I AM ? !

"Memes," as we know, are “units of culture," that is, "ideas, beliefs, practices, and anything else that can be passed on via social learning.” In his weekly newsletter, Rob Henderson further notes that memes which "confer social status on the host have a high likelihood of propagating themselves."

Which means that the mind of the meme-host is not properly conformed to intelligible being, rather, to social acceptance and popularity, AKA pride. This being the case, it is a form of vertical pathology, even if it afflicts the majority of human beings. 

Well, not exactly, for it depends upon the nature of the society conferring the status. For example, if one wished to maintain social status in Nazi Germany, one would express antipathy toward Jews. On the other hand, if one wishes to maintain social status in leftist academia, one will express antipathy toward Jews. 

Come to think of it, anti-Semitism is one of the world's oldest pathological memes, isn't it? If memes are analogous to genes, then it has also been passed on to anti-Christian bigots right down to the present. Remarkably, Jesus predicted as much, and on numerous occasions, e.g., "you will be persecuted for my sake," or "If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you."

How did he know that? That's above our paygrade, but it's fair to say that truth is always in a battle with social status. The latter explains how and why so many blatant falsehoods remain popular, from global warming to feminism to BLM. The average believer in catastrophic global warming knows literally nothing about the subject except that mouthing its pieties confers social standing, or at least doesn't trigger the hysteria and hatred that punish a lack of conformity.

Henderson alludes briefly to the timeless and universal appeal of Marxism, albeit in passing: "Marxism seems to click well with certain aspects of our nature." 

We've discussed this at length in the past; suffice it to say that nearly everything about the "progressive" left is deeply regressive and atavistic, appropriate for life in the paleolithic world in which we evolved genetically, but not the present world. 

Let's refocus on the subject at hand, Transcendence and History. We're just going to flip through the text and free associate on any meme that strikes our fancy. 

Ah, here's one: "a human being is first and foremost a questioner," and has even the "capacity to out-question the finite and the knowable and thereby to encounter transcendent meaning."

I don't know about "first" or "foremost"; perhaps he doesn't mean it literally. Rather, man the (?) is a consequence or side effect of a deeper principle. 

I would say that man is first and foremost created in the image and likeness of the Creator. Or, you could say that he is characterized by consciousness of the Absolute, or of O. As such, his mind surpasses any- and every-thing in this world. This sur-passing is another name for transcendence.

Think about it: there is nothing man cannot question. Except, of course, the election. And global warming. And "diversity." And the Religion of Peace. And the redefinition of marriage. And the abolition of biological sex. These questions have all been settled via the mechanism of social acceptance.

Nevertheless, not every mind is predominantly conformed to social popularity. There will always be some questioners (?) who remain in conformity to O rather than mass ideology. How to tell the difference? Well, for the ideologue, ideology is the end, whereas for (?) there is no end. 

Or rather, there is literally an "endless end," similar in a way to the inexhustibility of true creativity (and for the same reason). We will never actually run out of truth or beauty, so long as we remain attuned to their source.  Here again, the "artist" who is attuned to something less is tedious and soul-deadening. "Popular culture" overflows with these leaky sewer pipes.

(?) is characterized by unrestricted questioning. Conversely, as we've all seen over the past several months, the technofascist left is characterized by severely restricted questioning or unrestricted censorship of questioners. This is not healthy, to put it mildly.  Rather, it is as sick as the intellect can be, for it negates the purpose of the intellect and enables everything else.

Yes: "fidelity to the spirit of inquiry is the elementary normative standard for gauging human genuineness or authenticity" (ibid.).  It is normal for a human being to ask questions, even if our masters were to successfully ban all the wrong questions.  

I'm going to stop now, except to say that I've made a big decision. Yes, after giving it much thought and consideration, I've chosen my pronoun. Until just a moment ago it was going to be I AM. But now I hereby declare:

I AM ? !

I AM ? !

"Memes," as we know, are “units of culture," that is, "ideas, beliefs, practices, and anything else that can be passed on via social learning.” In his weekly newsletter, Rob Henderson further notes that memes which "confer social status on the host have a high likelihood of propagating themselves."

Which means that the mind of the meme-host is not properly conformed to intelligible being, rather, to social acceptance and popularity, AKA pride. This being the case, it is a form of vertical pathology, even if it afflicts the majority of human beings. 

Well, not exactly, for it depends upon the nature of the society conferring the status. For example, if one wished to maintain social status in Nazi Germany, one would express antipathy toward Jews. On the other hand, if one wishes to maintain social status in leftist academia, one will express antipathy toward Jews. 

Come to think of it, anti-Semitism is one of the world's oldest pathological memes, isn't it? If memes are analogous to genes, then it has also been passed on to anti-Christian bigots right down to the present. Remarkably, Jesus predicted as much, and on numerous occasions, e.g., "you will be persecuted for my sake," or "If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you."

How did he know that? That's above our paygrade, but it's fair to say that truth is always in a battle with social status. The latter explains how and why so many blatant falsehoods remain popular, from global warming to feminism to BLM. The average believer in catastrophic global warming knows literally nothing about the subject except that mouthing its pieties confers social standing, or at least doesn't trigger the hysteria and hatred that punish a lack of conformity.

Henderson alludes briefly to the timeless and universal appeal of Marxism, albeit in passing: "Marxism seems to click well with certain aspects of our nature." 

We've discussed this at length in the past; suffice it to say that nearly everything about the "progressive" left is deeply regressive and atavistic, appropriate for life in the paleolithic world in which we evolved genetically, but not the present world. 

Let's refocus on the subject at hand, Transcendence and History. We're just going to flip through the text and free associate on any meme that strikes our fancy. 

Ah, here's one: "a human being is first and foremost a questioner," and has even the "capacity to out-question the finite and the knowable and thereby to encounter transcendent meaning."

I don't know about "first" or "foremost"; perhaps he doesn't mean it literally. Rather, man the (?) is a consequence or side effect of a deeper principle. 

I would say that man is first and foremost created in the image and likeness of the Creator. Or, you could say that he is characterized by consciousness of the Absolute, or of O. As such, his mind surpasses any- and every-thing in this world. This sur-passing is another name for transcendence.

Think about it: there is nothing man cannot question. Except, of course, the election. And global warming. And "diversity." And the Religion of Peace. And the redefinition of marriage. And the abolition of biological sex. These questions have all been settled via the mechanism of social acceptance.

Nevertheless, not every mind is predominantly conformed to social popularity. There will always be some questioners (?) who remain in conformity to O rather than mass ideology. How to tell the difference? Well, for the ideologue, ideology is the end, whereas for (?) there is no end. 

