Leftist Lies and Bug-Eyed Lunatics

A liar and murderer from the beginning.

Speaking of which, here is a piece by one of our favorites, David Solway, called The Left's Great Lie is a Pervasive Threat to Our Culture. I haven't yet read it, but I'll bet it demonstrates how Big Lefty has also been a liar and murderer from the start. That being the case, it is natural to wonder if they -- Satan and Big Lefty -- are the same person. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

As Dennis Prager often says, truth is the most important "macro" principle. The same can't be said for the micro world, or maybe you've never been married. More generally, if we were always ruthlessly honest in all situations, I don't think civilization would be able to last 24 hours.

Conversely, governance -- the macro -- must be anchored in an accurate perception of reality. This goes to what is called the virtue of prudence. Bernie Sanders, for example, wants the federal government to provide "free" healthcare and college, while taking on 1.7 trillion dollars owed to us by people who blew the money on learning how to be embittered and entitled victims. Are these prudent policies?

In an essay called Reflections on Prudence, Pieper explains why prudence must be the cardinal virtue, since "only someone who is prudent can be just, courageous, and moderate." You can try to be good, but if you aren't prudent, then your goodness will likely backfire:

A person can be prudent and good only at the same time; prudence is part of the definition of a good action; there is no just or courageous action that could be called imprudent; and anyone who is unjust or cowardly is never prudent.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, this is because the intentions were imprudent, precisely.

In short,

doing what is good presupposes knowledge of reality. Good can only be done by someone who knows the real state of affairs.... An act is good if it is in accordance with things; and precisely this is what it means to be prudent: to let the situation, reality, dictate the course of action.

As an aside, I wonder how many students who understand this truth want or need to have their imprudent college debts paid for by the rest of us?

This being the case, what can you say about an ideology which proclaims at the outset that there is no "real" state of affairs, only opinions about it? Or that what we call "reality" is just a social construct rooted in power and oppression? Or that words do not refer to actual things, only to other words?

I call such an ideology straight-up diabolical. Even if you don't believe in Satan, this is nevertheless how he gets into everything.

Everything? Solway:

I have come to feel not only that lies are everywhere in the political and cultural world we live in, but that the Lie has become that world. We now live inside the Lie; it is the very air we breathe, the food that sustains us, the verbal milieu we communicate in, the dreams that disturb our sleep, the tastes and fashions we affect, the thoughts we think in our solitary moments.

My only quibble is the use of the first person plural. For they surely live inside the Lie. If we do too, then the End has truly arrived.

I'm thinking of how, for example, this isn't just our first purely partisan impeachment, but much more importantly, our first postmodern one. It is postmodern in the sense that the existence of an actual high crime is utterly beside the point. All that matters is that a bug-eyed lunatic and his slithering terrarium of dead-eyed political and media reptiles think there was one.

Takes one to know one. Solway was once on the left, until he realized -- just like your host -- that everything he'd imagined to be the case turned out to be

an outright lie and functioned as aspects of what Quentin Skinner... called “the potentially ruinous impact of rhetorical redescription,” that is, reframing something that is not the case as emphatically and undeniably the case.

Now, in order to do this one must -- ironically, I guess -- know the truth one is rhetorically redescrbiing. Satan -- the inventor of "spin" -- can only do so effectively because he knows the truth, at least within his limits to do so (there are certain truths -- certain inevitable blind spots -- that necessarily elude him).

I finally began to understand that what I’d taken for history was nothing but ideology and what I’d thought was truth was an order-of-magnitude lie. And that my political and cultural preceptors were, to a man and a woman, professional liars.

Why, that's just Genesis 3 All Over Again. For you may not believe in revelation, but it is timelessly true just the same.

Everything I’ve learned since I began paying attention has only served to confirm my conviction that we are living in unique times, an era in which lies come so thick and fast it seems like one is dodging bullets.

Here I'm not so sure about the uniqueness. The more history I read, the more I see that man is always man, and it doesn't get worse than that. Or better, depending upon the degree of prudence.

Well, that's about it. I want to see how the bug-eyed lunatic responds to questions.