Deusclaimer: everything about this post was unexpected, including the title, but I guess that's how the Tao rolls.
I certainly don't know why I am the way I am, but perhaps part of the reason is that I started out so completely aware of my own ignorance that I've never really recovered. I didn't know anything about anything -- except sports and pop music -- until I was well into my twenties.
Yes, there was a relatively brief respite from the ignorance, when I was a canard-carrying leftist (not just an ambient cultural liberal), and thought I knew everything -- or at least enough to render me superior to anyone to my right. Imagine Paul Krugman without the humility and charm.
Being that I am congenitally insecure, the period of leftist superiority must have been a compensation. Now, being that I can't be the only one, it must be that leftist ideology serves a similar compensatory function for others seduced not only by its promises of omniscience, but by the other benefits as well, such as unearned virtue, social status, and being accepted by the Right People more generally.
I never truly fit in with those superior specimens of humanity. And the way humans are built, when we don't fit in, we tend to blame ourselves. It's why we're vulnerable to social pressure.
I suppose it goes back to the principle that life is just a continuation of high school. I didn't know much back then, but I knew I was an outsider, and I know it now. There was that period in between when I thought I could be one of them. That could never happen in real life, so I guess I'm lucky I found out before it was too late.
Imagine wanting to fit in with the likes of Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Don Lemon, Tom Friedman, Joy Behar, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, et al. Worse yet, imagine actually fitting in. It would simultaneously be hell and not knowing one is in hell.
Maybe hell as such is not knowing you're there. They say God doesn't create hell per se, rather, it is built prick-by-prick by people and their bad choices. Really, it's just a consequence of freedom poorly used.
Hell is ignorant of being Hell. If it knew, it would be a temporary place of purgation (Dávila).
It starts back in Genesis 3 -- which, to repeat, didn't happen once upon a time, but rather, happens every time, starting today:
The proclamation of our autonomy is the founding act of Hell.
Like so many aspects of Cosmic Orthodoxy, the purpose of this principle is not so much to transmit formal content as to avoid catastrophic error. It's pretty simple: don't start by denying the existence of the Absolute, because that way lies cosmic madness, stupidity, narcissism, vanity, and the denial of every transcendent good. It is the Self-Evident Truth with which we must begin and on which everything else is founded. Deny it, and hell follows, whether sooner or later. And at the moment, it's gaining on us.
This is the primary reason why politics is so important. It reminds me of something Charles Krauthammer wrote about why it is arguably the most consequential subject of all, because if you get it wrong, then everything else goes south with it:
Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything -- high and low and, most especially, high -- lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.
And one of the most important guiding principles of politics is awareness of the Unknown -- and Unknowable -- Unknown.
It reminds me of a comment by Leo Strauss that I read this morning on PowerLine, to the effect that modern political science isn't "Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.”
I might add that this principle is not unknown to other cultures. For example, in the Tao Te Ching we read that
When the Master governs, the people / are hardly aware that he exists.
If you don't trust the people, / you make them untrustworthy....
He understands that the universe / is forever out of control, / and that trying to dominate events / goes against the current of the Tao.
Stop trying to control. / Let go of fixed plans and concepts, / and the world will govern itself.
That last one might as well be the Tao of Hayek. There's even a bit of explicit economic advice:
The more subsidies you have, / the less self-reliant people will be....
I let go of economics, / and people become prosperous.
Who knew Lao-tzu was an Austrian? And a liberal anti-leftist:
When the will to power is in charge, / the higher the ideals, the lower the results.
When they think that they know the answers, / people are difficult to guide. / When they know that they don't know, / people can find their own way.
Finally,
Those who try to control, / who use force to protect their power, / go against the direction of the Tao. / They take from those who don't have enough / and give to those who have far too much.
They unleash 87,000 new armed federal agents on the people, / raid the home of a past and future president, / use the threat of Climate Change to further enrich wealthy donors, / and rob from future generations to finance their greed.
