Toxic Feminism and Betacratic Tyranny

Nobody panics when progressive jokers blather on about something they call "toxic masculinity." But one little mention of toxic femininity -- AKA feminism -- and everyone loses their minds.  

Which isn't quite true, because their minds are already lost by virtue of believing in feminism to begin with.

Bob are you suggesting that feminism is intrinsically pathological?  Yes, precisely -- certainly in its contemporary manifestations. There was a time -- perhaps fifty or more years ago -- when a healthy man could be excused for falling for the rhetoric, if only to get these shrews to shut-up for five minutes. 

But today there is no excuse: feminism is a sickness (or a symptom of one; stay tuned to discover witch!).  It isn't healthy, least of all for women and girls.  

Moreover, since femininity can only be artificially detached from masculinity, it is the cause and consequence of sick men as well.  It is why we can never trust a "male feminist." Think it: a male feminist doesn't know.  He can never be a member of the Club, nor is he aware of the Code. And yet he's proud of it, like it's some sort of virtue!

But ignorance and stupidity are never virtues.

Does Bob sound angry this morning? Well, first of all, Bob is never angry, so you're just projecting again. 

Wait -- are you suggesting Bob is some kind of saint or something?  

Definitely not. He is not "above" anger, just way beyond it, into something resembling... how to put it... how about cold nausea? As usual, Dávila speaks -- and retches -- for me: 

Our spontaneous revulsions are often more lucid than our reasoned convictions.

One who does not share our repugnance does not understand our ideas.

And an old standby that is always worth regurgitating:

Moral indignation is not truly sincere unless it literally ends in vomiting.

First of all, if you think this problem is correctable -- let alone by politics -- you don't understand the nature of the problem, much less its magnitude. Conversely, if you do understand the magnitude of the problem, it ironically confers a kind of peace, if only the peace of resignation.  

I compare it to the peace that comes from having no options; in other words: No alternatives, No problem.  If death, for example,  were only a possibility, it would be far more anxiety provoking.

We all know people who have grown up and transitioned from illiberal leftism to liberal conservatism. How do we know when we can truly say to the convert:

GABBA GABBA WE ACCEPT YOU ONE OF US! 

Easy: when they are literally sickened at the thought of their old self.

Anyway, after completing yesterday's post, I plucked an old book from the shelf called Feminism & Freedom, and it's full of grade-A insultainment. I think we might have discussed it a number of years ago, but I don't remember.  Therefore, my bad memory is your good fortune.

(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887381251?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=0887381251)

Examples:

Surely no body of ideas is wrong about everything, as I imply feminism is.

How can a theory be wrong about everything? Easy: just begin with a first principle that is impossible, and everything follows as a matter of logic:

Any theory whose basic assumption about human nature is completely erroneous -- as I argue is the case with feminism -- is indeed bound to be wrong about everything else.

Okay then, why is it wrong? What's the big error? Why, it's so simple, a child can understand it -- unless the luckless child has sick parents who prevent her from seeing it:

Feminism is a program for making different beings -- men and women -- turn out alike.... 

More precisely, feminism is the thesis that males and females are already innately alike, with the current order of things -- in which males and females appear to differ and occupy quite different social roles -- being a harmful distortion of this fundamental similarity.

In short: reality, i.e., the order of things, is a harmful distortion. Which means feminists are hallucinating.  For gender differences are obviously real.  

So,  how does one transform reality into something it isn't?  The "patriarchy," as powerful as it is, is not powerful enough to eliminate reality. Rather, we need something more powerful than man (let alone woman).  I know!  The State!  It can do anything.  Supposing males are always trying to dominate this or that hierarchy,

The only agency that can prevent males in a human group from dominating it is a more powerful human group. 

True, but doesn't this just mean we'll ultimately be bossed around by male feminists -- whom we already know we can never trust?  Un-men such as Clinton, Obama, Biden -- or Bezos, Dorsey, & Zuckerman?  

Sure. You got a problem with that? Ultimately,  

one group's intervention in the affairs of another to strip its males of power does not transfer power to the females of the subject group; the real power goes to the dominant members of the dominant group -- who will be males if males are more interested in dominance than females.

Call it betocracy: rule by weak but sneaky beta males instead of a strong and transparent alpha.

To be continued...

Toxic Feminism and Betacratic Tyranny

Nobody panics when progressive jokers blather on about something they call "toxic masculinity." But one little mention of toxic femininity -- AKA feminism -- and everyone loses their minds.  

Which isn't quite true, because their minds are already lost by virtue of believing in feminism to begin with.

Bob are you suggesting that feminism is intrinsically pathological?  Yes, precisely -- certainly in its contemporary manifestations. There was a time -- perhaps fifty or more years ago -- when a healthy man could be excused for falling for the rhetoric, if only to get these shrews to shut-up for five minutes. 

But today there is no excuse: feminism is a sickness (or a symptom of one; stay tuned to discover witch!).  It isn't healthy, least of all for women and girls.  

Moreover, since femininity can only be artificially detached from masculinity, it is the cause and consequence of sick men as well.  It is why we can never trust a "male feminist." Think it: a male feminist doesn't know.  He can never be a member of the Club, nor is he aware of the Code. And yet he's proud of it, like it's some sort of virtue!

But ignorance and stupidity are never virtues.

Does Bob sound angry this morning? Well, first of all, Bob is never angry, so you're just projecting again. 

Wait -- are you suggesting Bob is some kind of saint or something?  

Definitely not. He is not "above" anger, just way beyond it, into something resembling... how to put it... how about cold nausea? As usual, Dávila speaks -- and retches -- for me: 

Our spontaneous revulsions are often more lucid than our reasoned convictions.

One who does not share our repugnance does not understand our ideas.

And an old standby that is always worth regurgitating:

Moral indignation is not truly sincere unless it literally ends in vomiting.

First of all, if you think this problem is correctable -- let alone by politics -- you don't understand the nature of the problem, much less its magnitude. Conversely, if you do understand the magnitude of the problem, it ironically confers a kind of peace, if only the peace of resignation.  

I compare it to the peace that comes from having no options; in other words: No alternatives, No problem.  If death, for example,  were only a possibility, it would be far more anxiety provoking.

We all know people who have grown up and transitioned from illiberal leftism to liberal conservatism. How do we know when we can truly say to the convert:

GABBA GABBA WE ACCEPT YOU ONE OF US! 

Easy: when they are literally sickened at the thought of their old self.

Anyway, after completing yesterday's post, I plucked an old book from the shelf called Feminism & Freedom, and it's full of grade-A insultainment. I think we might have discussed it a number of years ago, but I don't remember.  Therefore, my bad memory is your good fortune.

(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887381251?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=0887381251)

Examples:

Surely no body of ideas is wrong about everything, as I imply feminism is.

How can a theory be wrong about everything? Easy: just begin with a first principle that is impossible, and everything follows as a matter of logic:

Any theory whose basic assumption about human nature is completely erroneous -- as I argue is the case with feminism -- is indeed bound to be wrong about everything else.

Okay then, why is it wrong? What's the big error? Why, it's so simple, a child can understand it -- unless the luckless child has sick parents who prevent her from seeing it:

Feminism is a program for making different beings -- men and women -- turn out alike.... 

More precisely, feminism is the thesis that males and females are already innately alike, with the current order of things -- in which males and females appear to differ and occupy quite different social roles -- being a harmful distortion of this fundamental similarity.

In short: reality, i.e., the order of things, is a harmful distortion. Which means feminists are hallucinating.  For gender differences are obviously real.  

So,  how does one transform reality into something it isn't?  The "patriarchy," as powerful as it is, is not powerful enough to eliminate reality. Rather, we need something more powerful than man (let alone woman).  I know!  The State!  It can do anything.  Supposing males are always trying to dominate this or that hierarchy,

The only agency that can prevent males in a human group from dominating it is a more powerful human group. 

True, but doesn't this just mean we'll ultimately be bossed around by male feminists -- whom we already know we can never trust?  Un-men such as Clinton, Obama, Biden -- or Bezos, Dorsey, & Zuckerman?  

