1 = 0, 2 = 3, 3 = ∞

You want synchronicity? Here's a synchronicity: I began writing this post -- including the title -- yesterday, but didn't finish. The title struck me as a bit weird, but as usual, I wondered whether it was weird enough. 

Later in the day the mailman arrived with a book called The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space, by the Catholic philosopher Yves Simon. I didn't know anything about the book, except the title struck me as sufficiently weird to give it a shot and enter this Great Dialogue.

I'm only up to p. 50, but so far it's all about the differences between an Aristotelian and Cartesian vision of the cosmos, which represent the "nature" and "space," respectively, in the title.

The book is also about the mystery of change, which isn't only one of those primordial categories for which any decent philosophy must account, but in many ways the very source and occasion of philosophizing itself. If nothing changed, we wouldn't have to wonder why. 

Obviously, animals don't worry or wonder about change. But it's pretty much all we humans do in one way or another. It is the source of anxiety (if things change for the worse), hope (that they change for the better), trust (that they will stay the same), etc.

But in reality, things are always getting better, getting worse, and staying the same. It brings to mind Hello There Universe, by One Cosmos poet deploreate Mose Allison: even though / The good gets better and the bad gets worse / Hello there universe:

You let me sample your treasure chest
Showed me how to choose the best
Then you gave me lessons in humility
Do you know what you do to me?

You let me feel your mystic light
Showed me splendors of the night
Now you got me wondering if I missed my cue
Am I doin' what you meant me to?

So, ups and downs, strikes and gutters. Change, dammit!

The very first philosophers pondered this mystery and came up with two alternatives: either All is Change (Heraclitus), or Change is But an Illusion (Parmenides). For the P-man,

all reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, and necessary.... Parmenides explains the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful...

Parmenides' philosophy has been explained with the slogan "whatever is is, and what is not cannot be." He is also credited with the phrase out of nothing nothing comes. He argues that, despite appearances, everything exists as one, giant, unchanging thing (Prof. Wiki). 

In contrast, the H-man insisted that no man can step into the same cosmos twice:

He was most famous for his insistence on ever-present change -- known in philosophy as "flux" or "becoming"-- as the characteristic feature of the world.... This changing aspect of his philosophy is contrasted with that of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who believed in "being" and in the static nature of the universe. 

In the end, neither perspective was remotely weird enough to account for change or changelessness. 

This all goes to the cryptic title of yesterday's (and today's) post, and Simon explains why on p. 29. For if Parmenides is correct, then reality "is one and motionless," which ultimately means "not that all things are one, but that they are nothing" (¡emphasis mine!).

In other words, 1 = 0, and now we know why: "The world has disappeared" into a "homogeneous unit.  "Are you baffled by novelty?" No worries! In reality, it's all "one and the same." Everything is "a big unchanging ball." With this magic ball of Parmenides, strikes are gutters and gutters are strikes, so fuck it, let's go bowling.   

The other extreme -- pure change -- is no better. Among other inconveniences, if it were true we could never know it, because no changeless knowledge would be possible. (This is the trouble with a Darwinian metaphysic.)

Now let's skip back to yesterday's post, and find out how we got here:  

I've been reading a couple of books by a Catholic priest (Richard De Smet) who lived in India and wrote extensively about Vedanta. His thinking evolved over the decades (from the '50s to the '90s), but he eventually came around to the view that neither the Upanishads nor Shankara teach a doctrine of strict nondualism or acosmism.

(Acosmism, "denies the reality of the universe, seeing it as ultimately illusory, and only the infinite unmanifest Absolute as real." It "has been seen in the work of a number of Western philosophers, including ¡Parmenides!, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel" [Prof. Wiki].) 

This nondual approach is really no fun at all, for it is very much as if God exists and we can know Him with certitude, the only catch being that we can't be there to enjoy the experience. Rather, between you and God is a jive little man called the jivatman, AKA your illusory sense of identity: 

Understood through the paradigm of relative reality, jivas are cloaked by maya-avidya, or ignorance -- a state in which they are not able to realize their oneness with Brahman.

Metaphysically speaking, the whole thing reduces to acosmism, so instead of One Cosmos, it's No Cosmos for You! 

But De Smet suggests that we have Shankara all wrong, and that he actually believed that ultimate reality is personal, or has a Person-to-person structure. Does this imply a static dualism? Or does 2=3? Stay tuned to find out! 

1 = 0, 2 = 3, 3 = ∞

You want synchronicity? Here's a synchronicity: I began writing this post -- including the title -- yesterday, but didn't finish. The title struck me as a bit weird, but as usual, I wondered whether it was weird enough. 

Later in the day the mailman arrived with a book called The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space, by the Catholic philosopher Yves Simon. I didn't know anything about the book, except the title struck me as sufficiently weird to give it a shot and enter this Great Dialogue.

I'm only up to p. 50, but so far it's all about the differences between an Aristotelian and Cartesian vision of the cosmos, which represent the "nature" and "space," respectively, in the title.

The book is also about the mystery of change, which isn't only one of those primordial categories for which any decent philosophy must account, but in many ways the very source and occasion of philosophizing itself. If nothing changed, we wouldn't have to wonder why. 

Obviously, animals don't worry or wonder about change. But it's pretty much all we humans do in one way or another. It is the source of anxiety (if things change for the worse), hope (that they change for the better), trust (that they will stay the same), etc.

But in reality, things are always getting better, getting worse, and staying the same. It brings to mind Hello There Universe, by One Cosmos poet deploreate Mose Allison: even though / The good gets better and the bad gets worse / Hello there universe:

You let me sample your treasure chest
Showed me how to choose the best
Then you gave me lessons in humility
Do you know what you do to me?

You let me feel your mystic light
Showed me splendors of the night
Now you got me wondering if I missed my cue
Am I doin' what you meant me to?

So, ups and downs, strikes and gutters. Change, dammit!

