If Truth is a Myth, All Myths are True

Just an old post, revised, extended, and fortified with new insights and old aphorisms. The reason being that I'm getting over a mild cold which is nevertheless strong enough to disable the Gagdad melon, at least for concocting an all new post.

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Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of "subjectivity vs. objectivity" as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth -- "the Truth" -- is a construct of the Euro-West... This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny (A Bunch of Illiterate Leftist (but I repeat myself) Students).

I realize that people believe these things, but still. Do they really believe them? Are these things even possible, let alone the case?

Let's start with the existence of truth. If there is no truth, can there be such a thing as honesty? Obviously not. One can be earnest, sincere, passionate, etc., but honesty has to do with commitment to, and conformity with, truth. So the dim bulbs who penned this screed are not, by their own lights, honest. They are just... screeching or howling, like any other animal that registers distress.

Which explains a lot about the left, doesn't it?

Of course, they love nothing more than running roughshod over those old mythbound taboos. Never mind that Between animal and man there is no other barrier than a palisade of taboos (Dávila). Might as well try to take away an animal's instincts because they're just reactionary holdovers from the past.

Interesting too that the authors assert that belief in the existence of truth and objectivity is a "myth." In the shallow and profane sense, a myth is "untrue." But what can a myth be in the absence of truth? If truth is a myth, then all myths are true.

It never fails: Whoever does not believe in myths believes in fables (Dávila). Such as: truth is a construct of white supremacist oppression, and it's true that the world will end in twelve years if you don't give us absolute power over your lives!

On a deeper level, of course, myths convey transrational truths that are timeless and universal, applying to all people at all times. They are a kind of implicit corollary of human nature. However, the left has that covered as well, as it rejects the concept of human nature. For a leftist, the following aphorism is a compliment:

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man (Dávila).

Have these profoundly antihuman students never had a course in basic logic? The question answers itself, but there is a Logic without which no coherent statements of any kind can be made. This logic -- AKA Logos -- is not explicit, but rather, implicit in all speech. It is why we have speech at all, and one of the most generous (and generative) ways we are in the image of the Creator.

In short, only God and man possess speech. Animals and liberal college students can "communicate," but only in a predictable and repetitious way, on a very narrow frequency. (You might say that instead of possessing speech they are possessed by it, hence the repetitive and circular memeworld they inhabit, more like cries in the wild than truly human speech.)

What is especially perverse about the claims of these liberal fascists is that they render man utterly worthless. Which fascists tend to do. The rest follows logically (from the insane initial premise).

To put it conversely, "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute" (Schuon). Now, this is the same Absolute that is implicit in all speech, even if denied. Which is why the speech of the liberal fascists is so utterly incoherent: it explicitly denies the Absolute while making all sorts of claims that are meaningless in its absence.

The bottom line is that you can't just jettison the Absolute and pretend nothing has happened. Truly, it is like the Titanic hitting the iceberg while everyone ignores the water flooding into the hull. A ship cannot float, let alone get anywhere, under such circumstances. Just so, without the boundary between true and false, language capsizes and plunges into darkness.

Which raises another important point: that language is literally a conveyer of Light. Any lover of language appreciates this, as it is one of the more experience-near emanations of spirit. Great poems are not just gay sentences.

And speaking of "myth," In the beginning was the Word; without this Word nothing was made; and in this Word is Light and Life.

Those are metaphysical claims expressed in a mythopoetic manner. Not only are they true, they are precisely true, even the basis of Truth. They explain how and why the world is intelligible to intelligence, why we can share this intelligibility with each other, and ultimately how man and world are mutually illuminating, since they are derived from the same Absolute Light. (Recall that metaphysics isn't an inexact science, but rather, the science of the inexact, i.e., of subjects and qualities which are no less real than objects and quantities.)

In this majestic Light, how petty and impoverished are these proudly lightless students! Imagine rejecting the one thing that elevates you above the beasts! And then they get mad if you call them beasts.

It is especially ironic that these self-designated Students of Color would embrace an ideology that considers it "fascist" to make an absolute truth claim such as, oh, All men are created equal. Not to mention the fact that if there is no truth, then there can by definition be no freedom (unless the latter is conflated with being lost in permanent darkness and confusion).

Here are some more absolute truth claims. If they make me a fascist, then what can one say but God bless fascism?:

"The intelligence of the animal is partial, that of man is total; and this totality is explained only by a transcendent reality to which the intelligence is proportioned" (Schuon).

If the intelligence of animals is explicitly partial and of man implicitly total, then the stupidity of these students is complete and irremediable. They literally situate themselves beneath the beasts, since animals at least don't believe idiotic lies about themselves.

"Objectivity, whereby human is distinguished from animal intelligence, would lack sufficient reason without the capacity to conceive the absolute or infinite, or without the sense of perfection" (ibid.).

Animals can at least rely upon unwavering instinct instead of being plunged into the darkness of an absolute subjectivity that answers to no object.

"Truth is the reason for man's existence; it constitutes our grandeur and reveals to us our littleness" (ibid.).

