Probably the first paradox presented to a young person is the age old question. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? For most people, this is a fun puzzle, which is why it has remained a popular gag for so long. Aristotle concluded that both must have come into being at the same time, as to have either come first violated the logic of causality. Marxists used this example to “prove” that linear thinking was false. Instead, we have to admit that the egg creates the chicken just as much as the chicken creates the egg.
Evolution answers this by pointing out that eggs existed before birds existed in the fossil record, so the egg preceded the chicken. If you reject evolution, this apparent conflict can only be solved one other way. Some agent, outside of observable nature, was the first cause. It created either the chicken or the egg first. It created all of life, setting off the great chain of causality that controls the natural world. Plato believed that all things in the natural world existed in spirit, as an idea, before coming into being. Jews and Christians believe that God created the natural world just like a clock maker builds a watch.
This is not a post about abiogenesis, but rather a starting point for understanding the great debate of the modern age. What is the nature of man? What is his true and natural state, outside the artificial constraints of society? Did society naturally arise, or was it imposed? This is the question that haunted the minds of the Enlightenment thinkers and it is the question that has animated the great political movements since the French Revolution. If we can know the nature of man, then we can built a just society where virtuous men can be free.
One solution to this question, one that is at the core of every Leftist movement in history, is that man is born as a blank slate. Humans come into the world as a formless blob that is shaped into a person by their parents and community. Eventually they are shaped into a citizen by their society. The reason a person born in France becomes a Frenchman is he was shaped and formed by French society to become a Frenchman. A person born in Niger is what he is because he was raised by Hausa. It takes a village to make a man.
There are a number of implications to this that are critical to understanding the last three hundred years of Western history. The first is that all people are the product of their environment. Therefore, if a person turns out to be a criminal or a bad thinker, it is the fault of society. The good citizen was raised correctly and given the proper education, while the criminal was failed by his parents and society. Of course, it is never too late. The criminal can be rehabilitated and people can change. Our nature is infinity malleable.
That leads to the second implication of the blank slate ideology. The virtuous have a moral duty to remake society so that it creates virtuous citizens. Collective guilt is an inevitable byproduct of the blank slate ideology, because all of us are, by definition, our brother’s keeper. That also means we are collectively responsible for “fixing” the defects that arise from our social institutions. This is why Mussolini said “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Society is a unified living organism. When one bit fails, it all fails.
The alternative to this line of thinking is that people are born with qualities they inherit from their parents. Long before anyone knew about genetics, people could see that the son resembled his father or mother, sometimes both in various ways. People saw that the daughter would usually marry a man like her father and a son would marry a girl like his mother. It was assumed that each person was the result of their line of ancestors, which is why the children of great families took up places in the elite, when they reached adulthood.
This was the standard view of humanity up until the Enlightenment. People all over the world just assumed that the people in various lands were the product of their lands. They did not understand biology, but they knew that Africans were different from Persians and not just in appearance. They knew that the Welsh were different from the Angels and the North-men who showed up on long ships. It was always assumed that nature did not distribute her gifts equally among people or between peoples.
The result of this is that the customs and methods of rule are a reflection of the people who compose the society. Arabs have their ways, because they have their own unique history that has shaped their culture and people. China is the way it is because it is full of Chinese who have lived the way they have lived for thousands of years. In other words, there is no transcendent order that applies universally. There is only a natural order that is rooted in the local population. What works in China, will not work in Arabia.
Since the French Revolution, the great conflicts in the West have been over these two conflicting views of man’s nature and the nature of his society. The Left has always assumed that man is infinitely malleable and that virtuous societies make virtuous men. The Right has taken the other side, defending the natural order of man, which is hierarchical and diverse. Since the Enlightenment, the men of the blank slate have held the dominant position, winning the political fights and imposing their views on the West.
It is largely impossible to grasp the last 300 years of Western history without understanding this intellectual conflict. More important, it will be impossible to navigate the coming battles without grasping this. The new science of genetics is largely confirming what people used to know through observation. Not only are people not blank slates, their cultures are rooted in the shared biology of the people. The next era in the West is about the fight between Liberalism and science, the blank slate and the double helix.
