Liberal Patronage and Fugitive Slaves

I'm not quite ready to leave The Betrayal of the Masses behind. There's just too much fine insultainment to let pass, such as the crack that liberalism is the doctrine that dedicates itself "to preserving the problems for which it presents itself as the solution."

For example, there are some major cities that have had uninterrupted Democrat rule since, I don't know, World War II, or even World War I. A quick search reveals that most of the poorest cities in the country -- i.e., those with the highest poverty rates -- have been controlled by Democrats for over fifty years. This has to be the ultimate instance of the Butterfield Fallacy: Urban Poverty Soars Despite Liberal Governance. Ironic, no?

Consider the spiritual home of our Dear Leader, Chicago. Let's call in Mr. Butterfield again: Leading the Nation in Murdered Blacks Despite Powerful Black Political Establishment. But for the left, politics is a patronage machine dressed up in an ideology. There is no ideology per se, in the sense that Democrats must cobble together electoral groups based upon the gift of victimization, not the truth of ideas.

To put it another way, the only way to unify such disparate groups is through the vehicle of oppression-entitlement. Otherwise, an ovary tower feminist, say, has little in common with the Central Park thug who would just as soon mug her for her jewelry.

According to Siegel, the largest employers in Chicago are the federal government, its abysmal school system, the city government, the CTA, the Cook County government, and the Chicago Park District. And you can be sure that the machine hires only the very best and brightest parasites!

It's the same in my failed state, California. Yesterday we spoke of the iron triangle of Big Government, Big Media, and Big Stupid. Regarding the latter, Siegel notes that in the Cal State University system, there is a ratio of one administrator per one professor. And we all know their political affiliation. That is what you call grotesque and in-your-face patronage.

In fact, every couple of years we see student demonstrations over the high cost of tuition. Ironically -- ironically? -- they always direct their ire at the greedy citizens who don't want to waste more money on public education, instead of toward a corrupt system of political patronage that stocks our universities with mid-level hacks and free-riders.

Back in 1981, when I graduated from Cal State Northridge -- the Harvard of the west San Fernando Valley, the same venerable institution from which the great James Taranto nearly graduated -- tuition was like $105 a semester. Now it is $5,472 per year, which I believe represents a what -- 2,600% increase? Did I do that right? I should know this, since I received a Gentleman Loafer's C in Business Math at CSUN, which means I was definitely breathing in class.

At any rate, liberal governance is an expensive proposition, and not just because of taxes. Those parasites don't suck themselves, you know.

Speaking of irony and fine insultainment, Ann Coulter, in cataloging the wondrous deeds of feminist icon Wendy Davis, notes how very ironic it is that she left her sugar daddy-husband the very same day he made the last payment on her Harvard Law School loan. Iconic and ironic! -- as in It's ironic -- my car stopped running right after I ran out of gas.... It's ironic -- my house was broken into, and the next thing I knew all my valuables were missing.... It's ironic -- I was punched in the face right before my nose broke.

Ironic, isn't it, that a feminist hero should get to the top the old fashioned way, by sleeping with a wealthy or influential man? That's how Hillary did it, except for the sleeping part.

When we consider the list of Failed 20th Century Ideologies, only liberalism has survived. Why is this? Again, it must be because of its most excellent system of patronage, not because of the ideology, because when Americans hear the ideology in its naked form, without a fogleaf of pandering, bogus compassion, or intellectual dishonesty, they don't like it.

Thus, without the constant payoffs, liberalism might have gone the way of its cousins, fascism, socialism, and communism. The problem with those latter three is that they didn't involve enough people in the scam; or, to be precise, they didn't allow enough pigs at the trough.

Now, we all know liberalism is a status-centered belief system rooted in snobbery, moral superiority, and intellectual one-upsmanship. But again, in America, that just won't sell. And from the elite side of things, it is understood that not everyone can be an elite. Besides, if everyone can be one, then the elitism has no status value.

What to do? This is one of the themes of the Betrayal of the Masses, that in contemporary liberalism we see this otherwise inexplicable alliance of wealthy status seekers and overeducated mediocrities at one end, and various victim groups at the other. The latter have no personal identity, only a group identity. Only the people at the top are permitted to be pseudo-individuals, whereas the rabble is only permitted to go along with the elites. (Rush touched on this very theme in yesterday's program.)

As such, the greatest threat to the left is rampant individualism in the boobeoisie, because then they are not subject to top-down control by elites. This is why uppity blacks who stray from the liberal plantation are treated so cruelly, in an intellectual version of the old Fugitive Slave Laws. If you find one hiding somewhere, by all means turn him in! The same goes for fugitive women, fugitive homosexuals, fugitive journalists... and fugitive filmmakers, for revenge is a Dinesh pest served a cold indictment.

Then again, I suppose D'Souza could be just another victim of liberal irony. Nevertheless, it does resemble one of those Libyan film reviews we've heard so much about.

*****

Via Maggie's Farm, we are number two in soft tyranny. All others are number three or lower (click to embiggen):

Looks like the first seven are perma-blue states. Ironic!

Obama: The Three They've Been Waiting For

A few more thoughts on The Betrayal of the Masses before we return to whatever it was we were talking about.

One thing that occurs to me is that there must be a sort of political deep structure that shapes people's outward beliefs. In other words, politics can only be thought about in so many ways, so the same patterns recur from antiquity to the present. I know, Big Whoop, since no reader of Aristotle's Politics will be surprised to discover this truth.

I noticed the same thing in a book I recently read on The Rise of American Democracy from the time of the founding until Lincoln. Jefferson, for example, hated the Federalists, based upon his belief that they were just trying to create a new aristocracy.

Thus, like the liberals of today, Jefferson engaged in (small-d) democratic demagoguery in order to attain power. But once in power, he had little use for true democracy. Rather, he just wanted a new kind of aristocracy: his kind. The dispute between Washington/Hamilton and Jefferson/Madison was between elites, not the rubes, for no one believes 2+2=5 just because the mob says it is. But an aristocracy of men is quite different from an aristocracy of truth.

The bottom line is that aristocracy is a permanent temptation for the human being. As is its mirror image, democracy, AKA mob rule. Since these represent permanent possibilities, the founders built them into the system, with the executive branch being an expression of royalist tendencies, the senate for the contemplative and slow-to-change aristocratic trend, and the house for the hotheaded and mercurial rabble.

None of these, it should go without saying, is the locus of "political truth." Rather, they are only centers of power, and power is at a right angle to truth. Therefore, a man without truth on his side may appeal to the demos. Conversely, if he doesn't have the demos on his side, then he may appeal to royal decree. We see how Obama engages in both, depending upon the needs of the day.

(Obama reminds me of what Carson Wells said about Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men: "No no. No. You don't understand. You can't make a deal with him. Even if you gave him the money he'd still kill you. He's a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that. He's not like you. He's not even like me.")

Or, as Siegel points out, the history of liberalism shows that liberals are principled, loudmouthed authoritarians, or principled, loudmouthed anti-authoritarians, depending upon who is in charge. When it was Bush, they were reactionary anti-authoritarians. Now they are reactionary authoritarians (with a few principled exceptions).

This janus-faced attitude toward state power should not be surprising for a doctrine that rejects truth a priori, as does Obama i.e., "we hold this truth to be self-evident, that our nation is founded upon a rejection of absolute truth." In this context the adjective "absolute" is just an evasion, since truth is by definition absolute (or a reflection of the Absolute).

But leftists just want to tar truth with "absolutism," to imply that anyone who affirms it is some sort of extremist. Such extremists do exist, of course, but the problem is that they insist upon absolute lies, on things that cannot possibly be true. And leftism revolves around a number of such "impossible truths" such as multiculturalism, moral relativism, homosexual marriage, and all the rest.

Allied with this is the left's insistence upon equality unless equal treatment results in inequality, in which case they are all for unequal treatment. Not enough female firemen or marines? Okay, let 'em take the test. Oops! Even a strapping hulk like Michelle Obama can't pass it. Therefore, the law must treat men and women differently. Likewise, not enough blacks in law school? Easy. Just systematically treat them as inferiors.

The point is, just as the left is authoritarian or rebellious, depending upon whether they are in or out of power, they are egalitarian or discriminatory, depending upon how it effects one of their client groups, i.e., how it redounds to their power. Which is why they have no concerns about under-representation of groups that do not contribute to their power, say, Asians or Cubans or Raccoons.

Again, at the time the Constitution was written, the founders were mindful of the different ways of ordering power, i.e., royalty, aristocracy, and democracy. For the most part, the story of the left is the story of a new aristocracy/priesthood pretending to be an expression of the demos. This aristocracy is composed of groups that didn't exist at the time of the founding, i.e., Big Media, Big Government (especially the cancerous public sector unions), and Big Stupid (i.e., academia).

This is the iron triangle of the left, replacing the triangle intended by the framers. Looked at in this way, academia is the priesthood/church, the state is royalty, and old media is the elite/aristocracy.

Which is why Obama was so tough to defeat, what with (to paraphrase Siegel) his TV looks, his radio voice, his phony preacher's cadences, and his pseudo-intellectualism. He is the total package, three frauds in One. Thus, he is the three they've been waiting for since JFK, who also had the media looks, the royalist glow, and the superfical, liberal-approved intellectualism.

Unrealpolitik: Power is the New Truth

The Betrayal of the Masses is so rich with insights and provokes so many thoughtstreams that it may surpass my ability to blog about it.

