What Would Satan Do?

Switching gears for the moment, I want to discuss The Screwtape Letters, which I read for the first time a week or two ago. As readers no doubt know, it consists of a series of tutelary letters from a senior demon, Uncle Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, who is but a novice in soul snatching and possession.

The book is full of my highlights, which implies that it must be "about" something real, even if one doesn't believe Satan is real. Indeed, it is very much as if there is a Satan-shaped influence on the human soul, which we call... Satan.

For this shape is consistent, timeless, and universal, so it must be something. A Jungian archetype? Maybe, but that only begs the question. I studied Jung back in the 1980s, as he is a kind of semi-spiritual alternative to a purely secular psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, I soon enough found him to be simplistic, presumptuous, reductionistic, and incoherent, so I moved on. If you find him adequate, you may want to question your own adequacy.

As usual, I'm going to just flip through the book and blogviate (the g is silent) on whatever arrested my attention and seemed ripe for commentary.

It begins with a quote by Thomas More to the effect that the devil "cannot endure to be mocked." So true is this observation that it also applies the other way around: there is something diabolical in those who cannot endure mockery, who cannot make fun of themselves. Jumping straight to Godwin's Law, do you think Hitler ever laughed at himself? Stalin? Mao? Castro?

Jumping next to Godwin himself, trolls have been mocking me for over 14 years. But if they really want to know what is ridiculous about me, they should just ask. It's never what they think. They always get it wrong.

What is it about self-mockery that is so healthy? Well, for starters, it implies self-awareness, objectivity, and humility. Once again turning this around, there is something demonic in anyone lacking in self-awareness, objectivity, and humility; or at least these are the wounds through which the demonic energies enter and further influence the person.

If we were playing Jeopardy and the answer was "Lacking in self-awareness, objectivity, humility, and irony," I can think of two immediate answers: What is the MSM?! or What is academia?!

I defy anyone to point to something genuinely witty that has ever been written by Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, Charles Blow, or Nicholas Kristof, AKA the Times idiotorial page. This is not intended as an insult. Rather, a diagnosis. Likewise, say what you want about feminism, but it is the cure for hypocardiopathy, or in layman's terms, a light heart.

Jumping ahead momentarily to the next book we will be discussing, Traditional Truth, Poetry, Sacrament, Pieper observes that

one could even go so far as to speak of the cheerfulness connected with not being able to comprehend, a cheerfulness which is closely related to humor and which is based on the fact that man knows that he is a not-absolute being -- a creature.... The claim to absolute certainty contains not only something which is fundamentally humorless but even formally un-human.

And for this very reason -- the combination of blind certitude and utter cluelessness -- these incarnations of incognition are always inadvertently funny, from the demonic Mullahs running Iran into the ground to Democrat morons running aground in Iowa.

Funny, like Elizabeth Warren. Who is as funny as Greta Thunberg. Who is as funny as Rachel Maddow, or Adam Schiff, or Jerry Nadler. Which is pretty comical. The impeachment is already a mockery, but the senate really needs to bring out the humor by calling Schiff and the Bidens to the witless stand. Comedy gold if handled correctly.

It just occurred to me that since I've been alive, the funnier (or at least less unfunny) candidate has always prevailed, for example Kennedy over Nixon, Reagan over Carter, Bush 1 over Dukakis, Clinton over Bush & Dole, Bush 2 over Gore & Kerry, Obama over McCain & Romney, and of course Trump over Hillary.

Which means that President Trump will win in a landslide over any of the current crop of dour and sourpussies.

Let's get back to the Letters. In the preface, Lewis notes that our demonic colleagues are equally delighted if a man is a magician or a materialist, for these reduce the same thing.

A Darwinian materialist, for example, cannot account for the soul except by an appeal to magic, just as the physicist who denies the transnatural must inhabit a cosmos that magically gives rise to information, law, order, beauty, truth, life, consciousness, teleology -- and, of course, physicists. If physics could account for physicists, knowledge of physics would be impossible.

Speaking of ineluctable logic, i.e., of things that cannot not be the case, Screwtape highlights the danger of trying to use logic to turn people away from God, because this will -- if pursued logically -- lead to awkward questions about the ground and nature of logic itself. He doesn't put it exactly this way, but the point is the same, and reminds us of the truism that while a little philosophy inclines one to atheism, a lot of it leads straight to God. D'oh! Atheism is a kind of arrested development whereby logic is arrested at an arbitrary point.

Screwtape cautions his naive pupil that logical argument poses the danger of awakening the transrational intellect, and this is the last thing Satan wants. Of course, he doesn't mind people being locked into reason, i.e., rationalism, because this is ultimately a self-enclosed anti-philosophy that ensures a lifetime of mental masturbation or soph-tautology. Atheists are nothing if not proud, and this is why: unlike you, they are rational! Just ask one.

We're running out of time. Bottom line for today:

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy's [God's] own ground.... By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?

So never wonder why the left responds to argument with censorship, slander, smears, accusations, and -- irony of ironies! -- demonization.

Nothing funny about this video -- plus, she's TOTALLY self-aware:

God's Own Reality Tunnel

Why on earth would you ever want to be happy, let alone joyful?

Asked no one, ever.

This is because, or so it seems, happiness is the thing -- or better, a name for the thing -- we all seek. It is our telos, that to which we are ordered.

So, while no one asks, "Why do you want to be happy," we've all wondered why you think that, of all things, will make you happy. Because that not only won't make you happy, it will make you unhappy. Fine. Do it your way.

Says God, to everyone, ever.

Now, if you believe God exists, then he is the ultimate reality to which we are ordered. Or, if you understand that man is ordered to a transcendent and nonlocal archetype, you can be certain that this is because God exists. In the end, if God doesn't exist, then there's no plausible explanation for why we should be ordered to him; or, more concretely, for the existence of saints and sages -- the perfection, from our side, of sanctity and wisdom, respectively. Man can only get to ten because God goes up to eleven.

In a previous post we alluded to the ego <---> reality tunnel dialectic. Clearly there are degrees of reality, such that people can be more or less "in touch" with it. We call a person "psychotic" because he has lost touch with reality, or crossed a divide in which the world is more delusion or hallucination than reality; it is more the projection of his own subjectivity into the world than the reception of the objective world into his psyche.

Speaking of which, this subject is handled brilliantly in Joker. (Spoiler alert? I'm not sure.) You may have to view it twice to realize it's difficult to say exactly which parts of the movie happened vs. which parts are pure hallucination -- and everything in between. The film doesn't offer any clear guidance. It doesn't announce This Never Actually Happened This Way in the Real World. But this mirrors the sad reality of the psychotic person, who is psychotic precisely because he can't distinguish between world and hallucination, or truth and delusion.

Compare it to what happens in dreams. Dreaming has a kind of psychotic structure, in that we are plunged into a world where things routinely happen that couldn't possibly happen in real life, and yet, we don't realize it. Last night, for example... nah, never mind. Other people's dreams are only of interest to the person who dreamt them. Suffice it to say that the dream is a reality tunnel that we inhabit even while not realizing that we -- somehow -- are the creators of that very world.

So, just like real life, since -- at least in a free society such as ours -- people are freed to live in their own reality tunnels, instead of being permitted only to inhabit one determined by the state -- as in the North Korea, or Iran, or elite college campuses. Being woke means: do not dare disturb me from my nightmare, or else! No gratitude whatsoever.

Another crossroads, with six possible directions... Let me briefly finish up with Joker, which I think is brilliant. Nor do I know or care what the director's "intent" might have been. In my reality tunnel it gets an A, in particular, Joaquin Phoenix's performance. But many critics disagree. Different reality tunnels. I saw some of them on Rotten Tomatoes, and could scarcely believe what I was reading. I realize that in these psychotic times, nothing should surprise us, but still... Examples:

Joker doesn't understand its representation of violence because it doesn't know what to do with its politics, opting instead for a confused aestheticization of anarchy, all incendiary chants and masked malcontents thronging the streets.

Joker is a visual feast about mental illness, the crumbling of an unstable economic system, and toxic masculinity that thinks it has something groundbreaking to add to the comic book universe, but merely adds an obtuse reflection.

It's unclear if the movie thinks that the Joker doesn't know that his statement is political, or the film itself doesn't understand it's own political nature...

Like "The Dark Knight", this film demonizes the mentally ill. It also distorts NY realities in the early 80s.

Suffice it to say that I didn't see any statements about politics, economics, toxic masculinity, demonization of mental illness, or the conditions of New York four decades ago.

Reality tunnels. Yesterday I read -- or started to read -- a piece that is so detached from reality that I suppose I reacted to it in the way the above critics reacted to Joker. I'm speaking of an essay by Frank Rich called What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies? Being a Trump Toady myself, I am naturally curious to find out what's going to happen to me.

Here are some examples of the graffiti on the walls of Rich's reality tunnel; in fact, note the rich irony of accusing the president and his supporters of being out of touch:

The definition of “facts” has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that it’s impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say you’re sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.

What crimes? What misdemeanors? He doesn't say.

John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot.