Said it for years. When you reverse cause and effect every answer you get is wrong.
It’s insinuated but worth noting since this will in time come to be a highly referenced piece (as will the rest of the posts in this series) that the neocons and the Respectable Right are firmly and mostly in the blank slatist camps, respectively.
The hinge of Western thought is Christianity. Full stop. It pushed back against the idea that man can save himself and held forth that men were born inherently unable to live up to even the Golden Rule. Look around at the most virtuous vegan you know, and they’ll admit to lapses. The most devoted to “love your neighbor as yourself” cannot live up to it, for they will curse him on the way to work, in line at the DMV, or anywhere where “neighbor” has failed to live up to one’s expectations and judgments. Christianity addressed the utter helplessness of man to overcome this inherent sense of godlike privilege to judge and condemn others while omitting one’s own offense. Where, then, do men find the ability to walk upright in the “enlightenment” of their own inability to live up to the slightest “should”? How did the West overcome this glaring gap between “ought” and “is” to bring forth a new nation?
It wasn’t a mere scapegoat, else we’d have embraced Islam, or any of hundreds of the old ways. Christianity was distinct in the minds of Western thinkers as a way, not for nations or communities to be ruled, but for the individual to submit to a greater Rule of freedom to become, because he is freed from shame, i.e., “original sin.”
What a person does with their shame is what drives their being. Christianity is the only religion that addresses it. The Western mind the first that has embraced it. The world has rushed to consume the fruits of it, and ultimately destroy it, because, unless they assimilate to the Truth of it, they must be doubly shamed by the goodness of it. Freedom from shame is in our national DNA, but we’ve forgotten where it came from.
” abiogenesis ” There were no rock groups before Genesis?
Frazer’s book ‘The Golden Bough’ illustrates the commonality of all the myths ever devised by mankind throughout history. Further, the Jesuits are credited with boasting that if they were given control of a child for the first seven years of his life that they would then return to the world the man as he would always be.
This is strongly indicative of a built-in faculty to organize life’s experiences into recognizable patterns; more of an unfilled form than of a blank slate. Of course, some persons are broken from the start, blind, deaf, psychologically, etc., so exceptions to the rule will always be found.
The unfilled form can be likened to read-only-memory that is written to very early in life with the principles of humanity as it is then known and will from then on facilitate all future learning and development. It can be damaged later in life, but even if it could be rewritten, the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime is already stored in fixed patterns and would have to be re-experienced to be stored in the new pattern.
Otherwise, it is eminently reasonable to assume that, similar to body shape and visual acuity, that variances in the built-in faculties for pattern recognition and organization would also vary based upon inheritance as well as random luck. Not all the children of intelligent parents are intelligent themselves.
All of the individual cells, born of the single egg cell, organize themselves into marvelously complex organs and networks that make up the physical totality the creature within which they exist. They seem to do this with no conscious awareness of the specialized role they are destined to fulfill, yet their purpose somehow influences them to play their part. Cells will occasionally wonder off on their own, sometimes leaving their host with crippled functionality and other times actually destroying the host. Perfection is an as yet an unknown attribute.
I would find it presumptuous on my part to conclude that I’m fully capable of deciding my purpose independently or that I do not have an ultimate purpose. If all of my faculties are fully functional and are not warped due to externalities such as bad or no parents or other extreme circumstances, my built-in faculties of pattern organization will lead me to fulfill my purpose even if I’m completely unaware of my purpose’s existence.
Mankind’s feeble awareness of the effects of his purpose has been recorded over the millennia in the form of myths, then religions, then ethics and morality. These slow awakenings have lead many to seize upon one myth or the other as his purpose. More often than not, this leads to a very narrow focus upon a single facet of life, an obsession that halts all further progress.
Contentment, enjoyment of life, constant curiosity and continued learning are, I believe, indications that one is following one’s purpose, even though it remains unknown . Faith, especially in one’s sense of well being (despite the danger of its abuse) plays an important role when knowledge is unattainable and is one of those built-in faculties along with pattern recognition and organization.
The egg IS a chicken in embryonic form. The first chicken egg was begat (that’s a Biblical term, I hear) by two birds that were almost, but not quite, chickens.