The very first philosophers pondered this mystery and came up with two alternatives: either All is Change (Heraclitus), or Change is But an Illusion (Parmenides). For the P-man,

all reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, and necessary.... Parmenides explains the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful...

Parmenides' philosophy has been explained with the slogan "whatever is is, and what is not cannot be." He is also credited with the phrase out of nothing nothing comes. He argues that, despite appearances, everything exists as one, giant, unchanging thing (Prof. Wiki). 

In contrast, the H-man insisted that no man can step into the same cosmos twice:

He was most famous for his insistence on ever-present change -- known in philosophy as "flux" or "becoming"-- as the characteristic feature of the world.... This changing aspect of his philosophy is contrasted with that of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who believed in "being" and in the static nature of the universe. 

In the end, neither perspective was remotely weird enough to account for change or changelessness. 

This all goes to the cryptic title of yesterday's (and today's) post, and Simon explains why on p. 29. For if Parmenides is correct, then reality "is one and motionless," which ultimately means "not that all things are one, but that they are nothing" (¡emphasis mine!).

In other words, 1 = 0, and now we know why: "The world has disappeared" into a "homogeneous unit.  "Are you baffled by novelty?" No worries! In reality, it's all "one and the same." Everything is "a big unchanging ball." With this magic ball of Parmenides, strikes are gutters and gutters are strikes, so fuck it, let's go bowling.   

The other extreme -- pure change -- is no better. Among other inconveniences, if it were true we could never know it, because no changeless knowledge would be possible. (This is the trouble with a Darwinian metaphysic.)

Now let's skip back to yesterday's post, and find out how we got here:  

I've been reading a couple of books by a Catholic priest (Richard De Smet) who lived in India and wrote extensively about Vedanta. His thinking evolved over the decades (from the '50s to the '90s), but he eventually came around to the view that neither the Upanishads nor Shankara teach a doctrine of strict nondualism or acosmism.

(Acosmism, "denies the reality of the universe, seeing it as ultimately illusory, and only the infinite unmanifest Absolute as real." It "has been seen in the work of a number of Western philosophers, including ¡Parmenides!, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel" [Prof. Wiki].) 

This nondual approach is really no fun at all, for it is very much as if God exists and we can know Him with certitude, the only catch being that we can't be there to enjoy the experience. Rather, between you and God is a jive little man called the jivatman, AKA your illusory sense of identity: 

Understood through the paradigm of relative reality, jivas are cloaked by maya-avidya, or ignorance -- a state in which they are not able to realize their oneness with Brahman.

Metaphysically speaking, the whole thing reduces to acosmism, so instead of One Cosmos, it's No Cosmos for You! 

But De Smet suggests that we have Shankara all wrong, and that he actually believed that ultimate reality is personal, or has a Person-to-person structure. Does this imply a static dualism? Or does 2=3? Stay tuned to find out! 

Are We AllOne?

In the previous post we alluded to the oneness of things, from creator to cosmos and everything in between. 

Now, this oneness should not be thought of in terms of quantity, rather, qualitatively. If we think only numerically, there are always other numbers. Rather, we're thinking more along the lines of one-ness or of unicity. 

More than that, I suppose we're talking about a kind of dynamic complementarity between the one and the many. I was reading something about this the other day, but I can't recall where... Ah, here it is, from a chapter called The Spiritual Organism in Garrigou-Lagrange's Three Ages of the Spiritual Life.

Now, I kid you not, but I have a bunch of unneeded or obsolete books lined up on the floor that I was going to transfer to the garage, and one of them just now spontaneously fell over: it is called Rhythm of Wholeness (probably something I read in the late ' 80s). I wonder if the Cosmos is trying to tell us something? Let's have a peek inside. 

Okay. From the Prologue:

Reality, as presented in this book, is the unceasing, dynamic interplay of subjectivity and objectivity, of a principle of Unity and a principle of Multiplicity. It is neither Unity nor Multiplicity, neither spirit nor matter -- separately.

Agreed. You've got my attention, but can you be more specific?

Thus the word unity can refer not only to the state of being one but also to the process of becoming united and the quality required for the fulfillment of the process in a union....

[I]n an abstract sense, one can be considered the principle of numeration.... such a process is obviously a kind of self-multiplication. The tendency inherent in number one to generate all numbers, seemingly ad infinitum, clearly shows that unity and multiplicity are both inherent in number one.

I recall Schuon saying something similar, for example, 

The Pythagorean numbers prove that number in itself is not synonymous with quantity pure and simple, for they are essentially qualitative; they are so to the degree that they are close to Unity, their point of departure....

One might wonder if Unity is really a number; strictly speaking, number only begins with Duality, which opens the door to that projection of the Infinite which is the indefinite.

Schuon agrees that

it is in the nature of Unity to tend towards an extrinsic overflowing: there where God is, there will also be the world.

And vice versa. This is not to say, of course, that God was compelled to create this world, only that he wouldn't be God if he didn't create worlds out of nothing. It's what he does-and-is. Nor would we be human persons in the absence of the Divine Person, rather, only pretentious monkeys.

Back to Rudyar. I sense that he has something more important to convey to us, something we didn't already know, but I could be wrong. 

[T]he metaphysician has to infer two levels of oneness -- an absolute level at which one is not even a principle of numeration, and a level at which, as such a principle, it contains all numbers in potentiality.

Ah ha. This might be the place where I came up with the idea that the cosmos is shaped like a Klein bottle or maybe a möbius strip or dynamic donut -- 

an immense globe of undefinable energy-substance. The core of this globe is absolutely homogeneous and unchanging, yet it is endowed with the mysterious capacity to exteriorize itself without these exteriorizations ever leaving the globe....

[T]he core of the globe could be imagined as being either absolutely solid or absolutely void; it would make no difference as long as the state of being at the center, whatever it is, never changes. From this central core, power could be imagined to radiate in all directions as a kind of "superabundance" of being, but the overflow of the One is intrinsically nothing but the One.

Sounds very much like Eckhart.  

