You Had One Job, Assoul

Man has one job. Or three, rather: know truth. Cultivate virtue, AKA do good. Create and love beauty (or at least refrain from making the culture even uglier).

Each of these is related, so it's really a one-in-three situation. The rightly ordered soul loves truth, wants to do good, and is repelled by ugliness. Or, truth is the virtue of the intellect, virtue the beauty of action, and beauty the truth of creativity.

Before we proceed any further, let me say that this is an off-the-cuff meditation on evil -- the sort of evil carried out in Las Vegas three days ago. My only promise is that it will be a completely inadequate exercise in futility.

Everyone wants to know "why" he did it. Usually we "know" why right away: he was an Islamist, or a Bernie Bro, or a cop-hater, or whatever. As if that is a sufficient explanation! We could say that Stephen Paddock did it because he wanted to kill a lot of people. Obviously.

But even if we eventually discover that he was motivated by an ideology or religion, that doesn't really answer the deeper question, which is, Why do people want to murder innocent people? How and why does this thought ever enter their minds? In no other species does this occur. If not a function of humanness, it is certainly a feature. Why is someone attracted to a murderous ideology to begin with?

Thinking about this yesterday, I was reminded of Freud's theory of the death instinct, which few people ever took seriously. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean the phenomena the theory tries to explain don't exist and aren't in need of explanation.

For example, I've had a number of leaks in my tires lately. Let's say I have a theory that my liberal neighbor is sneaking into my garage at night and pounding nails into them. Even if this theory doesn't pan out -- and I'm working on it -- that doesn't mean the leaks aren't real. Much less does it mean that I shouldn't sneak into his garage and flatten his tires for being such an irritating moonbat.

What exactly was Freud trying to explain with the theory? Let's find out! Prof. Wiki writes that "the death drive (German: Todestrieb) is the drive towards death and self-destruction":

The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives. The death drive is sometimes referred to as "Thanatos" in post-Freudian thought, complementing "Eros"...

It's very much as if we exist in the crosscurrents of two arrows, one ascending upward into love and unity, the other downward toward the inanimate state. Instead of a one-way movement from the inanimate to the animate, it is more like a complementarity between the two: Freud "found it ultimately 'an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things' -- the inorganic state from which life originally emerged."

There are people who hate themselves -- who are self-defeating, intro-punitive, guilt-ridden, and prone to shame. Freud would say that this is the death instinct turned inward. Others turn it outward, AKA externalize it. And again, even if we reject the death instinct explanation, there is no doubt whatsoever that such people -- millions and billions of them -- engage in this defense mechanism.

This subject is very much tied in with the problem of aggression. Man is an aggressive animal, or at least potentially so. To back up a bit, all animals are either predator or prey. Wolves and sheep. Man is both, but this isn't the source of his flaw. One man -- our police, or military -- uses aggression to protect the sheep. Another uses it to slaughter them.

I'm sure you are aware of how many people -- especially liberals -- see aggression as the problem, as opposed to the uses to which it is put. Nuke imperial Japan to end World War 2? Good. Nuke Japan because you're a crazy and paranoid dictator? Not good. "Enhanced interrogation" because you're dealing with a known terrorist and are trying to save lives? Good. Torture people for the thrill of it? Death instinct. Or something.

So, yesterday I was wondering if there might be some way to update the death instinct.

By the way, I think there is something like this operating in certain types of addicts. A heroin addict such as Tom Petty or a barbiturate addict such as Kurt Cobain have very peculiar motivation, as if they want to return to the blissful oceanic oneness of the womb -- before there was all this duality, tension, asymmetry, and frustration. It is one surefire way to make the torture stop in the tortured soul. It's like a living death. Or, life without the hassle of being alive.

(I know the feeling well from my two post-colonoscopy experiences with fentanyl. Paradise is guarded, but there are ways to slip past the cherubim.)

Now I am reminded of Dracula, which I watched the other night. You know, the undead. Note that in order to maintain his undead status, he needs the living blood of victims. That is of course a myth, which is to say, entirely true. The left puts the bite on various victim groups, draining them of their living individuality in order to go on being as a viable political entity. Can you imagine a more vampirish woman than Hillary Clinton? I can, but we're running out of time.

Anyway, I pulled some of my old psychology books from the closet to see if I could find a way to update this thanatos business. Back in the day, one of my main influences was Ignacio Matte Blanco. He has this to say about the death instinct: the study of biology is embedded in standard, classical logic, but "there is some evidence of bi-logic also in biology." That is, in order to be, "life requires death, and in a way both are co-extensive."

To be or not to be is not the question. Rather, how to negotiate their complementarity. It's the difference between a living death and a life-in-death.

Random Thoughts on Randomness

I wasn't planning to post. In the wake of yesterday's horror story, I am reluctant to say anything, because most anything one says will sound trite, vicious, stupid, or agenda-driven. I suppose that's the point of a trauma: it shatters one's usual categories for interpreting and understanding reality, and we are left to reassemble the pieces of our narrative in more or less defective ways.

Leading up to the trauma (any trauma), Everything Makes Sense. Of course, it -- meaning life -- never really makes sense. Rather, we simply superimpose a grid of logic and predictability, which most of the time works. But trauma comes along and reminds us that our narrative grid is just a fairy tale.

On a more micro level, think of Tom Petty. I was reading this morning of how he was a tortured soul who struggled with an abusive childhood, insecurity, severe depression, a miserable marriage, heroin addiction, and alienation from his children.

Nevertheless, he apparently came through it all, and then BOOM! The worst sting of all, just when you least suspect it. Indeed, if Petty were conscious, he might well have said something like, "What's this?! This can't be! I battled my demons for decades and came out the other side of hell! You know, resurrected!"

That same cosmic BOOM is awaiting us all, no matter how many comforting stories we tell ourselves. And perhaps more often than not, it will be a Total Surprise, as it was for the victims in Las Vegas. Were they ready for it? What a stupid question! How many people have the luxury to meditate on their death every day, to keep it front and center, such that it is the Constant Companion? And even then.

People understandably don't like to ponder the randomness of it all. If our personal fairy tales are there to deny the power of chance, our collective ones attempt to do so in a more systematic way.

As to the latter, you might say that this approach tries to situate the random element in a higher order -- similar to how Thelonious Monk could take the sour note and integrate it into a deeper harmonic structure. That requires a large musical mind. The smaller mind will just hear the wrong note and not know what to do with it. It's just a mistake instead of an uppertunity.

I think it takes a wide and capacious soul to acknowledge the power of chance, which amounts to conceding our permanent and insurmountable ignorance.

Churchill for example, observes that "The longer one lives, the more one realizes that everything depends upon chance," and that "Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence" are but "different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man's own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power":

If anyone will look back over the course of even ten years' experience, he will see that many incidents, utterly unimportant in themselves, have in fact governed the whole of his fortunes and career.

Especially in war, "Chance casts aside all veils and disguises and presents herself nakedly from moment to moment as the direct arbiter of all persons and events."

Churchill knows of what he writes. Examples from his life abound, but on one occasion during WWI, when stationed at the front, he was called to a pointless meeting that was ultimately canceled anyway. Five minutes after he grudgingly took off for it, a bomb landed in his trench.

What is one to think in the wake of such a near miss? Yes, "I was spared." But why? And by Whom? And why not the others? Etc. Churchill was aware of a "strong sensation that a hand had been stretched out to move me in the nick of time from a fatal spot." But he doesn't pretend to understand the nature of the Hand.

Can we control the Hand? No, of course not. The best we can hope to do is tip the scales. There is no 100%. I would compare it to the casino, where the odds are always tipped in favor of the house.

Indeed, the house -- Death -- always wins in the end. But perhaps we can do things to delay his triumph. I, for example, have type 1 diabetes. That's a big tilt in favor of the house. Therefore, I do everything I can to nudge it back in my direction, for example, taking medications to keep my blood pressure and cholesterol even lower than they already are, working out every day, avoiding stress, sleeping well, getting enough alcohol, etc.

But we can never actually see the state of the playing field. I'm trying to tip it in my favor, but there is no controlled experiment. You can do everything right, but things nevertheless can and will turn out wrong.

Perhaps in the end, the best we can do is place the randomness in a higher order, a la Monk. Is this an intellectual dodge? I don't think so; chance presumes predictability; randomness must be parasitic on order. Indeed, the only reason we can perceive chance is because of order. Otherwise the two would be indistinguishable.

Robert Spitzer writes that "Death and loss are intensely negative moments within an ultimately loving eternity."

In this context, our brief lives are "a time for choosing who we are and who we will become." Thus, "Death is significant for only one major reason -- to compel us to make the fundamental decisions that will define our eternal character."

We know when things go wrong. But we will never know how many times the angel of death has passed us by. No one can hear or see the countless bullets flying past as we navigate from one horizon to the other. There is one with our name on it, but that should only serve to keep our souls concentrated on that distant shore.

The Globalist-Barbarian Axis

Back to who we are. Or were, rather; I'm afraid that train has left the station, and that now we're just dealing with the consequences of national we-lessness, AKA tribalism.

In the foreword, Huntington outlines the American Creed, that "crucial defining element" of our identity, our national We. However, each of its constituents is disputed if not under systematic attack from within:

Key elements of that culture include: the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to create a heaven on earth, a "city on a hill."

