How Not to be an Idiot

As mentioned in the previous post, this volume of essays by Voegelin is brimming with allusions and references to my Unwritten but unKnown text.

True, my text doesn't explicitly exist, but this doesn't mean it isn't floating around somewhere in the implicate order -- you know, in the vertical Cloud. It seems to me that E & I are peeking at the same ur-text from different spacetime locations, such that when he makes a point that resonates in me, it is because we must be viewing the same transcendent object through the pneumatic haze.

I'll cite various examples in no particular order. Then we'll circle back and try to assemble the puzzle pieces into a pattern and see if we can make out what they insinuate about the implicate text.

Oh, c'mon -- it'll be fun! Just remember to keep an open mind and "listen with the third ear," which is what we psychologists do when listening to a patient babble on about their problems. I may react to some of them as we proceed, but we still need to maintain an open stance toward the totality, i.e., to the hyperspatial pattern that emerges when seen together.

It is forgotten that Christ came not to Christians but to man.

Right. Of course. Elsewhere Voegelin makes the provocative point -- seemingly out of the blue, and with no elaboration -- that "Christ takes form in current events." That sounds suspiciously correct, but we'll have to figure out why later. (Come to think of it, we are seeing an awful lot of Crucifixion of the Logos going on, AKA logocide...)

By spirit we understand the openness of man to the divine ground of his existence: by estrangement from the spirit, the closure and revolt against the ground. Through spirit man actualizes his potential to partake of the divine. He rises thereby to the imago Dei which it is his destiny to be.

In the openness of the common spirit there develops the public life of society. He, however, who closes himself against what is common, or revolts against it, removes himself from the public life of human community. He becomes thereby a private man, or in the language of Heraclitus, an idiotes.

In the language of Cousin Dupree, an idiot. We can choose to be one, or we can choose to actualize our divine clueprint. Of all the choices we make in this life, this is no doubt the most consequential.

Language and fact have somehow separated from one another, and thought has correspondingly become estranged from reality.

Hoo boy. One of our pet peeves. But it's much more than a peeve, it's truly a primordial cosmic catastrophe, one that opens us to all the others and transforms us into idiots and eventually leftists. We'll just leave it at that, otherwise the post will autofill with the usual harangue. Besides, passages such as the following make my point:

We enter here upon a realm of spirit-like non-spirit or anti-spirit, which finds its representation on the plane of politics in the ideological mass movements.

For example, in, oh, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, or just about any other idiot-run Demopolis:

When the refusal to apperceive becomes radical, it leads to the phenomenon of total self- and world-annihilation...

Of course, reality doesn't actually disappear just because we fail to recognize it. Indeed, reality is that which persists despite our dreams, wishes, and political delusions.

And although expressed via politics, this is nevertheless a form of mental illness simply displaced to another plane. Think of how crazy one must be to not perceive the craziness of Antifa, or BLM, or AOC, or the DNC. Yes, there are people who don't see that Joe Biden is demented. There's a clinical term for that: negative hallucination.

"With the destruction of reality the public language is destroyed," ending in "the syndrome of illiteracy which is the result of the destruction of the language." Please note that he isn't talking about mere illiteracy, which poses a problem to the illiterate person but not the society at large.

Rather, he's referring to the hordes of college-educated illiterates that compose our Elite political, academic, and media classes who, unfortunately, don't know nothing, but rather, are post-literate in a parallel looniverse of anti-truth, anti-sprit, and anti-philosophy: unadulterated Ø.

Our great Silent but Deadly Majority can plainly detect it. Progressives, of course, can't smell it -- even though they dealt it -- for it is the polluted water in which they swim. Others have a chance to sniff it out, but

The nature of problem will perhaps not be immediately apparent, for life in the insane asylum of our time has become such a habit for many that they no longer react in a sensitive manner to the grotesque events on the public scene.

In fact, one of the functions of political correctness is to prevent the average person from not only seeing and proclaiming the emperor has no clothes, but that he is hideous, monstrous, grotesque. A beast from the abyss.

How to even begin to debate such a person? We're not talking about different opinions, rather, different realities:

we all have discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence....

Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence... the Second Reality.

Therefore, beneath what may superficially resemble rational "debate" lurks "the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses... when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared."

I was amused by a trivial but typical example over the weekend. Media in 2012: Obama is so great he could join Washington and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore! Media in 2020: Trump is so evil he could join Washington and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore!

I really must get some work done today that I've been putting off, so we won't be able to discern the contours of the implicate text. In the meantime, just keep an open mind, and we'll continue our investigation in the next post.

Oh, and if you see something, don't hesitate to say something. The implicate order is so rich that no single person could ever begin to exhaust it, so all Coons on deck.