Buying into God

With our metacosmic economic principles in place, perhaps we are in a position to address the perennial question of what a fellow profits if he gains the whole world and loses his soul.

Let's see: profit is what remains after costs are subtracted from value. Therefore, The World minus Your Soul = the Bottom Line.

Speaking of profits, I see that Pope Francis just called capitalism "the dung of the devil." But I wonder if that is what he actually said, for the piece later quotes him as referring to "the unfettered pursuit of money" as "the dung of the devil," which is something else entirely.

For example, Greece -- an anti-capitalist pile of devil dung if ever there was one -- is clearly engaging in an unfettered pursuit of money, the difference being that capitalism actually earns the money by producing something people want. Conversely, Greece produces nothing anyone wants and wants to be paid for it.

Robbing a bank is an unfettered pursuit of money. Offering things people want at prices they can afford is definitely fettered, as any businessman knows. Among other things, it is fettered by production costs, by taxes, by regulations, by competitors, by consumer preferences, and by civil law.

Where but in a socialist tyranny is the pursuit of money unfettered? Even Obama- or Clinton-style crony capitalism is somewhat fettered, unless you believe people send all those millions to the Clintons with no expectation of a return on their investment.

Anyway, back to the econo-pneumatic question posed in paragraph one. As awkwardly alluded to at the conclusion of yesterday's post, time is the economics of eternity. What I mean is that there can be no economics of eternity as such, being that by definition it has no scarcity.

Unless, as I suspect, time and eternity are actually complementary, in which case you might say that time is like a limited supply of eternity. Perhaps it's easier to conceptualize vis-a-vis finite and infinite: finitude is like infinitude bounded and thus limited.

Of which it seems we all have a kind of vertical recollection, as exemplified by mystics everywhere and everywhen. What I mean is that the mystic reverses perspective, as it were, in such a way that the infinite is seen in the finite, the eternal in the temporal, the absolute in the relative, the slack in the conspiracy, etc. Or just say creation.

If this weren't the case, then Jesus's ultimate profit-and-loss statement would make absolutely no sense to us. Of course we would trade our soul for the world, since it would amount to trading nothing for everything.

However, without coming right out and saying so, Jesus implies that this would be a bad deal, because we would actually be trading everything -- or something of infinite value -- for nothing -- or something of finite value, for all the finitude in the world does not add up to a single drop infinitude, which is a quality, not quantity.

Which reminds me. Adam raised a Cain. Or Cane, rather. Rosebud...

In short, bartering away the soul would be a core catastrophe, a spiritual blankruptcy, an eternal mortgage with a fatal balloon payment.

There are numerous other allusions to economics in the Bible. In fact, what is religion but a form of exchange with God? It is never a one way deal. For example, the whole thing starts with a contract between God and his people -- who become his people by virtue of the contract.

Likewise, God "gives" his son, but not without a price. The mystery there is that he does exactly what he says we shouldn't do, in that he sacrifices infinity for the sake of finitude.

More generally, the whole concept of sacrifice -- present in all religiosity -- entails an implicit awareness of spiritual exchange, however warped. For example, the Buddhist sacrifices the ego to nirvana, the leftist our prosperity to his resentments, the Islamist innocent men, women, and children to his transcendent sadism.

And now we are perhaps in a possession to grasp the perfect nonsense on p. 252, e.g., either pay your deus or be nilled to a blank, the rend is now redeemable on your mirromortal garment, and no body crosses the phoenix line lest it be repossessed and amortized. However you say it, Eloha, that's a good bye for the Love that removes the sin and other scars.

The Economics of Eternity and the Core Catastrophe

Warning: I am not entirely sure this post is fully half-baked. While there is no doubt something to it, I didn't have time to give it the once-over to make sure it makes perfect nonsense. So, proceed at my own peril.

As Sowell says -- and it's amazing that anyone actually has to say it -- "life does not ask us what we want." Rather, it "presents us with options."

Again, there are scarce resources with alternative uses, and economics deals with making decisions about these alternative uses.

Which got me to thinking. If truth calls out to Truth, then what Sowell just said should resonate in a higher key, i.e., the Octave of Spirit.

Now, what would be the scarcest resource of all? As far as I am concerned, it is my life, because there is only one. But this immediately extends to the people I care about, because there's only one of them too.

More generally, Christian metaphysics begins with the principle that the individual is of infinite value because he is an individual, but in any event, we see an economic principle at work here, since value is linked to scarcity.

I suppose if I could walk over to the Quickie Mart and find a wife identical to the present one, she wouldn't be so precious to me. This no doubt sounds a little coldblooded, but she would have the same option at the Bobstore, who knows, maybe even a newer model.

Now, a human life is the ultimate in alternative uses, at least under conditions of political and economic liberty. Most political systems constrain those alternative uses, which, even when not done directly, is accomplished indirectly via the economic system.

What I mean is that in the past we have discussed the the psychoanalytic concept of "idiom." According to this notion, everyone has his own particular idiom, a "psychic organization which from birth forms the self's core," and furnishes an implicit logic "of the familial way of relating into which we are then raised."

Here is the link to economics: "As adults..., we spend our time looking for objects of interest -- human or material -- which can serve to enhance our particular idioms or styles of life -- perpetually 'meeting idiom needs by securing evocatively nourishing objects.' Being willing to risk exposure to such transformational objects is for Bollas an essential part of a healthy life: the readiness to be metamorphosed by one's interaction with the object world."

To express it in economic terms, we begin with our intrinsically scarce self, which is not so much an individual but an on-the-way to it, i.e., individuation. Or in other words, it exists in form or potential, and it is up to us to spend or allocate our time wisely by choosing the objects and relationships that actualize our latent selves.

"The contrast is a refusal of development and self-invention, of open-endedness: the state of psychic stagnation. Bollas saw in what he called the anti-narcissist a willed refusal to use objects for the development of his/her own idiom, and a consequent foreclosure of the true self. The result can lead to what Adam Phillips called 'the core catastrophe in many of Bollas's powerful clinical vignettes... being trapped in someone else's (usually the parents') dream or view of the world.'"

I don't remember the term "anti-narcissist," but it is surely a vital concept, for just as the person can be trapped inside his own reflection, he can be trapped in someone else's. Either one results in a foreclosure of development and a loss of real freedom. Life is literally reduced to a waste of time, and a waste of time is a waste of life.

For what is a human life? From the perspective of pure abstract (modern) liberalism, it is time + freedom. But neither of these has any real meaning at all, because they have no ground and no telos. Thus, they are reduced to the nothingness of existentialism, AKA nihilism. Thus the credo of the left: come for the nihilism, stay for the power.

(Hetero)paradoxically, this leads to the conclusion that life is either of no value, or only of the value we -- or the state -- give it. Which goes directly to why the left has no compunction about diminishing our freedom or about turning us into anonymous wards of the state. Everything follows from one's initial assumptions.

Which leads to the Economics of Religion. What's that about? Clearly, a religious person and a secular person will have radically different ideas about the value of the individual and the proper use of time.

For example, we used to have a leftist troll who made much of his theory that free will doesn't actually exist. However, Marxists have been making this argument ever since they first climbed out of the toilet, just as radical Darwinians make it today. Indeed, you could probably trace it back to some ancient Greek sophist, but if man isn't free, then time has no value, because we don't really have a choice in how to use it.

This pathological idea permeates the left. For example, one of the ineradicable clichés of the left is that "poverty causes crime." This contains the buried assumption that the criminal has no alternatives as to how to spend his time. Rather, he is just a machine. But if he is just a machine, please remind me why we are supposed to give a fuck about him?

Again, the value of a person is predicated on the idea that he is certainly not a machine. It is the left that turns individuals into machines, or classes, or genders, or races. I don't do that, although I will acknowledge that leftist anti-narcissists do this to themselves by the millions.

For example, I will sadly concede that Al Sharpton, or Barack Obama, or Louis Farrakhan, or Eric Holder, are "just" black men. But I deny all responsibility for reducing them to such a paltry category, or inflicting this core catastrophe upon them. Rather, I want all men to have the opportunity to be one.

I suppose you could say that time is the economics of eternity, in the sense that eternity cannot be scarce, but renders itself scarce in its temporal reflection herebelow. It is because of this dialectic between time and eternity that life is precious, and that there are good and bad ways to spend our allotment of time.

Information Destruction and Time Distortion

Does economics begin in number or quantity, or only end there? I've told the story of how I flunked out of business school, one reason being Economics. There was Econ 1, followed by Econ 2, and I somehow got past those.

This was followed by Money & Banking, which I literally faked my way through. I think I mentioned that at some point I realized the professor didn't actually read our papers, only mark them. Therefore, I began literally writing stream-of-consciousness nonsense, and would receive it back with a checkmark on top, just like everyone else. Thus, I succeeded in passing (barely) the course without actually learning anything.

This was followed by... whatever comes next, and that is where I hit the Wall. To be precise, I didn't actually flunk out. I just stopped going in the middle of the semester. Phase One of my adventure in higher education had come to an end, nor was there any Phase Two on the immediate horizon. I took it as confirmation that I was ineducable, and I can't say I disagreed with the verdict.

