You Ought to be Ashamed!

If man evolved and/or is created to be monogamous, then wha' happen? For 99% of our existence we practiced monogamy, so we should have gotten pretty good at it. But then something changed.

Note that during that very long period of time, things were pretty "equal" for everybody, gender-specific specialities notwithstanding.

That is to say, everyone was equally poor, although no one knew it, because it turns out that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was characterized by a surplus of slack, working "short hours" and exploiting "abundant food resources" (Tucker). You might be astoneaged to learn that early humans lived "relatively relaxed lives" and that it was possible to get by "on two to four hours of subsistence effort per day."

One more way that I am a dyed-in-the-wool caveman.

I wonder if this is the blessedly enslackened situation Genesis describes, prior to the Temptation and Fall? That is, it seems there is plenty of low-hanging food of which we may "freely eat"; a girl for every boy; and the nuclear family ("a man shall leave his father and mother...") It's all good. Like the 1950s, but without the beatniks.

But then something unexpected happens. The text is frustratingly vague as to exactly what it is, but it is possible that it is conflating or reversing cause and effect.

That is, it may simply be describing an effect -- our all too obvious exile from paradise or the 1950s -- and then reading a cause back into time. Since what happened is "bad," then perhaps we must have done something bad to deserve it.

I've always been partial to Joyce's approach (in Finnegans Wake), which acknowledges the Fall -- the effect -- without trying to be too precise about what we did to cause it.

Look at it this way: we all have guilt and we all have shame -- Harry Reid being the exception that proves the rule -- but why?

Interestingly, the Bible acknowledges the existence of shame even in our prelapsarian state -- in fact, it is the Last Word ("ashamed") prior to Genesis 3, The Temptation and Fall of Man.

It also seems to implicitly acknowledge a capacity for guilt, in that there is an injunction -- don't eat of that tree -- and a potential punishment -- you shall die. There would be no point in communicating such a cause-and-effect formula to a creature incapable of freedom and responsibility, and therefore, guilt.

As we've discussed in the past, shame and guilt are quite distinct, the former having to do with ontology, the latter with existence. That is, shame has to do with being, whereas guilt has more to do with actions.

Shame also has to do with the other, with being seen (or busted). Thus, a truly shameless person -- Miley Cyrus, say, or Bill Clinton -- is so deeply disordered that it goes well beyond what any psychologist can deal with.

To put it inversely, to not feel shame is to not be human, and only humans can benefit from psychotherapy.

Sociopaths do not feel shame, nor do they feel guilt. In both cases, they are detached from the human family, in that they cannot empathize with the other, or see the other's point of view. Therefore, they can treat human beings as objects without being persecuted by a guilty conscience.

How would you feel if you had not only destroyed a young woman's life, but pretended she was the guilty party? A normal person would be deeply troubled for the rest of his life, but a normal person would also try to make amends (so long as the crime didn't involve murder, in which case no earthly reconciliation is possible).

So man, if he is man, must have a capacity for guilt and for shame. Modern man doesn't like this idea, so what does he do about it? Note that one cannot actually rid oneself of these (and remain human), any more than one can eliminate other quintessentially human characteristics.

Yes, but there is still a way: all one has to do is make the wrong right and the right wrong, and voila! The restoration of wholly unholy innocence! To be in-nocent means to be free of knowledge, and people who don't know any better -- children and animals -- are indeed innocent.

Furthermore, any person who would hold innocent children and animals to a higher standard would be an assoul. Therefore, you are an assoul for expecting humane, decent, and virtuous behavior of liberals!

There is another ontological perversion that infiltrates the liberal mind, and it is the equation of resentment and victimhood, accompanied by the equation of victimhood and innocence.

Therefore, instead of feeling shame about, say, being so envious and resentful, one not only feels innocent, but is proud about it (pride being another occasion for a normal person to feel humbled if not a little guilty).

I can summarize the lesson of this post in two words: Gay. Pride.

Which is a good thing, because I don't have time for one more word.

The War on Women is a Cat Fight

Time only for a short but I'd like to think important post.

I suppose to even suggest that females have a nature is to declare war on them.

Well, we are at war. But only against the women who deny their own nature -- and Nature in general (the one entails the other).