Sure. You got a problem with that? Ultimately,  

one group's intervention in the affairs of another to strip its males of power does not transfer power to the females of the subject group; the real power goes to the dominant members of the dominant group -- who will be males if males are more interested in dominance than females.

Call it betocracy: rule by weak but sneaky beta males instead of a strong and transparent alpha.

To be continued...

Toxic Femininity and Hell on Earth

I had an acute case of Baader-Meinhof a couple days ago. First there was a tweet that said:

Much of what we call leftism is simply femaleism.

As evolutionary biology would predict. 

(https://twitter.com/HappyHectares/status/1334122286190759936) 

Which immediately provoked the idea for this post, or at least proposed a hypothetical equation in my head:

Leftism = Toxic femininity

Later in the day I switched channels to American Digest, where I read the following:

Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny.

(http://americandigest.org/the-emphasis-added-aristotle-on-tyranny/#comments) 

To top it off,  later that same day I peeked over at Instapundit, where there was a link to an essay asking if our boyfriend is effeminate. The essay isn't worth reading, as it essentially lumps together every negative trait the author can think of under the heading "effeminate." 

(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/417740/) 

She claims this term is "not to be confused with 'femininity,'" but rather, "is the opposite of masculinity." But according to Mr. Webster, it means precisely that, i.e., "having feminine qualities untypical of a man: not manly in appearance or manner." 

The author instead equates effeminacy with "attachment to pleasure," but there's already a word for that: hedonism.  

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us with this post, which I felt more enthusiastic about yesterday, when I started it, than I do today, when I'm dutifully finishing it. Nevertheless, I feel like I owe it to the cosmos to take seriously such a synchronicitous trifecta of internet references. 

In other words, if the cosmic slot machine goes to all the trouble of coming up triple cherries for me, the least I can do is inquire as to why. Perhaps there's a big payoff in store. Or maybe it's just God making a silly pun, as usual.   

So: is there something about leftism that revolves around toxic femininity? Well, I suppose it depends upon what we mean by "toxic." And "femininity. "

Regarding the latter, there is masculinity and there is femininity, each being archetypal and therefore teleological. Precisely because they are teleological and not simply given all at once, they can veer off course, i.e., they can become pathological.  In other words, pathology itself is a failure to achieve what the system or organ or archetype is designed to do. 

Much as I'd like to descend immediately into insultainment, this is a complex subject. Nor do I want to mirror the author above and lump everything I don't like into a bitch's brew of Toxic Leftism. 

Let's cut to the chase, or to my conclusion, and then perhaps try to back it up, even though my cerebrated angelic intelligence informs me this isn't strictly necessary, i.e., that seeing is believing.

There is masculinity and there is femininity, each an essential human quality. However, these do not constitute a dualism, but rather, a complementarity. Neither is reducible to the other, nor is it possible to understand one without reference to the other. 

Moreover, we cannot describe, say, a "healthy masculinity" in the absence of the femininity which partly defines it.  If there were no women -- no feminine -- there could be no healthy or unhealthy masculinity. And vice versa: if there is no healthy masculinity, then there can be no crazy ex-wives from hell -- Nancy Pelosi, Sandy Cortez, Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow, Ruth Ginsburg, Maxine Waters, et al, would all be considered perfectly normal. 

Now, Petey informs me that the masculine-feminine pole isn't just horizontal but vertical; it manifests at every level of being -- some say as being itself, being that being must always be placed in the context of beyond-being, however one wishes to conceptualize the latter.  

The point I am making is a subtle or possibly just cranky one, but there is the cataphatic God we can know about and the apophatic God about whom we can know nothing (i.e., know nothing, not know nothing). Speaking only for myself and for Petey, it looks to us like Being is masculine in relation to the ultimate feminine womb-matrix of Beyond-Being.  

This no doubt smells a bit heterodox, but there are precedents, and not just Meister Eckhart, who wrote that "From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing."

However, there is also the sempiternal birth of existence from being, which has always been understood conversely, i.e., the masculine God and the feminine creation (e..g., "mother nature," or "Maya," or "Prakriti").  

Here again, these views are not contradictory but complementary -- much like the two stories of creation in Genesis. The first is more like Being from Beyond-Being, the second more like Existence from Being.

Bob, could you get any further afield?  

I don't know, but I'll try. Elsewhere Eckhart adverts to what we are calling Beyond-Being:

--The divine one is a negation of negations and a denial of denials.

--God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingness; and yet God is something.

--God is being beyond all being; God is a beingless being.

--The final goal of being is the darkness and the unknowability of the hidden divinity, which is that light which shines 'but the darkness cannot comprehend it.'

--God acts but the Godhead does not act. The mystery of the darkness of the eternal Godhead is unknown and never was known and never will be known.

I know: just like a woman.  

But there's more. If ultimate reality is a kind of eternal birthing, then I believe it helps us to comprehend what it means for the the Son to be eternally begotten and not made (the latter implying a creation in time). 

It also goes to the very nub of the gist of the whole point of the Incarnation, which, for Eckhart, is to facilitate this same eternal birth in ourselves:

Pay attention now to exactly where this birth takes place: this eternal birth takes place in the soul totally in the manner in which it takes place in eternity....

There is only one birth -- and this birth takes place in the being and in the ground and core of the soul.

Now, you may not agree with the Meistero, which is fine. Different storks for different dorks. Still, this is how I see it:  

And the Creator extends the same power to you out of the divine maternity bed located in the Godhead to eternally give birth.   

In other words, this is the ultimate explanation of our own inexhaustible creativity.  Or, let's say a more majestic explanation -- one that honors the extraordinary privilege of being cosmic co-creators:

Let me express myself in even a clearer way. The fruitful person gives birth out of the very same foundation from which the Creator begets the eternal Word... and it is from this core that one becomes fruitfully pregnant.

I guess we're almost done, and it would be bad form at this point to throw in some cheap shots about the toxic femininity of the left. Still, Eckhart wonders,

Why is it that some people do not bear fruit?

He suggests that it is due to a lack of faith in God. Which is not an issue for the left, since they posit no God in whom we owe our faith, only a State to whom we owe our obedience. 

Now, is this State a bad mother -- shut your mouth! -- or a bad father?

Trick question!

For it is both, the discordant marriage of a shrieking, hyperemotional femininity and an obnoxiously bullying masculinity, each equally toxic.  Also known as hell.

Toxic Femininity and Hell on Earth

I had an acute case of Baader-Meinhof a couple days ago. First there was a tweet that said:

Much of what we call leftism is simply femaleism.

As evolutionary biology would predict. 

(https://twitter.com/HappyHectares/status/1334122286190759936) 

Which immediately provoked the idea for this post, or at least proposed a hypothetical equation in my head:

Leftism = Toxic femininity

Later in the day I switched channels to American Digest, where I read the following:

Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny.

(http://americandigest.org/the-emphasis-added-aristotle-on-tyranny/#comments) 

To top it off,  later that same day I peeked over at Instapundit, where there was a link to an essay asking if our boyfriend is effeminate. The essay isn't worth reading, as it essentially lumps together every negative trait the author can think of under the heading "effeminate." 

(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/417740/) 

She claims this term is "not to be confused with 'femininity,'" but rather, "is the opposite of masculinity." But according to Mr. Webster, it means precisely that, i.e., "having feminine qualities untypical of a man: not manly in appearance or manner." 

The author instead equates effeminacy with "attachment to pleasure," but there's already a word for that: hedonism.  

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us with this post, which I felt more enthusiastic about yesterday, when I started it, than I do today, when I'm dutifully finishing it. Nevertheless, I feel like I owe it to the cosmos to take seriously such a synchronicitous trifecta of internet references. 

In other words, if the cosmic slot machine goes to all the trouble of coming up triple cherries for me, the least I can do is inquire as to why. Perhaps there's a big payoff in store. Or maybe it's just God making a silly pun, as usual.   

