Here Come the New Gods, Same as the Old Gods

We're in the midst of defining our terms, and doing so -- unlike our slipslopery competitors, whose allegiance is to power and not truth -- with precision.

Widespread violence, injustice, and tyranny are always preceded by attacks on language, such that fidelity to the dictionary is resistance to tyrants. Logocide is prelude to genocide, every time. After all, if you believe someone is a Nazi and fail to eliminate him when you have the chance, that makes you complicit in Nazism.

Similarly, accusations of "white privilege" are just a linguistic license to kill, since the slander bypasses the conscience, legitimizes envy, and sacralizes the violence that follows. This is just the latest iteration of a vertical anti-tradition extending all the way down to Genesis 3, when our archetypal human father is heard to exclaim,

You've got the wrong guy! It was the woman! It's her fault! And, -- with all due respect -- you gave her to me, so if we're laying our cards on the table, it's really your fault, is it not? Besides, the serpent was already here when I arrived.

You've no doubt noticed that the spasm of sociopathy to which we have been treated over the past week has been seeded and nurtured for over half a century by a race-obsessed media-academic complex that is drenched to the bone in lies.

If lies of this magnitude were susceptible to correction by fact, logic, or principle, they would have vanished long ago. But, as expressed in words that purportedly have no expiration date, -- or so we have heard from the wise --

He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Timeless truth, or at least it has stood the test of 2000 years. That's a pretty good track record.

Coming at it from another angle, Paul claims in 2 Cor 3:17 that "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

In a free country such as ours, inequality is an inevitable consequence of freedom. It's called the right be different, or in other words, who you actually are. You and I are unequal to everyone else, because we are individuals: we are free to be ourselves, and our self is utterly unique. Which is why it is written (by the Aphorist):

Freedom is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.

Indeed, what is the point of freedom if one is only free to be like all the other Don Lemmings and media-hackcrities, as in the diabolically misnamed "diversity," or "multiculturalism," or all those other totalitarian cults of noetic and pneumatic uniformity?

At this point we're way past the R & D and marketing phases, and are deep into the application: novel religion, same old gods. Imagine bowing before criminals and psychopaths to earn some sort of redemption? This is such a spiritual regression that it would represent a genuine leap in being to conduct a proper sacrifice and smear its blood on our doors in the hope that BLM will pass us by.

Enough insultainment. Back to our definitions.

Regarding the above-noted criminal blackslide into primitive appeasement of the angry and vengeful gods, Voegelin would insist this goes precisely to the reason why the discovery of monotheism by the ancient Hebrews was such a literal leap in being. It was a leap because it cleansed the cosmos of mere human projections in the form of gods, and situated the absolute principle outside and beyond the cosmos.

It will take awhile to explain exactly why this was such an advance, but we're running out of time, so we will only be able to strike a few preluminary sparks.

Speaking of our Hebrew friends and vertical relatives, Exodus, expressed abstractly and in principle, is "the process of transcendence." It goes to "the universal calling of humanity" toward "open existence in the metaxy oriented toward its transcendental pole."

Metaxy? Needlessly esoteric term IMO, for it is simply "the experience of human existence as 'between' lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge" -- or, as we prefer to express it, (¶) <--> O, with the arrows representing the metaxy, AKA the in-between.

This goes to the necessity of open existence, specifically, a vertical openness to the transcendent pole, failing which the mind and soul suffer ontological shrinkage and become pathological. It is a chronic condition of low T -- not just of Testosterone but of Transcendence.

Leftism is by definition a pathologically closed world, since it is predicated on the denial in principle of transcendent reality. Thus, they inhabit a "second world," which is "a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby 'eclipse' genuine reality."

"Eclipse?" It is "the voluntary, perverse closure of consciousness against reality" (although I would say that it is more often unconscious, unless I'm misunderstanding something). It necessarily results in a kind of anxiety, since reality always persists despite our efforts to deny and evade it. This, in my opinion, is one of the sources of political correctness, which is an enforcement mechanism of the Lie, or the verbal glove over the mailed fist.

I'll leave you with a couple of haunting images, first of the hideous anti-Bob:

Followed by the genuine Bob of freedom and space age transcendental living:

My Cosmos is Bigger than Yours

The order of history is the history of order. Let's try to understand what Voegelin means by this palindromic gnome, or gnomic palindrome.

First, as mentioned in yesterday's post, order is synonymous with cosmos, while history is... what, exactly?

