What is Satan Up To, and Why the Language Abuse?

So, contemporary ideological language "does not reflect reality," rather, "it reflects the content of one's own mind." Thus, "the ideological mind is by definition a troubled mind. It is troubled because it refuses to accept reality as it is" (Janowski). 

What shall we call this disease of language? Verbicide? Logopathology? Spousal abuse (for there is a kind of marriage between word and thing)?

Whatever we call it, the healthy alternative goes back a long time, all the way down to Genesis 2, when the Creator leaves it to Adam to give names to things. 

Seems like a small courtesy until we think about it, because herein lies the secret of man's distinction from all other creatures. Like us, they are created, nor do we merely enclose them in our own pre-conceptual categories; Adam was not a Kantian.

Likewise, God doesn't tell Adam that his words are only names for other words. God is not a deiconstructionist. If he were, then his Word could not become flesh, among other inconveniences. 

In short, "Objects are the measure of our knowledge" (Thomas, in Pieper). To reverse this relation -- to say that our knowledge is the measure of objects -- is to make us an idealist, a rationalist, an ideologue, and possibly a devil, depending on the degree of pathology.

Satan makes his first appearance in the NT in Matthew 4, and coincidentally, Jesus touches on the proper function of language when he reminds him that man shall live "by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." For me, this implies that, although we have the privilege of naming things, language itself doesn't come from us, rather, from God. Language only participates in the Logos, it doesn't create it. 

If language didn't have this external (or interSubjective) source, then we would indeed by bound and gagged in our own linguistic net. Like a spider, we'd weave language out of our own substance, waiting to catch any passing dreams. For the web would presuppose what it catches. Obviously the spider does not capture "reality" in its web, only insects. Insects are real, but there's more to life than eating bugs. Unless the globalists have their way.

Again, reality is the measure, not our linguistic web; and God is the measure of things:

Created things, from which our intellect receives knowledge, give the measure to our intellect. But they have received their measure from the divine intellect.... the divine intellect gives the measure and does not receive the measure. But created things both give and receive the measure (ibid).

But we -- being the monkey in the middle of the cosmos -- are in a unique situation, for "our intellect, in regard to natural objects, is receptive of the measure and does not give the measure." In other words, again, we name the intelligible objects, we don't create their intelligibility (notwithstanding our own artistic objects, which fall into a separate category).

To say that we alone give objects their intelligibility is to be an ass. For there is a "something which naturally precedes all cognition," and its name is reality. We get to name reality, but we don't create it. Someone who does is called sick. Or an ideologue.

I say or instead of and because in a true democracy like ours, we have only to get enough sick people to agree on something, and it is no longer sick (transsexualism being only the most conspicuous Current Thing). Now, Satan is usually pretty easy to read, but one thing I don't quite understand is why Democrats insist that one sex can be the other when two thirds of the country believe otherwise.  

Satan has something up his sleeve, but I am at a loss to understand what it is. Give him credit: say what you want about him, he's not stupid, let alone self-defeating. Rather, he is after your destruction, and the destruction of man. Transsexual ideology is surely a good way to go about doing this, but with only a third of the country on board, it seems a bit premature to be pushing it. After all, even our first homosexual president campaigned -- twice -- against the redefinition of marriage.

What is Satan up to?

Well, the example just given shows how rapidly things can change in a corrupt democracy. And perhaps the focus on transsexualism is a big head fake, distracting us from other equally if not more revolutionary and destructive changes. In other words, there must be a deeper sickness with regard to language itself in order to even entertain the possibility that two men playing house are "married," or that one of them is actually a "woman," or that it's a good idea for men to beat the crap out of girls on the wrestling team. 

Recall that God creates them man-and-woman; we only get to name this preexisting situation. I want to avoid the politics of the day and focus on this larger ontological situation. Satan has his day-to-day tactics and his larger strategy, and toxic ideology, linguistic disease, and soul pollution go to the latter. 

Which brings us back to Homo Americanus. In reading these two books side by side (the other being Reality and the Good), it is as if the former gives concrete and real-time examples of the latter, which is more purely abstract and metaphysical. 

Like how?

"Communist newspeak" aims "to falsify political reality"; socialist language is "a facade" designed "to introduce a sense of normalcy into the abnormality of political and economic existence," concealing the real goal, which is, of course, power. 

And "Creating a new language" is "important for another reason," in that it quite literally makes the impossible seem possible via this black magic. We know from our Hayek and our Mises that socialism is impossible, but so what? We have the words for it, and that's enough. God let's us name stuff, so why can't we create it?

Here lies Satan's greater strategy, because again, naming isn't creating, it's only naming what's already created, AKA reality. At this point we could go down a giant rabbit hole called A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell, and how the progressive vision is actually sponsored by Satan himself, but we're starting to run out of time. 

Suffice it to say that our very language -- which is either a gift of the Logos, or it is nothing -- "is becoming self-destructive" and "an instrument of anti-culture." Today's activists-and-journalists-but-I-repeat-myself "no longer see the difference between news and propaganda" (Janowski), and it is very much as if -- in the words of Petey --

Normality anywhere is a threat to abnormality everywhere.

In case you were wondering about the sick time we're living in, and why you are the sick one they want to persecute or ban altogether. We're just getting started, but we'll resume tomorrow.