Or rather, there is literally an "endless end," similar in a way to the inexhustibility of true creativity (and for the same reason). We will never actually run out of truth or beauty, so long as we remain attuned to their source.  Here again, the "artist" who is attuned to something less is tedious and soul-deadening. "Popular culture" overflows with these leaky sewer pipes.

(?) is characterized by unrestricted questioning. Conversely, as we've all seen over the past several months, the technofascist left is characterized by severely restricted questioning or unrestricted censorship of questioners. This is not healthy, to put it mildly.  Rather, it is as sick as the intellect can be, for it negates the purpose of the intellect and enables everything else.

Yes: "fidelity to the spirit of inquiry is the elementary normative standard for gauging human genuineness or authenticity" (ibid.).  It is normal for a human being to ask questions, even if our masters were to successfully ban all the wrong questions.  

I'm going to stop now, except to say that I've made a big decision. Yes, after giving it much thought and consideration, I've chosen my pronoun. Until just a moment ago it was going to be I AM. But now I hereby declare:

I AM ? !

Unity, Or Else!

"The horizon of modernity," suggests Hughes, "was established through the absolutization of immanence," AKA "nontranscendent reality."  

We rate this suggestion Entirely Plausible, with the caveat that it is strictly impossible for man to deny transcendence, any more than he could deny, say, language, for to deny it is to affirm it, even if one attempts to deny it with an interpretive dance.

To be perfectly accurate, one can obviously pretend to deny transcendence, but this hardly eliminates it. Seriously. Eight year olds, dude.

The far more interesting and consequential question is, What happens to transcendence when someone denies it? Where does it go? How is it transformed, distorted, and symbolized?  

And, more to the point, what happens when a mass political movement is organized around the violent rejection of transcendence, as with Marxism or national socialism or Antifa or BLM?

To ask the question is to answer it. Unless one is on Twitter or Facebook, in which case to ask the question is to be censored by the very fascists one is describing.

Happy Acres Guy asks: Did you notice how quickly Lefty relativism turned into Lefty absolutism? (https://twitter.com/HappyHectares/status/1352975030531973120) 

Why, yes. We've noticed it for a long time, for it is one of the permanent possibilities of man: the ineradicable freedom to get it utterly and catastrophically wrong.

Longtime readers -- if they've been paying attention -- already know how and why leftism is a destructive political religion, so let's try to build on that foundation rather than just rebleating ourselves. 

Among other things, this religion believes men can be women, that it is possible to run a modern economy on renewable energy, that it is possible to control the world's temperature, that the most effective way to end racial discrimination is make racial colorblindness illegal, and that forcing businesses to overpay employees will increase wealth and employment.

And that was just day one. What other strange gods does the left have in store for us, good and hard?

Ironically, another hallmark of the postmodern left is "incredulity toward metanarratives," but this is just a consequence of the rejection of transcendence, since "meta" and "trans" are synonymous. But here again, the only way to eliminate metanarratives is to...

Come to think of it, I can think of several ways. For example, psychosis is characterized by a terrifying loss of any metanarrative, or alternatively, a rigid and unbending one, e.g., a fixed paranoid delusion. In each case, reality is denied, or rather, the organ through which reality is contacted and interpreted -- the intellect -- is dysfunctional.

But there are nonpsychotic ways to seal oneself in unreality, e.g., indoctrination, ideological deformity, and miseducation. There are also purely utilitarian reasons to render oneself stupid, for it is difficult to get a journalist or professor to see something when his paycheck, his prestige, and his social standing all depend upon not seeing it. 

The bottom line is that the Absolute is the bottom -- i.e., the ground -- of intelligible being. It is the first object of the intellect. Always was and always will be, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Like it or not, the soul of man is immaterial and immortal.

Only human participation in a dimension of meaning that is nonparticular, nonfinite -- a realm of transcendent meaning -- justifies any metanarratives about humanity (ibid.).

"Nonparticular" and "nonfinite." Or in other words, universal and infinite. The left likes to talk about "unity," but there is and can be only one unity and one ground of unity. 

Or is that too complicated? For in the absence of transcendence, you won't have unity, rather, its impossibility. And because it is impossible, it must be violently forced into being. Hence all the censorship, repression, and threats: unity, or else!

Here is another pet point of ours: that symbols of transcendence "tend, in the course of their use and diffusion, to become cut off from the experiences of transcendence that originally engendered them." These symbols can "lose the power to communicate, or to evoke, such experiences and insights." 

Seeing through our vernoccular, these symbols become saturated and thereby unfit for the influx of transcendent experience and meaning.

This is a genuine problem, partly because people don't recognize it as one. And it is a more general problem, because our minds are on the one hand narrowly adapted to survival, but ultimately conformed to a reality that vastly transcends mere biology or psychology. Language can become disengaged from transcendent reality, resulting in an enclosed world of concretion and literalism. 

You will have noticed that this error characterizes two kinds dysfunctional religiosity, one of which unironically calling itself "a-theism." 

Suffice it to say, one must be careful with language, because it can both engender the experience of transcendence and foreclose the experience. Just don't blame transcendent reality for rendering its experience impossible. That was you, not God. 

Unity, Or Else!

"The horizon of modernity," suggests Hughes, "was established through the absolutization of immanence," AKA "nontranscendent reality."  

We rate this suggestion Entirely Plausible, with the caveat that it is strictly impossible for man to deny transcendence, any more than he could deny, say, language, for to deny it is to affirm it, even if one attempts to deny it with an interpretive dance.

To be perfectly accurate, one can obviously pretend to deny transcendence, but this hardly eliminates it. Seriously. Eight year olds, dude.

The far more interesting and consequential question is, What happens to transcendence when someone denies it? Where does it go? How is it transformed, distorted, and symbolized?  

And, more to the point, what happens when a mass political movement is organized around the violent rejection of transcendence, as with Marxism or national socialism or Antifa or BLM?

To ask the question is to answer it. Unless one is on Twitter or Facebook, in which case to ask the question is to be censored by the very fascists one is describing.

Happy Acres Guy asks: Did you notice how quickly Lefty relativism turned into Lefty absolutism? (https://twitter.com/HappyHectares/status/1352975030531973120) 

Why, yes. We've noticed it for a long time, for it is one of the permanent possibilities of man: the ineradicable freedom to get it utterly and catastrophically wrong.

Longtime readers -- if they've been paying attention -- already know how and why leftism is a destructive political religion, so let's try to build on that foundation rather than just rebleating ourselves. 

Among other things, this religion believes men can be women, that it is possible to run a modern economy on renewable energy, that it is possible to control the world's temperature, that the most effective way to end racial discrimination is make racial colorblindness illegal, and that forcing businesses to overpay employees will increase wealth and employment.

And that was just day one. What other strange gods does the left have in store for us, good and hard?

