I Took the Pill Less Swallowed, and That Has Made All the Difference

So, back when these posts were written, they were intended to be permanent, i.e., etched in eternity, since they go to unchanging principles that guide man and govern the cosmos. While this may sound grandiose, it is actually what thought is: conformity of the mind to reality. If we have no access to reality (a la Kant), then the mind only conforms to itself, and we are reduced to the cognitive onanism of the media-tenure complex.

Nor does this mean I'm not grandiose. Rather, I'm just honest about it. In all humility.

As we've said many times in many ways, knowledge -- whether of truth, beauty, or virtue -- is an adequation. If it isn't, then we are irreversibly plunged into absolute relativism, which is to say, ineradicable stupidity. That knowledge is an adequation is probably the most important Fact of the Cosmos, or at least I can't think of a higher or deeper one, since without it no real knowledge (knowledge of reality) is possible.

Is knowledge of reality possible? Yes or no. Take your choice: red pill blue pill. Depending upon your choice, you will inhabit mutually exclusive worlds. Which isn't quite accurate, since no one can consistently say No to reality. I believe the following post touches on this question, but you will have noticed that no modern -ism or -ology can be intellectually or spiritually consistent.

Rather, these folks are always cafeteria cretins who want to have their crock and eat it too. The left is always appealing to God-given rights while denying they exist.

I think we can all agree that existence is a problem. But only for man. Even -- or especially -- Stalin knew that "no man, no problem." Thus, we shift the blame by focusing on existence. In reality, the problem is man. Yes, to borrow one of the left's favorite adjectives, man is problematic.

Back to the Yes/No, Red Pill/Blue Pill dichtotomy. Our metaphysic accounts for both, in that, on the one hand we are created in the image and likeness of God, while on the other are fallen beings. Thus, our minds have the potential to conform to reality; or not. Which is another way of saying that we are vertically free to act against our own interests. If we aren't free to choose badly, then we aren't free at all.

The previous post left off with the assertion that the lofty goals of lefty gnostics "need not be understood very precisely."

In fact, this mystagoguery isn't optional for the political gnostic, since both the goal and the means will be seen as dangerous or cuckoo if spelled out in detail. It's not a bug but a feature. Look at the hostility directed at the two or three "moderates" in Tuesday's debate. No intoxicated gnostic who is drunk on power wants these buzzkillers around. You can't simultaneously pretend to save the world and be sober at the same time.

Expressed another way, the political gnostic needs to arouse and enlist emotion without engaging the critical intellect. Or, if intellect is involved, it must be in conformity with deeper emotional prejudices.

This is why political differences have much more to do with culture than with fact and logic. We talk about a "culture war" as part of a wider political conflict, but it's really the other way around: the political war is a subset of the culture war.

I just recently read a book called Four Cultures of the West that adds some useful insights, one of which is that the cultural container is just as important as the content.

For example, during the "religious wars" of the 16th and 17th centuries, religion was just a pretext to unleash violence and barbarism that had more to do with cultural differences than with religious doctrine. As O'Malley explains, different cultures were "doing battle with one another under the cover of religious polemics."

That line struck me, because it applies equally to the present, in which divergent sub-cultures are battling one another under the cover of political polemics. This is much easier for a conservative to appreciate than it is for a liberal, since liberals are always blinded by the conceit that their ideas and policies are entirely rational, "reality-based," and universal.

It is difficult for barbarous liberals to recognize they're actually part of a tribe, despite the fact that they openly embrace the neo-tribalism of identity politics. They are under the influence of deeper springs of kinship and xenophobia, even while projecting these into conservatives.

Consider this typical example dissected by Taranto (second story down), a "lurid fantasy" penned by some liberal hysteric who imagines that the people who disagree with him constitute a tiny and irrelevant minority fit only to inhabit reservations. In other words, half the country should confine itself to self-enclosed ghettos. What's especially ironic is that we already have self-enclosed ghettos crawling with political eccentrics and gnostic fringe dwellers. But maybe he never went to college.

Indeed, it is an enduring theme on the left that the mere fact of conservatism requires some sort of pseudo-scientific explanation, since the ideas and principles it promulgates needn't be taken seriously. Thus, the two cultures are often operating on different levels. Conservatives argue fact and logic, but liberals ignore this in favor of a hermeneutical/deconstructive approach that "interprets" what conservatives are "really saying."

For example, when we say we cherish the liberal principle of racial color-blindness, they interpret this as a cover for racial bigotry. Or, when we suggest it is a dangerously radical thing to redefine the essential unit of civilization, they interpret this as "homophobia." When we say that we don't believe women are an oppressed minority, they interpret this as misogyny. Defending our natural rights under the first amendment is just a pretext to engage in "hate speech" (which is really violence).

More generally, what we call "reality" they dismiss as a "talking point." For truly, the principle talking point of the left is that "truth" is just another talking point.

Here again, the left wages a culture war without even knowing it. Nor do they engage on the plane of ideas, but only pretend to do so. For them, there is no need to actually do the math to determine if an unconstitutional "wealth tax" will do anything to mitigate our fiscal calamity. Rather, this is just another prog-whistle that only the envious can hear.

The four cultures described by O'Malley are the prophetic, the academic/professional, the humanistic, and the artistic. Ironically, there is a huge culture war between these first two that goes mostly unacknowledged, at least on the left.

For example, there is no way to reconcile the intellectually suicidal relativism and deconstruction of the humanities with the cheap omniscience of scientistic know-it-alls who can't explain how we can even know a single thing.

This leads to all sorts of interesting conflicts, for example, that sexual orientation is genetically fixed and yet gender is just a cultural construct imposed upon us.

One could also the cite the Darwinian principle that homosexuality is the one thing that should never occur in a natural system revolving around reproductive success vs. the romantic idea that there can never be anything unnatural about any form of sexuality.

Of the prophetic idiom, O'Malley writes that "fundamentalists both religious and secular are comfortable here," for "it is the culture, above all, of the reformer decrying injustice and corruption in high places."

It is the culture that denounces the existing order while holding out vague but grandiose "promises of better times to come," i.e., weaponized hopenchange. It is "the culture of great expectations, expectations that surpass anything that seems humanly possible." And it is always gnostic, since it is "revealed to the few, hidden from the many."

Here is where extremes truly meet, e.g., the gnostic flower girl Marianne Williamson and the floridly gnostic Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

On Becoming Homo (?)ian

Our church recently had a rummage sale, and I snatched up about a dozen or more volumes from the 20th Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism -- basically all the ones you'd need in order to create a cosmos just like ours. Consider the titles, in ascending order: The Creation. What is Life? The Origins of Man. Primitive and Prehistoric Religions. Spiritual Writers of the Early Church. Who is the Devil? What is an Angel? The Origins of Christian Philosophy. Man and Metaphysics. Etc.

Some volumes are pretty good, others a little wooly. However, to paraphrase the Aphorist, Christianity may not not solve every earthly problem, but it is the only doctrine that raises and endeavors to address them all. Think of it: is there any other contemporary philosophy that even pretends to address the questions of our origins, nature, destiny, and purpose in a systematic and intellectually satisfying manner? Consider the alternatives: materialism, scientism, Darwinism, Marx and all his retarded progeny. Those are all nice philosophies, except they don't apply to this cosmos or to human beings.

Anyway, maybe I'll try to work in some of this new material as we proceed in unearthing and revisiting the old....

"By gnostic movements," Voegelin is referring to such ersatz religions as "progressivism, positivism, Marxism," not to mention "communism, fascism, and national socialism." He tosses in psychoanalysis, which is only half-true (but more true when this was written in 1960), and would require some lengthy qualifications, so we won't go there. At least for long.

Suffice it to say that there was a time when psychoanalysis took on the trappings of a hierarchical, gnostic cult that had all the answers to life's conflicts and enigmas, with analogous rituals such as sacrifice (of money), descent into the netherworld (of the unconscious), forgiveness, rebirth, and initiation. It can become a kind of closed world, which is precisely when it becomes pneumopathological (as is true of any open system that closes itself to the vertical and horizontal Real).

[And it is entirely possible that it has reverted to form in the 25 years since I last had any intimate contact with that world. Like the rest of the humanities, I suspect it has been hijacked by the left and rendered inane if not demonic -- or both, like deconstruction, feminism, African-American studies, etc.]

For me, the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion provided the means of escape from psychoanalysis without invalidating it. It's too bad something analogous can't happen with Darwinists and other reductionoids, since it is simply a statement of fact that no ideology can enclose the soul, unless the soul wants to be enclosed, which is to say, swaddled in twaddle, muffled in piffle, and cocooned in buffoonery. When one realizes this (?!), it is either liberating or terrifying, depending on how badly one is in need of an intellectual onesie.

[For what is man, really? Homo sapiens? Homo faber? Homo lumens? Homo religiosus? Good questions. One could indeed say Homo (?)ian, for enclose him as you will in theory, he can always ask another why? And why is that? Because man is simultaneously finite and aware of the infinite. He knows when you're trying to pull the natural wool over his transnatural I AM.]

[Something in man always transcends nature, or he is no longer man. Deny it and you have transcended it. Man "in his being is an addition to nature: Homo additus naturae" (Man and Metaphysics). Or, viewing our predicament from right-side up, creation is a prolongation of the Logos in which man participates. As we've pointed out on many occasions, viewed from the bottom up the cosmos contains a number of unbridgeable gaps and disconinuities. Viewed from the top down the discontinuities are seen as necessary distinctions in the spectrum between absolute and relative.]

