Barking Marxists Don't You Know the Gagster Laughs at You?

For Koestler, "all creative activities have a basic pattern in common," such that "certain basic principles operate throughout the whole organic hierarchy," all the way "from the fertilized egg" to the fertile egghead, AKA the creative individual.

Now, as it so happens, my doctoral dissertation was on just this subject, i.e., the patterns that permeate nature, from matter to mind. The Raccoon is born searching for the damn key to the world enigma, i.e., the "unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion."

Now, this is already funny, because humor, as we shall see, always involves an unforeseen clash of two frames of reference. We will return to this idea shortly.

If not now. Take the last sentence of paragraph one. I won't say that the conjunction of "fertilized egg" and "fertile egghead" is LOL funny, but it is mildly amusing. Why? Because we have the surprising conjunction of biology and human intelligence via the dual meanings of "fertile" and "egg."

And it's even funnier if it hits you that the fertile egghead is and must be ontologically prior to the fertile egg, which reveals how humor is woven into the very fabric of being. You might say that in the absence of verticality -- i.e., different planes of being -- humor would be strictly impossible, since there could be no clash of planes. An old lizard finds nothing amusing, Larry King to the contrary notwithstanding.

In short, in a horizontal world, nothing is funny. And that's a threat! One can't imagine ISIS members, or USSR commissars, or sensitivity trainers, or liberal activists, chuckling at the irony or absurdity of their beliefs. When the higher is dragged down to the lower -- or the lower subsumed into the higher -- laughter is no more.

Which, as we shall see, goes to the Incarnation, or let's just say incarnation, i.e., bodies-in-souls. Oddly enough, you can't laugh without a body, right? Laughter is a physical release. Why physical? What is the body doing when it laughs? After all, bodies don't get jokes. The mind gets the joke, but then somehow shares it with the body, which discharges the guffaw.

The same thing happens with crying: the mind is sad, the body releases. One can imagine this having some sort of Darwinian utility, some marginal survival value, but not so with humor.

In any event, both activities involve a clash of frames of reference. The awful or tragic or traumatic represent a sudden or violent intrusion of one reality into another. Humor can involve almost the same thing, but provokes a very different reaction.

For example, my son was watching the Three Stooges movie the other day, and there's a funny scene were a church bell lands on a nun. The Stooges aren't sure who it is, but her face -- of course -- rings a bell.

And even prior to that, the whole idea of the Stooges growing up in a Catholic orphanage sets the stage for an extreme clash of frames of reference, with piety at one end, slapstick at the other. True, it's lazy humor, but it hits the spot for a nine year-old.

Koestler suggests that "all patterns of creative activity are tri-valent," in that they may "enter the service of humour, discovery, or art." This largely depends upon the "emotional climate," as in the joyfully violent climate of the Three Stooges.

More generally -- referring to the triptych below -- the climate "changes by gradual transitions from aggressive to neutral to sympathetic and identificatory," or from the "absurd through an abstract to a tragic or lyric view of existence":

Remember, the lefthand column belongs to the jester (or wise guy), the center the sage (or wise man), and the right the artist. For example, if Newton were viewing the clip below, he might see evidence of the first Law of Motion. An artist might see a tragic misunderstanding, or perhaps an ironic statement about the dangers of religion:

A Raccoon notices that that's Larry David in a nun's costume, the very idea of which is a laugh, albeit on the cheap.

But just as there are cheap laughs, there must be cheap discoveries and cheap works of art. You will have noticed that this cheapness permeates the low-rent worldview of the typical MENSA atheist. They love nothing more than a cheap laugh at the expense of religion, oblivious to the howls of derision coming from above. But again, since the atheist lives in a horizontal world, he knows nothing of that deeper mine of comedy gold.

You could almost say that the scientistic atheist/materialist engages in a form of reverse punning, whereby bi- or tri-valent terms are reduced to their most concrete expression. It reminds me of the old joke:

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: That's not funny!

In other words, the flatlander refuses to participate in the joyful world of multivalent meaning, and cuts you off at the pass if not knees. You don't want to know where Muslims cut you off.

Say, how many atheists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Hmm. I would say none, since they prefer to curse the darkness.

So: in reality, i.e., here and now, "there are no frontiers where the realm of science ends and that of art begins..." Nor is there any place where the humor begins and ends, or in other words, Creativity is alphåmega.

To be continued...

Is God Laughing At Us or With Us?

Does the Creator have a sense of humor? I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion, or humor would be deprived of its sufficient reason. It certainly has no Darwinian utility.

According to Koestler, there are exactly 29 references to humor -- or at least laughter -- in the Hebrew Bible. Interestingly, only two are "born out of a joyful and merry heart," while thirteen "are linked with scorn, derision, mocking, or contempt" -- with the sarcastic ha ha of Nelson Muntz.

However, I think we need to widen out our definition of humor, because much of what is humorous resides in the Human -- in Homo hoho -- not in the text or the situation per se. Funny things are everywhere, but it takes a funnyman to notice them -- to bring out the implicit connection that tickles the funny bone.

I've been reading Koestler's The Act of Creation, which regards humor as the equal of scientific discovery and artistic creation. You might say that each of these three quintessentially human activities has the identical deep structure.

Many people have noticed, for example, that the theory of anthropocentric global warming is a joke. Problem is, it is a bad joke, because instead of seeing an implicit connection between two frames of reference -- in this case, weather and human activity -- it just makes one up. So the humor is forced, like the severely cramped and restricted humor that is permitted in a politically correct world.

Or sometimes the PC world forbids seeing the real comedic connection, therefore barring certain subjects from ridicule for the purpose of sustaining power. This article, for example, explains why comedians have somehow failed to exploit the comedic goldmine that is Obama:

'We learn this from Jim Downey, the longtime Saturday Night Live specialist in political japery. "If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10,’” the writer says in the expanded new edition of the “SNL” oral history book, “Live from New York.”

'“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature."'

Okay. Least funny president ever:

"The charter Choom Ganger, confessed eater of dog and snorter of coke. The doofus who thinks the language spoken by Austrians is 'Austrian,' that you pronounce the p in 'corpsman' and that ATMs are the reason why job growth is sluggish. The egomaniac who gave the queen of England an iPod loaded with his own speeches and said he was better at everything than the people who work for him. The empty suit with so little real-world knowledge that he referred to his brief stint working for an ordinary profit-seeking company as time 'behind enemy lines.' The phony who tells everyone he’s from Chicago, though he didn’t live there until his 20s, and lets you know that he’s talking to people he believes to be stupid by droppin’ his g’s. The world-saving Kal-El from a distant solar system who told us he’d heal the planet and cause the oceans to stop rising. The guy who shared a middle name with one of the most hated dictators on earth."

And that just touches the surface: his Lovely Wife. The Mom Jeans. The intellectual and physical laziness. The pomposity. The corruption. The backwoods liberal insularity. The straw man arguments. The compulsive lying. The thin skin. The media sycophancy. The fascination with celebrity trash. The never ending campaign. The absurdly positive Pravda-esque pronouncements on the economy. The blaming of government as if he's not in charge of it. Not only is Obama an ass, he is a perfect ass.

Anyway, Koestler's book is the only one I know of that gives humor its proper due, and treats it with the metacosmic seriousness it deserves (which itself is kind of funny). In the subsequent week or so, I hope to not only plunder the book for all it's worth, but extend his arguments into some hitherto unexplored corners of cosmic merriment -- or in other words, illuminate the divine sense of humor, which Raccoons know subjectively as the guffah-HA! experience.

In many ways, the latter is what defines us, which is why a Raccoon has merely to read the blog's masthead to know in his bones that he's come to the right place -- that he has found a spiritual home, or at least a halfway decent flophouse.

But today I have only time enough to play a fundation. Let's see how far we can take the joke in our remaining moments.

The frontispiece of the book has a helpful cosmic cartography that looks like this:

What does it mean? How to interpret the pleasure map? First, it reads from left to right; or maybe from the center, with left and right hands. Basically, the left column belongs to the Jester, the center the Sage, and the right the Artist. The center sage has to do with truth, while the right has to do with beauty. With what does the left have to do?

Koestler doesn't exactly say, as he leaves a lot to the imagination. Getting awkwardly personal for a moment, there are a couple of things I might say. There is no post in which I do not attempt to convey truth, beauty, and humor. The latter is especially difficult to judge, since I can't hear the joyous peals of laughter from my precious lambs.

Koestler points out that the person crafting the joke doesn't have the same physical reaction as the one who hears it. How then does one detect the humor? "The person who invents the joke or comic idea seldom laughs in the process." In fact, it just occurred to me that some things are so funny that they are beyond funny. For example, I might react to a Perfect Tweet by Iowahawk not with laughter, but with an envious THAT'S FUCKING BRILLIANT!

However, the converse might occur with a particularly earth-shattering scientific discovery: it might literally provoke laughter, a spontaneous physical release upon perceiving the hitherto hidden connection. So right there we see that jokes can be serious while science can be a hoot.

