Come for the Social Justice, Stay for the Omnipotent State

As the fifth act of creation involves the descent of ensouled movement into the world (discussed yesterday), the fourth act involves the creation of the archetypes -- just as the blueprint is prior to the building, genotype to phenotype, or logos (intelligent form) to substance.

Tomberg compares it to a symphony orchestra in which no one person has the entire score, but each member has his own instrument and his own part to play, in order to harmonize with the whole musical existentialada.

As such, the fourth day of creation "is that of the coming into being of those principles which direct 'time and tempo'" -- the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars in order to separate night from day, to provide light to the earth, and to serve generally as cosmic designposts: "signs and seasons, days and years." Tomberg asks, "What are these other than organs of direction, i.e., conductors of time and tempo for the world-orchestra, in accordance with the music-score of the stars?"

One might say that the sun illuminates space, while the moon and other heavenly bodies mark time, providing its primordial rhythmicity. (Although in another sense, the roles can be reversed, in that the moon rules the space of night, or the unconscious, just as the sun corresponds with the conscious self.)

Note as well that separation must precede order, something which is very much emphasized in Judaism. We revert to the chaos that preceded the creation if, for example, we ignore the distinction between the sexes -- which is one of the inevitable cosmic horrors of radical feminism, the homosexual agenda, or of left wing egalitarianism in general, which is always at war with discrimination (and the ability to discriminate vertically is what makes us human).

Looked at another way, the fourth day involves the enunciation of the principial world, which is anterior to creation in the same way that our personal essence is prior to existence (again, unless you are a Marxist/existentialist).

In fact, this is perhaps the central idea (appropriate that the four is midway between the one and seven) that separates the believer from the pagan and liberal from leftist, for the secular leftist inverts the divine order and insists that existence is prior to essence. Having denied his own essential blueprint, he is a cosmic orphan reduced to, and determined by, mere chance and superficial contingencies such as race, class, and gender (i.e., sex as social construct as opposed to principial archetype).

This is why leftism is 180 degrees from liberalism, and why leftism is unthinkable in the absence of this inappropriate obsession with horizontal accidents. Once you acknowledge a true self -- which is to say a created self, or a unique ontological center of personal autonomy -- you can no longer call yourself a leftist.

Thus, it is no surprise that we see the New York Times trumpeting the scientifically "sophisticated" but otherwise terribly unsophisticated idea that human beings do not possess free will. For if human beings do possess free will, then nearly the whole ghastly project of leftism crumbles in a heap. The absurdity of the free will deniers becomes clear if expressed explicitly, as in this piece at American Thinker:

"We here at The New York Times want to announce a new policy. This is that we will no longer criticize anyone, nor praise anyone. We will, in other words, hold no one responsible for his or her conduct.

"We institute this policy in light of the columns published recently in our pages arguing that human beings have no free will, that they cannot choose their own conduct. If this is so, as we believe it is -- we haven't published anyone arguing the opposite thesis, as you may have noticed -- there can be no choice about what people do. Neither Saddam Hussein, nor George W. Bush, nor Nancy Pelosi nor indeed anyone at all has anything to do with his or her conduct or, as social scientists prefer to call it, behavior."

In short, if there is no free will, then obviously there can be no morality, let alone a judicial system, for we are merely condemned to do what we do in a mechanistic way, and it makes no sense to punish a machine. Conversely, once one acknowledges that man possesses free will, and that he may (and must) recognize and choose between good and evil (or truth and falsehood), then one has left any form of leftism behind.

The Times quotes one "expert" who is apparently compelled (for he is not free) to say that free will is merely "a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free," but "the more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don't have it."

Hmmm.... if we are not free to scrutinize it, how could we ever know that it is true that we don't have free will? Here we see how there is no truth in the absence of free will, which is why the left ends up denying both freedom and reality (for truth coincides with the Real). To turn it around, if truth exists, so too does free will. Truth is the ultimate guarantor of liberty, and vice versa. Attack one and you maim the other.

One of our guiding stars in the principial firmament above is justice. This is as good an example as any of a "greater light" that allows us to navigate by day, as it illuminates the moral space we inhabit. That is, human beings possess an innate sense of justice -- not just this or that justice, but justice as such.