From whom did Bob borrow the preconceptual symbol O, and why? (In this context, "preconceptual" means an innate category of thought awaiting experience in order to be real-ized.) Bion:

I shall use the sign O to denote that which is the ultimate reality represented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself. O does not fall in the domain of knowledge or learning save incidentally; it can 'become,' but it cannot be 'known.' It is darkness and formlessness but it enters the domain K when it has evolved to a point where it can be known, through knowledge gained by experience.

Similarly, "the reader must disregard what I say until the O of the experience of reading has evolved to a point where the actual events of reading issue in his interpretation of the experiences."

[This applies, for example, whenever we use the term "God." For clearly, God by definition can never be contained by any thought, concept, idea, or experience. And yet we can obviously have "knowledge of God," which is none other than O-->(k). Dogma, you might say, is (k)-->O. It clearly has its place, but it must be complemented by O-->(k), or risk becoming static and sterile. You know the old gag: "faith seeking understanding," or (o) seeking O-->(k).]

[O] stands for the absolute truth in and of any object; it is assumed that this cannot be known by any human being; it can be known about, its presence can be recognized and felt, but it cannot be known. It is possible to be at one with it. That it exists is an essential postulate of science but it cannot be scientifically discovered.... The religious mystics have probably approximated most closely to expression of experience of it. Its existence is as essential to science as it is to religion (ibid).

It exists is an essential postulate of science but it cannot be scientifically discovered. That's what you call a key principle. The typical muddleheaded materialist will deny what he can never actually do without, which is to say, Absolute Reality:

The whole of human history is evidence of how man is never in fact without an absolute and how the real problem becomes one of correctly defining the nature of the meaning of something which reason itself is tireless in seeking and evoking (Man and Metaphysics).

[Thus, "If you don't believe in Spirit you will believe in Matter -- and in spirits under the counter!" In short, every man has a religion and can't help having a religion. Identify a man's absolute, and the rest falls into place. "Our freethinkers are less free than they suppose, and are still very religious, though devotees of religions which flourished many centuries before our own era" (Origins of Christian Philosophy.)]

You can see how Bion would be considered controversial among fellow analysts, especially the old-school ones of the time who were well up in the hierarchy of the Church of Psychoanalysis. The peevish poobahs whose pride and identity revolve around their superior intellects don't generally like to be informed that they not only know nothing, but that what they know is a kind of cowardly lyin' in the face of the uncontainable Wizardry of O.

Back to Voegelin. He writes that none of the above-noted gnostic nostrums "began as a mass movement." Rather, they always begin with some intellectual clown, or posse of clowns, who tries to enclose O and thereby drink the ocean. If their arguments were compelling, then no one would have to be forced to accept them, which shows the lack of intellect at the heart of this destructive intellectualism.

You will have noticed that Obama always speaks as if everything he says, believes, and prescribes is self-evident. But again, if it were true, then no one would have to be forced to accept it. If he actually had faith in truth, then he would simply express it and wait for others to nod in agreement, as they did back in college.

One conspicuous irony -- and this is vividly displayed in the rantings of Obama's spiritual mentor -- is that these types of political religions are ultimately "modifications of the Christian idea of perfection" (Voegelin). For the Christian, life is a pilgrimage toward a goal that isn't attainable in this world, even though it is the source and vector of meaning in this world.

In this context, one could say that time -- its human structure and meaning -- is a measure of the distance between man and God: "The Christian looks at creation as irreversible in time, directed toward a definite end, namely its divinization, and with no return" (Origins of C. P.). Time and creation are vectorial.

But gnostic man simply transposes this journey to the immanent plane, which thereby becomes both his axis in space and his destiny -- or his fate -- in time. Instead of the pilgrimage of cosmotheosis, life is reduced to a vain exercise in cosmobliteration; or, as we've said before, cutting off your nous to spite the face before you were born.

Classical liberty and progressive liberation turn out to be opposites. For to be liberated from O is like being liberated from gravity -- exciting at first, until the oxygen -- and money -- runs out.

When the teleological component is immanentized, the chief emphasis of the gnostic-political idea lies on the forward movement, on the movement toward a goal of perfection in this world. The goal itself need not be understood very precisely; it may consist of no more than the idealization of this or that aspect of the situation, considered valuable by the thinker in question (Voegelin).

Of the prophetic idiom, O'Malley writes that "fundamentalists both religious and secular are comfortable here," for "it is the culture, above all, of the reformer decrying injustice and corruption in high places."

It is the culture that denounces the existing order, while holding out vague but grandiose "promises of better times to come," i.e., weaponized hopenchange. It is "the culture of great expectations, expectations that surpass anything that seems humanly possible." And it is usually gnostic, since it is "revealed to the few, hidden from the many." Which brings us full circle and ends this post: the enemy of Homo (?)ian is the man who collapses the space between ? and O.

If You're Going to Strike at God, It Helps to Kill Man First

Picking up where we left off with the previous post -- in fact, let's continue downstream from its last sentence: "Indeed, this seething [politico-psychic] frustration is probably a permanent feature of deicide, as the murderers vainly attempt to force transcendence to be immanence, which is of course impossible."

Naturally, attempts at the impossible will result in frustration, and frustration is one of the causes of anger. Statements like that are why I have a PhD in psychology and you don't.

Come to think of it, another source of anger is "comparison," especially in a free country in which we are supposed to be equal. Ironically, there is less anger in highly stratified societies than there is in free ones, because in the latter you have no excuse for your failure.

Consider the race riots that only began in the mid-60s, precisely when the impediments to achievement were falling like dominoes. And the anger is only more institutionalized today, when economic prospects are better than ever for the disciplined and talented, irrespective of race. And why on earth would feminists be angry? (Hint: it has nothing to do with the world outside their heads.) Just because you fail to achieve, it doesn't mean you didn't have the potential to have done so with more prudent decisions.

Now, if one wants to make sure that God's not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead, one must somehow go after and eradicate the psycho-pneumatic matrix out of which contact with, and experience of, God emerges. One must sow the divine ground with salt, so to speak, such that nothing grows and (equally important) nothing grows (i.e., the literal expansion of nihilism which we've seen over the last six decades or so).

For Marx and his contemporary heirheads, God can be nothing more than a fanciful human projection. Therefore, our proper task is to withdraw the projections and thereby reclaim the psychic substance we've dribbled away via this psychic process. In short, the best way to kill a god is to become one.

Ironically, both religion and anti-religion posit a new kind of man, a novel cosmic development. For example, in Ephesians, Paul advises us to take off the old man and put on the new.

Indeed, remaining in the old man's shoes is identified with mental futility, while shedding the old coot is both a cause and consequence of vertical renewal via our participation in the divine grace.

Just so, the (hello,) NewMan of the left isn't just devoid of religious delusions, but "has taken God back into his being. The 'non-man,' who has illusions, becomes fully human by absorbing the 'superman.'"

Hence the breathtaking arrogance of the left, which they truly cannot help. After all, when one is the center of the universe, it's a little difficult to hide one's light under a bushel.

An essay by Doctor Zero, The [lower case r] republican virtue of humility [deceased link] touches on this theme. You might say that the new man of the left barters away his abstract freedom in exchange for something a little more concrete -- power, cash, privilege, or other valuable prizes.

Doing so is "only natural," whereas placing ultimate value in something as nebulous as "negative liberty" (i.e., our sacred rights conferred by the Creator) is only supernatural. Thus, under our Constitution you can't choose to be a slave, but you can get around this by choosing to have masters. At the moment, some two dozen Democrats are competing to be your master (or mistress). Each wants to limit your constitutional rights in order to expand your unconstitutional ones, such as free college, free healthcare, and punishing or rewarding groups based upon a hierarchy of racial grievance.

Back to Voegelin. He writes (quoting Bottomore) that "The struggle against religion is therefore a struggle against that world of which religion is the spiritual aroma." (Note that we don't so much project into God as he does into us.)

This is why leftist culture is every bit as iconoclastic as the Taliban thugs who blew up those magnificent Buddhist statutes. The left does the same thing with language in particular. As I've said before, the first victim of the left is always the poor dictionary -- that is, the plain meaning of things -- but the dictionary is only an emanation of the logos, so we're back to deicide.

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

And The progressive travels around among literary works as the Puritan did among cathedrals: with hammer in hand.

Again, fascism involves the violent rejection of transcendence; although I suppose we should qualify that, since Islamofascism -- or most any other kind of "religious fascism" -- involves a violent rejection of immanence.

In any event, for the liberal fascist, "once the world beyond truth has disappeared," it is necessary "to establish the truth of this world" (Bottomore, in Voegelin). Never mind that truth is always transcendent. That's none of your business. As the barbarians of the Jihad Squad might say, just grab your hammer and get with the pogrom!

For once the center of power has shifted from God to man, from transcendent to immanent, "it seeks not to refute but to annihilate" (ibid.).

And this is where the real action -- or acting out, rather -- begins, for "Here speaks the will to murder of the gnostic magician.... critique is no longer rational debate. Sentence has been passed; the execution follows" (ibid.).

The political platforms of the left are gradually transformed into scaffolds.

For The cult of Humanity is celebrated with human sacrifices.

The new man of the left, because he has taken what can only abide beyond into himself, "experiences himself as existing outside of institutional bonds and obligations." Like Kamala or Bernie, it's Laws for thee, exceptions for me.

As in the French Revolution, things can get out of hand pretty quickly, as the will to murder lashes out in all directions, and the fickle finger of fatwa falls on whom it will. Every normal person and personal norm gets a turn in the progressive barrel. There's no logic to it except for the underlying will to annihilate. Remember that Satan is 1, a liar, and 2, a murderer, the second always justified and facilitated by the first.