Ironically, another hallmark of the postmodern left is "incredulity toward metanarratives," but this is just a consequence of the rejection of transcendence, since "meta" and "trans" are synonymous. But here again, the only way to eliminate metanarratives is to...

Come to think of it, I can think of several ways. For example, psychosis is characterized by a terrifying loss of any metanarrative, or alternatively, a rigid and unbending one, e.g., a fixed paranoid delusion. In each case, reality is denied, or rather, the organ through which reality is contacted and interpreted -- the intellect -- is dysfunctional.

But there are nonpsychotic ways to seal oneself in unreality, e.g., indoctrination, ideological deformity, and miseducation. There are also purely utilitarian reasons to render oneself stupid, for it is difficult to get a journalist or professor to see something when his paycheck, his prestige, and his social standing all depend upon not seeing it. 

The bottom line is that the Absolute is the bottom -- i.e., the ground -- of intelligible being. It is the first object of the intellect. Always was and always will be, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Like it or not, the soul of man is immaterial and immortal.

Only human participation in a dimension of meaning that is nonparticular, nonfinite -- a realm of transcendent meaning -- justifies any metanarratives about humanity (ibid.).

"Nonparticular" and "nonfinite." Or in other words, universal and infinite. The left likes to talk about "unity," but there is and can be only one unity and one ground of unity. 

Or is that too complicated? For in the absence of transcendence, you won't have unity, rather, its impossibility. And because it is impossible, it must be violently forced into being. Hence all the censorship, repression, and threats: unity, or else!

Here is another pet point of ours: that symbols of transcendence "tend, in the course of their use and diffusion, to become cut off from the experiences of transcendence that originally engendered them." These symbols can "lose the power to communicate, or to evoke, such experiences and insights." 

Seeing through our vernoccular, these symbols become saturated and thereby unfit for the influx of transcendent experience and meaning.

This is a genuine problem, partly because people don't recognize it as one. And it is a more general problem, because our minds are on the one hand narrowly adapted to survival, but ultimately conformed to a reality that vastly transcends mere biology or psychology. Language can become disengaged from transcendent reality, resulting in an enclosed world of concretion and literalism. 

You will have noticed that this error characterizes two kinds dysfunctional religiosity, one of which unironically calling itself "a-theism." 

Suffice it to say, one must be careful with language, because it can both engender the experience of transcendence and foreclose the experience. Just don't blame transcendent reality for rendering its experience impossible. That was you, not God. 

Fallen Arches and a Flattened Cosmos

We've been discussing.... What have we been discussing, anyway? Mystery, discontinuity, and circularity, in the context of an unerring map of reality.  

Along these lines, let me tie up a few loose ends. I've been reading more books than usual lately, too many to blog about in detail, for example, The Last Things, by Romano Guardini. The book isn't required reading, but the following passage is: 

The shape of a man's life is not a growth and unfolding from within, culminating in a return upon itself; its figure, its symbol, is not the self-enclosed circle, but an arch that reaches out toward something that in turn comes to meet it (emphasis mine).

The symbol for man cannot be the circle, because man -- or better, the person -- is an open system, not just horizontally but vertically. Nor can we ever attain closure on pain of biological, psychological, epistemological, ontological, and/or spiritual death.  

To be perfectly accurate -- which is always our aim -- you will have noticed that it is very much possible for a man to be biologically alive while being intellectually starved and spiritually asphyxiated. Indeed, what is the plague of wokeness but a zombie apocalypse? 

Anyone can see that Joe Biden isn't exactly alive, but nor is he dead. His mind will be declared dead when he is no longer useful to the left, which I predict will be in less than one year. Change my mind.

Back to the symbol for man: not the circle, but rather, an arch reaching up and out toward something -- boo! -- that comes down and out to meet it. Let's just symbolize it (↑↓). There's no getting around this. Rather, only getting around in it. 

Again, the brightest animal remains enclosed in the circle of its nature. It can learn, but there is a strict limit to what it can learn, since its object is its immediate environment, whereas man's object is the limitless expanse of intelligible being. Big place. Many mansions. Circular stairway with no visible top floor.

Thenceforth the man has a new vision; and to acquire the habit of living in the new vision is intellectual conversion.  The new vision of the world includes a new vision of man. Man is no longer part of animate nature like all the rest, rooted and enclosed in his own nature.... Its movement, its growth, are directed from man to God and back from God to man (emphasis mine).

That's a bingo. Except the transpersonal arch is broken, and man -- this means you! -- broke it. And you see the sign: you break it, you pay for it. Okay, how much? That's the subject of a different post, but you get the point. Well, here's a hint from later in the book:

The arch we spoke of here appears again. Christ carries man's nature to God, and back again from God to man.

The arch restored and resurrected. And an invitation to become golden arches ourselves.  

Speaking of the Flat Cosmos Society of the left, let's lift a passage from a seemingly entirely unrelated book called The Church and State, by Thomas Molnar: the left

cannot comprehend its own fallacy because the worldview it professes does not recognize anything above the individual, except "culture" and "values," which are nothing but expressions of individual tastes and preferences.

Here we see a kind of "structural" Dunning-Krugery at play, since the leftist doesn't know what he doesn't know and thereby insists that what he doesn't know doesn't exist -- like a dog that can perceive a book but can never apprehend its interior meaning, or like a troll who reads this post and thinks it's about the fraudulent election.

Which it is, now that I think about it. 

In another book, Guardini writes that "The meaning of things lies beyond them. A thing exists beyond itself; its reality lies above it."  And as Balthasar writes, "The more a thing exists, the more it becomes essentially light." Meaning is light -- a light simultaneously shed on the subject and object; or from object to subject and vice-versa.  

Which brings us to the far more blogworthy Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy From Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. It will require several posts to unpack, beginning with the next one.  

Fallen Arches and a Flattened Cosmos

We've been discussing.... What have we been discussing, anyway? Mystery, discontinuity, and circularity, in the context of an unerring map of reality.  

Along these lines, let me tie up a few loose ends. I've been reading more books than usual lately, too many to blog about in detail, for example, The Last Things, by Romano Guardini. The book isn't required reading, but the following passage is: 

The shape of a man's life is not a growth and unfolding from within, culminating in a return upon itself; its figure, its symbol, is not the self-enclosed circle, but an arch that reaches out toward something that in turn comes to meet it (emphasis mine).

The symbol for man cannot be the circle, because man -- or better, the person -- is an open system, not just horizontally but vertically. Nor can we ever attain closure on pain of biological, psychological, epistemological, ontological, and/or spiritual death.  

To be perfectly accurate -- which is always our aim -- you will have noticed that it is very much possible for a man to be biologically alive while being intellectually starved and spiritually asphyxiated. Indeed, what is the plague of wokeness but a zombie apocalypse? 

