Cure for Postmodern Nihilism Announced by Obscure Blogger

It seems to me that Thomism is the worst philosophy, except for all the others. Let's find out why.

Just to set the stage, yesterday a commenter who calls himself "Gagdad Bob" linked to an article called Epistemic Nihilism Leaves Only Brute Force. I just skimmed it, but this caught my attention:

The postmodern cynic makes a false epistemological claim indicating epistemological skepticism and nihilism.... If there is an objective reality, we have no access to it.... This means that there is no way to settle debates by appeal to the evidence. Whose point of view prevails will thus be a matter of violence and power since there is no legitimate way to judge between perspectives. In this way, epistemic nihilism leaves only brute force. 

This chain of reasoning contains a contradiction and is thus false. The postmodernist claims to know that epistemic nihilism is true and thus that all agreement about how to interpret the world seen as a text can only be a matter of one person or group imposing its will on to another. But, if epistemic nihilism is true, they cannot possibly know this and thus they can have no justification for their imposition of force.  

If we do know that epistemic nihilism is true, then it is in fact possible to distinguish fact from fiction, text from reality, and truth from lies, and thus epistemic nihilism must be incorrect. The person promoting it is throwing sand in people’s eyes, shutting down debate or differing points of view, and sees no reason to confine himself to reason and logic, nor to avoid contradiction. He is a power-hungry psychopath. Reason and logic can only hurt him, so he disparages them. Why limit yourself to what is rational and logical? If power is everything, then I will shut you up. That is how they have decided to win a debate. By not having one in the first place.

By the way, I've been experiencing a marked case of Baader-Meinhof focused on the word "nihilism." It keeps coming up in a variety of contexts. Must be a reason. Unless nihilism is true, in which case there can be no reason.

Meanwhile, I've been rereading Garrigou-Lagrange's Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, and the word also popped up there. We'll discuss the wider context below, but he says that "by denying the principle of non-contradiction," one arrives at a

complete nihilism in the order of being, as well as the order of becoming and in the orders of thought, truth, error, opinion, desire, and action.

AKA everything. All due to one tiny error. But you know what Thomas says about a small error in the beginning growing enormous at the end.

Well, we're living in a world of Ginormous Error. For example, "my truth" instantaneously reduces to no truth, period, for it violates the principle of non-contradiction just mentioned by G-L. If my truth is true, and your contradictory truth is true, then anything and everything is equally true and false, with no objective way to adjudicate between them.

Which, among other catastrophes, is the death of the intellect.

Which for the left is not a bug, for reasons alluded to in the passage above:

The person promoting it is throwing sand in people’s eyes, shutting down debate or differing points of view, and sees no reason to confine himself to reason and logic, nor to avoid contradiction. He is a power-hungry psychopath.

Is it going too far to say satanic? Or not far enough? At the very least they are doing Satan's heavy lifting, and journalism takes care of the rest.

The Thomistic view is at antipodes to the postmodern, affirming the thesis "that our intellect can, by its natural powers, come to have metaphysical certitude concerning extra-mental being and its immutable laws" -- in other words, valid and true knowledge of reality.

I know. Crazy! Contra Kant, "The Truth is not merely the conformity of our judgment with the subjective laws of our mind," but "conformity with extra-mental reality."

Either the intellect can conform itself to the real, or it can't; but if the latter were true, we could never know it -- any more than an animal can transcend the closed circle of instinct and neurology. To be perfectly accurate, the animal is open to a world restricted by instinct and neurology, whereas the

man who is endowed with intellectual knowledge is opened up on the intelligible world, and will be able to become, in some way, everything that is intelligible.

The Kantrary view actually goes back a long way, appearing "in Heraclitus and in the Sophists," and later in the Skeptics. "It can be found once more in various forms of modern subjectivism," according to which the cosmos is turned upside down and inside out, such that knowledge is a function of the knower or of other knowledge. Thus,

I can make only one kind of judgment concerning a thing, namely, whether my knowledge of the object is in agreement with my knowledge of the object. Therefore, man is enclosed within himself and cannot escape from the self-enclosed state. He knows only phenomena, all in accord with the subjective laws of the mind (emphasis mine).

The whole idea of the intellect as an open system -- open to intelligible being -- seems to me rather important, not just for its own sake, but for what it says about the human being per se. It's a very strange situation that is either assumed and taken for granted, or denied, mostly by people with too much education and too little common sense.

Nevertheless, there it is: "the first object known by our intellect is the intelligible being of sensible things." Look around at the range of objects that communicate their intelligibility to your intelligence. What do they have in common? Not to insult your intelligence, but that they are; and are intelligible. To the intellect.

"Just as sight naturally knows color and hearing sound, so too the intellect naturally knows being" -- which includes the real being of the first principles of thought, such as the principle of non-contradiction.

Importantly, this principle is not merely a rule of logic confined to our heads, but an ontological principle applying to the extra-mental world. Again, unless you are a postmodern relativist, in which case contradictions can truly exist: a thing and its opposite can be equally true.

Which is like saying that "is" and "is not" are equally the case.

But this question of isness is incredibly important -- in fact, it is everything. If something is true, then it is the case; if it's not true, then it is not the case. Thus, "is" is the very soul of judgment.

Now, what is is?

Just kidding. Or maybe not. But let's stay focused:

Man differs from the animals first of all because the object of his intellect is not limited to the mere sensible phenomenon but, rather, is intelligible being, because he knows the meaning of this little word, "is," and quickly grasps that the verb to be is the root of all the others.

Verb? Yes: be is not a static noun, but rather, always be-ing, and this at both ends. Not to jump ahead, but the intelligibility of being could not occur at our end unless it were first the manifestation of the divine Intellect (i.e., a creative act). Otherwise there would be no intelligibility -- no essences -- there for us to extract.