Also sounds like the Cosmos is fractally organized:

Wholeness is in every whole, but it is also in what are inadequately called "parts" of the whole. The term part is confusing because parts are also wholes.... Accurately speaking, there are no parts, only wholes -- a hierarchy of wholes...  

Back to the wholeness of the spiritual organism:

All the parts of this spiritual organism grow together, says St. Thomas, like the five fingers of one hand. This proportionate growth demonstrates that a soul cannot have lofty charity without profound humility, just as the highest branch of a tree rises toward heaven in proportion as its roots plunge more deeply into the soil (Garrigou-Lagrange). 

Out of time...

Are We AllOne?

In the previous post we alluded to the oneness of things, from creator to cosmos and everything in between. 

Now, this oneness should not be thought of in terms of quantity, rather, qualitatively. If we think only numerically, there are always other numbers. Rather, we're thinking more along the lines of one-ness or of unicity. 

More than that, I suppose we're talking about a kind of dynamic complementarity between the one and the many. I was reading something about this the other day, but I can't recall where... Ah, here it is, from a chapter called The Spiritual Organism in Garrigou-Lagrange's Three Ages of the Spiritual Life.

Now, I kid you not, but I have a bunch of unneeded or obsolete books lined up on the floor that I was going to transfer to the garage, and one of them just now spontaneously fell over: it is called Rhythm of Wholeness (probably something I read in the late ' 80s). I wonder if the Cosmos is trying to tell us something? Let's have a peek inside. 

Okay. From the Prologue:

Reality, as presented in this book, is the unceasing, dynamic interplay of subjectivity and objectivity, of a principle of Unity and a principle of Multiplicity. It is neither Unity nor Multiplicity, neither spirit nor matter -- separately.

Agreed. You've got my attention, but can you be more specific?

Thus the word unity can refer not only to the state of being one but also to the process of becoming united and the quality required for the fulfillment of the process in a union....

[I]n an abstract sense, one can be considered the principle of numeration.... such a process is obviously a kind of self-multiplication. The tendency inherent in number one to generate all numbers, seemingly ad infinitum, clearly shows that unity and multiplicity are both inherent in number one.

I recall Schuon saying something similar, for example, 

The Pythagorean numbers prove that number in itself is not synonymous with quantity pure and simple, for they are essentially qualitative; they are so to the degree that they are close to Unity, their point of departure....

One might wonder if Unity is really a number; strictly speaking, number only begins with Duality, which opens the door to that projection of the Infinite which is the indefinite.

Schuon agrees that

it is in the nature of Unity to tend towards an extrinsic overflowing: there where God is, there will also be the world.

And vice versa. This is not to say, of course, that God was compelled to create this world, only that he wouldn't be God if he didn't create worlds out of nothing. It's what he does-and-is. Nor would we be human persons in the absence of the Divine Person, rather, only pretentious monkeys.

Back to Rudyar. I sense that he has something more important to convey to us, something we didn't already know, but I could be wrong. 

[T]he metaphysician has to infer two levels of oneness -- an absolute level at which one is not even a principle of numeration, and a level at which, as such a principle, it contains all numbers in potentiality.

Ah ha. This might be the place where I came up with the idea that the cosmos is shaped like a Klein bottle or maybe a möbius strip or dynamic donut -- 

an immense globe of undefinable energy-substance. The core of this globe is absolutely homogeneous and unchanging, yet it is endowed with the mysterious capacity to exteriorize itself without these exteriorizations ever leaving the globe....

[T]he core of the globe could be imagined as being either absolutely solid or absolutely void; it would make no difference as long as the state of being at the center, whatever it is, never changes. From this central core, power could be imagined to radiate in all directions as a kind of "superabundance" of being, but the overflow of the One is intrinsically nothing but the One.

Sounds very much like Eckhart.  

Also sounds like the Cosmos is fractally organized:

Wholeness is in every whole, but it is also in what are inadequately called "parts" of the whole. The term part is confusing because parts are also wholes.... Accurately speaking, there are no parts, only wholes -- a hierarchy of wholes...  

Back to the wholeness of the spiritual organism:

All the parts of this spiritual organism grow together, says St. Thomas, like the five fingers of one hand. This proportionate growth demonstrates that a soul cannot have lofty charity without profound humility, just as the highest branch of a tree rises toward heaven in proportion as its roots plunge more deeply into the soil (Garrigou-Lagrange). 

Out of time...

Brandon's Trifecta

Ripperger notes that "contradictory speech is a sign of one of three things."

The first and most common reason is that "the person is dishonest or disingenuous." This is usually the case in politicians and journalists. What kind of naif is Shocked, shocked to find that lying is going on in here!, in the government-media complex?  

Ripperger's second reason for contradictory speech is "real confusion in the mind of the individual." A normal person is sufficiently self-aware to be concerned about his contradictions. I know I would be alarmed if I woke up one morning to find more than one creator, one cosmos, one reality, one truth, one philosophy, one wife, etc.  

Consistency. That's what we strive for at One Cosmos. Although, at the same time, we enjoy the challenge of tossing this or that seemingly contradictory fact into the cosmic hopper, just for the fun of harmonizing it with the rest. 

Anyway, whereas in the case of the dishonest person it is a matter of a corrupt will or "spirit of falsity," anyone can be confused due to a "lack of understanding or due to the difficulty of the object of knowledge in relation to the limits of the human intellect." 

Most people are confused about a lot of things, for example, the appeal of Stephen Colbert. Nothing wrong with that, unless we paper over the confusion and pretend to a certitude that has no logical or factual basis. Then we're shading into mental illness, either functional (e.g., borderline personality) or organic (e.g., dementia).

Speaking of which, James Rosen actually asked the president why he thinks most Americans have profound concerns about his cognitive deterioration, to which Brandon replied I have no idea. 

Ironically, this is probably the most honest thing he said in the entire two hours of desperate obfuscation, dissimulation, and word salad. "One-armed paper hanger" comes to mind. 

