The Center Cannot Hold if the Top Can't Rule

Slouching Toward Gomorrah begins with a passage from Yeats' The Second Coming, which is so often repeated -- by left and right -- that it has become a cliché. You know, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, so mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Welcome to Any Day, Every Year.

I'm pretty sure humans have been thinking this from the beginning. Written in the wake of WWI, it could equally apply to the fall of Rome, or the wars of the Reformation, or the French Revolution, or, for an ahistorical leftist, the election of Trump. Leftists may be ignorant of history, but they feel like the world is ending, and that's what counts.

Another frequently cited line is The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. You often hear a passionately intense cretin -- say, Bill Maher, or Michael Moore, or MSNBC hosts -- complain about how timid and reasonable their side is. The absence of self-awareness makes me lightheaded.

By the way, because of the Dávila influence, I find that I've begun thinking in terms of spontaneous aphorisms. Often they float into my head fully formed, although sometimes I have to tweak them a little for that extra tang. I'm not saying they're as penetrating as his, but you have to start somewhere, right? For example,

If you're not a liberal at 20 you have no self-righteousness, and if you're not a conservative at 40 you have no self-awareness.

Or, Ideology fills the vacuum created by tenure.

--The news is a commercial for liberalism. The commercials are news about capitalism.

--Anything deep and true is conservative.

--A "male feminist" is either a wolf in sheep's clothing or a sheep in sheep's clothing. Useless either way.

--The cogito of the left: "I envy, therefore RACISM!"

--Universal human nature and self-evident truth are two sides of the same coin; likewise, identity politics and the tyranny of subjectivism.

--Since progressivism is a state religion, public schools should be abolished on 1st amendment grounds.

--The concept of "cultural appropriation" was invented by white Marxists, so blacks & Latinos need to stop appropriating it.

--Capitalism is unfair to people who want power but have no talent.

--Say what you want about the liberal arts, but they've found a cure for common sense.

--All socialists have to do is stop pretending to be God. But then they wouldn't be socialists.

I'd like to move more into the aphorism department, if only because it is a great courtesy to the reader. As I've said before, the world is filled with 400 page books that contain one idea. Conversely, Dávila has thousands of aphorisms that could be expanded into a book, -- or, better yet, are the distillation of that book, so it needn't be written in the first place.

Think too of all those books that contain one idea, but the idea is totally stupid (or monstrous). For example, the most popular history book on college campuses is Howard Zinn's History of the American People. Let me summarize it for you: America (and capitalism, and white males) is evil. There's no clever or witty way to say that, so he had to write the book.

Back to Yeats. When the center can't hold, why not? Is it because there are no centrists? That can't be right, because to be a centrist is to compromise with evil. There is no centrist position between conservative classical liberalism and Antifa fascists. A leftist would no doubt respond that there is no centrist position between them and white supremacism.

Which is a red herring, since the latter doesn't exist in any meaningful way, and certainly wields no political power whatsoever. And this leaves aside the fact that all wholesale racism comes from the left, not from conservatives. Conservatism is founded on ideas, not on blood or identity.

In the margin I have a note to myself: "The center cannot hold because the top cannot rule." That might qualify for an aphorism, except that it actually needs to be fleshed out in order to be understood, at least by most people. Very senior Raccoons might get it right away, and see all the implications, but our culture has been so saturated by egalitarian thinking, that Absolute Authority sounds downright un-American.

But if there is no absolute authority, then there is no center. Note that this vertical authority bisects reality, which is precisely what creates the center: you might say that "truth" is anywhere verticality bisects horizontality.

This verticality is also the source of legitimate order, organization, and hierarchy. Now, hierarchy is the opposite of anarchy; put conversely, the only cure for anarchy is hierarchy. I don't mean this in a polemical way. Rather, it is just the literal truth. For example, the campus anarchy of the 1960s was a result of administrators abandoning hierarchy and placing themselves on the same level as the rioters.

Obviously, anarchy cannot be cured by anarchy, because horizontality cannot transcend horizontality. Which is precisely why leftism always ends in tyranny. It is baked into the cake. As Dávila says, When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited.

Thus, the immediate result of the communist revolution of 1917 was a two-tier society. This was the new order, the new center, the new verticality. And No social class has exploited the others more brazenly than the one that today calls itself “the State.”

Now, man is the center of the world. Indeed, you could say he is the center of creation. This is a literal truth, and it is uncontroversial. It can only be denied from the standpoint of the center which it denies, thus refuting itself.

Besides, leftists are forever making pronouncements that could only emanate from a vertical cosmic center, even if they deny any ground for this center. Here is a typical "activist scholar" who is full of passionate intensity about denying normality and deconstructing reality (check out her CV: madness!).

So, don't ask why the center cannot hold. It can't hold because the top -- AKA truth -- can't rule. Therefore, the bottom dwellers fill the vacuum. Which is why leftism always comes down to rule by sociopaths.