Anyone can see that Joe Biden isn't exactly alive, but nor is he dead. His mind will be declared dead when he is no longer useful to the left, which I predict will be in less than one year. Change my mind.

Back to the symbol for man: not the circle, but rather, an arch reaching up and out toward something -- boo! -- that comes down and out to meet it. Let's just symbolize it (↑↓). There's no getting around this. Rather, only getting around in it. 

Again, the brightest animal remains enclosed in the circle of its nature. It can learn, but there is a strict limit to what it can learn, since its object is its immediate environment, whereas man's object is the limitless expanse of intelligible being. Big place. Many mansions. Circular stairway with no visible top floor.

Thenceforth the man has a new vision; and to acquire the habit of living in the new vision is intellectual conversion.  The new vision of the world includes a new vision of man. Man is no longer part of animate nature like all the rest, rooted and enclosed in his own nature.... Its movement, its growth, are directed from man to God and back from God to man (emphasis mine).

That's a bingo. Except the transpersonal arch is broken, and man -- this means you! -- broke it. And you see the sign: you break it, you pay for it. Okay, how much? That's the subject of a different post, but you get the point. Well, here's a hint from later in the book:

The arch we spoke of here appears again. Christ carries man's nature to God, and back again from God to man.

The arch restored and resurrected. And an invitation to become golden arches ourselves.  

Speaking of the Flat Cosmos Society of the left, let's lift a passage from a seemingly entirely unrelated book called The Church and State, by Thomas Molnar: the left

cannot comprehend its own fallacy because the worldview it professes does not recognize anything above the individual, except "culture" and "values," which are nothing but expressions of individual tastes and preferences.

Here we see a kind of "structural" Dunning-Krugery at play, since the leftist doesn't know what he doesn't know and thereby insists that what he doesn't know doesn't exist -- like a dog that can perceive a book but can never apprehend its interior meaning, or like a troll who reads this post and thinks it's about the fraudulent election.

Which it is, now that I think about it. 

In another book, Guardini writes that "The meaning of things lies beyond them. A thing exists beyond itself; its reality lies above it."  And as Balthasar writes, "The more a thing exists, the more it becomes essentially light." Meaning is light -- a light simultaneously shed on the subject and object; or from object to subject and vice-versa.  

Which brings us to the far more blogworthy Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy From Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. It will require several posts to unpack, beginning with the next one.  

The Dude Abides Biden

In the previous post we spoke of the mystery of discontinuity. This cosmos of ours has numerous "joints" between quite different realties, and these transitional interstices are precisely where the mysteries lay. 

Let's take our most consequential mystery, that between being and non-being: things either exist or they don't. So, how did existence get here? 

You can say "it has always existed," but this only pretends to answer the question by placing it off in the distance. As if we can't see you hiding back there! "Infinite time" solves nothing, any more than infinitely long fingers explain how I'm banging out this post.

And yet, there must also be continuity, only not the narrow type of material continuity to which scientism is limited. For there is also an infinite gap between "potential being" and "non-being"; nothing cannot become something unless an inchoate something was potentially present in the womb of being.

This, of course, goes to the metaphysical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Just because the Creator didn't use any existing material to bring the cosmos into being, it doesn't mean it wasn't present in potential. 

True, the Creator was and is free to create any cosmos he likes, but those creations too exist in potential. In other words, even the Creator cannot create something uncreatable. He can't make a square circle, much less a logical leftist. 

Before plunging forward, this goes back to that previous essay we were discussing, Man in the Cosmogonic Projection. "Cosmogonic projection" is another term for creation, i.e., how the immanent cosmos is a creative projection from a transcendent source. 

Hints and clues from this nonlocal source are everywhere; indeed, to be human is to have access to these transcendent murmurandoms. In their absence we would be like any other animal, devoid of concepts and bereft of understanding: no transcendence, no truth.

Ah, now I remember where we left off -- and how appropriate for this inaugspecious day!: 

the worst of perversions is that of man because [the corruption of the best is the worst of all]. The "dark" and "descending" tendency not only moves away from the Sovereign Good, but also rises up against It; whence the equation between the devil and pride (Schuon, emphasis mine).

We have discussed the circular nature of reality on many occasions -- to be exact, our participation in, and conformity to, the spiral of 

exitus-redditus, an exit from and a return to God, Who is both Alpha and Omega. God is the ontological heart that pumps the blood of being through the arteries of creation into the body of the universe... (Kreeft).

Arteries and veins, if we want to be technical. And let's not forget the capillaries, which allow the ittiest bitty to simultaneously receive and transmit the divine light, indeed, the meeker and more humble the brighter.

Which brings us back to the highlighted bit above, for there is but one beast in all of creation that is not only free to exit the circle of being, but rise up against it. We call this beastling Man, albeit with a big assist from forces that ape the divine energies in this diabolical up-rising. 

"[T]he great evil for man is not only to move away from God" but "to overlook that at the very depths of the abyss the lifeline is always there" -- on condition that "we have the humility and the faith that allow us to grasp it."

Deep abysses. Like today. It is at once a breathtaking movement away from God, "but this movement can have nothing absolute about it; the Center is present everywhere." The Dude abides.

The Dude Abides Biden

In the previous post we spoke of the mystery of discontinuity. This cosmos of ours has numerous "joints" between quite different realties, and these transitional interstices are precisely where the mysteries lay. 

Let's take our most consequential mystery, that between being and non-being: things either exist or they don't. So, how did existence get here? 

You can say "it has always existed," but this only pretends to answer the question by placing it off in the distance. As if we can't see you hiding back there! "Infinite time" solves nothing, any more than infinitely long fingers explain how I'm banging out this post.

And yet, there must also be continuity, only not the narrow type of material continuity to which scientism is limited. For there is also an infinite gap between "potential being" and "non-being"; nothing cannot become something unless an inchoate something was potentially present in the womb of being.

This, of course, goes to the metaphysical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Just because the Creator didn't use any existing material to bring the cosmos into being, it doesn't mean it wasn't present in potential. 

True, the Creator was and is free to create any cosmos he likes, but those creations too exist in potential. In other words, even the Creator cannot create something uncreatable. He can't make a square circle, much less a logical leftist. 

Before plunging forward, this goes back to that previous essay we were discussing, Man in the Cosmogonic Projection. "Cosmogonic projection" is another term for creation, i.e., how the immanent cosmos is a creative projection from a transcendent source. 

Hints and clues from this nonlocal source are everywhere; indeed, to be human is to have access to these transcendent murmurandoms. In their absence we would be like any other animal, devoid of concepts and bereft of understanding: no transcendence, no truth.