So: is there something about leftism that revolves around toxic femininity? Well, I suppose it depends upon what we mean by "toxic." And "femininity. "

Regarding the latter, there is masculinity and there is femininity, each being archetypal and therefore teleological. Precisely because they are teleological and not simply given all at once, they can veer off course, i.e., they can become pathological.  In other words, pathology itself is a failure to achieve what the system or organ or archetype is designed to do. 

Much as I'd like to descend immediately into insultainment, this is a complex subject. Nor do I want to mirror the author above and lump everything I don't like into a bitch's brew of Toxic Leftism. 

Let's cut to the chase, or to my conclusion, and then perhaps try to back it up, even though my cerebrated angelic intelligence informs me this isn't strictly necessary, i.e., that seeing is believing.

There is masculinity and there is femininity, each an essential human quality. However, these do not constitute a dualism, but rather, a complementarity. Neither is reducible to the other, nor is it possible to understand one without reference to the other. 

Moreover, we cannot describe, say, a "healthy masculinity" in the absence of the femininity which partly defines it.  If there were no women -- no feminine -- there could be no healthy or unhealthy masculinity. And vice versa: if there is no healthy masculinity, then there can be no crazy ex-wives from hell -- Nancy Pelosi, Sandy Cortez, Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow, Ruth Ginsburg, Maxine Waters, et al, would all be considered perfectly normal. 

Now, Petey informs me that the masculine-feminine pole isn't just horizontal but vertical; it manifests at every level of being -- some say as being itself, being that being must always be placed in the context of beyond-being, however one wishes to conceptualize the latter.  

The point I am making is a subtle or possibly just cranky one, but there is the cataphatic God we can know about and the apophatic God about whom we can know nothing (i.e., know nothing, not know nothing). Speaking only for myself and for Petey, it looks to us like Being is masculine in relation to the ultimate feminine womb-matrix of Beyond-Being.  

This no doubt smells a bit heterodox, but there are precedents, and not just Meister Eckhart, who wrote that "From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing."

However, there is also the sempiternal birth of existence from being, which has always been understood conversely, i.e., the masculine God and the feminine creation (e..g., "mother nature," or "Maya," or "Prakriti").  

Here again, these views are not contradictory but complementary -- much like the two stories of creation in Genesis. The first is more like Being from Beyond-Being, the second more like Existence from Being.

Bob, could you get any further afield?  

I don't know, but I'll try. Elsewhere Eckhart adverts to what we are calling Beyond-Being:

--The divine one is a negation of negations and a denial of denials.

--God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingness; and yet God is something.

--God is being beyond all being; God is a beingless being.

--The final goal of being is the darkness and the unknowability of the hidden divinity, which is that light which shines 'but the darkness cannot comprehend it.'

--God acts but the Godhead does not act. The mystery of the darkness of the eternal Godhead is unknown and never was known and never will be known.

I know: just like a woman.  

But there's more. If ultimate reality is a kind of eternal birthing, then I believe it helps us to comprehend what it means for the the Son to be eternally begotten and not made (the latter implying a creation in time). 

It also goes to the very nub of the gist of the whole point of the Incarnation, which, for Eckhart, is to facilitate this same eternal birth in ourselves:

Pay attention now to exactly where this birth takes place: this eternal birth takes place in the soul totally in the manner in which it takes place in eternity....

There is only one birth -- and this birth takes place in the being and in the ground and core of the soul.

Now, you may not agree with the Meistero, which is fine. Different storks for different dorks. Still, this is how I see it:  

And the Creator extends the same power to you out of the divine maternity bed located in the Godhead to eternally give birth.   

In other words, this is the ultimate explanation of our own inexhaustible creativity.  Or, let's say a more majestic explanation -- one that honors the extraordinary privilege of being cosmic co-creators:

Let me express myself in even a clearer way. The fruitful person gives birth out of the very same foundation from which the Creator begets the eternal Word... and it is from this core that one becomes fruitfully pregnant.

I guess we're almost done, and it would be bad form at this point to throw in some cheap shots about the toxic femininity of the left. Still, Eckhart wonders,

Why is it that some people do not bear fruit?

He suggests that it is due to a lack of faith in God. Which is not an issue for the left, since they posit no God in whom we owe our faith, only a State to whom we owe our obedience. 

Now, is this State a bad mother -- shut your mouth! -- or a bad father?

Trick question!

For it is both, the discordant marriage of a shrieking, hyperemotional femininity and an obnoxiously bullying masculinity, each equally toxic.  Also known as hell.

Absurd Gaps, Tenured Saps, and Complete Maps of the Cosmos

What else can be said about Angels and Orwell? Or have I written myself into a corner again?  

Well, one further point is that human intelligence, as great a thing as it is, is still pretty weak in the overall cosmic scheme of things. There's a reason why we not only so often get things wrong, but catastrophically so.  

Human -- qua human -- intelligence has some defects that can't really be remedied except in a handful of cases, and it can take your whole life just to track down their names and addresses. Truly, they are freaks -- faculty members of their own elite university.

There's a communion of saints. There is also a communion of geniuses -- of fertile eggheads and lumen beings.  Moreover, -- obviously -- these two converge: In a fiery intelligence the materials are not fused into a new alloy; they are integrated into a new element (Dávila).

Note that what I just said -- about the convergence of sanctity and brilliance -- is an example of a transtemporal truth that would make no sense whatsoever in the contemporary university. If would be rejected out of hand as not even wrong.

Which means that in the very place where intelligent people supposedly congregate, these folkers don't even know the first thing about intelligence, i.e., what it is and whence it comes. Thus, the intellectual community of the modern university unwittingly reflects the following ironyclad aphorism:

Intelligence isolates; stupidity brings together. 

It cannot be sufficiently stressed how anti-intellectual this is: not just unintelligent, but opposed to intelligence:

Modern philosophy, in rejecting the intelligence, has rejected the cornerstone of the whole edifice of continuity and progress in the universe (Sheen). 

Ever wonder why progressives can't help but be so backward in their thinking? Because they violate the principle that renders progress possible. 

Another key point -- this one also a bit ironic -- is that everyone believes in angels, and can't help believing in angels. However, the left does so implicitly, while assuming the function of angelic intelligence -- i.e., they claim to know things that only an angelic intellect could know.

This is a somewhat subtle point, or maybe my intelligence just isn't sufficiently angelic to explain it. But according to Sheen, modern philosophy has, in ideal, 

given man an angelic intelligence, and thus has broken continuity with the lower orders; in fact, it has given man a degenerate sense knowledge, and has broken continuity with the higher orders.

This explains so much about the metaphysical absurdity of the left, that it makes me want to slap yo' mama and my angel at the same time. On the one hand, modern philosophy insists on cosmic continuity (as must any philosophy). But it situates the continuity "below," thereby dragging down the very intelligence that posits and transcends it.  

In short, there is surely a temporal "evolution" in the cosmos, but only because it is ontologically posterior to an atemporal involution -- or to the timeless hierarchical structure of things; absent this structure, then, well, nothing.

Continuity and unity; or time and space, respectively.  Now, no one posits one without the other, since it is not possible to do so. But this doesn't stop them from trying, which is precisely what, say, an "angelic scientism" is: an oxymoronic orthodoxy. 

In other words, scientism (or metaphysical Darwinism, or leftoid neo-Marxism) reduces human intelligence to the animal or material while elevating it to a grand unified synthesis of reality.  This represents a kind of infracosmic stupidity of which there can be no stupider. 

Conversely, the sanctified intelligence of a St. Thomas

is constantly recurring to the principle of unification that runs through the universe.... For him the principle of unification is valid only on condition that there is no subordination of the higher to the lower order.

Unification is and must be from above; if it is from below, that's not unification, that's agglomeration and/or annihilation. I suppose it's a kind of unity, in that it turns your head into a desolate parking lot, but so what? Nothing is that stupid, let alone everything. 

Is life higher than matter? Is mind higher than life? Modern philosophy, left to its own resources and principles, can only say Nah. 