I see that many of my obscure notes to myself would serve as decent titles, such as:

Escape From Human Nature

Intellectual Fraudevillians

The First Law of Liberal Thermodynamics: The Conservation of Failure

How to Boost Self-Esteem by Sucking Dignity from Your Constituents

The Way of the Superior Mediocrity

Daddy, What Did You Tax in the War on Poverty?

Amnesty and Electoral Success: The Juans We've Been Waiting For

The New Indulgence System: Purchasing White Redemption by Giving to the Church of Racial Grievance

One theme that emerges from the book is just how wrong, and even deranged, various liberal luminaries have always been, e.g., Herbert Croly, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Cowley, G.B. Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, and all the Frankfurt School weenies, e.g. Adorno, Marcuse, Norman Brown, and many others.

As I said, Siegel has a much better mastery of their own literature than they do. Rather, contemporary liberals simply project into the past and cherry-pick absurdly self-flattering items. They are, of course, the originators of self-esteem via revisionism: unattractive women's history, homosexual history, black history, and all their other agenda-driven intellectual ghettos.

Of the latter, Siegel writes of how liberals found a way out of their own nonsense via deconstruction. Just when reality had caught up with them in the late '70s, they slipped through the linguistic net with postmodern antithinkers and philosophical celebrities such as Foucault, de Man, Derrida, and the rest of that sinister rabble.

Because social science had been such an epic fail for them, they switched over to this new literary "French-influenced romantic irrationalism" featuring "priestly truths much beyond the ken of the general public."

You might say that postmodernism is to thinking what climate change is to global warming -- a way to stay one step ahead of an inconvenient truth via word magic. This is why no conservative embraces deconstruction: because we believe language is a function of reality, not vice versa.

You know the drill, at least if you've been to college: there are "no objective truths," only the "truth-effects created by the workings of power" and the manipulation of language. Since All is Power, there is nothing wrong with seizing it and using the state "to break through the invisible web of coercion spun by everyday fascism."

You are either oppressor or oppressed, and if you are a fan of this blog, then you are the former, you Nazi bastard!

Speaking of intellectual fraudevillians, it's a great gig, because they somehow transform what can only be called "epistemological nihilism" into "political certainty." How do they do that?

For example, how did Obama arrive at the confident but utterly absurd conclusion that our nation is founded upon (in his words), "a rejection of absolute truth" and the dismissal of "any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations [read: ME] into a single, unalterable course..."

In other words, the Constitution is designed to ignore itself, to make way for the Rule of Man. At least the Right Man, i.e., the Divine Lightbringer. But... isn't that what we were fighting against from '76 to '83?

Insolence! As we know, if there is no truth, then power rushes in to fill the vacuum. Like all postmodernists, Obama wants it both ways: "there is no truth, only the truth that there is only power, so I will seize that power, thank you, and use it to impose my truth."

Where on earth did he get such a crazy idea, and why did no one ever correct his misunderstanding?

What a naive question. Such ideas are not subject to correction, but to tenure. He was, after all, an associate professor of constitutional law, so he knows better than anyone else that the law means what he wants it to mean.

Note that in order to harbor such an illusion, Obama must place himself above the Framers, just as he knows better than you do how to run your affairs. Obama must actually believe he never faced failure in life thanks to his own abilities, instead of being wafted to the top via upward political mobility: the right ideology wrapped in the right color. Thus, he is the epitome of illegitimate political power, so I guess he's right about that.

Like their dear leader, today's college students learn "that alternative opinions [are] merely masks for racism, sexism, and homophobia," and that America is "objectively racist, evil, imperialist, sexist (pick your term of opprobrium)."

So, how is the postmodernist exempt from his own sweeping verdict?

Easy: shut up! As we know, there is no place where speech is less free than on a college campus, since the ideas that predominate there cannot withstand scrutiny, and even the tenured know enough to know that.

Speaking of titles, this post could also have been called Feelpolitik, since liberal positions are felt and not thought.

Wanted: One Honest Liberal

Apropos of yesterday's post, Jay Nordlinger has a piece in the latest National Review in which he asks if anyone out there has a "go to" liberal writer or thinker, someone who is actually intellectually serious -- and honest -- and "who will give me the best arguments of the other side," without the usual smugness, comic evasiveness, girlish hysteria, high-minded name-calling, educated ignorance, Timesworthy narrow-mindedness, Koch-headed bigotry, and deep shallowness -- all of it with the best of intentions, of course.

I can't think of any. Perhaps you can. But in order to qualify for the role, one must not only be able to put forth rational and factually supported arguments for one's own positions, but just as important, make the best possible arguments for the opposing position. If one can't do that, then one is not being intellectually honest, but simply engaging in a logical fallacy, i.e., the straw man.

For example, Nordlinger mentions Richard Cohen -- who is a fairly innocuous middlebrow hack, and not even close to being one of the worst offenders -- and yet, he "imagines conservatives who do not exist. He seems unwilling to debate, or consider, conservatives as we truly are. He is a caricaturist..."

As are nearly all of them. MSNBC is really a cartoon network, not a news operation.

One exception who comes to mind is Lanny Davis. I've actually heard him be fair, honest, and self-critical. Still way wrong, but that's okay. Wrong is educable. And he seems to have a conscience, i.e., a capacity for shame which is totally missing in a Clinton, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and all the rest. The problem is (for I remember it well), snobbery, projection, smearing, superiority, intellectual dishonesty -- these are addictive, and not susceptible to correction, since the person who wants to correct you is an evil racist, or homophobe, or one-percenter, etc.

I am quite sure I can make the pro-abortion case in a dispassionate manner -- well, not the constitutional case, which is impossible -- but simply the argument that abortion should be available to a woman in the early stages of pregnancy. The problem is, they even lie about that, for example, by suggesting that abortion is only legal during the first trimester, when the fact of the matter is that there is no such practical or enforceable limit. There is a huge difference between what liberals say they believe vs. what they actually believe. They only discuss the latter amongst themselves, since they know the average person would be offended if not disgusted.

At any rate, you never hear a liberal abortion advocate acknowledge the unassailable principle that animates the pro-life position -- that it is unjust to take the life of an innocent human being. Instead, they will accuse the person of wanting to "control women's bodies," or some other nonsense.

Back to the OUTSTANDING book under review, The Betrayal of the Masses. I'm thinking Siegel must be an ex-liberal, because he is so thoroughly familiar with their literature of the past 100 years. No way would I want to voluntarily enter that swamp, for which reason alone we should thank him for his yeoman sewer service.

Another reason is that the left is deeply ahistorical about itself. If we treat the left as a "collective patient," so to speak, it is very much like a neurotic person in denial about his own past, and thus compelled to make the same mistakes over and over (the "repetition compulsion"), without in-sight. But in all honesty, "neurotic" is too mild a term.

Without getting too pedantic, a neurotic person has intrapsychic conflicts of which he is at least dimly aware, and which cause him pain. At the other extreme of psychopathology are psychotic individuals, who are frankly out of touch with reality, subject to delusions, hallucinations, and the like.

In between are borderline personalities -- not necessarily Borderline Personality Disorder per se -- but rather, people who rely upon more primitive defense mechanisms because of structural deficits in the psyche (generally rooted in early attachment).

Where is Dr. Sanity when you need her? Oh. Here she is. I forgot about the google machine. At any rate, she used to write a lot of good stuff on this very subject.

To simplify, there are neurotic and relatively healthy defense mechanisms such as repression, sublimation, and intellectualization; and intrinsically unhealthy ones such as denial, splitting, and projective identification.

One of the problems with the latter is that, instead of being intrapsychic, they tend to be intersubjective, meaning that they are acted out with other people or with the wider culture. They always induct others into their psychodramas, and cast other people as either villain (e.g., Koch Brothers), or savior (Obama), or some other primitive archetype yoinked from their intrapsychic swamp.

Siegel touches on this in the book, quoting Edmund Wilson, who wrote of how the liberal/progressive has "evolved a psychological mechanism which enables him to turn moral judgments against himself into moral judgments against society."

The liberal converts personal problems into collective ones -- conveniently located outside himself -- so the real problem can never be addressed, which leads to the cycle of repetition compulsion, in which we see the same discredited arguments time and again. For the left, it's always the same old whining in new battles.

Thus, "Liberal social programs to combat poverty and reform the schools, their failures long institutionalized, have produced a government whose grasp far exceeds its competence and whose costs are carried by the private-sector middle class" (Siegel). Nevertheless, "Liberalism, as a search for status, is sufficiently adaptable that even in failure, self-satisfaction trumps self-examination."

That is a perfect example of a primitive defense mechanism analogous to addiction: deny the reality, project the problem into others, and generate dopey good feelings via a dopamine rush -- e.g., sanctimony, self-righteousness, and intellectual superiority, not to mention the high from acquiring and wielding power over the contemptible citizenry -- so we're really dealing with a dual-diagnosis involving addiction and structural (i.e., borderline) deficits in the psyche.

No wonder they hate us.

The Liberal Coalition: Snobbish Robbers & the Slobbering Mob

Well, that's annoying. Lost most of today's post, so this is all we get. I'll have to continue it tomorrow. Never mind. Saved by the belle, Julie, who used some kind of computer magic to recover it.

What an opportune time, on this national day of liberal pandering, to review one of the best books on the spiritual pathology of liberalism I have ever read, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.