Now, political correctness is fundamentally a War on Noticing, so no one is supposed to be cognizant of any of this, hence the institutional amnesia of the media-academic complex, which restricts consciousness to the momentary in time and the immanent in space, AKA the Narrative.

In the words of Voegelin, "the being of the world and ego is restricted to the knowledge of the immediate or existent." It isn't just "radically anti-philosophical" but "a work of magic."

On the grave of the murdered God the golem is celebrating a ghastly ritual.... The goal has been attained.... This is the closing act of the order of being when gnostic magicians lay hands on it. --Voegelin

Nietzsche in Reverse

In his parable of the madman, Nietzsche implies that one must be both a little crazy and ahead of one's time to recognize that God is dead -- like a wild-eyed prophet, really, bearing the stark news that men are not yet prepared to accept:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?," he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers."

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?

Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.

[Comment from the future present: I had a guffah-ha! experience the other day while reading this excellent essay on Dávila, highlighting his link to Nietzsche, his twin aphorist from a different father:

For all his talk about the Church and civilization, why was this conservative and reactionary thinker likened to Nietzsche? For one, several of Gómez Dávila’s aphorisms seem to be responses pointed at Nietzsche’s philosophy: “The death of God is an interesting opinion, but one that does not affect God.” One student describes Gómez Dávila as an interlocutor of Nietzsche, because they are both confronted with the same problem of transcendence within humanity. According to Gómez Dávila, the suicidal factor of modernity to which society had become most accustomed consisted of “shooting a bullet into the soul,” killing God. Modern man had replaced God with a label, “humanity” that represented nothing: “Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience,” he wrote.

But Gómez Dávila was no nihilist, though he was a cynic and Epicurean. He was sympathetic to Nietzsche, writing that “Nietzsche would be the only noble inhabitant of a derelict world. Only his choice could be exposed without shame to the resurrection of God.” For Gómez Dávila, Nietzsche’s inquiry was an honest one; it destroyed him and proved the importance of hierarchy: From Nietzsche’s commitment to criticize morality and uphold perspectivism came the possibility to recognize man’s finiteness, and this is represented in Nietzsche’s tragic spiritual collapse. In many ways, Nietzsche had correctly assessed the problems of modernity when he dismissed the importance of God: Gómez Dávila wrote, “Reading Nietzsche as a response is not understanding him. Nietzsche is an immense interrogation.”

It was Nietzsche’s nihilism, and the “suicidal” impulse of the West that chose doubt and cowardice over faith that paved the way for a true rediscovery of God, although we are still trying to get there. Gómez Dávila does not view Western civilization’s course as irreversible: His aphorisms demonstrate his view that there is hope for the future because it is connected to a redemption that can only come about through the questioning or outright denial of God. From this point, it is possible to bring about a resumption of the natural order of things. Perhaps this is the task that Gómez Dávila envisioned for the conservative, the reactionary, or the philosopher.

You might say Nietzsche was the last honest atheist. You might also say that honesty is one of the names of God -- or that honesty is of course ordered to the very truth that is unthinkable in the absence of God. No wonder he went insane. But insanity is one of the two honest responses to atheism, the other being suicide.]

Again, Nietzsche is refreshingly candid, not to mention poetic, about the implications of deicide. I'll take a deicidal literary genius any day over an atheistic mediocrity, because at least the former points up and out in spite of himself. In other words, to deny God is to have transcended the material world (and let us not forget that transcendence proceeds in both vertical directions, which is why man is the only creature who can sink beneath himself).

The problem with our contemporary atheists is that they are shaped by an altogether different culture than was Nietzsche, essentially the cramped world of scientism instead of the wider world of art, letters, and literature. You might say that the styleless style of contemporary atheism that flows from vulgar scientism is just too facile to be true. With a little education, anyone can believe it, which our trolls prove. To put it another way, nothing can be as easy as atheism, let alone everything.

Being an intellectually consistent atheist poses as much -- if not more -- of a challenge than being a consistent theist. After all, a theist has the aid of heaven, whereas the atheist must accomplish his promethean -- not to say sisyphean -- task on his own. (Interesting that no matter where man goes, myth has been there first, from stealing light to rolling stones. Myth always comprehends man more than man comprehends myth, unlike, say, science, where this relation is reversed.)

In a way, the mythic situation sketched out by Nietzsche parallels the situation of Adam, or, if one prefers, the first man who awakened to his manhood and thereby became one. These questions confront any man qua man, e.g., Where are we moving? Is there any actual direction, or is this a meaningless question? Is there any up or down, or any vertical at all? Are we not floating, as through an infinite nothing? And how shall we comfort ourselves? What means of atonement, what sacred rituals shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of man too great for a mere man, an unimpressive biped who learned to yap just yesterday and hasn't shut up since? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of our manhood?

If it is true that myth shapes man -- that there exist preconceptual categories through which thought courses -- then each man is heir to the ontological inclinations of all men, irrespective of whether one calls it theism or atheism. Thus, we have "prophets of atheism" such as madman Nietzsche, who has more in common with a prophet of God than with the contemporary atheistic scribbler.

Now, man in his natural state is spontaneously oriented to God. This is something no one could deny, because the anthropological evidence proves there is no culture without the conception of an absolute that accounts for the genesis of the cosmos, the purpose of existence, and the means of salvation.

That being the case, in order for the madman prophet of atheism to succeed, he must not only murder God, but destroy the very conditions that make God necessary. Because if he doesn't eliminate those conditions, then they will continue to evoke God.

Consider a physiological analogy. You can ban sweets, but so long as human beings have a sweet tooth, they will keep discovering and being drawn to sweets.

Continuing with the analogy, the dietary madman can't just ban sweets, but must flood the world with anti-sweets propaganda, so that a kind of unnatural aversion is superimposed over the natural attraction.

Ideology functions in the same way, for example, vis-a-vis the LGBTQETC agenda. In order to transform something everyone knows is unnatural into something natural, the instinct of aversion must be displaced, which is how and why "homophobia" was invented. I suppose there are a handful of true homophobes with psychological issues of their own -- people with an infrarational (and not transrational) animus toward homosexuals -- but the real purpose of the homophobia accusation is to shame and pathologize normalcy. Similarly, if Islam really means what it says, why wouldn't someone be Islamophobic? (And recall that phobos is fear, not hatred.)

So in order to truly eradicate God, we must amputate, excise, or in some way annihilate that part of man that is spontaneously oriented toward his creator and source. We have seen how this works in America over the past seventy-five years or so, whereby the legal system now functions in this overtly destructive manner.

To take just one absurd example that comes to mind, a few years ago the County of Los Angeles was forced (not that there was any resistance on the County's part) by the court to remove a tiny cross from its official seal, which required millions of dollars to track down every last seal on every car, every office door, every building, every piece of stationery. The cross had always been there, as it is a banal historical fact that the territory was settled by Spanish missionaries, but as always, history must bow before ideology. Plus, you know, the government has so much money anyway, we don't know what to do with it. After all, we only have 60,000 homeless people living in Los Angeles alone...

In Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Voegelin explains how it all goes down. It is the task of the ideological historian,

once the world beyond truth has disappeared, to establish the truth of this world. Thus, the critique of heaven is transformed into the critique of earth; the critique of religion, into the critique of law; the critique of theology, into the critique of politics (Bottomore, italics in original).

Note that this is no longer a disinterested quest for truth as we have come to understand it, but a kind of mental or psycho-spiritual activism; it is no longer theory, but practice:

Its subject is its enemy, which it seeks not to refute, but to annihilate.... It no longer acts as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential emotion is indignation; its essential task is denunciation (ibid).

Boy, is that true. In another book I was reading this weekend, I came across this little wisecrack, that "Indignation usually erupts into exaggeration." Over the past three years we've seen how the Trump-derangement of the left has transformed its seething hordes of simpleminded imbeciles into even simpler imbeciles convulsed by even more hatred than usual. It hasn't worked thus far, so expect the seething to be cranked up to 11 until the 2020 election and beyond. Indeed, this seething frustration is probably a permanent feature of deicide, as the murderers vainly attempt to force transcendence to be immanence, which is of course impossible.

Leftism is the Solution to the Pathologies it Engenders

On purely logical and dispassionate grounds, the existence of thought is a cruel hoax in the absence of God. Put conversely, to engage in thought is to implicitly posit God.

Except to say the hoax can't be cruel, since there is no one responsible for this impractical joke. Rather, it's just an unnecessary, superfluous, and annoying activity that interferes with the real action of existence, which is to say food and sex, and the power to obtain them.

It is therefore ironic that the people who most insist that thought has no ultimate significance are the most certain of the ultimate truth of their own insignificant thought. For the restavus, we have only faith, not certitude, (o) not (ø).

The world seems so obviously defective, why should it make sense? In other words, perhaps all the disorder in and around us results from the fact that the disorder is built into the cake. We look for truth, for meaning, for order, but in vain, since there is none to be had. Our search for meaning is an itch that cannot be scratched; or worse, it is like phantom limb pain, so it is an itch with no source.

That's certainly one way of looking at it, and we actually respect the person who looks at it this way, so long as he truly lives by it -- Nietzsche, for example.

One of Nietzsche's finer qualities was that he at least had the good sense to merely go insane instead of trying to impose his insanity on the rest of us, as do the many existentialists who have followed in his wake.

If you want to go nuts, hey, go nuts! But what gives you the right to impose your insanity on the collective? What, are you nuts? What if we don't wish to be rescued by a bunch of statist nuts?

Aphorisms:

Social problems are the delightful refuge of those fleeing from their own problems.

As such, In order to enslave the people the politician needs to convince them that all their problems are “social.”