Now, the angelic intelligence can see God, and is therefore not in need of arguments to "prove" his existence. Analogously, no one has to use logic to convince me that the swimming pool I'm looking at is real. Indeed, in this context, any argument for the existence of the pool is weaker than my simply seeing it (let alone swimming in it). Merely reasoning about its existence is a defect, or at least rooted in one.  

The same principle applies to... to everything. In no persons short of God is there perfect correlation of knowledge and essence, or intelligence and intelligibility. 

But for us the perfection is on a continuum, e.g., from facts to conclusions to knowledge to prudence to wisdom. Is it controversial to suggest that hordes of intelligent people are bereft of wisdom, or that a faulty intelligence can misappropriate facts with diabolical facility?

It's getting late. We'll end with a passage by Sheen followed by an aphorism:

Without the intelligence there can be no continuity and no fluidity in the universe.... Discard the intelligence and you create a gap in the universe that no instinct or imaginal can fill.... Recognize the intelligence and you have a harmonious progression of perfections reaching even to God himself. Posit intelligence, and evolution becomes intelligible; deny it, and it becomes absurd. 

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.

Absurd Gaps, Tenured Saps, and Complete Maps of the Cosmos

What else can be said about Angels and Orwell? Or have I written myself into a corner again?  

Well, one further point is that human intelligence, as great a thing as it is, is still pretty weak in the overall cosmic scheme of things. There's a reason why we not only so often get things wrong, but catastrophically so.  

Human -- qua human -- intelligence has some defects that can't really be remedied except in a handful of cases, and it can take your whole life just to track down their names and addresses. Truly, they are freaks -- faculty members of their own elite university.

There's a communion of saints. There is also a communion of geniuses -- of fertile eggheads and lumen beings.  Moreover, -- obviously -- these two converge: In a fiery intelligence the materials are not fused into a new alloy; they are integrated into a new element (Dávila).

Note that what I just said -- about the convergence of sanctity and brilliance -- is an example of a transtemporal truth that would make no sense whatsoever in the contemporary university. If would be rejected out of hand as not even wrong.

Which means that in the very place where intelligent people supposedly congregate, these folkers don't even know the first thing about intelligence, i.e., what it is and whence it comes. Thus, the intellectual community of the modern university unwittingly reflects the following ironyclad aphorism:

Intelligence isolates; stupidity brings together. 

It cannot be sufficiently stressed how anti-intellectual this is: not just unintelligent, but opposed to intelligence:

Modern philosophy, in rejecting the intelligence, has rejected the cornerstone of the whole edifice of continuity and progress in the universe (Sheen). 

Ever wonder why progressives can't help but be so backward in their thinking? Because they violate the principle that renders progress possible. 

Another key point -- this one also a bit ironic -- is that everyone believes in angels, and can't help believing in angels. However, the left does so implicitly, while assuming the function of angelic intelligence -- i.e., they claim to know things that only an angelic intellect could know.

This is a somewhat subtle point, or maybe my intelligence just isn't sufficiently angelic to explain it. But according to Sheen, modern philosophy has, in ideal, 

given man an angelic intelligence, and thus has broken continuity with the lower orders; in fact, it has given man a degenerate sense knowledge, and has broken continuity with the higher orders.

This explains so much about the metaphysical absurdity of the left, that it makes me want to slap yo' mama and my angel at the same time. On the one hand, modern philosophy insists on cosmic continuity (as must any philosophy). But it situates the continuity "below," thereby dragging down the very intelligence that posits and transcends it.  

In short, there is surely a temporal "evolution" in the cosmos, but only because it is ontologically posterior to an atemporal involution -- or to the timeless hierarchical structure of things; absent this structure, then, well, nothing.

Continuity and unity; or time and space, respectively.  Now, no one posits one without the other, since it is not possible to do so. But this doesn't stop them from trying, which is precisely what, say, an "angelic scientism" is: an oxymoronic orthodoxy. 

In other words, scientism (or metaphysical Darwinism, or leftoid neo-Marxism) reduces human intelligence to the animal or material while elevating it to a grand unified synthesis of reality.  This represents a kind of infracosmic stupidity of which there can be no stupider. 

Conversely, the sanctified intelligence of a St. Thomas

is constantly recurring to the principle of unification that runs through the universe.... For him the principle of unification is valid only on condition that there is no subordination of the higher to the lower order.

Unification is and must be from above; if it is from below, that's not unification, that's agglomeration and/or annihilation. I suppose it's a kind of unity, in that it turns your head into a desolate parking lot, but so what? Nothing is that stupid, let alone everything. 

Is life higher than matter? Is mind higher than life? Modern philosophy, left to its own resources and principles, can only say Nah. 

Now, the angelic intelligence can see God, and is therefore not in need of arguments to "prove" his existence. Analogously, no one has to use logic to convince me that the swimming pool I'm looking at is real. Indeed, in this context, any argument for the existence of the pool is weaker than my simply seeing it (let alone swimming in it). Merely reasoning about its existence is a defect, or at least rooted in one.  

The same principle applies to... to everything. In no persons short of God is there perfect correlation of knowledge and essence, or intelligence and intelligibility. 

But for us the perfection is on a continuum, e.g., from facts to conclusions to knowledge to prudence to wisdom. Is it controversial to suggest that hordes of intelligent people are bereft of wisdom, or that a faulty intelligence can misappropriate facts with diabolical facility?

It's getting late. We'll end with a passage by Sheen followed by an aphorism:

Without the intelligence there can be no continuity and no fluidity in the universe.... Discard the intelligence and you create a gap in the universe that no instinct or imaginal can fill.... Recognize the intelligence and you have a harmonious progression of perfections reaching even to God himself. Posit intelligence, and evolution becomes intelligible; deny it, and it becomes absurd. 

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.

Big Tech is Watching You

Yesterday I reread 1984 just to get a peek at what else the left might have in store for us in the coming years. 

What is so striking about Orwell's description of the totalitarian mindset is how accurate it is in the small details. It makes me wonder if he was actually seeing into the essence of the left -- like an object before him -- as opposed to verbally articulating an abstract and conceptual ideology.

This is of course how angels know stuff, but there is some overlap between men and angels. In our hierarchical, full-employment cosmos, one man's ceiling is another man's floor, such that the toppermost of one level intersects with the underleast of the next. This is how we end up with dogs that are almost human and a few scattered humans who possess an almost angelic intelligence.

The quintessential case is St. Thomas, who is even called the "angelic doctor."  At the other end, I read somewhere that the creators of the Simpsons modeled Homer after canine psychology, always asking "what would a dog do in this situation?"

Sometimes I feel as if I'm thinking like an angel (when I'm not thinking like a dog), so it can't be that uncommon. Probably most everyone does it at times. In his God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, Sheen asks "what is the highest perfection of the human intelligence?"

It is a kind of intellectual perception and intuition by which it seizes essences.... This intuition is feeble..., but it is nevertheless the link between it and the next highest order of the intelligence, namely, the angelic. 

He goes on to say that "All angelic knowledge is by intuition; it does not abstract, as the human mind does; it does not reason, as we do; it sees. Its whole intellectual life is an intuition."

For me, Schuon is another example of angelic intelligence. Moreover, when he points at something he is seeing, I could swear I see it too! Maybe not as clearly as he does, but through the usual fog & haze. 

Of course, we are not angels, so the great danger is that our transcendent intuition can get mixed up with other levels and influences, from human to dog to snake.  Moreover, a -- perhaps THE -- great temptation is to work inversely and project a pseudo-angelic intuition onto the world.  

This is what ideology does, precisely, which is what makes it demonic. Ideological thinking is clearly an inverted and perverted form of angelic intelligence. Not for nothing does Voegelin regard all ideology as gnostic in form, irrespective of the specific substance. 

Above I mentioned that I sometimes feel as if I'm thinking like an angel. But I have nothing on a Karl Marx, who imagined he was seeing into the essence of all history and mankind! That was most certainly angelic, bearing in mind that demons are angels too.

