The Postmodern world isn’t so much a world without rules as it is a place where there are no longer any widely recognized authorities capable of enforcing the rules. This situation didn’t just materialize out of nowhere one day in 1968. At least in the West, disowning the authorities that used to foster social cohesion was a process that took about 500 years to reach this point. We bought into the pitch that tossing out the Church, the Bible, and finally reason would free everyone to pursue their personal preferences without fear of coercion. After all, each individual knows what’s best for him. Earthly paradise was always just around the corner.
A few weeks ago, an activist lawyer committed suicide in New York. After making a name for himself helping to abolish marriage and women’s restrooms, he decided that publicly burning himself to death in protest against global warming was preferable to living.
Some might call such an exit a senseless tragedy, but if you look close, a consistent trajectory emerges. Here was a guy who devoted his life first to the notion that there are no differences between men and women, and then to the idea that a man can turn himself into a woman. That these positions contradict each other must never have entered into his calculus. If he’d deigned to let his will be bound by logic, he probably wouldn’t have immolated himself for a racket run by science hucksters on the make for a government buck.
Then again, like, who are we to question the life choices of a sovereign individual, man?
A perennial normie mistake has been to underestimate the Left’s relentless drive to push the lunacy envelope ever further. This error is largely due to Leftists’ constant assurances that they just want one more concession; one last warping of reality, and they’ll be satisfied. That’s the problem with people who don’t believe in objective reality: They lie as easily as they breathe.
The gay lobby’s series of successful campaigns over the past few decades illustrates the process nicely. First they wanted sodomy decriminalized. Then they wanted hate crime legislation. Next came the call for civil unions–which, we were assured, was the endgame, but which immediately led to demands that primordial understandings of marriage be destroyed.
Even normies’ heads spun when the granting of these demands only emboldened the Left to use state and economic power in the interest of confirming a tiny minority of mentally ill men in their sexually dysphoric delusions. “Surely,” the normies said, “they must finally be satisfied with the abolition of women’s bathrooms.” Now the Left are agitating for minors to be given hormones capable of permanently stunting their normal development.
Study the Left’s behavior long enough, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they’re spoiled children throwing tantrums in the secret hope that an adult will step in to put his foot down and say no. The problem is, we’ve long since done away with that kind of authority. The West is a room with no adults. It turns out what you get under those circumstances isn’t Neverland. It’s Lord of the Flies.
Others have noted that the typical Leftist goes about his day in a functional manner not unlike a sane adult–except when it comes to culture or politics, in which case he raves like an escaped mental patient. But what if that outward sanity is as temporary as the Left’s fleeting satisfaction with Conservatives’ latest surrender on yet another once-sacred social issue?
What if, as the tantrum continues with no adults in sight, the Leftist’s political madness spills over into other areas of his life?
We may soon be entering an age of what can only be called ideologically induced psychosis. What happens when the Leftist in your social circle becomes convinced–and calls upon the courts to enforce his delusion–that he is Abraham Lincoln, or God, or that the President is a Russian agent?
What happens if the facade finally cracks, and an army of madmen turns to the awesome power of the Western surveillance state to enforce their batshit whims? We may yet have front row seats to the big reveal.
It's not really a lie, I think, when a leftist says "all we ask is…"
A leftist thinks that the path of history is inevitably in his favor, and that he is perfect just the way he is. He sees the past ratchets on reality not so much as his previous actions, but as milestones behind him on the One True Road; and he averts his eyes from the true introspection that would get him to know himself, and therefore what he would do in the future.
No objective sense of right and wrong may enter into all this.
"Sooner or later, it comes down to fate," said Billy Joel, under the delusion of coming as a liberator. "I want it now" is, for practical purposes, what he meant. "Only The Good Die Young" doesn't consider what came before, or what comes after. It's all about the moment's impulse and the current social cachet. It is living in the present, in the worst possible sense.
And that's how the Left mostly thinks. All they ask is one bit of surrender, which is inevitable, and then their perfect selves can rest content.
(Incidentally, this is also a major reason why marriages fail.)
Anonymous
But they can never rest because their consciences never do. They're really a lot like Dolores Umbridge.
An example is the foretaste in China with the social credit. It'seems other enough to give indifferent support it must be wholehearted or you'll literally be prohibited from living. And that goes for the familyear too.
xavier
"'Sooner or later, it comes down to fate,' said Billy Joel, under the delusion of coming as a liberator."
He isn't the unofficial Boomer poet laureate for nil.
The universe is a pointless void of broken rocks. Let's at least all be fat and happy together when we all meet oblivion together. That's the only reason they fight for anything.
The fundamental problem with a secular culture like this is that you eventually go full nihilist or full hedonist without anything to check it. Since nihilism is too scary for our soft generation, it's all about sugar, alcohol, drugs, and menthol, to ease the pain.