Democrats know this: they know that one of their most reliable clients is this large and growing pool of humanoid misfits. They are the polar opposite of whatever it is Pajama Boy represents.

Normally there is a sexual polarity that results from the complementarity of male and female. But who or what is the complement of Pajama Boy? A domineering mother, I suppose.

Likewise, what could be the complement to those pathetic "Julias" of the liberal imagination? The only thing I can think of is the State, so this is one of those rare occasions that I agree with liberals.

If marriage were still the norm, we'd have a permanent conservative majority. Consider: in 2012, married people favored Romney by a margin of 14 percentage points. Single women, however, supported Obama by a whopping 68 to 30 (cited in Tucker).

Who are those 30%, anyway? Right. The attractive ones. Or at least the ones who aren't repellant.

No woman is an island, which is why the State simply displaces the role of husband. As they say, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. However, she needs the government like a woman needs a man.

And the feeling is mutual, since the state needs single mothers like a man needs a wife. It's just patriarchy by another name.

In the past I have written of how the premature, neurologically incomplete, and helpless baby is the hinge of evolution. After all, if the babies don't survive and thrive, then the game is over.

However, in reality, like their Creator, humans are irreducibly intersubjective and tri-complementary. Therefore, you can't change one member of the subcelestial trinity without changing all the rest.

Thus, for example, when women no longer need men, we end up with Pajama Boy on the one hand and Hoodie Boy (e.g., Trayvon Martin) on the other: with wimps and barbarians.

So it is fair to say that each of the three is a hinge of evolution and of civilization: Man, Woman, and Baby. Each has certain responsibilities and certain entitlements.

But not just in terms of their biological categories. That means nothing. Here again, we're not talking about nature, but about NATURE, and a merely natural man sinks beneath himself into infrahuman Rousseauian hell.

Because we need to placate the angry and/or hysterical sub-female mob -- the ovary tower -- we are not permitted to talk about female responsibilities, only female "rights," such as the right to a dead baby and free birth control from Daddy.

Not so with boys, who are made aware of their responsibilities from the get-go, mainly to curb their aggression, impulsivity, competitiveness, enthusiasm, spirit, and life force. In short, they are to imitate female nature, even though there's no such thing.

And what is the primary cosmic responsibility of females? Interestingly, it is to help civilize male nature, but not in the way of the tenured or with the heavy hand of the state, as in the paragraph above.

Rather, Tucker discusses the centrality of female virtue, which is as critical to civilizational advance as are infantile helplessness and male strength and aggressiveness. You don't even need to look at it from a moralistic angle. Rather, just consider the results.

Tucker traces the roots of monogamy back to the spirited virtuous woman who refuses the seductions of powerful high-status males in favor of genuine passionate love.

This is a pattern we see "time and again in Western history -- high status aristocrats trying to make concubines and morganatic wives out of lower-status women, and the women, often peasant girls, standing up to them and refusing to comply. If there is one individual who is the lynchpin of a monogamous society, it is the Virtuous Woman." (Monica Lewinskys of the world, take note.)

Just consider the cascade of consequences that occurs when the woman fails in her duty to consecrate the booty. Ultimately we're talking about the failure of monogamy, and when that happens, all hell breaks loose for everybody, men, women, and children:

"[N]ormative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.... By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity...." (Tucker).

So yeah, there is a war on woman. Primarily by other women. Cat fight!

Nature is Supernatural

Men and women are faced with different Temptations. One difference is that men typically use power to obtain sex (e.g., Bill), while women use sex to obtain power (e.g., Hillary, riding the coattails of a powerful man). This truism is apparently rooted in different evolutionary strategies, but if this is the case, it doesn't negate free will. Rather, it's more like astrology: the stars incline but do not compel.

For the vast majority of human existence we have been hunter-gatherers -- 99% of that existence, according to Tucker. Therefore, if we want to know something about the ground floor of the psyche -- why man is the way he is -- it might be worthwhile to take a look at the ways and whys of our most venerable furbears.

More generally, if the evolutionary psychologists are correct, then we are definitely in the Wrong Place -- this is not my beautiful cave! -- and there's not much we can do about it. We have made our procrustean bed and now we have to live a lie in it. It is very much as if we have a nature designed for certain specific conditions, but those conditions are nowhere to be found -- like the old zoos that simply tossed the animals in cages without trying to replicate their environment.

