Sunday, January 24, 2010

Who's At Fault For the Fault Between the Fantasy and Reality of Obama?

I think I'll repost another antichrist update from last year, just because it pisses off our irony-poor trolls. But the main purpose of this verticalisthenic exercise is to gauge the accuracy of our cʘʘnvision one or two years on.

One thing that interests me -- and confirms the idea that group fantasies are very much real -- is that suddenly everyone is seeing Obama in the way we saw him from the first moment we laid three eyes on him. How can this be? Has Obama changed? Hardly. Then how to account for the distance between who Obama actually is and what people imagined he was?

One annoying reader keeps chiding me for using psychology to understand this gulf, but what is one supposed to use, physics? To the extent that there is a subjective abyss between the way things are and the way a person thinks they are, that's my bag, baby.

Here is a sample what people are only now seeing in Obama, even though there is "nothing new" here for the Raccoon:

"... [I]n this White House, there is no there there. It's all smoke and mirrors, bells and whistles, held together with glib talk, Chicago politics and an audacious sense of entitlement. At the center is a young and talented celebrity whose worldview, we now know, is an incoherent jumble of poses and big-government instincts. His self-aggrandizing ambition exceeds his ability by so much that he is making a mess of everything he touches.

"He never advances a practical idea. Every proposal overreaches and comes wrapped in ideology and a claim of moral superiority. He doesn't listen to anybody who doesn't agree with him. After his first year on the job, America is sliding backwards, into grave danger at home and around the world. So much so that I now believe either of his rivals, Hillary Clinton or John McCain, would have made a better, more reliable and more trustworthy president."

I might add that I am not engaging in any kind of "vicious attack" on anyone. For one thing, I'm talking about generally good people who have been captured by an ideology. And if you could actually see me instead of projecting all sorts of hostility into my words, you'd see that I am as calm and dispassionate as a person can be.

The plain fact of the matter is that psychology alone cannot account for the distance between fantasy and reality, not when it is this great. The XVth card of the tarot, The Devil, introduces us "to the secrets of the electrical fire and the intoxication of counter-inspiration."

But before proceeding further, let us take to heart the warning of our Unknown Friend (UF), who cautions us that "One can grasp profoundly, i.e. intuitively, only that which one loves. Love is the vital element of profound knowledge, intuitive knowledge." If you have ever wondered why true evil -- nazi evil, Islamist evil -- is so impenetrable, it is because the normal person obviously cannot love evil: "Evil is therefore unknowable in its essence. One can understand it only at a distance, as an observer of its phenomenology."

I suppose another way of saying it is that (in linguistic terms) "evil" is a signifier with no coherent signified, being that true evil represents a genuine absence -- an absence or deprivation of the Good. As such, the essence of evil is that it has no essence. It is slippery, shape-shifting, mercurial... You know what it's like to argue with it.

In turn, this is why evil is truly a "bottomless pit." It is not actually infinite, since only the Absolute can be infinite. It does, however, tend toward its own kind of "false" or "bad" infinite (in the Hegelian sense), which is why man can only rise so high but can fall and fall without ever hitting bottom, as proved by Keith Olbermann. I suppose the physics of black holes might provide a handy way to think about this negative infinity. This would be easier -- and less spiritually dangerous -- than trying to imagine, say, the bottomless darkness of the Berkeley City Council.

UF goes on to say that in comparison to the luminous worlds of the celestial hierarchy, the world of evil is more "like a luxuriant jungle, where you can certainly, if necessary, distinguish hundreds and thousands of particular plants, but where you can never attain to a clear view of the totality."

Do you know what he means? I do. It's what makes it so difficult to argue with politically deranged people, who, when you cut off one limb of their argument, just grow another. It's like a collection with no center or ordering principle, just a blob or agglomeration -- which is the opposite of the Life principle, i.e., that which organizes, unifies, and synthesizes. Dynamic wholeness is the essence of Life, which means that evil and death must be related to dispersal and fragmentation. Thus, "the world of evil is a chaotic world -- at least, such as it presents itself to the observer." (You will also have noticed that true science is impossible for such a person, because they cannot see the totality, only a collection of parts.)