And not only. I have also noticed that certain aesthetic experiences -- i.e., exposure to beauty -- may provoke laughter. In my case it often occurs with music. I might hear something that provokes a broad smile accompanied a spontaneous confession that this is ridiculous! In fact, it occurred last Sunday morning while listening to some gospel music. Here was one of the tunes:

The same song in a different style also made me grin:

So don't tell me God doesn't laugh.

Crapostolic Regression and the Satanic Magisterium

Any idiot can make history, but it takes a real genius to mess it up to this extent. To quote the maestro, "Those who live in the twilight of history imagine the day is being born, when night is approaching" (Dávila).

In other words, voters imagined it was 6:00 AM when they elected Obama, when it was actually 6:00 PM. D'oh! They thought it was the dawn of a bright new progressive day, and have therefore been taken unawares by the encroaching darkness. (Although an astonishing 40% continue to ignore the evidence of their senses, and insist the sun is rising.)

This makes it sound like we are pagans, and that history is cyclical, like a clock. Well, I say it is cyclical unless we do something about it. In other words, temporal cyclicity is the default state of man. The ancient Israelites accomplished a world-historical leap in being when they discovered linear time, or history proper.

This is probably one more reason why they are hated, for it redounds to a perennial conflict that goes a little like this: "Modern history is a dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is god" (Dávila).

The born again pagan who believes he is god -- in this case, Obama -- has no patience for those of us who believe in God, who believe God is beyond history, and who know that God -- with our cooperation -- lures history in the wake of his Divine Attractor.

Obama has made so many statements conveying the lunatic idea that he is -- with our cooperation, voluntary or otherwise -- Lord of History, that he blows right through tragedy and goes straight to farce. In this view, Republicans are literally Satan, AKA the Adversary who loves nothing more than erecting stumbling blocks that interfere with the felicitous hand of Progress.

But "History shows not the inefficacy of actions but the futility of intentions" (ibid.). Obama has actually been astonishingly effective in actuating his agenda, otherwise he couldn't have accumulated more debt than all past presidents combined. Ask your great grandchildren if Obama was effective. After all, they'll still be paying for it.

And it is true that the Adversary is responsible for that inconvenient disconnect between government actions and progressive intentions, but it's built into the fabric of reality.

After all, how many centuries ago did man discover that the road to hell is paved with good intentions? More to the point, when did he forget it? And when did progressives invert it and embrace the opposite: that the road to paradise is paved with progressive intentions? 2008? 1965? 1932? 1912?

No. Just Genesis 3 again: "ye shall be as gods," yada yada. This is literally the attractor at the other end of cosmic history - the "satanic attractor," as it were.

When we say "lead us not into temptation," this is precisely what we are referring to, because this cosmic lure is experienced subjectively as "temptation" -- just as the divine lure at the other end is experienced as grace, or intoxicating beauty, or the erotic tension toward truth.

Note that this latter requires -- and facilitates -- being "empty of self," whereas the other end requires and engenders being full of it. Obama is particularly full of it, i.e., himself, to the point of toxic overflow.

Which is a recipe for the greatest possible fall one can imagine. After all, if one is close to the ground, a fall hardly hurts at all -- just enough to send a corrective message. But the higher one pretends to be, the further the distance to the ground. One can only imagine the abyss between a self-styled godling and the terrable firma below.

When Obama proclaimed Ye did not build that!, he was again uttering an inverted Christian truth, but also a straight up demonic one.

As to the former, any decent or even polite individual knows that countless human beings have contributed to his success and happiness, beginning with the love of parents, the wisdom of teachers, and the general kindness of strangers along the way. Only a narcissistic dick would deny this.

As to the satanic inversion, it is entirely accurate to say to Obama: you didn't build that! Why? Because Obama would be impossible and unthinkable in the absence of the progressive hands that have borne him aloft his entire life -- not to mention a progressive state to employ an otherwise unemployable man. I mean, would you hire His Weightlessness for anything? Could you even trust him not to lie to your face and rip you off?

A curious paradox of progressives is that they love them some affirmative action, but the moment you point out that someone is a beneficiary of the racial spoils system -- in this case Obama -- they get all defensive, as if it's an insult. Which it is. But that's not my fault. I didn't come up with the idea of state-mandated racial discrimination, or permanent reparations.

Back to that question of when it all started. When we say "Genesis 3," we are of course referring to the vertical, i.e., the Time before time. But even as recently as "two hundred years ago it was possible to trust in the future without being totally stupid" (ibid.).

Why? Because it was inseparable from faith in God and trust in providence. But the distance between, say, 1776 and 1789 is virtually infinite, for the American revolution was as different from the French as Obama is from Washington or Hamilton or Lincoln.

I always try to remember that WE are living in the future promised and created by liberals. We are the splendid future of that terrible past! Yeah, this is it. Whoopee.

But "Falsifying the past is how the left has sought to elaborate the future," so they have to keep making the past worse and worse in order to justify their underperforming present and grease the skids to an even better future. This they do with race, with sex, with economics, with America, with everything, until the past is just a demented ghost that haunts the progressive psyche and runs around academia screaming at itself in the windows.

But there is always night history and day history. Day history is journalism, the cable tempest of the moment, the diversionary two-minute hate. There is also a nightwomb of history, analogous to those paleolithic caves which primitive man thought of as the womb of nature. Because of it, "Everything in history begins before we think it begins, and ends after we think it ends" (ibid.). What is the cause, and what is the effect?

We see, for example, the dreadful effect of Obama. But he is not his own cause. Rather, he is the lefthound embodiment of a kind of perverse apostolic succession reaching beyond the horizon of writehand daytome history, all the way back to that fine morning in the Garden. And to recall the immortal words of Otter: You fucked up, America. You trusted him.

Obama is Not Failing History. History has Failed Obama

Bad news: Obama is failing History 101, and it looks like he won't even be able to pull an affirmative action mascot's D, let alone a gentleman's C.

Did he just not study? Or did he study the wrong historians? Or did he perhaps unconsciously assimilate the latter by virtue of having no contact with anyone else, and then having insufficient curiosity to find out what the revisionists are so busy revising? Or what these tenured apes unknow and why they are so dead set on unknowing it?

I have to be honest and think back, because I too once believed all that revisionist crap. Passionately. I was as passionate about it as I am about truth, because I thought it was true -- not only true, but suppressed and denied by the Powers that Be, so that made me doubly pissed! How dare they deny us the truth! So what if truth doesn't exist! That doesn't permit Big Whitey to patronize us with childish myths!

Not only is Obama failing history, but his fellow treedwellers in California are actually enacting a law to force children to learn about what an important historical figure Obama is! Well, that he is. Not because he is a half-white, but because he is a half-wit.

To put it another way, it will henceforth be against the law in California to tell the simple truth about Obama, or in other words, to desist from mindfucking the children. Children Will Learn, for example, that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize within moments of being elected because of "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Fastest president ever! No wonder he needs so much down time. Those extraordinary efforts in the first days of his presidency wore him out. He gave us peace. Now let's give him some.

Let's look at some of the ways Obama has failed history: "He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European Renaissance and Enlightenment" (Hanson).

True, but in rebuttal, Obama might point out that VDH is naive about the real purpose of history, which is to boost the self-esteem of various abstract racial, religious, and pervertarian "classes" and groups -- in particular, the privileged historical losers -- and to denigrate the evil winners. And by "winners," we mean western civilization, i.e., Christendom, so it turns out that Obama is in fact rigorously intellectually consistent. Or a consistent anti-intellectual, rather.

Next, Obama "also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the 'right side of history.' He also chastises others for being on the 'wrong side of history' -- as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot" (VDH).

To which Obama would no doubt respond: a-DOY! As if Hegel and Marx were just some dead white European males! Modern leftist gnosticism is rooted in those two rascals, who wasted barrels of ink proving that history is indeed on dialectical autopilot, and that its outcome is foreordained.

Except when it's not, in which case you have to break a few skulls, or bribe a few senators, or use the IRS to harass the enemies of History. Don't worry, it's all good -- the end, that is. So long as we are serving it, the means scarcely matter.

Let's pause for an aphorism or three, since Dávila saw Obama coming in his vast world-historical rearview mirror: "Reason, Progress and Justice are the three theological virtues of the fool." Which is why the progressive is a priori a fool. All the fool has to do is get out of the way of history and don't do Stupid Shit, because Progress.

Obama often repeats that crack about "the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice," seemingly oblivious to the fact that 1) it's just a poetic metaphor, not a literal truth, 2) it doesn't bend at all except insofar as bent human beings undertake the lifetime task of trying to unbend themselves, one assoul at a time, and 3) "justice" does not simply refer to "what progressives want."

Or in other words, justice is not to be confused with the arousal and appeasement of envy -- the latter being social justice, not Justice. Justice means giving a man his due, not stealing a man's goods to satisfy the envious mob.

However, Obama might respond -- except without irony -- that "It is customary to proclaim rights in order to violate duties" (ibid.).