Let's describe the angelic dimension in a little more detail. First of all, it is the order between man and God -- just as there exists an order between man and biology, or between biology and matter.  "Each angel transmits to the angel immediately inferior the knowledge which it receives from above." However, -- and this is key --

It does not transmit this illumination in its fullness and perfection, but according to the capacity of the lower intelligence, just as a learned scientist does not transmit principles of science to his intellectual inferiors without examples.

So, we can apprehend the angelic, but always through a more or less darkened glass. Which is one of the reasons why a big part of the spiritual life comes down to cleaning windows. Nevertheless, the clearest  window is still a window and not a door.  The Door is another martyr. 

According to the capacity of the lower intelligence. This is why, no matter how angelic my pronouncements, our trolls can't help understanding them in the form of their own limited intelligence. It's not my fault; rather, it's just that what I am conveying clashes with some crystalized and internalized demonic ideology. 

Which I myself well remember! I know exactly what it feels like when truth crashes against my recalcitrant arrogance, stupidity, and contemptuousness. I am by no means excluding myself from the game.

No creature, however perfect, by the mere fact of its inherent imperfection, can fill the gap between itself and God. 

Now, toss in the acquired imperfection of our fallenness, and you've got an endless funferall and ruseinaction! Or divine comedy. For the cosmos "is not a juxtaposition of indifferently related" strands and  what-have-yous, but "a harmonious crescendo of perfections from the lowest minerals up to God -- a hymn to the Creator."

It just sings a little off key sometimes. Nevertheless, "The intelligence is the key to the communion of the human and the angelic and the divine. From God, who is the source of intellectual light, knowledge descends progressively" until it reaches us, of all people. 

It becomes feebler as it grows in distance from its source, just as the rays of the sun become enfeebled as they are removed further from their source.

The same goes triple for the light of truth, beauty, and goodness.  

I can't end this post without a little bit of Orwellian insultainment. I was struck at how prescient he was in his description of Newspeak -- which in our day is Newspeak. Our liberal media (singular, and for good reason!) is indeed the Ministry of Truth, AKA Minitrue, the purpose of which is "to make all other modes of thought impossible."  It "was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought."

Mission accomplished. Paraphrasing Sr. Dávila: A vocabulary of ten words is enough for the leftist to explain history.

One thing Orwell got wrong was the Two Minutes Hate. With CNN and MSNBC and all the rest, it's a 24 Hour Hate -- which makes one wonder what they'll do without Emannuel Trumpstein to be responsible for everything that is wrong in the world.  

I wouldn't worry -- one way or another, the Enemy of the People isn't going anywhere, for he is the Primal Traitor, the Defiler of our Purity, the Perennial Saboteur under the protection of Foreign Paymasters. He doesn't need the left, but the left can't go a day without him.

Big Tech is Watching You

Yesterday I reread 1984 just to get a peek at what else the left might have in store for us in the coming years. 

What is so striking about Orwell's description of the totalitarian mindset is how accurate it is in the small details. It makes me wonder if he was actually seeing into the essence of the left -- like an object before him -- as opposed to verbally articulating an abstract and conceptual ideology.

This is of course how angels know stuff, but there is some overlap between men and angels. In our hierarchical, full-employment cosmos, one man's ceiling is another man's floor, such that the toppermost of one level intersects with the underleast of the next. This is how we end up with dogs that are almost human and a few scattered humans who possess an almost angelic intelligence.

The quintessential case is St. Thomas, who is even called the "angelic doctor."  At the other end, I read somewhere that the creators of the Simpsons modeled Homer after canine psychology, always asking "what would a dog do in this situation?"

Sometimes I feel as if I'm thinking like an angel (when I'm not thinking like a dog), so it can't be that uncommon. Probably most everyone does it at times. In his God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, Sheen asks "what is the highest perfection of the human intelligence?"

It is a kind of intellectual perception and intuition by which it seizes essences.... This intuition is feeble..., but it is nevertheless the link between it and the next highest order of the intelligence, namely, the angelic. 

He goes on to say that "All angelic knowledge is by intuition; it does not abstract, as the human mind does; it does not reason, as we do; it sees. Its whole intellectual life is an intuition."

For me, Schuon is another example of angelic intelligence. Moreover, when he points at something he is seeing, I could swear I see it too! Maybe not as clearly as he does, but through the usual fog & haze. 

Of course, we are not angels, so the great danger is that our transcendent intuition can get mixed up with other levels and influences, from human to dog to snake.  Moreover, a -- perhaps THE -- great temptation is to work inversely and project a pseudo-angelic intuition onto the world.  

This is what ideology does, precisely, which is what makes it demonic. Ideological thinking is clearly an inverted and perverted form of angelic intelligence. Not for nothing does Voegelin regard all ideology as gnostic in form, irrespective of the specific substance. 

Above I mentioned that I sometimes feel as if I'm thinking like an angel. But I have nothing on a Karl Marx, who imagined he was seeing into the essence of all history and mankind! That was most certainly angelic, bearing in mind that demons are angels too.

Let's describe the angelic dimension in a little more detail. First of all, it is the order between man and God -- just as there exists an order between man and biology, or between biology and matter.  "Each angel transmits to the angel immediately inferior the knowledge which it receives from above." However, -- and this is key --

It does not transmit this illumination in its fullness and perfection, but according to the capacity of the lower intelligence, just as a learned scientist does not transmit principles of science to his intellectual inferiors without examples.

So, we can apprehend the angelic, but always through a more or less darkened glass. Which is one of the reasons why a big part of the spiritual life comes down to cleaning windows. Nevertheless, the clearest  window is still a window and not a door.  The Door is another martyr. 

According to the capacity of the lower intelligence. This is why, no matter how angelic my pronouncements, our trolls can't help understanding them in the form of their own limited intelligence. It's not my fault; rather, it's just that what I am conveying clashes with some crystalized and internalized demonic ideology. 

Which I myself well remember! I know exactly what it feels like when truth crashes against my recalcitrant arrogance, stupidity, and contemptuousness. I am by no means excluding myself from the game.

No creature, however perfect, by the mere fact of its inherent imperfection, can fill the gap between itself and God. 

Now, toss in the acquired imperfection of our fallenness, and you've got an endless funferall and ruseinaction! Or divine comedy. For the cosmos "is not a juxtaposition of indifferently related" strands and  what-have-yous, but "a harmonious crescendo of perfections from the lowest minerals up to God -- a hymn to the Creator."

It just sings a little off key sometimes. Nevertheless, "The intelligence is the key to the communion of the human and the angelic and the divine. From God, who is the source of intellectual light, knowledge descends progressively" until it reaches us, of all people. 

It becomes feebler as it grows in distance from its source, just as the rays of the sun become enfeebled as they are removed further from their source.

The same goes triple for the light of truth, beauty, and goodness.  

I can't end this post without a little bit of Orwellian insultainment. I was struck at how prescient he was in his description of Newspeak -- which in our day is Newspeak. Our liberal media (singular, and for good reason!) is indeed the Ministry of Truth, AKA Minitrue, the purpose of which is "to make all other modes of thought impossible."  It "was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought."

Mission accomplished. Paraphrasing Sr. Dávila: A vocabulary of ten words is enough for the leftist to explain history.

One thing Orwell got wrong was the Two Minutes Hate. With CNN and MSNBC and all the rest, it's a 24 Hour Hate -- which makes one wonder what they'll do without Emannuel Trumpstein to be responsible for everything that is wrong in the world.  

I wouldn't worry -- one way or another, the Enemy of the People isn't going anywhere, for he is the Primal Traitor, the Defiler of our Purity, the Perennial Saboteur under the protection of Foreign Paymasters. He doesn't need the left, but the left can't go a day without him.

First Things First

Let's review.

Okay. Review what?

Good question. We're nearly caught up (or given up) with our desk-clearing, with just a few miscellaneous zingers, gags, and aphorisms strewn about, such as  

Modern philosophy erects a wall of separation between intellect and reality.

We could spin that one into another whole post, but why bother? We get it, and they never will: truth is the link between intellect and being. If not, then to hell with it.  

