Self-Hatred & Radical Autonomy: an Interpretation of Thordaddy

[Thordaddy is one of our most loyal and prolific commenters. Most of the comments he has submitted have not appeared here, on account of his customary horrific abuse of English syntax, diction, and prosody. Most of them are simply incomprehensible. They have not therefore passed the threshold set by the criteria of our comments policy. Nevertheless, Thordaddy has some terrific insights, which over the course of years of earnest effort to understand him, I have at length come to appreciate. Thus, this post. All thanks to Thordaddy for his honest persistence. Now, if only he could school himself to write like a Christian …][Thordaddy: for the love of Christ, don’t get cocky: write like a Christian, for God’s sake. Your comments to this post will not otherwise see the light of day.][And, also: God bless you for your earnest loyal persistence.]

Self-hatred comes along with the vicious radical autonomy of modernism (that Thordaddy has so emphatically noticed to us all) as a package deal. If you are radically autonomous, then you alone are capable of fixing your own life, and so you are alone responsible for so doing. There is then no one to help you. You alone are alone at fault. Your fault is intrinsic, given along with your radical ontological autonomy, and therefore incorrigible – at least by you. Your fault is your own decision.

Naturally then you hate yourself for it (every man knows in his heart that he is responsible for himself; there is no escape whatever from this knowledge). But one cannot hate oneself and live; so your self-hatred is directed instead upon some Other, a wicked and as suspiciously odd therefore ostensibly blameworthy scapegoat, who works well enough as a halfway credible field for the projection of your own most despised characteristics. The scapegoat allows you to feel for a few moments – those of his holocaust – that you yourself are blameless in your predicaments; that it is all his fault, and that with his death, his ostracism or bewilderment, your faults likewise die; so that you are then free of responsibility, ergo of guilt, or shame, or blame – ritually pure and unimpeachable.

I.e., free. Radically autonomous.

Inequality Before the Law is Natural & Proper to Man

Men are not equal. Some are therefore rightly more authoritative, more influential, and more important than others. The law ought to recognize this reality – and it does. The question is not whether it does recognize this reality, then, but whether it does so justly.

Nations are Ontological Reals

Wholes are real, or else they are not worth talking about at all, as not existing in the first place. On materialism, there are no wholes: no persons, no molecules, not even any Rutherfordian atoms or protons.

So then, on materialism, most human discourse is – as pertaining to entities that do not truly exist, being therefore inapposite to things as they really are – simply not worth doing; is, rather, inapt, and so likely injurious.

But if materialism is false – as, being a notion of entities that under its own account do not actually exist, it must necessarily be – then wholes are real. Some of them, anyway. The trick is to discern which apparent wholes are entities in their own right, and which are only our own heuristics.

Liberal Sexuality Cannot Work, & So Tends to Traditional Marriage

Traditional sexual morality can be stated in a single sentence, that covers all the wrinkles: any sex whatever outside of marriage is utterly proscribed. Thus the only sort of sex that is traditionally permissible must transpire between man and wife.

The Sexual Left Devours Itself

The Great Sex Harassment Witch Hunt of 2017 is mostly hitting liberals. It is leaving conservatives largely unscathed (at least so far). Why should this be?

Marriage as an Ontological Real

By training and habit, we moderns think of marriage as a mere and adventitious arrangement of pre-existent and utterly independent entities. We think of it therefore as merely conventional, and so as subsistent completely in the continued agreement of its constituent members, the husband and wife, and so by either of them ever and completely severable, thus eliminable, without appreciable rupture or wound to the goodness inherent in the causal order. We think of it as a deal, and nothing more – as if deals were nothing. We think of marriage, that is to say, as not truly real. We think of it as a social and legal fiction.

In this, we err. It is not so. For, deals are real. And they really impose themselves upon us, so shaping our acts. They *oblige* us. Who has not felt this?

Profane Hierarchies are Bound to Work Evil

A hierarchy that is not consecrated and thus ordered in all its parts to the vision of the Good vouchsafed by the common cult is as likely to work good as is a broken clock to display the correct time. A profane institution is finally, and thus fundamentally, and thus thoroughly misdirected away from the proper mundane end of all human acts: the achievement, maintenance, repair and restoration of that proper harmony among and within things under and toward heaven, in virtue of which alone is there any health, prosperity, propagation, contentment, wisdom.

Increase of Subsidiarity Tends to Increase of Liberty

As each level of a subsidiaritan political hierarchy fobs off upon its subsidiaries every duty it possibly can, each level of the hierarchy will interfere with subsidiary systems less and less. The result should be a libertarian’s dream – and quite nice for sovereigns, too (indeed, optimally nice).

Holiness Spirals versus Sanctity

Holiness spirals are a problem only insofar as those who in them signal their virtue are not in fact auguring in on true sanctity. Truly holy men are the *opposite* of a problem; rather, they are the whole point and summit of the human endeavor.

But most public protestations of “holiness” are in fact evidence of profanity.

How to tell the difference?

Utilitarianism: yet another sacrificial cult

Utilitarianism is a moral theory associated with the Enlightenment that attempts to provide a universal solution for dealing with moral dilemmas. It claims that the correct course of action is that which produces “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” The option with the best consequences, defined in this way, is the correct moral choice.

The Enlightenment was a period where many thinkers imagined that social progress was to be achieved through a heightened use of “reason,” and reason meant science. Emulating and trying to join in the prestige of science, utilitarianism focuses on quantitative analyses; what is objective and measurable, to promote the greatest happiness.