That last one needs to be qualified, because I don't think our Puritan forbears conflated the C on an H with heaven. Ironically, this is the left's project; ironically², this makes them more Puritan than the Puritans they ridicule. Which in turn lines up with Polanyi's principle that the left combines unhinged moral passion with an absence of religious constraints. They specialize in creating moral monsters over which they inevitably lose control, as did Dr. Frankenstein.

Example. Okay, the dimwitted football players protesting the Anthem (a formerly uncontroversial symbol of unity, which is to say, our transcendent We-ness).

Where do these idiots get their ideas? Not from themselves, because they don't have any. Rather, from the white liberal elites responsible for the Narrative (AKA ideology for dummies).

Not only is the Narrative 180˚ from the truth, it is murderously hostile to the interests of blacks and other majorities. Thousands of blacks have already died as a result of the Narrative, and more will die as a result of the protesters (although it is intrinsically impossible to quantify how many):

While poorly educated athletes, egged on by leftist commentators, indulge in Black Lives Matter based protests against their country, evidence pours in that black-on-black crime is the real threat to black lives and that attacks on policing are causing an increase in such crime.

[Heather McDonald] points out that nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881.... The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these blacks? Not whites.... among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.

Does it not go without saying that black lives matter? No Christian would ever suggest or even imagine otherwise. But leftists are not Christians. Or, to paraphrase the Aphorist, mixing leftism with Christianity turns the idiot into a perfect idiot. Any idiots who support BLM are perfect idiots indeed:

In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed,” [which in turn] masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest.

Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers -- committed vastly and disproportionately by black males.

Out of, say, 10,000 white liberals who are informed of the truth, how many will say, "Oh. Sorry. Didn't know that." Who knows? One? I was one of them. Was I really that stupid? I can't be sure, because liberals weren't as crazy back then. Today, for example, Bill Clinton would be a mainstream Republican and JFK would be an out-and-out Reaganesque conservative.

Huntington mentions that after September 11, 2001, companies that manufacture American flags had to step up production to as much as five times normal. A note to myself in the margin says "autoimmune response."

What is the immune system -- I mean on a more abstract level? Clearly it is a function of identity: of self and not-self. And whether fortunately or unfortunately, collective identity in particular is often forged in war. We know who we are because we know who we aren't.

Indeed, what is the anthem but a call to, or vertical recollection of, unity in the face of danger? -- our blood-spattered banner illuminated by the glorious spectacle of bombs blasting and rockets reaming the defeated enemy.

Huntington suggests that "the proportion of people in America" who are loyal to and identify with other countries is "quite possibly higher than at any time since the American Revolution." Back then it was roughly one third for independence, one third neutral, and one third as pro-American as is our Media-Tenure industrial complex today.

Our contemporary situation is complicated by multiculturalism below and transnationalism above. Ironically, the left consists of an alliance between trans- and multiculturalists, even though these are polar opposites.

This is another example of leftist elites creating a monster -- multiculturalism -- that they cannot control. What does a transnational corporation such as Google have in common with, say, a racist organization such as La Raza, or a hate group such as the Southern Poverty Law Center? The only thing that unifies them is their mutual enemy: America.

Trump and the Americanism he champions are rejected by both wealthy globalists and multicultural barbarians. Antifa and BLM are merely tools of the elite, just as the guillotine was merely a tool of the Revolution.

To be continued....

God Has No Baby Mamas

Well. There was no time for a proper post. But I thought there might be time to lay a foundation and get some preluminaries out of the way. However, I didn't get very far before timelessness ran out. (By the way, this is the second post written while donning the sacred dude sweater. I think it's helping.)

In one of those strange but typical cosmic coincidences, I've been reading a book that perfectly complements Who Are We?, called The Immortal in You: How Human Nature Is More Than Science Can Say. The former goes to our collective identity --- the We -- while the latter goes to the deepest source of our personal identity -- the I.

We all have an I, hopefully no more than one. But all I's also belong to a We. In fact, more than one We. For example, my We may refer to my marriage, my family, my occupation, my country, my species, my nonlocal brothers-under-the-pelt, and more.

There are any number of potential disturbances in our personal and collective identities. Some -- well, many -- people, for example, do not develop a stable identity, such that there is more than one center of subjectivity in the psyche. I call them Mind Parasites, because it is very much as if these yousurpers live off our own subjectivity in order to maintain themselves. They are like hungry (or greedy, or envious, or angry, etc.) ghosts made out of our own mindstuff.

Now that I think about it, there are also positive mind parasites, analogous to the healthy bacteria that live inside our gut. Indeed, some people even take parasite pills (probiotics) in order to cultivate these friendly invaders.

So there are propsychotics as well. Like what? I don't want to get completely sidetracked into developmental psychology and attachment theory, but human maturity is very much a function of internalization, and we mainly internalize what are called "object relations."

For example, assuming what is called "good enough mothering," the infant internalizes what amounts to Mom, such that he is gradually able to sooth himself without her actual presence, or by using symbols of her presence, which are called transitional objects (like a favorite stuffed animal, or, later in life, a cigarette or government program).

Professor Wiki has an adequate description of how Bion explains it:

Bion took for granted that the infant requires a mind to help it tolerate and organize experience. For Bion, thoughts exist prior to the development of an apparatus for thinking. The apparatus for thinking, the capacity to have thoughts "has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts." Thoughts exist prior to their realization. Thinking, the capacity to think the thoughts which already exist, develops through another mind providing alpha-function -- through the "container" role of maternal reverie.

As to "reverie," this is a term of art referring to "the capacity to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant," equivalent to maternal attunement and preoccupation.

Yesterday, for example, my son reminded me that his mother always knew what he was talking about when he was blabbering on in his own language, which we called Tristonian. To me he sounded like a stroke victim, but Mom was bilingual and able to understand what he was going on about.

There are other ways of looking at the same phenomenon. For example, Jung would say we come into the world with a maternal archetype that is like an "empty form" waiting to be actualized by experience. Think of it as a universal pre-conception. What we call "human nature" consists of various archetypes that are filled in by particular experiences that correspond to them.

For example, there is clearly a God archetype. If there weren't, then we wouldn't have this in-built readiness to experience him. God is in the particular experience, but the particular experience is not God -- similar to how I am in my big toe, but my big toe is not me.

We're getting too far afield. The point is, I Am not myself allone. Or rather, in order to be ourselves, we need help from others. There is always an I-We complementarity.

This apparently applies all the way up into the Godhead, where God too is an irreducible I-We complementarity. There are hints of this all through the Bible -- for example, "Let Us make make man in Our image, according to Our likeness." Even -- or especially -- in God, I and We coarise. There the relationship is of Father and Son instead of Mother and Child, but still.

Why Father instead of Mother? That is by no means a stupid or irrelevant question. In fact, I just read something about that. But where? Ah yes, here, in an appendix to Edward Feser's Five Proofs of God that asks Is God Male? No, not exactly. "Nevertheless, the traditional practice has been to characterize God in masculine terms." Yeah, but why?

"God's relationship to the world is much more like a paternal relationship than it is like a maternal relationship." For example, "there is no change to a father's physiology as a consequence of impregnation, whereas there is a radical change in the mother's physiology."

Analogously, God cranks out worlds with no apparent change to himself. Similarly, there is "a literal physiological connection between the child and its mother," but not between child and father.

One wonders how many NFL crybullies have no relationship with the children of their baby mamas, which will in turn help create the next generation of fatherless victims with daddy issues projected into police, "white privilege," and authority more generally.

I'm not sure what the title of the post means, but there it is.

What Is We?

That is the implicit question in the title of Samuel Huntington's last book, Who Are We?: The Challenges to American's National Identity. It could scarcely be more timely, being that we are living in a civil war with two absolutely irreconcilable ideas of Who We Are. The controversy over our dimwitted athletes Disrespecting the Flag for Some Reason is just a microchasm.

Before asking who We are, one must first define what We is. Analogously, the question "who am I?" is different from the question of exactly what the human person is. A materialist who asks the question will likely arrive at a very different answer than the transmaterialist.

Ultimately, the former will "discover" an object that has the meaningless side effect of thought, the latter a meaningful soul with the side effect of embodiment. For the materialist, word is reduced to flesh; for the Christian, word is instantiated in flesh, such that the soul is the form of the body.

Indeed, to a large extent the conclusion one reaches will be a consequence of the premise with which one begins. Recall Kruschev's remark that when a Soviet cosmonaut was up in outer space, he didn't see any God there. Likewise, I've seen human brains before, and I've never see any souls in there.

Is there something fundamentally different in the way left and right go about defining the We? Oh yeah. The I too, since I and We are irreducibly complementary. Not only is threeness built into the nature of things, but this nature goes to the very essence of the differences with our spiritually blind com(un)patriots.

It has been many years since I've been in a flame war with the opposition, but I stupidly got into one on Sunday, over at the MLB website. I mentioned that I had been a Dodgers fan since 1965, but that if any player tried any stupid s*** during the anthem, I was done. Things deteriorated from there.

Some of the left-wing comments were unbelievable to me, but it's been a while since I visited the dark precincts of the internet. The media try to put a sane face on the left, or just ignore things that will expose the insanity for all to see. For example, they reframe fascist Antifa rioters as "protesters," so their insanity looks like Courage in the Face of Oppression or something.