In fact, so far from mankind being a blank slate, intelligence is now known to be 70-80 % heritable, while all behavior (and attitudes) is at least 50% heritable. There’s your culture and civilization, if any, for you. For a dismal example, subSaharan Africans average an IQ of 70, more than two standard deviations less intelligent than Northern Europeans. Not much potential for civilization there…
If you read the Norse sagas, they start out with a discussion of the families involved. People knew which families were reckless, which were the peacemakers. You just needed to know who was related to who and you’d have an idea of how the story would turn out.
The Norse Nine Noble Virtues
Courage
Truth
Honor
Fidelity
Discipline
Hospitality
Self Reliance
Industriousness
Perseverance
The Scout Law.
A Scout is:
Trustworthy
Loyal
Helpful
Friendly
Courteous
Kind
Obedient
Cheerful
Thrifty
Brave
Clean, and
Reverent.
And balance that with Gen. Mattis saying “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
You know just about any HS student in FFA or farmer who raises animals knows this instinctively. The same can be said of serious sports fans. They know champions are born. That you can’t become a contender for the Worlds Strongest Man or be a top NFL draft pick merely on effort alone. That a lot rides on having the right parents.begin with.
Of course it’s not openly talked about because it hurts feeling.
For example back in the late 80’s it was all the rage for Wall Street execs to send their boys to high end sports camps in the hopes they’d become the next Babe Ruth or Andre Aggasi. Problem was one of the top coaches at the camp explained to the WSJ, is that that parents have bad genetics, IMS he said to the effect these people were bred for money making and not athletics. But no one could tell the parents their kids just don’t have the right stuff because of them.
You guys are going to need the Christians if you indeed intend to be free men. I think in many respects we are natural allies. So if I might.
“Jews and Christians believe that God created the natural world just like a clock maker builds a watch.”
This sentence is largely false. Your preceding paragraph gives better glimpses of Christianity with slight modification.
This is what Christians believe; “Some agent, outside of observable nature, was the first cause. It created either the chicken or the egg first. It created all of life, setting off the great chain of causality that controls the natural world.” With the modifier that the “chain of causality” is ever influence and controlled by the “some agent” – God.
And
“If we can know the nature of man, then we can built a just society where virtuous men can be free.”
You can know the nature of man but you must first know God. God is observable. Read the book for crying out loud. Studying the created order without understanding it’s creator is a painful and time consuming ordeal. Eventually we could reverse engineer parts of His creation, the double helix, but we won’t know any more about ourselves. We more than likely have further and harder questions.
I love the rest of this posting. It is a masterful glimpse at trying to understand the Natural Law. If one picks any other explanation than ‘God created’ you will not understand the natural order. Here’s the gap; God reveals his Natural Created order to those who seek Him FIRST. One can find God a million different ways but understanding his creation requires Him to explain it.
Read the Bible, Locke, Jefferson. These texts, if you believe, answers the question of the created order and the laws of nature. And if you don’t believe, again, we are natural allies. The founders didn’t say awe screw Jefferson he doesn’t fully believe and Jefferson and the other deists and non believers did not reject the Christians in this common struggle to be at liberty in society with each other.
I am enjoying this occasional series immensely. Thank you.
According to my copy of the Bible….
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
Later…
Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. 25 God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
Your point is well taken sir.
I love to examine the verses. I prefer the KJV and I like it specifically for verse 2. And if someone has a bible that says ‘hovered’ in verse 2 you might as well throw it in the trash. God was not hovering around on coffee break or some such.
“…And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” This indicates that God acted upon the water in a task causation, affecting it. A human example (poorly) could be such as when you see something that causes you to move upon it, like a pretty girl or a big sale or a drink about to spill.
where have the christians been all along, while America was being dismantled? What have the Christians done to help their brethren in the middle east? so no, keep your christians, they aren’t worth much. maybe if we have a bake sale.
Sorry, but without Christians and Christianity, you have no Western Civilization, and without them there is and will be no recovery for the West. It is the rejection of Christianity that has given us the present sorry state of affairs throughout Europe and North America. Christians have their fair share of blame for that result, but then so do you and everyone else who has rejected Christianity. Where were you and the like-minded while America and the rest of Europe was being dismantled?