Which brings us to the third cause of contradictory speech, that "the person can be mentally ill; in fact, contradictory speech is a clear sign of mental illness."

How convenient is that! For it allows us to recognize and steer clear of mentally ill people, because they spew forth contradictions like a squid releases ink.

Now, many forms of contradictory speech are entirely benign, nor could civilization carry on in their absence. No one is brutally honest at all times. The very existence of good manners is a contradiction. And yet, there are people who cannot manage this -- e.g., babies, savages, leftists. But I threepeat myself.

President Brandon was of course born lying, but in his case there's something more going on; his contradictions are openly contradictory, and yet, he is the only person in the room who isn't confused by his confusion.  

It looks like Brandon has achieved the trifecta, in that he is a congenital liar; is confused but doesn't know it; and is suffering from a progressive neurodegenerative illness. 

Thus, most everything he says is an implicit or explicit contradiction, which is what makes trying to follow him so wearying. One cannot listen to him as one would to a normal person, since most of that he says makes no sense; one must strain to find the meaning, but it is often impossible. Try reading the following, and see what I mean. It's exhausting:

I mean -- and one of the things I find fascinating that’s happening -- and you all are dealing with it every day -- and it will impact on how things move -- is that a lot of the speculation in the polling data shows that the -- that the cables are heading south; they’re losing viewership. You know?

Well, Fox is okay for a while, but it’s not gated. And a lot of the rest are predicted to be not very much in the mix in the next four to five years. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.

*** 

I’ve spent a lot of time in South America and in Latin America. When I was Vice President, I spent the bulk of my eight years basically in Europe and/or in Latin America. I’m in contact with the leaders of the countries in South America, and we’re working closely with making sure that we do everything -- for example, with the -- to deal with helping the countries in question, particularly those in Central America, to be able to help them with their ability to deal with the inter- 

People don’t sit around in Guatemala and say, “I got a great idea: Let’s sell everything we have, give the money to a -- to a coyote, take us across a terribly dangerous trip up through Central America and up through Mexico, and drop us -- sneak us across the border, drop us in the desert. Won’t that be fun?”

People leave because they have real problems. And one of the things that I’ve done, when I was a Vice President, and got support with -- although I don’t have much Republican support anymore -- is provide billions of dollars to be able to say to those countries, “Why are people leaving? And how are you going to reform your own system?” And that’s what we’ve worked on a long time. It still needs a lot more work. And we’re focusing on that.

I also believe -- I’ve spent a lot of time talking about and dealing with policy having to do with Maduro, who is little more than a dictator right now, and the same thing in Chile and Af- -- not the same thing, but with Chile, as well as Argentina.

So, look, I made a speech a while ago, when I was Vice President, saying that if we were smart, we have an opportunity to make the Western Hemisphere a united -- not united -- a democratic hemisphere. And we were moving in the right direction under our -- under the last administration -- the Obama-Biden administration.

But so much damage was done as a consequence of the foreign policy decisions the last president made in Latin America, Central America, and South America that we now have --when I call for a summit of the democracies -- I called that, and a number of nations showed up for this Summit of Democracy -- what is it that’s going to allow us to generate -- we’ve actually had a reduction in the number of democracies in the world. And it seems to me there’s nothing more important.

We used to talk about, when I was a kid in college, about “America’s backyard.” It’s not America’s backyard. Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard. And we’re equal people. We don’t dictate what happens in any other part of that -- of this continent or the South American continent. We have to work very hard on it.

But the trouble is: We’re having great difficulty making up for the mistakes that were made the last four years, and it’s going to take some time.

Got that?

Now, "one of the most important first principles for psychology is the principle of sufficient reason," which is basically a fancy way of saying that things have causes, and that the cause must be sufficient to explain the effect. 

But "those who suffer from delusions often are not operating according to this principle," in that they "think that certain things are causing their problems when those things (or people) are not capable of it." They blame that for causing this, even though neither this nor that may even exist, let alone be causally related.

The "Voting Rights Bill" is a case in point. All American citizens already have the right to vote. And yet, racists such as myself will supposedly prevent them from voting unless this bill is passed. Nary a sufficient reason in sight.

We'd better stop here: "being around the mentally ill a great deal and trying to think the way they do in order to understand them can lead to the psychologist's own mental illness" (Ripperger).

Brandon's Trifecta

Ripperger notes that "contradictory speech is a sign of one of three things."

The first and most common reason is that "the person is dishonest or disingenuous." This is usually the case in politicians and journalists. What kind of naif is Shocked, shocked to find that lying is going on in here!, in the government-media complex?  

Ripperger's second reason for contradictory speech is "real confusion in the mind of the individual." A normal person is sufficiently self-aware to be concerned about his contradictions. I know I would be alarmed if I woke up one morning to find more than one creator, one cosmos, one reality, one truth, one philosophy, one wife, etc.  

Consistency. That's what we strive for at One Cosmos. Although, at the same time, we enjoy the challenge of tossing this or that seemingly contradictory fact into the cosmic hopper, just for the fun of harmonizing it with the rest. 

Anyway, whereas in the case of the dishonest person it is a matter of a corrupt will or "spirit of falsity," anyone can be confused due to a "lack of understanding or due to the difficulty of the object of knowledge in relation to the limits of the human intellect." 

Most people are confused about a lot of things, for example, the appeal of Stephen Colbert. Nothing wrong with that, unless we paper over the confusion and pretend to a certitude that has no logical or factual basis. Then we're shading into mental illness, either functional (e.g., borderline personality) or organic (e.g., dementia).

Speaking of which, James Rosen actually asked the president why he thinks most Americans have profound concerns about his cognitive deterioration, to which Brandon replied I have no idea. 

Ironically, this is probably the most honest thing he said in the entire two hours of desperate obfuscation, dissimulation, and word salad. "One-armed paper hanger" comes to mind. 

