The Rights of Truth and Obligations of Man

Schuon often said something to the effect that there is no privilege higher than truth, all others being number two, or lower. And while unsuccessfully looking up the exact wording of that quote, I found a paper by Schuon called No Activity Without Truth, touching on many of the items on this morning's implicit agenda. For example:

In the face of the perils of the modern world, we ask ourselves: what must we do? This is an empty question if it be not founded upon antecedent certainties, for action counts for nothing unless it be the expression of a knowing and also of a manner of being. 

Before it is possible to envisage any kind of remedial activity, it is necessary to see things as they are, even if, as things turn out, it costs us much to do so; one must be conscious of those fundamental truths that reveal to us the values and proportions of things. 

If one's aim is to save mankind, one must first know what it means to be a man; if one wishes to defend the Spirit, one must know what is Spirit. "Before doing, one must be" says the proverb; but without knowing, it is impossible to do (emphasis mine). 

Bingo. This means that, practically speaking, the rights of truth are prior to the rights of man, for if there is no truth -- including the truth of man -- then natural rights go out the window, deprived of their sufficient reason. 

To put it inversely: supposing you have a real, unalienable right -- any right -- then God exists. And supposing truth exists, then we have a "natural obligation," so to speak, to know, defend, and adhere to it. It's the least we can do, given the great privilege of knowing it. Ingratitude is base.

Thus it is no coincidence that we see our rights eroding before our eyes due to the very nature of radical secular left. It's baked in, once you take that first step into the ontological swamp of the left. 

Recall that among our first principles is the controversial one indicating that what is is, and what is not is not. Schuon touches on it here:

In our time one has often heard it said that in order to fight against materialism -- or materialist pseudo-idealism -- a new ideology is needed, one capable of standing up to all seductions and assaults. 

Now the need for an ideology, or the wish to oppose one ideology to another, is already an admission of weakness, and anything undertaken on this basis is false and doomed to defeat. What must be done is to oppose truth purely and simply to the false ideologies, that same truth that has always been and which we could never invent for the reason that it exists outside us and above us. 

We don't need no steenking ideology, rather, just the universal and timeless truths that are prior to the fictive maps invented by pneumapaths of the left:

To cut off man from the Absolute and reduce him to a collective phenomenon is to deprive him of all right to existence qua man.

The left proposes to save mankind by denying what -- and why -- man is. That's not a bug, rather, an axiom.  "It is precisely" man's 

intellectual superiority that the social egalitarianism of the moderns fails to take into account.... to the objection that man is distinguished from animals by his "culture" we will answer that the completely profane and worldly "culture" in question is nothing more than a specifically dated pastime of the human animal; that is to say, this culture can be anything you please, while waiting for the human animal to suppress it altogether. The capacity for absoluteness which characterizes human intelligence is the only thing conferring on Man a right of primacy...

Recall what I said about the diabolical events of October 7 being like a giant sword cutting through history, perverse and malicious goats to one side, healthy sheep to the other. It's not as if this cosmic sword created the division, rather, only revealed -- and continues to reveal -- it. It's also generational, in that the younger the goat, the more cutthroat: among the 18 to 34 crowd, 73% are pro-genocide.

None of this is new, rather, just the actualization of one of man's permanent possibilities. If we can ascend, then we can also descend. In Vedantin metaphysics these vertical trends (or "gunas") go by the names of "sattwa" and "tamas," respectively. The latter

is the guṇa of imbalance, disorder, chaos, anxiety, impurity, destruction, delusion, negativity, dullness or inactivity, apathy, inertia or lethargy, violence, viciousness, and ignorance.

Is that a bullseye, or what? The question is the ontological status of the gunas: are they just a Hundu thing, or the Hindu way of speaking of a universal thing? I suspect the latter, as there's a lot of convergence with what we in the west have typically identified as "diabolical tendencies."  

Speaking of which, this post was partly provoked by an essay called "White Logic" and "Jew Physics", about the battle over language -- or rather, the left's endless war on language as such:

the battle for language is not restricted to governments. Newspeak develops wherever a totalist ideology emerges -- it is, in fact, a necessary characteristic of the ideology. Such battles for language dominance are ongoing all the time, and the chief locus for these battles is the university campus, that petri dish of leftist ideologies.

But the ideology has clearly escaped the petri dish and has spread into the deep state, into its journalist-stenographers, and onto the streets.  

Eight year olds, Dude: 

Because this childlike assertion is nowhere acceptable for modern discourse, an entire vernacular is constructed to prop it up, and mantras are repeated ad nauseam to establish a faux legitimacy. In fact, the endless repetition of bombastic assertions is characteristic of all social-justice themes. 

And while they deny God, they cannot live without a Devil: they

generate a “devil word” to represent (or constitute) a ubiquitous enemy. This enemy is defined only by the fact that it opposes the totalist orthodoxy. Political scientist John Wesley Young characterized this as a technique to “coin or borrow a devil-term and tack it on indiscriminately to all of one’s adversaries.” He also noted that “the technique involved here requires little sophistication but much malice.”

You can't say it doesn't work. But only on the bovine and/or cunning:

it attracts and works for only two types of people -- those stupid enough to actually believe it (the storm-trooper class) and those who don’t believe it but see it as a useful tool to achieve their vision (vanguard puppeteers)....

The dullards and malcontents among us are always anxious to acquire by coercion and bullying what they cannot gain by merit. Because of this, their simple-minded doctrine is attractive for a certain type of disaffected bureaucrat. Today’s enemies of science, logic, reason, and progress have established beachheads on almost every campus in America.

It's "the critical-racialist oeuvre of paranoia, hyper-narcissism, pseudo-science, and magical thinking that would take us back to a pre-medieval world of superstition, sorcery, and shamans" -- which tracks with what was said above about those descending tamasic energies.

I'm going to pause here, because this has gone on a bit long already.