G-L speaks of "the ontological riches virtually contained in the verb to be," the larger point being that these are not merely epistemological riches confined to our heads; rather, to say that they are ontological is to say that these riches -- the conceptual cash -- are backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality. They're not just funny money, or checks that bounce when, say, you compare models of the climate with the climate.  

Our ideas are fungible to reality. If not, then they are known as "false":

the first demonstrable principle is that we cannot simultaneously affirm and deny the same thing of the same subject in the same respect, which is founded on the notion of being and non-being...

For example, what is a woman? A woman. Or nowadays, a man. In which case, is is deprived of any extra-mental reality. If both are true then neither is true. For "The principle of identity affirms, 'That which is, is; that which is not, is not.'"

So, this little matter of men pretending to be women, or of two men pretending to be married, or of morality being relative, or of all cultures being equally valuable, is no small thing. Or rather, they're all rooted in that small error regarding the isness of extra-mental reality.

There are many more deadly consequences to the denial of the principle of non-contradiction, but let's save something for the next episode.

My Nihilism Can Beat Up Your Nihilism

What is the Evil One up to? That's a question I often ask myself, but again, since the Devil is himself absurd and promotes absurdity in his friends and sympathizers, it can be a fruitless exercise. 

In an article in Tablet called France’s Nightmare Is Yours Now: How the Oct. 7 Massacres in Israel Gave Birth to a Global Pogrom, in which the author asks,

What am I watching?

I was staring at my phone in blank incomprehension watching the worldwide demonstrations of enthusiasm that followed the bloodiest pogrom since World War II -- the “gas the Jews!” of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Sydney, the “fuck the Jews!” in London, the Nazi salutes in Paris, the Nazi flags in New York. 

I was scrolling through footage from some of the most prestigious universities in America sinking further every day into their own shit -- the Washington University pro-Hamas students yelling “fuck Israel!”

Moreover, there were the

Columbia students gathering to celebrate the massacre in Israel one day after a Jewish student was beaten with a stick outside the main library; the Cherry Hill East high school student who screamed his hatred to his Jewish fellow classmates in the hall; the antisemitic demonstrations at UCLA. There was the Stanford professor who forced his Jewish students to identify themselves before grouping them in a corner so that they could feel “what the Palestinians feel,” the UC Davis associate professor who warned the “Zionists journalists” that they should “fear us” (whoever that “us” is) because “we can find their addresses and their children’s schools,” and who ended her post with hatchets and blood-drip emojis....

Etc., etc., yada yada.

It made no sense.

Except for a nihilist, in which case making no sense is the sense. As Michael Walsh wrote a couple of days ago, "In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,"

I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of “Critical Theory”? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary “arc of history”? The sunny uplands of “fairness,” “equality,” and even “equity”? None of those things, I replied. What they want is… nothing.

To assume that our ideological opponents want something is to play the game on their turf. It’s a mistake we make constantly. We imagine that words mean the same thing when they use them as when we use them. We have accepted their protestations that they “only” want a new, post-revolutionary Brotherhood of Man when they speak glowingly of the future, when instead they’re happy to stop with the destruction of the past two thousand years of history, and call it a job well done. We mistakenly assume that they want the same world that we do, only different, when in fact nihilism is their goal. To put it in contemporary terms, they are Jokers, the kind of men who only want to watch the world burn.

One of the first books I pulled out to in order to review what the Devil might be up to was Fr. Rose's Nihilism. In it he traces a fourfold and seemingly inevitable path from the classical liberalism of the founders to our contemporary illiberal leftists and their openly genocidal sympathies. Rather than starting from scratch, I searched some old posts, and here are some highlights: "the desire for revolution"

is what distinguishes the left from classical liberalism. It "has a theological and spiritual foundation, even if its 'theology' is an inverted one and its 'spirituality' Satanic." The revolutionary impulse is destructive and nihilist at its core, although always disguised as a desire for "change."

Destruction, of course, must precede the change, but it turns out that destruction is the change....

Now, "construction" is not possible in the absence of truth. This is as true on the material plane as it is on the abstract/metaphysical. Just as you cannot build, say, a functioning airplane without knowing about the laws of nature, you cannot have a functioning civilization without knowing about the nature of man....

Rose alludes to the nihilist "revelation" that "there is no truth," which is functionally equivalent to the death of God. For if one is intellectually honest -- and cognitively adequate -- one understands that the choice is between God and Nihilism. There can be no third, except in an imaginary or magical sense....

Formal atheism is merely "the philosophy of a fool," whereas "antitheism is a profounder malady." While the former "errs through childishness" and "plain insensitivity to spiritual realities," the latter "owes its distortions to a deep-seated passion that, recognizing these realities, wills to destroy them."

"It may be doubted, indeed, if there exists such a thing as 'atheism,' for no one denies the true God except to devote himself to the service of a false god." You gotta serve somebody, as the Poet said.

It is important to note that these hyperkinetic zombies are anything but spiritually "lukewarm." Rather, they are on fire for the Evil One, a truth easily discerned in the demented faces of their howling mobs....

Fr. Rose quotes the anarchist Proudhon, who wrote that "The first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to our nature.... Every step we take in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity.

.... the left's spiritual illness revolves around "envy, jealousy, pride, impatience, rebelliousness, blasphemy -- one of these qualities predominating in any given personality." (He left out raw stupidity and refusal to learn -- or more generally, refuse to submit to, or even recognize, one's superiors -- which is often mingled with the others.)