One thing I like about Sowell -- and the Austrians in general -- is that there isn't much math. In this 700 page book, there are almost no numbers except for the pages. The same is true of Hayek or von Mises. Instead of numbers, they deploy common sense, logic, and an understanding of human nature. Take away those three, and you're left with a Paul Krugman.

Put another way, all the math in the world will get one no closer to the truth if one lacks common sense, consistent logic, and a sound anthropology. For example, a Marxist lacks all three; in fact, he lacks all four, being that he has no math either. Keynesians have a great deal of math, and a form of logic that I suppose makes sense given its assumptions. But it lacks all common sense, and applies to a different species than man.

Here is an example of a basic non-economic lesson I learned from Basic Economics: that there are no economic solutions, only trade-offs. This is so because we live in a world of scarce resources with alternative uses. To choose one alternative is to exclude another.

But this is where politics comes in. Remember, the actual cost of something is its foregone alternatives. Take a barrel of oil. Or a cow full of milk. They can be used for gasoline or cheese, plastic or cream, vaseline or yogurt, kerosine or whey powder, fertilizer or butter, etc. Oil and milk have numerous alternative uses, and no person or bureaucracy could ever determine the most efficient way to apportion between them.

Which of course doesn't constrain the left one bit. Why? First, because they only tell us what they plan to "give" us, never what we are trading for it.

Second, remember what we said about time. None of us knows how long we will live, but this doesn't mean we order our lives as if we are going to die today or on some specified future date. Not so the politician, who orders his decisions to the next election and no further.

However, note that this doesn't apply to decisions the politician makes about his own life. For example, a Barack Obama places his own children in a private school, but meanwhile condemns less fortunate children to dysfunctional public schools.

Why? Because Democrats are beholden to the teachers unions on election day. They cannot afford to alienate such a special interest, anymore than they can afford to alienate other selfish and/or low-information groups, from homosexual activists to bitterclittoring feminists.

Thus, we can put forth the axiom that politics shortens the time-horizon, whereas wisdom is generally a consequence of expanding it -- for example, taking care of one's health, or saving for one's retirement, or not pretending one will be 25 forever.

Another point is that prices are simply messengers. Again, an economy is actually a vast information-processing system, with fluctuating prices conveying information about a thing's relative scarcity, and allowing us to plan accordingly.

But what if we don't like the message? In the real world, there's not much one can do about it. For example, I would love to own a pair of speakers costing $100,000, but that's not going to happen. Why? Because the price is prohibitive.

And as Sowell says, all prices are prohibitive in some sense, for this is their very purpose. My actual speakers are more in the range of $5,000. That's not prohibitive for me, but it will be to others. And even if it isn't prohibitive, most people would prefer to spend the money on other things.

I have a note to myself that liberals also pay attention to prices, except that they prefer to shoot the messenger. They especially like to shoot messengers with vital information about the cost of medicine, housing, and higher education; they try to kill the messenger by subsidizing these things, which, in the long run, inevitably results in more Bad News in the form of higher prices.

Often the left will personify the message, attributing it to "greed" or "corporations," or globalization, or what not.

Which they then sell to the low-information crowd, again, in the context of that shortened two- or four-year time horizon. As such, we could say that the left is an organized conspiracy to 1) destroy information, 2) distort time, 3) deny tradeoffs, and 4) put in place a system of perverse incentives which will redound to the very conditions from which the left will promise to save us come the next election.

Now, one mark of civilization is the gap between now and then; to diminish this gap is to reduce us to barbarism. In order to call ourselves civilized, we must be capable of impulse control, delayed gratification, self-discipline, awareness of trade-offs, and acknowledgment of unintended consequences. The left works at cross-purposes to all these things, which is why it is ultimately an anti-human project of re-barbarization. The best evidence for this is found in any city run by Democrats.

Life and its Alternative Uses

Today's column by Sowell contains a few zingers. He cites Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that "a good catch phrase could stop thinking for fifty years." That's a Dávila-worthy insight, in that the left is a mansion of many clichés.

And once inside a cliché, it can be difficult to leave, because the doors lock from the outside. To paraphrase Dávila, there are words we use to deceive others, and more importantly, words we use to deceive ourselves. It is the latter which ensnare us, for which reason "the only man who saves himself from intellectual vulgarity is the man who ignores what it is fashionable to know."

Today, for example, it is fashionable to think it courageous for a sick man to convince himself he is a woman, or to direct animus toward the one race that has, for whatever reason, contributed so disproportionately to the welfare and betterment of mankind. Modesty and good breeding forbid a gentleman from crowing about such an unmerited blessing, but what is the alternative when these barbarians insist you are a devil instead of a benefactor to all?

Oh well. "Intelligence, in certain ages, must dedicate itself merely to restoring definitions" (Dávila). You know, like marriage. I don't give a fig about soccer, but the other day my son asked who I wanted to win in the World Cup. I promptly answered "Japan." I didn't tell him it was because if Japan won, at least children would be spared the spectacle of some musclebound freak kissing her "wife." I remember when perverted old men had to pay good money to see that sort of thing.

Prejudice? Of course. "Prejudices defend against stupid ideas" (ibid.). One man's prejudice is another man's Collective Wisdom of Mankind. After all, we are descendants of the very people who held that particular prejudice. I am personally grateful my mother wasn't encouraged -- or bullied -- to "explore" same sex attraction in college. I mean, it's unsettling enough to think of one's mother having an opposite sex attraction.

"No one wanted to be a slave," writes Sowell. However, until the spread of Christianity, this was never a principled opposition.

Rather, "their rejection of slavery as a fate for themselves in no way meant that they were unwilling to enslave others." There is abundant anthropological documentation for the fact that the mentality wasn't "slavery is morally evil" but "enslave or be enslaved." So a slave didn't so much want to be "free" -- an abstract category that didn't exist -- but simply be the guy with the slaves.

In the link above, Happy Acres Guy alludes to the same thing vis-a-vis collectivism. Think about it: in the zero-sum economic world of the left, the wealthy man is a kind of criminal whose success has come at the expense of "the poor." Therefore, the leftist aspires to be the mirror image of the corrupt plutocrat via state power. Like the erstwhile slave who enslaves, Obama is the man of once modest means who now wields his power like a corrupt mafia lord.

Likewise the Clinton crime family. For them there is no possibility of clean power. Rather, they wish to seize power by any means necessary under the pretext that it will only be used for the benefit of the anonymous multitude of hapless rubes. The leftist convinces himself that his lust for power exists because it is in the service of others. Which is very much like the slaveholder who rationalized that without his paternalism, the childlike and ineffectual slaves would be incapable of caring for themselves.

Speaking of which, Dávila reminds us that power doesn't corrupt, rather, that it "frees up latent corruption." Power did not corrupt George Washington, or Calvin Coolidge, or Winston Churchill, or Harry Truman.

Back to our discussion of the metaphysics of economics. Much of it comes down to the principle that an economy is not really about money or wealth, but rather, about information. This is why we can say there is such a thing as "economic truth."

In a free market, for example, a price consolidates and conveys a vast amount of information about how much of a thing exists and how many people want it -- or about its scarcity and desirability. If too many people want what is too scarce, then the price naturally rises. But at the same time, because of the rising price, more people will be willing to jump in and produce the scarce thing. You can make something a "right" -- like healthcare. But that will hardly make it less scarce.

Especially if the state gets involved and decides the price is "too high," as in college, housing, and medicine. Of course, the state can do nothing to alter the actual cost, which costs what it costs. Reducing the price of diamonds won't magically create more. To the contrary, in the long run it will inevitably result in fewer diamonds. Money doesn't talk. Rather, prices talk and money listens, flowing to where its return will be greatest.

But the real link between metaphysics and economics has to do with time. Recall our definition of economics: the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses. And the flow of scarce resources into this or that use will have a cost. But what is this "cost" in absolute terms? We can't say the cost is this or that amount of money, because that is related to a host of factors, and always changing.

Thus, the real cost of anything is the value of its alternative uses. That's a tricky one to wrap your mind around, but you can apply it to life itself. For example, what is the "cost" of watching television? It is simply the forgoing of whatever else you could have done with the time, which is gone forever. Time is the ultimate nonrenewable resource.

So, I wrote this little memo to myself in the margin: the real value of your life is what else you might have done with it. So choose wisely, my friends!

Meta-Economics or Econo-Metaphysics

I am about to attempt something that probably can't be done, but human thought should always flirt with the impossible, shouldn't it? Otherwise it's like... like what Lao Tse says about the best way to control a bull: just give it a large pasture. The fences are still there, but the bull doesn't notice.

Similarly, any leftist who imagines he's a "free thinker" is simply unaware of the fences. A conservative is someone who ventures out a little further and notices all the barbed and electrified fences with snipers standing by ready to prevent escape to the NorthWest. A PC liberal, like the East Germans, would call the fence an "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart."

Fortunately, I wasn't really paying much attention in school, so I never fully assimilated the perverse ways of the Conspiracy. Therefore, I never internalized the Wall, or at least it remained rather porous. Now it's just a tourist spot, like Hadrian's wall.

It started yesterday, when I glanced over at Thomas Sowell's doorstop, Basic Economics. It's one of those books that is so full of ideas and information that it's impossible for the non-specialist to take it all in. So I thought I would thumb through it and try to refresh the old memory.