Indeed, as Dávila points out, "Every day we increase the number of words that signify their antonyms" -- in this case, using the term "social justice" to signify justice, for what is social justice but using the power of the state to unjustly give people what they don't deserve?

Obama despises our kind of course, but he cares deeply about those Others, i.e., the envious mob. Why? Because "Compassion is the best excuse for envy" (Dávila). And "Envy differs from the other vices by the ease with which it disguises itself as virtue" (ibid.). So, get on the right side of history and pay up, sucka'!

"Another of Obama's historical refrains is his frequent sermon about behavior that doesn't belong in the 21st century" -- as if one can distinguish right from wrong by consulting the calendar. Well, if it doesn't belong in the 21st century, then how did it get here? Can't we just synchronize our calendars, and advance Islamist watches forward a dozen centuries or so?

What leftists fail to grasp is that their ideas and behavior not only do not belong in the 7th (or any other) century, but that the Islamist means to do something about it, i.e., kill you.

Besides, telling an Islamist he's living in the 7th century is the sincerest form of flattery. It's like telling a Marxist he's accurately parroting the party line, or correctly propagating the Truth of the Day.

One man's myth is another man's guiding star. I would sooner believe George Washington never told a lie than Obama ever uttered a truth.

I Smell Trouble

More bad news for Obama: "No one should take himself seriously. Only hope to be taken seriously" (Dávila).

Interestingly, Dávila has thousands of cautionary aphorisms that speak directly to an Obama and his ideas, none of them flattering. This means that either Dávila or Obama is a malevolent idiot. I guess we won't be able to make that determination until Obama says something clever or witty or wise or intelligent, so we can make a direct comparison. Maybe he's saving that for his presidential memoirs, i.e., the next auto-fellatiography.

This one surely touches indirectly on the left: "Metaphysics is the olfactory nerve rather than the optical nerve." Schuon often speaks of the fragrance of truth, and Raccoons agree with their SubGenii brethren that each person carries a "soul stench" that may be detected by the Worthy. Not to boast, but I wrote of Obama's ghastly soul stench way back in 2008, before he was elected and the smell became overpowering.

According to this KoonKlassic, "As we know, certain persistent traits set the Raccoon apart from his peers, including a sense of essential Truth, a sense of the sacred, a sense of beauty, a sense of the eternal, a sense of grandeur (or dignity), a sense of mischief, a sense of soul-smell (or stench, depending on the case), a sense of the ridiculous, and a vulnerability to ecstasy (often at inopportune moments).

"Taken in aggregate, these comprise his cʘʘnvision proper, accounting for his fundamentally unserious quasi-infallibility in metaphysical matters ('laughty revelations,' or 'inrisible powers'). But this mystical intuition is balanced by deep humility and charity, to such an extent that many humans don't even realize it when there is an unassuming Raccoon in their midst. Hence the title of the unpublishable cult classic, The 'Coon Next Door."

One recalls that initial meeting between Toots Mondello and Herman Hildebrand, when Toots startled his fellow Raccoon by exclaiming what Herman heard as "eureka!" Toots, a first generation Italian American, was of course saying you reek-a! -- you know, just'a like a Raccoon-a!

As we troll through the archives for more soulfactory adventures, we find the following:

"Dennis Prager has mentioned that one of the things that turned him toward religion was the experience of college. There he encountered, as have most of us, the utter foolishness -- the horror, really -- of secular liberal thought in all its ghastly maninfestations. Thus, to the extent that a modern (not classical) liberal education is useful, it is primarily as a bad example. Which is not nothing. We learn just as much from adverse experiences -- perhaps even more, in a way -- as we do from positive ones....

"I was reminded of this by our recent atheist trolls and the cheesy ideas they propagrate on our nerves, which are at turns stupid, monstrous, or silly. Although we are always ridiculing them, hopefully it is in an instructive and good-natured way (i.e., sacred ridicure)."

But in any event, "you can learn a great deal about God by listening to an atheist -- just as Dennis Prager learned a great deal about God by detouring through the academonic ivory tower of leftist babble."

As to the existence of our transdimensional sniffer, "There really is a 'spiritual perfume' that is emitted by certain particularly lofty souls, just as there is a 'soul stench' given off by the rancid." If my Coon scent doesn't deceive me, I believe Obama's "enjoy by" date was technically in the 19th century, where it is engraved on Marx's tombstone.

I guess the point is, as Dávila suggests in different ways in number of aphorisms, you can learn a lot about reality by what spontaneously disgusts you, so long as your senses of taste and smell are not disordered. (I believe dis-gust comes from the same root as gustatory.)

In another ancient post, we read that "to dis-cern is to sift and separate; according to Webster's it is 'to detect with other senses than vision,' 'to come to know or recognize mentally,' and 'to see or understand the difference.' It is to know by seeing directly, not by discursive logic (which it transcends but does not violate)."

Therefore, "this path surely involves 'seeing the differences,' but not with Darwinian eyes, which see only what the genes want them to see. For example, a frog will starve to death before eating a perfectly good insect that isn't moving, or die of thirst before drinking a California wine. But the way of the Raccoon involves recognizing the differences between truth and error, appearances and reality, beauty and ugliness, virtue and sin, ego and Self, Petey and Deepak. To be objective -- which no mere animal can do -- is to touch the Absolute...."

I would say that all the senses must be activated, only transposed to their analogues in a higher key.

So, remember the above the next time Obama asks, "who you gonna believe, me or your lying nose?"

On the Function of the Negro in the White Liberal Imagination

It's always good to start the day with a breakfast aphorism or two: "Superficiality consists in hatred for the contradictions of life" (Dávila). And "Hierarchy is the principle that saves the contradictions" (ibid.).

Being that leftists pretend to despise hierarchy and inequality, this alone is sufficient to account for their intellectual superficiality. But they just replace a complex hierarchy with a simple duo- or bi-archy, i.e., state (including its clients and cronies) and subjects.

As we've been saying, an orthoparadox is a fruitful and salutary cosmic complementarity. To slightly modify what Dávila says above, the first misstep is in seeing it as a contradiction, the second in trying to make the contradiction go away by either ignoring one side or reducing one to the other. This is done by religious people no less than the scientistic mob. And it is done most flagrantly and explicitly by leftists and Islamists, neither of whom are good at tolerating ambiguity, complementarity, and hierarchy.

About that term, hierarchy: it is not to be confused with tyranny, since tyranny is not only entirely compatible with the elimination of hierarchy, but usually necessitates its attenuation in order to consolidate power. A hierarchy is an articulated, organismic, multi-leveled whole, whereas -- well, Dávila expresses it perfectly: "Leveling is the barbarian's substitute for order." You can try to rid the world of "exploiters," but you will just elevate the self-styled exploited -- or victim -- to the new exploiter. See Ferguson for details: when the left confers victimhood, it christens a bully.

Which reminds me of something I've been meaning to write about: the function of the Negro in the white liberal imagination. Now, the term "Negro" is meant to be offensive: not to blacks, but to the white liberals who reduce the humanity of blacks to their skin color, so as to -- in their imagination -- cleanse or purify themselves of sin, and to render themselves superior. Like, say, Chris Matthews, they turn a man into a Negro in order to feel superior to another white man. The black person is just an anonymous placeholder for a psychic process in the white liberal imagination.

The idea actually occurred to me before the Missouri madness, when reading this biography of Samuel Johnson. What insight Johnson had into the devious ways of the self-justifying conscience!

First, he writes of how man doesn't live in "the world," but "in idea." For example, what is a longing for celebrity but an unacknowledged wish to take up space in the minds of a bunch of anonymous nobodies, the more the better? It's the idea of being an idea in the minds of other idiots who live in ideas: a fantasy at both ends, which results in "a conspiracy for the destruction of paper" -- or film, or bandwidth, or airtime.

Johnson observes that censure is "willingly indulged because it always implies some superiority." This is so much a part of daily life as to be a banality, but one must never forget that there are two ways to censure and condemn, only one of which is healthy.

One must of course recognize, condemn, and fight what is evil, but only if and because it is evil. It is obviously evil to call a good evil, but on a more subtle level it is a kind of moral evil to get a secret thrill from the condemnation, because, as Johnson suggests, it covertly implies a moral or intellectual superiority in the one who indulges it.

So we really shouldn't take pleasure in the condemnation. We can have fun with it, as we do here at One Cosmos, but the moment you begin using it as a tool of superiority, you are rendered inferior. You know, humility: if you don't have an abundance of it, you're just wrong. For "an individual can ease his guilt by magnifying or dwelling on faults that seem different from his own." It's like going to confession, only you're confessing someone else's sin.

Bate writes that "In all this a fundamental motive is the desire to relieve our sense of unfavorable disparity between ourselves and others." We are always jockeying for position in an imaginary hierarchy, at least if we are not careful.