But our environment is changing all the time, and since we adapt to it so quickly, it might lead one to believe that man has no nature. This is discussed in the excellent Making Gay Okay, which, based on the reviews, is making gays insane.

What is interesting is that traditionalists believe in an enduring human nature, and that this belief is in conformity with evolutionary science. So it is ironic in the extreme for leftists to call anyone else "anti-science," being that these scientifically correct mythtics are the worst offenders. They don't just deny the science, but try to block the scientific paths. One is not permitted to even think in certain directions, for fear of stumbling upon a Forbidden Truth.

Leftists believe in nature but not in NATURE, the latter of which transcends nature. NATURE is what the Founders were referring to with the crack about our rights being rooted in "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." They surely didn't mean lowercase nature -- as if our natural rights are founded upon physics or biology or natural selection. If they were, then politics would be founded on the principle of kill or be killed, which is what nature teaches us.

By NATURE, the founders mean "in the nature of things," or just the way things ARE and reality IS. No rational person says "realities are," which is one more reason why leftists are intrinsically irrational, for to say that there are realities is to deny Reality, precisely.

Our "point of departure," writes Reilly, "must be that Nature is what is, regardless of what anyone desires or abhors." Thus, this places reality outside the domains of will and desire. As we've Schuonsplained on many occasions, the human being is composed of intellect, sentiment, and will, and if the latter two are detached from the former, we are soon enough in leftist Hell, where there is lots of hysteria and bullying but no truth.

Speaking of modern science, one thing we know conclusively about man is that Aristotle was correct: man is the political animal, which does not refer to vulgar politics, but rather, to the fact that man's nature is to be involved with others in order to create a society in which it is possible to pursue the Good.

We cannot do this if we are fundamentally atomistic monads, in which case community would just interfere with our nature. It would mean that any community is a kind of falsehood, and astonishingly, this is precisely what the uber-leftist Rousseau argued:

"The Rousseauian anthropology claims that man is not a rational, political animal and that society in any form is fundamentally alien, and alienating to individuals. In his origins, man was isolated and essentially complete on his own and in himself" (Reilly).

We can see how this primordial craziness is present in both leftism and libertarianism. In fact, it is the reason why leftism is confused with liberalism, because it posits a kind of radical freedom that is equivalent to nihilism.

But in reality, there can be no such thing as radical or pure freedom. Rather, as with all ultimate ontological categories, freedom only exists in a complementary relationship, in this case, to responsibility. And although the two necessarily coarise, responsibility must be ontologically prior, otherwise it would have no explanation. In other words, you cannot get from freedom to responsibility, whereas responsibility automatically implies freedom.

Also, freedom is purely abstract, with no positive meaning, whereas responsibility is concrete. It's like a woman's so-called "freedom to choose." Choose what? Anything? No, of course not. That kind of purely abstract freedom refers to nothing.

Rather, let's be honest: it is the freedom to kill her baby. Such freedom is of course completely divorced from responsibility, but also cannot possibly be rooted in nature. If it is in nature, then it is obviously present in female babies, so only male babies could be aborted in "good" conscience.

Thus, this so-called freedom can only be a positive freedom, but is there such a thing? I don't see how, without freedom becoming something it is not.

That is, natural freedom does not impinge on anyone else's freedom, and everyone is equally free (and responsible). But the positive right to abortion obviously impinges on the rights of others, including the father, the baby, and society in general.

Now, among other things, nature is objective, for which reason we are "subject" to it. It took a very long time for man to recognize this, apparently not until the ancient Greeks: "Before this discovery, ancient man was immersed in mythological portrayals of the world, the gods, and himself" (Tucker).

To put it another way, nature had been subject to man, not in reality -- as if rain dances or human sacrifice were successful in influencing nature -- but in the imagination, where man lived. Like Marx, man tried to change nature before understanding nature. But only by bowing to nature's laws are we able to use them as the boundary conditions for further exploration and evolution.

