Resisting the Resistance

There are degrees political sickness, from neurosis to psychosis. I suppose there's also political normality, but it's so rare as to be nearly non-existent. Still, we can't have neurosis or psychosis unless there first exists normalcy. Unless a certain degree of abnormality is inevitable, in which case normality can only exist as an ideal. Crooked timber and all that.

But in any case, in a political order under our present tyranny of relativism, there can be no such thing as normality. Nor can anything be called objectively sick, perverse, or abnormal. And now you understand how the left gets away with it. Just as leftism is a religion with no God but countless demons, it is a political ideology with no truth but an army of enforcers hunting down and punishing deviations from it.

Really, -- and we've seen this playing out on our TV screens over the past several weeks -- the left is just a violent mob with an ideology attached. And it works. The non-crazy and non-evil are always victimized but the crazy and evil.

The first act of violence is always to language, AKA Logos. Being that it is the vehicle of truth, the maiming of language is always of vital importance to the left. Is this torture of the Logos but a simultaneous reenactment and undoing of the Crucifixion? Yes, of course, but we'll come back to that universal metacosmic truth in a subsequent post.

Brief timeout for pedantry. To simplify, there are two types of patient: the neurotic and the psychotic (or relatively mature and immature-to-infantile). The neurotic is plagued by intra-psychic conflict (e.g., insecurity, excessive and irrational worry, impulsive behavior) but is nevertheless in contact with reality, while the psychotic has more or less lost contact with reality.

But it really comes down to a different set of psychological defense mechanisms. You might say the neurotic uses a handgun to deal with his psychic demons and persecutors, while the psychotic goes nuclear every time.

Some of the common neurotic defenses include intellectualization, repression, and reaction formation. The latter has become ubiquitous on the left, what with legions of racists crawling over themselves to signal their innocence of racism to each other.

For that matter, it is why one should never trust a male feminist, because he is simply hiding the fact that he is neither. Likewise, what is a self-proclaimed "ally" of BLM but a fellow racist? People who are innocent of racism couldn't care less about signaling the fact.

Note also how the left doesn't just deploy pathological defenses, but wants to eliminate the mature ones, most conspicuously humor.

The immature defenses are nearly synonymous with the left, especially projection and acting out. But every day we see how the garden variety versions of these have become frankly delusional, e.g., President Trump is a Russian agent, Blacks are victims of genocide at the hands of law enforcement instead of each other, the imaginary campus rape epidemic, etc.

Every day a new delusion, really. By the way, there are also "negative delusions," for example, that Joe Biden is neurologically normal, or that CNN is a news network, or that Al Sharpton is anything other than what he so obviously is.

Here's an extended passage from The Politics of Truth. It has to do with a proper "politics of resistance," which is very much the opposite of the self-styled "resistance" that has been plaguing the country since late in the evening of November 7, 2016. (To be sure, they are resisting, the question being what.)

The reasonable response by the unaffected to perverse education [i.e., indoctrination into ideology] is resistance.... We are obliged to become our own physicians through the therapy of common sense and a steady appeal to the givens of common reality as experienced in the concrete consciousness of everyman and accumulated in the evidentiary treasury of history.

You may know this proper resistance to perversion by its opposite, for example, oh, vandalizing or tearing down statues of George Washington, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, and other icons of our precious civilizational inheritance. (Speaking of logocide, those statues are surely forms of incredibly rich and compact speech.)

However, forgive them, for they know not what they do, for they all attended college. And they are also in denial of the oedipal implications of murdering the father of our country.

Since experience shows that the vanguard of perversion and pneumopathology is the debauchery of language [see paragraph four above], so fashionable now in the forefront of the political-correctness onslaught, it is important to recall the insight of George Orwell in a memorable sentence:

"The purpose of Newspeak," he wrote, "was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the English Socialist Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible" [emphasis mine].

Those who control your language will control your thoughts. The result is to make the asking of questions impossible, socially irrelevant, or ludicrous -- and thus de facto prohibited within the new orthodoxy of closure and deformed souls.

Deformed souls. Ah, but there'a an easy way around that one: not only denying the reality of the soul but rendering its existence impossible, irrelevant, or ludicrous. Which is certainly one of the purposes of state indoctrination, since there one is despoiled of the very means through which to perceive and resist the pathological political system. The polite name for it is soul murder.

To live in truth requires at all times resolute resistance to untruth and tyranny as the first courageous step.

Recalling the words of C.S. Lewis, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." I'm ashamed to admit I don't have the courage to put up an ALL LIVES MATTER sign in my front yard, because I'm afraid of my house being burned down by my moral superiors.

This was published in 1996, so call it prophecy if you like: "Polarization of American society has proceeded so far through the influences of socialism, Marxism, multiculturalism, and the welfare state's collision with traditional attitudes," that we are in danger of "a slide toward sedition and civil strife on a scale perhaps not seen in America" since the last time Democrats acted out to this extent and created the tyranny of Jim Crow.

How to resist this resistance to reality? Via

intellectual and spiritual resistance to untruth, conducted by reason and persuasion. It is resistance in the name of liberty and truth to revolutionaries who are succeeding in wresting major universities, academic professional associations, and much public discourse to radical control....

The connection with the Murder of God movement as the revolutionaries' common ground must be repeatedly demonstrated as inspiring their onslaughts.

A reminder that useless and idle RINOs are the favored tools of the Devil, who can accomplish nothing without their collaboration.

The Great Awokening, or Satan's Own Spiritual Revival

Let's try to knock another one off the desk, this time The Politics of Truth, a collection of essays that could scarcely be more timely, being that we are currently undergoing a plunge into the Politics of the Lie, the likes of which I've certainly never experienced in my life.

Indeed, I suspect it's no coincidence that Voegelin decided to pay us a visit precisely now, since 1) no other thinker better illuminates the kind of political pathology currently afflicting us, and 2) no other time in our recent history better exemplifies Voegelin's ideas. Compared to what is going on now, Obama was but a sulking, lazy, and ill-educated adolescent, whereas now we're dealing with a sociopathic cohort of spiritually deformed pseudo-adults.

Is there a name for this politico-spiritual disease? No, there are several: "deformation of reality," "gnostic derailment," "dogmatomachy," "ideological pseudo-reality," "secular moonshine," "para-Marxist buffoonery," etc.

As we know -- good and hard, right to the sweetbreads -- we are in the midst of A Great Awokening, which is a perverted -- and inverted -- caricature of the Great Awakenings that have periodically occurred in America. The first one occurred between 1730 and 1740, and this spiritual revolution set the stage for the physical one that would come to fruition a generation or two later. As John Adams famously wrote,

The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

The Second Great Awakening took place between 1790 and 1840. And according to Prof. Wiki there was a third between 1855 and 1930, and even a fourth between 1960 and 1980.

By my calculation, that adds up to 145 years of Awakening out of the 234 years since the Declaration, which is over 60%. And what do we call the periods in between? The Great Slumbers? The Pneumatic Snoozes? And what on earth is happening now? In my opinion, the Great Awokening isn't simply a harmless nap but a perverse caricature of these past Awakenings.

Sandoz points out that in past awakenings, "the church served as a school for politics." But in the case of the Awokening it is the other way around: politics is the school of a new religion. Interestingly, no one who is a member of this new religion realizes he is one. Rather, only non-members even recognize that it is a religion.

That's odd. Then again, perhaps not. We must remember that "religion" is a modern concept. For the great majority of history, people didn't know they "had" a religion. Rather, they were simply immersed in a cosmos -- an order -- that included an uncritical religiosity. Conscious religiosity as a separate modality only emerges with the recognition of other religions.

Extremes meet, such that our postmodern Awokening is rooted in a premodern mentality of uncritical religiosity. Here again, this is soph-evident to non-members but veiled to the Woke.

Real religion involves a human ascent and divine pull into the objective order of the cosmos. What then occurs in the logocidal anti-religion of the Woke? Is there an analogous downward pull, AKA temptation at one end, the old "glamor of evil" at the other? Preliminary indications say Yes, but let's continue to flip.

Now, what can the sudden acquisition of Wokeness! be but a caricature of spiritual conversion? Sandoz describes the latter as

a personal experience of regeneration.... The individual is flooded with a sense of divine presence and intense participation or union with God...

Let's stipulate that the Woke protesters, looters, and crybullies are indeed flooded with something, and that they are most definitely participating in some sort of mock mystical body. Yes, it's a "mob," but what is the interior of a mob? What is the psychic glue that holds it together?

It is at once a Krazy Glue and a Gorilla Glue, since it encourages decompensation, regression, and impulsivity unmediated by discursive thought. Come to think of it, it is also a Super Glue, in that it evokes the Neitzschean superman, or the failure to attain mature manhood masquerading as its transcendence -- the quintessence of which being the Antifa terrorist terrorized by the mother with whom he lives.

Among the chief hindrances to [the] life of true liberty is the oppression of men, who in service to evil deceive with untruth and impose falsehood in its place proclaiming it to be true....