12 comments:
I didn't know much back then, but I knew I was an outsider, and I know it now. There was that period in between when I thought I could be one of them.
I couldn't even get a date for prom. Never really tried being anything other than myself, though, and "fitting in" just wasn't my goal. Sometimes you find someone who clicks, and it's that much more meaningful.
Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.
We are getting an object lesson in just how swiftly the collapse can happen.
Conversely, one of the blessings of having Trump for president was discovering just how swiftly we can build ourselves up, too, given the right circumstances.
Consistent with the Tao, he got government out of the way, e.g., by reducing regulations on business, liberating the energy industry, lowering taxes, not pretending to control the climate, and generally pushing a freedom agenda.
Yep. They couldn't get those chains back on us fast enough.
Rachel Maddow dated roger Ailes, considering him a “close friend”. So what does she have to do with individualism, you may ask? Well, if you were more of an individual instead of some loser or sucker you could see that those two were just in it for the money. Allies helping each other out. Maybe power and status I suppose. Maddow only works in media. I doubt she cares what she preaches.
So I always try to view people in Genesis 3 terms. As in the degree of Genesis 3 each new person may be afflicted by. Does my new acquaintance only want my connections? …to voink me? …to drive me out to the middle of nowhere and leave me for dead? Or are they just doing their best and think me another interesting individual they’d like to spend their time with?
Genesis 3 is where I part company with individualism. Most individuals are greedy, corrupt and stupid sacks of shit desperately in need of a community that’ll keep their excesses in check. But beware the community which worships the narcissistic demagogue. In those kinds of communities, individuals need connect, voink, then drive the narcissistic demagogue out to the middle of nowhere and leave them for dead. It's a matter of time before they want payback for all the "good things" they've done for everyone.
In democracies, political parties at first are the consequence of a program; later, programs are pretexts for the party.
I've been an outsider for my entire life, I'd say. Initially, I'd have to say that my outsiderness was imposed by my parents and upbringing; Dutch CRC, heavy on the Calvinism; towards 7th grade and onward, though, I pretty much imposed my outsiderness myself. This is not to say that I did not dabble in attempts to be part of the hip crowd, and proclaim my ignorance proudly. I looked to books, which not only assisted me in owning my ignorance, but slowly, oh so slowly, began to shore up my ignorance with wisdom. Now I simply own my ignorance with a dose of humility (most of the time but not all according to my wife), but suffer fools poorly. I'd have to say that my early upbringing prevented me from leaning left all my life, as I always considered the leftist/socialist arguments ignored personal responsibility, and personal responsibility was almost a mantra in our home. I'm not afraid of owning it.
It's hard to have grown up in Old America and not have been imbued with the spirit of freedom, even if this freedom is misused. It persisted well into the '70s and '80s, and it seems to me that its explicit rejection isn't mainstreamed until around the assent of Obama. I'm sure it's a generational thing -- his youngest supporters were born in around 1990.
I remember the first time I heard a kid say "it's a free country" - I think he was being annoying and pointing out there was nothing my friend & I could do about it - but it was a revelation. I had to figure out which country he meant; we lived on a US Air Force base, but we were in England. This was early 1980s; I don't remember that phrase being used much in the 90s.
Making our living, such as it was, in a traveling rock band, I spent most of the 1980s living in the 1910s, systemically speaking. Aside from the occasional brush with disturbing the peace, living in an underground & under the table economy, we had no contact with laws, insurance, regulations, societal expectations, etc, and we were probably among the last people in America to associate actual meaning with "It's a free country". There were many shocks that came with resurfacing into the 1990s and getting married and getting a job working for someone else, but the loss of meaning in that phrase was the toughest to take.
Julie - I'm much older than you. That was a go-to phrase in my childhood whenever anybody tried to put undue restraints on us. Don't hear it much (at all?) anymore.
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