There are hundreds to choose from. Here are a few of the more thoughtful ones:

BEING IN THE MILITARY DOESN'T GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO BE WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE. OUR MILITARY IS PROFIT-MACHINE FOR THE BANKERS, AND THE POOR PEOPLE THAT JOIN THE U.S. MILITARY ARE MERELY LOOKING FOR JOBS. THEY ARE THE WEAKEST AND MOST VULNERABLE, JUST LIKE THE THIRD WORLD NATIONS THAT THEY ATTACK FOR A PAYCHECK. CARRYING A GUN DOESN'T MAKE YOU A MAN.

The Disgrace is the Racist, Sexist, Xenophobic failed business man and crook who is the accidental president in the WH.

if there's no place on the field for political expression... which does each game start with a nationalist pep rally?

can't we all agree that the presence of the flag is the cause of the issue? Stop with the jingoistic Nationalist propaganda of going through the ritual of singing the national anthem. I'll flag has no place in a baseball game I didn't go to the baseball game to look at a flag.

you tried to use your military service as if it gave you superiority. It does not especially since the USA have been the aggressors in every war since WW 2, and then was totally wrong in using nuks. So even when the US military has moral High Ground we have chosen to be the bad guys. Anybody who joins the military doesn't deserve respect in my book.

It couldn't be any worse than the Sexual Assault Grabber-in-Chief of 'alternative facts', N-A-Z-I sympathizing, and Russian treason.

These folks are crazy or stupid or ignorant, or likely all three. You'd think they'd have a hard time fitting into any "we," but you'd be wrong. Turns out there is a vast movement of misfits, cranks, perverts, cosmic inverts, bitter females, beta males, overeducated fools, undereducated animals, race-obsessed losers, and generally lost souls.

These in aggregate constitute the sufficient reason of the left: there is no effect without a cause, and the cause of the left is always some kind of alienation from, or inversion of, reality. The alienation is a treatable condition, susceptible to correction. The inversion is generally not. Once a person has inverted reality, he tends to stay there. But thanks to the left, he's never alone.

I'm thinking, for example of all those rock star cosmic inverts who haven't taken a new cognitive imprint since the 1960s: people such as David Crosby, Bruce Springsteen, Grace Slick, Paul Simon, Carole King, James Taylor, et al, are saying exactly the things they said fifty years ago, like a cognitive tick.

Which in effect it is, i.e., an obsessional defense mechanism that helps organize the psyche. It conveniently displaces evil and hatred and projects them into a fantasized right wing -- just as hordes of leftists literally believe President Trump is a white supremacist or Nazi sympathizer.

I've highlighted so much of this book, I don't know where to begin. Maybe I'll start with some of the notes to myself in the back, such as: "How to have one nation with two such completely different experiences?" You might say this goes to an identity crisis, only on the collective/interior level -- the We rather then the I.

What is the meaning and purpose of a nation? These two are nearly synonymous, or at least two sides of the same reality, since purpose follows from meaning. If you think America means Equality, then you will have a very different purpose from the one who believes it means Liberty.

I also have a note to myself about deconstruction and historical revisionism being analogous to False Memory Syndrome, only afflicting the We rather than the I. If, say, you major in history, then false memories of America's past are implanted into your psyche -- like those of the commenter above, who "remembers" America being the aggressor in every conflict since 1945. Remember when we invaded Korea and enslaved the south?

But one no longer even has to major in history to suffer from False Memory Syndrome. Rather, the implantation process begins in grade school, which essentially softens the ground for the reception of even more outrageous lies in college and grad school. The idea of tearing down historical monuments or insulting the flag doesn't come out of nowhere. Rather, it's just the reductio ad psychotum of idiocies people assimilate as early as kindergarten. It's why we homeschool our son.

It is also important to bear in mind that you can't implant one set of symbols without first destroying another. For example, when I was in school, George Washington was still the unproblematic father of our country, which in turn made us all siblings, i.e., members of the American family. The left has succeeded in killing Washington and other symbols of unity, such as the flag, so what takes their place?

Ideology. Ideology creates a false past in order to justify its current wishes. A nation's identity is a vertical phenomenon involving both imagination and recollection. One commenter above calls the anthem a form of "jingoistic Nationalist propaganda." That is what he imagines and remembers when he hears it. That's the vertical space he inhabits when it is played at a sporting event. I suppose when the fighter jets fly overhead, he thinks of the vast Military Profit Machine that benefits Bankers and Corporations.

Thanks to multiculturalism and identity politics, we are not one nation (a we) under God (the source and ground of unity), but many warring tribes under Diabolos, i.e., the sprit of division and father of lies.

Diabolical Division and Satan's Blender

It's desk clearing time. I've got books and notes everywhere, and I need to reduce the chaos to some kind of mere disorder. At the very least, the notes will be in one convenient place. And who knows, they may even cohere into a post. In any event, I wouldn't expect much.

The notes aren't always very helpful. Rather, they are often ideas for ideas that I am presumably supposed to enflesh at a later now. This one is typical: it says "Diabolos -- lies & division & truths at wrong level & blending of hierarchy."

Thanks for the tip! But what could it mean? Obviously it has something to do with the etymology of diabolical, and etymology is useful because it can highlight the experience-near reason for why we have a word to begin with. Obviously, ongoing use of the word can take us rather far afield from the original meaning.

Let's consult the dictionary. Not the little one, but the doorstop. From the Greek, diabolos, among other linguistic variations, connoting slanderer, discredit, throw across. Dia is related to dis, which connotes apart, to pieces, and division. Dis then sends us to dys, with connotations including doubt, bad, and difficult.

Where does this leave us? Correct: to Dems. Consider the the left's strategy, which is always founded upon five types of speech: slander, libel, incitement, sedition, and treason. This is what they throw at Trump every day, all day. Racism didn't stick. Anti-Semitism looks pretty stupid in light of the UN smackdown. So now we're back to Russia and treason. It will never end.

The lies of the left are obvious, as is the division, AKA multiculturalism and identity politics. What about truths at the wrong level and the blending of hierarchy? These two go together, because one way to wreck a hierarchy is to apply the truth of one level to a level where it isn't appropriate -- for example, conflating scientific and metaphysical truth.

The left never stops engaging in the latter, which is why they can accuse us of being unscientific when we are being metaphysical, or metaphysical (or better, "politicized" or ideological) when we are being scientific.

For example, when we say that a baby human being is a human being, we are not being political but scientific. No, that's an insult to science. We're just being logical and common freaking sensical, or even prescientific: what you have to be in order to even begin science.

Or, it turns out that different human groups have different average IQs. That's just the way it is. Likewise, it turns out that none of the models cobbled together by global warming activists has proved able to accurately predict the future (and more embarrassingly, the past). There's a name for that in science: wrong. They are the ones who elevate global warming to a metaphysic (AKA religion), in that it is literally unfalsifiable.

To back up a bit, that is precisely what metaphysics involves: the most general concepts about reality (or being) that by definition cannot not be true (for example, the principle of noncontradiction). As such, all events, experiences, and knowledge will be in conformity with it. If they aren't, then your metaphysic is wrong, and you need to go back to the drawing board, probably for the first time. It's the difference between things that cannot not be and things that just can't be.

Now, truth is hierarchical, or better, symphonic (throwing time into the mix). Reality is a concordance (or harmolodic, to borrow a term from Ornette Coleman) of chordal structure and melodic elaboration and variation, or verticality and horizontality: archetype and exemplar; form and substance; essence and existence -- the ultimate pattern of which is found in Father/Son, Creator/Creation, Beyond Being/Being, Being/Existence, etc. (IMO).

What about the diabolical blending of the left? Let us count the ways! Man and woman, legal and illegal, immigration and invasion, their right and our obligation, law and whim, truth and power, journalism and propaganda, education and indoctrination, college and infant daycare, art and excrement... They relativize the Absolute and absolutize their particular relativism.

In fact, here's another note: nature abhors a metaphysical vacuum. Which is itself a metaphysical truth! Deny it and you will inevitably end up with an unexamined and probably stupid metaphysic. Or more likely, a... what is the opposite of meta-?

Says here there isn't really one, but he recommends mesa-. So, mesapneumic, or something. I'm not going to read the paper, but it seems to me that it is analogous to the distinction between transcendent and immanent (speaking of necessary truths of being, which is "bilocal," so to speak; or local and nonlocal).

But fascism -- AKA the left -- involves, as the old gag goes, the violent rejection of transcendence. It reduces transcendence to immanence, or spirit to matter, which is precisely what Marx claimed to be doing. (Unlike contemporary leftists, he was at least honest about what he was up to.)

Damn, only two notes down, and we're out of time. We'll leave off with a third: paradise is enclosed in a wall of complementarities. Hell is their conflation.

Mathworld and Mythworld

We've finished the book on Thomas, and I'm pretty much left with nothing to say this morning, and no compulsion to say it. The end of a blogging cycle? Could be. In any event, what we have here is a rambling exploration of whatever pops up

Note to myself: the future never arrives. It was never there.

Something arrives. Just not the future. Rather, all we can really know is the new present. The present is always here, and we are always in it.

Pro-tip right there.

Still, we can't help thinking about the future. We are situated in this dimension called time, which has three distinct and extraordinarily different modalities: past, present, future. These three are so different in character that it's difficult to see how they could be the same thing; or, three views of the same thing. And yet, there it is: was, is, and will be.

I'm out of the loop. Has anyone cracked the enigma of time? Or have we still made no progress since Augustine's remark that if no one asks us, we know what time is. But if we wish to explain it, then we have no idea.