I think you will end up eating those words Karl. You wouldn’t have the luxury of free speech without the values and principles of Christianity and it’s influences in creating the West, in particular America, to begin with.
It just so happens, Christianity and Christians are tolerant of many things and many ways not found in the rest of the world.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”
The churches in America were nationalized in 1954 under the Johnson amendment. There was a pastor in Texas that was making the president angry because he wouldn’t stop telling the truth about his policies. So congress violated the first amendment and incorporated the churches under the IRS code. They get a bi-annual letter telling them what they can and can’t preach. The churches are dead. And to be honest, I’ve met mostly nothing but pussies in the churches of America.
Trump talked about rescinding this while on the campaign trail.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/c7/3c/e2/c73ce2a77fb8452f4acceb4221ef57cf.jpg
Syriac Christians
Known as the “Female Protection Forces of the Land Between the Two Rivers” – in reference to the stretch of traditionally Syriac-inhabited land between the Tigris and Euphrates, the all-volunteer unit consists of Syrian mothers, wives and professionals who pray in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.
Cool
Seriously folks, where would our civilization be without the women? (and I don’t mean that as a joke about the chicken and the egg!) Seems to me that instead of Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day which are so commercialized as to lack real meaning, men should organize an honest-to-goodness Women’s Appreciation March (all across the country) that recognizes the daily accomplishments/contributions/sacrifices of ALL women who help make our land and civilization a better place. Protesters are included. Peaceful, honorable protesters. Not hateful and destructive people. But men should take the lead on doing this and make it a thing from the heart.
I have always thought and told people I discuss world issues with that I think a big issue with the world is people just want to be RECOGNIZED. Too many feel invisible. We need to lift each other up. I am amazed at the reception I get many times when I look someone in the eyes and simply greet them. That simple acknowledgement seems to mean a lot. America First means taking care of those at home, something I know I have sorely failed at in my past, but my drift is that in order for the country to make a comeback from the Socialist choke-hold, we need to strengthen our women, let them know how much they are appreciated. No more foul language. More gentlemanly behavior as President Trump is displaying with his wife and family (disregard the stuff from years ago, we all make mistakes). He is leading by example.
What would that look like to put the Women’s March that just occurred, to put them to shame by having a million man march honoring women in America? Women today, from the past, yes, be inclusive. We have to right this ship. It is listing badly and taking on water something seriously. Once we stabilize the ballast then be assured of setting a steadier course that can weather the continuous onslaught from the loony Left. Because we know they will not be dissuaded from their religion.
Sounds like you are judging the whole batch of apples by the few you have seen and maybe tasted (experienced). While most of America is Christian, or would identify as such, it is a shame that the “government” pretends to represent such when they, the elites, make their own moves to suit their own needs. Look at your own country and tell me they do what your citizens want? Like any group, many help in their own ways, quietly going about their business without drawing attention while others are media hounds seeking money and attention. Others are all talk, and others are bad examples as Ambassadors for Christ. It runs the gamut. I think you have a bad case of LameStreamMedia poisoning which detests all things Christian. I recommend a mental cleansing.
History is circular, it phases in and out, it is coming around again to the second 5000 Year leap. Agrarian pluralism was the antedate and turning point to the anthropological pessimism that prevailed until the colonial patriots chose secession from Britain. The founders didn’t hold each other in contempt if they didn’t all adhere to the same scripture, just that scripture was paramount in creating dignity of the individual and liberty. Imagine Jefferson and Henry, Franklin and Hamilton, Stark and Washington, bickering and alienating each other because they didn’t all see things exactly the same way. It’s preference cascade. The mob of cultural marxism has attempted to equate popularity with correctness. It is baked in to it it offers nothing to dirt people and their provincialism and pluralism.
Just so, that founding provincial agrarian culture later was anathema to yankeedom. It is why the war of northern aggression.
That divine connection to the earth, hard work, perseverance, the crafts, arts, philosophy, religious scripture, the Stoics, the ancient Greeks and Romans wisdoms and thinking, the great creator, it is providence, it is where from freedom was born. Something for the first time in 5000 years of human history it not only became an idea, it became a sovereign entity. The 5000 year leap.