It must be the Order as it evolves through time. Perhaps we can visualize the process. Imagine a horizontal line which represents time as it moves from its ground to its meta-temporal telos and attractor, the latter situated outside or beyond time; it is bisected by a vertical line, except it is more of an ovoid space that expands and differentiates as it moves along the horizontal axis.

Having said that, this is no linear or ineluctable process a la Marx or Hegel. For one thing, we can never arrive at the right hand attractor, only be perpetually attracted by and to it. Foreclosing the space between -- let's symbolize them (¶) and O -- doesn't actually move (¶) foreword, but rather, leads to a host of problems herebelow. And that is putting it mildly.

Voegelin famously referred to this as immanentizing the eschaton, which is always a bad idea, perhaps even the Worst Idea Ever. Why? Why is it such a bad idea? What, aside from being impossible, is wrong with Utopia?

Put it this way: yes, we could actually create paradise on earth. However, it would last only a nanosecond until typology kicked in and kicked us out again.

In other words, we have a problem, and the problem is called human nature. Yes, there is a solution, but it must -- obviously -- involve "solving" the problem of human nature. Absent that, then we can no more create paradise on earth than we could reassemble a broken spider web by hand.

Let's get back to our visual image. Bear in mind that the O on the right side isn't God per se; rather, let's keep it unsaturated and experience-near, and simply affirm that this is the attractor to which man is always attracted by virtue of being a man.

This of course goes to the fundamental difference between animals and man, being that the former can know nothing of the divine attractor at the end of history, as they are plunged in neurology and bound by instinct. A small cosmos -- similar to academia, only with no stupid and dysfunctional ideas.

Perhaps we should emphasize here that we are not "speculating." Perish the thought. If we were, then everything about which we have written for the past 3,500 posts would be no better than any other philodoxic Babble of Tenure. (A philodoxer is a lover of opinion, man.) No, we are always trying to describe the objective and empirical facts as given to us by our expounding cosmos.

At this point I will defer to Voegelin, Sandoz, and Webb for some scholarly back-up. The following are selected more or less at random, because if I try to locate the Perfect Illustration, we'll be here all morning; to a large extent, all of this is intuitive, but nevertheless objective. Or better, it is noetic (never confusing noesis with Gnosticism!).

Correction. This actually is perfect (or as perfect as we're going to get on this imperfectly perfect morning: Webb has a glossary that defines our terms with precision. Let's begin with the cosmos, which is

the whole of ordered reality including animate and inanimate nature and the gods. (Not to be confused with the modern conception of "cosmos" as the [merely!] astrophysical universe.)

"Gods"? Yes, of course. Imagine what we would be excluding if we were to ignore them! For we'd be leaving out the whole conception of reality as experienced by premodern (and postmodern pagan) man, which is a lot of people for a long time -- much longer than we've been here. And to leave mind and intersubjectivity out of the cosmos is obviously a non-starter, too crude an approach to ever take seriously.

In this regard, it reminds me of what psychotherapy would be like if I were to ignore everything that happened to the patient before the age of 18. In a way, this is the problem, as people inevitably attempt to rationalize away the non- or irrational components of development, which results in various symptoms down the line.

Back to the cosmos: it

Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into immanent "world" and transcendent "divine ground."

Oh my. This is getting complicated. Let's start with "transcendent." What does it mean, exactly?

to go beyond, surpass. General term for that which extends or lies beyond some set of limits; may be relative (beyond some particular limits) or absolute (beyond all possible limits). The opposite of "immanent."

Again, man qua man exists in the differentiating space between immanence and transcendence. This differentiation can be experienced noetically or pneumatically (or it can be pathologically denied or compacted). Noetic differentiation is

the process by which one moves from compact consciousness to a more differentiated, conceptually articulated awareness of the inquiring consciousness and its structure... and its orientation toward the transcendental pole of the tension of inquiry toward Truth as such.

Or just say philo-sophy, properly speaking; it is intellectual differentiation within the ovoid space mentioned above. It is complemented by pneumatic differentiation, which is more spiritual than intellectual:

the awakening of the soul both by and to the experience of the pull in the tension of existence toward the pole of transcendental perfection; the emergent realization of the absolutely transcendent character of that pole.

In other words, it is the discovery of monotheism, which was one small step for Abram, one giant leap for mankind, but from which it is but a small step back into paganism, scientism, materialism, leftism, et al. Just don't, okay? We have enough problems.