"This rebellion, this messianic fervor that animates the greatest revolutionaries, being an inverse faith," is driven to destroy its "rival faith." Thus, we commonly see how "doctrines and institutions" are "reinterpreted" by the left, "emptied of their Christian content and filled with a new, Nihilist content" (ibid.).

And lately I've been wondering if anti-theistic nihilism is one of those inverse vertical analogies of the proper kind of nihilism. Is there a theistic or even "Christian nihilism" on which progressive nihilism is parasitic? Toward the end of the book, Rose has this to say:

And indeed the Christian is, in a certain sense -- in an ultimate sense -- a "Nihilist"; for him, in the end, the world is nothing, and God is all.

However, this is

the precise opposite of the Nihilism we have examined here, where God is nothing and the world is all; that is a Nihilism that proceeds from the Abyss, and the Christian's is a "Nihilism" that proceeds from abundance.

Same word, totally different sense. And it is only the latter "who can squarely face the Abyss to which Nihilism has conducted men."

Then I thought of the Aphorist, who said it all before, in various ways:

An irreligious society cannot cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be. 

Because he presumed he was capable of giving fullness to the world, modern man sees it becoming emptier each day.

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination. 

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous. 

Hell is anyplace from which God is absent. 

Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice. 

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing.

Humanity is the only totally false god.

Can our nihilism beat up their nihilism? Rose ends on an uncharacteristically optimistic note: 

It is the great invincible truth of Christianity that there is no annihilation; all Nihilism is in vain. God may be fought: that is one of the meanings of the modern age; but He cannot be conquered, and He may not be escaped...

 Resignation, I guess. But

Resignation must not be an exercise in stoicism but a surrender into divine hands.

Spiritual Combat

What do I know about spiritual combat? Then again, having once been a psychologist, I was the man you'd see when the combat in your head was getting out of hand. Of course, I wasn't trained in "spiritual combat," but then again, everyone's head is a combat zone, more or less. 

Back in grad school, the idea of spiritual combat never came up except insofar as it was a primitive way of talking about "psychological conflict." Thus, it is as if the upper vertical was subsumed into the middle zone of the psyche. But what if this middle zone can't account for certain phenomena emanating from above -- i.e., those powers and principalities we've been discussing?

It's analogous to how a psychological explanation will mislead when the problem is completely biological -- say, hypothyroidism, which can cause symptoms that mimic any number of psychological conditions.  Likewise, is it possible that we are misdiagnosing conditions that are completely spiritual in nature, just because they resemble psychological conditions?

Another way of asking the question is, what did we lose when we jettisoned thousands of years of spiritual wisdom for a wholly secular psychology? To a certain extent, Jung attempted to at least recognize relations with the old spiritual world, and to maintain an embassy there. Nevertheless, he too tended to reduce the spiritual to the psychological. 

I just remembered that I applied for post-doctoral training at the Jung Institute back in the early '90s, because it seemed like the only option for a guy like me. Instead I decided to cut out the middleman and deal with the spiritual world on its own terms. This being in 1995. 

Which meant that I was essentially dealing with a kind of dual citizenship -- psychology by day, religion by... the rest of the day. I never worked full time. Or you could say left brain / right brain: as I've said before, I don't think the spiritual world exists because we have a right cerebral hemisphere, rather, vice versa. It's why all of us have the dual citizenship alluded to above. 

Come to think of it, it is why we are all conflicted, and not just in a bifurcated way, but trifurcated; again, at the very least, there is body, soul, and spirit, and each influences the others. For example, if your thyroid is off, it will have both psychological and spiritual consequences. And it works the other way around -- if you are psychologically off, it can and will have spiritual or biological consequences.

For example, over the years, there is no physical symptom I've seen that hasn't been produced by purely psychological causes -- even those of a heart attack, stroke, or seizure. I remember one lady who presented with seizures that turned out to be "pseudo-seizures." How could they tell? Because in the ER, when they attempted bladder catheterization, she voluntarily closed her legs. In other words, modesty overrode the apparent seizure.

I remember another guy who had episodes of chest pain and radiation down the left arm, but thorough testing revealed no evidence of heart disease. Unfortunately, I remember another patient who had pain radiating up into the shoulder, for which he was treated with vicodin, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack.

You may recall my own little overnight hospital stay six months ago, when I was having unexplained episodic nausea. They ruled out the heart or aorta, but no one has ruled out demons, least of all me.

To back up a moment, we left off the last post with the promise to "consider some practical advice on now to conduct spiritual warfare -- starting with ourselves." Which comes back to the first sentence of the present post: What do I know about spiritual combat? 

To back up even further, this is one of the reasons I entered the church: in a word, for protection. It's the same reason I take a statin and an ACE inhibitor to protect my heart and kidneys, respectively. Different means for different dimensions. Likewise, I exercise every day to benefit body and mind, and I medi-pray every day to benefit the spirit, although I'm sure it trickles down into the mind and body. 

It's all very confusing, then again, it's just common sense: we need to address our health on all levels of being, which are in turn interconnected in ways that are difficult to discern, but we ignore at our own peril.

At the moment, it seems as if the world is going crazy, similar to how it must have felt at the time of World War II. In an old post I reviewed what Carl Jung had to say about it:

As Jung said in a 1936 interview, Hitler was a sort of "medium" who had an uncanny ability to articulate what the nation was feeling at any given time: "German policy is not made; it is revealed through Hitler. He is the mouthpiece of the gods as of old. He says the word which expresses everybody's resentment." 

It is "rule by revelation": "He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the Great War." "All these symbols together of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion and go on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer... can foretell -- and perhaps not even he."