Vertically speaking, order is "up," while chaos is down (although, there is a kind of paradoxical "static chaos" at the very bottom). No surprise there. In Genesis, God's first act is simply to separate. Without separation there is only the formless void of primordial chaos. If you don't understand the holiness and the sacredness of divine separation, then you don't understand anything. Yes, this separation, or duality, can be transcended, but only from above, never from below. Better to live in Holy duality than to obliterate divinely ordained distinctions out of a self-deluded belief in bogus transcendence, which is what the "new age" is all about.

As is leftism, which might just as well be called "down syndrome," being that it is rooted in the anti-divine principle of blending. For the left, In the Beginning was Order. Now, let us gleefully tear it down and blend darkness with light, the upper waters with the lower waters!

Examples are too numerous to mention, but one would have to include the obliteration of sexual differences, the trivialization of generational differences, the effacement of the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, the attack on private property, and the judicial activism which blurs the plain meaning of the Constitution; not to mention the conflation of transcendence and immanence, the satanic confusion of moral relativism, the abysmal fall into multiculturalism, and the obsession with the redistribution rather than creation of wealth. All of these trends are evil to the core, despite the paradoxical absence of a core. Again, evil is essentially without essence. It is perpetually going from nowhere to nothing, while enjoying the... what's the word, Jeeves? Yes, the frisson of the fall.

Now, just as the right kind of obedience is freedom -- for example, fidelity to Truth -- the wrong kind of freedom is slavery. According to UF, one of the subtexts of the Devil card is that of slavery, in that it depicts a man and woman bound by the neck to a much larger androgynous entity.

Interestingly, just as the union of male and female can create the miracle of a baby to raise (and who shall in turn raise them up in mysterious ways!), it seems that a false blending of their essences can engender another kind of being that shall lower them, so to speak. As UF explains, the card has to do with "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them. It is the Arcanum of creation of artificial beings and of the slavery into which the creator can fall -- becoming a slave of his own creation." (For example, consider how Tiger Woods is a slave of this false blending.)

Let's pause here for a moment. In this regard, I can remember the precise moment when I crossed over that line from leftist back to liberal (i.e., conservative); or, to put it another way, when it was no longer possible to be on the left. I simply asked myself, "who is responsible for my existential unhappiness?" I won't go into all of the details, as that would take us down a lengthy deitour. But the point is, I realized that I was a slave of my own creation -- for example, an evil creation I called "Ronald Reagan." Of course, my creation had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual Ronald Reagan. Rather -- and this is critical -- not only was it my creation, but it was me. Just as in a dream, I was persecuted by my own elaborate production -- like the spider who lives in a web spun from its own substance.

I was reminded of this again last night in reading the liner notes to the new edition of Donald Fagen's excellent Nightfly Trilogy (nothing I'm about to say detracts from the music). As much as I appreciate Steely Dan (Becker & Fagen), like most people of their generation, their jaded cynicism does not extend to their own default moonbattery, which sits there like a kind of unexamined Holy Writ. Which it is. It is the genesis myth of the Baby Boom generation -- the idea that the evil is Out There in the Nixonian uncool ones who are oppressing us. (And which is why they imagined that the Cool One would save the planet.)

I know exactly what Fagen means when he reflects that "to a weekend hippie in the '60s," political paranoia "seemed kind of exciting." Indeed, for me, this was the appeal of a Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn -- that they provided a kind of secret gnostic knowledge, an alternative conspiracy theory that explained everything -- why the world is so off-kilter and out of joint, and more to the point, why I was so unfulfilled. Ronald Reagan hates me!