It seems to me that science just putters around the edges of such mysteries. It can only assume time, not explain it. Likewise little things like causality, law, consciousness, subject, origin, event, etc. These are all prerequisites for science and therefore unexplainable by science -- just as the eye cannot see itself or the Antifa support himself.

You might say that science is one way to metabolize the mystery of existence. But just because you have metabolized it in a certain way, it hardly means you have done so exhaustively, or that nothing remains to be digested. Indeed, no explanation, no matter how complete, ever extinguishes the mystery, and may even deepen it.

As Feser explains, "there is simply no reason to suppose that physics gives us anything close to an exhaustive description of reality in the first place," and "ample reason to think that it does not." It "focuses its attention on those aspects of nature which can be described in the language of mathematics," but by definition leaves out everything that is not subject to mathematization. Thus, "if there are features" of the world "that cannot be captured by this method, physics is guaranteed to not find them."

Mathematics is an abstraction, indeed, the most abstract language available to man. But it is only possible because there is something concrete prior to it. We cannot live in mathworld. There must be something of an "intrinsic character" that simply is what it is, and can never be reduced to an abstraction.

It seems to me that this is Gödel's bottom line take, and yet, so few really take it to the bottom: that all of our intellectual systems are ultimately projections on the mystery of existence.

However, according to my sources, Gödel never intended this to consign us to a Kantian shadow-world of phenomenal appearances only, with no possibility of knowing reality. Rather, the opposite: that of course we have access to truths we cannot prove with our reason, the latter of which is always self-enclosed and tautological.

In short, we can exit the cave and see the sun. But we can never contain the sun in our own little abstract systems. To think otherwise is... G3AOA -- Genesis 3 All Over Again.

So, one must maintain a complementary balance reality and idea, or between concrete and abstract. Again, no matter how sophisticated your idea, reality nevertheless is what it is. Indeed, the more sophisticated the idea, the more one may be tempted to imagine that it is adequate.

This is precisely where idea transmogrifies into ideology, where education devolves to indoctrination, and where math is fallaciously reified into a misplaced concreteness.

It is the difference between mathworld and mythworld. No civilization can be founded upon mathworld, let alone maintained on it. Infertile eggheads who imagine otherwise are just leaves leafing in denial of the trunk and roots of the cosmic tree that nourishes them.

From a psychological standpoint there are two forms of independence, the real kind and a pseudo version. Real independence is always rooted in what we call "mature dependence." Conversely, to imagine we are literally independent -- an I without a We -- is the worst kind of narcissism. I think many libertarians fall into the latter error. Conversely, leftists champion a version of immature dependence in elevating the We to the detriment of the I.

Come to think of it, this is precisely the subject of Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. The questions 'Who Are We?' and 'Who Am I?' are absolutely intertwined and complementary: one cannot ask one without asking the other, either explicitly or implicitly.

And at the basis of our civil war are two completely irreconcilable version of the I and We. In other words, the We of the left has absolutely nothing in common with the We to which I belong. That may sound polemical, but it is quite accurate, and cuts right to the heart of the dispute.

I've highlighted so many passages in the book that I scarcely know where to begin. I'm almost out of time anyway, but let's just say that Trump not only speaks for the forgotten We of America, but for a We that the multicultural and transnational left effectively wishes to eradicate.

And I mean that literally. Ultimately what the left wishes to eliminate is Americans, that is, people who identify with our founding, our traditions, our history, our myths, our spiritual vision, and our exceptional mission. Even our statues. And certainly our constitution.

Let's put it this way: you can deconstruct the shorthand myth of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. Fine. But if you are not mythopoetically awed by the greatness of the man, and deny his national fatherhood, then we are not only no longer brothers but members of different and hostile tribes.

Let the Dead Bury the Tenured

"All beings naturally strive towards God -- not explicitly but implicitly" (Thomas). Since atheists are beings too, this goes for them as much as anyone else. But how can someone who rejects God be simultaneously striving for God? Let's think.

Well, most atheists of my acquaintance reject God on the basis of their intellect. But what is the intellect, and why can it be trusted, especially regarding a subject so vastly transcending its scope, its reason for being (which is biological reproduction)? Well, you have to put your faith in something. An atheist presumably puts faith in himself and leaves it at that.

But if you don't stop arbitrarily with your own mind -- if you refrain from the cosmic onanism for a moment -- then you are soon enough led into one of the classical proofs of God, to something certain, unmoved, eternal, etc. In short, your own thinking must have the backing of an eternal sponsor, or it is nothing.

We know and judge all things in the light of the first truth, for the light of our intellect, which is either natural or a gift of grace, is nothing other than an imprint of the first truth. This interior light of the mind is the principal cause of knowledge.

This was obviously the approach of our founders. They did not say, "in our opinion, people should be free to pursue their own interests & stuff." In this regard they foresaw the future fascist snowflakes who would say, "in our opinion, you are not free, especially Ben Shapiro. He triggers us, therefore he is violent, so we have the right to violently shut him down."

You see from where leftist principles always come and to where they inevitably lead: quite literally, they come from nothing and lead nowhere. These people are anarchists. Nihilists, Donny. Cosmocrats of the Dark Aion. Who cannot see it? And why not?

I'm old enough to remember when conservatives were free to speak in our Temples of Truth without $600,000 in police protection. Churchill once cracked that "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." In our current civil war, truth needs a bodyguard, period. An army of them if it ventures near a liberal campus.

It's not only that truth requires police protection. The reason it needs the protection is that it is under violent attack. Now, there is nothing more sick than attacking truth. Rejecting it is one thing. That's amenable to correction. But preemptively assaulting it is another matter entirely. For it is the negation of the very purpose of the intellect, which is to know truth in an objective and disinterested way.

Therefore, it is an attempt to violently sunder man from his very ground -- from his reason for being. It is the end of humanness, the end of all meaning except that which is violently superimposed by the requirements of leftist ideology.

The science is never settled. But nor is the religion, and for the same reason: "The reason we are called wayfarers is because we are striving toward God, who is our end and beatitude."

Likewise, science strives toward a truth it can never attain, on pain of Gödel coming to your house and slapping you around. And truth is the beatitude of the intellect.

For "The love of God has the power of uniting things." Indeed, God is the principle of unity, without whom there would be none. Here again, science is the reduction of multiplicity to unity. Therefore, it is always implicitly seeking God, at least when rightly practiced.

Conversely, "Love of self... divides up human affections and diversifies them." Those with ears, let them hear! Those with graduate degrees, remove those ideological truth-cancelling headphones!

There are only two vertical directions, up and down, toward God and unity or toward a futile cosmic dispersion and fragmentary selfhood shouting nonsense into the void, AKA the liberal media.

Truly, "The last end is the first principle of being." AlphOmega. We are wayfarers on an inspiraling journey, not from nowhere to nothing, but from ground to nonlocal destiny. And "when the first cause in which all else can be known is reached, the quest of the spirit comes to an end."

Note that the first cause of the left is matter, or nothing, or ideology, which amount to the same thing. It is why their journey is over before it begins -- a zombie-like quest for the impossible. Let the dead bury the tenured.

Does this mean everyone is the same? The precise opposite! For it is the very basis of our individuality:

"God is one in reality but is multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him." But if we do not know God, then it is as if everyone knows nothing, which truly renders them as unique and valuable as an ant.

On the Rights of Man and Obligations of God

No doubt an ill-sounding formulation and not to everyone's taste, but it is meant somewhat ironically, and is more or less half-true besides.

This zinger by Thomas is a good one, because it shows the insufficiency of a sola scriptura approach, and the necessity of an integrated vertical-horizontal metaphysic:

It is quite clearly a false opinion to say that, with regard to the truth of faith, [that] it is completely indifferent what one thinks about created things, provided one has the right opinion about God; [for] an error about creatures reacts in a false knowledge of God.

We know that a false belief about God results in false knowledge about the world -- which amounts to saying that an inaccurate conception of the Absolute redounds to a skewed perspective on the relative.

Indeed, I don't even think we can speak of the One without giving the Many its due. This is my own personal belief, and therefore not an ex cathedra teaching from the Seat of Toots -- but I don't believe there can be a One without a Many, which simply means that God cannot help himself from creating. It's what he does; or rather, is: man can be creative because God is creativity.

A God without creation would be like the Father without the Son, i.e., unthinkable. God is omnipotent, but within the constraints, so to speak, of his own nature -- a nature that is being, love, truth, beauty, freedom, unity, and creativity. IMO.

Now, when we say "give the Many its due," it is obviously possible to go too far in this direction, which amounts to divinizing the world, AKA pantheism. Materialism is just covert pantheism, again, because it gives totally unwarranted godlike powers to matter. A little sense of proportion, please.

But also, a belief in God without reference to the world ironically results in an over-materialized view of God. Think, for example, of Islam, which is all-God and no-world: everything is a direct result of God, with no mediation or secondary causes at all. Ironically, this redounds even to a materialistic conception of the afterlife.

It is interesting that Churchill noticed this way back in 1898 or so, but only based upon his direct experiences with Islam and its faithful, before political correctness came along to block and deny what is present before our eyes: "A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity" (emphasis mine).

Among the "dreadful curses" which "Mohammedanism lays on its votaries" is a "fearful fatalistic apathy" that is only the logical corollary of predestination. "Insecurity of property exist[s] wherever the followers of the prophet rule or live," no doubt because everything belongs to God, nothing to man.