Now, that is some bad writing, but the Russia hoax? If you ever believed this hoax, it was because you wanted to believe it. If you still believe it at this point, it must be serving a vital function -- a projected container for one's own unmanageable psychic distress.

"For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017" -- wait -- what damage? Again, he doesn't say. Apparently, in his reality tunnel the damage is so self-evident that everyone sees it.

"Rather than being the end of American history as we know it," -- wait -- what? The end of history as we know it? I'm not exaggerating when I say this is psychotic. Not that Rich is psychotic per se, but that this kind of catastrophic thinking emanates from a psychotic dimension of the mind, or from what are called unmetabolized beta elements.

Very soon, white supporters of the president will be Judged by our fellow Citizens of Color, and it won't be pleasant:

That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.

I don't know. Might they be too busy working and improving their lives, thanks to President Trump?

"All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trump’s Republican Party is nothing if not a cult." Wait -- what?

I've reached my limit. Let someone else do the fisking.

As to the title of this post, just as there is a dialectic between ego and world, there is one between the soul and God, or between (¶) and O. You might call the latter the attempt to build an "ultimate reality tunnel."

But clearly, anything (¶) can construct is not going to be ultimate. Still, it can get pretty far, much farther than can the horizontal ego. This is the realm of natural theology, but so long as it's from our side, it's still going to be a manmade reality tunnel.

The only way to exit a manmade tunnel is if God provides the tunnel. We have to wrap this up, but in my opinion and experience, God has done this. He has given us a reality tunnel back to him. It is the most valuable gift we could possibly imagine, being that it is the way, the truth, and the life, and what could be better than that?

Envy, Gratitude, Happiness, and Hell

Apologies in advance: this post veered way off course, but it couldn't be helped. We'll try to right the bus tomorrow.

We left off with the idea that happiness must have something to do with getting and having what we want; or certainly it can't involve getting what we don't want.

This seems simple enough, but simple isn't necessarily easy. For as Pieper says, beneath this are two implicit questions, first, "What does man want?," and second, "What is meant by 'have?'"

Vis-a-vis the latter, I'm reminded of that fact that I live in an area where I am literally surrounded by open space for miles around. Few people take advantage of this space, certainly considering its expanse. Therefore, for all practical purposes it might as well be mine. I can "have" it to myself any time I want. It is as if I can have and enjoy the privileges of ownership without the burden of property taxes. So again: what is meant by "have"?

At the other extreme, what does it mean to "have" your own property in a country with weak to non-existent property rights? What does it mean to have a house in Iran or North Korea -- or even Hong Kong? I suppose the protests in Hong Kong have much to do with the meaning of "have," because if mainland China prevails, its residents will be had. Tyrants will always have what they have, and will have what you have as well.

Haves and have-nots. What makes leftists doubly nauseating is that they conceal their envious wantery under a fig-leaf of disingenuous have-nottery. Which is why:

When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited. Yes, but only every time. What did Asians and Jews ever do to the left, aside from supporting it? And yet, they are among the primary victims of the left's institutional racism.

The revolutionary is ultimately an individual who does not dare to rob by himself. He doesn't even dare call it robbery, or even taxes -- rather, contributions. Moreover, Elizabeth Warren is only going to ask for them. But oddly enough, we won't be able to explain to the IRS that we politely decline the request.

The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who covets another’s goods but the one who defends his own. The left is the institutionalization of envy. Moreover, envy for the left has gone from one of God's own Top Ten Obligations or Celestial No-No's to an actual virtue! Indeed, if you aren't saturated with envy, you can scarcely be called Woke.

The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach. Warren? Ha! Imagine a person who would sink so low as to claim Indian Privilege for personal enrichment? Sanders? Ho! By selling envy to the envious, he has gone from living in a treehouse to living in three houses. Biden? Don't call him envious and grasping -- if you do, you're liable to be impeached.

Yes indeed, Revolutions do not solve any problem other than the economic problem of their leaders. Say what you want about AOC or Mayor Pete, but leftism has solved their own economic problems. Likewise Al Sharpton or the Obamas -- people with no skill but the ability to sell you a lot of the last thing you need.

No social class has exploited the others more brazenly than the one that today calls itself “the State.” The Trump presidency has been an ongoing revelation of just how brazenly we have been and are being exploited by the deep state.

The state was bad enough, but come to find out it is only the surface structure of a much deeper and more pernicious cancer which has metastasized into everything. It is why journalism and academia, for example, are so thoroughly corrupted. Note that a college education used to be about curing ignorance. Now it's about contracting a virus of the soul and intellect and spreading it to others.

What's up, Bob? This post is supposed to be about happiness, but it's veering way into envy! Fair point, except it turns out that happiness and envy are literally at psychic -- and spiritual -- antipodes. To revisit my psychoanalytic training -- I'll try not to bore you with details -- one of my seminal influences published a book called Envy and Gratitude, which you might say form the Hinge of Happiness.

Let's see how briefly I can conceptualize the essence of the crux of the gist. In psychoanalysis, envy is distinguished from jealousy, in that the latter is the painful desire for what one lacks, while envy essentially eliminates the pain of jealousy by attacking and spoiling the good object. This mechanism is vividly seen in many policies of the left, too many to chronicle here.

For example, as Heather MacDonald has so exhaustively documented, the entire infrastructure of the diversity scam revolves around the denial of black underachievement; or, more specifically, a transformation of this reality into something it is not. Therefore, as in so many areas, leftism is the disease it pretends to cure, the problem it pretends to solve, and the ignorance it pretends to relieve.

Meanwhile, the underachievement worsens, while white SJWs feel better about themselves, so it's a whine-win situation.

Back to the psychoanalytic definition of envy: at bottom -- i.e., unconsciously -- it is "a destructive attack on the sources of life, on the good object, not on the bad object." If this sounds crazy, it's because it is. Why, for example, does the left ceaselessly attack the most decent nation in history, while defending one of the worst, Iran? Why does it attack Western Civilization? Christianity? White men? Israel? At least in part to make the pain go away.

Take the so-called Palestinians. I have a two word solution to all their problems: Imitate. Israel. Indeed, I can also reduce the source of all their problems to two words: Destroy. Israel. If they could only cease the latter and engage in the former, affluence and happiness would follow. But then, this would also destroy a lucrative regime that enriches a whole class of leaders that mirrors our own class of Sharptons, Obamas, and other grievance mongers.

Again, gratitude isn't only at the other psychic extreme, but isn't possible so long as one is filled with envy. It is "akin to object-love" and is "counterposed to envy, a response which diminishes or kills gratitude to the object."

To open this discussion to the widest possible angle, if God is love, then envy is very nearly the "anti-God," since it isn't just the absence of the good, but an attack on it. Which is frankly diabolical, no? Gosh. Might this be why the most hellish -- and unhappy -- places on earth were built with bricks of envy? Communism. National socialism. Democrat run cities. Etc.

Funny/sad story: my wife was recently accused of being a white supremacist because of something the accuser saw in my office. Am I a white supremacist? No, worse: I am grateful!

What is Happiness?

Trick question: it is nothing, because it can't be an IS. I used to think otherwise, back in both my atheist and Vedanta days.

Let's start with atheism. Since the atheist denies transcendence, what is simply is, and there's not a thing we can do about it. Or, we can either accept what is, or pretend there is some escape. Therefore, happiness, such as it is, would come down to a stoic acceptance of -- or resignation to -- what is.

There's some truth in that, but it depends on what is is. For is there a difference between animal and human happiness? Can we even call an animal "happy," or is happiness a specifically human reality? I think the latter, or happiness would simply come down to being warm and well-fed. The temporary cessation of wants and needs can't be all there is to it.

However, we can't say that want and need have nothing to do with happiness. I suppose it comes down to what we "really" need and want.

We'll return to atheist man, but Vedanta man is in much the same boat, albeit in first class instead of in steerage with the other third class thinkers. Here's one straight from the Ganges' mouth, Patanjali. In his commentary, Swami Prabhavananda explains that the times we've been happy occurred when

we had temporarily ceased to feel anxious; when we lived -- as we so seldom do -- in the depths of the present moment, without regretting the past or worrying about the future.

Swami P distinguishes this state from the mere satisfaction of a desire, which not only lasts for short time, but inevitably "gives rise to another, and so the moment of happiness ends in further anxiety." True, of course, but is there something more to happiness than this entirely negative definition? In other words, is it only the absence of anxiety, or a positive presence?

The Swami points to the latter: one might suppose that "an absence of desire would merely produce a dull, neutral mood, equally joyless and sorrowless." But this isn't the case, at least for the sort of happiness he is describing, which comes down to the joy of the Atman which "is always within us." This prior condition

can be released at any time by breaking down the barriers of desire and fear which we have built around it. How otherwise could we be so happy without any apparent reason?

Here we're getting warmer, but with insufficient light. The light creates the warmth, not vice versa, and the Swami tosses out some shady concepts that will require some additional fleshing out. Literally, but we'll get to that later.

