To Be or Cannot Be, That is the Question

Not everyone has the inclination think about the ins & outs of ultimate reality, but some of us can't help it. How did we get this way? 

Perhaps because we are like men, only worse: "Man was made to know and love Truth" (Renard), and metaphysics is just the contemplation of the necessary truths that ground and entail all the rest. So, we're just doing what man was made to do, only taking things a bit far.

Psychology is a science, but I found out pretty quickly that it doesn't go far enough for me. For "each field of science has its own limitations, and at best can give us only a portion of truth." However,

most men, even so-called educated men, are content to rest here without seeking further into the ultimate truths that are the foundations of the special sciences (ibid.).

Well, I am not content to rest there, and it's just the way I'm built. After all, if being is intelligible, then we have to do something about it!

This truth [that being is intelligible] is so obvious that it cannot be demonstrated, and so necessary that it cannot be denied without the shipwreck of all knowledge (ibid.).

Has western civilization become shipwrecked? Who could deny it?

Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but in the end they determine which reef one is shipwrecked upon.

Ideology is not just the opposite of metaphysics, but the denial of its very possibility. Every ideologue is a deficient metaphysician:

Metaphysics deals with the most abstract and most universal concepts. It enables us, therefore, to analyze and study the fundamental principles of reality and those primary truths on which the validity of all other sciences depends (ibid.).

We live in an age of relativism and subjectivism, but the principles we're talking about 

are true not only for my intellect, but for every intellect, in as much as every knowable object is subject to these principles, both in my knowing it and as it exists apart from my knowing it (ibid.).  

So, a cure -- the only cure -- for the intellectual disease that afflicts our day and age. Or a way to get those shipwrecked boats to float again.

Some people want to return to a Christian worldview, but such a view both entails and is entailed by a very specific metaphysic. 

I suppose the biggest little words in all of creation must be I and AM, which imply that ultimate reality both is, and is personal.  

Likewise, "be" is an innocent enough sounding word, and yet, it is of the greatest consequence. For every debate, every dispute, every argument at every level, comes down to a judgment of what is. I say 2+2 is 4. You say math is a white supremacist conspiracy. Which is it?

Is Trump Hitler? Or is it the case that people who say so are out of their minds? 

In truth, the higher we ascend, the more we converge upon the apex of absolute and necessary, hence eternal, truths. No truths can be more secure than these, because the very possibility of truth is grounded in them.  

At the top of the cosmic hierarchy is necessary being: 

Only God is His Existence; He alone is Being Itself and was able to say, "I am that I am," or, "He who is." In contrast, every other being has existence (Garrigou-Lagrange).

You and I surely exist. But we aren't existence itself. We aren't necessary. We are contingent, wholly dependent upon that which exists necessarily. So, there is a gulf between being and merely having or participating in being. 

Now, as alluded to above, every dispute comes down to what is and isn't the case (and what could or couldn't be, based upon real potential).  

"To be" is "at the basis of all judgments," and is indeed "the soul of judgment." Someone with poor judgment, for example, makes decisions rooted in things that are not the case, that have no being (or potential being, like socialism, or "social justice," or transgenderism). 

Conversely, prudence -- rightly ordered practical judgment -- is founded upon conformity with reality: 

true judgment itself corresponds to reality -- that is, to the existence of things.... Judgment is true if it affirms that which is and if it denies that which is not.

It seems strange that all men cannot agree on such a self-evident truth -- that truth is, and what is is true --  nevertheless, here we are, ruled by intellectual tyrants who insist that we live in an imaginary ideological world of never was, can't be, and never will be. Make America Real again. That is to say, return to a commonsense realist metaphysic.