An Enacted Curse With Which He Damned the World

“The spirit that I have called Satanism, the spirit of unmixed hatred towards the existing World Order . . . is perhaps more rife today than it has been for over a thousand years.” 

Gilbert Murray, Satanism and the World Order (1920)

If you follow the bracing ruminations of Bruce Charlton, you are familiar with his notion that the world has crossed the hateful river and entered the stygian blackness of Sorathic evil.  Sorathic denotes that which is of Sorath, the spirit of opposition and negation in Zoroastrian theogony.  Charlton tells us that Sorathic evil hates and destroys that which is good, and that it does this not in spite of its goodness, but precisely because it is good.

The Red Light of a Bellicose Brothel on a Hill

Bill Vallicella links to a long post by his friend Edward W. Farrell, in which the latter tells us that Americans are today divided by their view of the United States.  These views are:

1) The traditionalist view: America is exceptional and a beacon to the rest of the world

2) The progressive view: America is thoroughly racist and needs to be purged top to bottom

These two views certainly exist, but the list is incomplete and the names are entirely wrong.  What Farrell calls the “traditionalist view” is, in fact, the old progressive view that one nowadays most often finds in that strange and confused creature, the conservative admirer of Abraham Lincoln.  I will come back to this ideological Minotaur—part man and mostly bull—but will begin by saying that an “exceptional” country could not be a “beacon” because its exceptional status would make its example irrelevant to “the rest of the world.”

In any event, everyone should know that this “beacon to the world” business goes back to the Puritan fanatic John Winthrop’s claim that Puritan New England was a “city on a hill,” and that Winthrop’s words are nothing but the slogan and war-cry of violent Puritan fanaticism.

Exclusion or Extinction, You Choose

“Those who council waiting, or remaining in the Union until some overt act is committed so glaring as to warm up those whose blood courses at present so slowly through their veins, will find, when that time arrives, that through the great patronage and insidious workings of a Black Republicans administration, there will have been mustered into existence, in our own midst, a hoard of unsound men, of sufficient numbers in some localities of the south to bring on civil war and bloodshed among ourselves.  These results I would avoid, and I believe secession is the remedy.”

Francis Richard Lubbock, Letter to The Houston Telegraph (October 29, 1860)*

Francis Richard Lubbock had been Lieutenant Governor of Texas, and would shortly be Governor, when he wrote this line in answer to the question, “what should Texans do if Abraham Lincoln is elected President and a Black Republican administration takes control of the Federal Government.”   His answer, as you see, was that Texas should immediately secede from the Union because, under a Black Republican administration, a “hoard of unsound men” would be “mustered into existence” within the very confines of Texas, and because the resulting multicultural Texans would one day fall together by the ears and tear each other to pieces.

The Populist Delusion by Neema Parvini, Part 1

What the heck is going on with the seemingly insane notion that all white people are evil?

From The Populist Delusion by Neema Parvini:

“For example, in 2021, the US Federal Government – the public face of the aforementioned syndicalist nexus of finance, corporations, and NGOs – has declared that ‘white supremacists’ constitute the highest terrorist threat to the country; former President George W. Bush even argued that they belong in the same breath as ISIS and that, in a statement as Schmittian as any ever uttered, ‘bigotry and white supremacy are “blasphemy” against the American creed. The media daily propagandise against ‘white privilege,’ explains why white people are ‘the problem.’ But why would Power focus so heavily on this group, ‘white people?’ It is because it comprises people who are independent of the state, would-be aristocrats, subsidiaries in potential, and even a few truly independent institutions, and therefore represents the largest threat to its hegemony. This was embodied in the hated figure of Donald Trump, but since he was banished from the airwaves and social media, now it must take the form of a direct attack on the disobedient people themselves, especially if they have refused the vaccination against the pandemic which is a very convenient proxy marker of ‘friend’ or ‘enemy’ to Power. Jouvenal as a guide would tell us two things: first, one way or the other, the hour of decision will come; second, whatever order exists after this hour of decision will grant no more ‘liberty’ than what came before – the game stays the same, only the players change.”[1]

The World Has A Visible Structure

Frederick Woodbridge in An Essay on Nature wrote that the world has a visible structure. It takes shaking off a lot of inherited thought to make sense of that claim. The world is filled with light, color, and sound, and we have evolved sense organs to help us to perceive these things. We have adapted to the world as it is. That phrase might seem inscrutable and gnomic, but it indicates nothing other than a full experiential realism. We experience the world more or less as it actually is. The wooden house is on the hill ready for you to see it. Your seeing it does not create the house. The world has a nature, a structure, and we have evolved to perceive it. Organisms such as we need to find food and mates and so we need to navigate through the world as it really is, with all its smells, and the way it feels, and sounds, and looks. If we develop a problem with our ears, then we lose our ability to perceive that aspect of the world. If we are color blind then that aspect of reality is lost to us. The fact that many many other animals have developed approximately the same sense organs to perceive the world, and the fact that evolution exists, with failed adaptations being eliminated, indicates that all the varied living organisms are all successfully aligned with reality to a large degree. Scientific materialism has so perverted our notion of perception that we think that if a tree falls in a forest with no one there to hear it, it makes no sound. It does make a sound regardless. Kepler has indirectly taught us to think in terms of soundwaves and ears, and sound depending on the perceiver, nonsensically leaving mind right out of it. He provides a little slice of the part of the process of perception but it is radically incomplete. By analogy, he is attributing “vision” to a camera lens while forgetting the film or the photo sensors on the computer chip.