Of course, it is not intrinsically wrong to regard oneself as "higher" than another, so long as the judgment is both objective and disinterested. I am in some senses "higher" than my son, but it is just a banal matter of fact, and does nothing to boost my self-esteem, covert or otherwise. Furthermore, if I am lucky, he will someday surpass me, so there is no personal interest in somehow freezing the superiority in place.

Instead of lowering others in our imagination, we should of course "try to raise ourselves." But "to lessen others" is just far too easy, plus it becomes addictive after awhile. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but I think this goes to the literal compulsiveness with which white liberals deal with race: they simply cannot get past it, because it feels too good to obsess over it.

Truly, you can't get away from it. For example, this weekend I was trying to enjoy the Little League World Series, but the announcers simply wouldn't let you forget that the Chicago team was made up of ALL NEGROES! And they were from the JACKIE ROBINSON Little League. And once upon a time Jackie Robinson couldn't play major league baseball because he was a NEGRO! But look at us! We're white liberals and we LOVE NEGROES! We're not like those old WHITE CONSERVATIVES who hated Negroes, even though they were DEMOCRATIC PROGRESSIVES! Truth and history don't matter, because it's all about using Negroes to feel MORALLY SUPERIOR!

It's all so inappropriate -- as obnoxious as the constant boner pill ads -- but like I said, it's a compulsion.

I would advise you to read the article linked above, for Williamson demolishes the myth that southern Democrats were "conservative." Rather, they "were practically indistinguishable from their non-southern Democrats" on the vast majority of other important issues: "Contrary to the myth of the conservative southern Democrat, the sons of the Confederacy voted en bloc with the GOP on a vanishingly small number of issues." Rather, they supported the progressive agenda 87% of the time.

But that doesn't matter, because the myth feels too good, and the white liberal relies upon it to elevate himself over the rest of us. That his policies are destructive to blacks, both individually and collectively, is of no consequence whatsoever. Nor does he care if he elevates toxic sociopaths such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson to the status of "leaders," so long as doing so provokes that tingle of superiority. The latter is the very source of any power wielded by the race hustlers, from Eric Holder on up.

You could say that Chris Matthews' infamous tingle wasn't caused by Obama; rather, vice versa: Obama is the product of millions of such self-deceptive moral tingles.

A Stranger on My Own Home Planet

Yes, remystification is a good thing. It is what the Raccoon strives for. However, this is to be sharply distinguished from mere mystification, which is either a sentimental or profit-driven erosion of distinctions rooted in magical thinking -- deepaking the chopra -- or a kind of cynical blocking of inquiry around a position that cannot be rationally defended -- political correctness.

Or as Chesterton said, "There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic."

Which is why Obama's defenders naturally call him a "pragmatist," of all things, the purpose being to throw a shroud of mystification over his dogmatism -- to blur, not clarify.

Chesterton also observed that "the main problem for philosophers" is how to reconcile -- or tolerate -- the following orthoparadox: how to "contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honor of being our own town?

"We need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable."

On that same fortuitous page we read that "All things grow more paradoxical as we approach the central truth." I know exactly what GK means, but again, mere paradox can be employed in the defense of mystification. In contrast, orthoparadoxy combines the utmost in clarity with the last weird in mystery: wonder and welcome, fascination and comfort, weirdness and security, strangers in our own hometown.

With that in mind, to what does the word God refer? Correct: it is a Mystery. But does this mean we can say nothing about God -- or that talk of God amounts to so much nothing? How then do we even have the word? We are not pneumababbling deconstructionists: we believe that words have referents in reality and that reality is intelligible in the form of words.

The problem, I suppose, is that God is the reality, so it is not possible to stand outside that reality in order to "refer" to it. Good point.

Still, we reject this as needless mystification: all wonder and no welcome. It is simultaneously too weird and not weird enough. Because what would be really weird is if creatures could have genuine insight into their Creator.

I will cut to the chase and say that I am entirely persuaded (with important modifications) by Harshorne's conception of God as not absolute, except insofar as he is absolute relativity. Furthermore, to posit God as absolute-absolute is to drain both God and world of all mystery, except in the annoying sense of "why does He bother?"

Because if God knows exactly how everything is going to play out, then there is no contingency: all is necessity, right down to the most infinitesimal decimal. This post, for example, was written before the foundation of the world. Which I would suggest is abject mystification, or in other words, grandiose cosmic bullshit.

What I don't quite get is how people in the Judeo-Christian stream would go for this conception, for revelation reveals some rather astonishing facts about God. There are many, but some of the critical ones are that he is person; that he is creator; that he is love; and that (for Christians) he is three. But the absolute in the philosophical sense could be none of these things.

What is also interesting is that the Christians most likely to embrace the notion of God as philosophical absolute are fundamentalists who are otherwise extremely wary about philosophical contamination of Christianity. But the idea of an unchanging Absolute is again a Greek import.

One of our teachstones is that man is the image and likeness of the Creator. The orthodox conception is that the image is analogous to the potential, whereas likeness is its actualization, i.e., theosis.

Now, if God is the unchanging absolute, this would imply that the best man would be the one who is likewise immutable, not subject to change or suffering, radically complete, an ainsoferable gnosis-all. First of all, that would be impossible, short of death. But even if possible, would it be admirable?

Besides, what is a person? Is a person without social relations even conceivable? No.

This is not to suggest that God is not absolute, because he is. But one of Hartshorne's excellent orthoparadoxes is not only that his relativity -- his capacity for real relationship -- is absolute, but that relativity both surpasses and includes his absoluteness -- just like any other person!

You might say that God's absoluteness is analogous to "character" in a human being. Character is what doesn't change, what endures over time despite changing circumstances. So to say, for example, that God is "good," or "love," or "creativity," is to refer to absoluteness, except converted into a dynamic verb instead of a static noun, so to speak.

Can love ever be static? Creativity? Knowledge? Speech? Life? I wouldn't even say that God is three so much as perpetually three-ing. And there is no unchanging noun behind or above this verbal dynamism, on pain of God not being a subjective Person-in-relation but an impersonal object.

Strangers on our own wondrous home planet:

The Theory of Divine Relativity: Nothing Exceeds the Speed of One

Good definition of orthoparadox: "For the Christian the truth is in tension between certain contrary propositions." Thus, "theology has no function in resolving the conflict, but in showing its necessity" (Dávila).

The etymology of paradox is para + doxos, i.e., contrary to thinking, or thoughts that seem to run counter to one another. Ortho-paradox borrows from it and from ortho-doxy, meaning "correct opinion."

Therefore, orthoparadox -- which began life as one of those annoying but harmless portmanteaus compulsively tossed out by Petey -- has come to actually mean something in the Raccoon luxicon, something quite important and even central to understanding our cosmic situation. It is a joke no more, or at least a serious guffah HA!

Orthoparadox must be distinguished from mere paradox, which implies a problem in the data or in the thinker, something that can eventually be overcome, e.g. a false assumption or naive expectation or hidden variable.

For example, Einstein spent a lot of time thinking about certain paradoxes of classical physics before he resolved them by vaulting himself to an entirely new plane. However, that plane has now generated paradoxes of its own, most conspicuously, the disjunction between quantum physics and special relativity, or between locality and nonlocality. In short, special relativity insists that nothing can exceed the speed of light, while the cosmos feels otherwise.

And as it so happens, "feel" is more than just a figure of speech. Rather, it is actually central to Whitehead's metaphysic, which in turn forms the basis of process theology. For what is feeling? For our purposes, it is a kind of spontaneous interior knowing, which in turn implies a wavelike connectedness or unity of things.

Let's zoom out for a moment and consider the big picture: the Christian truth alluded to above by Dávila posits -- or embodies -- several irreducible orthoparadoxes of the greatest possible significance, for example, Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrection. Expressed in the simplest possible way, God is One and Three; Divine and human; and Life in death.

None of these are paradoxes, nor are they mere mysteries that cannot be thought about. Nevertheless, as Dávila says, "In clumsy hands theology becomes the art of making mystery ridiculous." What I would say is that when the typical theologian reaches the threshold of a paradox, he makes a special plea to Mystery, and hopes you won't ask any more questions.

One of the most annoying examples of this is in the attempt to reconcile divine omnipotence with the obvious existence of evil. This is a difficult one to squirm out of, which is why even serious theologians will throw up their hands and say, for example, "God's ways are not our ways." Thanks for the tip!

The first thing I want to say is that perhaps God's ways are more like our ways than some assume. I mean, you and I want to eliminate evil, don't we? I always go back to something our Unknown Friend said, to the effect that God doesn't control history -- after all, he himself was crucified in history. At the very least, he doesn't control history in the way you imagine -- like a tyrannical dictator who eliminates freedom.

Here we are very much in the realm of orthoparadox, i.e., "the Creator of history crucified in history," which is a little like me jumping into this post and allowing myself to be physically pummeled by commenters.

Back to that idea of "feeling." Humans are social beings. Why? Or first, how? Because of "fellow feeling," or sympathy with and for our fellow man. When my son hurts, I hurt even more. Why? Well, Hartshorne writes that while humans love and care, they do not do so "perfectly." Our "social awareness" is mixed with a good deal of selfishness, or narcissism, or social unawareness -- granted, not as much as an Obama, who is so heartbroken that he nearly misses his tee time -- but we clearly have limitations, or we'd go insane.