Ah, now I remember where we left off -- and how appropriate for this inaugspecious day!: 

the worst of perversions is that of man because [the corruption of the best is the worst of all]. The "dark" and "descending" tendency not only moves away from the Sovereign Good, but also rises up against It; whence the equation between the devil and pride (Schuon, emphasis mine).

We have discussed the circular nature of reality on many occasions -- to be exact, our participation in, and conformity to, the spiral of 

exitus-redditus, an exit from and a return to God, Who is both Alpha and Omega. God is the ontological heart that pumps the blood of being through the arteries of creation into the body of the universe... (Kreeft).

Arteries and veins, if we want to be technical. And let's not forget the capillaries, which allow the ittiest bitty to simultaneously receive and transmit the divine light, indeed, the meeker and more humble the brighter.

Which brings us back to the highlighted bit above, for there is but one beast in all of creation that is not only free to exit the circle of being, but rise up against it. We call this beastling Man, albeit with a big assist from forces that ape the divine energies in this diabolical up-rising. 

"[T]he great evil for man is not only to move away from God" but "to overlook that at the very depths of the abyss the lifeline is always there" -- on condition that "we have the humility and the faith that allow us to grasp it."

Deep abysses. Like today. It is at once a breathtaking movement away from God, "but this movement can have nothing absolute about it; the Center is present everywhere." The Dude abides.

True Obscurity and False Clarity

Might as well continue where we left off. Speaking of which -- continuity -- man always lives amidst both, i.e., continuity-and-discontinuity. Which seems contradictory, -- indeed, to violate the law of non-contraction: for how can something be continuous and discontinuous at the same time and in the same respect?

On the one hand, we don't know. Then again, we do, for hints and clues and even fingerprints are everywhere: for example, the quantum realm cannot be reduced further than to the seemingly contradictory descriptions of "wave" and "particle." 

In other words, the particle isn't a function of the wave, nor vice versa. Call it "exact inexactitude." It's not something we can picture in the head. But it nevertheless is.  

As we all know, I'm not one of those new age bunk peddlers who like to pretend that a woo-woo interpretation of quantum physics is THE KEY to ABUNDANCE and IMMORTALITY or something. We leave the deepakery to those counterfeit mystery mongers and grotesque chopresque slack merchants.  

We'll just rewordgitate a line we swallowed long ago: that quantum physics is the way it is because it is a mirror of the Real. It is not reality itself, obviously. And importantly, this is a two-way mirror, AKA the mirror of intelligence-and-intelligibility. 

Consider the latter: are these two (world and knowledge) discontinuous? Yes. Are they continuous? Yes. If they weren't both, then neither would be possible.

Perhaps you don't know exactly what I mean. Let me try to spell it out briefly, because it's only peripheral to the subject of this post, but nevertheless foundational: what I mean is what St. Thomas means when he says that the knower is, in a certain manner, able to become other things. 

This latter goes to what knowledge is, precisely: something of the object inside the subject, but without damaging or destroying the former, as in chewing and digesting (or, on a lower level, how leftist historians destroy the object of history, or leftist psychologists the psyche). 

The process does, however, share the form of digestion, in the sense that, just as the pizza you eat mysteriously transforms into your material body, so too does the world mysteriously transform into knowledge of itself in the knower -- without destroying the world (leftism and other destructive ideological deformities notwithstanding).

Let's not pretend we understand either mystery. But let's also not pretend a mystery is just an indigestible absurdity or impregnable wall of stupid. Let's put it this way: mystery is present at the hinge points within the cosmos, and also at its edges. 

For example, we know that the cosmos is neither self-explanatory nor self-sufficient; rather, it is ontologically dependent upon another principle. We can deploy physics to map our universe all the way to its beginning in time -- or even (so they say) to the beginning of time -- but then... mystery. 

And where does the cosmos end? 

Same. Same mystery? Yes -- or so we have heard from the wise: we exist between Alpha and Omega, which are discontinuous here but continuous hereafter.

Not so fast. For what does it mean to say that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand? Does it not mean that the Kingdom of Continuity reveals its presence here and now in our vexatious Prison of Discontinuity?  

Or I am the Alpha and Omega. Logic -- or bi-logic -- would seem to entail the converse: that Alpha and Omega are I AM.  Which makes perfect nonsense to me.

We're rapidly losing track of the main point, which is this: that we are necessarily immersed in mystery, which is to say that mystery is for man absolutely necessary -- again, not mystery-as-ignorance, but rather, mystery as presence. Man himself is a mystery -- to both himself and others -- and thus always more (not less!) than we can specify.

Let me throw out some of these complementary and/or transitional mysteries off the top of my head: intelligible being and intelligence, being and non-being, sense and intellect, matter and life, life and mind, freedom and necessity, appearance and reality, one and many, origin and end, prehistory and history, being and beyond-being. 

In each case the two terms are related in an obscure way. Which is absolutely the clearest way to delineate such absolutely necessary mysteries. 

The end. And beginning.

True Obscurity and False Clarity

Might as well continue where we left off. Speaking of which -- continuity -- man always lives amidst both, i.e., continuity-and-discontinuity. Which seems contradictory, -- indeed, to violate the law of non-contraction: for how can something be continuous and discontinuous at the same time and in the same respect?

On the one hand, we don't know. Then again, we do, for hints and clues and even fingerprints are everywhere: for example, the quantum realm cannot be reduced further than to the seemingly contradictory descriptions of "wave" and "particle." 

In other words, the particle isn't a function of the wave, nor vice versa. Call it "exact inexactitude." It's not something we can picture in the head. But it nevertheless is.  

As we all know, I'm not one of those new age bunk peddlers who like to pretend that a woo-woo interpretation of quantum physics is THE KEY to ABUNDANCE and IMMORTALITY or something. We leave the deepakery to those counterfeit mystery mongers and grotesque chopresque slack merchants.  

We'll just rewordgitate a line we swallowed long ago: that quantum physics is the way it is because it is a mirror of the Real. It is not reality itself, obviously. And importantly, this is a two-way mirror, AKA the mirror of intelligence-and-intelligibility. 

Consider the latter: are these two (world and knowledge) discontinuous? Yes. Are they continuous? Yes. If they weren't both, then neither would be possible.

Perhaps you don't know exactly what I mean. Let me try to spell it out briefly, because it's only peripheral to the subject of this post, but nevertheless foundational: what I mean is what St. Thomas means when he says that the knower is, in a certain manner, able to become other things. 

This latter goes to what knowledge is, precisely: something of the object inside the subject, but without damaging or destroying the former, as in chewing and digesting (or, on a lower level, how leftist historians destroy the object of history, or leftist psychologists the psyche). 