It's one thing to think this way in the '60s. But it is rather pathetic to still think it in one's 60s, as Fagen apparently does. He's still haunted by his self-generated demons -- i.e., mind parasites -- which have now appropriated the host, as suggested in the liner notes of the dark and dystopian world of Morph the Cat, released in 2006 (especially when compared to the idealism and optimism of Nightfly). As he writes,

"Paranoia just wasn't fun anymore in the age of al Qaeda." But not because of al Qaeda! Rather, he speaks disparagingly of Republicans taking over his city (New York) at the 2002 convention, and ends his notes with the following warning: "If you see some folks who believe that spirits and ghosts and hell actually exist and they're really sure about it and they're comin' your way -- RUN!"

I couldn't agree more -- run away from those who believe in vague spirits called "change," ghosts called "Bush" or "Cheney," or the hell of Gitmo.

39 comments:

walt said...

"...suddenly everyone is seeing Obama in the way we saw him from the first moment we laid eyes on him."

Say what you will about cʘʘnvision -- it does save a person considerable time!

Two weeks from today at the Superbowl, during halftime, I'm betting that The Wh will play Won't Get Fooled Again -- and half the crowd will be reelin' with the feelin' while the other half will be thinking of Obama.

Cousin Dupree said...

Not to mention the Baba O'Reilly Factor.

walt said...

It's like a collection with no center or ordering principle, just a blob or agglomeration -- which is the opposite of the Life principle, i.e., that which organizes, unifies, and synthesizes. Thus, "the world of evil is a chaotic world -- at least, such as it presents itself to the observer."

There was a great illustration of this, di-rect from yesterday's WSJ, regarding ObamaCare:

>>Most everything in ObamaCare as it stands is designed to "solve" a problem created by something else in the bill.

The regulations that would convert insurance companies into public utilities could easily create market death spirals in the majority of states that have been sensible enough to avoid those rules. Thus the requirement for a coercive and unpopular mandate that people buy coverage, which in turn is more expensive because of these regulations, which in turn requires hefty insurance subsidies, which in turn requires big tax increases.

"It turns out that a lot of these things are interconnected," Mr. Obama conceded.<<

No "frisson" in all that for me, but a sense of visceral "chaos," yes!

NoMo said...

President Bush represented an evil that only Obamahopenchange could overcome. It seems one delusion breeds another...and another?

I've been sporting a Carter 2.0 bumper sticker on my prius next to the NRA sticker for over a year now. That prescience can stop any time. Unfortunately, there are even worse things an incompetent leader can help bring to pass than ushering in the ayatollahs to power in Iran. Especially over 3 years.

Pray.

hoarhey said...

Anyone else feeling a late Christmas reprieve from what looked to be an immanent Obama/Reid/Pelosi “Christmas present to the American people” jam down? That threat completely ruined my holidays; the shackles were fitted, the padlock was about to be clasped when, lo and behold, a miracle happened. It came from a land where, judging from recent history, no one would ever have expected it. The irony is just too thick, a Senator who has been pushing a bill for decades for the government takeover of the nation’s healthcare, from a party who had nothing standing in it’s way to pass it, dies, and the man who takes his seat, by a vote of the people no one would have predicted, puts a complete, though probably only temporary halt to the fascist cram down of that very bill.
I realize the battle has just begun, the manacles are still fitted yet unlocked……… but, I needed to express my gratitude for this belated, symbolism-rich, Christmas miracle. THANK YOU!

BTW, Microsoft Works word processor must be racist because it tells me that Obama is misspelled. You’d better get on that one Bill, Michelle is watching with that perpetual, contemptuous stare.

Gagdad Bob said...

Along those lines, I'm loving Tom Sowell's new book on Intellectuals and Society. He beautifully shows how and why these ideologues are so destructive, because they think they know more than the infinite knowledge dispersed through a self-organizing system. Such a system always seeks its center, whereas a centralized economy is perpetually decentered.

Susannah said...