Which brings us to the third cause of contradictory speech, that "the person can be mentally ill; in fact, contradictory speech is a clear sign of mental illness."

How convenient is that! For it allows us to recognize and steer clear of mentally ill people, because they spew forth contradictions like a squid releases ink.

Now, many forms of contradictory speech are entirely benign, nor could civilization carry on in their absence. No one is brutally honest at all times. The very existence of good manners is a contradiction. And yet, there are people who cannot manage this -- e.g., babies, savages, leftists. But I threepeat myself.

President Brandon was of course born lying, but in his case there's something more going on; his contradictions are openly contradictory, and yet, he is the only person in the room who isn't confused by his confusion.  

It looks like Brandon has achieved the trifecta, in that he is a congenital liar; is confused but doesn't know it; and is suffering from a progressive neurodegenerative illness. 

Thus, most everything he says is an implicit or explicit contradiction, which is what makes trying to follow him so wearying. One cannot listen to him as one would to a normal person, since most of that he says makes no sense; one must strain to find the meaning, but it is often impossible. Try reading the following, and see what I mean. It's exhausting:

I mean -- and one of the things I find fascinating that’s happening -- and you all are dealing with it every day -- and it will impact on how things move -- is that a lot of the speculation in the polling data shows that the -- that the cables are heading south; they’re losing viewership. You know?

Well, Fox is okay for a while, but it’s not gated. And a lot of the rest are predicted to be not very much in the mix in the next four to five years. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.

*** 

I’ve spent a lot of time in South America and in Latin America. When I was Vice President, I spent the bulk of my eight years basically in Europe and/or in Latin America. I’m in contact with the leaders of the countries in South America, and we’re working closely with making sure that we do everything -- for example, with the -- to deal with helping the countries in question, particularly those in Central America, to be able to help them with their ability to deal with the inter- 

People don’t sit around in Guatemala and say, “I got a great idea: Let’s sell everything we have, give the money to a -- to a coyote, take us across a terribly dangerous trip up through Central America and up through Mexico, and drop us -- sneak us across the border, drop us in the desert. Won’t that be fun?”

People leave because they have real problems. And one of the things that I’ve done, when I was a Vice President, and got support with -- although I don’t have much Republican support anymore -- is provide billions of dollars to be able to say to those countries, “Why are people leaving? And how are you going to reform your own system?” And that’s what we’ve worked on a long time. It still needs a lot more work. And we’re focusing on that.

I also believe -- I’ve spent a lot of time talking about and dealing with policy having to do with Maduro, who is little more than a dictator right now, and the same thing in Chile and Af- -- not the same thing, but with Chile, as well as Argentina.

So, look, I made a speech a while ago, when I was Vice President, saying that if we were smart, we have an opportunity to make the Western Hemisphere a united -- not united -- a democratic hemisphere. And we were moving in the right direction under our -- under the last administration -- the Obama-Biden administration.

But so much damage was done as a consequence of the foreign policy decisions the last president made in Latin America, Central America, and South America that we now have --when I call for a summit of the democracies -- I called that, and a number of nations showed up for this Summit of Democracy -- what is it that’s going to allow us to generate -- we’ve actually had a reduction in the number of democracies in the world. And it seems to me there’s nothing more important.

We used to talk about, when I was a kid in college, about “America’s backyard.” It’s not America’s backyard. Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard. And we’re equal people. We don’t dictate what happens in any other part of that -- of this continent or the South American continent. We have to work very hard on it.

But the trouble is: We’re having great difficulty making up for the mistakes that were made the last four years, and it’s going to take some time.

Got that?

Now, "one of the most important first principles for psychology is the principle of sufficient reason," which is basically a fancy way of saying that things have causes, and that the cause must be sufficient to explain the effect. 

But "those who suffer from delusions often are not operating according to this principle," in that they "think that certain things are causing their problems when those things (or people) are not capable of it." They blame that for causing this, even though neither this nor that may even exist, let alone be causally related.

The "Voting Rights Bill" is a case in point. All American citizens already have the right to vote. And yet, racists such as myself will supposedly prevent them from voting unless this bill is passed. Nary a sufficient reason in sight.

We'd better stop here: "being around the mentally ill a great deal and trying to think the way they do in order to understand them can lead to the psychologist's own mental illness" (Ripperger).

Between Hope & Hysteria

It seems that there are but three main philosophical possibilities open to man: empiricism (or materialism), rationalism (or idealism), or moderate (not strictly Platonic) realism. 

But in reality there is only one, since empiricism is a trap from which it is impossible to escape from the senses to knowledge, while idealism is a trap from which it is impossible to escape from knowledge to the world. 

Only moderate realism allows world and knowledge -- intelligence and intelligibility, subject and object -- to meet in the middle and to be harmonized in truth. Truth is the harmony of cosmos and intellect.

Let's think about "mental illness." Obviously it must involve some kind of privation or lack; at the same time, it cannot be posited in the absence of a proper end, or telos -- one might even say destiny. 

Now, as we know, the end is first in intention but last in execution. For example, if you're going to build a house, you begin with the blueprint and end up with a place to live. Nor can you reside in the blueprint; then again, there are plenty of people who live in their dreams, ideals, and abstractions.

Come to think of it, I just finished a wonderful book by Gordon Wood called Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WRQFZHC?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=B06WRQFZHC) 

So, what divided them? That's a long story, but certainly it had a lot to do with Jefferson being such an unhinged idealist and rationalist, while Adams was more a hardbitten cynic who was properly wary of Man and all his Works. 

Thus, ironically, the idealist ended up quite despairing about the future of the country, while the cynic was much more resigned to the messiness and imperfectability of things.

Which goes to a general lesson about the dangers of worldly optimism (which has nothing to do with the theological virtue of hope, and is often a twisted version of it). 

There is never a good reason to be optimistic. For one thing, strategic pessimism allows one to be happily surprised when events don't end in catastrophe, but instead turn out to be pleasantly disastrous. Aphorisms:

With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope for a miracle.