Anybody can say what they will in the contrary, it still exists. Christianity isn’t churches and cathedrals, it isn’t the Vatican, it isn’t even the Gideon’s Bible in a hotel room, long before that and all it’s trappings it was agrarian and pagan connections to the earth is where it sprung forth. Because in all things like this, it is always the purview of the dirt people, just as it is right now, that are who ever effect positive change, it is the circular nature of the human terrain. And I sense somehow it is all coming full circle, that we are on the cusp of changes we can not imagine because us dirt people are on the ascendent, and kicking and screaming, into a new age we will bring the divine and primal rights of men back from obscurity.
I tried to upvote this twice.
“Jews and Christians believe that God created the natural world just like a clock maker builds a watch.”
Do you really believe this? With respect, this is just plain wrong, probably the least insightful thing you’ve ever written–and I say that as a great admirer of your writing. I’m usually in agreement with your thought. But creation ex nihilo is not comparable to the assembly of a human artifact, and the idea of the First Cause means much more than the the Big Bang: more fundamentally it refers to that which is indispensable to the existence of all being in the here and now.
I probably should have said “mainstream Christians and Jews.” The standard presentation of Genesis is that God created the universe and the critters within it, as well as the rules that govern it.
I would argue that the rejection of occassionalism by Jews and then Christians is one the most important events in human history.
Well, speaking from within the Christian tradition, I’d say most Christians, even if not understanding the full philosophical significance, would still see ex nihilo creation as qualitatively distinct from watchmaking, but that is a quibble since the OP was not about this issue. And I agree with you about the importance of the West’s rejection of occasionalism, and would only add that Islam’s embrace of the doctrine is equally significant to understanding the last 1000 years or so of history.
I see what you mean now. Yeah, the watchmaker analogy comes with a lot of freight so I probably should not have used it.
Last in Line said it way better than me. I should have read this before spouting my mouth off about the watchmaker sentence, sorry.
Which came first? If the rooster’s any good, the chicken.
Now that is funny! But I hasten to correct … it is the Rooster who would come first! wink wink!
A related aspect of this important discussion is philosophical materialism. For some strange reason the blank slate folks, particularly the Marxist variety, used to insist that they were/are staunch materialists. The driving force of history that was going to bring utopia was posited to be dialectical materialism.
Why does this matter_? To begin with, the ‘science’ they’re so fond of saying as supporting their world view is really a lot about information. As evidence, several weeks ago the subject was mathematics. And if there’s one ‘science’ that is independent of physical, materially existing objects, it’s mathematics So what is mathematics_? I’d say it’s information about discoverable fixed relationships that are both material and nonmaterial. So can information be immaterial_?
The answer should be, “Obviously, yes, we are using immaterial information right now to communicate with each other online”. IOW, as computer science has long been able to demonstrate, information exists independently from the material means of its storage and can be passed with relative ease from one material means to another.
So, just as it should be a fatal contradiction to assert that it’s a fact that everything is relative, it should also be a fatal contradiction to assert that, “All that exists are atoms and the void.” IOW, how could you know or communicate this without immaterial means, i.e. information. So if materialism is intrinsically false, isn’t Marxism too_?
The WSJ today has an article about people who can play multiple games of chess simultaneously, while blindfolded or otherwise banned from actually seeing the boards. They are told the moves of their opponents in the chess-speak, I suppose. They play 5 or 20 or 40 games simultaneously, and win most of them. Tell me how the blank slate thing can explain that.
If one assumes blank slates, then it is really an excuse to meddle in the lives of others, IMO. If you are born with a semblance of who you are, then perhaps you don’t really need others to shape your being. I think that is the root of the argument, right there.
Finally, I am astonished that people with children still believe in the blank slate thing. Children are creative, impetuous, willful, and maddening to raise. They are obviously born with a lot it wired in. Perhaps the blank slate people just can’t deal with the messiness of raising a child, so they blame the system, rather than take ownership of the results.
I think it is just an excuse to cover up their own messed up lives and blame everything else except … themselves. It is always someone else’s fault. YOU are terrible.