Once man "discovered" the objective world, it permitted us to inquire into its rational structure. Thus, interestingly, the discovery of objective reality proved that NATURE is supernatural, i.e., infused with a transcendent truth intelligible to man's intelligence. As such, you might say that the world became objective on one level, but subjective on a higher level, i.e., the divine plane (in that it had to be grounded in a deeper, wider, and higher intelligence, ultimately a Person).

Oh my. Way out of time. Why didn't someone tell me? As always, to be continued...

TOTAL CLARITY and PERFECT NONSENSE

Yesterday I had insufficient time to express what I was trying to say with TOTAL CLARITY. For me, the achievement of TOTAL CLARITY means that no honest, intellectually adequate, and sincere person could possibly disagree with me.

I am always trying to paint the reader -- beginning with myself -- into an airtight corner from which there is no escape but inscape. Or there is no way out but up. This we call UPWORLD MOBILITY.

There is a lucid mechanical determinism that inspires futility and an organic entelechial deiterminism that nourishes HOPE.

Or in other words, one must know what IS in order to know what CAN BE. It is how ultimate reality can be always THE SAME and yet EVER NEW, instead of an ABSURCULAR repetitititititititition populated by a bunch of UNCLE AUTOMOTONS.

Revelation is both CLOSED and OPEN, or an open and shut case, because it is composed of TRUTH and FREEDOM, so it is dyna-static or olden pneumagain. This is the cosmic edge where all the RAZORACTION occurs.

I am always aiming for TOTAL CLARITY except for when TOTAL CLARITY only obscures the issue, for example, in defining God. To achieve TOTAL CLARITY in that arena would result in a total lack of clarity, i.e., absurdity. Any discussion of God requires the judicious use of orthoparadox, which cannot attain TOTAL CLARITY, but rather, transclarity, or PERFECT NONSENSE.

This is how and why O can be "incomprehensible and yet the meaning of everything," and why knowledge of it "does no more than render the mystery immediate and inescapable" (Ware).

This does not mean we should get an apophathead or veer off into irrationalism. Rather, there is an irreducible and endless play of apophatic and cataphatic, or knowledge and mystery, (n) and O.

This yeoman's work -- or play rather -- is NEVER DONE. The best we can do is to never stop aiming at that which transcends and defines us, the goal we can perceive but never see. Or we see through things toward that to which they point or converge upon.

And how do we perceive it? Two ways. We can look back and see its unmistakable fruit tracks, or turn forward and feel its attraction and its nourishment: it simultaneously PULLS on our emptiness and GIVES of its riches.

This dynamic force "attracts creation into the eschatological condition," which means that history is the interval or gap during which progress towards its own fillfullment occurs. For the AWAKE or even ALERT, time itself is the KNOWA's ARK of salvation.

"To the extent that one ascends in the knowledge of God, he ascends at the same time in the understanding of the mystery of God as that which is not to be understood. 'This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness'" (Staniloae). We are always rising above meanings toward MEANING itself via the DARKLIGHT of faith.

God is like any other name. Just because I know your name, or have a name for you, it does not mean that I fully know you, much less contain you.

You could say that being born again from above is the EIGHTH DAY of creation, i.e., VERTICAL LIFTOFF. Since the liftoff never ends, we could symbolize it [8∞] GUFFAW-HA! If it ever ends, it will mean that time has become eternal, or finally caught up with itsoph. History will have healed the wounds it inflicted, and hopefully JUDGMENT will wound the heels history inflicted upon the restavus.

So there will be a final endless COMM-UNION of orthoparadoxes such as flesh and spirit. Or not, because the other direction ends "in isolation within one's own emptiness" (ibid). In between is the exodus in the bewilderness of time, Israel on one side, Egypt on the other, Life or Death. Endless novelty or endless monotony.

Once upon a time we spoke of A influences and B influences, as described by Mouravieff. You could say that these are horizontal and vertical -- or terrestrial and celestial -- influences, respectively. No real happiness can result from A influences only. These bring transient pleasures, to be sure, but no quantity of horizontal pleasure adds up to one qualitative vertical bealtitude.

In order to be happy, man must have a goal "that transcends the domain of 'A' influences," or is "beyond the mental horizon" of mere horizontaloids. In the world of pure A, "nothing lasts, everything breaks, and everything tires." So you end up OLD, BORED, and JADED, or full to the brim with emptiness.

