Obama: Truth is What You Can Get Away With

Yesterday we spoke of Obama's troubled relationship with truth -- not that he's troubled, mind you. Rather, his casual acquaintance with truth -- and therefore reality -- results in troubles for us, Obama's "folks" (not to be confused with his volk, the true beneficiary of his collectivist lies).

For someone with a normal devotion to truth, it is difficult to comprehend the person who doesn't share this spontaneous allegiance to what transcends us -- just as it is impossible for good people to truly understand what motivates the evil.

Truth is disinterested, which is one major reason why, say, a pathologically narcissistic president may reject it, since the fragile self-image of the narcissist is of no concern to truth. Truth is for its own sake. It hurts, but only if one has an abiding interest in falsehood. Otherwise, it usually doesn't hurt at all. Rather, it feels quite pleasant. At least if you value freedom, which most Americans admittedly do not.

Without a doubt, truth is one of the names of God -- as is beauty, or love, or goodness, or creativity, or freedom. The existence of these celestial attractors creates a vertical space between us and them, which is essentially where we live and move and have our being -- or better, our becoming.

Hart agrees that "our experience of reality does in fact have a transcendental structure," and that the transcendent pole of our becoming provides "an absolute orientation for thought."

Just as there is a visual horizon at the edge of things, there is a "horizon of being... toward which the mind is always turned and against which every finite object is set off" within "the great middle distance of the phenomenal world" (ibid.).

This is what the Raccoon knows of as the expansive horizon of subjectivity, for there is no proper human subject in the absence of this horizon. But importantly, reality doesn't "end" at the horizon. Rather, this horizon expands infinitely, based upon the metabolism of experience.

For this reason, one person lives within a vast and unlimited metacosmic space, while another subsists between cramped and parochial horizons defined at one end by the matrix media and the other by state-run edudoctrination. Human appetite takes care of the rest -- that is, human desire untethered to any transcendent concerns, from the mind's proper objects. They call it "sophistication," but as Fred Reed writes, it is "the sophistication that comes of growing up in a whorehouse."

That kind of debased sophistication forecloses the real kind -- i.e., refinement, sublimation, transfiguration, etc. I mean, bathing "in civilization’s bilges" (Reed) doesn't actually result in cleanliness.

Hart describes our cosmic situation: "the gaze of the apperceptive 'I' within is turned toward a transcendental 'that' forever beyond; and mental experience, of the self or of the world outside the self, takes shape in the relation between these two 'supernatural' poles."

Exactly. Although it may appear as if the world merely makes an imprint on the mind, like a seal into wax, "we approach nature only across the interval of the supernatural," i.e., the dynamic space between us and O. We are always dependent "upon a dimension of reality found nowhere within the physical order." "The mind stretches out and toward and prospectively takes hold of an ultimate 'object,'" and "only in that way interprets and judges the world."

Back to our troublesome president and his infrahuman (or all too human, depending upon whether one sees the ass as only half-full of himself) relation with truth. When our pneumatic space shrinks, the world is horizontalized, resulting in the conflation of truth and desire (since desire is deprived of its transcendent object). Therefore, "truth" devolves to what I want to be true, e.g., the workability of socialized medicine.

Only something transcendentally disinterested within ourselves compels us "to accept an unwelcome truth, not because it pleases or attracts us, but because we are driven by a deeper devotion to truth as such" (Hart). Here again, proper human devotion belongs to transcendent truth as such, not to some fashionable idol of the tenured.

But Obama is a morally retarded child of Machiavelli, who seems to have invented the notion of "effectual truth," whereby "the truth of words is in the result they produce..."

Nor should the prince of darkness worry about "justice" (another star in the celestial horizon), but simply act, "and the words to justify your action will come to you afterward.” The prince must have faith that Queen Valerie will come up with something.

Thus, "In recent weeks the world has woken up to the fact that President Obama is one of the most committed disciples of effectual truth telling in recent history. Time and again, when confronted by political necessity, he and his administration have told falsehoods in order to achieve their objectives" (Continetti).

But has the world really woken up to the fact that effectual truth is the only truth the left knows? It pains me to say -- for in this instance the truth hurts -- no way.