Free Will, Authentic Evil, and The Infectiousness of the Morally Unrepressed

Bolton points out that "the last animal of a species spends its life doing exactly the same things as were done by the first one. Only man does not have to keep doing the same things ad infinitum, regardless of their value."

But it wasn't too long ago that human beings were caught in that same evolutionary rut (and most still are). As I wrote in the book, one of our immediate predecessors, Homo erectus bumbled around the evolutionary stage for a million and a-half years with no evidence of change in the archaeological record, despite having a bigger brain than most Raider fans. As one scholar put it, "As a whole, the archaeological record between 1.4 million and 100,000 years ago seems to revolve around an almost limitless number of minor variations on a small set of technical and economic themes." Imagine the numbing repetition of hip-hop, only for a million years instead of 20.

But this is how mere Darwinian evolution works. With the exception of modern human beings, all animals are trapped in an evolutionary rut. Animals find their successful adaptations, and stick with them. That's called "winning the Darwinian lottery."

But to what is free will an adaptation? First of all, as we touched on yesterday, if it is adapted to bad ideas or to a faulty conception of reality, it "will result in changes which would be for the worse" (Bolton). As such, although this gives the superficial appearance of freedom, it cannot really be free in any useful way, "because it is worse than no change at all."

No, freedom, if it is to be truly free, must be an adaptation to Truth. Truth must be anterior to freedom, or there can be no real freedom. More pointedly, to the extent that you have internalized bad ideas, you are a slave, even though you probably feel subjectively free. But that's just the pseudo-freedom of a kind of reactionary rebellion. You are still bound to the truth, but in revolt against it.

Materialism necessarily results in loss of liberty, because in identifying with matter, the mind inverts the cosmos and shares in the materialistic mode of being.

But if for no other reason than the fact that we have two cerebral hemispheres which regard the world and process information in radically different ways, we cannot really identify with the material mode. As I have written before, human beings are bi-logical; it is not so much that we operate with two different modes of logic, but that, in a healthy person, we synthesize those two modes into a "higher third," or what Grotstein calls the "transcendent position" (and Ogden calls the "historical position," more on which later, as it has important implications for the eradication and control of mind parasites).

What this means in reality is that human consciousness is proportioned to the "transcendent object," which necessarily bifurcates into the two modes of logic in the herebelow (or herewithin). In other words -- or symbols -- you could once again draw a triangle, with the transcendent object at the apex, which in turn bifurcates into right and left hemispheres, and all they imply (or better yet, Matte Blanco's symmetrical and asymmetrical logic, respectively). In short, you need no less than two brains to know the One. Which is why reductionistic Darwinians and other materialists are such half-wits.

It's way too vast a subject to get into in detail at this point, but Balthasar's magisterial Glory of the Lord only spends about 10,000 pages going into why it is necessary to understand God in this more hyperdimensional, aesthetic manner, and conversely, how we are foredoomed to failure if we attempt to comprehend God and revelation in solely naturalistic terms. In short, theology becomes positively deranged in the absence of the third transcendental, beauty. He has so many arresting passages that illuminate this point, that it's difficult to just pick one or two. Here are a couple of random quotes:

"Will this light not necessarily die out where the very language of light has been forgotten and the mystery of Being is no longer allowed to express itself?... The witness borne by Being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty."

Or better yet, "Whoever insists that he can neither see it nor read it, or whoever cannot accept it, but rather seeks to 'break it up' critically into supposedly prior components, that person falls into the void and, what is worse, he falls into what is opposed to the true and good."

Do you see the problem? God is not only whole, but the very condition and possibility of wholeness. Therefore, to treat God as, say, a biological object that one dissects on a table, is to kill the very object one wishes to understand. God cannot be understood from the bottom up, only the top down (and only then from the bottom up). The apprehension of God is like a "form" that radiates celestial beauty that is inseparable from its truth and goodness. "If form is broken down into subdivisions and auxiliary parts for the sake of explanation, this is unfortunately a sign that the true from has not been perceived as such at all." The form is seen first, just as a biologist must first be able to apprehend life before dissecting it into parts

But it is no different with man. To treat a man as an object is to have failed to understand what man is. Likewise, to treat scripture as a literary form to be deconstructed is to have failed to see the object one is so casually dismembering. One must first see the "whole," and then understand how it radiates into all the parts. If you don't first "see" Jesus, you can't possibly begin to understand him, for "the Incarnation uses created Being at a new depth as a language and a means of expression for the divine Being and essence."

As I said, that's a topic for another 100 posts. Back to Bolton. He points out that "the lack of free will which can be seen in animals results from the fact that their wills relate only to objects in the outside world." Now, don't you know, it is the same problem vis-a-vis mind parasites and man. This is another huge topic, and I'm not sure I can do justice to it in such a short space, but a mind parasite essentially comes down to an unconsciously internalized relationship with the environment, that then goes on repeating itself in a circular way.

For example, say the infant is abused or emotionally abandoned by a parent. This relationship -- which consists of two subjects and an affective link between them -- is internalized, say, into an oppressor-victim constellation. Later in life, the person will unconsciously re-enact the mind parasite, but due to the magic of symmetrical logic, he or she can at times sadistically identify with the oppressor in relationship to a projected victim, or masochistically identify with the victim in search of a persecutory oppressor.

Thus, in a perverse way, victims need their oppressors and cannot live without them. The Democrat party is proof of this. Many blacks, for example, are "addicted" to racism, just as so many Muslims are addicted to "Islamophobia." Again, because of the magic of symmetrical logic, they convert their own bloodthirsty impulses into the insane idea that 10 million Jews control and persecute a billion Muslims. Madness. A "proportionate response" would actually to be to nurture genocidal impulses toward Muslims, so Muslims should be careful what they wish for.

Note, by the way, that the Palestinians can never recognize the right of Israel to exist, because that would spell the death of their mind parasites -- a kind of "interior auto-genocide." They would rather physically die than allow their parasites to perish. Which again puts an interesting spin on the Darwinian aspect of all this, because the so-called "Palestinians" are not adapted to external reality; rather, they must bend reality to the will of their mind parasites, even at the cost of their own physical survival. Nor can you grant them "freedom," because they will only use the freedom to enslave themselves, as they have done in Gaza.

Morality -- i.e., conformity to the Good -- can only enter in the space between freedom and necessity. Free will is actually "movement" in a higher dimension, and one of those dimensions is the dimension of objective morality. Are Palestinians free to choose the Good? Hardly. If you do that, you will be murdered by another Palestinian.

Ironically, Bolton points out that in Islamic terminology, such beings are known as "saints of satan," that is, "authentic beings who are either evil or deranged, or both, but who have all the self-assurance of those who know themselves to be authentic."

In America, our problem is that half our population has no such-self assurance. For these totolerantarians reject the beautiful moral basis of our own civilization, but identify with the monstrous "authenticity" of the Palestinians. There is nothing like the "infectiousness of the morally unrepressed" (Becker) to get a liberal's heart pounding, since they are so free of everything liberals despise about themselves and their civilization.

Long day. Gotta run. Vote (remember, you can vote once a day):