One of the central principles of Vedanta is that ultimate reality is bi-polar, so to speak, with a transcendent absolute (Brahman) at one end, and an immanent one (Atman) at the other. There is God-Beyond and God-Within, and these are ultimately not-two. They say Atman is Brahman, but this can be misconstrued.

It is analogous to what the early fathers mean when they say "God became man that man might become God." This doesn't imply that we become the creator of the universe, rather, that we share in his divine nature. We are "not-two." Only Jesus is literally one with the Creator, and our task is to get on board the ark of salvation and participate in his eternal and vertically circular trinitarian descent <---> ascent.

At the end of Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination there's a helpful Q & A with the master. To the question "What is happiness?," the one word answer is "detachment." From what? From the ego, or better, the ego-world complementarity (for the ego gives rise to a -- not THE -- world, or to a self-enclosed reality tunnel).

The ego has disappeared. I have realized my identity with Brahman and so all my desires have melted away. I have risen above my ignorance and my knowledge of this seeming universe. What is this joy I feel? Who shall measure it? I know nothing but joy, limitless, unbounded!

That sounds pretty, pretty, pretty good. Chalk one up for the East. But can we do better?

Wayback in my doctoral program I studied psychoanalysis. Long story short, while psychoanalysis started out with one school -- Freudian -- soon enough, like Protestantism, it ramified into dozens of competing versions with very different models of the psyche in both sickness and health. Therefore, you have to pick the "best" one. How do we do that? On what basis can we choose?

I can only speak for myself. I don't want to get sidetracked, but in retrospect, it seems to me that my mind -- or maybe my whole being -- called out for a model that was sufficient to contain its expanse: its height, width, and depth. Which means, for starters, that there is an interior reality and that the model is there to conform to this. All too often I saw the converse, that is, students and professors reducing the psyche to their model. Which means they were trying to squeeze the wider world of being into what could be seen via their model. This is to confuse one's reality tunnel for the reality, and charge people good money to live in your tunnel.

So, that's where O came from. O is the ultimate reality prior to our theorizing about it, and which no theory can contain.

Stop digressing. Back to the question: can we (in the Western Division) do better? I think so, because the principle of Incarnation includes a great deal that Samadhi (release from the ego and identification with Atman) excludes -- little things like the body, the universe, other people. Here's some more joy from the liberated fellow above:

Now, finally and clearly, I know that I am Atman, whose nature is eternal joy. I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing that is separate from me....

Nothing binds me to this world. I no longer identify myself with the physical body or the mind. I am one with the Atman, the undying. I am the Atman -- infinite, eternal, at peace forever.... My nature is pure consciousness.... I am the infinite Brahman, without a second. I am Reality, without beginning, without equal

Etc. Again, I don't knock it. But note what is left out: for example, no body, just pure consciousness. Let's say I have no prior religious commitment, but it's time to choose one. I'm going through the brochures. Here's Vedanta, which promises to liberate me from this slab of animal meat into pure consciousness-bliss. I like that. Don't recycle that one just yet.

Ooh. Check this one out -- it promises not escape from the world and body, but the divinization of them! And God does the hard part. We have only to participate in it. We don't have to lift ourselves by our own buddhastraps. Rather, there's this thing they call "grace" and a fellow they call the Holy Spirit that do the heavy lifting.

As usual, this whole post was provoked by a single sentence by Pieper. If you open your Piepers to page 116, in a chapter on the subject of happiness, he discusses the notion,

perhaps always present down through the ages, that happiness consists of existence itself. This is the hidden presupposition both for the utilitarian plans of totalitarianism and for the quasi-religious overvaluing of psychotherapy.

Yes. Both approaches work fine so long as man isn't for something -- something beyond man. Now, what is a man for? It seems to me that happiness must be bound up with this question. I'm reminded of a canine officer I recently evaluated. Somehow we got into the question of whether police dogs are happy in retirement, but he said they are miserable. Having a job to do gives them purpose, structure, stimulation. Remove these and they're a mess. He implied that putting them down is putting them out of their misery.

Hold that thought. Back to man:

First point: what do we really want? The very formulation of the question implies that there is something we only seem to want, or think we want, but don't really want (Pieper).

He brings in Socrates, who remarked that the tyrant may well be able to do whatever he pleases, but not necessarily what he wants. Socrates' partner in dialogue calls this claim absurd, insisting that happiness means doing as we please, and that's all there is to it. Nevertheless, Socrates digs in his sandals.

This post has gone on long enough. I have to accomplish some actual work. We'll get to our exciting conclusion on Tuesday.

"Courageous Leftist" and Other Oxymorons

There can be no such thing as a courageous leftist qua leftism. In other words, a leftist may demonstrate personal courage in, for example, rescuing a drowning child, but he doesn't rescue the child because of his leftism, but because he sees what is needed and does it despite the possibility of incurring harm to himself.

In one sense courage is apolitical, but in another sense the essence of politics, because effective politics presupposes knowledge of reality, and courage is required in order to defend that knowledge when the going gets rough -- when the world hates you for its (truth's) sake.

Some Christians reject President Trump on the grounds that he is insufficiently virtuous, "not a proper Christian." Well, if being a Christian involves an absence of knowledge of reality, who needs it? Conversely, contact with reality is the very essence of Christianity, or again, who needs it? To paraphrase Schuon, nothing can be more privileged than truth (and the love of truth), so if Christianity isn't true, then it certainly should be abandoned, not defended.

Brief aside -- I'm reading a book called Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion, and the author points out that the Romans didn't so much mind Christians per se. They were a pretty cynical and tolerant bunch who didn't really care about your superstitions so long as you didn't actually believe them.

What alarmed them about the Christians is that they actually insisted their claims were true, and that insistence is a direct threat to the state, then as much as now:

faithful Christians would not bow to the state, and so that state could not tolerate Christians.... There could be nothing more upsetting to the pagan Rome imperium than the absolute Christian rejection of all other gods, including the gods of the empire, even in the face of death.

Thus, "Wonder as they might at the martyrs' courage, pagans couldn't understand the Christian insistence on the exclusive truth of their faith" (emphasis mine).

Now, as Uncle Screwtape says in another book that we will eventually get around to properly unscrewing, "courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." "Pilate," for example, "was merciful till it became risky." When tested, he fled truth and reality.

Conversely, President Trump, when tested by the fake news, runs toward the enemy with righteous flames of insultainment. For while Satan may not exist, he hates being mocked!

The bottom line of today's brief offering is that it is cosmically impossible -- a contradiction -- to courageously defend a lie. Doing so doesn't necessarily make the person a coward, because he may well actually believe the lie. But if courage is equally subordinate to lies or truth -- or to reality and unreality -- then it is not a virtue at all, just a power.

Even -- for example -- a person who gives his life for "gay marriage" cannot be courageous in so doing, because he is defending an impossibility. Nor can he be prudent, being that "realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality." Is any Islamist "martyr" (terrorist) courageous? No, of course not. It is an impossibility. Are Christian martyrs courageous? Yes, quintessentially so.

Christians believed that the truth had been revealed to them, and it was their responsibility to take that truth and make it boldly known to all the nations. They didn't suffer the most horrible martyrdoms so that Isis, Bacchus, or Jupiter could be safely adored by their respective cults.... it was precisely this claim to have the truth that irked the Romans, and made them suspicious of Christians.

No truth, no courage. Simple as. (Although it isn't always a strictly binary opposition, for as Schuon points out, truth isn't just discernment between the Real and the unreal, but between the more or less Real. The world is an ambiguous place, to put it mildly, which is why prudence is needed in order to make this discernment between degrees of reality. This also goes to why we surely need two parties, but two parties more or less in touch with reality; the last thing we need is a party devoted to unreality, but here we are.)

As Thomas Aquinas tells us, "praise of bravery depends on justice." Which is why "social justice warrior" is such an ironically apt designation, for it is strictly impossible to be a courageous SJW.

We mean this literally, because as Hayek explains with airtight logic, social justice is a mirage. It does not exist because it cannot exist. To paraphrase the Aphorist, social justice is nothing but a noble sounding name for claiming something to which we have no right. It takes no courage to be envious. Rather, to overcome it. It's one thing to brake for hallucinations, another thing to coerce others to inhabit them.

Reproductive Justice, Good and Hard!

I woke up unusually early this morning. I hadn't intended to write a post, but I had the time, so here it is. Given my slightly altered state, I'm not even sure it makes sense. In which case, just enjoy (or endure) this bit of nonsense.

Pieper asks the questions, "if being just means, in all our dealings, being prepared to give everyone his due, what is it that is everyone's due? And: what is the basis for saying that anything at all is someone's due?"

According to the Founders, we are owed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's not much. Rather, it's only everything, because it means existence-freedom-actualization. In other words, a human being has the natural and unalienable right to become in existence who he is in essence. This right cannot be surpassed, only eroded, diminished, or denied.

From whom are we owed these goods? From no man, and certainly no state! Rather, from God only. Perhaps this is ill-sounding, but the Creator makes us human, and humanness entails certain properties. We are owed these things in the sense that a sphere is "owed" roundness. It's just the way we're made.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, everything aside from humans simply Is. The human being is the only creature in all of creation that ceaselessly becomes. It's a cliche, but man is a verb, not a noun. (Man is really a complementarity of the two, which is to say, essence and existence in a dynamic and dialectical movement toward Celestial Central.)