As everyone knows, anything deep and true is conservative. Some things are true but not particularly deep, e.g., science. Others are deep but not true, assuming ideology can ever truly be deep. For it is written:

Confused ideas and murky ponds seem deep.

Jump headfirst into this shallow pond, and you're likely to knock yourself unconscious.  

Ideology is the antithesis of philosophy as such. There is a law of identity in this here cosmos, such that One ≠ Two; and the very point of philosophy is to comprehend and assimilate the oneness of this one. If we couldn't do this, there would be no such thing as progress.  

There exist many sciences, from physics to chemistry to biology and on up.  But to posit two or more philosophies is incoherent. Even if one hasn't arrived there, one must implicitly posit oneness as both the ground and telos, or alpha and omega, of thought.

I love simple and straightforward definitions of things, with few adjectives, less equivocation, and no poetry. The latter of course has its uses, but also its misuses.  Beware of, say, bad poets masquerading as worse judges. It's how we end up with a SCOTUS decision that includes the following purple passage by Justice Deepak Kennedy:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Yes, the infamous Mystery Passage. Nice sentiment, but what does it have to do with the Constitution as written, much less with abortion? Does the baby get to exercise this liberty? Or nah? 

Note that it pretends to be a principle, but this is precisely what it can never be, on pain of eliminating the Constitution and even law itself. 

For if law reduces to my right to define reality as I please, then we are all as crazy as the craziest progressive, with no cure. This crock of a doctrine simply allows imbeciles to call themselves philosophers. 

You wouldn't say there are "two physics" -- although I suppose that horsesh*t  has already left the barn too, what with the calls for gendered physics and maths of color.

Let's get back to the principle of one philosophy. Now, this doesn't mean we can't argue over the substance of this one philosophy, but let's not pretend old nobodaddy can be plurabelle.  Don't be buffaloed: nobody's right if everybody's wrong. Likewise, if everybody's right, then nobody is. 

Moreover, if you only understand one side of the question, you understand neither side, let alone the top and bottom.

I know we've discussed this before, but here it comes again: one cosmos, one human nature, one truth, one God, just ONE, gagdaddit!

Allow me to quote Cardinal Mercier on the matter: "philosophy does not profess to be a particularized science, with a place alongside other such sciences and a restricted domain of its own for investigation." 

Nor is it merely the sum of these particular sciences. Rather, it is their unity, both anterior, in a pre-differentiated manner, and posterior, in all their differentiation, i.e., in a higher unity: we analyze in order to synthesize, and abstract in order to unite.  

Science itself is the reduction of multiplicity to unity: as it advances -- say, from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or from Newtonian to quantum physics -- it unifies more disparate phenomena. It becomes both truer and deeper. 

Unless it fancies itself to be truth itself, much less the "deepest truth," at which point it careens off the shallow end into anti-philosophy, i.e., a silly caricature if itsoph.

The Cardinal defines philosophy as "The science of all things through their ultimate and deepest reasons." Again, it is the final answer to the Last Why. The deepest knowledge is the end of the line. It is known with certitude, and this certitude equates to rest. But the left hates rest -- it loves the opposite, "activism" -- and aways wants to stir things up.

For example, who, even a decade ago, would have predicted we would be relitigating the question of free speech? Or that half the country would favor corporate censorship of the other half?  Even Petey didn't see that coming.

Chesterton: "When a society has two souls, there is -- and ought to be -- civil war.... for anything which has dual personality is certainly mad; and probably possessed by devils."

One God and one Truth. Conversely,  many demons and countless lies.

I gotta get some work done, but not before we locate a few aphorisms to help wrap things up in a more restful and slack-infused way:

Because opinions change, the relativist believes that truths change.

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about the truth.

The truth does not need the adherence of man in order to be certain.

To change thoughts repeatedly is not to evolve. To evolve is to develop the infinitude of a single thought.  --Dávila 

First Things First

Let's review.

Okay. Review what?

Good question. We're nearly caught up (or given up) with our desk-clearing, with just a few miscellaneous zingers, gags, and aphorisms strewn about, such as  

Modern philosophy erects a wall of separation between intellect and reality.

We could spin that one into another whole post, but why bother? We get it, and they never will: truth is the link between intellect and being. If not, then to hell with it.  

As everyone knows, anything deep and true is conservative. Some things are true but not particularly deep, e.g., science. Others are deep but not true, assuming ideology can ever truly be deep. For it is written:

Confused ideas and murky ponds seem deep.

Jump headfirst into this shallow pond, and you're likely to knock yourself unconscious.  

Ideology is the antithesis of philosophy as such. There is a law of identity in this here cosmos, such that One ≠ Two; and the very point of philosophy is to comprehend and assimilate the oneness of this one. If we couldn't do this, there would be no such thing as progress.  

There exist many sciences, from physics to chemistry to biology and on up.  But to posit two or more philosophies is incoherent. Even if one hasn't arrived there, one must implicitly posit oneness as both the ground and telos, or alpha and omega, of thought.

I love simple and straightforward definitions of things, with few adjectives, less equivocation, and no poetry. The latter of course has its uses, but also its misuses.  Beware of, say, bad poets masquerading as worse judges. It's how we end up with a SCOTUS decision that includes the following purple passage by Justice Deepak Kennedy:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Yes, the infamous Mystery Passage. Nice sentiment, but what does it have to do with the Constitution as written, much less with abortion? Does the baby get to exercise this liberty? Or nah? 

Note that it pretends to be a principle, but this is precisely what it can never be, on pain of eliminating the Constitution and even law itself. 

For if law reduces to my right to define reality as I please, then we are all as crazy as the craziest progressive, with no cure. This crock of a doctrine simply allows imbeciles to call themselves philosophers. 

You wouldn't say there are "two physics" -- although I suppose that horsesh*t  has already left the barn too, what with the calls for gendered physics and maths of color.

Let's get back to the principle of one philosophy. Now, this doesn't mean we can't argue over the substance of this one philosophy, but let's not pretend old nobodaddy can be plurabelle.  Don't be buffaloed: nobody's right if everybody's wrong. Likewise, if everybody's right, then nobody is. 

Moreover, if you only understand one side of the question, you understand neither side, let alone the top and bottom.

I know we've discussed this before, but here it comes again: one cosmos, one human nature, one truth, one God, just ONE, gagdaddit!

Allow me to quote Cardinal Mercier on the matter: "philosophy does not profess to be a particularized science, with a place alongside other such sciences and a restricted domain of its own for investigation." 

Nor is it merely the sum of these particular sciences. Rather, it is their unity, both anterior, in a pre-differentiated manner, and posterior, in all their differentiation, i.e., in a higher unity: we analyze in order to synthesize, and abstract in order to unite.  

Science itself is the reduction of multiplicity to unity: as it advances -- say, from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or from Newtonian to quantum physics -- it unifies more disparate phenomena. It becomes both truer and deeper. 

Unless it fancies itself to be truth itself, much less the "deepest truth," at which point it careens off the shallow end into anti-philosophy, i.e., a silly caricature if itsoph.

The Cardinal defines philosophy as "The science of all things through their ultimate and deepest reasons." Again, it is the final answer to the Last Why. The deepest knowledge is the end of the line. It is known with certitude, and this certitude equates to rest. But the left hates rest -- it loves the opposite, "activism" -- and aways wants to stir things up.

For example, who, even a decade ago, would have predicted we would be relitigating the question of free speech? Or that half the country would favor corporate censorship of the other half?  Even Petey didn't see that coming.

Chesterton: "When a society has two souls, there is -- and ought to be -- civil war.... for anything which has dual personality is certainly mad; and probably possessed by devils."

One God and one Truth. Conversely,  many demons and countless lies.

I gotta get some work done, but not before we locate a few aphorisms to help wrap things up in a more restful and slack-infused way:

Because opinions change, the relativist believes that truths change.

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about the truth.

The truth does not need the adherence of man in order to be certain.

