Revisionist Ontology: Seeing and Being Like a State

It occurs to me that the revisionist history -- and journalism -- of the left has a deeper purpose than to just indoctrinate, miseducate, and misdirect.

This is probably just another way of affirming the obvious, but the ultimate purpose is and must be to alter reality -- or at least the perception thereof. In a desiccated post-Kantian mindscape, the two -- perception and reality -- amount to the same thing anyway: you see what you believe.

Hence, for example, the left's absurd attempt to spin the Wisconsin election results as a great victory for Dear Leader. Does anyone not see through this?

Yes, as a matter of fact, there are millions who don't see through it, which means that there must be some kind of self-imposed screen which the recipient places over reality, and which prevents them from penetrating beyond the plane of spoon-fed appearances.

I am quite sure that the people at the top who come up with these preposterous talking points cannot possibly believe them. They're way too clever for that.

For example, I find it hard to believe that the people responsible for the manipulation of the Trayvon Martin case can be unaware of the reality. And yet, the false narrative continues to be successfully propagated despite the reality. This can only happen because the people at the bottom -- the manipulated -- refuse to believe and even see any fact that contradicts the narrative.

Similarly, people such as our longtime cyberstalker and left-wing errand boy, William Yelverton, seem to sincerely believe the spin. They are the shock troops -- or tools -- whose task it is to assimilate and propagate the meme. But in order to be truly effective, they must be swaddled in spin from the earliest age, and then for the remainder of their lives. The fruity isn't just spin-deep, but goes all the way to the bone.

In the overall scam of things, it seems to me that the cynics at the top are actually less dangerous than the rubes at the bottom. Take Clinton, for example. He is the very archetype of the cynical and disingenuous manipulator, and yet, people seem to enjoy being manipulated by his genial mendacity. While the hypnotized never lie, the hypnotists surely do. And there are millions more hypnotized than hypnotists.

Again, a revision of reality can't just occur on the surface. In order for it to really take hold, one must either see to it that the revision penetrates to the level of ontology -- of being -- or simply eliminate those deeper planes altogether, as in the case of deconstruction or multiculturalism, which reduce vertical degrees of being to horizontal perspectives of equal value.

In order to live in an unreal spin-zone, one's world must in one way or another become closed. Thus the need for godlessness, for only a godless world can be closed and only the ontologically closed can be godless. The fact that we are in the image of the Creator is the one and only guarantor of an open world (and, a fortiori, mind ), a principle of which our founders were miraculously aware.

Through this principle of deiformity -- or the Incarnation, if you like -- man is freed "from the ontological slavery with which Fate burdened him. The stars, in their inalterable courses, did not, after all, implacably control our destinies. Man, every man, no matter who, had a direct link with the Creator, the Ruler of the stars themselves.

"It was no longer a small and select company that, thanks to some secret means of escape, could break the charmed circle: it was mankind as a whole that found its night suddenly illumined and took cognizance of its royal liberty. No more circle! No more blind destiny! No more Fate! Transcendent God, God the 'friend of men,' revealed in Jesus, opened for all a way that nothing would ever bar again" (De Lubac).

But such disturbing ontological freedom just won't do for the state. Thus a new mythology was forged, in which man is cut back down to size and identified with material, economic, and cultural forces. There is no hole, no escape, no freedom, and certainly no Gods. Get back in that circle, slave!

For the state, God is a problem, not a solution. God is a competitor, not just for loyalty, but again, for ontology. The state sees you in a certain way, and is very much interested in you seeing yourself in the same constricted way. You must be abridged, and for a freedom-loving soul, that's abridge too far.

For example, when you say "community," the state would prefer you to say "government." When you say "charity," it wants you to mean "welfare." When you say "school," the state hears "left wing seminary." When you say "taxes," the state thinks "investments." And so on.

The state, of course, is not a person. But like any autopoietic system, from family to culture, it does exert a force on the people within it, pressuring them conform to its survival needs. This is one of the reasons a state employee like Scott Walker quite literally drives the statists mad. He drives them mad for the same reason a woman who loves -- and is loved by -- men drives feminists crazy. Such people are traitors to their class.

The state will do what it must in order to go on being. However, the options are quite different between, say, a liberal democracy and Syria. The Syrian state has no need to conceal its ruthless will to survive.

But a democracy must use more subtle means to control the populace. Over the long run, it attempts to create the kind of citizen it needs in order for the citizen to adopt the narrow view of the state. In other words, the state deploys a host of means -- rewards and punishments, whips and goads -- to create State Man.

It seems to me that Obama is our first president to be fully State Man, owing to his rise up the ranks of the racial spoils system and his complete indoctrination in left wing ideology, with no outside influences. Note also that even when he supposedly turned to Christianity, he chose the ontologically closed pseudo-form of black liberation theology, which encloses the person behind bars of Marxist materialism.

Obama has spent his life in this hermetically sealed -- and ontologically closed -- world, so it certainly appears that he is more hypnotized than hypnotist. Which is again why he is far more dangerous than, say, Clinton, who clearly doesn't believe half of his own bullshit, and is even working as a double-agent for the GOP to rid us of this dangerous true believer who doesn't get his own joke.

These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were, I began to realize, rather like abridged maps. They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer. They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade.... --James C. Scott