So, it's not so much that God "owes" us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as that man is created with these in mind. Analogously, if you're going to create a plant, this implies the provision of soil, water, and nutrients. It makes no sense to build a tree without the means to sustain it.

As alluded to by Pieper, justice means giving each person his due. I don't know about you, but I was taught two bits of hard wisdom: 1) life isn't fair, and 2) the world doesn't owe me a living. This means that while God is just, man often isn't. And while God gives us a right to life, he leaves the living to us.

Reproductive justice.

Is this just a repulsive euphemism for infanticide -- the ultimate reproductive injustice -- or is there such a thing? I suppose so. For example, if two people decide to reproduce, they have the right to a child. Likewise, the child has a right to be born. Moreover, every child has the intrinsic right to a mother and father.

But again, rights and duties co-arise, so prior to the right to a child is the obligation to raise it. And prior to the right to be born and raised by a mother and father is... what?

Good question. Some things can't be paid back, only forward. I suppose it's unjust that my son won't pay me back for all I've done for him, but something about this doesn't sound right. According to Pieper,

there are debts which, by their very nature, cannot be paid, and for this reason justice has to be substituted (so to speak) by another attitude: of pietas (honoring one's mother, for example). I cannot pay back to my mother all I owe her and the moment cannot come where I can say to her: we are [even].

So, as some debts can't be repaid, others can't be recovered, at least considered from a selfish perspective. In a wider framework, I can repay my father by being a good father to my son. And my son can repay me by being a good father to his children. Would that repay me? No, it would actually more than repay me, in which case I am indebted to him again. D'oh!

It reminds me of a friend named Victor who has three children between one and four, and said he likes to be mindful of parenting in terms of its impact seven generations down the line. In other words, he wants to be a good patriarch, like Abraham.

Let's see. I don't think he and the wife are done reproducing, but let's say they stop at four. Let's say each of these four has three each, and each of those three has three more, etc. Math is hard, but by my calculation that works out to 8,748 children by the seventh generation. That's a lot of reproductive justice. How is Victor supposed to ever repay all his great-great-great-great-great grandchildren? It's not fair!

You Can't Do What's Good if You Don't Know What Is

While freedom and responsibility are complementary, like all complementarities one must be prior, in this case, responsibility. A human feels a sense of responsibility, obligation, duty; and for the same reason, we come equipped with a sense of guilt, which you might say is the interior "enforcer" of responsibility. If we fail to do the right thing, we are persecuted by guilt. Sociopathy is the exception that proves the rule.

All of this -- responsibility, goodness, choice, conscience -- can go off the rails at various points in the process. Some people -- existentialists, for example -- collapse responsibility into freedom, thereby reducing the question to one of pure action: we are what we choose. There is no right or wrong; or rather, it is wrong to lack the courage to choose. The deed is all.

We call these folks existentialists because they (speaking of complementarities) put existence prior to essence, thereby turning reality upside down and inside out, precisely: we are nothing until we choose (ultimately making ourselves our own gods), whereas in reality we are given freedom in order to actualize our essential nature. Davila says it better; note how each is a refudiation of existentialism:

--Freedom is not indispensable because man knows what he wants and who he is, but in order for him to know who he is and what he wants.

--Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

--Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything.

--Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison.

--Today what is called “intellectual liberation” is a change of prisons.

--Whoever is liberated from everything that oppresses him soon discovers that he is also liberated from what protects him.

This post at a crossroads. At this point it could go in various directions.... Choose one already!

Okay. Another hinge point where things can go wrong is with a "corrupt superego," which perversely punishes us for doing the right thing. Here it seems that if we only internalize a bogus ideology, it permits us to harm others with impunity. The corrupted superego gives us the green light to attack and even murder in good conscience. (Or to undermine good institutions such as marriage, the Boy Scouts, universities, etc.)

While I'm all for the death penalty, I fully understand why John Paul II would come out against it (even though the magisterium itself doesn't forbid it). After all, Catholicism is a world religion, and in most parts of the world, for most of history, the death penalty is little more than a pretext for human sacrifice, which is in turn the apex (or nadir) of a corrupted superego given illicit sanction to murder. The USA sentencing an evil mass murderer to death is nothing like Iran sentencing homosexuals to death. One is justice, the other an immature and primitive form of psychic projection and annihilation.

Likewise other violent ideologies from Fascism to Antifa (but I repeat myself). What better way to hide a corrupt superego than to pretend to fight it. Satan is getting more subtle! Or at least more convoluted.

Note that the corruption of language -- e.g., "Antifa," "social justice," "transphobia" -- is central to the project of the corrupt superego, which makes sense, since the Logos ramifies into both truth and goodness, and in order to do good, one must know the truth, or What is the Case.

Which brings us to the queen of the virtues, prudence. "Justice, courage, and moderation," writes Pieper, "exist only on the basis of prudence." No one talks about it -- I wonder why? -- but prudence "is the presupposition of all moral goodness." Prudence first, goodness second. Look at Jimmy Carter. Let's stipulate that he's a "good guy." How did that work out with Iran? How did his and Obama's niceness accord with prudence?

Some Christians seem to think that niceness is enough. This is profoundly un-Christian. Yes, innocent as doves. But prudent as serpents.

[T]he realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality; someone who does not know the state of affairs is not able, in the concrete, to do what is good. Mere "good intentions" -- wanting to be just, for example -- is not sufficient (Pieper).

The Decline and Fall of Language

While attacks on language are always present -- being that they are central to the Satanic Project -- never before in history have they been ideologized, institutionalized, and regarded as virtuous. As Pieper puts it -- and this was 45 years ago -- "in the sphere of language, words are always going to suffer wear and tear," especially important words that point to an ethical duty or obligation.

For as we have discussed in the past, while we have a natural right to liberty, this only makes sense for a being who is aware of a supernatural responsibility; obligation is anterior to freedom, or freedom isn't free, rather, just a disordered will -- or a will ordered to nothing but desire.

You'd have to be crazy to give liberty to a fundamentally irresponsible person. Which is why liberals not only want to clear out the prisons, but give felons and children the right to vote. This is with the perfectly understandable expectation that irresponsible people will vote for irresponsible politicians.

This is why so many lo-fo and no-dough millennials support Bernie Sanders. I was no better when I was a properly indoctrinated college student, as I was an enthusiastic supporter of Barry Commoner!

Since then, diabolical ideologies such as deconstruction and critical theory have taken over the humanities and turned them into subhumanities. Although there was some overlap, I just missed that, or it me. I remember one professor blathering some fashionable nonsense about the self-referential nature of language, but I escaped with my soul basically intact. Although wounded by reading such logocidal maniacs as Lacan and Foucault, I survived. Even in philosophy the French can't shoot straight.

Pieper quotes C.S. Lewis, who said, "Give a good thing a name and after some time it will be a name for a defect." Liberal. Tolerance. Merit. Nationalism. Colorblind.

Just as man cannot not be religious and still be man, there are certain words that cannot not be, because they conceptualize certain unavoidable realities. These realities are vertical, transnatural, nonlocal, and transcendent, and it isn't possible to make sense or communicate without them. The diabolical twist here is that if words only refer to other words (as in deconstruction), then they are closed to the reality that gave rise to them in the first place, i.e., the thing itself.

For example, we invented the word "family" to signify variations on the central theme of a married couple with children. "Marriage," of course, referred to the union of a man and woman. Again, reality first, word second.

But now, thanks to the Diabolical Inversion, the words marriage and family come first, the reality not at all (for a reality we define is no reality at all). And once this is done, there is no principle that stops new meanings from attaching to the words. In other words, there can be no principled opposition to polygamy, or sibling marriage, or adopting animals, or marrying robots. Family! In the name of a good we not only lose the good but gain a bad in its place.

If man is born with responsibilities, it means we have a purpose, a nature, a goal; and this telos is our ultimate good, our reason for being. "Man," writes Pieper, "still has to achieve the truly human in his real life," because "as he exists, he has obligations." While we are free, this freedom is "meant for something." This telos is a reality, something exterior and prior to the name we give it. Man is ordered to God, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Except recognize and cooperate with it. Or not. In a handbasket.

I suppose it comes down to the distinction between Is and Ought. Everything but man simply Is. But a man who only Is is no longer a man. Man qua man ought to do, be, and know certain things, which automatically lifts him into a transcendent sphere that cannot be grounded in matter. Imagine an atheist insisting that you ought not be religious. There's no ought in atheism!

Come to think of it, nor is there any ought for Luther, since he also denies free will. For him, any impulse to do the right thing -- what we ought -- is so thoroughly contaminated by original sin that it only redounds to the prideful and presumptuous idea that we can save ourselves or even please God. Of course we ought to believe, but we can't even do that. Rather, that was decided by God at our creation.