To be continued, of course.

Methinks Thou Dost Protest and Loot Too Much

Yesterday's bewilderness adventure concluded with the alibi that "this is such a big subject, in a way the biggest of all."

Okay, we'll bite: what's the subject?

The subject is order, and order is everything, literally. For the past several weeks we've been trialoguing with Voegelin, whose entire corpus comes down to unearthing and disclosing the order of Order; as he put it, "the order of history is the history of order," and no, this isn't just a mystic bromide worthy of the Sphinx:

Incidentally, our Democrat mayors are straight-up HEROES:

Now, Order is another word for Cosmos, and the Cosmos is indeed One (order is synonymous with the unity of plurality, or the reality beneath appearances).

The alternative to Order -- or in Good Times, its complement -- is Chaos. Chaos is generative -- or contributes to generatively -- up to a point, the reason being that the world is (or should be, in order to properly function) an open system, and an open system operates at the border between order and chaos, such that too much of either is a bad thing: sclerosis and compression at one end, dissipation and dissolution at the other.

Aphorisms:

Order paralyzes. Disorder convulses.

The former goes to the progressive state that is evoked to contain the barbarous consequences of progressive thought.

Legislation that protects liberty in minute detail strangles liberties.

But only for ordered souls. Disordered and criminal types will crash straight through the legislation, for example, rioting and looting while not even wearing proper face masks!

The price of absolute freedom would be a vulgarity without limits.

CNN should change its name to VWL.

According to modern man, oppression begins when any filth is prohibited.

Agreed. I get the looting, but...

Why all the cursing, whether via signs, graffiti, or thug-on-the-street interviews? The disordered freedom of the uncaged beast, one supposes.

Freedom is the dream of slaves. The free man knows that he needs refuge, protection, and help.

It reminds me of that idealist for whom it was insufficient to see bears at the zoo, but wanted to live intimately amongst them. Like the deeply progressive business owners of Santa Monica, he found out too late that he needed refuge, protection, and help.

The freedom to which modern man aspires is not that of the free man, but that of the slave on a holiday.

The question is, is this a slave rebellion or slave holiday? Either way,

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain.

Invisible chain? Yes, of course. It becomes evident the moment one of them opens his or her mouth (and I'm not just talking about the journalists, but the protesters and rioters as well).

It is difficult for you or I do identify with the chronic frustration one must feel to be such a stupid person in such a complex world.

The temptation to simplify and vilify, and to act out on these, is enormous. Why else would the Adversary tempt these weak-minded souls in this way? Like any form of intoxication, to be drunk on Victimhood is liberating -- the downside being that it requires imaginary oppressors.

Under the best of circumstances, politics is the organization -- AKA, ordering -- of hatreds. Encourage the haters to act on, instead of argue about, the hatred, and here we are. For a normal person the result is disorder. Not so to the left, for

Leveling is the barbarian’s substitute for order.

Our progressive class encourages rebellion in the name of "freedom" while imposing the burden of law (not to mention lawlessness) on the restavus. As Iowahawk so aptly put it,

We live in a nation of laws in the same way people on 'Hoarders' live in houses of cat food boxes.

This post has spiraled out of control and lost any semblance of order. Back to our truly cosmic thesis, that the order of history is the history of order. Whatever do we mean by this?

Tomorrow.

Apocalypse Now & Always, or Listening to the Barbarians

Yes, what are they trying to say? They keep insisting they want to be "heard," but not one of them -- protester, rioter, or looter -- is able to express a coherent thought. Perhaps that's part of the problem. Like children who are unable to put their thoughts and feelings into words, they act out.

However, if you ask the child what it is he's acting out, he won't know. Which is again the point of the acting out. It is indeed a kind of "speech," of symbolic communication, but it is the task of the therapist to interpret and put it into words. Acting out simultaneously veils and reveals; or, the revelation is hidden in the veil, and is veiled to the person who is using it to hide himself -- his conflicts and motivations -- from himself.

Our political system -- any political system -- is predicated on the ability to sublimate feelings into words and ideas, such that the battle takes place on a higher and less deadly plane. Thus, what we are seeing play out -- or act out -- has nothing to do with politics, but rather, is a form of what Voegelin calls "anti-politics." And it has been going on for at least 50 years, except it has taken this long for it to reach this grotesque tipping point.