Not so God, who is "socially aware -- period" (Hartshorne). He is the source and ground of our own soci-ability, which is to say, love. Thus, "We do not 'love' literally, but with qualifications" (ibid.); taken literally, love is God. He is the literal instance of what is for us a category. Likewise "knowing." We can know a little bit about everything, but we cannot know everything about a single thing. But God is knowing -- period.

Now, this knowing is, in my opinion, also the ground of nonlocality; you might say that nonlocality is the shadow of God's omniscience, or in other words, a consequence of the radical unity of things forged by God's knowledge-love. This interior unity is prior to any outward multiplicity. It is not so much "faster" then the speed of light as prior to it, for it is truly One Cosmos, and nothing arrives here more instantaneously than Oneness.

Well, I didn't have time to get nearly as deeply into this as I had wanted, but we'll take another plunge on Monday.

Snicking Suspicions and Absolute Stupidity

For many months now, I've been intending to get back to Hartshorne and to my modified neotraditional vision of his process theology -- since last November, I think. And even as I wrote that sentence, I thought of several other loose strands I need to follow up on. The cosmic area rug is getting a bit ragged along the edges.

Then again, maybe I'm just fooling myself, and it's all as Owen Barfield once said of C.S. Lewis: "somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything." You know, holo-pneumatic, or a soul fractal.

As an aside, I can't say I remember much of the past 2,500 posts. However, I have noticed that if I encounter even a single sentence of mine, I know instantly that that is ME. If they are someone else's words, I know right away that I wouldn't have expressed it that way. Therefore, "I" am indeed somehow present in the words. Is this true of everyone? I have no idea. But it's analogous to how the immune system, on the material level, distinguishes me from not me. Most of the time.

And now that I think about it, some of you folks have wondered how it is that I plow through so many books. Well, I don't exactly skim, because that implies a value neutral or global approach. It is too broad a description. Rather, it is as if I am "looking for something," and I always recognize it when I find it. I just skim past the things I am not looking for.

However, it's a little more complicated than that, because I don't necessarily know what I'm looking for until I find it. Thus, I am like a lock searching for the key -- the key to myself. When I find it, there is a satisfying sensation that feels like the "snick" of a good stick shift. I suppose it is related to what was said above about recognizing myself in my sentences, except that it's someone else's sentence. That's what it's like with one of Dávila's aphorisms, right? Snick!

I wonder if this means that I cannot actually be wrong or right, only Bob? Well, yes and no. What we are shooting for is the universal in the personal, or universal truth uniquely expressed. Both sides are necessary for the snick of the manuall trancemission.

Here is a beautiful example of something that deeply snicks in me: "The universe is not difficult to read because it is a hermetically sealed text, but because it is a text without punctuation." Thus, "Without the adequate ascending and ascending intonation, its ontological syntax is unintelligible" (Dávila).

The universe is not difficult to read. To the contrary! Any idiot can read it, except they put the punctuation where they please, which messes up the semantics.

To cite a prominent example, materialists place a period after matter. But who says the period goes there, or that that is a complete sentence? Indeed, what if the sentence, like Hebrew, is read right to left, not left to right? Or, more to the point, up to down, not down to up?

That is precisely what a Raccoon believes: that the sentence runs from God to matter, not vice versa.

Similarly, a metaphysical Darwinian has convinced himself that there is a period after life. As such, man is not a new sentence, but rather, just an adjective or footnote appended to an ape.

This is the whole point of the peculiar punctuation of The Book, in that each chapter is both discrete and continuous, particle and wave: the whole book is a wavicle, to be precisely blurry. And the wavicle is me, I guess. One might say that the wave is universal while the particle is singular.

Here is another snicky aphorism that expresses a samething psimilar: "Nothing affects divine transcendence; but human attitudes, in changing, regulate the tides of his immanence." As such, "God infiltrates out to the tips of the branches or recedes back into his empyrean."

What I would say is that the waters of (↓) are always present but that human beings -- both individually and collectively -- may "regulate its tide," so to speak. The left, for example, has built a seawall to keep it out. For them, God has indeed "receded," which may be filed under the heading "be careful what you hope and vote for, dryling."

Back to the first aphorism about the cosmic syntax, and how it is unintelligible without the proper intonation. Obviously, spoken language preceded written language, and spoken language has no punctuation. Rather, meaning is conveyed via emphasis, pauses, musicality, timing, rhythm, etc. The punctuation is not so black-and-white, nor is the speech uniform, like the Steven Hawking voice generator.

All of this is critical to bear in mind if it is true that the Word is God. And if it isn't, then the cosmos truly is a tail wagged by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying tenure.

Now, what does this have to do with process theology? Well, let's begin with an implicit commentary on yesterday's post, in particular, the bit about positive knowledge sometimes being a mask for omniscient ignorance.

Let's stipulate that all knowledge is by definition relative. The question is, relative to what? The Raccoon says: relative to reality, moron. But the moron says: relative to language. In other words, words don't reveal -- much less incarnate -- reality; rather, language is absolutely relative to language, in an absurcular snorecase.

Example?

Well, consider all those crazies and savages in Ferguson, up to and including the Attorney Generalismo: to what is their "knowledge" relative? It is certainly not relative to reality, at least as far as we know. Nor is it relative to "nothing"; it's not just "nonsense."

Rather, it is relative to a narrative, or in other words, other words. Thus, this narrative of theirs is not properly relative at all, but rather, absolute. Therefore, words and facts that do not relate to the narrative are sentences about "nothing" -- but really, sentences about racism.

Therefore, all speech about the situation confirms the narrative of white racism. For example, my present line of thought is not about what you think it is, it's about racism. The left's narrative is always unfalsifiable, and certainly not by mere reality!

We have all heard that "snicking" sound in the mind of a leftist who has succeeded in twisting reality into the shape of his narrative. It's no doubt a satisfying feeling for them, but to call it a snick is an abuse of the term. It's more like the perverse satisfaction Procrustes might have felt when violently lopping off a head or amputating a limb.

But what I really want to emphasize is that knowledge is the most relative thing conceivable, in that it is always relative to a known. A difference between God and man is that God's knowledge is absolutely relative, in the sense that it is always perfectly and infallibly relative to the truth of things.

Thus, the problem with the left's narrative(s) is not that it is too relative. Rather, it is absolute, and permits of no relation to truth and reality.

Reality: A Spiraling Vertical Space Between Two Infinite Mirrors

Remystification of the world is more of a negative capability than a positive one: you just have to stop pretending, assoul.

Negative capability? That's a term-of-artist Keats came up with to describe

"the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts." It is "the ability of the individual to perceive, think, and operate beyond any presupposition of a predetermined capacity of the human being. It further captures the rejection of the constraints of any context, and the ability to experience phenomena free from epistemological bounds, as well as to assert one's own will and individuality upon their activity."

In Keats' own words, it is the ability of a man to tolerate "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

How about that: there's even a paragraph about Bion, who really didn't influence me beyond plagiarizing him for all he's worth:

"The twentieth-century British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion elaborated on Keats's term to illustrate an attitude of openness of mind which he considered of central importance, not only in the psychoanalytic session, but in life itself.

"For Bion, negative capability was the ability to tolerate the pain and confusion of not knowing, rather than imposing ready-made or omnipotent certainties upon an ambiguous situation or emotional challenge."

This is especially important in psychotherapy, where one must tolerate the ambiguity and not foreclose the bipersonal space with mere knowledge, which any "expert" can do, in any field, therefore Pundits.

Rather, some truths -- the humanly important ones -- must be experienced. Indeed, Bion's first book was called Learning From Experience. Where else does one really learn? Let us count the ways!

No, let's not. But let us throw in some gratuitous insultainment, in that Obama's omniscient ignorance is exactly in proportion to a contaminated pool of positive knowledge of which he is nevertheless quite certain. I don't think his narcissism permits any of the negative kind.

Thus the Meltdown into and through the core of reality, as the latter refuses to conform to his knowledge. As Taranto observes, "If it's taken Obama this long to sense that he isn't omnipotent, maybe he isn't omniscient either." Wo. That would be something.

Dávila has an aphorism for the occasion, that "Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know" -- let alone what they do not and cannot know. And "Each person sees in the world exactly what he deserves to see." I am sorry to report that Americans deserve to live in the world Obama sees, since they twice elected this ignoranus (which is of course an assoul who has no idea what he doesn't know).

Those rioters and looters in Ferguson -- they too see the world they deserve. They too are ignorant with positive knowledge -- most conspicuously, the knowledge that an innocent young man was gunned down by the police for no reason but his race. Why do people want to believe things that are patently untrue? Might as well ask why people want to be liberal: because it makes the irritating ignorance go away by replacing it with high-density stupidity.