Man, unlike anything else in creation, has the imperative to be all he can be. We are all aware of this, whether implicitly or explicitly, which is why we can never be satisfied with any earthly achievement or attainment. However, this principle can and usually does transform in ways that actually run counter to the imperative. For example, there are people who spend their lives trying to be as wealthy, or powerful, or knowledgable as they can be, meaning that the Ought has become detached from its real Object.

It brings to mind Citizen Kane, who spends his whole life grasping at wealth and power in a vain effort to get enough of what he really doesn't need. But a need is ordered to a specific object, which is why you don't bring a fire extinguisher to a flood, an umbrella to a fire, or a socialist to America. Bernie, like all socialists, tries to bring heaven to earth, with is the recipe for hell.

Conquering the World with Negative Thinking

The most genuine way to conquer the world is through knowledge of reality. --Josef Pieper

"And so," asks Pieper, "what is philosophizing 'good' for?"

If you read and understood the previous post, you know the answer: nothing! Rather, it is one of those activities that isn't "for" something other than itself, as is true of all ultimate goods, in particular, human beings. A person is not a means to an end, and the moment you treat him like one, you have dehumanized him, precisely.

Just so, the moment philosophy becomes a means to an end, it is no longer philosophy but something less -- for example, science, which is still good, but good for something, e.g., technology, or for blowing up terrorists who would dehumanize us.

Speaking of dehumanization, this immediately reminds us of Marx, upon whose headstone is engraved the following aphorism: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Well, congratulations! In all of history, no philosopher has changed more people into corpses. And that's just for starters. He also changed countries into sh*tholes, wealth into worthless paper, college graduates into imbeciles, and Bernie Sanders into a presidential candidate.

For the sake of equal time, here's a counter-aphorism by an anti-Marxist:

Marxism turns the intelligence that it touches to stone.

So, in all of history, no "philosophy" has turned more intellects to stone. Including the 38 rockheads competing for the Democratic nomination.

We are also reminded of Hayek and the ineluctable Knowledge Problem. For which reason the Aphorist says:

The Marxist historian owes his certainty to his ignorance.

Do you know of anyone more arrogantly certain than AOC, than St. Greta, than B. Hussein?

In contrast to whom we have the father of philosophy, who ironically tells us the the only thing he really knows is that he doesn't know. And yet, this is a specifically human form of meta-knowledge that confers (or discloses) a quasi-divine status, somewhere above the animals but below the angels. Or, if you don't believe in a full-employment cosmos, between primates and God, relative and Absolute, contingency and necessity.

Not to belabor the point: man desires to know. This desire to know begins in Wonder, and the object of Wonder is unfathomable. It is Mystery, not as ignorance or superstition, but as empirical contact with the Transcendent Other, AKA O, through which course energies of various kinds, not just knowledge (of truth, or it isn't knowledge), but beauty, unity, love, grace, sanctity, etc.

Man is by definition lifted above nature -- man is transnatural, or he isn't one -- but this only gets us so far without O "reaching down" and completing the metacosmic circuit. At which point -- let's call it the Sacramental Synapse -- something like this occurs, from his being to ours (or beyond-being to being).

So, "The more I know about things, the further the sphere of the not-yet-known stretches out in front of me as immeasurable" (Pieper). Literally, in that it can never be quantified (thank you Gödel) but is unqualifiable as well, i.e., we can affirm or say no quality without simultaneously unsaying it, since O is (obviously) beyond language, even while being the ground and source of language (for before language was, the Word Am).

Importantly, there is Wonder at both ends of this process; you might call them Primordial Wonder and Consequent Wonder. For "we are not properly human if we are not able to to be profoundly moved by coming aware of the deeper aspect of the world" (Pieper).

Which goes to "the role of philosophy: to help man to experience again and again, along with the mysterious character of the world, his own unfinished state, the not-yet of his own being and existence" despite the most complete possible knowledge of anything and everything.

Augustine famously asked God to "give me chastity, but not yet." We say: give us not-yet, and now! Or in other words, "thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

Key takeaway: reality -- the really real kind -- is a vertically open system. The moment it becomes closed, you're doing it -- humanness -- wrong. But do not conflate "closedness" and doctrine, because real doctrine generates a kind of infinitude, or is infinitely generative, rather. By which we mean....

Put it this way: perhaps you've heard the witty village atheist say he doesn't believe in the Christian God for the same reason he doesn't believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I suppose this makes sense for the vertically closed atheist, but it makes no sense to -- speaking for myself -- me, because I would be hard-pressed to write a single post on the FSM, whereas on this blog alone I've spilled millions of intelligible words about O, with no conceivable end in sight short of dementia and/or death. I don't pretend I can ever exhaust O, whereas the FSM exhausts itself the moment you say it: it flies, it's made of spaghetti, and it's monstrous. Okay then.

"The more the world becomes accessible and opened up, the richer our existence" (ibid.).

The following must be important, because I scrawled an approving YES in the margin next to it:

Only a discerning encounter with the mystery -- which consists in the fact that something is -- only this experience gives us the awareness that the light which makes things "positively" knowable, is simply unfathomable and inexhaustible and thus, at the same time, makes things incomprehensible.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.... the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him." I can think of no fewer than three ways to construe this crypticism: the correct way, the stupid way, and the diabolical way.

Lose Your Muscles and Make Yourself Useless!

What we now call "wokeness" is the transformation and internalization of a mechanism -- political correctness -- into a person.

If we're going to be perfectly accurate, it results in the destruction of the person, which is one of its purposes, because it sacrifices the individual to the collective, when the whole point of the collective is to serve the individual -- not, of course, in a selfish way, but rather, to facilitate the actualization and flourishing of personhood per se. And critically, personhood is intrinsically intersubjective, so an atomized person is no person at all.

In short, there are two wrong ways of being a person: for the individual to be swallowed by the collective, or for the individual to exist entirely apart from the matrix of trinitarian intersubjectivity -- on one end socialism, on the other a largely irrelevant fringe of radical libertarianism represented by oddballs such as Murray Rothbard.

The Woke Person is nothing new. Rather, he is simply Socialist Man, or again, the successful eradication of man -- successful because the man does it to himself. Free will is turned against itself, strangling the individual in the approved and predigested line of the day. Someone else has done the "thinking," and it is for the woke person to simply take it on board, like an update for your computer operating system.

For example, no properly woke person knows why he is so passionate about transgenderism, or why it even became such an urgent topic of discussion. Thinking is not the point for the woke. Rather, your job as a woke person is to act on these thoughts, not to think them. Same with the redefinition of marriage, or giving free stuff to criminals who break into the country, or forcing female athletes to compete with men who think they're women.

This may sound a little odd when I first describe it, but when you think about it, you will understand that your Gagdad is speaking unalloyed truth: that for many, if not most, people, their minds operate more like a muscle than a mind. Yes, I am being literal, because when we come into the world our minds are largely submerged in the body, and only with development do we become increasingly de-somatized, so to speak, capable of genuine conceptual thinking instead of the musclebound kind.

Example. Okay, take "projection," which used to be (and still is) a psychoanalytic term of art, but has now become a colloquialism that is sloppily deployed by all and sundry. But when I use the word, I mean it in the precise sense as a primitive psychological defense mechanism that operates like a muscle, evacuating thoughts and feelings from Person A (the projector) and forcing them into Person B (the projectee).

The projector -- by definition -- doesn't know when he is projecting, whereas the target of the projections can tell when he is the recipient. To cite an obvious example, the president and his supporters are constantly being called "racist" by unhinged leftists. But we aren't racists, so why is this happening? What's going on?

Easy: the mental muscle of the leftist shoves this nasty sentiment into us, so he may then legitimately attack us for harboring these nasty sentiments. As such, you can see that the initial action (the projection) legitimizes literal muscular action, up to and including violence (e.g., Antifa, attacking conservative speakers on college campuses, chasing us out of restaurants, etc.).

But none of this is my point. My Real Point is that leftism is always totalitarian in its essence, and that political correctness is by no means an accidental accretion, but rather, an intrinsic feature: no muscular denial of thinking, no left. Everywhere and everywhen. Period.

(And importantly, just because the left uses this mechanism, it doesn't imply that everyone who uses it is a leftist; rather, leftism is simply the institutionalization of a pathological form of thinking that is a universal and permanent possibility of the human condition. It can only permeate collectives because it first infiltrates individuals.)

All of the above was provoked by the following passage in an essay called Philosophy and the Common Good, by Mr. Pieper:

It is an essential characteristic of every totalitarian regime that those who have political power claim to define, exhaustively and definitively, the concrete content of the bonum commune [common good].... [E]verything which does not meet the criterion is declared "socially unimportant" and "undesirable" if not forbidden, and is suppressed.

Boom. Notice the muscularity of the process: forbidden and suppressed by power. To be Woke means to have the punitive power to suppress and forbid.

The other day I heard Dave Rubin compare it to a vast circle of wokery, with each person holding a gun to the head of the person next to him. This explains how they can adjust their thinking muscles in an instant (Just Like That, as the meme teaches us). Look at Joe Biden: now that he's in the circle, he will say whatever he has to in order to prevent the guy next to him from putting a bullet into his head, even if it means disavowing everything he's ever thought, said, or done.