Wait a minute: "spiritual pathology?" Isn't such bobnoxious language just going to guarantee no liberal takes the book seriously? Well, first of all, those are my words. Thus far, Siegel hasn't used the word "pathology," although he does often touch on the deranged and displaced -- what I would call gno-nothing -- spirituality at the sclerotic heart the liberal project.

But what do you call someone who will accuse me of racism for merely pointing out the elementary truth that liberal elites pander to various interest groups -- they all know it -- in order to garner their support at the ballot box? And at the same time, smear as racist anyone who points out this elementary truth? That's right: deeply sick.

The world created by such pandering slanderers is called hell, for hell is anyplace where truth cannot be uttered, or where one is punished for expressing it. Such hells can appear anywhere from the childhood home to the politico-media-academic complex (although one suspects the latter is rooted in the former, for what kind of living human being would want to cash in his humanness in exchange for membership in a zombie cult of politically correct hell?).

Lately we've been discussing the confluence of high and low, abstract and concrete, psyche and soma, that we see in Catholicism and developmental psychoanalysis. We see something similar in contemporary liberalism, albeit in a perverse way, with the alliance of ideological malefactors of great wealth -- the deserving rich, e.g., entertainers, global warming alarmists, trial lawyers -- at the top, and what used to be called the proletariat, or working class, at the bottom, leaving out the eighty percent of the restavus -- that would be the middle class referred to in the title.

But the left doesn't really bother with the proletariat anymore. Rather, it is simply a coalition of the willing-to-be-victimized, and one needn't be poor to be a member.

Homosexuals, for example, are more affluent than the average, and girls do much better than boys on most measures, e.g., high school graduation, college, health, mortality, mental illness, drug abuse, suicide, imprisonment, etc. Latinos who hit the jackpot by making it to America have to be taught to think of themselves as victims, and what's up with Jews? This book provides some clues to that canaandrum, but I still plan to read Podhoretz's Why Are Jews Liberals?

Likewise, Obamacare actually discriminates against the young-and-poor, regarding them as selfish malefactors of great health, i.e., ATMs for authorized victims.

Siegel's book is short but extremely rich. There is hardly a wasted word, and there are provocative insights on nearly every page. Among other virtues, it provides a real history of 20th century liberalism, to counter the fraudulent, self-flattering one invented by themselves. Remember, most history is written by the winners. Of tenure. The rest is written by the whiners, e.g., feminist history and all the other subhumanities.

Siegel notes that the top-bottom coalition alluded to above didn't start with pre-WWI progressivism -- which was another beast entirely, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans such as TR, mostly rooted in the Christian "social gospel" -- nor did it begin with FDR's extra-constitutional statism.

Rather, the bitter roots of our contemporary liberalism are distinctly smelled "in the wake of the post-World War I disillusionment with American society. In the Twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right."

Very much contrary to their autoerotic self-image, this hostility revolved around an undisguised contempt for those they would presume to rescue via the creation of "an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide the same sense of hierarchy and order long associated with European statism."

So the story of how we have arrived at our liberal aristocracy is a long one, but Obama is its logical endpoint. Note that the aristocrats are by their nature contemptuous of anyone who isn't a member, but they are not permitted to express this toward the voting groups they need in order to retain power. Thus, it seeps from their every pore when discussing any group they don't need, e.g., "bitter clingers," or just white men (accent on both words) in general. White male grown ups supported Romney, just as they did McCain. Such a banality (and inevitability, given male nature) must be converted into a "war on women," or various other smears.

But liberals -- including auto-castrated white males -- can't even use the term without sneering. You will never hear a liberal strategist wondering how to garner more support from men, because not only do they not need it, they need to cling to their dehumanizing caricature in order to fire up one of their key constituencies, i.e., losers with a father complex.

Speaking of aristocracy and contempt, it is interesting to me that we actually see these on both sides of the political spectrum. For example, our good-natured contempt is directed at, say "LoFos," or college students with skulls full of mush, or tenured mediocrities, whereas liberal contempt is directed at white males (and male virtues in general), or Kansas dwellers ("what's the matter with them?"), or conservative blacks, or any woman who likes being one.

As for the aristocracy, the left's is again a combination of high and low, of properly overeducated fools at one end, and sanctified victims at the other. Thus, even a smart cookie as grotesquely undercooked as Rachel Jeantel can join the club, at least for 15 minutes: Oprah for a day!

But just because one is an aristocrat doesn't mean one has to be an affected, contemptuous, sneering snob, right? In fact, when one of these aristos comes off this way, one suspects that something else is going on. If I were a psychologist, I might suspect that the brittle snobbery is a defense mechanism against some sort of insecurity -- for a secure person doesn't need others to see him as special.

There are true aristocrats in this world -- people of Light -- and it has nothing to do with class, money, or education. Rather, one may discern them by the manner in which they tie their shoes. And the way they treat the help.

Can you even imagine liberalism without snobbery? I can't. It seems to be an addiction for them, and I can understand why, since I used to be one. All one has to do is affect the required intellectual posture in order to put down the Other -- something like, "can you believe that in this day and age, there are people who don't believe in global warming?" There is a 99% chance that such a person knows precisely nothing about global warming, and yet, by saying it, he is able to feel a charge of self-righteousness and intellectual superiority. That's a cheap high, and it is difficult to give up.

Likewise, what a thrill to call someone a racist! It's a thrill because one is really boasting of one's own non-racism, but what morally sane person would boast of his rudimentary decency? There's no thrill there, which is why the projection of evil is necessary in order to create that extra frisson, for hatred is more bracing than mere decency.

This ended up not being a review, just a standard-issue rant. I will get more deeply into the book tomorrow, and ratchet up the rant.

Living the Lie and Dying to Truth

"There is something in genuine myth that is analogous to our stories of what transpires between conception and the acquisition of language. Or in (m)other worlds, before living in language we are embodied in narratives -- a case of the word taking flesh -- a subject to which we will return tomorrow," he promised.

That's a little unclear, Bob, because what's the distinction between "living in language" and being "embodied in narratives"?

Fair question. My editor should have caught that. In order to explain what I mean, I think I will briefly reintroduce a little pedagogic device developed by Bion, which he simply called the "grid":

We've discussed the grid before. Let's see if I said anything helpful to our present concerns. "Basically, the vertical axis has to do with the evolution of thought, while the horizontal axis has to do with the uses to which the thought is put."

I'll just continue quoting from yesterBob until he outwrites his usefulness:

"Thus, for example, it is indeed possible to treat ideas as rocks, as the left proves every day. On the grid, the 'rock idea' would be at the intersection of 'concept' on the vertical axis and 'action' on the horizontal."

Note that the idea of a rock is naturally more evolved than the idea as a rock -- although it needs to be added that liberal elites consciously manipulate the language in this manner so as to influence their hordes of media-academic (and lower) LoFos into outrage and action -- or passion and bullying. An Obama or Clinton are masters at this, and pretty much nothing else. But where do they fall on the grid?

Notice the second column, Psi (Ψ). It essentially stands for the Lie, that is, "false formulations that are known to be false with the intention of counteracting the formulations which can generate anxiety or the developments which imply catastrophic change" (Grinberg, et al).

The first thing we need to notice is that the Lie exists on a separate axis from its potential evolution. Critically, the Lie is not necessarily on the stupid/intelligent continuum (although it can be).

Rather, the most brilliant person in the world can elaborate the Lie to the ends of thought, ad infinitum -- although in so doing, if the person were intellectually honest, he would realize that he has ended in a self-refuting absurdity, if you follow me, because the lie cannot go on "forever."

Doing so would represent an infinite regress, or a naughty infinity, which metaphysics will not allow. Thus, in the opinion of the Raccoon elders, the vertical axis not only ends in O, but everything prior to it is leading to -- or being attracted by -- O. That is indeed why thought "evolves" to begin with.

Recall what I said about rock-throwing leftists. A sincerely concerned reader has advised me to cut out the liberal bashing, because it instantly turns off readers who otherwise might benefit from the blog. He says that he has directed a number of liberal friends here, but that they were put off by what they would no doubt regard as my own primitive rock throwing.

But is that really what it is? Well, yes and no. We first need to ask whether the rocks are true or false. If they are true, then if you are hurt by one, then it is your own fault, because it is exposing a column 2 lie. What's the old saying about throwing a rock into a pigpen? The one who squeals is the one you hit. You have touched a nerve, as it were.

More to the point, if you've ever taken the trouble to read the masthead of the blog, it says right there LEFTWING RIDICULISM. And if you read ABOUT ME in the snidebar, it says that we take delight in providing fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls.

Now, what is politics but the organization of hatreds? Problems only occur when there is organized hatred that has ventured into a parallel psiworld.

To render this extremely concrete, let's apply this principle to the Benghazi fiasco, about which the regime has been systematically lying for the past 16 months. Now, why would they want to lie about it, and pretend it was just a movie review taking place on column 6 of the grid, action? See above: in order to counteract formulations which imply catastrophic change -- i.e., losing the forthcoming election. Yes, Obama promised change, but that was then. Now, like any entrenched power toker, he wants to prevent it.

And when we see comically evasive mouthpiece Jim Carney either dancing around the subject or expressing anger at reporters who bring it up, we are of course witnessing the attempt to counteract "formulations which can generate anxiety." Anxiety itself can easily transform into -- or mask itself via -- anger, petulance, impatience, irritability, self-righteousness -- you know, finger-wagging I did not have sexual relations with that woman, or the pseudo-detached At this point, what difference does it make?

