So, the plane is going down and the dials on our console have become useless, either spinning like Adam Schiff in a tornado or stopped altogether. Progressives have succeeded in dismantling all our standards, measures, and landmarks, leaving us literally dis-oriented.
Violence is not enough to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference to the particular values that founded it. --Dávila
So, there is a kind of speech that equates to violence. It’s called deconstruction, or any academic discipline ending in "Theory" or "Studies." It never stops destroying, but the tenured ape "cannot lament the disappearance of what he is ignorant of."
It wasn’t that long ago that the West oriented itself to little things such as God, truth, liberty, family, equality under the law, freedom of speech & assembly, etc. Meantime -- sing with me -- The blizzard of the world / Has crossed the threshold / And it’s overturned / The order of the soul (Cohen).
Yes, there are always countercultural pockets of resistance, islands of sanity, and bunkers of Slack, but we’re talking about the culture at large, both where it is and where it is headed. And it doesn’t take a prophet to read the signs of these times, because even if the progressive flight panel is useless, ours is working just fine.
For the Lie is parasitic on Truth, in that the most consequential liars do so because they are clever enough to know the truth.
However, the more stupid among them simply embrace the Lie with no reflection whatsoever. What is a progressive NPC but a sponge that sops up random drops of ideology? Or maybe you have no extended family.
It’s the difference between, say, Hillary Clinton and Sandy Cortez. Both never stop disseminating the Lie, but only one has some murky sense of the truth in her gutsies. Speech was given to one type of leftist in order to deceive, the other type in order to be deceived, and together they make an extremely effective team. At least until they reach the finals:
Cynical skill progresses from victory to victory until the final victory, which annihilates it.
Obviously, in order to maintain our flight, we must have a sense of up and down, just as every culture must have it in order to function, even if its standards are not our standards, to put it mildly. No, we are not relativists -- up is up and down is down. Rather, we’re thinking of something Dávila says about even a bad order being preferable to no order at all.
Elsewhere he says There are a thousand truths and one error. I’ll bite: what’s the one error?
He’s too respectful of the reader’s intelligence to come out and say it, but it must be the same as Chesterton’s one thought that ought to be stopped, the thought that stops thought: the ultimate stupidity of absolute relativism.
Progressives who complain about the present forget that it is the very crystallization of their dreams come true:
Two hundred years ago it was legitimate to have confidence in the future without being totally stupid. But who can believe in today’s predictions since we are yesterday’s splendid future?
Identity politics is about more than identity, it’s about joyfully participating in one’s own exploitation:
In order to exploit a man peacefully it is convenient to reduce him beforehand to sociological abstractions.
But EQUITY! Precisely, for
Homogeneity drives out God.
At the same time, godlessness drives out hierarchy, so it's a win-win for the left.
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