Nice to meet you, I am a carrier of tuberculosis
December 8, 2015 § 36 Comments
There is a tendency to view societies infected by liberalism as ‘not liberal’ because they still have illiberal features, etc, or because there are good, true, and beautiful things in those societies; or because those societies are only ‘kind of’ liberal. I think this perspective is a distorted view of reality, and in any case can be quite deceptive if we don’t import some additional perspective.
Liberalism is a disease or disorder, a parasite in political thought, not a kind of society; and so-called liberal societies are societies which are infected by this parasite. Just as banking and lending are not comprehensively and only usury, modern societies are not comprehensively and only liberal. Ireland is a liberal society because it is infected and even dominated by liberalism; but it is still Irish, which is not liberalism.
In general modern societies are well and truly infected by the mind virus of liberalism, just as modern banking is well and truly infected by usury. The fact that the disease progresses differently in different contexts can obscure our capacity to identify it as such.
We naturally want to think the best of our own societies. Americans in particular tend toward the ‘proposition nation’ ideal: they see liberalism the disease as what defines us, much as the homosexual sees his disorder as what defines him.
This is counterproductive, if we want to actually grasp the objective situation. Especially if we don’t want to degenerate into a fugue of self-hatred.
The homosexual needs to stop defining himself as his disorder and repent.
Zippy Catholic 
I seriously wonder if progressivism is caused by a pathogen.
Zippy, your posts seriously have the best titles.
Isn’t liberalism (as outlined in these posts) bound up in human nature? I have gathered your thoughts on these kinds of questions and sidelines, but I am asking for a reason.
Wouldn’t it require a necessary push on the majority of a culture/society to decide that to willingly -and there’s the kicker- accept and embrace the idea that equality is not a noble goal in and of itself? And with that, the acceptance for a goodly majority to be content with their lot and general place in the hierarchy. Are men even capable of such a thing?
Elspeth:
In grand historical terms liberalism has dominated politics since about last Tuesday, so men can certainly live without it. What it would take to get from here to there is another matter of course; but “there” has already been done so it is clearly possible.
There are unquestionably things about liberalism which appeal to fallen human nature. It creates the appearance of authority and structure while in practice simply affirming people in what they want or expect, transforming as wants and expectations change, for example – think of what ‘marriage’ under no-fault divorce does on the micro scale, extrapolated to the macro scale. It gives people ready-made ‘justifications’ for pretty much whatever they personally want or think is desirable. It makes them feel virtuous while affirming them in whatever they happen to want or think is desirable.
But it would be a mistake to think that comprehensive embrace of liberalism by society is inevitable. We may be ‘trapped’ in a fallen world, but that doesn’t excuse embracing particular lies; especially once we understand that and precisely how they are lies.
I think the biggest hurdle for Americans is that if we cast off liberalism, what then will America be? It’s not too difficult to see our people also casting off most of the remnants of the rights of Englishmen and sinking into a soft despotism that is merely different in approach from the one we have now.
Mike T:
Yes. The typical American view of himself qua American as nothing but an atomized rights-bearing individual makes this especially difficult for Americans. Part of the evidence of this – of how advanced the disease is in the American mind – is that the very first thing it occurs to you to talk about is despotism and loss of rights. That is all America is to many Americans: guarantor of liberal governance.
Just like, to the militant homosexual, all there is to him is his gayness. His entire identity is wrapped up in homosex, and he can’t even picture what he is apart from frequent acts of sodomy.
When the cancer is killing you *now,* it’s silly to worry about the side effects of the cure.
Then that means they aren’t willing (and therefore able) to repent.
Put in Catholic terms: Confessing of all your sins except the ones you like (or the ones you don’t think are sins) still puts you in danger of hellfire.
When I think of the loss of America, I think of all sorts of things. I think of baseball parks in summer, picket fences, Radio Flyer wagons and Schwinn bicycles, glass Coke bottles on ice, muscle cars, vast fields of grain, the Rocky Mountains, midwestern hospitality, long road trips across vast distances, vintage video game consoles, the Pacific Coast Highway — all sorts of things. Not the deepest things perhaps, but real things.
