Verbicide and Thought Control: If You Strike At the Word, Make Sure You Kill Him

How about a little Sunday Sermon at the Wee Church of Perpetual Slack, out on the edge of the vertical frontier?

The poor old cogitio -- I think therefore I am -- takes a lot of abuse, both from materialists and non-dualists, but Descartes was really just affirming a banality that is impossible to eradicate and live to see it: that the cleft between the exterior/objective and interior/subjective worlds is the most fundamental datum of our existence.

Monists at both extremes -- the materialists on the one hand, and the non-dualists on same one -- eliminate the duality, but at the expense of all qualities. For the materialist, the most sublime human virtues and qualities are secondary reflections of meaningless and impersonal electrical and chemical processes, while for the non-dualist they result from the deceptive play of maya.

But Bolton asks the question of whether the mind/matter or soul/world duality is "simply a falsehood, or is it a truth which is open to abuse?"

Good question, because most "heresies" -- including especially secular ones -- are not so much wrong as imbalanced or out of context. Often an error is merely an overemphasized but partial truth. For example we are surely material; but are we only material?

Likewise, mankind is indeed "one." But this hardly justifies socialism, since he is also -- and more fundamentally -- an individual. Similarly, it is surely a self-evident truth that human beings are "created equal." But contemporary liberals convert this to a lie in their tyrannical efforts to enforce their notions of material equality.

It is also common -- for it is one of Obama's primary rhetorical devices -- to convert an unwanted truth to a preferred lie by distorting it beyond recognition. Thus, people who support free enterprise are "greedy," or those who are skeptical of the pseudo-science of climate change are "anti-science."

Truly, there are many liberals who will never be forgiven for what they have done to the divine gift of language, for to abuse language is a kind of slow-motion genocide -- to say nothing of deicide; when you abuse words, you abuse the Word.

Nor can one harm language without damaging oneSelf. Often psychotherapy comes down to reconnecting words to emotional and psychic reality. It is fair to say that any psychopathology involves some significant disruption in the ability to mentalize experience through language. Sick people always have an unglishable secret life that is cordoned off from the reach of words.

Just remember: if you smite a king, you'd better make sure you kill him. And if you abuse language, you'd better make certain that you kill it dead, so that it is no longer possible to even think or say truth. Only if things no longer make sense can nonsensical things be forced upon you by the left.

This diabolical project is nearly complete in academia and the mass media, where the Lie reigns supreme. Dog around with these liars and you wake up fleeced. But the problem with any totalitarianism -- whether in its hard or soft forms -- is that any truth threatens the whole structure. It's like science, in which a single black swan disproves millions of observations that only white swans exist -- which is why in science, "consensus" is conformity and one man makes a majority.

There is something in the heart of the leftist that longs to be swaddled in certainty. Here again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, just a truth corrupted. For there is nothing more certain than the Absolute. Problems arise when human beings suppose that the Absolute abides on our side of creation. If it does, then man is God.

And historical experience reveals time and again that Man is a jealous god, for he doesn't like to be reminded that certain things are fundamentally outside his control, like, oh, let's say, the climate, or the economy, or the media.

It's so simple, really. For example, it only takes a single instance of something that defies the totalistic explanation of metaphysical Darwinism for it to be untrue. And there are any number of things that are not, and can never be, explained by Darwinism. Not only is ours an empirical argument, but a principial one. For example, a single instance of man knowing a transcendent truth falsifies the entire structure of materialism, whatever form it takes, both in fact and in principle.

Now, knowledge of any kind presupposes a relationship between knowing and being, or mind and essence. In other words, to say "knowledge" is to say "mind in communion with being." And not just communion, but union-in-difference, for only in difference can we "read out" what is implicit in the communion. (Not for nothing are knowledge and intercourse coonflated in Genesis; which is why the worst knowledge is still pretty damn Good.)

Here again, this is what I symbolize as O --> (k), which is not actually an abstraction, but as concrete a description as it is possible for human beings to have.

For this is actually a complementarity between whole and part, or a kind of spiraling vector flow of the former into the latter. Clearly, the one would be inconceivable in the absence of the other -- in other words, we couldn't know truth if we weren't at one with it, and yet, we also couldn't know it if we weren't separate from it.

Just as in the case of Love, it takes three to tango. Knower-Known-Knowledge is as irreducible as Lover-Love-Beloved. In each case, it is One for Three and Three for One.

You don't know me from the wind
You never will, you never did
I'm the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder --Leonard Cohen, The Future