Fuhrermore, in a 1938 interview, Jung contrasted Hitler with Mussolini, the latter of whom was still "human." But "with Hitler, you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man, because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation." Nothing Hitler said makes any sense to the non-German unconscious, with the interesting exception of the Islamic world, where Mein Kampf is always a huge seller.

With that in mind, I wonder if Jung's advice to America would be the same as it was in this 1938 interview:

"How to save your democratic U.S.A.? It must, of course, be saved, else we all go under. You must keep away from the craze, avoid the infection.... America must keep big armed forces to help keep the world at peace, or to decide the war if it comes. You are the last resort of Western democracy."

Keep away from the craze and avoid the infection.  

Which is precisely what we haven't done, what with the craze of wokeness and the spiritual infections of relativism, secularism, and ideological resentment in general. 

So, yesterday I consulted a number of books on spiritual combat, but was overwhelmed by the amount of material. Lotta ins & outs and what-have-yous, lotta strands in Gagdad's head, so I'll focus on just one. It's from Ripperger's Dominion: The Nature of Diabolic Warfare, and goes to the whole nature of victimology, and how it animates both Hamas and its useful idiots on the left:

Since demons are narcissists and they have contracted around the pain of their self-inflicted wound..., they desire to replicate that in human beings. They will pick constantly at the injustice in the person's mind, so that the person will become focused on the injustice and the pain of the injustice.

This is designed 

to block any type of healing process which could result in the person being able to be free and function properly.... if the demons maintain the person's focus on the injustice, the person's weakened state continues, and in fact, increases. 

What is this injustice the demon picks at?

Ultimately it is the same injustice the Serpent exploits in the garden: that there's a God, and you are not Him. There is also a chosen people, and you are not them.

Which, of course, does not mean what the enemies of the chosen people think it means. The Jews are just the proxies in a proxy war against God. 

In a recent editorial, Dennis Prager wrote that

There is no hatred like Jew-hatred. It is the longest ongoing hatred in history. It is the most universal. And it is the one exterminationist hatred: Those who hate the Jews want them destroyed. There is a Hebrew statement that is probably two thousand years old, and which is recited during the Passover Seder service: “In every generation, they arise to annihilate us.”

But why? Because  

Jew-hatred is largely a result of the Jews being The Chosen People. You can laugh at the idea if you are secular and inclined to do so. But those who hate the Jews have not laughed at the idea; they have hated the Jews because of it -- because they believed it and/or because it is true.

Why the Jews? Let us name the reasons: 

The Jews introduced to humanity the God in which most of the world believes; brought into existence the Bible that is the basis of the New Testament and the Quran; gave the Christian world its Messiah; and gave much of the world its morality through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Ten Commandments. Those who hate that moral code hate the Jews. The two groups who have tried to exterminate the Jews in the last hundred years, the Nazis and the Islamists (not all Muslims), hate that moral code. And they hate the Jews for embodying it -- compared to the Nazis and compared to Islamic regime of Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas, Israel is composed of saints.

Again, the war on the Jews is a proxy war for a much larger war on God. 

Progressive Monsters and How They Get That Way

Continuing with yesterday's post, 

Those beings inhabiting the worlds of evil are also called "angels," but they are rather subversive angels, angels of destruction (Steinsaltz).

But in addition to these preexisting demons, there are those that are co-creations, so to speak, of man, "the subversive angels created by the actions of men, by the objectification of malevolence: the evil thought, the hate-inspired wish, the wicked deed." In fact -- or in theory, rather -- these creatures

are not independent entities living by their own forces; their existence is contingent on our world.... 

Imagine arousing positive emotions in another person, and then being nourished in a healthy way by those emotions -- like say, an artist or entertainer who provokes the applause that come back to him. Or, as the Beatles put it, And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make. 

Well, something similar occurs with subversive angels, who "receive their life and power as the result of something they have aroused." Thus, "the more evil a human being does, the more life-force do these angels draw from him for their world." 

Which is why Israel has no choice but to destroy the evil world of Hamas, which is a closed system existing for its own sake, i.e., for the furtherance of evil. Like Nazi Germany, it has no other purpose. And extending the entertainment analogy above, notice the character of the people who "applaud" the actions of Hamas. You can learn a lot from an assoul, for whom the evil they take is equal to the evil they make.

Shifting seers to another book, this one called Dominion, by Chad Ripperger, he notes that demons, in the respect just mentioned, 

are able to make something appear as true, that is, the person under the diabolic influence can become very convinced of the truth of what is being proposed.

Satan, whatever else he is, has been a liar and murderer from the beginning, the latter facilitated by the former (which is why ideology is so critical to committing wholesale evil in good conscience). 

Interestingly, while there is "no truth in him," the evil one is adept at not only convincing people that they possess the truth, but simultaneously closing them off from the very truth that would amend their error. In other words, as mentioned at the end of yesterday's post, they are enclosed in a darkness they call light -- even "enlightenment." 

You know the type. 

Now, if enough people are mentally ill in the same way, we flatter the collective illness by calling it a "community" or even "culture" -- like the so-called culture of the Palestinians. Of course, there are also plenty of cultured Israelis -- AKA self-hating Jewish leftists -- but fewer than there were on October 6.

Consider the following, and ask yourself how a human being could adopt such absurdities:

I'm only a psychologist, not an exorcist, but it seems that demons -- or something like them -- "are able to block a person from self reflecting or being aware of his behavior." Thus, 

A psychologist would call this "cognitive dissonance," but I think we need a more expansive concept, for even if demons don't exist, something like them surely does. To paraphrase the Aphorist, one who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul requires a theological vocabulary, in this case, a vocabulary capable of conceptualizing and articulating the nature of evil.  

