You're Gonna Need a Bigger Lie

Continuing with yesterday's post, it's not just a matter of positing vertical reality, nor even interacting with it in an outward way -- e.g., through ritual, dogma, and rules of morality -- but of maintaining an open system.

It's no different than, say, biology. You might correctly posit a theory of how biological organisms are far from equilibrium systems that exchange energy and information with the environment in order to maintain their dynamic wholeness.

But put one of these organisms on the moon -- or even at the north pole -- and the words mean nothing. Rather, the reality is what counts; no matter how many words one uses, the reality exceeds the description. Human language cannot create life, but is already a prolongation of the divine life.

It's the same with man. It's fine to posit God, but if you're not in an open relationship with the divine reality -- O -- then you are "dying inside," so to speak. Vertically speaking you're on the moon or some other uninhabitable place. At the very least you are drying up, or asphyxiating, or starving, or shrinking. This is why scripture has so many analogies to shining light, flowing water, eating food, and breathing air.

Indeed, upon completing the horizontal creation, God provides the finishing touch by breathing the breath of life into man, thus making him a living being.

To be precise, he is already biologically -- or horizontally -- alive, but now he is a vertically living being. And as with the lungs, it is not as if we can just inhale once and be done with it. Rather, respiration is ongoing until we breathe our last. Not for nothing are pneuma and spirit cognate.

Likewise, man doesn't live on bread alone -- i.e., bio-horizontally -- but on every word that comes from the mouth of God -- pneuma-vertically. Vertical nourishment is real. In fact, no one -- regardless of what they say -- can live without it. Even the atheist will simply call it by another name, e.g., art, or culture, or truth, or compassion. Again, to deny these things is to live on the moon. Where no man can live.

Having said that, if you place an organism on the moon, it will decompose into its component parts. The parts themselves don't disappear. Likewise, place the spiritual being in, say, the Soviet Union or the New York Times, and the biological organism remains. This is the ambiguous world of zombies, of the living dead, of spiritually vacated pod-people -- MSM journalists, political activists, the tenured, etc.

Of such pseudo-peoploids, it is written:

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be (Dávila).

Why does the left believe such foolish things? This is why: God is a rather largish thing to try to replace. You're gonna need a bigger lie.

Not to pick on the hapless and vapid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but her enthusiasts certainly don't see her as hapless and vapid. Rather, it is as if they nourish themselves on her nonsense. And when I say "nonsense," I mean a certain specialized kind of nonsense that is essentially "God talk" without God, or spirituality without being ordered to the spiritual object, or O.

Example. Okay, I'll just check her Twitter feed. Heh: feed.

--What we have built is permanent. No. Matter. What.

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

--I have touched the hands of people who have felt ignored and invisible for a long, long time. And they felt seen.

She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.

--We will fight, we will vote, and we will run until hate is dismantled.

I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

Remember such cosmic BS next time you hear a liberal ridicule Jesus.

More aphorisms that apply to our zombie friends:

He avoids announcing to man his divinity, but proposes goals that only a god could reach, or rather proclaims that the essence of man has rights that assume he is divine.

After conversing with some “thoroughly modern” people, we see that humanity escaped the “centuries of faith” only to get stuck in those of credulity.

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

But Only the honest prophets are lynched. So Cortez is quite safe inside her basilica of imbecilic lies.

The Real Intersectionality (of Vertical and Horizontal)

What does the subject under discussion -- prerogatives of the human state -- have to do with the news of the day? In a way, we are always asking this question, because there are principles and there is the world, and our life -- or "historical time" -- consists of their intersection, i.e., inner and outer, vertical and horizontal, absolute and relative, music and geometry.

Vis-a-vis our political system, there are horizontal aspects such as democracy and rule of law, and vertical aspects such as freedom of thought and speech, the sanctity of human life, and the spiritual telos of human actualization (AKA "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness").

Now, the ultimate purpose of the horizontal aspects is to preserve the vertical; the horizontal must converge upon the vertical, or it is neutral at best. And neutrality inevitably sinks beneath itself, as we see in the EU, where a purely enclosed horizontality has successfully eliminated all verticality. Which is what makes the Muslim conquest so easy. They cannot be bribed with horizontal promises, but will gladly use horizontal means for their own (lower) vertical ends.

