When Films Collide: The Big Matriski

Continuing with yesterday's unfinished symphony of nonsense, later in the day confirmation came in the form of chapter 9 of Wolfgang Smith's The Vertical Ascent, entitled Vertical Causation and Wholeness. 

By way of context, we've been pondering the First Question that occurs to man qua man the moment he is capable of considering matters beyond immediate biological imperatives -- which is to say, whether our cosmos is open or closed, self-sufficient or grounded in something or someone transcending it.

(Bear in mind as well that to even say cosmos is to have uttered a mythful, as it is an implicit metaphysical conclusion about the transcendent order of reality.)

[B]y the time of the Enlightenment, something altogether unprecedented had taken place: as Huston Smith points out, it happens namely that "the modern West is the first society to view the physical world as a closed system" (emphasis mine).

So, for roughly 50,000 years we inhabited a vertically open system, but then we decided to take the blue pill, and for the past 300 years the cosmos has been closed for isness. 

Wait, what? When was this debated, and when was the vote held? I demand a recount!

"Never before," adds (W.) Smith, 

had mankind in general -- and the intellectual elite especially -- forgotten so completely the existence and function of what, from time immemorial, mankind had conceived as "higher spheres."

Okay, now I get it: intellectual elites. F***ing tenured. Nothing ever changes. We can be certain these perverts never conducted an honest debate on the subject, but they're sure the ones who voted on it, am I right?

This reminds me of the fact that the United States is explicitly founded on the principle that this is an open cosmos, and that the very purpose of the state is to protect rights that come to us not from anything within the cosmos -- much less government -- but from its Creator. Am I wrong?

Conversely, the French revolution and all its warped frogeny insist that this is a closed cosmos, beginning with the laughably pompous Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen:

The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation....

Law is the expression of the general will. 

Rousseau. Is this your handiwork? Is this your handiwork, Jacques? 

F***ing language problem. 

Look, JJ.... Have you ever heard of Vietnam? No? How about Dr. Guillotine? Is that your carriage outside?

In the closed world of the left, religion is fine, so long as it doesn't disturb the Public Order established by the General Will. Free speech? Go right ahead, so long as you don't offend the General Will, the tech oligarchs, and media gatekeepers.

In other words, Closed System: the original blue pill, at least in terms of modern politics. 

France was soon to enter a world of pain that was quite different from the American experience.

But as we know too well, government is powerless to stop deadly viruses -- or illicit pills -- from spreading across manmade boundaries, so the progressive pandemic reached our shores by the early 20th century. 

In an ideal world, someone would have stopped Woodrow Wilson from studying Hegel and publishing all his progressive bullshit, but for your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint. 

There's a kind of paradox built into our system, in that an open system permits closed minds that may ultimately destroy it, while the closed system does everything in its power to marginalize and thwart open minds.

I have something I need to attend to, so the end.