What is so ironic is that the leftist too lives by this light, but at the same time, denies its reality above and therefore its possibility below. This is why leftist theologies literally turn the cosmos upside down (speaking ontologically) and transmogrify transcendent justice into some version of "social justice" or "liberation" theology.

Equally ironically -- and this is key -- "social justice" is always an excuse for unlimited state power, since, if you try to understand what the leftist means by the term, you soon realize that it is imbued with omnipotence. (This is ably trissected in Thomas Sowell's foundational A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, and The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.)

In short, in order to impose one's idea of unlimited justice, one must have unlimited power. Whenever a leftist says "justice," reach for your blowtorch.

If no one is free and therefore nothing is moral, religion merely becomes the will to power, even -- or especially -- when it is dressed up in the language of social justice, entitlement, and "human rights," instead of the negative civil liberties of classical liberalism. For civil rights are here to protect liberty, whereas so-called "human rights" are here to deny liberty through state power -- which always ends up being a great injustice from the standpoint of heaven, since it imposes the same law on the lion and lamb, so we are all treated like sheep. First they steal our wool, then they pull it over our eyes.

Here is a typical voice from the abyss at huffingandpissed. He agrees that reality is not what it appears to be, and that there is a "hidden blueprint," so to speak, ruling over us. Yes, his opinions are obviously "crazy" -- that goes without saying -- but crazy does not mean random. Rather, one of the axioms of psychoanalysis is that craziness is merely order by another name. In other words, in order to heal the craziness, we must help the patient uncover the deep structure -- the implicate "lesser lights" of his night time unconscious -- that underlie the surface disorder:

"Every 'advanced' society exists as a parasite in those less 'advanced,' and that can be proven empirically and decisively. Bush is not responsible for the war in Iraq.... Civilization cannot exist in the absence of war, because civilization is itself inherently exploitative.... that is why we'll have more and more of it, and why it will eventually percolate from the peripheries populated by Dark Others into our suburbs. [How can there be "Dark Others" if war is inherent? -- ed.]

"Everything we have that we list in our catalogue of civilization is forged out of fraud, theft, and murder.... Show me the exception, and I'll take it back. [Since he is not an exception, he is a liar and a thief, so why should we believe, much less trust, him? -- ed.]

"The fine woods and metals and animal guts that make the orchestras, the stones and steel and trees for our libraries..., and the food displayed strategically along our supermarket shelves... they all require war. They are taken from cultures who first refuse to cooperate, then who are forced to cooperate or be depopulated. [In that case, we have to stop the world from stealing all of the food we produce here in the United States. -- ed.]

"The expansive and expanding heaps of... of asphalt and glass and plastic and paint and shiny right-angles -- are scraped out of hillsides and coastlines, with the corpses of biomes and simpler cultures left behind as the mizzens of this wretched thing called civilization.... Technology is driven by scarcity, and scarcity by pillage.... This is not a mark of superiority, but the cascading catastrophe of power seeking the enslavement of first women, then slaves and colonies and nature..." [But given your conception of man, wouldn't these women and other primitives just enslave and colonize white men if they could? -- ed.]

*****

Oh my. Imagine this fascist being in charge of your homeowners association, much less the wheels of government.

Here is a quite literal example of "justice gone mad," for when we reject the greater light of divine justice, we are left with mere animal justice, which is no justice at all. I am always surprised at the inherent irony of secular progressives calling themselves "humanists." For one thing, to deny God is to prevent man, pure and simple.

Secondly, have you ever read a more quintessentially anti-human diatribe? If human beings are what this or any other progressive says they are, then why would we ever trust progressive statists to set things right? If human beings are power-mad monsters of depravity, the last thing we want to do is give them more power over us, because they will treat us as such.

No one is responsible for anything, but somehow its our fault, otherwise this person wouldn't be ranting about his sense of cosmic injustice. But where does he get his grandiose sense of injustice, since it doesn't come from above, and he's a depraved human animal just like everyone else? From whence does it come if we are only self-interested monkeys who will commit any crime to get what we want? Indeed if we -- that is to say, civilization -- are a crime against man and nature?

End of part one.