Victims All the Way Down

In one of his unintended aphorisms, Whitehead observed that intellectual antagonists of a particular era will generally share some unconscious or implicit presuppositions about how the world functions:

Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

I’m old enough to remember when left and right in America shared some underlying assumptions, e.g., the Constitution, freedom of speech, equality under the law, Judeo-Christian values, etc. Now what do we share? I can’t think of a single principle we can all rally around, nor a single person we can all revere as a Superior Specimen. 

For one thing, to even recognize such a specimen is to acknowledge hierarchy and telos, which is precisely what their ontology denies at the outset. 

For us Washington is the greatest American, and worthy of our eternal gratitude; for them, a self-interested slaveholder. No need to review the list of similar heroes felled by the axe of cultural Marxism. You need only one grievous example to get the point:

Those who profess that nobility is vile end up preaching that vileness is noble.

For example, groomers, trannies, criminals, really, all the special pets of the left, who are special not by any merit or achievement, but only because of some immutable trait or correctable defect.         

Not only do we have different political philosophies, there is no longer a shared ontology. We literally live in different realities, but the first thing to know about reality is that there’s only one. Of course, there are different views of this single reality, but the left elevates the view to the viewed, AKA My Truth. 

Which for us translates to no truth and no possibility of truth. Nor can there be any compromise between what reality is and what I want it to be. At least after age ten or eleven.

Why can’t they understand this? It’s not necessarily stupidity, which leads to the corollary that not only is intelligence not enough, nothing good comes of it when it is unhinged from reality:

Compared to so many dull intellectuals, to so many artists without talent, to so many stereotyped revolutionaries, a bourgeois without pretensions looks like a Greek statue.

Second look at my entirely ordinary and unpretentious parents? Perhaps, but that’s another post. Besides, I was looking for a different aphorism. Here’s one that reminds me of the state-media-big tech gaslighting that has become so perversive in recent years:

Propaganda in Russia and in China selected such intentionally crude arguments and obvious falsifications that we must attribute the triumph of communism to the disdain with which it treats the intelligence of the masses.

There’s a subtle point in there, because the citizen who participates in the gaslighting at least gets to share in the disdain for the restavus, both the normal and superior. Is there a matrix-media journalist out there who doesn’t ooze this disdain from every pore? And not just disdain, but genuine hatred, contempt, dehumanization, etc. 

We’ve mentioned before that the people who are subject to these feelings may deceive themselves into believing they are “unpleasant,” when the opposite is the case: not only is self-righteous disdain pleasant, it’s addictive. Ultimately it's a form of "downward transcendence," or elevation from below. 

And now we have an anthropological context to understand such upper vertical counsels as forgiving, turning the other cheek, loving one’s enemies, etc. Obviously these have to be given from a supernatural source precisely because they do not come naturally. What comes naturally is tribalism, envy, scapegoating, human sacrifice.

In other words, what comes naturally is the left. The world of the modern left is an invention of Queen Karen for the benefit of their stupid, perverse, and criminal kings such as George Floyd. 

It's really an inversion of Christ's inversion alluded to above. But just because the ultimate victim of human depravity was God himself, this does not mean that any old Democrat-approved victim is the ultimate god.