The Infinite Stupidity of the Liztardian Mind

Those that deny the creator are the most miserable of all things. --Kepler Sings

[H]umanistic culture, insofar as it functions as an ideology and therefore as a religion, consists essentially in being unaware of three things: firstly, of what God is, because it does not grant primacy to Him; secondly, of what man is, because it puts him in the place of God; thirdly, of what the meaning of life is, because this culture limits itself to playing with evanescent things and to plunging into them with criminal unconscious. In a word, there is nothing more inhuman than humanism, by the fact that it, so to speak, decapitates man: wishing to make of him an animal which is perfect, it succeeds in turning him into a perfect animal; not all at once... but in the long run, since it inevitably ends by “re-barbarizing” society, while “dehumanizing” it ipso facto in depth. --F. Schuon

Man is not only capable of knowing the Absolute, but he was made to know it. As such, not only may he ascend to the eternal, the sublime, the godly, but he may sink beneath himself into a kind of infinite stupidity that in turn opens the floodgates to evil. For if man does not know what is ultimately true, he cannot act in accordance with virtue, at least in any essential, ontologically grounded way. Thus, infinite stupidity goes hand in hand with infinite evil.

For example, the reason we stand in awe of our military heroes is that they risk nothing less than an infinite sacrifice, for to give one's life for the Good is not susceptible to any human calculus. Likewise, to take an innocent life is an evil that can never be reconciled, at least on the human plane. A murderer with even a shred of human decency would ask to be put to death, because he has destroyed something infinite and infinitely precious.

Although it may be "in a manner of speaking" in order to emphasize the point, Jesus says that the one sin that will not be forgiven is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Why should this be so? I believe because in essence it undermines the very possibility of grace, redemption, and salvation, and attributes to man -- or to "matter" -- what can only come from the Creator. It is to turn the cosmos upside down, always and forever, rendering Man spiritually lost for all time.

In other words, to sin against the Holy Spirit is essentially to murder God, and how can that be forgiven? For this is to murder the Sovereign Good, the very source of truth, beauty, virtue, perfection, wisdom, harmony, holiness, light, radiance, the sacred. Furthermore in annihilating God, one commits the genocide of Man as such. And none of this can be accomplished unless it is under a cloak of pride, hubris, and cosmic narcissism.

At First Things there is an essay by Joseph Bottum (TW: Michael Egnor) that speaks to the infinite stupidity of the Liztardian mind and its gleeful vandalism against the human station. The essay is about the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, whose most famous Vicious and Unhinged Rant Against Queeg was The Revolt of the Masses, which I read long ago. In it he discusses a new psychohistorical phenomenon, the "mass man," who "is not just an ordinary man, and he is not associated with any particular class. He is, rather, a product of European historical development, a kind of human being born for the first time in the nineteenth century."

Thus, we appreciate the immediate irony that the Liztardian queegling is most assuredly a product of "evolution," except that it is a downward evolution -- or devolution -- away from what man was intended to be, in the direction of matter, of infinite stupidity, of "anti-wisdom," or (-n).

Indeed, without the vector provided by the Absolute, Darwinism can only produce the lateral mutation of this or that, but nothing of eternal value. There can be no standard of excellence, nothing timelessly true or beautiful. Obviously nothing can be higher than anything else, which is precisely why postmodernity is necessarily the cult of mediocrity in which every Queeg is "entitled to his opinion," no matter how banal and childlike.

To assault the Holy Spirit is to decimate the hierarchy that allows the mind to discern the infinite gulf between a Meister Eckhart and Masterless Liztard. So one might say that Queeg's puny misosphy is entirely self-serving, as it a priori places him on the same plane as those who infinitely surpass him, like a child who has no conception of adulthood (except perhaps as something from which to reflexively rebel). To paraphrase Schuon, the Raccoon is "one who transcends himself and loves to transcend himself," while the worldly Liztard "remains horizontal and detests the vertical dimension." Ho!

Again, this attitude is both an effect and cause of Cosmic Narcissism. As Bottum explains, "The mass man lives without any discipline"; he "possesses no quality of excellence," and "demands more and more, as if it were his natural right, without realizing that what he wants was the privilege of a tiny group only a century ago. He does not understand that technological wonders are the product of an intricate cultural process for which he should be grateful. 'What before would have been considered one of fortune’s gifts, inspiring humble gratitude toward destiny, was converted into a right, not to be grateful for, but to be insisted on...'"

In short, Ortega understood "that the nineteenth century created the kind of human being who would become the dominant social force in the twentieth century." He was concerned -- and rightfully so -- that this whole process would end in "the total disappearance of man as man and his silent return to the animal scale." Those with eyes to see are already witness to this re-barbarization of Man. The infinite stupidity of the Koslings and Queeglings is but a symptom.

Both of these deviant cults of ignorance "lack of even a rudimentary understanding of culture," which is to say, "the set of ideas, motives, and religious truths that gave birth to civilization." The cult member is "oblivious to the fact" that modern science is solidly rooted in Judeo-Christian metaphysics. Once in place, science can obviously continue. However, once severed from the roots that gave birth to it, it can be no different than when behavior is severed from consciousness of virtue. Being that man is "suspended," as it were, between God and matter, he does not remain stationary. If he does not ascend toward the nonlocal attractor, then he tends to fall in the other direction, toward dispersion, fragmentation, and absence of any true center.

Along these lines, Schuon writes that "We do not deny that evolution exists within certain limits, as is indeed evident enough, but we do deny that it is a universal principle, and hence a law which affects and determines all things, including the immutable; evolution and degeneration can moreover go hand in hand, each then occurring on a different plane. However that may be, what has to be categorically rejected is the idea that truth evolves, or that revealed doctrines are the product of an evolution" (emphasis mine).

In a way, that sums up the argument against the cult of Queeglings. Evolution cannot be a "universal principle," for nothing absolute can ever be derived from pure relativity. Clearly, change cannot affect the changeless, and if there is no vertical realm of absolute truth, then we would have no way to discern the difference between evolution and devolution, progress and degeneration. And truth surely cannot be a product of evolution. Rather, it is realized through evolution. Again, to the extent that human beings may know truth, then they have ipso facto either transcended it or realized its end -- which amounts to the same thing.

In this sense, the Raccoon obviously believes in real evolution, not the anemic, watered down version of the Liztards. As always, we go the whole hog, and say that Man is the pinnacle of evolution, which cannot be surpassed, being that he is capable of knowing the infinite, the absolute and the eternal, and none of these things can be exceeded. Rather, we can only fall short of them, like the devolutionary cult of clueless Liztards. Man's plight and his saving grace is that he is not fixed but an evolutionary possibility. A spiritually unevolving man who is "frozen" and encased in matter is a deviant monster.

There is a great deal of talk these days about “humanism,” talk which forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly “human".... Humanism is the reign of horizontality, either naïve or perfidious; and since it is also -- and by that very fact -- the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive.... What is human is what is natural to man, and what is most essentially or most specifically natural to man is what relates to the Absolute and which consequently requires the transcending of what is earthly in man. --F. Schuon