Which brings up another important point about politics. There's nothing wrong with passion, so long as it is in the service of truth. But too many people -- both left and right, but especially on the left -- are just addicted to the passion of self-righteousness. People always receive a secret charge when their self-righteousness is provoked, and this can take on a life of its own, entirely separate from question of truth or falsehood. People like to be in this fired up state, as it is preferable to feeling bored and empty.

Now, back to the question at hand -- about how the space between ape and man is filled by myth. Note that on the grid, this appears in row 3, "dream thoughts, dreams, myths." This stage of thought comes after what Bion calls "alpha elements" and "beta elements," and before preconceptions, conceptions, scientific deductive systems, etc.

Some of our most important -- if not the most important -- myths appear in Genesis. Again, at the horizon of history is myth. This is inevitable, since there is only so far conceptual thought can go before hitting a wall. Think of how physics doesn't really account for creation. Rather, it simply hits a wall at the end of its equations.

Any five year-old can (and will) ask what happened before the big bang, to which we can only sensibly respond with myth -- and the operational word here is sensibly, for this is where myth is infused with a truth that surpasses our ability to exhaust it conceptually. When we hear it, it bangs an interior gong, at least if we are still living in a place where truth is embodied and not just entertained in the head.

Which means that God is not a concept -- although God can of course be expressed conceptually. Again, I would situate God at the extreme end of the vertical axis, always drawing us toward him in thought, action, and passion-emotion. There is a kind of metabolism that goes on, which is grounded in the first two rows, beta and alpha elements.

In the book, I talked about that very first bit of matter that wrapped around itself and decided to go on being, and how every development subsequent to this is built upon that first outrageous act of rebellion.

For Bion, it is the same with the development of thought. He distinguishes thoughts from the thinker. Clearly, thoughts must have preceded the first man who started thinking them, instead of thoughts thinking him; instead of being subject to thoughts, he became the subject of them, AKA a thinker.

In other words, imagine what it must be like for an animal. Thoughts come and thoughts go, but there is no thinker to organize and reflect upon them. To do this requires what Bion calls "alpha function," which you might think of as the metabolism of thought.

Which brings us back to how we got started on this whole discussion, the practice of communion, which seems to be a concrete expression of metabolizing O -- of being nourished by logos-language and embodied in the God-given narrative.

In. The. Beginning.

What I meant to say yesterday but never quite got around to is that psychoanalytic theory -- specifically, developmental psychoanalysis -- has the same hi-lo, abstract-concrete, psycho-somatic structure we see in Christian theology, by which I mean there are a lot of really Smart Guys cogitating over the most Primitive Things imaginable.

You wouldn't think there'd be an overlap between the two, since Freud was so flagrantly wrong in his metaphysics (atheist, reductionist, materialist, mechanist), and wrote some profoundly foolish things about religion and morality (e.g., Moses and Monotheism, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents).

But his psychic explorations only took him as far as the Father, i.e., to the age of three or so, with the so-called oedipal stage of development. As for the great uncharted territory prior to that -- conception to three -- he just assumed it was a blank wall, a stage of "primary narcissism," with no significance at all.

This is no doubt the only time you will ever read the word "patriarchal" on this blog, in an un-ironic way, for to overlook that vast bewilderness is to ignore at least half the cosmos, probably the better half. Seriously. None of us would be remotely human without it, for it is the very laboratory of humanness. And the most important early explorers of the pre-oedipal world were either women or influenced by them, e.g. Melanie Klein, who analyzed Bion, who analyzed my analyst, as it so happens. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

One problem is that Freud imagined he could contain the mind in wideawake and cutandry language -- the Father's Rules -- when that is precisely what the infant lacks: the word comes from the Latin infans, meaning "incapable of speech." Indeed, "baby" is no doubt a bit of onomatopoeia from the preverbal sounds they make. As are ma-ma, da-da, and ba-ba. And who knows, maybe ha-ha, ca-ca, rah-rah, wah-wah, and poo-poo.

Anyway, the whole things reminds me of Tolstoy's wise crack that From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance, for there we confront another kind of infinite, but without which the other infinite would be literally inconceivable. No other animal can conceive of the Infinite or the Absolute to which it is related by marriage.

Thus, we might say that mankind's universal recollections of paradise are indeed just that: recollections of a land of nonduality and perfect harmony, where you are waited upon hand and foot and mouth by a giant and loving bellehop who responds to your distress and ministers to your needs. OMMMM, I remurmur mama...

(Now that I'm thinking about it, it is interesting that our eight year-old is experiencing a bit of a recrudescence of this infantile sense of liberal entitlement, wanting Mom to do things for him that he is fully capable of doing himself, so there are some power struggles going on over the Lost Birthright. Me? I cave every time. Just call me RinoDad.)

The journey from conception-to-three is marked by a number of distinct characteristics. Like what? Well, I haven't (consciously) thought about this stuff for awhile -- at least in a theoretical way -- but we've already talked about intersubjectivity and openness, which are two sides of the same phenomenon. If you think of an open system in nature -- AKA a dissipative structure -- it maintains itself and/or grows via an exchange of matter, energy, or information with the environment.

The same thing applies to the mind, only the exchange doesn't involve energy per se, i.e., physical energy (whatever that is). We do, of course, require lots of energy to fuel the brain, which consumes the lion's share of glucose in order to perform its magic.

But we certainly crave information, right from the get-go. The baby demands to know WTF is going on, and will show his displeasure when he is left out of the loop: what's this? I wasn't told anything about gas! Human beings are epistemophilic, meaning we not only need knowledge, but we luuuv knowledge (although we still don't really know what causes colic). And since knowledge-truth must come from God, you might say we come into the world loving God.

Here again, if this weren't woven into our very psychic substance, it would be impossible to acquire it later, to somehow superimpose it upon a fundamentally uncurious and self-satisfied mind. Those latter two types obviously exist, but the traits are acquired (or, more likely, imposed), not innate. Barring genetic or developmental disasters, no one needs to be an idiot.

But wait a minute: you said loving truth. That's two separate things, love and truth. What about the first? How does that get tossed into the mix?

Oh my. Now you're opening a clan of warms that I won't have time to fully flesh out this morning. But clearly, love is not an idea -- or a noun or a verb or an adjective or anything really englishable at all, unless maybe you happen to be William Shakespeare or Suzanne Somers or something.

Rather, first and foremost it is a preverbal embodied experience to which we only later give a name. Indeed, this is what makes it real, and not just an abstraction or a linguistic convention or Bill Clinton's marriage vows.

It very much reminds me of the founding of Amorica, which was, of course, rooted in freedom. The typical pinhead imagines that this cerebrated political freedom was just that: cerebrated rather than soma-tized (soma being Greek for body). There are a number of goodbooks that touch on this, at least implicitly, most recently Daniel Hannan's Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. The title is accurate as far as it goes, but of course it doesn't go to the deep psychosomatic source of freedom rooted in the unique circumstances of infancy.

However, Hannan does correctly point out that freedom was first "lived" for many generations before it could be reflected upon and codified. Thus, Englishmen were living in real freedom in the colonies, with only a very light touch from the distant government. In living it they came to cherish it, which is why they went all Alec Baldwin (a third of them, anyway) when the King began meddling in their affairs. I mean, compared to Obama, King George was a contemporary conservative fantasy of unintrusive government. If the original Tea Partiers were around today, they'd dump more than tea in the harbor. Instead of Teabaggers they'd have to call them Bodybaggers.

So, love. Where does it come from? According to John Hiatt, it don't come from me and you, but comes from up above. True, but how does it get down here, into flesh and blood? How does it, you know, in-caritas-nate?

I'm sorry I'm rambling. I could probably ramble like this all day long, in which case I would eventually get to the point. But I have to turn off the higherhose and get ready for lowdown work. I'll just leave you with a memorable passage from MotT that we've highlighted before.

Oh, but before that, one final point that came to mind yesterday: beyond the horizon of history is myth. Myth is what fills the unKnown space between prehuman apes and human history. Thus, there is an analogous and inevitable "silence" in that gap, since there are no written records, only stories that are handed down. Oh, and some cave paintings down in the womb of mother earth.

There is something in genuine myth that is analogous to our stories of what transpires between conception and language. Or in (m)other worlds, before living in language we are embodied in narratives -- a case of the word taking flesh -- a subject to which we will return tomorrow.

Here's the quote from MotT:

There is nothing which is more necessary and more precious in the experience of human childhood than parental love.... nothing more precious, because the parental love experienced in childhood is moral capital for the whole of life.... It is so precious, this experience, that it renders us capable of elevating ourselves to more sublime things--even divine things. It is thanks to the experience of parental love that our soul is capable of raising itself to the love of God.

Life Itself is a Mid-Life Crisis

Warning: this post took off in unanticipated and possibly fruitless directions, so don't get your hopes up.

We're digging beneath the superficially weird surface of the practice of Communion and looking for the perhaps even weirder core.

One thing that always strikes me is that Catholicism has by far the most sophisticated theologians -- from Aquinas to Balthasar to Ratzinger, etc. -- and yet this highly abstract pneumacognition exists side by side with -- or does it rest atop? -- what has to be the most primitive conceivable expression of worship -- of theophagy, or of eating God. You can't get more primitive (which I mean neutrally, as in primary) than that.

But as it so happens, we see something of this same hi-lo, or abstract-concrete, or psycho-somatic, pattern in psychoanalysis.