Liberty is most truly exercised by living in accord with truth and is, therefore, the correlate of responsibility (Sandoz).

I suppose this is the first time a Great Awokening has fully unleashed itself on our shores, but certainly not the first in history. It occurred, for example, in the USSR. As Solzhenitsyn described it, "The destruction of souls for three-quarters of a century is the most frightening thing." We're not nearly that far into our own Awokening, but as the Aphorist reminds us,

Everything in history begins before where we think it begins and ends after where we think it ends.

So the Awokening has been with us for awhile, just not this overtly violent, powerful, and oppressive.

a major difficulty lies in the ostensible "neutrality" in the public schools, which in fact often serves to shelter expanding beachheads of safe havens for antireligious ideology and attacks on American society's moral convictions, radical doctrines ranging from political correctness to advocacy of homosexuality, and neo-Marxism parading as dispassionate science....

The Woke have already lost the argument, but they don't know it. Or they do know it, hence the attacks on free speech and the violence to persons and property. Progressives may not know much, but they know violence and intimidation work.

The ideological antipolitics of the nihilistic second realities has been defeated theoretically, politically, economically, and by all the facts of human existence.

Yet unremitting assault continues on the American and generally Western heritage in the name of enlightenment and social progress by the ghosts of the very politics of atrocity whose true monuments are Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag. Its protagonists, unable to cope with reason and experience, resort to brute force tending toward the lethal.

That was published in 1996. It's no longer "tending." Rather, that toward which it was tending stands revealed.

The Science of Political Religions

Here's another book I think we can knock out in a hurry, A Government of Laws, a collection of Voegelinian essays on subjects ranging from the American founding to the contemporary political religions we've been seeing on our TV screens, with their primitive gods and violent liturgies.

As to the latter, we should never forget that human sacrifice is the default liturgy of the vertically untutored man. How many sacrificial offerings have occurred already at the hands of the BLM/Antifa priesthood? And how many thousands more will result from the defunding of police?

The book has an epigram by Aristotle ending with The law is reason unaffected by desire. Its unstated corollary is that the left is desire unaffected by reason; or it is abstract ideological reason uninformed by, and oblivious to, concrete historical experience.

There may be a shortcut through the book: how about I skip the things we already know, and focus only on the things we don't? And maybe throw in any passages that tell us what we already know, but do so in a clever or incisive way.

Here's an intriguing little fragment of a thoughtlet: that it would "be strange if a man chose not to live his own life but someone else's."

Well, in our opinion this happens every time a man chooses not to live in conformity to truth. So it happens quite often indeed. If the Truth sets one free, the Lie imprisons; and if truth is conformity to the real, then the Lie shackles one to a delusion of one kind or another. One is either inside or outside the cave; or rather, riveted by the shadows on the wall, or open to the light streaming in from outside. But enough about CNN.

Bob, I thought we were going to limit ourselves to what we don't already know?

Look, I'm trying, but it's nice to occasionally hear someone else say it, okay? You're not the only one who gets sick of the sound of my voice.

[W]e seek attunement with truth as far as we can. If we do not attain it with some degree of satisfaction, then there is discord and misery in our own being. We become what is variously represented as evil, unjust, and unhappy men. The higher capacities do not master the lower. Such men may be a walking civil war...

Wait -- are you suggesting that the Walking Civil Wars who imagine they're unhappy because of the existence of statues of Winston Churchill, or Thomas Jefferson, or Christopher Columbus, will not become happy after vandalizing or tearing them down?

No, they'll be delirious for a few minutes -- that's how mob psychology works -- before needing to repeat the experience. As with any other addiction, the progressive mobster keeps chasing the high, from canceling Gandhi to Basil Fawlty to Penny Lane. Pretty soon there's no one left to scapegoat -- no imaginary dragons left to slay -- so they must consume one another. It's one of those ironyclad Laws of the Left.

Why has the left plunged back into a premodern rejection of science? Because the very conception of science depends upon a prior "de-divinization of the world, which results in something we easily call nature; and nature can then be explored by science."

But "when this break is not radical, as it is [was] in the West, then there is trouble in having natural science."

The left -- since it is a pre-reflective political religion -- essentially re-divinizes (or demonizes is more like it) the world, thereby effacing the distinction between transcendence and immanence.

Which is how we end up with such idiotic decisions as yesterday's invention of new rights based upon the idea that sex -- a biological reality -- really refers to religious totems such as "sexual preference," “gender identity,” and cross-dressing.

But of course, they won't pursue the principle to its end, and proclaim that the Constitution protects the person who has a sexual preference for children, or thinks he's a giraffe, or likes to dress up in Klan robes.

Oh well: "Hatred of divine being is the mark of the radical modern, and specifically of Marxian revolt." Come for the hatred, stay for the destruction.

"Dogma supplants reason and science," so the born-again-from-below leftist -- hello, New Man! -- "can successfully usurp his place in a Second Reality of dreamworld imaginings."

For -- again, just turn on the TV -- "the spiritual dimensions of human existence do not vanish simply because men become atheistic and rebellious."

Oh, and never equate "spiritual" with "good." But you knew that already.

I think we're done here.

The Devil, the Apocalypse, and Other Nuisances

By now we're all familiar with the Mondello-Hildebrand Effect, whereby the subject of a post escapes the page and proceeds to comment upon itself after it has been written. In other words, it proclaims its own truth via synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences, or Divine Puns.

A case in point is the previous post, the title of which alludes to a "cartography of spirit." Afterwards the word "map" kept popping up in my reading. When this occurs, it must be for a reason.

The reason is that we have tapped into -- or so we have heard from the wise -- a hidden nonlocal connection, or a particularly rich vein of the cosmos. At the very least we must pay attention to these coincidences, and try to discern whether they truly reveal something of the underside of the cosmic area rug or are just symptoms of a delusional disorder. Example:

Let us not overlook the great secret that a sound map of human nature (as John Adams insisted) uniquely lies at the heart of the Constitution of the United States and its elaborate institutional arrangements (Sandoz, italics in original).

The passage then goes on to describe the events of the day -- no, not of 1787 but of 2020: that "The demos ever tends to become the ochlos [mob]," and therefore

must be restrained artfully by a vast net of adversarial devices if government is to have any chance whatever of prevailing over self-serving human passions while still nurturing the liberty of free men.

This passage adverts to several critical ideas, the most consequential being that if our politics isn't informed by an accurate map of human nature, then our political cosmos will eventually fall apart. Or, as the cliché has it, the center will not hold.

Let's face it: under the best of circumstances man is an ungovernable beast except from within. If he refuses to, or is incapable of, so governing himself, then he will be governed from without. In other words, the raging mob will evoke the force required to put it down, and then have the chutzpah to kvetch about it.

If you find no father in the home, you will probably find him later in the street with a uniform and gun. Disorder in the soul is the raison d'etre of Law and Order. If all men were Raccoons, government itself would be unnecessary.

Then I bumped into this observation by Richard Feynman, going to a life lived in the great In Between, which is the only place to be (or become, to be perfectly accurate):

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

We need maps, but the most accurate map is never the territory. Or, the most accurate map is the territory, AKA reality.

With that out of the away, let's turn to the Political Apocalypse, which has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks.

The apocalypse. It's always something, isn't it?

The book starts off with a bang. However, it's another one of those bangs that's self-evident to the clued in, but eternally beyond the grasp of the progressive mob, for if they knew it, it would cure them of their pathology, including all the infantile acting out:

"The secularization of existence" which "marks the modern age" has taken place "at the expense of common sense in politics and of rationality in philosophy through the disordering infusion of temporality with an ultimacy formerly reserved for the eternal beyond."

Boom. Again, this will convince precisely no one who doesn't already understand it, but this Great Leap Backward has resulted in "the rise of ideological mass movements whose key experiential ingredient is political apocalypse," i.e., of visions that promise "the radical transformation of man and history into the perfect existence of peace, plenty, justice, happiness, and a 'Final Harmony' of one description or another."

Yes, a Final Solution to... to what exactly? For if the problem is human nature, then failure to accurately map it will inevitably result in an aggravation of the primary problem.... as you have no doubt noticed, because what is a leftist but a human being, only worse?

Yes, man is the measure of all things. Except for God, who is the measure of man. Deny this and hell follows. In Democrat controlled cities, anyway.

The cartography of man pops up again:

We must have a systematic understanding of the nature of man if we want to have a systematic political science.... Society can destroy a man's soul because the disorder of society is a disease in the psyche of its members.

But that's an insult to multiculturalism, to the tenured fairy tale that all cultures are equally valuable and precious! Not exactly, for truth is never an insult, but it is always a scandal to the progressive.

As we've discussed in the past, the typical liberal is but a tool of lower forces -- or of demons in high places who manipulate the uncomprehending mob. The devil himself? He is essentially the personification of "the spirit of pure negation whose goal is simply annihilation." Some people just like to see the Wendy's burn.