Note the corollary: that deconstruction pretends to reveal our littleness while exalting man's pride -- for it is a proud man who claims to have "rights" in the absence of an antecedent truth and corresponding responsibility.

"Totality of intelligence implies freedom of will. This freedom would be meaningless without an end prefigured in the Absolute; without knowledge of God and of our final ends, it would be neither possible nor useful" (ibid.).

In such a world, freedom becomes a nuisance -- like these cognitively shipwrecked students who agitate for things that cannot be, and insist that other people are somehow obligated to respect their stupid claims.

"[W]ith intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite" (ibid.). That eternal circle bisects every now, as every now bisects the circle.

Recall Lincoln's gag, when someone asked him how long a man's legs should be: long enough to reach the ground. Similarly, how intelligent should a man be? Intelligent enough to reach the ground of truth, i.e., to intuit the principles without which truth is impossible and man sinks beneath himself.

It's a Whine-Win Situation: The Weak Shall Inhabit the State

For those who have lost the plot, I've been editing and revising any old posts that touch on the theme of common sense, in preparation for a forthcoming dialogue with Curry's follow-up, Reclaiming Common Sense.

It's such an important subject, and yet, you can be quite sure that people with the least amount of common sense are secure in their belief that they have the most -- hence their right to restrict your freedom and run your life. Yes, Greta Thunberg and all the other psychotic children running for president know you don't really need that straw, cheeseburger, automobile, health insurance, etc. They have common sense. You don't.

So, how and why and when did common sense realism -- our nation's founding philosophy, or operating system -- become so devalued and marginalized?

Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that part of the answer must have to do with virtue signaling and status anxiety.

Analogously, think of the art world. I read somewhere that the French impressionists are looked down upon by many critics. Why? Because everyone likes them. That being the case, they hold no snob appeal. What's the point of knowing or appreciating something accessible to anyone?

Recall that the intellect can be twisted by pathological narcissism, no less than physical appearance, acting, or athletic prowess. But when this happens it essentially disables the intellect, since it is no longer conformed to reality, rather, to the elevation of one's self-image. Its end is no longer truth but status.

In The Rape of the Masters, Kimball writes of how "the study of art is increasingly being co-opted by various extraneous, non-artistic, non-aesthetic campaigns." Which is to put it mildly.

And just as art has become politicized, politics has surely become aestheticized. Clearly, a great deal of the elite loathing of President Trump is on aesthetic grounds. They were more upset that he puts ketchup on steak than they were at Obama eating dogs, because at least the latter is exotic.

Kimball notes that the undermining of art involves a kind of two-pronged attack: first is "a process of spurious aggrandizement" through which "you hail the mediocre as a work of genius, for example, or pretend that what is merely repellent actually enables our understanding of art or life."

Dávila: --The artist who seeks personal celebrity, not content with the celebrity of his work, becomes a clown or a politician.

A relative of mine was a serious art collector, with many very expensive works adorning his walls. Admittedly I am a simple man, but I find them visually off-putting -- AKA ugly -- or just neutral, with nothing attractive (or radiant) about them.

Plus, they are a stylistic jumble. There is no connecting theme, such that the overall effect is of a kind of disjointed psychotic dream. Not the kinds of specters I want hanging around my house.

True, they are... original. But Since obviously the authentic work of art is original, the unlearned imagines that an original work is necessarily a work of art (Dávila).

Exaggeration? One could cite countless examples. Kimball notes that when a couple of well known artists "exhibited The Naked Shit Pictures -- huge photo-montages of themselves naked with bits of excrement floating about," one critic celebrated their "self-sacrifice for a higher cause, which is purposely moral and indeed Christian."

And if you do not see that -- which you do not and could not -- then it elevates the critic at your expense. It all takes place in the mind of the critic or connoisseur, again, for reasons of status anxiety.

The second strategy (after spurious self-aggrandizement) "proceeds in the opposite direction. It operates not by inflating the trivial, the mediocre, the perverse, but by attacking, diluting, or otherwise subverting greatness."

We don't have time for a full excursion into the art world, AKA Adventures in Vertical Perception. The point is, something similar has infected the political world, such that our leftist elites simultaneously aggrandize themselves and denigrate the restavus via allegiance to their strange ideas and stranger gods.

Indeed, this is precisely why they didn't see Trump coming, nor why they cannot (thankfully) refrain from saying and doing things that will ensure the coming of More Trump.

As mentioned a couple of posts back, Woodrow Wilson was our first progressive political elite to openly denigrate the Constitution. If even literal-minded idiots such as yourselves can understand it, then it must be pretty vacuous, right? Don't we need a more sophisticated document that only the experts can appreciate and decipher?

Even the cognitively labile Jefferson had sufficient wisdom to recognize that the principles embedded in the Declaration of Independence were (and are) forever): its purpose was "not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of," but rather, "to place before mankind the common sense of the subject... it was intended to be an expression of the American mind."

But today, leftists will read Jefferson's comment and notice only that he said MAN-kind!, thereby simultaneously triggering them (because they are so weak-spirited) and elevating them above men who are infinitely superior.

