The Ultimate Situation Comedy: The Bisection of Time and Eternity

A good aphorism is a kind of joke, isn't it? If so, no one is funnier than Don Colacho.

And if brevity is the soul of wit, then an aphorism is its very essence. Most of brother Colacho's bon mots would easily fit into the space of a tweet. Which means, when you think about it, that if you are very skilled, you can squeeze eternity into 140 characters with room to spare.

Example?

"We call origins the limits of science."

In reality, the Origin not only has nothing to do with science, but can have nothing to do with it. It is a category error, but easy to make if one pretends that science is the only category. So the aphorism embodies a clash of matrices, as science comes up against the impenetrable wall of metaphysics (recall the figures in yesterday's post, with the two planes of meaning).

"We do not pretend to be correct. We are content with intelligent error."

Here again, at least as it pertains to the world, man is essentially condemned to intelligent error -- with one conceivable exception: divine revelation. But scientism is the ideology that pretends to be (or that it is possible to be) comprehensively true, for which reason it beclowns itself in unintelligent error.

By the way, "intelligent error" is nothing to be devalued or scoffed at. Man's errors are only possible because truth exists -- just as an optical illusion is only possible because of visual reality. You might say that our margin of error is simply the distance between man and God. This margin can never be absolutely foreclosed, but it can certainly be healed -- or treated, anyway -- with a lifeline from God.

And guess what? "Intelligence knows no barriers, but it has stairs." That's right -- there exists a circular -- or spiroid -- staircase that resembles a strand of DNA. Nor is it just hanging there from the sky, unattached to anything. How would that even be possible?

For which reason, if you really think about it, the "ultimate joke" would have to be the bisection of time by eternity, right?

Furthermore, this makes man the last word in wit, because what is man but a temporal peepwhole on eternity? You could say that man is a particularly witty response "to the challenges of the environment" (Koestler) -- which, since we're getting pretty far afield here, is on every page of Finnegans Wake.

The bad news: Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again! The good news: Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain! Life takes place between the fines and the fun.

But "Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions" (Dávila). It is fair to say that ideology is the Full Employment Policy for the iron triangle of journalism, academia, and government. Imagine those fields without it! Yeah, I know I'm a dreamer, but I can't be the only one.

Seriously, what would most blacks major in if it weren't for ideology? The higher dysfunction of liberal ideology takes any number of forms: sociology, social work, African-American history, critical legal theory, education, mass media, "family and consumer science," whatever.

Black college graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed because they are twice as likely to major in worthless or made up ideological subjects -- made up, of course, for their benefit. Thanks, white liberals! You gave us the degree, now why don't you hire us?

Not gonna happen. But liberals will do this for you: use the state to force a third party to pay you more than you're worth for working at McDonalds. Deal?

Alternatively, we can grow the state and then use it to hand out jobs to the unemployable, which is what they do here in California. California is running out of other people's money because those other people with money are running out of the state.

Speaking of which, "Political activity is the pretext with which the intelligence avoids its debts." Even more daringly, "The left ekes out a living dodging genetics."

Which is getting increasingly difficult to do when even some of their own are starting to embrace science.

Interesting, because what if the satan of inequality is a consequence of their god of diversity? What on earth would the left do if genetics were true?

Actually, I think they're already doing it.

Following up with yesterday's post on cognitive matrices, "All coherent thinking is equivalent to playing a game according to a set of rules" (Koestler). Thus, comedy requires rules, otherwise there can be no clash of matrices, i.e., of two matrices with different rules.

Here is an example of a violent clash of matrices, in this case, Al Sharpton with the English language: