Why I Am Right and Everyone Else is Wrong

Continuing with yesterday's post, we were talking about the Science of the Real, or of the highest Metacosmic Truths accessible to common sense.

Which, by the way, I think is an interesting and exciting subject. I don't really understand why everybody else isn't interested, because one would think it would be the first thing on the human agenda, i.e., exactly WTF is going on down here?!

True, there are philosophers, but they constitute a tiny minority, plus they are almost all ridiculously wrong -- just philodoxers in disguise, in love with their own blather.

That's a pretty bold statement, Bob. What, you're smarter than all those luminaries?

Well, in our day and age, we have been trained to believe that truth is inaccessible to man, and that the best we can do is come up with clever and complicated systems of conjecture, which are always contradicted by the guesswork of some other tenured ape.

Thus, if you take a university philosophy course, you will be treated to a survey of the considered opinions of all the usual suspects, from the pre-Socratics to the postmoderns, leaving you in a dispirited, disillusioned, and defeated muddle. For without truth there is no hope, not even hope for hope.

As always, humans hunger for truth. We are epistemophilic to the ground, and yet, we are told before we even begin the human adventure that no object corresponds to this drive.

Imagine if we were all tormented by a sex drive, with no corresponding object. Imagine a world in which half the population consists of normal males, the other half clones of Sandra Fluke. If such were the case, we would have every right to call God a sadist and existence absurd.

And make no mistake: existence is either a reflection of truth, or it is absurd. God or nihilism. There is no other rational choice, and the sooner one admits it, the better. Either you are living in a fantasy for believing man may know Truth; or you are living in a fantasy for not so believing.

How have we arrived at this parched world of hollow men? Two ways, one vertical, the other horizontal. The first is simple rejection of transcendence, or the blind reenactment of Genesis 3. The second -- the horizontal -- consists mostly of crude repetition and violent pressure to conform.

This repetition is both verbal and nonverbal, and the latter is the more dangerous because it is implicit and pervasive in the culture. It goes to Breitbart's Axiom that politics is downstream from culture. It is as if everything about the culture is designed to not even confuse you, but to inculcate passive acceptance of pneumatic disorder as normative.

It reminds me of Evan Sayek's famous lecture on how the left first undermines judgment and discrimination, which results in an inverted world in which these become identified with moral turpitude. In the world of the left, judgment is judgmentally condemned, which results in a disconnect between the soul and truth. The disconnect is then enforced via political correctness, which someone called a War on Noticing. For example, if you notice the banality that it is impossible for two men to marry, you are a HATER.

So, someone is wrong on this question of whether man may know Truth. And if we want to be strictly logical about it, to insist there is no truth is to of course posit the truth of that statement. Yes, but is it a trivial truth? I don't see how, because to know any truth is to enter a transcendence in need of explanation.

Every secular humanist, every materialist, every leftist, every postmodernist, is just wrong, wrong, wrong, irrespective of how brilliant they and their disciples think they are. For the human longing for truth does have an object, which we call O. Which we will now proceed to explore, if not occupy.

As alluded to in yesterday's post, there is Truth and there are the diverse ways of expressing it. It seems that people become confused by this diversity, as if it implies that truth itself is "diverse."

Not so. For example, put ten people in a room, and each one will have a different view. We do not conclude from this that there exist ten different rooms; rather, there is just the one room seen from different perspectives.

Let's also stipulate that the ten people are diverse: there are men and women, intelligent and stupid, different languages and cultures, different developmental stages, etc. Doesn't matter. It's still one room.

Likewise, it is One Cosmos. Here again, we all implicitly recognize this, or we wouldn't even bother to try to communicate. Indeed, if multiplicity were the ground of existence, then communication itself would be strictly impossible, because there would be no common, implicit substratum of meaning and reality. Frankly, to say "cosmos" is to say God, but let's take it nice and easy and enjoy some stops along the way, shall we?

Where do we start? It seems that we have two pairs of possibility: we can begin with multiplicity or unity; and we can begin with the subject or the object.

Don't fall for his trick! For it is always both: multiplicity implies unity, just as unity implies multiplicity. Likewise, there can be no object without a subject who apprehends it, nor any subject without objects to apprehend. In a word: complementarity, or, if you prefer, orthoparadox.

Schuon writes that "In metaphysics, it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute." This is the Principle of principles, but you don't have to accept it. Again, you can affirm the opposite -- that the supreme reality is relativistic. But then you can stop, because the game is over. Congratulations, you've lost! But only forever.

I do have some slight disagreements with Schuon at this juncture, again, because of the Advaita Vedanta vs. Trinity thing, but we can agree that the Absolute must also by definition be Infinite. There are different ways to conceptualize or visualize the absolute. It is, as Schuon describes, "reflected in space by the point or the center; in time by the moment or the present," "in form, by the sphere," and "in number, by unity" (in other words, all numbers are multiples of one).

Think about this for a moment: each of these is a profound mystery, i.e., center, moment, unity. Each needs to be explained, not simply assumed. How is it, for example, that every human being is a unified subjective center of the cosmos, in each and every moment? Because we are the image and likeness of the Absolute, that's why. Our center is His Center (although His Center is not our center, if you catch my drift).

Many of Meister Eckhart's juiciest comments go to this reality. Let's see if I can dig one out.

--Every single creature is full of God, and is a book about God.

--The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

--Wherever I am, there is God.

--Being is God's circle, and in this circle all creatures exist.

--It is a joy to God to have poured out the divine nature and being into us, who are divine images.

--Outside of God there is nothing but nothing, and The divine one is a negation of negations.

--For you ask me: Who is God? What is God? I reply: Isness. Isness is God. Where there is isness, there God is. Creation is the giving of isness by God.

Those will do. As for me, it's the end of isness and the start of business. To be continued.

Common Nonsense: This is Heaven, but Heaven is Not This

So, is common sense rooted in principles, or do principles flow from common sense? And is common sense universal, or does it change from epoch to epoch, culture to culture, cable network to cable network?

First, we had better define the term. Before looking it up, I would say that it must have to do with knowledge accessible to every normal man by virtue of being one. It is preconceptual, or archetypal if you are Jung at heart -- not quite knowledge, but ready to become so: pre-knowledge.

In Bion's scheme, a preconception mates with experience in order to become a conception, and a conception goes on to become a grownup concept. But there can also be *bastard* concepts that are not the product of this proper union. Although this no doubt sounds abstract, it brings us right back to the left, for so many of their miscegenational ideas are infertile precisely because of this cognitive mismating.

"Homosexual marriage" would be as good an example as any, because this cannot be a preconception anchored in the nature of things, only a bastard of a concept imposed from above. And it surely cannot flow from common sense, unless every human until a few years ago lacked common sense. Among other things, the left is a war on common sense. And common decency. And our common heritage.

In the excellent Book of Absolutes, Gairdner has academically incorrect and therefore instructive chapters on the universals of human life and culture, the constants of nature, the universals of human sex and biology, the universals of language, and the universals of law. I am tempted to just say Read the Book, because that's an awful lot to cover in the spacetime of a post, especially because it's been five years since I read it.

Oh, and Gairdner has a new book coming out next year called The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree. This second book is no doubt a logical extension of the first, for what is leftism but the political implications of relativism and rejection of absolutes, i.e., a deeply principled political stupidity at war with Reason?

I'm going to try to skim that book later today and maybe get back to it tomorrow. Meanwhile, another book we haven't discussed but which I can heartily endorse is Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy, which is an introductory guide to his trans-thinking.

It is especially recommended to those of you who are a little intimidated by the master, but hey, who would be intimidated by this easygoing and nonjudgmental visage?:

Chapter five condenses his system to the very essence of what we might call Metacosmic Common Sense -- although he would hasten to add that this is no more "his system" than the sun can be private property. Rather, it shines equally upon the good and evil, the intelligent and stupid, the gifted and the tenured.

I realize this is controversial, but I am highly attracted to the idea that truth is anterior to revelation, or in other words, that we do not necessarily need the supplement of revelation to fill in the lacunae that result from our being mere creatures, or middling relativities of the Father.

On the other hand, revelation is sufficient to put us in contact with these necessary metacosmic truths, which is why, for example, a simple person of faith can be so much wiser than a brilliant scientist when it pertains to essential human truths beyond the scope of science -- and why we would prefer to be governed by the first 500 people in the Boston phonebook than the Harvard faculty.

Well, maybe not Boston...

I would also add that the metacosmic truths we are about to discuss are highly abstract, and that in the absence of revelation they are like forms with no content or a soul with no body. Also, revelation adds many details that cannot be captured in the abstract, nor can one have an intimate personal relationship with an abstraction.

Here is an example of a first principle that seems to me unassailable, that "God is ineffable," such that "nothing can describe Him or enclose Him in words." What mischief results from believing otherwise!

For it is not as if we are faced with a binary choice between a conceptual absolute posited by the mind and a paltry relativism that implicitly elevates man to God. Rather, we simultaneously posit the existence of the Absolute and our inability to contain it/him; or, if you can contain it, it is not God. (We could say that an "it" can be contained by the mind, whereas a person can never be.)

Before starting this post, the thought popped into my head: any valid knowledge of God is obviously already God and must come from God. However, the converse is not true: God is not that knowledge.

A map is not the territory, but nor is it other than the territory, in the sense that it provides points of reference on a human scale. Just so, metaphysics and revelation provide us with humanly realizable points of reference that permit us, say, to orient ourselves to eternity via time, or heaven via earth, or the celestial via the terrestrial, etc.

Indeed you could say that earth is heaven, but that of course heaven is not earth. Thus, Jesus can rightly affirm in the Gospel of Thomas that the kingdom "is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it" (#113). Some men, anyway. But we couldn't even know of paradise if we didn't sometimes catch glimpses of it herebelow.

For Schuon, "metaphysical doctrine is nothing other than the science of Reality and illusion." The postmodern secular leftist type will usually say that we can only know appearances and not reality, but we respond that we can know appearances precisely because they are appearances of a reality anterior to them; optical illusions only exist because of optical realities.

Now, the same doctrine "might be articulated in a number of ways, from a variety of viewpoints," for the same reason a truth can be expressed in different languages. You could say that a valid religion is a richly symbolic "metaphysical vocabulary" -- or that, conversely, a religion that fails to embody and communicate these truths is no religion at all.

I suppose where I differ from Schuon is that his preferred vocabulary is ultimately Advaita Vedanta, whereas I believe this fails to adequately convey certain fine points that are better expressed in the language of Christianity (although Ramanuja's interpretation of Vedanta gets the job done where Shankara fails, and is easily assimilated to Christianity).

It's getting late, isn't it? To be continued...

"Oy, what is it with these anonymous bonehead trolls?"

The Thuggery, Buggery, and Skulduggery of the Left, or Welcome to Our New Underlords

Perhaps the last paragraph of yesterday's post was obscure. In plain English, Obama ultimately wants to reconstitute the American electorate into a permanent LoFo Democrat majority. He knows that if we fail to implement effective border security now, we will never do so. Thus, for the left this is not a human catastrophe but an anti-human opportunity.

Ironically, given their predictable voting patterns, the malleable LoFos invading Texas, California, Arizona and elsewhere will transform America into exactly the type of nation from which they are fleeing: an authoritarian state in bed with its capitalist cronies and clients. Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing, nor will they ever know so long as the left controls public education. For the left this is a perfect shitstorm of power and ignorance, up there with the New Deal and Great Society: the New Society.

In a way, I understand. I would not be overly distressed if we were flooded with illegal Republicans who share our values, from Cuba, eastern Europe, Israel, wherever. I would of course prefer to win on the field of intellectual battle, but that is a battle in which the left will wisely never engage -- and certainly not honestly.

Therefore, their only options for maintaining political viability are extra-democratic ones such as judicial tyranny, administrative law (a permanent administrative state beyond the reach of any democratic check), control of the media and other institutions, racial demagoguery, identity politics, IRS thuggery, public employee unions, and now demographic swamping. Once the latter bears its inevitable fruit, they can then claim to have been the democrats all along. And since media and academic losers write the first and last rough drafts of revisionist history, he's got that angle covered as well.

Yes, it is demonic. Why? Because while the luciferic is simply devoid of or indifferent to the Light, the demonic actively works in opposition to it. America is still the political light of the world -- in his disordered soul, even the liberal must dimly recognize this, for why would all these wretches want to come here? -- but they won't rest until the light is extinguished and we are finally not a smidgen less exceptional than Greece or Mexico or Detroit.

Now, back to our Top Ten Cosmic Principles. As mentioned, I recently read Russell Kirk's memoirs, which prompted me to reopen his classic The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. In the latter he talks about the often unstated principles that animate conservatives of various stripes.

However he is very cautious about making them too concrete, because this could conceivably become reified into an ideology, when conservatism is, as he says, the rejection of ideology. In other words, it is rooted in experience, in tradition, in the "permanent things," not in the high abstractions that animate -- or better, nihilize -- the leftist mind.

With that in mind, he mentions six broad properties which strike me as reasonable. Since we don't have all day, I will paraphrase them; they include belief in a transcendent order; appreciation of the ineluctable mystery of human existence, such that no manmade system can exhaust it; recognition of order rooted in vertical hierarchy; freedom (which is necessarily related to property, thus creating an inviolate realm of sovereignty beyond the reach of the state); faith in custom, convention, and the accumulated wisdom of mankind; and an appreciation of change as the means of preservation, as opposed to radical change, which damages or destroys what needs to be preserved.

To boil it down further, we could say Transcendence, Mystery, Hierarchy, Liberty, Tradition, and Healthy Change (i.e., that change needed in order to secure and extend the permanent things, e.g., life, liberty, justice, etc.).

Yes, you could say this is pretty low hanging fruit. Who could possibly take issue with such a salubrious and soul-fortifying list?

The left, that's who!

Example?

Well, as the old cliche goes, fascism is violent opposition to transcendence. Thus the left isn't necessarily fascistic, since (at least in America) they mostly practice nonviolent opposition to transcendence.

Then again, so long as they appropriate the levers of state power to deny transcendence, that is implicitly violent, isn't it? For example, if the state wants to force Catholic employers at gunpoint to pay for abortions, what do you call that? I'm not even talking about the violence perpetrated on the baby, but the violence directed at the conscience, which is our most obvious and intimate evidence of transcendence.

The Obama administration is at the center of the two (at least) most consequential scandals in our nation's history, the fraudulent passage of Obamacare (probably the greatest consumer fraud in human history), and the enlistment of the IRS to intimidate and silence private citizens in order to steal an election. In the first, they took aim at our bodies; in the second, at our property. What's left? Yes, the soul, but the soul needs both a body and freedom in order to actualize.

Second, the left is transparently at war with the mystery of life. This comes out in any number of ways. What is scientism, for example, but the radical demystification of life? What is a secular "sex education" but the rebarbarization of man?

In other words, what they call "human sexuality" is quite literally subhuman sexuality; not liberation but servility. What is metaphysical Darwinism but the animalization of man? It cures us of the mystery of the human soul, just as feminism cures women of their divine femininity, and multiculturalism rids us of the delusion that truth exists. (Or as the postmodern leftist says: "There is no truth, and we possess it. Or else.)

The third is obvious: class warfare, or a belief that justice is a horizontal concept rather than vertical. In reality, a classless society would be the last word in injustice, since it would force uniformity upon everyone, such that life would no longer be worth living (or a truly human life would be unattainable).

In contrast, conservatives cherish the individual, and the individual cannot be shoved into some preordained, abstract category. The left always wants to stick us into categories of race, gender, ethnicity, "sexual orientation," etc., when the individual always transcends these.

The fourth is also easy, liberty and its relationship to property, for where would the left be without envy? Someone else's property is none of our business, and certainly not the business of the state (except to protect it from the acquisitive envy of the left).

Fifth is again easy, for job one of the left is to insist that this is Eden, that we are Adam and Eve (or Steve), and that this time we're gonna get it right by creating a state so powerful and a system so perfect that no one will need to be good (paraphrasing Eliot). Finally, we are the ones we've been waiting for to toss out the priceless wisdom of the species (especially that of dead white males) and start history anew.

In contrast to fundamental transformation... well, in point of fact, conservatives do very much believe in fundamental transformation, only on a personal level, never a collective one. We know it is fanciful to believe that a population of disordered souls can maintain an ordered polis. Rather, personal disorder will only evoke a police state to enforce a top-down order.

Say, how does all this fundamental transformation feel? I don't know abut you, but my butt hurts.

What is it with the left? It's always thuggery, buggery, and skulduggery, 24/7.

The Planet of the Apes, or Welcome to Liberal Paradise!

Reader James asks: "How does Cosmic Orthodoxy relate to common sense? Or to self-evident truths? If you were to start 'The Self-Evident Truth Society: Dedicated to Halting the Abandonment of Common Sense,' what would be your top ten cosmic orthodox principles, or self-evident truths?"

Well, that is precisely what this desultory series of posts has been driving at, going back at least a month. It might have started with Studying God in the University of the Cosmos, but it feels like longer. A number of recent books have synchronistically converged on the issue (e.g., The Common Mind), or maybe I just read them in light of this question of Cosmic Principles.

But if you ask me directly, it's difficult to respond. It's like trying to see a distant star at night: look directly and it disappears. But look away and relax, and it pops into your peripheral vision. Oddly, it's brighter when implicit and unconscious than when explicit and conscious.

Truth is more than a little like this, isn't it? Try to stare it down directly and we are simply not adequate to it. But relax and allow it to seep in, and there it is. Transposing from the empirical to the spiritual eye, you could call this receptive and enslackened mode "faith."

This would also go to how truth may be more adequately embodied in myth, parable, poetry, and other symbolic forms that preverberate in the soul. Some truths "become less evident by endeavors to explain them" (Johnson, in Moore).

My son, for example, is at an age in between the ability to understand revelation concretely and to do so more abstractly -- or between Piaget's concrete and formal operations thinking. Thus, I don't quite know how to respond when he asks a specific question about, say, creation, or Adam & Eve, or the Flood. I try to explain to him that revelation is about man in general and about him in particular, and in this sense is truer than true (i.e., truer than the mere empirical or rationalistic truth which are its prolongations on lower planes).

The typical atheist becomes stuck in concrete operations thought when he must deal with anything above the plane of matter; in other words, there is no fundamentalist more fundamental nor literalist more literal than the bonehead atheist. Somewhere along the lyin' they convinced themselves that they could profitably stare down truth without the vital supplementary (one might say "female") modes of faith, intellection, intuition, higher imagination, etc. This strategy is always tied up with the pride which would be mitigated if they had only understood such cautionary tales as contained in Genesis, e.g., the fall of man, Cain & Abel, the tower of Babel, etc.

In The Common Mind we read of "the attempt to integrate the intellect with the whole personality, and in so doing oppose intellectualism." That would be an example of a Cosmic Principle, but difficult to express in the form of a Top Ten list, for it implies, and is implied by, so many other truths.

Such as?

Such as the principle that man is in the image and likeness of the Creator; that man spans the vertical spectrum from the lowest to the highest planes, for better or worse; that knowledge is em-bodied and in-carnated; or even prior to this, that man is adequate to reality, not with his fragmented and desiccated ego-mind, but with his unified soul-intellect.

Conversely, intellectualism is the way of the tenured, of the infertile egghead who imagines (in the lower sense) that truth can be eagerly grabbed at instead of invited in. Only with higher intellect properly so-called (the nous) do we preserve the essential "otherness" of primordial truth, which is always relational and therefore personal.

Or in other words, if we can grasp it with our shriveled tenureMind, it cannot possibly be true. This is something, by the way, that Darwin -- who was far more intellectually honest than his latter day wackolytes -- understood. One thing that rightly puzzled him was why we have any right to trust the cognitions of a modified ape. For if an ape is capable of knowing truth, this is no mere ape but an entirely novel cosmic category irreducible to random genetic error.

Which is again why even a literalist reading of Genesis is more true than a strict Darwinian approach, because the former is true where it counts, i.e., on the human plane. Indeed, it preserves our humanness where Darwinism necessarily unexplains and eliminates it.

Reason only permits us to proceed from the known to the unknown. Thus rationalism begins with what it needs to explain, that is, the prior human ability to know. Therefore, it seems to me that one of our Top Ten principles must surely be that reality is intelligible and that man may know it. But these are really two sides of the same principle, which is Creation, or Rational Creator.

Therefore, in my view, to even talk about "truth" is to implicitly acknowledge the Creator. The problem with the left -- and with its retarded sister scientism -- is that it neither acknowledges its first principles nor follows them all the way to their inevitable conclusions, which is why they are so free to engage in such sloppy thinking. There is no liberal to whom one cannot say: tighten up that loose shit!

Or, to the extent that their excrement is tight, it is because it is circling around a tightly closed tautology of rationalism and intellectualism: garbage in, tenure out.

In The Common Mind, reason is opposed to common sense, the latter of which "perceives truth, or commands belief, not by progressive argumentation, but by an instantaneous, instinctive, and irresistible impulse; derived neither from education nor from habit, but from nature..."

In other words, transnatural intellection is to the human being what natural instinct is to the animal. Among other things, it is a homing instinct that orients us to the truth -- or source of truth -- that precedes us and of which we are ultimately constituted.

Moore continues: "That which is self-evident can neither be proved nor disproved by reason or logic" -- for example, our self-evidently free will. To deny free will is only to affirm it, since a truth not freely arrived at is no truth at all.

There may be an even more general principle behind the ideas discussed in this post. Perhaps it is this: that reality both Is and is anterior to our knowing it. But in knowing this we know that knowledge is always bound up with this prior reality in which we participate through assimilation.

Correct thinking requires a kind of negation. To paraphrase Russell Kirk, conservatism is the negation of ideology. Leftism is a parody of this, in that it is the negation of principle (or the blind acceptance of unarticulated principles). There is a big difference between a political animal and an animal with politics.

In response to James's question, I think in hindsight we will be able to compile a suitable list, as we leisurely dilate on it via our peripheral but wide open cʘʘnvision.

Oh, one other important implication of the above: "Thus, the 'rights' of slave owners are as meaningless as is the 'right' to abortion," since "Laws cannot be legitimate when they violate the foundation of law itself." One might say the same of Obama's attempt to demographically destroy the incarnational truth of America via open borders.

Cosmic Orthodoxy and How it Affects Your Wallet

A couple of posts back we dropped a casual reference to Cosmic Orthodoxy, which got me to thinking: exactly what did I mean by this term? Was I just joking? Being provocative? Poetic?

No, I meant it literally. Again, ortho-doxy is straight or right thinking; thus, cosmic orthodoxy is the correct view of everything, or rather, of the whole. It doesn't necessarily mean that one is correct with regard to every particular -- the history of any religion or science proves this -- but that one's overarching view is correct, or at least adequate; or even better, not infected at the start with a principle or axiom so fundamentally incorrect as to bar progress, or generate absurdity, or refute itself.

Example?

For example, the first principle of Cosmic Orthodoxy is that there is one. This probably sounds slightly tautological, but it isn't at all, for we know full well that there exists an influential mob of half-educated mediocretins -- we call them the tenured -- who believe otherwise.

These lazy folkers enforce an orthodoxy that insists that there is and can be no orthodoxy at all, only a pluralistic miasma they call "diversity or "multiculturalism" or a government or campus that "looks like America," etc.

In short, they believe in orthodox relativism, or that relativism is the right and proper stance toward reality. Thus they refute themselves right out the gate, but these are not the sharpest bulbs in the knife socket. Which isn't problematic for them, since, in the absence of truth, no one can really be deeper or brighter than anyone else, and besides, so long as you're a ward of the state with a guaranteed gig in the looniversity bin, who cares?

In other words, there can be no vertical measure of proximity to truth, which does wonders for one's self esteem -- or intellectual pride -- until one realizes that any scholarship produced by such heterodorks is equivalent to winning a trophy for showing up: the bland writing for the blind.

It reminds me of 1974, when the Nobel Prize in economics went to two illustrious experts, Freidrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. These two experts could not possibly disagree more on the nature of economic reality, nor is there any way to blend them into some kind of hybrid "middle way," for this would be the middle way of ice cream and excrement or orange juice and arsenic.

Now, the reason why there is economic truth is because there is truth; and the reason why there is truth is because there is reality; and the reason why there is reality is because there is creation; and the reason why there is creation -- including all this ongrowing creativity and novelty -- is because there is a Creator.

But the central point to bear in mind is that economics is not an ad hoc or sui generis discipline unattached to everything else, or something that only emerges at the level of human interaction. Rather, to the extent that it "works," it is because it mirrors certain principles of Cosmic Orthodoxy on its own plane.

Again, the views of these two men, Hayek and Myrdal, could not possibly be more different. To honor them simultaneously is analogous to handing out the Pulitzer Prize in poetry to T.S. Eliot and Maya Angelou, or a Templeton Prize to Thomas Aquinas and Deepak Chopra. It just makes no sense, for starters; it is utterly incoherent. Unless, of course, one is a relativist, in which case it is inevitable that we will conflate shit and Shinola.

"Actions," writes Easterly, "follow from principles and understanding." Although failure to act has its own consequences, "wrong actions are equally a danger," so "it is critical to to get the principles of action right before acting."

Or in other words, Doctrine and Method: the same principle that applies to religion applies equally to to economics, i.e., truth and its application.

The application of Myrdal's truth has directly led to a literally incalculable number of deaths, because it is impossible to calculate the number of deaths that wouldn't have occurred had authoritarian technocrats put Hayak's principles into effect instead of Myrdal's (or rather, if these meddlesome authoritarians hadn't existed to begin with, or had simply obeyed the Law).

It's like asking how many died as a result of Karl Marx. Only God knows. Given the guilt that would result, I suppose it's a sort of perverse mercy that Marxists don't know God. Yet.

"The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights" (ibid.). Consider America at the time of the founding. The average person at the time was probably poorer, say, than the people flooding our southern border. But they had their sacred rights, and that was enough.

Imagine, however, if, instead of securing our sacred rights, our forebears had burdened us with Authoritarian Experts like Myrdal or Keynes or Krugman. Had that happened, our subsequent development wouldn't have. It is very much like Marx, who railed about the misery of the proletariat when, for the first time in history, masses of people were rising out of subsistence -- not due to Myrdalian principles, but to straight-up cosmically orthodox Hayekian ones of spontaneous order resulting from dispersed and decentrailized knowledge known by individuals and no one else.

And it is the same for poverty in contemporary America, which was actually losing the fight until authoritarian liberal experts decided to declare war in it. There can be no exit strategy from such a fanciful war, for the same reason there is no exit strategy from any delusion. Rather, the delusion is the strategy.

We have Providence to thank for the fact that our founders were firmly rooted in Cosmic Orthodoxy, in nonlocal principles that apply to all men at all times. If they were alive today -- which they still are, by the way -- they would no doubt call King Barry before the tribunal of world history and formally charge him with Plundering Our Wallets, Ravaging Our Economy, and Burning Our Constitution.

(yoinked courtesy Happy Acres)

How Crazy is Obama?

Where any person or body of men, who do not represent the Whole, seize into their hands the power of the last resort, there is properly no longer government but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.

That was Jonathan Swift, who looked upon such a usurpation "as a greater evil than anarchy itself; as much as a savage is in a happier state of life than a slave at the oar."

Than again, Swift also spoke of our wholly irrational -- or at least arational -- "love of life, which, from the dictates of reason, every man would despise, and wish it at an end, or that it never had a beginning."

So, Dear Leader and his low information lowlives are putting our irrational love of life to the test, but the primary victims of his follies are and will be those they are supposedly designed to benefit. For example, even more low IQ illegals will only put more downward pressure on the wages of gardeners, housekeepers, and day laborers, while further increasing black and teen unemployment.

In an information economy that is already sorting by intelligence as never before -- the main driver of "income inequality" -- Obama is further reifying a two-tiered system in which the minority of HiQs create the wealth while the majority of LowQs vote.

Thus, while they cannot create much wealth they can surely appropriate it via the abuse and corruption of government. We're already there. Those with eyes open have seen the lightning. When the earth-rattling Thunder will arrive is anyone's guess, as it will no doubt come as a thief in the night, or like an IRS audit. Or, like bankruptcy: very gradually and then all of a sudden.

You know the old crack: never attribute to malevolence what can be more readily explained by stupidity. But the psychologist in me -- admittedly a mere remnant these days -- wants to toss in a third possibility, psychopathology. For there is something worse than mere stupidity, and that is a vast and secure knowledge of things that just aren't so.

I read much more history than I do psychology, but when I do, I am always impressed by the terribly destructive combination of confident error and primitive mental illness; or of crazy people doing evil things in the name of some kooky doctrine they've gotten lodged in their heads.

When I say "primitive" mental illness, I mean that type which causes a man to act out his pathology instead of thinking about it. In other words, for such a person, action is a substitute for introspection -- as indeed it is for a child.

A child doesn't have the vocabulary or self-distance to adequately describe what is going on inside. Therefore, a child psychologist must observe the child in action. His office is typically filled with toys, dolls, action figures, and other objects to which the child will be spontaneously attracted and then use to symbolically play out his conflict.

Perhaps he will pick out a male doll with which to bash a female doll while saying "bad mommy!" Or maybe he'll pick out the male doll, toss it across the room, and yell, "so stay in Africa! I don't give a fuck!," and then score some choom from another doll for the purposes of self-soothing, or to nurture his grandiosity.

At any rate, it is this deadly confluence of Higher Stupidity in Low Psychic Places that should concern us all. By now you all know and have even forgotten about Bion's Grid, which is not a sports bar but a visual means to conceptualize -- or a conceptual way to visualize -- various psychic and cognitive combinations.

For example, it is quite possible -- in this day and age, perhaps even likely -- that the most intelligent person in the world may devote his entire life to extending and refining a lie. In fact, it seems to me that this is inevitable so long as one is ignorant of the source of truth. That is, the sufficient reason of the intellect is the Truth of which it is a reflection and to which it is an adequation. Exclude Truth, and what is intelligence but an elaborate way to be stupid?

Or, to express it in the simplest way possible, to posit absolute relativity is to say that man's ignorance is categorical.

We've had some awfully bad presidents in the past, but prior to Obama, I don't think a single one of them would be characterized as an out-and-out relativist. But Obama is our first thoroughly postmodern president, which also makes him post-Christian, post-literate, post-rational, post-constitutional, post-American, and post-reality.

Let's even stipulate that this cynical product of a nihilistic and spiritually corrosive academia truly believes himself to be a Christian. Well, despite our differences, there is still a thing called Orthodoxy, by which I do not just mean Christian orthodoxy, but cosmic orthodoxy. Again, religion is not about religion, but rather, about Truth. To the extent that a purportedly religious person believes things that cannot possibly be true, and which lack all reason, that can't be religion.

In this world -- and all humans know it, even if they deny it -- nothing can be more privileged than Truth. Scientists are motivated by this, as is our judicial system. Rationality itself is simply impossible -- or pointless -- in the absence of the Truth of which it is a reflection. Again, a thing isn't true because it is rational, but rather, rational because it is true. And if you need the backup of the tenured, Gödel proved with ironclad logic that the most important truths cannot be proved with reason.

But the heterodorks of the left want to have their crock and eat it too, which only results in more hunger, more poverty, more insanity. Which then results in more food stamps, more bogus disability claims, more social chaos, more psychic disorder.

Remember when we discussed Gilder's Knowledge and Power a few months back? Order and disorder are not opposites but joined at the hip, in that the tyrannical imposition of top-down order generates disorder below. Conversely, entropy and information lead to upside surprise, or evolution -- which is why the progressive left is so regressive, since they undermine the very conditions of progress.

I think it's entirely appropriate to ask ourselves, "just how crazy is Obama?" But unless you understand the dynamics of primitive personality disorders, you won't get very far. As alluded to yesterday, narcissism runs along a continuum from normal and healthy, to fragile, to a rigid and shame-intolerant closed system revolving around triumph, contempt, and absence of curiosity.

This latter form can even appear to be the most healthy, in that such a person appears above it all -- cool, poised, no drama. But this is only because the person lives behind a hardened false self to protect the shriveled and vulnerable self within, more or less developmentally arrested at the age it was traumatized by a disappointing world.

Take that same mentally ill child in a consulting room full of toys, and put him in a position of vast power, with access to the biggest and best toys in the world. And then watch him play. Or, if you prefer, watch him fuck with us, like a sadistic kid pulling wings off a fly.

Right Thinking, Right Doing, Right Being, or Why Obama Hates Me

I don't think I'll have time for a real post -- one that burdens your time and patience. But I did want to follow up on Monday's post about ortho-doxy (straight thinking) and ortho-praxis (right practice). As one commenter noted, it comes down to doctrine and method, or knowing and doing. For what purpose though?

I suppose for the Raccoon the ultimate purpose would be ortho... onta? Orthonta? That's not very euphonious, but what we mean to say is "right being."

Thus, the most general categories of our lives are thinking, doing, and being, but these can only be artificially separated. And to the extent that they are severed from one another, mischief ensues.

For example, doing without thinking, thy name is liberalism. Doing also subsumes feeling -- which is interior movement -- so the same sad principle applies: for the liberal it is always I feel, therefore I am. What they generally feel is a troublesome combination of pity and sanctimony, for example, vis-a-vis the fiasco they have engineered at the border.

What's even worse is that one left hound doesn't even know what the other left hound is up to. In other words, one element of the left manufactures the crisis (the high-power, or HiPo segment), while the more LoFo element can be relied upon to exercise its pity, the end result being the transfer of more power and authority to the HiPo statists, accompanied by a diminution of personal and collective power and sovereignty among higher abnormals such as ourselves. Those of us who don't want hordes of (mostly) low IQ illegals swamping our already failed state have no say (much less do) in the matter.

Thus, the element that manufactured the crisis can propose to dig into our pockets for another few billion in order to address it. What I don't quite understand is why the LoFos never object to the manipulation, but I guess that's what makes them LoFos, i.e., members of the lowerdoxy.

So anyway, this is just one example of what can occur when crooked thinking gets together with crookward actions untethered by any rational principle rooted in ontology, or the Way Things Are.

As to orthonta -- our unsatisfactory word for right being -- more than one luminary has observed that if only man were capable of sitting alone in a room with his thoughts for half an hour, that would pretty much solve the world's problems. Why? Because it would mean that his thoughts and feelings aren't persecuting him into performing all kinds of wrong actions, for starters.

For what is an activist? Usually someone acting out his private psychodrama in public. No one, for example, would even attempt to organize a community, of all things, unless his soul were quite disorganized.

Speaking of Obama, he was preposterously presented to the public as an "intellectual" -- first of all, as if that's a good thing! When the left uses that term, all they mean by it is that this is the sort of naif or knave who still believes what he was told in college -- someone who has been thoroughly indoctrinated and can be relied upon to never have a creative thought, nor to question the political hetero-doxy of the left.

Therefore, we're dealing with a kind of hardened hetero-doxy, or crooked thinking frozen in place. This is why Obama behaves the way he does, in such an obnoxiously hetero-ontic way. He is way beyond caring what normal Americans think, because he is very much a (pseudo) intellectual narcissist.

The primary drive of the narcissist is to be mirrored by those around him. However, if there is a failure of mirroring, two possibilities may result: for the healthier narcissist there will be an internal collapse, which may then be used as the basis for rebuilding the self in a healthier way.

The more pathological narcissist deals with the rejection through the defense mechanism of outright contempt, and this is Obama's approach. In truth, the contempt has always been there, only now it's much more widespread and undisguised, what with his peevish and childlike taunts at congress. But it's of a piece with "you didn't build that," "bitter clingers," "I won," global warming skeptics as flat earthers, etc.

Well, I wish I had more time to get into the dynamics of narcissism, but you get the general idea. This is a world-historical political narcissistic tantrum the likes of which we have not seen in my lifetime.

One more thought: Obama is so heartbroken about what's going on at the border that he can't even bring himself to visit the scene. Rather, he needs to console himself by attending a fundraiser with similarly compassionate millionaires and billionaires who wouldn't be caught dead down there, let alone take one of those kids into their homes. They don't believe in fences, except around their estates and compounds.

Zig-Zag Wandering in the Wild Godhead

Religion -- and the truth it embodies -- would be inconceivable in the absence of the prior unity which it is "about."

Every philosophy too is about unity, but often -- especially in the fragmented postmodern world -- a flight from it. You could say that such philosophies are wholly reactionary, without ever acknowledging the unity to which they are reacting and from which they recoil.

This is not to say that such philosophies do not seek unity, but that is the problem. Instead of situating themselves in the nonlocal vector that leads the fragmented soul from illusion to truth and appearances to reality, they work to bring about their own impoverished substitute version of unity -- usually with force, since that is the only way to get people to order themselves to such top-down disorder.

We define the left as the political action wing of this demented metaphysic, e.g., diversity, multiculturalism, and relativism. How, you might ask, can we force disparate groups of human beings to live together -- to be "one" -- without any acknowledgement of the transcendent oneness that unifies them? With multiculturalism each culture is its own atomistic one, upon which we are expected to confer respect and dignity, irrespective of whether or not they are themselves in communion with the One.

Not only does this undermine any living basis for civic life, it gives official sanction to the elevation of systematic falsehood to a form of truth -- which is like claiming illness as another form of health, or blindness as a form of vision.

Which the left also does, of course: transsexuality and other perversions, obesity, promiscuity, envy, dependence, immaturity, Masculinity Deficiency Syndrome, Femininity Devaluation Hysteria, etc. Each of these is considered to be just as valid as its opposite, which is again an implicit assault on the unity of truth.

Our "political scripture" -- e.g., the Declaration and Constitution -- are documents that are supposed to give unified form to our political body. But the left easily makes hash of these, again destroying any possibility of unity except for that imposed by power, by the state. That is never unity, just a totalist fusion.

I suppose it's analogous to a sedimentary rock, which consists of countless disparate and independent granules compressed into an object. Look closely and you can see that the individual parts are quite different, and yet, they cannot escape the pressure of being objectified into anonymous rockhood. You know, like academia.

Speaking of which, a wise goodcrack by Edmund Burke about the tenured, found in this entertaining autobiography of Russell Kirk: paraphrasing, the man who hangs around a college after having been graduated is like a fellow who builds and stocks a ship, only to never leave port and set sail.

The loony idea that everyone should attend college has resulted, of course, in the need for exponentially more professors, way outstripping the supply of intellectual firepower, which is limited by genes, culture, family, the bell curve, and other factors. Thus, we have a permanent and ineradicable idiocracy that funnels the preposterous into the impressionable, resulting in this downward politico-cultural death spiral.

Just glancing at this chapter on Thomas More in The Common Mind. A character in his Utopia observes that "there is no place for philosophers among kings," to which the narrator replies, "Yes there is, but not for that academic philosophy which fits everything into place." Rather, there is "another, more sophisticated philosophy which accommodates itself" to the reality at hand, and "it is this philosophy that you should use."

Obama is just the latest example of government by Beautiful Theory applied to the wrong species. He is also a counter-example of our first duty, which is "to preserve, such a measure of unity, small or great, as the Christendom of their age has been able to inherit." But such unity is at odds with "the pressure of centralizing and absolutist power," with "the use of positive law for coercive purposes at variance with common law and natural law," and with "respectful use of our common language as opposed to the sophistical subversion of meaning."

Thus, as we have discussed in a number of posts, there are the two unities, one of which is invaluable (and the source of value), the other worthless (and the basis of nihilism, whether acknowledged or not). This is elucidated in Letter IX of Meditations on the Tarot, The Hermit, so I won't repeat the lesson.

Suffice it to say that there is a Light that is the prior source of all color, and a Darkness that results from the indiscriminate blending of all colors. The latter is the unity the left has been waiting for, and Obama is giving it to us, good and hard.

"Ignorant enthusiasm," wrote Kirk, "cannot remake the world." But it never stops trying. And just as there are critical truths "which no amount of mental effort could have produced," there are vital lies that no decent person could have imagined or foreseen. But that's our fault, because we need to balance the innocence of doves with the wisdom of snakes.

Interesting too that we are always zig-zag wanderers in our crookward movement toward the Light, whereas it is possible to plunge straight into darkness like an anvil dropped down a well. The Adversary is efficient that way, allowing gravity to do the work.

The Religion the Almighty and Me Works Out Betwixt Us

I've been getting more than the usual interior static about what I Am. Of course I would like to settle it once and for all, so I can move on with my life. Surely there must be a shorter answer than Improvisational Esoteric Judeo-Christian Orthoparadoxical Bohemian Classical Liberal Neo-traditional Retro-futurist in the First Church of Perpetual Slack.

What I really want to believe is contained up in the mysthead, in the immortal words of the Reverend Harry Powell. There is a scene in which a slightly skeptical listener asks, hey, wait a minute, just what religion do you profess, preacher?

Harry's face hardens and he responds with a menacing, The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.

Which doesn't usually work out well. The best you can usually hope for is some ego-flattering new age mush, or an idiosyncratic jumble of truth and fantasy.

Here's Reverend Harry conversing with the Lord about his next move. Yeah, you could say he has a purpose-driven life, but so does any psychopath.

Hey, wait a minute Mr. President. Just what kind of constitution did you swear to uphold?

The one I works out betwixt what it says and what I wants it to say.

This problem still comes up all the time, and I am far from resolved about it. For example, I know for a fact that I have provoked many readers to turn or return to orthodoxy or Catholicism -- wife included -- and yet, I cannot do so myself. Why is that? And is it just a lame excuse? And if you are excluded from the general mandate, what makes you so special? What makes you different from a Harry Powell, or worse, a Deepak Chopra?

I notice that the Happy Acres Guy has confronted the same issue, which essentially comes down to the source of authority and the means of salvation. He tried, he really tried, to turn himself into the authorities and go straight, but he just couldn't do it:

"I put aside my protestant prejudices, drawn by the Catholic writers that speak to me and to the truth behind it all. And not incidentally intending to poke my finger in the eye of progressives by joining the most traditional organization."

That last one is indeed a major draw -- to join the one institution that is at antipodes to the depraved values of the demonic left. If the left hates it so much, it must be true! Although as soon as you say that, the Pope comes out with some vague, innumerate economic blather that gives aid and comfort to the demon class (and will of course further immiserate the poor).

And I certainly revere those many illustrious Catholic writers who "speak to me and to the truth behind it all." Not just the most beautiful art but most of our deepest thinkers came out of the church. Then again, one of my favorites, Meister Eckhart, ran afoul of the church. Speaking of HA, I found a helpful comment there from the Meister, which very much comports with my sentiments:

"We ought simply to follow where God leads, that is, to do what we are most inclined to do, to go where we are repeatedly admonished to go -- to where we feel most drawn. If we do that, God gives us his greatest in our least and never fails."

Yes, no doubt. Cosmic Slack, and all that. But consider the mischief that can result from a misinterpretation of simply doing "what we are most inclined to do." Here we need to specify that he means vertically, not horizontally.

As we have discussed in the past, the soul is in constant trialogue with its ground and destiny; or situated in the space between the two, to be precise. We know the soul by paying attention to its spontaneous and yet specific inclinations and aversions. We are always oriented to the divine attractor -- O -- but in our own unique way, thus combining the universal and the particular, the one and the many, God and Incarnation, Father and Son, etc.