Which is one of the reasons why "The most repulsive spectacle is that of the ascendancy of a living professor over a dead genius," for it always means that higher mystery is being displaced by lowdown fashionable stupidity. There is mystery in great literature, great poetry, great music: indeed, that is a measure of its greatness, that it radiates an inexhaustible mystery, a luminous darkness, so to speak. How does it do that?

I would say that the palpable radiation is actually a kind of shadow of its inwardness. It is the penumbra around its seductive allure; it is soul calling out to soul, or depth to depth. And not only. For in the final unalysis, this is the very structure of reality, which I have attempted to schematize with the pneumaticons O <--> (¶).

Ironically, the idea for these pneumaticons goes back to Bion, who developed an "empty" symbol system to deal with psychological change and development, whereas my purpose is to abstractly outline the complementary ontological confrontation between spirit and cosmos: the least and most we can really say is that there is an inexhaustible "reality," or O, at one end; and the human spirit (¶) at the other: the result is a spiraling vertical space, or worldpool, between two infinite mirrors.

The bad news is that the space goes both up and down. Or just say right and left. Or, in the astringent words of Dávila,

Between the profane world and the divine world there is the sacred world; and God is the region that one who walks forward finally reaches. One who does not walk in circles.

A progressive walks only in circles. If we are lucky.

Magical Mystery & Tragical History

I could complain about having no time again this morning, but that would just be a waste of what little time I do have, wouldn't it? Maybe this will change next year, when I can start raiding my retirement accounts and extract a little slack.

And what are we to do with our slack? What is its purpose? Dávila says that "Our most urgent task is that of reconstructing the mystery of the world."

Normally we wouldn't use "slack" and "task" in the same sentence, but there are always worldly currents running counter to the stream of slack -- or just vertical gravity -- for which reason doing nothing can be the most difficult activity of all.

I am often reminded of the adage that we have a few -- or even one -- guiding ideas to which we return again and again. One of mine is a phrase that popped into my head long ago: the remystification of the world. The Official Narrative is that, over the past 300 or 3,000 or 30,000 years, mankind has experienced a gradual demystification of the world.

This was indeed the thrust of Comte's naive positivism, which held that mankind evolved in predictable stages from the theological, to the abstract/metaphysical, to the positive/scientific. There are so many things wrong with this that it's difficult to know where to begin, but let's just say that these categories are complementary, not linear.

Nor, for the Actually Sentient, does this supposedly linear development result in some kind of final unveiling of the Radical Mystery of it all. If anything, the mystery only deepens, and not just in a manner of speaking.

Rather, someone actually agrees with Bob that "Knowledge is not unlike a circle of light in a dark field of unknowing. The circumference of the circle of light is the size of our exposure to the dark. Each time the circumference of knowledge becomes larger, the length of our exposure to the unknown advances geometrically."

Thus, we should all welcome the new Light, but at the same time retain our humility and awe before the infinite mystery of the expanding Darkness. You could call this philosophy Logical Negativism, but people would no doubt get the wrong idea and confuse it with the Illogical Negativism of the left.

I suppose where Comte and his scientistic progeny are most naive is with the implicit idea that scientific knowledge is somehow unconditioned and transcendent of any cultural, historical, or personal perspective, whereas religion and metaphysics are at the opposite end: hopelessly contaminated by the human perspective.

But for the Raccoon, it is precisely the opposite: science is always necessarily perspectival, whereas metaphysics and theology provide the best and most objective view possible. Nor would I ever place metaphysics after theology, for to do so denies the very reason for theology, which is to communicate the ultimate transhuman truth of things -- the truth that sets us free (into slack), among other benefits.

In other words and ethereal worlds, what revelation reveals is meta-physical (or trans-natural) truths, while metaphysics illuminates what is latent or mythologically expressed in revelation.

That is to say, the most profound, universal, and culturally unconditioned truths are to be found, say, in Genesis. To pretend that science has somehow evolved beyond these primordial truths is one of the Founding Fantasies of the left.

Ironically, the regression to positivism doesn't lead the way to Objectivity and Universality, but rather, the opposite: the Seven Bad Ideas of Leftism are a kind of perverse remystification of the world, in that scientism drains the world of mystery at one end, while the religiously untutored masses dive into subjectivity at the other end, hoping for a little oxygen and light, i.e., a bit of Slack!

Solipsism, relativism, subjectivism, irrationalism, pervertarianism, nihilism, anything. Just get me out of this machine or cage or ideology or skull or skin or something!

Hey, it works, or it wouldn't have persisted since Genesis 3. "Leftism dulls the mental acuity. That is its purpose." In other words, it diminishes the pain of the demystification.

What Untamed Envy Looks Like

No time for a post today, and possibly tomorrow. But here's a timely aphorism by Dávila: "The worst demagogues are not recruited from the envious poor, but from among the embarrassed wealthy."

This fully explains the high-low composition of the Democratic party, with super-wealthy elites at one end and lofo and lower IQ hordes at the other. You could say that the difference between the two is that the elites are bankrupt in every way except financially.

This little formula explains why the wealthiest counties in the nation trend Democrat, just as do places like Ferguson. The two are locked in a deathly parasitic embrace, for liberals destroy and have destroyed the very people they most rely upon to support them at the polls, and the underclass can be relied upon to support the very people and polices that ensure its own continued ruin. The resultant civilizational collapse is what they call "progress."

Is greed a sufficient reason to account for wealth? If so, then every human being would be wealthy. But envy is a sufficient reason to account for poverty, and the left's core idea -- well, to be perfectly accurate, it is not an idea. Rather, envy is a human instinct that cannot be eliminated, only indulged or overcome. A necessary condition of national wealth is breaking through the envy barrier, so that people can become successful and wealthy without incurring the primitive "evil eye" of the envious.

But at the same time, the successful must tolerate the inevitable envy of others without surrendering to the impulse to make the envy go away by feeding it. This only fuels the envy, which is precisely why race riots only began after the greatest successes of the civil rights movement. (And to be clear, the cosmic imperative to exercise charity toward one's fellow man has nothing to do with appeasing envy; they arise from radically different places.)

After 1965 the movement transitioned from advocating universal principles to nurturing universal envy and resentment. If an Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson -- or Jeremiah Wright -- are actually your "leaders," then that is a hint that you have spiritually hit bottom.

President Wormwood and Professor Screwtape

If, as implied in The Screwtape Letters, "demons themselves are teachers," then teachers are -- or can be -- demonic.

I mean, someone is teaching this shit. So let's give course credit where it's due: Obama is our first president to have been the unalloyed creature of an insular educational system created and staffed almost wholly by leftists, devoid of meaningful diversity. Thus, we should not be surprised that his administration has produced no winners. Except for Jimmy Carter, who has plunged to a secure #2 on the list of all-time worst presidents.

A creature of the system. Now, we are all creatures, and we all exist in horizontal and vertical systems of dependence and interdependence. But it is not without reason that Mr. Screwtape is especially proud of his particular system and of the students it has tempted and molded. A coronerstone of this malefic system, according to Jacobs, is "the Historical Point of View" (although familiar with it, I haven't actually read the whole of Screwtape, only passages, so all quotes are from or in Jacobs).

Screwtape assures his pupil, Wormwood, that while "only the learned read old books" -- to be exact, books published prior to the establishment of the Oprah Winfrey Show -- they are nevertheless, thanks to the System, "of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom while doing so."

How does this System work its dark magic? "We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View," which, "put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true."

Rather, the modern denizen of the looniversity bin will place the source in its historical context, and if he's really successful, explain it with reference to the author's class, or gender, or sexual orientation. But by no means will he regard the author

"as a possible source of knowledge -- to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or behavior -- this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded."

Oh Gagdad, will you ever give up the cheap polemics? Well, let's consider our presidential product of this demonic System. Not only is he a Wormwoodian student, he's a Screwtapian Master, a Constitutional Scholar, no less. What sort of wisdom did he acquire from contact with our learned and venerable founders?

First, he dismisses the quaint idea that there is wisdom to be had, for these privileged heteronormative aristocrats forged only "a charter of negative liberties,” which places severe constraints on what the state can do to us.

Seriously, it's almost as if these white dudes were frightened of state power, as if the state, of all things, can endanger our natural rights!

Our Scholar-President went on to observe that our founding document “says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.”

Hmm. Are we reading the same document? I'm pretty sure there's something in there about ensuring domestic tranquility and securing the blessings of liberty to our posterior. In other words, the Constitution is supposed to have our backs. Its very reason for being is to secure and promote the natural rights alluded to in the Declaration and specified in various amendments, e.g., life, liberty, property, self defense, speech, assembly, worship, etc.

A man who is tired of those things is tired of life. And he seriously needs to get one, instead of devoting his annoying existence to eroding ours.

But that is not what well-trained demons do. Let's face it: they love to fuck with people, because without that perverse joy, they are reduced to absolute boredom. If you want to picture a black hole, imagine a Clinton without politics.

Another adultolescent genius, Ezra Klein, has checked into this Constitution business and assures us that the whole thing is "confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done."

