Gods, Kings, Chaos & Clowns

In the past we've mentioned the "Viconian cycle," which, if Joyce is correct, forms the underlying structure of this collective dream/nitemare we're having which we call history. The cycle features four recurring phases, beginning with  

the Theocratic or Divine Age of gods, represented in primitive society; the Heroic Age of kings and aristocrats, characterized by incessant conflict between the ruling patricians and their subject plebeians; the Democratic Age of people, in which rank and privilege have finally been eradicated by the revolutions of the preceding age. 

This is  

followed by a short period of chaos caused by the collapse of democratic society, which is inherently corrupt. Out of this chaos a new cycle in initiated by the ricorso, or "return", to the Theocratic Age. 

In FW, Joyce elevated the lacuna between successive cycles into a fourth age: the Chaotic Age. Vico's theory is applied to the image of the history of mankind as depicted in Earwicker's dream. 

Is there anything to this, or is it just an innocuous way to play with history, like that medieval monk who divided it into the ages of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or Comte, who thought it progressed from theology to metaphysics to positivism (speaking of theology)? 

Note that the left always historicizes in some form or fashion, hence the name "progressive," accompanied by the delusion that they are inherently on the "right side of history." Obviously this presumes some sort of telos to history, even though their retarded metaphysic allows for no such enduring reality. Rather, it's just the usual unwitting inversion and immanentization of the Christian eschaton.  

Obviously, the most infamous example of this historicizing is Marx himself, who likewise inverted the Christian metaphysic, beginning with the original sin of private property and ending in a stateless utopia whereby a man could fish in the morning and indulge in critical theory at night. I don't think he ever imagined a capitalist world in which hordes of tenured parasites would be paid to engage in critical theory all day, resulting in the ongoing destruction their own privileged world, but here we are.  

It's not difficult to posit an "age of gods," since we know of no culture or civilization that doesn't begin this way. The question is whether we ever leave it, or whether it is even possible to do so. I mean, if a man can imagine the world is composed of nothing but matter, or that he is a she, what can't he imagine? 

It's also not difficult to discern some kind of "progress" in history, but of what? In other words, change of any kind can only occur in the context of an unchanging substance. But again, this substance -- AKA human nature -- is precisely what the left denies. Therefore, progress for the left involves the denial and destruction of the substance undergoing it, or what Lewis called the abolition of man.

This abolition is well under way, and I suppose it always is. But who imagined even a decade ago that our institutions would be unanimous in slandering as bigots those of us who think the mutilation and sacrifice of children to the perverse homolochians of the left is a bit much? Strange gods for a stranger people. 

Nor is it difficult to imagine that we've entered an Age of Chaos, good and hard. Here again though, the question is whether we're ever not in an Age of Chaos. I think this is the way I'd look at it: that it is always simultaneously an age of gods, kings, heroes, men, and chaos, only in varying proportions. 

Looked at this way, we can see, for example, why a lot of Americans wouldn't have minded if George Washington had been elevated to king, just as so many on the left regarded Obama as a god, or Evolutionary Lightbringer. If historical "progress" can be measured in the distance between a Washington and an Obama, we are clearly moving backward at a frightful pace. Throw in the chaos of the Age of Brandon, and the cycle is complete.

All of this is confused by the intrinsic and incessant tendency of the left to project its own unwanted and unacknowledged chaotic and sub-religious impulses into us. Most obviously, they imagine we are Trump-deranged zombies who do and think whatever our god-king tells us. They are half correct, in that we are indeed surrounded by Trump-deranged zombies -- for example, an apparently prominent journalist named Edward Luce, who tweeted that 

I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.

This is not exaggeration nor hyperbole. Rather, I believe him, just as I believed any of my patients who confided in all sincerity that they were haunted by this or that persecutory delusion. Why would they make it up? Indeed, I even believe Liz Cheney. 

These meditations on the Viconian cycle were provoked by an essay by Hayek called Reason and Evolution, in which he describes how the "progress" of wideawake & cutandry constructivist rationalism lands us back in the historical soup of anthropomorphic gods. The idea that we can rationally understand and construct society 

is rooted originally in a deeply ingrained propensity of primitive thought to interpret all regularity to be found in phenomena anthropomorphically...

Although Hayek doesn't say so, I equate this to the ontological fall described back down in Genesis 3, whereby man presumes to be as a god, but in so doing merely encloses himself in an artificial world. In thinking he is "progressing," he is actually regressing, and this never stops happening. Therefore,  in *ironically* presuming that "reason alone should enable him to construct society anew," man only relapses "into earlier, anthropomorphic modes of thinking." 

For example, the other day Nancy Pelosi told of how "Mother Earth gets angry from time to time," and that opposition to the Dem's most recent legislative crime is a "vote against the planet" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAB2E-LzdTg). 

But if this is a chaotic age of primitive gods, then perhaps there's a king on the horizon. Or at least that's what the left never stops warning us of: the return of the Great MAGA King!