The Devil, the Apocalypse, and Other Nuisances

By now we're all familiar with the Mondello-Hildebrand Effect, whereby the subject of a post escapes the page and proceeds to comment upon itself after it has been written. In other words, it proclaims its own truth via synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences, or Divine Puns.

A case in point is the previous post, the title of which alludes to a "cartography of spirit." Afterwards the word "map" kept popping up in my reading. When this occurs, it must be for a reason.

The reason is that we have tapped into -- or so we have heard from the wise -- a hidden nonlocal connection, or a particularly rich vein of the cosmos. At the very least we must pay attention to these coincidences, and try to discern whether they truly reveal something of the underside of the cosmic area rug or are just symptoms of a delusional disorder. Example:

Let us not overlook the great secret that a sound map of human nature (as John Adams insisted) uniquely lies at the heart of the Constitution of the United States and its elaborate institutional arrangements (Sandoz, italics in original).

The passage then goes on to describe the events of the day -- no, not of 1787 but of 2020: that "The demos ever tends to become the ochlos [mob]," and therefore

must be restrained artfully by a vast net of adversarial devices if government is to have any chance whatever of prevailing over self-serving human passions while still nurturing the liberty of free men.

This passage adverts to several critical ideas, the most consequential being that if our politics isn't informed by an accurate map of human nature, then our political cosmos will eventually fall apart. Or, as the cliché has it, the center will not hold.

Let's face it: under the best of circumstances man is an ungovernable beast except from within. If he refuses to, or is incapable of, so governing himself, then he will be governed from without. In other words, the raging mob will evoke the force required to put it down, and then have the chutzpah to kvetch about it.

If you find no father in the home, you will probably find him later in the street with a uniform and gun. Disorder in the soul is the raison d'etre of Law and Order. If all men were Raccoons, government itself would be unnecessary.

Then I bumped into this observation by Richard Feynman, going to a life lived in the great In Between, which is the only place to be (or become, to be perfectly accurate):

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

We need maps, but the most accurate map is never the territory. Or, the most accurate map is the territory, AKA reality.

With that out of the away, let's turn to the Political Apocalypse, which has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks.

The apocalypse. It's always something, isn't it?

The book starts off with a bang. However, it's another one of those bangs that's self-evident to the clued in, but eternally beyond the grasp of the progressive mob, for if they knew it, it would cure them of their pathology, including all the infantile acting out:

"The secularization of existence" which "marks the modern age" has taken place "at the expense of common sense in politics and of rationality in philosophy through the disordering infusion of temporality with an ultimacy formerly reserved for the eternal beyond."

Boom. Again, this will convince precisely no one who doesn't already understand it, but this Great Leap Backward has resulted in "the rise of ideological mass movements whose key experiential ingredient is political apocalypse," i.e., of visions that promise "the radical transformation of man and history into the perfect existence of peace, plenty, justice, happiness, and a 'Final Harmony' of one description or another."

Yes, a Final Solution to... to what exactly? For if the problem is human nature, then failure to accurately map it will inevitably result in an aggravation of the primary problem.... as you have no doubt noticed, because what is a leftist but a human being, only worse?

Yes, man is the measure of all things. Except for God, who is the measure of man. Deny this and hell follows. In Democrat controlled cities, anyway.

The cartography of man pops up again:

We must have a systematic understanding of the nature of man if we want to have a systematic political science.... Society can destroy a man's soul because the disorder of society is a disease in the psyche of its members.

But that's an insult to multiculturalism, to the tenured fairy tale that all cultures are equally valuable and precious! Not exactly, for truth is never an insult, but it is always a scandal to the progressive.

As we've discussed in the past, the typical liberal is but a tool of lower forces -- or of demons in high places who manipulate the uncomprehending mob. The devil himself? He is essentially the personification of "the spirit of pure negation whose goal is simply annihilation." Some people just like to see the Wendy's burn.

And it needs to be emphasized that the devil even "loves" mankind in his own fashion. Indeed, he speaks truth, except that it is "my truth." Thus, any time you hear a liberal clown speak of "my truth," know that he is simply aping the Ape of God: "the devil speaks of his truth and of the other truth (about which, he admits, he can know nothing because he is pure negation."

Which is why you can hand a liberal the truth in a silver chalice, but you can't make him drink. This:

The insensibility of the modern apocalyptical gnostic to facts (including phenomenal facts) has been insufficiently noticed. It must be accorded a prominent place in any description of his psycho- or pneumapathology.

For not only is his conception of reality distorted by radical closure against transcendent Being, but he is highly selective and perversely willful with respect to the elements of phenomenal reality accepted as substantial.

One need only observe what happens to public figures who point out that BLM is a fraud rooted in disgusting and depraved lies about police treatment of blacks. Say what you want, but that is not the devil's truth.