It’s taken me over five years, but I’m finally reaching the point where I no longer find it worthwhile to try and debate the blank slate crowd. There really is no reasoning with the True Believers. This can be frustrating when you’re dealing with people you know in real life who are kind and otherwise intelligent. I guess we’ll have to have the debate without them.
The other day I came across this:
“Our goal in this article is simply to promote a more civil discourse about race differences and behavior. Our approach is unique: one of us is a sociologist (or sociological criminologist), trained as a sociologist and in traditional criminology. The other of us is a biosocial criminologist, trained across a range of biologically informed disciplines. Clearly we come to the study of race and behavior from different vantage points—and yet we see the importance of sharing our insights, of listening to the other, and of figuring out where we can move the fields in a positive direction. What follows is a dialogue representing the sociological (Mike’s) perspective and biosocial (Brian’s) perspective. We conclude with some reactions and a way forward.”
http://quillette.com/2017/01/17/saints-sinners-a-dialogue-on-the-hardest-topic-in-science/
Thanks for the link. I’ll read it later.
I’ll do another post on HBD and the whole nurture/nature/both issue. It’s a big topic. The blank slate types never can grasp the science, but the HBD’ers often fall into the determinism trap.
Bingo.
Is it simply about the question of nature verses nurture, or is a combination of both? But it begs the question for me at least, it doesn’t matter, just leave us dirt people alone, allright!?
Beautiful summary, though I’d tinker at the margins.
Where the idea of society or nation as an ‘organic’ entity, whole, or living being was actually most prominent in western political philosophy was on the reactionary right in the late 19c and early 20c, and it still seems to fit into a reactionary/trad/ or even in some ways ‘conservative’ view today. Granted they did not mean by it quite the things you suggest here, rather it struck them as the outgrowth of the idea of the naturally occurring people that you give as the ‘right’ worldview.
In that sense, fascism and its idea of state and society did actually belong to the right.
Not for the first time, I am forced to conclude fascism really was on both sides of the otherwise useless left right spectrum. The organic nation understood as the product of a discrete, independently extant people, whose thriving was the state’s duty, but also the idea of state led improvement. Reverence for history and identity but also a tradition of unifying nationalism straight out of the revolutionary liberal playbook of a century earlier. Tradition but also radical modernity. Tradition but also fascination with technology and science. The dream of preserving race and nation but also transforming them. Somewhat working class but also petty bourgeois base. Populist yet oligarchic. Traditional hierarchies but also obsessed with meritocracy.
And so on ad infinitum.
Somewhere in one of the disorderly book caches I have now at 4 locations in 2 cities [I’m a poor life organizer and still haven’t finished moving books from my parent’s home and a storage facility in that same city, in which I last lived in 1997] I had an anthology of essays on fascism from the 1960s, in which one prof called it the extremism of the centre, both as to its third way economics and its mid level class basis. He postulated reaction, fascism and communism as the extremist forms on a parallel line to the spectrum conservatism, liberalism, socialism.
As much as most people cannot fathom that approach, it still seems the most accurate to me. Not to mention it implicitly owed something to Aristotle, who also used parallel spectra when differentiating the good and bad forms of his political types- tyranny, oligarchy and ochlocracy bad, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy good. More or less.
I find that parallelism more useful than single lines, circles, squares, or what have you.
The biggest problem will be the empathy gap. Liberals, of course, think they’re great at empathy, but they’re terrible at it. They think — scratch that, they know — that what everybody really wants is to be hipster SJWs like themselves, wearing goofy lumberjack beards and scarves and talking about “football” while sipping lattes and listening to bands you’ve never heard of. It’s not that hard to get them to accept that not everyone can do this — elitism is, after all, a major part of Progressivism’s appeal — but they really can’t grok that lots of people don’t want to. If we accept that Dontarrious from the ‘jects and Billy Bob up the holler will never be IT guys or graphic designers, what then? What’s the good life for a 90 IQ guy who is constitutionally incapable of being a good little hipster SJW? They don’t know, because although they know what each individual word means, the question as a whole might as well be Sumerian. And short of sending them down to the countryside, Mao-style, I have no idea how to get them to get it…. but they have to, because they’ll never leave us alone until they do.