A Toy for Religious Dandies and a Tool for Designing Men

“I love religion, with all my soul, where it is sincere; but abhor, above all things, the pretense or abuse of it, to advance any purpose but those that regard the other world.” 

Letter of Sir Charles Wogan to Jonathan Swift (February 27, 1732) [1]

The pretense of religion is a false claim to piety in one’s self.  The abuse of religion is a false appeal to piety in others.  The former is the hypocrisy of vain men who covet praise.  The later is the hypocrisy of vulpine men who covet power.   The common mark of both, as Wogan says, is that their purposes lie in this world, the one in outward shows and the other in secret stratagems.  This is the essence of Christ’s criticism of the decadent religion of his day.  It had degraded into a toy for religious dandies and a tool for designing men.

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The Reality of the Great Replacement

“Evolution needs room but finds the earth’s surface limited.  Everywhere old and new forms of life live side by side in deadly competition; but the later improved variety multiplies and spreads at the cost of less favored types.  The struggle for existence means a struggle for space.  This is true of man and the lower animals.” 

Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (1911)

Recent events have stirred the great and good to once again denounce and deny what they call the conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement.  The Great Replacement is, in fact, the reality that, as the egregious Wikipedia puts it, “a ‘global elite’ is colluding against the white population of Europe [and elsewhere] to replace them with non-European peoples.”

I do not see a factual error in this statement, although it might be more accurately written as, the global elite is colluding to subject white populations to more rigorous competition by importing non-European rivals into their historic homelands.

Curing Mad Truths by Rémi Brague

In this collection of lectures, Brague begins by quoting G. K. Chesterton, “The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The world exceeds our ability to understand it. Rationalism exhibits an overweening pride and excludes from its purview intuition, feelings, tradition, mystical experience, and even ordinary experience. In order to function we produce simplified models of reality. The rationalist mistakes these models for reality and, at times, even hubristically claims that if something exceeds his ability to understand it, it must not exist. Finding oneself vulnerable to the decisions of someone who has lost access to feelings, including fellow feeling, and moral intuition, and reliant purely on “reason” is a dangerous place to be.

The scholar and poet Giacomo Leopardi claims that reason has a tendency to occupy the whole soul and to push to the last consequences of a train of thought even when it contradicts nature. Thoughts and assumptions have their own logic, some of which can destroy civilization itself. As Leopardi puts it, “Reason must shed light but not commit arson.”[1] He tendentiously, but interestingly, writes, “Reason destroys the illusions without which man cannot live leading thereby to its own contrary, barbarism.”[2] Thus, reason becomes the source of barbarism and this sums up much of modernity. Scientific materialism, for Michel Henry, writes nature in the language of mathematics, but cannot tell us how to live a meaningful life. This is reminiscent of the evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton’s claim that a belief in a good and moral God is necessary to provide the belief that one is a chosen people whose existence is worth preserving and defending and that having children has some kind of eternal significance. On top of that, sex is an instinct that reason can suppress and it is precisely the smart and educated among us who tend to do so. Reason cannot prove life is worth living, nor that it should be passed on to our children. Thus, the rational predilection for proof can commit the arson about which Leopardi warns. Barbarism predates and gives way to civilization only for civilization to become the victim of its own success and hubris, idolizing reason, science and proof, thereby losing sight of faith and hope in the life to come. Religion comes to be considered the meandering and wayward musings of a child.

Savage and Modern Superstition

“Anyone who has once penetrated into the imaginary world of primitive men, and knows something of the state of fear in which people may live when they believe in taboos, unavoidable curses, and active jujus, can no longer doubt that it is our duty to endeavor to liberate them from these superstitions.”

“Cannot much in the mentality of modern man that gives us ground for reflection be explicable by the fact that he no longer discriminates between the real and the artificial.”  

   Albert Schweitzer, African Notebook  (1939) [1]

The human mind makes a superstition when it treats the imaginary as real.  The work of the imagination may be conscious or unconscious, but the essence of superstition is that the mind treats a work of man as if it were a work of God.  This is why an important variety of superstition is the idol, and why the God of the Israel was so forceful in his condemnation of these “graven images.”

Two Cracks in a Twilit Cave, Video Version