But to most Americans those real things are mere accidents, and America is essentially abstract political equal freedom, a guarantee of equal rights against putative or contrived tyranny. Most Americans are like the militant fag so wrapped up in his gayness that he cannot even see himself as a real person apart from sodomy.
Part of the evidence of this – of how advanced the disease is in the American mind – is that the very first thing it occurs to you to talk about is despotism and loss of rights.
Actually, much of my concern comes from an observation that man never really knew much limits to the bounds of political authority until the rise of Christianity. America is also unmoored from its Christian roots. Taking away liberalism could also have the unintended side effect of removing all restraint (what is left) on what can be thrusted into the political realm and how far political authorities can go.
That’s not me just yammering about abuse, but also the fear that if Americans learn to become “good followers” as well, without Christianity as the rock of our culture, they’ll be “good followers” more like imperial pagan Romans (ie willing to support ghastly things in the culture and political realm).
Mike T:
“Taking away liberalism” isn’t something anyone has suggested, as far as I know, as some sort of political initiative. How would one go about doing that?
Can I ‘take away’ widespread commitment to the notion that 2+2=5? Aren’t I just pointing out that 2+2 is not actually 5, and suggesting that people should unequivocally give up on that lie without constantly making excuses for it? If I successfully manage to convince enough people that 2+2 is actually 4, mightn’t that also have ‘unintended consequences’?
Despite your protestations, this is just more of the same old Mike T troll.
Suppose I said “feminism is false and based on a lie, here is precisely what I mean by that and why it is false, here are all the ways that folks try to say otherwise and why those objections don’t work; and people should repent of their commitment to feminism”
Then Feminist Frank always comes along and says “Abuse! Unintended consequences! Wifely submission will result in rape!” etc etc etc ad nauseum. He simply cannot tolerate the discussion without interjecting his protestations. His protestations simply must be on the record in every discussion of feminism, despite his pro-forma agreement that feminism is false.
You’d see through Feminist Frank’s obsessive trolling in a heartbeat. You’d see through it even if Feminist Frank was being perfectly sincere, and did not see himself as trolling.
Just like I see through yours.
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
“When I think of the loss of America, I think of all sorts of things. I think of baseball parks in summer, picket fences, Radio Flyer wagons and Schwinn bicycles, glass Coke bottles on ice, muscle cars, vast fields of grain, the Rocky Mountains, midwestern hospitality, long road trips across vast distances, vintage video game consoles, the Pacific Coast Highway — all sorts of things.”
Here is a heretical thought — many of those things you list I would argue are a direct by-product of the liberalism you despise. Obviously not the Rocky Mountains or Midwestern hospitality or vast fields of grain — but the rest of your list are American products: the result of our entrepreneurial culture that springs forth from our liberal political institutions that support our capitalist economy. No liberalism, no Ford, no Coke, no Bally Manufacturing (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2562.html), etc. I suppose you could point to iconic companies in other western industrialized countries, but they are all infected as well…seems like liberalism is pretty good at giving us some useful stuff.
Jeffrey S:
That isn’t a heretical thought, it is just manifestly the genetic fallacy. Is the child born out of wedlock evil in himself? Does his existence justify concluding that fornication is actually just fine and dandy, because hey, look what resulted?
Examples can be multiplied, because the present world exactly as constituted is radically contingent, containing a great many good things which would not exist had nobody ever done any evil. If nobody had ever done any evil then none of us would be here at all.
But it is a basic and manifest fallacy to conclude that lies, murder, and self deception are OK because none of what exists today would exist at all had there never been any lies, murder, or self deception.
The genetic fallacy is fallacious in reverse too: the idea that nothing good would have happened, or that better things would not have happened, if liberal lies and self-deception had not been pervasively adopted, is obviously just as question-begging.