It reminds me of an Israeli saying to the effect that "we don't believe in miracles, we only depend on them." Likewise, we might say that "we don't believe in demons, we only fight them." After all, there is some power in man that causes him to call evil good and vice versa. That much is obvious. Starting with Genesis 3, come to think of it. 

Ripperger suggests that demons can "block the individual's ability to either hear what is being said or to see something." They can also affect the imagination "by causing the image to be so garbled that the person cannot understand what is being said to them." They frankly cause an otherwise intelligent person to become stupid, right before your eyes. You know the type.

Now, Schuon makes the Very Important Point -- this touching on the metaphysics of ideological victimhood -- that 

man has the right to be legitimately traumatized only by monstrosities; he who is traumatized by less is himself a monster.

This is how it has come to pass that we are ruled by progressive monsters who are traumatized by non-traumatic microaggressions such as being mispronouned, or being kink-shamed, or being subjected to abortion-stigma when "all abortion stories are beautiful." If you don't want to traumatize someone, then DON'T YUCK THEIR YUM! Simple as. 

Yesterday my son was scrolling through the twitter feed of Planned Parenthood, and examples are too numerous to repeat here, but it's even crazier than you might have imagined, for example,

There's no shame in contracting or spreading syphilis. In fact, there's no shame at all, and believing otherwise is to perpetuate trauma.

Speaking of which, exorcists have observed that "there is usually some form of trauma or psychological illness in which the demon only has to do a little bit of work... in order to get significant reactions from the individual." 

In other words, trauma is a point of entry for demonic influence, so it follows that the more the person is traumatized by trivialities, the more opportunities for the demon to exploit such weakness and control the "victim." 

You know the type, and if you don't, just check out that twitter feed. Darkness visible. And risible. In other words, simultaneously evil and ridiculous, which tracks with what Chesterton said. In a book called Jousting with the Devil: Chesterton's Battle with the Father of Lies, the author says

Satan is real. That's the first thing. The second thing should be obvious: Satan is horrible. But the third thing may not be obvious: Satan is also ridiculous. But he is the only ridiculous thing that must be taken seriously.

This book was discussed in a previous post, so we won't repeat it here. Rather, why don't we consider some practical advice on now to conduct spiritual warfare -- starting with ourselves? In the next installment.

A Disturbance in the Celestial Kitchen

The title refers to a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry and Jeff are in a restaurant and told by the manager that their order is being delayed by a "disturbance in the kitchen."

To their frustration, the restaurant manager is doggedly evasive when asked for specifics. Larry goes to investigate but rather than get to the bottom of the situation, he gets into an argument with the chef.

Well, this latest business in Israel has me thinking there's some kind of vertical disturbance going on, and that events on the ground are more or less distant reflections of it. It's also frankly kind of apocalyptic -- I don't mean the apocalypse, but at least an apocalypse, which simply means "unveiling" or uncovering of what has heretofore been concealed.

Unveiled? Like what? Like the fact that for the first time in history the majority of Democrats are more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to Israel. Being that the Palestinian cause is known as "genocide," this is not a small thing. Many, of course, are just ignorant, but the shift is also the result of decades of ideological brainwashing coming to fruition, and this ideology is as diabolical as the anti-Semitism it helps to engender and rationalize. 

Back to the disturbance in the kitchen. As one expert put it,

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Okay, but how about some details? 

Within 6:10–12 of Ephesians, Paul addresses spiritual warfare and how to combat spiritual attacks; "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes."

Hmm. I get it, but that's not much to go on.  

Speaking of Paul, I read somewhere that his writings contain an inordinate amount of hapax legomenon, meaning words or expressions that occur "only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text." I wonder if Paul's comments on spiritual warfare are among them? I mean, there's no real follow-up, especially considering such an important subject. 

The first image that occurred to me after the barbarism of October 7 was that this is like a giant axe slicing through history, sheep to one side, goats to the other. Except it's up to us whether we identify as a sheep or goat. Back when I was a boy of the left, I was very much like this guy:

When I was a clueless young leftist I too believed Israel was the oppressor and Palestinians were the oppressed, because that’s what everyone around me was saying, and my empty mind was a vacuum that sucked it all up. Once I escaped my echo-chamber and began to objectively assess the facts, I realized just how unfairly Israel has been demeaned -- not just among leftists and Muslims, but also in media, academia, and on Wikipedia.

Now, if the chosen people are an instrument of divine influence, then it makes sense that they would also be the locus of anti-divine energies, and indeed, one of the most distressing themes of history is how Jews never stop attracting the darkness: “In every generation they arise to annihilate us.”

And us, to the extent that we are grafted onto the original plant.

A generation or two ago, it was the Nazis who arose to annihilate the Jews.

In this generation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic movements have risen to annihilate the Jews.

But 

Radical Islam’s useful idiots on the Left deny this fact. They say that Muslims who seek to annihilate Israel are not motivated by antisemitism but by anti-Zionism, as if there is any real-world difference between the two, and as if seeking to eradicate one nation in the world -- the only one that happens to be Jewish -- is in no way anti-Jewish.

 Useful. To whom? To the Head Chef, of course. 

Gaza must be the most comprehensively spiritually depraved culture on earth, so fighting them is fighting pure evil. But how did they get this way without vertical assistance? It reminds me of reading about Nazi Germany or the USSR, where the evil was so extreme that it defies any natural explanation. Indeed, it's difficult to wrap one's mind around it -- it's as if I read and understand the words, but there is still something absolutely inconceivable at the core. 

Well, evil is like that. Or so we have heard from the wise. The particular wise man escapes me at the moment, but he said something to the effect that it is useless to try to comprehend evil, because it partakes of pure absurdity. It is the opposite of intelligible, in case you were wondering what prompts a man to gleefully decapitate a baby or to gang rape a woman you just murdered.