The progressive forgets that sin frustrates any ideal he longs for; the conservative forgets that he corrupts any reality he defends.

He who wishes to avoid grotesque collapses should look for nothing in space or in time that will fulfill him.

Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes.

In history it is sensible to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.

From what I understand, there are apparently millions of Americans who are now "disappointed" because they had hoped President Brandon would "unify" the nation. 

Ho!

I wonder how many of these purblind worldlings have sufficient self-awareness to even begin to understand how and why the eminently Self-evident could have been buried under an avalanche of Self-deception? For starters, what preternatural powers of mind prevented one from noticing Brandon's debilitating senility? 

But let's get back to our main subject. Because we're right here in the middle of it, it can be quite difficult to appreciate the historical, anthropological, and psychological weirdness of the times we're living in. Not only has man never lived like this, it's not yet clear if he should live like this. 

Like what?

One of the difficulties of modern life is that the principles innate in the intellect are being denied and so people who are trained to think contrary to right reasoning have difficulty working their way through life's normal problems. 

Not to bag on Jefferson, but not only was he the founder of the Democrat party, but he was -- not coincidentally -- a devotee of precisely this type of systematically flawed reasoning, the very same reasoning that pervades the contemporary left. Let's just call it an extreme environmentalism -- or "blank slate-ism" -- that denies our countless inborn differences, Locke, schlock, and something. 

The problem is, if we deny this truth, then unequal outcomes will be misinterpreted as unjust, which then legitimizes giving power to the state to unjustly enforce equality, or what the left now calls "equity." The whole nightmare is simply the logical entailment of a false premise at the start.

Of course, more people than ever are now susceptible to this delusion, and for several reasons, including widespread exposure to higher indoctrination, accompanied by a lack of exposure to the real world, ultimately ending in the current divide between productive blue collar men and affluent and overeducated white Karens of both sexes:

In the past, common sense, which is the ability to grasp the natures of things, tended to be a guiding light. Moreover, by the physical toil involved in the average person's life, one learned how reality functioned and so between common sense and experience, people could work their way out of difficult situations.

However, in a technocratic culture which pervades society today, less contact is had with reality as the technology becomes the prism by which a technocratic generation views reality. The technology stands between the knower and reality and thereby the knower is distanced from reality and loses the opportunity to gain the necessary experience in order to live according to reason....

[E]xcessive use of technology tends to strip one of common sense because it keeps a person from being in direct contact, either physically or psychologically, with reality and therefore the person loses the capacity to grasp the nature of things and how they are to be treated (Ripperger).

Is there a perpetually outraged activist who wouldn't be happier as a Midwestern farm girl with a husband and four kids? Or are they born that way?

Between Hope & Hysteria

It seems that there are but three main philosophical possibilities open to man: empiricism (or materialism), rationalism (or idealism), or moderate (not strictly Platonic) realism. 

But in reality there is only one, since empiricism is a trap from which it is impossible to escape from the senses to knowledge, while idealism is a trap from which it is impossible to escape from knowledge to the world. 

Only moderate realism allows world and knowledge -- intelligence and intelligibility, subject and object -- to meet in the middle and to be harmonized in truth. Truth is the harmony of cosmos and intellect.

Let's think about "mental illness." Obviously it must involve some kind of privation or lack; at the same time, it cannot be posited in the absence of a proper end, or telos -- one might even say destiny. 

Now, as we know, the end is first in intention but last in execution. For example, if you're going to build a house, you begin with the blueprint and end up with a place to live. Nor can you reside in the blueprint; then again, there are plenty of people who live in their dreams, ideals, and abstractions.

Come to think of it, I just finished a wonderful book by Gordon Wood called Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WRQFZHC?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=B06WRQFZHC) 

So, what divided them? That's a long story, but certainly it had a lot to do with Jefferson being such an unhinged idealist and rationalist, while Adams was more a hardbitten cynic who was properly wary of Man and all his Works. 

Thus, ironically, the idealist ended up quite despairing about the future of the country, while the cynic was much more resigned to the messiness and imperfectability of things.

Which goes to a general lesson about the dangers of worldly optimism (which has nothing to do with the theological virtue of hope, and is often a twisted version of it). 

There is never a good reason to be optimistic. For one thing, strategic pessimism allows one to be happily surprised when events don't end in catastrophe, but instead turn out to be pleasantly disastrous. Aphorisms:

With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope for a miracle.

The progressive forgets that sin frustrates any ideal he longs for; the conservative forgets that he corrupts any reality he defends.

He who wishes to avoid grotesque collapses should look for nothing in space or in time that will fulfill him.

Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes.

In history it is sensible to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.

From what I understand, there are apparently millions of Americans who are now "disappointed" because they had hoped President Brandon would "unify" the nation. 

Ho!

I wonder how many of these purblind worldlings have sufficient self-awareness to even begin to understand how and why the eminently Self-evident could have been buried under an avalanche of Self-deception? For starters, what preternatural powers of mind prevented one from noticing Brandon's debilitating senility? 

But let's get back to our main subject. Because we're right here in the middle of it, it can be quite difficult to appreciate the historical, anthropological, and psychological weirdness of the times we're living in. Not only has man never lived like this, it's not yet clear if he should live like this. 

Like what?

One of the difficulties of modern life is that the principles innate in the intellect are being denied and so people who are trained to think contrary to right reasoning have difficulty working their way through life's normal problems. 

Not to bag on Jefferson, but not only was he the founder of the Democrat party, but he was -- not coincidentally -- a devotee of precisely this type of systematically flawed reasoning, the very same reasoning that pervades the contemporary left. Let's just call it an extreme environmentalism -- or "blank slate-ism" -- that denies our countless inborn differences, Locke, schlock, and something. 

The problem is, if we deny this truth, then unequal outcomes will be misinterpreted as unjust, which then legitimizes giving power to the state to unjustly enforce equality, or what the left now calls "equity." The whole nightmare is simply the logical entailment of a false premise at the start.

