In order to facilitate any great evil, lies are necessary. People act upon their assessment of what is true. If they believe a lie is the truth, then they will act on the lie and adjust their lives accordingly. Palestinians are steeped in lies about Jews, as were Nazis. When lies are accepted as true, it transforms evil actions into "moral" ones.
Human beings cannot help believing truth and behaving morally; our minds are epistemophilic (oriented to the True) as our behaviors are oriented to the Good. Therefore, in order to subvert man, it is necessary only for him to assimilate the Lie in order to converge upon the bad or evil.
Obama and the left don't want to know the truth, because they don't want the truth to be true. Therefore, they shun it in order to nurture their lower vertical impulses of envy and resentment, perpetual grievance and blessed victimhood.
The same was true of southern slaveholders vis-a-vis Christianity. Before slavery had become morally problematic, no one needed a rationale for it, religious or otherwise. Just as Obama and Black Lives Matter activists cherrypick out-of-context statistics to support what they want to believe, slaveholders tried to find biblical support for their own immoral interests.
If you can get someone to believe a lie is true, you have done Satan's heavy lifting. The rest takes care of itself. Distance from the truth doesn't matter; rather, it's that first step that counts, in that it literally places one in a parallel universe, being that the universe is made of truth: what exists is true, and vice versa. Lies are always parasitic on truth -- they have no real being -- so believing one results in a kind of ontological erosion of the soul, of real personhood.
To believe the lie is to be in the universe without being of it. It is a precise inversion of the proper state of affairs, in that it fosters a reverse transcendence into the -- or a -- lower world. Instead of using the world as a ladder or stepping stone for the purpose of climbing to higher realms, the lie places a hole in the center of existence, through which we may drop down into unreality. Remember?
"The ego becomes a hole that 'fulfills' itself by devouring other selves, leaving behind a trail... like remnant bones on a beach" (Rutler). "[T]he Mocker turns to the men and women of this age endowed with more intelligence than judgment: 'Come down from the Cross! Give me your intellect!' And we do: we do each time we call truths lies and lies truths." Same snake. Same fall. Same result.
It has always been thus, "except for one aneurysm that has paralyzed the life of the mind in our day, a convulsion imperceptible along the way so that it is hard to locate in any one philosopher" (ibid.). Derrida? Nietzsche? Kant? Descartes? How long ago did we go off course? More to the point, when did we conclude that there was no course, or that all courses were of equal value?
When the student of old attended school, he "was told to prepare for truth." Certainly he assimilated untruths along the way, but "at least he was told there was such a thing as truth" (ibid.).
But the postmodern tyranny of relativism transmitted by the perpetual adultolescents of Big Education would have us believe "that there are two sides to truth, your truth and my truth." These intellectual abusers have "betrayed childhood by robbing it of a sense of the interior life of the soul, making it unfit" for the acknowledgement and reception of any higher reality.
Instead, the victims of this intellectual con are indoctrinated to believe things that specifically block the path toward truth. This results in an "intellect that appropriates information for private ends" and thus renders inoperative its submission "to the truth for truth's sake" (ibid.).
Progressivism is really a post-civilizational neobarbarism -- just as Obama is what "comes after" the United States of America, both its ideal and its reality. (Nothing can come "after" self-evident truths except for something worse, based upon lies of various magnitude.)
Along these lines, Rutler quotes a prophetic passage by Giambattista Vico (who, by the way, was a big influence on Joyce, specifically, with regard to the circular structure of Finnegans Wake -- its "commodius vicus of recirculation" -- in which the the Same Returns throughout history, like the theme in a symphony):
Such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure.
So, microaggression has a long genealogy.
They shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection...
Which is why the new barbarism of the left is even worse than the old.
20 comments:
Yes.
In that last quoted paragraph, I read "malicious wits" as "malicious twits" - a not-inaccurate description of many of today's barbarians.
Last night was horrible. Ironically, the people who suffer most from this may continue to be inner-city black communities, who are already seeing less responsiveness from the police - and a resultant rise in violence unfettered by fear of the law - thanks to the efforts of Black Lives Matter.
"...in order to subvert man, it is necessary only for him to assimilate the Lie in order to converge upon the bad or evil.
Obama and the left don't want to know the truth, because they don't want the truth to be true..."
Whether the intentions of those transmitting the lies are themselves good (!) or bad, it only needs to be accepted, to further the spread of evil, but for those who don't want the truth to be true - they are the hell holes.
