The Cheap Splendor of Liberal Lies

There is no way to know with certainty that we have "made contact with reality." Even if all other knowers agree with us we could still be wrong; and no one might agree with us, yet we could still be right. Therefore, our conviction that we have reached truth "is always a fiduciary conviction, as are also the convictions of other people seeking to evaluate our vision" (Prosch).

Fiduciary is another word for trust, which is in turn closely related to faith: we trust what we have faith in, and vice versa. Whom do you trust? I, for example, no longer trust the left, to put it mildly. This is because I naively trusted them for half my life, and it turned out that most everything they told me was a lie or distortion or half-truth. They abused my trust. Which is a sin, especially when done to a child (which is more or less always, because it renders adults childish). As we said once before, liberalism is a Peter Pandemic

A passage in this article on feminist indoctrination reminded me of how it felt to be a leftist. It's important, because one reason why leftist thought takes root in the psyche is that it mimics truth in a compelling way.

As the author puts it, "When I first discovered women’s studies, I was lulled into a comforting sense that I had discovered the 'truth.' It was as if my veil of ignorance had been yanked away, and I was blissfully seeing the world for what it really was."

Exactly. Any intelligent person realizes -- for it is built into man -- that appearances are not reality. Indeed, what is intelligence but our ability to see beneath the surface of things and know their deeper principle? Science, for example, reduces multiplicities to unities, and the deeper the theory, the more phenomena it unifies. Quantum physics unites more than its Newtonian forerunner, as Darwin unites more than Lamarck or other purely biological alternatives.

Just so, it is not only that the left lies; rather, it must be the type of lie that mimics truth in bringing together disparate phenomena, providing us with a kind of counterfeit aha! experience. This is no doubt how all those intellectuals were pulled in by Marx. Here was a theory that explained everything (except how Marx could transcend class and know unconditioned Truth).

Freudian psychoanalysis accomplished the same thing. Speaking of Darwinism, it also serves this purpose for flatland ideologues such as Richard Dawkins and the like. There is something positively thrilling about a theory that liberates one from the appearances of things, and gives access to a deeper reality that "explains everything."

For this is precisely what truth is supposed to do: you know, set us free. Free from what? Well, from appearances, for starters. Truth is surprising, as we've been suggesting over these past several posts. It is not merely a logical operation, or deduction from first principles. To quote Dávila, Faith is not assent to concepts, but a sudden splendor that knocks us down. You could say that real truth palpably defeats our efforts to resist it.

Continuing with the article, "I have taken seven women’s studies classes.... After taking those classes, I realize that not only was I deluded, but I was led into an absurd intellectual alcove where objective truth is subordinate to academic theories used as political propaganda."

Yes: deluded and used. Weak and malleable women serve this purpose for the left, but not nearly to the extent that blacks do. Women of all ages are more likely than men to be on the left, but for blacks the ratio is usually higher than nine to one.

How is that? Again, it must be the satisfaction, the counterfeit thrill of a theory that explains everything. All you really need to know is that you are black, and all life's mysteries are revealed to you. Such is the meretricious beauty of identity politics, whether one is female, homosexual, Hispanic, Aryan, whatever. It is the key that opens the Cosmic Door.

Now, the real splendor is a prolongation of truth, as light rays are to the sun. Faith is its mode of receptivity -- like one of the five senses, only on a higher plane. How to tell the difference between this and its phony substitutes? Hmm, let's see. Let's think back to when Bob was a liberal.

Surely it must be important that I was not only irreligious but anti-religious, such that I explicitly excluded myself from any real graces, except the ones that could get past my defenses. Therefore, the only splendor available to me would by definition have to come from the left. And that it did.

Even today, for example, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the bestselling work of history on college campuses. Thirty six years after its initial publication it is still #227 on Amazon, and must have made its Marxist author a small fortune (the wiki article on Zinn says it routinely sells in excess of 100,000 copies a year). Not bad for a torrent of lies.

In any event, I still remember the feeling upon reading Zinn and others like him. Again, like any good conspiracy theory, it explains everything. It also has a gnostic appeal, because now you are in on the secret. And it has a religious appeal, both because it saves (to be on the left is to be Good and therefore absolved of sin) and liberates one from appearances. It also provides meaning from evangelizing and converting those still living in darkness. Not incidentally, it also makes you a Superior Person, so the appeal to narcissism is transparent (no doubt accounting for its appeal to the featherbrains of Hollywood and the MSM).

I didn't intend to go in this direction, but here we are. Let's conclude with some aphorisms:

The only man who saves himself from intellectual vulgarity is the man who ignores what it is fashionable to know.

To feign knowledge of a subject, it is advisable to adopt its most recent interpretation.

Great stupidities do not come from the people. First, they have seduced intelligent men.