Excuse me, but what about the disturbance in the kitchen? 

If Paul is correct about those vertical powers and principalities, then local conflicts between good and evil must be a reflection of nonlocal ones, so to speak. Well, details. We want some details as to just what's going on, hopefully in a way that doesn't sound crazy, or primitive, or superstitious. 

What do the chosen people themselves say? The first book I pulled out yesterday was The Thirteen Petalled Rose, because Steinsaltz has a fairly detailed account of what goes on up there. Here are some excerpts from previous posts:

"The physical world in which we live, the objectively observed universe around us, is only a part of an inconceivably vast system of worlds. Most of these worlds are spiritual in their essence.... 

"Which does not necessarily mean that they exist somewhere else, but means rather that they exist in different dimensions of being. What is more, the various worlds interpenetrate and interact in such a way that they can be considered counterparts of one another, each reflecting or projecting itself on the one below or above it."

This reminds me of something Terence McKenna said -- that whole universes are but a micron away. In his case he meant a micron of psilocybin, but the point is well taken. For example, we talk about the "unconscious" as if it's a separate space, when it is actually the non-conscious aspects of this and any human space. The unconscious is right here, right now, exerting its influence.

Which begs the question somewhat, because while we have a signifier for it -- "unconscious" -- just what it signifies is... well, for starters, it is infinite, or where infinitude comes into contact with the mind. And infinitude is not in us, rather, vice versa -- we in it. 

This is a bit romantic for my tastes, but the psychoanalyst James Grotstein described it thus in an old post: he

attempted to rescue the concept of the unconscious from its unfortunate reduction to a mere cauldron of uncivilized desires and impulses, and restore it to its true place as a sort of alter-ego, or “stranger within” that shadows our existence in a most intimate, creative, and mysterious way. Far from being “primitive and impersonal” (although it surely includes primitive “lower vertical” elements as well), it is “subjective and ultra-personal,” a “mystical, preternatural, numinous second self” characterized by “a loftiness, sophistication, versatility, profundity, virtuosity, and brilliance that utterly dwarf the conscious aspects of the ego.”

What we call O. In that same post, Bob wrote of how blogging is not so much a creative outlet, but inlet, and I still think he was on to something. At the very least it must be both, because the one implies the other, After all, "Does anyone actually know where thoughts -- much less creative thoughts -- come from?" 

Don't look at me. I have no idea where ideas come from. Well, I do, but it reminds me of asking a songwriter where songs come from. Almost always they will say that they come from some other source, and that they just open themselves to, and cooperate with, it. Or It. I just now googled "Leonard Cohen on songwriting," because I knew he'd have a good description:

“If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often,” he said in response to a question regarding his songwriting technique. “Being a songwriter is like being a nun: You’re married to a mystery....

Married to a mystery. Or the Mystery, rather. 

So, the celestial kitchen is just a mystery? That's not very helpful. 

Let's get back to the Rabbi: 

Steinsaltz discusses the distinction between the vertical and horizontal.... Obviously, in speaking of the vertical, of the qualitatively higher and lower, he is not speaking of an actual physical location. Vertically speaking, "to call a world higher signifies that it is more primary, more basic in terms of being close to a primal source of influence; while a lower world would be a secondary world -- in a sense, a copy."

This may be important in terms of understanding the Disturbance: 

As Steinsaltz explains, "just as there are holy angels built into and created by the sacred system, there are also destructive angels, called 'devils' or 'demons', who are the emanations of the connection of man with those aspects of reality which are the opposite of holiness."

This would not only explain bad songwriters, but bad people:

Just as there are evil beings, there are evil worlds. These are simply the "space" inhabited by the evil beings. Wisdom is a space, or "mansion." So too, creativity, love, beauty, peace. You can sense it when you enter one of those mansions. You can also sense it when you are near one of those haunted mansions where the dark ones reside. Enough malevolent wishes and wicked deeds, and pretty soon you have created a world.  

As Steinsaltz describes it, "the sinner is punished by the closing of the circle, by being brought into contact with the domain of evil he creates.... as long as man chooses evil, he supports and nurtures whole worlds and mansions of evil, all of them drawing upon the same human sickness of the soul.... as the evil flourishes and spreads over the world because of the deeds of men, these destructive angels become increasingly independent existences, making up a whole realm that feeds on and fattens on evil."

Now we're getting somewhere, because it means that evil, whatever else it is, is a closed system, enclosed in its own darkness. It is no longer open to the Light which would negate it. It can only flourish in a kind of impenetrable darkness -- a darkness that we can see, but they cannot. You and I see Hamas, and know exactly what it is and where it comes from. But they cannot see us, except insofar as we are obstacles worthy of genocide. When they say "death to America," they mean it.

To be continued...

The Postmodern Hitler-Stalin Pact

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. --Schuon

Not only did the Devil appear on October 7, he's been exploiting the situation ever since, what with his media spokesghouls, academic defenders, and street-level demon-strators.

In an interview of Chesteron, he was asked the following:

"In your book just published you tell us 'what is wrong with the world.' As I haven't read the book yet, would you mind telling me what is wrong?"

"The Devil."

Concur, but we need a less theoretical and more concrete, even practical, understanding of how the adversary rolls. When his involvement in a situation is as obvious as this, then perhaps we can use it as an opportunity to see his tactics and rationalizations more vividly.  

The above is from an old post. I've been rummaging around the archives trying to find something appropriate to the current diabolical moment, but I can't decide whether there's too much or too little. Moreover, if I say something, I want it to be different from what the others are saying. There's plenty of astute commentary, but still, something is missing, i.e., the Raccoon perspective, whatever that is.