I'd like to say everyone will wake up and realize the slide into the gorge they're riding on, but as someone who deals with these types every day… I wouldn't bet on it.
Gimme gimme gimme
I need some more
Gimme gimme gimme
Don't ask what for
Sitting here I'm a loaded gun
Waiting to go off
I've got nothing to do
But shoot my mouth off
Gimme gimme gimme
I need some more
Gimme gimme gimme
Don't ask what for
You know I'm gonna go out
Get something for my head
If I keep on doing this
I'm gonna end up dead
Gimme gimme gimme
I need some more
Gimme gimme gimme
Don't ask what for
I know the world's got problems
I've got problems of my own
Not the kind that can't be solved
With an atom bomb
Gimme gimme gimme
I need some more
Gimme gimme gimme
Don't ask what for
Too cowardly for nihilism, too self-absorbed for Christianity.
I’ve said for years the West is now entirely made up of infantilized generations. Civilization is built on the back of men. What are we to build with generations of perpetual 14 year olds?
The authoritarian who shows up to whip these kids into shape is very likely going to be communist, atheist, and nihilistic. These people will get what they desire good and hard. I just feel bad for my descendants. And I feel bad for my ancestors too. Just a great civilization and culture, and now we go the way of Numenor but worse, we self inflicted our ruin.
I don’t know what to do with the kids on the culture issue. My faith I will teach and pass down, but I didn’t receive my cultural patrimony that was owed to me, and that’s because my parents didn’t receive it from their parents. And I reject modern Western culture from the time of a German nominalistic to the present, so I don’t have anywhere to take them or move them to to show them and allow the. To immerse themselves in it.
We are going to have to rebuild…but I still feel like we will go the way of Tolkien’s elves…slowly fading out, through genetic assimilation while tiny isolated groups disappear into the background.
"We are going to have to rebuild…but I still feel like we will go the way of Tolkien’s elves…slowly fading out, through genetic assimilation while tiny isolated groups disappear into the background."
Tolkien's works honored two types of heroism: the zeal of the Christian knight who, though he may be overmatched by his earthly foes, fights joyfully because he knows that Christ has already secured final victory, and the stoic, honorable courage of the pagan who is entirely without hope but fights just as fiercely because it's the right thing to do.
Read the works of 20th century Christian authors like Lewis, Tolkien himself, and even Ratzinger, and they seem more informed by the second spirit than the first. Much is made of Christians being in the world but not of the world and "fighting the long defeat".
As much as I admire these men, I think their fatalistic attitude, most likely imparted by the World Wars, lulled a lot of people into a false sense of soft despair. It's not a big jump from "We're outnumbered and outgunned, but it's our duty to fight the good fight" to "There's nothing I can do anyway, so I'm off the hook."
Revolutionary political movements only need 10% of the population to succeed. The Church only needs twelve men. The Apostles took on an empire that was far more ruthless and run by much more cunning people than ours. True, they didn't live to see Rome conquered for Christ, but their heirs did.
Amid the grim spectacle of the Left's madness, it's easy to get caught up watching the train wreck and lose focus on what we're fighting for.
Imagine a world where the arts and popular entertainment honor fathers and Christians.
Imagine having a functional economy where everyone from rocket scientists to unskilled laborers can find honest, fulfilling work at a living wage based on merit.
Picture cohesive local communities where intact families support one another and look out for each other's needs without requiring the intrusion of the state.
Parents, imagine not having to worry if your son will be frivolously abandoned by his wife and reduced to penury when she robs him of his house, income, and children with the backing of the state. Imagine not fearing that your daughter will flit from one sociopathic fling to the next while using Big Brother as a surrogate father for her bastard children.
Imagine universities honestly pursuing the truth and teaching it to your children.
Imagine a world that makes sense.
We could live there tomorrow if we really wanted to. The hardest red pill to swallow is the fact that the only obstacle in our way is us.
Brian
Intetesting observation. So we need to reevaluate the consequences of the first and second world wars. So by analogy we need to theow iff the Sykes Picot treaties and redraw the moral and cultural maps. Yeah it's violent but so what?
It's time to be like Cortez at the battle of the bridge totally outnumbered and stared annihilation in the face yet managed one of the most stunning military victories that won an empire and new souls. Same for Pizarro who conquered another exceptional empire with a mix of cunning persistence and strategic ruthlessness that consolidated an empire and incorporated more souls.
xavier
A good argument can be made that the Western mind, fixed in Modernism and Human Secularism, suffered philosophical and psychological PTSD from WWI and WWII. They were scared by what they saw in Western man, but they were too proud to turn back to God.
Odd, they saw the Void, but rather than run away from it, they just paved a different, 8-lane wide superhighway toward it rather than follow the one they were on already.