"Progressivism is really a post-civilizational neobarbarism -- just as Obama is what "comes after" the United States of America, both its ideal and its reality. (Nothing can come "after" self-evident truths except for something worse, based upon lies of various magnitude.)"
It is Pro-Regressive.
Excellent post.
Instead, the victims of this intellectual con are indoctrinated to believe things that specifically block the path toward truth.
Didn't Dalrymple say something like this? We are being corrupted by being forced to say things we know are not true.
Good interview with Heather MacDonald.
Mushroom: Dalrymple, yes, but first, Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless."
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html
Thank you for this post and for all that you have contributed to the world. I am sitting here appalled and aghast at some of my best friends, highly educated, middle-aged women in a university town, for their willful blindness. This may cost us our years-long friendship, but so be it.
Just a few days ago, we were discussing the book, "The Lady in Gold," and one of my friends made the very astute comment that Viennese society, the most cultured and sophisticated in all of Europe, descended into barbarism in just a matter of days. But she simply refuses to acknowledge that there is no reason the same couldn't happen right here, right now.
The FBI's announcement on July 5 that we are no longer governed under the rule of law has unleashed all kinds of nastiness. God help us all. I am thankful for your commentary and introduction to some brilliant theologians I might never have discovered otherwise (I am Eastern Orthodox, not Roman Catholic).
Thanks for the thanks. Lately I've been feeling I don't have much new to say, and/or that others can say it better anyway.
It's nice to be able to come back home when the earth trembles. So thanks, Bob. I can still remember that, after Obama's first election, you told us that post-Obaman America was going to be like Barbarian era Rome. Turns out you were right.
I'm a little hung up on the symbolism of snipers in Dallas. Communists and the guy they work for have a way of telegraphing what's next, like when Ubu stood at the Brandenburg Gate and said he was a citizen of the world, or when Air Force One buzzed NYC before openning the borders to terrorists, or when the abandonment of the missile shield in Poland was announced on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland.
Regardless, I think we know what's coming. Sooner or later the guns, and not just the forces of lawlessness, will be pointed at the real adversary of these demonic people and forces, the Church. In the meantime, we need to strengthen Her, especially in the innter cities where Christianity once guided the underclasses to lives of virtue, since replaced by greed and envy as preoccupations.
Meanwhile, something from C.S. Lewis along the lines of this post by Bob:
https://casorosendi.wordpress.com/2016/06/27/the-poison-of-subjectivism/
Disagree. This is one of the few places I can reliably read lately that doesn't increase the malaise.
*disagree w/ Bob, that is. Maineman, good to see you :)
O, say, can you throw a 'coon a life preserver?
I'm just now reading the Heather MacDonald book, and it is Pure Light. However, that only serves to illuminate the utter darkness into which the left has plunged, and into which they want to pull civilization itself.
This is not the End Times, but it will do until they get here.
On the other hand, it sure looks like the End of Times, doesn't it?
Yes, Heather has been everywhere lately, at least everywhere I go. I first ran across her in a Hillsdale flyer in which a speech she gave there was printed.
Thank you, Julie. It's good to be recognized. By the way, I think that you may have said something about baptism or confirmation the last time I stopped by but I never got around to finding out any details. I'm always interested in peoples' journeys.
I only found out that I'd been baptized Catholic when I was an intern in my 30's and a schizophrenic on a unit told me I had been because he saw a halo over my head. When I checked with my mother, it turns out he was right.
Ironic that just as abortion kills a disproportionate number of unborn Democrats, so too does the left's approach to crime end up killing thousands of born Democrats (blacks and Hispanics being the main victims of de-policing and increased crime).
This would explain why they need to replenish their stock with millions of illegal Democrats from over the border.
Maineman, you have a good memory! My family did get baptized, and I got confirmed, at the Easter vigil in 2015. Then married in the church in August. Two things I never expected to happen; God has quite a sense of humor.
Interesting about the schizophrenic. Could he see everyone that way, or just a special few?
The enormous problem is that folks on the left and the so-called right (conservatives) don't wish to acknowledge that races are truly and significantly different.
The left thinks that it's just white oppression. Remedy that and all violence will cease.
The conservatives think it's bad culture. Inject some founding fathers and all will solve itself.
Neither are even remotely close to accurate.
There is a genetic reason why blacks are violent and Europeans are not, generally.
It's all kissing in the wind until we reckon with these facts.
Pissing, not kissing.
I like the idea of kissing in the wind, personally.
Horatio, you know so little of heaven and earth, because of your philosophy.
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