And The more severe the problems, the greater the number of incompetents that a democracy calls forth to solve them.

Therefore, Social salvation is near when each one admits that he can only save himself.

This gets to the nub of Voegelin's argument in Science, Politics, & Gnosticism. In it he has a chapter called The Murder of God. It's peculiar that something that doesn't exist needs to be murdered at all, but that's just one more irony lost on the left. Shoot first, ask questions never.

In order to solve a murder, you need to discern what? Motive, means, and opportunity. What could be the motive for this deicide? Hatred? Yes, but of what? Can't be God, can it?

Voegelin writes that the aim of political gnosticism "is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man's creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order." The left simultaneously denies existential problems and pretends they are susceptible to political solutions.

Now, if there is no God, then there is no intrinsic order, not to mention any basis for justice. Therefore, injustice and disorder are precisely what we should expect to see, and we have no right to expect otherwise. There's no crying in Darwinism. Deal with it.

Conversely, for the believer, order is necessary, disorder contingent. In fact, disorder has its own necessity -- "relative necessity," as it were -- because it is not the Order, precisely, but a deviation from it. Everyone and everything necessarily falls short of its ideal, since we are creature, not Creator.

Therefore, for us, the existence of disorder is a banality, not a crisis per se. Indeed, most of us learn by the age of seven or eight that "life's not fair," and move on. Others become Democrats.

The task of man is indeed to "repair the world" (ticoon Olam), but this is because there is an ideal, precisely. It is not for us to reinvent the world order, because that's not repair, it's destruction. We are to be jehovial witnesses to this ideal, not witless juvenile idealists.

But for the gnostic, "the givenness of the order of being must be obliterated." The order of being is "essentially under man's control," and "taking control of being requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being -- the murder of God."

That's a pretty bold statement. Are we seriously charging the left with deicide? Not necessarily. It could be abortion, i.e., killing him in the womb of speculative thought, for the gnostic insists that "man should stop creating gods because this sets absurd limits to his will and action; and he should realize that the gods he has already created have in fact been created by him" (Voegelin).

Beneath the destructiveness there is envy. Envy is built into man -- at least post-lapsarian man -- but if unacknowledged and forced underground, it can take on literally cosmic proportions. Thus, one of the motives in deicide is envy of the Creator: "If there were gods, how could I endure not being a god!" Therefore, there are no gods, and I am he!

[As it so happens, I'm currently reading a book that asks Who is the Devil?, and it hews remarkably close to the present post. You could summarize it by saying that he is 1: envy, 2: rebellion, 3: lies, and 4: murder -- not just of such and such a man, but of man as such.]

In the Marxist version, man is a product of nature, which is a process through which man is gradually revealed to himself. Thus, the final apocalypse of man leads to the murder of God, for this bang ain't big enough for the both of us. God and socialist man cannot coexist (for the same reason God and Satan ultimately cannot coexist).

Now, to kill God is to kill man. Except man survives the operation. But in what form? There is the trembling little man, murder weapon in hand, blood dripping from the blade. Now what?

"The madman does not go backward, he goes forward.... [I]f the deed is too great for man, then man must rise up above himself to the greatness of the deed." Reminds me of another aphorism: With the generosity of his program does the liberal console himself for the magnitude of the catastrophes it produces. Thus, leftism functions very much like alcoholism, as it is the perpetual solution to the unavoidable problems it causes.

But in reality, "the nature of a thing cannot be changed; whoever tries to 'alter' its nature destroys the thing. Man cannot transform himself into a superman; the attempt to create a superman is an attempt to murder man. Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superman, but the murder of man: the deicide of the gnostic theoreticians is followed by the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners" (ibid).

Yes, leftism is a gnostic cult that denies God so as to diminish and control man. And The cult of Humanity is celebrated with human sacrifices (Dávila).

Thought, Meta-Thought, Non-Thought, Anti-Thought

It is difficult to conceptualize the differences between thinking and its competitors, because if one hasn't thought about thinking (metathought or thought² for short), genuine thinking may appear similar, if not identical, to non- and anti-thinking.

Anti-thought is not non-thought, the latter of which is just stupidity. MSNBC is anti-thought. Local TV news is non-thought (although permeated by anti-thought when it presumes to think about anything of substance; in general, journalism is an eddy of anti-thought in an ocean of non-thought).

No Thought is another matter entirely, with mystical and apophatic implications. I'm not sure if we'll be touching on it, since I haven't read this post in over seven years, if ever.

Anti-thought is an active perversion of thinking, and often exhibits a great deal of intelligence. It is a type of thinking that is detached from its proper object, -- or end -- which is reality in all its inexhaustible richness and depth (AKA being).

In normal times, anti-thought would be arrested and interrogated by philosophy. In abnormal times it might be healed or at least mitigated by psychology. But now psychology itself has careened into anti-thought; or, more accurately, anti-thought has infiltrated and corralled psychology into its dark principality (and let's not even talk about philosophy, except to say the greater the height the farther the fall).

I first began thinking about thinking exactly 34 years ago (?!), in the spring of 1985. And now that I'm in this gnostalgic mood, I just pulled a book from the shelf, Second Thoughts, by W.R. Bion (not recommended to the laity). The title is a play on words, because it is Bion thinking about his own thinking, providing "second thoughts" about various papers he had written over the preceding fifteen years or so. The book first presents the paper, followed by his second thoughts and re-servations. (Ironically, this is exactly what I am doing at the moment: having second thoughts about this post written seven years back.)

I see that one of the papers is called A Theory of Thinking. His first thoughts begin with the idea that his theory covers the same ground as various philosophical theories, with one difference: his theory is intended for use (i.e., clinical work leading to growth), analogous to the difference between, say, abstract theories of meteorology vs. whether you should to take an umbrella to work today.

For Bion, thinking is "dependent on the successful outcome of two main mental developments." The first of these is "the development of thoughts." That pretty much happens automatically, unless one is in a coma. The second involves the development of "an apparatus to cope with them." Thus, "thinking has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts."

Davila: Educating the individual consists in teaching him to distrust the ideas that occur to him.

This theory reverses the usual way we think about thinking -- as if thinking produces the thought. But for you thinkers out there, you know that thoughts just come to you unbidden, and that you couldn't create one via thinking any more than you could create life in a test tube or Obama could create wealth in any context.

Thus, "thinking is a development forced on the psyche by the pressure of thoughts and not the other way around." Psychopathology may occur at either end, with the creation of new thoughts or with the management of existing ones; in other words, there may be "a breakdown in the development of thoughts, or a breakdown in the development of the apparatus for 'thinking' or dealing with thoughts, or both."

Now, thoughts aren't necessarily of the same order. Rather, they arise on various planes of consciousness which we call "vertical." We can have empirical thoughts, sensory thoughts, spiritual thoughts, emotional thoughts, aesthetic thoughts, etc.

Some of our thoughts are quite primitive, and we clearly do not have control over them, as they are essentially "pre-human." Men, for example, beginning at a certain age, are bombarded by sexual thoughts. It's as if a primitive part of the psyche is unleashed, and now the mind has to develop a way to cope with these thoughts. Much of Arab culture revolves around the wrong way to do it. But increasingly, the modern left provides a cornucrapia of bad and infertile ways to think about sexuality.

There are also "empty thoughts," which is to say, categories of thought awaiting "realization." These consist of a kind of blueprint (or clueprint) awaiting fulfillment via experience. Jung called them "archetypes," but you could also just call them "human nature."

As Bion describes it, "when the pre-conception is brought into contact with a realization that approximates to it, the mental outcome is a conception." Thus, it is as if there is an implicit or nonlocal thought that only becomes explicit and local through experience -- somewhat analogous to the wave/particle complementarity in physics, where observation pulls the latter from the former. (Or, in Aristotelian terms, you would call it potency and act.)

Some thoughts are "unwanted," which means that emotion has clouded the picture. In other words, what happens if we have a true thought that we nevertheless don't want? The mind has a number of mechanisms to deal with this exigency, just as the body has ways to deal with unwanted invaders.

But just as the body can mistakenly attack itself -- what are called autoimmune disorders -- the mind too can mistakenly attack its own substance. For example, if man is in the image of the Creator, then any form of vulgar anti-theism would represent a psychic autoimmune disorder (with predictable consequences).

There are several mechanisms to avoid thinking unwanted thoughts, ranging from the primitive to the more sophisticated. The most primitive include denial, splitting, and projection, which, working in concert, displace the unwanted thought (or thought fragment) into the environment (which becomes "psychicized"), or into other minds. This doesn't actually eliminate the thought, but it is preferable for such a person to feel persecuted from outside than inside the head.

Some important implications follow this psychic expulsion of thoughts, touching on what was said yesterday about the will to power replacing the search for truth. On some level, the person who manages thought in this pathological way must feel superior to reality: instead of discriminating between true and false, "omniscience substitutes... a dictatorial affirmation that one thing is morally right and the other wrong."

Bion has just described the mechanism of political correctness, which again forbids certain avenues of thought through moral condemnation. And in the last decade or so, we have seen how nearly everything the left says is permeated with the projection of its own ideas, impulses, and emotions. When the racist anti-semite Ilhan Omar calls Trump a racist, and the left rallies being her, you know that their psycho-political world is upside-down and inside-out.

Let's flip ahead and find out what sorts of second thoughts Bion had about this preliminary sketch.

Hmm. Not too many, really. Or rather, too many: "the ramifications... are so considerable that I require another book to attempt elucidation."

Along these lines, he warns of how the thinker might seize onto a "sense of security" in order "to offset and neutralize the sense of insecurity following on the discovery that discovery has exposed further vistas of unsolved problems -- 'thoughts' in search of a thinker."