And it needs to be emphasized that the devil even "loves" mankind in his own fashion. Indeed, he speaks truth, except that it is "my truth." Thus, any time you hear a liberal clown speak of "my truth," know that he is simply aping the Ape of God: "the devil speaks of his truth and of the other truth (about which, he admits, he can know nothing because he is pure negation."

Which is why you can hand a liberal the truth in a silver chalice, but you can't make him drink. This:

The insensibility of the modern apocalyptical gnostic to facts (including phenomenal facts) has been insufficiently noticed. It must be accorded a prominent place in any description of his psycho- or pneumapathology.

For not only is his conception of reality distorted by radical closure against transcendent Being, but he is highly selective and perversely willful with respect to the elements of phenomenal reality accepted as substantial.

One need only observe what happens to public figures who point out that BLM is a fraud rooted in disgusting and depraved lies about police treatment of blacks. Say what you want, but that is not the devil's truth.

The Idiot's Guide to Your Head, or A Cartography of Spirit

I've never been this backed up in the brain. Usually there's a rough balance of tirade between input and output, but at present I'm so far behind the tomes that I count no fewer than a dozen of them with which we need to catch up. How did this happen?

Oh, I know. The quarantine. The increased slack resulted not only in a greater quantity of reading, but -- and maybe this was providential -- a much deeper quality of reading, what with the Voegelin binge.

As far as I'm concerned, he takes us as deep into the cosmos as we can go, at least from the noetic (i.e., pneumo-cognitive) side of things. The pneumatic (mystico-experiential) side is another matter. Perhaps we'll veer into that modality when we formally retire, which, with any luck, will be in about six months.

Until the quarantine, I'd been thinking that retirement would solve the enduring problem of the Great Sequel. But now I have to rethink that, because it is by no means self-evident that more free time equates to more containment of the Mystery, or taming of the bucking cosmos. No, it only aggravates the Mystery in an exponential way. I don't want to say that it leaves me more confused, because that's not it at all. More... how to put it?

It's more like, say, one hour of input requires three or four hours of output, so I need to either reduce the former or increase the latter. At the very least, I need to write every day just so as to keep from sinking beneath the waves. I guess I don't mind writing every day, but who on earth wants to read me every day? Isn't that a little tedious?

Whatever. Nothing I can do about that. In any event, let's try to knock one of these books from the pile. It's called Political Apocalypse, which sounds ridiculously timely, no?

I've told you before that when I do a deep dive into this or that thinker's body of work, I often *imagine* they're contacting me directly via the ether or whatever you wish to call it. "Nonlocal operators standing by, ready to assist you," and all that.

Now, if you really appreciate how weird this cosmos is -- and I've tried to tell you -- then this really isn't weird at all. Voegelin wishes desperately to be understood, and nothing about this has changed just because he's no longer with us biologically. (I promise to do the same once I leave earth behind and go looking for Bo Diddley.)

Remember when Jesus says "I am with you to the end of the age"? Not only is this not remotely implausible, he's not the only one. He may be the 800 lb guerrilla, but there are other spiritual warriors hiding in the burning bushes, trees of life, the mycelial network, etc. And look, they're everywhere, okay? True hallucinations. You just have to surrender to the process, and the process will come to you.

No, I'm not just in a queer mood this morning. Here's a passage I read just yesterday from Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History. He's right here, sitting across the table and reminding us that

To the extent that men are actually philosophers in the original sense, they are engaged in an experiential, mystical ascent to luminous participation in existential truth.

Are we not men? Are we not philosophers? Are we not mystically ascending to luminous participation in existential truth? Are we not Coons? YES! WE! ARE! Someone has to do it, and it has come down to us. And it goes like this:

the movement of the soul into luminosity of existence is simultaneously a human seeking [↑] and a divine drawing [O, the Great Attractor].

That's pretty commonplace and experience-near, but here's where it gets a little more interesting:

the breakthrough is not simply a human endeavor; there is also a divine breakthrough or irruption into man, and there is no way that this can be predicted. It takes place where and in whom it will.

So there is the human (↑) into God or O; but this is necessarily complemented by the divine (↓) into man. Why necessarily? That's a largish subject, so at this point let's just posit it as a hypothesis and focus on the notion that God "irrupts" from time to time -- or timelessness to time -- in man. Is this even conceivable?

Wrong question. I would state it conversely: is it even conceivable that the human person isn't a vertically open system that receives and metabolizes divine energies? It only happens all the time (even if it happens quintessentially and fully only in the Incarnation).

Unless one closes oneself off from the divine energies, a pathological condition Voegelin describes in exquisite detail. The problem there is that once you've experienced it you need no further proof, and if you haven't experienced it, then no amount of proof is sufficient.

Here's another quote, selected more or less at random, or via lectio divina flippia:

The substance of philosophy is not to to be found in the philosopher's ideas but in the ascent that he enacts, in response to divine calling and grace.

But again, one can always deny the ascent and/or resist the pull. Free will. Or won't, rather. Closure against reality is always an option, but just know what you're not getting yourself into, okay?

The tension of longing may feel too painful; one may prefer an illusion of certainty to the challenge of epistemic existence in truth.... Where this willingness is lacking, one may avert one's gaze and seek refuge in opinions.

I still want to get to the Political Apocalypse. With any luck we can knock that one off the desk in the next post.

No Amount of Walking Adds Up to a Leap

Have we hit the bottom (line) of the cosmos, or is there further to go? Yes and no. Although the truth of reality isn't subject to change, human beings we are always either approaching or fleeing from this Truth.

In other words, vertically speaking, the cosmos is asymptotic at both ends; recall the image from a few posts back with the horizontal time axis bisected by the ovoid vertical sensorium of human understanding. The larger and more luminous that space, the more of reality you understand (and not just know, which is a poor substitute for integral comprehension). And we do mean this literally, more on which as we proceed.

Actually, it's right there in the comment box, and has been for a number of years. In no sense is it meant metaphorically, poetically, mystagogically, or "in a manner of speaking." Rather, it's the way it is, and always will be in this life:

The quest, thus, has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

I want to say that Truth is eternal while Ignorance, Stupidity, and the Lie are sempiternal, the latter meaning they might as well be endless but are still located in time. Expressed another way, there can be only one Eternal, and it doesn't include fake news, secular idolatry, or tenured babble.

Also, far be it from us to try to convince anyone of our deuscoveries. We leave that drudgery entirely to the Marketing Department. This blog is all about pure R & D, while implications and practical applications are mostly left to others.

Put another way, we write only for... well, first of all for ourselves, and second for readers capable of understanding what we're going on about. But nearly all Bobjections come from people who haven't understood Bob at all, but merely imagine they have because they squeeze Bob into their own procrustean reality tunnel.

Having said that, we are always delighted to hear objections from fellow vertical travelers who do understand our perspective and our process, being that it is improvised on the spot and naturally can't have the finished elegance of a composition or score. Always check with your holy man to see if One Cosmos is right for you. Side effects may include second birth pangs, third eye strain, untimely chakra activation, ontological weight gain, existential bemusement, vicarious embarrassment, guffaw-ha experiences, and more.

Suffice it to say that we do not prescribe our medicine to horizontaloid beings for the same reason the Bible tells us that we shouldn't cast our spheres before circles, or Plato warns the free-range thinker of the consequences of assuming cave dwellers will welcome your insights about the Light from outside their cave narrative.

This no doubt sounds a bit abstract, so I will momentarily remove the coonskin cap and put on my psychologist's hat, and remind you that the human need for extra-biological transhistorical meaning is as intense and pervasive as any physiological drive or instinct.

We might say that while instincts are animal drives, the drive for meaning is the quintessential human instinct. It explains why all humans in every culture have come up with so many idiotic meanings, from human sacrifice to Marxism to BLM (but I repeat myself).

(Brief timeout and apology: I had had a proper subject for a post in mind, but I'm just going to continue with the free & loose associating and see where it goes. Who knows, it may eventually lead back to the subject I'd had in mind.)

Let's pull back and try to see what's going on here. And when I say "pull back," I mean 50,000 years or so. Or better, let's "pull above" and try to discern the patterns that continuously repeat themselves like currents in the oceans. Looked at this way, there is very little true "progress," mostly just a tail-chasing rat race on Sisyphus's own hamster wheel; nevertheless, there are, in Voegelin's terms, occasional "leaps of being" that are truly radical and revolutionary, for they change everything.

Looked at this way, a radical revolutionary such as, say, Marx, or Hitler, or Mao, isn't revolutionary at all, but rather, just the latest iteration of the regressive force that always pulls man and culture back to a more primitive and undifferentiated state.

Conversely, a conservative -- specifically, the American variety who wishes to conserve the radical leap in being expressed by the Declaration and given flesh by the Constitution -- is the counter-cultural radical. What we nowadays call the "radical" is but a reanimated fossil of the past, for he is an emissary of tribalism, relativism, animism and/or materialism (which are but two sides of the same dysfunctional ontology), etc.