Nobody knows what might have happened had there been no American Revolution, no French Revolution, no Nazi Holocaust, no Communist Holocaust, no Feminist Holocaust. We do know that those things were driven by liberalism: by the commitment of the revolutionaries to the incoherent ideal of political freedom and its concomitants.
We can’t say what might have happened if things had gone differently, because this is how things actually went. Liberalism was adopted as the pervasive political philosophy of modernity. Hundreds of millions of innocents have been slaughtered.
In short, particulars and our love of them do not turn incoherent lies into the truth, or justify the adoption, perpetuation, or defense of incoherent lies. This problem arises because Americans especially tend to love the lies more than the particulars: to treat the lies as opposed to the particulars as the essence of America.
As usual, an excellent rejoinder.
If I may, I just thought of you reading Mark Steyn’s testimony before the Senate. Here he is quoting an editorial in the science journal Nature about whether or not it might be wise to ditch democracy on behalf of the planet given the importance of climate justice:
So, here is my thought for you — like the infamous seminar organized by Father Richard John Neuhaus on whether or not democracy had to go because of abortion, perhaps the real political question is this: to organize people to pursue the common good is not easy and there is no one special way throughout history that governments have formed to get their citizens to behave in a just and righteous manner. Kings have done it, dictators have done it, but so have democrats. But, shouldn’t we at least try as best we can to limit the damage that authoritarian tyrants can impose on a people when they don’t want to pursue the common good — or in other words, shouldn’t we create forms of government that guard against abuse of power?
“Nobody knows what might have happened had there been no American Revolution, no French Revolution, no Nazi Holocaust, no Communist Holocaust, no Feminist Holocaust. We do know that those things were driven by liberalism: by the commitment of the revolutionaries to the incoherent ideal of political freedom and its concomitants.”
Ha! I love the neo-reactionaries and I love a lot of your stuff, but to deny that there are important political differences between the liberalism of the American revolution and the Communist revolution or the Nazi revolution just seems like semantic silliness to me. I won’t play that game with you.
Jeffrey S.
Theoretically, as long as those structures are adopted under an explicit, loud, unequivocal rejection of liberal political philosophy I don’t really care what experiments are done with structure. I’ve said before that there is nothing intrinsically liberal about democratic elections qua procedure, any more than going to Mass guarantees Catholic orthodoxy. The connection between ritual and philosophy is ‘soft’ not ‘hard’.
Practically speaking our modern societies are about as capable of practicing illiberal democracy as a lifelong alcoholic is of an unproblematic bender. And of course part of the problem in the first place is the modern attempt to substitute formalisms for authority: to find putative safety from tyranny in bureaucratic procedures and words written on paper.
Jeffrey S:
There are differences, but they all share commitment to the same fundamental political principles, as has been shown time and time again.
It is true enough that the Nazis managed to murder far fewer than either the Communists or the Feminists before they were destroyed in the great intramural battle of modern politics. And the only holocaust which is still ongoing is ours.
Mike T:
…if Americans learn to become “good followers” as well, without Christianity as the rock of our culture, they’ll be “good followers” more like imperial pagan Romans (ie willing to support ghastly things in the culture and political realm).
*blinks*
I wasn’t aware that there exists any essential difference.
How is this any different from “If we throw away liberalism we lose everything that makes us (or so we tell ourselves) special and different compared to the hoi pol- I mean, the unEnlightened”?
“Taking away liberalism” isn’t something anyone has suggested, as far as I know, as some sort of political initiative. How would one go about doing that?
You make it sound like I’m playing dumb, but apparently you can’t grasp that “take away liberalism” really just means “remove liberalism from the equation.” So you go into a whole comment of insult, making me out to be a troll when you are misreading my words for rhetorical purposes.
GJ,
How is this any different from “If we throw away liberalism we lose everything that makes us (or so we tell ourselves) special and different compared to the hoi pol- I mean, the unEnlightened”?
Disclaimer: I am a conservative Protestant more of an Arminian disposition than a Calvinist one, but my theology is closer to the Reformation than modern evangelicals.