In fact, even more than an incarnation, we are an incarnotion, i.e., an idea or notion of God. While one could theoretically understand how natural selection could account for a universal type, it can never account for the unique form of our soul, which again navigates in the hyperspace of the vertical in order to discover and potentiate itself by assimilating truth.

"Even if God is in all ways and all things evenly," asks Eckhart, "do I not still need a special way to get to him?" Well, yes and no. I would say that it cannot only be special, or else you are living in your own private Idaho. Rather, the special must embody the universal. With that caveat in mind,

"Whatever the way that leads you most frequently to awareness of God, follow that way; and if another way appears, different from the first, and you quit the first and take the second, and the second works, it is all right. It would be nobler and better, however, to achieve rest and security through evenness, by which one might take God and enjoy him in any manner, in any thing, and not have to delay and hunt around for your special way: this has been my joy! To this end all kinds of activities may contribute and any work may be a help; but if it does not, let it go!"

Note the evolution he implicitly describes: we begin in the unique, the particular, the individual, but end -- if we are lucky -- in the universal. This makes sense to me. By way of analogy, think of language. Let's stipulate that you can more or less convey truth in any language. Nevertheless, in order to do so, you must speak a particular language. You cannot do so with Language as such, which is pure abstraction.

Thus, suppose there is a Religion As Such which embodies the truth of reality. Well, as with language, you need to "speak" -- i.e., practice -- a particular one. But even then there are loopwholes. Alert readers will recall that in the Cosmogenesis and Cosmobliteration sections of the book, I endeavored to playgiarize with a kind of universal language beyond language in order to convey truth as such.

Recently I read an intriguing essay by Rebecca Bynum called God Descending. The reason I find it intriguing is that it is so Coonlike that it appears to me that we are in the orbit of the same attractor, although naturally coming at it from different angles, being that we are not the same individual. In it she expresses the wholly orthoparadoxical view that

"Just as we, in our limited ability, ascend toward God [↑], so does God descend toward us [↓], invading and encompassing his entire creation. Though God exists as an absolute, eternal being outside the confines of time and space, there must be some part of God, or level of God, that exists within those self-imposed and self-created confines -- a God of time and space. Thus creation remains a part of God, not separate from him."

This is an Exact Truth, a truth beyond which there can be no truthier. She continues:

"Ultimately of course, God the Father is eternal, absolute and unevolving, but within spacetime, he exists as actualizing potential -- he is both actual and potential.

"Therefore, as we participate in our own self-realization by growing in the spirit, that is to say, as our God-given potential becomes actual in time, we are adding our own small mite to the great actualization of the evolving God. We have been created as unique beings -- there is no one else who can contribute exactly the same bit of actualization to God and thus in a very real sense, God is dependent upon our growth, and our increasing ability to bear the fruits of the spirit, for his actualization."

My only quibble would be that she contradicts herself, in that she first refers to God as being "absolute and unevolving," and then suggests that human beings add "to the great actualization of the evolving God" (emphasis mine).

The only way to reconcile the contradiction, in my opinion, is with recourse to some version of Hartshorne's process theology, whereby God is essentially an "evolving Absolute." I don't want to get sidetracked into a defense of that proposition, but I will say that there is no other kind of God in whom I can believe. So it may well be my own limitation, but it is my own, dammit, and not somebody else's.

In fact, this forms the basis of the very multiundisciplinary religion the Almighty and me works out betwixt us, so back off! I'm lookin' at you, Bob.

Once Upon a Time in America

Obama Trounces Founders 5-1

If the truth is known but doesn't benefit certain parties, then those parties will be at war with it -- so long as they value their beliefs over the truth. The left is in its very essence a war on truths it refuses to accept. In fact, it might be more helpful to turn that around: a leftist is anyone who builds an ideology around the rejection of an important truth about man and/or the world.

There is no real debate about this: the most important truths are both knowable and known. In the words of The Poet, they have already been discovered / Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope / To emulate.

Which is what the celebration of Independence Day is all about (for the purposes of this post we are including the Constitution that gave political form to our liberty). Who can hope to emulate George Washington, or Alexander Hamilton, or James Madison? Barack Obama? He can only hope to neutralize them, or at least minimize the damage they do to the ambitions of progressive statists.

On that score he's arguably made more progress than any president in our history. Or in other words, he's succeeded in doing more damage to truth than any of his predecessors.

But what has been lost and rediscovered is always lost and found and lost again; and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. / For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business (Eliot).

As I'm sure we've discussed on a number of occasions, the truths we're talking about are never discovered in a once-and-for-all fashion. Rather, they must be rediscovered anew by each generation, and indeed, each individual. Why is this? Why must metaphysical truth be so seemingly difficult to discover and establish on this earth?

Two reasons come to mind. The first is that this discovery is bound up with our very reason for being here. Pursuit of truth constitutes the meaning, the struggle, the romance, and the adventure of life.

Furthermore, it is a vertical struggle, meaning that it naturally runs counter to impersonal (and personal) forces that run in the opposite direction. We might just as well ask, "why is it so difficult for me to make a slam dunk?" In my case, the answer is gravity. If it weren't for stupid gravity, I'd take some of these youngbloods to skool. Uncle Bob got skilz!

Also, the fact that this truth cannot be given but must be discovered is a mercy, not a curse. If this weren't the case, then the pleasures of the spirit would be diminished, just as the pleasures of the mind would be impossible if everything were known.

What if everything were known in the usual sense, and there were no mystery surrounding and penetrating us? That would be a kind of hell. The Library of Babel, a short story by Borges, captures this hellish (im)possibility. It "describes a vast collection of books... whose volumes contain all possible combinations of alphabetic characters" (Lindsey, where I found the reference. Don't worry, I'm not going all literary on you).

"Everything is there... the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary of this gospel, the veridical account of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books" (Borges).

One person's hell is another person's academia.

Of course, being random, "Most of the books, inevitably, contain only unreadable gibberish" (Lindsey). There is no combination of letters "which the divine Library has not already foreseen."

So, on the one hand, the library is omniscient, containing all possible knowledge. And yet, this is analogous to Hegel's "bad infinite," which you might say is simply unbounded nothingness, i.e., the endless night in which all cows are black. Everything and nothing.

How does a universe that is random at one end result in truth at the other? We'll come back to that in a moment later post.

Lindsey suggests that "Borges's library provides an apt metaphor for contemporary America's pandemonium of social and cultural diversity." Everyone is hard at work making their own little contribution to the Library.

Our president, for example, has contributed five books, when I thought it was just the two better known turds. In any event, that's five times as many as Hamilton and Madison, whose only contribution is the Federalist, and he knows so much more than they did.

The Liberal Subspecies: Homo Controlus

I suppose you could say that man has common sense -- an implicit sense of things held in common -- if man is a species. But maybe he's not.

The secular left, as always, is of two mindlessnesses about this: on the one hand, man is nothing but an animal, ergo, a species. On the other hand, he is a product of culture, and therefore not a species at all, since cultures are so beautifully diverse, with no common core, so to speak. In the latter view, putting a man on the moon is no better than putting a bone in one's nose. There's just no universal, objective way to distinguish these activities, much less say that one is more evolved than the other.

But if moon-manners and nose-boners aren't just horizontally diverse but vertically distinct, then they are more like different species. True, they can still interbreed and produce fertile offspring, but that alone doesn't resolve the species problem:

"It is surprisingly difficult to define the word 'species' in a way that applies to all naturally occurring organisms, and the debate among biologists about how to define 'species' and how to identify actual species is called the species problem. Over two dozen distinct definitions of 'species' are in use amongst biologists."

Even though the academically correct insist that man is nothing but an animal species, I have a feeling that they would object to the idea that this species naturally divides into subspecies, but why? I suppose Because Hitler and other progressive thinkers who leapt to the wholly unwarranted conclusion that this was a zero-sum game, and that other subspecies needed to be exterminated. But only a barbarous and undeveloped subspecies would arrive at such an evil conclusion.

Another example of secular muddleheadedness: virtually all psychological theorists posit a developmental model in which man transitions through various stages on the way to maturity. At the same time, they tell us that a fetus is not a human being. In short, they affirm that man is always in transition, pointing beyond himself to a higher organization, except during the first nine months of his existence. We've actually had commenters insist that this entity is not a human being. What is it, then? Oh, just a meaningless aggregate of cells.

That kind of thinking, by the way, is prima facie evidence of a certain subspecies of human being. We've discussed it in the past, but its main psycho-cognitive characteristics revolve around what Melanie Klein called the "paranoid-schizoid position" (heretofore PS) and what Bion called "attacks on linking." Briefly, starting with the latter, an attack on linking has the purpose of eliminating an unwanted meaning by attacking the cognitive links that lead to it.

