Lies Burn: Yelling Fire in a Clouded World

Before we were interrupted by unforeseen events -- and there is nothing quite so unforeseen as an event -- we were discussing the complementarity of individual <--> social, or narcissism <--> collectivism.

Note that each pole refers to the cosmic interior, as explicated by Wilber in various works. As culture represents the interior-collective, person is the interior-individual.

Note that we do not say "society" and "man," since those belong to the exterior-collective and -individual, respectively.

For similar reasons, "brain" is exterior while "soul" is the quintessence of interiority. One might even say that the purpose of life is to exteriorize the soul while interiorizing the world. The former is creativity, the latter knowledge. But obviously the two should be in harmony; to emphasize one to the detriment of the other is to compose a less than full life, i.e., words + music.

In my opinion, the presence of a cosmic interior -- a subjective horizon -- is without question the most mysterious and astonishing fact in all of existence. Frankly, it is the last thing we'd expect to find here, except that without it there is nothing to find and no one to find it. It is fair to say that the mystery of mysteries is the experience of experience.

One of the worst features -- maybe the worst -- of modernity is the persistent attempt to explain away the cosmic interior through various scientistic fairy tales, or to stunt it by neglect, or to maim it by exposure to a subhuman world that is then interiorized by the hapless soul. Already, at the age of seven, I can see the difference between my son and spiritually deprived children with no exposure to religious truth. A certain kind of light is slowly extinguished in the latter.

The two wings of intelligence are erudition and love. --Don Colacho's Aphorisms

And Without a certain religious childishness, a certain intellectual profundity is unattainable. (ibid.).

If you ignore this interior reality, how could you not end up with a field full of weeds? How else to put it... There is something a little animalistic about such persons, since they live in ignorance of one of the most enduring features of the human mindscape, others of which include such archetypes as romantic love, fatherhood, warrior, priest, death, shadow, great mother, sage, etc.

In my view, the cosmic interior attains a kind of pinpoint focus in man, similar to how a magnifying glass gathers the sun's rays into an intense area of heat and light.

In the soul, warmth is emotion while light is truth. Here again, light without warmth is going to end in the imbalance of, say, scientism or modern atheism (which are "artificial light," like a florescent bulb that makes you look awful).

Conversely, warmth without light ends in any number of pneumapathologies, not the least of which being modern liberalism (AKA illiberal leftism). For an example of balance, think of Jesus, whose warmth is exceeded only by his light (since light must ultimately be the source of warmth).

Think of last night's debate. Obama's goal for the evening was to appear more fiery, which he surely was, although not to the extreme of Biden's self-immolation. But did this equate to more light? Obviously not, except in the negative sense, in that it shed unintentional light on his character and record.

Nevertheless, for the leftist, the presence of this fiery heat is all that matters, which is why most people on the left imagined Biden "won" his debate. How to explain such irrationality in people who like to think they're so much brighter than the rest of us?

Ace takes a stab at it. One reason is that "they believe, as an article of religious faith, that they are smarter than the voters, and the voters are stupid, and therefore simple contradiction must appeal to such people, who are very stupid and think that an argument is won by he who says 'No it isn't!' the most."

And also "Because they themselves just want to hear Biden and Obama call Romney and Ryan 'liars'.... If you just contradict Ryan and Romney, who are by the way lying monsters, then that's awesome, that's 'tough,' and you win."

So behind the aggressive heat is another kind of heat: contempt and superiority, which are two sides of the same coin. In other words, the inflated superiority can only be artificially maintained through contempt. Which is why the one thing the left truly excels at is defamation, slander, vilification, caricature, etc., all in the service of their grandiosity. (The other thing they do well is disguise envy as compassion.)

Not for nothing is this book I happen to be reading entitled Fire in the Minds of Men. Its subtitle is Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, and its origin is, in a word, Fire:

"The heart of revolutionary faith, like any faith, is fire: ordinary material transformed into extraordinary form, quantities of warmth suddenly changing the quality of substance. If we do not know what fire is, we know what it does. It burns. It destroys life; but it also supports it as a source of heat, light, and -- above all -- fascination."

With modernity came the displacement of the quest for spiritual light and heat to the world: "A recurrent mythic model for revolutionaries -- early romantics, the young Marx, the Russians of Lenin's time -- was Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods for the use of mankind. The Promethean faith of revolutionaries resembled in many respects the general modern belief that science would lead men out of darkness into light" (ibid.).

Indeed, the revolutionaries went even further, to a millenarian insistence that "the new day that was dawning" in which "the sun would never set." Tragically, their little spark turned into a conflagration that swept "across national borders, carried by small groups and idiosyncratic individuals who created an incendiary legacy of ideas" (ibid).

It is in this qualified and restricted manner that liberal and science do indeed complement one another: for leftism is the phony warmth and compassion of a bloodless, scientistic metaphysic; and scientism is the artifical light of the horizontalized and desiccated soul. But

An intelligent man is one who maintains his intelligence at a temperature independent of his environment’s temperature. --Don Colacho's Aphorisms