Couldn't agree more with this sentiment by Richard Fernandez:

To the question 'where did the destructiveness come from?': it was there all along. What was once dinner party nihilism has lost its inhibitions. The riots are a 'coming out party' for all the doctrines taught in many a school.

One of the replies points out that

The rioters' view of the world came from Marxist professors in schools and colleges, with approval and support from media and Hollywood. How many murders and burning buildings does it take before that viewpoint sounds a little less crackpot?

But why would anyone burn a church, of all things? Wrong question:

One of the intriguing aspects of this outburst is a rage against religion, excepting those seen as hostile to Judaism or Christianity, that seems part of the drama. There is a special odium reserved for it, a kind of ritual desecration, which is key to understanding it.

Christianity is odium to these Marxian asses. Maybe they'll try to burn down a Muslim Mosque or Hindu temple. We'll see. The Night is young. And the darkness will be with us for a generation or two.

Which reminds me. In a few posts of yore, we pointed out that it took some 40 years or so for the new ideas of the 1920s to bear their toxic fruit on a culture-wide basis in the 1960s. In the '20s these progressive and nihilistic ideas were reserved for the elite, and the events of the Great Depression and WW2 temporarily slowed their metastatic spread into the tissues and organs of society.

I wonder if we can similarly reverse-imagineer the present crisis and discern its more distant roots? What ideas were being propagated 40 years ago, in 1980? That's a Big Question, much bigger than can be covered in the space of a post.

However, do not despair. God has given us a deeper way to understand any manmade crisis, because any such crisis is every crisis repeated ad nauseam. The archetypal and interpretive key is provided by typology, such that the apocalypse -- which of course means unveiling -- is always now.

Looked at this way, the pathological ideology of the 1960s was just a variant of the spiritually deformed ideas of the 1920s, as the present sickness is just a reflection of those. Really, it comes dow to One God, One Cosmos, One Human Nature, One Fall, One History, rinse and repent.

Not to veer off into the mother of all tangents, but this for me is the uncanny appeal of Finnegans Wake, the overarching theme of which is the same returns, only in diverse forms. It is "a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind," through which it is simultaneously

Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple.... And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace (the Skeleton Key).

For over half a century, state-run leftist seminaries have been inculcating children and permanent adolescents with the idea that we are just random products of natural selection, animals no different from any other. At last, the trousered baboons are acting like naked apes!

We've moved on from abstract theory to practical application, and it's not going away any time soon, for what's the alternative when you've successfully devalued, demonized, debunked, deconstructed, and destroyed it? Their obtuse secularism isn't presented as one among many, but the only acceptable religion.

Only God can help us, and I mean that literally, although certainly not in the manner our barbarian opponents are even capable of understanding. Rather, the only way they can understand religion and spirituality is through the broken and distorted lens of their own broken and distorted minds.

About the anti-politics. This shouldn't be understood as the opposite of politics, rather, the negation of politics. People keep saying the protesters have a "political message." No they don't. The message, such as it is, is embedded in an ideological second reality, which, no matter how real, is nonetheless an unreal pseudo-reality or dreamworld. It is a lie, only all the more fervently believed for its absence of truth. Truth needn't shout, nor does it descend into incoherent nonsense when given the opportunity to be expressed.

Sandoz provides an illuminating passage by Václav Havel, who knew something about leftist tyranny:

Ideological pseudo-reality... is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works as long as people are willing to live within the lie.

As such, our task as human beings, everywhen & where

is one of resisting vigilantly, thoughtfully, and attentively, but at the same time with total dedication and at every step and everywhere, the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power -- the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.

For as Sandoz says, "the second realities of the ideologues cannot withstand scrutiny" -- which is precisely why they must shriek, loot, and act out. "Free government is a historical rarity and the greatest political challenge; ochlocracy [mob rule] is its viral disease, inviting the socialist demagogue and constantly threatening every liberal democracy with extinction."

So don't wonder what's going on, for mob rule is just leftism by other means, as leftism is just mob rule veiled by ideology. Writing twenty one years ago, Sandoz asked the non-rhetorical questions, "how many decades and generations of systematic miseducation can we endure? How much abuse of our heritage through neglect, ignorance, and mendacity can we bear without experiencing disintegration and collapse" into civilizational chaos and the authoritarian response it demands?

By Jove, I think we have an answer!

Sorry about the rambling and non-linear style, but it's such a big subject, in a way the biggest of all. We'll take another stab at the beast tomorrow...

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...