Let's say, for example, I refuse to believe that congress shall make no law prohibiting the free expression of religion. It takes a lot of cognitive work to make that one go away, but liberals are always up to the task. This is what makes them such an intriguing subspecies to study! Think of the tortured mental process that can result in the belief that religious expression is not a constitutional right, but killing your baby is.

Same with Citizens United. How to get around the fact that congress can make no law abridging the freedom of speech? It takes a constitutional scholar to argue that the amendment applies to all "speech" -- including pornography, flag-burning, and dung-flinging -- except political speech.

Back in the day, I remember that this particular book, The Matrix of the Mind, did a superb job of explaining what paranoid-schizoid thinking is all about. Let's pull it down from the shelf and see if it still holds up.

Here it is, chapter 3, The Paranoid-Schizoid Position: Self as Object. I realize this may or may not be of interest to you, but it is to me, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. So come along. You might even learn something. One thing you might learn about -- not that you care -- is the deeper roots of my whole worldview, roots so deep that they have been forgotten and now operate unconsciously. In other words, this may lay bare some of my cosmic deep structure, for better or worse.

"Melanie Klein's view of psychological development can be viewed as a biphasic progression from the biological to the impersonal-psychological, and from the impersonal-psychological to the subjective." Well, first of all, that's three phases (biological / impersonal-psychological / subjective), to which I would add a fourth, the transcendent-universal, but this is a good start, for it highlights the fact that man is gradually teased out of this biological matrix, both individually and collectively. That is, as I described in the book, just as humanness was teased out of the biosphere, the mature human being is potentiated from the infantile matrix. Indeed,

"The first of these developmental advances involves a transformation of the infant as a purely biological entity into the infant as a psychological entity." The only thing I would add is that when he says "biological," a better term might be "psychobiological," because he's referring to a biological mode of human cognition, not to biology per se. It is a mode of thinking with distinctly human characteristics, not equivalent to something like "cellular thinking."

The shift from biological to psychological marks the entry into the PS position, "a developmental phase of 'itness,' wherein the infant is lived by his experience. Thoughts and feeling happen to the infant rather than being thought or felt by the infant."

I can confirm that Theodore Dalrymple is absolutely correct in his view that the permanent underclass is completely dominated by this arrested form of cognition -- which is why the War On Poverty is utterly beside the point, since we're not just talking about material poverty or even intellectual and spiritual poverty, but an impoverished mode of thinking as such. (See, for example, The Knife Went In. I didn't put it there. It just, you know, happened.)

PS thinking is dominated by certain processes known as "defense mechanisms," but they are really only defense mechanisms for a person in a higher developmental stage. In other words, for PS thinking, they are normative, and especially include splitting and projection, which naturally lead to a failure of integration at various levels of being.

The roots of splitting go back to "the most basic mode of management of danger," that is, "separating the endangering from the endangered." You might say that this is a psychological analogue of, say, a turtle withdrawing into its shell, or a possum playing dead, or a liberal placing his head up his ass. "Logic and volition are no more involved in this pattern of defense than they are in the neurological reflexes of the newborn infant."

Thus, what we call "splitting" is simply a mode of managing psychological danger. But how does a human being separate the endangering from the endangered if they're both in his own head? Easy: by splitting his head in two, and projecting the bad part out (or sometimes by projecting out the good, in order to keep it "safe"). Projection "can be understood as an effort in phantasy to remove an internal danger by locating the danger outside oneself, i.e., separating oneself from it as if it were located in another."

For example, why is it that the only females who believe there is a war on women are those at war with their own femininity? Or, why are men in the Islamic world so obsessed with the dangers of female sexuality? In order to control their own sexual thoughts and impulses, they exert extraordinary control over the object that provokes them. Or, why is it that only covetous liberals obsess over the "greedy one percent"?

In each case, the "bad" is placed outside the individual's mind, but only in phantasy, not of course in reality ("ph" phantasy is a psychoanalytic term of art essentially meaning a fantasy that is operating unconsciously). In reality it is an intrapsychic process between parts of one's own mind. Which is why, as Bion put it, such a person cannot "learn from experience." Why not? Because they are not actually experiencing something outside their own head, for starters. Because of this, the process will simply be repeated ad nauseam, which is one reason why liberals never learn, and why the same mistakes must be made again and again.

In short, with these kinds of primitive processes, "biological automaticity has been transformed into psychological automaticity." Such processes cannot be examined in a detached and critical manner, because they are not quite at the level of "experience." They are more basically "a mode of organizing experience," a mental operation "used in the beginning to create order out of the chaos of the infant's earliest experience on the basis of categories inherent in his instinctual deep structure."

You will have noticed that liberals are all about order. For them, the unjust order imposed by the state is infinitely preferable to the spontaneous order of free human interaction. So, for example, out of the 2.9 million inconsistencies produced by ObamaCare, only 15% can be fixed. Doesn't matter. Anything is preferable to the chaos of freedom. Make it go away!

So yeah, liberals are pretty much a different species: Homo controlus.

Common Sense and its Progressive Alternatives

It's just common sense. If the state is not permitted to force citizens to pay people not to have children, then that's a war on women, straight up. Think of all the females who might be born as a result of this tragic policy! Do you really think they want to exist? Without free birth control?

Is there such a thing as common sense, or has it been successfully eradicated by the progressive educational establishment? If it does exist, what is it, and how does it work? Is it something a person has by virtue of his personhood, or is it something only acquired through experience? And if the latter, is it through personal experience, or the collective experience of generations who have had to face the same existential conditions? And where does one acquire such collective wisdom? From the family? Culture? Education? The state?

What if the most important things not only can't be taught, but can't even be clearly articulated? Rather, they can only be lived and maybe symbolized, but not with language per se. A passage lifted from Happy Acres resonates:

"The challenge for each new generation is figuring out what’s worth keeping and what worth tinkering with. The progressive attitude is that everything is eligible not just for tinkering, but wholesale replacement. The people who lived yesterday were idiots, but we are geniuses!"

Which goes to something Schuon said on a number of occasions: that if people prior to us were such idiots, it is impossible to explain how we could be so brilliant, given the crooked timber we're built with. It's almost as if progressives posit a kind of cognitive original sin that strangled the mentality of every man until this new breed suddenly and inexplicably arrived on the scene with their immaculate and sinless intellects.

But "The conservative attitude is to assume that our parents and grandparents weren’t fools and that they did some things for good reasons." However, as alluded to above, it is possible that these reasons were never consciously thought out or articulated. Rather, perhaps "some things our forebears bequeathed us are good for no 'reason' at all."

This is consistent with Hayek, who "argued that many of our institutions and customs emerged from 'spontaneous order' -- that is, they weren’t designed on a piece of paper, they emerged, authorless, to fulfill human needs through lived experience, just as our genetic 'wisdom' is acquired through trial and error. Paths in the forest aren’t necessarily carved out on purpose. Rather they emerge over years of foot traffic."

Which reminds me of something I read in Lawrence in Arabia. It is impossible to imagine the vastness of the desert, which is essentially like a featureless ocean of sand and rocks. However, the Bedouins don't simply wander around blindly. Rather, the sandscape is dotted with the occasional well, so if we were to map the human phase space of the desert, we would actually see well worn (but invisible) paths from well to well.

Well, it's the same with the human mindscape. One of the fondest principles of progressives is that the mind is indeed a trackless desert -- a blank slate -- and therefore infinitely malleable. Absent that dubious principle, then progressive schemes cannot get off the ground, because people are going to be people, and there's not a damn thing the state can do about it.

What this really explains is why progressive schemes do get a few inches off the ground, only to promptly crash and burn. Which then requires another progressive scheme to put out the fire and clean up the mess. Repeat ad infinitum.

Continuing with the Happy Acres passage, "In the parable of the fence, Chesterton says you must know why the fence was built before you can tear it down. But Burke and Hayek get at something even deeper: what if no one built the fence?... Or what if everyone built the fence without realizing it? What if we are surrounded by fences that were never consciously built or planned but were instead the natural consequence of lived experience?"

Do you think beavers consciously think about how to defend their practice of dam building, or that spiders wonder about the environmental impact of their webs? Similarly, "So much of what makes civilization civilized is intangible, spontaneous, and mysterious. An unknowable number of our greatest laws are hidden, our greatest wisdom is authorless, and our most valuable treasures are in our hearts. This should foster enormous humility about how to out-think humanity."

I think this explains how and why the people who try to outthink humanity are always lacking in common sense, even if they are otherwise "geniuses." For example, Albert Einstein: genius at physics. Idiot at politics. Noam Chomsky: I'll take their word for it that he's a genius at linguistics, if they'll take my word for it that he's a retard at pretty much everything else.