I remember when then defense secretary Rumsfeld was condemned by the usual suspects for the banal observation (about the rebuilding of Iraq) that democracy was overrated, and not nearly as important as civil rights and the rule of law -- i.e., a stable liberal order.

It should be obvious to any properly catechized American that (for example) a monarchy with robust civil rights would be far preferable to a democracy in which our rights may come and go, depending upon the whim of the majority. After all, Venezuela is a democracy, just as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her election fair and square.

It would be nice if Cortez came packaged with the following consumer warning: In democratic elections it is decided who it is licit to legally oppress (Dávila).

Speaking of solid gold irony clad aphorisms, the following is so simple that even a journalist or political scientist might be able understand it: Either the man has rights, or the people are sovereign.

Either man has certain vertical prerogatives, or the hominid hive is sovereign. Man or antman.

And what is a socialist but someone who will use the vertical to destroy the vertical with vague and seductive appeals such as "the dignity of man," or "justice for working families," or "helping our neighbors"? In short, the progressive will use freedom to deny freedom, when the whole point of the system (in its horizontal aspect) is to preserve human prerogatives such as liberty.

What really disappoints me is that a bartender could be so stupid, but maybe standards have fallen since the days I frequented such establishments. But anyone whose livelihood depends on exploiting drunks should know that When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited.

How did Bernie Sanders go from living in a tree to being a multi-millionaire, with no actual job in between? Why, the same way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will go from bartender to baron in a few short years if not weeks (book deal in 3-2-1). Never mind that

The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach. But don't wait for Bernie or Alexandria to discontinue the ire and brimstone sermons on wealth and power. They're too damn lucrative. Liberals have principles, but no leftist allows these to interfere with making a living off the rubes and exploiting envy for cash and other valuable prizes.

Before returning the Prerogatives, a few more Aphorisms, because they're just too good, even though we've mentioned many of them before:

“Social justice” is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

Here again, it is a faux-vertical appeal that permits one to steal in good conscience. Indeed, what is socialism but the philosophy of the guilt of others? Once someone's guilt is established, then it's only a matter of determining the punishment. For example, progressive racists proclaim us guilty of White Privilege. We sit here in limbo, awaiting our sentence.

Perez is what, 28 years old? I remember when I was 28. It might be the last time I was stupid enough to know how to solve the nation's problems, although some symptoms persisted for a number of years thereafter. But certainty in the service of ignorance isn't just a Real Thing, but the usual thing. Who is humble enough to proudly proclaim his ignorance? Therefore,

Each day I less expect to meet someone who does not nurse the certainty of knowing how the world’s ills could be cured. You will have noticed that such individuals are barred from ever appearing on television, where only certitude is permitted.

And yet As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject. For example, the absolute apex of my knowledge of human psychology was when I was handed my Ph.D. in 1988. No hesitation at all! But now I scarcely know where to begin.

There's a picture of Maxine Waters next to this aphorism:

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence.

And this one goes precisely to the left's collective meltdown about the Supreme Court:

For the left the constitution is a shameful attack on the sovereignty of the people.

In other words, it is a vertical constraint on blind horizontality.

By the way, how is a progressive idea like suicide? Both are permanent solutions to temporary problems.

I was about to say "back to our prerogatives" but we're out of time. We'll leave off with this observation by Schuon, that man "possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open onto others and unto Heaven." This is the "religious instinct," or you could just call it vertical openness. And again, Job One of the left is to shut this down, barricade the roads, and enclose us in horizontality.

The Secret of Existence is Just Under the...

Continuing with our discussion of the Prerogatives of the Human State, I should say first of all that I am decades past the point of wondering whether there are any such prerogatives.

Rather, humanness entails certain rights and privileges, and that's all there is to it. Moreover, once you acknowledge these, then God is their necessary corollary: in short, no God, no conceivable privileges (except those man usurps for himself by the exercise of superior strength).

The Founders clearly recognized this entailment, for which reason they explicitly anchored our rights in Nature (i.e., in the nature of things, not in mere physics or biology) and Nature's God. For as the blind squirrel Jean Paul Sartre once remarked, if there is no God, then there is no human nature. And if there is no human nature, then there are no conceivable prerogatives.