But then I got another idea from left field (or right brain), which was to scan the book from a higher perspecive. In other words, the first time around it was necessarily a view from the ground. But what if we take flight and reframe it from the perspective of metaphysics? This is something Sowell himself would never do, and yet, the book is so full of "essential truth" that it would be a shame to confine it to economics.

Indeed, even though they have nothing else in common, Sowell and Schuon do share the characteristic of being so extraordinarily essential, meaning that they always get right to the essence of things, with no extraneous equivocating, excess verbiage, or academic BS. As a result, they provoke a similar sensation in my nonlocal resonator thingy, despite the radical difference in subject matter.

"I wonder," asked Bob, "if one essential truth speaks to another?" One difference between them is that Sowell is describing the exact dimensions of the real fence that surrounds us, being that we are unavoidably clothed in finitude.

On the other hand, Schuon is clearly speaking from beyond the fence, or better, deploying the forms of universal metaphysics to express formless insights that transcend it: he is using language to say what cannot be said, whereas Sowell uses it to say the most that can be said on this side of the Wall.

But even Sowell would say it's not really an impermeable wall. Rather, one of the points he makes in the book is that the state fails (among other reasons) because it imposes binary or categorical law in an incremental universe. Therefore, it can never reflect the reality of things.

As for Schuon's essentiality, Nasr captured it well, writing that his works "always go to the heart and are concerned with the essence of whatever they deal with. Schuon possesses the gift of reaching the very core of the subject he is treating, of going beyond the forms to the essential formless Center."

As such, "To read his works is to be transplanted from the shell to the kernel," or "from the circumference to the Center."

Now, this is utterly at cross purposes with the left, in that it insists there are no essences and certainly no Center, no Absolute, and no Universal -- with a few incoherent exceptions, for they do regard homosexuality and "whiteness" as essences, the former a sacred one, the latter demonic.

Let's consider Sowell's rock-bottom definition of economics (via Lionel Robbins): Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses. That's it. Can't get more essential than that.

Why is it essential? Ironically, he alludes to the Garden of Eden which, whatever else it was, wasn't an economy. Why? Because there was no scarcity. Therefore, one of the consequences of the fall is to plunge us into economics! Which gives new meaning to the "dismal science."

Now, the first thing you clever readers will notice is that the left, in denying the fall, also denies economics -- or economic reality, to be precise. You can't actually deny economics because the ineluctable truth is that the things we want are scarce and have alternative uses. Or in other words, this isn't Eden or Heaven. You could even say that Genesis 3:17 introduces man to grim economic reality, i.e., toil and sweat if you want to eat.

Back when I was a liberal, I was sadly influenced by a loon on the radio named Michael Benner. This was back before meaningful talk radio, and when radio stations had to devote a portion of their airtime to "public service." They would do this during hours no one was listening, usually between midnight and 5:00 or 6:00 AM on Sunday and Monday mornings.

Being that I often worked the graveyard shift in the supermarket, I would imbibe his political and spiritual wisdom while stocking shelves. One of his key principles was that there is no such thing as scarcity. If I recall correctly, he said something to the effect that scarcity is just a mental limitation produced by the capitalist mindset.

Sounded good to me! For it meant that I was entitled to be prosperous, but that someone was just stealing it from me. Indeed, it looks like he hasn't changed one bit since I listened to him in the late '70s and early 80s. Speaking of essential truths, one of his is that -- and this is weird, because he even clothes it in a Schuon-like appeal to the Perennial Philosophy, Esoteric Philosophy, and the consensus wisdom "from all cultures and all times about the Spiritual Reality."

In any event, one of the essential truths is that we may magically "manifest and refine form," or turn wishes to horses. For example, the only real challenges to abolishing world hunger forever are "fear of change and the will to do it anyway."

Not only is there no scarcity in his world, but he also has the secret to ending war. How? "The Great Dichotomy of Life is not so much a conflict between good and evil as it is a choice between harmony and discord, between Unitive Love and separative fear." As such "We must feed and educate our 'enemies' — give them bread and books." ISIS is not evil, just in need of a happy meal and a good summer read.

Enough of that grotesque nonsense. Here is Sowell's pithy definition of scarceness: "It means that what everybody wants adds up to more than there is." Simple as.

However, what is the real source of this disconnect between "want" and "have?" It is that human desire is infinite, while the objects of this desire are finite. Therefore, all economics, from Adam Smith to Barack Obama, is a way to allocate the resources. If it isn't done via prices, then it will be done in some other way, e.g., rationing by state bureaucrats.

Liberals like to ridicule "supply-side" economics, but consumer-side economics is just a mob of open mouths and empty hands. In other words, What I Want does not magically transform into What I Have. If that were the case, then Haiti would be the most affluent place on earth.

In order to get from want to have, there is a little thing alluded to in Genesis which comes down to being productive. The things we want don't produce themselves, as in Eden.

You could say, with the the left, that we have a "right" to healthcare. No doubt true in a sense, in that you have the right to take care of yourself. But you do not have the intrinsic right to compel someone at gunpoint to care for you. The trick is to induce this person to, get this, voluntarily do something for your health, i.e., to get him to produce the desired output without placing him in chains.

Well, we didn't get far, and now I gotta get some WORK done. To be continued....

Memoirs of a Frivolous Man

Well, this is heartening: "I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account" (Lichtenberg, in Kimball). Therefore, when you keep a book in your library, it's like eating your cake and having it too.

I sometimes think I have too many books, but then it occurs to me that their presence is just a kind of accident of the medium.

For example, think of what your house would look like if you were physically surrounded by every movie and television show you had ever watched. It is a blessing that those generally weightless things disappear, for it would be depressing to be reminded of all that wasted time. It would be a monument to a misspent life, like a Grammy, or a Nobel Peace Prize.

At least my survivors will look at my liberatory and know that I tried, and as mentioned the other day, if you can't surpass even yourself, then you're not trying very hard.

What is a wasted life, anyway? One can only not waste it if it has an actual purpose. If life has no purpose, then the whole thing is just a profligate waste of time and energy, a meaningless blip amidst the entropy. Which is why Camus made that crack about suicide being the only valid philosophical question. If you say No to suicide, it implies a reason for living.

In reading this book about Israel, which followed the book on Churchill, I can't help thinking what a frivolous wastrel I am. It reminds me of Dr. Johnson's crack about how every man thinks badly of himself for not having been a soldier or at sea (I've been adrift, but it wasn't at sea).

I don't so much think about the latter, but when you read about real courage, it helps you understand why the left would vilify the military, the police, and past American heroes in general. Just as they don't understand evil, for the same reason they don't understand courage. Which is why leftists such as John Kerry or Dick Durbin accuse our soldiers of being terrorists and Nazis, while praising the incredible courage of Brucelyn Jenner. One of these is not like the other.

Having said that, there must be a place for the entirely frivolous man, for the same reason there is a place for music, comedy, art, and literature. A long time ago I came up with the brilliant rationalization that someone has to just enjoy life, otherwise what's all this fussing and fighting about?

In other words, assuming we're fighting -- whether militarily or politically -- for a purpose, then what is that purpose? What can it be aside from "living a good life"? If the good life is impossible for man, then why bother fighting for it?

I say, dammit, someone needs to prove that this so-called good life is actually possible, or else we're fighting over an illusion. Call it the Courage to be Frivolous.

Look at the left, for example. They never stop fighting, but are they ever happy? Of course not. Any victory only makes them hungry for more, since you can never get enough of what you don't really need. They won't rest until earth is heaven, which can only occur by turning it into hell. Call it the bad- or heteroparadox of the left.

I just read a biography of Giuliani that shows how he utterly transformed New York from the dangerous and increasingly unlivable hellhole it had become in the early 1990s to a once again thriving necropolis. I won't bore you with statistics, but suffice it to say that this didn't make the left happy. Miserable, rather.

Al Sharpton, for example, called Giuliani the worst mayor in world history -- as if anyone could know that -- because 1) he showed how liberal ideas created and maintained the mess, and 2) threatened to put people like Sharpton and Rangle and Cuomo out of business. Not to mention the thousands of black lives that were spared from black predators because of the incredible drop in crime. The left wants more crime, as in St. Louis and Baltimore.

Job One of the left is always about creating the misery from which they promise to rescue its victims with more of the same. It never works (in the world), but always works (at the polls). If nothing else, it sheds light on the deep structure of man's soul, since every generation falls for the same trick. To put it another way, to expose the trick is to illuminate man, naked and shivering, without so much as a fig leaf of tenure.

But we're getting off track here, because this current train of thought began with the intention of propagating a little joy in these trying times. Remember the reader who emailed me for advice on how to cope with the madness? One excellent way is to go on enjoying life despite the best efforts of these miserable bastards to immiserate us all.

This is what Dávila did, and this is the nonlocal source of the aphorisms. For example, I do not belong to a world that is passing away. I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die. We live in that sacred space into which truth flows like crystal waters, and we mustn't confuse this with the merely gross-physical world of the left.

And Christianity does not solve 'problems'; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.

Imagine how much happier the left would be if they aspired to this instead of scouring the world for imaginary microaggressions. What a recipe for misery! Not only that, but they ignore the macroaggressions, like, I don't know, A GLOBAL FUCKING RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT THAT WANTS TO SHOVE YOUR GENITALS DOWN YOUR THROAT BEFORE CUTTING OFF YOUR HEAD.