From our vertical meta-cosmic perspective we see a number of outstanding leaps in being. In other words, these are "discontinuous," being that there is nothing in their antecedents that can account for or predict their consequences. I know, because I'm one of them. My life makes no sense in linear terms.

At risk of boring the Old-timers, let's briefly run down some of the big leaps. There is, for example, existence itself, which is either created or it isn't. This is the Greatest Leap of All, even the greatest leap conceivable, and we mean this literally, because this is what creatio ex nihilo means.

Ask yourself: is there a greater conceivable leap than that between nothing and something? No, of course not. Compared to nothing, even something as vacuous as the quantum vacuum is of infinite significance.

The alternative metaphysic pretends the cosmos is self-sufficient and that there are no leaps. This view tends to be held in a consistent way by its flatland devotees, such that no subsequent leaps are seen or permitted either.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase Galileo, and yet it leaps. For example, the transition from inanimate matter to life isn't a line but a leap; likewise the leap from biology to intellect. And there's another vitally important leap from mere animal lineage to human history. Animals have a past but they have no history.

So history is indeed a leap, but what kind of leap, and into what? You might say that Voegelin spent his entire life exploring and answering this question. And the answer is quite multifaceted, requiring familiarity with...

Let's just say with everything; and not just what has occurred outside, but even more critically, what happens inside, which, after all, is the only thing of which we have direct and unmediated awareness.

Thus, for example, the transition from cyclical to linear time represents a tremendous leap forward; likewise the leap from polytheism to monotheism, or from collective identity to the individual, or from rule of man to rule of law. And if you personally haven't leapt into the space between immanence and transcendence, you are nowhere, literally. And yet, you are still a nuisance.

Does any of this touch on the news of the day? Yes, of course. But the clock has run out for today...

Upped Jumped the Devil

At risk of captaining the good ship Obvious, let's call this crisis what it is: spiritual warfare, except with only one side fighting. Thrones, dominions, powers, principalities, the whole menagerie of nonlocal cosmic influencers are present and accounted for.

I suppose I've always regarded that passage as more of a poetic inventory, but this website defines principalities quite specifically as "one type of spiritual (metaphysical) being which are now quite hostile to God and human beings" (for hostility to God is always hostility to man, and vice versa).

Well, who but Petey and his ilk can really see the unseen with perfect clarity? We only have privy to the effects, while the exact causes necessarily remain obscure for us.

But that's true of purely human behavior as well. Obviously, no one has direct access to the mind and motivations of another person. Rather, we can only infer or deduce them. Nevertheless, this isn't nothing, and one of the privileges of the human station is the ability to distinguish appearances from reality, even if we can never fully grasp the latter on this side of the area rug.

Indeed, I was discussing this just yesterday with the young master. There are so many mysteries to which we simply assign words, as if this eliminates the mystery, but it only does so for the incurious and easily mollified -- as if anyone really understands the nature of, say, energy, or metabolism, or organism, or consciousness, or even just existence.

Back when I was in grad school and pondering a dissertation subject, one idea that occurred to me was something having to do with The Remystification of the Mind. We typically equate "progress" with demystification, and that is true to a certain extent and up to a point. But we must never forget that any demystification is always in dialectic with Mystery as such, so that to imagine the world has been demystified is a grandiose delusion and even grounds for tenure.

Imagine, for example -- even though it is impossible for readers of this blog -- the mind satisfied with "the selfish gene" as an adequate explanation for human existence and experience. Or dialectical materialism, or scientism, or any other ideology.

You all know the drill, so I won't re-belabor this dead horse. The bottom line is that Mystery isn't some peripheral nuisance to be eliminated at a later date, but The Perennial Fact of the Matter. Literally, because it dwarfs our modest area of illumination. It is a sea that always surrounds and permeates our isle of knowledge.

Which is in no way to celebrate obscurantism or ignorance or irrationalism. Rather, it is to highlight the permanent and ineradicable truth of the human situation, which is again -- as we've been discussing these past several weeks -- always situated in a developing and differentiating space between the mysteries of immanence and transcendence.

I've mentioned before that you can learn a lot about normality by studying insanity, because psychological defense mechanisms that operate more subtly in the normal neurotic become quite vivid and hypertrophied in the borderline or psychotic patient. These defenses don't differ in essence, only in magnitude.

Well, it's the same vis-a-vis spiritual warfare. It's always going on, except sometimes it's so obvious as to be undeniable. But if we lack the vocabulary to describe it, it will probably be ignored, or worse, mischaracterized in deceptive terms that will only make matters worse.

For example, if you are a spiritually normal person, you will have noticed while watching the chaos play out on your TV screen, a very specific and ancient feeling bubbling up from your core (even if you never felt it before, it will still be familiar for vertical reasons related to species memory).

This needs to be given its proper name, and not transformed and renamed into something it isn't. But this is precisely what the left does, which is itself an important strategy in spiritual warfare, i.e., appropriation of the language.

Again, you will have noticed that once the Adversary has successfully seized, defined, and renamed the terms of debate, he has won the battle. Now everyone is talking about "police brutality" instead of brutal criminality. Everyone knows the statistics, for example, that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be murdered by a black criminal than the other way around, or that the greatest threat to black lives -- by orders of magnitude -- comes from fellow blacks. Such dangerous statistics are among the first casualties of spiritual warfare.

It reminds me of Pearl Harbor, a daring mission to preemptively decimate the US Navy before it even knew it was at war with Japan. With regard to the present spiritual warfare, it has been going on in its present form for decades, as the left has successfully softened the linguistic battlefield with its ceaseless campaign of logocide, such that merely conveying a banal truth is sufficient to to get oneself "cancelled" --which is to say, to become a spiritual battlefield casualty if not fatality.

Tucker Carlson has been on fire about this subject for the past couple of weeks, but even he can only go so far. Remember Patton after victory in Europe? I don't know if this was just in the movie, but he supposedly wanted to continue rolling right into Moscow and strangle the Beast in his nest. Which was more or less unfeasible even if his heart was in the right place. Turning on our "ally" would have been seen as a betrayal after so much propaganda had successfully transformed Satan himself into benign "Uncle Joe."

When is the last time we truly adopted an unapologetic No Half Measures approach to spiritual warfare? Nothing comes immediately to mind except the denouement of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, when the Manson girl gets it with the flamethrower. Or maybe Inglourious Basterds, when Nazis are reeducated with a Louisville Slugger vigorously applied to the cranium, and conveniently identified by a swastika carved into the forehead.

Does this mean Bob is advocating cruelty and sadism? Hardly. But let's understand whom we're dealing with. A little perspective is in order before we devise strategy and tactics. Going back to what I was saying about the exaggeration of psychological defense mechanisms in severe mental illness, we see a similar distortion in spiritual warfare.

In other words, certain activities we consider immoral under normal circumstances are sanctioned in war, e.g., violence, killing, and destruction. While we try to set limits on these, Satan honors no such limits. We see this in the French Revolution, in National Socialism, in communism, in Islamic terrorism, etc.

And of course we are currently seeing the same pattern play out with Antifa and BLM (which is a Gnostic ideological movement hiding behind race-obsessed white liberal guilt). Their violence has no limits -- which goes to that funny but distinct feeling you had in your tummy last week while watching the barbarian invasion. It's the same feeling St. Augustine had in 430, when Vandal Lives Matter sacked Hippo and looted the place.

Aw, look at me, I'm ramblin' again. I had intended to begin with this timely observation by Schuon, that

It makes no sense to believe in the devil and then each time, when he appears -- most often exploiting a specific situation [!] -- to deny that he is involved.

He also speaks of hypocrites "who secretly harbor grave faults" which break to the surface because they were never properly "dissolved by humility" to begin with, but rather, were simply "gilded with pride."

Which brings us to the very real problem of virtue signaling, which is nothing to snooze at, but rather, like political correctness, can be quite deadly.

A couple of aphorisms come to mind, that

1) The devil can achieve nothing great without the thoughtless collaboration of the virtues (i.e., gold-plated pride and hypocrisy),

and 2) Man does not call a solution the formula that solves problems, but the formula that hides them (which goes to the abuse of language which renders the actual problem unthinkable and unsayable).

But in the current maelstrom of willful ignorance masquerading as deep concern, one does well to remember that

Only the very intelligent man does not possess the solution to current problems.

For permanent existential problems have no political solutions, so pretending to solve them actually makes them worse. Or, if you do have a political solution to greed, lust, gluttony, laziness, anger, envy, pride, hypocrisy, ingratitude, racism, and the rest, let's hear it.

On the Acceleration of Politico-Cultural Insanity

The previous post ended with the question: "how did the obvious become controversial, and how did such anti-human buffoonery become the conventional wisdom of the media-academic complex?"

Exactly which anti-human buffoonery? There's so much of it, the average person is unable to distinguish between the shallow and trivial buffoonery of academia vs. the genuinely important and revolutionary buffoonery that threatens -- or promises -- to undo the cosmic progress of millennia.