Of course, more people than ever are now susceptible to this delusion, and for several reasons, including widespread exposure to higher indoctrination, accompanied by a lack of exposure to the real world, ultimately ending in the current divide between productive blue collar men and affluent and overeducated white Karens of both sexes:

In the past, common sense, which is the ability to grasp the natures of things, tended to be a guiding light. Moreover, by the physical toil involved in the average person's life, one learned how reality functioned and so between common sense and experience, people could work their way out of difficult situations.

However, in a technocratic culture which pervades society today, less contact is had with reality as the technology becomes the prism by which a technocratic generation views reality. The technology stands between the knower and reality and thereby the knower is distanced from reality and loses the opportunity to gain the necessary experience in order to live according to reason....

[E]xcessive use of technology tends to strip one of common sense because it keeps a person from being in direct contact, either physically or psychologically, with reality and therefore the person loses the capacity to grasp the nature of things and how they are to be treated (Ripperger).

Is there a perpetually outraged activist who wouldn't be happier as a Midwestern farm girl with a husband and four kids? Or are they born that way?

Mental Health Food

Truth is to the soul as food is to the body, except to say that there's no such thing as unhealthy truth, e.g., junk truth, processed truth, deep fried truth, etc., no matter how much it triggers the recipient.

 "The study of mental health," writes Ripperger, "includes in its very ratio or notion the necessity of the mind to attain the truth in order to have mental health." 

Conversely, we know that those who suffer from mental illness often do not possess the truth about the thing(s) which troubles them. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that the science of mental health and illness grasp the nature of truth so as to be able to foster it in those under its care. 

Well, the American Psychological Association begs to differ: it has officially voiced 

approval of policies President Joe Biden has adopted to address the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, immigration, climate change, LGBTQ rights and access to health care, among others. 

We also support the administration’s actions to reinstate the policy allowing transgender people to serve in the military, since scientific research shows not only the deleterious effects of discrimination but that gender identity is irrelevant to the ability to serve our nation. 

Of course. As if we need scientific research! to prove that trannies make the toughest soldiers. 

We are also pleased that this White House has made curbing global warming a priority, especially given growing anxiety and concern about the environment documented by psychological research.

If only there were some way to cure people of the anxiety they feel over imaginary problems... 

"The human intellect, in order to know the truth, must conform or adequate itself to the thing" -- the real thing, not imaginary things such as "transgenderism," catastrophic climate change, discriminatory policing, "systemic racism," etc. 

Hmm. It seems that the APA aligns itself with the very societal forces, powers, and institutions that guarantee more mental illness. Which is perfectly understandable. Your problems may be imaginary, but that doesn't mean psychologists are going too charge less to treat them. Gotta feed the monkey. 

As we've said before, Thomistic psychology is just common sense; more to the point, it is simply a description of human behavior, emotion, and intellection, of what we do and can't help doing when we think, will, or desire. But

Part of the scourge of modern philosophy and its effect on modern society is that people expect reality or things to congrue to them; this is prime material for mental illness (emphasis mine).

This is to literally invert the cosmos, so no wonder it should result in so much psychopathology -- and again, no wonder modern psychology should embrace a metaphysic that lubricates the greasy wheels of the revenue stream.

"While we may want the sky to be green" -- or men to be women, or trespassing to be insurrection, or election security to be racist, or Trump to be a Russian agent, or defunding the police to make us safer -- "nevertheless reality dictates that it is actually blue." Bottom line:

People who suffer from a grave psychological illness make assertions which do not congrue with reality and it is precisely because the individual's intellect is not functioning properly that he states what is false.

Does this imply that people who make untrue assertions suffer from grave psychological illness? Not necessarily, but certainly more often than we might appreciate. Adam Schiff, for example, may not be as delusional as he appears to be; rather, his lies may be a result of sociopathy, which is another form of grave mental illness, and no doubt more dangerous than mere delusions.

It's the difference between, say, a delusional but harmless and even entertaining Keith Olbermann, and a conniving psychopath such as Schiff or Omar, who have no entertainment value. Yet. 

If people "are unwilling to conform to reality, they have already begun the process which will result in causing mental illness." 

You'd think this would be uncontroversial, but then, you have common sense. In fact, there are whole university departments dedicated to the proposition that truth is relative. Conveniently, such twisted thinkers are too stupid to understand the arguments that demolish their ideology.

Nevertheless, for the restavus & bestavus

it is not difficult to see that falsity is the evil or bad of the intellect, for if the intellect is by nature designed to know the truth, then falsity militates agains that nature (Ripperger).

Mental Health Food

Truth is to the soul as food is to the body, except to say that there's no such thing as unhealthy truth, e.g., junk truth, processed truth, deep fried truth, etc., no matter how much it triggers the recipient.

 "The study of mental health," writes Ripperger, "includes in its very ratio or notion the necessity of the mind to attain the truth in order to have mental health." 

Conversely, we know that those who suffer from mental illness often do not possess the truth about the thing(s) which troubles them. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that the science of mental health and illness grasp the nature of truth so as to be able to foster it in those under its care. 

Well, the American Psychological Association begs to differ: it has officially voiced 

approval of policies President Joe Biden has adopted to address the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, immigration, climate change, LGBTQ rights and access to health care, among others. 

We also support the administration’s actions to reinstate the policy allowing transgender people to serve in the military, since scientific research shows not only the deleterious effects of discrimination but that gender identity is irrelevant to the ability to serve our nation. 

Of course. As if we need scientific research! to prove that trannies make the toughest soldiers. 

We are also pleased that this White House has made curbing global warming a priority, especially given growing anxiety and concern about the environment documented by psychological research.

If only there were some way to cure people of the anxiety they feel over imaginary problems... 

"The human intellect, in order to know the truth, must conform or adequate itself to the thing" -- the real thing, not imaginary things such as "transgenderism," catastrophic climate change, discriminatory policing, "systemic racism," etc. 

