Serving concrete gods

Liberty is a jealous god.

Taken minimalistically to mean the observation that we have free will, coupled with a judgment that this is good, liberty lurks in a motte within which it bides its time, waiting to escape into social reality.

As a doctrine situated in concrete social reality it is the intrinsic and essential nature of liberty itself to liberate, to break free from boundaries which contain it. Liberty is never satisfied to remain motte-imprisoned as the banal academic observation that human beings have and exercise free will. Liberty by its nature actively demands liberation, something beyond the mere observation that it is the nature of human beings to choose our own behaviors. It is in the nature of liberty to advance on the imprisoning barriers of authority: thus liberalism is, at its very foundations, a political doctrine.  In an individual mind it may be theoretically possible to keep liberty locked in a box; as something considered an important social good, as a public reality, liberty is intrinsically and essentially political.

Because the social reality of liberalism is political, it is incoherent. Paradoxically this incoherence delivers precisely what liberty promises: it destroys authority and unleashes all-hungering Will, emancipated from history, tradition, unchosen heritage, nature, and nature’s God.  Liberty is Ungoliant, a hunger which by its nature cannot be fulfilled or permanently contained: a black hole which will never be satiated even as it swallows the entire world.  Only Ungoliant can promise the eternal cosmic emptiness of the utterly unfettered and unsatisfiable will, and through the power of paradox deliver the emptiness of that promise.

Libertarians serve their master with the same monotheistic devotion of the followers of Mohammed.  Although their god is the same god as the god of leftism, their simple minds fail to grasp that he is a trinity, simultaneously one and three.

Left liberals serve liberty the immortal abstraction in his full trinitarian glory, correctly realizing that father liberty begets son equality, from both of which proceed the fraternity of the free and equal emancipated new man.

Right liberals, with their conservative disposition toward concrete reality, are polytheistic. They view Liberty as one (perhaps even subordinate or minor) god among many in a pantheon of concrete gods. They imagine that the god Liberty will remain content in a locked room, will leave Family and Church and Christianity to their own separate domains while Liberty confines himself to whatever territory has not been claimed by other gods.

They imagine, in other words, that Liberty will be content to live out his life in a monk’s quiet cell and yet will still somehow remain Liberty.

Orthodeontia

For some technical reason involving WordPress, commenting at the Orthosphere has become (apparently just for me) like pulling teeth.  For the record, I posted this comment (which disappeared into the ether) yesterday.

A conundrum of roles in gay divorce

The main problem with gay divorce is that you can’t tell which one is the “wife” — who is awarded cash, prizes, and custody — and which one is the “husband,” who gets ejected from the home and sold into slavery to keep the cash and prizes coming.

Though I suppose a reasonable approximation is to assume that the one who files for no fault divorce is the “wife”.

Liberalism is just politics; AIDS is just a virus

Liberalism is first and foremost a political doctrine: an (incoherent) view about legitimate exercise of authority. It is true that once empowered liberalism cannot be contained and ‘leaks’ into everything else. But characterizing liberalism as a grand overall religious or anti-religious worldview, rather than as a specifically political doctrine, is a mistake: a mistake easily rejected by liberals as a caricature which creates a motte and bailey social structure from which escape becomes impossible.

In order to resist our enemy you have to understand him; and if liberalism is not understood as primarily a political doctrine – a political doctrine which by its nature cannot be contained or kept as subordinate by any amount of virtue, moderation, or good intentions – it cannot be adequately resisted.

Almost every conservative or reactionary travels down the same old path, which invariably seduces him into right liberalism.  The infinitesimal number of exceptions merely prove the rule: we are all liberals, and the all encompassing gravity well of liberalism will comprehensively dominate human existence until enough people reject it unequivocally.

Liberalism is ‘more than political’ only in a similar sense to which AIDS is more than a virus. By defining liberal commitments as more grandiose and religious than they are in fact, as something greater or more transcendent than specifically political commitments, we can avoid unequivocally rejecting freedom and equality as political principles (principles of authority in action). This gives liberalism a ‘motte’ into which to retreat whenever its own excesses would otherwise lead to self destruction.

Liberalism always starts as specifically political commitments, just as AIDS always starts out as a tiny invisible virus. We can rage against the snot running down the nose of the AIDS patient all we want; but if we hope to actually prevent AIDS we have to adequately grasp what causes it in the first place.  Only then can we begin to know what to do about it.