In nearby Santa Monica, for example, progressive rioters can destroy in a weekend what had been taking years for progressive politicians to destroy.

And the discernment is only more difficult if one has attended college, since college is precisely where explicit indoctrination into the religion of radical secularism takes place.

Sr. Dávila says something to the effect that for most adults, their intellectual capital consists of a modest inheritance or small lottery won in adolescence. Think of someone like, for example, Obama, who hasn't taken a new cognitive imprint in 40 years, and still thinks and speaks like a stoned college student -- or worse, a sober college professor.

(Did anyone see the Laurel Canyon documentary on Epix? One of the most interesting things about these seedy musical legends is how every single one of them passionately believes the same vaporous cliches at 75 they did at 20!)

An added complication is that in recent times the harmless buffoonery is transitioning to destructive buffoonery at an increasingly rapid clip. In other words, moral and intellectual insanity are redefined as sanctity and political correctitude so quickly, who can keep up? Most people are unable to discern exactly when to denounce themselves, or even to conduct a daily ideological inventory to know what to denounce.

I, for example, still believe in tolerance, merit, and racial colorblindness. But all of a sudden, such beliefs are the quintessence of hatred, oppression, and "white privilege."

Similarly, it took a few years for the redefinition of marriage to go from the lunatic fringe to mandatory acceptance and celebration. Afterwards it took a month or so for the insanity of transgenderism to go from profound irrelevance to The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time. But it has taken only a week for police defunding to go from unthinkable to un-vetoable in Minneapolis.

At any rate, your common sense doesn't deceive you: the madness is accelerating. Indeed, even my 15 year old notices it. He's nostalgic for simpler times, when he was 11, and the politico-cultural insanity seemed a little more treatable if not curable.

For there is no human -- let alone political -- cure for this spiritual malady, in part because the very essence of the disease is the conviction that politics can cure it -- which in turn is the essence of leftism itself.

What I mean to say is that the left specializes in politicizing the existential and even ontological, which is why Progressivism Inc. will never go out of business, because existential and ontological problems will by definition always be with us.

To cite only the most obvious ones, there is and always will be economic scarcity, the infinitude of desire, the unavoidability of sexual differences, the ineluctability of the Bell Curve (e.g., half the population is always of below average intelligence), inequality of outcomes, the terror of freedom, the mystery of existence, the inevitability of death, et al.

Me? I'm not a misanthrope per se. Rather, I just have high standards. Leftism can only succeed if we 1) eliminate all standards, 2) pretend human nature doesn't exist, 3) and empower the state to cure the incurable.

Back in the old days of the blog, puns would spontaneously and intrusively pop into my noggin. I think I mentioned that nowadays -- no doubt because of the influence of brother Dávila -- aphorisms come in unbidden. I'm not saying they're as good as his, but the post has to end somehow.

Just as leftists who love mankind in the abstract hate and mistreat actual people, those who love blacks in general hate blacks in particular and do them great harm.

If there's something more ecstatic than violence rendered legitimate by belief in a lie, Satan kept it for himself.

Thankfully for the left, there is nothing in the Constitution about separation of idols and state.

The left would be far less influential if its ideas were sane.

Look on the bright side: if they defund the police it will be the first time Dems have ever ended a government program.

No Lives Matter

Unless God exists, in which case all lives not only matter but are of infinite value.

Indeed, where do people think this radical idea came from? Karl Marx? Oprah Winfrey? Marx believed the opposite, and rightly so, given his fundamentally anti-theistic principles: "The critique of religion is the presupposition of all critique."

Why might this uber anti-idea be so foundational to the whole project of the left? A number of reasons, but certainly because it undercuts any claims to truth, and thereby clears the field for the exertion of raw power and unapologetic violence, the old libido dominandi (which isn't just the pleasure of physical domination, but the perverse joy of intellectual and spiritual domination, in case you haven't noticed). As Lenin so eloquently expressed it,

Why should we be squeamish about the sacrifices to our righteous cause?... It does not matter if three-fourths of mankind is destroyed; all that counts is that ultimately the last quarter should become communist.... Later centuries will justify the cruelties to which circumstances have forced us. Then everything will be understood, everything.

So don't ask why BLM doesn't care about murdered black police officers and looted black-owned businesses, not to mention the chronic pandemic of black-on-black crime: the media will justify the cruelties to which circumstances have forced them, nor do we have to wait centuries, rather, seconds. Progress!

We should also point out that in the absence of our God, persons don't matter, being that the discovery and elaboration of personhood itself was one of those differentiations of consciousness discussed a couple of posts ago. It represents a tremendous advance -- a leap in being -- over its atheistic, materialistic, and primitive religious alternatives.

Incidentally, "secularization" for Voegelin is "a polite word for 'deculturation'" (Webb). Deculturation? That's another word for "deformation," an impolite word for the intrinsically pathological "destruction of the order of the soul," which can only be properly formed in and by "the love of transcendental perfection inherent in the fundamental tension of existence," i.e., in vertical openness to the Beyond (what we call O).

To repeat a formula I must have mentioned almost 15 years ago (October will mark 15 years of blogviating -- the "g" is silent), "there is a soul within and a grace above, and this is all we know or need to know."

Yes, it's a slight exaggeration, but not by much, for the soul is that by which God is known, and grace is that through which God reveals himself. For example, "revelation" is one thing, but in the absence of a graced intellect, it is a closed book. As is the world, but forgive the tenured, for they haven't a clue.

To make it even more abstract, just say there is a supra-vertical transmitter and an intra-vertical receiver, and that if there isn't, then nothing can be known about anything, period. There is no truth because there is no intellect to know it. And if you want to take it one step further, both poles -- grace and soul, truth and intellect, intelligence and intelligibility -- are of a single differentiating substance. We'll return to this idea in due course.

Some of the quotes above are from a book I read yesterday called Political Apocalypse (not really recommended because the other books on Voegelin we've been discussing are better). In it Voegelin points out that

the substance of society is psyche. Society can destroy a man's soul because the disorder of society is a disease in the psyche of its members.

This is in no way an exaggeration, polemic, or distortion. In order to appreciate its literal truth, one must only try to imagine what it would be like to live in the deformed and derailed world of the MSM, with no friction or cognitive dissonance. You can't.

To cite just one out of millions of examples, you can't possibly see Fredo Cuomo equate the barbaric thuggery of Antifa with the liberation of Europe and say to yourself, "yes, exactly!" Give Fredo credit though. He obviously paid attention in history class. It even sounds like he may have majored in history, for in the words of the Aphorist, There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.

And yesterday I learned that Dostoevski was "among the first to understand that the modern political movements are secular religions ('irreligions'), aping science, dedicated to the destruction of God and the humanity of man, and at bottom are spiritually and intellectually bankrupt."

In other words, the left is bankrupt in every way except financially, but they're working on it.

You and I understand all this, as does any normal person, albeit intuitively and not necessarily philosophically or metaphysically. Which led me to ask myself: "Bob, this didn't used to be difficult, nor was it reserved for scholars and specialists, let alone fringe bloggers. What happened? Why the eclipse of the obvious? Why is half of America so bereft of common sense?"

I'll go further: Voegelin correctly observed that "the essence of modernity is Gnosticism." But I'll bet if some spiritually obtuse and ideologically deformed egghead were to happen upon this blog, he'd say something to the effect of "what a bunch of occult and grandiose nonsense!"

The question is, how did the obvious become controversial, and how did such anti-human buffoonery become the conventional wisdom of the media-academic complex?

The answer may surprise you! But only if you've forgotten everything man has learned about man over the past 50,000 years or so.

About the title of this post. I'll leave off with some aphorisms that shall never pass away, even if they are forever banned on grounds of constituting racist hate speech:

For God there are only individuals.

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

If the soul is a myth, genocide is a simple problem of effective anesthetics.

Hell is any place from which God is absent. --Dávila

UPDATE -- same attractor, slightly different angle: America in the Aftermath of George Floyd: Between Paganism and Christianity.

Here Come the New Gods, Same as the Old Gods

We're in the midst of defining our terms, and doing so -- unlike our slipslopery competitors, whose allegiance is to power and not truth -- with precision.

Widespread violence, injustice, and tyranny are always preceded by attacks on language, such that fidelity to the dictionary is resistance to tyrants. Logocide is prelude to genocide, every time. After all, if you believe someone is a Nazi and fail to eliminate him when you have the chance, that makes you complicit in Nazism.

Similarly, accusations of "white privilege" are just a linguistic license to kill, since the slander bypasses the conscience, legitimizes envy, and sacralizes the violence that follows. This is just the latest iteration of a vertical anti-tradition extending all the way down to Genesis 3, when our archetypal human father is heard to exclaim,

You've got the wrong guy! It was the woman! It's her fault! And, -- with all due respect -- you gave her to me, so if we're laying our cards on the table, it's really your fault, is it not? Besides, the serpent was already here when I arrived.