Since we've discussed fake muscular thinking, what about the real kind? The first thing to understand is that their are degrees of thinking, with ideology at one end, philosophy at the other; the former always has an explicit content, while the latter is an asymptotic process that can never fully grasp its object, only love it from afar. Which is why it is called philo-sophy and not possessophy.

The philosopher

who wants to know what all that is [is] fundamentally about, what "reality" "really" means -- or who seeks this kind of knowledge does not start out with a definitely formulated question in the way a scientist does.

Precisely this attitude of wordless listening [(---) and (o), respectively] enables him, on the one hand, to see all information from every branch of knowledge as a contribution to the answer he is really looking for; on the other hand, it disposes him not to be satisfied with any of these items of information but to remain open to the ultimate "wisdom," aspiring to which is central to the concept of philo-sophia (Pieper).

Now, philosophy can never be "practical" because it can never be "muscular." It can never force, only show. It can be detached from neither love nor freedom, because its essence is the free exercise of a loving relationship to wisdom hersoph. If philosophy becomes "for" something other than its own sake, then it is no longer philosophy.

The bottom line is that we have too many useful idiots running around, when we need more useless ones. Any imbecile can see there are problems, but it takes real wisdom to ignore them.

Only a discerning encounter with the mystery -- which consists in the fact that something is -- only this experience gives us the awareness that the light which makes things "positively" knowable, is simply unfathomable and inexhaustible and thus, at the same time, makes things incomprehensible.

It is true that the world is intelligible and that the mind may attain knowledge of it. However, the deeper truth is that we can never know it completely, for this would reduce to a closed ideology and therefore hypertrophic muscleheadedness.

Who Rejects God Believes in Fairy Tales

This essay looks good: Knowledge and Freedom (from Exercises in the Elements). There was a time I didn't understand or even see the necessary relationship between these two, but you may be certain: there is no knowledge in the absence of freedom, and vice versa; to affirm one is to imply the other.

That's the good news. The bad news is that you have only to deny one in order to limit or destroy the other.

But the left takes no chances, and undermines both. Which is why few institutions are less intellectually and spiritually free and open than our corrupt and fraudulent educational establishment, which every year cranks out millions of closed-minded clones who are "triggered" -- which is to say, traumatized -- by truth.

Now that I think about it, truth is traumatic, at least much of the time. Yet it is still truth, and it is up to us to adapt to it, rather than vice versa.

I first encountered this principle back in grad school, and it has been with me ever since. Really, it's just a more abstract and formal way of talking about Freud's concept of "resistance," which is present in everyone to a greater or lesser degree. To put it simply, the more we have of it, the crazier we are, since resistance is always resistance to the truth.

To jump back a bit -- more than a bit, actually, to the very Beginning -- why would such a cognitive capacity be woven into the human psyche? Why is it part of our standard equipment? I would say for the same reason we have an immune system to identify foreign invaders and preserve the integrity of the body. Just so, we need to be careful about what we let into the psyche, for reasons of both self-flourishing and self-preservation. In other words, humans cannot survive without accurate information about the world. And yet, too much of the wrong kind of truth can wreck a man.

Regarding the latter, you don't have to read too much history to realize that people believe a lot of things not because they're true but because they're consoling, or convenient, or containing. They can help to structure an otherwise chaotic mind and world.

In this regard, I present you with two diametrically opposed opinions. First, the other day, Democrat mouthpiece Chuck Todd suggested that the millions of us who support the president are predisposed to do so in light of our belief in Christian fairy tales:

“Why do good people support Trump? It's because people have been trained from childhood to believe in fairy tales. This set their minds up to accept things that make them feel good. The more fairy tales and lies he tells the better they feel. Show me a person who believes in Noah's ark, and I will show you a Trump voter.”

“Look, this gets at something that my executive producer likes to say, voters want to be lied to sometimes. They don't always love being told hard truths,” Todd proclaimed.

That's deep. And brave. Now do Islam. And Judaism. We'll wait.

But that's not my point. Of course Todd is a coward, which is why he plays the bully. The deeper point is that he's saying the exact same thing I am -- that people are motivated to believe a comforting lie because truth can be painful. So we both agree on the mechanism, but we disagree on who is using it to distort reality beyond all recognition, Trump supporters or Trump haters such as himself.

Now, denial wouldn't be very effective if it didn't deny denial! In other words, denial always covers its tracks, so the the person engaging in it doesn't know he is doing so. Nevertheless, it's not that easy to eradicate the truth. In fact, it can't be done. So, what happens to it?

Well, it returns in various ways, in the form of persecution. Forgive me if this is all too obvious, but the most common way for truth to haunt the person who denies it is in the form of symptoms. Indeed, virtually every patient I see presents with what are called "symptoms" -- both psychic and somatic -- which are really just "transformations of truth," so to speak.

It's really rather profound: truth is easily transformed into pain, but one of the purposes of the transformation is to prevent the person from connecting the pain to the truth it simultaneously reveals and conceals. This is so common as to be... commonplace. When you see a real doctor, you might say something like: "I'm having this pain. What's really causing it, Doc?" Same thing when you see a so-called doctor such as myself, only it's more like this: "I'm having this pain, Dr. Gagdad. Please don't tell me what's really causing it." Again, that's what Freud calls "resistance," and it is ubiquitous.

Now let's contrast Todd's foolish take to this one by Dennis Prager, which goes to the question of what leftists really believe, and why they believe such crazy things. "How," he asks, "is one to understand what leftism stands for?"

The truth is it is almost impossible. What leftist in history would have ever imagined that to be a leftist, one would have to believe that men give birth or men have periods, or that it is fair to women to have to compete in sports with biological males who identify as females?

There are two primary reasons it is so difficult, if not impossible, to define leftism. One is that it ultimately stands for chaos.

He means this literally, and goes on to provide a partial list of specific policies which I would say are both a cause and consequence of Chaos (yes, such dis-order is demonic, but let's stay on track), including open borders, imaginary genders, meaningless "art" requiring no talent, "Drag Queen Story Hour for 5-year-olds," "rejection of the concept of better or worse civilizations," "the end of all use of fossil fuels," the dismantling of capitalism, etc.

How is it that we who believe in authorized "religious fairy tales" are so much more in touch with reality than the people who explicitly reject them? Prager goes on to explain why, but it is for reasons we've discussed on numerous occasions. The bottom line is that man is religious and cannot not be religious, in the sense that the human qua human is ordered to the Absolute, AKA God. Remove the real Absolute and man will inevitably replace it with an unauthorized false one. This story is told in Genesis 3, and retold in and by every subsequent generation.

How do we avoid being seduced and hypnotized by a fake religion such as leftism, feminism, Marxism, environmentalism, progressivism, et al? Well, when you put it that way, the question answers itself. For example, the other day, Prager published another essay on true Judaism. I suppose Todd, if he is to be intellectually honest and consistent -- an impossibility, but we'll let it pass -- would have to call this "fairy tale thinking." Prager mentions seventeen metaphysical, ontological, existential, theological, epistemological, and ethical principles (or fairy tales, you decide), including,

--"There is one universal God" [or Absolute]. This God is the Creator of the world and the God of all humanity. Given this principle, racism is impossible.

--"One universal God means there is one universal morality." [Morality is not relative.]

--God is incorporeal, eternal, transcendent, personal, and the source of goodness and morality.

--"God's primary demand is that people be good." (Indeed, if people were only good, this would be paradise. We would say the restoration of God's grace is the necessary condition of real goodness, i.e., sanctity, but such theological distinctions would be the subject of a different post.)

--"There is an afterlife -- God rewards the good and punishes the bad." If this weren't the case, then God would be unjust, which would defy logic.

--"Human beings are not born basically good." (There are two kinds of people -- those who believe man is fallen, and idiots.)

--"Therefore, evil comes primarily from within the human being, not from external causes, such as poverty." Interior chaos generates the exterior kind. See Democrat run cities for details.

--"All people are created in the image of God." Somewhat of a no-brainer if you understand what man is, and that he couldn't possibly be what he is if God weren't Who Am.

--"Judaism is a religion of distinctions," which is to say, a cure for the formless chaos of the left, e.g., "God and man, Good and evil, Man and woman, Holy and profane, Life and death," etc.

I suppose if you want to be really stupid, you could oppose such fairy tales to science. In which case,

Man's self-limitation to scientific knowledge in the strict sense can mean that he loses his openness for the unlimited object of knowledge [the Absolute]. In other words, there is a particular form of intellectual un-freedom, the root of which is the exclusive ideal of science (Pieper).

Any form of scientism is a fairy tale. Leftism is a materialistic ideology. Ergo, leftism is a fairy tale.

A Course in Hallucinations

Another attempt at a brief and pointed post. Otherwise I won't be able to post until Wednesday, and I want to maintain contact with my nonlocal sources before they become impatient and maybe leak to someone else. I want them to know I am reliable and not some kind of flake who doesn't take the voices in his head seriously.