Klein's equally brilliant interlocutor muses that Republicans sure give this antiquated document -- over a hundred years old! -- "a whole lot of lip service." I wonder why? It's almost as if they are products of a different teacher from a different system.

Look at how Klein views the Law of the Land: it not only confuses but frustrates him, because it interferes with what he and our tykeminded progressives want to "get done."

But that is such a passive way to put it! For it is a truism that in order for the state to do something for you, it must first be given the power to do something to you (like fine you for not buying its crappy health insurance). But the state tends to have a selective institutional memory, and is prone to forget all about the first part of the bargain, so we end up paying an awful lot of money for the privilege of our own subjugation. After all, the business end of the state is the IRS, which is all do-to and no do-for.

Back to the contours of the Demonic System. "The Historical Point of View is one of the chief means by which we insulate ourselves from the possible wisdom of our ancestors," but not the only means. Another is what Lewis calls "Bulverism" -- or what the left calls Diversity and Multiculturalism and which the Raccoon calls the Absurdity of Absolute Relativism.

If you have attended a Screwtape-sponsored college, one of the first things you will have learned is how to Bulverize an author or text. It requires no skill at all, and yet, magically elevates one above the author who is being Bulverized. It is an intoxicating temptation because it renders the inferior soul superior to his superiors, and as we saw from the examples above (Professors Klein, Obama, and O'Donnell), it is difficult for the temporo-centric soul to resist.

Dávila has a perfectly apt aphorism to describe Bulverism: "Reducing another's thought to its supposed motives prevents us from understanding it." For example, just recently Harry Reid attacked a Supreme Court decision on the grounds that it was decided by "five white men." Even leaving the Bulverizing absurdity aside, it is an empirical fact that Harry Reid is whiter than Clarence Thomas's eyeballs.

But it doesn't matter. The Wormwoodian apprentice will have heard the dog whistle, and that is sufficient to settle the matter. Same with Citizens United. Turns out the Constitution does empower the state to limit free speech so long as a "corporation" is engaging in it, such as the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and Hollywood, not to mention colleges and universities, which are big businesses too.

Screwtape assures his students of "the great truth [!] that refutation is no necessary part of argument."

Rather "Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error." President Obama has mastered this method to perfection. He would never condescend to prove he is right or his adversaries wrong. Rather, they just be hatin' on him! Stop hatin' all the time!

"That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century." His "diabolical purpose" is "to remove questions of truth and falsehood from the mind's life." The well-trained student does not think of doctrines as true or false, but rather, "'academic' or 'practical,' 'outworn or contemporary,' 'conventional or ruthless.'" "Don't waste time" trying to convince with argument, rather, with jargon, shame, superiority, etc., such as "we are on the right side of history." In short, believe "not because it is true, but for some other reason. That's the game."

Once lured into the game, then "people can find themselves unable to recognize the difference [between truth and falsehood] even when it is put before them plainly: they come to possess invincible ignorance."

And what we call invincible ignorance is what products of Screwtape's system call the Smartest President Ever!

Laughing Our Way to the Brink

"With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored" (Dávila). Which explains why the earnest do-gooders of the left are not just wrong but tedious.

Even to God, who "tried to survive in the Newtonian universe as a bloodless specter cornered in a remote heaven," but "died of boredom."

In reality, "God is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything."

Indeed, God is the term without which the universe is nothing, precisely. Is that too nebulous for you? Well, "Any straight line leads straight to hell," so thank God for the crookward paths without which existence would be a machine instead of an adventure.

Ever notice how the scientistic worker bee combines "the most refined ideas about pieces of the universe" with "the most abject cliches about the universe itself"?

Which speaks to a kind of nearsightedness at one end and systematic blindness -- or cardiomyopia -- at the other. All trees and no forest means no happy or funny campers, just a bunch of sober, tree-counting arborists. Such an expert "believes he is a superior being because he knows what, by definition, anyone can learn."

But you know, "There is evidence that disappears along with those who deserve to perceive it." My Great Dane likes to play a fighting game in which he spins around and thinks he has disappeared. But I see him just the same -- just as God sees the atheist.

And wisdom? Forget about it. "The wisdom of this age comes down to observing the world through the bitter and dirty eyes of a depraved adolescent." Or maybe you've never looked into Obama's eyes.

I tell ya', reactionaries get no respect. Turning our backs on progressive hope? As if we aren't turning our face toward the light!

I don't blame them for thinking of us as terrorists, for "The imagination quietly piles up its dynamite under the dogmas that naturalisms rest upon."

Imagine actually being stuck in the progressive prison of the left, or if they could successfully seal up the windows and block the exits! Of course they want to, but nothing short of totalitarianism can accomplish this, which is why leftism is inherently pulled in that soul-killing direction.

Thus it is no surprise that "Contemporary literature seems like a cacophony of eunuchs in heat," or that "The modern citizens' libertarian demands are limited to claiming the right to copulate freely in the slave prison in which they are held." Leftism is a dungeon with conjugal rights. But "mystery is the only infinity that does not seem like a prison."

For the left, it takes real courage to break through doors that are wide open or to defy a norm they are not equipped to understand. But "The fool imagines that the delight in breaking rules grows indefinitely after having abolished rules altogether." Or in other words, without us, the reactionaries of the left would have no fun at all, for where's the sport in overrunning "fortresses without defenders"?

DON'T TEAR DOWN THIS WALL, MR. CONSERVATIVE, BECAUSE THE ADOLESCENTS WILL HAVE NOTHING TO REBEL AGAINST, AND NONE OF US KNOWS NOW HOW TO BUILD ANYTHING!

As we have said before, argument is fruitless with these ideological zombies. They cannot be convinced, only converted -- or un-converted rather, since the descent into leftism is the consequence of a prior conversion.

All minimally alert humans know that "man has in the back of his soul a crouching animal" and that "a just society needs to be protected from human perversity." The leftist brings this crouching animal to the forefront of the soul and shields it from justice -- from what it both needs and deserves.

And justice? "[L]abeling a sealed package 'Justice' has made it easy to introduce any contraband." Like in St. Louis: no justice no peace, or in other words, give the crouching and snarling animal what it wants!

Imagine trying to convince such an animal! At best you can enunciate clearly that there is neither peace nor justice without order, perhaps with some added emphasis from the business end of a billy club. But that wouldn't be progressive, which "finally comes down to stealing from man what ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price what debases him."

Well, not quite. With dependence on the state at an all time high, the debasement is free. As if there is no cost, neither material nor moral.

(All aphorisms by Nicolás Gómez Dávila)

One of These Things is Not Like the Others: Divine Comedy, Stand-Up Cosmology, Suicide

What is the nature of that little by which we may know much?

We'll let that one percolate awhile in the nonconscious and come back to it later, or maybe answer it in a roundabout way. But surely this is part of the answer: "He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary" (Dávila).

Alternatively, one may bar extreme seekers from these black diamond spiritual trails by banishing the vocabulary. Perhaps even easier is what I have called "dimensional defense mechanisms," whereby a person essentially amputates higher realities -- the vertical -- from his soul and from his experience.

This is the approach of positivists, historicists, Darwinists, and the rest of the usual academic rabble. Let's say I don't like spaces, or I'm afraid of them -- you know, agoraphobic. One may defend oneself from the attendant anxiety by clinging to the second dimension -- the plane -- and pretending the third -- space -- doesn't exist. Just as Flatland is a defense against Sphereworld, atheism is a defense against spirit.

Yes, it happens. There is a kind of autism that is not genetic but acquired. It's been awhile, but there was a particular theorist, Frances Tustin, who wrote a number of interesting books on this subject. Another term for it is "encapsulation," which evokes the idea of being cut off from some part of reality and being enclosed in one's private Idaho.

Importantly, this private Idaho need not be something we would normally associate with mental illness. Or, think of it this way: as there is tailored clothing that fits us perfectly, there is also readymade clothing we may purchase off the rack.

It is no exaggeration to say that an ideology is a readymade neurosis (and sometimes psychosis), which has a number of advantages over a custom mental illness: first, it will be collective, and there is safety -- or faux sanity -- in numbers.

Analogously, if everyone is wearing wide-flared bell bottoms -- or platform shoes, or rings in one's nose -- then one doesn't look like such an ass wearing them.

Second, a well made retail ideology will cover most of the bases of human experience, the difference being that instead of being that wise little by which one may know much, it will be that ideological little by which one may know even less.

Example.

There are frankly too many to chronicle, and besides, it isn't difficult for you to draw the connections. Darwinism is an obvious one (by which I mean Darwinism "without remainder," as if it is a sufficient explanation of man's capacities); for Voegelin, it generally comes down to positivism and scientism, which are perfectly fitting suits for an adolescent McDullard.

The adolescent, of course, will continue to grow, and if he is normal, outgrow the garment and toss it aside. In other cases he may, to his surprise, burst through the seams. But some people -- we call them the tenured -- wear an adolescent suit made of iron. Imagine a teenage knight growing out of his armor. I wonder what that would look like? It's kind of repulsive to think about, but so too is academia, and for the same reason.