To change thoughts repeatedly is not to evolve. To evolve is to develop the infinitude of a single thought.  --Dávila 

Thanksgiving & Envy Thwarting

Thanksgiving is nice, but a more spiritually efficacious holiday might be StopResenting. Or at the very least, these two are complementary: it is impossible for a resentful person to feel thankful, while a thankful person isn't bitter, resentful, and envious.

Even a secular person understands this relationship, or at least I did. Back in graduate school one of the more important theorists we studied was Melanie Klein, whose work focused on the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of primordial -- which is to say, constitutional -- envy.

Why is envy even included in the standard package of humanness?  Is it the shadow or exaggeration of a healthy impulse, or is it a pure privation, or negation, or mind parasite?  We'll get back to that.  Suffice it to say that it appears quite early in our vertical adventure, on page 3. There it describes how, even in paradise, humans find a way to be resentful instead of thankful.  

Note as well that the adversary recognizes this weak link in the human psyche, and exploits it to the hilt.  Could it be that envy is the human kryptonite throughout history, right down to this morning's headline?  Signs point to Yes, but we need some further analysis.  

Let's say the serpent is the very spirit of envy. This cunning spirit puts the bug in Eve's ear that she deserves more -- that someone, somewhere, is having more fun than she is, in this case, God.  

Given the close relationship between man and envy, is it possible that human beings couldn't exist without the potential for envy?  I'm going to say Yes, but with an explanation. Analogously, we could say that human life can't exist without water. Does this mean man must drown? 

If envy is a pathology, or exaggeration, or privation, the question is, of what? Of what healthy impulse or striving?  For we don't want to posit a dualistic or Manichaean cosmos with two ultimate principles fighting it out for supremacy, i.e., an eternal struggle between giving thanks and taking offense.

Let me begin by reviewing my psychoanalytic learnin's, which I haven't looked at in many years. Envy "is a destructive attack on the sources of life, on the good object, not on the bad object."  

This is key, for not only is it an attack on the good object, but envy transforms the good into a bad object.  In other words, the object doesn't start off bad, which then justifies the envious attack; rather, it starts off good until it is transformed by envy.

For example, consider the very next biblical story about Cain and Abel.  Cain envies Abel to the point of murdering him, but not because Abel's offering is bad. Cain is subsequently cursed for his envy, but this might be another way of saying that envy is the curse, for no one who is envious is happy. "Of the deadly sins," writes Joseph Epstein, "only envy is no fun at all" (in The Politics of Envy, by Hendershott).

Hendershott notes that "the envious want the unattainable -- and they want it all."  Being that the unattainable is by definition unattainable, it is as if the envious person has discovered a perpetual unhappiness machine. We are tempted to say that socialism is the collective institutionalization of this machine, but be patient. We'll get to the insultainment.

Why is there a movement to "forgive" college debt? Could it be that these people are unusually envious - even that they went into debt in order to pursue advanced degrees in resentment, and that doing so only made them more resentful?  

Is it possible to eliminate the envy of of the envious by placating it? Or is it preferable to shun envy and marginalize the envious?  The progressive obsession with "equality" is founded on the notion that we can create economic conditions in which envy will disappear.

Is it possible to create conditions that would eliminate other human foibles, say, gluttony or lust?  Knowing what envy actually is, how could one possibly believe it could be eliminated?  Indeed, there is reason to believe that the attempt to eliminate it only aggravates it, largely because indulging a bad habit only fuels it. 

Never underestimate the human ability to justify envy over the most trivial of differences:

History has shown that envy increases in communist countries because the stakes become so small that even the smallest advantages are envied.  

Why do our corporate and technological elites embrace envious socialism?  Easy: to deflect the envy that would otherwise be directed at them.  

Wealthy mediocrities -- celebrities and the like -- know full well that they don't deserve their wealth (nor for that matter do they not deserve it; it's just a fluke of the free market, or a consequence of the greater good of freedom).  Claiming to support socialism is analogous to a business putting up a BLM sign: don't attack me! I'm on your side!

In simple societies, the fear of envy is very high. Tribal people believe that they will be envied by their neighbors for any advantage they may gain, and they are likely to believe that the hostile wishes of their neighbors can harm them...

Exactly.  Simple societies like San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Manhattan.   

Question: is envy socially constructed? Or is it innate?  Trick question! For there is no such thing as a person outside a social context.  As we've discussed in manyposts, We is ontologically prior to I, and is its necessary ground (no We, no I).  

Now, there are many possible links within this We, for example, love, curiosity, empathy.  But there can also be envious or greedy or hateful links. Could it be that envy comes down to a persistent intrapsychic link within the structure of the self, only projected outward?

That's what I think, for what it's worth.  Its why envy cannot be eliminated by being indulged.  You can project the unwanted contents of your psyche all day long, but this doesn't actually eliminate it. 

Still, externalizing it is preferable to introspecting and realizing what a rotten and envious person you are.  Better to accuse Trump of racism, or fascism, or being power-hungry, than to confront one's own inner tyrant. Better to cry "structural racism!" than own up to one's failure.  What a seductive -- and addictive -- temptation. 

Is envy getting worse in our day?

Although all generations have been vulnerable to the anxiety caused by the movement to an other-directed society, millennials, the first generation raised on the Internet and social media, have been the most affected by the shift.

Thanks to the internet, we are exposed every day, all day long, to things we can't have and people we'll never be.  

Now, when is it time to reach for one's revolver?

when envy masquerades as resentment or righteous indignation, the envious feelings become legitimated -- even moral.  

Antifa, BLM, feminism, Critical Race Theory, et al. What are these but envy that has been to college? And wants you to pay for tuition?

Demagogues appeal to envy because they believe that promising to destroy the advantages enjoyed by others will win votes and inspire loyalty.

Now, does this mean Biden & Co, will actually destroy the advantages enjoyed by their class? You're not too bright, are you?  No wonder you spent all that money on a worthless degree.

Thanksgiving & Envy Thwarting

Thanksgiving is nice, but a more spiritually efficacious holiday might be StopResenting. Or at the very least, these two are complementary: it is impossible for a resentful person to feel thankful, while a thankful person isn't bitter, resentful, and envious.

Even a secular person understands this relationship, or at least I did. Back in graduate school one of the more important theorists we studied was Melanie Klein, whose work focused on the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of primordial -- which is to say, constitutional -- envy.

Why is envy even included in the standard package of humanness?  Is it the shadow or exaggeration of a healthy impulse, or is it a pure privation, or negation, or mind parasite?  We'll get back to that.  Suffice it to say that it appears quite early in our vertical adventure, on page 3. There it describes how, even in paradise, humans find a way to be resentful instead of thankful.  

Note as well that the adversary recognizes this weak link in the human psyche, and exploits it to the hilt.  Could it be that envy is the human kryptonite throughout history, right down to this morning's headline?  Signs point to Yes, but we need some further analysis.  

Let's say the serpent is the very spirit of envy. This cunning spirit puts the bug in Eve's ear that she deserves more -- that someone, somewhere, is having more fun than she is, in this case, God.  

Given the close relationship between man and envy, is it possible that human beings couldn't exist without the potential for envy?  I'm going to say Yes, but with an explanation. Analogously, we could say that human life can't exist without water. Does this mean man must drown? 

If envy is a pathology, or exaggeration, or privation, the question is, of what? Of what healthy impulse or striving?  For we don't want to posit a dualistic or Manichaean cosmos with two ultimate principles fighting it out for supremacy, i.e., an eternal struggle between giving thanks and taking offense.

Let me begin by reviewing my psychoanalytic learnin's, which I haven't looked at in many years. Envy "is a destructive attack on the sources of life, on the good object, not on the bad object."  

This is key, for not only is it an attack on the good object, but envy transforms the good into a bad object.  In other words, the object doesn't start off bad, which then justifies the envious attack; rather, it starts off good until it is transformed by envy.

