The Cosmic Law & Disorder of the Left

A brief unscheduled snidetrip while my brain wakes up.

I was arrested by this observation at Happy Acres, to the effect that "A movement toward the Left, and ultimately toward despotism and collapse, is the 'normal course of history', in exactly the same way that the 'normal course' of a river is to run downhill."

Quite true. Axiomatic even. But why? Following the quote to its source, the author points out that "the phenomenon is even more general than either history or human nature: in conformance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is in fact a manifestation of entropy -- of the wearing down of complex and specific structures, the destruction of the particular in favor of the general, and the relentless erosion of all of the gradients, distinctions, and disequilibria that are the only possible source of usable energy, and therefore useful work, in any system."

In short, the left is "an entropic historical force." And "any compromise with entropy is ultimately futile, because all such compromises are necessarily a unidirectional movement toward greater disorder" (ibid.).

Entropy explains the left. But what explains the right (or better, the ordered and creative liberty of conservative liberalism)?

As it so happens, this does converge upon our recent discussion of the "struggle for the true self," except that it is on a collective/political/civilizational scale. For if there is no attractor above or ahead, then chaos is the norm and order is just arbitrary, or oppressive, or meaningless. Which is pretty much what I believed when I was a leftist. It explains why the left can only destroy but not create.

This discussion takes me back to that enigmatic Russian Orthodox esoterist, Boris Mouravieff. The amazon page informs me that I purchased his book Gnosis Vol. One on March Forth! 2003. A lot of his writing is kooky, but a lot is orthoparadoxically sound. My recollection is that the three volumes become less sound -- or more occultish -- as they proceed, so the first is the best.

On page 3 he has a good description of the ordinary life of quiet entropy: "Man is so caught up in the toils of mechanical life that he has neither time to stop nor the power of attention needed to turn his mental vision upon himself. Man thus passes his days absorbed in external circumstances. The great machine that drags him along turns without stopping, and forbids him to stop under penalty of being crushed," such that "he quickly exhausts himself in the frantic race, impelled in a direction which in the end leads nowhere."

In that single paragraph he describes the absence of Slack (time theft) due to the power of the Conspiracy (the great machine), ending in Entropic Death (exhaustion leading nowhere). The result? "Life passes away from him almost unseen, swift as a ray of light, and man falls engulfed still absent from himself."

Now you know what inspired the obscure passage on pp. 257-258 that reads: So long. So short! Whoosh! there went your life (see footnote 33).

So, it's all connected in the cosmic area rug.

Should we fail to become ourselves, then naturally "life will be in effect a factitious existence," because if you're not you, who are you? Whose life are you living? "This state of things" is called "The Law of Chance, or The Law of Accident," and is "the principal law under whose authority he leads his illusory existence."

So, a lawless and disordered life that has no higher authority than transient impulses and desires is actually the most lawful life of all, except that it is the law of Chance, Accident, and Entropy. Which is why all those dysfunctional Democrat-run cities such as Baltimore are actually quite lawful. But instead of "law and order," they reflect "law and disorder."

Now, man does have different centers of consciousness, the question being which one will rule the roost, and how integrated they are. One can conceptualize these in different ways, but let's just call them intellect, emotion, and will; or mind, heart, and body.

We are not born with a harmonious synthesis of these three; to the contrary, the whole purpose of human development -- at least on the horizontal plane -- is to achieve their integration. As I also wrote in the book, we may judge the value of a culture in terms of how effectively it produces integrated and actualized human beings, the latter (actualization) largely depending upon the former (integration). In other words, it is difficult to actualize oneself in the absence of one self.

Sometimes we have to fall -- or be torn -- apart, in order to be properly put back together and reassembled in accordance with our higher clueprint.

For example, the self-satisfied entropic man will "live in the absurd and inconsequential, taking his desires and illusions for reality." Such a one is in desperate need of a kind of breakdown, or existential pimpslap; he must see his life for the meaningless null-de-slack that it is, and get out while he can. This is no doubt the principle behind Jesus's warnings to the wealthy and powerful caught up in their counterfeit versions of terrestrial slack.

Therefore, we must facilitate "a transformation of our factitious existence -- whose value is no more than potential -- into real existence."

Now, every lie is the dark penumbra of a factitious existence. And some people are lies, such that they veritably radiate darkness, as in the case of an Obama.

Truth is alive; it is a living thing, because its source and substance is Life Itself. Conversely, the Lie must partake of Death. This is the true meaning of the so-called "death culture," which is really founded upon a lie culture.

Here again, this is precisely what Jesus means with his crack about those who will be "persecuted for my sake." Yes, it is difficult to "love one's enemies." But bear in mind that telling them the truth is a way of loving them while irritating them at the same time, so perhaps not.

Importantly, the Lie doesn't just function in terms of its content, but rather, its very form. That is to say, the Lie is a way of achieving a kind of factitious continuity in the self. A narcissist such as Obama, for example, lives in a narrative in which he is so brilliant that he is always right about everything, and therefore entitled to appropriate our God-given Slack. That is an enviable psychic continuity, but obviously quite thin and brittle, and dependent upon millions of enablers to help prop up the fantasy.

Mouravieff describes what would happen if such a Lie were suddenly taken away: "Life would become impossible due to the shocks and conflicts which we would have to face." Here we see that the real function of lie is to serve as a buffer, "like the buffers of railway carriages which soften shocks."

So, Rule One in the adventure of consciousness is to stop lying, especially to yourself. Think about it: how can the lie get you anywhere except deeper into it? If, as Mouravieff says, the goal is "the march [forth] towards Consciousness," then it would be a contradiction in terms "to try to approach the truth while continuing to lie to ourselves or to believe in our own lies."

In short, the vertical march is a march toward truth, and vice versa. Conversely, lying is the satanic eucharist, such that when we eat it, it eats us, like in that Garden once upin a timeless.

I want to get back to the subject of the Law of the Left, which is entropy. Mouravieff calls it the General Law, whereas the Raccoon just calls it vertical gravity. Thankfully there is another law that opposes the General Law, or just call it the Great Attractor.

As we always say, man is situated between two vertical attractors; call them God and Satan if you like, but those terms might be too loaded.

For Mouravieff, "the Devil" is simply "the personalized moral aspect of the General Law"; he is the personification of a principle, so you needn't literally believe in satan so long as you see how he operates, which is via the broad way that leads to destruction and dissipation -- the abyss -- as opposed to the strait gate and narrow way that lead to Life and Truth -- the other Abyss.

What I really want to say is that time will indeed be entropic or cyclic at best unless we step in to prevent it. Hence the old adage that any institution that is not explicitly conservative will eventually drift toward the left.

Preventing this eventuality requires the ingression of truth into an otherwise vertically closed system. At the other extreme -- should truth be more or less completely rejected -- is a Flood or Holocaust of total destruction, which is where the left always leads us.

But as we all noah, at least those of us who survive the flood get a fresh start.

Mouravieff says that the "bipolar" structure of our intelligence exactly mirrors the structure of "the World," in that both are situated between what we call the two Attractors. The point is to lay up those upper vertical treasures that moths can't eat and thieves can't steal. The more we are bound to the lower, the less power we have, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Rather, "power means liberty," or freedom of vertical movement. Which is why the meek shall inherit the earth and blessed are the poor in spirit, and all that.

So, we got that going for us.