“And short of sending them down to the countryside, Mao-style,”
No need to rule this out so quickly.
They prey on something almost primal in many people. I think it is why American’s are both an easy target for cultural marxists, and an uncrackable nut. A fear, something that rises up out of the depths of our sense of origins as a country, a people, of privately examining, in the most private intimate manner, honestly examining, in our heart of hearts, the profound human founding of liberty as a conceptual basis of being a people and country. Something if it is to be examined honestly within our inner selves, it either has to be shoved back within it’s box, or let free. If it is let free it requires a profound responsibility, as true liberty, self determination, and individualism is the acme of personal responsibility. It takes unwavering personal courage and audacity to let it free.
Some do, many stuff it back and refuse to look at it. but we know it is there. I think cultural marxism is specifically designed to prey on and capitalize on, a kind of deep rooted guilt for not being completely responsible for our individual liberty and self determination. It gives those who refuse to be personally responsible an out. Provides a rationale for coping out. But cultural marxism, how cunning it is, it does something else when people embrace it’s fabrications, it eats away at personal dignity, it rots a persons responsibility, it usurps virtue, till all that is left, (no pun intended), is a person who transforms into a slave to ideology and fantasy. They become zombies.
To be free, to be self determining, to stick to your principles, defend your virtues, to have the courage and audacity, is a motive power to stand above everything else, to never say die, to say I Won’t! and Mind Your Own Business, people who are thus are by default enemies of those people who betrayed their personal responsibility of liberty, and being inherently cowards and betrayers, they find comfort in the hive of statism, in the embrace of the mob, they find safety, and the mob becomes a powerful hum, a bath of abandon of everything moral and of tradition, of anything that reminds them of their desertion, and through safety in numbers they will kill anything that threatens their safe places.
Where they go wrong is those who say I Won’t!, they are by nature indomitable. Their safety begins not with the embrace of the mob, but with themselves as individuals, and the motive power of the self determining individualism is exemplified on an logarithmic, almost exponential order, in the form of consent, they become a plurality which possesses a kind of power all outside it’s diminutive origins as nothing else in the scope of human activity is or can be.
The hives purpose becomes the destruction, the extermination of that audacity of consent. The hive, the collective, fears it like nothing else. There is nothing else it does fear, so by default it is all consuming, this fear and anger to destroy. It is a self feeding closed loop. And today, we are seeing the hive begin to behave in confusion, disarray, it is fracturing, the dirt people are refusing to submit to the collective, they are turning their backs to the hive, there is nothing the collective can do that the dirt people fear or react to that gives the hive it’s power to control others, and at some a critical mass of refusing to submit, refusing to comply is reached and the hive collapses. I think we are seeing the beginnings of the collective’s demise. It is fracturing. But even more salient is it created it’s worst enemy and it has no more offense than defense against it.
About 100 up votes.
While I am somewhat skilled at seeing the dots, I also am something of a summarizer. I like to back up and see how it all comes together into the big picture. For me, it’s summed up as the ultimate war of evil against good. Evil is a capable shapeshifter. Imitation good. Good for goodness sake that is actually the exact polar opposite in truth. For me, the big picture is as much about the ancient and yet ever new battle for control. My faith concludes the war is won regardless the ongoing skirmishes.
But what you said Doug. May I quote you?
“I have no idea how to get them to get it…. but they have to, because they’ll never leave us alone until they do.”
They don’t have to get it. It is not your or my job. Not our circus, not our monkeys. They have to stop. If they don’t they must be stopped, because they won’t stop till they are.
They count on the weakness of their enemy of trying to accommodate them of compromising their principles of being vulnerable by thinking they think the same, are alike, and can be reasoned with. They won’t stop till that changes. Till it is finally realized there is no bargaining. That is how they win, they never quit.
The threshold here is getting over that threshold of civility towards something that has none.