In other words, reality never stops speaking just because we have stopped listening, or because we have some little theory (or reality tunnel) to make the mystery go away and stop bothering us. A theory of thinking is not the same as the unending project of thinking.

Which leads right back to Voegelin's Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, because this is precisely what the gnostic has done: stopped listening to reality. Consider this little gem from Karl Marx's crocktoral dissertation:

"The confession of Prometheus, 'In a word, I hate all the gods,' is its own confession, its own verdict against all gods heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity. There shall be none beside it" (in Voegelin).

Later in the book Voegelin outlines what might be thought of as the cure for such gnostic omnipotence: "Thus, 'actual knowledge' is reserved to God; finite man can only be the 'lover of knowledge,' not himself the one who knows.... If a thinker attempts it, he is not advancing philosophy, but abandoning it to become a gnostic."

In short, for the gnostic, "In the clash between system and reality, reality must give way."

Or, anti-thought must triumph over thought.

There is No Truth, and The Left Possesses It

A note to the reader: you will recall that I more or less ceased blogging last fall in order to take a peek at the 3,500 posts in the archive, with the idea of extracting the good bits and stringing them together into a book. I put the bits into files labeled by year, while awaiting the descent of the Organizing Principle that would pull them all together into a clear, concise, coherent, and pleasing narrative about Everything and How it Got that Way.

We're still waiting.

Meanwhile, 2012 proved to be a turning point, in the sense that that is when I begin to sound more like my current self. If the cosmos is, as I believe it to be, pneumatically teleological, then my 2012 self should be more evolved than my 2005 self, and that is indeed how it's looking. Whereas prior to 2012 the inspiration in the posts is discontinuous, I'm finding it to be more continuous thereafter.

But this introduces a new problem, because instead of just extracting the good bits from posts, I'm finding that the posts are compelling (at least to me) in their entirety. Which is why I've taken to reposting these old posts.

However, I'm not just reposting them verbatim, but interacting with them, so to speak. A good post should produce sparks in the head, and these sparks can set of conflagrations of their own. So be assured that these reposts aren't just a product of my exquisitely cultivated sense of laziness, but are revised, edited, and fortified with new material. I also make every effort to remove the gags that don't hold up, are unnecessarily obscure, or just plain irritating.

****

Sometimes I wonder how many of those who like to call themselves "progressive" are consciously aware of its mythico-scientistic roots. Then I remember that none of them do, or they wouldn't be progressives. That's certainly how it worked in my case: I discovered that I was in error, and made the appropriate adjustments to my worldview.

Why is this so difficult? Good question! Perhaps we'll return to it as we proceed.

Voegelin characterizes Marx as a "speculative gnostic" who grounded his politico-economic framework in an evolutionary vision of nature. In this scheme, all of nature is "in the state of becoming, and in the course of its development it has brought forth man: 'Man is directly a being of nature.'"

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea that nature is developing, except that this can have nothing to do with Darwinian evolution, which describes only change, not progress. More to the point, Marx re-buries man in nature, so that what is actually distinct in man, and belongs to his trans-nature, is annihilated. Man evolves out of mere nature only to devolve and plunge back into it. D'oh!

Here we see how the work of millennia can be undone in a single generation. Literally! Questions that had been entirely settled -- for example, the centrality of natural rights such as free speech, the constitutional irrelevance of race, the felicitous distinction between the sexes, etc. -- are once again up for debate. This isn't progress; rather, its precise opposite.

Thus, "When 'socialist man' speaks, man has to be silent," which is a rather polite way of putting it, being that it often equates to destroying the man who refuses to be silent. In any event, it is why the left would like for us to shut up, why they impose speech codes, why political correctness abounds, and why they hate God and religion. This is described in the last paragraph of the previous post, in reference to those special assouls who know exactly why

"their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis and who therefore make the prohibition of the examination of their premises part of their dogma. This position of a conscious, deliberate, and painstakingly elaborated obstruction of ratio constitutes the new phenomenon" (Voegelin).

So if you want to talk about progress, this systematic assault on truth is indeed something new under the sun. Yes, the impulse has always been present -- see Genesis 3 for details -- but the modern statist systematization of it is new. You might say that progressivism is nothing less than the institutionalization of original sin, whereby the fall is normalized instead of resisted and reversed via metanoia and grace.

But it's not just the children of Marx who have progressed in this deviant manner, for truth is also forbidden by the dictates of Positivist Man. This humanoid beastling can also be called Scientistic Man, Atheist Man, or Darwinist Man, for each of these, in his own way, pretends that materialism not only accounts for man but exhausts the meaning of the human phenomenon. Which is only the most phenomenal fact in all of existence.

Now, a minimal acquaintance with philosophy is sufficient to establish the plausibility of a Marx, a Darwin, a Dawkins. Thus, one needs a little more than the minimum to debunk them, which I suppose is why philosophy isn't taught in public schools, in favor of multicultural mush and relativistic rubbish. As they say, a little philosophy inclines one to atheism. More than a little, and you inevitably find yourself being pulled into the Divine Attractor.

To perfectly accurate, it's not that philosophy isn't taught, but that it is conveyed via implicit assumptions that are buried elsewhere and never spoken of explicitly. For example, in science it is considered plain rude to speak of teleology, even though science is incoherent without it.

This metaphysical incoherence has provoked a backlash of "creationists" in certain quarters, but the real problem is metaphysical, not scientific or theological. You don't need intelligent design to prove the existence of God, or vice versa.

Ultimately, the only proof of God is God. Clearly, God is necessary being. We, on the other hand, are optional. We are contingent. Now, the only way a contingent being can even know of necessity is if it shares a portion of that necessity. Which is what it means to be in the image of the Creator. This is why we may know truth, and why we have the freedom to discover it. Truth is necessary to free will (otherwise freedom is arbitrary), as freedom is necessary to the discovery of truth.

Wherever there is leftism, there is the suppression of certain questions and avenues of thought. As we have discussed in the past, just as a neurosis may be thought of as a "private culture," a culture may be thought of as a public neurosis. Now, a neurosis always involves the suppression of an unwanted truth.

Just so, the neurotic culture of the left has many defense mechanisms in place, so that alarms go off as soon as anyone approaches a dangerous truth. Examples are too numerous to chronicle, but just think of how promiscuous charges of RACISM! are deployed to bar the free exercise of thought. Which is why it is so delicious to see world class race-baiters such as Biden and Pelosi having this mechanism unleashed upon themselves.

Voegelin describes the deeper structure of this process. It begins with "a thinker who knows that his construct will collapse as soon as the basic philosophical question is asked." The intellectually and spiritually normal person recognizes this and abandons the construct. Not so the leftist, who merely prohibits the question.

But why? What has happened to the person who is no longer animated by the passionate desire for truth, and yet -- without irony -- imposes a single desiccated version of it: There is No Truth, and I Am Its Prophet.

Voegelin called it an "intellectual swindle," which is an excellent way of putting it. For to exchange truth for ideology isn't just a bad deal, it's suicidal. Which wouldn't necessarily be so bad if it weren't also homicidal.

But again, why? Man has an innate epistemophilia, so what has happened to this transnatural instinct in the ideologue?

As we have discussed before, man is composed of intellect, will, and sentiment, which are ordered to truth, goodness, and beauty, respectively. To deny truth is to maim the intellect at its root. But that doesn't kill the body. Rather, it seems that the will to power rushes in to fill the vacuum. This perverse will

"has a violence and cruelty that go beyond the delight in masquerade and in the deception of others." It also "turns on the thinker himself and unmasks his thought as a cunning will to power."

Let's take another example from just last week, when President Obama decided to stop pretending he doesn't support the redefinition of marriage. It is a matter of public record that certain wealthy donors were threatening to withhold funds if he didn't openly embrace their agenda of sexual nihilism.

For Newsweek to then proclaim Obama the "first gay president" is completely absurd, in light of the fact that he is just another statist with a transparently cunning will to power.

To believe otherwise one must want to believe otherwise, which is itself another instance of the will-to-power genre, except that it doesn't accrue to the power of the rank-and-foul self-deluder, only to the powerful. In reality it is but a "graceless disorder of the soul" rooted in a "demonic mendacity" (ibid).

Again, man is intellect-will-sentiment. But if truth is denied, then the truth of man is that he is reduced to will-sentiment, or desire and force. And that is the essence of the left: I want what I want, and you are obligated to provide it.

(All Voegelin quotes are from Science, Politics, & Gnosticism.)

Secondary Realities and Metastatic Hope

A secondary reality, according to Voegelin, is a kind of microcosmos or dreamworld that reflects a universal possibility in man. Always and forever, man is faced with a choice: reality or fantasy, which is to say, truth or desire. (I trace this all the way down and back to Genesis 3, which is indeed its deeper lesson: that man prefers to create and inhabit his own world over the one created for him.)

Modern political gnosticism -- like its premodern religious variants -- is an expression of "the horror of existence and a desire to escape from it." You will have noticed that for leftists from Marx to AOC, the dream world blends into the real world, such that "the dreamers adopt the vocabularies of reality, while changing its meaning, as if the dream were reality" (Voegelin).

If you've been paying attention to the Democrat clown show, what you see is a magical effort to transform the dream into reality and reality into dream. These two processes necessarily co-arise once immanence and transcendence are conflated and confused. Realms that must be distinguished in order to properly think about existence are promiscuously blended. Thus, "in the Gnostic dream world,"

nonrecognition of reality is the first principle. As a consequence, types of action which in the real world would be considered morally insane because of the real effects which they will have will be considered moral in the dream world because they intended an entirely different effect.

