Liberty Is the Fruit of Sovereignty

You can’t do anything at all if the world isn’t ordered. Actions are conceivable under conditions of absolute disorder, but their effects are not. So, since acts can complete their actuality only insofar as their actions somehow eventuate in effects – which cannot happen under conditions of disorder – then actions cannot actually happen except under conditions of order.

This holds not just for the cosmic order that warrants our expectations of the consequences of our actions, but for its social subsidiary.

Only in the context of a social order can we do anything as individuals.

More on Defection

For those who are interested, Quincy Latham and I have continued over at Quas Lacrimas with our discussion of issues and problems raised in my recent post, The Summary of the Law is the Sine Qua Non of Society Per Se. Quincy has published two posts of worthwhile reflections: Defection and Discussion of “Defection”. I have responded at length to both of his posts, and other commenters have raised a number of interesting tangential issues.

The Summary of the Law is the Sine Qua Non of Society Per Se

The Summary of the Law is composed of two Great Commandments that both take the form “thou shalt:”

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Matthew 22:37-40

Notice then that in the Decalogue, there are only two commandments that are likewise prescriptive:

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. (Exodus 20:8)

Honour thy father and thy mother … (Exodus 20:12)

These four prescriptives are related. Those of Exodus are corollary elaborations of those given by Jesus as the foundation of all law. Thus:

1. Love God, for he who is supreme deserves no less than your supreme loyalty; so, therefore: Keep holy and lively his Cult; preserve its doctrines and faithfully observe its observances, such as the sabbath, rituals, fasts and feasts, and so forth.
2. Love your fellow as if he were a human being like you, or there’ll be hell to pay; so, therefore: Honor your parents; likewise ergo the things that they honor: keep and honor your kin, and your patrimony.

If you are not doing these things, you have no society. If you don’t agree about First Things, you’ll have a hell of a time reaching completely harmonious and pacific agreement about anything else, including how people ought to treat each other; and if you don’t agree about that, you won’t care about keeping a patrimonial tradition; so that you won’t have a perdurant culture, or therefore a robust and durable people. No cult, no culture; no culture, no nation.

Our Basic Difficulty vis-à-vis Islam: It’s the Death of the Enlightenment

The leadership of the West is desperate to avoid naming or recognizing our obvious, declared enemy: Islam. Why?

Jubilee, or Something Like It

The West needs a peaceful, orderly way to delete inapt state institutions. E.g., the Fed, the UN, NATO, the Department of Education. We want something short of a general catastrophe – war, plague, famine, pestilence, in short, Collapse – that takes down all institutions violently and unexpectedly, killing millions.

General pervasive catastrophe is the only thing that has ever worked to cleanse the administrative systems of cultures. But devising something equally effective yet much gentler does not seem to be an insurmountable engineering problem.

Iterated ritual formal elections are OK for relatively pacific and orderly changes of leadership in the creation and modification of institutions. But so far they have not been quite adequate to the elimination of inapt institutions – to their complete deletions. Thus the bureaucracy compounds out from under the control of the executive, or of anyone else.

Divorce: Symptom of a Profound Psychopathological Reproductive Disorder

Divorce is a gesture that implements and urges demographic and political suicide. It is an expression of self-hatred; of the will to delete the patrimony inherent in oneself, and to prevent people such as oneself from peopling the future.

Reversion to Tit for Tat

As the optimal strategy for iterated games, Tit for Tat long ago became the norm and basis of human social coordination. It is manifest in our sense of fair play, in our customs and laws, and in all our economic exchanges. Tit for Tat is then a strange attractor for human societies. They all tend toward it, homeostatically. The further you push a society away from Tit for Tat, the harder will it try to get back.

Prevent a people from responding to tats for a long, long time, and eventually they will snap. The frenzy of the explosive rush to restore equilibrium will manifest in a million tits for every tat. Those who had lately done well by tatting will find themselves all tits up.

It will be a bloody ugly rebound.

No Title Necessary: Res Ipsa Loquitur

Comments invited.

Supragenous Authority & the Subsidiaritan Feudal Stack of Sovereignties

The considerations of my recent post Authority Must Flow Down From On High have important implications for the subsidiaritan feudal stack of sovereign corporations. They go instantly to matters of legal form.

Authority Must Flow Down From On High

This brief essay proposes two conjoint and mutually implicate notions: Authority must come down from on high, or it is not authoritative in the first place; and, it must flow downward, from those to whom it has been granted, to their subsidiaries, or it is not effectual, or therefore in the last place actual.