When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples.

In other words, what he left behind were dramatically and permanently changed individuals. The subsequent book is a consequence of the people, not vice versa. Or, its purpose is not so much to "learn" as to recapitulate the Personal Change -- the metanoia -- that brought it about. Thus, The Bible is not the voice of God, but of the man who encounters him.

About my abject cowardice alluded to above: just how would one go about proving one is not a coward? That is what Dr. J. means by the regret over having not been a soldier. Ultimately, the only way to prove one's courage is to look death straight in the eye without flinching.

Likewise, how would one express truly selfless love, in which there is nothing in it for the lover? Yes, by dying. Anything short of this might be suspected of self-interest, which is why Jesus in principle transcends any such self-interest.

Which is also why, as Dávila says, Man is only important if it is true that a God has died for him.

Wo. That is deep. For The importance it attributes to man is the enigma of Christianity.

So, cheer up. Life has a point and you actually matter. And remember,

Whoever is not ready to prefer defeat in certain circumstances sooner or later commits the very crimes he denounces. Or just say GOP, the Gratuitous Old Pussies.

Life Beside the Point

Retracing our steps back to where we started yesterday, we were discussing Dávila's Annotations on an Implicit Text, but couldn't get past the marvelous implications of a cosmic text which explicates the nonlocal implicate order. Or in other words, that we may know and talk about God, or the Ultimate Real, in a way that is both specific and inexhaustible, for it is like trying to map a hyperdimensional reality in 3D.

Just as there is an infinite number of points in a line, or an infinite number of lines in a plane, you might say there is an infinite number of aphorisms about the Creator. Theology is inexhaustible because its subject is.

An aphorism is a mode of expression that conveys the maximum with the minimum, and as far as I know, Dávila is the greatest of all aphorists. All others are number two or lower.

Lichtenberg said of his own aphorisms that if they "fall on the right soil" they "may grow into chapters and even whole dissertations" (in Kimball). That is certainly the case with Dávila. How does that work? How does one pack so much power into so little a space?

Most tenured babble is precisely the opposite: it requires whole books to convey a single pedestrian thought, and oftentimes not even that. You can always tell when a book is of this nature when it has a blurb from some mainstream figure such as Tom Brokaw, or a NY Times reviewer, or Katie Couric, or a politician. Such names guarantee banality.

On the other hand, not only does no one within the conspiracy know of Dávila, if he were known, he'd be treated like Donald Trump. For they wouldn't understand Dávila, but only know he is saying Forbidden Things that must be reflexively attacked.

"One commentator," writes Kimball, described Lichtenberg as a "spy on humanity," and you know what they do to captured spies. In Obamaworld it is as if we are spies exiled in our own land. Living as I do in the one party state of California, I am forced to supra-sist as a deep cover agent. Fortunately there are other agents whom we are able to detect through the operation of our regular-guydar.

Of Lichtenberg, Kimball writes that his aphorisms present "not so much a system as a sensibility, a take on the world." Same with Dávila. He is coming from the same place he is describing. I like to think I do the same thing, only ad nauseum.

Even so, I am always mindful of getting the strunk out of my white and Omitting Needless Words. I realize you folks don't have all day, and if I had all day, I could perhaps pack it all into an aphorism. My #1 excuse is that my primary audience is me, and that I simply allow others to spy on my improvisations. So you have no one to blame but yourselves.

"A man of prodigious but unfocused curiosity, [he] dabbled everywhere but persevered nowhere" (Kimball).

Hey, that's an insult! No, wait. He's talking about Lichtenberg.

"Aphorisms are insights shorn of supporting ratiocination" (ibid). Think about that: they are the direct transmission of an insight. Therefore, they are like ex-sights dropped into your head.

Kimball says that when Bertrand Russell told Wittgenstein to, hey, feel free to provide an actual argument for what you just said, LudWitt "replied that arguments spoil the beauty of insights and that 'he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands.'"

I heard that. Is that what I'm doing by blogviating on Dávila's aphorisms, as I am no doubt about to do? Am I defeating their purpose by explicating what is implicate?

For "A ponderous aphorism is a failed aphorism." And "like an electric flash on a camera, they require time between discharges if they are to be fully illuminating" (Kimball). You have to allow them to sink in and do their work. Example:

"With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on blind belief in something else" (Lichtenberg).

Now, I could go on and on about that one, but the arkive reveals that I already have, so I'll let it go.

"Having a low opinion of human nature may not be a prerequisite for being a good aphorist. But it helps" (Kimball).

I don't know about that, for if you don't have a low opinion of human nature, it is doubtful that you have any wisdom to convey. After all, thinking well of human nature is among the most catastrophic principles of the left: you know, they love mankind. It's individual human beings they hate.

"Aphorists are by profession debunkers" (ibid). Here again, this is why members of the conspiracy cannot be good aphorists. Think of a Bill Maher. He's got the cynicism and the brevity, but they are in the service of rebunking (e.g., AGW, Christianity, redefinition of marriage, etc).

Not to sound like a leftist, but you could almost say that power makes a poor aphorist. Imagine Hillary making a witty comment. Debunking power is the power of the aphorist. Or one of them, anyway.

Question and answer: Lichtenberg: When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it have always come from the book? Dávila: The collision with an intelligent book makes us see a thousand stars.

Now, watch how quickly I can assemble a few of Dávila's aphorisms that express everything in this post in concentrated form:

To write honestly for the rest, one must write fundamentally for oneself.

Check.

For The first step of wisdom is to admit, with good humor, that there is no reason why our ideas should interest anybody.

Double check.

Words do not communicate, they remind.

Ever gnosis that? It's why arguments are not necessarily necessary, and may just obscure the insight.

Clarity is the virtue of a man who does not distrust what he says. Think of the clarity of a Thomas Sowell vs. the tortured and torturing obscurity of the tenured.

For The writer who has not tortured his sentences tortures the reader. And Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas. Boy is that true of the left! Ever notice how they go on and on without saying anything substantive? To be a leftist is to be entirely beside the point.

The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie. Here again, if you remove the hysterical adjectives from a leftist's speech, there is nothing left. A lie surrounded by a bodyguard of adjectives doesn't make it true.

A very consoling one for these endarkened times: I do not belong to a world that is passing away. I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die.

Boom!

Besides, When one century's writers can write nothing but boring things, we readers change century.

And Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, trivial to the serious man, we must start over.

I can only hope this post was obsolete, immature, and trivial enough for you.

Non-doodling in the Margin between Man and God

Dávila called his aphorisms Annotations on an Implicit Text; "annotations" is a much better translation than "scholia," but unfortunately, this is the only authorized English edition of Dávila's works, and it is filled with similarly negaesthetic translations. For in addition to the wisdom, irony, and humor, the aphorisms are often clothed in pure poetic beauty, and there are much better translations floating around the ether.

I remember Roger Kimball discussing another aphorist, G.C. Lichtenberg, in his Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse. Which is not to say I remember anything about what he said. That's what highlighting is for. Or my annotations to Kimball's explicit text. While I'm warming up here, let's learn a little something about the whole genre of aphorisms.

Before getting to Kimball, think about that title: annotations on an implicit text. What is this text? You could say it is the Transcendent Real, or the nonlocal object to which the intellect is strangely proportioned. There's a lot of weird stuff going on down here, but that has to be among the weirdest.

Because it is nonlocal, the text cannot be seen or touched, and yet, it can easily be sensed, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation (for the past ten years), nor would religion converge upon anything. Rather, as the atheist believes, it would be just nonsense about nothing instead of non-sensuous intellection of the implicate metacosmic order.

Forgive this brief bit of gnostalgia, but one of the first books that opened my eyes to the wider world was Wholeness and the Implicate Order, by physicist and FOE (Friend of Einstein) David Bohm. You see, at the time, science was the only vertical gate available to me, so thank God for rebellious scientists who think outside the tenured box of settled science.

Lng stry shrt, I went on to write my dissertation on the freakish commonality between Bohm's vision of the cosmos and psychoanalyst W.R. Bion's vision of the psyche, and here we are, pretty much engaged in the same oldenpneumagain verticalisthenic gymgnostics every morning. The annotations change but the text remains the same. You could say that both macrocosm and microcosm are implicit, and that it is our task to explicate the fractal links between.

No, seriously. That's what it is. I can't help how I talk.

Now that I think about it, life would scarcely be worth living without links to the Nonlocal Text, for truly, it is these links and nothing else that separate us from the beasts, both human and nonhuman. Are modern and postmodern barbarians losing the ability to intuit and forge the links?

Adoy.

Therefore, man is only forgoing his reason for being. Instead of a being of reason, he is rendering himself an unreasonable being of nonbeing, which is simply what sub-Marxist existentialism does. It is how marriage or gender or even truth itself become just anything instead of specific things.

Note that the word "religion" literally means to "bind," and the binding in question goes precisely to the links between local and nonlocal, macro- and microcosm, heaven and earth, man and God, (¶) and O.