So it's a whine-win situation (in that order), as is true in general of the celebration of liberal victimhood. It's an inversion of "the meek shall inherit the earth," i.e., the weak shall inhabit the state, thus a monstrous confluence of ineffectuality and omnipotence. But just because God humbled himself in becoming man, it hardly means that all victims are gods. But that's what we have these days instead of common sense: identity politics is just a grotesque inversion and perversion of Christianity.

[N]othing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in [later] life -- save only this -- that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education. --Prof. John Alexander Smith (in Kimball)

[To which I would add one more critical faculty, that is, the ability to situate vertically the person or movement with whom you're dealing. Broadly speaking, there are children of the Light, of the Earth, and of the Darkness, and it's not all that hard to discern which is witch.]

The Educational Establishment and the Incarnation of Stupid

Before reading Common Sense Nation, I had never heard of the philosopher Thomas Reid, the intrepid discoverer of Common Sense. Prior to him, no one had any or knew what it was. It was as if the whole world were populated by MSNBC hosts.

All gaggery aside, Reid founded a school of thought known as common sense realism. Right away you can see why this wouldn't appeal to the tenured, as their whole mystique is based upon the essentially gnostic idea that they possess some special knowledge inaccessible to the restavus. Therefore, common sense realism blows their cover and reveals them as the phonies and frauds they are, without so much as a fig leaf of credibility to cover what amounts to a naked will to power.

Nevertheless, academia has been dining out on this anti-intellectual hoax for half a century, although there are signs their bubble is in the process of bursting.

As ususal, aphorisms come to mind:

--Instruction does not cure foolishness; it equips it.

--The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly.

--The State imposes obligatory and free instruction, for making a stupid man still stupider at the public expense.

--Modern education delivers intact minds to propaganda (Dávila).

Note that, for reasons of self-preservation, the last thing the state is going to do is promulgate a philosophy that undercuts the very need for statism. In short, education must deny, obscure, and debilitate the functioning of common sense.

Indeed, this is why public schools don't teach children logic, economics, or ethics, for if they did, they might produce self-governing individuals animated by common sense instead of intellectually enfeebled and dependent drones. Someone like AOC is a pure product of our public and higher educational system. She's not an accident. She's the epitome and quintessence, the very embodiment of the negation of common sense.

According to Prof. Wiki, Reid enumerated

a set of principles of common sense which constitute the foundations of rational thought. Anyone who undertakes a philosophical argument, for example, must implicitly presuppose certain beliefs, such as "I am talking to a real person," and "There is an external world whose laws do not change," among many other positive, substantive claims.

The point is, the very possibility of rational discourse presupposes various implicit principles that cannot not be, on pain of rendering rational discourse strictly impossible. Likewise,

For Reid, the belief in the truth of these principles is not rational; rather, reason itself demands these principles as prerequisites, as does the innate "constitution" of the human mind. It is for this reason (and possibly a mocking attitude toward Hume and Berkeley) that Reid sees belief in the principles of common sense as a litmus test for sanity.

Which is why, for example, the American Psychological Association is no longer a promoter of sanity, but rather, has become an enthusiastic proponent and enabler of personal and collective insanity, e.g., transgenderism, intersectionality, and identity politics.

Reid observed that "before men can reason together, they must agree in first principles; and it is impossible to reason with a man who has no principles in common with you." Sure, you can do other things with such people. That's what relatives are for. It's just that they are "not fit to be reasoned with."

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time (Dávila).

Anyway, it turns out that this proponent of common freaking sense and rudimentary sanity was a huge influence on the founders. For Reid, what he calls common sense is the very power in us that renders understanding possible.

Think about that one: when you understand something, it is because understanding is possible in principle. Therefore it is appropriate to ask: by virtue of what principle(s) is understanding possible?

I haven't actually thought this through in a completely systematic way, because I am not a systematic guy. More of an intuitive guy. But as I've said all along, one headrock principle surely must be that the world is intelligible to intelligence. If not, then we're all done here except for those tenured pretexts for a naked Power Grab alluded to above.

For Reid, "self-evident truths are true and discoverable by us because of the constitution of our human nature." In the absence of the latter, "we would lack access to the foundational truths we require to be able to reason..." Thus, human nature is conformed to certain self-evident and ineradicable truths that allow it (human nature) to realize its potential.

The following passage caught my eye, because it too is a point I have often belabored: self-evident truths -- our innate cosmic principles -- are not arrived at by logic per se, but are the very basis of logic.

In other words, a thing cannot be true merely because it is logical, but rather, logical because true; obviously Truth is higher than logic -- one reason why Truth manifests in any number of extra- or translogical ways.

Again, the truths we are discussing are not "conclusions" but perceptions; we don't shine the light of intelligence upon them, because they are that light (i.e., intelligence is ultimately composed of the light it is able to discern). Analogously, although the moon gives off light, you wouldn't use the light of the moon to try to illuminate the sun. For those of you living in Rio Linda, reason is the moon, truth the sun.

The Founders wrote our Constitution in such a way that any person using his God-given common sense could understand it. Which is why you have to be a constitutional scholar in order to twist it to the nonsensical ends of the left.