You've no doubt noticed that the spasm of sociopathy to which we have been treated over the past week has been seeded and nurtured for over half a century by a race-obsessed media-academic complex that is drenched to the bone in lies.

If lies of this magnitude were susceptible to correction by fact, logic, or principle, they would have vanished long ago. But, as expressed in words that purportedly have no expiration date, -- or so we have heard from the wise --

He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Timeless truth, or at least it has stood the test of 2000 years. That's a pretty good track record.

Coming at it from another angle, Paul claims in 2 Cor 3:17 that "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

In a free country such as ours, inequality is an inevitable consequence of freedom. It's called the right be different, or in other words, who you actually are. You and I are unequal to everyone else, because we are individuals: we are free to be ourselves, and our self is utterly unique. Which is why it is written (by the Aphorist):

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

Indeed, what is the point of freedom if one is only free to be like all the other Don Lemmings and media-hackcrities, as in the diabolically misnamed "diversity," or "multiculturalism," or all those other totalitarian cults of noetic and pneumatic uniformity?

At this point we're way past the R & D and marketing phases, and are deep into the application: novel religion, same old gods. Imagine bowing before criminals and psychopaths to earn some sort of redemption? This is such a spiritual regression that it would represent a genuine leap in being to conduct a proper sacrifice and smear its blood on our doors in the hope that BLM will pass us by.

Enough insultainment. Back to our definitions.

Regarding the above-noted criminal blackslide into primitive appeasement of the angry and vengeful gods, Voegelin would insist this goes precisely to the reason why the discovery of monotheism by the ancient Hebrews was such a literal leap in being. It was a leap because it cleansed the cosmos of mere human projections in the form of gods, and situated the absolute principle outside and beyond the cosmos.

It will take awhile to explain exactly why this was such an advance, but we're running out of time, so we will only be able to strike a few preluminary sparks.

Speaking of our Hebrew friends and vertical relatives, Exodus, expressed abstractly and in principle, is "the process of transcendence." It goes to "the universal calling of humanity" toward "open existence in the metaxy oriented toward its transcendental pole."

Metaxy? Needlessly esoteric term IMO, for it is simply "the experience of human existence as 'between' lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge" -- or, as we prefer to express it, (¶) <--> O, with the arrows representing the metaxy, AKA the in-between.

This goes to the necessity of open existence, specifically, a vertical openness to the transcendent pole, failing which the mind and soul suffer ontological shrinkage and become pathological. It is a chronic condition of low T -- not just of Testosterone but of Transcendence.

Leftism is by definition a pathologically closed world, since it is predicated on the denial in principle of transcendent reality. Thus, they inhabit a "second world," which is "a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby 'eclipse' genuine reality."

"Eclipse?" It is "the voluntary, perverse closure of consciousness against reality" (although I would say that it is more often unconscious, unless I'm misunderstanding something). It necessarily results in a kind of anxiety, since reality always persists despite our efforts to deny and evade it. This, in my opinion, is one of the sources of political correctness, which is an enforcement mechanism of the Lie, or the verbal glove over the mailed fist.

I'll leave you with a couple of haunting images, first of the hideous anti-Bob:

Followed by the genuine Bob of freedom and space age transcendental living:

My Cosmos is Bigger than Yours

The order of history is the history of order. Let's try to understand what Voegelin means by this palindromic gnome, or gnomic palindrome.

First, as mentioned in yesterday's post, order is synonymous with cosmos, while history is... what, exactly?

It must be the Order as it evolves through time. Perhaps we can visualize the process. Imagine a horizontal line which represents time as it moves from its ground to its meta-temporal telos and attractor, the latter situated outside or beyond time; it is bisected by a vertical line, except it is more of an ovoid space that expands and differentiates as it moves along the horizontal axis.

Having said that, this is no linear or ineluctable process a la Marx or Hegel. For one thing, we can never arrive at the right hand attractor, only be perpetually attracted by and to it. Foreclosing the space between -- let's symbolize them (¶) and O -- doesn't actually move (¶) foreword, but rather, leads to a host of problems herebelow. And that is putting it mildly.

Voegelin famously referred to this as immanentizing the eschaton, which is always a bad idea, perhaps even the Worst Idea Ever. Why? Why is it such a bad idea? What, aside from being impossible, is wrong with Utopia?

Put it this way: yes, we could actually create paradise on earth. However, it would last only a nanosecond until typology kicked in and kicked us out again.

In other words, we have a problem, and the problem is called human nature. Yes, there is a solution, but it must -- obviously -- involve "solving" the problem of human nature. Absent that, then we can no more create paradise on earth than we could reassemble a broken spider web by hand.

Let's get back to our visual image. Bear in mind that the O on the right side isn't God per se; rather, let's keep it unsaturated and experience-near, and simply affirm that this is the attractor to which man is always attracted by virtue of being a man.

This of course goes to the fundamental difference between animals and man, being that the former can know nothing of the divine attractor at the end of history, as they are plunged in neurology and bound by instinct. A small cosmos -- similar to academia, only with no stupid and dysfunctional ideas.

Perhaps we should emphasize here that we are not "speculating." Perish the thought. If we were, then everything about which we have written for the past 3,500 posts would be no better than any other philodoxic Babble of Tenure. (A philodoxer is a lover of opinion, man.) No, we are always trying to describe the objective and empirical facts as given to us by our expounding cosmos.

At this point I will defer to Voegelin, Sandoz, and Webb for some scholarly back-up. The following are selected more or less at random, because if I try to locate the Perfect Illustration, we'll be here all morning; to a large extent, all of this is intuitive, but nevertheless objective. Or better, it is noetic (never confusing noesis with Gnosticism!).

Correction. This actually is perfect (or as perfect as we're going to get on this imperfectly perfect morning: Webb has a glossary that defines our terms with precision. Let's begin with the cosmos, which is

the whole of ordered reality including animate and inanimate nature and the gods. (Not to be confused with the modern conception of "cosmos" as the [merely!] astrophysical universe.)

"Gods"? Yes, of course. Imagine what we would be excluding if we were to ignore them! For we'd be leaving out the whole conception of reality as experienced by premodern (and postmodern pagan) man, which is a lot of people for a long time -- much longer than we've been here. And to leave mind and intersubjectivity out of the cosmos is obviously a non-starter, too crude an approach to ever take seriously.

In this regard, it reminds me of what psychotherapy would be like if I were to ignore everything that happened to the patient before the age of 18. In a way, this is the problem, as people inevitably attempt to rationalize away the non- or irrational components of development, which results in various symptoms down the line.

Back to the cosmos: it

Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into immanent "world" and transcendent "divine ground."

Oh my. This is getting complicated. Let's start with "transcendent." What does it mean, exactly?

to go beyond, surpass. General term for that which extends or lies beyond some set of limits; may be relative (beyond some particular limits) or absolute (beyond all possible limits). The opposite of "immanent."

Again, man qua man exists in the differentiating space between immanence and transcendence. This differentiation can be experienced noetically or pneumatically (or it can be pathologically denied or compacted). Noetic differentiation is

the process by which one moves from compact consciousness to a more differentiated, conceptually articulated awareness of the inquiring consciousness and its structure... and its orientation toward the transcendental pole of the tension of inquiry toward Truth as such.

Or just say philo-sophy, properly speaking; it is intellectual differentiation within the ovoid space mentioned above. It is complemented by pneumatic differentiation, which is more spiritual than intellectual:

the awakening of the soul both by and to the experience of the pull in the tension of existence toward the pole of transcendental perfection; the emergent realization of the absolutely transcendent character of that pole.

In other words, it is the discovery of monotheism, which was one small step for Abram, one giant leap for mankind, but from which it is but a small step back into paganism, scientism, materialism, leftism, et al. Just don't, okay? We have enough problems.

To be continued, of course.

Methinks Thou Dost Protest and Loot Too Much

Yesterday's bewilderness adventure concluded with the alibi that "this is such a big subject, in a way the biggest of all."

Okay, we'll bite: what's the subject?

The subject is order, and order is everything, literally. For the past several weeks we've been trialoguing with Voegelin, whose entire corpus comes down to unearthing and disclosing the order of Order; as he put it, "the order of history is the history of order," and no, this isn't just a mystic bromide worthy of the Sphinx:

Incidentally, our Democrat mayors are straight-up HEROES:

Now, Order is another word for Cosmos, and the Cosmos is indeed One (order is synonymous with the unity of plurality, or the reality beneath appearances).

The alternative to Order -- or in Good Times, its complement -- is Chaos. Chaos is generative -- or contributes to generatively -- up to a point, the reason being that the world is (or should be, in order to properly function) an open system, and an open system operates at the border between order and chaos, such that too much of either is a bad thing: sclerosis and compression at one end, dissipation and dissolution at the other.

Aphorisms:

Order paralyzes. Disorder convulses.

The former goes to the progressive state that is evoked to contain the barbarous consequences of progressive thought.

Legislation that protects liberty in minute detail strangles liberties.

But only for ordered souls. Disordered and criminal types will crash straight through the legislation, for example, rioting and looting while not even wearing proper face masks!