You might say that psychoanalysis is the Catholicism of psychologies, in the sense that it has by far the most deep and sophisticated thinkers and theories. If one is remotely intellectual, there is really no other option but psychoanalysis, since most of psychology is pretty vapid and silly (not to mention obnoxiously politically correct), and holds little appeal to the thinking person.

Modern, post-Freudian psychoanalysis (at least the main artery) is profoundly rooted in early attachment, which is to say, infantile experience (whereas Freud's outdated, one-person psychology revolved around instinct and energy).

Again, being that there is "no such thing as an infant," we're really talking about a primordial union of two, except that only one of the parties can be fully aware of the twoness. From the infant's perspective, reality must start out as a kind of oneness, out of which twoness gradually emerges. In psychoanalysis this is referred to as "separation and individuation."

Separation-and-individuation is not a one-time-only deal. Rather, it is a lifelong process, albeit reflecting different stages of maturity. To paraphrase Donald Fagen, life itself is a mid-life crisis.

For example, one rule of thumb is that in adolescence we will see the emergence of the same conflicts that were present in early attachment. This makes sense, because with the onset of puberty, we must renegotiate everything that had seemed settled. We have to discover "who we are" on a different plane that now includes sexuality, and more generally, an identity that is more separate from the parents.

I was thinking about this the other day -- that I'm starting to feel as if I am on the cusp of "old age puberty." It's not that I feel old or anything, but I think most people these days try to avoid the march of time, and cling to an earlier identity.

In my case, I vividly remember the onset of "middle age puberty." I guess it was in my mid-to-late 30s. One thing I noticed is that the world -- or the culture -- no longer revolved around me and my kind, AKA the Boomers. It was around the same time people were talking about "generation x," about the Pacific Northwest music scene, about new directors and TV shows, new sensibilities. All of a sudden, not everything was about me. I was an irrelevant geezer!

Flash forward 20 years, and it's even worse. Now nothing in the culture is for me. Except maybe talk radio. Which we already know is for grouchy old white guys.

In a way, you don't even know you have an identity until the context that had supported it changes. Then you either morph with the culture, dig in your heels and live in the past, or carry on your adventure in individuation, only paddling at a bright angle to the stream of culture, AKA "Shit Creek."

Again, think of an analogy to infancy. The infant has one type of relationship to the mother. But then, at around the age of one, he is suddenly able to walk, which is every bit as monumental as a sixteen year old being given a new BMW. Awesome! I'm outta here!

In the toddler we will see two competing -- or complementary -- trends, one that wants to be independent, and another that is afraid of independence and wants to re-merge with the mother. But ultimately there is no going back, any more than one can put the genie of puberty back in the bottle. (Notice how a pervert such as Michael Jackson attempted to do just that: take his sexual awareness back to a time of prepubertal innocence.)

We often hear from the tenured that there is no such thing as a "self," let alone a true self. However, we know they are wrong, if only because it is quite clear that they are idiots.

But more to the point, we all know people with a false self. Raccoons can smell one a mile away. Perhaps there have been times that you yourself were swaddled in a false self, so you'll know what I mean. You know what it feels like to shed the false self and exist as your true self, i.e., to caterpult your buddhafly into the upper atmansphere.

Now, the true self always exists as relationship. In fact, this is one reason why the tenured can deny its existence, because they can locate no individualistic "essence" inside the person's head.

But this is the whole point: in a trinitarian cosmos, essence is relationship (and vice versa), so it is not possible to be our selves if we aren't properly attuned to the other(s).

The rabbis have a useful image of this: it is if we are all jigsaw puzzles missing a piece (or two or three). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the relationships that provide the missing pieces. But in no way can "wholeness" be found outside relationship -- both horizontally and vertically, or toward man and God.

Just think of the beauty of this (not to mention the weirdness): without it, true community wouldn't be possible, not even stable family life. A family is not just a bunch of people living under the same roof, but rather, an internally related group in which the individuals are members of one another.

Every time I hear someone speak of the possibility of intelligent life on other planets, I think of the barrier of intersubjectivity that needs to be climbed before something resembling human intelligence could occur.

Indeed, intelligence itself, sundered from the human person, can just as easily be pure evil. Imagine, for example, if dinosaurs had continued to get more intelligent. Such a reptilian intelligence, existing apart from intersubjectivity, would be a nightmare. I would much prefer stupid dinosaurs, for the same reason I would prefer Muslims without nuclear power or liberals without tenure.

Speaking of the Islamic world, if I understand these babies correctly, it seems that the essence of their beef with modernity is that it doesn't comport with their fanciful ideas about themselves, i.e., their identity. Thus, this causes emotional pain: it is a crisis of separation and individuation. Their solution is to obliterate reminders of this painful separation, and to restore a culture in which their infantile omnipotence is mirrored. Good luck with that.

I don't know if this post actually went anywhere, and now I have to get some work done. I'll try to reboot tomorrow and get back on track.

Theology vs. Theophagy: Shut Up and Let's Eat!

Somehow yesterday's post vanished from the internet. So here it is, followed by today's offering:

I don't always have time to post, and when I don't, I prefer one of these quickly dashed off stream-of-consciousness ones.

I finally gave up on Gregory's Unintended Reformation. Made it two thirds of the way through before he used the word "gendered" one too many times. The whole thing is a jargon-filled, name-checking swamp of monochromatic tenurespeak, with prose as melodious as the sound of a toolbox hitting the garage floor.

The one place where it almost came to life was in chapter two, Relativizing Doctrines. His point, if he has one, is that the contemporary tyranny of relativism may be traced to the crack-up of Catholic orthodoxy into hundred and thousands if not millions of doctrines and crocktrines, each as different as the person who believes it.

Ironically, reformists imagined that reliance upon sola scriptura would put an end to such disputes once and for all, but it had precisely the opposite effect: schism after schism after schism, each rooted in, and supported by, scripture.

In turn, because it then appeared that religion was whatever one wanted it to be, it was just a step to chucking it altogether. Most people implicitly obey the law of the excluded middle, meaning that truth claims are mutually exclusive. Therefore, if there are, say, 10,000 churches, which one is right? This in turn becomes a meaningless question, because not only is there no way to arbitrate the dispute, there's not even an agreement as to what would constitute a way.

The upshot is that religion just ends up looking stupid.

However, in its defense, there is something of this problem in every discipline, say, physics. Physics still "works," despite the fact that its models of the macro- and microcosmos cannot be reconciled.

In fact, the higher up the cognitive food chain we go, the more perverse the diversity -- say, psychology. Because there is no rational way to determine the winner, this leaves a vacuum for power to become the referee.

Here again, this is precisely what has occurred in psychology, which is a playground for politically correct bullies. History is just as susceptible, as is economics. Even biology -- which is just a few rungs up from physics -- is totally politicized by the materialist rabble. Chemistry too is politicized, for example, by people who insist on a rigid distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" chemicals -- as if none of the former are deadly, or none of the latter beneficial.

Ironic that Schuon regarded himself as an upper case Traditionalist, when his whole program is a way to cut through the thicket of modernity, into a post-critical unity of thought and being. His first major work, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, showed how it is possible to understand the deeper point of religion as such, instead of getting lost in particulars -- although he also emphasized the importance of the particulars, since that is how one practices a religion.

I suppose this is similar to the Aristotelean principle that we don't see universals running around naked without their particulars, or forms without substance. Thus, revelation is the (God-given) terrestrial form of a celestial substance, as it were.

In my marginal gnotes to mysoph, I posed the question: "What are the irreducible principles of Christianity?" -- those that define Christianity, and without which it is something else.

The first three that pop into my noggin are 1) Trinity, 2) Incarnation, and 3) Resurrection. Without the first, the second would be impossible (for God could not contain or "be" his own "other"), and obviously we can't have the third if we don't first have the second, because only God could transcend death.

But is it possible to abstract this trio even further? I think so. Let's start with the second principle, Incarnation: what does this really mean, or imply, about Reality? In other words, what is the principle by which it is possible -- that makes it more than just an ad hoc and unanalyzable point of dogma?

I believe it implies just what so many of the early fathers said it did: that God becomes man so that man might become god (or godlike). But perhaps that's still too "mythological" sounding. Purified of myth, we might just say that the Absolute becomes relative so that the relative might know, or be, or become "absolutized." Obviously we can never be the Absolute, but we can certainly move closer or further from it, vertically speaking.

As to the first principle, Trinity, this is said to be one of those ideas that man could never have discovered on his own, via reason, because reason inevitably leads back to the unity, or oneness of existence.

But I don't think this is narcissarily so. This first occurred to me back when I was writing the Psychogenesis section, and attempting to trace humanness all the way back to its origins. In so doing, I became 100% convinced that the very idea of a monadic, isolated human being is impossible in fact and in principle: it did not happen because it could not happen.

Rather, the laboratory of humanness can only be the mother-infant dyad, and then only with an infant neurology that is both incomplete and intersubjective. In short, he or she must intrinsically be an open and malleable system from the very ground. The orthoparadoxical psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott was quite correct when he said that there is no such thing as an infant. Or, as another analyst put it, "You [the mother] think, therefore I [the baby] am."

From this it was an easy step to the idea that the ultimate ground must also be a matrix of dynamic intersubjectivity. You can call it "Father-Son-Holy Spirit," but here again, one can demythologize -- or de-culture, or de-historicize -- those elements and try to see the more abstract principle, such as Source-Creation-Love, or something like that.