Then -- just watch! -- the inevitable gap "between intended and real effect" is blamed not on the Gnostic's failure to appreciate reality (including the reality of human nature), but on "the immorality of some other person or society that does not behave as it should behave according to the dream conception of cause and effect. The interpretation of moral insanity as morality... is a confusion difficult to unravel."

To put it mildly. Consider poor Joe Biden, who has been doggedly asleep in the liberal dream for some fifty years. But the dream has moved on -- which is to say, metastasized -- so rapidly that he simply can't keep up: busing is good, borders are bad, gender is whatever we want it to be. Frankly, when the first principle is nonrecognition of reality, there's nothing to grasp onto, not even straws, because there is no solid ground to thought:

The identification of dream and reality as a matter of principle has practical results which appear strange but can hardly be considered surprising. The critical exploration of cause and effect in history is prohibited; and consequently the rational coordination of means and ends in politics is impossible.

"Dangers" are recognized -- they cannot not be recognized -- except "such dangers will not be met by appropriate actions in the world of reality. They will rather be met by magic operations in the dream world, such as moral condemnation, declarations of intention, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors," etc.

In short, irrespective of what happens in the real world -- say, for example, a flourishing economy -- Orange Man Bad! And if you are delighted by the record low unemployment of People of Color? White supremacist!

A deeper point, I think, is the jettisoning of our western tradition, which can only result in the eradication of civilization. I mean this literally, for the first step of civilization must be the vertical distinction between transcendence and immanence, which must be maintained in order for order to persist. (The creation story of Genesis is all about ordering primordial chaos by drawing and maintaining vertical and horizontal distinctions between God and man, light and dark, good and evil, man and woman, adult and child, life and death, etc.)

But it doesn't end there. Rather, you might say that the whole arc of salvation -- which is nothing less than the story of the West -- is the elaboration of the transcendent, ending, for the Christian, in Christ and his Church.

However, that "end" is only another (and endless) beginning, as it fertilizes and transforms the immanent. But the Gnostic has no patience for the time this takes (or just say Time, which is qualitative and organic, not mere quantitative duration). Rather, he wants his heaven here and now. He is too sophisticated to believe in God, but not sophisticated enough to distinguish God from man, the celestial from the terrestrial. Terrible consequences follow, every time. In short, this is where the dream turns to nightmare

Hope itself isn't the problem, properly understood. After all, it is a theological virtue. I have here a handy little book called The One-Minute Philosopher, which distinguishes between Hope and Wish.

The former "involves the conviction that, despite appearances to the contrary, truth and goodness will prevail." Thus, it isn't at all easy to maintain hope in the teeth of this depraved world, which is precisely why it is a virtue.

Please note that this is not the magical hope of Gnostic dreamers and ideologues. Any tenured yahoo can imagine a better world, but that isn't what we're talking about.

Rather, we're talking about accepting (and even loving) the world for what it is, and committing ourselves to its betterment. If we do not accept the world for what it is -- and human beings for what they are -- then our hopes will be completely misplaced. They will be reduced to wishes, and wishes to ashes.

For what is a wish? It "involves the fancy that, despite appearances to the contrary, our desire will be satisfied. To wish is to invoke fortune to bring us what we want, even when what we want is not good" (Brown).

Consider some of the implications drawn out by Brown: "hope is creative," but "wish is imaginative." While "I can wish for anything, I hope only for what is possible. My hope looks to the future, but is rooted in reality as it is."

And importantly, "what we hope for, we are also willing to work for." Conversely, a wish "has no particular bond with reality as it is, but feeds on fantasy.... Wishing is like dreaming: it is not confined to reality as it is, nor is there any good reason to believe that my wish will come true.... [U]nlike when we hope for something, we are not necessarily willing to work for it. We wish for all sorts of unattainable and frivolous things" (ibid.).

The left wishes socialized medicine would work, that college were free, that borders didn't exist, that members of the same sex could exist in a state of matrimony, that racial discrimination could end racial discrimination, that human fetuses weren't human, that women weren't women, that men weren't men... the wishlist is endless because desire and imagination are infinite.

But none of these things can be. We can try to force them to be, but the system will crack under the pressure of the denied reality. You could even say that politics -- which deals with the finite -- becomes cancerous when forced to conform to infinitude.

Why, for example, have our Supreme Court hearings become so malignant? Largely due to the twisted pettifoggery of Roe v. Wade. The left wants us to bow before this grotesque example of judicial wishery, so that only those who reject reality -- the reality of the human person -- are acceptable to liberals. This is bound to create tension, a tension that forces infinitude (the human soul) to be finite and finitude (a "woman's right to choose") to be infinite.

The marketplace of ideas is supposed to be a struggle of truth against truth, or, more accurately, a struggle for or toward truth. But what if it becomes a struggle for and against truth? For Voegelin, that is precisely what the political struggle involves, because it is the same struggle that is "waged on every level of human existence."

For example, it is axiomatic in psychology that pathology results from one part of the mind being at war with another. An unwanted truth is denied, repressed, or projected, and the psychic lacunae -- AKA the hole in your soul -- is unconsciously filled with the wish, the desire, the preferred state of reality.

Likewise, we enter dangerous pneumapolitcal waters when confronted "with persons who know that, and why, their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis and who therefore make the prohibition of the examination of their premises part of their dogma." The result is "a conscious, deliberate, and painstakingly elaborated obstruction of ratio..." (Voegelin), or what we call logocide.

Yes, the cognitive tyranny of political correctness. I wish it weren't so, but for the left, it is what it isn't.

Anti-Antifa, Cosmic Jihad, and the City of God

A double oldie, i.e., a repost of a repost, albeit updated, revised, and enriched with all new vertamins:

Since new readers will never catch up with the Arkive -- I realize that 2,000 posts is a major commitment to a mere blogger -- it can't hurt to whip out an old one every nowandagain. Besides, even if you're a venerable O'timer, something like 1,200 posts have passed under the bridge since we started, and maybe you missed this one. Let us also recall the evergreen words of our venerable Schuon:

Everything has already been said, and well said; but one must always recall it anew, and in recalling it one must do what has already been done: to actualize in thought certitudes contained, not in the thinking ego, but in the transpersonal substance of human intelligence.

I'm still making my way through and up the 1,100 page Spiritual Ascent, a "compendium of the world's wisdom" organized into three main sections that mirror the universal stages of purification, illumination, and union, but with dozens of subsectional byways along climb.

You could say the book is fractally organized, in that each section is a part of the whole, even while the whole is in each part. Likewise, every day of our lives is a microcosm of the lifelong spiritual adventure, i.e., an ongoing process of purification, illumination, and union, at least if we are consciously aware of this onetime uppertunity to ride our wrungs on Jacob's ladder.

Like the cosmos itself, the book gets off to a very promising start, with chapters on divine creation, the process of manifestation, man's primordial birthright, and similar felicitous topics.

I suppose this is only fitting, being that the Creator's main excuse for the creation was that "it seemed like a good idea at the time," i.e., "God saw everything he had made, and indeed it was very good." But you know what they say about how the beast waylaid the plans of lousy men. Very soon the karmic wheels fall off the creation, ironically due to its only wideawake members, homo sleepyones.

This reminds us of Finnegans Wake, which begins innocently enough with a sentence about Adam & Eve ("riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay"), but by the third paragraph is in fullfall ("the fall of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy"), and by the guilt-stained fourth paragraph is ringing in the full scale war of each against all ("arms apeal with larms, appalling. Killykillykilly: a toll, a toll").

Similarly, The Spiritual Ascent hits a bit of a rough patch with the chapters on illusion, sin, suffering, sacrifice, damnation, hell, and the like. D'oh!

Nevertheless, these sections do emphasize the existential stakes involved, as well as the unavoidable fact that "purification" is somewhat analogous to the manner in which a diamond is made. Just take a lump of coal, put it through unimaginable fire and pressure in the middle of the earth, then chip and chisel away what is impure and unnecessary, and you've got a luminous little gem fit for eternity.

What a bi-cosmic coincidence that the name diamond derives from the ancient Greek adamas and that most of them, like alluvus, originate from Africa. Reminds me of the Johnny Cash song (written by Billy Joe Shaver):

I'm just an old chunk of coal / But I'm gonna be a diamond some day.... / I'm gonna spit and polish my old rough-edged self / 'Til I get rid of every single flaw / I'm gonna be the world's best friend

I just finished a couple of fascinating sections, Pilgrimage -- Descent Into Hell and Holy War. The section on Holy War is particularly interesting, as it emphasizes that jihad isn't just for jihidiots. Rather, there is Jewhad, Buhad, and Crusad, in both the interior and exterior senses, as well as above and below. Quite simply, war isn't just inevitable but necessary, with roots extending deep into the very structure of the cosmos.

Conversely, it is pacifism that isn't only unnecessary but highly narcissary to boot; sanctimonious pacifists are usually just people unaware (or at least pretending to be) of their viciousness and cruelty, as with most prominent leftists who are always passive-aggressive when they aren't being actively aggressive.

Pacifism is essentially a surrender -- not just in war, but in the struggle of existence itself. For as written in Exodus, The Lord is a man of war; or in the words of Jesus: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword; or in the words of Krishna: Nothing is higher for a [member of the warrior caste] than a righteous war.

In his introduction to the subject of Holy War, Perry cites Guenon, who wrote that the essential reason for war -- legitimate war -- is

to end a dis-order and re-establish order; in other words, it is the unification of a multiplicity, by use of means which belong to the world of multiplicity itself.... War understood in this way, and not limited in an exclusively human sense, thus represents the cosmic process of the reintegration of the manifested into the principial unity.