There is a timeless axiom that an armed society is a civil society. Many truths in that. One of which is why the 2nd, the other why The Whole Armor of God. It wasn’t an accident the founders understood why the 2nd was so important, why it was the single most agreed upon stipulation. They understood human nature and where things would go eventually. They literally fought and died for it. It’s no different at the crux of it today. The Why’s and the What For’s haven’t changed.
that’s just the cover tory to feed rubes. underneath it’s just pure power politics. 80% of society is in the herd, 10% pulls left, 10% pulls right. philosophy isn’t jack shit in the real world. human nature is well understood; the only book you need to read on this is The Prince by M.
This…
“We divide reality, forget that we have divided it, and then forget that we have forgotten it.”
— Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness
…is that the reverse of the unknown unknowns?
Or this…?
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2017/01/15/MW%20GDP.jpg
…the commission of altering the knowns aka cognitive dissonance?
The herd may be 80%, give or take, but !00% of the herd pulls left. Human instincts are left–socialist, communists, fascist, the order of survival in the small group for 100,000 years. People crave certainty, despise uncertainty. All civilizing advances are anti-instinctual. They must be defended each generation or fail. Instincts require nothing to start the same fight all over again. It’s easy work, and they even get to call themselves intellectuals.
Still don’t make them right or give them power to make others who disagree go along with it. If anything it makes those who withdraw consent the most legitimate in their persons and their freedoms.
Meh, I promote Aesop’s Fables as “The One Book”, as it’s comprehensible even at the child’s level of intellect.
I’m not convinced that The Prince is suitable for the humans that instinctively pursue a life of
progressive ease.
The leftists conveniently leave out the one thing in their blank slate ideology they go on to revile. if man began as a blank slate, there had to be a cultural influence in order to imprint nature on this living blank canvas to begin with. So it begs the question about leftist human nature logic gymnastics and how they can justify whatever cultural influence of the moment to fit the narrative. If leftist ideology about culture is indeed correct, it is the biggest double standard imaginable and leftists are responsible for exactly what they accuse their enemies of being.
Philosopher David Stove calls this “the Ishmael Effect” — if your theory is true, then by definition you can’t know it. If “man’s social being determines his consciousness,” for example, then how did you, comrade, manage to raise your consciousness above your social being far enough to be able to tell the rest of us about it? Same deal with the Postmodernist, who tells us for a fact that there’s no such thing as a fact. The feminist professor preaching about the all-powerful Patriarchy should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, not living a 1% lifestyle on the public dime. If Trump is Hitler, and W Bush was also Hitler, then shouldn’t all of you people calling Trump Hitler be getting some rubber hose time with the GOP-stapo? &c. One has to be very very Smart indeed to be this stupid, but Our Betters manage it daily.
Stove is an under appreciated thinker. He take down of Popper is really good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper_and_After
Are you trying to con me with some fancy logic gymnastics cultural marxism is an innocent occurrence of omission and not commission? Whatever happened to good old fashioned bullshitting yourself and taking the easy way out?
Or is that now what passes for diversity?
Personally, if you haven’t picked up on it by my previous comments, there is no excuses for not being responsible for your actions. No matter how you try to spin it or rationalize it.
Isn’t that why we are as a nation the pickle we are in to begin with?
All sorts of psychological and social factors will influence you and urge you to a particular action. Look at children. But you still retain the option to take responsibility for your actions and reject influences. This is called, “becoming an adult”. Some adults achieve this early and others never do.
Then there are the “motivationalists” such as Limbaugh who insist you can be whatever you will yourself to be, and that all good and evil is a matter of choice.While this may have an element of truth, it fails to explain why the football-obsessed Limbaugh was unable to will himself into an NFL quarterback, and why Ben Shapiro has never had a prayer in the NBA, or any of those rappers as philosophers. I wanted to be an ace fighter pilot shooting down Fokker Triplanes, but vision limitations forced me to sublimate my aggressive inclinations in other directions. As a wise man once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
And therein lies my answer to your puzzle. One’s genes provide a potential and set the achievable limits.But whether you achieve to those limits or fall short of full capacity is determined by other environmental factors, including health and nutrition, and how one is raised, educated, and conditioned by parents and society. The ways to succeed may be numerous, but the ways to fail are infinite.
You heading toward the conflict of Kalgeri vs. Nationalism?
Finally a worthwhile conflict.