The price of absolute freedom would be a vulgarity without limits.

CNN should change its name to VWL.

According to modern man, oppression begins when any filth is prohibited.

Agreed. I get the looting, but...

Why all the cursing, whether via signs, graffiti, or thug-on-the-street interviews? The disordered freedom of the uncaged beast, one supposes.

Freedom is the dream of slaves. The free man knows that he needs refuge, protection, and help.

It reminds me of that idealist for whom it was insufficient to see bears at the zoo, but wanted to live intimately amongst them. Like the deeply progressive business owners of Santa Monica, he found out too late that he needed refuge, protection, and help.

The freedom to which modern man aspires is not that of the free man, but that of the slave on a holiday.

The question is, is this a slave rebellion or slave holiday? Either way,

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain.

Invisible chain? Yes, of course. It becomes evident the moment one of them opens his or her mouth (and I'm not just talking about the journalists, but the protesters and rioters as well).

It is difficult for you or I do identify with the chronic frustration one must feel to be such a stupid person in such a complex world.

The temptation to simplify and vilify, and to act out on these, is enormous. Why else would the Adversary tempt these weak-minded souls in this way? Like any form of intoxication, to be drunk on Victimhood is liberating -- the downside being that it requires imaginary oppressors.

Under the best of circumstances, politics is the organization -- AKA, ordering -- of hatreds. Encourage the haters to act on, instead of argue about, the hatred, and here we are. For a normal person the result is disorder. Not so to the left, for

Leveling is the barbarian’s substitute for order.

Our progressive class encourages rebellion in the name of "freedom" while imposing the burden of law (not to mention lawlessness) on the restavus. As Iowahawk so aptly put it,

We live in a nation of laws in the same way people on 'Hoarders' live in houses of cat food boxes.

This post has spiraled out of control and lost any semblance of order. Back to our truly cosmic thesis, that the order of history is the history of order. Whatever do we mean by this?

Tomorrow.

Apocalypse Now & Always, or Listening to the Barbarians

Yes, what are they trying to say? They keep insisting they want to be "heard," but not one of them -- protester, rioter, or looter -- is able to express a coherent thought. Perhaps that's part of the problem. Like children who are unable to put their thoughts and feelings into words, they act out.

However, if you ask the child what it is he's acting out, he won't know. Which is again the point of the acting out. It is indeed a kind of "speech," of symbolic communication, but it is the task of the therapist to interpret and put it into words. Acting out simultaneously veils and reveals; or, the revelation is hidden in the veil, and is veiled to the person who is using it to hide himself -- his conflicts and motivations -- from himself.

Our political system -- any political system -- is predicated on the ability to sublimate feelings into words and ideas, such that the battle takes place on a higher and less deadly plane. Thus, what we are seeing play out -- or act out -- has nothing to do with politics, but rather, is a form of what Voegelin calls "anti-politics." And it has been going on for at least 50 years, except it has taken this long for it to reach this grotesque tipping point.

Couldn't agree more with this sentiment by Richard Fernandez:

To the question 'where did the destructiveness come from?': it was there all along. What was once dinner party nihilism has lost its inhibitions. The riots are a 'coming out party' for all the doctrines taught in many a school.

One of the replies points out that

The rioters' view of the world came from Marxist professors in schools and colleges, with approval and support from media and Hollywood. How many murders and burning buildings does it take before that viewpoint sounds a little less crackpot?

But why would anyone burn a church, of all things? Wrong question:

One of the intriguing aspects of this outburst is a rage against religion, excepting those seen as hostile to Judaism or Christianity, that seems part of the drama. There is a special odium reserved for it, a kind of ritual desecration, which is key to understanding it.

Christianity is odium to these Marxian asses. Maybe they'll try to burn down a Muslim Mosque or Hindu temple. We'll see. The Night is young. And the darkness will be with us for a generation or two.

Which reminds me. In a few posts of yore, we pointed out that it took some 40 years or so for the new ideas of the 1920s to bear their toxic fruit on a culture-wide basis in the 1960s. In the '20s these progressive and nihilistic ideas were reserved for the elite, and the events of the Great Depression and WW2 temporarily slowed their metastatic spread into the tissues and organs of society.

I wonder if we can similarly reverse-imagineer the present crisis and discern its more distant roots? What ideas were being propagated 40 years ago, in 1980? That's a Big Question, much bigger than can be covered in the space of a post.

However, do not despair. God has given us a deeper way to understand any manmade crisis, because any such crisis is every crisis repeated ad nauseam. The archetypal and interpretive key is provided by typology, such that the apocalypse -- which of course means unveiling -- is always now.

Looked at this way, the pathological ideology of the 1960s was just a variant of the spiritually deformed ideas of the 1920s, as the present sickness is just a reflection of those. Really, it comes dow to One God, One Cosmos, One Human Nature, One Fall, One History, rinse and repent.

Not to veer off into the mother of all tangents, but this for me is the uncanny appeal of Finnegans Wake, the overarching theme of which is the same returns, only in diverse forms. It is "a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind," through which it is simultaneously

Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple.... And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace (the Skeleton Key).

For over half a century, state-run leftist seminaries have been inculcating children and permanent adolescents with the idea that we are just random products of natural selection, animals no different from any other. At last, the trousered baboons are acting like naked apes!

We've moved on from abstract theory to practical application, and it's not going away any time soon, for what's the alternative when you've successfully devalued, demonized, debunked, deconstructed, and destroyed it? Their obtuse secularism isn't presented as one among many, but the only acceptable religion.

Only God can help us, and I mean that literally, although certainly not in the manner our barbarian opponents are even capable of understanding. Rather, the only way they can understand religion and spirituality is through the broken and distorted lens of their own broken and distorted minds.

About the anti-politics. This shouldn't be understood as the opposite of politics, rather, the negation of politics. People keep saying the protesters have a "political message." No they don't. The message, such as it is, is embedded in an ideological second reality, which, no matter how real, is nonetheless an unreal pseudo-reality or dreamworld. It is a lie, only all the more fervently believed for its absence of truth. Truth needn't shout, nor does it descend into incoherent nonsense when given the opportunity to be expressed.

Sandoz provides an illuminating passage by Václav Havel, who knew something about leftist tyranny:

Ideological pseudo-reality... is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works as long as people are willing to live within the lie.

As such, our task as human beings, everywhen & where

is one of resisting vigilantly, thoughtfully, and attentively, but at the same time with total dedication and at every step and everywhere, the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power -- the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.

For as Sandoz says, "the second realities of the ideologues cannot withstand scrutiny" -- which is precisely why they must shriek, loot, and act out. "Free government is a historical rarity and the greatest political challenge; ochlocracy [mob rule] is its viral disease, inviting the socialist demagogue and constantly threatening every liberal democracy with extinction."

So don't wonder what's going on, for mob rule is just leftism by other means, as leftism is just mob rule veiled by ideology. Writing twenty one years ago, Sandoz asked the non-rhetorical questions, "how many decades and generations of systematic miseducation can we endure? How much abuse of our heritage through neglect, ignorance, and mendacity can we bear without experiencing disintegration and collapse" into civilizational chaos and the authoritarian response it demands?

By Jove, I think we have an answer!

Sorry about the rambling and non-linear style, but it's such a big subject, in a way the biggest of all. We'll take another stab at the beast tomorrow...

Ideas Have Riotous Consequences

People generally think of ideas as good or bad, correct or incorrect, brilliant or stupid. They don't -- especially in our age of stupidity, AKA relativism -- think of them as intrinsically pathological.

However, among Voegelin's principle themes is that thinking is indeed subject to disease and decrepitude, and that when this happens on a widespread basis, culture follows. We are seeing this play out on TV in real time -- on TV if you're lucky enough not to reside in a Democrat stronghold, unlucky if you have to live amidst the savages.

One question is whether or not the left will finally appreciate the consequences of their ruinous ideas. No chance. Ideas are easy to change, political religions, not so much.

About the religiosity, the following passage caught my attention yesterday:

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything....

The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide "These are the lies we will tell today." No, that would be too crude and honest.

Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they've chosen to live their lives.

It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully.... [It's] the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don't even know they're true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything (Stephen Hunter.)

One thing I noticed yesterday is the knee-jerk quality: everyone compulsively repeating the same lies, over and over.

Why? Why the constant proselytizing and virtue signaling, the conspicuous conviction that these are fine people with good intentions, with a handful naughty people taking advantage of the situation?

A few bad actors couldn't, for example, turn a Tea Party rally into a dress rehearsal for the collapse of civilization. I don't see Asian Americans rioting over the widespread and systemic legal discrimination against them by our most expensive looniversity bins.

A few notes to myself from over the weekend. Those who understand them will require no explanation. For those who don't understand them, no explanation will be sufficient, although I will no doubt expand upon them tomorrow, when I have more time:

Secularization is the process whereby Homo religiosus convinces himself he isn't.

