New book!

I’ve been playing hooky from this site for a while, but I hope no one minds if I show up to announce I have a new book coming out, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church. It’s about the old identities that worked (man, woman, Catholic, American), the new ones that really don’t (Latinx, nonbinary), why the change, whence the lunacy, and what to do about it. The problems go pretty deep, and like everything else today they’re not going to get better unless we change a lot about how we live and think about things.

 

The Basic Problem With Libertarianism

The demons, too, maximize their own hedonic profit – as they themselves construe it. Unfortunately for them, they are wrong in their construction of things. They are wrong about where the true hedonic profit truly lies. So, the profit they wrongly seek is of the sort that is earned as one Falls: falling feels like flying, for a little while.

We need not be like the demons. This is one of the things that makes temporal creatures like us superior to the aeviternal angels, some many of whom have Fallen incorrigibly: we can learn, and change our minds. For a little while.

Liberty can work toward the common good only insofar as it be first constrained by a vision of the good *which is in absolute terms itself correct about what is absolutely good,* toward which the idiosyncratic will finds itself inclined, prior to hedonic effects of this or that particular act. Liberty works, i.e., only when free agents think always in terms of a good prior to themselves, subvenient to their being, and therefore utterly suasive, whatsoever the agonies they suffer in obedience thereto.

Liberty unmoored from absolute morality is just chaos. Is, i.e., just evil.

Hi You Pathetic Dickless FBI Weenies

Now that we know that the FBI has been targeting traditionalist Catholics such as we *in our own churches* – and, no doubt, the devout in the temples also of our Evangelical and Orthodox brethren – we can be *absolutely sure* that they have been tracking all of us here.

We all of us here are known to the FBI. They have all our contact info, and all our email traffic. Those utter fools consider us enemies.

So pathetically sad. You infamous impotent weenies of the FBI. How can you live with yourselves?

Probably you compensate for your profound weakness with sadism of some sort. How forsooth could you bear up from one day to the next, otherwise?

So absurd; so sad, your lives, so wicked and so sordid.

May God bless and keep you, and may he make his coruscant light to shine upon you. It can’t give you peace, unless you repent.

Repent, I beg you. Don’t go to Hell.

The Vipers Are Now in Charge

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

Matthew 3:7

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For, out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Matthew 12:34

The Pharisees whom both John and his cousin Jesus called a brood of vipers were in first century Palestine the counterparts of what today we would call the Woke Enforcers of Political Correctness. Not of Justice, properly so called. Just of Political Correctness.

Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist

Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”

I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?

One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?

Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit:

On the Slippery Slope of Classical Liberalism

This post about slippery slope arguments subsequends three priors: JM Smith’s post, Bill Vallicella’s critique thereof, and JM Smith’s response thereto. Readers might want to run through them, before essaying what here follows.

The slippery slope argument is to be sure, and strictly speaking, a logical fallacy, as Vallicella notices. But then, it is not intended first as a logical argument; so that it is mistaken to take it first as such. It is rather intended as an empirical and pragmatic argument – or even, rather, a simple observation, from which we might begin to adduce logical arguments.

Kill Them All, & Let God Sort Them Out

This is how social deliquescence appears concretely. One faction or another – or, all factions – throw up their hands, give up negotiations, and resort to civil war. As soon as the percentage of those in the nation ready to take such a step surpasses about 3%, war is on, no matter what, sooner or later, and despite the wishes of all the other nationals. On such occasions, a Fort Sumter event is inbound. It shall soon or late happen. Then, all bets are off.

This is where we now find ourselves. Far more than 3% of Americans – perhaps it is as much as 5%, or even 7% – have decided that all Americans who are remotely such as we of the Orthosphere ought to be, and so are to be, deleted. So, the war is on.

The shooting has not yet begun, but the imprisonments have. The American gulag has already begun.

What is more, the plan is already out in the open. The elite have by the offices of the FBI declared war upon Traditional Catholics, such as I. Good heavens, and forsooth: I sang the Hassler Missa Secunda at Mass this last Sunday, in Latin; probably that makes me an enemy of the state.