This reintegration necessarily involves destruction, as catabolism is to metabolism.

Guenon continues:

The purpose of war is the establishment of peace, for even in its most ordinary sense peace is really nothing else than order, equilibrium, or harmony, these three terms being nearly synonymous and all designating under slightly different aspects the reflection of unity in multiplicity itself.... Multiplicity is then in fact not really destroyed, but 'transformed'...

In another sense, legitimate war is none other than justice, being that justice is really an "equilibrating function" which is "directed against those who disturb order and [has] as its object the restoration of order." The reason we catch and punish bad guys is ultimately to restore order -- to the community, to the wronged individual, within the disordered psyche of the perpetrator, and ultimately to the Cosmos itself.

Compare interior warfare to the Black Liberation Theology which so attracted the weak-souled Obama: "Many have been asking what Liberation Theology is all about. Well, it is not very complicated! It is the simple belief that in the struggles of poor and oppressed people against their powerful and rich oppressors, God sides with the oppressed against the oppressors."

Thus, it precisely inverts the true meaning of holy war, in that it imagines God sides only with "the poor" instead of the righteous, or that he is angry at the wealthy instead of the evil (we should say that the righteous, to the precise extent that they are righteous, side with God).

The "great holy war" is the struggle of man "against the enemies he carries within himself, that is to say, against all those elements in him which are contrary to order and unity" (and dynamic unity is not unicity, the latter being top-down coercion and conformity).

Consider this astounding claim by The New Republic:

Liberals are notoriously loath to take their own side in a fight. But their reticence may well be changing in an age of vigilante, white nationalist terror -- openly condoned and supported by an incumbent president who has suggested that his armed devotees won’t stand for his removal from office. Increasingly, the antifa left is arguing -- and training -- in response. They are worried not only about an armed reckoning following a contested election, but also about rising violence from the paramilitaries loyal to President Donald Trump.

It is so lacking in self-awareness on so many levels, that one scarcely knows where to begin. Put it this way:

The German people are notoriously loath to take their own side in a fight. But their reticence may well be changing in an age of vigilante Bolshevist and capitalist terror -- openly condoned and supported by their Jewish puppet masters. Increasingly, our stormtroopers are arguing -- and training -- in response.

Here's the reality, which I read just yesterday in this big ol' book on Fundamental Theology. History is

a protracted and unremitting battle between God's plan for redemption and those who oppose it, even unknowingly, throughout history. St. Augustine.... shows that the most fundamental structure of human history is the conflict between these two "cities," or types of civilization, found in every age.

Same as it ever was.

Extremists Meet

As mentioned a few posts back, what is especially interesting about Voegelin's writings on modern political Gnosticism is his attempt to trace the phenomenon back to antiquity, and to outline the continuity between premodern "religious" and modern "political" varieties.

[It seems that progressives have always been with us, such that extremes meet: in Australia, for example, university instructors have been told to avoid lecturing "on the natural historical record of that country; instead, they should teach a creation narrative regarding the origin of indigenous Australian people." This is not because of any possible metaphysical symbolism embedded in the myth; rather, to "ensure inclusivity" by pandering to literal-minded and prescientific imbeciles.]

If Voegelin is correct on this score, this would have to represent the ultimate rebuke to self-styled progressives, who are perpetually building bridges to the past -- and not even a real past, but rather, a myth-drenched one. Indeed, they are building a bridge to the lower vertical, which anyone can see by the primitive and barbarous behavior of Antifa terrorists or their political wing, the Democrat party.

Superficially Voegelin's approach makes sense, since man = man everywhere and everywhen, and must be vulnerable to the same temptations and stupidities from age to age, even, or perhaps especially, when we imagine we have transcended them -- the tendency toward idolatry being one obvious and enduring example. Envy would be another. Each age finds a new way to legitimize what is called constitutional (i.e., innate) envy.

[When I hear Senators Warren or Sanders rail about "greed," I wonder why they never propose federal laws to combat the other six deadly sins, such as sloth, lust, anger, and pride.]

Man is man for at least three reasons. First, we share a common genetic heritage (Aborigines notwithstanding). Second, we all have a rational soul. And third, our existential conditions do not change, at least at the center: mother, father, brother, sister, love, death, loss, illness, need, children, mystery, etc.

For example, we have extended the average lifespan, but we nevertheless live in the shadow of death. We imagine ourselves to be "sexually liberated," but that hardly resolves the conundrum of human sexuality. We live more comfortably than the nobility of old, but this only fuels envy. [Progressives are proof that misery rises to the level of the means available to alleviate it.]

For this reason, there always have been, and always will be, cosmic snake oil salesmen who promise a cure for existence, such as L. Ron Hubbard or Marianne Williamson. But there are no cures for merely natural existence short of death. There is treatment, to be sure -- more on which later -- but no final cure in this life. We must learn to live amidst a welter of tensions, trade-offs, enigmas, missed opportunities, reversals of fortune, bad hands, raw deals, blown saves, buzzer beaters, etc.

The would-be Gnostic simply cannot accept the conditions of existence. He refuses to admit that they are "in the nature of things," and imagines that they are caused by some willful and systemic malevolence. The essence of the left is to imagine there can be political solutions to existential problems. While they call it "social justice," what they really mean is "cosmic justice." And cosmic justice revolves around envy and vengeance.

The ancient Gnostics theorized that this world was created by a kind of renegade god, and that the snake in Genesis is the hero, not the villain of the story. The snake was simply trying to tell the humans to wise up to this fraudulent cosmic usurper.

Likewise, modern forms of political Gnosticism always require an easily identifiable enemy who is responsible for the unfairness and injustice of the world. Obama's mentor, Saul Alinsky, was very much aware of this need -- and I'm not one of those who (Gnostically!) overemphasizes his importance, as if he is the mystic key to understanding the Enigma of Obama; Alinsky simply articulated how radicals and revolutionaries think, and what they always do anyway. No one has to teach a progressive how to hate, only whom!

Indeed, in the book's epigraph, Alinsky is self-aware enough to give an ironic shout out to Lucifer himself, as "the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom" (emphasis mine).

However, Alinsky was not self-aware enough to realize that his whole life revolved around conformity to this very mythic structure. Too ironic by half.

Note how the task of the community organizer is not to help people adjust to reality, but to fuel their messianic hopes that reality can be fundamentally changed: "They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution" (Alinsky).

Thus, the goal of the organizer is to present a vague cure -- sweeping but vague, on pain of being recognized as magic -- for the very despair he provokes: "the organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy." This essentially involves "a process combining hope and resentment."

Regarding the latter, since human beings are so myth-prone and susceptible to simplistic and morally satisfying narratives, it is necessary to "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." This is the person or organization responsible for our obviously f*cked up existence. It is the One Percent, Fox News, Hate Radio, Creationists, Corporate Greed, Stay-At-Home Moms, Right Wing Christians, Zionist Hoodlums, Institutional Racism, etc.

Perhaps I should emphasize that conservatives can be prone to the same sort of Gnostic narratives. A genuine conservative should have no delusions about what would happen with even the ideal political and economic conditions, for he has a vertical recollection of paradise lost. Genesis 3 isn't about what happened once upon a time, but what happens every time. To deny the Fall and locate salvation in politics is a grave error on the right, but a sacred principle on the left.

Now, the revolutionary, since he has already determined that the existing order is a result of willful malevolence, has no compunction whatsoever about destroying it. This is a very dangerous form of pneumopathology, and it is precisely what motivates the Islamists.

For once one has determined that the world is evil, then it legitimizes and disinhibits any form of violence or cruelty. One can gleefully destroy the system -- with all the "collateral damage" it entails -- in good conscience.

This is about as far as man may descend in the cosmos, where death is conflated with life. And woe unto them who call evil good and good evil! Indeed, woe unto those who even call the-best-we-can-do-under-the-circumstances evil, for it is easy to make matters worse, and impossible to make them better without trade-offs, unintended consequences, and unavoidable feedback from human nature.

Here is how Voegelin describes it: "Self-salvation through knowledge has its own magic, and this magic is not harmless. The structure of the order of being will not change because one finds it defective and runs away from it. The attempt at world-destruction will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder in society."

See history for details.

We'll conclude with an Aphorism:

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence. --Dávila

The Political Gnosticism of the 20 (D)warves

"Mr. President, if you're listening, I want you to hear me, please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. I'm going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field. And, sir, love will win." --Marianne Williamson

In his introduction to Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Ellis Sandoz writes that Voegelin's new science of politics -- that's right, science -- "can be used to diagnose maladies of contemporary political existence and offer remedies within the modest limits of reason and science" (emphases mine). Or in other words, it deals with the cause and cure of various political sicknesses and pathologies.

Consider the analogy to medicine. In the West, we have settled on allopathic medicine as the most useful approach to the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. But there are also other systems: homeopathic, osteopathic, ayurvedic, humorism, traditional Chinese medicine. Each of these posits a different etiological, classificatory, and therapeutic system for physical illness.

Since the mind is obviously more ambiguous than the body, there are even more treatment approaches to the psyche, veering from the completely biological to the completely psychological, from the collective to the individual, and from theories that consider everyone neurotic to crazy psychiatrists who conveniently consider abnormality normal.

Body. Mind. What about spiritual disorders? First of all, you can disabuse yourself of the notion that there is "no such thing," because each religion -- like the different schools of medicine -- provides a kind of diagnosis and cure for man's spiritual condition. Sometimes these are presented in mytho-speculative language, but they are no less penetrating for it.