I mean, you don't have to. But I think it might be helpful to present it in this way to Outsiders, who are going to be intrinsically hostile to any myth that isn't approved by the New York Times, such as multiculturalism. Ironically, they don't know that the latter is a myth, but it is just another iteration of the ivory tower of babble.

I will conclude with another quickthought: that perhaps Jesus knew what he was doing when he left no written doctrine or book for pinheads to argue over. He did, however, leave an embodied act to perform.

Could it be that the abstract Doctrine is entirely embedded in this concrete act, in such a way that it bypasses all superficial arguments over doctrine? I cannot help but think of how the infant first experiences "love," in such a way that the experience of love is inseparable from the experience of milk. Thus, food is the first love, and vice versa.

Well, that was yesterday's post. What about today?

Not so easy, because having just read it, I'm now in the mind of yesterday's nous. The first thing I want to do is respond to the possibly rhetorical question posed by yesterbob in the last paragraph, "Could it be that the abstract Doctrine is entirely embedded in this concrete act?" -- referring, of course, to the sacrament of Communion.

Since I am not Catholic, Catholics will have to be patient. And since I'm revisiting a practice most Protestants have rejected as unBiblical, unnecessary, and frankly superstitious, they'll have to forgive me. But you have to admit it's a weird thing for God to ask us to think and do, i.e., "this is My body" and "do this in remembrance of Me." No one would invent such a preposterous request or inscrutable bequest.

Again: what could be the deeper principle involved here? One could consult the Catechism, but I don't think we'll find the sort of answers we're I'm looking for, i.e., something that would explain it that isn't simply self-referential and self-authenticating. Well, let's take a peek anyway.

Blah blah yada yada, this seems important: how do we restore unity if we are so obviously housed in separate bodies, for starters? The Eucharist goes to the unity with each other (horizontal) and with God (vertical). And it is a truly "holographic" act, in the sense that it contains numerous aspects, depending upon how one looks at it: sacrifice, incarnation, salvation, mystery, gift, heavenly nourishment, resurrection, vertical memory, etc.

I think I'll take a left turn and look at the psychology of all this, the psychology of the Ground. But before that, I remind you that both our troubles and our salvation seem to be wrapped up in "food": eating the wrong thing results in expulsion from paradise, into duality and pain, while eating the right thing seems to reverse this disaster.

Let me yank down a couple of oldies from the shelf -- some things I probably haven't glanced at since graduate school, but which intuition tells me may be relevant. Here's one: The Mind Object, on the "pathology of self-sufficiency." It goes to what occurs when, either due to maternal insufficiency or other factors, the self fails to be an open system with the primordial m(o)ther.

When this occurs, a kind of split develops in the psyche, whereby the mind itself becomes a substitute for maternal care -- thus the "mind object" of the title. As Winnicott put it, the mind "becomes the nursemaid that acts as mother-substitute and cares for the baby in the child self."

I think that atheists almost by definition suffer from this ontological defect, imagining that they can be their own source of ultimate truth. Some of these patients "are narcissistic, some depressed, some boringly obsessive," but all of them are enclosed in their own private Idaho.

Nor can they "relax into being, but must be constantly stimulated and enlivened by something or someone outside themselves," since their being-ness does not flow with intrinsic intersubjectivity and slackful communion. When alone, they are literally alone.

Winnicott says that "the psyche of the individual gets 'seduced' away into this mind [object] from the intimate relationship which the psyche originally had with the soma" -- which again resonates with the "seduction" of Genesis 3 and the split between body and mind (which comm-unnion undoes).

And what is this pathological self-sufficiency but the striving to become one's own god, a la Genesis 3? One's own "mind object" becomes "an object of intense attachment," and is "turned to for security, solace, and gratification." It "provides an aura of omnipotence," but "is basically an illusion, vulnerable to breakdown and the anxieties associated with breakdown."

Another book that comes to mind is So the Witch Won't Eat Me, on fears of cannibalism and infanticide in children -- for where there is the infantile fantasy of eating mother, there is also the possibility that mother might eat baby.

Would such anxieties help to explain the near-universal practice of child sacrifice, as if to say: "here, take this one, don't take me!"? And of course, one also thinks of abortion.

That's it for today. We leave off with another rhetorical quest. To be continued, I suppose. Unless the subject is just too weird.

One Truth, One Cosmos, One Transdimensional Lodge

Warning: this highly praised book on the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation is a bit of a slog. Which is unfortunate, because it's an extremely important subject. The author shows how everything we -- by which I mean Coons and Coonistas -- despise about modernity are the stalks, shoots, and then leaves of seeds shot by philosophical, theological, and metaphysical snipers some 500 years ago.

Could the crockup have been avoided? Well, to even posit this question is to wonder if history is inevitable, which it clearly is not. And yet, one of the consequences of post-Reformation thought is a kind of implicit historicism that parcels out history into discrete developmental stages, one atop the previous. The author calls it "supercessionism," which I suppose is a handy word to have around. It's just that it takes him 100 pages to say it.

But because of this implicit historical mythunderstanding, modern atheists, for example, imagine they have nothing to do with premodern deviant theists, e.g., Occam and the rest of the nominalists.

In a comment the other day I mentioned the well known scandal of there not being one church. But the scandal goes way beyond that, for why isn't there One Truth in general? Other animals are guided by one truth -- each lives in its own truth, from aardvark to zebra. Only man can have fundamentally different ideas about how man is supposed to live. Almost like we have free will or something. Or as if our lives are dictated neither by suprahuman forces nor subhuman farces, e.g., "selfish genes."

I suppose the every-man-for-himsoph approach wouldn't be so problematic if these fascist völkers didn't try to impose their authoritarian ideas on the rest of as, as do Islamists and leftists. I mean, by definition, Obama believes he knows more about how we should conduct our lives than we do. Frankly, I doubted this idea the moment I laid eyes on Michelle, but found it impossible to believe once she opened her mouth.

But how is this different from, say, some church telling me how to run my isness? Prior to the Reformation, we had "more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West." But how much choice did people really -- not just theoretically -- have?

A better question than Could the modern crack-up have been avoided? is Could we have proceeded on a trijectory leading to all the good things about modernity, minus all the fragmentation, polarization, alienation, and homicideologies?

From our historical standpoint, it seems almost inconceivable, because modernity seems to be built from bricks of skepticism, suspicion, cynicism, irony, and doubt. Seen in this light, the pre-Reformation world seems to us impossibly innocent.

I personally don't think we could ever recover and restore such historical innocence, probobly because I personally couldn't (maybe you can). I don't see how one can put the truthpaste back in the tube, so gnostalgia is futile.

But the ambient culture is spiritually intolerable -- so toxic as to asfyxiate the soul. So, we can't go back and we can't stay here, shipwrecked in the present. Where does this leave us?

Yes, a March 4th into higher unity, into a recovery of wholeness, which just so happens to be the mission of this blog, i.e., One Cosmos. Under God. With liberation and joycetice for all. It even says so in the Coonifesto -- at least I think that's what it says:

Take us before & beyond this womantary maninfestation, reveal not the horizontal but our inmost upmost vertical bigending. Here, far from the twisted reach of yestermorrow, we are finally cured of plurality -- plurality being a symptom of feeling down in the humpty dumps.

Gregory likens history to a river with many tributaries. If we examine the river here and now, there is no way to disentangle the waters and identify where they came from. We know for certain that their source is upstream somewhere, but it seems impossible to be any more specific than that.

For which reason he reminds us of Faulkner's well known wisecrack that "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

This is an important truth, for it renders any kind of literal supersessionism -- i.e., compartmentalization of history -- absurd; but it also renders both atheistic and theistic predetermination impossible -- which is no coincidence, because Gregory traces both to the same upstream tributary. Prior to the Reformation, it was understood that history had a meaning and a purpose that was partly determined by human choice.

Why can't we just agree that truth cannot contradict Truth, and get one with it? Is it really that painful? Which is to say, is the Adversary really that powerful? Are you really paralyzed in plurality, unable to pull yourself together?

"Knowledge of Divinity is an endless movement of the spirit. But a mystery always remains, which can never be plumbed to the bottom. And this is expressed in symbol: it cannot be expressed in concepts" (Berdyaev).

O. I see.

'Symbol'... means both 'sign' and 'union.' Symbol and symbolization predicate the existence of two worlds, two orders of being. If there is only one world, one order of being, symbol has no place. Symbol tells us that the meaning of one world lies in another, that signs of meaning are given from this other world. Symbol tells us, not only that another world exists, that being is not all-included in our world, but that connection between the two is possible, the union of one with the other. --Berdyaev

ʘ. 1C.

Trouble in Paradise: In Spite of My Awesomeness, I'm Still a Little Narcissistic

It seems that dogmatic and mystical theology have often been regarded as antagonistic, when they should be seen as complementary. They are two sides of the same coin-cidence, perhaps a reflection herebelow of form (revelation, dogma) and substance (experience, being).

Berdyaev suggests that "where mysticism begins, there is the end of the realm of dogmatic clarity," but must this always be the case? No doubt it is sometimes or maybe even often true, what with various suburban shamans, dime store gurus, and cracker barrel gnostics hocking their counterfeit upperwares.

The difference, I think, is between a kind of grasping at spirit -- a storming of heaven, or attempting to pull oneself up by one's own buddhastraps -- versus an infusion or acquisition (not possession!) of something that is always "other" -- a pneumatic "third," as it were.