To answer your question: man apart from God is not just born in a general state of sin, but with a disposition to gravely displease God. It is man’s nature, apart from the Holy Spirit, to seek an efficient and fool-proof route to eternal damnation by piling grave sin upon grave sin. As man does this, he steps closer and closer to reprobation and a spirit aligned completely with Satan. Even his powers of reason will be completely corrupted.
There are two forces holding back America from a great descent: the residual influence of Christianity and our own libertarianish brand of liberalism. Liberal America is not nearly as bad as most of the world that has embraced liberalism. When was the last time we had a coup? Ethnic cleansing? Mass murder on an industrial scale aside from the abortion Holocaust?
So when I say be prepared for the STHF if a godless America also rejects liberalism, I don’t mean anything like what Zippy (who so cleverly tries to find some way of calling me a troll in the mold of Dalrock’s feminist trolls) was getting at. If the repentance is not coupled with an equally vigorous embrace of any semi-orthodox brand of Christian (take a pick: Baptism, Methodism, Catholicism, hell even the Oriental Orthodox), it will get worse.
A whole lot worse. We will go from where we are now to being full on pagan Rome where people don’t think twice about doing things like crucifying enemies, torture on a level that makes waterboarding look like a noogie and so on and so forth (insert your own scenario of evil hearts gone wild here).
GJ,
None of that should be taken as a reason to maintain the status quo and avoid repentance. I think I am simply a lot more pessimistic than Zippy about human nature and where that repentance would go. Much of that is a theological difference. I believe that man can see the truth of natural law and many metaphysical truths by light of reason, but man cannot embrace them without God’s help.
Hah! I’m such an optimist!
Then there is this:
“There are differences, but they all share commitment to the same fundamental political principles, as has been shown time and time again.”
No, this is not true. I followed all your links on this blog and you don’t demonstrate this at all — especially when your only evidence is the abortion holocaust. The problem with abortion as evidence of liberalism’s equivalence to Nazism, communism. etc. is that we find abortion all over the world under every form of government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law
Are you suggesting that liberalism has infected the world? That Arabia and Morocco and China and Thailand and Mongolia and Nepal are all liberal? And as a result all allow abortion?
There is a good reason the commies and Nazis saw themselves as mortal enemies of liberal democracies — but in Zippy world we can’t take them at their word because they live under a false consciousness and everyone is infected with the modern lie of liberalism. Not a very convincing theory from my perspective.
It is also interesting that we don’t find modern Popes condemning liberalism with the kind of certainty we find on this blog. Indeed, we find John Paul praising democratic revolutions that broke out around the world post 1989:
My emphasis throughout.
Like our Founders, John Paul II would have argued that a free people cannot remain moral without God — in other words, Zippy and I agree that freedom cannot be the highest principle upon which a government is formed and laws are adjudicated. The common good must be sought out, fought over, and enabled by law. I don’t think the preamble to the United States Constitution says otherwise. We just disagree that at a fundamental level, certain forms of liberalism always and everywhere require one to put freedom on this pedestal.
Jeffrey S:
I know, I know. When Nazis for example profess their commitment to freedom and equality they are just liars. Their commitment to the freedom and equality of the emancipated new man is not authentic. When they reject (classical) liberalism because of its failure to actually emancipate the new man, because of its lack of authenticity, they don’t really mean it.
All you have to do is look at their coins. They are not shiny and pretty like our coins.
Gotta love the “aside from” thrown in there.
I like the “infection” metaphor Zippy. Liberalism is an infection just like any “ism” is an infection. Why? Because its origin point is in this fallen world- the world of Mammon.
Mike, I think Zippy’s point was that it was not about “removing” something, but rather making a positive assertion. Liberalism, as far as I can tell, is like Zippy said, a kind of disease. That is, if you are inside the liberal mindset, you are actually seeing things wrong. So, for instance, in the USA, there is this culture of being independent and limiting the authority of the nation’s leaders on what they can or can’t do to their people.