"In Genesis, God's first act is simply to separate. Without separation there is only the formless void of primordial chaos. If you don't understand the holiness and the sacredness of divine separation, then you don't understand anything." I've had the eerie experience of the new growth popping up in the middle of a discussion...that strange blending effect. The first thing you learn when trying to have a discussion with a leftist is that words no longer mean what you think they mean. And woe betide you if you try to nail down what they mean. Naturally, if we can't even agree ahead of time that language is supposed to convey real meaning, then we can't discuss anything. Defining a term obviously involves that "separating" you mention, Bob. But separating also involves using one's judgment. And judgment of any kind is a no-no, unless the leftist is doing the judging.

Petey said...

Remember, if "In the beginning was the Word," then in the beginning for the left is strangling the Word in its crib.

Gagdad Bob said...

Indeed. The preemptive attack on language is job one of the left. Look at the furor over the recent Supreme Court decision -- what part of "congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech" do they not understand?

walt said...

Is this an attack on language? Or intelligence (ours)?

[White House spokesman Robert] Gibbs said that Brown may have campaigned on stopping the health care bill but that's not why voters elected him over Democrat Martha Coakley.

"More people voted to express their support for Barack Obama than to oppose him," Gibbs said.


Uh ... sure. That makes sense. Riiiight.

Tigtog said...

Just finished reading the The High Priestess from MOTT. "A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system can no longer see the world, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything through the disorienting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in history of mankind other than the "class struggle"". After reading this passage, I asked myself can a Marxist be happy? Or alternately, do happy Marxists exist? I see Obama as the perfect Marxist vessel and I notice that he is rarely happy. Can happiness and Marxism coexist?

julie said...

Re. Gibbs, leftists - you can pimp slap them with brutal reality, and somehow they'll still take it as an accolade.

I have to wonder if its even that they're attacking our intelligence so much as that they're protecting themselves from the truth that people really don't like what they're doing. After all, the people gave them "a mandate;" from their horizontal perspective, that's as good as a divine right to rule, and hey, they know they're just trying to do what's best for the little guys who can't be trusted to take care of themselves. Therefore, any censure from the people after the mandate is given must really be directed somewhere else. They are, after all, the elect, whose wisdom and benevolence have been acknowledged by the compliant little folk who put them in charge.

Kind of like kids for whom any attention, good or bad, must really be good.

Or maybe they really do think we're that dumb. It's hard to tell sometimes; either way, they're out of touch with reality.

julie said...

Tigtog, every now and then someone will recommend books to me wherein the author looks at history through an openly stated -ism, for instance a feminist look at life around the time of Christ. I generally smile, nod, and make a mental note to avoid it at all costs, since the -ism is bound to take precedence over the truth about how things were.

That said, of course everyone has a specific perspective that colors their view of, well, everything. But some people are better at getting themselves out of the way than are others.

julie said...

re. happiness and Marxism, that seems a tougher question to answer since happiness can be so subjective. Some people are happy regardless of the circumstances. I imagine Marxists are briefly happy when they think they've won something, but since the revolution is never over it never lasts.

A more important question is perhaps whether Marxists are ever grateful for anything, since gratitude is such a key element of lasting happiness. Given that they always want what someone else has (or at least seek to make sure one person can't have something that's better than someone else's), I'm guessing the answer is no.

debass said...

They don't understand the second amendment either.

wv: krapt. exactly.

Aquila said...

debass: Actually, that's not 100% true. Go far Left enough, as I have, and you'll start seeing the AK-47s and the calls for a "People's Militia". Of course, come the Revolution, the Second Amendment and all those other bourgeois Constitutional strictures will be history.

Aquila said...

On a mostly unrelated note: Can Bob, or anyone else, explain to me why so many moonbats and New Age ninnies are self-proclaimed "Buddhists"?

Gagdad Bob said...

Because the anti-intellectual left replaces standards with compassion, and then ironically feels superior for it.

Susannah said...

This is rife with daddy issues--less the President's than the author's in this case, I think.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

If you have ever wondered why true evil -- nazi evil, Islamist evil -- is so impenetrable, it is because the normal person obviously cannot love evil: "Evil is therefore unknowable in its essence. One can understand it only at a distance, as an observer of its phenomenology."