Consider, for example, the Bhagavad Gita, which is none other than a dialogue between the troubled patient, Arjuna, and the spiritual doctor, Krishna. Likewise, the Buddha clearly diagnoses mankind (the four noble truths) before offering the cure (the eight-fold path). In the Yoga Sutras Patanjali does the same, and Jesus frankly compares himself to a physician.

In short, all religions recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with man. And in our view, one of the things that is fundamentally wrong with man is his tendency to become a closed system. Please note that this is true of every level of existence, the material, psychic, and pneumatic.

Of Voegelin, Sandoz writes that he "evokes the philosopher as physician of the soul." This is not philosophy as practiced by the tenured rabble, i.e., mental masturbation on a grandiose scale, but rather, a way of life; for it is "the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order" (Voegelin).

In this context, Sandoz notes that "protecting philosophy against perversion is vital to the larger task of protecting human existence itself against perversion and tyranny."

Especially in a free society such as ours, right thinking is our main line of defense against tyranny, which is precisely why it is attacked and undermined by the irrational and dis-ordered forces of the left. The left imposes a system in which lies either become compulsory, or in which the proper conclusions cannot be drawn from the allowable data.

The essence of modern tyranny involves prohibiting questions that might undermine the credibility of the system, which is why there is no place in America where speech is less free than on a college campus. No surprise there. [Update from seven years hence: the tech giants have surpassed even academia in their repressive intolerance of dissent.]

In the book, Voegelin outlines "three major types for whom a human inquiry has become a practical impossibility," including "socialist man," "positivist [e.g., scientistic, Darwinistic, reductionistic] man," and "national-socialist man."

Now, as there is philosophy (in Voegelin's sense), there is anti-philosophy. Political Gnosticism is an instance of the latter, which Voegelin defines as a perverse desire for "dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs a system."

Thus, instead of a spiritually open engagement with reality and truth -- which is philo-sophy, or love of wisdom -- the Gnostic shuts himself off from this ground and constructs a closed system based upon the Answer known only to elites such as himself, quintessential examples being Marxism on the political plane or metaphysical Darwinism on the biological plane (and this is the kind of perverse and simplistic science -- i.e., scientism -- preferred by the left in order to bolster its enfeebled image of man).

Each of these denies transcendence up front, which has the practical effect of murdering man (and eventually men). As Sandoz explains, modern forms of Gnosticism are characterized by their "renunciation of 'vertical' or otherworldly transcendence and [their] proclamation of a 'horizontal' transcendence or futuristic parousia of Being -- that is, intramundane or worldly" salvation. In short, a dreamworld of hope and change.

But in imposing this absurd doctrine of worldly salvation, the parousia must be perpetually postponed. For the gnostic, it is always right around the corner, the endless Recovery Summer. The War on Poverty is not a Keynesian quackmire, but actually winnable with one last surge of obscenely profligate spending on our pet projects and political allies!

Thus, in their Gnostic lust for power, each of the 20 dwarves insists that we ignore what has actually happened to the economy and country over the last four years. Rather, look ahead, to the glorious future that is promised by... well, by Marianne Williamson, for example:

What we most need now is a political visionary -- someone with a deep understanding of where we have been and where we need to be going....

My campaign provides the American people with the option of choosing another way -- not just a better version of same old, same old politics, but a genuine pattern disruption that allows for breakthroughs and possibilities that will not otherwise occur.

We need to address the deep emotional and psychological dynamics within the average citizen that have led to the erosion of our political system. In order to have a moral and spiritual awakening in America, we need a leader who is a moral and spiritual awakener.

I believe I am that person.

As a psychologist, I am intimately familiar with narcissistic grandiosity. But Voegelin understood that the grandiosity of the left is on another plane altogether, and requires a deeper explanation.

Finding God's Autograph

One could say that all of man's problems have to do with truth.

First, in order for truth to be possible, one must implicitly maintain that the world is intelligible and that man may know it. Truth then is a relation or adequation between these two: ultimately between man and cosmos.

Next, one needs to propagate this truth to others.

No, I take that back. Rather, one can always just horde the truth and keep it to oneself. More for us! But interestingly, virtually no one wishes to do this, least of all the God in whose image we are.

Instead, when a normal man stumbles upon a truth, he has an intrinsic desire to share the joy with others. Indeed, truth radiates, just as does beauty, but in a slightly different way. I would say that truth partakes of the Absolute, beauty the Infinite. Truth doesn't need to be compelled by force, as the left believes, because it attracts by its very nature. Only lies are compulsory. Also, if truth were compulsory, we would be deprived the merit of faith. Faith too is an adequation, but it involves one's whole being, not just the intellect.

As an aside, wouldn't it be nice if some people would keep the truth -- or what they regard as the truth -- to themselves? If they had just done that, then there would have been no Soviet Union, no Nazi Germany, no Islamism. We'll return to this topic later, i.e., the impulse to propagate the Lie, and what it means.

[UPDATE from seven years hence, i.e., today: I was just reading of this very subject in Dennis Prager's line-by-line analysis of Genesis: placing ideology above truth "is not only common, it is probably the greatest source of mass evil in the world." Each of the genocides of the twentieth century was justified by massive lies that were obviously attractive to masses of people. "Given the overwhelming importance of truth, it is no wonder the Talmud states, 'God's signature is truth.'"]

In order to propagate truth, man must be able to formulate it in his head, put it into words, and transmit it to others. But then the person to whom one is speaking must decode the transmission back into the experience of truth.

Right there you've got another problem, because, to plagiaphrase Karl Popper, it is impossible to speak in such a way that one cannot be misunderstood. Did you understand that? Well, good. This means that some things can be understood. Communication is difficult but not impossible.

But what about more complex things, like, say, the truth of man? When we say "truth of man," we have several things in mind, but they essentially come down to three areas: our origin, our destiny, and our present purpose. Or in other words, where did we come from, where are we going, and what should we do? Or even more simply, Who (are we), Why (are we here), and What (are we supposed to do with our lives), respectively.

[To which another critical item must be added: what gets in the way, and why?]

Now, any sane man acknowledges up front that ultimate -- or transfinite -- truth is impossible for a finite being. Unless, of course, this truth is somehow communicated -- which is to say, revealed -- to man from outside, above, beyond, or behind the cosmic system. Some will say this is impossible and leave it at that. However, if you have senses of irony and humor, you will recognize that only a god would be in a position to affirm such a thing. Or in other words, if God doesn't exist, only he knows it. And if he does exist, only man can not know it.

Back to our problem. What if someone 1) discovers a critical truth, 2) formulates it, 3) publishes it, and 4) no one but a few fertile eggheads pays attention?

What I specifically have in mind is Voegelin's Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, which strikes me as densely packed with vital truths about man. And when I say "vital," I mean that man cannot survive -- not as we know him, and not in the long run -- without knowing them.

Time out for aphorisms:

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.

And

Each day modern man knows the world better and knows man less.

First, we should point out that Voegelin is hardly the only person to discover truths that no one wishes to hear. But more importantly, if this is the truth, then it is doubtful in the extreme that he would have been the first to discover it.

Indeed, Voegelin once quipped that one of the hallmarks of truth is unoriginality. Just as animals come equipped with various mechanisms of defense, man's intellect has always been able to arrive at certain salutary and guiding truths (to paraphrase Schuon, as unwavering instinct is the animal's intellect, unwavering intellection is man's instinct). But since we also have free will, we are free to deny, invert, and even oppose these truths.

This lines up with something else Schuon wrote, to the effect that everything has already been said, and even well said, but it still needs to be discovered anew by each generation. And as mentioned above, when spontaneously discovered, there is an intrinsic joy associated with sharing it, i.e., the cosmic Woo Hoo!

One of Voegelin's themes is that when a man moves from faith to ideology, he falls from uncertain truth to certain untruth. Obviously, man has a lust for certitude, but this must be a means, not an end. If this passion does become an end, then one has entered a state of pneumopathology.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, Voegelin made the statement that "the essence of modernity is Gnosticism." What did he mean by this?

First, let's discuss what impels a man to Gnosticism. First, the would-be Gnostic "is dissatisfied with his situation," which, in a certain sense, is neither here nor there, for all men are dissatisfied with their situation. This is just another way of saying that man is a finite being with infinite appetites. Life is tough. Deal with it.

Ah, but this is precisely what the Gnostic refuses to do, which is to say, accept reality. For the Gnostic does not consider the constraints of existence, let alone the nature of man. Liberals, says the Aphorist, describe a past that never existed and predict a future that is never realized.

[One immediately thinks of Sowell's classic elucidation of the unconstrained vision. If you pay attention to the forthcoming Democratic debates, you will hear nothing but unconstrained vision mingled with unconstrained hate, which I believe to be the most dangerous combination in mankind's deadly arsenal.]

Rather, the Gnostic visionary concludes that the community of man is just "poorly organized" and that "salvation from the evil of the world is possible." No one doubts that things can improve, but everyone should doubt that, say, an Obama has it in his power to do such a thing, especially with no unintended consequences, no losers, no trade-offs, no scapegoats, etc.

But the Gnostic believes "that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action" and "that this salvational act is possible through man's own effort." Remember Obama's 2008 promise -- or was it a threat? -- that he intends to fundamentally change this nation. But of course, it has always been known that any idiot can make history by changing things. The hard part is keeping them, e.g., life, liberty, property, etc. [A slogan comes to mind: Keep America Great.]

Usually the Gnostic has his own personal issues, which he avoids by inflicting them upon the rest of us. I mean, no one cares if Obama thinks he can save the world. It only becomes a problem for the rest of us if he is given the power to try.

We'll end with another aphorism to bear in mind as the Twenty Dwarves fight over who's the tallest:

Social problems are the delightful refuge of those fleeing from their own problems. --Dávila