Except when it does: "every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property," and "the final extinction of slavery" must await the day that "the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men."

Why the slavery and misogyny? Because once you have determined that God is everything and man nothing, then it scarcely matters how you treat a person. Perhaps this will one day change, but not until such a time as they develop a correct conception of the limits of God (in the sense that he is constrained by his nature, as above) and the rights of man, i.e., the proper place of the Many in the overall scheme of things. (Note also that prior to man's rights are his duties, including especially those toward his Creator!)

The world is not nothing. It is not just maya (illusion), nor is it just God's footstool. To treat it that way is actually to mistreat God.

By the way, must Islam be the way it is understood and practiced in the Muslim world? No! Lest anyone accuse me of Muslim bashing, first of all, I'm only trying to help. Second, the mere existence of Schuon proves the point. Everything I have said above (before the Churchill material) is straight out of his playbook. Let me see if I can quickly back that up...

This is from the first book I grabbed, Logic and Transcendence. On the one hand, "Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself." As with any form of existentialism it "postulates a definition of the world that is impossible if existentialism itself is possible."

Thus, a sole focus on the Many without reference to the One is a total non-starter. Tweaking what Schuon says above, it is literally the case that if atheism is possible, then it is impossible. QED.

What about the opposite error, of denigrating the legitimate rights, so to speak, of the creation?

"Man is what he is, or else he is nothing." And if God is what certain people believe he is, then Man is nothing on stilts. In reality our "capacity for objectivity and absoluteness of thought" prove that we have one foot in the divine reality; or that we are "in" freedom while being oriented toward the truth that surpasses us.

You might say that we have the right to freedom, but only on account of our obligation to truth. This is the very structure of the zigzag -- for all lines are straight in a deterministic cosmos -- journey we call Life. Freedom is nothing without truth, just as truth is unattainable without freedom. And God would not -- could not? -- give one without the other.

Satan is Always Working on a Better Louse Trap

Let's return to the Human Wisdom of St. Thomas. A couple posts back we pointed out that there can be no such thing as pathology in the absence of a proper order or function. Physiological pathology is generally easy to recognize, since various organs have distinct purposes. When one fails to achieve its purpose, then you're sick.

But what about the mind? What is its purpose? If we adopt a Darwinian approach and treat it like any other organ, then its purpose is to survive. But does anyone short of a psychopath actually regard his mind in this manner, as a survival machine?

For Thomas, a being "is perfect in the measure in which it reaches up to its origin." Ah, but where is the origin? For the Darwinian -- or any other materialist -- it is necessarily below. But where's the perfection in that? In fact, that is the elimination of progress altogether.

It reminds me of the Freudian idea that the purpose of an instinct is to discharge tension. The infant, for example, doesn't love his mother; rather, he only cares about the elimination of tension caused by being hungry or cold or frightened or whatever. In this view, the human links between mother and infant are eliminated, and the person is reduced to a hedonistic atom instead of a trinitarian community of love.

But the origin is not, and cannot be, below. Rather, it is above. Note that both perspectives are vertical in nature. It's just that the false view turns on itself and eliminates verticality. It is literally a case of using transcendence to deny transcendence, which is obviously a contradiction, a form of the old all-Cretans-are-liars gag, i.e., "all verticality is horizontal."

For Thomas, "The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being open to God." Is this not axiomatic? Obviously the mind is situated in a vertical space, or between O and Ø. Equally evident is the fact that we can move closer to or more distant from O.

Thus, in the ultimate sense, the object of life is conformity to O. The only alternative is conformity to Ø, which is a kind of cosmic suicide. Not only does it deny the purpose of life, it denies -- again, necessarily -- purposes altogether.

In reality, "Every rational being knows God implicitly in every act of knowledge." Boom. In the absence of God, neither reason nor knowledge would be conceivable, let alone achievable.

Some atheists are honest about this, but not many. In truth, it's God or anarchy. The an-arche is literal, in that there is no order: no beginning, no origin, no source, no ground, no basis for action, no first principles of knowledge -- and each of these is a reflection of the same First Principle.

Instead of regarding the cosmos as a tree with its roots aloft and branches down below, the materialist drives his roots deep into matter. Which of course turns him into the sap.

"Nothing is knowable except through its likeness to the first truth." No doubt true, but what is the first truth that all truths resemble?

Hmm. I would have to say Trinity, which is the last and therefore first truth. I may be wrong about this, but it is as if the structure of Trinity is Subject, Object, and Intelligibility. It is a dynamic spiral in with the Incarnation allows us to participate. The Son is the real-ization of Being, and Being radiates (or glori-fies) the implicit Intelligibility of the Father.

"The natural desire for knowledge cannot be satisfied in us until we know the first cause." Really, this goes triple for any scientific discipline. It's just that each discipline (except theology and philosophy) arbitrarily stops short of the first cause.

YOU MUST HAVE A FIRST CAUSE, whether or not you call it God. But if it is not God, then you are elevating something less than God to godhood. An atheist is just someone who confers godlike qualities on matter.

"God, however, is the first cause. Hence the last end of the creature endowed with a spiritual intellect is to see God in his essence." Alpha and Omega. You can't have one without the other. The only alternative is a static and closed circle, or an absurcular tautology. If you find yourself in one, you need to get out more often. Windows and doors are everywhere, but no one can force you to take the look or leap of faith.

Returning to the vertical space between O and Ø, we have termed the former the Great Attractor. We could never even know about it unless we were lured in its direction. Conversely, we are not lured by Ø. Rather, the operative word there would be "seduced" or "hypnotized" or "ensnared."

"Liberation" -- the truth that sets one free -- involves freeing oneself from these lower vertical snares. You are not so much in need of information as dehypnosis. In the hypnotic state you can't understand the information anyway.

Lately I've been catching rats in the backyard. It's amazing how effective peanut butter is in luring them to the rattrap. The other morning I went to check out the trap, and the peanut butter was missing, even though the trap had sprung. Lucky rat! Or clever.

This strikes me as a useful analogy to the lures that surround us. The clever ones are able to snatch the peanut butter, and yet, keep on thinking. They are like zombies who are psychically dead but alive, AKA the tenured, the fake news media, and the plague spreading Democ-rats more generally...

Leftism: Come for the Messianic Fantasies, Stay for the Sadism

Regarding spiritual sickness, we agree with the Aphorist that Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

You can take this quite literally, in that the first function of a society is to perpetuate itself. When Obama promised to "fundamentally change" the nation, he was not only serious, but giving voice to an ideology that perceives a vast system of oppression that must be dismantled from top to bottom.

Speaking of demons in democracy, Legutko reminds us that communists and socialists "sternly and ruthlessly criticized -- just as liberals did -- existing communities with long traditions, and after seizing power, ruthlessly destroyed them."

Leftists everywhere and everywhen are especially contemptuous of what is known as "flyover country," being that more rural areas are "seen as the mainstay of tradition" and "strongholds of conservatism and bigotry"-- bitter clingers, deplorables, white supremacist Trump voters, etc.

Exaggeration? I won't bother tracking down the links, but consider liberal luminaries such as Bill Maher and that actress person who regard the hurricanes in Florida and Texas as just deserts for their ideological deviance. Gaia is a jealous god!

The process described by Legutko is similar to how Democrats use blacks as vote farms while pretending to help them. Just so, communist regimes "systematically did their best to wipe out rural culture while at the same time" appearing to defend them "as victims of exploitation." Even on the face of it, how can a Democrat party that wants to import millions of unskilled laborers to suppress wages, be a friend of the working man?

But the ideologue doesn't deal with the real world, let alone real human beings. Rather, he sees only his projected ideology. There is a word for this: insanity. Except this is a kind of ready-made, off-the-shelf insanity, as opposed to the custom made kind. Give the latter credit: they may be crazy, but at least they think for themselves.

This point is worth belaboring: just as traditional religion provides a way for the average person to be wise, ideology provides a way for even the most intelligent person to render himself an idiot. Let's stipulate that Noam Chomsky has a higher IQ than, say, Margaret Thatcher. Who is the wise one, who the malevolent idiot?

For communists, "the 'proletariat' was an abstract term to which no real community corresponded; it was nothing but a requirement of political strategy" -- like an empty placeholder. Likewise, there are no flesh-and-blood little people who correspond to the left's blather about the Little Guy. To the extent that they exist, they are only there to fulfill a role in the left's existential passion play.

The same can be said of "women," which is just "an abstract concept that does not denote any actual existing community, but only an imagined collective made an object of political worship among feminist organizations and their allies." Actual women aren't even women if they deviate from the abstract ideological ideal. The same can be said of blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, etc. You will have noticed that what the left calls "multiculturalism" is the last word in homogenization -- of herding everyone into the same ideology:

Never before in human history did we see a similar phenomenon when millions of people, indistinguishable from each other, using the same patterns of thinking, politically homogeneous and oblivious to any other way of viewing the political world except according to the orthodox liberal-democratic version, are not only convinced of their own individual and group differences and proclaim the unchallenged superiority of pluralism, but also want to enforce the same simplistic and tediously predictable orthodoxy on the entire world as the ultimate embodiment of the idea of multiplicity.

Something in there sounds familiar... ultimate embodiment. Yes, just as the Incarnation is Word made flesh, the left has its own inverted version of this, in that they want their insane ideological word to be embodied in everyone, without exception. What else to make of UC Berkeley, which absolutely cannot tolerate a Ben Shapiro in its midst?