I'll give you a very brief but concrete example. A friend of ours and her 10 or 11 year-old daughter spent last week volunteering at a Haitian orphanage. The mother sent a photo of Julianna holding an adorable baby. But the first thing that occurred to me is that Julianna did not resemble the girl she had been just a week ago. She looked decidedly different -- older, more fully formed, more maternal (but those adjectives are poor substitutes for What I Saw). It wasn't just her expression, mind you; rather, something about her whole being, only transmitted through the photo.

Lng stry shrt, we were babysitting the other children yesterday. When the dad came by to pick them up, he revealed independently that he had seen the identical thing in the photo, to such an extent that he was moved to tears. That is what you call independent convergent testimony of a nonlocal reality. If it were my daughter I would surely have shed a tear as well. The point is that we were both godsmacked by a reality that can only be seen with eyes not made by Darwin.

Or as Dávila himself says, To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which the poet sang.

Which is also why it is impossible, try as you might, to photograph a "gay wedding," because such a thing does not exist. Rather, that would be the annotation of a nonexistent or fantasized text, now enforced by the state. In shrt, the state is compelling its subjects to bow down before a completely unreal world which, at the very least, violates the separation between crotch and state.

"Coincdentally," this book by Lings says pretty much the same thing, minus the gratuitous vulgarity. When Churchill discovered that someone before him had stolen his ideas, he called it "anticipatory plagiarism." So somehow, Lings hacked into the future of my blog. Either that or he is annotating the same nonlocal text.

Remember, for Lings, an authentic symbol is a link between worlds, man as such being the quintessential symbol this side of heaven, or perhaps the symbolizing symbol. The Fall means that the link has been severed -- or damaged rather -- with the result that we have been grounded. However, there are heavenly answers to our "wingless predicament," such that we may fly on wings of symbolic slack, so to speak.

"They could be defined as symbolic acts or enacted symbols, providentially endowed with wings for return to their Source..." You might say they are like vertical OMing pigeons, so perhaps the dove in Matthew 3:16 is just an infelicitous translation. In any event, doesn't everybody know -- from the trashman on up -- that this bird is the Word? Or better, the Holy Third, b'atman!

In any event, it is "a life-line thrown down from Heaven; it is for the worshipper to cling to the life-line," but much (or all, depending on how you look at it) "is in the hands of the Thrower," the "Supreme Archetype."

Look, if I can't even surpass myself, that's not saying much, is it? Well, the same applies to you and everyone else. Failure to do this makes you an ambient human, a blob of refried ectoplasm subsisting at cultural room temperature, like the Rainbow People who imagine that all you need is human love.

Which is of course necessary but not sufficient to leave the ground or decipher the text.

Rather, we cannot do it without a Divine Intervention. I mean seriously, who would even attempt to do so without the aid of heaven?

Our nonlocal lifelines "amount to an other-worldly intrusion" manifesting "a real presence of the Infinite in the finite, or the Transformal in the formal."

These come to us fresh every morning, straight from the source, although you might say they are providentially a little half-baked so that man may learn to do a little baking on his own. If they were fully baked, this would, among other things, deprive us of our freedom to eat or not eat the manna. You know what they say: teach a man to bake, and he eats forever...

Returning to the Kimball from whom this post has badly deviated, he cites one of Lichtenberg's more famous aphorisms about certain works -- the type we have been discussing -- being mirrors; when an ape looks into them, no apostle looks out.

Boom! Likewise for the troll, the tenured, the tyrant in robes, who see only the dreary architecture of their own beshriveled souls.

Tough Times Call for Tough Aphorisms

To be born in the United States is to have won the cosmic lottery. However, the left is not only oblivious to this pleasant fact, but determined to do something about it.

When a leftist begins a sentence with the lamentation that We're the only industrialized nation that..., it's time to reach for your revolver. It never occurs to them that we are the greatest nation that has ever existed because we are the only one that doesn't do that retarded shit. But the left won't be happy until we are as miserable as Greece.

Tough times call for tough aphorisms. Either because I am lazy or ambitious, I'm going to review my lengthy collection of Don Colacho-isms, with a particular focus on how to survive our Fundamental Transformation from the only industrialized nation that doesn't to the last one that did. The aphorisms are in italics, my commentary isn't.

Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different

Or just say Diversity, for what is diversity but mandatory consent to left wing twaddle? Liberal equality used to mean the same rules apply to all. But that naturally results in unequal outcomes, so now they insist on unequal rules in order to ensure equal outcomes. But giving a college degree to a person with an IQ of 85 doesn't magically increase it to 115. Nevertheless, we must pretend it does.

The bourgeoisie is any group of individuals dissatisfied with what they have and satisfied with what they are.

Boom. Here again, the left has no interest in maintaining standards of achievement, because that would result in low "self-esteem" for those who cannot meet the standards.

This is the basis of Justice Kennedy's extra-constitutional whim to redefine marriage: people falling outside that definition might feel bad, so we have to change the standard. They still can't be married, but at least they now have the word, just as Cornell West has a Ph.D., and people on Medicare have a theoretical "access to healthcare." They may die trying to find a doctor who will accept Medicare, but the boost to liberal self-esteem is incalculable.

The United States is the only industrialized nation that maintains a relationship between wanting and achieving! We have to give people what they want without forcing them to actually earn it. Conservatism is fascism! No, wait. It's just liberty.

Authentic intellectual seriousness does not frown, but smiles.

Entirely true. It is why leftist "intellectuals" are such a dreary bunch of church-lady scolds. Churchill made many statements to the same effect. For example, one thing he dreaded about Nazis was the absence of humor. It seems to me that if they had only been capable of laughing at themselves, we could have avoided unspeakable horrors, as in "look at these silly uniforms. They are so gay!" Likewise, I challenge anyone to find a witty comment by an ISIS member.

Or Obama, for that matter (not his teleprompter, mind you). The left doesn't do understatement. Rather, the insane rhetoric is always turned up to eleven. I remember what Tip O'Neil said about President Reagan: "The evil is in the White House at the present time." (No, not the Soviet Union, because you can never be too far left.) "And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America.... He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood."

Never mind that the working class did much better under Reagan -- our most conservative modern president -- than under Obama -- our most far left ever. The left doesn't judge outcomes, only its own pure intentions. They frankly can't judge outcomes without ceasing to exist. Thus, judging outcomes is racist-sexist-homophobic. They cut you off before you can even point to them. "But homosexual behavior leads to..." HOMOPHOBE! "But affirmative action only causes..." RACIST! "But lowering standards just to have a Navy SEAL with a vagina will..." SEXIST!

Revolution is progressivist and seeks the strengthening of the state. Rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance.

This is appropriate, with July 4th coming up, for ours was no progressive revolution, but the quintessential reactionary rebellion. It was not to establish new rights but to preserve ancient ones, in particular, from the state. But that won't do, because it puts progressives out of business. Thus, ever since Wilson the left has been trying to eliminate the separation of powers so the State might speak with a single voice and represent the Will of the People.

The Führer Principle. Is there anything it can't solve?

The left's ideas produce revolutions; revolutions produce the right's ideas.

This is because conservatism has no content per se. It depends on what one is conserving. In our case, we specifically wish to conserve the classical conservative liberalism of our founders.

Which is why modern conservatism really didn't become an articulate movement in the United States until the mid 1950s. Prior to the statism of FDR, it really wasn't necessary. Most of Wilson's damage was undone by Coolidge, but the left -- never missing an opportunity to exploit a crisis -- used the stock market crash of 1929 to create an extended depression which it then proposed to cure. Forever.

Thus, we are all forced to live with 1930s solutions to 21st century problems, e.g., social security. But that is very much like suicide, another permanent solution to a temporary problem. Now we have a permanent problem with no solution, i.e., trillions of dollars of unfundable mandates because of the left's extravagant generosity with other people's money.

With the categories admitted by the modern mind we do not succeed in understanding anything but trifles.

Boy and how. Or as they say in Colombia, aye mamacita! Reduced to thinking within the lines of modernity, I couldn't think at all. Very shortly after receiving my Ph.D., I realized that the rest of my life would simply be more of the same. It is the "last degree," meaning that it is not so much an attainment as confinement. Forced to think in terms of modern psychology, life would hardly be worth living.

For There are no ideas that expand the intelligence, but there are ideas that shrink it. Intelligence is what it is, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Our intelligence is always condemned to transcend the intelligible, which is why it is here.

It reminds me of the volume knob on a pre-amplifier. It doesn't actually "turn up" the volume. Rather, it is a limiting device that turns it down. You could say that academia is a giant volume knob deployed to turn down intelligence. It is why conservatism is not permitted there, because it would interfere with all the beautiful diversity of monotonous opinion.

Besides, the fool calls conclusions he does not understand 'prejudices'. You don't believe the constitution doesn't grant the Supreme Court the power to redefine marriage? Bigot! Why understand arguments when you can condemn motives?

And the antepenultimate aphorism above goes immediately to this next one: If we could demonstrate the existence of God, everything would eventually be subjected to the sovereignty of man. You might say that because God, we are always free of the left's ideology. Without God, we are trapped inside some hideous ideological gulag with no vertical escape hatch.

That's about it for today.

Dispassionate Hatred

Picking up the theme from yesterday's brief post, it is not as if life without the left would somehow be paradise. Rather, the problem is man, and man only. Thus, the left is just like man, only worse. It simply exaggerates what is worst in man -- envy, ingratitude, entitlement, pettiness, perversion, dishonesty, etc. -- and then turns it into virtue before going on to subsidize it.