Voices in the head. Don't pretend you don't hear them. For what is life but an unending commentary on existence? You could say it's a monologue, but in reality there is no such thing, for language itself is irreducibly dyadic and intersubjective, in that its reason for being is communication from party A to party B, even if both parties are in the same being. (The Trinity, for example, involves a kind of perpetual exchange between persons inhering in same substance.)

Therefore, the voice in our head must have a from --> to relation, but from Who to Whom? Moreover, there are diverse modes of speech, from the literal to the allegorical to the poetic, so the voice must be interpreted in terms of both content and mode or genre.

And even literal speech is never actually literal, because a word is a symbol, and a symbol points to something other than itself. If I write "chair," I don't mean the letters that constitute the word, but that thing over there that you can sit on. Now, what if I say something more abstract, like "justice" or "being" or "God"? To what am I pointing? Language is still mediating, but from whom to what?

There's another twist: that one must be adequate to interpret the message. Someone could relate a perfectly sound mathematical equation to me, but I would have no way of knowing whether or not it is true. Rather, I'd have to take it on faith.

Now, what if existence itself is a message? To turn it around, how could it not be a message, for everything we do, all day long, involves, or may be traced back to, the interpretation of the world. For example, at the moment I'm typing on a computer keyboard, which presupposes a computer science rooted in various related disciplines such as information theory and digital transmission.

The so-called "scientific revolution" was revolutionary precisely because we began listening to the world in a specific way and interpreting the message. To everyone's surprise (boo!) it spoke in pure mathematics, to the point that it was eventually forgotten that it doesn't only speak in terms of abstract quantities.

Soon enough there was a counter-revolution (Romanticism) that felt the math nerds were totally ignoring the aesthetic message of the world. Positivists insisted that math is the only message, while our existentialists and deconstructionists maintain that there is no message at all. The latter are essentially saying: there are no voices in my head, and I obey them implicitly! Come to think of it, that's what leftists say as well.

For example, the message of biology is that you are a boy or you are a girl. Period. DNA has spoken! If you go the ER with a serious medical problem, they're going to want to know: man or woman. It will be of no concern to them what you think you are, or what you want to be. If they do care about that, then you are in the wrong ER. Unless it is a psychiatric emergency, which is another matter entirely. As a psychologist, my stock in trade is what people feel is the case as opposed to what is actually the case.

Is the truth true if we don't want it to be? No, truth must by definition be what IS, regardless of how we feel about it. Same with reality: it doesn't disappear just because we're not in contact with it.

Some people on the left -- the Deepaks of the world -- will tell you that "perception is reality." Indeed, Deepakrat presidential candidate Marriane Willamson is a student and teacher of the Course in Miracles, which started off as a voice in the head of a psychologist named Helen Schucman, which she presumed to be Jesus. Strangely, despite the voice insisting that illness is an illusion, she died anyway of pancreatic cancer. Now, who are you going to believe, the voice in this lady's head or your own lying eyes?

Yeah, you could say that death is a Course in Reality. It has its downside, but think of how little we could understand of reality in its absence. Why would we need to learn anything about the world if we were immortal?

For example, the word from reality is that we shouldn't jump off buildings or walk in front of buses. But if doing so didn't result in injury and death, we'd have no reason to learn about gravity, or the physics of collisions.

Besides, if everything is love, then nothing is. And if perception is reality, that's another way of saying that there is no such thing as reality and therefore nothing to perceive. Nevertheless, you have to pay for such wisdom with real money. Try paying for it with LUV and see how far it gets you.

Which leads to the question: who is really saying this, and why is anyone listening? Examples:

"It [the Course] states that everything involving time, space, and perception is illusory."

"Healing is accomplished when the sufferer no longer sees any value in pain."

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

To this latter I would say that man is by definition both material and spiritual at the same time, which is kind of the Whole Point, certainly of the Incarnation. If this weren't the case then God would just incognate as a voice in our head.

A voice in my head once remarked that the two essential principles of Christianity are Incarnation and Trinity, and that everything else is, as it were, an entailment of, or commentary on, these. I believe it.

The Tao of Fredo

Nothing proves more the limits of science than the scientist’s opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession. --Dávila

Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility. Well, yes -- if one doesn't believe the world is created, in which case there is no principle that can account for all these layers of intelligibility, everywhere we look.

Of course, when it comes to the big wide world outside physics, Einstein was no Einstein. He became Einstein because of his preternatural ability to focus so narrowly on that little world. Or maybe it was just autism.

Wait -- little world? Let's see you make a revolutionary breakthrough in physics, Bob! Last time I checked, you flunked out of business school during the Carter administration because of "math and stuff." What makes you qualified to judge Einstein?

I'll tell you what makes me qualified: the same thing that makes you qualified, which is to say, common sense. For the plain fact of the matter is that the world is comprehensible. (Or to back up one step, either it is comprehensible or it isn't; and if it isn't, you may -- must -- stop thinking now, assuming you ever started, because your "thinking" will bear no knowledge-relation to the world.)

For those of us with common sense, the world is plainly comprehensible. Now, why is it comprehensible? The first thing you must comprehend is that this is not a scientific question. Rather, the intelligibility of the world is a scientific assumption, or an implicit axiom without which the conduct of science is impossible.

Here again, in order to even begin to answer this question, one must exit the narrow world of physics, because no answer(s) will be found there. Sure, you can pretend physics holds the answer, but mere physics can't even account for itself, let alone anything transcending it. Which is why this polemical sounding aphorism isn't really polemical at all:

Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question.

This is literally true, in the sense that the very concept of "importance" is an extra-scientific value judgment. The other day I saw Fredo Cuomo on CNN, a man who pretends to be Catholic, aggressively insist that only science could (some day) determine the morality of abortion. Until it weighs the evidence and renders its judgment, it's like, just your opinion, man.

Here we see how science, far from answering (or even being able to answer) important questions, renders one stupid by attempting to rely upon it to answer those very questions. Again, don't believe me, believe the Aphorist:

Fredo vividly demonstrates to his airport audience how Nothing is more alarming than science in the ignorant.

For just look at how Fredo's Stupidity appropriates with diabolical skill what science invents.

Indeed, Fredo shows us how Scientific ideas allow themselves to be easily depraved by coarse minds.

And What is more irritating than [Fredo's] stupidity itself is a scientific vocabulary in [Fredo's] mouth.

Now, If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is.

THEREFORE, Whoever appeals to any science in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust of his honesty or his intelligence.

In the case of Fredo, honesty AND intelligence.

Hmm, I got a little sidetracked with the Fredo bashing. However, I think we're almost finished anyway.

I suppose we've left out one other possibility, that the world is comprehensible but not created. What would this imply, and why does it make no sense?

Well, for starters, the world's comprehensibility would be anchored in no principle; nor would its intelligibility to our intelligence have a sufficient reason. As Pieper describes it, this would reduce to a "total lack of orientation," because we would deprive ourselves of any and all possible support, whether from inside or outside ourselves, i.e., subjectively or objectively.

Existential freedom? Yes, "this is precisely that famous kind of freedom to which one is not called but condemned." It is not freedom as the Christian understands it but as the nihilist understands it: it is reduced to being irretrievably lost in the cosmos, as opposed to being given a teleological freedom, the purpose of which is theosis, or participation in, and assimilation of, divinity. "God becomes man that man might become God," as the Fathers say.

Freedom, truth, knowledge, intelligibility, virtue, science: each of these is impossible in a world that isn't created -- not "in the past," but in each and every moment. If the world isn't created, then not only are we all condemned to Fredohood, but inescapably so.

Although creation as a process and event necessarily remains inaccessible to our knowing faculties, still it can be said that it must be at any rate a non-temporal event which transcends all succession in time....

Our routine "awareness of going beyond the 'here and now'" will be dismissed "as unreal and poetic idealization... to those who do not see or admit to the true situation of man within the whole of reality." But for the restavus, this vertical awareness "is nothing other than the simple description of reality."

Bottom line aphorism: modern physics PROVES that the cosmos is vastly larger than we had ever imagined. And yet:

The distances of the physical universe are those of a prison.

Meta-Critical Thinking

Just a quick post unless things get out of hand.

Critical thinking. You will have noticed that leftists -- largely because of rampant Dunning-Krugery on the left -- congratulate themselves on engaging in it. Well, if AOC is a critical thinker, then I am a bubbleheaded yokel. And vice versa: if I am the critical thinker, then AOC is a credulous buffoon.

Suffice it to say, we can't both justifiably strike down with great vengeance and furious anger those who would poison and destroy our brothers with sloppy thinking.

How convenient that the next chapter in Exercises in the Elements is entitled Two Ways of Being "Critical." First of all, why do we want our thinking to be the critical kind? Defined negatively, it is to ensure "that something which too easily happens to the uncritical mind does not also happen to" us.

What is this "too easy" thing? It is prematurely accepting an obvious or superficial explanation without sufficient testing to make sure it is valid. We all, secular and religious alike, have faith in things. But

Neither the philosopher nor the believer is allowed to ignore problems and counter arguments: both have the duty to be "critical," though each in his own way.

For the scientist, the focus is more narrow and analytic, "in short, not to let anything slip through unchecked."