The process does, however, share the form of digestion, in the sense that, just as the pizza you eat mysteriously transforms into your material body, so too does the world mysteriously transform into knowledge of itself in the knower -- without destroying the world (leftism and other destructive ideological deformities notwithstanding).

Let's not pretend we understand either mystery. But let's also not pretend a mystery is just an indigestible absurdity or impregnable wall of stupid. Let's put it this way: mystery is present at the hinge points within the cosmos, and also at its edges. 

For example, we know that the cosmos is neither self-explanatory nor self-sufficient; rather, it is ontologically dependent upon another principle. We can deploy physics to map our universe all the way to its beginning in time -- or even (so they say) to the beginning of time -- but then... mystery. 

And where does the cosmos end? 

Same. Same mystery? Yes -- or so we have heard from the wise: we exist between Alpha and Omega, which are discontinuous here but continuous hereafter.

Not so fast. For what does it mean to say that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand? Does it not mean that the Kingdom of Continuity reveals its presence here and now in our vexatious Prison of Discontinuity?  

Or I am the Alpha and Omega. Logic -- or bi-logic -- would seem to entail the converse: that Alpha and Omega are I AM.  Which makes perfect nonsense to me.

We're rapidly losing track of the main point, which is this: that we are necessarily immersed in mystery, which is to say that mystery is for man absolutely necessary -- again, not mystery-as-ignorance, but rather, mystery as presence. Man himself is a mystery -- to both himself and others -- and thus always more (not less!) than we can specify.

Let me throw out some of these complementary and/or transitional mysteries off the top of my head: intelligible being and intelligence, being and non-being, sense and intellect, matter and life, life and mind, freedom and necessity, appearance and reality, one and many, origin and end, prehistory and history, being and beyond-being. 

In each case the two terms are related in an obscure way. Which is absolutely the clearest way to delineate such absolutely necessary mysteries. 

The end. And beginning.

You Are Here: Your Ultimate Map of Reality

It seems to me that because there are "two sides to every story," people often conclude that objective truth is unattainable by man. 

But it actually proves the opposite, because the logic of argument implicitly assumes the object of its search. In other words, no one -- assuming sanity and intellectual honesty -- argues for the existence of "things that are not," much less "things that can never be."

Here at One Cosmos we symbolize the implicit-but-always-present object of this search "O." In our view, one is free to deny the existence of O, but never in a self-consistent way. For on what rational basis can one deny the potential conformity of mind to reality? One is in effect saying: there is no possibility of truth, and that's the truth.

This goes to one of the more subtle "proofs" of (or ways to) God. The problem, of course, is that Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them (NGD), while no amount of proof is sufficient for the person without a knack for these things, i.e., vision, intuition, gnosis, common sense, pneumacognition, and/or infused contemplation. 

Ultimately -- and this is not a tautology -- The sole proof of the existence of God is His existence (ibid.). 

The reason this isn't a tautology is that proof of God is the experiential realization of his necessity, bearing in mind that this realization has many horizontal and vertical degrees and modalities, e.g., truth, beauty, love, mystical union, vertical recollections, eschatological murmurandoms, and various other Magic Moments of theophanic breakthrough -- for which we use the "empty symbol" (?!).

Even the most spiritually bereft and psychically desiccated atheist has been privileged to experience at least one episode of (?!), and probably more, for Celestial Central radiates and can't help radiating its presents down and out. 

Exactly what is happening during a theophanic breakthrough? In virtue of what principle is the breakthrough both possible and even inevitable if you would only get out of your own way and open yourself to the divine energies?

As it so often happens when (?) meets (!), I've been reading all about it in a book called Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity, by Glenn Hughes (see sidebar below).

No, there's nothing really new in it for the seasoned One Cosmonaut, but it's always gratifying to run into even a single individual who sees the world as we do. I won't say it can get lonely inhere, because with God one is never allone. Also, Hughes comes at it with a very different sensibility -- i.e., scholarly sobriety as opposed to loosey-nousey divine comedy and metaphysical mischief. 

Let's first jump to conclusions and lay out the under- and overall vision with a sample passage:

First of all, the timeless ground is real. The structure of reality includes the transcendent ground of meaning [O], which we experience through participation. It is a "flow of presence" in all human consciousness, whether we attend to it or not, and however sophisticated or unsophisticated our imaginative or conceptual portrayals of it. 

So, the irreducible structure of reality is an experiential and participatory flow of presence, in case you haven't gnosissed. How to symbolize this flow in the most abstract and universal way possible? Easy for me to say: O --> (k) and O --> (¶), the first more epistemological, the second more ontological.

Or better, these should be visualized as vertical relations, and with the arrows going both ways; oh, and in such a manner that the flow of presence is a spiraling movement toward increased depth and richness, sponsored at every step of the journey by the always complete but unattainable (by man, in this life) O.

Like the following: read s-l-o-w-l-y and see that the divine presence 

is understood precisely as the nonfinite condition for the existence and good of every finite thing. Every place becomes the place of the intersection of the timeless with time. And human being is where that intersection comes to self-recognition and self-realization, where the flow of eternal divine presence orients temporal existence, through human consciousness, toward timeless meaning and truth.

Orients. Where are we? I mean ultimately? Correct: we are "in" reality. What is the nature of this place we call reality? Correct again: it is at the crossroads of vertical and horizontal energies:

Human beings, then, always "remain in the 'in between,' in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present.... at every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time [O]." 

What is our ultimate "point of reference?" Is it O? Yes and no. Although Hughes doesn't express it this way, my view is that in a trinitarian cosmos -- or a cosmos everywhere stamped with the imprimatur of the Trinity -- the point of reference is more properly understood as (↑↓), not so much a "place" as a relation, or a "place of relation. Why so?

So as to avoid the twin errors of a radical transcendence or immanence. The former error persists in Buddhism and Vedanta, while the latter error is at the heart of scientism, Marxism, and any manmade ideology more generally.

I guess we'll leave off with this passage, because we agree with every word of it: 

History is not simply the unfolding of time; it is the intersection of the timeless with time. Historical progress, consequently, is not simply movement forward on a time line. It is, most essentially, success in attuning social and personal life to the truths of timeless meaning, a success that waxes and wanes...

And with our self-styled progressives in charge, we are of course seeing this progress wane before our very eyes. It's wane's world now. We just live in it. Oh well. What cannot continue will not continue. And in reality the waxing is always already underway, if you know where to lOOk. 

You Are Here: Your Ultimate Map of Reality

It seems to me that because there are "two sides to every story," people often conclude that objective truth is unattainable by man. 

But it actually proves the opposite, because the logic of argument implicitly assumes the object of its search. In other words, no one -- assuming sanity and intellectual honesty -- argues for the existence of "things that are not," much less "things that can never be."