For example, consider the very next biblical story about Cain and Abel.  Cain envies Abel to the point of murdering him, but not because Abel's offering is bad. Cain is subsequently cursed for his envy, but this might be another way of saying that envy is the curse, for no one who is envious is happy. "Of the deadly sins," writes Joseph Epstein, "only envy is no fun at all" (in The Politics of Envy, by Hendershott).

Hendershott notes that "the envious want the unattainable -- and they want it all."  Being that the unattainable is by definition unattainable, it is as if the envious person has discovered a perpetual unhappiness machine. We are tempted to say that socialism is the collective institutionalization of this machine, but be patient. We'll get to the insultainment.

Why is there a movement to "forgive" college debt? Could it be that these people are unusually envious - even that they went into debt in order to pursue advanced degrees in resentment, and that doing so only made them more resentful?  

Is it possible to eliminate the envy of of the envious by placating it? Or is it preferable to shun envy and marginalize the envious?  The progressive obsession with "equality" is founded on the notion that we can create economic conditions in which envy will disappear.

Is it possible to create conditions that would eliminate other human foibles, say, gluttony or lust?  Knowing what envy actually is, how could one possibly believe it could be eliminated?  Indeed, there is reason to believe that the attempt to eliminate it only aggravates it, largely because indulging a bad habit only fuels it. 

Never underestimate the human ability to justify envy over the most trivial of differences:

History has shown that envy increases in communist countries because the stakes become so small that even the smallest advantages are envied.  

Why do our corporate and technological elites embrace envious socialism?  Easy: to deflect the envy that would otherwise be directed at them.  

Wealthy mediocrities -- celebrities and the like -- know full well that they don't deserve their wealth (nor for that matter do they not deserve it; it's just a fluke of the free market, or a consequence of the greater good of freedom).  Claiming to support socialism is analogous to a business putting up a BLM sign: don't attack me! I'm on your side!

In simple societies, the fear of envy is very high. Tribal people believe that they will be envied by their neighbors for any advantage they may gain, and they are likely to believe that the hostile wishes of their neighbors can harm them...

Exactly.  Simple societies like San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Manhattan.   

Question: is envy socially constructed? Or is it innate?  Trick question! For there is no such thing as a person outside a social context.  As we've discussed in manyposts, We is ontologically prior to I, and is its necessary ground (no We, no I).  

Now, there are many possible links within this We, for example, love, curiosity, empathy.  But there can also be envious or greedy or hateful links. Could it be that envy comes down to a persistent intrapsychic link within the structure of the self, only projected outward?

That's what I think, for what it's worth.  Its why envy cannot be eliminated by being indulged.  You can project the unwanted contents of your psyche all day long, but this doesn't actually eliminate it. 

Still, externalizing it is preferable to introspecting and realizing what a rotten and envious person you are.  Better to accuse Trump of racism, or fascism, or being power-hungry, than to confront one's own inner tyrant. Better to cry "structural racism!" than own up to one's failure.  What a seductive -- and addictive -- temptation. 

Is envy getting worse in our day?

Although all generations have been vulnerable to the anxiety caused by the movement to an other-directed society, millennials, the first generation raised on the Internet and social media, have been the most affected by the shift.

Thanks to the internet, we are exposed every day, all day long, to things we can't have and people we'll never be.  

Now, when is it time to reach for one's revolver?

when envy masquerades as resentment or righteous indignation, the envious feelings become legitimated -- even moral.  

Antifa, BLM, feminism, Critical Race Theory, et al. What are these but envy that has been to college? And wants you to pay for tuition?

Demagogues appeal to envy because they believe that promising to destroy the advantages enjoyed by others will win votes and inspire loyalty.

Now, does this mean Biden & Co, will actually destroy the advantages enjoyed by their class? You're not too bright, are you?  No wonder you spent all that money on a worthless degree.

Language Finds a Way

Time only for a brief.  

In the recent election it seems that two viruses proved decisive -- first, the Chinese virus that facilitated all the cheating; and second, the English virus that was so effectively contained by Big Tech, Big Media, Big Debate Moderator, etc., such that truth was not permitted to spread into the population. 

In other words, totalitarianism works, at least for awhile, but language always finds a way, doesn't it?

To plagiaphrase the scientist in Jurassic Park: if there's one thing the history of politics has taught us, it's that language will not be contained. Language breaks free. This is true. But how, and why?

First, why do people everywhere & when want to contain it? How do they do it? And how do we avoid it and them?

Let's proceed directly to the insultainment portion of this post, and put forth the hyperthesis that what we call the "left" is always the anti-language faction (cf. the well known phenomenon of the "totalitarian temptation"), while the essence of liberalism involves setting language free.  

In short, free your speech and your aseity will follow. One need only ponder this mystery for about two seconds to see that it's not a mystery at all.  

Rather it's terribly obvious.  No one is banning speech, books, tweets, ideas, professors, and bloggers but the left. Me? I want the left to speak, in order to show how crazy they are. I've never banned a commenter no matter how stupid, for what is a dullman but a brightcoon's teacher?  

There is obviously a "conserving" aspect of language that is as vital to its flourishing as is the liberating function. It's called, in a word, truth. Free speech without a nonlocal telovator literally goes nowhere.  

Consider just the progress of science. What does it do? It relentlessly strikes down falsehood, superstition, and sacred cowpies without fear or favor, until nothing is left standing but Truth.

Well, not exactly, and for obvious reasons, beginning with meta-science at one end (i.e., the principles by virtue of which science is possible and my understand itself) and scientism at the other, which foolishly equates its necessarily falsifiable proposals with Truth itself.  

You will have noticed that the left likes to think of itself as the "party of science."  Even on its face the opposite is true, but the claim becomes plausible if we think of vulgar scientism as a contemporary mythology of tenured fools, credentialed tools, and digital ghouls. 

Consider the following statement: One ought to believe in science.  No doubt true, as far as it goes. Problem is, there is no Ought in science. Science describes only narrow slices of what Is, never what ought to be.

Yes, there exists an objective land of Ought, but the moment we advert to it, the fool will accuse us of religious dogma. So, who let the dogma in? Did we invent it? Or does it emanate from an immaterial source?

Some if not all of you probably wonder about the irritating wordplay. What's that all about, and is it really necessary? Yes, it is necessary, if only for myself, in order to keep language free.  There is something that is not only freeing about language, but is freedom itself.

A few posts back we described this discovery of freedom in literal terms, with Helen Keller's dramatic inscape from a cramped animality to the wide-open spaces of the logosphere. 

Yes, the truth will set you free. But at the same time, freedom sets one upon the path to truth. In other words, truth itself is the principle, the reason, and the telos of freedom.  

If this is not the case, then freedom has no value at all.  Come to think of it, this is precisely why the left devalues and attacks even the possibility of truth. In their postmoderm, post-truth, and post-literate world, truth poses an everpresent threat to their power.  

This is so obvious that it qualifies as a soph-evident banality: to understand it is to confirm it, once and for all. It goes from hypothesis to principle, just like that. Unless you've successfully internalized a vertical barrier or roadblock.

Now, the purpose of thought it to arrive at principles.  Here again, this goes to precisely why it is impossible to argue (rationally) with a leftist. Oh, they have plenty of principles alright. It's just that the "principles" are ruled by immanent expediency (i.e., the needs of power) instead of transcendent truth, and  can never be reconciled with one another.  Nor are they ever pursued to the absurd conclusions that annihilate them.  

This is why, in order to be a leftist, one must be a little bit educated. But never too far!  Rather, it is obviously critical to stop thinking before the point at which the principles of leftism devour themselves.

The left has near total control of big tech, big education, big journalism, big government, big gender, big poverty, and big entertainment, and yet, it's never enough. Again, language always finds a way. Because -- in a manger of speaking -- it is the way, the truth, the life, the light, etc.

I'll end with a cryptic anecdote. I've been married for, let's see, 33 years. Once upon a time my wife decided to take a leap of faith and assume I was actually trying to help. It changed everything. Although she still needs to be reminded every once in awhile.

Truth cuts both ways. The skill of a surgeon vs. the rusty blade of a 27 year old tech overlord with an advanced degree in nothing.