In the case of the philosopher and believer the task is very different, in that it is more vertical and synthetic, so to speak. Here the challenge is "not to leave anything out and not to neglect anything that belongs to the totality of the world," not excluding revelation -- the whole existentialada, top to bottom, inside and out, in all its depth, width, height, and power.

This is a Tall Order, but it is precisely this integrated totality to which man is uniquely ordered. Along these lines, just yesterday I thought of a "proof of God," which I place in quotation marks because as always, proofs of God abound for those in no need of them.

The short (because I want to move on) version goes like this: if you understand man, then you understand that man has god-like abilities. But we are not God. Therefore God exists, because there can be no other explanation for the source of our godlike abilities. They are not something that could have ever "evolved" in the natural sense, because they are by definition transnatural. Even a human baby can know things in a way no mere animal could ever do.

You could say that encountering the totality of being requires the totality of ourselves. But if we weren't born with this preconceptual ability, it isn't something we could ever acquire or even conceive (no animal wonders about the cosmos because no animal could ever conceive it).

Imagine a pig saying "in order to fly in the air for long distances, we need wings." Conversely, a bird doesn't have to say this. Rather, it just flies. Likewise, man comes into the world ordered to the Absolute, before he has ever experienced a thing in this world. It's not something we need to learn. It just is -- and is, by the way, the necessary condition for learning any truth.

Oh. That's the end of the chapter. Only two pages. Therefore, I've succeeded in dashing off a quick & dirty drive-by post.

Only a Story

Pieper has a brief chapter on Socrates, who emphasizes a point that is often forgotten by modern (let alone postmodern) sophisticates: that language is only a means to a message. If we get hung up on the means, then we can miss the message. Forest and trees.

This is no less true for science than theology, because it's true of everything. For example, what is the message of the cosmos? That may sound like a nonsense question, but it really isn't, because most everyone has an answer, even if they never explicitly formulate the question. But it really (and truly) comes down to this:

--The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

Or in other words: the cosmos is meaningful if it is a means (to the message), insignificant if it is the message.

But the cosmos can't be the message, or we couldn't be here to decode it. The fact that we may do so indicates that something transphysical is going on, in that there is means, message, receiver, and decoder. These cannot be reduced to the physical cosmos without negating the reducer.

Similarly, what is the message of history? Of man? Of life?

Regarding the first, if history is the message, then the bard was right: sound + fury signifying nothing. Or, to put it in more simple terms, history = Ø.

Interestingly, this is the conclusion of both premodern and postmodern mentalities, in that the former believed in a cyclical time that goes nowhere, whereas the latter insist that we simply invent and superimpose meaning in order to justify power.

These are equivalent barbarisms, which is why you shouldn't wonder at the barbarity of precivilized tribes nor be surprised at the neobarbaric tribalism of the postcivilized left. For what is the message of the left? Never be distracted by the literal narrative, for it is always much ado about nothing but power.

As to the message of history, aphorisms:

--Real history exceeds what merely happened.

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

So anyway, in one of the dialogues, Socrates says (in reference to a venerable myth) "You think it is only a story, but I think it is true." Why? Because the story is essentially a temporal means to a timeless message.

Take Genesis: is it the message, or only the means to a message? Here again, both religious and scientistic fundamentalists will tend to see it as the message and thereby miss the truth.

For example, it scarcely matters whether God literally breathes the breath of life into our nostrils so long as we understand that we are animated (given life) by the spirit of God. His pneumatic exhalation is our inhalation, and vice versa. Every sigh is a prayer, and every in-spiration a bene-diction.

Speaking of Christmas, that same spirit is received by Mary, but in a different way. Yes, you can try to figure out the biology of it all, but you won't get far, plus it's like trying to ascertain the color of three or the square root of cauliflower. Category error, big time. Pieper:

Neither the material from which the message is composed, nor the form in which it is couched is a decisive factor. What is decisive is the message itself.... Only the message is important. This alone is what Socrates considers to be true, and indeed, so true and valid that one can and must live one's life according to it.

This principle came up just last night, after we saw the highly raccoomended Richard Jewel. There's a scene in which a skeevy journalist sleeps with an FBI bully in exchange for a tip that Jewel is the prime suspect in the bombing.

Afterwards my son wanted to know if that "really" happened. I pointed out that it didn't matter, and that the truth was much worse -- that MSM journalists are a bunch of sleazy whores who couldn't care less about the truth, much less about the people they harm.

The film could scarcely be more timely. You could say it's only a story, but don't confuse its means with its message. As if the FBI would never be in bed with the MSM!

Eh, that seems like a logical place to stop. Merry Christmas, which is to say, listen carefully to the Christmas message in the Christmas story.

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous. --Dávila

Another Obsolete, Immature, and Trivial Post

I'd like to finish our review of Exercises in the Elements, partly because I have two more newly reissued books by Pieper in the piepline (Traditional Truth, Poetry, Sacrament and The Weight of Belief: Essays on Faith in the Modern Age), and there's no sense in starting them until this one has been digested. Otherwise it's like Chinese theology: read it and you're hungry an hour later.

No disrespect to Mr. Pieper, but we really think alike. Same attractor, same approach. You might call it novelty within tradition, or creative thinking within the constraints of sacred doctrine. Anyone can be creative without constraints, but then that's not really creativity, or rarely so, anyway. To live outside the law you must be honest, and to live outside tradition you'd damn well better be a spiritual genius. And even then, a spiritual genius will probably do better by working with traditional materials.

It makes sense that the most fruitful approach is to confine oneself to the constraints handed to us by God himself. Conversely, just look at what happens to thought when these constraints are ignored, or we imagine we can do without them. In so many ways, the culture war comes down to a bifurcation between these two visions; DSIB (Davila says it best:

--The modern desire to be original makes the mediocre artist believe that simply being different is the secret to being original.

--Originality must adhere to the continuity of a tradition.

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

--Ideas less than a thousand years old are not fully reliable.

--Nothing is more outdated at any moment than yesterday’s novelty.

--Nobody thinks seriously as long as originality is important to him.

--Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, and trivial to the serious man, we have to start over.

As I said a couple weeks ago, I'm going to just highlight some passages that stood out for me, and then try to stop myself from adding too much nauseam:

[I]n the midst of the evolutionary process the human spirit is not something developing like everything else but is incomprehensibly a new reality which is not undergoing transition, and which does not "become," but emerges "finished" from its origin in the creator and remains directly connected with it.

This is such a fundamental and consequential point that I could indeed expand upon it for the rest of this post. The point is that in the midst of a cosmos in which everything is evolving, has appeared a being who cannot be a mere product of contingent evolution. Early in my vertical career I was lumped in with the evolutionary mob (in fact, Prof. Wiki says I still am), even though I wouldn't be caught dead with most of them.

(Brief asnide: Trump and a Post-Truth World? Bitch please. What a self-beclowning tool Wilber has become. But that's what happens when one omnisciently presumes to ignore the God-given constraints referenced above. An exercise in grotesque egotism masquerading as egolessness peddled to a spiritually obtuse crowd of spiritual retards, self-righteous narcissists, and postmodern ignoramuses.)

Human beings are not going to "evolve" into something beyond human; we are not merely links in the evolutionary chain between us and something better, as we are already conformed to the Absolute, and there can be by definition nothing beyond the Absolute. It doesn't mean we can't more adequately conform to it, and this is indeed the point of the spiritual life. DSIB:

--The mind of the individual does not “evolve.” We only orchestrate with greater or lesser talent the themes we are born with.

Theology is translation from infinitude to finitude. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is impossible, at least for man:

"[T]he business of the theologian necessarily requires 'bilingualism,'" a translation from and to. A "literalist" collapses the two, or pretends that no translation is required, no familiarity with the two worlds. You will notice that atheists are as (if not more) prone to this as are fundamentalists, as they insist on treating scripture as the "thing itself" instead of being a translation about the thing itself. The thing itself (O) surely exists, but the scriptural map is not the divine territory.

The divine authors "speak," but we must hear through them "what cannot be fully and adequately expressed in any historical language." As Schuon would say, the language provides "points of reference" between the two worlds, very much in the manner of a beautiful painting, which is obviously a two-dimensional rendering of a three (or more) dimensional reality. I say "more" because the gifted artist is also able to convey interior realities, e.g., the inscape of a landscape or the soul of the person. How is this even possible? And yet, there it is.

At any rate, "it is clear that theology, strictly speaking... by its very nature exceeds the capabilities of any individual, no matter how gifted" -- any more than the gifted artist could depict visually the "place" from which art pours into our world.

Nor can theology be done in the absence of "loving faith," because what's the alternative? Hateful cynicism? That's not going to get you far, because ultimate knowledge of God must involve conformity to him, and God is not a hateful cynic. "Theological knowledge cannot be fruitful except as

knowledge based on fundamental solidarity, even loving identification, by virtue of which the infinite object appears not as something alien but is directly one's own.

In this regard, love is less a sentiment than a link between two subjects, through which divinity flows. DSIB:

--We only love in our life the presences that cross it like messengers from other worlds.