Liberalism: An Infinitely Valuable Doctrine for Infinitely Worthless People

Speaking of man's deiformity, it is precisely this that gives man his value, his dignity, and his purpose, since without it he is just another animal.

There is secular humanism and there is Christian humanism, and the two could hardly be more opposite in their ground and their aims. For the secular humanist never stops trying to render the human animal "as useful as possible to a humanity as useless as possible" (Schuon).

That sounds like an insult, but it is quite literal. Take the question of abortion, which is founded on the principle that the human being is of no value whatsoever.

Indeed, the "right" to a dead child is considered higher than the child herself -- such that the abortion industry is of infinite value to a species which is of no value at all. So, why shouldn't the first amendment be repealed if it is deployed to question this orthodoxy? If a human being doesn't have the right to live, on what basis can she have the right to speak?

In order for leftism to "work," there must always be slaves and there must always be corpses. For example, what is Black Lives Matter but the systematic insistence that there be more deaths due to black criminality? What is the gay rights movement but the assurance that its beneficiaries live shorter and more miserable lives? What is the minimum wage movement but the desire for increased numbers of the unemployable to be dependent upon the state? And what is the right to healthcare -- or any other "positive" right -- but someone else's obligation to provide it, AKA involuntary servitude?

By way of contrast, Christian humanism begins with the principle of man's deiformity, which is to say that he is in the image and likeness of the Creator. It means that man qua man is utterly unique in the cosmos, in that he has intelligence, reason, self-consciousness, free will, and objectivity, all emanating from a nonlocal center which is the vertical prolongation of the Celestial Subject.

Thus, our proper cosmic orientation is toward the Celestial Subject who draws us into his gravitational field. Or not, for it is always possible to defy gravity and fall into another orbit. In fact, this is precisely what secular humanism does: it forgoes the divine orbit for the human one.

In so doing, it can look like we are elevating man, but we are really demoting him in a way that is solipsistic, narcissistic, and tautologous. In other words, we are enclosing man in a prison of ego, transforming a vertically open system into a closed one, which eventually leads to asphyxiation and/or starvation.

Secular humanism is the extinguishing of any and all possible meaning, since any meaning must derive from our converging upon something that isn't human. Again, to merely converge upon man is to be trapped in an absurcular tautology, to be sophicated in the quacksand of tenure.

Which is why the Master was able to reduce Christian practice to two fundamental principles, i.e., 1) love God and 2) love the neighbor, the second dependent upon the first. Our center comes from the first, our periphery from the second (in that the latter must be a prolongation of the former).

Schuon talks about the man with no center, and there are millions of these decentered people walking around. Look at it this way: people need a center, and if it isn't in God, it will be in something else: sex, drugs, work, ego, politics, intellectualism, hatred, thrill-seeking (sensation), -- even in religion (for example, Islamists).

Schuon suggests that there are people incapable of finding their own center within and above, and the more you think about it, the more useful this theory appears to be. In other words, even if it isn't literally true, it certainly appears to describe a class -- or caste -- of humanoids who, as he puts it, have "no ideal other than more or less gross pleasure."

I used to associate with this type, being that I was a blue collar fellow for all of my 20s and into my early 30s. In fact, I didn't become a fully licensed pslackologist until age 35, so most of my life was spent out of orbit. However, never completely. Somehow, I never lost contact with Celestial Central, and it eventually drew me back in.

Failing that, there is only one course of action for the decentered: "not knowing how to control himself," he "has to be controlled by others, so that his great virtue will be submission and fidelity."

We're almost out of time here, but consider the fact that the Democratic party is rooted in this very principle, i.e., hordes of centerless people who are supposed to do as they are told by a handful of billionaires (the center) and activists (their prolongation).