Hmm. It seems that the APA aligns itself with the very societal forces, powers, and institutions that guarantee more mental illness. Which is perfectly understandable. Your problems may be imaginary, but that doesn't mean psychologists are going too charge less to treat them. Gotta feed the monkey. 

As we've said before, Thomistic psychology is just common sense; more to the point, it is simply a description of human behavior, emotion, and intellection, of what we do and can't help doing when we think, will, or desire. But

Part of the scourge of modern philosophy and its effect on modern society is that people expect reality or things to congrue to them; this is prime material for mental illness (emphasis mine).

This is to literally invert the cosmos, so no wonder it should result in so much psychopathology -- and again, no wonder modern psychology should embrace a metaphysic that lubricates the greasy wheels of the revenue stream.

"While we may want the sky to be green" -- or men to be women, or trespassing to be insurrection, or election security to be racist, or Trump to be a Russian agent, or defunding the police to make us safer -- "nevertheless reality dictates that it is actually blue." Bottom line:

People who suffer from a grave psychological illness make assertions which do not congrue with reality and it is precisely because the individual's intellect is not functioning properly that he states what is false.

Does this imply that people who make untrue assertions suffer from grave psychological illness? Not necessarily, but certainly more often than we might appreciate. Adam Schiff, for example, may not be as delusional as he appears to be; rather, his lies may be a result of sociopathy, which is another form of grave mental illness, and no doubt more dangerous than mere delusions.

It's the difference between, say, a delusional but harmless and even entertaining Keith Olbermann, and a conniving psychopath such as Schiff or Omar, who have no entertainment value. Yet. 

If people "are unwilling to conform to reality, they have already begun the process which will result in causing mental illness." 

You'd think this would be uncontroversial, but then, you have common sense. In fact, there are whole university departments dedicated to the proposition that truth is relative. Conveniently, such twisted thinkers are too stupid to understand the arguments that demolish their ideology.

Nevertheless, for the restavus & bestavus

it is not difficult to see that falsity is the evil or bad of the intellect, for if the intellect is by nature designed to know the truth, then falsity militates agains that nature (Ripperger).

Intellectual Vice

A good habit is a virtue, while a bad habit is a vice; we know about physical and moral vices, but today we want to discuss intellectual vices and virtues, and the habits that dispose us one way or the other. 

Of note, only intellectual beings can have intellectual vices. Come to think of it, only human beings can have vices at all, as these presuppose both a telos and the freedom to reach it. 

Therefore, we must first establish the telos of the intellect, which is -- wait for it -- knowledge of truth. In particular, speculative knowledge exists for its own sake, and is thus objective and disinterested. Like this blog. 

If truth is relative, then there can be no such thing as intellectual vice, and voila!, you are cured. Thus the perennial appeal of relativism, subjectivism, and sophistry more generally, since these cure the spiritual disease by denying its existence. The rest is tenure.

I know you don't need examples, and if you do, then no amount will suffice. Nevertheless, here you go (https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=18773): 

Gender Professor Says Biological Sex is a 'Social Construct'

I will resist the temptation to read the article, and just rewrite the headline to say: 

'Gender' 'Professor' Denies Principle of Contradiction, Thereby Nullifying Anything Else He Says

Specifically, he denies the principle of contradiction -- which is only the foundation of the possibility of logical thought -- by affirming that biology both exists and doesn't exist, or that biology is just "biology." The rest is tenure.

This is what happens when an intellect descends into vice. Truly, the (intellectual) vice that justifies (physical or moral) vice is more vicious than the vices it normalizes. 

They used to say that "modernism is the sum of all heresies." Analogously, relativism must be the substance of all intellectual vices, heresies, and academic clown shows. That sounds about right, but check back with me at the end of the post. 

Meanwhile, Ripperger notes that psychiatry at least has "a sound basis as a science," since it has a well-defined material object, i.e., the brain and its electrochemical activity. 

Granted, it doesn't have a very good understanding of this inconceivably complex object -- in my opinion because if it could understand the object, the object would be too simple to host the consciousness of the psychiatrist. Nevertheless, at least in theory it recognizes the brain as brain.

Not so psychology, which violates the principle of noncontradiction before it even begins. After all, "psyche" is Greek for soul, which modern psychology denies. Oh sure, there are new age types that blabber about the soul, but in an entirely frivolous and ad hoc manner, not in any consistent scientific way rooted in ultimate metaphysical causes and the nature of things.

Now,

any valid psychology must recognize that its object is not merely material. Rather, man's intellect has three parts, two of which are immaterial and perform their functions independently of the body (Ripperger).

The material part is, of course, the senses; to be perfectly accurate, the senses are part material and part spiritual, but they are obviously not fully intellectual as they cannot reflect upon themselves -- in other words, the eye sees light but doesn't know it is seeing light. Rather, it is the task of the immaterial intellect to know such abstractions.

There are two parts of the intellect that transcend matter, these being what is called the "agent intellect" and the will, the latter being our freedom to rationally choose between alternatives. The will is subordinated to the intellect, in that in its absence there can be no real freedom, just arbitrary or predetermined movement.

If you are a modern sophisticate, then you know the immaterial may be reduced to the material. But if you are a deplorable rube like me, then you are under the delusion that 

the mere fact that man contemplates the nature of truth is a sign that he is different from animals.... For one cannot point to a physical instance of truth, for truth is not a material thing and cannot be grasped by a material thing.

In a very real way, in order to believe the fantasy of materialism, one must reduce oneself to matter, and then it all makes sense. In other words, one must kill or at least numb the soul.

But you can't kill the soul, since it is both immaterial and immortal. It always comes back, usually with a vengeance. Consider the joyless, puritan religiosity of the anti- and irreligious Woke. 

We'll conclude with this controversial claim:

No psychology can treat the individual without recognizing that he gains his knowledge by means of reality (ibid., emphasis mine).

This claim doesn't apply to the vice of modern "psychology." The rest is tenure.