Which -- you will have noticed -- is the main reason why the left ceaselessly attacks God, because God is the biggest impediment to their tyrannical follies. Eliminate Nature's God and they can do whatever they want to us, from mere theft and oppression to genocide. God is the barrier between the roiling id of the left and civilization.

Exaggeration? Again, once you have determined that someone is a Nazi, then it becomes a question of how to stop him. If he won't stop his Nazi-ing, then he has to be stopped by force. Call Maxine Waters what you want, but she is logical enough to make the correct deduction. Yes, the premise is insane, but this only reveals the limits of logic, since there is no logical operation to ensure true premises.

Prerogative: an exclusive right or privilege held by a person or group, especially a hereditary or official right.

In this case it is held by a group, or better, a nature, i.e., human nature. These prerogatives inhere in human nature, flowing from there to the individual. Note that for the materialist, there is no vocabulary to even describe this reality. He doesn't have to account for it, because he makes it disappear via linguistic deception or auto-woolpullery.

But as we have said on many occasions, you can split off and deny a portion of reality, but it always returns, usually with a vengeance. This has so much practical application that it could easily send us down a rabbit hole of a sidepost, but suffice it to say that human nature will have the last word(s) -- including those prerogatives alluded to above.

How so? Okay, this is an obvious example: if you are a strict Darwinian, then there is no reason to take seriously the radically contingent thoughts of a randomly evolved primate. And yet, you affirm the theory just as if truth exists and man can know it -- in other words, as if truth about his origins is one of the prerogatives of the human state!

Which it is. On that we agree. Only my metaphysic explains how this is possible, whereas yours renders it strictly impossible, in principle and in fact. Notice how you denied this principle up front, but how it snuck up from behind and bit you right in your assumption.

Now, having said all this, "the effects of the 'the Fall' weaken the prerogatives of human nature, but they cannot abolish them without abolishing man himself" (Schuon).

And this "Fall" is whatnow? Well, unfortunately, part of being fallen involves a degree of obscurity and ambiguity surrounding this question. As it so happens, just last night I was reading the very book Thomas Aquinas was working on when he left this world, Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology. Yes, he died in mid-sentence, or mid-thought anyway:

"Secondly, an evident example shows that attainment of the kingdom is possible."

D'oh! "The treasure is buried right under the..."

Anyway, he sheds some interesting light on the question of the Fall. I'll paraphrase, but he essentially says it is a consequence of a kind of breaking of the vertical link that unifies all of creation.

Imagine an organismic hierarchy, say, the human person. You can sever something at the "bottom" or periphery, say, a kidney or toe, without affecting the hierarchy or damaging the essence. But perform a lobotomy or sever the spinal cord, and everything below is affected.

It's a matter of telos, since an organismic system is organized and governed from the top down. Eliminate the top -- in this case, God -- and what happens to the whole?

Prior to the Fall, man "referred all things to God as to his last end, and in this his justice and innocence consisted." The resultant harmony "came from a higher power, the power of God." Reason was subservient to God -- which goes to the question raised above about one's premises holding water (or Waters, as the case may be). Remove God, and one can prove anything. Put another way, if you are credulous enough to believe God doesn't exist, then what won't you believe?

So, "The state enjoyed by man" -- that of primordial slack -- "depended on the submission of the human will to God." Yes, Adam had one job. Now we have Ten Commandments, but once upin a timeless there was only one. The precise opposite of this one commandment is: Ye shall be as gods. The rest is history, over and over and over again until you want to vomit.

The harmonious integrity of the original state depended entirely on the submission of man's will to God. Consequently, as soon as the human will threw off the yoke of subjection to God, the perfect subjection of the lower powers to reason and of the body to the soul likewise disintegrated.

As in dis-integrated. And we've been searching for the missing integration ever since. Every ideology is nothing more than a faux integration, from Marxism to feminism to environmentalism to queer theory to scientism and on and on. In each case, you can't get there from here, for "when a cause is removed, the effect cannot follow." God is both first and last cause. Remove him and there is no beginning, no source, no ground; and no end, i.e., no meaning, no purpose, no reason for existence.

That's the bad news. The good news ("gospel") is that there is a way to re-integrate, to reconnect with the source. Yes, attainment of the kingdom is possible...

To be continued. Unlike Aquinas.