Looking into Yesterday's Crystal Ball

They say the world underwent a fundamental change in 2012, and that ever since then we've been living in the shadow of this metastatic ideological cancer of wokeness (https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/what-the-heck-happened-in-2012).  

Among other factors, the author cites the marked increase in mental illness and suicide among both adults and teens, a decline in reading and math skills, a plunge in the US birth rate, a new obsession with racism despite having less of it than ever, and a great increase in popular songs that use s'many cuss words. All of these things coincide with the growth and dominance of Wokeness -- which, in 2012, we just called political correctness.

I distinctly recall something unprecedentedly weird happening during the Obama years -- weird times call for a weirder man -- and I wrote of it often, since insultainment never goes out of style. 

Since I have nothing else on my mind at the moment, I thought I'd travel back to 2012 and take a peek at how things looked on the goround. This exercise will serve a second purpose, in that it will help me determine if anything down there is worthy of being resurrected for the sequel that is always being written and never completed.

I see that in January 2012 there was a rant on the subject of Occupy Wall Street, which was like a minor league Antifa or budding BLM: these misguided assouls 

and other radical leftists imagine that retrieving their missing slack is somehow dependent upon stealing the slack of some other arbitrarily defined group. They absurdly call these targets of their own hatred and envy the "one percent" -- as if the latter have somehow stolen all of the slack for themselves!

Wait. Isn't slack just some dollar figure? And isn't there a finite amount of dollars?

Please. This is like saying that homelessness is caused by a shortage of inches and feet. If we could just distribute more rulers and tape measures to contractors, they can start using them to build houses!

You don't see Korean or Vietnamese immigrants risking their lives to make it to America, only to complain after they get here that all the slack is gone. Why? Because they appreciate slack and know how to use it. Indeed, if not for state sponsored racial discrimination, most of the students in the UC system would be Asian.

In a free society such as ours, slack theft is usually an "inside job." In short, it is a result of mind parasites, the internal saboteurs that covertly appropriate our destiny and subject us to fate.

Eh. Standard issue rant. Here's something on the growing political divide between conservative liberalism and progressive tyranny:

Underneath it all, the fundamental division among Americans is between relativists and absolutists.

Then again, Bob asked,   

who is more certain of the truth of his convictions than the sanctimonious liberal who knows all conservatives are racists, or the naive Darwinian who can explain everything but the explainer, or the hammerheaded atheist who regards God as the big nail in the sky?

So the real division is between absolutists and people who pretend not to be. Which means that there is always this make believe element to leftism, in that the leftist must pretend to not know things one cannot not know. In many ways, a college education -- I mean a thorough one -- systematically trains one to deny the undeniable and therefore promulgate the unthinkable. By which I mean sling the bullshit.

But "absolute relativity is a contradiction in terms, because the relative is always testimony to the absolute."

The moment one realizes this -- assuming one really and truly does -- one understands that the human state is not and cannot be any kind of Darwinian "extension" of the animal state, but is something fundamentally irreducible to any materialistic terms.

Yes, there is continuity, of course, and it is the task of science to explain this continuity. But there is also irreducible discontinuity, and to the extent that science ignores this, it will generate ambiguity, absurdity, and paradox.

For example, let us say that man and chimp share 99.6% of their DNA, or whatever it is. Far from explaining the continuity, this only shows how DNA is powerless to account for the shocking discontinuity between man and beast -- unless one wishes to argue that all the painting, poetry, and music, all the novels, symphonies, games, and jokes, all of the science, religion, mathematics, and genetics, is in that little accident of biology.

Is the study of genetics genetic? No, of course not. Humanness is in fact the gate of exit out of mere animality -- indeed, out of the relative cosmos itself. Humans are the "hole" in creation that permits knowledge of the whole of creation; in our heart is a mysterious absence that potentially holds all the Presence. To put it another way, man is an "incomplete completeness," which is another term for our neoteny, or endless childhood (or limitless potential).

There is this critical relationship between the absence and the Presence, the relative and the Absolute. Animals do not know this absence, which amounts to the recognition of one's relativity, hence one's dependence. But to be aware of absence is to know in an instant that one stands in relation. To what? Or, more to the point, to Whom? I AM, for starters.

Having said that, it is eminently possible for human beings to deny the absence, which results in two conditions, both fatal. First, it forecloses knowledge of the Absolute; second, it inserts a false absolute in the space the real one should occupy. In short, this is the zone of the graven image that exiles one from eternity.

For in knowing the Absolute, human beings may participate in eternity on this side of manifestation -- in the relative world. We do this by 1) aligning ourselves with truth, and 2) assimilating truth.

Looking back, it seems like my voice has changed. Did I, between 2012 and 2023 finally attain adulthood or something? I remember being baptized and even confirmed in April 2023. Perhaps that did the trick.

Here's something on what I called the cheap grace and cheaper intelligence of the left, Perhaps it will shed some light on the burgeoning weirdness they had in store for us.

one of the central appeals of modern liberalism for the dead-from-the-neck-up is the cheap grace it offers via its institutionalized political kitsch.

As we all know, in order to be considered moral or intelligent by the left, one simply has to conform to their ideological template, e.g., top-down economic planning, global warming, women as victims, political opponents are racist, etc.

There was apparently a Republican debate the night before, and, based on the hysterical liberal reaction, we predicted that 

This is a preview of how the upcoming presidential campaign is going to be all about race, despite the fact that we specifically elected a "post-racial" president in 2008.

Indeed, despite his spectacular failures, if Obama had only delivered on this promise, his presidency might have been worthwhile, since it would have at least neutralized this most poisonous and destructive of the left's dark arsenal of verbal weaponry.

Called it.

But alas, it was not to be, and we have the most race-conscious and race-baiting administration since perhaps Woodrow Wilson, that father of modern progressivism.... 

This chart from the article linked above documents the sharp increase since 2012 of progressive delusional ideation regarding racism, misogyny, "homophobia," "transphobia," and all the rest: