Do Progressive Sheep Dream of Electro-Chemical Assholes?

We left off with a quote from Homo Americanus: The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy in America, that

Forcing others to live by bad ideas is to introduce chaos and disorder into people's lives, and thus to destroy society. 

That right there is a little problem with no obvious solution, but here at One Cosmos we're all about the big problems. They don't have solutions either, but there are good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, ways of living them.

Regarding the latter, these are existential or even ontological problems that go with the vertical territory. They're part of the human condition, and we can't do anything about that, not even try to turn ourselves into a collie, because that guy's no more a dog than Whoopie Goldberg isn't one.

We've discussed in the past how the left will always be in business because it will never run out of suckers -- that is, people who are encouraged to believe their existential problems can be solved by political "solutions." The solutions rarely solve the problem, but they do generally bring a train of new problems in their wake, thus calling for a new set of political solutions. The progressive cycle of life death!

Obviously, there can be no anthropocentric solution to the problem of humanness. Obvious to us, but not to them, and for all sorts of reasons. 

The reasons are different for the "provider" than for the"recipient"; both actually benefit from the exchange, but not in the ways they imagine. The former gain power and status under the fig leaf of compassion and virtue, while the latter get to be victims, and there's no one higher in the progressive totem pole. 

As for healthy ways to live out the human condition, I mentioned a few posts back that I was rereading a book by Josef Pieper called Living the Truth, and title actually adverts to our ultimate solution. 

Or, to put it conversely, let's say you're a psychologist, and someone comes to you with problems, as patients tend to do. It wouldn't be the worst possible advice to encourage them to go right ahead and live a lie. 

Rather, the worst possible advice would be to reinforce the lie while pretending it is the truth. And bonus points if the therapist has first convinced himself that the lie is true! This is auto-pullwoolery at its finest, and it increased by orders of magnitude just during my so-called career. Happily, it's no longer my problem. 

So, life is a problem, a big one, some say the biggest in all of creation. Nor would they be wrong, because until Homo sapiens arrives on the scene, there are obviously no problems at all. At best there are predicaments or perhaps sticky wickets or even evolutionary null-de-slacks, but no one is sitting around pondering the "mollusk condition" or the tragic vision of lizardkind, or how to Awaken Your Giant Marsupial Within.

This book by Pieper actually contains two works, one of which is called Reality and the Good, and what a provocative if not triggering title, being that, for the left, there is no such thing as objective reality, just narratives masking the drive for power. Likewise, their moral relativism is at antipodes to an objective morality. 

The thesis of the book is just a little over three pages long, but it is so dense with truthiness that I didn't get any further. Nearly every sentence is highlighted, and I suppose I could just post the whole thing without comment, and maybe I will. Except with running commentary.

All obligation is based upon being.

Boom, right out of the gate. Now, this is obvious to me, but it would have been anything but back when I was a liberal know-nothing -- you know, back when I knew everything. Frankly, it would have made no sense, whether grammatical or semantical. It would have expressed "nothing," so why say it?

Well, STFU and let Pieper continue:

Reality is the foundation of ethics. The good is that which is in accord with reality.

In other words, the good is to action as truth is to being. In the past, we've written of how man is free, and of how responsibility must be prior to free will. 

Think about it: what would it mean to grant freedom to a subhuman entity, a bear, for example. Is the bear actually free to choose the good? Of course not. It is neither responsible nor irresponsible for anything it does.

But to be a man is to be aware of both freedom and responsibility. Of course, in a poorly formed conscience the man may convince himself that wrong is right, or that such distinctions are arbitrary, but he will do so on the basis that such a meta-perspective is both right and true.  

I recall getting into a discussion over this subject with an atheist friend a few short decades ago, when we touched on the basis of good and evil. In exasperation, he eventually affirmed that it was just a matter of not being an asshole, and everyone can agree on what an asshole is. End of discussion.

Ironically, I agree, only with some important qualifications, for assholery is not self-explanatory. This should become clear as we proceed:

He who wishes to to know and do the good [in other words, not be an asshole] must turn his gaze upon the objective world of being.

My friend would have agreed, because he was a medical doctor with a thoroughly (albeit unexamined) scientistic metaphysic. Certainly he would have said knowledge is objective, even if he wouldn't have been able to explain how or why. Really, he was a relativist pretending to be objective, or wanting to have his crock and eat it too.

Now,

"Reality" means two things.

I'll paraphrase, but in one sense it refers to the extra-mental world, to those things presented to, and independent of, the senses. We call such things "objects," but they also ob-ject to us, for

"Real" in this sense is whatever is "opposed" to us..., [Whereas] Not-real is that which is merely thought (but its being thought is also something real). 

So thought is real -- obviously -- but not in the same way that objects are real. Reality as such is "the whole of being which is independent of thought," and which is "antecedent to all cognition" (even though we need to keep in our back-pocket the idea that cognition is obviously real; if we forget this, then it will come back to bite us through the back pocket, right in the ass).

Frankly, everyone who disagrees with Bob engages in this bit of auto-cannibalism, nor must one be religious to understand why. I was first made aware of this by the secular theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, in his Life Itself. 

It would take me too long to track down an exact quote, but it's fine to remove subjectivity from your model or system, so long as you don't forget you did so, otherwise it will inevitably return in covert and disfigured ways (think of how the materialist forgets all about the mind that affirms materialism, thus plunging himself into a kind of autistic dream; same for any ideological -ism).

I don't want to try the reader's patience, so we'll pick up the thread tomorrow.

Oh, and happy anniversary to Mrs. G. You folks can stop reading any time, but imagine putting up with it for 36 years!