comprehensively waste your life.

Thus, the first commandment of nihilsim is the converse of the actual first commandment. Instead of “I am your God and you shall have no other gods before me,” the parallel looniverse of the secular left begins with the commandment that “there is no Absolute and you shall bow down before all of the sacred relativities we have inserted in its place.”

From this first commandment follow all of implications and ramifications of nihilism. You might say that the subsequent nine commandments are "fractals" of the first, in that each of them represents the first in miniature -- or shall we say, the first commandment applied to this or that more limited realm -- just as the real first commandment is the basis of the other nine.

Also, it should be kept in mind that the first five commandments apply to the vertical (i.e., man-to-god relations), the second five to the horizontal (i.e., human-to-human relations). But in the case of the ten commandments of nihilism, there is reversal, so that the vertical commandments become horizontalized, while the horizontal ones become verticalized.

Sorry. That was Petey talking again. Allow me to explain.

The first commandment of nihilism is that God, the Absolute, does not exist, and that you shall have no gods before this. Therefore, the commandment affirms that the vertical does not exist, and that there is only the horizontal, or relative. Thus, the horizontalization of the vertical, which instantaneously creates an absurd universe. Whereas God created the universe ex nihilo -- i.e., something from nothing -- the devout nihilist creates nothing out of something. And that takes some doing -- some real mental gymgnosticism.

The reason why we bobject to leftism is that it represents the political program of nihilism -- i.e, the horizontal implications of the vertical commandments of nihilism. However, since the nihilist's cosmos is literally upside-down, this means that that the nihilist's political program becomes absolute -- which is to say totalitarian (often concealed in the form of politically correct totolerantarianism, which involves denial of your right to push back against the bullies).

Paradox? No, not at all. Man was made to know and to worship the Absolute. If you eliminate the Absolute, then you will simply insert something else in its place -- a false absolute -- which is what all statist, socialist, and collectivist schemes do. When Hillary Clinton promises that she is going to steal your money because she knows better how to spend it than you do, first of all, believe her.

But secondly, realize that she is "the voice of the nihil," for the human being represents the "absolute within the relative," a state of affairs from which all of our sacred rights and obligations emanate. This is why there is nothing so precious as a human being, whose freedom and dignity are absolute, and whose "relative sovereignty" must be respected.

In this regard, America's founding avatars were the diamatriarchical opposite of Hillary. In contrast to her, their philosophy represents the political program of true vertical understanding. This is why they could say with perfect clarity that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. This is just another way of saying that the Absolute exists a priori, and that our absolute rights only exist in light of this fact. Take away the Absolute, and no rights can intrinsically exist. And if they don't, then reach for your wallet, because your money absolutely belongs to Hillary. So says Petey, the wise, the compassionate, the mirthiful!

The founders did not enumerate all of the rights that follow from the affirmation of the Absolute, but among them are, of course, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here again, each of these is absolute. Make no mistake, either a human life is infinitely precious or it is worthless. You can pretend that there is some middle ground, but you are simply pretending and you know it, you rascal.

If human beings are really nothing more than Darwinian machines that resulted from a random shuffling of material genes, then obviously, there can be no absolute rights, only human agreements. By definition, our rights cannot be rooted in anything transcendent or timelessly true. Is this not obvious? Again, the only thing I ask of leftists is that they have the courage of their absence of convictions and admit that their first commandment pulls certain inevitable ramifications in its wake, including the absence of any meaning aside from what we make up -- which is no meaning at all.

Liberty too can only be derived from the real first commandment. This is why the first commandment of nihilism always leads to one or another form of slavery. The slavery may be physical or it may be psychological, and you may well forge the fetters of your own enslavement, but make no mistake, you will be a slave -- a slave to the passions, to ideology, to maya, to the relative, to anything other than God. This is why surrender to God is the way of liberty, while surrender to anything less is the way of slavery. Therefore, St. Paul is simply passing along a metaphysical truism when he says Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

I don't know how anything could be more obvious, for not only is God the guarantor of liberty, but our spiritual liberty -- one purpose of which is to distinguish between good and evil -- is ipso facto the sufficient proof of God. Freedom, which is to say, free will, exists. But not for a nihilst, or a scientific materialist, or rank-and-foul Islamists, for that matter. In each case, they deny God (or the true God), and therefore diminish liberty.

Starting with the latter, I don't want to get into a full explanation, but suffice it to say that the Islamists deny horizontal causation and insist that God intervenes on a moment by moment basis to cause everything, so that free will doesn't really exist. To be fair, some deluded Christian fundamentalists also believe this, but they are mostly harmless.

A nihilist thinks he is free -- after all, he has replaced God with himself, and is therefore the most exalted thing in the universe. However, there is a big difference between being "lost" and being "free." If I drop you off in the middle of the Sahara desert and leave you there with no means of communication or transportation, you are certainly "free" -- even unto death, which will occur within a matter of days.

But one is actually only free in any meaningful sense of the word if the freedom has a direction, a meaning, an end, and a telos. Your freedom is only valuable because it is the existential prerequisite to arrive at a meaningful destination. Again, is this not obvious? My son, who is two years old, is very spontaneous and "free." But what if this freedom did not exist in a stream of psychological development with a meaningful endpont? Then we would not call him "free." Rather, we would call him "retarded."

Which is what we call secular leftists -- not mentally retarded, but spiritually so, by their own acknowledgment. Indeed, they are proud of their infirmity. They write books about it, teach classes in it, publish newspapers to propagate it, found political programs upon it. They obviously want us to be like them -- which is to say, slaves.

And a scientific materialist cannot be free, since freedom cannot be derived from matter. Or, if it can, then matter is not what we thought it was. Rather, it is more like a "divine substance," which, of course, it is. For example, this is why it may serve as a receptacle for so much divine beauty.

Well, I'm writing under duress this morning. Slept a little later, his majesty woke up a little earlier, and the in-laws are en route canal. Just kidding. Anyway, to be continued. Don't forget to enjoy the coony tunes in the sidebar. Some good stuff in there. Stay With Me, by Lorraine Ellison, never fails to send a chill up my spine. Or as brother Sam Phillips said, this is where the soul of man never dies.