Indeed. We can give thanks that we can't understand the essence of evil.
The less evil we understand the better.

Whenever I hear someone say "I can't understand why tht serial killer murdered all those people,"
or something to that effect, I say "be glad you don't."

That kind of knowledge has nothing good in it. That's not to say we can't understand the effects of evil, or how folks are duped into embracing it the (anti) hope of it, but the evil itself?
All we need to know is how it can be fought and destroyed by Good.

Great post, Bob!

Aquila said...

Bob,

Good answer, thanks. And you're right about the "superior" attitude -- I have yet to meet one of these allegedly egoless No-Minders who doesn't reek of smugness and condescention.

Gagdad Bob said...

Yes, their ego is very much wrapped up in being ego-less, just as the leftist's identity and self-image revolve around being more compassionate and evolved than you.

julie said...

Susannah - the first line of that article says it all, in the context of today's post:

I understand Barack Obama. It is not always easy, but I do. I can even relate to him.

walt said...

"...being more compassionate and evolved than you."

B-but Bob, isn't that sort of thing oneupsmanship? How can that reconcile with "compassion"?

julie said...

Hah - apropos, another line from the article:

There is no punishment in the Obama White House.

*snork* - yeah, that's because you have to be outside before they can throw you under the bus...

Aquila said...

Walt,

I suppose these types reconcile one-upsmanship and compassion, the same way they somehow reconcile their own obvious cravings and lusts with the Buddha's teachings on giving up desire.

Warren said...

>> Better to live in Holy duality than to obliterate divinely ordained distinctions out of a self-deluded belief in bogus transcendence

Eloquently and brilliantly said - thank you.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of fantasy and reality I find these two sentences persuasive.

At present, a culture of total war, a culture of death, is ruling, while the people are engrossed in consumerism.

The modern every-man of consumer society is a propagandized individual, participating in illusions and, effectively, self-destructing.

The author of these two sentences also pointed out that the 8 years of the Bush "administration" were easily the worst and most destructive period in the history of the USA.

Van Harvey said...

"As is leftism, which might just as well be called "down syndrome,""

Ha, that is soOo perfectly descriptive.

Van Harvey said...

Hoarhey said " It came from a land where, judging from recent history, no one would ever have expected it. The irony is just too thick, a Senator who has been pushing a bill for decades for the government takeover of the nation’s healthcare, from a party who had nothing standing in it’s way to pass it, dies, and the man who takes his seat, by a vote of the people no one would have predicted, puts a complete, though probably only temporary halt to the fascist cram down of that very bill."

But of course, it is the home of the original Tea Party....

;-)

Susannah said...

So what are we supposed to do, go back to weaving our own cloth, tanning hides for our own shoe leather, and making our own moonshine? Let the enlightened anti-consumerists lead the way. At least it will keep them too busy (and/or drunk) to go nosing about in other people's business. Thank the good Lord above we are no longer burdened with the innumerable tasks that fill all daylight hours for the purposes of mere survival! Thank Heaven we have leisure time to burn, blogging, commenting on blogs and whatnot. Thank *God* for a Lowe's full of power tools to accomplish in hours things that took *weeks* during our pioneer forefathers' time. They looked from their horses to those newfangled tractors and, being astute time and resource managers (unlike your typical leftist), never looked back! This kind of claptrap is understandable from reality-deficient leftists, but I personally find the crunchy cons supremely irritating...even though we are effectively setting up a homestead on our own place. I don't have any illusions about total independence from "consumerist" society, though. I know good & well hobby farming would be impossible without the blessings of a modern, specialized economy, especially on such small acreage. It's just not "sustainable" without outside infusions of income, factory-produced goods, "big agriculture" farms to produce feed, & so on. Silly greenie elitist doofuses. Where do they think their lattes and laptops and MP3 players and cell phones and hybrids come from? They should be kissing the rings of these "corporatists" for sustaining their cushy lifestyles.

Susannah said...

Rant over. Heh!