For the spiritually awake, one of the most subtly dangerous aspects of the left is that it makes it so easy to feel superior. I alluded to this in yesterday's post, and it's a real temptation. When Jesus enjoins us to love the enemy, he is conveying a deeper lesson than just Unreasonable Niceness.

Rather, if not done in the proper spirit, criticism can become a covert vehicle to elevate and exalt the self. Hatred would be just an extreme case: it is as if by hating the object, we unconsciously justify ourselves, such that God's forgiving grace is not needed.

I would even go so far as to say that -- so long as we have deeply internalized the lesson above -- we are free to hate what is properly hateful. But few people can pull this off without the thrill of auto-salvation. It is analogous to, say, a saint being able to sleep in a bed full of naked supermodels and not have a lustful thought, even while appreciating their beauty. The point is, the spontaneous aversion of hatred can be a kind of dispassionate discernment, but it rarely is.

I have only to think back on my own irrational hatreds of the past to see how this works. I suppose I hated Reagan at the time. Certainly I agreed with all the hateful things the left said about him and about conservatives more generally, which automatically placed me on a plane of completely unmerited, even delusional, superiority -- as when, say, a squalid creature such as Al Sharpton rebukes an Antonin Scalia.

So, it's preferable to just hate without being hateful, i.e., to not enjoy that secret thrill of hating. In ten years of blogging, I can't recall ever making an angry comment to a troll. Rather, I find a way to make them appear ridiculous.

What was the real Last Temptation of Christ? Perhaps it was the temptation to hate his executioners, otherwise why ask the Father to forgive them? Likewise, forgive Justice Kennedy, because he is utterly without a clue.

One book that really gets deeply into this whole discernment-of-hatred business is Christ the Eternal Tao. The key principle, if I recall correctly, is that we all have a higher and lower nature, and that it is the task of the higher to detach -- or distance, rather -- itself from the lower, so as to observe it without being caught up in it.

In a certain sense, this goes to the distinction between our animal and properly human natures. For example, why do we wear clothing instead of going about naked, as they do in San Francisco? What's the big deal? What's your hang-up? In the Jewish tradition, the purpose of clothing is to elevate us above the beasts. Which is why San Francisco is so bestial.

Man is composed of body, soul, and spirit; or soma, psyche, and pneuma. It is possible for one's being to be conditioned from the bottom up, when the whole freaking point -- at least in the Judeo-Christian view -- is to be conditioned from the top down so as to humanize the animals we are (not to animalize the human, which is literally the project of the left. Which I can affirm with no hatred whatsoever).

As we have discussed in the past, man has two sets of defense mechanisms, one against the lower, the other against the higher. Few animal types can successfully sink all the way down to animality.

Take the example of an ACLU lawyer, defending the right of a high school student to wear a t-shirt saying SUCK MY DICK. I am waiting for the day one of these pasty-faced legal adventurers has the courage of his convictions and wears such shirt to court. But most liberals do not practice what they preach, or they would be as dysfunctional as the people who actually live liberal ideas, as in the inner cities.

You could say there are three main attractors in the human state: call them unconscious, ego, and supra-conscious. In Vedanta they are called sattva, rajas, and tamas (the gunas), for these are an expression of universal metaphysics. In short, there are luminous and "ascending" types, just as there are tenebrous and descending types. The middle area is not necessarily "bad," as these can be positively expansive types. Furthermore, everyone has a mixture of the three, with one guna typically predominating.

People who are spontaneously attracted to God are likely of an ascending nature. Conversely, most people who are spontaneously attracted to politics are of a rajasic nature -- say, Bill Clinton, who is rajas-tamasic all the way down. There is no higher in him, only its facsimile. Obama is an even more dangerous case, for he was elected on the basis of a kind of meretricious sattva ("the Lightbringer"), which is an inverse analogy of hell. Which I say with no hatred in my heart.

From Christ the Eternal Tao: the wrong kind of condemnation "is a kind of mechanism which the ego uses in order to immediately exalt itself over something or someone..." But "When we are truly humble and in submission to God, it is possible to discern right from wrong without judging or condemning."

In other words, it is possible to be godly without presuming to be God. This egoic judgment is wrong to the extent that it is "made in order to feel more right than the person whom we have judged." It blocks the path to God, as opposed to dilating it via humility.

Metanoia -- the second birth -- is really a reorientation to the Great Attractor. "Along with this comes the yearning... for that which separates us from Him to be removed..." And "We know that our metanoia is genuine -- that is, that a Divine change has really occurred in us -- when we have a revulsion for what before appeared sweet to us."

I don't know about you, but my old self not only nauseates me, but I am always mindful that there but for the grace of God...

Which is what occurs to me when dealing with a troll, as in yesterday's post. "[W]e still carry within ourselves the inclination and habit to return to our former condition." For example, I could have a head injury, or a stroke, and somehow regress to my former self, and I don't think it would be right to hate me for that, but rather, to have compassion.

Looked at this way, it is as the Tao says -- something to the effect of, "What is a bad man but a good man's teacher?" Each one is a kind of object lesson which we should learn in all humility. Trolls are stepping stones to our better selves. When Jesus says "resist not evil," I don't think he means to just "let it go," but rather, to rise above it, i.e., do not engage it on its own level.

Here again, this is one thing that really impresses about Churchill. He did what was necessary to eradicate evil without getting caught up in the pleasure of being superior to fascists. But now we are denied not only the pleasure, but even the superiority over our Islamic enemy. For the left, the only permissible pleasure is the participation in our own well deserved destruction.

How to Survive the New Dark Ages

A longtime reader has asked me for advice on how to cope with the new Dark Age we are living through. I am sure he speaks for dozens when he describes the president as "that shameless, lying con-man" who "goes on about how 'love wins' when in 2008 he claimed that same love to be a bit more restricted."

Actually, he claimed that as recently as three years ago. And it is not so much love that won, but greed, being that millions of dollars from Hollywood bundlers was at stake. Money talks, sodomy walks.

But the following plea pierces the Gagdad heart:

"Since I last wrote to you I have been through a lot of twists and turns came back to God, to Christianity. I've had moments where I thought my heart would float out of my chest; I can't get enough. But so much hate has come to the surface in the last two days that I think I may as well throw in the towel in regards to friendship with God. He tells me to love my enemies when in fact I HATE them, lying sacks of shit they are. I feel I have no way I can call myself a Christian with this in my heart, and the ease in which it bubbles up" (italics mine).

It is the italicized part that most troubles me. Who ever said we are not supposed to hate evil? To the contrary, God hates evil, and wishes for us to burn it from our midst. It's just that it costs nothing to be polite while doing so. When Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down this fucking wall, did he sound angry to you? No, of course not. Resolute, maybe. Unambiguous. But he was just transmitting the gift of truth, which must occasionally be delivered at the end of a hammer. That's not hate, even if it leaves a few lumps.

The key, I think, is that you have to learn to be dispassionate about it, or else you run the risk of living like the perpetually self-righteous leftist who actually enjoys being sunk in his hatreds. This is why they can never be satisfied, and why victory only causes them to be more frenzied, since you can never get enough of what you don't really need.

A leftist can always find a way to be be miserable, if only because that is what envy does. Envy is one of the two or three keys to unhappiness. Ingratitude would be another. And let's not forget hope for the world (or, God forbid, hope for man, of all things!).

Conversely, a Christian can always find an excuse to be joyous. Remember the martyrs? Besides, You will be persecuted for my sake. That's just the terrestrial cost of doing isness with God. Be prepared for more, since this is not about love for homosexuals but hatred of the divine order, AKA reality.

On the positive side, light shines all the more brightly in the dark.

To help this reader and perhaps help ourselves, I would like to throw this subject out to the wider coonosphere: how are you dealing with the madness? What's your secret, you unreasonably happy bastards?

The Supreme Court Does the Impossible

Not sure where we left off, but then again, I will align myself with the gentleman from Colombia, who says... he says a few choice things, actually, for example, that his sentences are merely "dots of color in a pointillist painting"; nor do his words try to explain, but rather, "circumscribe the mystery." And he also says something about being less like a tree and more like a bush that grows every which way from the center out.

In other words, it doesn't really matter where we begin so long as we are either starting from or returning to First Principles, AKA Alpha and Omega. For only first principles can really bite into reality and generate traction for the vertical ascent. Without them we cannot "defy gravity," as it were, at least on the intellectual plane.

Indeed, if everything were just contingencies and not principles, then we could never get off the goround, could we? Then we would be in the position of the krugmaniacal Keynesian who stands in a bucket while attempting to lift himself by the handle.

This book by Lings -- Symbol & Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence -- is all about first principles. The second half of the title is a hint: the meaning of existence.

Oh great. Just clicked over to Drudge. Let the learned gentleman from Colombia have the floor: "Moral indignation is not truly sincere unless it literally ends in vomiting."

Excuse me for a moment. I need a bigger bucket.

"The fool, seeing that customs change, says that morality varies." The same fool "does not content himself with violating an ethical rule: he claims that his transgression becomes a new rule" (Don Colacho).

Oh well. "Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists." Besides, "Whoever defeats a noble cause is the one who has really been defeated." Therefore, "The cost of progress is calculated in fools," and I can't count that high.