Every war is a religious war, especially if it's irreligious.

Not a clash of civilizations, rather, of reality tunnels.

Under threat, a worldview will defend itself with violence.

Uncritical thought elevated to first principle is intrinsically pathological.

Leftists don't have ideas. Ideas have them.

In a world run by the left, who knows how to be a victim knows everything.

And who has mastered self-esteem has mastered everything.

In poor countries the wealthy are fat. In wealthy countries, the looters are disgustingly fat.

Paranoid people don't wonder about the meaning of life.

Trump's barbaric nationalism is an insult to glorious tribalism.

Progressivism is a lawsuit against reality by Perfection.

The left won't rest until all America is a university campus.

Black isn't a race, it's an ideology.

Leftism turns have-nots into will-nots, and will nots into why not, the police won't stop me.

Natural rights are never zero sum. Invented rights are whiner take all.

The demonstrators are ANGRY -- unlike most people, who learn their feelings can't change reality by the age of five, and move on.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for brokenhearted beta-men to virtue signal.

If you can politicize a perennial problem rooted in human nature, the left has a career waiting for you in politics, academia, journalism, activism, or criminality.

The rioters are showing with great persuasiveness why, despite the most thorough precautions, there will be the occasional tragedy of a George Floyd. Given the vast numbers, statistical aberrations are inevitable. Some people who never touch a cigarette will die of lung cancer.

Let's begin with the bottom line: if reality is the tension between immanence and transcendence, then default to one side or the other is intrinsically pathological, because it denies the proper form and end of man -- no different than if we were to, say, pretend man can live without food or oxygen.

One can always hold the theory that man is an angelic being who doesn't require nutrition, but what can't go on won't go on. The question is, will the person admit his error, or even acknowledge the fact that he is putting food in his mouth?

It is identical vis-a-vis any deformed ideology: it can last awhile, but not forever. It is difficult to say exactly when the present ideology under which we are forced to live fully crystalized into a pneumo-cognitive totalitarianism voluntarily internalized by the majority of citizens.

Having lived through the disease process, I can identify certain accelerations or "leaps," especially during the past two decades, e.g., the attempt to overturn the 2000 election in Bush v. Gore, the ascendence of Obama and his vile race war, the second and ongoing effort to deny a peaceful transition of power in 2016, the open attacks on free speech, the gender hysteria, the rise of social media facilitating the instantaneous transmission of pathological hatred and stupidity, the total politicization of the Narrative Media...

As I said, to be continued tomorrow...

Q & A on the Riots with Señor Dávila

These are more than riots, they're a revolution!

Revolutions do not solve any problem other than the economic problem of their leaders.

Yes, but surely you acknowledge racial injustice?

In order to enslave a group of people the politician must only convince them that all their problems are a consequence of racism, sexism, or class.

Wait -- you don't want social justice?

“Social justice” is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

I get it. You don't want The People to be liberated.

For a couple of centuries, “to liberate man” meant to facilitate mob behavior.

But Americans have every right to air their grievances!

It is customary to proclaim rights in order to be able to violate duties.

I get it. You just don't tolerate people who don't look like you.

Unlimited tolerance is nothing more than a hypocritical way of giving up.

But I heard the mayors of Minneapolis and Atlanta criticize the rioters.

The smile with which the pig hears the one who criticizes the mud!

These aren't mobs, they're courageously standing up for minority rights!

Minorities that become majorities continue to believe they are brave.

Unity now! Together we're stronger!

The revolutionary is ultimately an individual who does not dare to rob by himself.

What about my rights 'n stuff?

In order to corrupt the individual it is enough to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses.

But life is unfair! The world owes me a living!

We only know how to carry ourselves with decency in front of the world when we know that we are owed nothing. Without the pained grimace of a frustrated creditor.

Last night I heard Don LeMon and Fredo Cuomo point out that it's simplistic to characterize the conduct of the rioters in negative and judgmental terms. One man's looting is another man's retail therapy.

The arguments with which we justify our conduct tend to be more stupid than the conduct itself.

It's not arson -- it's the fire of freedom and justice!

Activism burns without giving light.

Don't you think it was wise for Mayor Jacobin Frey to give the rioters space to blow off steam?

No one grants humanity certain extreme liberties except someone indifferent to its fate.

One thing I don't get -- why do they burn down their own cities and businesses?

The liberal is capable of sacrificing even his interests to his resentment.

And cleaning up this mess is going to cost billions.

Every “liberator” finally passes on the bill.

So, what's really going on here?

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence.

You don't think they're frightened?

The frightened liberal is a bloodthirsty animal.

But if this isn't really about the police, who's to blame for urban squalor and unrest?

With the generosity of his program does the liberal console himself for the magnitude of the catastrophes it produces.

Any final thoughts?

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.

The Dis-covery and Re-discovery of Reality

Time enough for a brief post for which several titles come to mind, including Where is Reality? and Between Matter and Neurology, the latter being the unending answer to the permanent question of the former. Man is in essence an abiding (?), and philosophy begins -- and ends -- in (?!).

Why, you may ask, do I keep harping on this? We get it, Bob. Reality exists, and can only exist, in the great In Between -- in the quasi-infinite space between immanence and transcendence. Life is a bewilderedness adventure, an exodeus, an expansion into the endless frontier, a careful documentation of our ignorance, multi-undisciplinary circumnavelgazing, ad gnoseam. Move on.

Well, I can't. There's an old gag about how even the most exalted egghead generally has One Big Idea that he spends his life rediscovering in various ways. Is it possible this applies to me? That I too am exalted?

Hmm. I'm almost afraid to look, but let's glance back at the very first article I ever published in a -- back off, man, I'm a psychologist! -- scholarly journal in 1991, the same year I got my license to cure souls and save mankind.

Indeed, it looked at the time as if Bob were off to a promising career. Which leads to a host of ancillary questions: what on earth went right? How and why did Bob abandon a life of distinguished mediocrity for an anonymous plunge into eccentric psycho-cosmography?

Wait -- a licensed psychologist? Don't make us laugh!

The greater the importance of an intellectual activity, the more ridiculous is the claim of certifying the competence of those who exercise it. A diploma of dentistry is respectable, but one of philosophy is grotesque (Dávila).

I suppose you could say that I abandoned licensure, certification, and societal validation for a vertical career that has no point. Lo and behold, it's working! I may be grossly misgodded, but at least I'm not grotesque.

Back to the article. Interestingly, it doesn't just confirm the hypothesis that I keep rediscovering the same thing; rather it seems that in the intervening 29 years I have become that which I discovered, or at least increasingly so. Whether this is a good or bad thing, it's too soon to say. Ask again in 29 years. Perhaps distinguished mediocrity would have been the more prudent path.

About "becoming what I discovered." A few selected passages:

Because it is difficult to visualize a domain such as the mind with dimensions of more than three, we tend to rely upon mental models derived from the sensual (primarily visual), explicate world. This in turn leads to the erroneous conclusion that explicate knowledge can disclose the truth of our being.

However,

One of the perils of this form of psychic cartography is that contained within the map is a tacit structure of ideas and concepts which tends to become self-confirming: thought is thus excised from its deeper source and becomes a self-generating and closed loop. With this approach the unknown is foreclosed, and what may appear to be "discoveries" will in fact be merely verifications of one's hidden assumptions about reality.

At the time, I had never heard the name "Voegelin," but what I have just described -- i.e., cognitively and spiritually closed loops -- is another way of talking about ideological pseudo-realities and gnostic dreamworlds built upon ontological lies, i.e., not lying "about" reality but living in a lie about reality. It is analogous to an MSM news silo, only with lifetime tenure.

The silo is the matrix or reality tunnel from which only our second birth from above can begin to save us. It's the beginning of a new order of difficulties, but at least the difficulties are real and no longer imaginary: an engagement with, instead of a flight from, reality. The majority of what is given to us as knowledge, news, and information is clearly a dispersing, crystalizing, or twittering flight from.

More timeless (or fixated) autoBobography from 29 years past:

Thought begins first of all with a creative perception, which is always part of a more encompassing flow from which it has been abstracted.

Doesn't that way lie madness, postmodernness, and other dodgy subjectivisms? No, because

an enormous amount of thinking must take place before the suspension of thought can lead to a generative insight and discovery. Without this preparation, suspension of thought will merely generate undisciplined observations and chaotic and inconsistent interpretations.

But here again we must meet in the middle and not default to the other pole: "with training and preparation, our minds can become circular, saturated, and unable to perceive the truly novel." In short, we must maintain what Voegelin calls the "balance of consciousness," defaulting neither to the transcendent nor immanent poles.

In the article, I also spoke of vertical defense mechanisms, so to speak, which are ultimately defenses against God (or at least the transcendent pole or ground that inevitably leads back to him). Supposing we have an objective map of the world, it may lead to a situation whereby "the unknown is defended against through the possession of knowledge."

Which is none other than what Voegelin calls a second reality, "a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby 'eclipse' genuine reality" (Webb).