Regarding this third, it is either "acquired" via human effort, and is therefore simply human; it is loaned, in which case it is repaid upon death; or it is a gift, free and clear.

The moment someone begins taking credit for the process, we're going to have problems, e.g., Andrew Cohen and all the rest of the self-styled new age saviors.

I mean, show me the genuine saint who boasts of his enlightenment. To the extent that he is enlightened, the only valid recognition is the testimony of others. And even then, one would be embarrassed. What's that word? Starts with an h... humility?

Speaking of whom, now he tells us: "I’m fifty-seven years old and currently find myself facing the biggest challenge of my life."

Oh? The Enlightened One is facing a challenge? What, parenthood? Having to make an honest living? The other messiah canceled your health insurance? Ken Wilber won't return the lawnmower? Do tell.

But first: does everyone get their money back?

Just kidding! Besides, not only can the Enlightened endure good-natured mockery, but they are known to have a refreshingly self-effacing sense of humor. They don't take themselves seriously.

"I’ve been a teacher of spiritual enlightenment for twenty-seven years."

You sure about that? Enlightenment? Is that really something one can teach? I mean, I know you can charge for it, but is that the same as teaching it?

And would an "enlightened" person charge big bucks for the secret, or would giving it away be one of its seals of authenticity? Because I'm with Captain Beefheart on this question: I want to give it away, because where I got it, it didn't cost me a thing.

I know what you're thinking: "Bob, you're just jealous. Plus, you're using reverse psychology on us, trying to plant the seed that since you don't profit from your prophetry, ergo you must be the enlightened one. You are Neo!"

Well, I'm not Neo. Like you, I'm just Morpheus, looking toward Neo while trying to extricate myself from the Matrix. You can comb through all 2,500 posts for the merest suggestion that I am some sort of enlightened evolutionary being, the next phase of cosmic evolution incarnate. What an obnoxious -- and fascistic -- idea. From the Raccoon perspective, there are plenty of infrahumans, that is, people who sink beneath their humanness. But there are no suprahumans, with only one possible exception.

As I've said before, if there are suprahumans among us, then anyone less than the Übermensch is just a means to a superior end, thus rendering his own life as meaningless as that of a drone to the queen bee. Or, to quote the Sphinx,

"Enlightenment has always been and always will be about transcending the ego."

Or not. Perhaps it's about infusing the ego. Or maybe it cannot be understood in such an intrasubjective manner, and is fundamentally intersubjective, i.e., about relationship. If this is the case, then the most transcendent ego in the world is just wrong if it is not properly attuned to the Other -- both horizontally and vertically.

Indeed, in the Raccoon tradition this is rule number one: all other rules are number two or lower. In concrete terms it is reducible to the formula: love the lord (↑) and love the neighbor/stranger (↳) -- which is really one and the same spiro-paracletic movement.

"Over the last several years, some of my closest students have tried to make it apparent to me that in spite of the depth of my awakening, my ego is still alive and well."

Ah, the students have surpassed the teacher! Isn't that a good thing? You know what they say: if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! Or at least stop paying him.

You know Taranto's running gag about the Butterfield Fallacy, e.g., Crime Down Despite Increased Prison Population? Well, here's one for the book: "in spite of the depth of my awakening, my ego is still alive and well."

Classic.

"I’ve understood this simple truth -- that we all have egos no matter how enlightened we may be..."

Er, shouldn't that realization come at the beginning, not the end? Because if not, then you can be quite sure that

"when I was being asked to face my own ego by those who were nearest and dearest to me, I resisted. And I often made their lives difficult as a result."

I know people like that. Except I don't call them "enlightened." Rather, I call them "patients."

"I’m aware that many of my students over the years have also been affected by my lack of awareness of this part of myself."

Part, eh? Okay. But I think it's a little like dieting: you can't spot reduce.

And to paraphrase the Sphinx, you need to know that the Adversary has many weapons. To defeat him you will need to have more than just flunkies and flatulence.

In any event, what is mankind to do in your absence? Will you send a helper?

Orthodox mysticism is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit -- a mysticism of the Holy Spirit. In it human nature is transfigured and illuminated from within.... Christ enters the heart, and by this 'christ-ization' of the heart the whole human nature is changed: man becomes a new creature....

The grace of the Holy Spirit is acquired by means of humility.... We may establish three conditions for Christian mysticism, three marks or signs of it: personality, freedom, love.... [It is] at once more involved in the world, and more free from it. --Berdyaev

Slowing Time and Standing Fast

If this post seems different, it's because it's the first time I've tried to write one standing up as straight as a post.

For a couple of years I'd been thinking about getting a stand-up desk, but the Paleo book convinced me to make my move, for it seems that no caveman ever conducted his business without one. I even figured out something that no caveman could have known -- that all you have to do is place a flat object on top of your existing desk, and there's your "stand-up desk." Idiots.

It's surprisingly comfortable, even natural. I was able to adjust it by half-inches by stacking some unused shelves underneath, and 48" seems just about perfect.

So, here we go. Feet don't fail me now!

Yesterday we touched on the subject of mysticism, and were wondering if it is analogously to spirit as science is to matter. Petey once quipped that religion is the science of spirit, whereas science is the religion of matter. His wisequack may sound just ducky, but how do we say it without tainting proper science and religion?

I would say that religionism is the scientism of spirit, whereas scientism is the religionism of matter. Expressed this way, it recognizes the imbalanced application of science and religion. Religion, for example, is "about God." But it is quite common for religion to be about religion, and to forget all about God, except in the form of dogmas, rules, and formulas.

Likewise, science is supposed to be about the natural world. But it easily slips into its own abstractions, and becomes about science. Global Warming is a fine example, but there are many others. For example, there is the joke about the two economists. One says to the other, "Yes, it works in reality. But will it work in theory?" That is not an economist speaking. Rather, that is a purveyor of... economicism, AKA a Krugmaniac.

We all know the globe hasn't gotten warmer over the past fifteen years. Ah, but does that make sense in theory? No way!

Once you see how the game is run, you can distinguish real science from scientism. For example, the gap between man and ape is infinite -- as infinite as the difference between truth and falsehood. True enough, but it just doesn't work in theory -- the theory that there are no discontinuities in nature. But if there are no discontinuities, how is it that an ape is presuming to utter the absolute truth of existence?

Easy: shut up.

That's an example of biologism, I guess you'd call it. There is also psychologism, a practice with which I am sadly familiar, since it pervades my field. In fact, I try to stay away from psychology for that very reason, and was recently reminded why when I read a biography of the dissident psychoanalyst Otto Rank.

I won't bore you with the details, but what a crock. Rank essentially tried to decrock Orthodox Psychoanalysis just a little bit, for which reason he was defrocked and treated like Judas -- smeared, vilified, excommunicated, libeled. He was literally called insane, and even psychoanalysts who had been successfully analyzed by him had to be re-analyzed by an orthodox Freudian in order to undo the success -- or to be convinced that they weren't really healthy, just imagining it.

And Rank was no prize either. Yes, he grasped some important truths, but they are only important in light of what he was up against. He was more courageous than brilliant, or at least he was willing to burn his bridges in pursuit of truth. He's more like a Palestinian who wonders if Jews aren't actually pigs and dogs, or a liberal who thinks that maybe conservatives aren't evil.

At any rate, I would go so far as to say that there is no religion in the absence of mysticism -- or, let us just say a mystical experience, in order to make it more concrete.

Mystical experience involves direct perception of a spiritual reality. Thus, the Bible is obviously pervaded by such experiences, for example, the disciples witnessing the transfiguration of Jesus, or Saul falling from his horse, or John, who writes of how "we beheld his glory" -- glory being the Divine Beauty.

So, I think we need to broaden out what we mean by "mystical," since "spiritual experience" is wide, varied, and deep. It has different modes, essentially corresponding to love, truth, and beauty -- or to heart, mind, and will. Thus, there can be mystics of the intellect -- e.g., Schuon or Aquinas -- mystics of beauty -- e.g., Bach or Arvo Part -- and mystics of the will -- e.g., Bonhoffer and every other martyr. Each, in his or her own way, comes into contact with an absolute truth and absolute reality.

That being the case, mysticism can only be "individual" -- in that only the individual can experience it -- but not "individualistic" -- in that it is not arbitrary or idiosyncratic.

Rather, in the words of Berdyaev, "We must insist that mysticism is not a subjective condition," for in reality "it is an escape from the very contrast between the subjective and the objective." Again, as we were saying yesterday, it is a kind of "cure" (or at least treatment) for the very divisiveness and dis-unity we harbor.

For it is easy to forget that dis-unity is also "just an experience." Monistic theories of existence are not so much wrong as merely partial. Looked at in a certain way, existence is by definition "one," or we wouldn't have the word "existence" (or uni-verse). But the mere fact that we can experience the unity introduces twoness into the mix.

Once we are in this devilish twoness, there are two ways out. One way is heralded by Buddhists, Vedantins, and non-dualists of various stripes: just dissolve twoness back into primordial oneness.

Yes, but to reverse-paraphrase Woody Allen, I don't mind ego death -- I just want to be there when it happens.

The second way is up and out of twoness, into a dynamic threeness. This threeness, of course, is a higher and deeper form of oneness. It is trickier to attain, so it is understandable that so many people prefer the two and the one.

The reason it is trickier is that it does not reject the world. Indeed, it doesn't reject anything, for which reason its central icon is of the Godman, i.e., the Absolute incarnate. Thus, God "experiences" humanness, which permits human beings to experience God-ness.