Today is Weimar; Today is the Reign of Elagabalus; This is Belshazzar’s Feast

I remember back in the 70’s reading about Weimar and Elagabalus and Nero, and thinking, “How could anyone have been so nuts as to believe any of that obviously perverse and stupid stuff, let alone act on it?” Yet we seem to fall into such fantasies pretty regularly, especially in times of general prosperity and calm. Any number of other such wild and absurd episodes could be adduced: the French and Soviet Revolutions, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, ancient Persian Mazdakism, the Marquis de Sade and his circle (he must have had a pretty extensive circle, who bought his stuff, or we could never have heard of him, no?), Bloomsbury, the Frankfurt School, transhumanism, on and on.

Also, less violently but more radically and pervasively, Freemasonry and the occult – theosophy, New Age, and so forth.

I.e., Gnostic Pelagian utopianism, in all its instantiations.

And, now, right now, today, abortion, porneia, divorce, wokeism, globohomo, transsexuality, and – especially, and at their root, and at their most energetic and fulsome – anti-Christianity; which is to say, when abstract doctrinal push comes down at bottom to pragmatic bloody shove, infanticide and the genital mutilation of children.

That’s where it always ends, no? These Gnostic transvaluations of value always terminate upon the mutilation and death, or just the prevention, of children; i.e., of humanity.

What You Can Do Right Now

You are not going to prevail against the FBI, the IRS, Facebook, Google, or their equivalents in the rest of what remains of the West. Not if you go up against them directly. So, don’t try. Render unto Caesar. Give them what is needed to get them off your back. Live to fight another day, in another way.

In what way?

By a direct spiritual assault upon the Enemy, and his minions, the enemies of Man.

How?

The spiritual war is fought one body at a time. Mundane wars, likewise; but only inasmuch as they resemble their spiritual archetype.

Let your body be your battlefield, and so with it your worldly life. Perfect your holiness. That is at bottom your only weapon against the Enemy. It is the only field of battle on which you can fight him, practically; so, it is the only battlefield on which he can be fought, at all. And if you are holy and righteous altogether, like Galahad, he cannot, when push comes at last to shove, ever touch you; for, you shall then belong utterly to the Lord God, who is the font of his being, so still his King, and thus his conqueror. So in Christ shall you conquer him, who would destroy you, and all that you love.

If in your decisions from one moment to the next you frustrate the Devil, and bid him get behind you, well then, you have done far more to deal with the perfidy at the high places of our worldly governments than you could possibly have done by going up against them directly, who are after all no more than the hapless stupid clueless minions of their Dark Lord.

Your outward governors are enemies capable to you at all only inasmuch as you let the Enemy govern you inwardly.

Defeat him within yourself! It is at bottom fairly easy, if just you pray; the Lord Jesus will help you, if you do. And so shall he through you help Christendom; thus, derivatively, the West.

On, then, brothers. Deus vult.

Pray the Jesus Prayer, & Be Done With All the Rest

Hunting as I do daily over the links provided by our valuable and indefatigable allies at Synlogos, I am struck again, as I have of late been more and more often, with the bootlessness of it all.

Our struggle looks doomed. As usual.

What mundane prince might save us? None, at the last. For, we are all doomed to die. We are doomed to lose all that to which we have devoted our lives, including our progeny and their heirs, all of whom shall like us, and like the grass, wither away. That shall all happen, no matter the outcome of the midterm elections, or the war in Ukraine, or … of anything else whatever.

Mundane princes then are in the final analysis neither here nor there. While it behooves us as a matter of plain duty to attend to their motions, still in the end they amount to nothing. All that matters to us in our private persons is our ultimate reconciliation – each of us – with ultimate reality.

Pray then with me the Jesus Prayer, as often as you can remember to do so:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.

Nothing could be more lethal to our worldly adversary, and to his designs.