Speaking of first principles, the SCOTUS decision is a violation of the first rank, because it goes to the very basis of civilization. Perhaps we'll get into that more deeply once this acute nausea subsides a bit.

I wouldn't blame the Creator if he withdraws that providential hand that has both guided and bailed us out so many times over the past 250 years. Why bother with these loons?

It's one thing to be fallen. It's something else entirely to confuse down and up. Once that happens, then man enthusiastically pursues his own destruction. But nothing obliges us to participate in the sickness of the world. Well, except the IRS.

I feel like I'm live-blogging a black hole. This is a Dark Day, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with animus toward homosexuals. Indeed, I have a homosexual relative by marriage, an artist, and one of his works hangs on my office wall. If someone can't appreciate the distinction between micro and macro, between private behavior and the state presuming to redefine reality, then they are too unsophisticated and too insentient to even bother with. Let the dead bury the tenured.

For Lings, what we call the "fall" results in a kind of veiling, the veil being part of the "atmosphere" that opens up between divine and human, terrestrial and celestial. The path of return is "upward," but it is not as if we have lost all O-rientation.

Rather, "the science of symbols is inextricably linked with the path of return," for these symbols "are reminders for the spiritual traveller of man's lost perfection." Or, they may be nuisances, depending on the case (e.g., marriage, which can obviously only be between man and woman without ceasing to be what it is; to not know this truism is to not know what marriage is, even if one is technically married).

The spiritual adventure always involves "swimming against the tide." What makes the contemporary journey a little more tricky is that the stream is a sewer, so we are battling both gravity and ambient toxicity. That's okay. The exercise just makes our wings stronger, and exposure to the left makes our immune system all the more robust. Like a child who eats dirt, I have the antibodies acquired during my many years of exposure to higher education.

About that shrub alluded to in the first paragraph. Imagine looking down on a shrub, which seems to grow in every direction from a central point. Or better, imagine a spider's web, which "is all the more apt inasmuch as the web is woven out of the substance of its 'creator.'" For Lings, this provides a fruitful symbol of the cosmos.

In considering the web, "The concentric circles represent the hierarchy of the different worlds," such that "the more outward the circle, the lower its hierarchic degree." Thus, if the central point is "truth" or "sanctity" or "Christ," then the outer circle would represent darkness, journalism, and tenure.

But in addition to the concentric circles, there are also radii from the center out. Thus, we are never really separate from the Principle; you could say the circles represent immanence, while the radii signify transcendence. Without the radii, we would indeed by stuck like flies in whatever circle we happen to inhabit.

Lings makes the helpful point that at the "end" of each radii is a symbol. Or better, at the center is an archetype, while at the outer end is a symbol that more or less reflects the archetype. The local symbol is an emanation or prolongation of the nonlocal archetype, as it were.

Thus, for example, herebelow, marriage is a symbol that reflects a much higher and deeper archetype, ultimately the union of male and female, or absolute and infinite and other primordial complementarities.

This is the archetype the Supreme Court presumes to be qualified to destroy. Which is analogous to Iranian mullahs feeling qualified to destroy the bond between protons and neutrons. The result is vast destruction, the "unleashing of hell," so to speak. Likewise, to undermine the primordial link between male and female is to unleash a different kind of hell, but equally destructive.

Now, bearing the image of the web in mind, we see that there will necessarily be some things that "fall between the cracks," so to speak, i.e., the indeterminate spaces between the radii.

What sorts of things are these? I would say these spaces are filled with human illusion -- for there is no other kind -- i.e., with things that cannot be, because they have no ontological basis. In one sense they "must be," man being what he is. And yet, they "cannot be," for they are like the possibility of the impossible, or the nihilistic side of freedom, detached from principles and from God.

So, give the Supreme Court credit for doing the impossible.

Pecking at the Inside of the Cosmic Egg

It just now popped into my head that perhaps there's a connection between unity/totality and Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which prove that an intellectual system can be consistent or complete, but not both. Unity would go to consistency, while totality would go to completeness. Therefore, we could say that a human life can be consistent or complete, unified or total, but not both.

"Does this make any sense?" -- a question he probably should have asked himself before springing it on an unsuspecting public. Only one way to find out: keep writing until it either makes sense or goes off the cosmic rails.

What does it mean to love God with all one's mind, heart, and strength? These three are intellect, heart, and will, respectively.

It seems to me that intellect goes more to the quality of absoluteness and consistency, while heart would go more to unity and completeness, while the will is that antsy thing in us that won't rest until it rests in the absolute unity-totality that is God, for God is the one being who escapes Gödel's logical straitjacket.

You could say the straitjacket necessarily exists because under terrestrial conditions, God bifurcates into unity and totality at our end of the bargain.

In his Spiritual Perspectives & Human Facts, Schuon says "Metaphysical knowledge is one thing and its actualization in the mind is another," which right away puts it on a different plane than ordinary knowledge for which there is no such distinction.

But metaphysical knowledge is always mindful of that gap between man and God: no matter how absolute our knowledge, it is never absolute per se, only a reflection of it herebelow.

Here again, this would be consistent with Gödel, who was really trying to prove the meta-truth that just because we can't prove something logically, it doesn't mean it isn't true. He just wanted to place appropriate limits on logic, not invalidate it, for if everything were subject to logic, then man would be condemned to an absurcular tautology. But just because we can't attain unity and totality, it hardly means they don't exist. That's what you call an unwarranted leap, only a leap down, off the cosmic telovator.

Which is why, as Schuon says, "All the knowledge the brain can hold is as nothing in the light of Truth even if it is immeasurably rich from a human point of view."

Substitute "complete" for "immeasurably rich," and you get the idea: no matter how complete our knowledge, it is as if nothing compared to the nonlocal object of all knowledge, which is precisely what Thomas Aquinas meant when he made his famous crack about everything he had written being "so much straw" compared to the soul-shattering experience of infused grace. In the end, God shatters all speech. A word is like an egg, inside which there is always a bit of life pecking at the shell to get out.

Or, "Metaphysical knowledge is like a divine seed in the heart; thoughts represent only faint glimmers of it." If thought were to fuse with divinity, it would turn from a glimmer to an explosion of light. Contact between the two is necessary to get anything done, but you don't plug your toaster directly into the nuclear reactor.

At the other end, failure to plug into the cosmic grid at all necessarily results in Error, whether trivial or grandiose, human or tenured. Why? Because without the divine rocket boost -- AKA the free launch of grace -- "the ascending curve of a circle changes imperceptibly to a descending curve." Remember, just because you don't recognize Gödel, it doesn't mean he doesn't recognize you.

Nevertheless, here lies "the whole tragedy of philosophy," which either breaks out toward God or is a manmode tautology: it is like stamp-collecting instead of sending and receiving letters. Ever see a complete stamp collection? First of all, who would want to? Second of all, no.

Or, as Schuon puts it, "Modern man collects keys without knowing how to open a door." Ho! Even worse, like the politically and academically correct left, he is like "a child who, after having burnt itself, wants to abolish fire." But if you don't burn baby burn, you can't learn baby learn, because where there is Light there is Heat.

This is why everything about Obama is not only dark but frigid. History shows that the two always go together when conjoined with Power. It's why this particular historical passage is so gloomy.

With preluminaries out of the way, let's get back to Lings, who relates all of this to Genesis 3, for "the eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree was the attachment to a symbol for its own sake apart from its higher meaning."

Again: the symbol is "thrown across." The postmodern posthuman will stipulate this, except to say that all throwing is only horizontal in nature, such that symbols point only to other symbols, such that we are forced to participate in this bootless linguistic circle jerk. Which is why it is absolutely the case that liberals throw like girls.

Instead of setting us free, this leftward truth imprisons us. Which I would refuse to believe even if it were true, just for the joy of questioning authority. For even if there is no truth, there is still fun, and what's more fun that tweaking our leftist prison wards?

Remember: man is the "mediator between Heaven and earth." In our unfallen state, you could say this is the "end of the story," in that the Bible would abruptly end at Genesis 2:24, with man and woman naked and happy. What could go wrong?

The short answer: history.

Yes, yes, history is one long chronicle of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of our post Gen 3 exile in the bewilderness. But that's not all it is. For we insist there is nevertheless a vector, an inscape hatch from the egg, a path of return, a lifeline. The way forward is more or less an I witless foggus, but, like an airplane pilot, we may nevertheless novelgaze forward with the use of our God-given instruments:

"The clouds of the macrocosm are never permanent; they come only to go, the luminaries still shine, and the directions of space have lost nothing of their measurelessness" (Lings). Our primordial calamity veils the firmament but doesn't sever the link nor void the promise. God is still God, even if man will always be man.

Humans Hear a Who

Unity and totality. What are they, and where do they come from?

A totality without unity would be just a blob, while unity without totality would be an impenetrable monad. But darn it, that's not the kind of universe this is, nor the kind of people we are.

This topic may sound... whatever you think it sounds like, but I promise you it isn't, because it goes straight to the nub of the gist of the essence of things. First Philosophy, you might say, because you either have to address this issue or skip right past it while pretending you have dealt with it.