It reminds me of a dream I had last night. I'm always thinking about the Sequel, and in the dream I realized that I will never find the book I'm searching for, so therefore I will have to write it. 

It sounds solipsistic to say that I must write a book that is from and for myself, but then it occurred to me that all theology is a bit like this. The reason one theologian differs from another is that he has verbalized a theology that is first of all acceptable to him, and he's just hoping it will also speak to others as well. 

Which reminds me of something I realized way back in grad school. I don't know how many schools of psychology there are, but whatever the number, it is much higher today, and there were already too many in my student days in 1980s. 

Anyway, with no objective way to determine the correct one, it occurred to me that each theorist develops a theory that first and foremost applies to, and satisfies, himself. Each theorist is patient zero, so to speak, of his own theory (and therapy). Ultimately,

The great imbecilic explanations of human behavior adequately explain the one who adopts them.

But I never found a psychological theory adequate to explain Bob to Bob, let alone cure Bob. I could fit myself into the theory, but this always entailed cutting off important pieces of myself. Procrustean.

I eventually wandered into theology (among other disciplines), but still couldn't find a perfect fit. So I had to invent my own. But not totally. Rather, since I accepted the fact of revelation, it was more a matter of "tailoring" than creating a bespoke ideology -- take in the waist here, let out the leg there. I guess you could say it's a divine-human project, AKA the religion the almighty & me works out betwixt us.  

What is truly original is never a wild plant, but one that has a clever graft. 

Conformity and nonconformity are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.

Originality must adhere to the continuity of a tradition.

In any event, this explication of a theology acceptable to me isn't exactly new. For it is written (on the About the Author page), that

Dr. Godwin spent many years searching and researching for his book, only to conclude that it didn't exist, and that if he ever wanted to read it, he would probably have to write it himself. Having now read it a number of times, he is happy to share that burden with a wider audience of fertile eggheads interested in peering behind the annoying veil that separates them from ultimate reality.

Still true, except that after 18 years of blogging, I need to boil it down to another book from and for myself. And for anyone else who is built like me, which may reach even into the double digits.

As for the title of this post, I am reminded of the good news / bad news of our "victory" in the cold war in 1991: yes, we "won," but by then, Marxism had infiltrated and taken over nearly every major institution of society. Some victory.

Likewise, it certainly looked like we had defeated Nazism in WWII, but the left's widespread support of Hamas is leading to a reassessment of that victory as well. 

For nearly a third of WWII, Hitler and Stalin were allies. And it looks like they're getting the band back together for WWIII, albeit in a new iteration, i.e., the international left and the Iranian-backed Nazis who seek the destruction of both Jews and the Christian west. 

The turning point of WWII was Hitler's betrayal of Stalin with the invasion of Russia. Is there something equivalent that could cause a rift between the Islamist Nazis and their useful idiots on the left?

I don't know, but I was heartened by this story about Bari Weiss, for if leftist Jews wake up en masse and come over to our side, I think it would go a long way toward the erosion of the postmodern Hitler-Stalin pact.

Progress and Maturity

Everything is dated, but not everything ages. -- Dávila

A couple of posts ago we highlighted the importance of your philosophy or religion applying equally to good and bad times. 

This has real life consequences, because in a place like the United States, it is all too easy to believe in a kind of inevitable progress, because we take for granted all the particular attitudes, values, and difficult choices that made the progress possible. Most of the progress was a side effect of a spontaneous process designed by no one. See Hayek for details.  

It is as if progressives take the effect -- progress -- and presume to turn it into a cause, not unlike "peace activists" who think that if we all just think peaceful thoughts, war and conflict will end. 

Me? I was full of progressive thoughts when I was younger, and progress seemed an inevitable law of the cosmos. For example, I remember lifting weights when I was 18, and the results were immediate and dramatic. But equal effort today would not yield the same automatic results. Rather, it's more a process of forestalling decrepitude for as long as possible. I'm still in good shape, but I'll never be in the shape I was at 18. 

This may partly explain why progressivism makes so much sense to the young and stupid, and certainly why Dems would reduce the voting age to 16 if they could.

To praise youth is to forget our former idiocy.

The young person is proud of his youth, as if it were not a privilege that he shared with the most idiotic.

Young people believe that youth is a destination, when it is merely a provincial bus stop.

Believing that he roars, the youth brays.

The independence of which every youth boasts is no more than submission to the new prevailing fashion.

Adolescents rise up in flight with the contemptuousness of eagles and soon crash softly to the ground like pretentious chickens.

The above thoughts were provoked by an observation by Tolstoy (in Morson):

"Ashamed as I am to confess it, it was only much later that that I recognized why the theory of progress seemed so convincing to me. It was at the time" when "my muscles were growing and strengthening, my memory was being enriched, I was growing and developing; and feeling this growth in myself it was natural for me to think that such was the universal law in which I should find the solution of my life."

I remember well. Good times. Early on I glommed onto the "evolutionary thought" of people like Ken Wilber -- as if all we have to do is ride the coattails of a universe that is inevitably progressive. In fact, if you look at the integral movement subsection, there I am with all those other dubious thinkers with whom I have nothing in common. 

Back to Tolstoy's surprising discovery that progress isn't automatic or endless:

But the time came when I felt I was "fading," my muscles were weakening, my teeth falling out, and I saw that the law not only did not explain anything to me, but that there never had been or could be such a law, and that I had taken for a law what I had found in myself at a certain period of my life.

D'oh! I don't know that I would express it quite so pessimistically, because there is a principle of Life, just not rooted in biology. But there is also a principle of... crucifixion or something, and "he who loses his life for my sake shall find it." 

