Ideological "Reality" and the Immortalizing Process

Not much time this morning. Just flipping through this volume of correspondence by Voegelin, looking for any nuggets of joy before it undergoes the transition from desk to shelf.

In particular, I was looking for a passage about the unforgivable evil of ideologues warping the minds of children -- which is what Governor Christie will be doing by signing legislation making it a crime for a psychologist to help sexually confused adolescents.

To not know that ideologues and activists have taken over the American Psychological Association -- along with most every other professional group -- is to live in a state of profound naivete. I suppose he also thinks the ACLU is full of people who just really care about the Constitution.

But if the left is really sincere in its objection to "conversion therapy," how about a law forbidding colleges from converting impressionable students into liberal ideologues?

This one's good: "[B]ankers are tough and have common sense; one can discuss with them rationally; it is not like the academic world, where opinions, if wrong, do not cost you any money, so that one can have any opinions that look pleasing."

In fact, at the epicenter of the financial meltdown of 2008 was the state forcing bankers to lend money to unqualified borrowers -- as if the state actually understands such a complex system!

But that's the essence of the problem with both government and the educational establishment, isn't it? To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, politicians are forever making decisions affecting our lives that cost them nothing if they are wrong (and often enrich them, as in the case of Clinton). Thus the built-in moral hazard of liberalism.

The purpose of life? What else could it be than to "immortalize as much as possible"?

I interpret this to mean that man lives in the vertical space between the beginning and the beyond -- or between immanence and transcendence -- and that the immortalizing process, so to speak, involves the metabolism of the latter into the former, or of eternity into time. One might say: God creates time so that time may become eternity.

What is art, for example, but the immortalization of matter, or color, or shape, or sound, or language?

If that is not what's going on down here, then I frankly don't see the point.

This would also explain why "Existences that have been abandoned by God are boring, or burlesque, or dangerous to public safety.... over time, perversity becomes stale." One can hope, anyway.

About the curiously named "progressivism" which is frozen in time when it isn't moving backward. The ideologue exits the vertical space alluded to above, which makes real growth -- which is indistinguishable from the immortalizing process -- impossible. This frequently occurs around college age. The rejection of reality naturally results in (or from, depending) a kind of anxiety, and

"from anxiety is born hatred. From such hatred then may arise an infinite variety of attempts to stop the flux of time -- childish things like the professor for whom science must stop at the point that he has reached... at the time of his Ph.D."

Speaking of Obama, the hatred of reality can result in "terrible things like the political leader who wants to freeze history at some ridiculous point of order that he has picked up somewhere in his youth."

This would explain why, for example, for the left, it is "always Selma" -- even in a high-end handbag boutique in Switzerland. Note that they don't just freeze history, but freeze a delusion about history -- like the global warmists who don't know the warming stopped seventeen years ago.

Again, it begins with an attack on language, on meaning: "an ideological language has the purpose of interrupting the contact with reality, and on the other hand, to admit as 'reality' in quotation marks only the phantasy of the ideology.... Every ideology with its apparatus of taboos is, therefore, a Newspeak in the sense of Orwell."

This distortion of language always results in the deformation of reality, for "in the beginning is the word," whether you believe that or not.

In contrast to the immortalizing process is the immanentizing process of ideologues -- the attempt to force transcendence into immanence. This can only be achieved through an "outburst of cruelty in overcoming resistance" -- a cruelty that must be permanent because the goal of the ideologue can never be reached. It's why the IRS is still harassing Tea Party groups. Why wouldn't they? They may be crazy, but they're also evil.

Thus, where the normal person in vertical space lives in loving attraction to O, the ideologue lives in a spiteful rejection of O, and cruelly takes out the hatred on others.

An Emmanuel Goldstein a day keeps the reality at bay.