Despite its radical nature, this is just making explicit what is implicit in every human being. For anyone who says... Better yet, I read something in Vanderleun's sidebar (traceable back to here) that goes to just this subject:

"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things" (Philippians 4:8).

Placed in context, we read that this "standing fast" and being "of the same mind in the Lord" results in divine peace.

I don't know about you, but I am standing as fast as I can, but now it's time to move.

***

Some people thought the title of this song was derived from the acronym G-O-D:

Go Out of Your Mind and Come Back to Your Senses

Chaos this morning. Grumpy boy back to school + painters and tilers, the latter making big noise with their angry saw. We'll do what we can, but don't expect much. That's right: the usual, only more so.

I used to think that mysticism is to the cosmic interior as science is to its exterior: two methods for two modes of reality. Is this too fossile a banalogy? And do I still fall for it?

"Through all human history," writes Berdyaev, "mysticism has revealed the world of the inner man in contrast to the world of the outward man."

And when we say "world," we mean the whole world, inside and out, upside and down, not just, say, an experience of one's own neurology. No mystic interprets the mystical experience as nothing more than a transient and idiosyncratic episode, but rather, an insight into the whole of reality. This doesn't mean it's true, but it is interesting that the experience is accompanied by certainty of its truth content, as opposed to, say, daydreaming, or hypnosis, or imagination.

Thus, "mystical revelations of the inward man have always taught of man's microcosmic quality," for mystical experience reveals "the cosmos within man, the whole immense universe."

You could even go all Kant and say that this whole I-AMmense universe is just a form of our sensibility. Except that little word: just? The soul of man just happens to conform to the whole of intelligible reality, easily containing everything within its boundaries? This is not a demotion. It's a miracle.

Which is certainly how the most illustrious early scientists understood this freakish ability. We won't rehearse that whole argument, but look at Zack Newton, the icon of genius prior to Einstein. Although materialists naturally want to claim such a singular genius as one of their own (since by definition, geniuses cannot be religious), Newton's ultimate goal was to explicate "such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity."

And according to Professor Wiki, Newton "saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation." In short, one might say that he was an early advocate of the One Cosmos approach of regarding spirit and matter as complementary, but seeing spirit as the more encompassing of the two. Which it obviously must be, since spirit may contain matter, but not vice versa.

However, one can well understand how Newton's ideas were easily co-opted by atheistic types, essentially due to the Unintended Consequences of his Protestantism. That is, the Newtonian system eventually reinforced "the deist position advocated by Leibniz. The understanding of the world was now brought down to the level of simple human reason..."

Which wouldn't necessarily be a disaster, except that -- and we'll have to save this argument for another day -- Protestantism inevitably redounds to scientism, since the latter is simply a more parsimonious version of the former. Once you become your own priest, it's a simple step to being one's own god, and then chucking the ladder entirely.

This is why so many liberals mistakenly regard the American founders as somehow irreligious, since they simply project backward their own infertile sensibilities into the more deistic among them, such as Jefferson. So scientism is deism minus deity, i.e., a completely rationalized world without Reason(er).

And I'm not suggesting that Protestantism is necessarily a "bad thing." As you know, I am not a formal member of any church except for this one. Being deusluxic, I don't have a God in this fight. But it's like any knowledge: once you understand the secrets of the atom, you end up with the atom bomb. Mankind cannot unknow or cover up what it dis-covers. Knowledge has its own momentum, its own necessary implications.

So, the -- or one -- question is, how do we unbreak the eggistenshell after it has suffered its great fall? I don't know. What would Joyce say? Let's see: The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice... that the humptyhillhead of himself sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes.

Wha'? Big help.

Let's just say that for Joyce, Humpty's fall is built into the cosmic system. Youfall, Ifall, we allfall from the ovary tower, which results in some awful offal. Thus, the broken fragments were there in what Protestantism hoped to put back together, just as they are present in Protestantism. The crackup cannot be avoided, for the Fall of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy.

Back to this morning's mynstrelcism. It seems to me that the mystical experience represents one type of treatment for the wounds inflicted by existence, for it "is in profound contrast to every kind of closed-in individualism, isolated from cosmic life."

In other words, as we have been saying, individualism is, or can be, interpreted as a rebellion against the group, so here again there is built-in fragmentation. So, how do we restore our oneness?

Well, I give up. Too noisy in here. Eck! I'll leave you with this bit of healthy meistercism:

Mystical submersion... always means going out of oneself, a breaking-through beyond the boundaries. All mysticism teaches that the depths of man are more than human, that in them lurks a mysterious contact with God and with the world. --Berdyaev

History: Wall or Bridge?

If time has its problems, then history is like time on stilts or steroids or stuck on stupid.

However, like time, history must have an upside and not just an oopside, hence, everything that falls under the heading of "evolution."

That is to say, even when absurcularists use that term, they don't envision things going backward and getting worse. "The evolution of man" is a oneway affair, hard as some humans, some cultures, and some political parties try to prove otherwise.

Does history occur in time, or does time occur in history? In other words, is history just a side effect of time?

No, probably not. I say this because we have already established or at least insisted that time is a side effect of creativity -- ultimately divine creativity -- and what distinguishes history from mere animal duration is its creative development. In other words, animals have no history because they live in an essentially timeless state that is free of creativity (and therefore freedom).

Also, as Berdyaev writes, "Movement in historical time is not in a circle; it is in a line, moving ahead." So, time is a lying serpent that consumes its own tail, while history is a tale with a point, extending in two directions from a central point. While this pointed tale "aims at a goal," the goal is not to be found in history, much less time. Alienated from this deus-orienting goal, we are indeed stuck in a disorienting gaol, subject to a kind of "evil endlessness" or naughty infinity.

Unless.

Unless what?

Use your logic: unless we can somehow escape from history -- or, more likely, whatever it is that lies beyond history can inscape to us.

Which is what Berdyaev means when he says that "the only way out is a break-through of the transcendental. Immanently, history may aim at the establishment of a perfectly rationalized and mechanized society" -- c.f. the historical nightmares of the left -- "But I do not want this." Rather, "I want the Kingdom of God, that comes unseen."

In other words, we don't want some broken promidise brought to us by leftist nightmarians, but a break-in and break-down of the real thing. You might say that leftism always revolves around counterfeit (↑). I suppose there is also a counterfeit (↓), most recently in the form of the divine charisma of the evolutionary lightworker, racial healer, and oratorical genius of the Tell-O-Promptly.

Remember Berdyaev's crack about how time recovered from its illness is eternity? Well, here he goes one further, and claims that "If there is no eternity, there is nothing whatever."

This claim is true. I say this because, on an even more basic level -- again, use your logic -- there is either God or nothing, with no possible alternative. So, if there is no God, then absolute nihilism is the only honest option. Of course, there are any number of intellectually dishonest options, otherwise universities would go out of business. Nor would we be open for isness.

Another critical point: (mere) time is quantity. It is why, in the words of The Clash, Clocks go slow in a place of work / Minutes drag and the hours jerk. But history lifts us from quantity to quality -- I would say toward the source of qualities, qualities that ultimately flow from the the One, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, etc. There are many cryptic allusions to this in the Book of the Personalized Blessing, such as

Reverse worldward descent and cross the bridge of darkness to the father shore.... rest your chronescapes and preprayer for arrisall.... Floating upstream along the ancient celestial trail, out from under the toilsome tablets of time.... Returning to the Oneself, borne again to the mysterious mamamatrix of our birthdeath, our winding river of light empties to the sea.... Etc.

Hey, I'm with you. I hate to refer to my own book, but if I don't, who will? Speaking of which, how about this for a deal: just write a review on amazon, and I'll knock five bucks off the price! It doesn't even have to be flattering, just ecstatic and fawning. Make it fun -- try to top each other in your outrageous but accurate claims for the transformative power of the cult of Raccoons! Alternatively, just write a review, and Petey will absolve you of the burden of reading the book.

Or not. There's no pressure. But I think we could all benefit from some fresh blood around here, don't you? Back when I was a member of PJ Media, we got more people wandering in and going wha'? Of course, I quit PJ Media because Charles 'Queeg' Johnson did. Who knew he had lost his mind? Oh well, God sometimes works in annoying ways.

Back to the topic at hand. Speaking of insanity, because there is God or nothing, it is quite insane to look for salvation in history. It just makes no sense: "Nothing is more pitiful than consolation derived from the idea of the progress of humanity and the happiness of future generations." We know this is true, because we are the happy generations promised by the liberal politicians of the past. But are liberals happy? Of course not. Can't happen, so long as they project it into the future.

Look at the new mayor of New York: even the most complete political expression of liberal dominance has resulted in nothing better than a f*cking plantation. And if the most liberal big city in the country is a plantation, what does that make your city, you filthy animal? That's right, subhuman -- not even a plantation.

Speaking of revulsion, this type of deferred political consolation "has always revolted me." For "nothing 'general' can comfort the 'individual' man in his unhappy fate." In other words, collectivism is no cure for the pain of history, for the simple reason that being nobody is not a cure for being somebody. Might as well amputate your melon for a headache.

Meaning must be commensurate with my own destiny. Objectivized meaning has no meaning for me. Meaning can only be in subjectivity; meaning in objectivity is merely a mockery of meaning.... If God does not exist, if there is no higher sphere of freedom, eternal and genuine life, if there is no deliverance from the world's necessity, there is no reason to treasure this world and our frail life within it.... --Berdyaev