Will you knock it off with the capitalizing already?

Besides, what was it you were unclear about yesterday?

Well, it had to do with that penultimate crack to the effect that "homosexuality is rooted in the concrete pseudo-principle of selfish pleasure, which is then converted into the abstractions of freedom and equality."

Reilly expresses it more clearly, writing of how nature "is teleologically ordered to ends that inhere in their essence and make them what they are." In short, there is a truth and a reality that we do not invent and to which we graciously defer.

Conversely, the first principle of the homosexual activists is that "things are nothing in themselves, but are only what we make them to be according to our wills and desires" (emphasis mine). Here we see how one man's metaphysical trash is another man's libidinous pleasure, the pleasure of dominating reality with the will to POWER.

Marriage Equality and World Destruction

Barely no time today, and so much to fill it with. Maybe you should just read the book, because there are important ideas on every page.

And when I say important, I only mean like "world saving" (or world-shattering, depending on where you stand). Dennis Prager is the only other person I know of -- although I'm sure there are others -- who realizes that the attack on marriage is an attack on the very foundation of our humanness and therefore of civilization itself.

But when you affirm this, you of course sound crazy. It reminds me of the left's thus far successful attempt to controversialize Benghazi.

That is, the first step in turning the world upside down is to make right side-up "controversial," as if there is some legitimate doubt about it.

It's amazing how rapidly the left has been able to accomplish this with regard to the redefinition of marriage. The Obama who assumed the presidency in 2009 would now be unqualified due to his then hateful support of traditional marriage. He would have to be mozilla'ed.

It's not just marriage and homosexuality. Consider all the other things the left has successfully controversialized: the military, school prayer, sexual identity, motherhood, fatherhood, bastardy, the english language, illegal voting, illegal immigration, free speech, the Constitution...

Just the fact that we have to argue over these things makes us a little crazy too, because it's crazy to argue with a crazy person. Normally I would have no interest in doing so, but in this case we have no choice, because these crazys want to control our lives.

The very idea that the left, of all things, suddenly cares about monogamy and sexual commitment is absurd on its face. On what basis? In other words, on what principle of leftism is marriage founded?

Whatever it is, it is not the same as ours, so we're necessarily talking about apples and oranges -- or rather, the compulsory belief, backed by state violence, that apples and oranges are identical.

To believe otherwise is a thoughtcrime. It is to place oneself outside the margins of civilized society, which is again ironic in the extreme, since monogamous marriage and civilization are two sides of the same coin, as compellingly demonstrated by Tucker.

Thus, anyone who cares about civilization should be on our side, but these fools and tools have no earthly idea what is at stake. For upon what principle do they found their deviant notion of marriage? As far as I can tell, it is either "equality" or "freedom," as in "marriage equality" or "the freedom to love who we want."

Now, to be sure, equality and freedom are genuine principles. However each refers to the other; not only do they oppose one another, but each has its own irreducible complement. The complement of freedom is responsibility, while the complement of equality is hierarchy.

Freedom can have absolutely no meaning in the absence of responsibility, while equality in the absence of hierarchy is just nihilism. (I might add that in these complementarities, responsibility is prior to freedom, just as hierarchy must be posterior to equality.)

And bringing about the monstrous equality of the left always requires great violence and coercion, while its version of freedom simply equates to irresponsibility. Or rather, there is no personal responsibility, only collective responsibility.

Thus, individuals are incentivized to be more personally irresponsible, which results in the need for a larger and more intrusive state to be responsible for all these irresponsible losers.

But beneath the left's misunderstanding freedom and equality is an even deeper principle: pleasure. To put it inversely, real marriage is not based upon pleasure. Rather, it is based upon reality, specifically, the reality of sexual polarity and the recognition that monogamous marriage channels this in prosocial ways, in the direction of civilization.

As Tucker emphasizes, there is nothing wholly "natural" about monogamy. Rather, although rooted in nature -- the nature of things -- it is an institution that transcends nature.

But homosexuality is rooted in the concrete pseudo-principle of selfish pleasure, which is then converted into the abstractions of freedom and equality. Conversely, marriage is rooted in the abstract cosmic principle of sexual polarity, which is concretized in the form of marriage.

But I'm out of time. To be contined....