Speaking of autism and encapsulation, I ran into this article on Why Funny People Kill Themselves. I personally found you-know-who more irritating than funny, but the question is, was his humorous persona a kind of autistic prison?

First, I don't know if it's true that funny people are any more vulnerable to depression and suicide than anyone else. While I have heard that creative people in general are more prone to mood disorders, I wonder if this is simply because we hear so much more from creative individuals? They are more able to articulate their subjective states, whereas the average boob may be frightfully unable to do so. A lot of people have no earthly idea they are depressed, and their depression mainly manifests by making others feel depressed in their presence.

I mean, what wideawake person would not be a little depressed about the world and about the terms of existence? You might say that in order to not be depressed, you have to be worse than depressed, which is to say, out of touch with reality.

Indeed, In Freud's classic formulation, humor is the highest and most developed defense mechanism. All others are second best or lower.

Having said that, I think it partly depends upon the person. If we pull out old Bion's grid (never mind if you don't know what that is), humor will lay on a spectrum of maturity from, say, Adam Sandler to P.G. Wodehouse, or Jerry Lewis to Samuel Johnson. For me, Robin Williams always had that manic quality which is... well, it's manic, which is to say, a more primitive defense mechanism than humor per se. It is as if the humor is piggybacking on the mania, especially because he seemed unable to turn it off.

The author of the above-linked piece posits four stages whereby the funnyman may end up a deadman by his own hand. Now interestingly, a defense mechanism is always a kind of aggression turned toward the self. Thus, suicide is obviously the ultimate defense mechanism, and yet, it is just the initial death writ large.

One can see this by considering the author's first step; indeed it is rather transparent: "At an early age, you start hating yourself."

True enough, except that the majority of people who who hate themselves are not funny. Intentionally, anyway. Wong would no doubt respond that this is because they don't have the comedy gene, which has some truth to it. People who are not funny should never attempt to be, because they are just annoying.

Step two is the discovery that one may provoke laughter in others. Now, I enjoy making people laugh, but I do not connect it to step one (self-loathing), nor do relate it to a need to control others. To the extent that humor is deployed for these reasons, we have again entered a dimension that has nothing to do with humor per se. After all, the dour Obama is not a humorous person, but he sure loves to control people, and one certainly gets the impression that he exists in an autistic bubble.

Speaking of which, number three, "You soon learned that being funny builds a perfect, impenetrable wall around you -- a buffer that keeps anyone from getting too close and realizing how much you suck."

Really? I hope not. I actually try to do the opposite, that is, use divine comedy and stand-up cosmology to provoke the guffah-HA! experience -- to foster vertical escape, not to fortify the prison.

Number four, "In your formative years, you wind up creating a second, false you..."

Again, true enough, but this "false self" is very much related to the neurotic "autistic self" referenced above. It is a shell, an exoskeleton, a defensive structure that prevents vulnerability and intimacy. The more "open" you are as a person, the more you can sense the closed-ness in others, who generally have no idea how closed they are, because it is an unconscious defense mechanism.

And also, while the false self is an exceedingly common phenomenon, most false selves are not funny. The false self can revolve around anything from politics to entertainment to academics to wealth to sports to fitness to looks...

I hate to break up the party, but the laughter is over. Time to put on my false face and get serious.

In Order to Know Much, You Must Know Little

To paraphrase something Richard Weaver said, in order to know much, we must know little.

This indeed is the purpose of a liberal education, i.e., the assimilation of timeless principles that allow us to accurately interpret the world and to order our lives accordingly. All science is grounded in this same principle, of the reduction of multiplicity to unity -- or particular to universal, local to nonlocal, and finally (in the larger scheme of things), knowledge to wisdom.

Human consciousness exists in a kind of bi-directional dialectical space, "down" into facts, details, and particulars; and "up" into ideas, theories, and principles. Ultimately, one might say that God and Fact define the limits of this space, but the one can never be understood in the absence of the other (even though God is obviously ontologically prior; immanence is a consequence of transcendence, not vice versa).

In one sense, the downworld of facts and particulars becomes increasingly expansive as we descend into it, but not really. In reality, it can lead to specialization, specialization to shrinkage, shrinkage to provincialism, provincialism to deformity, and deformity to tenure.

This constricted way of looking at things tends toward what Voegelin calls a pneumapathological rejection of reality, or a "counterexistential dream world." The modern ideologue collapses this divine-human space because he refuses to live in the unresolvable tension of its complementarity.

Indeed the malignant dream of the left is that if we only create a more powerful and intrusive state, our existential tension will be eliminated. Or else! Liberalism is an experiment that never ends, because the state never learns -- or learns one thing only, how to expand based upon empty promises of deferred human happiness. But if you're still waiting for the state to make you happy, then you'll never be embarrassed by that Obama sticker on your Prius.

For human reality exists only in that space of vertical energies (or attractions), "between the material world and the pneumatic pull from a palpable spiritual source" (McAllister). As such, our first and last temptation -- and this is precisely the lesson of the Genesis 3 space mission -- "is to believe in a symbolic expression of a deformed but fully intelligible reality" (ibid.). In other words, make God and nature conform to man rather than vice versa.

Clearly, in our secular world, the most "educated" person is going to be the most vulnerable to this temptation, due not only to opportunity and access, but to the spiritual pathology that has become normalized in this inverted age. Clever mediocrities are the quickest to conform and the easiest to indoctrinate, therefore Academia.

To plunge into matter is to take flight from spirit (even though, ironically, it is an imaginary flight). However, the loss of spirit is compensated for by a growth -- or better, metastasis -- of pride and vanity. Or, as God shrinks, narcissism expands. And yes, we are looking at you, Obama. You are the end state of the oldest cosmic disease.

To paraphrase (or possibly quote) Weaver again, total immersion in matter makes a man unfit to deal with the problems of matter. Is this not axiomatic? Who does a materialist call when matter is broken? Remember, the materialist cannot stand outside or above matter, any more than the residents of Flatland can perceive their world from the third dimension.

Speaking of which, just as every picture tells a story, every story may be reduced to a picture. This is because man's default mode of thinking is an analogue of the eyes. But to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the deepest things must be seeingly felt or feelingly seen. Or in other words, despite its temptation to detached abstraction, seeing is really just an extension of the sense of touch -- as is true of all the senses. Sight is what it feels like when photons are striking the retina.

Likewise, spiritual in-sight is what it feels like when Spirit touches the intellect. Spiritual wisdom is no less a matter of touching and being touched by God, otherwise it would have no explanation. Indeed, Johnson once wrote a prayer that comes very close to the morning Raccoon prayer, i.e., to the way Toots Mondello taught us to pray: "Almighty God, without whose grace all wisdom is folly, grant [that] thy Holy Spirit not be withheld from me, that I may promote thy glory, and the Salvation both of myself and others."

Or in other words, Save me this day and this post from idiocy and its propagation!

Johnson was not an orthodox Christian, and yet, there really was no category then for what he was. As such, he was more than a little troubled, or at least unsettled, in his faith. Along these lines, he made many timeless observation on our recent subject of imagination, in both its healthy and pathological aspects.

In general, I suppose one could say that a pathological imagination is one that plunges headwrong into the lower vertical.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the lower vertical, mind you. It's just that you need to be accompanied there by an adult. In the absence of adult supervision, it redounds to hell. It will "grow claws and start to tunnel" downward, breathing life into envy, resentment, auto-victimization, entitlement, and illegitimate violence.

This is why the well-ordered soul must be prior to the order of the state, while a principal task of the state is to promote order in the soul -- or at least not its opposite, which is precisely what the left not only encourages but often mandates: you will photograph homosexuals! You will pay for men to cut of their wangs! You will be racist!

Johnson made a subtle observation to the effect that "so few of the hours of life are filled up with objects adequate to the mind of man." This is because, in my view, our mind is ultimately an adequation to God. God -- or the Absolute -- is the only thing fully adequate to our intelligence and understanding. It is not that we should ignore the lower vertical, but rather, see it in the light of the upper vertical. It's simple, really: see the relative in light of the absolute, or time from eternity, or individuality in terms of transcendent communion and love.

If we opt out of this dynamic space, then we may plunge into mischievous uses of the imagination, "to past and future supplemental satisfactions," such that "recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments." This is done to escape from "the vacuities of life," which are mostly vacuities in the soul. For Johnson, it is critical that imagination be regulated or disciplined by reality, otherwise it may become an instrument of torment.

Difficult? Maybe. That's why they call it a spiritual practice. In contrast, living from hope to imaginary hope is one way to go hungry, since it is a refusal of our daily bread. We see how the "future bread" of Obamaism works -- that is, give me your bread, and I promise this time to spend it on more bakeries.

I say, teach a man to bake. And prior to that, to separate the good seed from the bad, to plant, grow, harvest, and eat. But I suppose that's unconstitutional.