Everybody's Got One

Suppose someone approaches you and sincerely asks what they might read in order to better understand the conservative perspective. Easy. You respond without hesitation: the New York Times! Could anything else better illustrate the ignorance, craziness, and girlish hysteria of the left? 

Problem is, this person already reads it every day and swears by its honesty, neutrality, and objectivity, so it's obviously not working as we would have anticipated. The question is, how can an intelligent person read the Times and not know he's being lied to, indoctrinated, and manipulated by mentally ill 27 year old grievance studies majors who know nothing? 

Indoctrination is easy. The hard part is keeping people from discovering they're being indoctrinated. You all remember the Matrix: keeping millions mindlessly dreaming their lives away in their pods -- or glued to their screens -- is easy. The hard part is tracking down and neutralizing a single dissenter who doesn't go along with the programming: Neo.  

Neo. Which, of course, is an anagram of One (and also implies novelty, and therefore individuality). 

Hmm. If we are on the right track, then it would appear that controlling millions is easier than controlling a single person -- especially in a free society such as ours, in which people accept the yoke voluntarily. And indeed, there are many wise old sayings, gags and aphorisms that go precisely to this truth; moreover, the left itself is a war on genuine individuality, so there's that.  

Put it this way: oneness is the point -- of both departure and arrival -- of both illiberal leftism and conservative liberalism.  The argument -- if they would permit us to be heard -- is over the nature of this one.  

For us it is in the Creator -- the very principle of oneness, and without which oneness is inconceivable -- followed by family and individual. 

We place family prior to individual for trinitarian reasons, i.e., the irreducibly intersubjective love without which mere human beings cannot actualize our intersubjective personhood; it's really more of a complementarity of three terms: lover, beloved, and love.

The left is an ontological cancer on these truths. For it too posits the one, but locates it in a rootless and atomistic human animal, which is in turn subordinated to the tribe and the state.  

The atomistic human animal and omnipotent state necessarily go together, for in a community -- or herd, rather -- of radically selfish ones, there is no way to control them except by means of the heavy hand of state coercion. There are no immanent self-evident truths below to constrain these beasts, nor any God above. Indoctrination is one way to control them, but some people are too stupid even for college. 

Thus -- as we all witnessed on our TV screens earlier this year -- the left is in essence a riotous throng of post-literate animals running wild, wanting what they want, when they want it, which is to say, in the ahistorical NOW. Not only do they want it, they are entitled to it, because of justice or something, i.e., perhaps reparations for low IQ and absent fathers.

Will the left permit this behavior when it threatens the Harris-Biden state instead of just human beings and their property?  I doubt it, but we shall see.  They either won't authorize it to begin with, or will check it before it damages the "brand."  

Nevertheless, the future isn't written, and there is the ongoing struggle in the Democrat party between the lying manipulators and the true believers. Even Petey cannot say at this juncture how this will play out, but I would put my money on the young and energetic true believers.  

The old-school manipulators and frauds -- the Pelosis, Obamas, and Clintons -- believe they're just holding the wolf by the ears, and maybe the wolf, like a spoiled child, will exhaust itself from the prolonged tantrum.  

In reality, I think the wolf already has them by the ovaries, and they're trying to figure out how to appease the beast.  Perhaps the otherwise pointless lockdown is buying them time.

Anyway, back to the Great Divide touched on above, between the two types of One.  Let's try on a few aphorisms for size:

To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.

Precisely. Let's be blunt, the better to clarify our differences.  For we will never, under any circumstances, agree with the left.  The best we can do is to politely explain why we can never agree.  One reason why we can never agree is that we know there is no human -- much less political! -- solution to the problem of man.  

In fact, -- and the founders spoke of this ad nauseam -- our political operating system won't even function with a deeply non-, much less anti-Christian citizenry. Or maybe you haven't noticed. Or you've noticed, and you think the solution is the problem. You are a Times reader.  You are sick. By which we mean,

The conservative is a simple pathologist. He defines sickness and health. But God is the only therapist.

I don't presume for one second that I can help anyone -- beginning with myself -- in the absence of divine intervention. I couldn't even type this sentence without it; for God exists for me in the same act in which I exist.  Here's another good one:  

I distrust any idea that does not seem obsolete or grotesque to my contemporaries.

Especially the New York Times, or Big Tech, or your average woke college student. If people who disagree with me don't frankly find me monstrous -- or sick, twisted, fascist, and paranoid -- then I'm doing something wrong.  Fortunately, they do, albeit not nearly enough of them.

Back for a moment to our antithetical understandings of the one and how this plays out culturally, personally, and politically. Come to think  of it, as politics is downstream from culture, I would suggest in turn that culture must be downstream from one's one (for example the oneness engendered by human sacrifice is quite different from the nonlocal oneness of God's church). 

I'm going to try to order the following aphorisms stepwise, from self-evident conclusion to conclusion, and see where it leaves us:

1. Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

2. To call the problems that depend on the very nature of man “social” is only useful in order to pretend that we can solve them.

3. In order to enslave the people the politician needs to convince them that all their problems are “social.”

4. As the State grows, the individual shrinks.

5. Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

6. For God there are only individuals.

7. The only possible progress is the internal progress of each individual. A process that concludes with the end of each life.

8. Social salvation is near when each one admits that he can only save himself.  Society is saved when its presumed saviors despair.

It was nice to see our saviors so filled with despair these last four years, but remember what I said above about the wolf, the ears, and the ovaries. That can't continue.

Meanwhile, the wife had a temperature last night, so, out of an abundance of paranoia, I slept on the couch. Or "slept," rather.  This gasbag is out of gas.