Existentialism, Essentialism, and the Crisis of Stupidity

My takeaway from yesterday's post is that our civilizational crisis of stupidity comes down to a flight from essentialism and a downward drift into existentialism. It is because of this cosmic sophistry -- centuries in the making -- that a person is able to say he is somehow trapped in the wrong body. 

Recall these three extracts from The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self describing the knowable Cosmos we once knew, which 

--regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it,

and in which

--the authority of the created order was obvious and unavoidable. The world was what it was, and the individual needed to conform to it,

versus one that 

--sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

What was so wrong with the previous world, a world in which men were men and women were glad of it? 

In a word, essentialism, which "is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity." If I Am is a consequence of What Is, then obviously we cannot choose our gender. Rather, it is just one of the many things assigned by reality.  

Therefore, reality has got to go. In this view, there are far more important things than mere reality, beginning with fantasy. Which is how we got to this fantastical place, where 

it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to or passively accept (Trueman).  

Liberation! From reality:  

Today what is called "intellectual liberation" is a change of prisons.

And

Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison. 

The perfect totalitarian gulag of the Woke, in which "identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination." Nevertheless, the biggest conceivable prison is still a prison.

Hell masquerading as heaven, AKA the utopia of the left.

Hell is a place where man finds all his projects realized.

It is also any place from which God is absent. 

As we've said before, leftism is the institutionalization of man's fall, in which we "take the place of God as self-creators" and presume to be "the inventors, not the discoverers, of meaning" (ibid.).

But freedom!

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

If these people are so liberated, why are they so unhappy, constantly jumping, growling, and barking like a dementia patient that found Hunter's crack?  

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain.  

Oh. That explains a lot: the invisible collar and chain is reality, and they bark and growl at us because we remind them of it. 

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence. 

You know, the mostly peaceful™ kind. 

Here's a good one:

Marxism turns the intelligence that it touches to stone.

Why? Because it denies the very essences that render the world intelligible to the intellect. You'd be mad too if "So-called 'external' or 'objective' truths" are "simply constructs designed by the powerful to intimidate and harm the weak" (ibid.). 

Or at least constantly frustrated because of the deplorables who reject your fantasy of how the world ought to be. Truly truly, they despise us, but only because they have first despised the world, AKA reality.

All "traditional institutions must be transformed to conform to the psychological self, not vice versa," and that's a heavy task. After all, they've completed their grim march through the institutions, and yet, the growling is only louder. One suspects that the growling isn't a means but an end: that I am angry, therefore I am.

The progressive becomes angry at nothing as much as the stubbornness of the one who refuses to sacrifice the certain to the new. 

Or essences to opinions, intellect to ego, reality to fantasy, justice to social justice, liberal order to progressive anarcho-tyranny, etc.