Let's start with an observation by Schmitz, that there must be "an immanent specifying principle," i.e., something that gives things form and makes them what they are -- this and not that. To put it another way, in the absence of the specifying principle, everything would be the same, and we're back to the cosmic blob. It has oneness but lacks all distinction.

Totality, on the other hand, "brings unity to an even wider context, to a system, horizon, or world. It is a kind of organizing form that brings diverse factors into a complex and more or less internally related arrangement."

Thus, it seems that formal unity is the more static of the two, while totality seems more of a process. In fact, totalizing might be a better way of expressing it.

For example, what is personal growth -- the kind of post-biological growth alluded to yesterday, subsequent to the achievement of (merely) formal adulthood? I don't know about you, but to me it feels like a kind of totalizing process whereby the person attains to a higher and deeper sense of totality. Call the latter One Cosmos, or the Cosmic Attractor toward which we are drawn.

Look at it this way. A person laboring under the dead weight of scientistic materialism will agree that there is One Cosmos. But what an impoverished cosmos it is! Sucked into the "vortex of objectivity," it is lacking precisely the totality under discussion. It is one, but in this case, one does not equal one. It doesn't even come close, for the most exterior thing still has an immaterial interiority that transcends materialism, otherwise we couldn't know anything about anything. Knowledge is a relationship and relationships are not material objects.

So there is really a dynamic complementarity between unity and totality. Physicists talk about a "theory of everything," but you can be sure this theory will go only to unity, not to totality. In a footnote, Schmitz dryly mentions that postmodernists "wish to make war upon totality."

This is an understatement, since they actually destroy the very possibility of totality up front, and then go on from there, cleaning up their own mess and calling it scholarship. A tenured barbarian can destroy in five minutes what took thousands of years to attain. In so doing, the postmodern savage is far more effective than those Muslims with hammers, although we don't want to find out what would happen if the latter were to replace their hammers with nuclear missiles.

Grinding our gears a bit, I want to turn to a book by Martin Lings called Symbol & Archetype, because I think it advances our discussion more deeply into Totality. I've only read one chapter so far, but it is so dense and rich that I had to stop to digest it. {Belch}

Lings begins with the bold statement that "symbolism is the most important thing in existence; and it is at the same time the sole explanation of existence." Really? Symbolism is the theory of everything we've been looking for?

This makes a kind of superficial sense, in that any explanation of existence is naturally symbolic, and a cosmos capable of symbolization is radically distinct from one that isn't. Ironically, we may conclude that the very possibility of a "theory of everything" rests on metaphysical grounds far more consequential than its specific content, for the theorist is essentially proclaiming I can explain everything!

In short, he is confessing to omniscience, which you will agree is more interesting than the theory itself. Omniscient products of random evolution? Wo! Now you need a theory for how that is even possible, being that it cannot be explained by your little theory of everything. If anything, your theory renders the theorist impossible, so you need to go back a few steps in order to account for this strange totality to which man is uniquely qualified to access.

We have touched on this subject in the past: that is, we just so happen to inhabit a cosmos in which one thing can stand for another. In short, it is a symbolic and symbolizing cosmos, and we are its privileged symbolees. How did that come about? In any event, we can be sure that physics in principle cannot explain it, only rely on it.

The literal meaning of symbol is something "thrown across." Here again, this implicit meaning is loaded with implicit assumptions about the nature of this universe. For example: thrown across what? Or, from who and to whom? Who? Wo, slow down. How did a who get into the cosmos? And can there be a who without a whom?

"Man himself," writes Lings, "is the greatest of earthly symbols" -- which follows from the "universal doctrine that he was made in the image of God." That language is unfortunately loaded -- or saturated -- such that its metaphysical meaning is lost to most. But in the context under discussion, it suggests that man himself is "thrown across," so to speak, just like any other symbol.

However, being the quintessential case, "man is the symbol of the sum of the attributes, that is, of the Divine Nature in its Totality."

There's that word again, totality. This implies that man is a symbolic totality thrown across a something by another Totality. Everything short of man is also a symbol, but in a much more limited way. They will have more or less unity, but not totality. Which is why we can know -- contain -- them, but not vice versa.

This is why the world "lies open" to us. It is a kind of open book, filled with words, which is to say, symbols. It's where the all the metaphysical transparency comes from, whether we are talking about truth, beauty, or unity.

Better stop. Gotta get ready for work.

Liberalism and Other Spiritual Abortifacients

Every psychologist has his pet developmental theory, but when you get right down to it, one could say human development has only two stages: the first runs from conception to adulthood, the second from adulthood to infinity and beyond, being that there can be no conceivable end to human post-biological development. It's like what they said about the quarterback Y.A. Tittle, if I am remembering rightly: he never lost a game, the clock just ran out.

The great within of the soul is oddly proportioned to the great beyond of God, in that man's worth, in the words of Schuon, "lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." Alternatively, if man is proportioned to relativity, then he is nothing, just as our tenured apes tell us.

What is the essential difference between these two movements? Well, the first must be guided by some sort of largely genetic telos, or morphogenetic field, or teleonomic attractor. It happens "by itself," given certain minimal environmental conditions, e.g., good enough mothering, good enough nourishment, and good enough information.

I am old enough to remember when being an adult wasn't considered much of an achievement. But in the contemporary world there is a panoply of barriers to the achievement of adulthood, virtually all erected by the cultural left. For example, they have no use for motherhood, with the predictable result of producing children with attachment disorders inhabiting adult bodies. That's no way to preserve and hand on a civilization.

The insanity of triggers, microaggressions, speech codes, and political correctness in general are just ways to protect children from the rigors of adulthood. Dennis Prager says the loudest applause he ever heard was during a commencement speech by Obama, when he reminded the supposedly grown-up students that with his healthcare plan, they would be able to stay on their parents' insurance until age 26! YAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY! Parasitism rules!

With so few children making it to adulthood, we can forget all about the second movement for most people. An abortion -- which is to say, an arrested birth -- can occur at any age. I believe it was Boris Mouravieff who coined the term "astral abortion." Let me look it up. Hmm, no index. Ahh, here it is. An astral abortion occurs should we fail to undergo the second birth, because we can't stay in the womb forever. Unless of course we receive tenure.

But once born again, this new "individuality no longer depends on the physical body, in the same way that the child who has been born does not die, even if his birth has been at the cost of his mother's life. It is this to which the apostle alluded, saying we shall not die."

At the very least, the person faces a life of arrested development if not born again from above, which facilitates transition from the little human cosmic womb to the big divine-human matrix which "forms the link between visible and invisible worlds." That link goes to the famous ombilical cord between man and God.

Some additional relevant observations from our guest bobstetrician: "If we were to imagine a perfect World based on a principle of perfect and stable equilibrium, it would be a petrified image -- that of Death. Above all else, Life is movement; movement from a flowing current," such that a key to evolution is broken equilibrium.

Which immediately calls to mind an aphorism: "An 'ideal society' would be the graveyard of human greatness" (Don Colacho).

This is precisely why liberal academia has become just such a graveyard, because it wants to create an ideal world for emotionally fragile children, such that there is no motivation for women to grow up or men to grow a pair.

Remember: the source of man's value -- his dignity -- is in that disequilibrium between us and God. You are of course free to pursue a life of equilibrium with the world, but if you succeed, then you fail.

About that disequilibrium: "God is infinitely close to man, but man is infinitely far from God." The first makes the journey possible, while the second makes it necessary. Again, unless you forge a static equilibrium between the two, which reduces to a death-in-life, for no one is more safe and secure than the dead.

Even before leaving genetic adulthood behind and below, we all have intimations of the beyond, which are analogous to the contractions of labor (second birthquakes). Eventually, the womb simply becomes too small to contain us. Which is why, as Schuon puts it, we discover "that the things of this world are never proportionate to our actual range of intelligence."

Think about that, because it is so experience-near that we can fail to appreciate the weirdness of it. All other animals short of man are indeed proportionate to the world; or not even the world, of which they know nothing (any more than they know of the universe). Rather, they know only their world, as in how a frog can see a living insect but will starve in the presence of dead ones. The dead ones simply fall off the frog's radar screen, as in how living truth ceases to exist for the liberal.

But man is never at equilibrium with the world, a condition which is both our privilege and a source of frustration if not seen rightly. You know Augustine's crack about not-resting-until-we-rest-in-God? This is what he's talking about, i.e., a kind of higher equilibrium that goes by different names in different traditions, e.g., beatitude, shanti, shalom, ananda, slack, etc. It can never be 100% "complete" in this life, because "only the 'divine dimension' can satisfy our thirst for plenitude in our willing or our love," and there are certain terrestrial barriers to full identification with it, such as our materiality.

The following also goes to the developmental continuum under discussion, that "The way towards God always involves an inversion: from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity" (Schuon).

Note that this doesn't necessarily involve withdrawal from the exterior world, but rather, the infusion of these latter qualities into the world, such that we pull ourselves out by our own buddhastraps -- i.e., the bodhisattva principle whereby we extricate our heads from our own aseity. Or just say down- and in-carnation.

Inwardness is a quality, not a place. You want to cultivate it everywhere, because it is where all the radiance radiates from, whether in the mode of truth, love, beauty, depth, light, etc.

The end, I guess, not that we've achieved equilibrium or anything. Rather, only the fruit of disequilibrium.