Ideas Have Riotous Consequences

People generally think of ideas as good or bad, correct or incorrect, brilliant or stupid. They don't -- especially in our age of stupidity, AKA relativism -- think of them as intrinsically pathological.

However, among Voegelin's principle themes is that thinking is indeed subject to disease and decrepitude, and that when this happens on a widespread basis, culture follows. We are seeing this play out on TV in real time -- on TV if you're lucky enough not to reside in a Democrat stronghold, unlucky if you have to live amidst the savages.

One question is whether or not the left will finally appreciate the consequences of their ruinous ideas. No chance. Ideas are easy to change, political religions, not so much.

About the religiosity, the following passage caught my attention yesterday:

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything....

The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide "These are the lies we will tell today." No, that would be too crude and honest.

Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they've chosen to live their lives.

It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully.... [It's] the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don't even know they're true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything (Stephen Hunter.)

One thing I noticed yesterday is the knee-jerk quality: everyone compulsively repeating the same lies, over and over.

Why? Why the constant proselytizing and virtue signaling, the conspicuous conviction that these are fine people with good intentions, with a handful naughty people taking advantage of the situation?

A few bad actors couldn't, for example, turn a Tea Party rally into a dress rehearsal for the collapse of civilization. I don't see Asian Americans rioting over the widespread and systemic legal discrimination against them by our most expensive looniversity bins.

A few notes to myself from over the weekend. Those who understand them will require no explanation. For those who don't understand them, no explanation will be sufficient, although I will no doubt expand upon them tomorrow, when I have more time:

Secularization is the process whereby Homo religiosus convinces himself he isn't.

Every war is a religious war, especially if it's irreligious.

Not a clash of civilizations, rather, of reality tunnels.

Under threat, a worldview will defend itself with violence.

Uncritical thought elevated to first principle is intrinsically pathological.

Leftists don't have ideas. Ideas have them.

In a world run by the left, who knows how to be a victim knows everything.

And who has mastered self-esteem has mastered everything.

In poor countries the wealthy are fat. In wealthy countries, the looters are disgustingly fat.

Paranoid people don't wonder about the meaning of life.

Trump's barbaric nationalism is an insult to glorious tribalism.

Progressivism is a lawsuit against reality by Perfection.

The left won't rest until all America is a university campus.

Black isn't a race, it's an ideology.

Leftism turns have-nots into will-nots, and will nots into why not, the police won't stop me.

Natural rights are never zero sum. Invented rights are whiner take all.

The demonstrators are ANGRY -- unlike most people, who learn their feelings can't change reality by the age of five, and move on.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for brokenhearted beta-men to virtue signal.

If you can politicize a perennial problem rooted in human nature, the left has a career waiting for you in politics, academia, journalism, activism, or criminality.

The rioters are showing with great persuasiveness why, despite the most thorough precautions, there will be the occasional tragedy of a George Floyd. Given the vast numbers, statistical aberrations are inevitable. Some people who never touch a cigarette will die of lung cancer.

Let's begin with the bottom line: if reality is the tension between immanence and transcendence, then default to one side or the other is intrinsically pathological, because it denies the proper form and end of man -- no different than if we were to, say, pretend man can live without food or oxygen.

One can always hold the theory that man is an angelic being who doesn't require nutrition, but what can't go on won't go on. The question is, will the person admit his error, or even acknowledge the fact that he is putting food in his mouth?

It is identical vis-a-vis any deformed ideology: it can last awhile, but not forever. It is difficult to say exactly when the present ideology under which we are forced to live fully crystalized into a pneumo-cognitive totalitarianism voluntarily internalized by the majority of citizens.

Having lived through the disease process, I can identify certain accelerations or "leaps," especially during the past two decades, e.g., the attempt to overturn the 2000 election in Bush v. Gore, the ascendence of Obama and his vile race war, the second and ongoing effort to deny a peaceful transition of power in 2016, the open attacks on free speech, the gender hysteria, the rise of social media facilitating the instantaneous transmission of pathological hatred and stupidity, the total politicization of the Narrative Media...

As I said, to be continued tomorrow...