When we speak of the "body of Christ," we are adverting to a capacity for embodiment that must exist prior to this or that particular case. To make an obvious point, it is possible for the same body to embody something other than Christ; think, for example of cults, which collectively embody lies of various kinds.

Antifa is the embodiment of a (sick) word, just as was Nazism. Therefore, to say that Christianity is the ongoing embodiment of the Word is not in any way some one-of-a-kind miracle. Humans are always embodying abstract ideals. Occasionally these ideals are even true, but not often. Which is precisely why man is in need of revelation. Left to his own devices, he is clearly vulnerable to the embodiment of anti-Words of varying degrees of malignancy.

In a certain way, history is a catalogue of anti-Words made flesh. Clearly, our founders recognized this -- for example, with Madison's crack about government being "the greatest of all reflections on human nature."

This recognition of the priority of the word does not go unnoticed by the left. Indeed, it is why, in the words of the Aphorist, Rather than an ideological strategy, the Left is a lexicographic tactic. In short, their motto might well be: "in order to embody the word, we had to destroy the word."

Words like marriage, truth, normality, freedom, man, woman, constitution, first amendment, etc.

"An intellectual's sharp eye and perceptiveness will always recognize what is politically dangerous: a sentence, a metaphor, a proverb, an incorrect text on the bulletin board, a work of fiction.... there is no shortage of people who ecstatically become involved in tracking disloyalty and fostering a new orthodoxy" (Legutko).

Think of nosy Lena Dunhams everywhere, monitoring ideological conformity, "a moralist, a commissar, and an informer rolled into one." These conforming nobodies help embody the left. They "develop a sense of power otherwise unavailable," and cannot "resist the temptation to indulge in a low desire to harm others with impunity." All with the best of intentions!

There is a Simpson's episode in which Homer dreams of a job that combines his desire to help people with his desire to hurt them.

What is leftism but a way to reconcile an unhinged passion to redeem mankind with a sadistic desire to harm human beings, the former providing ideological rationalization for the latter?

Psychopathology and Pneumopathology

An annoyingly rambling post that asks more questions than it has time to answer. In my defense, it's a Big Subject, perhaps the biggest.

No, it's the biggest: how a man ought to be.

As always, it's a little difficult to locate the thread after having let it go for a couple of days. Oh, there it is: instead of being wise as serpents and innocent as doves, the left recommends being cynical as a psychopath and credulous as a child.

This credo has always guided the left, but is especially vivid these days due to Trump Derangement. It is the difference between neurotic and borderline personality structure.

I don't like to get pedantic this early in the morning, but broadly speaking, there are four main categories of adult patients, and you generally know within seconds which one you're dealing with. First there are people with organic problems ranging from dementia to closed head injuries to hormonal disorders. They don't have any psycho-political relevance.

Speaking of which -- it's all coming back to me now -- yesterday on the way to work, Dennis Prager mentioned that leftism is... I forget the exact phrase, but essentially a spiritual sickness. That may sound polemic, but I've been listening to him for a couple of decades, and it is a considered opinion based upon years of examining the patient. He means it literally, not as an insult.

However, two things: first, spiritual illness presupposes spiritual health. Any normal person has the ability to intuitively diagnose spiritual illness, but he may not know how he is doing it, nor on what implicit criteria he is basing the diagnosis (nor on what basis he presumes himself to be normal!).

Second, this means that we must distinguish between psychopathology and something like pneumopathology.

Thus, the entire innerprise is based upon a distinction between mind (or psyche) and spirit. However, profane psychology either conflates the two or denies spirit altogether.

The problem is, the more intellectually rigorous the psychology, the more spiritually purblind it tends to be (for example, materialistic approaches that know -- so to speak -- everything about the brain but nothing about the person).

On the other side we have squishy and intellectually vapid new age approaches that make both psychology and religion appear stupid. And either approach can easily be mastered by morons with political agendas. I know this because when I was an agenda-driven liberal moron, I used psychology to bash conservatives.

Back to our other three categories of mental illness: they are 1) neurotic, 2) borderline, and 3) psychotic. The last one doesn't interest us per se, except insofar as the borderline individual is vulnerable to a "psychotic core" that he is always attempting to manage with various primitive defense mechanisms. The neurotic person is subject to various psychic conflicts, but not to the point of frank loss of contact with reality.

I've been out of the loop for awhile, but back when I was in grad school -- this would have been between 1982 and 1988 -- there was a lot of research and writing on borderline phenomena. There seemed to be a general consensus that we were seeing a lot more of it, because prior to the 1960s, most of the psychoanalytic literature dealt with neurotics.

But after the 1960s, we saw an influx of more seriously ill patients for whom the model of neurosis didn't fit. Which led to a great deal of research and theorizing on borderline psychic structure. Of course, it is difficult to know if we are seeing a new phenomenon, or just taking notice of an old one (as with autism or attention deficit disorder).

Another confounding variable is the general loosening of cultural controls. As a result, people are more "free" -- which includes the freedom to be as crazy as one wants to be. Prior to the 1960s, these various forms of madness, deviance, and perversion were suppressed and stigmatized, whereas afterwards they weren't only allowed open expression but even "normalized." Feminism, for example, offers a woman many novels ways to act out her mental illness that were unavailable in the past.

So in a generation or two we have gone from marginalizing mental illness to actually celebrating it. And if you are not on board with the celebration, then you are the deviant one!

Recent example plucked from the cultural pneumosphere: Twitter Bans Activist Mommy for Tweeting Her Dislike of Teen Vogue’s Anal Sex Guide.

Such a headline begs for a psychological interpretation, but that would be too easy. Besides, we're well beyond what psychology can explain, although, at the same time, I think we need both views -- the psychological and spiritual -- in order to comprehensively understand the phenomena. Although psyche and spirit permeate one another, there are also ways in which spirit is situated atop psyche, depending upon whether you look at it vertically or horizontally.

Recall the other day, when we suggested that traditional religion is a way for the average person to be wise. Conversely, leftist ideology provides a way for the intelligent man to be an idiot. But it also provides an excellent way for the crazy person to appear sane, and for the spiritually disordered person to appear "elevated" and "evolved" -- e.g., Deepak Chopra or Jeremiah Wright.

In the normal course of development, psyche comes first. However, we know from our Aquinas that what comes first ontologically is last existentially; in other words, the final cause is the last to appear. For example, the adult toward which the child is developing is present as telos before actualizing in time.

No one ever put it this way in graduate school, but clearly, the entire category of psychopathology presumes a proper developmental telos. In other words, if there is no right way to be, then there can be no wrong way.

Now, over the past 50 years, the left has been preaching that there is by definition no right way to be. Indeed, pretending otherwise is just a way to legitimize power over the oppressed and marginalized (as if, for example, heterosexuality is a conspiracy against homosexuals!). Therefore, a leftist should be the last person in the world to call someone crazy -- or evil -- for supporting Trump.

The left has systematically destroyed all standards and hierarchies, and here they are appealing to a standard of some kind. If they were sane, we would call them hypocrites. But what is hypocritical for the neurotic is standard operating procedure for the borderline person who lacks the psychic integration to maintain intellectual or emotional consistency.

To what timeless and universal standard does the left appeal? Just leftism. This is what the left has always done -- for example, in the Soviet Union you were either a Marxist or mentally ill.

No one ever thought this would happen in the U.S., but here we are.

"The liberal-democratic man, especially if he is an intellectual or an artist, is very reluctant to learn, but, at the same time, all too eager to teach.... he assumes and never has the slightest doubt that he is in possession of the entirety of the human experience" (Legutko).

This leads to the ideological flatulence that surrounds us, from fake news to fakademia, an awareness that we are "always surrounded by non reality, i.e., artifacts fabricated by the propaganda machine, whose aim [is] to prevent us from seeing reality as it [is]." We are "living among phantoms in the world of illusion," or rather, in a cloud of projected mind parasites (a "cloud of witlessness") known as the Narrative, AKA Ideology for Dummies.

These dummies never suspect that there is more to realty than what their ideology permits them to see -- and less than what it compels them to imagine.

Eh. We'll try to pick up the thread next week...

Innocent as Ted Kennedy, Wise as Maxine Waters

Let's begin with some metaphysically sound bites from Thomas that have a bearing on the Demon in Democracy.

For example, Man cannot possibly be good unless he stands in the right relation to the common good. And Just as the right use of power in ruling over many people is a good in the highest degree, so is its misuse in the highest degree evil.

This implies that the hottest precincts of hell are reserved for rulers who misuse power. Note that Thomas understood this long prior to the appearance of 20th century monsters such as Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, et al.

Now, this is weird, but extremely telling. I just did a quick search of the most evil rulers in history, and this was the first that popped up: on it, George Bush is #2, Ariel Sharon #4. It proves Dennis Prager's adage that "Those who don't fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils."

For example, this is why leftists get far more worked up over innocuous statues than genuine evils such as inner city black-on-black violence; or the make-believe science of AGW than third world poverty that can't be overcome without a larger carbon footprint.

The purpose of the intellect is to know truth. Obviously. But "the purpose of ideology," writes Legutko, "is not to disclose intricacies and ambiguities but to make a clear statement." The MSM Narrative (which is again Ideology for Dummies) is rarely in accord with reality, but always loud and clear.