Van Harvey said...

Susannah said "that strange blending effect. The first thing you learn when trying to have a discussion with a leftist is that words no longer mean what you think they mean. And woe betide you if you try to nail down what they mean."

Yep, and they have always been so, and always on the side of destruction, of disintegration. You can see how old the tactics of the left are, in a classic from Plato, a humorous look at two spinning sophists showing off how they can 'win' any argument, even pro and con on the same issue, they ask 'are those who learn the wise or the ignorant?' and boast that “Whichever he answers …he will be refuted”, in the Euthydemus,

"And were you wise then?
No, indeed, he said.
But if you were not wise you were unlearned?
Certainly.
You then, learning what you did not know, were unlearned when you were learning?

The youth nodded assent.
Then the unlearned learn, and not the wise, Cleinias, as you imagine.

At these words the followers of Euthydemus, of whom I spoke, like a chorus at the bidding of their director, laughed and cheered. Then, before the youth had time to recover his breath, Dionysodorus cleverly took him in hand, and said: Yes, Cleinias; and when the grammar master dictated anything to you, were they the wise boys or the unlearned who learned the dictation?

The wise, replied Cleinias.
Then after all the wise are the learners and not the unlearned; and your last answer to Euthydemus was wrong."


It's always the same, disconnect the discussion from reality with the arbitrary, use equivocation to blend the boundaries of words actual meanings on non-essentials, and all to 'win' the argument - their purpose is never concerned with truth in the least, only in forcing agreement for other purposes “Whichever he answers …he will be refuted” – it’s ends justify it’s means - pure power over truth, or,

"I suppose another way of saying it is that (in linguistic terms) "evil" is a signifier with no coherent signified, being that true evil represents a genuine absence -- an absence or deprivation of the Good. As such, the essence of evil is that it has no essence. It is slippery, shape-shifting, mercurial... You know what it's like to argue with it."

Susannah said...

"It's always the same, disconnect the discussion from reality with the arbitrary, use equivocation to blend the boundaries of words actual meanings on non-essentials, and all to 'win' the argument - their purpose is never concerned with truth in the least, only in forcing agreement for other purposes “Whichever he answers …he will be refuted” – it’s ends justify it’s means - pure power over truth..." That's precisely it, Van. Perfectly put. Pure power over truth. For a recent instance, a left-leaning friend of mine posted a link yesterday to a George Washington quote featured on--get this--the Daily Dish. That's right, Andrew Sullivan. Lamenting partisan politics, of course...right after the MA election, naturally. Here is the quote, if you can stand a few seconds' visit there (ew). Keep in mind this is a blog that spent an inordinate amount of time conspiracy theorizing over the circumstances of Trig Palin's parentage. When you read the actual quote, the irony is supreme on so many levels. Language means whatever they want it to mean; it transforms in their ham hands into a bludgeon. Here, language decrying the very tactics this guy employs is used to endorse them, and to condemn the outworking of the voters' choice via a fair election. How do these people live in their own skulls without going mad from the cognitive dissonance?

Anonymous said...

I'm beginning to understand -- you can't stand leftists and Buddhists because they appear to be condescending to you. But it's only people with deep feelings of inferiority who feel threatened by other people's (alleged) claims to superiority. You are obviously worried that the leftists are right, or you wouldn't be spending so much energy into attacking their character. That explains the constant odor of spiritual self-congratulation around this place; it's an attempt to ward off these deep-seated doubts. Give me a Buddhist any day over that kind of crap.

Susannah said...

Sounds like the Buddha was conservative.

spanky said...

"I'm beginning to understand"


Heh......funny.

Cousin Dupree said...

Baby steps. He'll get it eventually.

xlbrl said...

I once knew a fellow who was very successful in raising his own hunting dogs. He told me of one puppy which of which he had failed to break of the habbit of chewing shoes. So he took that last chewed shoe and tied it into the puppy's mouth for a day. That was the cure.

We've got Obama tied into our mouth, and it may cure us when nothing else did.

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