Bion said something about the limitations of language, to the effect that we run into trouble when we try to use this device designed to negotiate the physical world to map the psychic -- let alone spiritual -- world. Obviously, in order to accomplish the latter, we will have to use language in a different way, if we can accomplish it at all.

To cite one particularly obvious example, if you want to be perfectly literal, then there can be no name, no word, for God. As soon as you confer a name, you have placed a boundary around the boundless and signified the unsignifiable. Or, you might say that God is the (implicitly) signified with no possible (explicit) signifier.

But there are many things of this nature -- even the most important things in life. I would say that there is a kind of permanent dialectic between knowledge and mystery -- (k) and O -- and that to pretend to have transcended or eliminated the latter is to drain life of all its romance, charm, and adventure. Think about this the next time you imagine you could do a better job at creating a cosmos: how to make one that is simultaneously infinitely knowable and yet infinitely mysterious?

In my opinion, this can only be because the cosmos is personal and from the hand of a person, since a person is the quintessential case of something infinitely knowable and yet utterly mysterious and "other."

You could say that we are talking literally about embodied -- or incarnated -- truth(s).

Fine observation by Eliot, also lifted from Happy Acres, about "the decline of religious sensibility." Sensibility is not sense per se, but sensation in a higher key, so to speak -- like taste in music or poetry.

So "The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless" (emphasis mine).

Thus, there are any number of things in which human beings believe because they understand them, even without being able to explain how or why. This goes back to Paul's crack about faith being the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not (yet) seen. This "substance" is the ground of being, while the evidence is its end; or, just say origin and destiny, which is where we always are, because we are in (created and personal and meaningful) being.

When we talk about the "social issues" at the root of the culture war, the problem is that we are mostly talking about pre- or trans-articulated, embodied knowledge, or common sense. In his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg writes of how these are also connected to

"the role and authority of the family. Arguments about abortion, gay marriage, obscenity, sex ed, etc. all connect to the family directly or indirectly. Even gun rights have a lot to do with the family, and not just because 'gun culture' is primarily learned in the home. Guns fit neatly into the conception of the autonomous family and the role of parents as primary protectors of their children."

Furthermore, "no institution transmits culture more effectively than the family. We learn language, dialect, and accents in the home.... We get most of our religion and morality at home. We learn from our parents how citizens behave in a society and what they should expect from society and government. It's important to keep in mind that while parents teach their kids by telling them things, the real learning comes from watching what parents do — or don't do. Kids are wired to emulate their parents" (emphasis mine).

Here again, we're talking about incarnated and largely unarticulated knowledge, i.e., how to "be" (not what to "know"; or, the "unthought known"). Which is in turn "why progressives of all labels have had their eye on the family. It is the state's greatest competition."

Or to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson -- now, there was an honest and honestly nasty progressive! -- said, "the primary mission of the educator is to make children as unlike their parents as possible."

Which is ultimately to make them as unlike human beings as possible. Well done.

Back in the Saddle of Reality

Where were we? And does it matter anyway? This blog is supposed to be an exercise in pure verticalisthenics, so any horizontal continuity is more a matter of luck than design.

Well, not pure luck. Vertical flight necessarily converges on the One, so in that sense, each post more or less touches the others. Conversely -- or inversely -- with vertical descent there is a kind of increasing divergence, discontinuity, and atomization, so that everything becomes a unique instance, with no underlying or overarching unity.

For those of you who have read the KoonKlassic IDEAS Have F*cking CONSEQUENCES, this is Weaver's central point: that our present culture war (though the book was published in 1948, it is just as true today) may be traced to the modern abandonment of transcendentals and the blind plunge into bonehead nominalism. To quote that first amazon reviewer, Weaver has in mind the Consequential Idea of

"nominalism or relativism -- the absence of belief in any source of truth outside man, the absence of universals, the reduction of all things to formless particulars. You might think that such an idea is too abstract to have any impact on your life, but Weaver argues persuasively that nominalism makes impossible the 'metaphysical dream' of an organized universe, leading to social chaos, formless art, virtueless individuals suckered by [the media-educational complex] into believing that life consists only of chasing ever more creature comforts and a universal 'spoiled-child psychology.'"

This goes back to what was said above in paragraph one, that -- obviously -- a coherent and unified worldview is only possible via some form of transcendental realism. Otherwise we are stuck down in nominalism, relativism, scientism, and materialism, which are demonically synthesized in the form of political leftism.

Isn't that a contradiction, Bob? You just said that reality cannot be integrated in the lower vertical, but is fundamentally dis-integrated, fragmented, and divergent.

Yes, precisely: for the normal human being, reality can only be synthesized through God; or, on a more purely experiential level, God is the living principle of synthesis, of integration, of unity. This is because the God-principle is both ground and destiny, or alpha and omega.

In other words, if God weren't primordial unity, there would literally be no possibility of human unity, whether religious, scientific, political, spiritual, interpersonal, aesthetic, metaphysical, intellectual, or in any other way.

Note the manner in which God, because he is the very principle of dynamic unity, cuts across and unifies all those diverse domains, from political philosophy to aesthetics to scientific inquiry to mystical experience. Each involves a form of oneness, and oneness is obviously an echo or shadow or fractal or recollection of the One.

More generally, anything that is true will be convergent with other truths and ultimately with Truth itself. On the other hand, falsehoods will stick out like undigestible sore thumbs. They can't be integrated, because they reject integration a priori. Again, once you have taken the dive into nominalism and relativism, there can be no recovery of real unity.

Unless....

Yes, unless you somehow appropriate power over reality in order to impose your will upon others.

But even this is impossible for a mere man, no matter how tenured. Rather, the only way it is possible is through the assistance of a massive state that interferes with every dimension of life, from private property to education to employment to healthcare to intimate relationships. Only then does a mere human being possess the power to impose the fractured metaphysical dream of his father -- the father of lies -- upon the rest of us.

Which is why today's Supreme Court decisions are important, since they modestly chip away at that demonic power to determine and enforce a deeply pneumapathological testavus on the restuvus.

I just remembered where we left off -- or at least it remembered me, now that we're up here. We were discussing The Common Mind, one theme of which is that there is indeed a Common Mind. And if there is a common mind, then it can only be because there is a transcendent mind, or because mind is both transcendent and ordered. Or just say Transcendent Order; or, in a word, God.

To requote a particular passage, Moore writes that "Christian humanism is in radical tension with the spirit of" postmodernism, "which in deconstructing texts finds an abyss at the heart of them. In the sense in which postmodernism does the work of the devil, it is at the farthest remove from the creative function of literature."

To cite a timely example, the Constitution was written in such a way that anyone with adequate intelligence can understand it. But it takes a constitutional scholar to find an intellectual abyss at the heart of it, a nothingness so deep and wide that socialism can pass right through it without even brushing up against the natural law that is its source and purpose.

In order for the assault on transcendent reality to succeed, words must be eviscerated of their meaning; and not just words, but language itself. To quote something found at Happy Acres, Liberal Newspeak

"deliberately embraces the feminine side of language. It strives to be comforting, nurturing and soothing. It never tells you anything directly. Instead it makes you read everything between the lines. It rarely answers questions. Instead its answers indirectly explain to you why you shouldn’t even be asking the questions.

"The empty words are signals like the noises that birds and animals in the forest make. They establish identity, rather than ideas. A Liberal Newspeak discussion is more likely to be about identities, racial, gender, sexual, than about anything tangible. Like two moose meeting in the north or two sparrows chirping on a power line, the only communication that really happens is an assertion of identity."

Which is again why it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion with a leftist, because they aren't operating in the realm of intelligibility, but power. For the Machiavellians of the left, good language is effective language, not "truthful" language.

Actually, leftist language has three related functions, 1) to sever the link between words and reality, 2) to open up a space for the state to improperly co-opt the power of truth, and 3) to make liberals feel good about themselves. Thus, we end up being ruled by logophobic cretins with inappropriately high self-esteem, who get their jollies by bossing other people around.

Another accurate zinger from Happy Acres: "Today as never before there is an industry dedicated, not to educating people, but to making them feel smart. From paradigm shifting TED talks to books by thought leaders and documentaries by change agents that transform your view of the world, manufactured intelligence has become its own culture.

"Manufactured intelligence is the smarmy quality that oozes out of a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni and the rest of the gang who tell you nothing meaningful while dazzling you with references to international locations, political events and pop culture, tying together absurdities into one synergistic web of nonsense that feels meaningful."

Which brings us back to the common mind. The left has sustained a frontal assault on our common mind and culture, replacing them with an entirely fanciful second reality that is assimilated by those most susceptible to indoctrination, i.e., overeducated mediocrities such as Obama, whose only defense against an ever-intrusive reality is the same old smelly orthodoxies he inhaled in college.

Which proves that you can drive out language out with a pitchforked tongue, but she eventually comes back shouting.