Here at One Cosmos we symbolize the implicit-but-always-present object of this search "O." In our view, one is free to deny the existence of O, but never in a self-consistent way. For on what rational basis can one deny the potential conformity of mind to reality? One is in effect saying: there is no possibility of truth, and that's the truth.

This goes to one of the more subtle "proofs" of (or ways to) God. The problem, of course, is that Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them (NGD), while no amount of proof is sufficient for the person without a knack for these things, i.e., vision, intuition, gnosis, common sense, pneumacognition, and/or infused contemplation. 

Ultimately -- and this is not a tautology -- The sole proof of the existence of God is His existence (ibid.). 

The reason this isn't a tautology is that proof of God is the experiential realization of his necessity, bearing in mind that this realization has many horizontal and vertical degrees and modalities, e.g., truth, beauty, love, mystical union, vertical recollections, eschatological murmurandoms, and various other Magic Moments of theophanic breakthrough -- for which we use the "empty symbol" (?!).

Even the most spiritually bereft and psychically desiccated atheist has been privileged to experience at least one episode of (?!), and probably more, for Celestial Central radiates and can't help radiating its presents down and out. 

Exactly what is happening during a theophanic breakthrough? In virtue of what principle is the breakthrough both possible and even inevitable if you would only get out of your own way and open yourself to the divine energies?

As it so often happens when (?) meets (!), I've been reading all about it in a book called Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity, by Glenn Hughes (see sidebar below).

No, there's nothing really new in it for the seasoned One Cosmonaut, but it's always gratifying to run into even a single individual who sees the world as we do. I won't say it can get lonely inhere, because with God one is never allone. Also, Hughes comes at it with a very different sensibility -- i.e., scholarly sobriety as opposed to loosey-nousey divine comedy and metaphysical mischief. 

Let's first jump to conclusions and lay out the under- and overall vision with a sample passage:

First of all, the timeless ground is real. The structure of reality includes the transcendent ground of meaning [O], which we experience through participation. It is a "flow of presence" in all human consciousness, whether we attend to it or not, and however sophisticated or unsophisticated our imaginative or conceptual portrayals of it. 

So, the irreducible structure of reality is an experiential and participatory flow of presence, in case you haven't gnosissed. How to symbolize this flow in the most abstract and universal way possible? Easy for me to say: O --> (k) and O --> (¶), the first more epistemological, the second more ontological.

Or better, these should be visualized as vertical relations, and with the arrows going both ways; oh, and in such a manner that the flow of presence is a spiraling movement toward increased depth and richness, sponsored at every step of the journey by the always complete but unattainable (by man, in this life) O.

Like the following: read s-l-o-w-l-y and see that the divine presence 

is understood precisely as the nonfinite condition for the existence and good of every finite thing. Every place becomes the place of the intersection of the timeless with time. And human being is where that intersection comes to self-recognition and self-realization, where the flow of eternal divine presence orients temporal existence, through human consciousness, toward timeless meaning and truth.

Orients. Where are we? I mean ultimately? Correct: we are "in" reality. What is the nature of this place we call reality? Correct again: it is at the crossroads of vertical and horizontal energies:

Human beings, then, always "remain in the 'in between,' in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present.... at every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time [O]." 

What is our ultimate "point of reference?" Is it O? Yes and no. Although Hughes doesn't express it this way, my view is that in a trinitarian cosmos -- or a cosmos everywhere stamped with the imprimatur of the Trinity -- the point of reference is more properly understood as (↑↓), not so much a "place" as a relation, or a "place of relation. Why so?

So as to avoid the twin errors of a radical transcendence or immanence. The former error persists in Buddhism and Vedanta, while the latter error is at the heart of scientism, Marxism, and any manmade ideology more generally.

I guess we'll leave off with this passage, because we agree with every word of it: 

History is not simply the unfolding of time; it is the intersection of the timeless with time. Historical progress, consequently, is not simply movement forward on a time line. It is, most essentially, success in attuning social and personal life to the truths of timeless meaning, a success that waxes and wanes...

And with our self-styled progressives in charge, we are of course seeing this progress wane before our very eyes. It's wane's world now. We just live in it. Oh well. What cannot continue will not continue. And in reality the waxing is always already underway, if you know where to lOOk. 

The First Principle of Normality

The first task of philosophy -- come to think of it -- must be to distinguish the real from the unreal. Reality, of course, is one. If you do not accept this principle, then you are dismissed. For to differ on a principle so fundamental is to differ on everything else. 

As the Aphorist says, Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. And Intelligent discussion should be reduced to clarifying divergences. Thus, the most intelligent -- or consequential anyway -- discussion involves the clarification of differing fundamental principles. 

For example, I believe political violence is always wrong (at least in a free society such as ours). The left believes it is good so long as it is being committed by the left. Big difference. 

On what deeper principle can the left's seemingly contradictory stance be founded? It can't be the principle that "might makes right," for if gangs of deplorable MAGA rioters and looters were to burn down our cities to exert political pressure, the left would immediately recognize it as fascism.

Nevertheless, there is a deeper principle involved in the left's seeming lack of principle, most ably articulated by comrade Lenin; for him, the question always comes down to: Who and Whom. When the left is the hammer, it is Good; conversely, when the left is the anvil, it is Evil. 

We see the same principle with regard to racism: it is always bad unless the left engages in it. Thus, affirmative action is just racial profiling under new management.  

But just try explaining this to an NPC leftist. It will not compute. Instead, one will be greeted with regurgitated epithets such as RACIST, FASCIST, and in recent days TERRORIST, INSURRECTIONIST, and TREASONIST.

Nevertheless, these NPCs make it a special point to visit our comment section on a daily basis and rewordgitate their memes. For it has never occurred to them that Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time, for both NPC and living human alike.

So, we don't engage in dialogue with people who have never even examined their own principles, any more than we would ask a dog why it is such a slave to instinct. We prefer the mode of meta-level insultainment, i.e., Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Back to our main theme, which is the one reality and its many alternatives. Now, man is always arguing 1) from principle; 2) toward principle; or 3) from or toward any or no principle at all, this latter corresponding to the intellectual Calvinball of the left. 

A normal person...

STOP! That right there is controversial, isn't it? For one of the first principles of the left is that there can be no such thing as normality because there is no such thing as human nature. "Normality" presupposes a transcendent essence, but transcendence presupposes God, and the left can't consistently go there: In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other (NGD).

This principle-of-no-principle leads directly to a host of "illogically logical entailments" such as men can be women or marriage can be anything. For the normal person these are absurdities, but for the absurd person they are normalities. How can one argue with a person who doesn't even bow to the principle of non-contradiction? One can't.  

For example, if a person who believes in the principle of free speech argues with a person who believes in the principle that free speech means suppression of thoughtcrime, the argument inevitably ends with the former expressing impermissible thoughtcrime. Banished from Twitter. No conversation for you!   