Morson continues: "since progress, defined as educated people do, depends on educated people, we should hardly be surprised that they are the main 'believers in progress.'" 

That certainly checks out. It seems that spending your life with young people with skulls full of mush has a two-way influence that it didn't have back when human development had a telos -- AKA mature adulthood -- instead of being a kind of perpetual adolescence that "progresses" nowhere,

Which is not to say I have anything against adolescence. But there's a right way and a wrong way to perpetuate it.

A fulfilled life is one that after long years delivers to the grave an adolescent whom life did not corrupt. 

The young mature when the old no longer seems automatically bad and the new no longer seems automatically good.

Without a certain religious childishness, a certain intellectual profundity is unattainable.

Whoever fights against the process of aging merely ages without ever maturing.

 From an old post:

"For Schuon, all natural phenomena are here to convey deeper lessons to us. Thus, for example, our lives are not just divided into day and night, but into seasons: the childhood spring of 'formation and learning'; the mature summer of 'actual and effective realization'; the late-middle age autumn of 'consolidation, reparation, and the directing of others'; and the old age winter of 'detachment and transcendence.' 

"Alternatively, one could say that childhood is 'the paradise of innocence,' youth 'the time of the passions,' maturity 'the time of work,' and old age 'that of sadness' -- at least for the horizontal man. For the vertical man, 'the opposite takes place: age is an ascent towards another world. Extremes meet, as paradise comes into view.'"

Ideological Alibis and Islamist Allahbis

In an editorial touching on the book we've been discussing, Morson writes that Dostoyevsky

showed how even the most innocent hearts can be drawn into committing monstrous deeds and feeling proud to have committed them. “And therein lies the real horror: that... one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without in the least being a villain! 

Later, Solzhenitsyn, "contemplating the idealist Russians who joined in torture and the enlightened Western intellectuals who whitewashed it,"

asked why Shakespeare’s villains murdered only a few people while the Bolsheviks killed millions. To answer this question, he reflects, one must grasp that no one thinks of himself as evil. To perform evil deeds a person must discover “a justification for his actions,” so that he can regard stealing, humiliating and killing as good. “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble,” and so conscience restrained him. He had no ideology, Solzhenitsyn observes, nothing like “anti-imperialism” or “decolonization” to allay pangs of guilt. Solzhenitsyn concludes: “Ideology -- that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination..." (emphasis mine).

So, in order to accomplish wholesale evil on a genocidal scale in good conscience, all one needs is an ideology: it "readily leads us to commit immoral acts" while transforming evil into good.  

The word "Islamism" was invented to distinguish the ideology from the religion, but the millions of Hamas supporter around the world might beg to differ. As far as Hamas or Hizb'Allah are concerned, they're just good Muslims, not "ideologues." Rather, "Zionists" are the evil ideologues doing evil things because of their evil ideology. Such as defending themselves from evil. 

Before a person can do evil... he must discover "a justification for his actions" so that he can tell himself that his stealing, destroying, killing and torturing serve the good (Morson).

So, an ideology, whatever else it is, is an airtight alibi:

When one claims an alibi, one can perform an otherwise heinous action while disclaiming responsibility for it.... Such thinking is literally irresponsible: invoking the alibi, a person disclaims responsibility that cannot be disclaimed.   

At least without a lot of help from the media. I thought they might wait at least a week or so before giving cover to the terrorists, but it started within 48 hours. Interestingly, they never mention or defend Hamas's actual genocidal ideology, rather, they condescendingly incorporate them into the western ideology of victimhood.

The terrorists, of course, know this, and never stop manipulating the useful idiots of the western media, who cover the religious Allahbi with their own secular alibi. In the ideological self-deception of the left, all religions are due equal respect. Except western religion. 

I can't think of an ideology that doesn't divide the world into victims and oppressors, whether based on race, class, gender, climate, whatever. And

This division absolves people of individual responsibility. It also offers the heady feeling of moral superiority. 

So, is victimhood the most effective alibi for committing evil in the name of good? Only in western civilization, which is so thoroughly infused with the Christian message (of God as innocent victim). 

Again, our adversaries know this, which is why they even purloin our terminology to manipulate us -- for example, calling terrorists "martyrs," or living under Islamist tyranny "freedom for Palestine," or calling genocide "social justice." 

Victimhood offers an alibi for evil because it allows one to regard the harm one inflicts as a form of justice. Evildoers are punished, and oppressors, or those who belong to the group of oppressors, suffer what they have long deserved. It follows that those who wish to inflict suffering will seek to view themselves as victims....

Boy and how. As Rene Girard or Gil Bailie might have predicted, the whole thing is playing out as a media drama of Who's the Real Victim Here? Note that in this exercise victimology completely displaces morality: instead of considering objective good and evil, all they need to know is who is the victim, and morality takes care of itself (even if it is deeply and intrinsically immoral).

I want to say that victimology is the lazy man's way to morality, but it's much worse than that. For it is the wicked man's way to transform evil into good. And the western media cooperate with this depravity because why? 

Morson quotes a fellow who says "Woe to the new society in which yesterday's slaves become today's rulers." He goes on to say that

former victims make the worst tyrants. First, they feel justified in inflicting on others what they have suffered; and second, they know better than anyone else what hurts the most.

And Dostoyevsky in particular

detected in [the ideology of the intelligentsia] a systematization of victimhood psychology, which licenses unlimited harm and provides a perfect alibi for those who inflict it.

Which brings to mind any number of Aphorisms, for example,

When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited.

That would be Hamas and Gazans, to the extent that there's a difference. And "the man guilty of having committed the crime is not the envious murderer [Hamas] but the victim who aroused his envy [Israel].