Faith in Truth, Hope for a Miracle

If truth is not a property of being, then we are all leftists, except some of us pretend not to be. 

Put another way, there is either one philosophy or no possibility of philosophy. And if the latter, power rushes in to fill the epistemological void. 

Indeed, any properly indoctrinated leftist can tell you that politics is just a mask of power relations, and that's the end of it: Who and Whom, period, full stop, end of story. And beginning of nightmare.

It's true that power can distort and displace reality. It is the work of a moment for human beings to deny truth, but rather difficult to ignore the gun at your head or the taxman at your door (but I repeat myself).

Western civilization -- AKA civilization -- seems to be dying before our eyes. I say "seems" because I do not rule out the possibility of a miraculous intervention, or at least stay of execution.

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope for a miracle.

In history it is sensible to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans (Dávila).

Although I am by nature an optimystic sort, I always feel a bit pessimessedup after reading Z Man:

Great Britain is barely a country at this point and it will soon be closer to South Africa than its glorious past. Like America, Britain is on its way to becoming a majority-minority society. At that point it ceases to be a nation or even a country, but simply an administrative zone. 

The Queen’s funeral will be a time for the old British to mourn the loss of their country and its traditions. There will be those who try to lever this emotion into a rearguard action to fight against the gathering darkness. Of course, the new British will be out reminding everyone that the new Britain will be vulgar and coarse. An ungrateful nation of foreigners will get to be ungrateful one more time....  

There is no going back and starting over, so the logical thing to do is close the books on it and begin thinking about what sort of future can be fashioned from the present. Maybe use thoughts of the glorious past to maintain a healthy anger at the bastards responsible for wrecking your country and turning it over to ungrateful foreigners (https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=28210).

Aside from being a civilizational canary in the ghoulmind, what is was Great Britain? 

Civilizations are the summer buzzing of insects between two winters.

What's left for us but to laugh at our barbarian overlords?

Defeats are never definitive when they are accepted with good humor.

But as I said, I am an optimist by nature, or at least I wake up every morning in an irrationally good mood. Until I check in with Z Man. But that's okay. From time to time we all need to be slapped unsilly. And behind this slap is Death itself, which we pretend to avoid by obsessing over his many disguises. 

Are there reasons for hope? Of course, just not in this world, let alone with this bunch. We'll return to this point, but I want to get back to that passing remark above about "one philosophy." That sounds more than a bit authoritarian, Bob. Now you know why Brandon calls your kind fascist!

Not at all. I'm just claiming equal rights for philosophy. No one says there are many valid forms of physics, or math, or chemistry. Your mechanic doesn't have two theories on how cars work.  

Yes, I realize there are leftists who believe otherwise -- that everything we claim to be true is just about Power and Oppression, but let's be serious. These clowns are not yet totally in power. 

And besides, it will actually prove to be difficult to maintain power in the absence of truth, a recent example being the California man using a gas powered generator to charge his planet-saving electric vehicle. This is far from the only reductio ad absurdum that occurs when you follow a leftist idea all the way to its logical end, for

The theses of the left are rationalizations that are carefully suspended before reaching the argument that dissolves them.

Of course, progressives aren't bothered by the crime wave they've unleashed, since it's mostly their urban pets killing and brutalizing each other. Things will change when we start having some high-profile murders instead of the thousands of low-brofile ones. I'm not calling for that. Rather, it's the next absurdum around the bend.

It is not when it fails to meet its promises, but does what it promises to do, that the true failure of the left is obvious.

Let's try to refocus before the sands run out on this post: one cosmos, one mankind, one philosophy. You could say this is trivial, but the operative word is one, by which we do not mean the number -- a quantity -- rather, the quality, and this quality is the basis of the possibility of any and all truth.

I'll just give a preview of the coming attractor with this passage from Living the Truth, by Josef Pieper:

With the expression, "All that exists is true," Western philosophy for almost two millennia intended to make a statement not only about reality as such but no less about the nature of man.