The Road to Hell is Paved by Saintly Ideologues

Time enough for a short post consisting of MORE STUFF I CAN USE!

We ended in the midst of a discussion on the intrinsic impossibility of honest debate with ideologues who inhabit second realities impervious to reason. As they say, you can't reason a person out of something he was never reasoned into. It is why leftists respond to rational argument with irrational slander, every time. Math, physics, merit, standards, the National Anthem, anti-racism: all racist.

As we know, no amount of logic, evidence, or personal behavior can impact a leftist's delusions about race. The delusions are rock solid, and they are rock solid for a reason: because they serve purposes having nothing to do with race. I know, Captain Obvious, but perhaps we can dig a little deeper.

For example, what's really happening when a typical race-obsessed leftist calls a racially colorblind person a racist? First of all, you will notice that there is an immediate shift of planes -- or modes, rather -- from the logical to the moral. In other words, instead of addressing the argument in the mode of reason, the person is attacked from a childishly Manichaean standpoint of good vs. evil.

Childish arguments are appropriate for children. But how and why do they persist in adults? That is the subject of a future post, as it is elaborated in a book called Worldview and Mind. While I can't recommend it, it nevertheless contains some STUFF I CAN USE!

"Dogmatic propositions," writes Voegelin, "survive socially, even when their fallacious character has been thoroughly analyzed and exhibited to public view." As such, there again must be something -- for there is no effect without a cause -- "engendering them and sustaining their life."

I know: the leftist reveals the whole plot when he shifts modes from the rational to the moral; for every time he accuses you of being evil (a racist, a sexist, a homophobe), the real point is that he is elevating himself to membership in the Righteous, and Righteous people transcend any need to be logical. Sanctity is its own argument.

Al Sharpton or Barack Obama or Cornell West, for example, don't need to make sense, because the fulgurant light of their holiness radiates from them so profoundly. Only racists aren't blinded by its power.

Here's a compact truthbomb that has been thought and said and understood by countless normal people, but is still worth mentioning because it is so fundamental and so irrefutable (by intelligence, anyway):

a universe which contains intelligent beings cannot originate with a prima causa that is less than intelligent.

As we know, the universe is a vertical hierarchy deployed in time (i.e., horizontally). As we also know, there is no hierarchy that isn't conditioned from the top down, i.e., teleologically. Having said that, I guess I don't have to repeat what Voegelin says about it.

In short, the telos of thought is O: "the knowledge of something that 'exists' beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence." Sounds paradoxical but it isn't, because thinking has a Point, and the Point is located nowhere in existence. If you believe otherwise you're well on the way to ideology, whether scientistic, political, or spiritual.

Can you say more about that? Sure. Let's begin with "experience." Where in existence is this thing called experience? Correct. It is nowhere, inasmuch as anything to which we can point must presume it. You can pretend to make it go away, as do materialists, but that's just the thinking of a preoperational child: "out of sight, out of mind."

Would it be correct to say that experience doesn't exist, or that it partakes of a real mode of non-existence? Yes, paradoxical as it sounds,

existence is not a fact. If anything, existence is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death.

And "if man's existence were not a movement but a fact, it not only would have no meaning but the question of meaning could not even arise."

Another quickie: consciousness is "the point of intersection of the timeless with time." The Cross roads, so to speak. How wide is your intersection? That's really the question.

Ideologues, for example, reduce the intersection to a oneway horizontal road. Then they insist we must arrive at the destination now. All we have to do to forge this intersectional paradise is to hand over ultimate power to the state and joint the utopian in his imaginary intellectual prison. For those who resist in preference to reality, there are gulags and concentration camps that actually do exist.

This goes back to the appeal of ideology and its "resistance to rational argument. The alternative to life in the paradise of [the activist's] dream is death in the hell of his banality."

In other words, ideology -- which is to say, political religion -- is a way for the leftist to transform his banal life into a world-historical drama of good vs. evil, starring himself.

In this dream of self-salvation, man assumes the role of God and redeems himself by his own grace

It's past 10:00. Work to do. To be continued.