Nevertheless, we believe in human nature and in normality, including intellectual normality. Is there such a thing? Of course there is: for it is identical to asking whether truth exists. Supposing it does, then it is normal to conform to it.  

Cue NPCs: NO EVIDENCE ELECTION RIGGED. NO EVIDENCE ELECTION RIGGED. Which peacefully coexists with 2016 ELECTION RIGGED, 2004 ELECTION RIGGED, and 2000 ELECTION RIGGED. 1960? NOT RIGGED. NIXON BAD.

Now, to reject the principle of human nature is to reject any principle of objective morality. Give Lenin credit for intellectual honesty and for arguing from first principle:

We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts.... there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle.... all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters.

Mass struggle against the exploiters. Or in our day, the left's victim culture whereby certain citizens are innocent and others guilty by virtue of immutable characteristics such as Whiteness or Maleness. 

For example, Biden's pick for head of the Civil Rights Division is innocent of racism despite believing the chemical melanin renders blacks superior, or that race should go into determining who pilots your plane.

About the principle of non-contradiction that permits and constrains normal thought. As it so happens, the latest Hillsdale Imprimus discusses this in the context of 1984, which has arrived 36 years late. Nevertheless, "better late than never" according to our technofascists.

As the first essential step of his education, Winston has to learn doublethink -- a way of thinking that defies the law of contradiction [which] is the basis of all reasoning, the means of making sense of the world.

Note well that last one, for it means that denying the law of non-contraction renders one forever incapable of making sense of the world. And there's a name for a world that isn't reducible to rational sense: hell.

Speaking of which, here's an example:

In our time, the law of non-contradiction would mean that a governor, say, could not simultaneously hold that the COVID pandemic renders church services too dangerous to allow, and also that massive protest marches are fine.

Well, unless there is a "higher" principle involved, Lenin's principle that whatever contributes to the left's success is good. Nothing more opposes the left's project than genuine religiosity, so Governor Newsom's logic actually checks out.

Just getting started. To be continued. 

The First Principle of Normality

The first task of philosophy -- come to think of it -- must be to distinguish the real from the unreal. Reality, of course, is one. If you do not accept this principle, then you are dismissed. For to differ on a principle so fundamental is to differ on everything else. 

As the Aphorist says, Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. And Intelligent discussion should be reduced to clarifying divergences. Thus, the most intelligent -- or consequential anyway -- discussion involves the clarification of differing fundamental principles. 

For example, I believe political violence is always wrong (at least in a free society such as ours). The left believes it is good so long as it is being committed by the left. Big difference. 

On what deeper principle can the left's seemingly contradictory stance be founded? It can't be the principle that "might makes right," for if gangs of deplorable MAGA rioters and looters were to burn down our cities to exert political pressure, the left would immediately recognize it as fascism.

Nevertheless, there is a deeper principle involved in the left's seeming lack of principle, most ably articulated by comrade Lenin; for him, the question always comes down to: Who and Whom. When the left is the hammer, it is Good; conversely, when the left is the anvil, it is Evil. 

We see the same principle with regard to racism: it is always bad unless the left engages in it. Thus, affirmative action is just racial profiling under new management.  

But just try explaining this to an NPC leftist. It will not compute. Instead, one will be greeted with regurgitated epithets such as RACIST, FASCIST, and in recent days TERRORIST, INSURRECTIONIST, and TREASONIST.

Nevertheless, these NPCs make it a special point to visit our comment section on a daily basis and rewordgitate their memes. For it has never occurred to them that Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time, for both NPC and living human alike.

So, we don't engage in dialogue with people who have never even examined their own principles, any more than we would ask a dog why it is such a slave to instinct. We prefer the mode of meta-level insultainment, i.e., Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Back to our main theme, which is the one reality and its many alternatives. Now, man is always arguing 1) from principle; 2) toward principle; or 3) from or toward any or no principle at all, this latter corresponding to the intellectual Calvinball of the left. 

A normal person...

STOP! That right there is controversial, isn't it? For one of the first principles of the left is that there can be no such thing as normality because there is no such thing as human nature. "Normality" presupposes a transcendent essence, but transcendence presupposes God, and the left can't consistently go there: In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other (NGD).

This principle-of-no-principle leads directly to a host of "illogically logical entailments" such as men can be women or marriage can be anything. For the normal person these are absurdities, but for the absurd person they are normalities. How can one argue with a person who doesn't even bow to the principle of non-contradiction? One can't.  

For example, if a person who believes in the principle of free speech argues with a person who believes in the principle that free speech means suppression of thoughtcrime, the argument inevitably ends with the former expressing impermissible thoughtcrime. Banished from Twitter. No conversation for you!   

Nevertheless, we believe in human nature and in normality, including intellectual normality. Is there such a thing? Of course there is: for it is identical to asking whether truth exists. Supposing it does, then it is normal to conform to it.  

Cue NPCs: NO EVIDENCE ELECTION RIGGED. NO EVIDENCE ELECTION RIGGED. Which peacefully coexists with 2016 ELECTION RIGGED, 2004 ELECTION RIGGED, and 2000 ELECTION RIGGED. 1960? NOT RIGGED. NIXON BAD.

Now, to reject the principle of human nature is to reject any principle of objective morality. Give Lenin credit for intellectual honesty and for arguing from first principle:

We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts.... there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle.... all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters.

Mass struggle against the exploiters. Or in our day, the left's victim culture whereby certain citizens are innocent and others guilty by virtue of immutable characteristics such as Whiteness or Maleness. 

For example, Biden's pick for head of the Civil Rights Division is innocent of racism despite believing the chemical melanin renders blacks superior, or that race should go into determining who pilots your plane.

About the principle of non-contradiction that permits and constrains normal thought. As it so happens, the latest Hillsdale Imprimus discusses this in the context of 1984, which has arrived 36 years late. Nevertheless, "better late than never" according to our technofascists.

As the first essential step of his education, Winston has to learn doublethink -- a way of thinking that defies the law of contradiction [which] is the basis of all reasoning, the means of making sense of the world.

Note well that last one, for it means that denying the law of non-contraction renders one forever incapable of making sense of the world. And there's a name for a world that isn't reducible to rational sense: hell.

Speaking of which, here's an example:

In our time, the law of non-contradiction would mean that a governor, say, could not simultaneously hold that the COVID pandemic renders church services too dangerous to allow, and also that massive protest marches are fine.

Well, unless there is a "higher" principle involved, Lenin's principle that whatever contributes to the left's success is good. Nothing more opposes the left's project than genuine religiosity, so Governor Newsom's logic actually checks out.

Just getting started. To be continued.