This reminds me of the distinction between, say, the metaphysics of Thomas and Bible stories -- but with a big difference. Few people have the time or aptitude to study metaphysics. Which is one of the principle reasons for revelation, in that it provides a way to implicitly understand the same truths, only available to one and all. You might say that it is a way to make the average person wise.

For example, as we've said before, even the person with a literal understanding of Genesis has superior wisdom to the credentialed atheist who imagines the world came about by accident. The latter is "learned stupidity," while the former is more akin to "naive wisdom."

It is the other way around with ideology, which has two functions: on the one hand, it makes the idiot feel superior to the wise, while turning the most intelligent man into an idiot. Regarding the former, even the dimmest college student can assimilate enough cliches and insults to render him a Democrat for life. It is the whole basis for the appeal of Bernie Sanders, and of the leftward lurch of Democrats more generally:

The race to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020 will be a race to the left. The Bernie Sanders agenda has taken root. By the time the Democrats’ nominating process was complete in 2016, Hillary Clinton had become Bernie Sanders-lite... the next Democratic nominee as likely to be Sanders on steroids.

Economic polices will consist of government giveaways and anti-business crusades. Social causes will give no quarter to moderate positions, and LGBT special interests, labor unions, global warming fanatics and factions such as Black Lives Matter, along with other grievance industry groups, will face no moderating counterforce.

In other words, thanks to college, people are increasingly dis-oriented: the stupid ones imagine they are superior, while the intelligent ones are the most readily indoctrinated into the stupidity. Similar to how all you need is a little menstrual blood and a lot of bitterness in order to call yourself an "artist."

Of course, if you criticize college they will call you "anti-intellectual," which is itself part of the indoctrination. In short, they will call you a name. The left never argues. It accuses.

But the purpose of philosophy is not to accuse. Rather, it is to lead persons to the Light, one assoul at a time. It is to help him exit the cave of contingency (and of historicism) and into the wide open space of truth, AKA O. If you don't know that O is far vaster than your puny ideology, then you don't even know nothing, because what you think you know is all wrong.

"No wonder that those contaminated by ideology" have such "a deep suspicion toward ideas" (Legutko). The irony is that there is no one as anti-intellectual as the leftist who fancies himself an intellectual. Let's take the example of Bill Maher. Everything about him cries out that he wants you to know that he's a Smart Guy.

If that is the case, why does he only pick on such easy targets? I'd like to see him go toe to toe with a Thomas Aquinas or Frithjof Schuon. But an insult is not an argument, and smugness is not actual superiority.

Speaking of which, "In a certain sense humility is man's readiness to approach spiritual and divine things." Indeed,"Humility prepares the way for wisdom" and "makes a man capable of knowing God" (Thomas).

Those qualify as the most important things one can know, being that they are a prerequisite for knowing the most important things. But how many people learn this at a liberal university? Any? If so, it is only in reaction to the pestilent nonsense that pervades the atmosphere. Experiencing a place that has been sanitized of God can be a very effective source of conversion. When the cave fills with toxic gas, get out!

Jesus counsels us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, a combination of discernment and humility. The left has a twisted version of this -- something like "cynical as a psychopath but credulous as a child."

Why You Oughta

Just finished a book called The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. I skimmed a lot of it, so I'm not sure if the author came right out and identified this demon. But the demon is obviously man.

Or, if the temptation is totalitarianism, the temptee is us. (We won't delve into the identity of the tempter behind the temptation today.)

Not all are equally vulnerable to the temptation, for "conservative totalitarian" is a contradiction in terms, being that we believe in the freedom of individual over and above the state, while the left believes in the power of the state over and above the individual (because the individual is likely to abuse his freedom and not want what the left wants him to want). It's a question of the locus of power. In the words of the Aphorist, As the State grows, the individual shrinks.

Speaking of aphorisms, let's begin with a quip from St. Thomas that could generate reams of commentary:

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do.

Now, there is no man -- or no humanness -- in the absence of the Ought. The worst man nevertheless feels there are things he ought to do. It's just that, in reality, he oughtn't do them.

I know it's early in the morning for Godwin's Law, but Hitler obviously felt he ought to murder all Jews, just as the Soviet Union was under the imperative that it ought to liquidate all class enemies. Members of ISIS feel they ought to kill anyone who isn't, just as Antifa goons feel they ought to bring violence upon those with misgivings about liberal fascism. And so on.

The Ought is very much like any other drive or instinct. Just as, say, sexual desire has its proper object, so too does the Ought have its.

You will have no doubt noticed that a central feature of the left is the insistence that there is no such thing as on objective or disinterested Ought -- that there is no Ought built into the nature of things. Which is why they believe a man can be a woman, or marry a man, or even wear a man bun. You are not permitted to point out that these are things a proper man ought not do.

The irony, or course, is that the left is essentially saying that you ought not ought: or else! There is a word for this. I know there is, because I made it up: totolerantarianism. It ultimately reduces to absolute relativity enforced by absolute power; or in other words, the Lie backed by Force.

Which is why Thomas can say that "Moral virtue presupposes knowledge," because if you don't know what IS, then you will have no idea what to DO. If you really think that men and women are interchangeable, then you will literally have no idea that members of the same sex cannot "marry."

The name for truth-in-action is prudence. Which is why prudence is the pre-eminent virtue: "Without prudence," there can be no "discipline, or moderation, or any moral virtue." Which ultimately means that the Ought is again rooted in something prior: the IS. Thus, "All sins are opposed to prudence, just as all virtues are ruled by prudence."

Now, the left is the very essence of imprudence; which is another way of saying that it is always intemperate. Anyone can turn on their television and see images of leftists behaving intemperately. Why? Because they are out there on the street doing things they ought not do, because their Ought is completely screwed up, bearing no relationship to what IS.

With that little preface out of the way, let's return to the Demon in Democracy. The best chapter by far is called Ideology. Looks like I highlighted nearly every sentence. Let's find out why.

Wait. I think I know: if the Ought ought to be conformed to the IS, the left makes the fundamental error of conforming the Ought to Ideology. Deviation from the latter constitutes thought-crime, punishable by anything from banishment to job loss to murder. Marx is a jealous god!

Here is a timeless passage about the left:

Contrary to what most of us think, prevailing opinions, theories, and convictions that we consider timeless and self-evident are neither timeless nor self-evident, but are the product of economic and political arrangements peculiar to a specific phase of historical development. Whoever thinks otherwise and claims he speaks from a non-committed absolutist perspective is cheating himself, failing to notice that his supposedly disinterested consciousness has been fabricated by material conditions.

There it is, in all its vulgar glory: there is no truth, and we are its prophets!

Now, what conservatism wishes to conserve first and foremost are precisely those timeless and self-evident truths which the left insists don't exist. Rather, they say that these so-called truths are just pretexts for a naked power grab.

Which brings to mind Goebbels' advice to always accuse the other side of that which you are guilty. Certainly the fascists of Antifa have taken this to heart, but this is simply what the left does, every time.

As a matter of fact -- speaking of timeless truths -- the book begins with a comment by Dostoyevsky to the effect that

I have found from many observations that our liberals are incapable of allowing anyone to have his own convictions and immediately answer their opponent with abuse or something worse.

Something worse, like bottles of urine.

And again the crude trick: the left promulgates timeless truths about how there are no timeless truths to a human animal who is simply a product of history. Wha'?

There is no truth to the left's ideas. But they more than make up for this with their perverse power. The left's ideas "vaulted to unprecedented popularity," largely because they provide "a most convenient tool in political conflicts," allowing one to discredit "one's opponent without entering into substantive argument."

Quite simply, without slander there would be no left left. Think of the attempts thus far to slander President Trump: treason, misogyny, Islamophobe, racist, anti-Semite. Thus far nothing has stuck. Next up: tax cuts for the wealthy!

We'll leave off with another timeless truth about the left: "Ideology is always inherently simplistic and simplifying as its function is instrumental, not descriptive." With leftist ideology you always know what to do: identify and slander enemies. Physically assaulting them is just ideology by other means.

All the Left is Saying is Give Piss a Chance

Short book. Long exegesis.

I mean The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas.

In this regard, it is similar to other highly condensed tracts such as the Tao Te Ching, the Yoga Sutras, and the Upanishads, each serving as a compact owner's manual for the human being (and we do own ourselves -- although God co-signs the mortgage -- leftist ideology to the contrary notwithstanding).

Come to think of it, that itself is a cosmic principle: you own yourself. What we call the left begins with the contrary principle: that you first belong to the collective, the state, the class, the volk, etc.

That's really what it comes down to if you follow the ideas upstream to their first principles. Most ideas of the left can be traced to the principle that the individual is either illusory or selfish and antisocial, and therefore something to be eliminated or transcended. Or violently suppressed.

Which is why the left is organized around the idea of "identity politics." When they use the word "identity," they don't mean it in the way you or I do, that is, who we are as individuals.

Rather, they subordinate the individual to the group identity, such that one's primary attribute becomes race, class, gender, sexual preference, etc. Which is why it can be said that feminists love womankind, but can't stand individual women such as Margaret Thatcher or Ayaan Hirsi Ali; or that blacktivists love astract blackness but detest particular blacks such as Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, or Thomas Sowell.

Truly, it is a soul sickness, something one can only affirm 1) if there is a soul, and 2) if the soul has a proper order. The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas is all about the proper order of the soul, which is why it is again such a fine owner's manual.