Yet, because this culture is profoundly liberal, it doesn’t achieve its objectives. It is based in a lie (that the authority comes from the people themselves) and thus only leads to people being “enslaved”. On one side you have a political class willing to reinterpret the words of the constitution whenever it becomes useful to do so. On the other you have people who are more than willingly to block legitimate authority from functions that belong to it by right. And if you block legitimate authority, the end result is that who ends up deciding the matter is someone or something else (such as economic factors).
If somehow we could teach people about what legitimate authority is like, they wouldn’t be more malleable to bad leaders. Being a good subject is not simply about being servile. It is about understanding where the authority from your superior comes from, so you know when you should and when you shouldn’t obey him. The first thing we need to understand about authority is that it all comes from God. Therefore, any command that would go against God’s will isn’t to be followed. For instance, any command to disobey one of the commandments*.
Sure, if you worry about a population that lacks Christianity but is obedient, of course such population can be used for evil. But that is because nothing can replace Christianity itself. Maybe I am generalizing too much right now, but I think the only way to have a good relationship of authority-subject is to have the relationship mimic that of the Father and the Son.
Of course, I might be mistaken in these views, in which case sorry for wasting your time. But this is how I understand these things, at least.
*Of course, there are situations where evil might be needed as an unintended collateral from some actions. For instance, how supposedly Pius XII had some say in plots to kill Adolf Hitler. But I think it is unnecessary to delve in this kind of thing right now.
Zippy,
It would be nice for your readers if you finished Hitler’s quote about his true feelings for democracy:
Sounds to me like you and Hitler would get along great — you both find lots to despise about democracy! Lots more analysis of how Hitler thought about democracy, socialism, and liberalism here:
http://www.mattbrundage.com/publications/hitler-and-democracy/
A few choice sections:
Jeffrey S:
Was that lengthy comment supposed to undermine the thesis that Nazism was a particular manifestation of the impact of classical liberalism with reality?
Mike:
Now this is truly American, more so than muscle cars or your baseball parks: the unconscious sense of superiority in your liberalism, the pure and unadulterated arrogance. And this is all the more ironical given that your liberalism is the main contributor to your descent, not your saviour.
When was your country most libertarian by your lights? At the start. And what did you do then? Rebel against your King. Cleanse the land of the native Indians. Hold and abuse many in slavery.
After then, you crushed your brothers who wanted to separate. Once your land was pacified, you turned to others: coups in Hawaii, South America, Iran; invasions and interventions into many other nations. The libertarianism justifying an international lawlessness on an unprecedented scale while the shiny side of the coin assuring you that this is justified because you are the Ubermensch, the exceptional nation.
As to torture, you know it takes place; all the matters to people like you is that you remain as unaware as possible. So Guantanamo and other bases are overseas, and ignorance is bliss. Domestically, even though it’s a open secret that much police abuse occurs, “NAPALT!” and again you and yours tend not to inquire too deeply. Your prison system fosters a widespread culture of rape, but who cares? All these criminals and terrorists are the Low Men, and their welfare doesn’t concern you.
As to paganism, the nation’s worship of Mammon is well-known, you sacrifice your children to Eros and then later to Mars. Do you really think you’re any better than Rome?
And you claim that your liberalism is good! When all it does is show you its pretty side, assuring you that you are so good, so special, and you stare at it, convinced by its reflection that all is well with you and what you do as havoc and destruction rains upon others. You are the Ubermensch, so you are justified in Enlightening others, so you waltz in into Libya and other nations with trumpets blaring about democracy and to show how good you are to bring it to the people, then slowly slip out when all descends to chaos.
What self-centeredness, what supreme chutzpah to judge your own nation merely by what happens within its own borders! And what utter audacity to then exclude from consideration, knowingly or otherwise, your own contemporary moral trainwrecks such as abortion and divorce, all justified by the libertarian urge to do as one pleases. At just about every point from beginning to end liberalism has been the justification or distraction from all the evil, and it will only continue to do worse.
But it is not too late to repent. Reject it all, and mayhap the Lord will delay the judgment and fall that comes to all empires.
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