"The principles of reason are those which are conformed to nature," i.e., in the nature of things. This is the same Nature to which the founders appeal when they advert to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" -- there being no possibility of Nature without a divine author.

For example, even Sartre has the rudimentary intellectual honesty to concede that "there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it."

In short, you are what you do, and what you do is whatever you will, such that you are encased in a meaningless tautology.

Which is where I believe the left comes to the rescue. The other day, Dennis Prager commented that leftism provides meaning for the soulless. I would say that it is a kind of therapy for the existentialized person who denies his own soul and therefore God -- the soul being the link between man and God.

With reference to cosmic principles, Thomas says it is not even possible to think they can be false. But then, this was before Marx came along and achieved the impossible. And look what happens when you attempt to force the impossible upon an intransigent reality: only 100 million murdered, give or take.

"Reason is man's nature. Hence whatever is contrary to reason is contrary to human nature."

Just try to disprove that. In so doing, you will have proved it. The only way to effectively disprove it is to eliminate the person who believes it. In other words, the will must take precedence over the intellect, such that power trumps truth. And now you understand Antifa, which answers reason with blows. If you're lucky. Bottles of urine if you're not.

They do not speak truth to power; rather, urine to truth.

A psychoanalyst would have much to say about the symbolism of urine, but I don't have time for such trivial insultainment. Well, maybe a little. According to Melanie Klein, in infantile (unconscious) phantasy,

the excreta are transformed into dangerous weapons: wetting is regarded as cutting, stabbing, burning, drowning, while the fecal mass is equated with weapons and missiles.... these violent modes of attack give place to hidden assaults by the most refined methods which sadism can devise, and the excreta are equated with poisonous substances.

So it's the same old whine in new bottles. Nevertheless, all they are saying is give piss a chance. We can only hope they never attain fecal capability.

Recall what was said above about owning oneself: "Human nature in the strict sense consists in being according to reason. Hence a man is said to contain himself when he acts in accordance with reason."

Hence it is possible to not contain oneself.

Here again, psychoanalysis is all over this subject, for every psychological defense mechanism comes down to an unconscious means of denying or expelling unwanted content: splitting, projection, denial, et al. This is why in the book I used the pneumaticons (•) and •••(•)•••, the latter symbolizing the person who is out of his mind; or rather, whose mind is out of himself.

Are we free to be another? No, for that would be the essence of un-freedom. It is another iteration of gaining the world but losing the soul, the latter being "everything." Which is why "every movement conformed to false knowledge is in itself bad and sinful," and "the will which departs from the reason is always bad."

In other words, whether the will is good or bad depends upon whether or not it is in conformity with truth. If a will informed by the lie isn't wrong, then nothing is.

Bottom line for today: Wherever there is intellectual knowledge, there is also free will. And where there isn't intellectual knowledge, there is always free urine.

Omniscience and Omnignorance

We left off with the radical idea that "the truth or falsity of an opinion depends on whether a thing is or is not." Thus, "man's thought is not true on its own account but is called true in virtue of its conformity with things" (Cosmic Zingers of St. Thomas).

Collusion with Russia is not a thing and never has been (except by Democrats); nor are Trump's racism, anti-Semitism, and fascism things at all. It is impossible to be conformity with these, because they are not.

So, with what are these millions of liberal lunatics in conformity? The short answer is ideology, or the Narrative (the latter being Ideology for Morons); perhaps equally important, they are reliably in conformity with each other. You've heard Rush play the clips in which every liberal media outlet not only has the same angle on a story, but uses the identical words. Sheep with no shepherd; or thanks to PC, the sheep conveniently herd themselves.

Two days ago the narrative Word of the Day was empathy -- as in Trump's absence of it for the victims of Harvey. Obviously, this is not something anyone can actually perceive. Rather, it is seen only through the lens of ideology. Ideology is the grandest lie one can embrace, because not only is it a lie, but it makes all the other lies possible.

Recall that the thing is prior to our thinking, and that truth is conformity between the two. But for the left, ideology is not only prior to the thing, but the thing itself. Which is why it "sees" things that do not exist, e.g., racism, collusion with our enemies, absence of empathy, racist cops, etc.

Look at academia: the only place you're sure to find conservative principles is in the business department. This is because in business, if your ideas don't conform to reality, you are bankrupt.

Conversely, in the humanities, if your ideas are bankrupt, then you're in business!

In real business, the customer is always right. But since ideology is prior to reality, the liberal is always right (and just and empathic and charitable and socially conscious and woke & stuff).

It's all so basic, and yet, no one is taught these principles. And "taught" isn't even the right word. Rather, they are seen; once seen, they are obvious; and they are obvious because they are in meta-conformity with human nature -- and with the nature of things more generally.

Thus, knowing the principles is vertical recollection; it is also elementary self-awareness -- so, never wonder why the left is so lacking in this commodity as well. One cannot embrace leftism without first banishing self-awareness from the psyche. It is why they can promulgate such nonsense with no shame.

"Nobody perceives himself to know except from the fact that he knows some object, because knowledge of some object is prior to knowledge of oneself knowing" (Thomas).

Again, one is tempted to say Tell me something I don't know. And yet, in this degraded age there exist entire university departments dedicated to systematically not knowing (or knowing nonsense): women's studies, queer theory, critical race theory, Chicano studies, et al.

In each case, knowledge of the ideology is not only prior to knowledge of oneself (and of reality), but effectively prevents it. Truly it is omniscience in reverse, or omnigorance. It is G3AOA.

The following truth can also be perceived directly, but one may require perfect 20/∞ vision in order to see it: "The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light in which eternal ideas are contained."

In other words, the Light with which we see the Light is the same Light with which we are able to see it.

Sounds paradoxical, but there is no other explanation. Certainly it explains how someone can plausibly claim to be the Light of the world. This Light shines even in the university, although the tenured do not see or comprehend it.

Another basic one: The truth is something good; otherwise it would not be worth desiring; and the good is true; otherwise it would not be intelligible.

In fact, truth is the good -- and beauty -- of the intellect, without which the intellect is worthless or even harmful. For an intellect not conformed to truth is a will conformed to power. This is the disloyal opposition of the left, being that they have no fealty to the reality prior to ideology.

******

The power of omnignorant ideology (courtesy Ace of Spades; click to enlarge):

Thy Thingdom Come vs. Thine Face be Punched

I didn't oversleep. Rather, I overdreamt. What a show! However, the show ran overtime, leaving time only for a brief and rudely insultaining post:

"The greatest kindness one can render to any man," says Thomas, "consists in leading him from error to truth."

If that is so, then the most grievous injury one can inflict upon another consists in leading him from truth to error; or even from curiosity to error, curiosity being the precursor to, and incubator of, truth.

In a certain sense curiosity is similar to faith, the latter representing conformity to the Infinite (recognition of doctrine being conformity to the Absolute). Each is a womb, whereas ideology is a tomb.

This being the case, then the greatest wholesale sources of evil in our day are 1) the left, 2) its seminaries of indoctrination (the university and educational establishment), and 3) its vectors of crude propaganda (the MSM and entertainment industry). Mother-daughter-unholy spirit, you might say (with no offense to their proper instantiations!).

In any event, all three are barreling hellward and trying to drag us there with them.

Do I really believe this? Yes, but only literally.

This goes to the essential difference between human beings and animals. Which is guess what? The intellect. To deny the intellect and its needs is to reduce man to an animal.

I wish!

For in reality, it reduces man to a station beneath the animals, for no animal can live a lie and still live. If you prefer to consider hell metaphorically, this is how it works: the Lie places man in a kind of negative ontological space, i.e., non-being. This follows logically from the fact that being and truth are convertible; so too lies and non-being.

This goes back to why it is such a grave sin to lead a man from truth to error: it is literally a kind of existential murder, or theft of being.

The other day Secretary De Vos tweeted that "Our prayers are with all those in the path of Hurricane Harvey" and that the federal government "stands ready to assist impacted schools." Innocuous enough.

In response, Keith Olbermann temperately tweeted that "The hurricane is going to do less damage to schools than you are, Motherfucker."

Now, even liberals -- who have been in control of the educational establishment for generations -- acknowledge that public education is a disaster. True, it succeeds in indoctrinating and molding future obedient liberals, but that's all it does. So, whose fault is this, Mr. Enthusiastic Violator of the Incest Taboo? Who has been f-ing the children for decades?

Not surprisingly, everything said above also converges upon freedom. It explains why freedom is a central value for conservatives, but public and private enemy #1 for the left. For as Thomas says, "the root of all freedom lies in the reason." To the extent that we are alienated from reason, or we have provided it with false premises, then we are unfree.

The other day I tossed off a comment at Instapundit to the effect that "Political correctness shows that the most effective form of totalitarianism is self-imposed and self-monitoring."

Political correctness is, among other things, an attack upon the very foundation of freedom, which is conformity to truth. Put conversely, if everyone "voluntarily" believes the lie, then vertical development is denied and enslavement is complete.

What is truth? For the left, it is perception -- so long as you perceive correctly, for example, that boys can be girls or that women are identical to men or Trump is Hitler.

But for the restavus, "the truth or falsity of an opinion depends on whether a thing is or is not." In other words, we begin with the object, the thing; the left begins with the ideology -- the subject -- superimposed upon the thing. The rest is commentary.

Or was anyway. Now it's masked thugs beating up people who believe in the primacy of the thing.

[M]an's thought is not true on its own account but is called true in virtue of its conformity with things. --Thomas the Brain